Former ToS Member on Satanic Crime
"I find it entirely reasonable to believe that this is, in fact, occurring."
- Dale Seago
San Francisco Examiner reporter's notes:
Excerpts from Dale Seago [former Temple of Set officer] Interview 10-1-85
I was investigated in December 1981. I was at a Tactical Intelligence
Officers' class at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. A couple of students and a class
leader who was an infantry major went to the school security officer and
complained there was a Devil worshipper in the class. That was me. Later,
with information I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, I was
able to reconstruct everything that happened....
At that time I was a first lieutenant in a military police unit. After
the class ended, I was going to become battalion intelligence officer (S2)
for the 504th Military Police Btn. stationed at the Presidio. Later when I
got my top secret clearance back, I did service as intelligence officer for
the 504th at the Presidio for 18 months before the unit moved to Fort
Lewis, Wash.. ... I also had a counter-intelligence function.
I left the Temple of Set in July 82. I had been out of the Temple for
a little over six months when I took over as btn intelligence officer.
I met Aquino when he was on the faculty of the Armor School at Ft.
Knox, Ky., as a captain. I was a Marine corporal at the time. We met
through the Church of Satan. I had joined the church independently and he
was already a priest. It was the summer of 1971. I was stationed in North
Carolina. The Church of Satan in San Francisco put us in touch with each
other. We wrote to each other at first. When I heard the Church of Satan
(LaVey's group) because I had always been interested in magic and the
occult. And I thought the philosophy expressed in LaVey's Satanic Bible was
the most down-to-earth, practical philosophy I had read.
I left the Marines in 1973 and re-enlisted in the Army Reserves in
1976. I took a three-year active duty-recall tour. I joined a psychological
warfare unit in 1976 at For MacArthur in San Pedro in S. Calif.. He was
still a captain and I was a Spec. 4. Later I went to ROTC for two years and
returned to the same PSOP [psychological operations] unit with Aquino as a
second lieut. For a time, both Aquino and I lived in Santa Barbara.
When Aquino split from the Church of Satan and formed the Temple of Set
in 1975, he was already living in Santa Barbara and working at the PSOP
unit and I had not yet joined the cult. The unit was the 306th
Psychological Operations Btn., which dealt with PSOP on a national policy
level. It researched and analyzed psychological studies for long-range
military objectives. Objectively, Aquino was regarded as incisive,
brilliant and innovative. When I returned to the unit as an officer, I was
a research analysis team leader.
Aquino's memo about Mindwars was generally considered too avant garde
and controversial. The address on the top (referring to Stormtrooper Btn)
was sent to me tongue-in-cheek. It was a private joke between us. But it
was an indication of how his mind works. Frankly, it scared me a little
bit. I was afraid it would focus some undue attention on the Temple.
Aquino was not an intelligence officer, although he had been to some
strategic intelligence courses. Temple of Set members in the military -
William Butch [a former Pittsburgh police officer, employed at the time of
this interview by Cal-State Patrol Service, a private security firm],
currently runs SF group, is a naval reserve officer; Bruce Bibee, former
captain in the PSOP unit at San Pedro is no longer in the military; Capt.
Willie Browning is an intelligence officer who is no longer in the military
(medically retired); and Dennis Mann, a reserve Army major in intelligence.
Q: Did you ever run into people who wanted to do horrible stuff?
We encountered people who either wanted to do some of the nastier
kinds of satanic things, animal sacrifices, perhaps even human sacrifices
and so on, or claimed to have done them....
Q: Can you believe this is happening?
I certainly can. It's such a consistent pattern. In any kind of
investigative or intelligence sort of work, you look for what in the
intelligence business you call significant indicators, certain patterns of
activity. And the more cross-verification you get the more probable it is
that there's some truth to it. And from the material you've shown me, there
may not quite enough evidence to make a court case but just from my
experiences with satanic philosophies and brushing up against people who
have held varying forms of those philosophies and with a historical
perspective going back to the Middle Ages, I find it entirely reasonable to
believe that this is, in fact, occurring.
