-Caveat Lector-
an article from:
Blacklisted News, Secret History . . . From Chicago, '68, to 1984
�1983 Youth International Party Information Service
Bleecker Publishing
POB 392
Canal St. Station
New York, NY 10012
ISBN 0-912873-00-0
-----
Some old news but very interesting.
Om
K
-----
The Great Heroin Coup
Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism
In The Great Heroin Coup, Danish journalist Henrik Kruger begins his original
material with one of the lasting images of The Politics of Heroin In Southeast
Asia-Heroin Kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr. boarding a jet in the summer of 1968
to seek his fortune ...
Trafficante liked what he saw in his Southeast Asian tour. With enough trained
chemists, his Mob could be supplied with heroin at a fraction of what it was
then paying out to the Corsicans. But first the smuggling networks had to be
worked out and the Corsicans had to be eliminated. That was a job for
President Nixon and his White House staff, the BNDD/White House Death Squad,
and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Role of Nixon
Control of this effort was placed in the hands of a relative unknown, a young
and inexperienced newcomer, Egil Krogh.
Egil Krogh was less than satisfied with existing narcotics efforts, especially
those of the CIA, whose intelligence reports, according to [the Federal
Narcotics head] Ingersoll, were decisive for the work of the BNDD. Krogh
wanted the White House instead to handle the BNDD's intelligence work. Nixon's
staff would then decide which drug traffickers to pursue. Krogh's
dissatisfaction was expressed to Hunt, who immediately proposed an Office of
National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI) where all narcotics intelligence
reports would be analyzed and follow-up actions decided.
Hunt told Krogh he could enlist for the office experienced CIA figures,
starting with Lucien Conein at its head. Nixon, however. chose William C.
Sullivan instead. Once second to J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI, Sullivan had
managed Division Five, which investigated espionage, sabotage, and subversion.
He also directed Operation Cointelpro, the bureau's vendetta against dissident
political and cultural groups (such as the Black Panthers), and had been
Nixon's choice to direct the Huston Plan's elaborate surveillance of U.S.
citizens.
Hunt nevertheless found a niche for his friend. Conein was assigned to the
BNDD as a "strategic intelligence officer," and came to control overseas
narcotics intelligence, originally the domain of ONNI, while Sullivan
concentrated on domestic affairs.
The White House now controlled narcotics intelligence at home and abroad. But
that still wasn't enough. Nixon's staff also sought to control enforcement
itself, and that required effective strike forces. In January 1972 the White
House set up the Office For Drug Abuse Law Enforcement
(ODALE) according to a plan conceived by Gordon Liddy. It became the domestic
strike force under Myles Ambrose�whose government career ended with news of
his pleasure trip to the ranch of a Texan indicted for narcotics and gun-
running. ODALE soon became notorious for its record of illegal raids, no-knock
entries into private homes, and beatings of innocent people. Some called it
the American Gestapo.
U.S. narcs; proceeded to wipe out the Corsicans' Turkey/Marseilles/U.S.A.
pipeline, especially in South America, ignoring S.E. Asia.
In Vietnam, meanwhile, in 1969-70, pot-sniffing dogs banished grass from the
barracks and 90% pure heroin suddenly became available. 14-year-old girls
stuffed it in GI's pockets for peanuts. By 71, Congress found that 15% of all
GI's returning from Viet Nam were addicted. Thus, when agents of French
intelligence were compromised bringing in loads welded into Mercedes bodies,
and New York's finest bragged of bagging the French Connection, the only
heroin shortage came from there being four times more junkies on election day
1971, than when Nixon was inaugurated.
