Wes Lee -CIA Monarch MKUltra Mind Control Slave -Intro
CIA's Secret History MK-Ultra Experiments Trailer
Kathy O'Brian CIAMK-Ultra Mind Control Survivor Part 1
Kathy O'Brian CIA MK-Ultra Mind Control Survivor Part 2
Paul Bonacci-Wes Lee The Real Manchurian Candidate
CIA Monarch MKUltra Mind Control Slave Testimony Part 2
CIAs Secret Quest For Mind Control -Torture LSD And A Poisoner In Chief - Sidney Gottlieb
CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb headed up the agency's secret MK-ULTRA program, which was charged with developing a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies. Courtesy of the CIA
CIAs Secret Quest For Mind Control -Torture LSD And A Poisoner In Chief - Sidney Gottlieb
Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.
MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."
Some of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer's research.
"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process," Kinzer says. "First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."
Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. "We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says.
Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. After MK-ULTRA shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use.
Kinzer writes about Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA in his new book, Poisoner in Chief.
On how the CIA brought LSD to America
As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MK-ULTRA. Actually, the MK-ULTRA director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.
In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control.
Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. Who were those people? Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA by MK-ULTRA, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. Although, of course, he never knew that name.
So the CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly, and actually it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended.
On how MK-ULTRA experimented on prisoners, including crime boss Whitey Bulger
Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was. Essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period?
Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote, "I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me." And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him.
On the CIA hiring Nazi doctors and Japanese torturers to learn methods
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps.
Stephen Kinzer, author of 'Poisoner in Chief'
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.
For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.
Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin.
On the more extreme experiments Gottlieb conducted overseas
Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s, and therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places. ...
CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation — all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And that made Gottlieb, although in some ways a very compassionate person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation.
On how these experiments were unsupervised
This guy [Sidney Gottlieb] had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder.
Stephen Kinzer
[Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. I think the mentality must have been [that] this project is so important — mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power.
On how Gottlieb destroyed evidence about his experiments when he left the CIA
The end of Gottlieb's career came in [1973], when his patron, Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by [President Richard] Nixon. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records. ... However, it turns out that there were some [records] found in other places; there was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remain. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
Preamble to the United States Constitution My name is Marquart (Mark) Ewing Phillips, born May 17, 1943 in Nashville, Tennessee, I have no criminal record and I have never been adjudged insane, I am not a scholar, professional writer, or mental health physician. While I lack the official published academic credentials, I am recognized internationally by mental health and law enforcement professionals as an authority on the secret science concerning external control of the mind. The purpose of Part I of this book Trance Formation Of Americaby CATHEY O BRIEN is to document how this reputation was gained. This brief and highly condensed contribution is intended to provide an understanding of why, when, and where I embarked on a study of the most secret technology known to man: Trauma-based mind control. Through the publication of declassified United States Government documents, our U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) admits that this ancient wizard's mechanism for control is so dangerous that most information pertaining to it must remain Classified as TOP SECRET. As tbe employee of a DOD subcontractor with exposure to mind-control research, I was required to sign an oath of secrecy. To this day I am restricted by law from revealing certain specific information that directly pertained to my employment as, among other "sensitive” exposures, a U.S. DOD subcontractor in mind-control research. This super secret technology is an evolved system of remote human physical find psychological manipulation that has only recently been officially recognized by accredited mental health physicians for what it is, absolute mind control. My first encounter with mind-control research began in the late 1960s in Atlanta, Georgia on the Emory University campus at the Yerkes Primate Center, It was there that I learned about primate behavior modification-the basis for human mind control. Part I of this book is my attempt to impart an understanding of how this and other exposures would prepare me for the Challenge of a lifetime. What I witnessed, in terms of technology, at the Yerkes Primate Center and Other government sponsored research facilities, combined with years of personal research into this science of mind manipulation, did not adequately prepare me for what I would be exposed to in 1988 through an unexpected chain of events. This exposure came in the form of personal acquaintance with the human results officially entitled by DOD as, among other cryptic file titles, MK-Ultra. 1 1 have outlined this noxious introduction in hopes that the material provided by one MK-Ultra survivor, Cathy O'Brien, will incite a legitimate federal investigation of her claims. I was able to liberate MK-Ultra victims, Cathy O'Brien and her daughter, Kelly, from the invisible grip of this U.S. Government secret weapon of control. In the process, I also helped Cathy recover her mental and physical health. However, I have not been successful in enlisting the cooperation of my government to pursue the justice issue. There is a reason for this failure to obtain justice that you, the reader, NEED TO KNOW. I have been told repeatedly, "Justice is not obtainable, For Reasons Of National Security.”
This book is primarily the autobiography of Cathy O'Brien, who did not volunteer for service to her country, but was used her entire life against her innate, voluntary will for perpetuating criminal activity by many so-called leaders within the U.S. Government. These "treasonous leaders" did volunteer for political "service" to our country. They must be held accountable for their actions. Together, Cathy and I have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of justice and rehabilitation for her and Kelly. All avenues for justice and rehabilitative relief have been blocked For Reasons Of National Security. The question arises, whose security? Cathy O'Brien provides the logical answer. Perhaps after reading this work, you will inspire others to read it. Collectively, as patriots, we can make a positive difference for Cathy and Kelly, our government, and humanity, by having our voices heard. In my opinion, our great United Stales Constitution does not need to be amended it needs to be enforced. The grim reality we must all embrace is that there is, in human terms, no justice, and no revenge adequate to equal what these two, and many other victims of this U.S. Government secret weapon experienced. The only remaining remnant of opportunity for justice for these survivors would be derived from a public forum expose of what they experienced. What these survivors need to witness is the mass dissemination of their story and a radical, positive change in their government's management of secrets. This would be an acceptable, though belated, substitute for justice. Their hope lies in the belief that- "Truth lives a wretched life, but always survives a lie,"
Sometimes words, or groups of words, found in the English language have many definitions or meanings. Within each meaning there may be different logical and Literal perceptions of the application of a given word. However, the words mind control usually conjure up a single response. This is most unfortunate due to the vast differences of perception contained within the reference. For example, if you have access to a late 1980s Random House or later Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary and reference mind control, you will notice there is a conspicuous absence of a listing. Should you go one step further and secure a college professor's teaching copy of Oxford's Companion To The Mind (Oxford Press 1987), you can reference practically anything concerning research of the mind without a reference to mind control. Perhaps you may now realize that through Random House, Webster and Oxford Press omissions, you are a victim of information control. Mind control is sometimes loosely defined as information control. This being one of many accepted ways to define the term should immediately rase questions of distrust towards your information sources. Since what we think is based on what we leam, manipulation of a mind, or a nation of minds, can be accomplished through control of information. With thought control being a result of information control, many avid researchers of mind sciences simply label it "soft" mind control. These days, we live in a world in which the continued existence of multinational businesses and governments depends upon instant com¬ munications. However, with consideration to the so-called problem of. information overload, it would appear to most people that we hear and see enough to make rational decisions concerning our individual lives. Unfortunately, this is not true. What we don't know, as evidenced by mind- control atrocities, is quickly destroying society as we have known it The answer to this problem is glaringly apparent. We, as citizens of a supposedly free country, should not permit our government to restrict any information that protects criminal activity under the guise of National Security. Secret knowledge equals power, with the end result being control. Therefore, despite the deliberate efforts of those persons in control of national media information management (who are not media employees), results of secret mind-control projects gone awry have been leaking out for years through the media. People are literally waking up to the mind-control reality because there is an obvious lack of logical explanation for certain sensational news events. What really happened at Jim Jones' Jonestown and with Sirhan Sirhan, John Hinkley, and Lee Harvey Oswald? And, more importantly, why did it happen? The simple common denominator existing among these persons has been publicly slated by the media, based on research of their medical histories, is mind control. In reality, information control is but one component of mind control. Whereas "brain washing," a term coined by an investigative journalist writing about Korean War P.O.W.s around 1951, described the results of what the Chinese regarded as thought reform.
The term brainwashing denotes to most people the destruction of a person's memory. This slang term continues to be used by the news media in place of the all encompassing term, mind control. In reality, applied brainwashing techniques are similar to those used in trauma-based behavior modification. During the past three decades, a significant number of religious groups worldwide has been cited by the mainstream news media as destructive cults. An emphasis on the word destructive is necessary in defining these groups as cults. Random House Dictionary defines cult as "a particular system of religious worship". By this definition, the word cult would encompass all religions. These so-called destructive cults have been publicly denounced by the news media for using brainwashing, thought reform, and mind manipulation tactics on their believers. However, there is an obvious lack of expressed concern by these same media as they fail to address the underlying issues of mind control, the power basis for abuse. Perhaps the reporting news media can not, for some reason, publicly open the proverbial Pandora's Box. Is it plausible then to consider that closer scrutiny, by the media and the public, of these destructive cults' leadership could reveal a solid connection to government sponsored mind-control research? These arc questions that, in themselves properly addressed, would provide important answers to this social epidemic involving physical and psychological abuse. The answers that an in-depth professional investigation would provide could be the first step in resolving the rash of problems that destructive cults, serial killers, and sexual child abusers, thrust upon society. As consumers of national news media supplied information, we continue to invent half-truths which, in this case scenario, is seeing and hearing only what results from mass mind manipulation. Historians provide us a glimpse into the future through recorded events of the past. It appears that throughout recorded history, man has, towards the end of each millennium, returned to a focus on certain types of bizarre human behavior. For example, there has been in the past 150 years a resurgence of wide spread interest in the occult "black arts" which include satanism or Luciferian religions. These constitutionally protected "religions" use trauma to control the minds of their followers. Mind-control practices within the occult groups (according to survivors adjudged credible and law enforcement officials) have been accredited with bridging the gap between applied science and Shamanism. Occultism as a manner of religious expression has been around for thousands of years. Only in the last 150 years has science aggressively pursued the truths regarding mind manipulation hidden within the occult belief systems themselves. According Lo the Random House Dictionary, occultism "is the practice of alleged sciences claiming knowledge of supernatural agencies which are beyond the range of ordinary knowledge." Once again, it is a reminder that secret knowledge equals power. In 1971, the New York Times reported a story on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and occult research, the basis of which was gained through a collection of documents released by the U.S. Government Printing Office under the Freedom of Information Act. This was a report to Congress and clearly showed that the CIA was interested in the cause and effect clinical findings that occult religious practices have on the Black Arts practitioner's and/or the observer's mind. Of particular interest to the CIA were the heightened levels of suggestibility that certain occult rituals produced in the minds of the practitioners. Cannibalism and blood rituals were ranked highest in the order of importance to their research. Behavioral psychology teaches us that control of human suggestibility is recognized as the fundamental building block for external control of the mind. This suggestibility factor alone potentially creates a human rights legal issue when we consider constructing laws to protect people from overt or covert mind-control practices. Consideration to the human suggestibility factor could result in all forms of consumer oriented service and/or product advertising becoming illegal. Advertising and the marketing of services and/or products through communications can be justifiably defined as a type of psychological manipulation, (nought reform and/or mind manipulation which results in a form of behavior modification, A patriot friend, Steven Jacobson, published his book entitled Mind control in America 2 in 1985, eloquently exposing the science of mind manipulation through advertising. The basis for successfully modifying human behavior requires mind manipulation techniques that, when expertly applied through advertising media, become a form of "soft" mind control. Factoring in suggestibility through the tactile senses as the "Achilles' heel" of the human race renders everyone vulnerable to becoming, on some level, a victim of soft mind control. The controversy of what is and what is not mind control rages on among scholars in the schools of law, human rights, and mental health. All lhe while the confusion of issues provides a form of legal protection for practitioners of trauma-based mind control, the only known form of remote human control that is absolute. All other forms of mind control, including chemical and electronic manipulations, are considered by mind-control experts as temporary. There are laws protecting U.S. citizens' rights to practice their religious beliefs and freedom of speech. There are no laws which specifically protect leaders of destructive cults and/or practitioners of trauma-based mind control. However, because of the U.S. Government's use of mind control and the broad diversity of legal opinion concerning the accepted limits of free speech and religious practices, the legal loop holes for criminals employing mind-control techniques on their "flocks" for personal gain remain open. For every problem there exists a solution.. The formula for problem solving, rests firmly on the quality of the supporting research information concerning the nature of the problem. Legislating laws specifically to protect people from mind-control abuses would be futile. Practically every civilized society in¬ existence has some law and/or group of laws which would protect the people and punish the practitioners of mind control. Laws are enforced according to lawmakers' interpretations of the specific legal language. The lack of enforcement of laws already on the books that could protect us from mind- control abuses stems from applied legal interpretations and cover-ups of sur¬ vivor testimony by the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) For Reasons Of National Security. Mind-control atrocities, if committed by anyone who could be linked to government sponsored projects, are typically ignored and covered up. Access to the courts by these hapless survivors is thus stonewalled by government paid so-called legal experts who receive their orders from the National Security Agency. Defining the term "mind control" is akin to defining the limits of the 1947 National Security Act. The basis for the solution to the National Security controversy is simple. It is known as: Truth logically applied.
It is an obvious truth that the National Security Act has been interpreted, not to guard the integrity of military secrets, but instead to protect criminal activity of the highest order. Repeal of this Act and replacement with the established rules of military conduct concerning National Security that do not infringe upon the constitutional rights of America's citizenry or the rights of its allies would result in compliance with the Constitution.
CHAPTER 2 SALESMAN, AD MAN, MIND MAN, PATRIOT MY PERSONAL EVOLUTION
"Every revolution, bloody or bloodless, has two phases. The first is the struggle for Freedom; the second the struggle for power. The phase of the struggle for Freedom is divine. He who has participated in it invariably feels, physically, that his best and most precious-inner self has come to the surface. We know that being faithful to the TRUTH stands higher than our own participation in governing the country—and that is why we must not have a suciety that would reject ethical norms in the name of political mirages." 3 As I was saying to my grandmother, Mamaleen Johnson, "My life has turned into a nightmare and I'm wide awake," tears were streaming down my face, dripping off my chin onto her patent leather shoes. She affectionately patted my shoulder as she listened. The words we exchanged, the room's wallpaper and furnishings, my beloved grandmother, Mamaleen. even the taste of my tears combined with a feeling of overwhelming grief-it is ail there etched into my memory. This was the summer before I was to enter my second year of school in 1950. The first year remains a blur with cause. Life for me and my family had changed dramatically over the previous year. So radical a change that it had taken almost a year for me to realize life was not becoming any easier to live. My stuttering was getting worse. The rare moments I could speak coherently were limited to short sentences devoid of the word "you", and then only to my mother and grandmother. Occasionally when angry I could speak clearly, or when alone in the woods while talking or singing to trees. Apparently my frustration with oral communication due to stuttering had been intensified by a trauma I experienced the previous year. Little did I know then that this trauma would positively and negatively influence my future and the lives of others I would know for the rest of my life. On a hot and sticky Tennessee July day in 1949, my father helped boost first my mother, then me, into the saddle astride our four-year-old high-spirited "gift horse" Wojac. This was to be my first ride on the back of an animal. The excitement of the moment combined with stuttering rendered me, literally, speechless. As I recall and from photographs taken at the time, I was wearing a sweat-soaked, pale yellow cotton shirt, dark tan shorts, brown socks, and dirty tennis shoes. At six years old, I was very thin and did not take up the re¬ maining saddle space behind my mother. With the reins in my mother's hands, the horse responded to her polite command of "Come on, Wojac. Giddyup." He began slowly walking down our driveway to the narrow crushed limestone road beside our property. Upon reaching the gravel road, the horse turned or was guided left, momentarily disappointing me as I knew we were only going for a short ride. It was only about a quarter of a mile to the busy paved intersection that would be dangerous to cross. (Had my mother decided to go in the opposite direction, we could have ridden for a couple of miles before reaching any automobile traffic.) As quickly as the horse made the turn from our driveway onto the country road, my mother nudged his flanks with her heels. With another command of "let's go," the horse responded with a mild jerk of motion and he began a fast trot down the middle of the road. The horse's speed, in retrospect, was too fast for safe travel on gravel. Not knowing this then, I was not scared until I saw the crossroads looming closer, I can hear myself half shouting "BBBBBetter slow down. MMMight BBBBe a CCar CCComming." Before I could enunciate the last words, my mother began a slow sideways slide off the saddle. I could not see her face as she disappeared under the horse, and the reins disappeared with her. The horse bolted full speed ahead. In the blink of an eye, my realization of being alone in the saddle with no way to control the horse washed over me. Quickly, I tugged on his mane to no avail. It was in this instant I determined that the runaway horse was not going to stop for the crossroads. I jumped. As I recall, the fall was swift and my abrupt landing in the sharp rocks was not painful, though it seemed that my body would never stop rolling. Panicked and with the dust beginning to settle, 1 sat up, blinked the dust and sticky blood from my eyes, and looked about for my mother. She lay in a disorganized heap beside the road. I ran to hen The first mental impression 1 experienced was that she was just wide-eyed dazed from her fall. Then I noticed her eyes weren't blinking and around her head was a thick puddle of blood. Not wanting to leave her in the road for fear she would be run over, and not strong enough to pick her up, I began screaming in the direction of our home in hopes that my father could hear me. Almost immediately he responded by sprinting to us", all the while shouting, "What happened? What happened?" For the "life remaining in me" I could not answer for, as usual, I was speechless. As he knelt down to speak to my mother, he stopped mid sentence when he apparently saw her eyes in a fixed gaze and that the back of her skull was crushed inward. Instantly he picked her up. and as we were running back to the house, he commanded my eleven-year-old sister to call an ambulance. To this day I cannot recall how we got to the hospital. The grisly scenes of this tragedy were not my nightmare. It did not play over and over again in my mind, for 1 had dissociated from it. I had voluntarily and autogenically created a memory barrier of this trauma. This is a normal human response. Had I been tortured after the trauma, I would not have been able to voluntarily recall either the accident or the torture. Hence the basis of this book. The nightmare began during the subsequent recovery year when we realized my mother would never be herself again. She had lost over a quarter of her brain when the horse stepped into her skull. Permanently gone was her ability to smell, taste, and hear in one ear. These were the physical handicaps she developed. Her resultant emotional condition would become evident to me many years later. As a child, this new awareness of my mother's condition had minimal impact on me compared to the fear I lived with, moment to moment, due to my father's chronic alcoholism. Years later my sister would follow his lead into a losing battle with the bottle. I was safe, as alcohol made me stutter. After being told so many times during my developmental years that my mother's condition was attributable to her brain damage, and that my stuttering was because my brain was not working correctly, it occurred to me at some point to leam about the brain. For years after the accident, 1 overheard adult conversations about my mother's brain. My curiosity peaked about the brain and the resultant invisible mind and had set the course for my life's interest.
Somewhere in this time period, I fantasized I would learn enough about the mind and brain to help my mother and myself. As a child, my attention span was regarded as abnormal. I was considered very bright, yet my grades in school reflected something different. Although not properly diagnosed, I was most likely suffering from what is now termed Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). The handicaps of stuttering and ADD were to become my first personal improvement challenges once I was out in the world on my own. This "on my own" objective came at an early age. I was barely sixteen- years-old when I left home to begin my pursuit of happiness. My first efforts resulted in total failure. However, I could not return to my parents’ home because they were now divorced. Young, broke and rejected, I was able to determine two things. First, I must learn how to communicate if 1 were to enjoy any success in life, I went about this task methodically, first by enrolling myself into a local night college. In the classroom I studied speech, business law and psychology. At the library; I studied brain functions and their effect on the mind. I was not degree oriented because I could not earn enough at two jobs to attend the required classes to graduate, but my studies were slowly providing me a usable skill. Secondly, somewhere during this period of learning 1 began to realize I possessed a natural ability to sell. Perhaps this ability to persuade others resulted from my childhood experience of having to "read people" through their body language rather than talking with them. My first real job in sales was so successful that my client base was reduced by my employer. I responded to this action by moving on. The Vietnam War was heating up and I was eligible for the draft. No longer in school, 1 knew that my number would be drawn soon. And it was. Little did 1 know that my prayers for a deferment would be answered and would afford me an exemption from military duty. I would soon be working for the Ampex Corporation and with the U.S. Department of Defense in a civilian capacity. The defense work closely associated me with top research scientists working in the area of primate and human behavior modification. Ironically, I learned more about the mind from my casual relationships with these scientists than I did working at the various research sites. The sites included teaching hospitals, state mental institutions, military bases, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) facilities, and the Yerkes Primate Center. The following years of my corporate employment in national and in¬ ternational sales evolved into sales and marketing management positions in an executive capacity. My personal life, in terms of loving relationships, was again in shambles but my career and ongoing mind, brain, human behavior research was rewarding enough to compensate for my lack of emotional expression. The secrets I had learned so well concerning powers of persuasion, both conscious and subliminal, had long since become a functioning part of my mind’s arsenal of defensive and offensive tools of control. I resolved then and there to become a "control freak". Instead, my fantasy was not to learn what I could control but what was controlling me. Then, around 1986, a peer friend of mine observed that I had arrived in the perverbial "comfon zone" in terms of presenting profitable ideas for others to set upon, and advised me to go into business for myself. Shortly thereafter he provided me an excellent example by resigning his six-figure executive marketing directorship and nominated me as a candidate for his replacement.
Ironically, for the first time in my life, the nomination was rejected because I did not possess at least a master's degree in business management or communications. His assistant was given the position, and I was subsequently offered the assistant's vacated position with no hope of promotion, which of course I refused. Soon thereafter, my friend, free of his corporate golden handcuffs, established his own firm which became a very successful business. Around this same time a childhood acquaintance, long since socially separated from my life, reappeared long enough to introduce me to his country music entertainment friend, Alex Houston. From this introduction I learned this acquaintance, Ray Myers and his wife, Regina, are alleged pedophiles who reportedly sexually molested Cathy's daughter and their own children. It seemed that Houston was looking for someone with international business negotiating skills who could assist him in putting together a large enough sales deal to finance a manufacturing operation. After spending a few days of complimentary consulting time with him, I had made some rather interesting and intriguing observations about the man and his ideas. First of all, Houston did have a legitimate, potentially profitable idea concerning the manufacture of an electrical capacitor device that could increase energy efficiency for large industrial consumers. Secondly, Houston favorably impressed me as a calculated risk-taker. Thirdly, Houston agreed to finance my production of a marketing plan for presentation to potential foreign buyers. And finally, Houston agreed that I would run the company as President, if and when I sold that plan, I thought. "No problem!" The intriguing part of this "budding" relationship was my awareness of Houston's propensity for dishonesty. I felt an urgent need for legal advice on how to insure contractual protection from Houston. Within days, Houston and I had conceptually and contractually agreed to start up the business. I designed a logo and assigned the name UniPhayse. The contracts we entered bound both of us to our respective areas of commitment and was iron clad. Houston's willingness to participate in my legal protection maneuver further perplexed me, because of the obvious "honesty type" clauses contained in the agreement. At the time, in my mind, I had determined that if Houston could "keep it clean" and perform his role, we would be able lo make this company successful. If not, I owned the company lock, stock, and barrel and could still make it work. Months later, with business and marketing plans in ray briefcase and a demonstration model of the proposed product in hand, Houston and I boarded an airplane to Hong Kong. We were met upon arrival by a tall, well-dressed, Korean gentleman who introduced himself as William Yoon. He owned an international shipping company. His ships carried practically everything from scrap metal to Chinese silkworm missiles all over the world, Mr. Yoon, as he preferred to be called, in keeping with Far Eastern protocol, was interested in negotiating a joint venture company with his friends in the most populated nation on Earth, The People's Republic of China. All arrangements had been made by Mr. Yoon's staff for Houston, myself, and him to fly to Beijing the following day to begin negotiations with the Mining Ministry. After several days of exhausting discussions through an interpreter almost entirely between myself and the deputy director of the Chinese Mining Ministry, it appeared as though we had a workable deal. An elegant banquet was ordered by our gracious Chinese hosts, and it was there I learned that the Mining Ministry was a part of the Chinese Ministry of Defense. Feelings of patriotism welled up in me for the first time in my life.
was aware that China was engaged in supplying missiles to Libya, a Middle Eastern country with whom the U.S. was in conflict. The Chinese were swapping missiles and other weapons for cheap Libyan light crude oil. The Chinese were about the only country in the world who dared defy the Reagan Administration's trade embargo. These fleeting thoughts of being involved with the Chinese military felt treasonous to me. Although uncomfortable with the idea of a business venture with such potential for political disaster, I reminded myself that hundreds of other U.S. companies were already in China. Houston refused to discuss the subject. During the return flight from Beijing to Hong Kong, I confided my patriotic concerns to Mr. Yoon knowing that he would soon become my business partner. He eloquently relieved my fears of potential disaster with a complicated explanation that made sense at the time. This man politely informed me that we could not lose money as he and I would have interim control over all product sales revenue generated outside of China, By Chinese law for joint venture companies, 60% of all manufactured product must go outside China. Houston and I returned to Tennessee and I briefly met his wife, Cathy, for the first time when she greeted us at the gate. She appeared to me to be young, beautiful, very dumb, and dressed like a prostitute. I paced my walk to be several steps away from her as we headed to the baggage claim area. Within a few weeks of this visit, a delegation of Chinese electrical engineers and finance experts were flown to our Tennessee office for more negotiations and to collect technical production data (we held) for future manufacturing purposes. Soon after the delegation departed for China, I received a mysterious phone call from someone at the U.S. Department of State, aka the State Department. It seems someone in my Chinese delegation had earlier been refused entry into this country due to his being identified as an international weapons supplier for terrorists. This telephone voice assured me that there were no problems that would arise and that this information was not to be publicized. I thanked him and assured him the information was secure. A couple of months later, my new Hong Kong partner, Mr. Yoon, invited me, my wife, Houston and his wife, Cathy, to come to China for the official signing of the Chinese joint venture agreement. When I asked Houston if he and his wife would attend, he flatly replied, "No". He had already booked his "act" and could not cancel. I then offered to escort his wife and mine to China. He responded "no" again, that it was too far and too expensive for a pleasure trip. I was relieved because I had already learned enough of the Chinese lan¬ guage to know our partners did not like or respect him, and Cathy's demeanor embarrassed me. I later learned that Houston's "gig" was to "trance- sport'Vtransport Cathy and little Kelly to the infamous Bohemian Grove for prostitution. My trip to China with all the pomp and circumstance went well as expected, even though my wife and I were in the process of separating for a divorce. However, just before I was prepared to return to the U.S., I received some extraordinary information from a man who showed me Chinese Ministry of Defense credentials that gained my full and complete attention. This man was in possession of a file on me that could have only been gained through a thorough investigation of my past professional associations. His English skills were only strong enough to roughly, nervously translate some of the file's conIronically, for the first time in my life, the nomination was rejected because I did not possess at least a master's degree in business management or communications. His assistant was given the position, and I was subsequently offered the assistant's vacated position with no hope of promotion, which of course I refused. Soon thereafter, my friend, free of his corporate golden handcuffs, established his own firm which became a very successful business. Around this same time a childhood acquaintance, long since socially separated from my life, reappeared long enough to introduce me to his country music entertainment friend, Alex Houston. From this introduction I learned this acquaintance, Ray Myers and his wife, Regina, are alleged pedophiles who reportedly sexually molested Cathy's daughter and their own children. It seemed that Houston was looking for someone with international business negotiating skills who could assist him in putting together a large enough sales deal to finance a manufacturing operation. After spending a few days of complimentary consulting time with him, I had made some rather interesting and intriguing observations about the man and his ideas. First of all, Houston did have a legitimate, potentially profitable idea concerning the manufacture of an electrical capacitor device that could increase energy efficiency for large industrial consumers. Secondly, Houston favorably impressed me as a calculated risk-taker. Thirdly, Houston agreed to finance my production of a marketing plan for presentation to potential foreign buyers. And finally, Houston agreed that I would run the company as President, if and when I sold that plan, I thought. "No problem!" The intriguing part of this "budding" relationship was my awareness of Houston's propensity for dishonesty. I felt an urgent need for legal advice on how to insure contractual protection from Houston. Within days, Houston and I had conceptually and contractually agreed to start up the business. I designed a logo and assigned the name UniPhayse. The contracts we entered bound both of us to our respective areas of commitment and was iron clad. Houston's willingness to participate in my legal protection maneuver further perplexed me, because of the obvious "honesty type" clauses contained in the agreement. At the time, in my mind, I had determined that if Houston could "keep it clean" and perform his role, we would be able lo make this company successful. If not, I owned the company lock, stock, and barrel and could still make it work. Months later, with business and marketing plans in ray briefcase and a demonstration model of the proposed product in hand, Houston and I boarded an airplane to Hong Kong. We were met upon arrival by a tall, well-dressed, Korean gentleman who introduced himself as William Yoon. He owned an international shipping company. His ships carried practically everything from scrap metal to Chinese silkworm missiles all over the world, Mr. Yoon, as he preferred to be called, in keeping with Far Eastern protocol, was interested in negotiating a joint venture company with his friends in the most populated nation on Earth, The People's Republic of China. All arrangements had been made by Mr. Yoon's staff for Houston, myself, and him to fly to Beijing the following day to begin negotiations with the Mining Ministry. After several days of exhausting discussions through an interpreter almost entirely between myself and the deputy director of the Chinese Mining Ministry, it appeared as though we had a workable deal. An elegant banquet was ordered by our gracious Chinese hosts, and it was there I learned that the Mining Ministry was a part of the Chinese Ministry of Defense. Feelings of patriotism welled up in me for the first time in my life. I was aware that China was engaged in supplying missiles to Libya, a Middle Eastern country with whom the U.S. was in conflict. The Chinese were swapping missiles and other weapons for cheap Libyan light crude oil. The Chinese were about the only country in the world who dared defy the Reagan Administration's trade embargo. These fleeting thoughts of being involved with the Chinese military felt treasonous to me. Although uncomfortable with the idea of a business venture with such potential for political disaster, I reminded myself that hundreds of other U.S. companies were already in China. Houston refused to discuss the subject. During the return flight from Beijing to Hong Kong, I confided my patriotic concerns to Mr. Yoon knowing that he would soon become my business partner. He eloquently relieved my fears of potential disaster with a complicated explanation that made sense at the time. This man politely informed me that we could not lose money as he and I would have interim control over all product sales revenue generated outside of China, By Chinese law for joint venture companies, 60% of all manufactured product must go outside China. Houston and I returned to Tennessee and I briefly met his wife, Cathy, for the first time when she greeted us at the gate. She appeared to me to be young, beautiful, very dumb, and dressed like a prostitute. I paced my walk to be several steps away from her as we headed to the baggage claim area. Within a few weeks of this visit, a delegation of Chinese electrical engineers and finance experts were flown to our Tennessee office for more negotiations and to collect technical production data (we held) for future manufacturing purposes. Soon after the delegation departed for China, I received a mysterious phone call from someone at the U.S. Department of State, aka the State Department. It seems someone in my Chinese delegation had earlier been refused entry into this country due to his being identified as an international weapons supplier for terrorists. This telephone voice assured me that there were no problems that would arise and that this information was not to be publicized. I thanked him and assured him the information was secure. A couple of months later, my new Hong Kong partner, Mr. Yoon, invited me, my wife, Houston and his wife, Cathy, to come to China for the official signing of the Chinese joint venture agreement. When I asked Houston if he and his wife would attend, he flatly replied, "No". He had already booked his "act" and could not cancel. I then offered to escort his wife and mine to China. He responded "no" again, that it was too far and too expensive for a pleasure trip. I was relieved because I had already learned enough of the Chinese lan¬ guage to know our partners did not like or respect him, and Cathy's demeanor embarrassed me. I later learned that Houston's "gig" was to "trance- sport' transport Cathy and little Kelly to the infamous Bohemian Grove for prostitution. My trip to China with all the pomp and circumstance went well as expected, even though my wife and I were in the process of separating for a divorce. However, just before I was prepared to return to the U.S., I received some extraordinary information from a man who showed me Chinese Ministry of Defense credentials that gained my full and complete attention. This man was in possession of a file on me that could have only been gained through a thorough investigation of my past professional associations. His English skills were only strong enough to roughly, nervously translate some of the file's con-tent. This man had photographic proof of a U.S. Department of Defense security clearance I once held. He acknowledged that the ’’Chinese knew all about me". Thoughts of blackmail raced across my mind. These thoughts instantly disappeared when he began to voice his government's true concerns. Their concerns were about Alex Houston and his involvement with the CIA, drugs, money laundering, child prostitution, and the big one he saved for last, slavery. No mention of mind control was offered, although he did comment that Houston was a "very bad man" and his crimes were "of the White House". Disbelief was in order but not possible, due to the wide array of "Eyes Only" stamped and initialed (official) CIA letterhead and U.S. Government documents he slowly flashed before my eyes. My first response to this "officer" was that Houston was too stupid and crooked to be connected to U.S. "intelligence". This comment was quickly countered with a gut wrenching photograph of Houston. He was smiling a demonic grin while apparently having anal sex with a small, very young, frightened Black boy. Later he was identified to me as being Haitian. When confronted with this horrific information and the apparent validity of it, I asked, "What do you (your government) want me to do?" He replied, "Get rid of him, distance yourself from him and all of his associates". I responded by asking him how he thought I could accomplish this task. He stated, "Any way you choose". I told him that regardless of what he had seen of American television concerning violence, the only way I knew was to force him out by purchasing his company stock, and I needed money to do it. He said, "Give us the figure and make the arrangements. It is done." I had returned to Tennessee with a Chinese government contract for products valued at thirty-one million dollars. Stapled to it was a telex letter of credit made out to me and the company from Houston's bank connection the New York branch of the now infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.). The amount was one million dollars in U.S. funds. The contract was wortn approximately ten million dollars in gross profit for Mr. Yoon and me. Given the charge by the Chinese to immediately discharge Houston of his duties, I knew exactly what my plan of action would have to be. Any other approach to resolving this problem could backfire and all would be lost. And since a former, indirect employer of mine (when I worked for Capital International Airways), the CIA, was implicated, I knew one mistake and it could cost me my life. A comforting thought prevailed and I reminded myself Houston was not only corrupt, but stupid. The CIA must not have respected him either. Otherwise why would he have had to go outside his circle of powerful perverts to recruit me for an international business deal. I drove to my office to begin the process of discovering something Houston "must have done" that would breach the performance contract he and I had signed when we started the company. Houston was out of town supposedly doing one of his entertainment gigs, so I had complete, unobstructed access to all files, his included. As I had mentally predicted during the long flight from Hong Kong, the entire ferreting process took about fifteen minutes. It seemed that Houston and the old acquaintance who had introduced him to me were, as they say, "selling out the back door". I collected the shipping bills and, ironically enough, the bank deposit slip Houston had retained when he cashed and deposited the customer's check. There was even a letter copy where Houston had specifically instructed the customer not to discuss his account with anyone at our company other than Houston himself or bis pervert friend, Ray Myers. Upon this discovery, I phoned the local Korean lawyer (whose business card I had been given by Mr. Yoon while in Hong Kong) to begin the stock transfer process. With pleasure, 1 wrote Houston's letter of resignation. With this problem in the process of being resolved, I left the office to visit an old, dear friend (now deceased) who had maintained powerful U.S. and foreign intelligence connections. I needed answers 1 could trust with my life. This "retired" Air Force General from the Intelligence division would be my source. The word "slavery" delivered in broken English by the Chinese Intelligence officer shouted in my ears during the short drive to a local hotel lobby, a comfortable place my "spook" pal selected for us to talk in private. In the few short minutes of the drive, I had my questions (for him) mentally noted. I wanted so much to gain the most from our meeting. The slavery word had triggered a dark question in my mind, blocking other constructive thought, as I was not comfortable with introducing the term mind control into my presentation. I knew 1 could speak freely about anything to this trusted friend. I wanted desperately to avoid the words mind control, not for reasons of comdemnation, but because they represented a secret I had patriotically main¬ tained for twenty years. After my arrival and the light chit chat of social niceties had been exchanged between us, the air changed to one of seriousness. I briefed him on my business involvement, and began a methodical line of questions concerning the file the Chinese Intelligence officer had presented on me and, especially, on Houston: shortly, my friend interrupted me in mid-sentence, smiled a toothy grin, and said, "Flash, you're still the same, and you know damn well what I mean." "Yes", I replied. The spook was referring to a 70s rock ballad titled "Still the Same" by singer Bob Segar that was assigned to me years earlier by mutual poker-playing buddies who identified with my passion for successful risk-taking. I despised gambling. My passion was "risk management" and poker gave me a recreational outlet for it. Although my friends each paid dearly, they soon learned my poker strategy was not so much "card counting" as it was my ability to read their body language. This included the micromuscle spasm responses around their eyes, Houston also lost to me at cards. The message the General was implying, roughly translated, was that I was once again "lucky as hell" to have survived my brief business relationship with Alex Houston. The discussion went down hill from that point directly into the dreaded arena of mind control. After several minutes of listening to details concerning a huge, invisible CIA slave trade going on world wide, the talk became more regionalized to Tennessee. I learned that Cathy and her little girl were victims of trauma-based mind control. They were slaves and the "soul" property of my Uncle Sam. I learned that everything 1 knew in theory and application about external control of the mind was fully operational and encroaching on the private sector of society. I was growing numb. The first words out of my dry mouth were, "How would you spring these people out of it?" He smiled and said, "I wouldn't! What are you going to do with them if you did get them out?" Before I could answer, he interrupted and said, "Look, you're still the same, but nothing else is with Uncle. Now most of the CIA, FBI, and the MOB (Mafia) are the same, and they're making their moves on the military." I responded, "I already know that, but how do I save these two people?" He said, "OK. Get the mother on the phone while her handler is gone. Use the usual hang up code of dial and ring twice, hang up call back, ring once, hang up and call back. Tell her you're God, Give her a biblical passage. They're all Christian based programmed around here." Understanding that this procedure would gain Cathy's full attention, the General continued, "She'll do anything, and I mean anything—except toast Houston—that you command her to do. Remember, God commands. Find yourself a preacher who knows the Bible and get a double-bind verse. You know what to do—for God's sake. And, listen, if you do this, you're on your own.” "Mark, this is nuts," he pleaded. Go to China and take them with you, Forget about this Red, While and Blue cesspool. It'll clean up. There's lots of good guys in the inside busting their asses to stop this mess, but you're not going to save the world." I injected, "No, just my ass and a couple of people who Uncle considers something other than human," Then we briefly chatted about some fine points of the rescue and how to legally stop Houston from taking her back. I never saw this friend again. Walking back to my car, I listened again in my mind to his haunting words, and my own life suddenly seemed like a scratched phonograph record with the needle following the same groove over and over again. The thoughts in my head were suddenly very unpatriotic - a far cry from the feelings I had expressed in China concerning Mr. Yoon's involvement in shipping Chinese missiles to Libya. Now I felt pure rage for what my country had become during the years after I had bowed out of doing defense work. For once my own mind seemed to be my worst enemy. Hatred for everything consumed me, I loved what my country had once represented to me, but now I was ashamed to be an American. And unbeknownst to me at the moment, soon I would be ashamed of being a male, based on Cathy and Kelly's memories. During the long, usually boring drive to my secluded house in the wilderness southwest of Nashville, I distinctly recall considering the inherent risks in the formula I was given for "stealing" two slaves from under the coke- filled noses of the CIA. My concerns were not of whether I could do it, but related to my friend's question of, "What are you going to do with them?" My thoughts went blank as I muttered to myself, "Life is getting com¬ plicated again", I then consoled myself with the old adage of "first things first". Within a few days, I had played God and coordinated the move of Cathy and her 8-year-old daughter, Kelly, out of Houston's house into a nearby apartment. All of this was totally unbeknownst to Houston. As instructed, I had deliberately placed the powerful coded suggestions into Cathy's mind. These commands partially bridged her own amnestic true perceptions that Alex was going to kill her. Little did I know that the message I was provided to block Houston's former control of her was true. Cathy and Kelly seemed to me to be very disoriented and somewhat disconnected from reality. In their new, sparsely furnished kitchen, I listened quietly to Caihy excitedly explain that "God had sent me" to her. She "knew this was true because her hands seemed to automatically open her King James version of the Holy Bible to Psalm, Chapter 37, verse 37, which proclaims for the literal minded, "Mark, the perfect man". Not only had I placed this biblical reference by a covert suggestion in her mind while playing God on the phone, but just now in her home moments earlier, I had broken the spine on her Bible so that it would "magically" open to that page. She said, "See, God did it again for you to see". Using a deprogrammer's language trick, I replied in a "reversed" response, "Well, I'll be damned. You are right. That's the only explanation left—that could explain all this", I was anxious to change the subject so as not to risk alerting any one of her observant personalities to my well contained laughter. I had been warned that programmed slaves were hyper-observant. In retrospect, I could not have had thoughts of being sacrilegious. I was and remain deeply spiritual, but my earlier years of researching religions for life's answers had turned me cynical and cold of man's interpretation of the Bible, Koran and Buddha's teachings. This attitude 1 privately harbored towards organized religions did nothing to squelch the dread I felt wash over me for that moment. In my attempt to change the subject from religion, I had remembered the Nazi mind-control research performed under Himmler's command on the families of northern European multi-generational Satanists. Christianity, particularly Catholicism, was Himmler's pick of the religions' litter for targeting "Chosen Ones" for his hideous mind-control experiments. These Chosen Ones were to be the robotic leaders of Hitler's New World Order. 1 then asked Cathy what religion she was before she met Houston. She replied, "Mormon, but I was a good Catholic before then". My mind swirled from that shocking revelation. 1 again quickly changed the subject and suggested we go out to dinner and discuss her new job as my assistant starting the following the day. But tonight we would discuss her divorce plans. Later that evening, I began my search for a secure phone to find someone from past associations I knew were CIA connected on an officer's level. I needed a get-well-quick formula or a clean mental health referral who could help these two wide-eyed unfortunates. I was informed there were none and that I knew more about "that mind stuff' than anyone who would talk. I returned home to find my phone ringing with an anxious Alex Houston, who had returned from a "vacation" at Boys Town in Nebraska, on the other end exclaiming that he was looking for his wife. She had" disappeared". I faked not knowing anything and suggested he come to my house the next afternoon to go over some urgent business. The next morning, I located a lawyer, for Cathy, and she had the divorce papers drawn up. That afternoon I had Granville Ratclift, a local Sheriffs deputy 1 partially trusted, who occasionally watched my house when I was out of town, waiting inside my house to witness and legally serve Houston with the divorce papers and his termination notice from the company. My last words to Houston which I recorded on tape were, "You could get hurt if you mess with me or them. Alex, get out!" (Now, I hope Houston lives to be a hundred years of age.) Getting the legal jump on Houston to project Cathy reminded me that I needed to attend to my own divorce needs. My wife mutually agreed her life could be more emotionally rewarding without me. She moved to Florida and set up house with her mother. We filed for a noncontested divorce. I agreed to sell the house and what remained of our joint possessions. Still unable to secure expert help for Cathy and Kelly, I maintained their safety by moving them into my house until it was sold. It was during this time that I was approached by a neighbor who said he had seen someone through his binoculars wearing a gun and taking pictures of my house. Other such intrusive visits by unknown persons followed suit. I was getting real nervous. I again called on a CIA operative I knew who worked within Nashville's corrupt law enforcement elite who, days later, informed me to "get my ass out of there now-someone wanted me dead!" When I asked why, he said, "You know damn good and well why!" The house sold quickly and I had already decided to walk away from my company, my contracts, and the one million dollars on deposit as a letter of credit at B.C.C.I. in New York. Mr. Yoon came to Nashville, He purchased Houston's stock. I returned Mr. Yoon to the airport. My last words to him were, "Farewell, friend". He knew nothing of what was going on and I have never seen or spoken with him again. That afternoon I cleaned out my office, handed the keys to the landlord, closed out my personal and company bank accounts. I had become angry beyond anything I had ever experienced. In retrospect, this was the birthing process of evolution from man to patriot. I now only wanted answers to what was going on in my government. We needed to be safe while I searched for these answers. My next stop in this pursuit would be Las Vegas, Nevada, Once there, I met with some powerful, underworld characters I had befriended back in my aviation days at Capital International Airways while "packaging" gambling junkets for these characters. I felt confident that these guys would protect me at least until I could find out what and who Cathy knew. I was reminded by these men that they were a part of the CIA's new funding operations. One of them flippantly remarked while chomping his Cuban cigar, "You can't hide an egg in a hen house, fella". My contact then coldly informed me that I had become involved in something that affected our National Security. I lied to this "wise guy" and cryptically responded, "Oh, well. I'll take them (Cathy and Kelly) to Alaska and play like a voiceless chameleon". In retrospect, this spontaneous lie must have worked to protect me from "red shining" myself to become the recipient of a CIA/MOB hit. Cathy and I continued to stay "parked" in Las Vegas for a few more days waiting to retrieve Kelly from a last minute (suspected CIA) court ordered visit with her biological father, Wayne Cox. Later, I would learn from Kelly's medical reports that she had spent Christmas vacation "in hell." I was now alone in my mind, scared, and going broke fast. Once again I felt totally alienated from everything and everybody in my life. At this moment, 1 began constantly reminding myself that I was doing the only thing I knew for sure was right. Realistically, I was astride the proverbial tiger and I could not get off its back and survive.
"Given that Fox is a “central node” of the far-right conspiracy machine, it’s fair to regard the Murdochs as America’s first family of disinformation....." ....
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Tine, Wirral UK, Putting politics to one side I also believe Murdoch has far too much power, Tesco is another with too much power I believe they are trying to get into banking now Tesco should stick to what they know best food, these people become too greedy, greedy for power as well as money.
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has announced his engagement to his partner Ann Lesley Smith, a former police chaplain.
The Sun King Rupert Murdoch's Endless Reign Part 2
MURDOCH AND ME
Rupert Murdoch may be the world’s most powerful private citizen. After running Murdoch’s Sunday Times of London for 11 years, a noted journalist reveals the triumphs and terrors of working for a 20th-century Sun King.
John Dux agrees: “Rupert is the world’s worst manager. During his visits he should have inspired and encouraged his lieutenants. Instead he left them miserable and demoralized with his autocratic style and raging temper. It used to take weeks to restore morale after he had gone.”
When you work for Rupert Murdoch you do not work for a company chairman or chief executive: you work for a Sun King. You are not a director or a manager or an editor: you are a courtier at the court of the Sun King—rewarded with money and status by a grateful king as long as you serve his purpose, dismissed outright or demoted to a remote corner of the empire when you have ceased to please him or outlived your usefulness.
All life revolves around the Sun King; all authority comes from him. He is the only one to whom allegiance must be owed, and he expects his word to be final. There are no other references but him. He is the only benchmark, and anybody of importance reports directly to him. Normal management structures—all the traditional lines of authority, communication, and decision-making in the modern business corporation—do not matter. The Sun King is all that matters.
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Mar 20, 2023 · Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has announced his engagement to his partner Ann Lesley Smith, a former police chaplain. Mr Murdoch, 92, and Ms Smith, 66, met in September at an event at his..
Business and Financial Leaders Lord Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch Invest in Genie Oil & Gas Genie Energy Corporation (Genie Energy), a division of IDT Corporation (NYSE: IDT, IDT.C)
FOX NEWS HAS DONE MORE TO INCITE DOMESTIC POLITICAL VIOLENCE THAN DONALD TRUMP
The origins of Fox News’s insidious role can be traced to a 1970 memo from the Nixon White House and Roger Ailes.
Rupert Murdoch had said he was "not worried at all" about Ofcom
Lachlan Murdoch (R) and Rupert Murdoch (L) would be co-chairmen of the new company
Rupert Murdoch with his sons James (right) and Lachlan (left)
Rupert Murdoch Has ‘More Impact Than Any Living Australian’ Says Tony Abbott
Rupert Murdoch's And News Corporation controlled News International phone hacking scandal
"To Beat or subdue or weaken the Enemy, You Have To Understand How The Enemy .:.. and how How The Enemy Operates and Thinks..." .... USA Major Smedley Butler
News Corp a “cancer” on democracy and suggested it should be the subject of a royal commission. “They go after people who have the audacity to raise a question about their behaviour,” Rudd said. He added, “It’s one of the reasons I’m speaking out directly, so that people can have a normal national conversation rather than a continued national embarrassed silence about this.”
Murdoch has a seat on the Strategic Advisory Board of Genie Oil and Gas, having jointly invested with Lord Rothschild in a 5.5% stake in the company which conducted shale gas and oil exploration in Colorado, Mongolia, Israeland, controversially, the occupied Golan Heights.
Rupert and James Murdoch News Corp Media Empire
First Mafia Bosses Who Didn't Know They Were Running A Criminal Enterprise -
UK News Corp Phone and Email Hacking UK Parliamentary Inquiry
James Murdoch, left, and Rupert Murdoch provide evidence to the Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee in the House of Commons in London on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal on July 19, 2011.
“Mr. Murdoch, you must be the first Mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise.”.... Mr Tom Watson UK Labour MP and co-author with Guardia journalist Martin Hickman, of the book "Dial M For Murder"
'This book uncovers the inner workings of one of the most powerful companies in the world: how it came to exert a poisonous, secretive influence on public life in Britain, how it used its huge power to bully, intimidate and cover up, and how its exposure has changed the way we look at our politicians, our police service and our press.'
Rupert Murdoch's newspapers had been hacking phones, blagging information and casually destroying people's lives for years, but it was only after a trivial report about Prince William's knee in 2005 that detectives stumbled on a criminal conspiracy. A five-year cover-up then concealed and muddied the truth. Dial M for Murdoch gives the first connected account of the extraordinary lengths to which the Murdochs' News Corporation went to "put the problem in a box" (in James Murdoch's words), how its efforts to maintain and extend its power were aided by its political and police friends, and how it was finally exposed.
The book is full of details which have never been disclosed before in public, including the smears and threats against politicians, journalists and lawyers. It reveals the existence of brave insiders who pointed those pursuing the investigation towards pieces of secret information that cracked open the case.
By contrast, many of the main players in the book are unsavoury, but by the end of it you have a clear idea of what they did. Seeing the story whole, as it is presented here for the first time, allows the character of the organisation which it portrays to emerge unmistakeably. You will hardly believe it.
About the Authors of Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and The Corruption of Britain
Tom Watson is the MP for West Bromwich East. He campaigns against unlawful media practices and led the questioning of Rupert and James Murdoch when they appeared before Parliament in July 2011. He is the deputy chair of the Labour Party.
Martin Hickman has worked for the Independent since 2001, and has driven the paper’s coverage of the phone hacking scandal. He was named Journalist of the Year by the Foreign Press Association in 2009.
Tom Watson is the MP for West Bromwich East. He campaigns against unlawful media practices and led the questioning of Rupert and James Murdoch when they appeared before Parliament in July 2011. He is the deputy chair of the Labour Party.
“I find it incredible, absolutely incredible, that you didn’t say, ‘A quarter of a million? Let me look at that,” Davies began. “I can’t begin to believe that that is the action that any self-respecting chief operating officer would take, when so much of the company’s money and reputation is at stake.”
Another member of the committee, Labour’s Tom Watson, went many steps further.
“Have you ever heard the term omertà, the Mafia term they use for the code of silence?”
“I’m not an aficionado of such things.”
“Would you agree it means a group of people who are bound together by secrecy, who together pursue that group’s business objectives with no regard for the law, using intimidation, corruption, and general criminality?” Watson asked.
“Again, I’m not familiar with the term particularly,” James replied.
“Would you agree with me that this is an accurate description of News International in the U.K.?”
“Absolutely not,” James responded. “I frankly think that’s offensive and not true.”
Watson was not done.
“Mr. Murdoch, you must be the first Mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise.”
During those hearings, Rupert Murdoch, seated next to James, even had a pie thrown at him by a protester. (Rupert’s wife at the time, Wendi Deng, famously lunged at the pie-thrower.) In the committee’s final report, Rupert was described as “not a fit person” to run a major corporation, and James was criticized for “willful ignorance” and a “lack of curiosity” in finding out what had happened. Deflecting attention from calls for his father to resign, James fell on his sword, shedding his post in London and relocating to New York, where he assumed different duties in his father’s empire. With the aura of disgrace, James was sidelined in the competition to succeed his father.
Elisabeth Murdoch stands with her father, Rupert, as they watch the Cheltenham Horse Racing Festival on March 18, 2010, in Cheltenham, England.
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Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has announced his engagement to his partner Ann Lesley Smith, a former police chaplain.
By Emma Saunders - Entertainment reporter
Mar 20, 2023 · Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has announced his engagement to his partner Ann Lesley Smith, a former police chaplain. Mr Murdoch, 92, and Ms Smith, 66, met in September at an event at his..
Mr Rupert Murdoch attended the Super Bowl recently with daughter Elisabeth Murdoch (left) and Ann Lesley Smith (right)
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has announced his engagement to his partner Ann Lesley Smith, a former police chaplain.
Mr Murdoch, 92, and Ms Smith, 66, met in September at an event at his vineyard in California.
The businessman told the New York Post, one of his own publications: "I dreaded falling in love - but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I'm happy."
He split with fourth wife Jerry Hall last year.
Mr Murdoch added that he proposed to Ms Smith on St Patrick's Day, noting that he was "one fourth Irish" and had been "very nervous".
Ms Smith's late husband was Chester Smith, a country singer and radio and TV executive.
"For us both it's a gift from God. We met last September," she told the New York Post.
"I'm a widow of 14 years. Like Rupert, my husband was a businessman... so I speak Rupert's language. We share the same beliefs."
Mr Murdoch, who has six children from his first three marriages, added: "We're both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together."
The wedding will take place in late summer and the couple will spend their time between California, Montana, New York and the UK.
Mr Murdoch was previously married to Australian flight attendant Patricia Booker, Scottish-born journalist Anna Mann, and Chinese-born entrepreneur Wendi Deng.
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Jerry Hall files for divorce from Rupert Murdoch Published
Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall at their London wedding in 2016
Jerry Hall has filed for divorce from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch in a court in the US state of California.
The petition cited "irreconcilable differences" between the pair, six years after they married.
The model and actress, 66, is claiming spousal support from the 91-year-old billionnaire, but is still seeking information about the full extent of his assets, the petition said.
Ms Hall was previously the partner of the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger.
It will be the fourth divorce for Mr Murdoch. US media had said the split had come as a surprise to those close to the family.
Mr Murdoch - whose News Corporation empire controls major outlets including Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in the US, and The Sun and The Times in the UK - was previously said to have been devoting more time to his new wife.
At the time of his marriage, the billionaire announced on Twitter that he was "the luckiest AND happiest man in world", and that he would stop posting on the platform.
In 2018, his elder son Lachlan was named as his successor as chief executive of Fox Corp. Mr Murdoch also sold most of 21st Century Fox to the Walt Disney Company.
The couple had also been spotted together in public on several occasions.
Last year, Ms Hall was seen "doting on" her partner at his 90th birthday party, according to the New York Times.
The Texan model-turned-actress was previously in a long-term relationship with Mr Jagger, with whom she had four children. The pair tied the knot in a Hindu wedding ceremony in Bali, Indonesia, in 1990. The marriage was annulled less than a decade later in London's High Court of Justice, which ruled that the marriage had never been legal under British or Indonesian law.
Mr Murdoch was previously married to Australian flight attendant Patricia Booker, from 1956 to 1967; Scottish-born journalist Anna Mann, from 1967 to 1999; and Chinese-born entrepreneur Wendi Deng, from 1999 to 2014.
Across their marriages, the pair have 10 children.
Rupert Murdoch Considers Combing Fox News And News Corp
Murdoch’s succession: who wins from move to reunite Fox and News Corp?
Deal would seal legacy with favoured heirs, but markets question whether companies should merge in the first place
Rupert Murdoch and eldest son Lachlan pictured in 2015.
Rebekah Brooks and Rupert Murdoch.
Rupert Murdoch with his sons Lachlan (left) and James
This week’s 200th anniversary soiree for the Sunday Times gathered some of the biggest names in media at the headquarters of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London’s Piccadilly to celebrate one of the jewels of Rupert Murdoch’s empire.
But talk of famous front pages and scoops among guests at Monday night’s event, where the attendees included News Corp boss Robert Thomson and News UK chief Rebekah Brooks, was overshadowed by the news that broke three days earlier: the mogul’s plan to reunify his media empire.
After a lifetime of deals, Murdoch, now 91, is making perhaps his final play as he seeks to merge News Corp – home to the Times, Sun, Wall Street Journal and the Australian – with Fox, broadcaster of Fox News and crown jewel NFL games, as he hands the running of his empire over to eldest son, Lachlan.
While the 51-year-old heir, who shocked his father by abruptly leaving the family business in 2005 to move to Australia and pursue his own interests before being enticed back a decade later, is primed to become chair, there is plenty of chatter over who will get the top job running the day-to-day business.
Thomson had long been mooted as the one to manage the combined group after a merger – he is Rupert’s right-hand man and the fellow Australian considers him practically a son. But with Lachlan in the driving seat, that is not to be.
Then there is Brooks, another Rupert favourite who has long held ambitions to rise further. However, she lacks international experience, and has the issue of the phone-hacking scandal on her CV, with new allegations brought recently relating to her tenure as Sun editor. (News UK has always denied any hacking took place at that newspaper, saying it only happened at its sister title, News of the World.)
“Lachlan is not going to be running the business day to day. The really interesting question is, who will be?” said a source. “I think it will be Lachlan’s decision who does, not Rupert, and that makes it interesting. Robert has historically been protected, but Rebekah is also powerful – she is the only person all the children talk to. She’s like another sibling and is very close to Lachlan.”