Kruger explains:
"That Nixon might have been involved . . . is lent credence by the following
quote from Dan Moldea's ... The Hoffa Wars: "A former Nixon aide, not privy to
the Haig investigation, says that one of his associates in the White House
mentioned to him sometime 'during the impeachment summer, that someone high
up, maybe [White House chief of staff, General Alexander) Haig,' was
interested in Nixon's possible 'organized crime involvements.' That
conversation involved 'a massive payoff' from those in 'Army service club
scandals in Vietnam' during 1969 or 1970. The aide says that the service club
scandals ripoffs 'involved the Mafia and millions of dollars' and that the
main focus of interest by 'someone high up' in the White House was on whether
'the top Mafia guy' who ran 'all these things in Southeast Asia' had made
payoffs to Nixon. The crime figure, he says, was 'the one who was apparently
known as the socalled mastermind or architect of the Southeast Asian drug
trade ... who was very powerful and very well known as a mob leader ...
According to government narcotics experts, the central figure in the
Indochina-Golden Triangle narcotics traffic was Santo Trafficante."
In my opinion the central manipulator in the whole narcotics scheme was the
CIA, or rather a faction within it. It is erroneous to treat the agency as a
monolith. Various lobby groups have their own agents in the company,
generating internal power struggles that reflect political polarizations
external to the CIA... Equally certain is the fact that one should take the
agency's new, outwardly benign face with a grain of salt. Within the agency
there remain powerful groups promoting continued support of "old friends" in
Latin America and Southeast Asia. The China/Cuba lobby has traditionally been
one of the most influential within the CIA, and there is little reason to
believe that the situation has seriously changed...
In addition to, or rather behind, the CIA's new official policy there is also
an unofficial one. It manifests itself in such matters as the manipulation of
the DEA to perform what previously had been CIA dirty work, and in the
toleration, if not encouragement of a large, apparently independent army of
Cuban exile terrorists, available for action in Latin America at the request
of the presiding dictators.
The evidence suggests that the forces behind the unofficial policy were able
to place many of their loyal CIA agents in the DEA, and in such private
intelligence agency covers as Intertel and Wackenhut, where they continue
their tasks while letting the agency wash its hands. Intelligence is still
gathered by the CIA, but some of the dirtiest operations are now performed by
"former" agents.
We cannot, of course, discount the possibility that the unofficial policy is
in fact executed by former agents who had either been purged from the agency,
or left in protest against its more moderate line. However that implies that a
renegade CIA faction now runs an independent service, aided by lobby
interests�i.e., not Intertel, but an even more powerful "third force." If that
is so, I can come up with only one lobby group with the relevant motives as
well as the power to back them-the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). WACL
can mobilize CIA agents closely associated with the China/Cuba/Chile/ lobby,
especially the large contingent of former agents of the Gehlen/Vlassov
organization (the intelligence agency run by Hitler's masterspy Reinhard
Gehlen, which became the BND, the West German equivalent of the CIA).
CIA 'Old Boys' Work DEA Scam
According to Kruger, it was E. Howard Hunt and Lucien Conein who pulled off
the great heroin coup. Hunt secured Cuban exiles including Barker and Manuel
Artime to kidnap and assassinate the independent French Narcotics-for-guns
traffickers in Paraguay, etc; while Conein focused White House attentions
exclusively on Corsicans.
Creation of the DEA was intended not to consolidate, but to obfuscate, writes
Kruger, who quotes Ron Rosenbaum quoting an unnamed Customs official:
"BNDD and Customs are finally getting somewhere, they break up the French
Connection, they're getting big conspiracy cases. Suddenly they [the White
House] step in and there's this big shake-up, and by the time people get back
to work the Mexican Connection is set up, protected and doing big business.
What's this say to you?"
"Mexican" heroin included not just the brown mud locally produced to provide
cheap stuff for new users in the States; it included regular transhipments of
No. 4 White from S.E. Asia for the veins of the most discriminating users.
Kruger continues:
The emergence of the DEA was the next to the last phase ... Hunt and Conein's
CIA agents moved into DEA intelligence and operations, Conein locating twelve
Latino CIA agents in his Special Operations Group alone ...
... Conein's forces were apparently directed, for the most part, against
small-time independents ... The biggest Cuban network, Santo Trafficante's,
went untouched ...
That brings us to the last, the political phase of the heroin coup, which
began with the DEA's 1974 takeover of the CIA's Latin American torture
apparatus, and ended with the formation of CORU, Bosch's terrorist army... The
brutalities financed by the heroin coup continue. The DEA ... protects major
narcotics dealers. The latter ... support�financially and through gunrunning-
anti-Communist para-military groups which work hand in hand with Latin
American police and military forces, whose death squads and torturers are
supervised by agents of the DEA. [page 1941
Kruger believes there are 2 "wings" of the DEA�one of them "clean" and out to
bust the other, crooked one-and dates this split right from the formation of
the Agency under Nixon.
Final Consolidation of the DEA
In July of 1973 Nixon's narcotics forces were essentially consolidated
according to Reorganization Plan Number Two worked out by former CIA agent
Walter Minnick and Egil Krogh. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was
formed out of the BNDD, ODALE, ONNI and Customs Intelligence. 4,000
operatives, including 50 CIA agents (many of them Cubans from the ODALE
hardcore), 500 customs agents and most of the BNDD staff made the DEA a
powerful new agency.
... No bureau has been as plagued by scandal as the DEA has in seven years of
existence. The exposes and charges run the gamut from trafficking in drugs,
teamwork with the Mob and protection of major traffickers, to thievery,
gunrunning, torture and assassa nation of drug traffickers.
When Lucien Conein became the head of the DEA's Special Operations Branch he
allegedly carried out an assassi nation program after setting up the DEA's
Special Operations Group (DEASOG) under cover of the B.R. Fox Company ...
housed on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. . .
DEASOG shared its Washington office with an old friend and colleague of Hunt
and Conein's from OSS China, the weapons dealing soldier of fortune and
specialist in assassination, Mitch Werbell III. Werbell ... had been a
business partner of Conein's as late as 1974, and ... he and Conein had worked
together on providing the DEA with assassination devices. Among Werbell's
other associates were Frank Sturgis, Cuban exile leaders, and Robert Vesco,
who, like Werbell himself, has been charged with bankrolling narcotics
smuggling ...
Assassination, it can be argued, became a modus Operand under Richard Nixon.
The CIA carried out ... extermination campaigns in Vietnam, Guatemala,
Argentina, and Brazil-aided in Latin America by the local Death Squads. The
White House appears to have sponsored a secret assassination program under the
cover of drug enforcement. It was continued by the DEA, which seemingly
overlapped with the CIA in political rather than drug enforcement.
Until 1974 the training of torturers and members of Latin American death
squads came under the auspices of the CIA and USAID's Office of Public Safety.
Some 100,000 Brazilian policemen, for example, were trained and 523 of them
were chosen for courses in the U.S.A. They were trained at the International
Police Academy in Georgetown, Washington D.C. and at a secret CIA center in
the same city on R Street, under cover of International Police Services, Inc.
When school was out the prize pupils returned home to ... moonlight with the
Death Squads.
After Tupamaros guerillas kidnapped and killed U.S. police advisor Dan
Mitrione in Uruguay, Washington's schools for foreign police came into the
limelight and Congress cut off their funding. Nonetheless, the training
program and direct assistance and supervision continued. A, 1976 investigation
authorized by Senator James Abourezk revealed that the U.S. torture academies
had not in fact been completely closed down. According to Jack Anderson,
Abourezk found such a school had been in operation since 1974 in Los Fresnos,
Texas at the site of a former "bomb school." Another journalist, William
Hoffman, later confirmed the existence of a school for torture in Los Fresnos,
which had since moved to Georgia, where it was known as the Law Enforcement
Training Center. Interestingly, Conein's friend Werbell runs his own large
training center in Georgia, The Farm. It's used for, among other things, the
training of law enforcement officers.
Much of the old police support apparatus was simply transferred to AID's
International Narcotics Control program (INC), which really spelled DEA.
In 1974 the DEA had some 400 agents in Latin America, or roughly the number of
advisors recalled from the OPS program. INC's budget for technical equipment
abroad, meanwhile, jumped from $2.2 million in 1973 to $12.5 million in 1974.