Lachlan, who insiders say was against the decision to downsize the empire by selling 21st Century Fox’s global entertainment assets to Disney for $71bn (£63bn) five years ago, is seeking to rebuild scale in an era of global tech and media giants.
“Lachlan was furious,” says one former senior executive. “I think it was the nail in the coffin when [his brother] James supported it too. James and Lachlan, no matter what anyone says, did get along. After that they stopped speaking. I believe that is still the case now. A scaled-down News Corp is the opposite of what he wants.”
The sale of 21st Century Fox also carved the younger James, once seen as heir apparent, out of the line of succession and ended any possibility of a future potential dynastic struggle.
The 49-year-old resigned from the board of News Corp two years ago, citing “disagreements” over editorial content, understood to include coverage casting doubt on climate change, severing his last formal link to the empire created by his father.
A reunified News Corp and Fox, valued at $9.7bn and $16bn respectively, would create a more muscular $26bn business. This would put it on a par with the market capitalisation of the freshly minted Warner Bros Discovery ($30bn), albeit still a relative minnow compared with beasts such as Disney ($180bn) and Comcast ($134bn), which bought Murdoch’s Sky for £30bn four years ago.
Special boards at each company are now evaluating the merits of a merger, and the relative value of each company to the other in the proposed all-stock deal, but banks and shareholders seem to have made up their mind already.
Investors in Fox and News Corp both believe they are undervalued – shares in each are down 30% over the last year – something analysts suggest a tie-up probably will not solve.
There is also the cautionary tale of the similar recombination of CBS and Viacom after 13 years of separation. The business, now called Paramount, is valued at $12.5bn – less than half the value of the separate businesses before the deal.
“On a standalone basis, this transaction raises more questions than answers as we struggle to see the strategic rationale for combining these two companies,” said Jessica Reif Ehrlich, an analyst at Bank of America, summing up the wider market reaction.
Meanwhile, some Fox investors balk at tying the hugely profitable business to a primarily publishing operation, regardless of the leaps and bounds it has made striking commercially lucrative ad deals with Silicon Valley giants such as Google.
Analysts at MoffettNathanson put Fox on track for record profits of $3.3bn next year, while News Corp made $1.6bn in profits in the year to the end of June, a 31% increase.
To get a deal through will require a majority of non-Murdoch family shareholders.
“There will be some investors in the margin that will have a problem with Fox News in their portfolio,” said a second source. “And the Wall Street Journal [staff] loathes Fox News, they see it as toxic, silly, and think it would harm their brand. But in the end it won’t be overly consequential because Fox News is so damn profitable.”
However, with the Murdochs’ family trust controlling 39% of the voting shares in News Corp and 42% in Fox Corporation, there are good odds they will get their way if the plan gets as far as being put to a shareholder vote.
“I think this has been in the works for two years,” said the former senior executive. “I give it a 75% chance it will happen, 25% that it will be blocked. It’s all about Lachlan. Rupert is in his 90s – this is his last deal, it’s succession planning.”
When the Rupert era ends, the power behind the family trust will be equally split between his four eldest children – Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence – while his two youngest daughters, Grace and Chloe, are financial beneficiaries.
Whether such a setup could see a situation emerge akin to HBO’s hit drama Succession, which features members of a powerful family vying for control of a sprawling media conglomerate that has drawn endless comparisons with the real-life Murdochs, remains to be seen.
But for now, for Rupert, merging the two businesses he was forced to split against his will almost a decade ago after the phone-hacking scandal is about securing a family legacy after seven decades of deal-making.
“At a certain level of money, it is control that matters the most,” says Claire Enders, founder of Enders Analysis and a longtime Murdoch watcher. “What this transition is about is future control and restoration of the original structure of News Corp and a long-term umbrella for the newspaper assets.”
Despite the negative sentiment from investors and Wall Street about the rationale behind the merger, sources close to Murdoch say the deal is all about business, not family.
“The proposal is 100% based on business rationale which is a combination of complementary portfolios of premium content to create a global leader in news, live sports and information,” said the source. “Any commentary that implies it has to do with succession planning is absurd and comes from sources with no knowledge of the strategy and intent.”
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Rupert Murdoch questioned Fox News coverage of stolen US election claims, court documents show Posted Wed 8 Mar 2023
Fox's bid to dismiss lawsuit fails
A judge rules Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit against Fox News Network can go to trial, with the voting machine company alleging Fox defamed it by amplifying conspiracy theories about its technology.
Rupert Murdoch wrote that two of his TV hosts "maybe went too far" on voter fraud claims.
Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch said TV hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham may have gone "too far" in their coverage of voter fraud claims after the 2020 US elections, court documents reveal.
His comments came to light when an email of his contained in a trove of new exhibits in Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit against his TV network was unsealed on Tuesday. Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News Networks for $US1.6 billion ($2.4 billion) in 2021, accusing the cable TV network of amplifying debunked claims that Dominion voting machines were used to rig the election against Republican Donald Trump and in favour of his rival Joe Biden, who won the election.
The reams of documents that became public on Tuesday offer a window into Fox's internal deliberations as it covered the 2020 presidential election, alienating some viewers by being the first network to project that Mr Biden would win the crucial state of Arizona.
The documents show top executives down to show-level producers and hosts discussing concerns about the network's reputation and casting doubt on the plausibility of Mr Trump's claims of election fraud.
More than 6,500 pages were released on Tuesday. However, the full extent of the evidence is not clear as many filings are heavily redacted. Fox has defended its coverage, arguing claims by Mr Trump and his lawyers were inherently newsworthy and protected by the first amendment of the US constitution.
The network said in a statement the documents showed Dominion using "distortions and misinformation" to "smear Fox News and trample on free speech". The unsealed exhibits contain evidence underlying both parties' duelling motions for summary judgement, filed last month, in which they seek rulings in their favour to avert a trial. In one exhibit, Mr Murdoch emailed Fox News president Suzanne Scott on January 21, 2021, asking: "Is it 'unarguable that high profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6th [was] an important chance to have the result overturned'?
"Maybe Sean and Laura went too far. All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump but what did he tell his viewers?"
Fox News host Sean Hannity (right) with Donald Trump.
Rupert Murdoch also suggested that a prime-time host like Laura Ingraham say "the election is over and Joe Biden won".
A sample ballot on a Dominion voting machine
'There'd be riots like never before'
In an earlier exchange with Ms Scott, Mr Murdoch wrote that it had been suggested to him that the network's prime-time hosts say something like "the election is over and Joe Biden won", according to Tuesday's filings.
Mr Murdoch told Ms Scott that some version of this would "go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen".
According to Dominion's unsealed filings, Mr Murdoch emailed a friend, saying suggestions state legislators could change the election outcome — an idea then gaining traction on the right — "sound ridiculous. There'd be riots like never before".
"Stupid and damaging," Mr Murdoch continued, referring to a news conference by Mr Trump's then lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
"The only one encouraging Trump and misleading him. Both increasingly mad.
"The real danger is what he might do as president." 'Stop the media in its tracks'
These exhibits and other material included in Dominion's summary judgement motion are part of the voting machine company's effort to prove the network either knew the statements it aired were false or recklessly disregarded their accuracy. That is the standard of "actual malice", which public figures must prove to prevail in a defamation case.
Fox has said Dominion's "extreme" interpretation of defamation law would "stop the media in its tracks" and chill freedom of the press.
Fox's exhibits include more context of testimony and messages that it says Dominion "cherry-picked" and "misrepresented" in its summary judgement filing.
For example, Fox cites additional testimony by Fox Corp co-chairman and CEO Lachlan Murdoch, who said under oath he was "concerned" but "not overly concerned" by declining ratings after the election.
Dominion has alleged Fox continued to push the stolen election narrative because it was losing viewers to right-wing outlets that embraced it.
In another exhibit, Fox News host Hannity — quoted by Dominion as saying he "did not believe" Mr Trump's lawyer Sidney Powell's claims "for one second" during a deposition — went on to say that during the interview he was giving her time to produce evidence but stopped having her appear on-air after she failed to deliver.
A Dominion spokesperson said in a statement that the "emails, texts, and deposition testimony speak for themselves".
"We welcome all scrutiny of our evidence because it all leads to the same place — Fox knowingly spread lies causing enormous damage to an American company."
The trial, set to begin on April 17, is slated to last five weeks. Reuters Posted 8 Mar 2023
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MURDOCH AND ME
Rupert Murdoch may be the world’s most powerful private citizen. After running Murdoch’s Sunday Times of London for 11 years, a noted journalist reveals the triumphs and terrors of working for a 20th-century Sun King.
When you work for Rupert Murdoch you do not work for a company chairman or chief executive: you work for a Sun King. You are not a director or a manager or an editor: you are a courtier at the court of the Sun King—rewarded with money and status by a grateful king as long as you serve his purpose, dismissed outright or demoted to a remote corner of the empire when you have ceased to please him or outlived your usefulness.
All life revolves around the Sun King; all authority comes from him. He is the only one to whom allegiance must be owed, and he expects his word to be final. There are no other references but him. He is the only benchmark, and anybody of importance reports directly to him. Normal management structures—all the traditional lines of authority, communication, and decision-making in the modern business corporation—do not matter. The Sun King is all that matters.
Other courtiers who believe they are your boss may try to tell you what to do, but unless they have the ear of the Sun King on the particular matter at issue, you can safely ignore them if you wish. All courtiers are created equal because all have access to the king, though from time to time some are more equal than others. Even Sun Kings have a flavor of the month—though those who enjoy that privileged post at the Murdoch court must remember that a month is not a very long time.
The Sun King is everywhere, even when he is nowhere. He rules over great distances through authority, loyalty, example, and fear. He can be benign or ruthless, depending on his mood or the requirements of his empire. You never know which: the element of surprise is part of the means by which he makes his presence felt in every corner of his domain. He may intervene in matters great or small; you never know when or where, which is what keeps you on your toes and the king constantly on your mind. “I wonder how the king is today?” is the first question that springs to a good courtier’s mind when he wakes up every morning.
The knack of second-guessing the Sun King is essential for the successful courtier; anticipation of his attitudes is the court’s biggest industry. It is fatal ever to make the mistake of taking him for granted.
All Sun Kings have a weakness for courtiers who are fawning or obsequious. But the wisest—among whom we must number Rupert Murdoch—know they also need courtiers with brains, originality, and a free spirit, especially in the creative media business. But independence has its limits: Sun Kings are also control freaks—and they are used to getting their way.
No matter how senior or talented or independent-minded, courtiers must always remember two things vital to survival: they must never dare to outshine the Sun King; and they must always show regular obeisance to him to prove beyond a doubt that, no matter how powerful or important they are, they know who is boss.
My problem was that I was not very good at either of these courtly virtues. I was too inclined to become a public personality in my own right; and I am not by nature deferential—to call anybody “boss” sticks in my throat. Looking back, it is remarkable I survived so long at the court of King Rupert and enjoyed it so much—a decade-long roller-coaster ride with the man who runs the world’s greatest media empire.
By 1983, Rupert Murdoch was looking for a new editor for the most prestigious of his properties, The Sunday Times. The then editor, Frank Giles, had been promoted from within in 1981, when Murdoch had moved Harry Evans from The Sunday Times to reinvigorate its daily counterpart, The Times. But Murdoch had always regarded Giles as a stopgap. Now he was impatient to efface the liberal, left bent of The Sunday Times and re-create the paper in his own, conservative image.
When Rupert summoned me to his office to offer me the job, I knew what was on the agenda—my old friend Alastair Burnet, with whom I’d worked at The Economist in the 70s, had tipped me off. I had been recommended to Rupert by mutual friends he trusted, and he saw in me an ideological soul mate. Also, since I had worked in America for three years as a reporter for The Economist, Rupert thought I could bring some American-style energy and drive to transforming The Sunday Times.
Despite his blunt, even brutal reputation, Rupert can sometimes take a long time to get to the point; this was one of these times. We talked about politics, satellite TV, Fleet Street—even the weather might have merited a mention. Eventually he turned to me and asked, “What do you think about being editor of The Sunday Times?”
Even though I knew the question was coming, I was still taken aback. I rambled on about not really having considered the possibility, the size of the challenge, and other banalities.
“I want you to take the paper in the direction we talked about,” he interrupted, as if this were only the latest in a number of talks we’d had about my becoming editor. “It must be strongly for democracy and the market economy. . . . There’s a lot of deadwood at The Sunday Times” he continued. “It’ll be a tough job to get rid of it. But I’ll be behind you.”
He was as good as his word. The biggest plus about having Rupert Murdoch as your proprietor is that he has no great social aspirations in Britain. He does not seek the approval of the Establishment, nor is he interested in their baubles, having turned down a knighthood and a peerage. This is a huge advantage for a newspaper editor out to make waves: when various parts of the Establishment objected to our coverage of the Thatcher government or the royal family or whatever powerful interest we had most recently upset, they often tried to work through Rupert to put pressure on me. He invariably resisted their blandishments.
I grew to learn that you could count on Rupert in a tight spot, even when he did not agree with what you had done. Our exposé of a bank account in which Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark, deposited proceeds from various business activities in Oman that some tried to claim his mother had helped him obtain brought down on us the wrath of Margaret, Rupert’s heroine, but Rupert never criticized me for running the story. The most he ever said was that maybe we had given it too much prominence (and, in retrospect, he was probably right). When a constitutional crisis flared round our story that the Queen thought Mrs. Thatcher was not showing enough compassion for the dispossessed in society, and there were calls for my head, Rupert was as solid as a rock. Even when he disagreed with my attack on the royal family for playing golf and going to nightclubs during the Gulf War, and supporters of the monarchy were baying for my blood, he never gave them any joy.
In private, he leaves you in no doubt that he would sweep the royal family away tomorrow if he had the chance: he regards them as the apex of a class system that has held Britain back and slighted him on numerous occasions.
He could also be robust with complaining advertisers. Mohamed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrods department store in London, called me one night in the mid-80s to complain about a story we had run criticizing the way he was renovating the house in Paris once occupied by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. I offered him space to put forth his point of view. He demanded a retraction and an apology. I refused. He threatened to withdraw all Harrods advertising from Times Newspapers.
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked. “It’s my advertising.”
“Because as of this moment,” I replied, “you are banned from advertising in The Sunday Times.”
He hung up, somewhat mystified. A little later the phone rang again. It was John King, the chairman of British Airways. He sought to intercede on Mohamed’s behalf. “Look, John,” I said firmly, “I’ve just banned Britain’s big-gest department store; I’m happy to ban Britain’s biggest airline too.” I was clearly in a bad mood.
“I think I’ll just stay out of this,” said John.
“Good idea,” I replied.
A half-hour later the phone rang again. It was Rupert, calling from New York. This, I thought, could be a tough one.
“I hear you’ve just banned our biggest advertiser,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied, explaining the circumstances.
“How much do Harrods spend with us?” he inquired.
“About £3 million,” I said nervously. There was silence at the other end of the line. I contemplated whether it would be better to back down or resign and become an unlikely hero of the liberal left.
“F— him if he thinks we can be bought for £3 million,” he said, and hung up.
Years later I visited the Windsor house in Paris. It seemed to me Mohamed had done a magnificent job of restoring the house, which was almost exactly as the Windsors had left it. But I did not regret my stance: once one advertiser knows you are a soft touch, they all do, and editing a paper free of commercial pressure becomes an impossibility. Anyway, once the ban was lifted, Harrods came back to The Sunday Times when it discovered no other paper could rival the impact of its advertising clout.
My relations with Rupert remained cordial for a lot longer than they might have partly because he was not living in London. It was tough enough for him to keep tabs on everything when he was based in New York running his new American media interests, including the New York Post and New York magazine (since sold), starting around 1976, but at least New York is on the same information network as London. When in the late 80s he moved to Los Angeles to supervise more closely his movie studio, Twentieth Century Fox, he found himself on another planet as far as
the news agenda is concerned. When he called from L.A. one day, I remember saying enthusiastically, “We’ve a great story for Sunday.”
“Great story?” he repeated. “They wouldn’t recognize one in L.A. if it came round the corner and hit them.” For all the power and glamour of owning a major motion-picture studio, Twentieth Century Fox, and an American television network, Fox Broadcasting Company, he will never give newspapers up: they are his first and last love.
There is a common myth among those who think Rupert Murdoch has too much power and influence: that he controls every aspect of his newspapers on three continents, dictating an editorial before breakfast, writing headlines over lunch, and deciding which politician to discredit over dinner. He has been known to do all three. But he does not generally work like that: his control is far more subtle.
For a start he picks as his editors people like me, who are mostly on the same wavelength as he is: we started from a set of common assumptions about politics and society, even if we did not see eye to eye on every issue and have very different styles. Then he largely left me to get on with my work.
But you always have to take Rupert into account: he is too smart to ignore. The snobbery of his British enemies has led them to regard him as something of a colonial hick because of the racy, down-market image of his tabloids and his strong Australian accent. They have had to learn the hard way that he is one of the smartest men in business, with a restless, ruthless brain that is more than a match for any British competition in newspapers or broadcasting. His mind is always buzzing, always up on the issues, and always original, which means his editors have to be on their toes if they are to keep up with him.
When I took the job of Sunday Times editor I imagined a short honeymoon before I would feel his wrath. In fact, he left me alone for most of the decade, keeping a wary eye on my progress from a distance, intervening only when he felt strongly about something. He would more often than not call me as the paper was going to press on Saturday (though there were weeks, sometimes months, when I would not hear from him at all) to find out what was on the front page and to share political gossip, which is Rupert’s stock-in-trade—give him some good inside information and he will go away happy, even if you haven’t a very good paper to tell him about.
He never barked orders to change what I was planning for the front page; he was invariably complimentary about our story lineup and would usually finish his calls with his customary courtesy, by thanking me for all my hard work. He only once ever directly tried (and failed) to influence the paper’s editorial line, when, in the 1990 Tory leadership contest, I decided to back Michael Heseltine’s attempt to oust Margaret Thatcher. He kept to the letter of his promises to Parliament of editorial independence when he bought Times Newspapers, consisting of The Times and The Sunday Times, in 1981. (He had earlier acquired two British tabloids—The Sun and the News of the World—and, in 1987, acquired the since folded Today.)
Editorial freedom, however, has its limits: Even when I did not hear from him and I knew his attention was elsewhere, he was still uppermost in my mind. When we did talk he would always let me know what he liked and what he did not, where he stood on an issue of the time and what he thought of a politician in the news. Such is the force of his personality that you feel obliged to take such views carefully into account. And why not? He is, after all, the owner.
Rupert is a highly political animal: even meetings about some technical matter having to do with color printing or pagination would invariably begin with an exchange of views on the current political scene in America or Britain. Business and politics are his only two passions: art, music, hobbies, poetry, theater, fiction, even sports (sailing may be an exception) have no interest for him. He is fascinated by politics for its own sake—but also because politics affects the business environment in which he operates.
Rupert expects his papers to stand broadly for what he believes in: right-wing Republicanism from America mixed with undiluted Thatcherism from Britain and stirred with some anti—British Establishment sentiments, as befits his colonial heritage. The resulting mix is a radical-right dose of free-market economics, the social agenda of the Christian right, and hard-line conservative views on such subjects as drugs, abortion, law and order, and defense.
He is far more right-wing than is generally thought, but will curb his ideology for commercial reasons (thankfully, he realized that a Sunday Times which entirely reflected his far-right politics, especially on social issues, would lose readers). In the 1988 American presidential election his favorite for the Republican nomination was Pat Robertson, the right-wing religious fanatic who claims to speak in tongues and have direct access to God, takes credit for having persuaded the Lord to spare his headquarters from Hurricane Gloria, and believes in a Jewish money conspiracy. “You can say what you like,” Rupert said to me during the ’88 Republican primary campaign, “he’s right on all the issues.”
Since the demise of Reagan and Thatcher, Rupert has found nobody to replace them in his affections on either side of the Atlantic. He supported Robert Dole in the 1996 presidential campaign without enthusiasm because he loathes Bill Clinton, but Dole is far too moderate a conservative for his tastes. So was George Bush: in 1992, Rupert reportedly voted for Ross Perot. He detests John Major with a vehemence few outside Rupert’s own circle have appreciated. He regards him as a weak, indecisive man, not up to the job.
Where political principle and business expediency clash, you can be pretty sure expediency will win. Despite his longstanding hatred of socialism, he is flirting with supporting the Labour candidate, Tony Blair, because Blair is heavily favored to become Britain’s next prime minister. Rupert would have far less time for Blair if the Tory government were doing better.
In the 80s, Rupert insisted on the hardest of lines against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. Yet he has cozied up to China, another evil Communist empire, in the 90s. This has required a wrenching U-turn in his attitudes toward China since the mid-80s, when Thatcher was negotiating with Beijing over the future of Hong Kong. Rupert wanted his papers to take a tough line to stiffen her resolve against China. “She should hold out,” he told me one day, “make no concessions, and tell the Chinese that there’s a Trident submarine off their coast: if the Red Army moves into Hong Kong they should be left in no doubt that we’ll nuke Beijing . . . though I suppose we could fire a warning nuke into a desert first,” he added, after a moment’s thought. There is no mystery about why Rupert has changed his tune: he will always moderate his political fundamentalism if it suits his business strategy. He had no business interests in the Soviet Union in the 80s; he is selling satellite TV to the Chinese in the 90s.
Iagreed wholeheartedly only with the free-market part of Rupert’s policy agenda, though, like him, I was also something of a Cold War warrior—the combination was enough to keep him satisfied about our editorial line most of the time. I had little time for his social agenda, especially that part inspired by America’s Christian right, to which he became more devoted as the 1980s progressed. He never struck me as a religious man—for Rupert’s religion is an extension of politics—and I believe he liked the Christian right for political rather than religious reasons (i.e., it produces blue-collar votes for conservative candidates and their agenda).
But he is also under the influence of Anna, his strong-willed wife, who is a staunch Catholic. Their marriage has lasted for almost three decades without a hint of scandal, despite Rupert’s long globe-trotting absences. This is just as well: given the kind of tabloids Rupert owns, many people would love to take revenge by revealing his infidelities. But I have never even heard a rumor of any. Rupert is actually not that interested in women.
Rupert and Anna are a close and even loving couple when together: I’ve seen them hold hands in a taxi and as they walk down the street. They talk regularly on the phone during the frequent times when they are far apart. Anna is formidable in her own right, with strong conservative social views that bolster Rupert’s (if anything, they are more stern than his). Her Catholicism has grown stronger over the years and had its effect on Rupert’s social outlook. He does not take much notice of her views on the business (he has ignored her pleas to stop the topless pictures in his London tabloids), but he will defer to her on family matters. And if Rupert was to fall under the proverbial bus tomorrow, many believe Anna rather than the children would come to the fore to try to fill his shoes in the company; she is certainly tough enough, though nobody is sure if she is ambitious enough.
Under Anna’s influence Rupert took up a fundamentalist anti-abortion position. Late one night he told me he was considering becoming a Catholic. “Since we both come from the same Scottish Presbyterian stock, you can hardly expect me to be over the moon at that prospect,” I replied, surprised at my own bluntness. He never raised the subject again—although some of his closest associates think he may have secretly turned Catholic.
There were times when The Sunday Times reflected very little of what its owner thought, but it did so enough of the time for us not to fall out. I was able regularly to criticize Margaret Thatcher, even though he adored her. Criticizing Ronald Reagan was a more risky business: Reagan was Rupert’s first love.
I admired Reagan’s economic and foreign policies, too, so there was not much friction between us. But I felt it impossible to support the president’s Iran-contra shenanigans. Rupert suffered our attacks on his hero in sullen silence because he knew Reagan had screwed up. But he regarded Oliver North, Reagan’s wayward White House assistant, as a national hero: “He sold weapons to the Iranians, freed hostages, and used Middle East money to finance the contras,” he once said to me admiringly. “The man deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor.”
He did not expect to see his particular views immediately reflected in the next edition of The Sunday Times after one of our many talks, though he would not have objected if they had been. But he had a quiet, remorseless, sometimes threatening way of laying down the perimeters within which you were expected to operate. His editors have to become adept at reading Rupert Murdoch: stray too far too often from his general outlook and you will be looking for a new job. It can be strangely oppressive, even when you agree with him: the man is never far from your mind. Rupert dominates the lives of all his senior executives. One who parted company from him 15 years ago confessed to me that he had only recently stopped dreaming about him. He still pops up from time to time in mine.
His first love is tabloid journalism (witness his willingness to sustain open-ended losses at the New York Post because of the enjoyment the paper gives him); it is what gets his juices going, and he has a brilliant populist sense for it. The wall of his office at Twentieth Century Fox in Los Angeles is covered with front pages from The Sun and the News of the World; there is nothing from The Sunday Times or The Times. Despite his privileged upper-middle-class background, he sees himself as an anti-Establishment man of the people (whom he once wincingly described on BBC TV as the “common people”) and believes his tabloids speak for their concerns, even though he has never had any real contact with Britain’s “common people” and mingles largely with Establishment types. He has a less certain touch for broadsheets. It has taken him almost 15 years to make a circulation success of The Times—and then only by spending tens of millions on price-cutting, which means it is still accumulating substantial losses. Though it would grieve him to think so, he has become an old-fashioned Times proprietor of the type he used to sneer at, keeping the paper going at a loss for years because of the power and prestige it brings its owner.
We were always broadly in agreement about the general direction of The Sunday Times. Any pressure he did exert, however, was in a down-market direction: he complained often that there was too much politics in the paper, that it was too issue-driven, and that it needed more human-interest stories and personality pieces. Sometimes the best reaction was to nod in agreement, then do nothing, in the hope he would forget; it usually worked. A confidant once explained that Rupert sometimes counted on his best people not to do his bidding—it allowed him to make broad attacks, which he enjoys.
Rupert gives his broadsheet editors far more latitude than his tabloid ones. If you want to know what Rupert Murdoch really thinks, then read The Sun and the New York Post. His name is on the editorial page of the Post as “Chairman”; there are no names on the editorial page of The Sun, but his is written in invisible ink, since The Sun reflects what Rupert thinks on every major issue. He dislikes Europe, for example, which he associates with socialism, and rarely visits it even as a tourist. He despises the idea of a European Union—especially one that might interfere with his Pan-European business interests: hence The Sun’s strident anti-European line.
He is brutal with his tabloid editors, who live in fear of his calls. I only ever had a few harsh words with Rupert on the phone in 11 years; he nearly always treated me with respect, courtesy, and sometimes even kindness. Others were not so lucky.
Kelvin MacKenzie of The Sun endured almost daily “bollockings” from the man he always referred to as “the boss”—a steady stream of transatlantic vituperation and four-letter words was his regular diet for over 12 years, even though he ran a paper which netted his proprietor £70 to £90 million a year. “He treats the tabloid editors like dirt,” confirms John Dux, who was managing director in the early 90s at Wapping, Rupert’s high-tech non-union printing plant and Publishing center. “Kelvin used to go into great depressions after Rupert’s onslaughts. When you run the most successful tabloid in the world it is not nice being regularly told you’re a f— idiot by the owner.”
The abuse did not get better with time. A depressed Kelvin called me in February 1992. “I’ve just had the worst-ever four-letter tongue-lashing from Rupert,” he informed me. “I came very close to resigning last night. I’ve told Gus Fischer [Rupert’s top man in London in the early 90s] that I can’t take any more from that Australian bastard.
“Monty [David Montgomery, then editor of Today] has also been lambasted. In effect, Rupert said to him, ‘I don’t like your f— paper, and I don’t like you!’”
In the summer of 1993, Kelvin finally snapped: in the middle of a particularly bruising face-to-face encounter with Rupert in his office, Kelvin simply stood up, put on his coat, and walked out. His resignation followed within hours, by fax from home. He refused to take Rupert’s calls or answer his faxes. “I’ve gone too far this time,” Rupert confessed to Gus Fischer. “Will you intercede on my behalf?” It took Gus several days to talk Kelvin into returning, with Rupert even promising, “I’ll change.”
Rupert got his way and treated Kelvin with more respect after that. But things were never quite the same again: the whipping boy had finally stood up to the boss—and the boss was unsettled by it. Kelvin was soon moved from his beloved Sun to Sky Television, Murdoch’s multichannel direct-to-home satellite service, early in 1994. My belief is that Kelvin’s revolt in 1993 led directly to that unhappy and short-lived transfer, which, given the obvious fact that Kelvin and Sky’s boss, the cantankerous Sam Chisholm, were bound to fall out, could easily be construed as a disguised firing.
Kelvin was not the only one of Rupert’s editors to experience regular “bollockings.” Wendy Henry and Patsy Chapman used to live in fear and trembling of his calls when they were editors of the News of the World; they would call me almost every Saturday afternoon to ask if I knew where Rupert was, if he had called—and what kind of mood he was in. Patsy found it particularly tough to cope with Rupert’s telephone terrorism: she suffered a nervous collapse from the pressure and had to resign. Rupert made sure the company picked up the medical bills.
There was an element of the bully in this: Rupert ranted at Kelvin and others because he knew he could get away with it. I think Rupert sensed that I would be out the door before he finished his sentence if he talked to me in the same way; he never did. I always made it clear that if he was unhappy with my editorship I would not fight him to keep it. But I would not take being scolded like a schoolboy. Telephone terrorism is his weapon of choice to make sure his influence extends throughout his worldwide empire. He was often grumpy with me on the phone for no particular reason—and sometimes downright curmudgeonly, especially when the jet lag was bad. His global flying schedule added to his bad-tempered calls. He takes sleeping pills prescribed by a British doctor to help cope with the time-zone changes. Gus Fischer used to deliver a steady supply to him in America, but Rupert’s trusty personal assistant, Dot, was always worried that he would become too dependent on them. “I’ll take these,” Dot would say when Gus arrived, so she could ration their use. But if they helped him to sleep on planes they did not make him any more cordial when he hit the phone on arrival. These were the calls I came to dread, not because I feared their consequences but because they were unpleasant and pointless. It was never quite clear why he was in such a bad mood—whether I or Kelvin or some other editor was the cause of it or whether it was because he was dog-tired from his perpetual globe-trotting. There were simply times when he relished giving his underlings a bad time. You sensed the bleak atmosphere the moment you lifted the phone.
There was nothing you could say on such occasions to cheer him up or please him: he would quarrel with every remark you made, no matter how trivial, and nitpick the previous Sunday’s paper while praising the weakest stories of our rivals. He was determined to be miserable. If I had said, “Rupert, I’ve discovered a billion dollars in gold bars in the basement of our offices. I’m shipping them to you today,” he would have replied, “Why didn’t you find two billion?”
He punctuated such calls with long silences—traps inviting you to say something else with which he could disagree. You’d say something innocuous to keep the conversation going, like “Thatcher’s doing better these days,” and he’d snap back, “It won’t last.” Or I’d say, “The Sunday Telegraph was pretty weak,” and he’d reply, “They had better page-one stories than you.”
These calls were not designed to build morale; they left me angry and depressed. But over time I learned how to deal with them: when his “silent routine” began, I decided to say nothing. It worked. I remember one call when he seemed to have nothing to say—certainly nothing nice-and I just let the silence run. It became a test of wills, with the cost of a transatlantic call adding up as neither of us said anything. I could have gone and made a cup of tea. Just as I was about to crack, he finally said, “Are you still there?”
“Yes, Rupert,” I replied.
“Sorry, I have to go now,” he said. “Thanks for everything.” And off he went. I never got the silent treatment again.
There is a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality to Rupert: despite the bad-tempered calls, there were many times when he was courteous, even charming. Almost every time he called he began by asking if he was interrupting something important; of course, there is nothing more important to a courtier than a call from the Sun King. One Friday, when he was in London and I was behind with the editorial, I put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my office door. I learned later that he had come across to see me, looked at the notice, and gone for a chat with the deputy editor, who advised him that the sign was not meant for him. “No,” said Rupert, “it means Andrew’s busy. I’ll leave him alone.”
Those times when he was in London (which became increasingly infrequent as his American interests expanded) had everybody on their toes. He would spend Saturdays going through budgets or administration with his managers, then wander across to my office as the first edition came off the presses. He would lay the paper on the lectern and noisily turn each page, stabbing his finger at various stories or circling them with his pen. He had the unerring knack of zooming in on the paper’s weaknesses— ones you had sensed as the paper was going to press but you hoped nobody else would notice. Rupert always did.
Sometimes he would leave you wondering if you had done anything right; it cast a cloud over your whole life. Other times, when he liked the paper, you felt you could walk on water, not just because the boss was happy but because Rupert’s newspaper judgment is unrivaled. It was part of his management style that he could leave you in a deep depression or on top of the world. I grew to resent that one man could have such an effect on me.
In the early years we had been quite close. During the mid-1980s I spent several Christmas Days in Aspen, Colorado, with the Murdoch family, who always made me feel welcome. Their Aspen house is a gargantuan alpine ski lodge with a swimming pool in the living room, but Christmas Day dinner was a delightful, low-key affair with only the immediate family present; I felt privileged to be there. The children—Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James—never behaved like spoiled rich kids and were always fun to be with. (Elisabeth, 28, and Lachlan, 25, are now executives in their father’s empire; James, 23, is trying his luck starting an independent rock recording label in New York.)
They are a happy family. Rupert enjoys spending time with his children when he can, though the phone never stops ringing to drag him away. Meal-times are informal and often the venue for spirited debate on politics and social matters. The family is not intimidated by him. Lachlan shares his father’s conservative views, James is more liberal, and Elisabeth is somewhere in between. Rupert has long regarded Lachlan as heir apparent, but Elisabeth has let it be known she wants to be in the running, too. Rupert, having dismissed the idea that his daughter could succeed him, now likes the rivalry between them. It was always a competitive household. When we played charades after dinner, the most obscure phrases—some in Latin!—were acted out. The same competitive instincts emerged on the ski slopes.
Both Rupert and I are enthusiastic if clumsy skiers. He had an obsession with finding the most difficult route down a slope. Once, he took a gang of his executives from Australia down a particularly challenging run; though most could barely ski, none said so for fear of losing face with the boss. I slipped away and took a fast, easy route to the bottom. When I looked up it was like the Battle of the Somme: bodies and skis everywhere, with Rupert at the bottom shouting at them all to get a move on.
On another occasion we took a Sno-Cat and went in search of powder off-trail on the back of Aspen Mountain; we spent most of the day on our backs or struggling to stay upright in the soft, champagne snow. I made it down one slope that had a small river at the bottom obscured by a recent snowfall. Rupert came hurtling after me. I waved frantically to warn him: “There’s a river here!” I yelled. “What?” he shouted, shooting past me, flying over the river, and landing flat on his face with a thump in the snow as he catapulted out of his bindings when the tips of his skis dug into the far bank. It was like a scene from a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and I collapsed in uncontrollable laughter. I then pulled myself together and rushed to dig him out before he suffocated.
For Rupert, everything in life is a competition. Gus Fischer told me of the time Rupert took him sailing round Sardinia on his huge new yacht. They had dropped anchor and taken the dinghy to a beach for a swim. Then it was time to return for dinner: Gus suggested they swim back to the boat. “It was a joke,” says Gus. “The boat was over a mile away on the horizon and the tide was coming in. But Rupert immediately replied, ‘Let’s do it,’ and started swimming out to sea. We made it, but there were times when I thought we were both going to drown.”
The boat was Rupert’s latest executive toy, but also the culmination of an Australian’s dream: sunshine and water. He had agonized over the huge expense of building it. “Maybe I should wait before buying,” he said to me. “It’s hard to justify the cost.”
“You work hard, Rupert,” I replied. “Why not enjoy the fruits of your success now?”
He thought for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “Why should I wait till I’m too old to enjoy it?” His high-tech floating palace was built in Italy, providing long-term employment for an entire village. But by the time it was delivered I was no longer flavor of the month and never sailed on it.
Such examples of conspicuous consumption are rare for Rupert, who is his mother’s son in this regard. His Scottish Presbyterian background makes him reserved about spending too much on the baubles of billionaires. He has beautiful homes on three continents—including a stunning if somewhat soulless triplex overlooking Green Park in the St. James district of London and a 2,800-acre sheep farm in Australia—but he actually lives quite modestly, eating simply and drinking moderately, even preferring taxis to limousines. For a Sun King, his immediate entourage is very small. There is no kitchen cabinet that follows him around the world; he travels alone, but then, he is a loner.
It took him ages to acquire his own executive jet. He finally decided it was time when we arrived by commercial jet in Aspen one morning in the late 80s only to find that Barry Diller, then boss of Twentieth Century Fox (a recent acquisition of Rupert’s) had already arrived in his own jet. I could see the dialogue bubbles coming out of Rupert’s head with the words “It’s time I had one of these.” Within weeks, he did.
Even when I worked closely with Rupert I knew it would not last: he does not allow himself to make lasting friendships. “Don’t fall in love with Rupert,” Bruce Matthews, one of Rupert’s top London executives, warned me in 1987, when Rupert and I were very close. “He turns against lovers and chops them off.” The only people who are really close to him are his wife, his children, Helen, his sister, and his mother. He has no real friends. He does not allow himself to become intimate with anybody else, for he never knows when he will have to turn on them—it is always more painful to sack your best friend, whereas courtiers are disposable. “He cannot afford friends,” says Gus Fischer. “He has built his empire by using people, then discarding them when they have passed their expiration dates. It is not the sort of management style which lends itself to lasting friendships.”
“The management style of News Corporation,” said Rupert’s Australian chairman, Richard Searby, at a company seminar in Aspen which I had helped organize in the late 1980s, “is one of extreme devolution punctuated by periods of episodic autocracy. Most company boards meet to take decisions. Ours meets to ratify yours.” (Rupert was in the audience.) Searby was one of Rupert’s longest-serving lieutenants (though that did not save him when Rupert decided it was time to sack him, which he did by fax despite an association which went back to their school days), and he knew Rupert’s style well.
For much of the time, you don’t hear from Rupert. Then, all of a sudden he descends like a thunderbolt to slash and burn all before him. “Calculated terror” is how one of his most senior associates has described Rupert’s management style—that and a simple but superb weekly financial-reporting system combined with an eerie grasp of numbers explain why he is able to keep tabs on almost all that is happening. It is a combination which provides the backdrop to his many telephone calls, and it has its advantages: quick, unbureaucratic decision-making (providing you can get his ear), a daring corporate ethos, and a continuous adrenaline flow that keeps everybody excited. But it also has its drawbacks: senior managers are easily demoralized and undermined by Rupert’s cavalier behavior, which encourages sometimes irrational and unpredictable decisions.
Nobody in the company other than Rupert knows the whole picture. He relishes keeping even his most senior executives in the dark: a divide-and-rule approach which leaves them all feeling vulnerable. I knew many senior executives who spent far more time trying to second-guess Rupert than running the company. Kelvin MacKenzie once said, only half in jest, that the only real decision senior newspaper executives in London ever made was to toss a coin to decide who was going to call Rupert in New York to find out what they should do. This makes for weak management—but then, Rupert is surrounded by weak managers. Those who behave otherwise do not last long.
It is not just managers that Rupert regards as second-class citizens. He has little time for shareholders or board directors. Shareholders are a potential threat to his control of the global company he has built from scratch. He recognizes their interests only with reluctance. His view is that News Corporation shareholders should have no interest in current earnings or dividends; they should leave it to him to build long-term capital values—and anybody who buys the company’s shares should realize this. His boards are full of pawns who will do his bidding; he rarely consults them and only nominally seeks their approval. Gus Fischer told me of the time Rupert called to say he had just spent $525 million for 64 percent of the Asian Star satellite system, the Asian equivalent of Sky. “Could you call a couple of the directors and tell them?” asked Rupert.
“He had not bothered to seek board approval,” says Gus Fischer, amazed to this day. The Murdoch-family holding in News Corporation is down to only 30 percent; he once told me he would be nervous if it fell below 40 percent. But he still runs it as his personal fiefdom.
Those who survive longest at the court of the Sun King are a group of unthreatening Australians who have been with him for years. They are totally loyal to their master, and he is comfortable and relaxed in their company, though they suffer the rough side of his tongue when he feels like it. This they take without complaint. They have no choice: most are unemployable elsewhere at anything like the salaries and status they enjoy with Rupert.
They are the consummate yes-men, their purpose to reinforce his judgment in decisions the Sun King has already made, to nudge him in directions he has already decided to go, and to present no challenge to him. It always amazed me to see how the company prospered with such people in key posts. But they are the timeservers, whose job is to keep the show on the road. They are periodically supplemented by more talented folk whom Rupert hires temporarily for specific jobs he needs done. They might not last long and Rupert invariably falls out with them at some stage, but they serve their purpose at the time. Their intermittent presence is easy to accommodate in the company because there is no hierarchical management structure at News Corporation. If there is a structure at all it is a circle of courtiers, with the Sun King sitting at the center.
Rupert’s restless energy makes him prone to micromanagement. When I once complained about the food in the canteen, he spent part of a week sorting it out himself. He calls distribution or sales managers himself for the latest circulation figures and other information so that when he calls his top men he will know more than they.
The flaw in all this is that Rupert is actually not a very good manager—he does not have the patience for it. He is at his best as a consummate deal-maker, maybe the most formidable in the world for spotting an asset with potential, then acquiring it with the most imaginative financing methods. It is the excitement of the deal that attracts him. It awakens the gambler in him. It suits his short attention span. It makes him one of the world’s greatest business predators. But these very qualities make him an erratic manager.
“In fact, Rupert is a lousy manager,” says Gus Fischer bluntly. “He terrorizes those under him when he makes one of his flying visits: it takes weeks to restore their morale. He provides no leadership to inspire. He wants to take all the decisions himself—so he won’t delegate power. He wouldn’t even agree who should report to me. He prefers the tension between executives which his episodic intervention creates.”
John Dux agrees: “Rupert is the world’s worst manager. During his visits he should have inspired and encouraged his lieutenants. Instead he left them miserable and demoralized with his autocratic style and raging temper. It used to take weeks to restore morale after he had gone.”
Imitating the Sun King is always a great temptation, even for minor courtiers; it was something too many of Rupert’s managers found impossible to resist. He was brutal with them, so they were brutal in turn with their under-became a regular Saturday-night event; they were fun, work was the only topic on the agenda, and everybody enjoyed them. But word reached me that Rupert regarded them as an unnecessary extravagance—and that “living it up on a Saturday night at his expense” was just another example of how semi-detached I was becoming. I resented this ignorant long-distance carping and grew furious with the disinformation and innuendo being supplied for Rupert’s receptive ear. I confronted him in his office on one of his London visits.
“I hear you’re not happy with me,” I said bluntly. “What’s the problem?”
“You don’t seem that involved with the paper,” he said, almost embarrassed. Rupert does not like confrontations unless he provokes them, which he rarely does.
“That’s rubbish,” I snapped back. “It’s poison being poured in your ear. I’m more involved in the paper than ever before. Yes, I’m doing other things [I had started broadcasting on LBC, the London talk-radio station], but they complement what I’m doing at the paper, which remains my first priority. I’m not married, haven’t got a family, I live to work. Anyway, you should judge me not by the input but by the output of the paper; everybody thinks the paper’s going gangbusters, our Gulf War coverage is great, and sales are soaring.” He was somewhat taken aback by this blast. But I was angry.
The meeting cleared the air. For a while I had the best of all possible worlds: a disengaged, even remote owner from whom I heard less and less. The early 90s were the years when I hardly had a boss. I exploited this unprecedented independence to the hilt—I knew it would not last forever. At some stage, Rupert would inevitably seek to cage, remove, or destroy this monster he had unleashed.
By the summer of 1990 I was able to write in a private note that I was “now out of the Rupert Murdoch/News Corporation loop.” Placing The Sunday Times at the center of so many controversies had given me a certain celebrity, not to say notoriety, and going to bat for the newspaper in countless television and radio broadcasts had made me a public figure in my own right. Rupert resented it.
At first I could not believe my public profile was a problem for him. How could the billionaire owner of the world’s most powerful media empire, a man fêted by presidents, prime ministers, and captains of industry wherever he went in the world, be envious of my minor fame in Britain? It sounded too ridiculous even to consider. But I learned that it was the major reason behind his growing disillusionment with me.
“Do not underestimate how much Rupert resents your becoming a public figure in your own right,” I was warned early in 1994 by one of his closest confidants. “He hates the fact that you are better known, more regularly recognized than he is in Britain. He resents the way people talk about ‘your’ Sunday Times. He hates it when you refer to ‘my’ paper. He thinks your social life is a whirlwind of glamorous women and expensive restaurants. He does not like being upstaged like that. There is room for only one superstar at News International.”
“He used to get very annoyed when you got more or better publicity than he,” confirmed Gus Fischer three years later. “He couldn’t stand it. ‘One day he’ll get too big for his boots,’ he used to fume.”
Rupert was in his shirtsleeves when I arrived at his London apartment in April 1994. He had flown in from New York and looked tired and drawn. But he was in a good mood, having just made a deal with a Bombay businessman, who passed me on the way out, to expand his satellite-TV interests in India. As the two of us dined at a large round table on asparagus and flounder, served by a butler, he was at his most charming. This is also when he is at his most dangerous.
We talked about the newspaper: I gave several examples of how well it was doing, both in sales and stories. He agreed: “You’ve done a great job with the paper,” he said. “It’s a great paper. If I have one criticism it’s your tendency not to take any prisoners in a controversy. But that’s O.K. That’s you.”
We moved on to politics, discussing the relative merits of those who sought to succeed John Major. It was only when we adjourned to the sofas at the other end of the long room to sip chamomile tea that the conversation turned to me.
“We’ve talked about the paper and politics,” he said hesitatingly. “Let’s talk about you.” He proceeded to tell me about how his Fox TV network had concluded a multimillion-dollar deal to secure the rights to broadcast National Football League games on Sundays. He then explained how CBS, the previous N.F.L. broadcaster, had followed the games with 60 Minutes, its popular and prestigious newsmagazine show. That helped give it a lock on the Sunday-night ratings; it then did a substantial amount of on-air promotion before this big audience to preview shows it had coming up during the week. It had been part of the strategy which had made CBS America’s No. 1 network in its heyday. Rupert wanted Fox to develop its own version of 60 Minutes to follow the Sunday football games and similarly build Fox’s ratings. This is where I came in.
“I think we’ll need an American host for the show,” he said, “if we need a host at all [on 60 Minutes the reporters share the presenting]. But I see you as the senior of four reporters; you do the big international stories, the interviews with people like Clinton, the major investigations. I see you as the Mike Wallace figure in the show.”
I was not totally enthused by the prospect of going from being editor of one of the world’s great newspapers to a reporter on America’s fourth-rated network.
“Do you want a new editor for The Sunday Times, Rupert?”
“No,” he said emphatically, his eyes looking away. “I just thought it might appeal to you. Take your time and think about it.” It was 10:30 P.M. and his jet lag was now taking its toll: I thought it best to leave without committing myself to anything. We parted with a friendly handshake.
Early the next morning I consulted a couple of friends whose advice I valued and who I knew could keep a secret.
“It’s a f— insult,” one said angrily. “You’re one of the most successful editors in the world and all he can offer you is a reporter’s job in America? Why should you walk the plank? If he wants you to go he’ll have to do a lot better than that.”
Two weeks later Rupert asked me to dine with him and Anna, on a Saturday evening. Over dinner he lamented being in Los Angeles and wished he could spend more time in New York, “the capital of the world.” He talked about moving back. Anna did not want to hear it: she had settled into their beautiful Spanish-style house overlooking Beverly Hills, and hated the grime and crime of New York. For the first time ever, they began to argue in front of me. “You’re a perpetual-motion machine,” she said to Rupert. “I’ve had enough of keeping pace with you. I’m staying in L.A.”
Their exchange confirmed what I had already heard: Rupert had become increasingly unpredictable, even whimsical, moving people about for no very good reason (“spinning wheels” was how one executive put it) except to satisfy his latest wheeze. He was even doing it to himself. Now over 60, with intimations of mortality but still so much to do, he had become even more a man in a hurry. He was moving senior executives around like pieces on a chessboard to suit whatever ephemeral purpose obsessed him at that particular moment: regardless of the disruption in their lives they were expected to fit in, even if fundamental decisions risked being reversed only weeks after they were made. I was the latest victim. I was prepared to go along, provided I got everything I wanted.
There are only two times when Rupert is generous to those who work for him: one is when he wants you, the other is when he wants to get rid of you. Since I was in both positions at once I decided to exploit the situation to the full. I asked Rupert for the following: a substantial fee for the seven-month transition period in New York; the titles of executive editor, chief reporter, and host or co-host; the continued payment of my Sunday Times salary plus all perks during the transition; a two-year contract at a minimum of $1.5 million a year after the transition; a large severance payment should either Rupert or I decide for any reason whatsoever not to go forward; and a two-year contract to write a well-paid weekly column for The Sunday Times. I referred to these last two demands as my parachute.
I was right about Rupert’s time-sensitive generosity. When we met late on Monday morning he agreed to everything without bargaining, which only underlined how eager he was for a new editor.
I tried one more time to make sure the American part of the deal was not just a charade to get me out of The Sunday Times without having to admit it.
“The parachute is all I really want, Rupert,” I said. “You’ve agreed to a substantial payment and a column. I’m happy to walk away from The Sunday Times now with absolutely no hard feelings on my part whatsoever. There is no need to go through with America if it’s just a ruse to get me out of the paper.”
“Andrew,” he said, fixing me with his gaze, “I need you in New York. I hope we’ll do great things together in America.”
Iarrived in New York to discover that somebody already had my new job—and Rupert had not quite mustered the courage to tell him that I was coming to take over. David Corvo had been executive producer of Front Page, Fox TV’s previous attempt at a newsmagazine show, a sort of yuppie 60 Minutes which had been produced out of Los Angeles and canceled after the ’93-’94 season, having been ignored by critics and viewers alike. Corvo had returned to New York expecting to be the boss of the new, more grown-up show Rupert was now supposed to be determined to launch.
Corvo and I lunched with Rupert in his private dining room in his midtown headquarters on the day I arrived. We were joined by Judith Regan, whom Rupert had hired from Simon & Schuster with the promise of having her own imprint within his HarperCollins book-publishing empire and of being a television star for his Fox TV network—he had really wanted only her publishing skills but lured her away with the prospect of a TV career.
A small, tidy woman in her 30s, Regan had impressed Rupert with her mix of intelligence and tabloid instincts. She was briefly to be one of Rupert’s flavors of the month because she had just made a fortune for Simon & Schuster by publishing Private Parts, by Howard Stern, and The Way Things Ought to Be, by Rush Limbaugh. She was smart and original, but she had no background in serious journalism, no experience in front of a camera, and possessed a somewhat uncertain judgment.
The four of us brainstormed about the kind of show we should produce, with Regan pleasing Rupert with her tabloid attitudes. I was beginning to feel a little depressed about how down-market this show was going to be and wondering what I was doing there when Corvo asked a crucial question: “Who’s going to anchor this show?”
“You’re looking at them,” replied Rupert, nodding his head at Regan and me.
“Ah aah” was all Corvo could muster. But you could see what he was thinking: “An unknown Brit with a non-American accent and an unknown American with no television experience. The man must be out of his mind.”
After lunch we wandered around our new offices on the second floor of News Corporation’s U.S. headquarters on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, wires hanging from the ceiling and builders drilling and hammering everywhere.
“I know we’ve both been asked to do the same job,” I said to Corvo. “It’s the sort of infuriating thing Rupert does. So let’s divide it between us. You concentrate on the television side, I’ll concentrate on journalism. You remain executive producer, I’ll be executive editor.” That was pretty much the way it was in the crazy months ahead.
Worse was to come: at our next meeting Rupert began to think aloud about the wisdom of doing a weekly television magazine at all, arguing that a late-night daily news show might be more distinctive. The conversation ended with the matter unresolved. I wandered back to my apartment feeling depressed. There was obviously no settled plan in his mind, despite his certainties in London.
Strangely, Rupert’s authority did not run at Fox as fully as it did through the rest of his company. It was a matter of course that what Rupert wanted to happen anywhere in his global empire usually did happen; that was the Sun King’s might. But not at Fox; it seemed to resist his domination, even after he moved to L.A. to be more hands-on. I always got the impression that the Fox people worked for the Hollywood entertainment industry rather than for Rupert. They were creative folk who could easily find other lucrative employment in the industry should Rupert ride them too hard舒and he could not afford to lose too many. Several times Rupert expressed to me his frustration at not being able to get a grip on Fox. He blamed Barry Diller, who had run Fox and kept Rupert at a distance in the early days, for building a “state within a state.” But Barry (who may have been the first to refer to Rupert as a Sun King) had been gone since 1992 and still Rupert was not master in the house that Barry had built.
Unfortunately, the undermining of Full Disclosure, as the show was called, began almost the moment Rupert gave us our marching orders to prepare for an October launch. John Matoian, the recently departed president of Fox Entertainment, and his men bombarded him with two messages: a newsmagazine would rate badly on Fox, especially one on which I was the main on-air presence. The man who only a few days before had been saying I could anchor the show on my own was now agreeing privately with his Fox executives that my role should be confined to executive editor. His problem was that he feared I would quit when he told me that. His executives’ problem was that they had achieved only half their objective: they had turned him against me—now they wanted to turn him against the whole idea of a newsmagazine.
After months of dithering, and pushing back our launch date, Rupert finally decided to change the whole concept to that of a late-night daily news show to compete with ABC’s formidable Nightline. Finally I had had enough. I met with Rupert in his L.A. office. We sat down on his white sofas, a coffee table between us. He started talking politics, first about how well the Republicans would do in the next day’s congressional elections, then he repeated his belief that John Major was finished.
“But I’m really more anxious to talk about my future,” I said at last.
“I know,” said Rupert, finally realizing there was no escape from the conversation. “I need you to drive this new daily show.”
“I’m sorry, Rupert,” I replied, “I don’t want to do it. If it was just the two of us calling all the shots, like The Sunday Times, then I would stay. But it’s not. I have lost faith in Fox to deliver a news show like this. You may want one, but almost everybody else here does not. I want to pull the parachute.”
Rupert started to remonstrate with me, but the phone rang. Irritated, he picked it up, then a smile crossed his face. It was Anna, telling him he had become a grandfather: Elisabeth had just given birth to her first child.
“Congratulations, Granddad,” I said, smiling.
He began to resume his argument, then stopped. I think he saw I was adamant. “All right,” he said, “pull the parachute.” We stood up to shake hands, and said good-bye; it was a curiously low-key ending to 11 tumultuous years, but at least it was amicable. I think we both realized that if we did not part now it was certain to end in tears later.
“Let’s keep in close touch; I’d like to be able to call on you whenever I need you,” said Rupert as I left his office.
In fact I never heard from him again.
Excerpted from Full Disclosure, by Andrew Neil, published in October in the U.K. by Macmillan;
'Murdoch has too much power': Miliband demands break-up of tycoon's UK empire as Yard probe phone hacking emails
Labour leader calls for new rules on media ownership
James Murdoch investigated over alleged 'cover-up'
Ed Miliband has cranked up the pressure on Rupert Murdoch by demanding the break-up of his UK media empire as the tycoon was hit today by new body blows over the phone hacking scandal.
The Labour leader called for all political parties to agree on new laws governing media ownership, significantly cutting the billionaire's market share. He accused Mr Murdoch of having 'too much power over British public life.'
Mr Miliband's demand came amid claims from a Scotland Yard source that executives at News International - including Mr Murdoch's son James - were being investigated over a possible 'cover up' of the hacking scandal.
The Sunday Telegraph reported that the Met want to know why a series of emails were not handed over to police until January this year - four years after they had been passed from the company to an outside law firm.
A Met source was quoted as saying: 'It would have to be proved that James Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks or any other senior executive knew the information handed over in 2011 was actually in the system in 2006 and suppressed it.'
James Murdoch and Mrs Brooks, the former News International chief executive, have denied any knowledge of widespread wrongdoing.
In an interview with the Observer, Mr Miliband said the current laws governing the media were outdated and needed to be changed so they could keep up with the burgeoning digital era of publishing and broadcasting.
Despite the closure of the News of the World, News International withdrawing its bid for BSkyB, and the eventual resignation of Mrs Brooks, Mr Miliband said Mr Murdoch had not done enough to restore public faith in a badly tarnished media industry.
He said: 'I think that we've got to look at the situation whereby one person can own more than 20 per cent of the newspaper market, the Sky platform and Sky News.
'If you want to minimise the abuses of power then that kind of concentration of power is frankly quite dangerous.'
Mr Miliband added to rumours that News International would be launching a Sunday Sun, saying that it would only add to the Murdoch dominance of the UK media market.
He is clearly enjoying his role as champion against abuses of media power, not least because it has revitalised his Labour leadership and has seen a healthy increase in his personal rating in the polls.
Today his Commons deputy Harriet Harman described Mr Murdoch's empire as 'too powerful and too rich'.
The 'concentration of power' that he had built up should not be allowed to happen again, she said.
Their comments will be seen as a warm-up to the Murdochs and Mrs Brooks appearing before the Commons culture, media and sport committee on Tuesday.
News International has confirmed to the Sunday Telegraph that senior executives had read a series of emails allegedly exposing phone hacking at the News of the World.
In the intervening years before the emails were handed to police, James Murdoch is said to have paid Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association £700,000 to settle out of court.