The politics of the new drug effort were exposed when, in 1974, the man behind
Argentina's death squad (the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance), Social
Minister Lopez Rep, appeared on TV with U.S. Ambassador Robert C. Hill to
publicize the 2 nations' anti-narcotics collaboration with the words,
"Guerillas are the main users of drugs in Argentina. Therefore, the anti-drug
campaign will automatically be an anti-guerilla campaign as well."
It's striking how close the various extermination and repression campaigns
have been to the narcotics traffic. The Meo Army deployed by the CIA in Laos
smuggled large quantities of opium. Lopez Rega and his Argentine AAA henchmen
were eventually exposed as keys to a cocaine ring. One of the chief AAA
hatchet men, Francois Chiappe, was a lieutenant in the Ricaord/David heroin
metwork...
Francois Chiappe had excellent connections in rightwing Peronist circles. A
former OAS Commando Delta member in Algeria, he had remained in touch with
other OAS figures assembled in the Paladin group, a Fascist terrorist combine
founded in Spain by the Nazi war criminal Colonel Otto Skorzeny. It was among
the organizations to which Juan Peron's grey eminence, Jose Lopez Rega, allied
himself when he formed the dreaded terrorist group, the Argentine Anti-
communist Alliance (AAA).
When the Peronist Hector Campora became president of Argentina in May 1973,
Chiappe was released and immediately recruited into the AAA.
When Peron himself returned a month later from 18 years of exile in Spain, an
enormous crowd gathered at Ezeisa airport on June 20 to greet him. Among them
was a large contingent of Montoneros and other leftists. Security police were
well aware of their presence. Police and AAA terrorists led by Colonel Jorge
Osinde attacked the demonstrators with machine guns and hand grenades. Some
100 were killed and 300 were badly wounded. The AAA's prisoners were dragged
to the airport parking lot and tortured. Two of the more zealous hatchet men
were Chiappe and former OAS colonel Jean Gardes.
Many of the barbouzes booted from SAC fled to Spain to join the Paladin group,
where they learned to work side-by-side with their former arch enemies, the
OAS terrorists.
Paraguay's most ruthless high-ranking officers were exposed as heroin
profiteers... And finally as we go to press we learn that the dictator,
Pinochet, assumed control of Chile's cocaine trade, then turned it over to his
secret police, DINA, which shared the profits with its Cuban exile henchmen.
Mitch Werbell &
The Mexican Connection
Kruger really establishes the degree to which fascists have taken over with a
couple of examples where chance busts, like flashes of lightning, have
illuminated the radically altered terrain: Werbell and Sicilia Falcon.
Alberto Sicilia Falcon, "the Mexican Connection" who was not even Mexican but
a Cuban Exile Bay of Pigs veteran, turned up in Mexico in 1973 at the hub. of
a gigantic heroin and marijuana establishment. He would not even have been
arrested, except that he was trading China White for guns to destablize�among
others�Echevarria.
On 2 July 1975 Sicilia-Falcon was arrested. Under rough interrogation he
claimed to be an agent of the CIA, and that the drug ring had been set up on
orders from and with the support of the agency. Part of his profits were to go
towards the purchase of weapons and ammunition for distribution throughout
Central America for the destabilization of "undesirable" governments. If true,
U.S. heroin addicts were again footing the bill for clandestine paramilitary
operations and anti-Communist terror campaigns. And Sicilia-Falcon and his
Syndicate associates were not short of funds. In his possession police found
two Swiss bank books to the tune of $260 million.
... In the Sicilia-Falcon case the DEA and CIA struggled bitterly against one
another. It was symptomatic of a split within the DEA's own ranks, a split
rooted in the effective control of its narcotics intelligence division by
transplanted agents of the CIA.
Since the DEA's emergence many of its agents have resigned in disgust ...
Werbell, as former number-three White House Narc under Hunt, Conein and Nixon,
has always operated with impunity.
In August 1976 Lucien Conein's chum Mitch WerBell III (whose B.R. Fox Company
had shared a Washington office with Conein's DEA Special Operation Group) was
brought before a Miami federal court on charges of conspiracy to smuggle
50,000 pounds of marijuana a month from Colombia to the United States....