Critics claim the confidential agreement effectively had bought his silence.
Mr Murdoch has said he would never have made the payment if he had known then the full facts of 'industrial scale' hacking which is thought to have targeted thousands of people.
The police investigation has now spread to the investigative unit of The Sunday Times, according to a report in the New York Times.
The investigation will look into allegations that journalists hacked into email accounts and took part in other online privacy invasions, a person with knowledge of the scope of the inquiry told the newspaper.
One target of the investigation is alleged to be Jonathan Rees, a private detective employed by the News of the World.
Tom Watson, the Labour Minister who has led the campaign against phone hacking, claims police have evidence that Mr Rees was paid by News International and that he had claimed to have met with members of the Sunday Times investigation unit.
The claims were published in the New York Times, which is currently in a circulation battle with Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.
It was also reported that:
Shareholders are calling for News Corporation, the parent company, to sell its newspaper titles in the UK to stop the scandal spreading to the U.S.
James Murdoch's position as BSkyB chairman will be discussed after the board agreed a special session.
The Liberal Democrats have written to Ofcom urging an investigation which could see News Corp being forced to sell its 39 per cent stake in BSkyB.
Lawyers acting for David Beckham have contacted police over his fears he was the target for News of the World private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.
Sir Paul McCartney's press aides claim they were hacked when he split from his second wife Heather Mills.
Radio breakfast DJ Chris Evans has announced he has joined the list of hacking victims.
Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem deputy is leading his party's demand for the watchdog to launch a BSkyB investigation under the Broadcasting Act which forces Ofcom to consider 'any relevant conduct of those who manage and control such a licence.'
Sorry: The apology advertisement from Rupert Murdoch and a promise to co-operate with the police which appeared today in several newspapers
The regulator is claiming it cannot act while there is a criminal investigation in progress, but this was dismissed by the Lib Dems. Ofcom is expected to respond later this week.
Beckham, the former England football captain, believed he was the target for phone hackers over the past decade. He has instructed his solicitors to find out if he is on the list of 4,000 possible victims.
Chris Evans, 45, the Radio 2 Breakfast Show host said he has no intention of suing for damages after being told by police he had his phone hacked.
He said 'I was hacked. It's official. Scotland Yard contacted my people to inform them my name was on the list and notes were made.
'Do you want to sue?' I was asked. 'You'll almost certainly receive some cash,' I was told. ''No thanks, I replied, count me out. After some of the stupid things I did back then, I'm lucky to be still here.'
Meanwhile, News International has made a fresh apology in today's national newspapers, placing adverts declaring there should be 'no place to hide' from the police investigation.
The publisher's advert, is headed: 'Putting right what's gone wrong' and states that the company's 'obligation' includes 'full co-operation with the police' and 'compensation for those affected'. It says the organisation is 'committed to change'.
In relation to the police inquiry, it reads: 'There are no excuses and should be no place to hide. We will not tolerate wrongdoing and will act on any evidence that comes to light.'
The advert concludes: 'apologising for our mistakes and fixing them are only the first steps.
'It may take some time for us to rebuild trust and confidence, but we are determined to live up to the expectations of our readers, colleagues and partners.
'We will not stop until these matters are resolved.'
I wonder if Murdoch takes his orders from the USA? That would explain the way we give them everything they want which ever party is in power. Maybe he can say do as I say or I will ruin you by giving you a bad press, and maybe he has, though his phone hacking and other methods, something to reveal on the individual politicians. I have often been puzzled and outraged in equal measures at the way they continually do things which are against our national interest and maybe that is the reason? Whatever it is a big security risk having such a powerful media monopoly and Milliband is right. However I doubt we know how far it actually goes!
Both main political parties are hypocrites is this debate but at least it may lead to law changes that will benefit the public, the fact is Murdoch could not own as much media outlets in both Australia where he is from or America where he has citizenship yet as a foreign national to this country he can own more that a third of the total news media? It's about time changes were brought in.
Putting politics to one side I also believe Murdoch has far too much power, Tesco is another with too much power I believe they are trying to get into banking now Tesco should stick to what they know best food, these people become too greedy, greedy for power as well as money.
For goodness sake I'm fed up of hearing about this Hacking, I can understand that if Bank account details are stolen this is serious and a criminal matter, also the Dowler family must be given due compensation for what is alleged to be partially responsible for the tragic happening. The matter should then be left to the Police to search out the culprits and ensure it never happens again. Regarding Mr Murdoch, although he's paper was allegedly responsible, when your at the top of the Management he must trust he's subordinates - it is they who must be brought to book - this I understand is happening, little by little.
Tony Webb, presently in Southern Europe, 1 decade ago
Ah, how I wish he would be as passionate about denouncing his predecessor for bringing the uk to a point of bankruptcy and it´s young people to decades of reduced opportunity. How I wish he would denounce in as strident language the mess that his party has left others to try and mitigate. How I wish he would accept responsibility where it lies. But like his predecessor, he makes a mountain out of a molehill, while accepting his vitriolic speech, because he is unable to deal with the mountainous matters affecting everybody I have no desire to see Murdoch brought down, but to clean up his empire ... yes. The same applies to Mr Milliband and his party. The Dowlers and their solicitor spoke in a much more reasoned and enlightened way.
Both main political parties are hypocrites is this debate but at least it may lead to law changes that will benefit the public, the fact is Murdoch could not own as much media outlets in both Australia where he is from or America where he has citizenship yet as a foreign national to this country he can own more that a third of the total news media? It's about time changes were brought in.
This man is an idiot anything to appear to care when infact he is the last man I would trust , he is just jumping on the band wagon and is a first class hypocrite
Mr Echo Cambridge England 9 13....Well said Mr echo you only have to read through all news stories and comments throughout the Country to see Milliband is pursuing the right path ..Its only DM readers that are in a world of their own..God help us if they were the true voice of the Country.
If RED Ed is to be taken seriously, then perhaps he should take stock of his own election to leader of the Labour Party. Corruption in the media, Government and the Police has been endemic since the beginning of time, which in my opinion is not right nor justified. But for the leader of a party whose roots are entrenched in control, just look at all the snooping which was advocated by one of his previous leaders, snooping in to peoples bins et al, he really needs to take stock of what he is really trying to advocate himself; by saying Murdock's media empire should be culled, that also should be enforced on any one institution which has unwarranted control. I wonder how many cosy meetings Miliband has had with other such organisation, namely the Unions. Ed's current rhetoric whilst strong and forceful actually has very little substance, but he does appeal to the lynch-mob mentality. It is easy to be forceful in opposition but the reality is often very different when in Government.
Little Ed thinks the public is so gullible that we can't see his real pathetic motives in this circus. First break down Murdoch's media, then go for total control of the press under Big Brother Corporation, the BBC, and there you have it, state control of the media. Then he dreams of being elected PM and leading our country into a new era of glorious socialism where we will be only a small region in the great federal state of the EU. What worries me more is that the other political parties are too quiet about this... Freedom of the press is essential to maintain democracy, worse than the ownership of the press by a private organisation is having the press under complete state control. Phone hacking is just the excuse to carry out this plan.
When We Talk About Fox News, We Need to Talk About the Murdoch Family Too
The Murdochs own Fox News but rarely get the scrutiny they deserve for bankrolling racism and hatred.
Rupert Murdoch, co-chair of Fox Corporation, speaks to members of the media outside One Aldwych Hotel in London, on July 15, 2011.
A protester is seen at the offices of News Corp Australia in Surry Hills in Sydney on Jan. 31, 2020.
HERE’S A TRICK question about the controversy over Hunter Biden’s laptop: Who’s most to blame for giving this pseudo-scandal more attention than it deserves? The New York Post for publishing the first sketchy article, or Fox News for elevating it in broadcast after broadcast?
The answer is neither. The guiltiest party is the Murdoch family, which owns both outlets. Fox and the Post are key parts of a media empire assembled over the decades by 89-year-old Rupert Murdoch, who now shares ownership with his six children, one of whom is chief executive of the family’s main company, Fox Corporation. While the Post doesn’t register much with readers outside New York, Fox is of course a national brand with a gusher of profits that has helped turn each of the Murdochs into multibillionaires. Given that Fox is a “central node” of the far-right conspiracy machine, it’s fair to regard the Murdochs as America’s first family of disinformation.
The Murdochs, however, attract far less attention than their hired hands, the journalists and shouting heads who have downplayed Covid-19 and created the delusional content that helped catapult Donald Trump to the White House. The New York Times, in the approximately dozen stories it has published that touch on the Biden laptop controversy, referenced the Murdochs in just two of them, in passing. At the Washington Post, only three articles about the laptop mention the Murdochs — again, in passing.
There’s no shortage of reporting about the wretched content created by the Murdoch machine, but remarkably little reporting about the fact that the Murdochs are behind it. As MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes noted on Twitter after the first laptop story came out, “If you’re just choosing from people in OECD countries, ostensible liberal democracies, Rupert Murdoch has to be up there as the most-single-handedly destructive person of the last three decades, right?” But Hayes can be part of the problem. While he often criticizes Fox, and on rare occasions discusses the Murdochs, most of the time he fails to mention the family that could literally flip a switch and shut off the poison. On April 20, Hayes broadcast an eight-minute segment about Fox encouraging protests against stay-at-home orders, and a week later he devoted seven minutes to detailing the ways in which Fox downplayed Covid-19 — but while he named hosts and guests who spread the worst disinformation, “Murdoch” never passed his lips.
On the occasions when it bothers to focus on the Murdochs, the media often does the opposite of what it should. It coddles them. The latest exhibit comes this month in the form of a friendly profile in the New York Times of Rupert’s youngest son James, who loyally served for years as a senior executive and board member of the family’s global businesses (their holdings include major media outlets in Britain, Australia, and Asia, and in the U.S. include the Wall Street Journal). James, who lost out to his elder brother Lachlan in a succession battle, quietly left his remaining board seat this year and voiced some gentle regrets about the Frankenstein created by his family. “My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” he wrote in his brief letter of resignation. The newspaper of record thus treated him as a hero — its story, written by Maureen Dowd, was headlined, “James Murdoch, Rebellious Scion.” And in 2018, Lachlan Murdoch was a featured guest at a Times business conference where he was served uniformly friendly questions by columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, whose softballs included, “Do you watch ‘Succession’?”
This isn’t just a matter of journalistic oversight or malpractice. It’s a missed opportunity.
If the family’s last name became as toxic as the Fox name is, would they bring themselves to make changes, such as enforcing a zero-tolerance policy for racist and hateful content at their news outlets? The answer is probably no; Rupert Murdoch, an obdurate conservative, is famously unmoved by criticism and seems to enjoy being despised in Australia and Britain, where the media outlets that he doesn’t control are unsparing toward him.
But we won’t know for sure until we hear “Murdoch” as often as we hear “Fox.” There would, at the very least, be a greater awareness among Americans that the controlling authority at Fox News is not a newsroom of journalists, but a family of billionaires. Murdoch’s six children might not share his delight in being reviled and held accountable for what the family has wrought in America.
Murdoch’s children from three marriages include Prudence, the oldest, who has never played a role in the family businesses; Elisabeth, who briefly worked for her father but fell away when it reportedly became clear he had no interest in appointing a female successor; Lachlan, the oldest son who shares his father’s reactionary politics and is the chosen one; James, a centrist who was moved to gently comment on the problems at Fox only after he lost the succession race; and two teenage daughters, Chloe and Grace. According to the available descriptions of a secretive Murdoch trust registered in Nevada that’s unavailable for public inspection, the four eldest children control half the board seats of an LLC that oversees the family’s assets, with Rupert controlling the other half. (His teenage girls do not control any seats although they have ownership shares that are equal in value to their siblings’.)
There is no indication that Murdoch’s children, apart from Lachlan, actually hold his right-wing views. Many of them provide financial support to cultural or philanthropic organizations that are liberal in nature. James and his wife have even donated to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Yet there is not a puff of evidence that any of these offspring have taken serious steps to change the racist and hateful content that is produced by their media properties. The Murdoch children have received their billions in dividends and payouts without protest or consequence.
Sadly, the media’s habit of coddling the Murdochs (notalways, but most of the time) tends to get noticed and called out only by a small circle of journalism watchers. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, a prominent media analyst, recently blistered the Times for its fluffy profile of James Murdoch. “The only thing I want to read about the Murdoch family concerns their anguish, repentance, or indictment,” Rosen wrote on Twitter. “[James Murdoch] was on the board of the company that owns Fox News. Complicity doesn’t get more formally realized than that.”
When Margaret Sullivan, usually an all-seeing critic at the Washington Post, managed in March to write an article about the peril of Fox News without once mentioning the Murdochs, the Columbia University journalism professor Bill Grueskin gently noted on Twitter, “’Rupert Murdoch could save lives by forcing Fox News to tell the truth about coronavirus’ is the headline for this timely @sulliview column.” The actual headline of the Murdoch-free column was “It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously.”
The final question is simple: Why does this hole in coverage of the Murdochs exist?
Journalists, like everyone else, are attracted to shiny objects. It’s so easy and satisfying to heap scorn on the crude TV shouters and not look beyond them. Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who are so obviously absurd and dangerous, are inviting and willing targets. It is certainly right to expose their lies — we should not have less of that from any news organization. But movements of racism and hate are not propelled by visual histrionics alone. They require platforms and they require capital, which means they require wealthy people who are able and willing to underwrite the machinery of information warfare.
The Murdochs are not dumb. The younger ones are generally wise enough to stay in the background and give all appearances of being reasonable citizens. When they face complaints about their insane employees, they will downplay the harm or suggest they are a bit fed up too, but it would be inappropriate or fraught to meddle. They will donate money to worthy and liberal causes. They will present themselves as responsible men and women with whom we’re just having a civil disagreement, rather than prime enablers of fascism.
IN 1994, A PHILOSOPHY student at Princeton University submitted a senior thesis that began with a famous passage from Lord Byron, the Romantic poet. The passage reflected the student’s apparent uncertainty about who he was and what he would become after college.
Between two worlds life hovers like a star, ’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge. How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be!
The thesis was written by Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch. In the 57-page thesis, Lachlan tried to develop a system, rooted in German philosophy, for leading a life guided by morality and love. His thesis was titled, “A Study of Freedom and Morality in Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” and he salted it with spiritual inquiries. It even concluded with a striking Sanskrit line about yearning for the purity of infinity.
A quarter-century later, this document is strangely relevant because its author has become one of the most important yet least-known purveyors of white nationalism.
Until recently, the Murdoch who most dominated Fox News was Rupert, the craggy billionaire who created the network in 1996. But with Rupert nearing his 90th year, the Murdoch who now oversees the network — who in the past year has presided over some of the most racist and conspiratorial programming it has ever broadcast — is Lachlan. The tattoo-flecked chair and chief executive of the parent company of Fox News is now 47 years old and lives in a mansion in Los Angeles with his wife and children.
Lachlan Murdoch represents an archetype of extremism that often escapes scrutiny, because he is not an on-the-barricades provocateur. Instead, he is a behind-the-scenes proprietor. He doesn’t publicize his views — there is even a polite guessing game about them. At a recent conference, he had to be asked whether he agreed with the ideas on Fox News. “I’m not embarrassed by what they do at all,” Lachlan replied. His general practice of gilded silence stretches across the decades and has been the opposite of the foot-in-mouth bluntness of his infamous father.
Lachlan’s emergence as the Murdoch in charge of Fox offers an opportunity to assess the family for what it truly is. In America, the Murdochs are usually treated as a financial success, not as a political plague. Rupert and his sons, Lachlan and James, regularly attend exclusive businessconferences where they are celebrated like royalty; media coverage tends to be congenial. The anger that exists toward Fox News is mostly directed at the network’s on-air barkers, notably Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro. But these far-right shouters wouldn’t be on our screens without the approval of the Murdochs. Just as the Sackler family owns the pharmaceutical firm that created and marketed OxyContin, at the center of the opioid epidemic, the Murdoch family is behind Fox News and the far-right sludge that has been injected into America’s political bloodstream.
The friendly narrative is showing signs of fraying. Earlier this month, Jane Mayer wrote an investigative story for the New Yorker, “The Making of the Fox News White House,” that detailed the network’s conspiracy-mongering and the connections between Rupert Murdoch and President Donald Trump. As Mayer noted, “A direct pipeline has been established between the Oval Office and the office of Rupert Murdoch.” Fox is not just a trumpet for Trump, though. A recent book co-authored by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts examined the spread of extremist ideas in America and identified Fox News as “the central node of the online right-wing media ecosystem.” The authors wrote, “Repeatedly we found Fox News accrediting and amplifying the excesses of the radical sites.”
Lachlan Murdoch has become the new boss of this far-right node. As with most tales about men in power, there is an interesting twist to his life. Unlike Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh or Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Lachlan does not appear to be an upstanding citizen hiding a terrible secret in a sordid past. His trajectory has been the opposite of the usual corruption arc — the decency was in his early years, before he slid into dishonor as a loyal son laboring for the approval of an imperious and reactionary father. The tale is so ripe with intrigue and pathology that it seems stolen from Shakespeare.
From left, Lachlan Murdoch, James Murdoch, Anna Murdoch, and Rupert Murdoch in December 1987.
Lachlan Murdoch represents an archetype of extremism that often escapes scrutiny, because he is not an on-the-barricades provocateur. Instead, he is a behind-the-scenes proprietor.
The page featuring Trinity’s “Conservative Society” in the school’s 1987 yearbook.
LACHLAN MURDOCH, from an early age, benefitted from the easy pathways that are a recurring feature of ruling-class privilege.
His father is Australian by birth and began his media empire there but moved to the U.S. in the 1970s to expand his holdings. Lachlan was enrolled in a series of private schools: Allen-Stevenson School and Trinity School in Manhattan, then Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and he graduated from Aspen Country Day School. According to a book by Neil Chenoweth, Lachlan, as well as his sister, had disciplinary issues at their East Coast schools — a “drinking episode” in Lachlan’s case — prompting their mother to move with them to the family’s winter vacation home in Aspen, Colorado. (Hope Hicks, the chief communications officer for the parent company of Fox News, described Chenoweth’s book as “not accurate” on these points. Lachlan declined to be interviewed for this story, and Hicks declined to respond to a list of additional questions.)
Despite bouncing from school to school and graduating from a tiny one in a winter ski resort (there were just six students in his Aspen graduating class), Lachlan, like his siblings, landed quite well in college. While he was accepted to Princeton, his sister Elisabeth got into Vassar and his brother James went to Harvard. These Murdochs were either remarkable students or, as can happen in families of wealth, remarkably fortunate. The doors to elite universities often have magical openings for the offspring of the rich and famous.
Trinity holds a clue to the political bent that would set Lachlan apart from his siblings, who are not believed to share their father’s arch-conservative views. In 1987, Lachlan was a member of Trinity’s “Conservative Society,” a club that, according to the school yearbook, was created to respond to “a definite imbalance of political ideology in the school community” and was open to “those with a clear conservative conscience.” A club photograph shows five students, all of them boys dressed in jackets standing side by side, with Lachlan wearing a tie, his head tilted, the makings of a slight grin on his face.
It seems notable that he’s at the margin of the photo, away from the center, which is occupied by Harrison LeFrak, an heir to a billion-dollar real estate fortune. While enjoying the privileges of his station, Lachlan seems to have tried to avoid the attention that usually goes with it.
At Princeton, it was easy for a billionaire’s son to blend in, because even by Ivy League standards, Princeton is known for its high quotient of 1 percenters. There were princes from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in Lachlan’s class, as well as real estate heirs from Hong Kong and New York. I reached out to dozens of his classmates, including some who lived in Wilson College, his residential college, during their freshman and sophomore years, and others who studied in the philosophy department. Most of those who responded could not remember him.
“I frankly don’t recall that he was in the class,” said Neil Weber, a president of Lachlan’s class.
“Wow,” wrote a Wilson College student after I sent her a yearbook photo of Lachlan, “he does not look familiar at all.”
“Didn’t know Lachlan at Princeton,” replied another student who was a philosophy major.
John Fleming, the faculty head of Wilson College, had no recollection of him.
Princeton was known for its clubby culture, and Lachlan was the type of scion who would easily be at its apex, but he steered clear of it. After living in residential colleges for their first two years, as required, most juniors and seniors moved into campus dorms and ate meals in social organizations known as eating clubs. Lachlan lived in an off-campus apartment on his own and did not join an eating club, according to classmates and records obtained by The Intercept.
One of his lecture courses, which used the concept of time travel to investigate key ideas in metaphysics, involved study sessions known as “precepts” that were led by graduate students. Lachlan’s precept was headed by an Australian, Alan Hajek, and because of Lachlan’s roots in Australia, they became friendly and occasionally met for cappuccinos. Hajek told me that Lachlan never indicated his father was one of the most famous Australians in the world.
“It was only three years later when I saw him on TV, there was a documentary on him, and the penny dropped,” Hajek said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s who he was.’”
In retrospect, there had been hints, but not intended to give away the secret. Lachlan had mentioned that his family had a vacation home in Yass and had invited Hajek to visit in the summer. It was only after Hajek figured out Murdoch’s identity that he understood his missed opportunity: He had been invited to one of the most legendary estates in Australia, the Cavan Station, which is owned by the Murdoch clan.
“I want to stress that he was a really likable, modest guy,” Hajek said, adding, “I shouldn’t speak to his grade, but he was a good student.”
The front of Nassau Hall on the Princeton University campus in Princeton, N.J., on March 12, 2015.
N 1993, BÉATRICE LONGUENESSE began teaching philosophy at Princeton, and her first course delved into German idealism. Exploring Kant and Hegel, the class was rigorous but didn’t scare away a polite student who asked whether Longuenesse might agree to serve as his thesis adviser. Longuenesse, new to Princeton, told a colleague about the inquiry she had received from a senior named Lachlan Murdoch.
“Do you know who that is?” the colleague asked.
Longuenesse guessed that he was related to Iris Murdoch, the British novelist.
This was not correct.
The real-world pedigree of her soon-to-be protégé didn’t matter to Longuenesse. She thought Lachlan was earnest and bright, and she agreed to his request, working closely with him for the rest of the year. Princeton has its share of spoiled kids, and while Lachlan was rich, he wasn’t arrogant. He quietly told Longuenesse about his affection for nature and rock climbing, and he worked hard on his thesis. During graduation week, she even attended a celebratory dinner in New York City with his father and other family members.
“It was quite clear that he wanted to be a decent person,” Longuenesse told me. “And he was a decent person.”
The thesis he completed under her tutelage follows along the lines of what a diligent, soul-searching senior would produce. As Lachlan wrote, “What is morality if not a human ideal by which we can measure our human actions?” For a close reading of his thesis, I interviewed Longuenesse a few months ago as she waited to perform jury duty at a Manhattan courthouse. I brought a copy of the manuscript and sat quietly as she paged through it for the first time since she had graded it more than two decades ago (she wouldn’t disclose the grade). As she began reading, she nodded her head and said, “I had forgotten how good this is.”
Lachlan Murdoch’s photograph in the 1990 Princeton Herald
Longuenesse looked at the epigraph from Byron, which seemed to have less to do with German philosophy and more to do with Lachlan’s state of mind on the cusp of leaving college and doing whatever he would end up doing in the world. “That’s interesting,” she said. “I had forgotten that at that time, he was kind of a poetic character, because of his interest in the outdoors.”
The thesis starts by examining Immanuel Kant, then moves to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Lachlan found Kant’s views of morality to ultimately be limiting and preferred Hegel’s openness to human agency. “Hegel’s notion of the will allows for a much fuller, and ultimately rewarding, moral theory than Kant’s,” he wrote. His thesis finished with a nod to Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosophy professor who, as Lachlan noted, argued that “love can be valued as a motivator under Kant’s strict definition of freedom and morality.”
The thesis does not make for light reading. “A certain effect follows a certain cause, bound to it by the apparent laws of nature,” Lachlan writes at one point, in a passage that is not the most impenetrable. “A ball drops, as an effect of the cause of gravity, by law. Causes cause effects, just as my will wills the effect of an impulse to act. But what causes my will? As a free will, it must cause itself. If I am hungry for a snack, I may or may not will to eat one. The choice is mine and the cause of my ultimate action originates with me.”
The title page of Lachlan Murdoch’s thesis
Yet the document is, in places, accessible and, it seems, revealing. In both the introduction and conclusion, Lachlan wrote about the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Sanskrit scripture generally understood as a call for living selflessly. With its grounding in Hindu mythology and metaphysics, the Bhagavad Gita is a staple on college campuses. Lachlan, in his introduction, evoked the differences between the Bhagavad Gita’s exploration of the ideas of renunciation and discipline, writing that the debate “has raged throughout the history of ethical study.” His final paragraph returned to the Bhagavad Gita. In what seems a prescription for his own life, or the life he hoped would be his, Lachlan ends with one of the sacred text’s most famous passages: “The man of discipline has joy, delight, and light within; becoming the infinite spirit, he finds the pure calm of infinity.”
Longuenesse read these final lines closely.
“It’s a young man struggling with questions that are clearly his own questions, but working on them through major issues in philosophy,” she noted.
Longuenesse had hoped that Lachlan might follow his romantic muses — as she put it, “disappearing into nature” — but she was well-aware of the expectations, forces, and rewards that he would face after Princeton. “He was not going to rock the boat of the world he was in,” she said, a bit sadly. “He was the son of Rupert Murdoch, after all.”
MUCH MORE THAN his father, Lachlan has an innate ability to cover his tracks. His thesis reveals, for instance, the curious story of a friend who had a major influence on Lachlan, even though, as it turns out, the friend had no idea of his influence and still isn’t sure what it was.
The story begins in the two-sentence acknowledgements of the thesis, in which Lachlan wrote, “I also should thank Peter Hunt for the example he set for me, which led to the two most happy and fulfilled years of my adult life.” There is no further mention of Hunt — who he was or how Lachlan knew him — but it didn’t take long, thanks to Google, to figure it out.
In 1990, Peter Hunt, then a Stanford graduate student, spent a year taking seminars at Princeton. A decade older than Lachlan, Hunt was an experienced climber and became Lachlan’s climbing partner. Hunt, now a classics professor at the University of Colorado, told me that in the beginning, he had no idea who Murdoch was and referred to his new friend as “Loughlin” without being corrected. Hunt’s girlfriend figured things out and informed Hunt that his young climbing partner was not like most others.
The hub of climbing at Princeton was an artificial wall in a warehouse-like building known as the Armory. By today’s standards, the wall was primitive — on one occasion, Hunt remembers a climber falling a few feet to the ground after a piece of webbing failed. He said Murdoch was a decent climber who improved rapidly once they began training in an intentionally harsh regimen.
The wall’s limited height, about two stories, meant that it wasn’t much of a workout to get to the top. They made things more difficult by wearing 20-pound weighted vests and doing laps up the wall. One of them would climb to the top, then belay down, then climb back up again, and repeat until exhaustion, when they would switch positions and the belayer would become the climber. “He pushed very hard,” Hunt recalled.
Lachlan and Hunt went on road trips together, driving to a climbing mecca in upstate New York, the Gunks, and in the summer they climbed in the Colorado Rockies at Shelf Road (at the time, Murdoch was staying in Aspen, while Hunt was in Boulder). Their conversations focused on climbing. “From pretty early, I figured that we had different political views,” Hunt recalled. “I don’t think we talked about politics, [but] I saw no sign in any active way of reactionary or far-right views. He was a very pleasant person. … I thought of him as being very soft spoken.”
Hunt was surprised when I told him that Murdoch had thanked him prominently in his thesis. He had no idea about it.
“That’s very nice of him,” Hunt said, but added that he didn’t know he had set any example that impressed the younger man. “I’m very flattered, but I don’t know. We climbed together. Yeah, I really don’t know.”
I prodded a bit more and Hunt remembered a call years ago from an Australian reporter writing about Lachlan. The reporter said Lachlan had mentioned Hunt as a model of intensity. This made some sense to Hunt — not only was he a rigorous climber, he was a classics scholar, which isn’t that far from philosophy in its rigor and paucity of direct applications to the modern world.
“He considered himself a philosophy nerd at Princeton and he was really into it,” Hunt recalled. “A theory about what led to his happiness [at Princeton] is that he saw someone else who was doing something impractical and difficult and enjoyed it.”
Just as Lachlan had brought Longuenesse to a graduation dinner with his father, he had extended a friendly invitation to Hunt, asking him to an engagement party for his sister. Hunt regrets not attending. “It would have definitely been the most posh thing I’d been to,” he said.
“It’s a young man struggling with questions that are clearly his own questions, but working on them through major issues in philosophy.”
Lachlan Murdoch in Australia on March 13, 1996.
LACHLAN HAD A UNIQUE distraction during his Princeton years: his father’s business.
At the start of the 1990s, Rupert Murdoch still had his principal assets, and his greatest notoriety, in Britain. In the 1980s, he had incurred the ire of the British establishment by buying the Times of London and other publications and turning their politics further to the right, while also crushing a yearlong printers strike. Britain’s left, in particular, despised Murdoch. Then, in 1990, his empire was threatened by a liquidity crisis that Lachlan was drawn into.
Rupert had always involved his children in his business affairs. A profile of Lachlan in 1998, by the writer Geraldine Brooks, noted that as a child, he was woken by his mother to have pre-dawn breakfasts with Rupert before he flew off for business meetings. At breakfasts that weren’t pre-dawn, Rupert and his children would read the morning papers and discuss what was in them. Lachlan told Brooks that he would also stay up late at night “listening to his father at the dinner table hashing out strategies with famous guests.”
During the first semester of his freshman year, as creditors circled around the family business, Lachlan was summoned by his father to attend tense meetings in London, according to the Brooks article. It described the two Murdochs walking home late at night on Fleet Street, with Lachlan wanting to put his arms around his dispirited and unsteady father. As Brooks wrote, “Some sons bond with their fathers through baseball, some through fishing. But for Lachlan Murdoch and his father, Rupert, there has only ever been the Business.”
The crisis passed and Lachlan returned to Princeton. But his devotion to German philosophy and the spiritual questions of the Bhagavad Gita did not dominate the next phase of his life. Princeton, like other top universities, tends to function as an incubator of the status quo. After four years of apparently sincere immersion in history, philosophy, or literature, a large number of students from Princeton and other elite universities glide to the highest reaches of the business world, which they do not tend to disrupt with the lofty ideas they explored as undergraduates. A poll at the fifth reunion of Lachlan’s class showed that at least half of them had become bankers, lawyers, managers, or consultants.
What’s clear is that father and son engaged in an intergenerational transfer of an extreme ideology.
After Princeton, Lachlan started working for his father in Australia, where he oversaw the family’s media properties, though at least one part of his college life followed him there. In the garage of his $5 million home in Sydney, he built a fiberglass climbing wall. Another bit of continuity: Some accounts from those years describe him as courteous and modest, though he was no longer the semi-anonymous figure he had been at Princeton. He gave speeches, attended parties, and married a model.
Lachlan began to manifest, quietly, the inclinations he had gestured toward as a member of the Trinity Conservative Society. Speaking with Brooks, he described himself as “economically conservative but libertarian on people’s individual rights.” He offered an example. “I don’t smoke,” he said. “But I think taxes on cigarettes are the most outrageous example of the nanny state. It would be one thing if every penny went to researching lung cancer, but in fact it’s greedy politicians using the money to pork-barrel roads or put into the welfare state. People who want to smoke shouldn’t be burdened because of the political correctness of our times.”
Unlike his father, who is not shy about expressing the problematic ideas that have found their xenophobic expression on Fox News, Lachlan has tipped his political hand mostly behind closed doors, and even then, infrequently. The existence of his hardening views has mostly emerged in little-known accounts from former insiders of the Murdoch empire. One of those is Chris Mitchell, a longtime editor-in-chief of The Australian newspaper.
In an obscure memoir, Mitchell described a Pebble Beach retreat at which Al Gore debated a vocal skeptic of climate change. Lachlan, according to Mitchell, was “almost cheering” at the challenges to the former vice president. Mitchell also wrote about a private dinner at which Lachlan urged the prime minister of Australia not to object to Indonesia’s plans to execute two Australians on drug smuggling charges. The Australians, Lachlan argued, were getting what they deserved. Mitchell wrote, “As with his views on gun control in the United States, Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician, [Tony] Abbott included, and usually to the right of his father’s ideas.” (Mitchell, contacted by The Intercept, declined to comment further.)
Of course, it’s difficult to know whether Lachlan developed right-wing views on his own, whether he embraced them to please his father, or whether it is both. But what’s clear is that father and son engaged in an intergenerational transfer of an extreme ideology.
Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch outside News Limited in Sydney, Australia, in April 2004
FAMILIES ARE CRUCIBLES, and the Murdochs are no exception. Rupert Murdoch has put the three children he had with his second wife, Anna, through a public competition to succeed him. For a while, Lachlan was assumed to be ahead, then James and Elisabeth, then Lachlan once more. In its emotional intensity, the succession saga mixes Freud, Hobbes, and Marquis de Sade. The father loves and punishes his children to gain their obedience — and to discern which of them is most devoted.
How did Lachlan, whose senior thesis ended with a line about seeking the pure calm of the infinite, wind up overseeing the impure hysteria of Fox? An answer may lie in the one occasion he broke from his father, in 2005.
At the time, Lachlan was the deputy chief operating officer of News Corp, and he was living in New York. He was constantly jousting against two of his father’s most trusted lieutenants, Peter Chernin, who was president of News Corp, and Roger Ailes, then the chief executive of Fox News. Chernin and Ailes were notoriously sharp-elbowed and not averse to undermining the young prince. After Rupert gave Ailes (subsequently fired for sexual harassment) a green light to ignore a directive from Lachlan, the jilted son decided he’d had enough.
That rupture was just one twist in several decades of Murdoch-on-Murdoch warfare that has been documented in shelves of books and articles, and even informed the HBO drama “Succession,” about a megalomaniac media billionaire and his squabbling adult children. One of the chroniclers, the writer Michael Wolff, has described an emotional tension that others have noticed too — Rupert’s humiliation of Lachlan, whom Wolff interviewed for his 2008 book on the family. “The point he wants to make is about being infantilized,” Wolff wrote, referring to Lachlan.
He makes it without obvious recrimination but with a sense of great burden, weariness almost. Lachlan, whose career has, in a sense, yet to start, has already experienced a great rollercoaster ride in his professional life. He has been tutored, elevated, anointed, then thwarted by his father’s courtiers — and finally turned his back on it all. … The father in small but constant ways humiliated the son, which made him a joke to everybody else. In every meeting the father was the impatient, domineering, fussing presence. He couldn’t stop calling attention to himself and away from the son. At the same time, the son, stamping his foot, was trying to call attention to himself.
Wolff is a controversial figure in media circles, regarded as prone to flourishes with the truth, but his psychological assessment tracks closely with what appears to be Lachlan’s own account of the rupture. An emotionally complex story of the father-son breakup was told years ago in a lengthy article by Steve Fishman, who described the events from Lachlan’s point of view. The article detailed the thoughts that were running through Lachlan’s head at various times, as well as his confidential remarks to friends and his father. While Lachlan was never described in the story as being its source, there is no other explanation for Fishman’s information, and he has coyly hinted at it.
“He loved his father, but he felt undercut, maybe humiliated. The feeling mushroomed. Lachlan began to brood … about his identity, in the company and out.”
“He loved his father,” Fishman wrote, “but he felt undercut, maybe humiliated. The feeling mushroomed.
Lachlan began to brood … about his identity, in the company and out. Where was the respect due a successor, a deputy COO, a son? … ‘You don’t want to wake up in ten years’ time and feel your soul has been destroyed,’ Lachlan thought. ‘For what? One day you might run the company?’”
Lachlan met his father for lunch in Los Angeles to break the news to him.
“As their talk progressed,” Fishman continued, “both became emotional. Lachlan hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking of himself apart from the company, or apart from his dad. It seemed to shake him. It’s just difficult to sort of uncouple your life and your identity from the company, he thought. But that’s what he now proposed. ‘I have to do my own thing,’ Lachlan told his dad. ‘I have to be my own man.’ Then the heir apparent walked away.”
It is one of the ironies of the succession battle that walking away from it was a demonstration of strength rather than weakness. By participating in the competition, the Murdoch offspring had to bend to their father’s will and wishes. They enriched themselves, of course, while also debasing themselves by managing their father’s noxious newspapers and TV stations.
Lachlan was 34 when he stepped away. He was still a rock climber, but he had moved along in life and was not about to return to college for another degree in philosophy or in some other way unplug himself from the business world. He remained in close touch with his father, continuing to serve on the board of News Corp, but he relocated to Australia, eventually upgrading to a $21 million mansion in Sydney, and set up his own media company (it was called Illyria and would have mixed results).
James Murdoch, then-chair and chief executive of News Corp., leaves his corporate headquarters in London after it was announced that the News of the World newspaper was to close on July 7, 2011.
THE MOST SURPRISING transformation involved James, who is a year younger than Lachlan. James is decidedly liberal. At Harvard University, he worked at the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine that skews sarcastically left. He has donated to Democratic Party candidates and causes. After a woman in Charlottesville was killed by a neo-Nazi who in 2017 drove his car into a peaceful crowd, James and his wife Kathryn gave $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League, writing in an email to friends that “standing up to Nazis is essential.”
James might not seem a likely candidate for running or aspiring to run a far-right media entity, yet for a number of years, he led the succession contest. In 2007, after Lachlan had gone to the sidelines of sibling competition, James was placed in charge of the Murdoch papers in Britain, including the right-wing News of the World and The Sun. They were among the most retrograde tabloids in the U.K., and they didn’t waver while James was in charge. Before he took over, the News of the World had even gained an unusual measure of infamy for illegally hacking the cellphones of British royalty, politicians, and celebrities.
The paper’s hacking method was deviously simple, taking advantage of famous people who did not change the factory settings for accessing their voicemail. Employees of News of the World called their targets’ cellphones and used default codes, such as 0000 or 1234, to listen to their messages. This practice, first exposed in the mid-2000s, caused a far larger scandal when Guardian reporters Nick Davies and Amelia Hill revealed in 2011 that the voicemails of a murdered 13-year old girl had been hacked by News of the World, impeding the police effort to find her killer. Voicemails of the relatives of fallen British soldiers had also been accessed illegally, and the paper was additionally revealed to have bribed police officers.
Although these crimes occurred before James assumed his position, he was the boss when the full extent came to light, and was accused of overseeing a cover-up. He has claimed that he was not aware of the scope of the hacking, but evidence emerged, in the form of an email to him, that he had been updated on it. When that email’s existence was made public, James claimed that he hadn’t read through it. He also claimed, during implausible testimony to a parliamentary committee in 2011, that he had approved large hush payments to a hacking victim but didn’t fully realize what they were for.
James Murdoch, left, and Rupert Murdoch provide evidence to the Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee in the House of Commons in London on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal on July 19, 2011.
“I find it incredible, absolutely incredible, that you didn’t say, ‘A quarter of a million? Let me look at that,” Davies began. “I can’t begin to believe that that is the action that any self-respecting chief operating officer would take, when so much of the company’s money and reputation is at stake.”
Another member of the committee, Labour’s Tom Watson, went many steps further.
“Have you ever heard the term omertà, the Mafia term they use for the code of silence?”
“I’m not an aficionado of such things.”
“Would you agree it means a group of people who are bound together by secrecy, who together pursue that group’s business objectives with no regard for the law, using intimidation, corruption, and general criminality?” Watson asked.
“Again, I’m not familiar with the term particularly,” James replied.
“Would you agree with me that this is an accurate description of News International in the U.K.?”
“Absolutely not,” James responded. “I frankly think that’s offensive and not true.”
Watson was not done.
“Mr. Murdoch, you must be the first Mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise.”
During those hearings, Rupert Murdoch, seated next to James, even had a pie thrown at him by a protester. (Rupert’s wife at the time, Wendi Deng, famously lunged at the pie-thrower.) In the committee’s final report, Rupert was described as “not a fit person” to run a major corporation, and James was criticized for “willful ignorance” and a “lack of curiosity” in finding out what had happened. Deflecting attention from calls for his father to resign, James fell on his sword, shedding his post in London and relocating to New York, where he assumed different duties in his father’s empire. With the aura of disgrace, James was sidelined in the competition to succeed his father.
Elisabeth Murdoch stands with her father, Rupert, as they watch the Cheltenham Horse Racing Festival on March 18, 2010, in Cheltenham, England.
Around this time, attention focused on Elisabeth Murdoch, who had worked for her father before establishing her own television company, which was called Shine. Her company, which had an early infusion of capital from a satellite broadcaster partly owned by News Corp, expanded quickly and after a few years was bought by News Corp for an amount that struck some observers as generous. One newspaper even ran a front-page headline that read, “Murdoch’s Daughter To Get £370M From Daddy.” Payouts of this sort have been one of the incentives Rupert Murdoch used to keep his children in his orbit. In 1995, James dropped out of Harvard and established his own hip-hop label, Rawkus, which was later bought by News Corp. Last year, James and Lachlan each received more than $50 million in compensation for their work.
Elisabeth did not go far in the competition, reportedly because Rupert believed her gender was not appropriate for the task. In a 2012 article in the New Yorker, Elisabeth spoke elliptically about her decision to pursue a career outside her father’s empire. “Each time I tried to work in his company, he wasn’t impressed,” Elisabeth said. “I realized I had to just go and be myself.” A family friend who spoke far more bluntly was quoted as saying, “She loves her father, but she’s the wrong sex.”
Rupert Murdoch, center, leaves the News Corporation building in New York City with Lachlan on July 21, 2016.
FOR NEARLY A DECADE, Lachlan refused his father’s requests to return to the family business, especially after the hacking debacle in 2011.
But then, suddenly, Lachlan changed his mind. On March 26, 2014, News Corp issued a celebratory press release that Lachlan had been named nonexecutive co-chair of the company, and quoted his father as saying, “In this elevated role, Lachlan will help us lead News Corp forward as we expand our reach.” It was, as a Reuters article described it, “the return of the prodigal son.” Although James was still in the picture — he had a senior role at 21st Century Fox, which was the entertainment part of the family’s holdings — it was a clear sign that Lachlan was not just back, but in the lead.
Four years later, in 2018, Rupert Murdoch agreed to sell Disney most of his entertainment assets for $71 billion; the Murdochs got about $12 billion of the total when the deal closed earlier this month, with shareholders getting the rest. The still-considerable holdings that remain under family control include a new company called Fox Corp. that has Lachlan as its chair and chief executive, with Fox News as its political heart. The epigraph from Byron that was on his 1994 thesis — “How little do we know that which we are!”— found its answer more than two decades later. Lachlan was the victor of a survival contest in which it was not necessarily the strongest who prevailed, but the most malleable.
ÉATRICE LONGUENESSE LOST touch with her protégé. She saw Lachlan at a Princeton reunion a few years after his graduation, and she encouraged him to visit again, even offering to host him at her home. But she laughed, as she waited for jury duty, at the hopes and ideas she once had of him. Lachlan Murdoch would never need to crash at her place in Princeton, and he was never going to become the citizen she wished he might become.
Now a professor at New York University, Longuenesse recalled listening to a recent interview in which Lachlan defended Fox News. It left her disappointed but not surprised. The lures and pressures that create ruling-class conformity — what she described as “social determinism” — are difficult to resist. Even his voice had changed, becoming harder. Little remained of the Lachlan she once knew.
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Fox News Is Poisoning America. Rupert Murdoch and His Heirs Should Be Shunned.
The Murdoch family is warmly received in the hallways of power and money. But they should be ostracized in the same way that Steve Bannon has.
Rupert Murdoch, center, leaves the News Corporation building with his son Lachlan Murdoch, right, on July 21, 2016 in New York City
IN THE EARLY 1990s, some of the smartest people resisting Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic worked out of a chaotic office in the center of Belgrade. The office was filled with a haze of cigarette smoke, ringing phones answered with shouts, off-kilter desks scarred by abuse, and half-empty bottles of liquor. This was the nerve center of Vreme, an opposition magazine presided over by the wise-cracking Milos Vasic.
A cross between Seymour Hersh and Ida Tarbell, Vasic saw beneath the surface of things. He realized that his small magazine made little difference to Milosevic, who had instigated and fueled the brutal wars in neighboring Bosnia and Croatia. There was just one media platform that mattered: state-controlled Radio Television Serbia, which was a relentless promoter of the Serbian strongman and his eliminationist agenda.
Vasic had a sharp analysis of how Serbs, in their susceptibility to indoctrination, were not unique. “All it took was a few years of fierce, reckless, chauvinist, intolerant, expansionist, war-mongering propaganda to create enough hate to start the fighting among people who had lived together peacefully for 45 years,” Vasic said. “You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line — a line dictated by David Duke. You, too, would have war in five years.”
Instead of a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, we have Rupert Murdoch as the founder of Fox News, which for years — starting long before Donald Trump’s presidency — injected racist, anti-Semitic and anti-liberal tropes into the American mainstream (remember the war on Christmas?). Fox isn’t watched by everyone, but for those who do watch, Fox is everything. As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote the other day, it’s possible to imagine the political violence of the past weeks occurring even if Hillary Clinton had been elected president — we can take Trump out of the equation, and we still might have crazed Americans trying to kill other Americans because of their religion, skin color, or party affiliation. But it’s impossible to imagine these attacks occurring without years of Fox News spreading the ideology of white nationalism. The network promotesconspiracy theories that begin in the bowels of the internet, and it feeds into those bowels an army of converts willing to go further than Fox & Friends dares.
The latest terror attacks in America have provoked a newwave of indignation against the network, culminating in a widely noted call by the U.S. editor of the Financial Times, Edward Luce, for an advertiser boycott. “The most effective thing Americans can do is boycott companies that advertise on Fox,” Luce tweeted. “They bankroll the poison that goes from the studio into Trump’s head.” It’s a worthwhile idea, but its impact will be limited, because as a Bloomberg article pointed out, the network’s main source of revenue is from cable subscribers, not advertisers. Some sponsors, heeding public pressure, have withdrawn from Laura Ingraham’s show after she mocked a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, but the show’s ratings have surged since then — a condition that can lead, theoretically, to more subscriber revenue.
How can Fox News be pressured?
The Murdoch family is absolutely central — without their support, and particularly Rupert Murdoch’s support, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson would be off the air. The curious and condemnable thing, however, is that whereas Steve Bannon became persona non grata in polite society for his role in spreading far-right ideas, Rupert Murdoch and his heirs are welcomed into the halls of power and money even though their network has done irreparably more damage to America than Breitbart News, the media platform Bannon once controlled. Few doors (if any) are closed to the Murdochs, with little questioning of whether they should be shunned rather than solicited by the various nonprofit organizations they patronize and support.
This point was highlighted in a recent exchange in which NBC reporter Ben Collins pointed out that “extremist talking points may get workshopped on fringe sites, but they’re platformed on and reach the most dupes on Fox News. Never forget that Sean Hannity was literally tying Hillary Clinton to actual Satanism three days before the 2016 election.” Bill Grueskin, a journalism professor at Columbia University, aptly responded on Twitter, “As so often, it returns to the toxicity of Rupert Murdoch, and the complicity of his heirs.”
The key heirs are Murdoch’s sons, Lachlan and James. Each of them has held senior positions in the Murdoch empire in recent years, though James has been edged aside in a restructuring that leaves Lachlan with direct control over the news side, albeit under his father’s eye. The other Murdoch children — Prue, Elisabeth, Grace, and Chloe — are not involved in managing the empire (Grace and Chloe are minors), though they are beneficiaries of a family trust that holds an estimated $12 billion in Murdoch assets.
Media coverage of the Murdoch sons has been inexcusably indulgent. Lachlan was a featured guest at the New York Times DealBook conference in New York on Thursday, where he was welcomed with applause and had a generally amiable chat with DealBook founder Andrew Ross Sorkin. This is in contrast to what happened when it was merely announced that Bannon would appear at the New Yorker Festival not long ago; after a surge of protests, editor David Remnick was forced to withdraw the invitation.
In a lengthy article in 2017, the Times reported that while Rupert Murdoch remained in control, the sons “seem determined to rid the company of its roguish, old-guard internal culture and tilt operations toward the digital future. They are working to make the family empire their own, not the one the elder Murdoch created to suit his sensibilities.” This friendly narrative bends reality. While shedding itself of Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes due to their sexual harassment of women, Fox News has not throttled back its xenophobic content. Indeed, it’s actually gotten worse (just watch Tucker Carlson’s show). Lachlan Murdoch even refuted the Times’s reformist narrative when he was asked at the DealBook conference — held in the Times headquarters — whether he was embarrassed by Fox News. “I’m not embarrassed by what they do at all,” he replied.
Moreover, the don’t-worry-we’ve-got-this narrative hinges on the notion that the elder Murdoch, now 87, won’t be around much longer — that his sons will be in charge soon and things will get better. But guess what? Rupert Murdoch’s mother lived until she was 103 years old. If he lasts that long — and he appears to be in good health right now — he’ll be calling the shots until 2034. We can’t wait until then for the younger Murdochs to make their move, if they even want to make a move. The emergency, and the time for action, is now.
What would ostracism of the Murdochs look like? To begin with, it would probably involve the rescinding of invitations to all the conferences and galas they regularly attend. They would become as toxic to business-as-usual as Bannon has become. Their presence and their money would not be accepted by any organization that aspires to stand against the poison that Fox News continues to unleash on the country, including the Democratic Party, which has reportedly received a number of contributions from James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn.
Here’s one potential scenario.
After neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year and one of them drove a car into a crowd of pro-democracy protesters, killing Heather Heyer, James Murdoch wrote in an email to a group of friends that “vigilance against hate and bigotry is an eternal obligation. … I can’t believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis.” He announced that he and his wife would donate $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL confirmed that it received the donation.
But should organizations dedicated to fighting hatred accept money from the owners of a company uniquely guilty of spreading hatred?
James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 10, 2015 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Here’s another potential scenario for ostracism.
Kathryn and James Murdoch have established a foundation, Quadrivium, that provides funding to organizations that are involved in and, among other issues, environmental protection. Kathryn Murdoch is also on the board of trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund, which fights climate change. Yet Fox News is the only major media institution that regularlyexpressesskepticism about the science of climate change (it told one guest, an editor from Scientific American, to not discuss it), and the network cheered the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.
Should organizations dedicated to fighting climate change accept money from the owners of a company that’s uniquely devoted to lying about it?
James and Kathryn Murdoch are akin to the Javanka of the Murdoch family — the supposedly reasonable (or not reactionary) ones who do what they can to quietly rein in their bigoted patriarch. Kathryn Murdoch, in fact, has a Twitter account that is decidedly liberal. “Literally the only consistency that Trump has shown is to be against all forms of evidence-based or even rational thinking,” she tweeted last year, just before Trump’s inauguration. Earlier this year, she shared an anti-Trump story from the New York Times and wrote, “Worth reading.”
But there are only two tweets in her account that mention the word “Fox,” and they date from 2016. In both, she shared Fox stories that were abnormal for the network: one that admitted climate change posed a big risk and an opinion piece arguing for Hillary Clinton’s election. It does not appear that she, her husband, or any other member of the Murdoch family has publicly criticized the 800-pound gorilla of hate that has helped turn them into billionaires.
The question now is whether America’s great and good, having deplored the rising tide of far-right violence, are willing to confront the family that controls the largest platform of intolerance.
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FOX NEWS HAS DONE MORE TO INCITE DOMESTIC POLITICAL VIOLENCE THAN DONALD TRUMP
The origins of Fox News’s insidious role can be traced to a 1970 memo from the Nixon White House and Roger Ailes.
A pedestrian walks past the News Corp. headquarters building in New York, displaying posters featuring Fox News Channel personalities, on April 19, 2017.
HOW DID WE get here? Why is America a country where, in just one week, two African-American senior citizens were gunned down in Kentucky, pipe bombs arrived in the mailboxes of over a dozen prominent liberals, and 11 members of a Pittsburgh synagogue were slaughtered at a bris?
Our current reality only makes sense if we comprehend Fox News and its origin story, revealed in a startling 1970 memo from the Nixon White House.
President Donald Trump and the White House have strongly denied that he bears any responsibility for this streak of atrocities. In a sense, they’re right. If there’s popcorn on the stove and you turn up the heat, there’s no way to say you made any individual kernel explode. It might have happened without you. It’s easy to imagine the three recent perpetrators doing exactly the same things under a President Hillary Clinton.
On the other hand, it’s nearly impossible to conceive of all the politicized violence happening without Fox News. In the popcorn analogy, Fox may not have turned on the stove, but it has lovingly provided steady supplies of gas every day since its founding in 1996. It’s tough to miss how Cesar Sayoc’s vehicle looked like Fox News in van form.
Fox is America’s central clearinghouse for hateful conspiracism, including the violent delusions that animated Sayoc and Robert Bowers. A rich cosmopolitan Jew is scheming to help dangerous foreigners invade and despoil the homeland. Barack Obama, Tom Steyer, and Robert DeNiro are trying to destroy America for reasons known only to themselves. Black people want to steal everything for which you’ve worked so hard.
The problem with Fox isn’t just what it puts on its airwaves, but the impact it has on others. It pressures the corporate media to give credibility to its lurid fairy tales. It provides oxygen to the even more paranoid fantasists to its right, turning individuals into stars and other outlets into sustainable projects. And amazingly, Fox has nonetheless managed to present itself as a normal news outlet, like a cuckoo’s egg in a dunnock nest, mimicking the form with radically different content.
The fact that Fox has pulled this off is especially remarkable because we know how it was created, and why.
In 2011, Gawker obtained the 1970 White House memo from the Nixon presidential library, titled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News.” (The original Gawker article about it is still online, but thanks to technologist Peter Thiel’s successful attempt to destroy Gawker, the memo itself disappeared from the internet. The Intercept today is republishing it.)
When the memo was published by Gawker, historian Rick Perlstein said he believed it was written by Chuck Colson, a special counsel to the president during the Nixon administration who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice during Watergate. The memo makes the case that Republicans needed to avoid the “prejudices of network news selectors” and get the GOP perspective on TV. Why? Because Americans are stupid, and they could take advantage of that:
“Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication,” the memo states. “The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.” [emphasis in original]
At the time, there was no such thing as cable television, just the networks and local news. The memo said that the operation could “provide pro-Administration, videotape, hard news actualities to the major cities of the United States.” That is, they would shoot and edit video segments that looked like news and provide them for free to local stations, which would hopefully run them without revealing their origins.
The handwriting of Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, is, as Gawker pointed out, literally all over the memo. Ailes, then a paid adviser to the Nixon administration, wrote in the margins that it was an “excellent idea” — one that “should be expanded.” Indeed, Ailes said, he’d like to run it.
Ailes got the job, although the project never came to fruition in that form. As another Nixon White House memo put it, “Ailes will probably be doing more work in this area.” He tried again a few years later with “Television News Incorporated” with funding from the beer magnate Joseph Coors. The political views of Coors, who was a prominent financial supporter of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, were described by his brother as “a little bit right of Attila the Hun.” It was at TVN that Ailes first began using the slogan “Fair and Balanced.”
Fox News CEO Roger Ailes poses at Fox News in New York on Sept. 29, 2006.
TVN died in 1975. But Ailes kept on chugging at the intersection of the Republican Party and television, working on the 1984 Reagan presidential campaign and the George H.W. Bush presidential campaign in 1988. He briefly was president of CNBC and created “America’s Talking,” a cable network that eventually became MSNBC. Finally it all came together — Ailes’s vision, the timing, the technology, and the money — when the media billionaire Rupert Murdoch put up the money to start Fox News in the middle of the Clinton administration. Before long, Fox was sucking up the effluvia of the GOP’s most feverish swamps and sluicing it directly into America’s homes.
All the while, Ailes was constantly coordinating Fox’s messaging with the top members of the GOP. According to Gabriel Sherman, author of an Ailes biography, during the Obama administration “the right-wing media and the Republican Party started to fuse into this single entity.” In 2016, Fox helped make Trump, Ailes’s longtime friend, president of the United States. Sherman says “there’s almost no daylight now between the agenda of the White House and the agenda of Fox News. … Trump is the logical conclusion of entertainment and right-wing media taking over the Republican Party.” President George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has concluded that “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”
Or as Max Boot, another disillusioned conservative, writes, “The frightening thing is that the right-wing media will be here long after Trump and the current crop of Republican politicians are gone.” And hence eruptions of random, terrifying reactionary violence will endure as long as Fox and its friends do.
A 15 Page Plan For Putting GOP On The News
For 200 years newspaper headlines dominated public thinking. In the last 20 years things have changed. Today television news is watched more often:
Than people read newspapers
Than people listen to the radio
Than people read or gather information from any other form of communication
Reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit -watch -and listen. The thinking is done for you. As a result over 50% of people rely on television for their news. 8 out of 10 people say they tune into the radio or television at least once a day.
FOR QUITE A while, there has been a bull market in stories about Steve Bannon calling the shots in the incorrigible tangle of neurons that passes for Donald Trump’s brain. Michael Wolff’s new book about the dysfunctional White House, “Fire and Fury,” adds a marvelous coda to this narrative, with Bannon, in his waning days in the West Wing, telling the insane truth about the most ridiculous and frightening presidency ever.
Bannon deserves every bit of attention and disgust that has come his way in recent times. His racism, laundered through Breitbart News and the White House, has fueled the far right and fanned Trump’s enfeebled instincts. Bannon’s hatred of immigration and Muslims is so fierce that he even concocted a tale about seeing the dangers of Islam firsthand when a Navy vessel he had served aboard in 1979 stopped in Pakistan – except, as it turns out, the vessel did not stop in Pakistan.
But the attention Bannon demands of us should not obscure the rival media impresario with truly Manchurian levels of influence over the president: Rupert Murdoch. One of the less-noted passages in Wolff’s book explains that the president reveres Murdoch, regularly seeking advice from the founder of the Fox empire, a condition that made Bannon jealous of Murdoch’s power over Trump. The book quotes Roger Ailes, who ran Fox News for Murdoch until being dismissed for sexual harassment, as noting that “Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert.”
Wolff’s book may not be the whole truth, but its account of Trump’s infatuation with Murdoch is consistent with reports elsewhere. Murdoch and Trump speak frequently – “Murdoch here,” their phone calls begin, according to the New York Times, which reports that Trump counts Murdoch “as one of his closest confidants.” The men have known each other for decades, since the days when Murdoch owned the New York Post and Trump was one of its fawning obsessions (“Best Sex I’ve Ever Had,” read a famous Post headline from 1990, referring to an apparent remark from Trump’s then-mistress and future short-term wife, Marla Maples).
Murdoch’s conservative ideas have never been in the shadows, and his media empire’s embrace of dirty tricks has been evident since it was revealed that one of his papers hacked the phones of a murder victim and the relatives of deceased soldiers. But the ethical brutality of the Trump era has seemed to relieve Murdoch of the burden of dressing up his views and morals. Murdoch had delayed his dismissal of Ailes in 2016 (with a $40 million severance package), after which he denied there was a culture of abuse at Fox, despite several male hosts and executives resigning or getting fired for harassing women. “It’s all nonsense,” he said last month.
We don’t know the instructions given to Trump in his “Murdoch here” conversations, but we do know the instructions the president gets from Fox News. There’s a cottage industry, in which the Kremlinologists of social media correlate Trump’s statements and tweets to what he has apparently just watched on Fox and, in particular, his favorite show on the network, Fox & Friends. Of course, it’s distressing that a president spends as much time as Trump does watching television (while eating cheeseburgers in bed, according to Wolff), but the fact that he mimics what he hears on a cable channel that promotes conspiracytheories and racists is … oh God, it would be a pleasure to conjure something more absurd and less chilling.
Fox News is not on autopilot. Its unhinged condition is not a consequence of its anchors and producers deciding, autonomously, that they would like to take the network where no network has gone before. This is Murdoch’s doing. After Ailes left, Murdoch assumed the position of the network’s executive chair and led its swan dive into the far-right gutter. “Rupert Murdoch is in charge,” noted Fox anchor Bill Hemmer a year after Ailes’s departure. According to the Daily Beast, Murdoch often presides over the morning news meetings; Vanity Fair quotes a former Fox executive as saying Murdoch “is having the time of his life running” the network.
Fox was never balanced or fair, and Ailes was not a nice guy. But according to Tamara Holder, a lawyer and former Fox contributor, Ailes at least made sure the network didn’t totally lose it. Holder, who left the network at the end of 2016 after accusing a senior executive of sexual misconduct (the executive was fired and Holder received a settlement), views Ailes’s dismissal and death a year later as key factors. According to Holder, Ailes required at least a bit of balance, if only a fig leaf, in the network’s coverage. “The one thing they’re missing is the Roger Ailes control button,” Holder told me. “Roger was good at overseeing things and calling it when he saw it was a little out of control.”
In the wake of Wolff’s book, there is no shortage of headlines about Bannon’s quotes and their fallout. The wealthy Mercer family, in response to Trump banishing Bannon from his set – er, his presidency – is distancing itself from Bannon’s projects. But Bannon’s malevolent influence on Trump and America is slighter than that of Murdoch and Fox. While the reach of Bannon’s Breitbart News is large in relation to its modest size – it is headquartered in the basement of a three-story townhouse in Washington, D.C. — Fox News is a globe-spanning entity with more than 1,000 employees and 90 million subscribers, including a particularly avid one at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The power behind the throne of the xenophobic right in the United States is not the millionaire banker from Goldman Sachs, but the billionaire immigrant from Australia.
Top photo: President Donald Trump is embraced in New York City by Rupert Murdoch, Executive Chairman of Fox News, during a dinner to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the World War II Battle of the Coral Sea, on May 4, 2017.
Did Rupert Murdoch Choose Britain’s New Prime Minister?
Theresa May was selected to lead the British Conservative Party, and hence Britain, with the help of a media onslaught against her last remaining rival.
David Cameron Was Overheard Humming After Resigning As UK Prime Minister
WHEN PRIME MINISTER David Cameron announced on Monday that he would be moving out of 10 Downing Street quite a bit sooner than planned, not in September, but on Wednesday — leaving the house, the office, and the cat to his successor, Theresa May — the abrupt end to his lame duck tenure seemed like a weight off his shoulders. And indeed Cameron was overheard humming a jaunty tune as he made his own personal Brexit, stage left.
But the backroom process through which the British Conservative Party had suddenly chosen May as its new leader, and hence prime minister — cutting short a campaign that was supposed to take two months and end with more than 120,000 members of the party’s grassroots getting to vote either for her or her rival, Andrea Leadsom — left many troubling questions unresolved.
To start with, there was the fact that May will now take office having secured just 199 votes for the position, all coming from Conservative members of Parliament, in a ballot that was supposed to choose not the prime minister, but just the two nominees with the most support from their fellow lawmakers. In effect, the Conservative Party’s equivalent of superdelegates just short-circuited even the pretense of democracy and selected the country’s leader from among their own ranks.
There is also the fact that May, unlike Leadsom, had opposed the U.K.’s withdrawal from the European Union before last month’s referendum vote in favor of a British exit imposed that course of action on the next government. Now Cameron is leaving office because he lost the campaign against Brexit but is handing over responsibility for implementing it to a new prime minister who agrees with him that it is a bad idea. May taking office to implement a policy she thinks unwise is perhaps the clearest proof that the referendum has created a crisis in which representative democracy and direct democracy are in direct conflict.
Then there was the suggestion from some, including Leadsom’s campaign manager, Tim Loughton, that the candidate’s downfall had been less her own doing than a sort of coup brought about by a vast, right-wing conspiracy of media barons, led by Rupert Murdoch, who published “an onslaught of often very personal attacks from colleagues and journalists.”
To unpack this allegation, it is important to understand that May’s elevation to party leader came about after Leadsom abruptly ended her own campaign on Monday, choosing to withdraw rather than face further criticism over ill-advised remarks she made three days earlier to The Times, the jewel in the crown of Murdoch’s British newspaper empire. In an interview splashed across the front page of that newspaper on Saturday, Leadsom had expounded on how being a mother made her more fit to lead the nation than her rival, May, who is childless.
In the interview, Leadsom, who had frequently used the phrase “as a mum” in speeches calling for Britain to leave the EU, was asked how that was relevant to her politics. She responded: “I don’t really know Theresa very well, but I am sure she will be really, really sad she doesn’t have children, so I don’t want this to be ‘Andrea has children, Theresa hasn’t,’ do you know what I mean, because I think that would be really horrible, but genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a very real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake.”
“She possibly has nieces, nephews, lots of people,” Leadsom continued, “but I have children who are going to have children who will directly be a part of what happens next.”
Over the weekend, the candidate tried and failed quite spectacularly to spin her way out of the ensuing mess by claiming that she had been misquoted.
On social networks, the candidate’s supporters even shared a note of apology from the newspaper on Twitter, before it was exposed as an obvious fake.
Unfortunately for Leadsom, her demand that the newspaper release a transcript of her remarks led The Times to publish not just the text but the audio of her exchange with the writer Rachel Sylvester, which left no doubt that she had indeed been quoted accurately.
While The Times’s journalism was vindicated, Loughton was not alone in wondering if the political preferences of the paper’s owner had played a role in the weight given to Leadsom’s remarks.
In her letter explaining her withdrawal from the race, Leadsom made no mention of the avalanche of bad press triggered by her comments, but the man standing directly behind her as she read it aloud to the press, her campaign manager, quickly blamed the media.
“It is absolutely not the job of media commentators to ‘big up’ politicians whether in this leadership contest or elsewhere in politics,” Loughton wrote. “But neither should it be their compulsion constantly to try to trip them up. Using spin and underhand tactics against decent people whose prime motivation is to serve has for too long undermined the confidence of the public in our politics.”
Loughton was clearly referring to the disastrous impact of Leadsom’s interview with The Times, but, as TheGuardian media columnist Roy Greenslade observed, before Leadsom withdrew on Monday she looked set to be overwhelmed by uniformly negative coverage from Britain’s most influential conservative-leaning papers. In addition to the relatively sober Times, Leadsom was being torn apart by the populist Sun, also owned by Murdoch, as well as the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.
Since British television broadcasters are still legally required “to ensure that news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality,” Murdoch has not been able to create a version of Fox News to influence events in the U.K. in the way that channel does in the U.S. However, his newspapers and others have much more latitude to take and support political positions, and leading figures in the Conservative Party are often paid to write columns, in much the same way that Republicans are paid to contribute to Fox News.
By Monday morning, the editors of all four papers had come out openly in favor of May. The leading editorial in Monday’s Sun urged Leadsom to drop out.
It’s increasingly clear that Andrea Leadsom lacks the experience and temperament to be our next Prime Minister.
Mrs Leadsom should have spent the weekend reflecting on the purpose of her campaign after a bruising few days.
She was ridiculed by fellow Tory MPs for her hustings performance, ex-colleagues questioned key parts of her CV, and her slur on Theresa May having no children drew wide condemnation.
While it appears certain that the hostility of Murdoch’s two papers — one aimed at the business class and the other at the working class — indeed played a role in pressing Leadsom to withdraw in favor of May, it seems likely that the man who brought London tabloid-style journalism to the American airwaves with Fox News was, in fact, forced to settle for his second choice.
On the eve of last week’s vote to narrow the list of potential prime ministers to two Conservatives, the editors of The Times and The Sun attacked Leadsom in similar terms as too inexperienced for the job and promoted the candidacy of Michael Gove, the justice minister, who had been a leader of the anti-EU campaign before the referendum.
Gove, whose most important role in the succession drama was undercutting support for his former ally, Boris Johnson, by denouncing the former London mayor and Telegraph columnist as unprepared to be prime minister, is, perhaps not coincidentally, a Times columnist.
The day before Gove finally withdrew his support from Johnson, a leaked email from his wife, Sarah Vine, suggested that both Murdoch and Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail editor, “instinctively dislike Boris” and would not support him unless he offered assurances about going ahead with a complete withdrawal from the EU. Like her husband and Johnson, Vine has close ties to the right-leaning papers and is also a columnist, in her case, for the Daily Mail.
Although The Times had cautiously editorialized in favor of remaining in the EU, The Sun had led the charge for leaving the union. Murdoch himself has made no secret of his distaste for the EU. “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say,” Murdoch once told Anthony Hilton, the former business editor of The Times. “When I go to Brussels they take no notice.”
Just before Gove’s surprise announcement that he was entering the race to lead the country, Murdoch made his joy at the outcome of the referendum clear. Speaking at The Times CEO Summit, Murdoch called the decision to leave the EU “like a prison break,” but expressed concern that Johnson might look for a way to stay in if he became prime minister. Then the newspaper’s owner urged Gove, who attended the mogul’s wedding to Jerry Hall in May, to get into the race.
When Gove then failed to secure enough support from his fellow lawmakers to be one of the two nominees in the final stage of the leadership election, however — and May made a clear statement that she would oversee a complete withdrawal from the EU, pledging that “Brexit means Brexit” — it seems clear that the editors of Murdoch’s papers, like most Conservative MPs, came to see Leadsom as a loose cannon better removed from the race.
By Tuesday morning, The Sun was cheering May’s selection, even if doing so in the most sexist possible terms, by creating a photo montage that suggested her leopard-print shoes were appropriate for the new dominatrix of the Conservative Party.
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Rupert Murdoch had said he was "not worried at all" about Ofcom
Karen Bradley says she has been "scrupulously fair"
When I said hello to Rupert Murdoch outside the Manhattan headquarters of his media empire last month, he told me he was "not worried at all" about Ofcom.
It turns out his confidence was misplaced, but not for reasons that are simple, or were widely predicted.
As Karen Bradley said in Parliament today, the advice she received from Ofcom was that despite massive corporate failure at Fox News, there was no good reason for doubting the commitment to excellent broadcasting standards of the future, fully Murdoch-owned Sky.
The regulator also said the Murdochs were indeed fit and proper holders of a broadcasting licence. The grounds on which Ofcom came to this view were that senior executives at Fox were unaware of the alleged rampant sexual and racial harassment by their biggest on-screen star (Bill O'Reilly) and Fox News' omnipotent late CEO, Roger Ailes, until 2016.
Given the alleged rampant harassment has been taking place since the early 2000s - though not a single case has yet been proven - this assertion by Ofcom opens up a very juicy possibility: if anyone can produce evidence that the Murdochs were informed about such behaviour before 2016, then Ofcom will have to review their thinking on the fit and proper tests.
Journalists on both sides of the Atlantic have now begun searching for this evidence.
Douglas Wigdor, the lawyer who is leading the charge against Fox News in Manhattan, told me this afternoon: "In its bid to salvage the merger, Fox has represented to Ofcom that no executive director was aware of any allegations of sexual and racial harassment at Fox News prior to July 2016. I can assure you that the veracity of that statement will be probed in our current litigations."
Plurality concerns
Ofcom raised concerns about media plurality, saying that "public interest concerns" about excessive concentration of power justified moving to Phase 2 of this regulatory process.
But here we come to a curiosity about this case. Fox approached Ofcom to suggest behavioural remedies for these concerns. Basically they made suggestions about guaranteeing editorial independence and investment. These were enough to satisfy Ofcom, who said, according to Mrs Bradley, they were enough to "mitigate" the serious concerns about plurality - but that they could be strengthened.
If you study what Mrs Bradley said in parliament, she puts a great deal of weight behind Ofcom's view that these remedies suggested by Fox could be strengthened.
So for Ofcom, what Fox suggests on editorial independence and investment is enough to mitigate concerns about media plurality.
Whereas for Mrs Bradley, these proposals aren't enough.
In short, Mrs Bradley defers to Ofcom on most of what they say, but on the crucial matter of media plurality, where they are satisfied but think more can be done, she finds reason to delay this process by many months.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will have at least 24 weeks to look into this matter - so long as there is no change to the government's position, following submissions to Mrs Bradley from the relevant parties by 14 July.
If the CMA come to the same conclusions as Ofcom about media plurality, the ball will be back in Mrs Bradley's court. So there could be a weird circularity about this whole process.
At every stage of this bid, the Secretary of State, who is acting in a quasi-judicial capacity, has taken the cautious path and deferred to other bodies. This has the effect of politicising - even though they would resist the term - Ofcom and its chief executive, Sharon White.
The name Murdoch is so synonymous with controversy that whatever Mrs Bradley's decision, and Ofcom's judgement, there would be anger.
A new media landscape
The truth is Rupert Murdoch and his newspapers aren't nearly as powerful in Britain as they used to be. Though their papers have an online presence, Westminster is often pathetically lethargic when it comes to political opinion online. And in any case, digital publications such as Mail Online will never, I suspect, have the influence of print ancestors such as the Daily Mail. This applies to the Murdoch titles too.
Rupert Murdoch with his sons James (right) and Lachlan (left)
Moreover, the media world has changed beyond recognition in just a few years. Netflix will invest $6bn in content this year. Amazon are reinventing original production by the minute. I hear constant whispers that Facebook are going to follow Twitter into live sports.
This massive disruption, rather than political influence, is driving James Murdoch's zeal for full ownership of Sky. It's about those who own the pipes and those who tell the stories becoming one and the same. It's the marriage of distribution and content, in the parlance, that I've been banging on about on this page.
When competition for eyeballs is so intense, he wants total control of the access to Sky's 22 million customers, particularly in the under-nourished markets of Germany and Italy.
A constant headache
The other story at Fox News which seems to have been neglected is that their ratings aren't what they used to be, and no wonder, given the departure of not just Mr O'Reilly but the brilliant Megyn Kelly.
Together with the flight of advertisers online, this ratings pressure threatens to reduce profits at Fox News - which means that the Murdochs need to sweat their other assets, such as Sky. Hence this bid.
A major worry for this still extraordinarily powerful family is that a new civil trial into phone hacking claims at The Sun is due to start in October. Fox had wanted to complete the takeover by the end of this year, to trigger a 10p-a-share special dividend.
That now looks unlikely. For the Murdochs, this second attempt to acquire full control of a broadcaster they have done so much to build is proving to be as big a headache as the first.
At some point, a politician will have to take a view on whether the Murdochs are too powerful. Given the current mood in Westminster, that's a tough call that Mrs Bradley - and the prime minister - feel they could do without.
Rupert Murdoch Talks About His 50 Years Old Australian Newspaper and His Media Empire Part 1
Lachlan Murdoch (R) and Rupert Murdoch (L) would be co-chairmen of the new company
Elder son Lachlan Murdoch has been named as the heir to Rupert Murdoch's business empire.
The media mogul's 21st Century Fox said Lachlan Murdoch would be chief executive and chairman of the new company it plans to form after selling some holdings to Disney.
His father, Rupert, is to serve as co-chairman of the new firm, expected to focus on news and sport.
The announcement comes as the company awaits regulatory approval of its plan.
Disney and 21st Century Fox announced the deal last year. At the time, Fox said it expected the transaction to be completed in 12 to 18 months.
The new company to be led by Lachlan would include the flagship Fox News channel, as well as the Fox Business Networks and several sports networks.
But Comcast, the US cable giant, could disrupt the plan to sell to Disney. The firm is reportedly exploring making a higher offer for the Fox assets.
Lachlan Murdoch currently serves as executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, alongside his father. He is also co-chairman with his father of News Corp, home of the family's newspaper holdings.
He returned to the family business in 2014, after an abrupt departure nearly a decade earlier.
Brother James Murdoch, currently chief executive of Fox, was not mentioned in the announcement.
Lachlan Murdoch (L), Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch (R)
A multi-billion dollar deal has been announced that will see Disney buying film and television assets from 21st Century Fox, which is led by the Murdoch family.
The purchase could lead to a major shake-up in the global media industry and marks a strategic shift for the Murdoch family, which is known as an empire builder.
So why did the Murdochs - who control about 39% of Fox's voting rights - agree?
1. The media industry is changing
Fox is selling its movie studios, television productions, regional sports and international businesses, including Star and Europe-based broadcaster Sky, leaving a smaller company more narrowly focused on news and major live sports events.
The sale means Fox is left with content believed to be more resistant to the threat from online ads and streaming - and which are dear to Rupert Murdoch's heart.
At the same time, Fox sheds parts of its business that have suffered from revenue declines in recent years.
"Any honest observer has to be disappointed in Fox's content cycle in film and on the Fox network over the past two years," analysts at Moffett Nathanson wrote last month. "As such, it makes sense to re-think 21st Century Fox's asset mix now."
How 21st Century Fox fits into the Murdoch empire
2. The Murdochs will get a piece of Disney - and online streaming
Disney wants Fox's business to create a larger suite of movies, television shows, and sports, as it invests in its own online streaming platforms to compete with Netflix and Amazon.
The deal gives Fox shareholders - which include the Murdoch family - a roughly 25% stake in Disney, so they win too if the gamble succeeds.
"This transaction is a game changer like no other," James Murdoch said in a call on Thursday.
The two companies already have interests in common through investments both firms have made in companies such as Vice and Hulu, which will be majority controlled by Disney when the deal closes.
Disney's films include action movies such as "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"
3. Family dynamics
The deal has led to speculation that Rupert Murdoch's younger son, James, will take a spot at Disney - discussions Mr Iger said were ongoing.
A move would address reported strains in the Murdoch family over the direction of Fox, which has been led by a family triumvirate of sorts since 2015, with James as chief executive, and Rupert and elder son Lachlan as executive chairmen.
James, who reportedly favoured a break-up, is viewed as less committed to the news part of the business. He has also worked to distance himself from his father's right-wing politics, which have sometimes embroiled the firm in controversy.
James has deep ties to the parts of Fox involved in the deal, including the international holdings such as Sky, where he served as chief executive and remains the company's chairman.
If he does switch to Disney, it could place him in the running to succeed Bob Iger, chairman and chief executive, who has been talking about retirement for years. (Mr Iger, who once said he would retire in 2015, will now remain at the firm until 2021.)
Fox's movies include dramas such as "Murder on the Orient Express" starring Judi Dench and Olivia Coleman
4. Sky is the limit
Speaking of Sky... Fox's plan to take full control of Sky, acquiring the 61% it does not currently own in a bid for greater scale, has run into trouble with UK regulators.
Selling the firm's Sky stake to Disney distances the Murdoch family from the deal, which could make the takeover less politically fraught.
It also splits Sky from Fox's news holdings, which might answer regulator concerns about competition and news standards.
Fox said it is "totally committed" to completing the Sky acquisition, but the deal with Disney does not depend on it.
5. Disney made an offer Fox couldn't refuse
Fox's shares have jumped more than 30% since the first report that the firm was open to sales talks.
The surge reversed declines in recent years, after the firm failed in a bid to acquire Time-Warner and grappled with a sexual misconduct scandal at its flagship Fox News channel.
"Everyone has a price," says Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research.
Other Fox suitors, such as Comcast, sparked concerns about how competition regulators in the US might respond to a deal. (They recently moved to block a merger involving AT&T and Time Warner.)
Regulators will have to approve a Disney deal too, but the company believes it has a better chance of making it past a competition review.
Analysts have speculated that the sale will provide room to pursue other targets, or Fox's remaining assets could be recombined with Murdoch's newspaper holdings, which were spun off as the independent company News Corp in 2013.
"Are we retreating? Absolutely not," Rupert Murdoch said on Thursday.
Fox revenue by segment
Rupert Murdoch Talks About His Media Empire With Peter Robertson
Uncommon Knowledge Part 2
Murdoch bid for Sky faces plurality and standards probe
James Murdoch urged the government to give the deal the go-ahead
The bid by 21st Century Fox to buy Sky will be referred to competition regulators in the "coming days", Culture Secretary Karen Bradley has confirmed.
The deal is facing a much fuller examination than initially expected.
It will be assessed "on media plurality and genuine commitment to broadcasting standards grounds," Ms Bradley said.
The Competition and Markets Authority will provide its response within 24 weeks of the referral.
James Murdoch, chief executive of 21st Century Fox, urged the government to approve the deal.
"Remove the noise and get to the facts," he said, speaking to the Royal Television Society Convention in Cambridge.
Giving it the go ahead would send a signal that the UK is "open for business post-Brexit", he said. James Murdoch is also chairman of Sky which is currently 39% owned by 21st Century Fox.
The culture secretary had already indicated earlier this week that she was "minded" to ask the competition regulator to look at the deal on two counts: the level of influence it would give media companies controlled by the Murdoch family within the UK media landscape, and over 21st Century Fox's commitment to broadcasting standards.
James Murdoch said: "We owned 100% of [Sky] for many many years, there were no issues. When I was chief executive - no issues. And when I was chairman - and I'm chairman again - no issues. So the record has to count for something."
Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable said: "I am glad that Karen Bradley has shown courage in the face of pressure from the Murdochs.
"This referral is completely justified on grounds both of plurality and broadcasting standards.
"It is now over to the Competition and Markets Authority to properly scrutinise this bid and stand up for a plural and independent media.
'Corporate failures'
Earlier this year, Ms Bradley said she had received evidence casting doubt on Fox News's "commitment to accuracy and fairness in broadcasting" and supporting accusations of "false reporting" at the US channel.
A series of damaging allegations of sexual harassment at the Fox News Channel have become another hurdle in the Murdoch-backed bid for full ownership of Sky.
Last month, the media regulator, Ofcom, noted the "alleged behaviours amounting to significant corporate failures" at Fox, but concluded that as they didn't take place in a broadcasting standards context they "were not relevant to the decision over the takeover bid".
However, Ms Bradley said broadcasting standards and corporate governance questions would be included in the CMA's assessment of whether or not the deal should be approved, and if so, under what conditions.
Several women have alleged they were harassed by former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, who died in May this year. He was removed from his post following the allegations, but critics argue Fox had inadequate systems in place to deal with claims of this kind.
The expanded agenda for the CMA referral has raised the prospect that the deal - the Murdochs' second attempt to acquire the rest of Sky - could fail.
Culture Secretary Karen Bradley informed Parliament of her decision on Thursday
An initial bid in 2010 was abandoned in the wake of the phone hacking scandal.
New governance systems were then introduced at Murdoch-owned media companies, and the broadcasting and film businesses were separated from Mr Murdoch's newspaper interests, which include the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.
Late last year, 21st Century Fox launched its new bid for Sky.
On Tuesday, Ms Bradley gave both broadcasters involved in the £11.7bn deal 10 days in which to submit further arguments. They declined the opportunity to make further representations.
Both his enemies and those who work for him paint him as an almost supernatural figure. Beyond critics calling him “the Supreme Satan”, or “Dracula”, or the “Prince of Darkness” are eyewitnesses to Murdoch’s uniquely insinuative and wily approach.
In Australia, Kevin Rudd’s former campaign manager Bruce Hawker wrote that News Corp is “easily the most powerful political force in Australia, bigger than the major parties or the combined weight of the unions … I saw how, on a daily basis, the storm of negative stories that emanated from News Corp papers blew our campaign off course.”
In the UK, Murdoch’s tabloids were at one time the most feared political force in the country. This is partly due to their concentration – they are national tabloids, not city-based – and also their supreme nastiness. The former director general of the BBC John Birt once met a government minister who was physically shaking at the prospect of an imminent meeting with Murdoch.
“I have never met Mr Murdoch,” the former Tony Blair communications deputy Lance Price wrote for The Guardian, “but at times when I worked at Downing Street he seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet. His voice was rarely heard … but his presence was always felt. No big decision could ever be made inside No 10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men – Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch.”
Murdoch accepting the Hudson Institute's 2015 Global Leadership Award in November
Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd is more indicative of how these tiger rides usually end. He was so poorly treated by Murdoch’s Australian newspapers that in a recent interview with The Saturday Paper he called News Corp a “cancer” on democracy and suggested it should be the subject of a royal commission. “They go after people who have the audacity to raise a question about their behaviour,” Rudd said. He added, “It’s one of the reasons I’m speaking out directly, so that people can have a normal national conversation rather than a continued national embarrassed silence about this.”
"To Beat or subdue or weaken the Enemy, You Have To Understand How The Enemy .:.. and how How The Enemy Operates and Thinks..." .... USA Major Smedley Butler
News Corp’s Board of Directors and management are committed to strong corporate governance and sound business practices.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS of News Corporation K. Rupert Murdoch Executive Chairman, News Corp Lachlan K. Murdoch Co-Chairman, News Corp
Lead Director – Masroor Siddiqui News Corporation 1211 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10036 email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Executive Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Fox Corporation Executive Chairman, NOVA Entertainment Group Masroor Siddiqui Lead Director, News Corp Chief Executive Officer, Naya Capital Management UK Limited Ana Paula Pessoa Director & Partner, Kunumi AI Robert J. Thomson Chief Executive, News Corp Natalie Bancroft Director, News Corp Kelly Ayotte Former United States Senator for the State of New Hampshire BOARD COMMITTEES Audit Committee
Masroor Siddiqui – Chair José María Aznar Ana Paula Pessoa
Managers and Directors of REA Group Limited year in review 2022 511 Church Street, Richmond(Vic) 3121 Owen James Wilson Chief Executive Director Janelle Hopkins - Chief Financial Office and CEO of Financial Services Hamish Roy McLennan - Chairman Chris Venter- Chief Technology Officer Nick Dowling- Independent Non Executive Director Jennifer M, Lambert- Independent Director Richard John Freudenstien- Non Executive Director Tracey Fellows- Non Executive Director Michael Miller- Non Executive Director
Shareholders of REA Group Limited News Corporation 81,141;397 81.4%
The Sun King: The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch: After decades of influence, the media mogul isn’t so much a person as an epoch
News International phone hacking scandal
In July 2011, Murdoch, along with his youngest son James, provided testimony before a British parliamentary committee regarding phone hacking. In the UK, his media empire came under fire, as investigators probed reports of 2011 phone hacking.
On 14 July 2011 the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons served a summons on Murdoch, his son James, and his former CEO Rebekah Brooks to testify before a committee five days later. After an initial refusal, the Murdochs confirmed they would attend, after the committee issued them a summons to Parliament. The day before the committee, the website of the News Corporation publication The Sun was hacked, and a false story was posted on the front page claiming that Murdoch had died.
Murdoch described the day of the committee "the most humble day of my life". He argued that since he ran a global business of 53,000 employees and that News of the World was "just 1%" of this, he was not ultimately responsible for what went on at the tabloid. He added that he had not considered resigning, and that he and the other top executives had been completely unaware of the hacking.
On 15 July, Murdoch attended a private meeting in London with the family of Milly Dowler, where he personally apologized for the hacking of their murdered daughter's voicemail by a company he owns.
On 16 and 17 July, News International published two full-page apologies in many of Britain's national newspapers. The first apology took the form of a letter, signed by Murdoch, in which he said sorry for the "serious wrongdoing" that occurred. The second was titled "Putting right what's gone wrong", and gave more detail about the steps News International was taking to address the public's concerns. In the wake of the allegations, Murdoch accepted the resignations of Brooks and Les Hinton, head of Dow Jones who was chairman of Murdoch's British newspaper division when some of the abuses happened. They both deny any knowledge of any wrongdoing under their command.
On 27 February 2012, the day after the first issue of The Sun on Sunday was published, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers informed the Leveson Inquiry that police are investigating a "network of corrupt officials" as part of their inquiries into phone hacking and police corruption. She said that evidence suggested a "culture of illegal payments" at The Sun and that these payments allegedly made by The Sun were authorised at a senior level.
In testimony on 25 April, Murdoch did not deny the quote attributed to him by his former editor of The Sunday Times, Harold Evans: "I give instructions to my editors all round the world, why shouldn't I in London?"
On 1 May 2012, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a report stating that Murdoch was "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company".[103]
On 3 July 2013, the Exaro website and Channel 4 News broke the story of a secret recording. This was recorded by The Sun journalists, and in it Rupert Murdoch can be heard telling them that
Rupert Murdoch "... the whole investigation was one big fuss over nothing, and that he, or his successors, would take care of any journalists who went to prison..."
Rupert Murdoch said: "Why are the police behaving in this way? It's the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing."
On 8 May 2006, the Financial Times reported that Murdoch would be hosting a fund-raiser for Senator Hillary Clinton's (D-New York) Senate re-election campaign.
In a 2008 interview with Walt Mossberg, Murdoch was asked whether he had "anything to do with the New York Post's endorsement of Barack Obama in the democratic primaries". Without hesitating, Murdoch replied, "Yeah. He is a rock star. It's fantastic. I love what he is saying about education. I don't think he will win Florida [...] but he will win in Ohio and the election. I am anxious to meet him. I want to see if he will walk the walk."
Metropolitan Police role in the news media phone hacking scandal
This article provides a narrative beginning in 1999 of investigations by the Metropolitan Police Service (Met) of Greater London into the illegal acquisition of confidential information by agents in collaboration with the news media that is commonly referred to as the phone hacking scandal. The article discusses seven phases of investigations by the Met and several investigations of the Met itself, including critiques and responses regarding the Met's performance. Separate articles provide an overview of the scandal and a comprehensive set of reference lists with detailed background information.
The Metropolitan Police conducted several investigations between 1999 and 2011. The first three investigations, involving phone taps and seizure of records, successfully gathered large quantities of evidence that confidential information was being acquired illegally, sometimes with the help of public officials including policemen. By 2006, seven men had been found guilty, but no further arrests were made until 2011. The Met was criticized for not aggressively pursuing all the significant leads available from this evidence, for not adequately informing all individuals who were victims of the phone hacking, and for allegedly misleading the public and Parliament about the scope of the problem.
While continuing to investigate illegal acquisition of confidential information, the Met itself became the object of several investigations about the diligence of its probes and possible involvement of its own personnel in illegal activities. After the scope of the phone hacking scandal became generally known in July 2011, the top two officials of the Met resigned. The new Met leadership augmented the ongoing investigations with the unusual measure of bringing in an independent police organization to help. By mid-July 2011, there were as many as ten separate investigations active at the Met, Parliament and other government agencies.
Investigations by the Metropolitan Police
Full article is displayed lower down on this webpage
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Murdoch's British-based satellite network, Sky Television, incurred massive losses in its early years of operation. As with many of his other business interests, Sky was heavily subsidised by the profits generated by his other holdings, but convinced rival satellite operator British Satellite Broadcasting to accept a merger on his terms in 1990.
The merged company, BSkyB, has dominated the British pay-TV market ever since, pursuing direct to home (DTH) satellite broadcasting.
By 1996, BSkyB had more than 3.6 million subscribers, triple the number of cable customers in the UK.
Murdoch has a seat on the Strategic Advisory Board of Genie Oil and Gas, having jointly invested with Lord Rothschild in a 5.5% stake in the company which conducted shale gas and oil exploration in Colorado, Mongolia, Israeland, controversially, the occupied Golan Heights.
In response to print media's decline and the increasing influence of online journalism during the 2000s, Murdoch proclaimed his support of the micropayments model for obtaining revenue from on-line news, although this has been criticised by some.
In January 2018, the CMA blocked Murdoch from taking over the remaining 61% of BSkyB he did not already own, over fear of market dominance that could potentialise censorship of the media. His bid for BSkyB was later approved by the CMA as long as he sold Sky News to The Walt Disney Company, which was already set to acquire 21st Century Fox. However, it was Comcast who won control of BSkyB in a blind auction ordered by the CMA. Murdoch ultimately sold his 39% of BSkyB to Comcast.
News Corporation has subsidiaries in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands and the Virgin Islands. From 1986, News Corporation's annual tax bill averaged around seven percent of its profits.
Genie Energy Corporation (Genie Energy), a division of IDT Corporation (NYSE: IDT, IDT.C), today announced that Lord (Jacob) Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch have each purchased equity stakes in Genie Oil and Gas Inc. Jacob Rothschild will join Rupert Murdoch on Genie Energy’s Strategic Advisory Board and Jacob Rothschild’s interests will partner with Genie Energy to raise capital for the eventual commercialization of its oil shale projects.
Jacob Rothschild and Mr. Murdoch separately purchased equity positions equivalent to a cumulative 5.5% stake in Genie Oil and Gas Inc., which consists of IDT’s interests in American Shale Oil, LLC (AMSO), and Israel Energy Initiatives, Ltd., (IEI), for a total of $11.0 million dollars.
Claude Pupkin, CEO of Genie Oil and Gas, commented, “Genie’s success will ultimately depend, in part, on access to the expertise of the oil and gas industry and to the financial markets. Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch are extremely well regarded by and connected to leaders in these sectors. Their guidance and participation will prove invaluable.”
“I am grateful to Howard Jonas and IDT for the opportunity to invest in this important initiative,” Lord Rothschild said. “Rupert Murdoch’s extraordinary achievements speak for themselves and we are very pleased he has agreed to be our partner. Genie Energy is making good technological progress to tap the world’s substantial oil shale deposits which could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world.”
Jacob Rothschild, OM, GBE is Chairman of the J. Rothschild group of companies and of RIT Capital Partners plc (RITCP), the investment trust company. RITCP is listed on the London Stock Exchange and has a market cap of over £1.7 billion. Jacob Rothschild is also Chairman of Five Arrows Limited, a family investment company, and a number of other companies. Jacob Rothschild is a noted philanthropist, and serves as Chairman of the Rothschild Foundation.
“The Rothschild family continues to build on its 250-year tradition of leadership in the financing of innovation and growth,” said IDT’s Chairman and CEO, Howard Jonas. “It is a great honor to me, my family and our Company that he has agreed to partner with us to advance this project to its successful conclusion. Rupert Murdoch is the greatest and most well informed media magnate of our generation. His decision to invest in our shale initiatives and serve on Genie’s Strategic Advisory Board is very gratifying and we look forward to benefiting from his input.”
“Covering and distributing news has been my life’s work,” said Mr. Murdoch. “If Genie’s effort to develop shale oil is successful, as I believe it will be, then the news we’ll report in the coming decades will reflect a more prosperous, more democratic, and more secure world.”
Rupert Murdoch is the founder, Chairman of the Board, and CEO of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest diversified media companies. News Corporation’s holdings include Fox Entertainment, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, HarperCollins and significant other media assets on six continents.
Other members of Genie’s Strategic Advisory Board are:
Alan K. Burnham, PhD – Chief Technology Officer, American Shale Oil, LLC.; Research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for over 30 years;
Dick Cheney – 46th Vice President of the United States. Former President and CEO of Halliburton Company, and U.S. Secretary of Defense;
Wes Perry – Chairman of the Board, Genie Energy. Founder and CEO of E.G.L. Resources, an energy exploration and development company;
Allan Sass, PhD – Former President and CEO of Occidental Oil Shale, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum;
Michael Steinhardt – Principal Manager, Steinhardt Management LLC. Renowned hedge fund investor and founder Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz & Co., and noted philanthropist;
Eugene A. Renna – Former Executive Vice President of Exxon Mobil and a member of its Board. Also formerly President and COO of Mobil Corporation;
Stephen M. Trauber – Vice Chairman and Global Head; Energy Investment Banking Group, UBS Investment Bank;
Harold Vinegar, PhD – Former Chief Scientist – Royal Dutch Shell
Harold Vinegar, PhD – Former Chief Scientist – Royal Dutch Shell.
About Genie Energy:
Genie Energy Corporation is a division of IDT Corporation (www.idt.net), a consumer services company with operations primarily in the telecommunications and energy industries.IDT Corporation’s Class B Common Stock and Common Stock trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbols IDT and IDT.C, respectively.
Genie Energy is comprised of IDT Energy, an energy services company that resells electricity and natural gas to residential and small business customers primarily in New York State, and Genie Oil and Gas, Inc., which consists of (1) American Shale Oil Corporation which holds and manages a 50% interest in American Shale Oil, LLC, a joint shale oil initiative in Colorado with Total, S.A., and (2) an 89% interest in Israel Energy Initiatives, Ltd., a shale oil initiative in Israel.
Investor Relations IDT Corporation Bill Ulrey, 973-438-3838 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The purpose of this book is to inform readers about historical facts that most US history books omit. Most US citizens do not know about the unnecessary and unjust wars, violations of international law, and covert operations by the CIA and other US government agencies. I hope future historians and you will find my mistakes so together we get closer to the truth.
USA and CIA Vietnamising The War 1969-1973
CIA USA Operation Paperclip and MK Ultra Operations Part 2
As a critic of the CIA, Prouty pointed out its influence in global matters, outside the realm of U.S. congressional and government oversight. His works detailed the formation and development of the CIA, the origins of the Cold War, the U-2 incident, the Vietnam War, and the John F. Kennedy assassination. Prouty wrote that he believed Kennedy's assassination was a coup d'état, and that there is a secret, global "power elite," which operates covertly to protect its interests—and in doing so has frequently subverted democracy around the world.
After the war, Prouty accepted an assignment from the U.S. Army in September 1945 to inaugurate the ROTC program at Yale University, where he also taught during each scholastic year from 1946 to 1948. This timeline intersects with the years that George Bush and William F. Buckley, Jr. also spent at Yale. Prouty fondly recalled Buckley at that time in his role as editor of the Yale Daily News, and Prouty later told an interviewer in 1989 that he had written for Buckley on several occasions.
In 1950 he transferred to Colorado Springs to build Air Defense Command. From 1952 to 1954 he was assigned to Korean War duties in Japan, where he served as Military Manager for Tokyo International Airport (Haneda) during the post-war U.S. occupation.
In 1955 he was assigned to the coordination of operations between the fledgling U.S. Air Force and the CIA. As a result of a CIA commendation for this work he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the U.S. Air Force, promoted to colonel, and assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Following the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency and termination of the OSO by Secretary Robert McNamara, Prouty was transferred to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and charged with the creation a similar organization on a global scale.
From 1962 to 1963 he served as Chief of Special Operations with the Joint Staff.
Some Unpopular History of the United States The Richard Nixon Years- Jan. 1969 – Aug. 9, 1974
Book eight by Richard McManus
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this book is to inform readers about historical facts that most US history books omit. Most US citizens do not know about the unnecessary and unjust wars, violations of international law, and covert operations by the CIA and other US government agencies. I hope future historians and you will find my mistakes so together we get closer to the truth.
________________
Vice President: Gerald Ford (Oct 10, 1973 –1974)
Spiro Agnew (Jan. 1969 – Oct 10, 1973)
White House chief of staff: Bob Haldeman (?? to middle 1970s)
Richard Nixon graduated from Duke University School of Law in 1937 and returned to California and practiced law. He and his wife Pat moved to Washington in 1942 to work for the federal he graduated from Duke University School of Law in 1937 and returned to California to practice law. In 1942 he and his wife Pat moved to Washington DC and he started working for the federal government. As a lieutenant from about May 1943 he served as a naval passenger control officer for the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command. In about March 1944 he served as the Officer in Charge of the Combat Air Transport Command at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and at Nissan Island east of Papua New Guinea.
The New Zealand 3rd Division landed on Nissan Island in February 1944 as part of the Solomon Islands campaign against the Japanese. Shortly after the landings two airfields were constructed on the island. Nixon’s unit on this island prepared manifests and flight plans for C-47 operations and supervised the loading and unloading of the cargo aircraft.
Nixon was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1946 and to the US Senate in December 1950.
Chicago mafia boss Sam Giancana allegedly told his half brother Chuck Giancana, "Nixon's done me some favors, all right, got us some highway contracts, worked with the unions and overseas. And we've helped him and his CIA buddies out, too. Shit, he even helped my guy in Texas, (Jack) Ruby, get out of testifying in front of Congress back in forty-seven (1947)”
A FBI documents supports Giancana's contention. It was addressed to a congressional committee investigating organized crime. It stated, "It is my sworn testimony that one Jack Rubenstein (aka Ruby) of Chicago ... is performing information functions for the staff of Congressman Nixon, Republican of California. It is requested Rubenstein not be called for open testimony in the aforementioned hearings."
In exchange for Ruby's testimony, the FBI is said to have eased up on its probe of organized crime in Dallas.
Luis Kutner, a staff member on Estes Kefauver's special Senate committee investigating organized crime, described Ruby as "a syndicate lieutenant who had been sent to Dallas to serve as a liaison for Chicago mobsters."
President Nixon’s administration intervened on the side of mafia figures in at least 20 trials, mostly for the ostensible purpose of protecting CIA ''sources and methods.'' Nixon even went so far as to order the Justice Department to halt using the words ''mafia'' and ''Cosa Nostra'' to describe organized crime. Presidential assistant Charles Colson was Nixon's emissary to the Teamsters Union. He once voiced the theory that mafia bosses owned Rebozo and had gotten "their hooks into Nixon early."
Annie Jacobsen- Operation Paperclip.
In Deep the FBI the CIA - Truth About The American Deep State By David Rohde
Inside CIAs Darpa The Pentagons Brain - Annie Jacobson
Ted Gunderson Talks About Being Recruited by the CIA as Agents for the USA
to help the CIA Distribute and Smuggle Illegak Drugs
Jack Ruby Trial Panel Discussion
The following is a list of some of the members of the North American Jewish super mafia. I thought since most people understand the American mafia was being Iralian, it was important to show just how many men of Jewish ancestry were involved in the mafia. In Gus Russo’s book, Super-mob:
How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Power Brokers, he coined the term for the Jewish mob. Russo explains how the North American Jewish super-mafia had been able to protect itself from prosecution by aligning itself with key judges and politicians – both local and national. An example was the Nevada’s Lieutenant Governor Clifford A. Jones (1945-1954). (Sources: Mr. Mob: The Life and Crimes of Moe Dalitz by Michael Newton)
Edward "Monk" Eastman (New York's crime boss), died in December 1920.
Arnold Rothstein (New York's crime boss) was shot and killed in 1928.
Harry “Nig” Rosen was a prominent racketeer in southeast Philadelphia who became involved in prostitution, extortion, labor racketeering and later in narcotics with Arnold Rothstein during the mid-1920s.
Dutch Schultz (aka Arthur S. Flegenheimer); (Newark's crime boss) died 1935.
In 1931, Joseph “Doc” Stacher built up Las Vegas by pairing the Jewish and Italian Mafia into a national organized crime syndicate. He helped Meyer Lansky organize a conference of Jewish organized crime leaders which later would see the alleged merging of the Jewish and Italian Mafia into a national crime syndicate (American mafia). Stacher ran the West Coast and Caribbean gambling operations for Meyer Lansky during the 1930s, as well as becoming a silent partner of movie studio Columbia Pictures in the late 1930s. Stacher continued running mafia gambling operations until 1964, when Federal authorities arrested him for tax evasion. While the US government was in favor of deporting him to his native Poland, federal law prohibited deporting anyone to a communist-controlled country. Because of the Law of Return, Stacher was successfully immigrated to Israel in 1965 where he lived until he died 1977.
Harry ‘Pittsburg Phil’ Strauss was a Murder Incorporated hit man who killed over 100 men from the late 1920s up to 1940 died by electric chair in 1941.
Abraham “Abe” Reles a hit man of Brooklyn-based Murder, Incorporated which was an almost totally Jewish organization, who turned informant on Dutch Strauss and was murdered in 1941.
Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter was the original head of Murder Inc, Incorporated. He was the only national crime boss ever to have been convicted executed by the electric chair in 1944.
Benjamin "Bugsy" Sigelbaum (aka Siegel) who came from New York. He became the Las Vegas' crime boss and was instrumental in creating the legalized gambling starting things off at the Flamingo Hotel and Sands Hotel. He died 1947.
Meyer Lansky was born in Belarus to a Polish-Jewish family. His family immigrated to the US and settled New York City. Lansky met Bugsy Siegel when they were children. They became lifelong friends, as well as partners in the bootlegging trade. During the 1930s, Harry “Nig” Rosen and Meyer Lansky worked on expanding drug trafficking operations in Mexico as an alternative to older routes such as Japan now closed with United States entry into World War Two. By 1939, a lucrative heroin network had been established from drug traffickers based in Mexico City to major cities across the United States including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Los Angeles as well as Havana, Cuba. Lansky was never found guilty of anything more serious than illegal gambling. Lansky was also close friends with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, the two met as teenagers. He Lansky died in 1983.
In the 1950s, Harry “Nig” Rosen used such Swiss bank accounts to launder his heroin trafficking profits. Soon, Lansky and his associates established their own banks.
Mickey Cohen was raised by an Orthodox Jewish family living in the Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn of New York City. In 1939, Mickey Cohen arrived in Los Angeles to work under Jewish American mafia boss Bugsy Siegel. Cohen helped Siegel founding the Flamingo Hotel and casino in Las Vegas and ran its sports book gambling operation. Siegel used money from the syndicate to build a drug trade route from the US to Mexico and he was also was instrumental in setting up the race wire, gambling with the Chicago mafia crime family. In the mid-1940s, while Siegel was setting up the casino in Las Vegas, his lieutenant, Mickey Cohen worked to secure all illegal gambling in Los Angeles.
Abe Bernstein, leader of the Detroit Purple Gang which was responsible for the deaths of more than 500 men during the so-called ‘bootleg wars.’ Abe and his gangsters joined the National Crime Syndicate in 1931. He died in 1968.
Abe and Sam Bronfman were from a wealthy family that immigrated to Canada from Russia by their rabbi and two servants. In 1903, the family bought a hotel during Prohibition they r made tremendous profits by shipping liquor into the United States, reportedly shipping booze through Cleveland, Detroit and New York. The Bronfman crime family of Montreal, Canada set Kemper Marley up in liquor business and for 40 years, Marley was Meyer Lansky syndicate’s front man in Phoenix, Arizona. Marley headed the Valley National Bank, which lent Bugsy Siegel, the money to build the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas. Siegel was murdered on orders from the nation mafia syndicate in 1947. Siegel nationwide gambling wire was turned over to Kemper Marley in Phoenix, Arizona. The murder of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles, in Phoenix set off an important investigation of the influence of Kemper Marley in Phoenix. Bolles was killed in a 1976 car bombing. Law enforcement believed that the Marley gang was behind his murder, but they could not prove it. http://americanfreepress.net/the-king-of-the-jews-is-dead/
The Bronfman’s makes Seagram brand alcohol that was the largest distiller in the world. The Seagram assets have since been acquired by other companies, notably The Coca-Cola Company, Diageo, a British distiller and Pernod Ricard, a French distiller. The aggregate assets held by the various branches of the Bronfman family were estimated to be $7 billion in 1978, by Peter C. Newman in his book King of the Castle.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish-American_organized_crime
Jeremy M. Jacobs, Sr. is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. The Jacobs crime family was originally from Buffalo, NY and they got rich bootlegging during Prohibition as partners with the Canadian Bronfmans crime family. In May 1972, the Jacobs’ Sportservice was convicted of a federal conspiracy charge for attempting to hide its ownership of share in the Frontier hotel and casino in Las Vegas.
His three sons have taken over running their crime family called Sportservice which is a New York based company (now called Delaware North). It is the largest nonpublic, family-owned corporations in the world, a conglomerate with control or partial control over 450 separate companies. Its stated annual profit is $350 million, from holdings in North American and British sports complexes, race tracks, and food consortia.
On June 3, 1976, Don Bolles an investigative reporter for the Republic was murdered due to a bomb planted under his car. He had been investigating the likely illegal relationships between Arizona racing regulators and the tracks owned by the Jacobs family.
In 1972 the Democratic Party members of the House Select Panel on Crime decided to terminate their hearings on Sportservice . US Senator Robert Dole, (R-KS) revealed that the decision had followed a private meeting between Jeremy Jacobs and Democratic National Committee Chairman Larry O'Brien. O'Brien subsequently left his Democratic Party post and assumed a lucrative job as president of the National Basketball Association—an organization with heavy representation by the Jacobs family. Senator Dole publicly protested the decision by the House Select Panel. (Source: May 24, 1972 issue of Sports Illustrated "Jacobs — Godfather of Sports) https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2017/11/part-3-final-judgmentthe-missing-link.html
Reuben Sturman was born in 1924, the son of immigrant Russian Jews and who grew up on Cleveland's East Side. By the late 1970s, he owned perhaps 800 retail pornography stores in the US, often through very complex patterns of concealed ownership. In England he worked in close collaboration with local organized criminals, like the Holloway family, a well-established pornography group. On the European continent, his chief foothold was through a firm called Intex Nederland, a key distributor of pornographic videos. A subsidiary of Intex is Video-Rama, which distributed pornographic videos throughout Europe and to the extremely lucrative Middle Eastern market of Cairo, Beirut, Kuwait City, and Riyadh. It was Sturman's refusal to pay taxes properly that finally brought him down. In 1989, Sturman was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to ten years in jail and $2.5 million in fines. Another charge, this time for the interstate transportation of obscene material, resulted in a plea bargain for Sturman, but he was later caught trying to bribe a juror, via his ex-wife, and was sentenced to 19 additional years for extortion. He died in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky on 1997.
Joseph H. Reinfeld (1891–1958) (last name later changed to Renfield) during the Prohibition era he was a major bootlegger smuggling liquor from Canada in the United States using ships. After prohibition ended, he owned several large liquor import and distribution companies. Testimony during the Kefauver Committee hearings estimated that Reinfeld's mafia syndicate imported nearly 40 percent of all the alcohol consumed in the US during Prohibition. Reinfeld was charged in 1925 for the murder of a former government prohibition agent, but the government failed to get an indictment from the grand jury and the charges were dropped.[ After Prohibition ended in 1933, Reinfeld founded Browne-Vintners, a liquor import and distribution company.
Abner "Longie" Zwillman (1904 –1959) a Jewish American was a member of Reinfeld’s gang. After Dutch Schultz's murder in 1935, Zwillman took over those of Schultz's criminal operations that were in New Jersey. The press began calling Zwillman the "Al Capone of New Jersey." Abner "Longie" Zwillman New Jersey crime boss took over those of Dutch Schultz's criminal operations. In 1929, Zwillman helped organize the Cleveland Conference, one of the first meetings between Jewish and Italian organized crime leaders, later resulting in the establishment of the Mafia Ruling Commission and also associated with Murder Incorporated. Shortly after taking over Dutch Schultz's operations, Zwillman became involved in local politics, eventually controlling the majority of local politicians in Newark for over twenty years. During the 1940s Zwillman dominated gambling operations in New Jersey, in particular the Marine Room inside Zwillman's Riviera nightclub, The Palisades. He was suicided (murdered made to look like a suicide) by the mafia in 1959.
Joseph Stacher (1902 – 1977) in the 1920s, he was running much of Zwillman's gambling operations. In 1931, Stacher helped Meyer Lansky organize a conference of Jewish organized crime leaders at the Franconia Hotel, which later would see the alleged merging of the Jewish and Italian Mafia into a national crime syndicate. Running West Coast and Caribbean gambling operations for Lansky during the 1930s, as well as becoming a silent partner of movie studio Columbia Pictures in the late 1930s, Stacher would later supervise gambling in Las Vegas, Nevada, particularly the Sands and Fremont Casinos.
Charles "King" Solomon (1884 –1933) was a Jewish-Russian mob boss who controlled Boston's bootlegging, narcotics, and illegal gambling during the Prohibition era. Attending the Atlantic City Conference in 1929, Solomon was one of the several leaders in the "Big Seven" who helped negotiate territorial disputes and establish policies which would influence the later National Crime Syndicate in 1932.
Joseph Linsey (1899 –1994) was an organized crime figure in Boston's underworld during the Prohibition era and he associated with Joe Kennedy and Meyer Lansky. At the start of Prohibition, the 21-year-old Linsey began bootlegging illegal liquor with Charles "King" Solomon. Linsey also has dealings with Raymond Patriarcha, the titular godfather of New England narcotics trafficking and who became the boss of the New England mafia in 1955.
From the 1930s, Linsey sits on the board of International Airport Hotel Systems Inc., a Miami-based company with Lansky sitting was a member of the board of directors. FBI wiretaps show that Linsey also had dealings with Raymond Patriarcha, the titular godfather of New England narcotics trafficking. Patriarca of Rhode Island had important ties to the five families in New York, especially the Colombo’s, and became the boss of the New England mafia in 1955.
Linsey sits on the board of International Airport Hotel Systems Inc., a Miami-based company whose board also includes Lansky. Hotel Systems is also connected to Resorts International. Linsey also owned two liquor distributing firms and a dog racing track in Tauton, Massachusetts. Linsey was one of the top contributors to John F. Kennedy's 1976 senatorial campaign.
John Torrio was a Bronfman man and by 1928 he was able to cal1 a meeting in Cleveland to establish a nationwide crime syndicate. Under the auspices of Lansky and Torrio, Lucky Luciano succeeded in wiping out all recalcitrant godfathers. In the early 1930s Murder, Incorporated was formed as a regulatory commission of sorts to police any overzealous free enterprise style crime advocates who might try to buck the syndicate. A special assassination bureau was set up by Meyer Lansky and Benjamin "Bugs" Siegel. The Bugs and Meyer Gang had originally been used to protect Bronfman liquor shipments across the border against freelance hijackers.
The third item on the agenda at the meeting in Cleveland was what to do after Prohibition. The commodity, Torrio proposed the commodity to replace big profits from selling liquor was to focus on selling narcotics. http://www.lyndonlarouche.org/dope9.pdf
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During Joseph P.”Joe” Kennedy Sr own bootlegging days in Prohibition he entered into a coalition with Newark's Reinfeld Syndicate. It was 50 percent owned by the Bronfman gang. During Canada's four dry years from 1915 to 1919, the Bronfmans established their contacts with US criminal figures for illegally importing liquor into Canada. In 1916, the Bronfmans established their first link with the opium trade. In Yiddish Bronfman means "liquorman." Yechiel “Ekiel” Bronfman, emigrated to Canada in 1889. Since 1920 the Bronfmans had been importing British scotch whiskey from the Distillery Company of London (DCL) with Bronfmans splitting 50-50 the profits.
Joe’s father Patrick Joseph "P. J." Kennedy began his rise to fortune as owner of three taverns and he who bought his way into the corrupt Democratic Party machine. At the age of 26, he sold his taverns and went into the more lucrative wholesale whisky business. P.J. Kennedy was one of the shanty-town mobsters of late 19th century Boston. South Boston teemed with them. “Shanty” meant rough, uncouth, usually a drinker.
As historian Lawrence McCaffrey notes, from the 1830s to the 1960s, Irish Catholics voted heavily Democratic. Their precincts showed average support levels of 80 percent. During the 1920s, mobsters Frank Wallace and his brothers lead a crime family in Boston during prohibition and due to their local political influence; they were rarely convicted, and spent relatively little time in prison. Frank is reported to have been arrested more than 25 times, but only served time twice, at Deer Island House of Correction in 1919 and 1928.
Joe Kennedy retained his business dealings with the syndicate thugs all the way until 1946 when he sold his liquor company, Somerset Importers Ltd., for $8 million to the "Renfield Importers," the legal version of the Reinfeld Syndicate after prohibition ended in 1933.