Werbell was found innocent and released. Just like the Thai opium smuggler/ClA
agent Puttaporn Khramkhruan before him in 1973. He went home to Georgia to
pursue his weapons business and law enforcement training camp. According to
writer Hank Messick, in 1978 he was involved in far Right politics with the
likes of Major General John K. Singlaub (who had been relieved of his command
in Korea after outspoken criticism of President Carter) and members of the
American Security Council-the key U.S. link to the far Right's international
umbrella organization, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). As reported
recently in the New York Times, the beneficiaries of his anti-terrorist
training have included members of the far Right, anti-Semitic U.S. Labor
Party.
Werbell owns eight companies, most of them dealing in firearms used by law
enforcement and intelligence units. One of the firms, Studies in the
Operational Negation of Insurgents and CounterSubversion (SIONICS),
specializes in the production of M10 and M11silenced machine pistols. The
latter two weapons, designed by Gordon Ingram and Werbell, are about the
ultimate weapons for terror and extermination. Their sales agent was Werbell's
Military Armament Corporation.
Together with the anti-Castro Cuban arms dealers Anselmo Allegro and the
mercenary Gerry Hemming, Werbell founded the Parabellum Corporation in 1971 in
Miami. Parabellum was licensed to sell arms in Latin America. It was also the
firm from which Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis planned to obtain weapons for
Cuban ex-iles who were going to (but eventually did not) disrupt the 1972
Miami conventions.
In 1974 Werbell�according to a motion filed by his own lawyer when Werbell,
his son and his company Defense Services, Inc. were charged with illicit
weapons sales�was involved in a "conspiracy among the CIA, Robert Vesco, and
various corporations to finance clandestine guerilla activities in Latin
America." Vesco wanted to purchase Werbell's stock of 2000 silenced M10
machine pistols. When Werbell failed to secure an export license, he devised a
plan to smuggle the weapons to Vesco. The two later negotiated the
construction of a factory in Costa Rica which would be licensed to fabricate
the pistols.
Intriguingly, in that same period someone was negotiating with a U.S. firm for
rights to fabricate, in Mexico, fully automatic weapons for clandestine
guerilla actions in Latin America. That someone was Mexico's Cuban exile
heroin czar, Alberto Scilia-Falcon, and among the weapons he was inspecting
was the Ingram M10, 9mm Parabellum .
Although the M10 and M11 could be acquired legally only with the special
permission of U.S. officials, large numbers of silenced M10s turned up in the
hands of European fascist terrorists in 1976-77. When Pierluigi Concutelli, a
leader of the Italian terrorist group Ordine Nuovo, was arrested in Rome in
February 1977, police found in his apartment the silenced M10 which he had
used to murder the Rome magistrate Vittorio Occorsio. Occorsio had been shot
down on the streets of Rome in July 1976 after announcing he would expose the
close collaboration between Fascist terror groups and the Mafia.
However, it was among Spanish terrorists in particular that Werbell's machine
pistols appeared in quantity. Most notably, a sizable consignment of M10s,
sent to Spain under license from U.S. authorities, had been purchased by
Spanish intelligence agency DGS, which has allegedly coordinated the actions
of Fascist terrorists.
The fugitive IOS billionaire Vesco employed a large contingent of Cuban exiles
in his Costa Rica sanctuary. Moreover, his weapons negotiations coincided with
the efforts of the fanatic anti-Castro Cuban leader Orlando Bosch to assemble
Cuban exile groups into an army of terror, CORU, that would later carry out
assassinations and other dirty work for several Latin American regimes. During
Bosch's 1974-75 drive, a wave of murder struck Miami's Cuban exile haven. Most
victims had been. opposed to Bosch. With the obstacles to his plan removed,
CORU was established in June 1976.
While Vesco and Werbell were hatching their weapons deal Bosch's base of
operations just happened to be Vesco's kingdom of Costa Rica-and Mafia heroin
boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. was also reportedly there between January 1974 and
summer of 1975... The three may have joined forces in a CIA conspiracy to
escalate anti- Communist terror in Latin America.