In 1933, Joe Kennedy was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to head the new Securities Exchange Commission, for helping to swing the Boston Democratic Party machine behind the FDR at their 1932 nominating convention. In 1936, FDR appointed Joe Kennedy US ambassador to Great Britain. Once in London, the Royal Family further obliged Kennedy by posing with his family in full regalia for the newspapers. He aligned himself with all the British backers of Hitler. Kennedy was a personal friend of Herman Goering. He was in total agreement with the Nazi's. There were reports that Jews would come to Kennedy asking for help for relatives being put to death by the Nazi's and he would tell them "I'll do nothing for you" and sent them packing.
He quickly attached himself to the most pro-Nazi British aristocrats including the opium-trading Sassoon family. The Jewish Sassoon family of Baghdadi Jewish was based in Baghdad, Iraq, before moving to Bombay, India and then spreading to China and England. Between 1830 - 1831 the Sassoon’s were busy trafficking in opium in Canton, China. They traffic 18,956 chests of opium earning millions of dollars. Part of the profits went to Queen Victoria and the British government. In the year 1836 the trade increased to over 30,000 chests and drug addiction in coastal cities became endemic. In 1839, the Manchu Emperor ordered that it be stopped and 2,000 chests of Sassoon opium were seized and threw it into the river. An outraged David Sassoon demanded that Great Britain retaliate. Thus, the First Opium Wars began with the British Army fighting as mercenaries of the Sassoons. They attacked cities and blockaded ports.
The Chinese Army, decimated by ten years of rampant opium addiction, proved no match for the British Army. The war ended in 1839 with the signing of "The Treaty of Nanking." This included provisions especially designed to guarantee the Sassoon’s the right to sell opium to the entire population.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's fortune was inherited from his maternal grandfather Warren Delano. In 1830 he was a senior partner of Russell & Company. It was their merchant fleet which carried Sassoon's opium to China and returned with tea.
Sassoon’s company was totally operated by Jews only! The corrupt British monarchy honored them with privilege and knighthood. To this day the Sassoons are in the history books as "great developers" of India but the source of their vast wealth is never mentioned!
One way the profits from crime moved between America and the Far East was for Asian gamblers to visit Las Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe, where they spent a few nights at the casino tables and signed IOUs to cover their "losses." These IOUs were then sold to West Coast banks that redeemed them through banks in Hong Kong. Everyone involved made money through commissions at each stop, and in the process large sums were transferred across the Pacific.
Concerned that President Harry Truman was wobbly in his support for creating a new nation of Israel, Meyer Lansky pressured the Kansas City mafia and so they responded by using their connections in the White House to persuade Truman to change his mind, reminding the President that the union had helped elect him to office. (Source: Sandi Lansky Lombardo (Meyer Lansky’s daughter) http://www.fivefamiliesnyc.com/2010/05/meyer-lanskys-mafia-secrets-exposed-by.html
In 1946, FBI agents in New York were investigating Bugsy Siegel and Frank Costello. They were getting together to come up with the financing for the Flamingo casino.But the New York FBI agents soon received an order from Truman's Attorney General, Tom Clark, to cease the investigation on the grounds it "lacked federal jurisdiction." It was later learned that Nevada’s US Senator Pat McCarran had interceded on behalf of his newly emerging Las Vegas mafia. Senator McCaran charged that the FBI investigation had been designed to "damage the economy" of Nevada.
The source of this information was Joseph Yablonsky, the FBI special agent in charge of the Las Vegas district office from 1980 through 1983. Yablonsky said he didn't see a lot of integrity among the Navada’s major politicians, with the exception of US Senator Dick Bryan, when he assumed the governorship in 1980. http://www.newsnet1.com/electricnevada.com/pages96/mob1.htm
Heroin from Frank Coppola in Italy went to John Priziola in Detroit, and from there to Canada, New York and elsewhere. Frank Coppola arrived in Detroit in 1926. During the early 1930s with the help of and Coppola’s Detroit mafia helped in union strikes. Jimmy Hoffa was able establish the Teamsters as a powerful labor union on a par with the AFL-CIO. In exchange for their help, Jimmy offered up Detroit's trucking industry to the mob. Coppola was instrumental in Hoffa's rise through the labor ranks offering support once again when the Teamsters made their big push forcing the AFL-CIO out of Detroit in 1941.
Coppola had been involved in the drug trade in Detroit and New Orleans. Carlos Marcello was the mafia boss of New Orleans. Following the death of Lucky Luciano in 1962, Coppola was often called the most powerful mafia figure in Italy.
Coppola was replaced by John Priziola in Detroit and as far west as San Diego, California. Later Joe Zerilli remained the top boss of the Detroit Mafia until his death of natural causes on October 30, 1977 at the age of 80. Coppola groomed the top mafia bosses in St. Louis. Coppola was arrested in June of 1975 and charged with attempted murder. After a lengthy trial the aging mob leader was acquitted and died soon thereafter.
In the early 1960s Joe Zerilli would be given a seat on the American Mafia's leader committee known as The Commission. As a commission member Zerilli acted as a senior north American mafia leader alongside the five New York City bosses and other top Mafia bosses from around the country at the time that included Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo, Sam Giancana of Chicago, Angelo Bruno of Philadelphia, Santo Trafficante Jr. of Tampa, and Raymond Patriarca Sr. of New England.
In Richard M. Nixon’s first political foray was a successful 1946 race for Congress as a strong anti-Communist from southern California. Nixon received a $5,000 (or some $63,000 in 2017 dollars) contribution from mafia boss Meyer H. "Mickey" Cohen, who let Nixon’s campaign headquarters to use rent free an office in one of Cohen's buildings. Cohen’s mother was a Jewish Ukrainian who immigrated to the US and moved her family to Los Angeles. Cohen went to Chicago, where he ran a gambling operation for the Al Capone's powerful crime family. In 1939, Cohen arrived in Los Angeles to work under "Bugsy" Siegel. During their association, Mickey helped set up the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and ran its sports book operation.
In 1950, Cohen set up a fund-raising dinner for Richard Nixon in Los Angeles. The affair took in $75,000 (or some $768,000 in 2017 dollars). Cohen himself later said, “… It was all gamblers from Vegas, all gambling money. Everyone from around here was on the pad naturally had to go. Looking back on it (the dinner) it was all gamblers from Vegas, all gambling money. There wasn't a legitimate person in the room.'' Cohen later recalled Nixon addressed the dinner and afterwards, Cohen told the crowd the exits would be closed until the whole $75,000 quota was met.
Journalist Drew Pearson wrote that this fund raising dinner of Cohen’s was organized by Murray Chotiner. In his autobiography, Cohen claimed his support of Nixon was ordered by ''the proper persons from back east.” The words “Back east” meant the leaders of the national mafia syndicate, who were Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky. Mickey Cohen died in his sleep in 1976. (Source: a radio broadcast in 1956 by journalist Drew Pearson)
Murray Chotiner was Nixon's earliest campaign manager and political advisor and he was known as a lawyer who specialized in defending members of the mafia. Chotiner had contacts with mafia-connected Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa and New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello.
In 1962 journalists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson wrote that Murray Chotiner was the lawyer who was representing the top gangster of Philadelphia, Marco Reginelli, as well as a long list of mafia guys and income tax violators.
Nixon's appointment of Walter Annenberg as Ambassador to England also echoes the themes of underworld involvement. Annenberg and his father were indicted in 1939 for "aiding and abetting" in connection with their gambling wire service operation in Chicago, an operation run with the protection of Al Capone. The Annenberg family was also a major contributor to Nixon's 1968 election campaign.
Here is a short section of Kefauver Committee Interim Report #1 and #2 of the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver Aug. 1950: B. MIAMI;
8. These general patterns of organized criminal activity were specifically evidenced in the situation uncovered by the committee in Florida in Broward and Dade Counties, and the cities of Miami and Miami Beach, which are located in Dade County. Moreover, although hearings bearing on this point have not yet been held, the committee has convincing evidence in its possession that analogous situations exist in other portions of the State of Florida.
9. Groups of known gangsters, from diverse sections of the country, many of whom have long criminal records, assemble primarily at Miami Beach. There they make their headquarters at certain hotels and establishments. Frank Erickson and the New York gang make their headquarters at the Wofford and the Boulevard Hotels; the Detroit gang, at the Wofford and the Grand Hotels, and the Philadelphia gang at the Sands Hotel.
10. These racketeers operate various gambling and bookmaking establishments openly and notoriously in clear violation of Florida law and apparently with the full knowledge of the entire community including the law-enforcement officers, who in some cases incredibly insisted to the committee that they had no knowledge of the operations. Bookmakers focus on accepting bets and paying off winners.
12. In Miami Beach a group of five local residents, through a syndicate known as S & G Syndicate, have controlled the racing-wire services and the bookmaking establishments for a number of years prior to 1949. This control was so tight that the bookmakers in effect worked for the syndicate.
13. The S & G Syndicate operated with the protection of the Miami Beach Police Department and of the Dade County sheriff, and apparently under cover of a complacent city council, at least one of whose members was proven to have had profitable financial dealings with syndicate members.
In all, the committee figures conservatively that $204,700,000,000 (in 2018 dollars) changes bands every year in the United States as a result of organized illegal gambling, a not inconsiderable portion of which stays with the promoters and operators of this illicit activity The S. & G. Syndicate, which dominated book-making operations in Miami grosses upward of $266,100,000 a year (in 2018 dollars)
Being This Close To Nuclear War Should Change How We See Things`_Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone
Dr. Frank Olsens Mysterious CIA Death - A Jimmy Atkins Analysis
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The Chicago mafia was headed by Tony Accardo until 1944 when he voluntarily stepped down. He still had powerful leadership role within the crime family. In 1957 his lieutenant Salvatore “Sam or Mooney" Giancana took over as boss of the Chicago crime family and some evidence points to Giancana as being the head of entire American mafia.
During the reign of Italian American Frank Costello’s Genovese crime family controlled much of the bookmaking, loan sharking, illegal gambling and labor racketeering activities in New York City.
In 1954 Johnny Rosselli helped engineer CIA’s overthrow of the Guatemalan government. Throughout 1956 and 1957 Rosselli travelled back and forth from Mexico City, the planning center for all CIA operations in Latin America. An experienced CIA operative noted that "John (Rosselli) had access to everyone and everything that was going on there. He had an open door at the embassy in Guatemala City and in Costa Rica. He was in there plenty of times. I know because I saw him. He supplied information to the government, and had a hand in a lot of the intrigues that were going on."
In the 1950s lobbyist Fred Black became a business associate and political adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson. He was also a close friend of mafia boss, Johnny Roselli. In the early 1950s, Roselli gradually shifted his focus away from Hollywood and to Las Vegas, Nevada. By 1954, Roselli had become the Chicago and Los Angeles mafia’s chief representative in Las Vegas. His job was to ensure that the Chicago and Los Angeles bosses each received their fair share of the burgeoning casino revenues through "skimming." The skim was profits made from the gambling casinos that were not reported to the IRS and thereby no income tax was paid. In 1947 the FBI identified Roselli as a close associate of Santos Trafficante Senior and Junior, mafia bosses in Tampa, FL. In 1959, Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante, Jr. were hired by the CIA in try and assassinate Fidel Castro.
In 1954, Robert A. Maheu Associates handling sensitive CIA assignments, dirty work, involving prostitution, pornography, illegal wiretaps, (and) assassination. According to Joe Shimon, one of Maheu’s oldest friends, Maheu was a pimp for the CIA. CIA would call him up when Sukarno or King of Jordan Hussein, a long time CIA asset, was coming to town, and ask him to get some prostitutes. Shimon was the chief of detectives for Washington’s upscale Northwest quadrant where almost all of our nation’s capitol’s foreign embassies are located. Shimon was a close friend of Mob figures Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, both involved with Maheu.
Ross A. Schoyer, who once worked with Joseph W. “Joe” Shimon, said Shimon ran the International Police Academy in Washington, DC. Shimon was a lieutenant or inspector with the Washington, DC Metro Police Department. This academy was a CIA front that specialized in training Iranian Secret police. Joe Shimon told his daughter Toni that he was a principal liaison to the mafia for the CIA. She said he confessed to meeting with mafia bosses Roselli, Giancana, Trafficante, and CIA officer William “Bill” Harvey and these meetings included sporadic attendance by CIA boss James Angleton. She said Harvey and her father were very close and he was also close to Angleton.
He told his daughter his job was to kill people.Harvey was in charge of assassination of foreign nationals or Soviet spies after World War Two. Shimon told his daughter that Allied Investigators Inc. was a CIA front and had been used for his undercover work. Shimon was partner of John W. Leon’s Allied Investigators Inc. Their specialty was wiretapping. One of the investigators with whom Shimon and Leon were allied on a part-time basis was Louis J. Russell. (Sources: Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, by Jim Hougan, (1984) and Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer ...by Peter Janney)
Meyer Lansky founded gambling resorts/casinos on Florida's Gold Coast, in the Bahamas, and in pre-Castro Cuba. Before he fled Cuba, he was said to be worth an estimated $20,000,000 (equivalent to $180,375,940 in 2016). Lansky's brother, Jacob Lansky, managed Lansky’s Nacional Hotel in Havana, Cuba. (Fidel Castro a mixed legacy that includes fighting the mafia, by Mo Barnes, RollingOut, November 26, 2016)
Lansky laundered the profits from his growing casino empire to avoid paying US income tax, as well as profits of other mafia bosses, to a Swiss bank account, where anonymity was assured. He laundered money through a network of shell and holding companies. A holding company is a company whose only job is to watch over the shares of stock it owns in other businesses. Lansky was identified as the mafia's banker, the head of the Combination -- the Chairman of the Board. (Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life by Robert Lacey, pp. 10-11, (1991)
After Bugsy Siegel was killed the Flamingo casino's next manager was Gus “Mooney” Greenbaum. By 1950, Greenbaum was behind the building of the $50 million Tropicana casino-hotel in Las Vages. By 1958 the Riviera hotel-casino was built and Greenbaum owned 27 percent of it stock. In December 1958, the mafia Commission ordered and Greenbaum and his wife killed because he disobeyed their order to sell his share in the Riviera to one of the mafia's front men and leave Las Vegas.
Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo was a New York mobster and a high-ranking capo in the Genovese crime family who set up casino operations with Meyer Lansky in Florida and Cuba. Alo first met Lansky in about 1947 when Alo was setting up a casino in the town of Hallandale, Florida. Alo and Lansky closed their two Hallandale casinos and started planning for establishing casinos in Cuba.
In 1952, Jimmy Alo started flying out to Las Vegas on a regular basis to oversee construction of his latest investment, the Sands casino. However, Lansky had chosen Joseph "Doc" Stacher to run this casino with Charles “Babe” Baron. Baron was chosen to looked after Sam Giancana's shares of stock in the hotel and insure he got his share of the skim. The others owners in the Sands included Joe Fusco, Longy Zwillman, Tony Accardo, a mafia lawyer Abe Teitelbaum, Gerardo Catena in New Jersey and Frank Sinatra. Edward “Ed” Levinson was a prominent member of the illegal gambling fraternity of Detroit, south Florida and Kentucky. He was also one of the investors in the Sands Hotel and Casino, which opened in 1952. Oil businessman Jake Freedman was ostensibly the main shareholder, but it was really controlled by Frank Costello.
In 1956, Howard Hughes made a controversial $205,000 loan to Nixon’s brother Donald. Details of this loan were leaked during the Nixon vs. Kennedy presidential campaign in 1960.
In 1956 Meyer Lansky established the Havana Riviera Hotel and casino in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Three Syndicate gamblers from Cleveland, including Morris ''Moe'' Dalitz, were part owners of Lansky's Hotel Nacional in Havana. According to mafia hit man Angelo ''Gyp'' DeCarlo, during the dictator Batista’s regime, ''the Mob had a piece of every joint down there. There wasn't one joint they didn't have a piece of.''
After Castro kicked the mafia out of Cuba, Lansky became partnered in Las Vegas casinos with Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Sam Tucker, Wilbur Clark of the Desert Inn; Ed Levinson and Sam Giancana of the Fremont Hotel and Hyman Abrams and Morris Rosen of the Flamingo. As with all of Lansky’s dealings, he and his mafia associates hid ownership of the hotel/casino behind layers of managers and front men, whose names were used to fool the Nevada state gambling regulators as to known mafia guys really owning the casino/hotels.
Giancana consolidated his power thru ordering the deaths of over 200 people, some of whom were tortured to death. These killings brought him to the head of an international crime empire, which included interests in the Riviera, Sands and Desert Inn hotels in Las Vegas. In 1960 Giancana made arrangements to buy the Cal-Neva Lodge, located at the north end of Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border. The owners of record were Frank Sinatra, Hank Sanicola (an old friend and business partner of Sinatra's) and Dean Martin. Giancana was the real owner. This was confirmed by a FBI wiretapped conversation with him and Johnny Roselli. The FBI estimated these casinos to generate over $2 billion (or some $17 billion in 2018 dollars) in income annually. Some $40-$50 million (or some $375 million in 2018 dollars) of that went directly to Giancana.
In 1967 Lansky and Alo realized a profit of just over $1 million (or $7.3 million in 2018 dollars) each when their man Jack Entratter, working under the guidance of Moe Dalitz, sold the Sands Casino to Howard Hughes for $14.6 million (or some $108 million in 2018 dollars).
It was alleged that Meyer Lansky and his group had skimmed over ten years from the Flamingo, the Sands, the Thunderbird, the Riviera Las Vegas casinos some $300 million (or $2.5 billion in 2018 dollars). And that's not counting the millions taken from joints in New York, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, Cuba, the Bahamas and England.
According to historian Anthony Summers, when Nixon was gambling very heavily, and Rebozo covered Nixon's losses and to the tone of possibly $50,000. Most of Nixon's gambling took place at Meyer Lansky's Hotel Nacional in Cuba. Lansky rolled out the royal treatment for Nixon, who stayed in the Presidential Suite on the owner's tab. Lansky developed Cuba for the American mafia during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, when Havana was ''The Latin Las Vegas.'' Under its tall, swaying palms, gambling, prostitution and drug trafficking netted the US Syndicate more than $100-million-a-year, even after handsome payoffs to Batista. Mafia gamblers from Cleveland, including Morris ''Moe'' Dalitz, were part owners of Lansky's Hotel Nacional in Havana. Dalitz was a friend of Rebozo.
Nixon first met Charles “Bebe” Rebozo in late 1950. Nixon had served as a US Representative from California from January 1947 to November 1950. Fearing that Nixon was facing a nervous breakdown, Florida US Representative George Smathers suggested Nixon take a holiday in Florida where he met Rebozo. They became very close friends.
Representative Smathers became partners of an automatic vending machine company called Serve-U-Corporation with Bobby Baker, political lobbyist Fred Black and Jewish mobster Ed Levenson. This company which was established in 1962, provided vending machines for companies working on federally granted programs. And the vending machines were secretly owned by Sam Giancana and other mobsters based in Chicago. (Source: Nonmenclature of an Assassination Cabal, by William Torbitt)
Next Nixon was elected to the US Senate and in November 1952, he was elected as Dwight Eisenhower's running mate despite a scandal over a secret slush fund put together by wealthy California backers.
According to crime investigator Jack Clarke, in 1951 Rebozo had been involved with Meyer Lansky in illegal gambling rackets in parts of Miami, Hallandale, and Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Clarke said,”When I checked the name (Rebozo) with the Miami police, they said he was an entrepreneur and a gambler and that he was very close to Meyer (Lansky).”
Mafia experts connect Richard Nixon to Carlos Marcello and to Jimmy Hoffa through Murray Chotiner and Santos Trafficante Jr. through Bebe Rebozo. Carlos Marcello, the son of Sicilian immigrants, ruled New Orleans crime family from 1947. He took control of Louisiana's illegal gambling network. He had also joined forces with Lansky in order to skim money from some of the most important casinos in the New Orleans area. According to former members of the Chicago Outfit, Marcello was assigned a cut of the skimmed money from Las Vegas casinos, in exchange for providing muscle (assaults) in Florida real estate deals. Marcello had been selected as the godfather of the New Orleans mafia, by the family's capos and he held this position for until the 1980s.
The FBI said Bebe Rebozo was cozy with the mafia, especially Santos Trafficante and Alfred “Big Al” Polizzi of Cleveland. Polizzi was a drug trafficker associated with Lansky. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) branded Polizzi “one of the most influential members of the mafia in the United States.” Rebozo and Polizzi were partners in developing a shopping center in Miami. Rebozo’s parents come from Cuba and he was born in American and he was a big deal in the Cuban exile community in Miami. Investigative journalist Anthony Summers notes that, by the 1960s, there was no doubt among FBI special agents that Bebe Rebozo was pals with a who’s who of the country’s major gangsters.
Rebozo also purchased land in Florida Richard Fincher. It was believed that Fincher worked as a front man for Meyer Lansky. An examination of Fincher's telephone calls revealed that he was in regular contact with mafia bosses Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante. Vincent "Fat Vinnie" Teresa also admitted that he had used Rebozo's bank to launder stolen money. Teresa was an American mobster in the Boston branch of the Patriarca crime family who was a lieutenant of boss Raymond Patriarca (aka the Boston crime family, the Providence Mafia, or the New England Mafia) Rebozo's Key Biscayne Bank was a suspected pipeline for mafia money skimmed from Crosby's Paradise Island casino nearby Nassau in the Bahamas.
Rebozo arranged for E. Howard Hunt to investigate Hoke Maroon, a former partner of Rebozo, Maroon claimed Nixon was once the part owner of Rebozo’s Coral Gables Motel.
Before Nixon became president, he and Rebozo went to their favourite restaurant, the Jamaica Inn on Key Biscayne, owned by their old friend Donald Berg. The Secret Service eventually asked the President Nixon to find a more suitable restaurant after uncovering Berg’s ties to the mafia. Donald Berg had been indicted in stolen stock deals but never prosecuted. Donald Berggave Nixon a cut-rate deal on the land for his Key Biscayne vacation home as a favour. The Secret Service never issued a similar warning about socializing with Rebozo.
In 1970, Nixon appointed James Lawrence King as a federal judge. One of King's first cases involved Bebe Rebozo's Key Biscayne Bank accepting 900 shares of stolen IBM stock as collateral for a loan he granted. King decided the case against the insurance company, a great favor to Rebozo, who should have checked to insure the stock was not stolen.
Rebozo sold 600 of the 900 shares, producing $196,984, which -was enough to pay off the loan. Rebozo sold 300 share of this stock for $91,984 cash, even after an insurance company circular was mailed out to every bank listing them as stolen and after an insurance investigator allegedly told him it was stolen. The FDIC discovered that less than a year after the Securities and Exchange Commission barred Franklin S. Deboer him for selling unregistered securities, Rebozo had hired to head Key Biscayne Bank's trust department.
In 1964, Judge King had been a director of the Miami National Bank.
In 1964 Rebozo started his the Key Biscayne Bank in 1964. It is mysterious as to how he could afford to purchase or start a bank, given that Rebozo’s only education was graduating from high school (aka no banking training) and his working life involved being a steward with Pan American Airways. It was assumed he was really a front man for this bank real owner, like the mafia. Rebozo was a principal secret mafia or CIA go-between in CIA’s plots against to assassination Cuban leader Fidel Castro. From 1959 thru 1960, Vice President Nixon and CIA officer E. Howard Hunt were key figures attempting to overthrow Fidel Castro. Nixon reportedly is the chief mover behind an associated CIA/mafia plan to murder Castro. Hunt later admitted his role in Castro assassination plots. Nixon held Savings Account number one and led dedication ceremonies for the grand opening of Robozo’s bank.
Leonard Bursten, a Milwaukee lawyer became a director of the Miami National Bank and was involved in an attempt to improve the Fisher Island real estate off the coast and nearby Miami. Nixon had a financial interest in Fisher Island’s beach-front houses and golf course.
Then Bursten appears in Los Angeles involved with the Beverly Ridge Estate development in Beverly Hills. This project suspiciously went into bankruptcy after receiving over $12,000,000 in Teamster pension funds. Bursten and two other men were convicted for illegal activities in connection with the failure of the development. Bursten was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for mail fraud, perjury and bankruptcy fraud. However, in early 1973 Nixon’s aide Murray Chotiner called the US Attorney in Los Angeles and this political pressure resulted in Bursten's jail sentence was reduced to straight probation. Bursten was a close friend of Jimmy Hoffa. Nixon first met Bursten when they both were working as lawyers for the McCarthy Committee.
Nixon had appointed Chotiner as a special counsel to the President on January 13, 1970. Chotiner received reports from private investigators who were secretly investigating of Edward Kennedy (aka Operation Sandwedge). Chotiner acknowledged in court papers his role in a milk producer’s scandal by admitting he intervened with John Ehrlichman and White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and others to get the price increase for the milk producers. And as a result, these milk producers contributed money to the Nixon campaign. (Source: Kirkpatrick Sale, Yankees and Cowboys: The World Behind Watergate (1973)
By the 1930s, mafia money was moving into real estate and into ventures like Tropical Park Race Track in Coral Gables, FL, and especially Lansky's Colonial Inn. Al Capone began wintering in Miami in 1927 and two years later bought a house in Miami Beach even though residents voted to pass a resolution to ban him as a notorious criminal. Meyer Lansky also had strong ties to Miami Beach, with casino interests in Florida dating back to the 1930s.
In the 1940s, the Wofford Hotel in Miami was the Florida base for both Lansky and Frank Costello. Tatum Wofford was friendly with Nixon and Bebe Rebozo. In 1948 this company transferred a Key Biscayne property to a shadowy Cuban investment group (ANSAN) in which mafia money was allegedly involved. This linked the anti-Castro Cubans such as Jose Aleman with Batista and Luciano allies.
By the 1950s, organized crime had a well developed role in Miami hotels like the Sands and the Grand. By the 1980s, some estimates claimed that roughly half of Miami Beach hotels were connected to mob money through Lansky or associates like Lansburgh and Yiddy Bloom (Moldea, 1978: 105-107).
Later, control of Keyes Realty Company passed to two new groups: the Teamster's Union Pension Fund and Lansky's Miami National Bank. Author John Andrews wrote in his book, Power to Destroy that Nixon invested heavily in Florida land via a secretive investment syndicate headed by Rebozo. Nixon and Rebozo forged close ties to Keyes Realty which was mainly set up as an investment funnel for the mafia and for ex-Cuban politicians who served under Batista. The lender for one of Nixon's Key Biscayne properties in 1967 was Arthur Desser. He was a real estate developer who consorted with both Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa and Meyer Lansky.
In 1967 this land passed to Nixon and Bebe Rebozo at bargain rates.
Florida banking structure was used by organized criminals from all parts of the US. Keyes Realty Company was named in the Kefauver hearings for its role as intermediary in bribes between organized crime and Miami’s Dade County political officials. One of the Watergate burglars, Eugenio Martinez was Vice President of Keyes Realty. Later Martinez and Bernard Barker formed another real estate firm called Ameritas.
Rebozo came in and out of the White House as he pleased, without being logged in by the Secret Service. Though, as noted, he had no official government position, Rebozo had his own private office with a telephone and a designated bedroom always at his disposal at White House. Known as “Uncle Bebe” to Nixon’s two children, Trisha and Julie, Rebozo frequently bought the girls—and Nixon’s wife Pat—expensive gifts. “Beeb” as Nixon referred to Rebozo (who always called Nixon “Mr. President”) purchased a $100,000 house in the suburbs for Julie after she married David Eisenhower. Rebozo paid for bowling alleys to be put in the White House and Camp David.
In Florida, his home was right next door to Nixon’s. It was equipped with free worldwide telephone service through the White House Office of Communications. The same was true at Rebozo’s private villa on the grounds at the San Clemente, CA White House. Rebozo was there in Key Biscayne in 1952 when Nixon celebrated his election to the vice presidency; he was in Los Angeles in 1960 when Nixon learned that Senator John Kennedy had edged him out for the presidency; he comforted Nixon after his crushing 1962 loss to incumbent Edmund “Pat” Brown for California governor.
Rebozo and Nixon drank and sunbathed together in Key Biscayne after Nixon narrowly defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the 1968presidential election. During Nixon’s White House years, rough estimates show Rebozo was at Nixon’s side one out of every ten days. The president made 50 trips to Key Biscayne with Rabozo, most of them without any of Nixon’s family members. Rebozo was at Nixon’s bedside when the former president died in 1994. When Rebozo died in 1998, he left $19 million to the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif.
Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie wrote, “Nixon seems to have been willing to risk the kind of gossip that frequently accompanies close friendship with a perennial bachelor, this despite his known public aversion to homosexuals, and his acute sensitivity to the damage that the label of homosexual on a friend could bring to a public man.”
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J. Edgar Hoover
According to Anthony Summers, the author of The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993): oilmen had started cultivating him in the late forties-inviting him to Texas as a houseguest, taking him on hunting expeditions.
Hoover and his boyfriend, Clyde Tolson were regular visitors to Murchison's Del Charro Hotel in La Jolla, California. Allan Witwer, the manager of the hotel at the time, later recalled: Witwer estimates that over the next 18 summers Murchison's hospitality in $100-a-day suites and including meals was worth nearly $300,000 ($2,520,000 in 2018 dollars).
He was friends with Walter Winchell, who was extremely close to many gangsters, including Frank Costello, and he regularly spent time at clubs frequented by gangsters. Hoover’s daily lunch tab at an expensive Washington restaurant was picked up by a friend who owned a large laundry service. Furthermore, he claimed that his annual trips to California were official FBI “inspection trips,” so they were paid for by taxpayers. Hoover had also invested in oil companies and railroads owned by Murchison and Richardson. The FBI was responsible for renovations and new furniture for his house.
In 1955 a Senate committee discovered that 20 per cent of the Murchison Oil and Gas, Inc. was owned by Vito Genovese and his family. The committee also discovered Murchison had close financial ties with Carlos Marcello.
In 1958 Murchison purchased the publishers, Henry Holt and Company. One of the first book's he published was by his old friend, J. Edgar Hoover. The book, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America (1958) was an account of the Communist menace and sold over 250,000 copies in hardcover and over 2,000,000 in paperback. It was on the best-seller lists for thirty-one weeks.
The head of Federal Narcotics Bureau (FNB), Harry Anslinger stated that the CIA and Hoover subverted a grand jury that had been convened in Miami to probe the financial affairs of dozens of top mobsters. (The Strength of the Wolf, pgs. 260- 261)
As might be expected, that kind of money wielded enormous political power, and not just in Texas; then congressman Lyndon Johnson was bought and sold by Texas Big Oil, a feat that was apparently not so hard to accomplish. Likewise, in the days before campaign finance reform, Dwight Eisenhower owed a great deal to Big Oil, in particular from investing in wells drilled by his new best friend Sid Richardson. As author Burrough relates it, through an old family friend: “There's an old game in oil, you know, where your friends, they only invest in your good wells, not the bad wells? You understand? It was that way with Eisenhower. You never could prove it. But he did it. I know he did. Sid told me.”
(Source: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough
According to attorney Kenneth D. Ackerman, author of Young J. Edgar: Hoover and the Red Scare, by 1960, the FBI had open 'subversive' files on some 432,000 Americans.
In November 2011, by way of a Freedom of Information Act request, The Los Angeles Times received old FBI files on journalist Jack Nelson. J. Edgar Hoover, 85-year-old, was mistakenly convinced that Nelson planned to write an article stating that the FBI director was homosexual. Hoover began compiling a dossier on the reporter and tried to have Nelson fired and he met with the paper's head man in Washington, Dave Kraslow. Kraslow refused to fire Nelson, but did ask him to send Hoover a response which read, in part, "I emphatically deny that I have at any time under any circumstances ever said or remotely suggested that Mr. Hoover was a homosexual."
In 1970 Nelson wrote a story about how the FBI and police in Meridian, Mississippi shot two Ku Klux Klan members in a sting operation bankrolled by the local Jewish community. One of the Klan members, a woman, died in the ambush. Hoover attempted unsuccessfully to kill the story, which would appear on page one, by trying to smear Nelson, falsely, as an alcoholic.
Hoover limited the Los Angeles Times’ access to information and complained about Nelson, calling him “a mental case.”
By 1966 Lansky's men were in full control of Miami National Bank. CIA tax lawyer Paul Helliwell was legal counsel for the Miami National Bank and he was an active leader in the Florida Republican Party. This bank was also used by Meyer Lansky to launder to move the Las Vegas casinos’ profits (skim) thru the banks in Bahamas or Caymon Islands to the International Credit Bank in Switzerland, founded by the Israeli gunrunner Tibor Rosenbaum. (Cook and Carmichael; Scott et al., 1976: 356-358, 1981).
The McClellan Committee (1957 to 1960) observed that perhaps 150 men with organized crime contacts played an important role in the Teamsters Union with Hoffa's approval. After hearing testimony from 100 of these men on their crime careers and relations with Hoffa, the Committee summed it up in 1958 by saying: "James Hoffa, from his early years in the labor movement, has formed an alliance with the kingpins of the nation's underworld, a partnership which has moved him swiftly up through the ranks of the Teamster hierarchy to his present powerful post ... Hoffa's first association was with the Detroit mob.
It is alleged that the McClellan Committee did not conduct its investigation with clean hands. Conservative Republican Senators Irving Ives, Barry Goldwater, Carl Curtis and Karl Mundt displayed more of an interest in developing legislation to limit the power of trade unions rather than simply helping the unions get rid of parasitic labor racketeers. (Source: The Breaking of a President 1974 - The Nixon Connection by Marvin Miller)
President Kennedy wanted to expel Air America, the CIA’s front company airline drug smuggling from Laos. In 1962, Bobby Kennedy indicted Sea Supply Company’s manager for having bribed a US official in Laos. This prosecution was blocked by JFK’s ultra right-wing, political enemies and Air America kept its contract in Laos. But during the Kennedy administration's war on organized crime was highly effective with the number of defendants convicted jumped from zero to 619. (Ibid. 262)
By the 1970s, a group of banks in southern Florida was linked by "interlocking directorates and major investors." Besides the Miami National Bank, there were the Bank of Miami Beach, International Bank of Miami, the Key Biscayne Bank, and Southeast First National. Federal prosecutors linked Southeast First National to the intelligence community. These banks have also been associated with the Lansky and Luciano and the Cleveland, Boston, and Las Vegas crime organizations. (Freed, 1980: 141).
Robert Morgenthau, former US Attorney for New York, discovered that Lansky was using the Exchange and Investment Bank of Switzerland in tandem with the Miami National Bank to launder money illegally skimmed from gambling casinos or other illegal activity, hiding these profits from the IRS so they did not have to pay income tax on it. A 1969 federal indictment charges Lansky, Cohen, Lansburgh and six others with using the Miami National Bank to skim funds. According to Morgenthau, Cohen cleaned more than $2,000,000 in gambling skim from the Flamingo by sending it through the Miami National Bank and then to the Exchange and Investment Bank of Switzerland.
In 1958 Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa was far from being a mere user of Miami National Bank. He actually controlled it for a substantial period of time authorizing all large loans. In 1959, three years after the bank was founded, the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund made a loan of $2,000,000 to Lou Poller, the original founder of this bank. Poller was one of the owners of record of the Exchange and Investment Bank of Switzerland along with Bugsy Siegel and Ed Levinson, the overseas bank also used to launder money.
In 1964, Sam Cohen, a close associate of Meyer Lansky, made a sizeable loan to Miami National Bank. By 1966 the Teamster loan was paid and Meyer Lansky's mafia guys were in full control of the bank. Cohen was a partner of Miami businessman Morris Lansburgh. Cohen and Lansburgh between them own eight Miami Beach hotels. The two partners also lease King's Inn on Grand Bahama, and bought the Flamingo in Las Vegas from Albert Parvin. A decade later, Lansburgh and Cohen were convicted and given one-year prison sentences on charges related to skimming casino proceeds, estimated at $10 million, from the Flamingo.
According to United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Robert M. Morgenthau, Cohen cleaned more than $2,000,000 in gambling skim from the Flamingo hotel and casino in Las Vegas by sending it through the Miami National Bank and the Exchange and Investment Bank of Switzerland. In October 1971, Lansky, Cohen, and Lansburgh were charged with conspiring to conceal and distribute unreported and illegal proceeds from the gambling activity in violation of Federal law. Also Lansburgh, Cohen, and four others were charged in a second count with conspiring to evade income taxes on unreported Flamingo Casino income of about $4.5million a year from 1960 through 1967.
In January 1969, the Nixon Administration tried to force Morgenthau to resign. Morgenthau and his supporters claimed the reason Nixon might be seeking to replace Morgenthau, was to prevent him from pursuing investigations that would prove embarrassing to Nixon or his friends. Morgenthau was eventually forced out of office at the end in January 15, 1970.
Rebozo purchased land in Florida with a man called Richard Fincher. It was believed that Fincher worked as a front for Meyer Lansky. An examination of Fincher's telephone calls revealed that he was in regular contact with Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante. Vincent Teresa, a high-ranking mafioso, later admitted that he had used Rebozo's bank to launder stolen money. https://www.mail-archive.com/This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it./msg11475.html
During the 1930s Wallace Groves had become a very successful financier in New York City. He moved to the British Bahaman Island and in August 1955 he made an agreement with the government of the Bahaman to develop land and create jobs for the people on Grand Bahaman Island. The Island was the ugliest, least promising of all the habitable islands in the Bahamas. A big chunk of this unsightly island was converted by Wallace Groves into the swinging community or a city named “Freeport.” Freeport had big, garish hotels, a casino that looks like an Arabian harem, an old English pub with deep-chested wenches for waitresses, International Shopping Bazaar, girlie shows "direct from Las Vegas," gangsters, discothèques, and a scuba club.
Wallace Groves had a millionaire business associate Daniel Kieth Ludwig. Ludwig developed a port on Grand Bahama Island and built a couple of hotels in Freeport. He leased these hotels to Morris Lansburgh who controlled substantial hotel interests in Miami Beach and was a front man for Meyer Lansky. In other words, because Lansky had a reputation of being associated with organized crime, casino gambling at these hotels would not be authorized if he was on the deed as the real owner.
Another businessman who tried to get rich in the Bahamas in 1959 was Huntington Hartford who inherited and ran A&P supermarkets and was one of the world’s rich people. He bought a small island near Nassau Island and re-named it Paradise Island. And he spent $30 million building luxury hotels there. But then he discovered that the place could not break even without a casino. So 1966 Hartford gave up and sold Paradise Island to Resorts International Incorporated. In 1967 the Paradise Island casino opened with a glittering assembly of guests including Richard Nixon.
By 1960 Groves’ Bahama Port Authority business almost went bankrupt. In December 1963 Lou Chesler, a Canadian invested $12 million, ($97.2 million in 2018 dollars) to set up the Grand Bahama Development Company (Devco) and gave Groves' Port Authority 50 per cent of Devco's stock. Among Chesler’s specialties was fencing stolen securities thru Switzerland and the Bahamas. He was involved with the mafia stretching back to at least 1942. Meyer Lansky provided him much of the 1958 investment capital for another of Chesler’s property, Miami’s International Airport Hotel.
Meyer Lansky picked the Grand Bahamas Island as the site for a plush casino-resort by using front man, his longtime business associate Louis A. “Lou” Chesler,
Chesler also owned a paint making company and had hired James M. “Jim” Crosby to manage it, the Mary Carter Paint Company. Crosby's brother, Peter Crosby, was a convicted stock swindler and a close business associate of Dino Cellini.
The Grand Bahama Development Company (Devco) spent the next three years building the Lucayan Beach Hotel on Grand Bahama, and roads, sewers and stores for the city of Freeport. Devco also was interested in selling nearby residential lots to Americans who might like to live near a gambling casino.
Lansky negotiated a purchase of a large tract of land on the island and oversaw the construction of the grand Lucayan Beach Hotel and Casino Corporation. This hotel/casino opened for business before the end of 1963. It was managed by two of Lansky's longest-established gambling technicians, Dino and Eddie Cellini. Red Ritter was general manager; Max Courtney was credit manager; Charley Brudner was his assistant; and Dino Cellini was supervisor. Dino came originally from Sicily by way of the syndicate casino on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. Cellini was the first lieutenant to Meyer Lansky and was known as Florida's "connection" to Canadian heroin trafficker Guiseppi Cotroni. (Mahon, 1980) https://kennysideshow.blogspot.com/2008/05/dope-inc-part-3-organized-crime.html?m=1
Chesler eventual purchased a small island, Paradise Island. It was about 2,000 feet off the shoreline from Nassau Island in the Bahamas. Resorts International hotel/casino was later built on Paradise Island. Chaster sold his paint manufacturing company and incorporated Resorts International Inc. with that money from getting out of the paint making.
Chesler also controlled Universal Controls, which manufactured the pari-mutuel betting machines used at racetracks. Buying Warner brothers lead to a deal by which they set up the Grand Bahama Development Company. This was a dummy corporation which was attempting to build a casino in the Bahamas for Meyer Lansky and Chesler's business partner.
Lou Chesler contributed $14,000 to Nixon's campaign in 1960, and he was a traveling companion of Nixon's during part of the campaign. Chesler was also a contributor to Nixon's 1968 campaign. Chesler was a close friend of Donald Berg, the Cape Florida Development executive who sold Nixon his lots on Key Biscayne. Chesler also had engaged in a number of Canadian mining deals with Meyer Lansky and had operated night-clubs in Miami Beach with John Pullman and Pullman's brother-in-law, A. C. Cown.
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Meyer Lansky’s front-man Ed Levinson was a business associate of Maxwell M. “Max” Rabb, a close friend of Nixon's and a Jewish lawyer who served as a secretary of Eisenhower's cabinet. He was a top Republican Party fundraiser. Rabb's first public association with organized crime occurred in 1962 when he joined the board of Ancorp, a newspaper distribution company in New York City with strong mob ties.
Max Rabb was also the chief executive officer of a shady company known as International Airport Hotels, a business front for Meyer Lansky. Rabb also serviced on the board of Sterling National Bank, financed a $27 million fraud operation for mafioso Michele Sindona in 1974. According to the London Sunday Times of July 20, 1980, Sindona was the paymaster for an abortive fascist coup plot in Italy. Sterling National Bank’s principal business was with the mafia controlled New York City garment business.
The shadowy Italian-Jewish Recanati family was the reputed power behind Sterling National Bank, is part of an 800-year old financial elite controlling position in the Israeli diamond trade through Israel Discount Bank, as well as major New York-based ship-owning interests.
(Source: Dope, Inc., by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., and Jeffrey Steinberg, 1978)
Rabbi Tibor Rosenbaum was a Hungarian Jew who owned and operated the Banque De Credit Internationale (BCI) (aka “International Credit Bank” in English). Mafia money flowed into Rosenbaum's Bahamas branch of Banque De Credit International and from there into this branch in Geneva, Switzerland. John Pullman was partners in this bank with Rosenbaum.
In 1961, the Bank of World Commerce in Nassau in the Bahamas was established and headed by John Pullman and with investors including Ed Levinson. In turn, Levinson and Siegel were active in another Swiss bank, the Exchange Bank of Geneva. Another investor in Exchange Bank of Geneva was Alvin Malnik. Lansky and his closest mafia associate, Joe Stacher had accounts in this bank. Lansky invested $10 million in Italian real estate through this bank. This bank was basically the most important transfer points for money from countless gambling, smuggling, extortion, and drug deals of the North American mafia. Mafia bagmen arrived with suitcases full of cash to Geneva or Rome, flying as tourists from Miami or the Bahamas.
CIA boss James Angelton used this bank to launder CIA money for the Latin American covert operations. Rosenbaum also maintained an insurance agency in London to make contributions to then-British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
Tibor Rosenbaum had immigrated to Palestine with the help of a Britain's Jewish Agency. After the founding of the state of Israel, he was the first Department Chief for Logistics and Finance of Mossad. He came to Switzerland in 1951 with full diplomatic status as an agent for Israeli immigration. Rosenbaum was also the treasurer of the World Jewish Congress and held numerous posts in other leading Zionist organizations. According to authors Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, CBI bank "appears to have been a semi detached Israeli Government money laundry into and out of Israel." The bank collapsed in 1974.
In 1965, Jim Crosby with Wallace Groves purchased a resort/casino on Paradise Island, a small island some 2,000 feet next to Nassau Island in the Bahamas. An expensive bridge had to be built to connect to this smaller island. Crosby hired Ed Cellini, the brother of Dino Cellini to manage the casino. Crosby was the longtime chairman of Resorts International Incorporated which was a corporate front for Meyer Lansky’s mob family.
Lou Chesler’s Florida real estate company the General Development Company, was reportedly worth $50 million in 1959 (some $417 million in 2018 dollars).
Resorts International was financed largely with a transfer of funds from the Banque de Credit Internationale of Tibor Rosenbaum and Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, and the Investors Overseas Service of Bernie Cornfeld and the Rothschild family.
New Jersey state law enforcement officers claimed that Resorts International had suspicious ties to the mafia. They opposed Resorts' application for a license to run a casino in Atlantic City.
In 1920, due to prohibition in the US the economy of the Bahamas prospered with the help of whisky imported from Britain and blockade-runners smuggling it into the US. American gangsters built big homes in Bahaman islands, and many of leaders of the Island. With the repeal of prohibition in 1932 the Bahamas sank, with the rest of the world, into the Great Depression. The Bahaman islands are almost entirely self-governing, except the British government is responsible only for defense, external affairs, and internal security. The office of royal governor is mostly ceremonial.
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Wallace Groves also founded Intercontinental Diversified (ICD) Corporation with CIA officer Paul Helliwell acting as his attorney. It was Helliwell’s job to establish CIA front companies in Miami and the Bahamas to laundered covert CIA funds. In 1965, Groves was busy laundering millions of dollars for the CIA through banks and casinos in the Bahamas. The CIA hired Wallace Groves to suborn the top elected government officials in the Bahamas to get permission to run gambling casinos. (The Strength of the Wolf, by Douglas Valentine, p. 261)
An attachment to a declassified CIA document stated that Wallace GROVES was connected with Meyer LANSKY and Resorts International Inc. and GROVES is the subject of CIA OS file #473 865. This document reflects that from April 1966 to April 1972, GROVES was of interest to the [CIA] Office of General Counsel for the utilization of GROVES as an advisor or possible officer of one of the Project (DELETED) entities. CIA documents also show that Wallace Groves was secretly working for the CIA from 1965 to 1972. The Bahamas quickly became a major transit point for Latin American drug smugglers. (The Strength of the Wolf, by Douglas Valentine, p. 261)
Groves held 46 percent of the shares in the mutual fund company, Intercontinental Diversified (ICD), until he sold his shares in 1978 for some $125 million in 2018 dollars. A former CIA official said in an interview that between 1970 and 1976, almost $5 million of CIA money that had been invested in Intercontinental Diversified’s funds was sold. (Source: The Grim Reapers by Ed Reid, 1969) and The CIA’s Global Drug Connection and Deep Events by Peter Dale Scott, 2008)
Intercontinental Diversified (ICD) was a Panamanian holding company founded by Paul Helliwell and a spinoff from a Filipino company, Benguet Mining or Benguet International. It was represented by Helliwell’s law firm and partly owned by the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Helliwell and his CIA front companies
In 1943, American lawyer Paul L.E. Helliwell became the head of the Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS in Europe with the rank of Colonel, and he served as the chief of the Far East Division at the War Department's Strategic Service unit. Helliwell founded CIA front companies to assist in the CIA covertly shipping arms to Burma in cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek’s guerrilla army (KMT) fighting against the People Republic of China and later in the CIA’s secret war in Laos. Sea Supply Corporation of Bangkok, Civil Air Transport (aka Air America), and Civil Air Transport Company, Ltd. (a separate firm not owned by but affiliated with the CIA. These companies were subsidiaries to the CIA’s front, Pacific Corporation, a holding company located in Florida and also run by Helliwell. These companies employed nearly 20,000 people and operated around 200 aircraft. In 1971, the CIA was forced to sell them due to their cover being publically exposed. (Source: 1976 testifmony before the Senate's Church Committee of CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston)
Author Joseph Trento wrote in his book, Prelude to Terror, that through Sea Supply Inc. weapons were ferried into Burma on Civil Air Transport (CAT) airplanes, then the empty planes flew opium from Burma to Taiwan, Bangkok, and Saigon. There the opium was processed into heroin in Taiwan for the benefit of Chiang Kai-shek’s army.
US Naval Intelligence officer William Corson who served in South Vietnam from 1966 until he retired from the Navy in 1968 claims that: "Portable heroin processing facilities were brought in. It was a creation of the CIA's technical services division." Some of the profits from the sale of opium went to help CIA run some unofficial covert operations. (The Betrayal by William Corson)
Retired Admiral Felix B. Stump was the chairman of board of Air America from 1959 to 1970. In 1958, he 64 years old, and a 78 years old he died in 1972. Stump was noted for promoting using nuclear in Vietnam War. During his US Navy career he had been a pilot and commanded a Navy’s aircraft carrier.
Paul Helliwell also had set up CIA front banks and other CIA fronts in Miami, FL to support the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and for operation mongoose. Mongoose was CIA secret economic warfare operation to aid in the overthrow or killing of Fidel Castro. In 1962 Alvin T. Malnik, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was a director of the Bank of World Commerce, a Bahamas-based institution that involved some of the top gangsters and this bank had a relationship to CIA lawyer Paul Helliwell. Helliwell was a money laundering expert for the CIA as well as setting up CIA front companies. Malnik was also a business partner of Bobby Baker, the Senate aide to Lyndon Johnson.
Malnik left his mark on much of the Miami Beach landscape since he moved there in 1956. He had already established himself in the banking and real estate businesses in Miami but soon become Lansky's public front-man. Melnik was alleged to have been picked by some observers of organized crime as Lansky's probable successor. Malnik was a New York gangster/lawyer who moved to Florida.
Malnik with others and bought a controlling interest in Resorts International Incorporated. To get his gambling license for the Resorts international’s casinos, Lansky brought with him old gambling partners like Max Courtney, "Trigger Mike" Coppola, Frank Ritter, and the Cellini brothers. (Mahan, 1980).
According to one investigation, millions of dollars passed through the Bank of World Commerce and the money were reinvested into mafia-controlled legal businesses in the United States. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhelliwell.htm
Malnik had business dealings with Caesars casino in Las Vegas and he owned two hotels in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. Malnik essentially invented the black art of money-laundering, taking mob money and routing it to legitimate ventures (like real estate). In the 1960s, Malnik set up the Bank of Commerce in the Bahamas. Mob money flowed into its secret numbered accounts by the hundreds of millions, then out again into Tibor Rosenbaum's International Credit Bank of Switzerland before returning to the United States for investment."
Albert Fried wrote that Malnik would convert illegal cash by laundering it in various real estate ventures." One of his companies, Title Loans of America, had a history of charging such exorbitant interest rates, at more than 250 percent. The former Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth likened it to "legalized loan sharking." (Source: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America, by Albert Fried, 1993) and Forbes magazine "The Invisible Enterprise"),
In the early 1970s, Malnik was also involved with Sam Cohen's sons in land deals in Florida and the Poconos Mountain area of Pennsylvania (about 50 miles west of New York City. Their companies -- COMAL and "Cove Associates" -- dealt with Caesar's World and the Teamsters Pension Fund, both institutions which have attracted a substantial amount of law enforcement attention. Sam Cohen fits the pattern we have seen so often, of continuity from the Prohibition gangs to the financial world of the 1970s and 1980s. He moved from New York to Florida in the 1920s and joined the exodus to Nevada in the 1950s (Messick, 1969: 326-331, 363; Mollenhoff, 1973: 186).
Malnik associated with Donald “Don” J. Aronow, another the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. In 1959, Aronow moved to Miami with his family, where he began building and racing speed boats called cigarette boats. These boats became useful to drug traffickers trying to evade US Customs. Aronow's role in marijuana smuggling was reportedly confirmed by Bill Norris, head of the Major Narcotics Unit at the Miami US Attorney's office. He was the top federal drug prosecution official in south Florida. Aronow was murdered. A subpoena was to be served on him the day after the shooting. It was rumored around Miami that Aronow had been questioned by the authorities about cocaine trafficking prior to his murder. Robert "Bobby" Young was paid $60,000 to murder Aronow on the orders of casino owner and drug trafficker Benjamin Barry Kramer. Young boasted of involvement with gun-running, prostitution rings and violence during the 1970s. The death of Aronow on February 3, 1987 occurred within the time frame when Vice President Bush and Oliver North’s illegally funding of the Contras in Latin America. http://tarpley.net/online-books/george-bush-the-unauthorized-biography/chapter-20-the-phony-war-on-drugs/
Another close friend of Alvin Malnik was Joel Steinger. In 1974 Steinger became a member of Lansky's crime family by marrying the daughter of Philip Simon. Simon was reputed to have been an associate of Lansky and worked at the Miami National Bank. Simon laundered money through the bank for known mafia members, including Lansky.
Meyer Lansky’s wife Teddy and his longtime lawyer David Rosen attended Steinger’s wedding. Steinger was the mastermind of the billion-dollar ponzi scheme known thru Mutual Benefits. This crooked fund was connections to Colombian drug cartels in the mid- to late 1970s. His selling of bogus options on commodities led to his first felony conviction.
Jack Kramer had married a niece of Meyer Lansky. Jack Kramer’s son Ben Kramer was also a notorious Los Angeles casino owner and organized crime figure. On March 28, 1990 Jack Kramer and Ben Kramer were both found guilty of 23 and 28 counts (respectively) of federal money laundering charges. In the previous year, Ben Kramer had also been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for having imported half a million pounds of marijuana.
It was a known fact among the criminal underworld that dealing with Al Malnik was the same as dealing with Meyer Lansky, said Vincent Teresa. Teresa was a convicted criminal and frequent government witness currently in the federal Witness Protection Program. (Source: My Life in the Mafia, Vincent Teresa, 1973) http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Malnik_Al_58621055.aspx Finally, Allen R. Glick (born 1942) of Pittsburgh attracted a great deal of attention when his firm A.R. Glick Enterprises (ARGENT) seemingly came from nowhere to secure a vast Teamsters loan of about $146 million.
In Burton Hersh‘s book, Bobby and J. Edgar, he wrote that in Cuba, Michael J. “Mickey” McLaney was an associate of mafia boss Santos Trafficante, Jr. After he was released from Castro’s Cuban prisons, McLaney continued to operate a casino on Cat Cay Island in the Bahamas. This is an island about 30 miles due east of Miami and about the size of a small golf course with an airport. McLaney formed a professional partnership with Carroll Rosenbloom. Rosenbloom was a known gambler who was allegedly Jewish and owned the Baltimore Colts football team. He bet a million of dollars on his team in 1958, and allegedly ordered his team to cheat and thereby making millions.
John S. Alessio was the assistant general manager of the Caliente Race Track in Tijuana from 1943 to 1950. He turned race track into the largest legal gambling operation on the North American continent. In the mid-1960s he was conviction for skimming millions of dollars from San Diego's racetrack revenues (hiding the profits from the IRS and failed to pay income taxes on the profits). During the 1960's he bought a number of resort properties, including the Hotel del Coronado, the Kona Kai Club and the Kona Inn in California, a greyhound track in Arizona. His company, the Alessio Corporation, owned a finance company, an insurance company and a leasing corporation. He and C. Arnholt Smith merged their combined interests, and Alessio became a director and major stockholder in the Westgate-California Corporation, a conglomerate Smith controlled. Smith owned the Banco del Pacifico, a bank in Tijuana, Mexico and he was a major contributor to the political campaigns of Nixon.
Italian American Joseph C.”Joe Dip” Dippolito was convicted for three counts of lying to a grand jury and he was identified by the US Justice Department as one of the leaders of the mafia in Los Angeles. In 1969, the mayor and police chief of San Bernardino, CA and a Superior Court County judge wrote some positive letters vouching for his good character and asking the court to go easy on his sentencing him. They wrote that Dippolito had good community involvement, “enjoyed a reputation of honesty and reliability,” and he “was an outstanding citizen.”
Another source states, in December 1971, Dippolito was paroled after only serving eight months. Joe Dip was released after letters were written to a probation officer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Dippolito
The letters were all dated just ten days after Dippolito was convicted of lying about ownership of Charlie’s Market. Because of his background, he had been barred from having a liquor license for the store. Dippolito also falsified the ownership of this store by registering it in the name of a relative. Despite the letters, Dippolito was given five years in prison for lying to the Grand Jury. There was really no secret about Dippolito’s Mafia activities which had been fairly well-publicized by state and federal crime-fighting agencies. Dippolito’s role in Los Angeles’ mafia came to light in the pages of the 1981 bestseller, The Last Mafioso, by Ovid Domaris. It was based on interviews with Los Angeles Mafia leader and government informant Jimmy Fratianno as well as access to police files.
The letters were supposed to have been sealed but a San Bernardino Sun article by writer Ted Harp on July 24, 1970, not only revealed their existence but published copies of the letters.
Louis M. Bloomfield, a Canadian citizen, managed to assume a highly secretive top post within the J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and retained in that post for over 30 years. He was years later a suspect in conjunction with assassinations against officials of three governments.
Sir William Stephenson using the special relationship that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had cultivated with Franklin Roosevelt, arranged for Bloomfield to be assigned to the Office of Strategic Services with rank of Major in the US Army. Major Bloomfield was not the only Canadian brought into the US military under Stephenson's auspices. Stephenson was created clandestine operations under an American cover. This became a particularly important feature of SOE post World War Two political warfare in locations like Italy.