... Vesco [also] once employed government narcotics agents. In 1972 two
bugging specialists from the BNDD flew from Los Angeles to New Jersey to sweep
Vesco's home and office of surveillance devices... The sweeping tour had been
arranged by an admitted friend of Vesco's who was also involved in supplying
the fugitive with 2000 machine-guns and helping him establish a factory for
the weapons in Costa Rica. Guess who.
INSIDE NCLC
To find out what goes on inside the USLP, it is necessary to talk to former
members who have left the group. One former member agreed to talk, but only if
his name was not used and even the east coast city in which he lives was not
mentioned. Most former members fear reprisals.
Sexual Imagery and Psychological Brainwashing: Inside the USLP Cult
A nervous walk up several flights of stairs, through a hall filled with
competing smells from last night's dinner for the four or five ethnic groups
that share the building. Finally, we come to the door that opens to reveal the
person we will call Mark.
Mark joined the National Caucus of Labor Committees in the early 1970's after
graduating from a prestigious eastern university. "I was attracted primarily
because of the economic perspective, a holistic approach, when the rest of the
left saw things on an issue-by-issue basis," explains Mark, who left the party
last year.
LaRouche was an incredibly good speaker�he still is�and he used the good parts
of the program almost as a carrot to lead us into the paranoid part of his
thinking, "says Mark. "He's brilliant, but he has gone absolutely bonkers."
Mark views his years with the NCLC and the USLP as a time when he existed in
suspended animation, cut off from reality, and he thinks it will take him
years to readjust. Before joining the party he had successfully pursued an
academic career in the social sciences; now he works nights at odd jobs.
"I never thought I could be brainwashed," Mark says ruefully. "I was known for
my independent thinking, but I was sucked right in." At first, morale in the
NCLC was high, and new recruits were common. NCLC was expanding, setting up a
telex information network between its branches in various cities, and founding
the U.S. Labor Party to run in local and national elections.
Things started going sour in 1973 says Mark. First there was "Operation Mop-
Up," designed to physically destroy other leftist groups that LaRouche saw as
holding back the preeminence of the Labor Party. LaRouche announced the USLP
would lead a worldwide revolution in five years. "We shall be cruelly ruthless
in carrying out those duties which are necessary to build the kind of mass
force required." The "ruthless" duties under Operation Mop-up included a
series of assaults on leftists; NCLC cadres would invade political meetings
swinging baseball bats and lead pipes, sending some people to the hospital.
A particular, target of Operation Mop-up was the Communist Party, and Mark
remembers that one night he found himself with a band of other white USLP
stalwarts marching down a street in black Harlem to attack a Communist Party
meeting. "We were wearing hockey helmets covered with ski hats to try to
disguise them. We had on kneepads, and we were carrying sticks, trying to hide
them under our coats. Imagine, it was the middle of summer, and here we were
marching through Harlem dressed like that. I remember seeing the blacks on the
stoops looking at us in amazement, and thinking 'My God, we are going to be
made into mincemeat.' But instead, for blocks ahead, people were going inside
and locking their doors."
A locked door was what the squad of Labor Party thugs found when they reached
the Communist Party headquarters, so that attack was a failure. Other assaults
were successful. Mark recalls feeling alienated and confused about his role as
a goon. "Our hearts were not in it. We were all intellectuals, only LaRouche
was up for it. We knew it was an aberration but it was all or nothing. The
attacks were supposed to be necessary to harden the membership. Most of us now
find the whole thing was crazy."
By forcing Labor Party members to engage in violent acts that most found
repugnant, LaRouche was setting the stage for the psychological control that
turned the group into a cult. It was during this period that LaRouche began to
use twisted Freudian psychoanalytical techniques to intimidate members during
weekly meetings. According to the research study "Brownshirts of the Seventies
... .. The 'self-consciousness' sessions that LaRouche introduced were
ostensibly to train the 'leadership' to withstand psychological terror. In
fact, they were designed to create psychological terror and destroy opposition
within the leadership-and eventually within the whole organization."
Mark reluctantly broaches a topic usually avoided by people investigating the
Labor Party. "You really can't separate the political and the sexual in terms
of the psychological manipulation inside the party," he admits. Many defectors
have described the grotesque sexual imagery used in verbal attacks on party
members who step out of line; and USLP leaflets frequently use antigay
rhetoric, or make charges of sexual deviation or impotence in attacking the
party's enemies. According to Mark, party members develop strong fears of
becoming homosexual or impotent as a result of USLP-style psychological
conditioning, which is part of the party's attempt to increase anxiety, and
therefore obedience, within the organization.
"Brownshirts of the Seventies" reveals the text of an internal USLP memorandum
circulated during the 1973-74 period of weeding out non-believers. In the memo
LaRouche links the political with the sexual: "I am going to make you
political organizers-by taking your bedrooms away from you... What I "I do is
to expose you to the cruel fact of your sexual impotence, male and female... I
shall show that your pathetic impotence is a mere aspect of your political
work such that you will know that you cannot cure one without solving the
other."
During the institution of the psychological manipulation techniques, "LaRouche
began to move away from the issues," Mark recalls, "and instead started saying
everyone who opposed him was an agent." The USLP evolved a paranoid theory in
which Nelson Rockefeller led a worldwide conspiracy bent on assassinating
LaRouche and destroying the Labor Party. "People who disagreed were called
brainwashed and put in isolation, "says Mark. The evidence that they had been
brainwashed was that they opposed LaRouche's policies. LaRouche, naturally,
possessed the unique skills needed to "deprogram" the Labor Party members who
had been led astray. The unfortunate dissidents would be subjected to lengthy
sessions in which they would be psychologically coerced into renouncing their
former views and embracing LaRouche's paranoid vision of reality.
After LaRouche achieved control over the organization, "There were no economic
policies left," says Mark, "only conspiracies. Everyone hated everyone else.
The person above you was only a vehicle for LaRouche. You couldn't talk to
your wife because she was trained to rat on you."
"LaRouche said we needed more education, but he knew there wasn't time,
because we were being sent into the street to raise money for the telex. We
had less and less time to think about what was happening to the party because
we were totally exhausted," Mark explains. "We were all pushed to do such
crazy things ... it was very much like a Moonie operation."
LaRouche began to predict imminent nuclear war, and the entire organization
adopted a crisis mentality that still pervades its activities. Since
Rockefeller was at the heart of the nuclear war threat, according to
LaRouche's conspiracy theories, the USLP began to initiate contact with other
anti-Rockefeller forces, primarily extreme rightwing elements such as the
Minutemen and the Liberty Lobby.
These ties to the right should have been difficult to explain to early NCLC
members who had joined the group because of its socialist viewpoint. According
to Mark, however, "by 1976 the demoralization was so bad that when LaRouche
told us we had allies in the capitalist class, we were so happy to find out we
had allies anywhere we just accepted it."
With bizarre conspiracy theories at the heart of the USLP ideology, it was
often difficult to bring people closer to the party. "The problem was that you
knew when you were trying to organize somebody that they would eventually have
to read the newspaper (New Solidarity), so you had to immunize people by
giving them dribs and drabs of the conspiracy," explains Mark. The USLP still
uses this technique of recruiting support for LaRouche and the party. At
public meetings the conspiracy rhetoric is subdued, and at the meetings of the
various front groups it is barely alluded to. "They lie about everything,"
Mark adds. "It would make Hitler blush."
Almost totally absent from public statements is the curious fact that the USLP
leadership apparently still claims socialism as its goal. According to a
memorandum circulated last year by a group of former members, LaRouche at
first explained the ties to the right as a "policy of 'tactical alliance' with
'progressive industrial capitalists' against the 'monetarists' (bankers)."
This tenuous rationale lasted for about a year, until LaRouche concocted
another excuse to explain his increasingly bizarre activities. According to
the former members, LaRouche announced in the fall of 1977 that socialism
would be impossible for at least a generation, and that a "humanist capitalist
alliance" was now the goal. At the same time, LaRouche announced another in an
endless series of assassination attempts against himself, and hired a former
OSS spy with close ties to the CIA to provide protection: rightwing extremist
Mitchell Werbell, who operates a security firm and an arms company that sells
silent machine guns.