Louis Bloomfield's business interests extend into the field of transoceanic shipping. He was a former head of the Israeli Maritime League of Canada. Bloomfield was the Consul-General in charge of the Western Hemisphere of the Liberian government since World War Two. Liberia is notorious as both a tax shelter and smugglers' port-of-call. With no shipping regulations to speak of, Liberia is the flag of convenience under which the majority of ships bearing bulk shipments of Far East narcotics are registered. Liberia was one of the secondary ($7 billion in average daily transfers) offshore banking centers through which British drug revenues are laundered.
The only other foreign-stationed Consul-General for Liberia is Bloomfield associate and Israeli Mossad official Tibor Rosenbaum.
Beneath his various hats as banker, philanthropist, prominent attorney, Bloomfield was/is? first and foremost an officer of the most secretive branch of British MI6, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). SOE was an allied special forces team that went behind Nazi line in World War Two. In 1938 Bloomfield was recruited to the SOE by its director, Canadian-born Sir William Stephenson,
Stephenson appointed Bloomfield as the recruitment officer and agent handler (case officer) for the newly created counterespionage and espionage branch of the FBI, known as Division Five.
British historian Nicholas John Cull says in his book, Selling War, the British effort to sway the American people was “one of the most diverse, extensive, and yet subtle propaganda campaigns ever directed by one sovereign state at another.” Work was done to counter the American stereotype of the stuffy Brit. The propaganda theme in the winter of 1939-1940 was to reinforce the message of American and Britain’s common values and interests. The trick was to bring to the larges possible US audience without leaving any visible British fingerprint of their sales job. Polls shows Americans saw the British government as guided by selfish interests and imperialism, British society as anti-democratic and class bound. The BBC was persuaded to drop the Oxford accent in programs aimed at Americans. Almost daily SEO officers leaked to the American press rumors discrediting American isolationist leaders and placing unreliable stories of Nazi atrocities in Europe.
An isolationist US Senator, Gerald P. Nye, from North Dakota, threatened to launch an investigation of non-American Hollywood producers who had been injecting war propaganda into films. And the true was they were. British propagandizing hardly ended with the US’s entry in war. Radio programs targeted at the traditionally isolationist plains states contained interviews of Midwestern American soldiers in England and stories about British farm life. http://www.historynet.com/britains-propaganda-war-on-america.htm
During the war, Ian Fleming served as assistant to the chief of British Naval Intelligence. Fleming came to America and met Ernest Cuneo while visiting Sir William Stephenson at his New York apartment. Ernest Cuneo a New York attorney had served as a wartime assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and also served as official wartime liaison between British Intelligence, the OSS and the FBI.
In the mid-1950s, the company North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) was purchased by former British Intelligence officer Ivor Bryce and his American associate Ernest Cuneo. They hired reporters who have repeatedly become entangled in clandestine affairs. NANA was a fully functioning intelligence network closely associated with CIA’s Operation Mockingbird (propaganda directed at Americans).
When journalist Priscilla Mary Post Johnson went to Moscow and interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald at the time of his defection. Ivor Bryce and Ernest Cuneo signed her checks. Ian Fleming was NANA’s European Editor and Priscilla Johnson's editor was Sidney Goldberg. Goldberg worked for Fleming at NANA. Johnsoh was given a CIA clearance in 1956 and continued meeting with CIA officials throughout her career. From the records released under the JFK Act, it is apparent she maintained contact with a CIA liaison officer for years, and was passed off from one CIA case officer to another.
Luci and Syd Goldberg were close personal friends and NANA colleagues with Victor Lasky. Lasky was a simple right-wing columnist. From 1956-1960 he was a public relations executive for CIA’s Radio Liberty. Starting just two years later and continuing until 1980, the North American Newspaper Alliance distributed his syndicated column. Sidney Goldberg was part of Nixon’s “dirty tricks” operation that stalked McGovern during 1972.
Journalist Virginia Prewett was an anti-Castro activist who was recruited by NANA founder Ernest Cuneo. Prewett wrote news articles in support of CIA operations. Prewett was also one of the founders of the Friends of Democratic Cuba. Prewett and Life Magazine’s Clare Booth Luce were among the founders of the Citizens Committee to Free Cuba (CCFC) one of the anti-Castro groups backed by the CIA. https://archive.politicalassassinations.net/2012/07/was-oswald-bottlefed-by-nana/
Operation Mockingbird
Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), in the 1950s, “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts”. Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala.
Main stream media alleged that Garrison was as a reckless ego maniacal politician who played fast and loose with the facts, bribed and coerced witnesses, and ruined the life of an innocent upstanding citizen. They wrote that Garrison was accused of being both a dupe of the KGB and on the take from the Mafia. Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson printed an unsubstantiated rumor that Garrison had fondled a little boy in the New Orleans Athletic Club. It has been suggested that Garrison's investigation was triggered by his opposition to the Vietnam War, but in 1966, when he began the investigation, he was supporting the Vietnam War.
Writers Jim Phelan, Hugh Aynesworth, and David Chandler all published devastating and unsubstantiated attacks on Garrison's investigation and at the same time they were reporting back to both the CIA and the FBI.
In 1959 Journalist Don Bohning joined the Miami Herald staff in 1959 as a reporter. Five years later he became a foreign correspondent for the newspaper. Over the next 36 years he reported from every independent country in the Western Hemisphere. Don Bohning, who retired from the Miami Herald . Don Bohning was CIA contract agent codenamed AM/CARBON 1. (Source: A Farewell to Justice, Joan Mellen)
According to a CIA memo, which dealt with New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, Bohning passed along information about the Garrison probe to the CIA. A declassified CIA memo dated April 9, 1964 explained that the CIA’s covert media campaign in Miami aimed “to work out a relationship with (south Florida) news media which would insure that they did not turn the publicity spotlight on those (CIA) activities in South Florida which might come to their attention...and give (the CIA’s Miami station JM/WAVE) an outlet into the press which could be used for surfacing certain select propaganda items.”
Journalist David Talbot says that Bohning told him, “There were several people in the Herald newsroom during the 1960s who had contact with the CIA station chief in Miami.” Talbot added that over the years, Bohning’s journalism has consistently reflected his intelligence sources’ points of view, with little or no critical perspective. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/10654-don-bohning-and-the-cia/
(Sources: Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, by David Talbot)
William Gurvich, who with his brothers ran a private investigative firm specializing in the Port of New Orleans, and who infiltrated Garrison’s investigation, fits this profile exactly. Gurvich’s chain of communication with CIA went through Hugh Aynesworth, a CIA media asset writing for both The Dallas Morning News and Newsweek. Aynesworth used his Newsweek column to ratchet up the cover of Walter Sheridan who went down to New Orleans. He admitted this openly to discredit Jim Garrison’s investigation undercover as an NBC correspondent. Aynesworth wrote about how fine a journalist operative Sheridan was.
After the JFK assassination about 15 corporate media outfits fell into line and editorially backed the Warren Commission's report after it was issued in October of 1964. In May of 1967, after Garrison's investigation hit the news, Aynesworth wrote a violent attack on Garrison's investigation, and it was published in Newsweek. Aynesworth accused Lynn Loisel, a Garrison staff member, of bribing Al Beaubolf to testify about a meeting to plot the assassination. Beaubolf later denied this accusation in a sworn affidavit and proved Aynesworth and Newsweek to be fabricators of information.
The Newsweek story on the JFK assassination, published in the issue of April 28, 1975 left the impression with the readers of Newsweek that editorial position regarded the (JFK) researchers as kooks who misled or talked Senator Schweiker and Representatives Gonzalez and Downing into the wrong attitudes. "Oswald did fire the shots" is the Newsweek message.
John McCone also attempted to stop Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary.
In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, was planning to publish that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association. FitzGerald ordered CIA officer Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: “I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off.”
In March, 1967, Sol Stern, wrote an article in Ramparts entitled “NSA and the CIA. “ about CIA funding of the National Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. In May 1967 Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article entitled,” I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral,” in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of this action by the CIA.. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress. As he pointed out in the article: “In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot.
Meyer’s role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. The book was highly critical of the CIA’s dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia.
According to the Congress report published in 1976: “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.” Church argued that the cost of misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.
Frank Church showed that it was CIA policy to use clandestine handling of journalists and authors to get information published initially in the foreign media in order to get it disseminated in the United States. Church quotes from one document written by the Chief of the Covert Action Staff on how this process worked (page 193).
For example, he writes: “Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any US influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publicans or booksellers.” Later in the document he writes: “Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability”. Church goes onto report that “over a thousand books were produced, subsidized or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967”. All these books eventually found their way into the American market-place. Either in their original form (Church gives the example of the Penkovskiy Papers) or repackaged as articles for American newspapers and magazines.
By analyzing CIA documents Church was able to identify over 50 US journalists who were employed directly by the CIA. He was aware that there were a lot more who enjoyed a very close relationship with the CIA who were “being paid regularly for their services, to those who receive only occasional gifts and reimbursements from the CIA” (page 195).
Church also identified E. Howard Hunt as an important figure in Operation Mockingbird. He points out how Hunt arranged for books to be reviewed by certain writers in the national press. He gives the example of how Hunt arranged for a “CIA writer under contract” to write a hostile review of an Edgar Snow book in the New York Times (page 198).
Journalist Carl Bernstein provided further information about Operation Mockingbird in an article in The Rolling Stone in October, 1977. He claimed that over a 25 year period over 400 American journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA: “Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country.
According to researchers such as Steve Kangas, Angus Mackenzie and Alex Constantine, Operation Mockingbird was not closed down by the CIA in 1976. For example, in 1998 Kangas argued that CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world.
The record of the The New York Times from 1969 to 1971 follows the same pattern as CBS and Life magazine. In 1964 the Times formed a research team headed by Harrison Salisbury to investigate the assassination. The team was made up of six reporters and it included Peter Khiss and Gene Roberts. Their conclusions were never made public by the Times but indications point to their finding evidence of a criminal conspiracy. In June, 1968 Peter Khiss was ordered by the Times management not to do any more research on assassinations or to discuss the subject at the Times.
When the Garrison investigation made the news, the Times began a regular campaign to undermine Garrison's case, to support the Warren Commission, and finally (during the Clay Shaw trial) to completely distort the news and the testimony presented.
Of all the fifteen major US news organizations, from 1967 to 1968 UPI has come closest to really pursuing the truth about the JFK assassination. Yet they did not have the courage of their convictions in analyzing conspiratorial evidence. In 1975 AP and UPI sent out the longest stories ever broadcast over their news service wires. They were so long that they were divided into installments. The stories backed up the Warren Commission and attacked the researchers, especially Jim Garrison. And UPI suppressed the original 8mm color films by Marie Muchmore and Orville Nix.
Dorothy Kilgallen was writing several articles about the JFK assassination for the newspapers who published her column. She said the owner of the New York newspaper where her column appeared refused to let her print stories in opposition to the Warren Commission
The 1991 movie, JFK made by Oliver Stone, was attacked by those journalists who had since 1963 had steadfastly defended the lone-gunman theory. Thomas G. "Tom" Wicker a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times, attacked Stone’s portrayal of Jim Garrison as a hero-figure and complained that he had ignored the claims that he was corrupt. He added that the film treats “matters that are highly speculative as fact and truth, in effect rewriting history” was an American journalist.
Bernard Weinraub argued in the New York Times that the studio should withdraw the movie: "At what point does a studio exercise its leverage and blunt the highly charged message of a filmmaker like Oliver Stone?" When veteran film critic, Pat Dowell, provided a good review for The Washingtonian, the editor, John Limpert, rejected it on the grounds that he did not want the magazine to be associated with this preposterous viewpoint. As a result Dowell resigned as the magazine’s film critic.
Jack Valenti, who at that time was president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, but in the months following the assassination, was President Lyndon Johnson’s special advisor, denounced Stone's film in a seven-page statement.
Journalist Dan Rather, another long-time lone-gunman advocate, hosted a CBS program on the JFK movie, and put down the film as not the truth.
Back to Special Operations Executive /MI6 and FBI Division Five
Stephenson set up Special Operations Executive (SOE) headquarters in New York City's Rockefeller Center under the name of an importing-exporting company and established its communications and another clandestine center at a resort complex at Montego Bay, Jamaica. Under Major Bloomfield, Division Five's spies operated as a Christian missionary group, sending its devotees to every corner of the United States and Latin America.
It should be noted that all the SOE's activities were conducted under the protective umbrella of Britain’s Official Secrets Act. Any British Commonwealth citizen releasing information about the SOE was liable to prosecution on charges of high treason, punishable by execution.
A relevant feature of the wartime Stephenson-Bloomfield SOE teams was its use of the North American mafia as intelligence contract agents for the OSS and FBI Division Five. Charles "Lucky" Luciano is the best-known case of a convicted drug-runner, pimp, and suspected murderer who was "rehabilitated" under OSS-SOE sponsorship.
In early 1943, as the US was planning to invade Sicily, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill discussed using North American mafia guys to aid the invasion. Churchill then had to admit that the Americans possessed an undeniable advantage when it came to dealing with Italians. In a telegram to Churchill, Roosevelt wrote, “In view of the friendly feeling towards America entertained by a great number of citizens of Italy, and in consideration of the large number of citizens of the United States who are of Italian descent, it is my opinion that our military problem will be made less difficult…”
Director of US Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Carl Espe and Captain Wallace S. Wharton, head of the Counter-Intelligence Section, Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington DC, tasked Captain Roscoe MacFall, chief intelligence officer of the Third Naval District, a region that encompassed New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to exploit further their connections with North American mafia. MacFall then tasked US Navy Commander Charles R. Haffenden to set up a special security unit. It was called the B-3 investigative unit.
Fears about possible sabotage or disruption of the waterfront had already been the job of Commander Haffenden. The Mafia represented the most antifascist organization in the world. Under Mussolini’s savage purges, Sicilian mafiosi were bombed, machine-gunned, and arrested in droves. Many of the American mafia had fled their homeland because of Mussolini.
Haffenden sought the help of Joseph “Joe Socks” Lanza who was born in Palermo, Sicily. His criminal history stretched back to 1917 with arrests for homicide, burglary, conspiracy, and extortion. Lanza as a member of Lucky Luciano’s mafia family was in charge of labor racketeering over the United Seafood Workers Union stretching from Maine to Florida.
Haffenden assembled a team of colorful Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) officers, many of them Italian-Americans versed in the Sicilian dialects spoken by the mafia guys. Among these men were Lieutenant Anthony Marsloe, a man fluent in Italian, Spanish, and French; Lieutenant Joseph Treglia, a former bootlegger now in charge of breaking and entering operations; and Lieutenant Paul Alfieri, a safecracker. Lieutenant Treglia, leader of B-3’s breaking-and-entry teams. Their black-bag jobs helped uncover several German espionage rings across the nation.
Wiretaps revealed a startling conversation between Haffenden and Lanza. Haffenden asked how about Harry Bridges, the West Coast union leader saying, “I don’t want any trouble on the waterfront during the crucial times.”
Lanza replied, “You won’t have any. I’ll see to that.”
A goon squad later caught up with Bridges in a popular dance hall and savagely beat up him.
To organize the West Side docks, the Navy required the cooperation of Irish mafia guy, Joseph Ryan, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association.
According to Lanza, said only the imprisoned Lucky Luciano could order Ryan to go along with the US Navy. To get Luciano’s cooperation Haffenden had to go thru Meyer Lansky.
Lansky’s hoodlums battled American Nazis in Manhattan’s streets long before the declaration of war. Lansky later recalled, “We got there that evening and found several hundred people dressed in their brown shirts. The stage was decorated with a swastika and pictures of Hitler … We attacked them in the hall and threw some of them out the windows. There were fistfights all over the place.” Extremely patriotic, the Jewish mob busted up Nazi meetings and offices all over the city.
Lansky talked to Luciano in prison and outlined Project Underworld which required gathering intelligence about airfields, naval bases, and power plants in Sicily.
Longshoremen’s Association tough Jerry Sullivan later testified, “Lansky was solving the problem for the Navy on the waterfront by the visible deployment of some of the most ruthless gangsters in the city. It was expected that the mere appearance of these men on the piers would serve as a deterrent, a warning to cooperate with the United States war effort or face the consequences.”
When Haffenden sent Cockeye Dunn to investigate two suspected German agents, the Irish hoodlum took the men for a gangland one-way ride. Wiretaps recorded Dunn’s chilling report, “They’ll never bother us again.” The Navy frowned upon unauthorized killings, but it was impossible to keep a mad dog like Dunn in check.
Haffenden formed the F-Target Section, a group dedicated to gathering data on the planned invasion zone.
Luciano ordered his lieutenant, Joe Adonis to hauled hundreds of Italians into Naval Intelligence headquarters. Throughout 1943, mob heavies came and went from the New York City ONI office in a hotel, relaying orders and carrying out missions. Target Section crafted a map of Sicily with a clear plastic overlay that detailed strategic points for the invasion.
Charlie Luciano applied for executive clemency on the grounds of his cooperation with the Navy. His request was granted, and on January 9, 1945, after sending some six years of his 30 to 50 year prison sentence, he was deported to Italy.
Lucky Luciano: The Real and the Fake GangsterbyTim Newark and Project Underworld: The U.S. Navy’s Secret Pact with the Mafia by Rodney Campbell, (1977)
Lucky Luciano was dispatched to Sicily to reconstitute old networks that had been dispersed or expatriated during the Mussolini period. Major Bloomfield came into active collusion with Meyer Lansky's narcotics syndicate by no later than the close of World War Two. In the 1940s James J. Angleton was the OSS station chief for Italy, and he was in charge of (case officer for) Luciano. (Source: Ogonyok (Soviet youth magazine) by Julian Semyonov, October 1978)
In pre-war Italy, Angleton crew up in Milan, Italy, where his family moved after his father bought a NCR's Italian subsidiary. During the First World War, NCR (originally National Cash Register) manufactured fuses and aircraft instrumentation, and during World War Two built aero-engines, bomb sights and code-breaking machines. Angleton joined the US Army in March 1943. By February 1944, he became the chief of OSS’s Italy desk for X-2 in London. In November Angleton was transferred to Italy as commander of SCI [Secret Counterintelligence] Unit Z, which handled Ultra intelligence based on the British intercepts of German radio communications. By the end of the war, he was head of X-2 for all of Italy. ULTRA dealt with decoding intercepted enemy electronic communications and making sure only the Commanding General with a need to know saw selected important intelligence about the Nazis or Soviets.
As head of counterintelligence for the CIA for nearly 30 years, Angleton was the official in charge of all activities relating to terrorism, assassinations, and international narcotics traffic. As the head of the Israeli Desk, he was also the liaison chief to the Mossad. Among his other responsibilities at the CIA, Angleton ran the Vatican desk, a position that placed him equally in touch with the Italian Royal Family.
In October, 1962, Enrico Mattei took off in his plane from a business trip in Sicily. The plane exploded in mid-air. Rumors began to circulate that it was a mafia/CIA/Texas Oil Industry combined operation. During the Second World War, Mattei was one of Italy’s leading anti-fascist political figures. He was the head of two Italian partisan groups fighting the Nazis in Europe. Unlike most Italian politicians he decided to fight fascism rather than embrace it.
After the war Mattei was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Most of the partisan leaders in Europe were elected into official positions after the war. This caused great concern for the OSS and later the CIA. As a result funds meant for rebuilding the European economy (the Marshall Plan) was redirected into a covert operation against left-wing politicians in Europe. This included bribing political leaders in Europe to move to the right. Many succumbed to this policy. However, Mattei was not corruptible. (Source: The Frank Church Select Committee investigation into the CIA)
Enrico Mattei was placed in charge of an agency administrating the Italian oil resources. He was a great success and Italian nationalized oil industry, (ENI) which was very profitable. ENI had been organized by Mussolini, to some private group of oil producers. Mattei was so successful that the Italian government allowed it to remain nationalized. He signed a pact with Iran which gave Iran 75 percent of the profits for oil wells drilled and followed this with similar concessions in India, Egypt, Tunisia, Morrocco, Somalia and the Sudan. The oil companies of the world were immediately up in arms against him.
Foreign oil companies were outraged because the profits of oil exploration in the Middle East were divided on a 50-50 with the governments. Mattei brought the price of petrol down and accordingly, rival oil producers who were forced to meet his prices.
The following appeared in Harper’s Magazine (March, 1961): “Mattei has become the symbol of a vigorous new state socialism of the type which has longed appealed to the logical Latin mind. He carries the banner for a large, perhaps a majority, group of Italians who think that by a judicious use of public monies some of the grave short-comings of capitalism can be corrected.”
Mattei’s success posed a serious threat to the CIA’s policy of halting the growth of socialism in Europe. He also posed a serious threat to the American oil industry. This became an even more serious problem when Mattei began negotiating deals with the Soviet Union, Iran, India, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Somalia and the Sudan.
The oil companies of the world were immediately up in arms against him. They were especially concerned by the deal with the Soviet Union. This would allow the Italian oil company ENI to undercut the oil prices being charged by the Texas oil industry.
The Bloomfield-Luciano collaboration was still operational in 1962 when Luciano was the CIA case officer on the scene in Sicily for the Mattei assassination. The decision to go with a plane crash was made by Luciano. In 1970, the prestigious Italian newsweekly Panorama published an account of the mysterious death of Italian Oil Minister Enrico Mattei in an October 1962 plane crash on his to a historic economic summit in Africa. Mattel's plane was sabotaged during a contrived unscheduled stopover at an obscure airport in Sicily. Forty-eight hours before the crash, New Orleans crime family boss Carlos Marcello had been identified by local police in Sicily as the mysterious American who showed up at the airport while a four-man team was tampering with Mattel's plane.
Sicilian-American mafioso Carlos Marcello owned a private fleet of chartered jets called the United Air Taxi Service, which shared its staff of pilots and mechanics with company called Permindex. One such "shared employee," David Ferrie, was also a pilot for Marcello and Clay Shaw.
During a 1991 investigation the killing of Enrico Mattei it was learned that his bodyguard had planted the explosives on the plane and this bodyguard was a Gladio Officer. Gladio was the code-name for US/NATO’s stay behind operation in the event the USSR invaded Western Europe and which was led by the CIA. This secret stay behind guerrilla force was armed and trained to act like the French Resistance of World War Two. Therefore it was not linked to the mafia directly. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/4495-enrico-mattei/
Louis Bloomfield was the founder and president of the Permindex Corporation and he was a 50 percent shareholder since its incorporation in Montreal in 1958-1959. In 1968 his name was removed from Permindex’s letterhead after the de Gaulle assassination attempts were linked to Permindex. Bloomfield is a man of many hats. He was a founding partner of the prestigious law firm that represents and controls the Bronfman family holdings of Montreal, Canada (aka on legal Seagram brand alcohol).
Bloomfield was a big Zionist philanthropist. A Canadian group collected charitable contributions and passes them on to the Israeli labor movement. Curiously, these funds have been discovered on several occasions to have found their way back to Permindex after recycling through the Bank Hapoalim.
Bloomfield's charitable activities extend into his chairmanship of the Canadian Red Cross ambulance service. He controlled the Israeli Continental Corporation, the Canadian subsidiary of the Dutch Heinekens Breweries, and Credit Suisse of Canada, a correspondent bank to the Credit Suisse of Geneva. All these corporations are listed among the investors in Permindex.
George Mantello, a Romanian Jew, was a board member of a Permindex subsidiary, Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). An immigrant to Italy, George Mantello’s Swiss holding company, Capocetto, was the conduit for the Israeli labor movement’s funds into Permindex.
Max Hagerman was the administrative officer of Permindex and the editor of the West German right-wing newspaper National-Zeitung allegedly a neo-Nazi publication.
Giuseppe Zigiotto, on the board of CMC was the head of the Italian Royal Family’s neo-fascist movement called the Fascist National Association for the Militia Arms.
Carlo D'Amelio, another Permindex-CMC board member. During the Mussolini period, d'Amelio was the attorney representing the grouping of oligarchic families that imposed the fascist dictator in collaboration with Sir Winston Churchill. This grouping was known as Circo Rex ("Royal Circle") and is believed to exist today as the control point for the Red Brigades, the neo-fascist cells.
One of the principal channels of laundered money for Permindex-CMC was the Seligman Bank of Zurich. Hans Seligman was the director of this bank (or the Hans Seligman-Schurch & Co investment banking house located in Basel) Seligman and Ferenc Nagy, a notorious anti-Communist, were among the initiators of the first attempt to found Permindex on Switzerland soil in 1956. It is worth keeping in mind that CIA boss Frank Wisner was Ferenc Nagy’s CIA case officer.
Documents of the Bloomfield Archives is that Dr. Nagy was the initiator of contacts with David Rockefeller at the beginning of year 1960, and that Rockefeller did collaborate with Permindex and CMC in order to speed up the development of his New York City World Trade Center.
Although not an officially cited as a board member of any of the Permindex fronts, John De Menil bears special note as an indispensable business partner of Bloomfield. DeMenil was the president of the Schlumberger Corporation of Houston and southern Florida. The firm was implicated by Jim Garrison along with Permindex in smuggling guns and explosives to anti-Castro Cuban exiles. DeMenil worked with a CIA Miami-based front called "Double-Chek," which in turn was a contact point for Bloomfield's FBI Division Five.
DeMenil was a White Russian émigré who fled to France, married into the wealthy Schlumberger family, and eventually settled in Houston to open a US branch of the family's heavy machinery firm. Nagy relocated to the United States during the 1950s and he became the titular head of a number of White Russians who performed covert operations for Division Five of the FBI.
One of DeMenil's closest associates was Clay Shaw. Shaw was one of Bloomfield's directors on the board. Shaw ran a subsidiary of Permindex in New Orleans called the International Trade Mart. A former Shaw associate alleged Permindex was a front for mafia drug-running and organized crime activity centered in the Caribbean. Shaw was the financial backer and primary case officer of Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald’s lived in New Orleans. David Ferrie was a former employee at the International Trade Mart and an airplane pilot for Shaw. Another associate of Shaw’s was Guy Bannister, the southeast regional chief of Bloomfield's Division Five of the FBI. Shaw was the business partner of Carlos Marcello.
After an estimated 30 to 40 aborted assassination attempts against French President General Charles de Gaulle during the 1960s, the French intelligence bureau, (External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service/ SDECE) gathered reams of evidence showing that Permindex had been the recipient of funds laundered into Geneva and Basel through Zionist charitable organizations and Israeli intelligence front such as the Bank Hapoalim. These funds had been channeled into the neo-Nazi terrorist groups in West Germany and Italy.
De Gaulle issued vociferous personal protests to the Swiss and Italian governments. As a result, Permindex was forced to shut down its offices in those countries and move to a more friendly location, Johannesburg, South Africa. The Paris-based Western European branch headquarters of Israel's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, was kicked out of France and reestablished its operations in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Far from being a small international trading company, Permindex is revealed to be a subsidiary branch of the most powerful, well-financed, and well-protected intelligence agency in the world responsible for carrying out the most important political assassinations of the century. Permindex puzzle was a complex web of holding companies, dummy corporations, and offshore sealed bank accounts through which the Permindex acted as Britain’s Assassination outfit. Sixteen years passed since Permindex conducted its first known assassinations and despite all the accumulated evidence, none of the principals has been brought to justice.
The Bloomfield, Lansky, and Rosenbaum
Sufficient evidence has surfaced in the public record to show that Permindex was a courier channel through which profits of drug trafficking were shuttled into designated secret bank accounts in Geneva, Basel, Liechtenstein, and the Caribbean. Permindex cites among its investors the regional crime czars of North America and the Caribbean, the lieutenants of Meyer Lansky.
Back in 1928 Lansky inherited the bootleg booze and narcotics trafficking from the deceased Arnold Rothstein. Lansky's biographer, Hank Messick describes the weekly ritual in which the regional syndicate couriers (bag men) went to the Singapore Hotel in Miami to deliver 60 percent of their take to Lansky’s mafia money laundering banks.
Messick wrote: “The scope of Lansky's interests is illustrated by a trip his international courier, John Pullman, made in 1965. His first stop was Bogota, Colombia. The Eden Roc in Miami was his next destination. In February he went to the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, where Lansky's old bootlegging chum from Boston, Hy Abrams, was boss. In March he was conferring in Los Angeles with Mike Singer, an ex-Teamster official who had helped put together the Bank of World Commerce (one of Permindex offshore banks) with Alvin Malnik. In April he was at the Peninsular Hotel in Hong Kong, where the syndicate had casinos and obtained much of its narcotics. Lebanon and its casinos were visited next. By June, Pullman was back in Switzerland where he conferred with Lansky in person. Together they visited the French Riviera to study plans for the ultimate takeover of the casinos there.”
“The money is placed in initial deposits in any one of a number of Geneva, Basel, Liechtenstein, or Caribbean banks affiliated with Major Bloomfield's (Centro Mondiale Commerciale). Several of these banks, like the Astaldo Vaduz of Miami, De Famaco Vaduz of Liechtenstein, and De Famaco Astaldo Vaduz of Geneva, are post office box fronts. These three, for example, are all listed as wholly owned subsidiaries of Permindex. As noted above, Credit Suisse, one of the more formidable laundering holes, maintains a Canadian subsidiary, also run by Major Bloomfield. The Bank of World Commerce Ltd. of Nassau, Grand Bahamas, was a personal creation of Lansky's. The largest and most important banking entity in the Permindex-Lansky family was the Banque de Credit Internationale (BCI) of Basel,
The October 8, 1967, issue of Life magazine detailed the following interesting triangular business relationship. US law enforcement officials in turn identified a BCI officer Sylvain Ferdman as a Swiss citizen as also the chief bagman for the Lansky money laundering outfit. Ferdman and John Pullman, carried money from the Caribbean to Lansky, and then on to the BCI and Bloomfield's Credit Suisse. Pullman, in addition to his global travels, was the president and director of the Bank of World Commerce Ltd. of Nassau.
Rabbi Tibor Rosenbaum’s Banque de Credit Internationale (BCI) was the Swiss side of a triangle composed of a professional hit bureau and Meyer Lansky's retail drug business in North America and the Caribbean. Bloomfield's trading company in Montreal, through its subsidiary Centro Mondiale Commerciale ran the protection side of the courier operation and was on the receiving end of those funds earmarked for terrorism and political assassinations. Centro Mondiale Commerciale had branch offices in Geneva and Rome. Bloomfield founded Permindex as an intelligence and financial front for the Israeli Mossad.
Rosenbaum was a close associate of Bloomfield from at least the end of World War two when both smuggled weapons, money, and mercenaries into the Haganah. Haganah was the name of the Zoinist paramilitary organization in the British Mandate of Palestine (1921–1948). Rosenbaum was subsequently served as the first Director-General for Finance and Supply for the Mossad. In addition he was a cofounder of the World Zionist Congress and a director of the Jewish Agency.
The Banque de Credit Internationale (BCI) in Switzerland was falsely alleged it move there to be a vehicle for financing illegal Israeli trade with Africa and the Third World. It real purpose was its relationship to the Mossad. With the exception of Bloomfield, Rosenbaum was the only foreign representative of the African smugglers' in Liberia.
Another member of BCI’s board of directors was Ernst Israel Japhet. He was on the board of the bank that Meyer Lansky' used to launder the mafia profits. Japhet was also the chairman of the Bank Leumi, the largest bank in Israel. Bank Leumi was the link in the diamonds-for-dope trade into Hong Kong. The Japhet family’s roots go back to Hong Kong's opium trade for 150 years ago and they never left.
Joining Japhet on the board of Leumi Bank was Baron Stormont Bancroft, a former Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen and a director and deputy chairman of Cunard Lines, a shipping company heavily involved in the drug traffic over Middle East, India, and Far East routes. The Samuel family also retains interests in Bank Leumi and Cunard Shipping Lines. The Jewish Agency created the Bank Hapoalim as the official agent for the Israeli labor movement, Histadrut. Samuel also presided as head of the Israeli Red Cross. The founder and a board member of Bank Hapoalim was the British High Commissioner Viscount Erwin H. Samuel.
Bank Leumi keeps its hand in the drug trade through its 100 percent owned subsidiary, Union Bank, of which Japhet is also chairman. Union Bank deals over one-third of the world's diamonds.
Bank Leumi was not the only Israeli bank to heavily invest in the Banque de Credit Internationale (BCI). Even more heavily involved was the Bank Hapoalim. As chairman of Permindex, Bloomfield maintained direct cash flow relations to Bank Hapoalim. It is the third largest bank in Israel founded by the Jewish Agency, which runs the bank today.
Bank Hapoalim has been widely exposed in the Western European press as a dirty-money channel into Swiss and Liechtenstein banks. The charge is corroborated by the presence of Zwi Recheter a member of the board of directors of Bank Hapoalim, one of Israel's largest banks.
Another channel of Bank Hapoalim's complicity is the Permindex family of dope traders and assassins is the Israeli Continental Bank Ltd., a 50-50 joint venture between Bank Hapoalim and its West German Socialist International counterpart, Bank fur Gemeinwirtschaft. The German bank is chaired by Walter Hesselbach, a member of the West German branch of the Jerusalem Foundation, the Zionist group.
During the 1960s, Edward J. DeBartolo, Sr. engaged in a joint development in Florida with Lou Chesler and his General Development Corporation. According to their contract, Chesler and General Development were responsible for building houses in Port Malabar, Port Charlotte, Port St. Lucie, and other locations on both Florida coasts, while DeBartolo handled all commercial construction such as shopping centers.
By 1965, DeBartolo had begun building shopping malls, beginning with the Summit Mall in Fairlawn, Ohio, near Akron. A 1978 classified report for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement described him as "a very wealthy, powerful, influential person with organized-crime connections in Ohio. Subject deals in land purchases, construction and development of large shopping centers through the United States."
The US Customs Service had received information from one of its special agents, William F. Burda, in January 1981 that the DeBartolo organization 'through its control of particular state banks in the state of Florida is operating money-laundering schemes, realizing huge profits from narcotics, guns, skimming operations, and other organized-crime-related activities. This organization is reported to have ties to mafia bosses Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and Meyer Lansky and because of its enormous wealth it had high-ranking political influence and affiliations.
Years later, Meyer Lansky’s daughter Sandi stated that President Nixon’s had threaten to withhold the sale of Phantom fighter jets to Israel because Lansky refused to cut Nixon in on a casino deal in the Bahamas. Nixon was already angry that Lansky had supported JFK for president years earlier. (Source: Sandi Lansky Lombardo (Meyer Lansky’s daughter) http://www.fivefamiliesnyc.com/2010/05/meyer-lanskys-mafia-secrets-exposed-by.html
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During the Watergate investigation it was suggested that Resorts International had been linked to Bebe Rebozo, that Resorts and Robert Vesco had been laundering Nixon campaign money, Vesco was investigated because of a secret $200,000 contribution made to the 1972 campaign to re-elect Nixon.....
To view and read more about USA Hidden History Please Go To
The Secret Team - The CIA and Its Allies by L. Fletcher Prouty
The Secret Team The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World L. FLETCHER PROUTY Col., U.S. Air Force (Ret.) by L. Fletcher Prouty
Acknowledgments AUTHOR'S NOTE: 1997 Preface Preface to the 2nd edition
To read the above chapters of the book
The Secret Team - The CIA and Its Allies by L. Fletcher Prouty
The Secret Team The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World by
Col., U.S. Air Force (Ret.) by L. Fletcher Prouty
Also please note that if any of the below videos are not playing properly
Leroy Fletcher Prouty (Retired USA Airforce Colonel who worked with the USA's CIA
Talks about the real hidden truth of the JFK Assassination as being arranged and coordinated by Ed ;Lansdale on behalf of the CIA a d other power people and networks who for many various reasons wants and needs President John F Kennedy Assassinated
Ed Lansdale at Dealey Plaza 22nd November 1963 with three suspects arrested from a nearby box car in the assassination of JFK who even though apprehended but were never charged, and never publicly mentioned until Leroy Fletcher Prouty exposed them in this video. Cornet Leroy Fletcher Prouty shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the CIA did not try to protect JFK in Dallas Texas and in doing allowed and approved the assassination of JFK, a d that it was a very unprofessional fanciful fabricated movie supported by all the CIA/MI6 controlled mainstream media, who have continually repeated for the last 68 odd years the obviously fabricated fanciful story that.. Please
"Lee Harvey Oswald was the loan gunman that fired the three gunshots from the book depository that killed USA President John F Kennedy of the 22nd of November, 1963 in Dallas Texas"
Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty (1917–2001), a retired colonel of the U.S. Air Force, served as the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. He was directly in charge of the global system designed to provide military support for the clandestine activities of the CIA. He was the author of JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy and The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies.
Leroy Fletcher Prouty (Retired USA Airforce Colonel who worked with the USA's CIA
- The Secret Team -JFK Assassination and America's Hidden Clandestine History
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Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty interview in 1994 Speaks About His Book The Secret Team
Using CIA Opium Instead of US Dollars To Pay The Chinese Military For Help in the War P6
Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty - The Secret Team
Explains that Oil is not a Fossil Fuel as Claimed by Scientists. and states that there is not ever likely to be any shortage of Oil as it is the second most available liquid on planet earth under water
US officer obsessed by the conspiracy theory of President Kennedy's assassination
It is appropriate that Fletcher Prouty, who has died of organ failure following stomach surgery at the age of 84, will best be remembered as the model for the mysterious Colonel X, played by Donald Sutherland, in Oliver Stone's film JFK.
Prouty, who believed the assassination of President John F Kennedy was a coup d'état perpetrated by elements of the United States military and intelligence communities, was a career military man who spent a decade liaising between the Pentagon and the CIA. After leaving the US Air Force (USAF), he became an outspoken critic of the intelligence establishment, although by the time JFK was filmed, he had been relegated to the fringes along with countless other conspiracy crackpots.
When asked why he did not use Prouty's name in the film, Stone said: "Because the man does not want to be known, he doesn't want to be traced." Yet his identity was common knowledge. It seemed that the shadowy image of the figure Sutherland portrayed, instructing the naive New Orleans attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), was one Prouty was proud to fit.
As a young man in Massachusetts, his early ambition to become a singer was interrupted by the second world war. He served, first, as an army tank commander, and then as a transport pilot. His CV shows him providing VIP transport for the key allied conferences in Cairo and Tehran, as well as evacuating a Guns of Navarone-style commando team from Turkey. He claimed to have flown in the first overt cold-war mission, rescuing Nazi intelligence officers from the Balkans at the bequest of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, in 1944.
In 1955, Prouty was assigned to coordinate operations between the USAF and the CIA, and remained in intelligence duties until retiring in 1964 to join an aircraft company. He later worked in banking and public relations, while writing on intelligence topics and the assassination of Kennedy.
His 1973 book, The Secret Team, was reviewed seriously. In it, Prouty called the CIA, and the cold war, a cover story, which had allowed elements of the military and intelligence community to work on behalf of the interests of a "high cabal" of industrialists and bankers. It found a ready audience in the atmosphere of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and, in the light of Iran-Contra and CIA drug-running controversies, many of its revelations have been confirmed.
A mass-market paperback was published by Ballantine in 1974, but the book immediately became hard to find. Prouty believed it was "disappeared"; at any rate, copies remain collectors' items.
After that, his writing became increasingly marginalised. He wrote for Genesis and Gallery, two men's magazines, or in specialist journals, such as People And The Pursuit Of The Truth. He continued to develop links between the secret team and the Kennedy assassination, characterising the events in Dallas as a way of thwarting the US president's plans to take control of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
General Edward Lansdale was in charge of Operation Mongoose, aimed at overthrowing Fidel Castro. As General Y in the JFK film, he assigns Prouty to a South Pole trip, to remove him from the Pentagon at the time of the assassination. Prouty later claimed that Lansdale was in Dallas - and visible as a passer-by in the famous "tramps" photograph - on the day Kennedy was killed. "He was there like the orchestra leader, coordinating these things," he said.
In 1986, Prouty's book-length manuscript, The Role Of Intelligence In The Cold War, appeared as a series in a magazine called Freedom, published by the church of Scientology. Like other assassination critics, he found an outlet via the Liberty Lobby, a far-right organisation with ties to Holocaust deniers.
Although Prouty himself never espoused such beliefs, the connection enabled critics to dismiss his later writings. He helped them by publishing articles that made easy targets, such as his revelation that, according to President Franklin Roosevelt's son, Kermit, himself an OSS/CIA man, Stalin believed "the Churchill cabal" had poisoned Roosevelt, and his widow, Eleanor, had kept his coffin closed to stop anyone finding out.
Following the release of JFK, Prouty's book, JFK, The CIA, Vietnam, And The Plot To Assassinate John F Kennedy, was published by the small, independent Birch Lane Press. He remained active, via his own website, until his death, and is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and three children.
As a critic of the CIA, Prouty pointed out its influence in global matters, outside the realm of U.S. congressional and government oversight. His works detailed the formation and development of the CIA, the origins of the Cold War, the U-2 incident, the Vietnam War, and the John F. Kennedy assassination. Prouty wrote that he believed Kennedy's assassination was a coup d'état, and that there is a secret, global "power elite," which operates covertly to protect its interests—and in doing so has frequently subverted democracy around the world.
After the war, Prouty accepted an assignment from the U.S. Army in September 1945 to inaugurate the ROTC program at Yale University, where he also taught during each scholastic year from 1946 to 1948. This timeline intersects with the years that George Bush and William F. Buckley, Jr. also spent at Yale. Prouty fondly recalled Buckley at that time in his role as editor of the Yale Daily News, and Prouty later told an interviewer in 1989 that he had written for Buckley on several occasions.
In 1950 he transferred to Colorado Springs to build Air Defense Command. From 1952 to 1954 he was assigned to Korean War duties in Japan, where he served as Military Manager for Tokyo International Airport (Haneda) during the post-war U.S. occupation.
In 1955 he was assigned to the coordination of operations between the fledgling U.S. Air Force and the CIA. As a result of a CIA commendation for this work he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the U.S. Air Force, promoted to colonel, and assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Following the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency and termination of the OSO by Secretary Robert McNamara, Prouty was transferred to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and charged with the creation a similar organization on a global scale.
From 1962 to 1963 he served as Chief of Special Operations with the Joint Staff.
Leroy Fletcher Prouty Jr., 84, a retired Air Force Colonel who also worked for Washington area corporations, died of multiple organ failure June 5, 2001, at Inova Alexandria Hospital. He lived in Alexandria, Virginia.
Colnel Prouty was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. As a young man, he sang with professional big bands in New England. He was a graduate of the University of Massachusetts.
He served with the Army Air Forces during World War II as a transport pilot in North Africa and Saudi Arabia.
After the war, he was assigned to Yale University, where he established an ROTC program, and to the Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs in 1950.
He was a squadron commander stationed in Japan during the Korean War. Prior to his retirement in 1963, he worked at the Pentagon. His honors included the Legion of Merit.
After he left the military, Colonel Prouty was vice president for general operations of General Aircraft Corp., vice president and Pentagon branch manager of First National Bank of Arlington and vice president of marketing at Madison National Bank.
Prior to his second retirement in the 1970s, he helped establish the government marketing division at Amtrak and was a speechwriter for the corporation's president.
Colonel Prouty held a patent for a disposable razor with a continuous, rotating blade and wrote two books, “The Secret Team” and “JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy.”
He was a consultant to Oliver Stone on the movie “JFK.”
His other interests included painting.
Survivors include his wife of 59 years, Elizabeth Prouty of Alexandria; three children, David Prouty of Laurel, Jane Prouty of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Lauren Prouty of Lynchburg, Viginia. His brother, Air Force Colonel Robert Vincent Prouty, died in January 2000 and is also buried in Arlington National Cemetery
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (USAF)
Born: Springfield, Mass., January 24, 1917. Attended public schools. President, High School Student Government. Member, undefeated Golf Team. Vocalist with Big Bands, sang in most large dance halls, hotels and colleges in Northeast. Graduate: Massachusetts State College 1941, A.B. degree and Second Lieutenant Commission, U.S. Cavalry.
June 1941
Began military career with 4th Armored Division, Pine Camp, New York. At Communications Officer School, Ft. Knox, Kentucky, on December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor). Transferred to Air Force 1942. Earned Pilot's wings November, 1942. Arrived British West Africa (Ghana), February 1943 as pilot with Air Transport Command.
Assigned to V.I.P. flying, summer 1943. Personal pilot for General Omar Bradley, General J. C. H. Lee and General C. R. Smith (Founder and President – American Airlines), among others. Landed U.S. Geological Survey Team in Saudi Arabia, Oct 1943, to confirm oil discoveries for Cairo Conference.
Assigned special duties at Cairo and Teheran Conferences, November-December 1943. Flew Chiang Kai Shek's Chinese delegation (T.V. Soong's delegates) to Teheran.
Chief Pilot (1,200 pilots), Cairo for Air Transport Command. Led special air mission into Soviet Union, and others into Turkey, 1944. Evacuated “Guns of Navaronne” British commandos from Turkey to Palestine. Assisted in capture of the leader of German Gold smuggling ring (The actor, Bruce Cabot) in Turkey and Cairo. Led large flight of transport aircraft to Turkish-Syrian border to evacuate 750 American POW's and OSS-selected Ex-Nazi Intelligence experts from the Balkans, September 1944. The first “overt” Cold War mission.
1945
Transferred to Southwest Pacific, flew in New Guinea, Leyte and was on Okinawa at end of war. Landed near Tokyo at surrender with first three planes carrying General MacArthur's bodyguard troops. Flew out with American POWs. Photographed Hiroshima, that date.
1946-49
Assigned by Army to Yale University to begin first USAF ROTC program. Taught “Aeronautics”and “Evolution of Warfare”. Transferred to U.S. Air Force ROTC headquarters to write college text books. Wrote the college textbook on “Aeronautics” and another on “Rockets and Missiles”.
1950-52
Transferred to Colorado Springs to establish Air Defense Command. There, Director, Personnel Planning for Command (77,000 men) and first to put personnel records on Computer. Attended Nuclear Weapons school, Sandia, New Mexico. Selected for Air Force Command and Staff College, Montgomery, Alabama.
1952-54
Assigned to Korean War duties in Japan. Military Manager, Tokyo International Airport (Haneda) during Occupation. Commander, Military Air Transport Service, Heavy Transport Squadron responsible for military and diplomatic flights from Toyko to Saudi Arabia and back, in addition to daily flights to Korea, Honolulu and Pacific Islands. Founder, Toyko Toastmasters Club. Attended, JCS operated Armed Forces Staff College, Norfolk, 1955.
1955-1964
Assigned to Headquarters, U.S. Air Force and directed to create an Air Force world-wide system for “Military Support of the Clandestine Operations of the CIA”, as required by a new National Security Council Directive, 5412 of March, 1954. Wrote this policy in conjunction with Air Force General Counsel and CIA's General Counsel. Set up a TOP SECRET world wide support force and communications system. Was sent around the world by the Director, Central Intelligence, Allen W. Dulles, to meet the CIA Station Chiefs, 1956. Directed Air Force participation in countless CIA operations during this period. As a result of a CIA Commendation for this work, awarded the Legion of Merit by the Air Force, promoted to Colonel and assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense to carry out this same type of work for all military services. Assigned to the Office of Special Operations.
With the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Secretary McNamara and the abolishment of the OSO, was transferred to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to create a similar, world-wide office and was the Chief of Special Operations, with the Joint Staff all during 1962-1963.
Received orders to travel as the Military Escort officer for a group of VIPs who were being flown to the South Pole, November 10-November 28, 1963, to activate a Nuclear Power plant for heat, light and sea water desalination at the U.S. Navy Base at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.
Retired as Colonel, U.S. Air Force, 1964 and was awarded one of the first three Joint Chiefs of Staff Commendation Medals by General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff.
1964-1965
Vice Presdient, International Operations, General Aircraft Corporation… a company created by MIT and Harvard specialists that designed and built aircraft that were used by the CIA and Army Special Forces.
1965-1968
Vice President, Manager, Pentagon Branch, First National Bank, Arlington, Virginia, later Vice President, Marketing, 1965-1968. Vice President, Marketing, Madison National Bank, Washington, D.C.
1968-1971
Graduate, Graduate School of Banking, University of Wisconsin, 1966 – 1968.
Charter Member, American Bankers Association committee for Automation, Planning and Technology to develop plans to convert all U.S. banks to automation, including the Federal Reserve System.
President, Financial Marketing Council of Greater Washington, D.C.
Member, Advertising Club of Washington, D.C.
1971 AMTRAK, as Manager, created nationwide Government and Military Marketing organization. Senior Director, Public Affairs, corporate speechwriter for Presidents and members of the Board.
1972-1982. Retired
Author, Public Speaker, radio and TV, 1950 to present. Book “The Secret Team”, Prentice-Hall, 1973, and paperback by Ballantine, 1974.
Worked with all major USA TV networks, and with BBC-TV, CBC-TV, Japanese, Australian Broadcast Commission and others.
For McGraw-Hill Scientific Encyclopedia wrote “Railroad Engineering” section, and for its “Scientific Yearbook-1982” yearbook, wrote “Foreign Railroad Technology”.
For Traffic Quarterly and Congressional Record, wrote “Transportation at the Crossroads”, July 1981. Numerous magazine articles from New Republic to Air Force, Gallery, Genesis, and Freedom magazines.
Recently
Consultant: Rail Transportation for Northrop Services Inc., Northrup Corp. and for Ohio Rail Transportation Authority. Assisted Chairman, Joint Economics Committee of the Congress to set up International Hearings and to write “Rail Passenger Services Act of 1981”.
At request of Oliver Stone, worked as Creative Advisor (1990-1991) on production of his film “JFK” and was the original for “Man X” character played by Donald Sutherland.
New Book, “JFK, the CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy” published by Birch Lane Press, 1992.
Memberships:
Director, National Railroad Foundation and Museum National Press Club, and Foundation Rotary Club of Washington, formerly a Director Member, Society of Historians for American Foreign Relations
Family:
Wife: Elizabeth Son: David Daughter: Jane Daughter: Lauren
Additional data:
a) By direction of the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a Founder, of the International Air Traffic Controllers Association. b) Founder, Tokyo Toastmasters Club c) A Charter member, American Bankers Assn, Committee of Automation Planning and Technology. d) A graduate of the American Bankers Assn, Graduate School of Banking, University of Wisconsin. e) Guest Lecturer, American University. f) Staff, Cairo Conference, 1943 g) Staff, Teheran Conference, 1943
PROUTY, JR., LEROY FLETCHER, Col. U.S.A.F. (Ret.)
On June 5, 2001 at Alexandria Hospital, LEROY PROUTY, of Alexandria, Virginia. Beloved husband of 58 years to Elizabeth B. Prouty; loving father of David F. and his wife, Bonnie Prouty of Laurel, MD, Jane E. Prouty og Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Lauren M. Prouty of Lynchburg, Virginia. He is also survived by a sister, Corinne Toole of Fairfax, Virginia. Funeral services will be held on Friday, July 6, 1 p.m. at the Fort Myer Chapel. Interment Arlington National Cemetery will Full Military Honors. The family requests memorial contributions be made to the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria, 910 S. Payne St., Alexandria, Virginia, 22314 or local humane society of your choice.
The Col. L Fletcher Prouty Reference Site is a focal point where researchers can locate and retrieve articles, books, videos, and tapes on a variety of subjects which Fletcher has written and participated in. "This is the Official Site for all things Fletcher Prouty"
Col. Prouty was the model for the 'Man X' in Oliver Stone's film 'JFK'. Col. Fletcher Prouty answered e-mail from this site while he was alive. His responses and comments are posted here
Col. Prouty spent 9 of his 23 year military career in the Pentagon (1955-1964): 2 years with the Secretary of Defense, 2 years with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and 5 years with Headquarters, U.S. Air Force. In 1955 he was appointed the first "Focal Point" officer between the CIA and the Air Force for Clandestine Operations per National Security Council Directive 5412. He was Briefing Officer for the Secretary of Defense (1960-1961), and for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
At times he would be called to meet with Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles at their home on highly classified business. He was assigned to attend MKULTRA meetings. In this capacity Col. Prouty would be at the nerve center of the Military-Industrial Complex at a time unequalled in American History. He has written on these subjects, about the JFK assassination, the Cold War period, and Vietnamese warfare, and the existence of a "Secret Team". He backs up his his work with seldom seen or mentioned official documents - some never before released.
Fletcher Prouty offers a rare glimpse of the "Power Elite" as described by Buckminster Fuller, or "The High Cabal" as Winston Churchill refered to them; and how they really operate. Those who have not been in a position to witness events such as these from the inside would not understand how invisible but ultimately effective they and their power structures are.
Len Osanic - Web site administrator
If you have any questions, or are interested in his CD-Rom you can reach Len Osanic by E-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 604 525-3974
AUTHOR'S NOTE: 1997
Preface
Preface to the 2nd edition
1 The "Secret Team" -- the Real Power Structure ……………………page 22
2 The Nature of Secret Team Activity ………………………………..page 46
3 An Overview of the CIA ……………………………………………page 81
3 Section 2 ………………….……………………………………….page 93
3 Section 3 ………………………………… ……………………….page 107
4 From Law to Interpretation ……………………………………… …page 128
5 "Defense" as a National Military Philosophy ……………………… page 158
6 "It Shall Be the Duty of the Agency . . ." …………………………...page 178
7 The Nature of Clandestine Operations ……………………………...page 199
8 "The Cover Story" Intelligence Agency …………………………… page 222
9 The Coincidence of Crises …………………………………………. page 246
10 Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report in Action ………………………… ...page 271
11 The Dulles Era Begins ……………………………………...…… …page 291
12 Personnel: The Chameleon Game ……………………………… ….page 317
13 Communications: The Web of the World ……………………… …..page 333
14 Transportation: Anywhere in the World -- Now ………………… …page 348
15 Logistics by Miracle ……………………………………………… ...page 359
16 Cold War: The Pyrrhic Gambit …………………………………… ..page 369
18 Defense, Containment, and Anti-Communism …………………….. .page 397
19 The New Doctrine: . . . ……………………………………………… page 417
20 Khrushchev's Challenge: The U-2 Dilemma ………………………. page 435
21 Time of Covert Action: U-2 to Kennedy Inaugural ………………... page 446
22 Camelot: From the Bay of Pigs to Dallas, Texas …………………... page 457
23 Five Presidents: "Nightmares We Inherited" ………………………. page 486
App. I: Definition of Special Operations
App. II: Powers and Duties of the CIA
App. III: Training Under Mutual Sec
"In a very prescient paragraph, Ransom shows how important this grasp for power by an inner secret team was becoming as far back as 1952. Even as the NSC was getting started, a struggle for control of that body was under way; and the control was to be elected by gradually making that advisory committee into an operating power center. Ransom's comment is worth repeating here:
"Early in NSC's life, according to President Truman, 'one or two of its members tried to change it into an operating super-cabinet on the British model.' Truman identifies the members as his first two Secretaries of Defense, James Forrestal and Louis Johnson, who would sometimes, Truman recounts, put pressure on NSC's executive secretary to use NSC authority to see that various governmental agencies were following NSC policy. The executive secretary declined to do this, on the ground that his was an advisory staff rather than an executing 'line' function. Truman fought to keep the subordinate nature of NSC clear to all, emphasizing that Congress had in fact changed the title of NSC 'Director' to 'Executive Secretary'. Forrestal had, Truman notes, advocated using the British cabinet system as a model for the operation of postwar American government. To change this system, wrote Truman, "we would have to change the Constitution, and I think we have been doing very well under our Constitution. ..."
To read the above chapters of the book
The Secret Team - The CIA and Its Allies by L. Fletcher Prouty
The Secret Team The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World L. FLETCHER PROUTY Col., U.S. Air Force (Ret.) by L. Fletcher Prouty
Acknowledgments AUTHOR'S NOTE: 1997 Preface Preface to the 2nd edition
To read the explosive full story of Eyes Wide Open by Fiona Barnett ... the true story the mainstream media controlled by the CIA/MIMI6 and their trillionaire controllers refuse to mention ...
Mr Blakey Says He Does Not Trust The CIA To Tell The Truth Part A
Eyes Wide Open
CIA Child Trafficking | MK-ULTRA in Australia Ritual Abuse & Mind Control | Trauma-Based Forced Dissociation Trauma-Focused Integration 2019 by Fiona Barnet
Contents
Introduction
The Luciferian Cover-up
1. Watergate was Pedogate
2. Royal Whitewash
3. Victorian Pedophile Network
4. NSW Pedophile Network
5. Bond University Pedophile Network
6. ‘The Greater Good’
7. Conspiracy Fact The Luciferian Philosophy
8. Justice Denied
9. MK-ULTRA & the Occult
10. MK-ULTRA in Australia
11. MK-ULTRA in Hillsong Church
12. Confessions of a Sydney Satanist My Witness Testimony
13. Ritual Abuse in Australia
14. Relevance of Intelligence
15. The Programming Matrix
16. Candy Girl Child Prostitute
17. MK-DELTA Child Soldier How to Heal
18. Psychology 101
19. Trauma-Focussed Integration
20. Dirty Doctors
21. A Life Sentence
22. Source of Hope Within
CIAs MK Ultra Mind Control Program
Story Of Former CIAs MK Ultra Mind Control Patients
CIA Mind Control Search Sidney Gottlieb CIA Chief Poisoner By Stephen Kinzer
Walter Bowart was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1939. He was awarded a McMahon journal-ism scholarship to the University of Oklahoma and has since worked as an editor, publisher and writer. His articles have appeared in many journals including The East Village Other, the underground newspaper which he founded in 1965.
Walter Bowart lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife and three children.
Published in the U.S.A. by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1978
First published in Great Britain by Fontana 1978
This book is dedicated to those who are obedient to authority. May they follow in the path of Daniel Ellsberg, L. Fletcher Prouty, Victor Marchetti, John Marks, and George OToole, become responsible, and break free from the chains of command.
“ I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education” …. Thomas Jefferson
“In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploring the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason,” …… Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to USA President Jimmy Carter
Walter Bowart was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1939. He was awarded a McMahon journal-ism scholarship to the University of Oklahoma and has since worked as an editor, publisher and writer. His articles have appeared in many journals including The East Village Other, the underground newspaper which he founded in 1965.
Walter Bowart lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife and three children.
Published in the U.S.A. by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1978
First published in Great Britain by Fontana 1978
This book is dedicated to those who are obedient to authority. May they follow in the path of Daniel Ellsberg, L. Fletcher Prouty, Victor Marchetti, John Marks, and George OToole, become responsible, and break free from the chains of command.
“ I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education” …. Thomas Jefferson
“In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploring the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason,” …… Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to USA President Jimmy Carter
Author's Note
This book is an exercise in citizens' intelligence. The author and the majority of those who've contributed to it are private citizens working on their own in a synergistic effort, without major funding or corporate support, without government privilege or "need to know," other than that need cited by Jefferson—the need for informed discretion in a democracy. Without the help of these many people, who, like the author, were motivated by shock and outrage that citizens have been so victimized by their own government, this book would not have been undertaken.
Thanks first to the victims of mind control who had the courage to come forward and tell their stories.
A number of professional people gave valuable technical assistance and patient explanations. My thanks to Harry Arons, Robert Brauers, Dr. and Mrs. Sidney M. Cohen, Dr. Remo Dicenso, Betty Dumaine, Dr. Milton E. Erickson, Morris Ernst, Bernard Fensterwald, George Griffin, Col. Laird Guttersen, Dr. Paul Henshaw, Edward Hunter, Hon. Louis K. Lefkowitz, John MacDonald, V. R. Sanchez, Alan W. Sheftin, Dr. Edgar Schein, Mrs. E. D. Yeomans, and Col. Joseph H. Ziglinski.
I received a great deal of assistance from a number of researchers and writers around the world. Thanks to Chip Berlet, Nancy Bressler, Jeff Cohen, Loren Coleman, Richard Crowe, William Grimstad, Paul Hoch, L. Ron Hubbard, Larry Lee, Charles Maierson, John Marks, David McQueen, Sandra Meiersdorff, Janet Michaud, Beverly Ogden, George OToole, Richard Popkin, Jeff Quiros, William Stevenson, Scoop Sweeny, Harold Weisberg, David Williams, and Peter Watson.
Other valuable assistance was given by the following institutions and organizations: The Rare Books and Special Collections Division of Princeton University Library, Brain Mind Bulletin, Zodiac News Service, Freedom News Service, Pacific News Service, The Fifth Estate, Network Against Psychiatric Assault, The Assassination Information Bureau, American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, Sanity Now, Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Center for National Security Studies, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, and the National Technical Information Service.
My understanding of the intelligence community was molded by exchanges with a number of intelligence and military people. They shall remain nameless. Special overt thanks to Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, Michael Kradz and Alan Bell of Dektor Counterintelligence and Security, and Carl F. Boode of Desert Security. Tom Miller gave me much of his time and expertise, as Director of Research and citizens' counter-intelligence agent extraordinaire. He gave me research and editorial assistance and encouragement. Above and beyond the call he patiently listened to the vent of all my frustrations over a period of years. His interest in the subject never waned, and research for his own book
The Assassination Please Almanac (1977, Contemporary Books) uncovered leads for this one. Kudos to Dr. Robert M. Thomson, Johanna Moore G., Martha Sowerwine, my mother Fenna, and my wife Peggy for their patience and support.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Richard Condon, who gave me early encouragement and offered his valued commentary. And to my editors Wendy Broad and Cynthia Vartan who burned midnight oil to polish this manuscript.
Last and foremost I am indebted to my Enid High School journalism teacher, Miss Ruth Scott, who, twenty years ago, started me on the path of citizens' intelligence.
—Walter Bowart July 7, 1977 Tucson, Arizona
Contents
Foreword by Richard Condon 13
Chapter 1 The Cryptorian Candidate 19
Chapter 2 Only One Mind for My Country 27
Chapter 3 The Mind Laundry Myth 43
Chapter 4 Without Knowledge or Consent 59
Chapter 5 Pain-Drug Hypnosis 75
Chapter 6 The Guinea Pig Army 87
Chapter 7 The MKULTRANS 99
Chapter 8 The Mata Hari of Mind Control 115
Chapter 9 The Slaves Who Buried the Pharaoh .. 131
Chapter 10 Brave New World in a Skinner Box .. 151
Chapter 11 A School for Assassins 161
Chapter 12 The Four Faces of a Zombie 171
Chapter 13 The Lone Nuts 183
Chapter 14 The Ignored Confessions 197
Chapter 15 Another Hypno-Patsy?.... 205
Chapter 16 Confession by Automatic Writing 215
Chapter 17 The Patriotic Assassin 233
Chapter 18 Deep Probe 249
Chapter 19 From Bionic Woman to Stimulated Cat 261
Chapter 20 The Engines of Security 275
Appendix A Memorandum from Richard Helms to
Lee Rankin, Warren Commission
Document 1131 285
Appendix B List of Drugs Tested by the CIA 289
Notes 293
Bibliography 297
Index 311
Foreword
The father of Grock the clown, having had his legs broken in eight places by
His father for professional reasons, broke Grock's legs in eight places to be certain that the child would grow up walking grotesquely so as to ensure his eminence as a clown. The act brought much pain and indignity forever but, Grock's father reasoned, was there not a wholly justifiable element involved? Was not the clowning tradition immortally enhanced by those unnatural legs?
As demonstrated inescapably by Walter Bowart in this book, our Father who art in the American secret police has endowed hundreds of scientists at American universities to unravel methods for fracturing American minds. That this research in so many great halls of learning has exceeded a cost of untold secret millions of dollars (the only yardstick remaining by which we are willing to measure anything)
indicates that this Grockian entertainment being produced by our secret police is a matter of ambitious policy rather than the happenstance of cloak-and-dagger adventure.
In this book Walter Bowart has proven each step of this official, terminal, government anarchy, even though that appears to be a contradiction in terms. To alter and control human minds is the ultimate anarchy. What is offered by official apologists as a tribute to the needs of derring-do by romantic spies are acts of hatred and sadism against all people in an insane and degraded determination to extirpate conscience from society.
Walter Bowart underwent a long and expensive process to assemble the hard facts which comprise this book. Each document attesting to secret police intent had to be ferreted out of government archives by badgering persistence until, page by page, the information was released to him by his right under the Freedom of Information Act. The essence of that law seems to be that one need only write away to a federal agency for information about the general areas in which the citizen is interested. Not so. Walter Bowart needed to expend large sums of money to employ researchers in Washington and elsewhere in order to discover the precise name, number, and description of contents of each document toward which he was groping through black streams of informational darkness. Without this it would have been impossible to apply for the transfer of copies of these documents to himself for this book. He had to comb the United States for people from many walks of life who knew, vaguely remembered, or suspected that they had been under the mind control of secret police and military agencies, then had to backtrack again with information gleaned from them to labyrinthine research among thousands of federal archives.
Please keep fearfully in mind that the astonishing information published in this seminal work of investigative reporting, concerning avenues taken to decision and execution by our secret police to fracture or dissolve human minds, then to operate those minds as a small boy might operate a Yo-Yo, for purposes of counter-intelligence military "efficiency," and the destruction of democratic institutions, was drawn directly from federal records and from official laboratory archives of the highest educational purpose—as well as from the reviving memories of those who had already undergone the dehumanizing process.
The prostitution of the mind by our secret police preceded the murder of the mind. To attain the advanced
Academic papers from the 1960s reveal how a CIA-funded 'mind control' program came to Australia
In another example, the CIA funded experiments at a psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, directed by the controversial Professor Donald Ewen Cameron.
Professor Cameron's"psychic driving" involved subjecting drugged, sleep-deprived patients to continuously repeated audio messages on a looped tape.
Years later, a senate hearing on MK-Ultra concluded that some of these experiments represented "a fundamental disregard for the value of human life".
In the 60s, the CIA wanted to find out if hypnosis could control political figures as portrayed in the film The Manchurian Candidate.(Getty/Hulton Archive)
In the winter of 1960, Martin Orne, remembered as one of the 20th century's greatest psychologists, touched down in Sydney.
The American professor was due to begin a three-month sabbatical at the University of Sydney, attracted by its world-renowned psychology faculty.
Professor Orne was one of the leading researchers into hypnosis, something the Sydney team awaiting his arrival was also interested in. They were all trying to apply a scientific approach to a practice long associated with magic and mystery.
Dr Martin Orne was highly regarded by the CIA for his scientific approach to hypnosis.(Supplied: University of Pennsylvania)
"The environment at [the University of] Sydney was electrically alive with intellectual stimulation," says psychologistDr Peter Sheehan, who was completing his honours in psychology at the faculty during Professor Orne's visit.
"I suddenly found myself surrounded by people who were entrenched in the issues of hypnosis."
But, unbeknownst to the Sydney university staff and students, documents recently retrieved by the ABC confirm that Professor Orne was receiving funding from the secretive intelligence program MK-Ultra, which was in turn funded by the CIA.
Orne was a keen psychologist, well regarded for his scepticism and scientific rigour, but the CIA had questionable motives.
Sleep, drugs and Operation Midnight Climax
In the early years of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union were poised for nuclear combat.
"The United States became convinced that we were under imminent threat," says Stephen Kinzer, a former foreign correspondent atthe New York Times.
"[The population] felt that the Soviet Union had the power, almost at a moment's notice, not only to destroy the United States but to destroy the entire possibility of meaningful human life on Earth."
The anxieties of US citizens were not just about their nuclear capacities.
There was a widely held suspicion that the Soviets were developing mind-control capabilities.
Reports had emerged of American soldiers, captured during the Korean war, defecting to the communist side and seemingly renouncing the US.
When American POWs defected after the Korean war, many decided the communists must be using mind-control. (Getty: Bettmann)
US intelligence concluded that the communists must be hypnotising the soldiers. Alarmed, they decided that they needed to develop similar capabilities.
This spurred the creation of the MK-Ultra program.
It was, says Mr Kinzer, "a project to find ways for the CIA to seize control of the minds of other people".
Over 100 experimental projects were set up under MK-Ultra. The project titles included phrases like "aspects of magicians' art useful in covert operations" or "sleep research" and "behavioural modification"
Mr Kinzer says that those working on MK-Ultra experiments, often under extreme secrecy, would push ethical boundaries in the name of national security.
For instance, in an operation known as 'Midnight Climax', the CIA employed sex workers in San Francisco, Mill Valley and New York.
They were instructed to bring their clients to a safe house and dose them with LSD, so researchers could assess the impact of the drug and gauge its suitability for use in military settings.
YOUTUBECIA's mind control program
In another example, the CIA funded experiments at a psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, directed by the controversial Professor Donald Ewen Cameron.
Professor Cameron's"psychic driving" involved subjecting drugged, sleep-deprived patients to continuously repeated audio messages on a looped tape.
Years later, a senate hearing on MK-Ultra concluded that some of these experiments represented "a fundamental disregard for the value of human life".
"The research and development program … resulted in massive abridgments of the rights of American citizens, sometimes with tragic consequences," the 1977 report states.
According to the senate committee report, many participants felt the "residual effects" of the experiments decades after the program ceased. At least two died.
The Human Ecology Fund
Arguably the most coveted of the CIA's mind control projects were those investigating the possibilities of hypnosis, with documents showing that it occupied up to eight MK-Ultra sub-projects.
At the time, pop culture led many to believe that hypnosis could be used to create a "Manchurian candidate." The 1962 film of the same name, starring Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh, depicts a former soldier brainwashed into becoming an assassin. Some in the CIA believed hypnosis could be weaponised in real life in a similar way.
"Instead of waging war, [the CIA thought] 'we'll just find a way either to hypnotise leaders, or to hypnotise entire populations to control other people's minds from far away'," Mr Kinzer says.
"The prize would be nothing less than global mastery."
Martin Orne, then a young professor at the Harvard Medical School, became a key part of this quest in the late 1950s.
Dr Peter Sheehan says he learnt a lot from Professor Orne. (Supplied: University of Sydney Archives)
The Vienna-born American psychologist had worked in magic shows as a teenager and developed a keen interest in hypnosis.
He had continued to research it throughout his career and, according to author John D. Marks, Professor Orne's rigorous scientific approach made him attractive to the CIA.
In the late 1970s, when researching his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, which exposed the details of the MK-Ultra program, Mr Marks interviewed Professor Orne, whorevealed he was regularly consulted by the CIA. According to Mr Marks, Professor Orne knew about the program and also received funding to support his research on hypnotism.
"He was their man on the outside — their specialist who they would go to for ideas about hypnosis," Mr Marks says.
In 1960, Professor Orne's work took him to the University of Sydney.
The university was an intellectual spark in an at-times culturally conservative Australia. The psychology department was renowned, particularly for its work on hypnosis.
In the 1950s, there were five significant hypnosis labs in the world — four in North America and the other at Sydney University, under the guidance of professors John Philip Sutcliffe and Gordon Hammer.
So Professor Orne came to collaborate with some of Sydney's esteemed psychologists. His financial backing for the trip, however, came from a source with shady motives.
An article published in a 1965 edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which Professor Orne and his colleague Professor Frederick J. Evans record the results of one of their key experiments in Australia, has been referenced by the ABC.
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On the first page, the authors acknowledges the contribution of the Human Ecology Fund, a secretive organisation used by the CIA to provide grants to social scientists and medical researchers investigating questions of interest to the MK-Ultra program.
"This study was conducted at the University of Sydney, Australia, during a visit by the senior author [Orne], June-August 1960. It was supported in part … by a grant from the Human Ecology Fund," the paper reads.
Dr Sheehan, who had studied under Professor Orne, says the researchers at the University were unaware that their work was CIA-linked.
"That particularexperiment was at the University of Sydney, while I was doing my honours year, and I had never learned that was CIA-funded," he says.
Alternative explanations
The aim of Professor Orne's experiments in Sydney was to see if it was possible to get hypnotised people to engage in "anti-social behaviour". If a subject could be made to perform tasks against their own wishes, the CIA could potentially use this power against opposition soldiers.
Historical experiments had recorded hypnotised subjects doing almost anything. They could be made to steal, injure themselves, even attempt murder.
Professor Orne wanted to test historical theories that found that hypnotised subjects would do almost anything. (Supplied: State Library of Victoria )
Professor Orne wanted to test this. According to the article, he asked a group of hypnotised subjects, comprised of Sydney University psychology students, to perform a series of seemingly dangerous acts, including picking up a venomous snake and throwing a vat of nitric acid at an experimenter.
While many of the subjects completed these seemingly dangerous tasks, Professor Orne did not necessarily conclude that hypnosis was responsible.
Eager to find alternative explanations to why the participants had performed these actions, Professor Orne used a control group of non-hypnotised subjects.
They also completed the tasks, the researchers discovered.
The subjects, Professor Orne concluded, knew at some level that they would be safe, regardless of whether they were hypnotised. They judged correctly that researchers were simulating danger.
In experiments with snakes, for example, the animals had been rendered harmless by the University's zoology department; in other experiments with nitric acid, the acid was simply a convincing "coloured solution". The subjects were not told about this.
"The tasks are within the broad range of activities which are perceived as legitimized by the nature of the situation," the journal article reads.
"They were requests made by experimenters, viewed by subjects as responsible scientists, in the context of a psychological experiment."
But if the CIA was looking to control the human mind in their Cold War battle against communism, Professor Orne's findings would have proven disappointing.
"No conclusions can be drawn from the present investigation about the potential use of hypnosis to induce antisocial behaviour," Professor Orne wrotein the journal article.
According to Mr Marks, this scepticism was part of the professor's appeal to the CIA.
"Orne was the person they would go to, in terms of hypnosis, to say, do you think this is going to work — and he tended to be a sceptic," he says.
"So, his sceptical and academic way of looking at it would have been useful in turning down half-baked ideas."
This scientific approach is Professor Orne's legacy.
In a career that continued for four decades, Professor Orne helped to established what hypnosis could and couldn't do, and moved it from the realm of magic to an established academic and clinical practice.
"I learnt an awful lot from him," says Dr Sheehan, Professor Orne's student and collaborator.
"There are lots of people out there that would love to think that you or I could do terribly immoral things under hypnosis, but I don't think that's true," he says.
"I think that experiment would have been absolutely pivotal in proving otherwise."
The toxic legacy of Canada’s CIA brainwashing experiments: ‘They strip you of your soul’
In the 1950s and 60s, a Montreal hospital subjected psychiatric patients to electroshocks, drug-induced sleep and huge doses of LSD. Families are still grappling with the effects
Sarah Anne Johnson had always known the broad strokes of her maternal grandmother’s story. In 1956, Velma Orlikow checked herself into a renowned Canadian psychiatric hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, hoping for help with postpartum depression.
She was in and out of the clinic for three years, but instead of improving, her condition deteriorated – and her personality underwent jarring changes.
More than two decades passed before Johnson and her family had an explanation, and it was much stranger than any of them could imagine: in 1977 it emerged that the CIA had been funding experiments in mind-control brainwashing at the institute as part of a North America-wide project known as MK Ultra.
At the time, the US agency was scrambling to deepen its understanding of brainwashing, after a handful of Americans captured during the Korean war had publicly praised communism and denounced the US.
In 1957, this interest brought the agency north of the border, where a Scottish-born psychiatrist, Ewen Cameron, was trying to discover whether doctors could erase a person’s mind and instill new patterns of behaviour.
Orlikow was one of several hundred patients who became unwitting subjects of these experiments in Montreal in the late 1950s and early 60s.
Velma Orlikow. Photograph: William Eakin
“It’s almost impossible to believe,” said her granddaughter, Sarah Anne Johnson. After her grandmother died, the Canadian artist began reading up on the institute, delving into Orlikow’s journals and court documents. “Some of the things he did to his patients are so horrible and unbelievable that it sounds like the stuff of nightmares.”
Patients were subjected to high-voltage electroshock therapy several times a day, forced into drug-induced sleeps that could last months and injected with megadoses of LSD.
After reducing them to a childlike state – at times stripping them of basic skills such as how to dress themselves or tie their shoes – Cameron would attempt to reprogram them by bombarding them with recorded messages for up to 16 hours at a time. First came negative messages about their inadequacies, followed by positive ones, in some cases repeated up to half a million times.
“He couldn’t get his patients to listen to them enough so he put speakers in football helmets and locked them on their heads,” said Johnson. “They were going crazy banging their heads into walls, so he then figured he could put them in a drug induced coma and play the tapes as long as he needed.”
Along with intensive bouts of electroshock therapy, Johnson’s grandmother was given injections of LSD on 14 occasions. “She said that made her feel like her bones were melting. She would say: ‘I don’t want these,’” said Johnson. “And the doctors and nurses would say to her: ‘You’re a bad wife, you’re a bad mother. If you wanted to get better, you would do this for your family. Think about your daughter.’”
Orlikow died when Johnson was 13 years old. Her experience – and the profound imprint it left on her family – has influenced Johnson’s artwork.
“I knew, even at a very young age, that my grandma was not like other grandmas,” said Johnson, 41. “She had a hair trigger for nerves and anger. If someone bumped into her or if we were in a restaurant and someone spilled something on her, she would just explode. She wouldn’t hurt anybody, she would just scream and yell and it would take hours to calm her down.”
A 2016 video installation shows Johnson, wearing a mask made from an old photo of her grandmother, trying to prepare a meal. Photograph: Courtesy of Sarah Anne Johnson
Johnson was close to her grandmother, often spending afternoons at her home while her parents worked. They would sit on the couch and watch TV together, surrounded by piles of books and newspapers.
Years later, Johnson found out that the experiments had wreaked havoc on Orlikow’s brain; it could take her three weeks to read a newspaper, months to write a letter, and years to read a book.
“But she kept trying, she kept trying to be her old self and do the things that she used to love,” said Johnson. “Now I think that she was just sitting in a big pile of her own failures, every day on that couch.”
Similar scenes played out across Canada as former patients of the institute attempted to return to their lives. “It tainted our whole family,” said Alison Steel, whose mother was admitted to the institute in 1957.
Her mother was 33 years old at the time, reeling from the loss of her first child and showing signs of depression. “Back at that time, this Dr Cameron, he was this miracle psychiatrist,” said Steel. “He was supposed to do wonders with people with depression or mental health issues.”
Steel’s mother, Jean, was put into chemically induced sleep, once for 18 days and a second time for 29 days. She was subjected to rounds of electroshocks, injections of experimental drugs and seemingly endless bouts of recorded messages.
“They say it was torture for human beings, human torture,” said Steel, who was four years old when her mother was hospitalised. “What they attempt to do is erase your emotions. They strip you of your soul.”
After three months at the institution, her mother returned home. The treatments had taken a toll on her memory and left her riddled with nervousness and anxiety. “She wasn’t able to talk to me about life and regular stuff. She wasn’t able to joke and laugh,” said Steel.
A 2009 series by Johnson uses a squirrel to represent her grandmother at times, after Orlikow once said the LSD injections made her feel like a squirrel trapped in a cage. Photograph: William Eakin
At times her mother would interrupt conversations to utter statements out of the blue, which Steel believes were the recorded messages she had been exposed to. “She would blurt out something like: ‘We must do the right thing,’” said Steel. Cameron, the psychiatrist behind the experiments, died in 1967 of a heart attack while mountain climbing, but recent decades have seen various attempts by former patients and their families to hold the Canadian government and the CIA accountable.
In 1992, the Canadian government, which had provided grants from several agencies to fund Cameron’s research, offered compensation payments of C$100,000 (US$78,000) to 77 former patients of the institute who had been reduced to a childlike state. Hundreds of others – including Steel’s mother – were denied compensation, at times because they were deemed not to have been damaged enough by the experiments.
Steel, who launched a legal challenge against the government in 2015, settled last year with the federal government, receiving a C$100,000 payment in exchange for signing a non-disclosure agreement.
The settlement was one of a handful made in recent years, said the lawyer Alan Stein, who has represented several former patients and their families. The Canadian government – while not fully aware of the extent of the experiments being carried out at the time – said the payments to former patients were made on compassionate and humanitarian grounds, said Stein. “It never admitted its legal responsibility.”
In 1980, Johnson’s grandmother and eight other former patients took on the CIA, launching a class-action lawsuit over the six years of funding it had provided to Cameron. The legal challenge left her grandmother fighting anxiety and panic attacks, said Johnson. “And then she would summon, as difficult as it was, every bit of energy and courage and step out and face it.”
After originally asking for US$1m each in damages and a public apology, the plaintiffs settled in 1988, with each of them receiving a little over US$80,000.
A 2009 piece by Johnson paints over an image of her grandmother smiling as she balances her two grandchildren in her lap. Photograph: William Eakin
Art became Johnson’s means of processing her family’s painful history; a 2009 series uses a squirrel to represent her grandmother at times, after Orlikow once said the LSD injections made her feel like a squirrel trapped in a cage. A 2016 video installation shows Johnson, wearing a mask made from an old photo of her grandmother, trying to prepare a meal. “The doctor took her apart and put her back together so it’s an impossible task,” said Johnson.
Velma Orlikow’s experience at the Montreal institute left deep scars, but her fight for justice is a source of deep pride for her granddaughter. It’s that mix that Johnson aimed to capture in a 2009 piece that painted over an image of her grandmother smiling as she balanced her two grandchildren in her lap – turning her grandmother’s hands into vines and tendrils that wrapped tightly around the children.
“Those vines, they’re just fact. They’re not dark. It’s not bad,” she said. “It seems strange to say this but because of the horrific ordeal that my grandma went through and then going after the CIA, I grew up feeling like I’m from a family that stands up for things. And so this is a part of me now, it’s how I see the world.”
CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb headed up the agency's secret MK-ULTRA program, which was charged with developing a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies. Courtesy of the CIA
During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.
MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."
Some of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer's research.
"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process," Kinzer says. "First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."
Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. "We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says.
Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. After MK-ULTRA shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use.
Kinzer writes about Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA in his new book, Poisoner in Chief.
Interview highlights
Poisoner in Chief
Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
by Stephen Kinzer Hardcover, 354 pages
On how the CIA brought LSD to America
As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MK-ULTRA. Actually, the MK-ULTRA director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.
In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control.
Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. Who were those people? Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA by MK-ULTRA, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. Although, of course, he never knew that name.
So the CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly, and actually it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended.
On how MK-ULTRA experimented on prisoners, including crime boss Whitey Bulger
Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was. Essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period?
Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote, "I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me." And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him.
On the CIA hiring Nazi doctors and Japanese torturers to learn methods
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps.
Stephen Kinzer, author of 'Poisoner in Chief'
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.
For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.
Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin.
On the more extreme experiments Gottlieb conducted overseas
Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s, and therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places. ...
CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation — all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And that made Gottlieb, although in some ways a very compassionate person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation.
On how these experiments were unsupervised
This guy [Sidney Gottlieb] had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder.
Stephen Kinzer
[Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. I think the mentality must have been [that] this project is so important — mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power.
On how Gottlieb destroyed evidence about his experiments when he left the CIA
The end of Gottlieb's career came in [1973], when his patron, Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by [President Richard] Nixon. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records. ... However, it turns out that there were some [records] found in other places; there was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remain. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
Correction Oct. 27, 2019
In the audio of this interview, as in a previous Web version, Stephen Kinzer incorrectly says the end of Sidney Gottlieb's CIA career came in 1972. It actually ended in 1973.
Previously posted Sept. 9: A previous photo caption incorrectly referred to the CIA's MK-ULTRA program as MS-ULTRA.
Wormwood: Inside the CIA's cold war 'mind control' program
Tamsin Shaw Jan 30, 2018
"Wormwood: Inside the CIA's cold war 'mind control' program"
Transparency and accountability are essential virtues in a democracy, but they're clearly not as viscerally appealing or as thrilling as their opposites, secrecy and impunity.
The intelligence operative – especially the rogue spy flouting the law, from James Bond to Jason Bourne – is one of the most glamorised figures in the fiction and ........
US covertly experiments mind control on people across continents for decades; no official apology
Project CIA
By GT staff reporters Published: Mar 15, 2022
"US covertly experiments mind control on people across continents for decades; no official apology - Global Times"
"They've taken away enough from me. I don't remember my birth name. I am not in contact with my children. It's a very degrading, devastating reality," said 72-year-old Maryam Ruhullah, an MK Ultra victim who now lives in Grand Prairie, Texas.
MK Ultra is the code name of a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the US and its notorious spy agency the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It started on April 13, 1953 and lasted for 20 years.
It was the height of the Cold War, and the US designed covert operation, among which was MK Ultra, aimed at developing tools that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.
Psychedelic drugs, paralytics, and electroshock therapy, all heinous and inhumane techniques, were clandestinely but routinely used on humans. They included citizens from the US and other countries who were unwitting test subjects, an encapsulation of immense human rights violations.
Many experiments were conducted in Fort Detrick as a key base of operations. Many people died as a result of these experiments. Those who survived had their memories forcibly erased, forgetting their names and having their personalities irrevocably altered, and faced threats to their lives, living in fear for the remainder of their days. More than 40 years on, the physical, mental, emotional, social horrors, and injuries are still with her, Ruhullah told the Global Times.
US mind control scheme
The psychosis induction of Ruhullah started when she was 5 or 6 while attending a parade in London. She was then brought to the US where CIA operatives would continuously use a recording played over tape recorder to embed in her mind what they wanted her to become in her own memory.
"I remember one time I had been given electric shock treatments and was returned to a room. When I regained a little bit of consciousness, I heard one of the hospital staff say something to the effect of: Why do they do this to her? Why are they giving her so many shock treatments?" said Ruhullah.
Ruhullah believed that what happened to her was political because of her Iranian heritage. She was then relocated, taken away, and lived and was educated in Russia afterward. At 19, she married an American and moved to the US. Seven years later, a member of US law enforcement agency entered her house and told her she had to be put in protective custody. Although she greatly protested, she was forced to go. She was not able to contact her husband or her son who was about 6 years old at that time. It was the second time that she would be an unwilling participant in a mind control program.
Ruhullah said she has been living somebody else's lie.
"You remain physically drained, because there's something that drains your spirit. You cannot hold a conversation with anyone regarding a situation, because everyone that is allowed in your life goes along with the lie, either out of total indifference and complacency, or because they build an allegiance to the government that they have to continue this lie or something would happen to them."
The CIA mind control schemes did not just remain on US soil but were extended to US allied countries including Denmark, Australia, and Canada.
In December 2021, a Danish documentary titled The Search for Myself was released, leveling claims against the CIA that in the early 1960s it had financially aided experiments on 311 Danish children, a good number of whom were orphans or adopted. The filmmaker, Per Wennick, himself was one of them.
Wennick told Radio Denmark that as one of the kids forced to participate in the experiment, he had electrodes placed on his arms, legs, and chest around his heart. The children were also subjected to loud and high-pitched sounds, which was "very uncomfortable."
According to Australian media reports, the US once took the experiments to Australia in the 1960s that involved Sydney University psychology students.
What took place in the Danish documentary and Australian media reports was just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1950 and 1964, experiments funded by the Canadian government and covertly in part by the CIA as part of MK Ultra were conducted at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University in Canada and were led by Scottish psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron.
None of the Canadian patients provided consent or knew that they were being used for clandestine research purposes. So far, neither the CIA nor the Canadian government has apologized for either's role in these experiments which ruined hundreds of families.
Julie Tanny's family is one of them. In 1957 when she was 5 years old, her father went to see a doctor as he had trigeminal neuralgia, while the doctor, who worked in cahoots with Dr. Cameron, put him into one of the many brainwashing programs.
Tanny told the Global Times that her father was put to sleep first, then he was forced to listen to clips of some of the things he had said on a continual 24-hour loop underneath his pillow while he slept as part of the brainwashing process. Then he would be subjected to shock treatments administered using a machine called the Page-Russells, which emitted voltages about 75 times the strength of a regular shock treatment, and the aim was to wipe out his memory.
Such experiments were administered on Tanny's father for three months, and he was discharged because he "still has ties to his former life." He returned home, but the happy family was soon destroyed.
Photo: VCG
Typical US democracy style
Colin A. Ross, a US-based psychiatrist, wrote a book titled The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists, after reading a collection of 15,000-page files from the CIA reading room. As a psychiatrist, he believes the CIA mind control programs were very abusive to innate human nature.
Moreover, Ross calls into question the medical ethics of said CIA doctors.
"You have to create psychiatric disorder on purpose, which is completely the opposite of the purpose of psychiatry. And the patient, the subject doesn't give informed consent. They don't have legal representation. So it completely violates all medical ethics," said Ross.
Despite mounting public backlash and condemnation, the CIA is yet to officially apologize for the actions it took during the Cold War and after. The CIA's mind control projects are still relevant today because they provide a horrific historical narrative of intelligence misconduct in a country that keeps touting human rights and freedom.
"The problem I have with the United States, while I'm a US citizen, is that they tend to point the finger; accuse other countries around the world of human rights violations, but they don't take responsibility for their own. So I think it's hypocritical and it's all part of geopolitical maneuvering and so on," said Ross.
"This is the typical style of US democracy - violating human rights and committing crimes at will and then being forced to acknowledge it decades later," Aleksandr Kolpakidi, a Russian intelligence historian, told the Global Times.
Tanny said she gets many emails from people who say they are currently being experimented on, and she believes mind control experiments are still ongoing, albeit not quite as primitive as those performed in the 1950s.
"I guess today there're different ways of mind control that are a lot more progressive than what they did in the past. It's hard to know. I wouldn't be at all surprised. Governments are governments. I don't think all that much has changed. Our world has become all about power and control," said Tanny.
CIA mind control myth. Graphic: Deng Zijun/GT
Seeking justice
The CIA MK Ultra program was brought to the public's attention in 1975, and victims and their families in Canada started to fight for the responsible parties to be brought to justice and be held accountable for the lifelong pain and suffering.
A 1980 lawsuit which dragged on for eight years made nine Canadians receive only $67,000 each from the US Department of Justice.
Tanny's father died in 1992, the same day his wife, Tanny's mother, received compensation worth $100,000 by the Canadian government. He was among the 77 victims who received such compensation.
But for Tanny, this was just a drop in the bucket in comparison to the whooping $2 million it took her mother to take care of her father. And her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer very shortly after the death of her father.
In 2017, she and other victims formed the group Survivors Allies Against Government Abuse to exert more pressure on the defendants, and she keeps meeting new people who are victims of such mind control programs. Tanny has filed a request for a class-action lawsuit against the US and Canadian governments, the McGill University health center, the McGill University, and the Allan Memorial Institute, hoping this will extend compensation to family members and other victims.
Tanny told the Global Times that they will be in court against the US government on April 26.
Ruhullah said that she hopes the world will remember the immense suffering of MK Ultra victims by setting aside a special day.
"I know after apartheid, they had a reconciliation council. We don't have anything like that, be it MK Ultra, be it slavery, be it the genocide of the Native Americans, in order for the individuals and the country to heal. There needs to be acknowledgment, there needs to be apologies, there needs to be compensation, and there needs to be a genuine reconciliation," said Ruhullah.
MK-Ultra was a top-secret CIA project in which the agency conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments—sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens—to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering and psychological torture. Though Project MK-Ultra lasted from 1953 until about 1973, details of the illicit program didn’t become public until 1975, during a congressional investigation into widespread illegal CIA activities within the United States and around the world.
The Cold War and Project MK-Ultra
In the 1950s and 1960s—the height of the Cold War—the United States government feared that Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents were using mind control to brainwash U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.
In response, Allan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), approved Project MK-Ultra in 1953. The covert operation aimed to develop techniques that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.
The program involved more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics and electroshock therapy. Sometimes the test subjects knew they were participating in a study—but at other times, they had no idea, even when the hallucinogens started taking effect.
Many of the tests were conducted at universities, hospitals or prisons in the United States and Canada. Most of these took place between 1953 and 1964, but it’s not clear how many people were involved in the tests—the agency kept notoriously poor records and destroyed most MK-Ultra documents when the program was officially halted in 1973.
The CIA began to experiment with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) under the direction of agency chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb. He believed the agency could harness the drug’s mind-altering properties for brainwashing or psychological torture.
Under the auspices of Project MK-Ultra, the CIA began to fund studies at Columbia University, Stanford University and other colleges on the effects of the drug. After a series of tests, the drug was deemed too unpredictable for use in counterintelligence.
MK-Ultra also included experiments with MDMA (ecstasy), mescaline, heroin, barbiturates, methamphetamineand psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”).
Operation Midnight Climax
Operation Midnight Climax was an MK-Ultra project in which government-employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA “safe houses” where drug experiments took place.
The CIA dosed the men with LSD and then—while at times drinking cocktails behind a two-way mirror—watched the drug’s effects on the men’s behavior. Recording devices were installed in the prostitutes’ rooms, disguised as electrical outlets.
Most of the Operation Midnight Climax experiments took place in San Francisco and Marin County, California, and in New York City. The program had little oversight and the CIA agents involved admitted that a freewheeling, party-like atmosphere prevailed.
An agent named George White wrote to Gottlieb in 1971: “Of course I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
Frank Olson was a scientist who worked for the CIA. At a 1953 CIA retreat, Olson drank a cocktail that had been secretly spiked with LSD.
A few days later, on November 28, 1953, Olson tumbled to his death from the window of a New York City hotel room in an alleged suicide.
The family of Frank Olson decided to have a second autopsy performed in 1994. A forensics team found injuries on the body that had likely occurred before the fall. The findings sparked conspiracy theories that Olson might have been assassinated by the CIA.
After prolonged legal proceedings, Olson’s family was awarded a settlement of $750,000, and received a personal apology from President Gerald Ford and then-CIA Director William Colby.
Ken Kesey and Other MK-Ultra Participants
Ken Kesey, author of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, volunteered for MK-Ultra experiments with LSD while he was a college student at Stanford University.
Kesey later went on to promote the drug, hosting LSD-fueled parties that he called “Acid Tests.”
Acid Tests combined drug use with musical performances by bands including the Grateful Dead and psychedelic effects such as fluorescent paint and black lights. These parties influenced the early development of hippie culture and kick-started the 1960s psychedelic drug scene.
Other notable people who reportedly volunteered for CIA-backed experiments with LSD include Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist; Ted Kaczynski, better known as the “Unabomber”; and James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston mobster.
Church Committee
In 1974, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh published a story about how the CIA had conducted non-consensual drug experiments and illegal spying operations on U.S. citizens. His report started the lengthy process of bringing long-suppressed details about MK-Ultra to light.
The following year, President Ford—in the wake of the Watergate scandal and amid growing distrust of the U.S. government—set up the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States to investigate illegal CIA activities, including Project MK-Ultra and other experiments on unsuspecting citizens.
The Commission was led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and is commonly referred to as the Rockefeller Commission.
The Church Committee—helmed by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church—was a larger investigation into the abuses of the CIA, FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies during and after the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.
The Church Committee delved into plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. It also uncovered thousands of documents related to MK-Ultra.
These revelations resulted in Ford’s 1976 Executive Order on Intelligence Activities that prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject.”
LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, is a hallucinogenic drug that was first synthesized a Swiss scientist in the 1930s. During the Cold War, the CIA conducted clandestine experiments with LSD (and other drugs) for mind control, information gathering and other purposes. Over time, the drug became a symbol of the 1960s counterculture, eventually joining other hallucinogenic and recreational drugs at rave parties.
Albert Hofmann, a researcher with the Swiss chemical company Sandoz, first developed lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD in 1938. He was working with a chemical found in ergot, a fungus that grows naturally on rye and other grains.
Hofmann didn’t discover the drug’s hallucinogenic effects until 1943 when he accidentally ingested a small amount and perceived “extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.”
Three days later, on April 19, 1943, he took a larger dose of the drug. As Hofmann rode home from work on his bicycle—World War II restrictions made automobile travel off-limits—he experienced the world’s first intentional acid trip.
Years later, April 19 came to be celebrated by some recreational LSD users as Bicycle Day.
LSD Effects
LSD is just one mind-altering substance in a class of drugs called hallucinogens, which cause people to have hallucinations—things that someone sees, hears or feels that appear to be real but are in fact created by the mind.
LSD users call these hallucinogenic experiences “trips,” and LSD is a particularly strong hallucinogen. Because its effects are unpredictable, there’s no way to know when taking the drug whether a user will have a good trip or not.
Depending on how much a person takes or how their brain responds, a trip can be pleasurable and enlightening, or, during a “bad trip,” a user may have terrifying thoughts or feel out of control.
Long after they’ve taken the drug, some users experience flashbacks, when parts of the trip return without using the drug again. Researchers think LSD flashbacks may happen during times of increased stress.
The CIA and Project MK-Ultra
Project MK-Ultra, the code name given to a Central Intelligence Agency program that began in the 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, is sometimes known as part of the CIA’s “mind control program.”
Throughout the years of Project MK-Ultra, the CIA experimented with LSD and other substances on both volunteers and unwitting subjects. They believed that LSD could be used as a psychological weapon in the Cold War. Hypnosis, shock therapy, interrogation and other dubious mind-control techniques were also part of MK-Ultra.
These government acid experiments—which also involved dozens of universities, pharmaceutical companies and medical facilities—took place throughout the 1950s and 1960s, before LSD was deemed too unpredictable to use in the field.
When Project MK-Ultra became public knowledge in the 1970s, the scandal resulted in numerous lawsuits and a congressional investigation headed by Senator Frank Church.
Ken Kesey and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
After volunteering to take part in Project MKUltra as a student at Stanford University, Ken Kesey, author of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, went on to promote the use of LSD.
In the early 1960s, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (as his group of followers were called) hosted a series of LSD-fueled parties in the San Francisco Bay area. Kesey called these parties “Acid Tests.”
Acid Tests combined drug use with musical performances by bands including the Grateful Dead and psychedelic effects such as fluorescent paint and black lights.
Author Tom Wolfe based his 1968 non-fiction book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, on the experiences of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The book chronicles the Acid Test parties and the growing 1960s hippie counterculture movement.
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert
Both psychology professors at Harvard University, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert administered LSD and psychedelic mushrooms to Harvard students during a series of experiments in the early 1960s.
At the time, neither of these substances were illegal in the United States. (The U.S. federal government didn’t outlaw LSD until 1968.)
Leary and Alpert documented the effects of the hallucinogenic drugs on the students’ consciousness. The scientific community, however, criticized the legitimacy of the studies which Leary and Alpert conducted while also tripping.
Both men were eventually dismissed from Harvard but went on to become symbols of the psychedelic drug and hippie counterculture.
Leary founded a psychedelic religion based on LSD called the League for Spiritual Discovery and coined the phrase “tune in, turn on, drop out.” Alpert wrote a popular spiritual book called Be Here Now under the pseudonym Baba Ram Dass.
Carlos Castañeda and Other Hallucinogens
Hallucinogens can be found in the extracts of some plants or mushrooms, or they can be manmade like LSD. The ergot fungus, from which Hofmann synthesized LSD in 1938, has been associated with hallucinogenic effects since ancient times.
Peyote, a cactus native to parts of Mexico and Texas, contains a psychoactive chemical called mescaline. Native Americans in Mexico have used peyote and mescaline in religious ceremonies for thousands of years.
There are more than 100 species of mushrooms around the world that contain psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound. Archeologists believe humans have used these “magic mushrooms” since prehistoric times.
Carlos Castañeda was a reclusive author whose best-selling series of books include The Teachings of Don Juan, published in 1968.
In his writings, Castañeda explored the use of mescaline, psilocybin and other hallucinogenics in spirituality and human culture. Born in Peru, Castañeda spent much of his adult life in California and helped to define the psychological landscape of the 1960s.
A number of manmade hallucinogens, such as MDMA (ecstasy or molly) and ketamine, are sometimes associated with dance parties and “rave culture.” PCP (angel dust) was used in the 1950s as a anesthetic before it was taken off the market in 1965 for its hallucinogenic side effects, only to become a popular recreational drug in the 1970s.
CIA Child Trafficking | MK-ULTRA in Australia Ritual Abuse & Mind Control | Trauma-Based Forced Dissociation Trauma-Focused Integration 2019 by Fiona Barnet
The worst thing about being an inspiration is that you have to be perfect. - Anne McDonald Eyes
Wide Open is not a biography as such, and descriptive dialogue is limited. Consider it more a reference book designed to meet three distinct aims:
1. Provide the relevant historical basis for understanding the existence and coverup of CIA child trafficking, ritual abuse, and mind control.
2. Document my personal experience of this abuse in Australia and the USA.
3. Offer information for combating the techniques which cults, the military and intelligence agencies use to artificially induce dissociation and achieve radical and strategic behaviour modification. I explain the nature of Trauma-Based Forced Dissociation including the victim selection process, why most therapy is ineffective, and why a Trauma-Focused Integration approach is essential.
My testimony is scaffolded by the extraordinary research of Steve McMurray who assembled the jigsaw of faces, places, and relationships I recalled and relayed. Steve’s work features mainly in the chapter MK-ULTRA in Australia. This book would not exist, and my integration would not have been as thorough, without Steve’s research efforts.
The following publications provide a preliminary understanding of ritual abuse and mind control, which my book builds upon:
- Secret Don’t Tell: The Encyclopedia of Hypnotism (1998) by Carla Emery.
- How the Illuminati Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave (2008) and Bloodlines of the Illuminati (1998) by Fritz Springmeier and his wife ‘Cisco Wheeler.’
- A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People (2002) by Carol Rutz. - The Greenbaum Speech (1992-3) conference presentation by Dr Corydon Hammond. The Bible suggests we may know them by their fruits.
That is, we recognise the wolves in sheep skins by the consequences of their words and behaviour. Be they arrogant academic or bottom-feeding troll, anyone who attempts to discredit the above writings is certainly an operative for the trafficking network. Similarly, whoever attacks my book has a vested interest in the lucrative international child trafficking operation coordinated by the CIA.
This electronic version of Eyes Wide Open is being distributed at no cost because the truth and healing ought to be free. Victims have paid enough. The public is welcome to download, distribute and host complete copies of this book version online for therapeutic purposes. Flooding the internet with multiple copies combats the increasing censorship and stops the child traffickers burying this information again.
NAMBLA & Arthur C. Clarke
British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 predictive programming film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1961, Julian Huxley’s UNESCO awarded Clarke the Kalinga Prize for popularising science. Clarke is famously quoted as saying, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ More significantly, Arthur C. Clarke was a gay pedophile who pioneered the Sri Lankan child sex tourism industry. The British Royals knighted Clarke just days after Sunday Mirror journalist Graham Johnson revealed Clarke admitted to having solicited young boys for sex. When Clarke subsequently denied this admission, the Sunday Mirror produced Clarke’s taped admission plus a secret document naming Clarke as a pedophile known to members of the NAMBLA (North American Boy Lovers Association) pedophile network.
US detectives, who arrested leaders of the [NAMBLA] association 10 years ago, say Clarke was named by other pedophiles they quizzed during an FBI investigation. The perverts had set up children's homes in Thailand as fronts for their sick activities.
One of its leaders was Jonathan Tampico, 48, a top nuclear scientist who worked for the American Government. He served two-and-a- half years in jail for molesting a boy of 12 and is now on the run with a million-dollar warrant on his head for further porn offences. He told detectives he had stayed at Clarke's home in Colombo and had swapped letters with the author. Another known pedophile, former church minister John Wakefield Cummings, 56, is serving a 24-years-to-life sentence after admitting molesting 17 boys in his care. He told police in Sacremento, California, that Clarke had been contacted at his Sri Lankan home by a pedophile who was on the run from the American authorities. In a sworn statement made to an investigator for Sacremento's district attorney…Wakefield Cummings told how the pervert fled to Sri Lanka where he was able to contact the pedophile community through Clarke. He then fled from Sri Lanka to Indonesia. Detectives contacted a child welfare group to warn them about Clarke's activities.
Arthur C. Clarke said in the notorious interview: ‘I am all in favour of efforts to stop [pedophilia]. But how do we stop it without interfering with the rights of responsible adults. I think most of the damage comes from the fuss made by hysterical parents afterwards. If the kids don't mind, fair enough.’
In recent years Clarke's name has been linked with two notorious pedophiles, one of whom - a Swiss millionaire - was kicked out of Sri Lanka on the orders of the president for abusing impoverished beach boys. He is now awaiting trial in Zurich accused of sexually abusing up to 1,500 young boys and like Clarke was friends with a lot of Sri Lanka's top politicians, senior policemen and influential government figures. Clarke is said to have attended parties at the tycoon's home. When asked if he had, Clarke replied: ‘I may well have done. I mean the very first man I met here in 1954 was a pedophile and made no bones about it. He was in intelligence in the army, a fantastic guy.’ 58
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch stopped his UK newspaper News of the World from breaking the story that Arthur C. Clarke was a pedophile because he was friends with the pedophile. 59
Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd is more indicative of how these tiger rides usually end. He was so poorly treated by Murdoch’s Australian newspapers that in a recent interview with The Saturday Paper he called News Corp a “cancer” on democracy and suggested it should be the subject of a royal commission. “They go after people who have the audacity to raise a question about their behaviour,” Rudd said. He added, “It’s one of the reasons I’m speaking out directly, so that people can have a normal national conversation rather than a continued national embarrassed silence about this.”
Eyes Wide Open by Fiona Barnett
Chapter 1 Watergate was Pedogate
CIA Child Trafficking | MK-ULTRA in Australia Ritual Abuse & Mind Control | Trauma-Based Forced Dissociation Trauma-Focussed Integration
Eyes Wide Open
1 Fiona Barnett Eyes Wide Open CIA Child Trafficking | MK-ULTRA in Australia Ritual Abuse & Mind Control | Trauma-Based Forced Dissociation Trauma-Focused Integration 2019 by Fiona Barnett
The Watergate break-in was strictly based on one thing - the pedophile records that were being kept at the Democratic National Headquarters. - Detective James Rothstein (NYPD, Retired)
In October 2016, I presented at Colin Ross’ Trauma and Dissociation conference in Seattle, USA. Following my talk, one attendee approached me in the hotel lobby where my fellow presenters sat at their merchandise stalls. ‘All this!’ she shouted while sweeping her arm across the sideshow alley of over-priced books, stickers, and fridge magnets, ‘All this is shit! You have the real stuff! Where’s your book?!’ Tears welled in her eyes. ‘Write a book! Please write a book!’
Yes, I have the real stuff. I am not some left-brain dominant academic pretending to understand what it is like to be a victim of the most heinous crimes. I lived it. I spent my developmental years trapped in a mind control labyrinth. I spent my adult years navigating an escape. I eventually achieved what few victims of the most extreme abuse do, integration. I may therefore declare with authority what does and does not work.
I prefer the term ‘victim’ to ‘survivor’ because the latter implies my ordeal is over. My ordeal will likely never end. As Dr Reina Michaelson warned, ‘Fiona, I think this is a life sentence.’ Indeed, I serve a life sentence for crimes committed against me, with the full knowledge and blessing of the Australian government. I am constantly harassed by police, paid agitators, agent academics and journalists, DID sleeper cells, perpetrator relatives, sold out victims, fake advocates, professional social media trolls, Special Intelligence Operatives, and retired intelligence community thugs hired to do the dirty work of VIPs who dare not overtly attack me for fear of attracting media attention to their part in the international child trafficking operation.
Recovery from extreme abuse begins with realising the true nature and extent of international child trafficking. In 2015, Newcastle Herald journalist Ian Kirkwood wrote favourable articles in the wake of my Sydney press conference. 1 I consequently passed to him a story regarding David Hogg, the Lifestyle Solutions founder who was later convicted of historical child sexual assault. Kirkwood worked with Joanne McCarthy whose media campaign, starring whistle-blower Peter Fox, helped spark Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse.
In 2012, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox exposed his colleagues’ coverup of a massive pedophile network in the Newcastle Catholic diocese. The NSW police hierarchy consequently physically threatened Peter Fox and demanded his doctor allow police to attend his private therapy sessions. University of Sydney law graduate Margaret Cunneen chaired a Special Commission of Inquiry into child sex abuse in Newcastle which attacked and discredited Peter Fox and journalist Joanne McCarthy.
Cunneen had a history of supporting pedophiles. In 2009 she attended the book launch of organised crime boss Roger Rogerson and admitted she had ‘known him since he was a detective.’2 Detective Sergeant Roger Rogerson was dismissed from the NSW Police Force in 1986, meaning Cunneen associated with him during his underbelly heyday when he oversaw the trafficking of drugs and children in Sydney, and committed multiple murders to conceal his crimes. Then in 2002, Margaret Cunneen advised Queensland Police to drop their prosecution of pedophile swim coach Scott Volkers on the grounds: (a) one victim’s sexual assault was too ‘trivial’ to prosecute; (b) 12-year-old female victims were unlikely to have developed breasts and thus allegations Volkers groped them would be difficult to substantiate; and (c) 12-year-old girls could not relax enough to experience orgasm while being abused.3
Firstly, Cunneen’s conclusions defy biology. Secondly, my sister-in-law was Scott Volker’s assistant coach in the 1990s. Long before Volkers hit the news, I was told he assaulted his own niece whom he regularly drove to swimming practise, that his pedophilia was common knowledge to Queensland Swimming staff including Greg Lawler who caught Volkers showering naked with Olympian Samantha Riley, and that Swimming Australia was generally infested with pedophiles including National Coach Don Talbot (my first swim teacher) who was deported from Canada for impregnating a 14-year-old - prior to being appointed as Australia’s head Olympic coach.
The federal Royal Commission into child abuse subsequently vindicated both Peter Fox plus the multiple victims of Scott Volkers who in 2018 was finally charged for the same crimes Margaret Cunneen dismissed. Cunneen was further discredited when Roger Rogerson was convicted of murder in 2014. Cunneen narrowly escaped investigation by the Independent Commission Against Corruption in 2015.
As Chair of the Special Commission of Inquiry, Margaret Cunneen banned Peter Fox from including crucial evidence thereby prejudicing his testimony. She subjected Fox to hours and days of aggressive interrogation, and facilitated his being slandered ‘a liar,’ ‘the devil incarnate,’ ‘obsessed’ with exposing pedophile priests, and involved in a ‘conspiracy’ with Newcastle Herald journalist Joanne McCarthy who was also interrogated under cross examination. Cunneen branded Fox an ‘unreliable’ witness who acted ‘without integrity.’ I enjoyed afternoon tea with Peter Fox and witnessed the toll this took on someone victims consider a national hero. If only all NSW police were so obsessed with exposing pedophiles.
The NSW Police Force then targeted Deputy Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas for supporting Peter Fox. Kaldas was suddenly subjected to excessive scrutiny, investigation, public discrediting and career destruction. Margaret Cunneen’s witch hunt occurred under the command of NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione who publicly supported pedophile Frank Houston, the Hillsong founder who sex trafficked kids to Kings Cross brothels in association with fellow child rapist Roger Rogerson.
So, if the Newcastle Herald would not publish my story, I figured, no other newspaper would. I phoned Ian Kirkwood to request he investigate and publish my full story. If only one mainstream journalist published my testimony against Antony Kidman, I reasoned, it would blow the international child trafficking network wide open.
During our call Margaret Cunneen queried whether swimmer's breasts big enough to be groped. The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 July. 6 call, Kirkwood relayed a conversation he once had with ‘a couple of spooks’ who told him that all senior politicians are pedophiles because that is how they are controlled. Kirkwood asked me if that was my story.
‘That’s exactly right! That’s consistent with my experience.’ I tried to contain my excitement. ‘The mainstream media has long documented the CIA’s involvement in drugs and weapons trafficking, right?’
Kirkwood agreed, noting there had just been another story about that in the mainstream press.
‘Well then, is it so hard to imagine they are also involved in trafficking children which is far more lucrative than guns and drugs? ASIO and the CIA work together to traffic children between Australia and America. They’re the ones who trafficked me.’
The journalist promised to consider my request, bearing in mind he had a young family and publishing my story would surely place them at risk. But he never got back to me. A short time later, Ian Kirkwood developed a rare and aggressive form of cancer. I called him, expressed my condolences, and we chatted for a bit. At the end of our conversation, I mentioned I was considering writing a book. I asked him to clarify and elaborate on what he told me of his encounter with the ‘spooks.’
‘I never said that,’ he bluntly asserted.
I sighed in resignation. There went my last chance at breaking into the mainstream media. There sunk years of building rapport and credibility with mainstream journalists. There went years of investigating other abuse cases and passing my findings on to television and newspapers. Years of driving journalists around the district to personally meet victims. Years of results in other cases.
My Gold Coast Hogtie Doctor story went international, with paediatrician Neville Davis being banned from practising medicine in Australia (although that doesn’t stop him setting up shop in Thailand). My story on Gary Willis’ 18-year child abuse spree ended with a life ban on his teaching for the NSW Education Department (although that didn’t stop him working for the Queensland Education Department). My story on Daruk government boys home forced reluctant NSW police and 60 Minutes agent journalists to conduct a mop-up investigation. I broke the Daruk story on my blog and negotiated it into the mainstream news. Sensational headlines about a victim having his penis cut off went global. Police and the media charged multiple low-level perpetrators, and 60 Minutes falsely presented the story as ‘exclusive.’ Police and media conspired to bury the crux of the Daruk story, that it was a recruitment centre for (a) boy prostitutes to service ASIO’s human compromise operation, and (b) Project MK-ULTRA lab rats. Journalists may print all sorts of child abuse information, except that which exposes the global child trafficking operation.
I had come so close.
My October 2015 press conference – delivered in response to Senator Bill Heffernan’s announcement that a former prime minister was a pedophile - was statistically the most popular story on the Sydney Morning Herald website that day (although the news site’s computer technicians prevented it from displaying as the most viewed article). Another of Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s sex assault victims, the daughter of Hawke’s architect Kevin Borland, agreed to address a follow-up press conference with me but pulled out last minute. The USA National Inquirer intended to run a front-page story about Antony Kidman being a pedophile, until they received a vicious legal threat from his 7 daughter Nicole Kidman. A journalist and her photographer husband flew up from Sydney to interview me for a major Australian magazine, until Nicole Kidman took a ‘Scientology approach to managing’ me. And a UK journalist travelled around the country interviewing me and two other victims of Antony Kidman for the Daily Mail, until one of the victims (whose parents were friends with Kidman) was threatened and subsequently withdrew his permission last minute.
Nicole Kidman’s PR team shut down my mainstream media exposure by drawing on her lucrative contracts with Australia’s media outlets. So, I turned to the internet. Armed with a simple meme app and a right-brain talent for lyric writing, I launched my own social media campaign. I spent five years in front of the computer, communicating with hundreds of victims and supporters, many fake, many genuine. I hit the conspiracy theory jackpot when David Icke featured an enormous photograph of me and my story during his Australian speaking tour.