In 1976, LaRouche began to phase out Rockefeller as the archenemy of
civilization, replacing him with an assortment of real and imagined
"conspiratorial" organizations including the Knights of Malta (remember the
Maltese Falcon?) and the "Zionists." According to LaRouche, the B'nai B'rith
AntiDefamation League was the American control group for the conspiracy, and
he charged the Jewish human rights organization with controlling the heroin
drug trade in the U.S. Behind the worldwide conspiracy, said LaRouche, was the
British oligarchy; however, a careful reading of U.S. Labor Party material
reveals that virtually all the British conspirators are Jews, and that the
entire current ideology of the party is virulently anti-Semitic.
The party's anti-Semitism appeared shortly after the ultra-right Liberty Lobby
began praising a 1976 USLP pamphlet tided "Carter and the Party of
International Terrorism." The pamphlet outlined the "Rockefeller-CIA-Carter
axis," which was supposedly trying to "deindustrialize" the U.S. and go to war
with the Soviet Union by 1978. In an overall favorable review of the USLP
treatise, Liberty Lobby's newspaper Spotlight complained that the report
failed to mention any of the "major Zionist groups such as the notorious Anti-
Defamation League" in its extensive list of government agencies. research
groups, organizations and individuals controlled by the "Rockefeller-Carter-
CIA" terrorism apparatus.
Liberty Lobby's hint was taken to heart, and soon New Solidarity was running
articles with increasingly anti-Semitic themes. The shift in LaRouche's
perception of who controlled the worldwide conspiracy came at an opportune
time, since Nelson Rockefeller's untimely death would normally have required a
major alteration of LaRouche's conspiracy theories had he not already
identified British Jews as the new puppet masters.
The new found anti-Semitism also served as a bridge to older rightwing
organizations and individuals such as Colonel Thomas McCrary, leader of the
Georgia Independent Party, which split from the American Independent Party
partly because AIP candidate George Wallace was selling out on racial
segregation. LaRouche has met with a number of influential far-right leaders
to ask for support in his presidential campaign, but reaction so far has been
cautious. Most researchers feel the organized far right wants to float the
LaRouche campaign as a trial balloon, to see how far an extremist rightwing
candidate can go in the current atmosphere of political confusion. At the same
time, the organized right wants to be able to disavow any close connection
with LaRouche, since he is so clearly unstable and paranoid.
USLP leadership, however, is convinced that the organized right will
unequivocally support LaRouche. At a National Office USLP briefing last year,
according to Mark and other former members, the party's leadership was told
that the problem with the Western word has been democracy, and what the U.S.
needs is a military coup. The former members' memo on the meeting charges that
the new goal of the NCLC is "to establish a dictatorship by a military coup,
with LaRouche of course becoming dictator." The USLP's rightwing allies were
supposed to "aid the organization in pulling off this coup sometime before the
1980 elections," according to the memo.
No one seriously believes that the USLP can stage a military coup, but given
the fanaticism of the cadre and the distorted perception of reality evidenced
by the group's printed material, a violent confrontation, albeit short-lived,
cannot be dismissed so easily. Operation Hop-Up has shown that LaRouche is
capable of ordering assaults against his real and imagined enemies, and that
the cadre has been willing to carry out LaRouche's orders even against their
better judgement.
One troubling development has been the admission by Werbell that his security
company has been training USLP members in what he calls defensive techniques
to protect LaRouche from assassination. The 6-day course includes rifle,
knife, and pistol use. Mark and other former members refer to the USLP. "hit
squads" and literally fear for their lives.
"if they don't make it with the rightwing, they're finished," says Mark, who
feels the group is becoming more desperate and paranoid. "LaRouche has these
glimmers of sanity, but then he gets totally screwed up."
As for the humanist-capitalist alliance, Mark puts it this way: "What they
call humanism is really fascism."
pps. 182-191
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