My tactics worked. Online articles about Nicole Kidman, where the pubic was free to leave negative comments, were followed by streams of intelligent attacks on her heavily orchestrated stardom. I realised my impact when Kidman’s PR team paid the Daily Mail plus a morning television show to feature an article tellingly titled, ‘Shame on you, Australia. Stop Hating on Nicole Kidman.’4 People don’t hate Nicole Kidman as an individual. They hate what the Harvey Weinstein scandal subsequently highlighted: that Hollywood rewards something other than an ability to sing, dance or act.
Despite everything the pedophile network threw at me, my story still got out there, such that if you Google Antony Kidman’s name the words ‘child abuse’ soon follow. Yet no amount of alternative media success can match a complete break into mainstream news. So, I admitted defeat. I stopped posting and did not bother checking my blog sites.
Pedogate
Days before the 2016 US Presidential Election, I received a barrage of phone texts from old friends asking if I was okay. People started questioning my kids regarding our family’s welfare. I had no idea what was happening. Then I checked my blog site. A spike of 100,000 views in one day stemmed from an article that activist group Anonymous published about my being trafficked to American VIPs as a kid. They used my story to expose Hillary Clinton’s involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. The Clinton Foundation was a front for the trafficking of children including Haiti earthquake victims.
Bill and Hilary’s trafficking network implicated campaign chairman John Podesta, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, and ‘Saint’ Mother Teresa. In 1995, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient opened a Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children adoption centre in Washington DC with Hillary Clinton which quietly closed in 2002.5 Mother Teresa’s Roman Catholic order, Missionaries of Charity, came under Indian government investigation for child. trafficking, with a nun arrested for selling babies. 67 Mother Teresa accepted donations from Haiti dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficked minors to VIPs including Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, Kevin Spacey, and Bill Clinton who flew aboard the Lolita Express to Epstein’s ‘Little St. James’ pedo island in the Caribbean. Surveillance camera footage allegedly leaked from the island showed children locked in underground rooms. The island conveniently caught fire due to a massive explosion in early 2019, destroying all evidence. Jeffrey Epstein is among the many VIPs and government heads who knowingly donated money to the Clinton Foundation child trafficking operation. The Clinton Foundation received $88 million from Australian taxpayers between 2006 and 2014, peaking during Welsh-born Australian ALP Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s term.8
Hilary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta and his brother Tony Podesta were staying in a Portuguese villa owned by UK politician Sir Clement Freud, in the same resort where British child Madeleine McCann was when she disappeared. Clement Freud was Sigmund Freud’s grandson. British media outed Clement Freud as a violent child rapist. 9 John and Tony Podesta perfectly matched the identikit images Scotland Yard released of Madeleine’s abductors.
Pedogate, as the scandal became known, surfaced when Wikileaks released emails from John Podesta’s account in October 2016. The emails notably outed Hillary Clinton as a self-confessed ‘Molech’ worshipper, and captured politicians ordering children for pedophile parties using alleged fast-food code words. The content of the Podesta emails is consistent with the following leak from a CIA cut-out company called STRATFOR:
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From: Fred Burton [mailto:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.] Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 2:39 PM To: 'Don Kuykendall' Cc: 'Aaric Eisenstein'; 'Darryl O'Connor'; 'Copeland Susan' Subject: RE: Get ready for ‘Chicago Hot Dog Friday’ I think Obama spent about $65,000 of the tax-payers money flying in pizza/dogs from Chicago for a private party at the White House not long ago, assume we are using the same channels?
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A related email from STRATFOR’s president informed Aaric Eisenstein (of SVP Publishing): ‘Aaric, you can participate as well!’ ‘If we get the same ‘waitresses,’ I'm all for it!!!’ Aariac Eisenstein replied. If STRATFOR staff were talking about a Whitehouse orgy, the word ‘waitresses’ was placed in inverted comas to indicate its alternative meaning. Waitressed would typically be prostitutes, most likely child prostitutes. According to this email (disseminated by Anonymous and Wikileaks), President Barrack Obama ordered $65,000 worth of fast food, an act which contravened Whitehouse policy dictating all food be prepared onsite using raw ingredients to counter the security risk posed by externally prepared foods. The leaked emails prompted Hilary Clinton to publicly declare Australian award-winning journalist and whistle-blower Julian Assange a ‘dead man walking.’
Child prostitutes visiting the Whitehouse is old news. On 29 June 1989, the front page of the Washington Times read:
HOMOSEXUAL PROSTITUTION INQUIRY ENSNARES VIPs WITH REAGAN, BUSH: ‘CALL BOYS’ TOOK MIDNIGHT TOUR OF WHITE HOUS
The sensational headline related to the Franklin Scandal in Omaha Nebraska that David Shurter was a victim of and witness to. Shurter is also a victim of my perpetrator Lt. Col. Michael Aquino who was implicated in Franklin plus the Presidio and McMartin preschool scandals in which children were sexually and ritually abused
Pedogate whistle-blowers claimed, children trafficked to Washington DC were held in transit cellars within local businesses including a restaurant where an ‘entertainer’ was filmed boasting about raping and killing kids. Clean FBI and NYPD officers apparently made multiple attempts to charge Hillary Clinton and other VIP members of the trafficking ring, but their efforts were thwarted by those in the chain of command above them. One of the attempted charges related to a video of Hillary Clinton and her bisexual lover Huma Aberdeen (wife of pedophile Anthony Weiner) conducting a Luciferian ritual in which they skinned the face off a live young girl. The dissemination of this video was the said reason behind YouTube’s global shutdown that occurred in late 2018 while I was online. Someone later posted forensic photos of the skinned victim on my Twitter feed which I automatically viewed.
Mainstream media giants launched a cover-up campaign against the leaked Podesta emails and related crimes, to muddy the waters and leave the general public confused about the truth. The likes of CNN (founded by my pedophile rapist Ted Turner) successfully drew the public’s attention from what was contained in the emails, to who might have leaked them and spread ‘fake news.’ The pedophiles coined the term ‘fake news’ in reaction to the publication of Podesta’s emails. Clinton herself never addressed or denied the email contents. The emails were said to have been leaked by US Intelligence community staff opposed to organised pedophilia. Mainstream journalists whose reports were consistent with this version of events were promptly fired. Further, over 100 Clinton staff and associates met untimely deaths, in quick succession, just like the many witnesses to JFK’s assassination, and witnesses to Kevin Spacey’s sexual assaults. Pedogate was discredited as ‘fake news’ despite NBC’s (11 June 2013) televised report regarding Hillary Clinton using her position as US Secretary of State to cease an investigation into child sex trafficking within the State Department.
Despite the mainstream media blackout, Pedogate reached the public via social media. YouTube featured interviews with credible witnesses who testified to the existence of an international child sex trafficking operation involving US politicians and the CIA. That was when I noticed retired NYPD Detective James Rothstein. Pedogate, he explained in interview, was the same VIP pedophile network he investigated for 35 years. The perpetrators were doing everything in their power to shut the Pedogate story down, Rothstein observed. He predicted the perpetrators would successfully bury it just like every other time their network was almost exposed, including the Franklin, Presidio, and McMartin scandals.
Rothstein explained that the NYPD was no ordinary state police force, but a leading investigative agency with national and international offices. Back in 1966, Rothstein became the first police detective assigned to investigate the prostitution industry. Almost immediately he discovered an underground sexual blackmail operation that compromised politicians with child prostitutes. ‘Human Compromise’ is what he labelled the honey-trap process. Rothstein and his colleagues found that approximately 70 percent of top US Government leaders were compromised in this way. Rothstein said, the CIA conducted the human compromise operation, while the FBI was tasked with covering up any leaks.
The CIA trafficked the kids, the FBI covered their tracks
James Rothstein said he was alerted to an identical VIP pedophile ring operating in the UK when Scotland Yard consulted him regarding the Profumo Affair. UK agents visited Rothstein in New York to extract anything he knew about British politicians and other VIPs having sex with child prostitutes. Britain were in damage control, tying up loose ends, covering up the true pedophile nature of the Profumo Affair. Here is my email exchange with Rothstein concerning this incident:
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From: Fiona Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2018 6:24 PM To: Jim Subject: CIA Hollywood pedophiles being exposed Incidentally, someone criticised my writing saying the Profumo Affair was 1963 and before your appointment, and so you are a disinfo agent. Obviously I don’t believe that - but can you tell me what to say in your defence regarding those dates? _________________________________________________
Subject: RE: CIA Hollywood pedophiles being exposed
From: Jim
Date: Monday, July 30, 2018 at 10:41 AM
To: Fiona
That is correct. They did not do the follow up until a number of years later after the Profumo case broke. My source in the business knew the whole story.
They were making sure that there were no other connection to the operation we had in New York. Here is a copy of the actual report.
The part they were looking for was from 1963.
In the late 60’s, Rothstein is called to attend a meeting with a number of New York Police Department officials and two agents from Scotland Yard at a high-end restaurant on the Upper East Side. (They picked up the tab). Scotland Yard was following up on the Profumo Scandal in 1963. They were trying to find out if their national security had been compromised. Profumo had used the services of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies. The two girls had also been involved with a Russian, Yevgeny Ivanov. The connection in New York was that Keeler and Davies had been associated with a high-level prostitution ring operating out of an apartment on Fifty Sixth Street and Second Avenue. Rothstein calls on Peggy to determine who was operating the ring and what was going on at the prostitution operation on 56 St. and 2nd Ave. Rothstein conducted an in-depth investigation using Peggy’s information and determined that the association between Keeler, Davies, and the Madam of the Prostitution House on 56 St. and 2 Ave. were in fact true. The information Rothstein gleaned from the investigation verified that the location was being used to set-up and compromise victims. Rothstein believes it is a sanctioned State of the Art, High-End human intelligence and human compromise operation.
The late 60’s was 68-69. I became a cop in 1965 Feb. 15.
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Rothstein and his law enforcement associates realised the international pedophile rings were all connected. He said the VIP members met at various world locations where each destination catered for a different type of degenerate sexual proclivity, including ‘satanic-themed’ abuse.
Rothstein said he and his colleagues encountered fierce resistance to the investigation and prosecution of members of the child trafficking operation. His journalist contacts at the New York Times and Washington Post could not get stories about the VIP ring printed. All police, FBI, customs and IRS officers who pursued the VIP pedophile network above street level had their careers subsequently destroyed. Rothstein’s attempts to arrest key perpetrators were continually thwarted. For example, the time he served the head of the CIA’s human compromise operation, Tippy Richardson. According to pedophile turned-police-informant Ben Rose, in November 1971, Tippy Richardson, businessman Leonard Stewart (from OPEC, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) and a surgeon named Dr Chesky, raped and murdered three boys aged 14 to 15 years in Ben Rose’s apartment on East 64th Street in New York City. The New York State Select Committee on Crime subsequently served subpoenas on both Tippy Richardson and Leonard Stewart. When served, Tippy Richardson said that because he worked for the CIA the subpoena would be withdrawn under the National Security Act by the time Rothstein and his colleague returned to their offices. That is precisely what occurred.
In 1972, Rothstein arrested one of the five Watergate burglars, CIA operative Frank Sturgis. During a subsequent two-hour interrogation, Rothstein discovered the truth about Watergate (plus Sturgis’ and the CIA’s involvement in the Bay of Pigs incident, and the related assassination of JFK). Sturgis told Rothstein, the Watergate burglars sought something they nicknamed ‘The Book’ which listed the Democratic and Republican politicians who accessed child prostitutes, their sexual proclivities, the amounts they paid to rape kids, etc.
The official Watergate explanation is that the Liberals broke into Democratic National Committee Headquarters to obtain information about their election strategies. People who lived through Watergate typically comment with a frown, ‘That never made sense.’ Rothstein’s experiences make better sense of why Nixon conspired to quash the Watergate investigation, why he suggested the investigation posed a threat to national security, why his personal secretary destroyed Oval Office tape recordings after they were subpoenaed, why chief CIA psychologist John W. Gittinger was called to testify at the congressional committee that investigated Watergate, 1011 and why Nixon’s own Vice President issued a pardon which protected Nixon from prosecution for any crimes he had ‘committed or may have committed or taken part in’ as President. If Nixon’s crimes included pedophilia, that would make perfect sense.
I am confident President Richard Nixon and his good buddy ‘the Reverend’ Billy Graham were named in the Watergate pedophile records. I am confident of this because I was sex trafficked by CIA head psychologist John W. Gittinger to both men as a young child.
I spoke with James Rothstein on 13 April 2018, 9:48 am and asked him whether he knew, or had heard, that Nixon was a pedophile. ‘No, I did not,’ he quipped with surprise and interest. I next asked him whether he knew about Billy Graham being a pedophile. At this, Rothstein chortled and responded confidently, ‘Oh, we heard lots about that!’
CIA Billy Graham
I published a draft of this Watergate was Pedogate chapter on my blog in 2018. It proved popular. ‘Watergate was Pedogate is the best thing I ever read,’ one reader commented. My article caused great controversy, particularly among Southern Baptist Billy Graham worshippers who told me I was the talk of many a Sunday table. Photographs published by Billy’s son Franklin Graham on social media showing him proudly dining on what he described as ‘killer doughnuts’ at Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland added weight to my allegation, that Billy Graham was a multi-generational Luciferian pedophile. Many concluded that Franklin Graham posted his tweet as a cult threat against me, in direct response to my articles exposing his Freemason father. Conservative Christians found it inappropriate for an evangelical preacher to dine at an establishment that sold doughnuts decorated with encircled pentagrams and which featured Jesus Christ crucified on a penis and testicle shaped doughnut called ‘Cock-N-Balls.’ My articles caused one elderly Baptist to cut the Billy Graham Foundation from her will.
The CIA intervened to protect their agent Billy Graham.12 One of my key perpetrators, US Army Psychological Operations expert Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, weighed in on an orchestrated international effort to discredit me. Another perpetrator, Bond University lecturer Katarina Fritzon, responded to my allegations on official Bond University letterhead. The written responses of my two perpetrators mirrored each other in their accusation I was a crazy fantasist. Yet people typically ignore crazy fantasists. People respond to someone who is swaying public opinion and who threatens to expose their cult involvement. Only the most desperate and dumb perpetrators respond personally in writing. After this umpteenth attack on my credibility failed, the fool who published both responses subsequently begged social media sharers to delete Luciferian priest Michael Aquino’s email to him, before he disappeared from the internet.
Team Aquino’s angle was to focus on whether Rothstein had personally investigated Billy Graham, and they staged a phone interview with the retired detective. I subsequently phoned Rothstein’s home. His wife, who had warmly welcomed Aquino’s lackey, was cold and short with me. I phoned Rothstein’s mobile. ‘How did you get this number?!’ Rothstein asked defensively. It was the same number Aquino’s lackey called him on.
‘It’s plastered all over the internet,’ I responded. ‘You were tricked. A recording of your conversation with Aquino’s lackey is everywhere.’
‘I thought what you’re doing is admirable,’ he lamented.
‘Can’t you just tell people an old man got it wrong?’ No, I could not.
To clarify, Rothstein never told me he personally worked on an investigation into Billy Graham. Rothstein spoke of Billy Graham in the context of having heard about the preacher’s pedophile antics from somewhere within his network of associates whose job it was to investigate VIP pedophile rings. We never discussed the source of this information, or whether it came from his own NYPD organisation, or from external agencies like the FBI, or his journalist contacts. He simply immediately and emphatically asserted to me that he and his colleagues ‘heard lots’ about Billy Graham’s pedophile involvement
I am not the first to publicly accuse Billy Graham of being a CIA agent, Freemason, and rapist. MK-ULTRA victim Kathleen Sullivan, who wrote Unshackled: A Survivor's Story of Mind Control, 13 said he raped her. Former high-ranking Freemason James Shaw described how 33⁰ Freemason Billy Graham was present at his own 33⁰ initiation ritual.14 Time magazine reported, 15 the CIA funded Billy Graham’s 1967 Latin American crusade under a CIA cut-out, the US National Student Association, which also financed the National Council of Churches, Harvard Law School, and AFL-CIO affiliates.16 The New York Times picked up the story.17
The Rothstein incident is a fine example of the tactics employed by CIA paid social media trolls. They search hard for inconsistencies and try to discredit and dismiss my entire testimony based on one small detail. I spent five years on the internet disproving every accusation. Every time I successfully defended myself, the CIA paid internet trolls ignored their defeat and moved directly onto their next attempt. That is a CIA tactic and the same thing a courtroom lawyer is trained to do. These CIA social media trolls are trained in public persuasion tactics based on Social Psychology, Crowd Psychology, and Bystander Effects. The CIA know that most people do not bother researching facts for themselves. Instead they would come to me and demand an answer to every false accusation, no matter how absurd. That is another reason I ditched social media: people’s apathy. To most I became a source of entertainment, with people watching how I fared in the attacks, like Romans watching Christians being fed to lions in the colosseum. The CIA will do the same with this book, focus on discrediting my entire 160,000+ words with one stupid point that I do not clarify sufficiently.
James Rothstein told me that during his investigations he became aware of an identical child sex trafficking ring in Australia which involved our Prime Ministers. Regarding this matter, Rothstein did clarify that he had not directly investigated the Australian pedophiles himself, but that an Australian intelligence officer named Peter Osborne knew the details. Rothstein confirmed that Australian politicians and other VIPs attended international child brothels.
The Black Network
Dutch banker Ronald Bernard also surfaced in the wake of the Pedogate scandal to shed further light on the people and system behind the international child trafficking network. During a series of interviews with a woman named Irma Schiffers, Bernard explained how he worked in international finance and high-end money laundering for 12 years. In that role, he discovered that political power does not reside with publicly elected representatives, but with the world’s 8,000 to 8,500 wealthiest individuals who exercise power behind the scenes and who routinely manipulate the media. These elites, Bernard said, sit at the top of a power structure that resembles a pyramid:
World Banking Power Structure
8,000 - 8,500 wealthiest individuals
Bank for International Settlements (BIS)
IMF (International Monetary Fund) + World Bank Central Banks
Multinational companies
Countries’ governments
Ronald Bernard described the Central Banks as ‘illegally created private banks’ which oversee the commercial banking system of their respective countries. He said the wealthiest 8,000 to 8,500 people created the BIS in 1930. Since the world’s richest individuals are too young to have helped establish the BIS 88 years ago, he must mean banking dynasties like the Rothschilds.
Dope Inc. (1978)
In a chapter called Banking and the World’s Biggest Business, the book Dope Inc. (1978) lists nine family dynasties responsible for the modern drug industry which ‘…is run as a single integrated world operation, from the opium poppy to the nickel bag of heroin sold on an inner-city corner.’ 18
The names of the families and institutions are known to the history student: Matheson, Keswick, Swire, Dent, Baring, and Rothschild; Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Chartered Bank, the Peninsular and Orient Steam Navigation Company [P&O]. Britain’s array of intelligence fronts ran a worldwide assassination bureau, operating through occult secret societies: The Order of Zion, Mazzini’s Mafia, the ‘Triads’ or Societies of Heaven in China.19 …
We will then take a grand tour through the Anglo-Dutch offshore banking centres, watching money being laundered through Basel, Liechtenstein, Tel Aviv, and the Bahamas; tracing it carefully as it changes ownership from the mob, to the Bronfmans, to British banks, to the Israeli Mossad — finally ending up in dummy corporations to finance international terrorism and a privately owned worldwide assassination bureau. 20
The drug industry is run as a single integrated world operation.
Dutch Origins. Ronald Bernard said the financial hierarchy he worked for originated in Holland. The Dope Inc. (1978) authors agree. The British Crown employed the Hofjuden (‘Court Jews’) to financially manage their drug operation. These Royal bankers migrated from Amsterdam to Britain after the 1688 Revolution during which Holland’s leader conquered England and was crowned King William III. Previously, the bankers participated in the Dutch East India Company's first opium trade expeditions, collaborated for centuries with the British Jesuits, and participated in the Jesuit Inquisition. The Royal bankers were rewarded with Royal bloodline wives. These bankers, including the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Oppenheimers and Schroeders became Hitler’s main financial backers. The British Royal family are of German descent and changed their family name from German-sounding House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to English-sounding House of Windsor in 1917. Their Nazi sympathies were demonstrated in the 1933 film footage of future King Edward VIII teaching the ‘heil Hitler’ arm salute to young Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and their mother. In October 1937, abdicated Edward visited Nazi Germany where he met Hitler, dined with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, and toured a concentration camp.
The Royal bankers coordinated the laundering of drug money via offshore unregulated banks including Britain’s island colonies. Hong Kong was established as the centre of the global drug trade. The British Crown created the P&O shipping line specifically to transport the drugs, plus the HSBC bank to launder the opium proceeds. A portion of the drug money was laundered via ‘legitimate’ cash businesses like hotels, restaurants, gambling establishments, while some was channelled into blood diamonds, gold and art.
The Royal Family created P&O to traffic drugs, & HSBC to launder drug money
The Hofjuden sponsored select families to run the criminal underworld and its front organizations. These families committed crimes of trafficking, extortion and murder. The Bronfman Rothschild finance company is a prime example of this arrangement. The Canadian heirs to the Seagram liquor company were originally known as the ‘Bronfman Gang.’ They made their initial fortune boot-legging alcohol and operating prostitution brothels during prohibition, followed by trafficking cocaine and heroin.
Nothing has Changed
Dope Inc. (1978) named prominent families involved in the drug trade, including the Astor, Bundy, DuPont, Freeman, Kennedy, Li, Rockefeller, Rothschild, and Russell dynasties. Fritz Springmeier added Bronfman, Cabot, Shaw, Bacon, Perkins, and Morgan to the list. He aid all of these were Luciferian bloodlines. The same families are still trafficking drugs and children, as recent events indicate:
- In April 2019, Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman pleaded guilty to her role in a sex trafficking operation called NXVIM. Her sister and co-financer Sara Bronfman was implicated but avoided charges.
- In June 2019, US officials seized a cargo ship owned by J.P. Morgan Chase which was trafficking 20 tons of cocaine worth $1.3 billion.
NXIVM is MK-ULTRA
In the late 1990s, Amway salesman Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman founded NXIVM. Raniere, who attended a Luciferian Rudolph Steiner school, modelled NXIVM on Scientology. Salzman was trained in NLP by Richard Bandler (MK-ULTRA perpetrator), and in hypnosis by Herbert Spiegel (US Army hypnotist, and MK-ULTRA researcher at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, who wrote the foreword to the MK-ULTRA classic, The Control of Candy Jones).
The Bronfman sisters financed NXIVM and its subsidiaries including the non-profit Ethical Science Foundation which came under state Attorney General investigation in 2017 for performing brain-activity and other human behavioural studies. Medical doctor Brandon B. Porter conducted MK-ULTRA style ‘Human Fright Experiments’ in which he hooked over 100 victims to an EEG and recorded their reaction to surprise screenings of snuff films:
…an actual video of the horrific and brutal murders and dismemberment of four women by machetes; and violent film clips, including a male African American being viciously stomped by a Nazi; a conscious male being forced to eat a portion of his own brain matter; and a graphic gang rape.21
The New York State Office of Professional Medical Conduct initially determined Dr Porter’s behaviour did not constitute medical misconduct. They caved to pressure following the high profile NXIVM case.
Back in 2013, Keith Raniere patented a device designed to measure victims’ sensory responses to watching snuff films. He labelled this, ‘Determination of whether a Luciferian can be rehabilitated.’ Women who were not overtly traumatised by the images were considered suitable recruits and physically branded like cattle. Their numbness at watching snuff films indicated their passivity to, and suitability for, sex trafficking.
The mainstream media ignored the crux of the story, that NXVIM was a front for CIA child sex trafficking.
NXVIM leader Raniere and his sidekick Allison Mack were originally charged with child sex trafficking. In 2019 the couple were additionally charged with child pornography. The pending counts filed on 19 April 2018 read:
1. Sex trafficking of children by force, fraud, or coercion.
2. Conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of children by force, fraud, or coercion.
3. Attempt to establish peonage, slavery, involuntary servitude, human trafficking.
Adding weight to NXVIM posing as a ‘legitimate’ front organisation for child trafficking, Clare Bronfman sponsored a NXVIM subsidiary called Rainbow Cultural Garden which operated numerous international childcare centres located in the USA, UK, Ireland, Guatemala, Spain and Mexico. Bronfman also purchased an island in Fiji, a notorious child trafficking hub. The NXVIM court case revealed the Mexican government, including their President, were involved in the operation, vindicating my five-month 2018 online campaign to expose the Arizona/Mexican border as the main human trafficking land route involving Tuscon Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, his senior police staff who were previously implicated in child trafficking in California, and a minion of NSA / FBI informants with Luciferian cult connections. Isaac Kappy who helped me expose this operation subsequently died under suspicious circumstances in Arizona near an NSA base immediately after he reached out for help to the Clinton and CIA-linked trained assassin who hid the discovery of child trafficking camps in the Tuscon desert.
NXIVM bore the hallmarks of a CIA human trafficking and compromise operation. The cult sex trafficked children and adults, targeted influential people including entertainers, and owned over 60 related companies including a video department called Moving Pixels. Connections were detected between NXIVM and human trafficking mob bosses Bill and Hillary Clinton:
- Texts exist between Keith Raniere and Hillary Clinton. - In the 1990s, Bill Clinton asked Keith Raniere for money because he was doing business in Arkansas. When Raniere refused, the state Attorney General targeted his operation for closure. Consequently, Raniere’s new NXIVM operation made illegal campaign contributions to the Clintons. This information was revealed during Mark Vincente’s testimony during the NXVIM trial (12 May 2019).
The Octopus
Dope Inc. described the same criminal system as Ronald Bernard who said his own laundering operation dealt with governments, multinationals, terrorist organisations, and secret service agencies. Intelligence agencies like the CIA, MI6 and Mossad do not serve and protect a people or country as the public expect, he explained, but are all criminal organizations that trade in drugs, weapons, and children. The CIA functions as a private police force for the elite. According to Bernard, the wealthy elite control their employees through compromise and blackmail – just as James Rothstein described.
There must have been some truth to the 1978 content of Dope Inc. because after its publication the HSBC lost its licence to operate in the USA. Further, the 1978 book inspired law enforcement officials to swap their assumption that drug trafficking consisted of pockets of independent criminal activity, for understanding the drug industry as a global network coordinated by the CIA, with proceeds laundered through banks and funnelled into the CIA’s covert terrorist operations.
All intelligence agencies are privately owned criminal organizations
Dope Inc. and Ronald Bernard’s testimony are consistent with the 1972 Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal and the findings of reporter Danny Casalaro who was ‘suicided’ while investigating the same secret syndicate. The Manhattan District Attorney who closed BCCI’s USA branch announced that 16 witnesses died while investigating the BCCI’s involvement in covert CIA operations, arms smuggling to Iraq, money laundering, and child prostitution. Danny Casalaro labelled the system The Octopus and described it as follows:
They’re not government officials but their tentacles can reach into any part of the government in almost any country including legitimate and rogue spy networks. They are not notable industrialists, but they can pull the strings of the oil and banking empires at will. They are not known criminals, but they successfully penetrated all factions of organized crime including the Mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, the secret Chinese Triads, and the terrorist underground. 22
Casalaro linked The Octopus to people, places, and activities consistent with my experience. His notes and phone records referenced drug trafficking, money laundering, Mossad, CIA, shellfish-based bioweapons, genetic engineering, Nicaragua, Watergate, Australia’s Nugent-Hand Bank, Pine Gap, MJ-12, and Area 51.23 This bizarre combination of diverse and seemingly unrelated research topics only makes sense within the context of witness testimonies like mine. I can pull together every single one of those topics and explain their solid relationship.
The best way to understand the global child trafficking industry is to trace the history of the drug trafficking industry. As you read Dope Inc. cross out the word ‘drugs’ and replace it with the word ‘kids’ to gain a picture of the child trafficking network that traded me. Like the drug trade, the child sex trafficking industry is run as a single integrated world operation. At the top sit the wealthy elite who maintain control by ensuring only blackmailed, compromised politicians, military brass and government officials occupy leadership. The secret services, including ASIO, MI6 and the CIA coordinate the child trafficking and human compromise operation, receive the victims procured via the little men, modify the behaviour of child victims until they become suitable assets, and transport the trained victims nationally and internationally to service VIP pedophiles
Child trafficking is run as a single integrated world operation coordinated by the CIA
Operation Mockingbird: In 1977, Watergate investigative journalist Carl Bernstein said the CIA had recruited over 400 American journalists:
Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.24
This CIA operation was called Mockingbird. Australia and the UK have their own network of Mockingbird journalists which sprung to the defence of Westminster VIP pedophiles.
PIE
In 1971 an Adelaide barrister from the Communist Party of Australia created the precursor to what later became the Pedophile Information Exchange. This lawyer was the late ELLIOT JOHNSON. The Pedophile Information Exchange was formed from earlier pedophile groups such as the Lewis Carroll Collectors Guild and the (homosexual) Peter Pan Club. Another founder of this organization (from the Peter Pan Club) was FRANK HOUSTON who also founded the pseudo-church The Assembly of God. Houston was pastor of the Surrey Hills Christian Centre which later morphed into Hillsong Church. Houston was an organizer for the Peter Pan Club when he was contacted by Elliot Johnson and asked to assist in forming a ‘united front’ for organized pedophilia. This resulted in the formation of the Pedophile Information Exchange in February 1973. This organization was then exported to the United Kingdom.
The above is an excerpt from correspondence I received in 2017. PIE (Pedophile Information Exchange) campaigned for the social and legal acceptance of pedophilia:
We want to dispel the myths connected with paedophilia, and show that most pedophiles desire gentle, loving, and mutually pleasurable relationships. We believe it is inhumane to children to outlaw their sexuality and we support moves to lower the age of consent.25
PIE proposed reducing the age of consent to age 4 years. Their motto was, ‘Sex before eight - before it’s too late.’ PIE produced a magazine, Understanding Paedophilia which contained articles written by psychologists. PIE was affiliated with the UK National Council for Civil Liberties and backed by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. 26 The UK government gave PIE grants totalling at least £70,000 via the Home Office between 1977 and 1980.27 PIE membership exceeded 1,000 by the early 1980s to include judges, politicians, 28 scoutmasters, headteachers, diplomats, aristocrats, intelligence agents, and child protection experts. Notable PIE members were:
- Prime Minister Edward Heath (regularly attended PIE meetings in Westminster). 29
- Richard Maurice Clive Bigham (son of Viscount Mersey, convicted of raping sisters aged six and 10). 30
- Sir Peter Hayman (Senior Diplomat, British High Commissioner to Canada, Foreign Office Minister. In 1981, MP Geoffrey Dickens used Parliamentary privilege to expose information that Thatcher had suppressed: Hayman sent pornographic material through the post. Dickens consequently received death threats and was burgled). 31
- Geoffrey Arthur Prime (British Intelligence Officer, Soviet spy, convicted in 1982 of raping three girls). 32 33
- Peter Righton (PIE founder, UK’s most senior child social worker, scapegoat for entire VIP network).
- Charles Napier (PIE treasurer, schoolteacher).
Moral Panic
Peter Righton was charged and cautioned for raping a boy in 1960. In a 1981 publication, Perspectives on Paedophilia, Righton attacked the ‘moral panic’ over pedophilia, and said with ‘the child’s willing compliance…the sex is unlikely to do much harm.’ The UK’s top social worker and child protection expert, Righton served as Director of the National Children’s Bureau charity, Director of the National Institute for Social Work, and consultant for the National Children’s Bureau. In 1992, Peter Righton was convicted of possessing hard core child abuse porn obtained from Amsterdam. Police also found a diary containing ‘scores of boys’ whom investigators believed Righton had sexually abused. At the time of his arrest, Righton lived with his gay pedophile partner at the 2,500-acre estate of Lord John and Leslie Henniker-Major which operated as ‘an educational and recreational centre for children.’ London Borough of Islington sent children to the Henniker estate under a scheme called The Islington Suffolk Project. Hundreds of Islington children holidayed at the Henniker estate since the 1970s. Islington was implicated in child trafficking. Jimmy Savile raped kids on Islington where 14 investigations revealed pedophiles operated all 24 children’s homes.34 The entire island was complicit in the abuse, such that victims refused to testify to internal investigators who ‘lost’ all files documenting child abuse on Islington.
Operation Fairbank was established in 2012 to investigate allegations against Peter Righton and his connections. During the 1992 raids on Righton, police found 25 years of correspondence between Righton and pedophiles in Britain and around the world.35 Police found a letter from Charles Napier to Righton boasting of his life in Cairo as a British Council teacher, how Cairo was ‘full of boys, 98 per cent of them available,’ and how Napier could send child pornography to Britain in diplomatic bags.36 Charles Napier fled England for Cairo in 1972 after being banned from teaching in the UK for indecently assault pupils at a Surrey school. In 1995, Charles Napier was convicted of the historical rape of a boy. Police evidence included letters exchanged between Napier and Righton about the availability of boys in Sweden, plus a 1978 film showing Napier and Righton with boys in Sweden.
Elm Guest House
Operation Fernbridge was an Operation Fairbank offshoot. It focused on, ‘Elm Guest House, south-west London, a gay brothel where VIP pedophiles preyed on young boys supplied from local care homes.’37 Rent boy candidates were identified from school magazine photos and forced into foster care by government social workers like Peter Righton. Multiple boy brothel victims identified VIP Elm Guest House clients including politicians, police, Royal family employees, British Intelligence, military, and pop stars. Cliff Richards obtained a high court injunction to prevent the media naming him as an Elm Guest House client codenamed ‘Kitty.’ The media instead named Cliff Richards for sexually assaulting a boy at Billy Graham’s 1985 Crusade in Sheffield, forcing him to relocate to pedophile-friendly Portugal (where Madeleine McCain disappeared).
Multiple victims named Prime Minister Edward Heath and Home Secretary Leon Brittan as Elm Guest House clients. In November 1983, Geoffrey Dickens MP gave Leon Brittan a ‘massive’ dossier on child abuse containing specific allegations about a link between PIE and Buckingham Palace staff, Foreign Office staff, and the civil service. Dickens gave Brittan a second dossier in 1984 alleging child abuse in a children’s home and naming prominent pedophiles including a BBC TV executive. Leon Brittan investigated nothing – because he was one of them.
Spartacus
Elm Guest House ran an advertisement in the Spartacus International Gay Guide pedophile magazine which offered a ‘10% Discount to Spartacus Club members.’ According to Australian police detectives, ‘Spartacus’ was codename for an international underground pedophile network.38 Spartacus Club, part of the British-registered Spartacus International, was run by pedophile Catholic priest John Stamford, a PIE activist who fled the UK for Amsterdam where he published and managed the German Spartacus International Gay Guide. The magazine functioned as a shopping catalogue / tourist guidebook for international pedophiles who could arrange to meet up with the children advertised in the magazine. The Spartacus International Gay Guide was distributed to pedophiles travelling to ‘Europe, Mediterranean, America, Africa, Asia, Australasia, USSR.’
Clarence Osborne
Brisbane court stenographer Clarence Henry Howard-Osborne was Australia’s contact point for senior PIE figures including John Stamford.39 Osborne took photos of Brisbane children that appeared in German and English pedophile magazines including Spartacus International Gay Guide. Clarence Osborne organised for international pedophile tourists to meet up with Brisbane children whose photographs he had placed in the Spartacus International Gay Guide.
In 1973, the Public Service Board conducted two secret inquiries into Clarence Osborne. Resultingly, Gough Whitlam’s ALP government transferred Clarence Osborne to the Hansard bureau at Parliament House in Canberra. (I was trafficked to a pedophile party held inside Parliament House during Clarence Osborne’s placement there.) Clarence Osborne committed suicide in 1979 after police raided his home:
[Police] discovered thousands of pictures of naked children, hundreds of hours of tape-recorded conversations with boys and a meticulously organised filing cabinet filled with index cards bearing the details of his victims, from their names, ages and addresses, to their physical measurements. It was later estimated that Osborne had been involved with more than 2500 under-aged males over a 20-year period… Incredibly, Osborne and his voluminous files were never thoroughly investigated by police. According to officers who viewed the Osborne material at the time, the names on the index cards, so dutifully recorded by Osborne, were not only those of the boys he had seduced, but adults – members of the judiciary, the legal profession, politicians, academics, and even police officers – with sexual interests in children. One former officer said the Osborne material was enough ‘to bring down the [then Queensland] government overnight.’ 40
Osborn shared his pedophile materials with Australia’s leading criminologist and ABC Radio regular Paul Wilson who wrote a book defending Clarence Osborne. 41 At the University of Queensland during the 1980s, Paul Wilson organised a pro-pedophilia conference and showed a child porn snuff film to his psychology class. Bond University published Paul Wilson’s pro-pedophile articles on their website, until Wilson was charged with historical child sexual assault.
By the early 1980s the Osborne case had been all but forgotten, and many of the diminutive stenographer’s secrets were presumed lost with him. Except a retired Queensland police officer with a conscience and a phenomenal memory, who wanted to pursue Osborne at the time – and was warned off by senior officers, and who received a death threat after he pushed the pedophile investigation too far – only to be drummed out of the force, never forgot the case. And in breaking his silence, he would link Osborne to an international pedophile ring, and the child abuse scandal currently rocking Westminster in the UK.42
Jimmy Savile, who associated closely with prime ministers Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, was linked to the PIE child trafficking operation. Initial allegations against Saville were satanic ritual abuse in nature, but the press downgraded this to a ‘plain vanilla’ story. Pro-pedophile mouthpiece The Telegraph led the propaganda charge with quotes like: ‘Satanic ritual abuse does not exist, it’s like alien abduction.’43 The quoted female barrister advocated for lowering the age of consent to 13, not charging pedophiles with historical crimes because it was ‘too late.’ She employed the term ‘moral panic’ to dismiss victim testimony. Quoting a female pedophile defender is effective because the public do not realise how many females, including barristers, are involved in Luciferian pedophile cults.
The ‘plain vanilla’ account pushed by UK media involved 13 police stations which gathered reports from 589 victims, 450 of whom claimed abuse by Savile. The abuse implicated the BBC and 32 government hospitals. A 2014 National Health Service report concluded, Savile raped public hospital patients over several decades, including children, adults, and dead bodies, with the knowledge and support of government authorities. Nurses felt so helpless to stop Savile, they warned hospitalised children to feign sleep to avoid Savile raping them during his late-night ward rounds. Savile even assaulted hospital staff and visitors. Further, politicians and civil servants appointed unqualified Jimmy Savile to run Broadmoor psychiatric unit where he boldly assaulted staff, raped patients, and invited high profile associates to watch women shower. To date the British Government has failed to explain how one grub wielded such influence and terror without the backing of Westminster pedophiles.
Jimmy Savile was implicated in the abuse of children at tax/pedophile haven Jersey Island 44 where residents’ front yards proudly display statues of very young children performing oral sex on erect penises, plus a 12-foot statue of Satan as pedophile Pan. The entire island population including police, judiciary, social services and journalists were complicit to the ritual rape, torture and murder of children at the island’s children’s home, Hart de la Garenne, where police found buried remains of multiple children, plus a kill room featuring shackles, a blood-stained concrete tub, lime bath, and incinerator full of children’s dismembered body parts. Senior police, including Scotland Yard, blocked investigations of most of the 151 perpetrators identified by 192 victims who made 1,776 statements. A few low-level staff were charged, while all VIPs and those accused of satanic ritual abuse, escaped police investigation. Anyone who tried to expose the Luciferian pedophile child trafficking operation were arrested or murdered, including Dyana, sister of Bill Maloney who produced a documentary, Sun, Sea and Satan about the ritual abuse the siblings experienced on Jersey Island.
Prime Minister Edward Heath closely associated with Jimmy Savile whose nephew Guy Marsden testified that ‘Ted’ Heath sexually assault a boy at a London party. Edward Heath was also implicated in the rape and murder of Jersey Island children aboard his yacht.
Silent UK Witnesses
British Intelligence and the BBC went to extreme lengths to plug any leaks regarding the VIP trafficking operation:
- In 1978, the BBC banned pop star ‘Johnny Rotten’ for outing Saville as a pedophile during interview. 45
- In 1996, the British government assassinated a Dunblane teacher and her entire primary school class following disclosures the children were being sex trafficked to the elite Westminster pedophile ring. Websites exposing the truth of the Dunblane Massacre were wiped off the internet.
- In 1999, journalist Jill Dando was gunned down in a professional hit to stop her exposing the same VIP pedophile network on the BBC Crimewatch television program she hosted.
Owing to the internet, the truth became more difficult for the UK government to supress. Here is a summary of notable newspaper articles that documented multiple police investigations into thousands of VIP pedophile allegations in the UK.
TORY PAEDO COVER-UP
Jonathan Corke, Tony Bushby & Deborah Sherwood, Daily Star, 28 Oct 2012. - The British Royal Air Force flew rich and powerful European VIPs, including Belgians, to attend London pedophile orgies in the 1980s (via RAF Northolt located outside London). - Numerous boys were sex trafficked to rich and powerful men in the 1980s.
- VIPs paid boy prostitutes to attend pedophile orgies at ‘millionaire properties’ in London and the Home Counties.
- A ‘network’ of boys, including runaways, were prostituted to the orgies.
- A teenage rent boy witness vanished just weeks after speaking to Met detectives.
- The boy named VIP pedophiles including a living Tory Cabinet minister, judges, and senior civil servants.
- Met detectives received multiple pedophile allegations against the Cabinet minister.
- Metropolitan Police ordered detectives to stop investigating the VIP pedophile ring. - A retired detective who worked on the case said: ‘It wasn’t that we ran out of leads, but it reached a point where a warning to stop came. It was a case of ‘get rid of everything, never say a word to anyone. It was made very clear to me that to continue asking questions would jeopardise my career.’
- The Tory Cabinet minister was never arrested. No one was charged over the rent-boy pedophile ring.
- Labor MP Tom Watson said case files from 20 years ago link pedophile Peter Righton to a Prime Minister. Watson knows of evidence linking a second pedophile ring to Parliament and the PM. Watson said the leads were not followed up, and he was contacted by someone claiming the police ‘held a vast quantity of material suggesting Jimmy Savile was a predatory pedophile.’ - Police conducted at least 7 investigations into Savile while he was alive – yet no charges were laid.
- Scotland Yard investigated Savile in the 1980s over claims he attacked a girl in a caravan at London BBC TV Centre.
- Metropolitan Police are currently investigating Jimmy Savile’s assault of 300 victims over 60 years.
MI5 'HELPED MARGARET THATCHER COVER-UP PEDOPHILE TORY MP's ACTIVITIES' NEW DOCUMENT REVEALS
Nick Sommerlad & Jack Blanchard, The Mirror, 22 July 2015.
- A 1985 letter from MI5 head Sir Antony Duff to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher revealed two sources accused an unnamed senior Tory MP of having ‘a penchant for small boys.’
- MI5 told Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong he accepted the MP’s denials of the pedophile allegations, adding: ‘At the present stage... the risks of political embarrassment to the Government is rather greater than the security danger.’
- Pedophile documents link PM Thatcher’s parliamentary secretary Sir Peter Morrison, Home Secretary Leon Brittan, diplomat Sir Peter Hayman, and minister Sir William van Straubenzee. ‘
EDWARD HEATH ABUSED US TOO’ SAY MORE ALLEGED VICTIMS COMING FORWARD
Russell Myers, The Mirror, 4 Aug 2015.
Metropolitan, Wiltshire, Jersey and Kent police forces investigated pedophile allegations against PM Edward Heath.
- The Met Police had been investigating Heath for almost 10 months. - A Scotland Yard inquiry, Operation Midland, investigated Heath as part of a 1970s - 80s VIP pedophile ring.
- Wiltshire Police received ‘a number’ of fresh calls from Heath victims.
- In the 1990s, a brothel keeper threatened to reveal in court that she had evidence PM Heath was a pedophile. Charges against her were dropped.
- The Police force is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission for allegedly failing to investigate the brothel keeper’s evidence.
- The NSPCC [the child abuse charity Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher supported] has also been contacted by people claiming Heath sexually assaulted them.
- A central police operation codenamed Hydrant collated all historical pedophile allegations involving VIPs.
- Heath raped a 12-year-old runaway at his flat in Mayfair, Central London, in 1961. The victim made a detailed statement to lawyers. Social workers called the victim a ‘fantasist’ when he tried to report the rape.
- Another man contacted Kent Police yesterday saying Heath raped him in the 1960s. ‘Detectives are making inquiries and will obtain a full account from the victim.’
- Jersey police said, ‘Heath is one of at least 13 “well known” politicians, celebrities and sports stars being looked at over decades of child abuse’ under Operation Whistle investigations of historical pedophilia.
- Jimmy Savile frequented Jersey care home Haut de la Garenne.
- Jersey Police’s Operation Whistle, launched in 2015, investigated 4 institutions, 45 suspects including 13 VIPs.
The Dutroux Affair
In the 1990s, Catholic Belgium became notorious for the Dutroux Affair, a 1990s child sex trafficking scandal implicating Belgian Royals, politicians, bankers, businessmen, police and lawyers. WikiLeaks dropped a ‘Dutroux dossier’ showing clientele from European countries, plus Morocco and Saudi Arabia, paid to rape trafficked Belgian children. Belgian victim Regina Louf said VIP clientele were secretly filmed without their knowledge as part of a human compromise operation, ‘It was big business - blackmail - there was a lot of money involved.’ 46 Belgian girls were kidnapped, caged, gang raped in pedophile orgies, and murdered for snuff films. They were tortured, ritually sacrificed, suffocating to death in holding cells, wrapped in plastic and buried alive, and killed for sexual pleasure.
Regina Louf was sold to the Belgian trafficking network by her wealthy grandmother, Cecile Beernaert, whose WW2 brothels serviced Nazi troops. Regina described being raped at sex orgies organised by businessman Jean Michel Nihoul who was later convicted of trafficking drugs and people into Belgium. Regina Louf and other Dutroux victims told police they were subjected to satanic ritual abuse and child hunts in which VIPs including Belgium Royalty hunted and murdered children for sport in locations including the grounds of Chimay Castle.
The Belgian government subsequently covered up the true nature of the Dutroux Affair. Evidence disappeared, numerous suspects were never investigated, and over 20 key witnesses were murdered.47 48 One witness was poisoned, and his wife incinerated in her bed.49 No VIPs were charged, and a few low-level scapegoats were prosecuted, including Marc Dutroux and his wife who received lengthy sentences for starving two eight-year-old girls to death in their cellar. RTBF, a government-owned TV station campaigned ‘to prove that Dutroux was an isolated pervert kidnapping girls for himself, that there was no network, that Jean Michel Nihoul was innocent, and Regina Louf was a liar.’50 VIP pedophile mouthpiece The Telegraph supported this angle from the UK. 51
In 1996, a massive 350,000 Belgian citizens protest marched against the VIP child trafficking operation. Belgian fire fighters protested by turning their hoses on the Belgian Parliamentary building. One third of Belgians surnamed Dutroux legally changed their family name. Yet this all this achieved nothing.
Belgian sex trafficking victim Anneke Lucas came forward in 2017 in the wake of Pedogate. Anneke’s mother sold her into sex slavery at age six years. For the next 5.5 years she was raped six hours per week by up to 200 pedophiles including Royalty. Anneke Lucas was subjected to torture, child murder, and satanic ritual abuse. From age six she attended weekly, late-night pedophile orgies held in mansions and castles during which she was ‘used for an S&M show, on a low stage, chained up with an iron dog collar, and made to eat human faeces.’ 52 Anneke said she and the other trafficked children were ‘made to commit violence’ against child victims so they felt too ‘implicated’ to inform police.
UK Prosecutes ‘Fantasist’ Victims for Whistleblowing
The UK’s latest tactic to silence victims of government child trafficking is to prosecute them for reporting the crimes committed against them to the police. Their modus operandi involves the DPP charge the victim with perverting the course of justice, while the government-controlled media slander the victim as a ‘fantasist’ who fabricates witness testimony for the money. The UK government tried this on Ben Fellows, former UK child actor and Westminster sex trafficking victim. Ben Fellows said his agent Sylvia Young solicited him at age 14 years for sexual abuse by Tom Cruise. Fellows was subsequently targeted for false arrest and slander by the media who described the victim as ‘an inventive and sometimes persuasive fantasist.’ In 2015, the UK government unsuccessfully prosecuted Ben Fellows for perverting the course of justice for providing a 2012 police witness statement to Operation Fairbank. 53
Multiple victims who came forward and made police witness statements against elite UK pedophiles including Edward Heath were initially supported as ‘credible and true.’ In 2016, Westminster victim Darren Thornham used Twitter to warn of a coverup operation involving (a) a fake victim being planted to discredit the genuine ones, and (b) a cut-out media company (Exaro News) gathering testimonies from victims who were subsequently falsely arrested and murdered. Darren implicated Australian 60 Minutes journalist Ross Coulthart in an elaborate media rouse. According to Darren’s tweets, police beat him, threatened him with false arrest (for attending a 1992 rave at age 15 years with eight fellow trafficking victims) and threatened to raid and charge him for terror crimes along with victim Kevin Allen (brother of missing victim Martin Allen) whose family were also threatened. The UK media branded Darren a ‘fantasist’ after police charged him in 2016 for making false accusations against VIP pedophiles. Police eventually dropped the charges, according to Darren’s final twitter post:
Darren Press Statement – 17.11.17
The false charge against me, which was downgraded from making hoax claims to wasting police time, has rightly been dropped. I have been subject to a terrifying ordeal of being attacked, stalked and threatened by individuals determined to get even with me for telling the truth about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. The case has clearly shown serious misconduct by Suffolk police officers, who have ignored complex issues surrounding harassment and intimidation of myself. The case was part of an attempt by police and the wider establishment to silence me.
I refute claims that I invented the allegations of child abuse committed by high profile offenders. On many occasions, the media have simply published lies as part of a campaign against me. Some media behaviour has bordered on harassment and bullying of a CSA survivor. I was especially saddened and shocked to see certain people who claim to be CSA survivors on social media, as well as certain journalists, vilify me.
The last nine months since my arrest have been very difficult for me. It has led to my being on the verge of suicide on more than one occasion. It is only the support of people very close to me that I did not ultimately kill myself…
Darren’s press statement inexplicably thanked the Exaro News journalist he criticised in numerous earlier tweets. Was Darren under duress?
Tavistock Psy-Op
In 2019, after the UK government failed to prosecute high profile victims Ben Fellows and Darren Thornham, they made an example of a convicted pedophile who named Prime Minister Edward Heath plus the heads of MI5, MI6 and the Army, in a police witness statement. Nick was sentenced to 18 years prison – a disproportionate sentence compared to the lenience granted to pedophiles – for perverting the course of justice. Social media agents spread the discourse that this action against Nick was justified because he himself is a convicted pedophile. The Telegraph vilified Nick as a ‘fantasist’ who fabricated his witness testimony to get compensation – as though by extension ALL victims of government child trafficking are fantasists. Was this the plant Darren Thornham warned of on Twitter? Nick was used to discredit and bury numerous witness testimonies against PM Edward Heath, including six different people who named Heath to police in SRA accusations. Nick’s prosecution was a Psychological Operation designed to sway public opinion, deter all other government child trafficking victims from making future police statements, and discredit the many Westminster VIP pedophiles reported to police 50 years before Nick’s prosecution. This one successful prosecution does not erase the following 1969 and 1989 police investigations into the sex trafficking of government care children to Westminster pedophiles:
1. 1989 Police Investigation into Wales Boy Home Brothels Scallywag magazine was published between 1991 and 1998. Issue 22 (1994)
contained an article ‘LORD MCALPINE AND THE PEDOPHILE RING’ by Angus James which exposed the Bryn Alyn Community, a private company centred in Wrexham, Wales, which operated 11 children’s residential homes. The Bryn Alyn organisation was a front for a massive international child sex trafficking and pornography business managed by scapegoat John Allen who was eventually convicted of 33 counts of child rape against 19 children. Allen prostituted foster children to VIPs who attended boy brothel houses located all over the UK including London, Manchester, South Shields, Gloucestershire, Wrexham, Brighton, plus Bordeaux, France. He also hired rent boys for members of the Wrexham Golf Club to rape. Allen also operated a child porn empire including a branch in Amsterdam and a Wrexham film studio where foster children were used to make pornography. John Allen’s VIP clients included:
Lord Robert Alistair McAlpine (Treasurer, PM Margaret Thatcher’s Advisor. Formally cautioned in 1965 by Strathclyde police for committing a sexual offence against a child. He sued the media for outing him as a pedophile).
- Gordon Anglesea (Police superintendent and notable Freemason. He sued two national newspapers in 1994 for printing crimes he was eventually convicted for. In 2016, he died six weeks into a 12-year prison sentence for violently raping two boys in the 1980s). 54
- Lord Kenyon (North Wales Police Authority Chair).
- Wyn Roberts (MP for Conway, minister for State at the Welsh Office). - Adam Mar-Jones (son of film critic Justice Jones).
- Sgt. David Morgan.
- PC David Rodgers.
- Michael Portillo (politician).
- Peter Lilly (politician).
- Lord David Steel (politician).
In 1989, Detective Superintendent Ackerley collected over 1,500 witness statements during an internal police inquiry, yet his findings were buried, and key witnesses and investigators were physically assaulted. Alex Siddington (Welsh Coordinator for the National Association of Young people in Care) was beaten and had chemicals sprayed into his eyes. Gordon Anglesea’s rape victim and key witness Steven Messham was beaten twice. The local BBC journalist who investigated the case for 18 months was burgled in retaliation.
2. 1969 Police Investigation into Rochedale Boy Home Brothels
Lord David Steele MP recently admitted to burying child abuse allegations that publicly emerged against politician Sir Cyril Smith in a 1979 Private Eye magazine. 55 In 1969, Lancashire police investigated Cyril Smith’s sexual assault of young boys in Rochedale care homes. The inquiry ended in 1970 when prosecutors falsely concluded they had insufficient evidence to prosecute Cyril Smith. MI5 knew the DPP lied to journalists about their decision not to charge Cyril Smith, but did nothing. 56 In Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith (2014) Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk claimed Cyril Smith was allowed to continue abusing children as young as eight, after 144 victims’ complaints were submitted to authorities. This is not the extent of investigations into Westminster VIPs and UK children homes being used as VIP brothels. I will mention one more high profile due to its international trafficking relevance.
NAMBLA & Arthur C. Clarke
British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 predictive programming film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1961, Julian Huxley’s UNESCO awarded Clarke the Kalinga Prize for popularising science. Clarke is famously quoted as saying, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ More significantly, Arthur C. Clarke was a gay pedophile who pioneered the Sri Lankan child sex tourism industry. The British Royals knighted Clarke just days after Sunday Mirror journalist Graham Johnson revealed Clarke admitted to having solicited young boys for sex. When Clarke subsequently denied this admission, the Sunday Mirror produced Clarke’s taped admission plus a secret document naming Clarke as a pedophile known to members of the NAMBLA (North American Boy Lovers Association) pedophile network.
US detectives, who arrested leaders of the [NAMBLA] association 10 years ago, say Clarke was named by other pedophiles they quizzed during an FBI investigation. The perverts had set up children's homes in Thailand as fronts for their sick activities.
One of its leaders was Jonathan Tampico, 48, a top nuclear scientist who worked for the American Government. He served two-and-a- half years in jail for molesting a boy of 12 and is now on the run with a million-dollar warrant on his head for further porn offences. He told detectives he had stayed at Clarke's home in Colombo and had swapped letters with the author. Another known pedophile, former church minister John Wakefield Cummings, 56, is serving a 24-years-to-life sentence after admitting molesting 17 boys in his care. He told police in Sacremento, California, that Clarke had been contacted at his Sri Lankan home by a pedophile who was on the run from the American authorities. In a sworn statement made to an investigator for Sacremento's district attorney…Wakefield Cummings told how the pervert fled to Sri Lanka where he was able to contact the pedophile community through Clarke. He then fled from Sri Lanka to Indonesia. Detectives contacted a child welfare group to warn them about Clarke's activities.57
Arthur C. Clarke said in the notorious interview: ‘I am all in favour of efforts to stop [pedophilia]. But how do we stop it without interfering with the rights of responsible adults. I think most of the damage comes from the fuss made by hysterical parents afterwards. If the kids don't mind, fair enough.’
In recent years Clarke's name has been linked with two notorious pedophiles, one of whom - a Swiss millionaire - was kicked out of Sri Lanka on the orders of the president for abusing impoverished beach boys. He is now awaiting trial in Zurich accused of sexually abusing up to 1,500 young boys and like Clarke was friends with a lot of Sri Lanka's top politicians, senior policemen and influential government figures. Clarke is said to have attended parties at the tycoon's home. When asked if he had, Clarke replied: ‘I may well have done. I mean the very first man I met here in 1954 was a pedophile and made no bones about it. He was in intelligence in the army, a fantastic guy.’ 58
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch stopped his UK newspaper News of the World from breaking the story that Arthur C. Clarke was a pedophile because he was friends with the pedophile. 59
Coverup Tactics
The UK government employed dirty tactics to cover-up the Westminster pedophile story. Similar tactics were implemented in Belgium, Australia and the USA:
1. Label outspoken victims as liars, fantasists, and/or insane.
2. Frame victims for false arrest for fabricated crimes.
3. Label concern about, and investigation of, pedophilia and ritual abuse crimes
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Tine, Wirral UK, 1 decade ago
Putting politics to one side I also believe Murdoch has far too much power, Tesco is another with too much power I believe they are trying to get into banking now Tesco should stick to what they know best food, these people become too greedy, greedy for power as well as money.