-Caveat Lector-
(We're lucky to have an exclusive from Alex Constantine's upcoming new book
Operation CHAOS courtesy of the author. You can also seek an interview with
him in the pages of the latest issue of Seconds, a hip rock & roll magazine,
found on cool newstands. Remy C.)
Operation CHAOS
Political Murders of American and British Rock Musicians -
An Annotated Guide
by Alex Constantine
Excesses of domestic intelligence assets during the Vietnam War
have surfaced repeatedly in the public print since the Saigon evac: the
FBI's COINTELPRO outrages, the probable involvement of intelligence
officers in the murder of Martin Luther King, et.al., the distribution of
LSD to drown the anti-war movement in mystic hallucinations, a litany of
Watergate "horrors" and various ill-conceived, federally-sanctioned
undercover felonies. Some of this closet activity has only come to light
decades later, including the existence of a "Sovereign Committee," a secret
society of prominent right-wing reactionaries bent on turning back the
civil rights movement in the Dixie of the 1960s by decimating the lives of
its leaders.
In 1967, the CIA conceived Operation CHAOS in response to the
rising popular backlash against the Vietnam War. Vern Lyons, a former CIA
undercover operative and current director of the Des Moines Hispanic
Ministry, traced the roots of CHAOS to the Eisenhower administration and
the monitoring of emigr� organizations on domestic soil. The Eisenhower
sanction transformed the Agency into an internal security patrol and
rendered CHAOS - still secret, since the files remain classified to the
present day (the little that is known originates almost entirely from
former and active operatives) - possible:
The CIA's Office of Security was monitoring other groups at this time
and had recruited agents within different emigr� organizations. The CIA
considered this a normal extension of its authorized infiltration of
dissident groups abroad even though the activity was taking place within the
U.S. Increased use of the CIA's contacts and agents among the Cuban exiles
became commonplace until mass, open recruitment of mercenaries for what was
to be the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion was no longer a secret in southern
Florida. It was no secret to Fidel Castro either, as we later found out.
This activity led the CIA to establish proprietary companies, fronts and
covers for its domestic operations. So widespread did they become that
President Johnson allowed the then CIA Director, John McCone, to create in
1964 a new super-secret branch called the Domestic Operations Division
(DOD), the very title of which mocked the explicit intent of Congress to
prohibit CIA operations inside the U.S. This disdain for Congress
permeated the upper echelons of the CIA. Congress could not hinder or
regulate something it did not know about, and neither the President nor the
Director of the CIA was about to tell them. Neither was J. Edgar Hoover,
even though he was generally aware that the CIA was moving in on what was
supposed to be exclusive FBI turf.
In the classified document creating the DOD, the scope of its activities
was
to "exercise centralized responsibility for the direction, support, and
coordination of clandestine operational activities within the United
States..." (V. Lyons, "Domestic Surveillance: The History of
Operation CHAOS," Covert Action Information Bulletin,, Summer, 1990).
Among the political targets of CHAOS, count Black Panther Geronimo
Pratt, framed for the murder of two activists on a tennis court in Santa
Monica, California, subsequently cleared and released from prison (Pratt
interview). Two opponents of "conservative" authority were murdered,
another set up for the crime, thereby silencing three voices of resistance
with a single clean smash.
With the Nixon administration clearing the way, a clandestine war
was waged against the youth and civil rights movements. The Army's
Counter-intelligence Analysis Branch collected personality profiles, mug
shots and "black lists," stored on computer-files and microfilm reels.The
DoD's intelligence divisions, disguised as journalists, gathered
information at demonstrations - the "Midwest Audiovisual News," an Army
front, interviewed Abbie Hoffman at the 1968 police riot in Chicago
(Blanche Wiesen Cook, "Surveillance and Mind Control," in Howard Frazier,
ed., Uncloaking the CIA, New York: The Free Press, 1978).
The program came complete with inter-agency "operations centers,"
direct lines to local police, teletype machines, "situation maps,
closed-circuit television and secure radio links," reports Daniel Brandt,
the propietor of the Internet's CIA Namebase ("The 1960s and COINTELPRO: In
Defense of Paranoia," NameBase NewsLine, July-September 1995). A 180-man
"command center" appeared in 1968 after the rioting in Detroit, inspired by
the killing of Martin Luther King. By 1969 the files were housed in a
$2.7-million war room in the cellar of the Pentagon.
British spy Phillip Knightley described an intelligence program
operating like a finely-tuned Gestapo:
When Ramparts magazine began preparing, in early 1967, to publish an
expos� of the CIA's funding of the National Student Association, the CIA
decided that this was "an attack on the CIA in particular and the
Adminsistration in general," and put the magazine's editors under
surveillance to see if they were in contact with hostile intelligence
services. This project was later expanded into Operation CHAOS, an
examination and analysis of the whole anti-war movement.
Congressmen and government officials were targetted, singled out for
surveillance and investigation. CHAOS operatives "developed a horrific
repetoire of dirty tricks." They "organized unsuccessful assassination
plots against heads of state" (Knightley,The Second Oldest Profession,
1986).
In the culture at large, politics and music fused from sea to
psychedelic sea, fuelling protest of the war and its military-industrial
foundations. It was clear that some unpolled segment of the population had
no use for "permissive" rock-and-roll music or the men who performed it:
In 1966, the Bobby Fuller Four exploded on the charts with a
Hollyesque "I Fought the Law and the Law Won." The song managed to reach as
high as number nine on the pop music charts. The song's writer was Sonny
Curtis, a guitarist who had once been a member of the Crickets..... On July
18, 1966, Bobby Fuller's beaten and bruised body was found in a car. There
was evidence that the singer had not only been BEATEN but GASOLINE WAS
FOUND IN HIS STOMACH AND A RAG CRAMMED IN HIS THROAT. Some rumors spread
that Fuller had been killed in an automobile accident, but the police and
coroner ruled his death a SUICIDE, which is interesting considering the
substantial beating Fuller must have received before his death (R. Gary
Patterson,Hellhounds on Their Trail , 1997).
A year after the unprecedented "suicide" of Fuller, the human
Molotov cocktail, rock music would blend with politics in San Francisco's
Summer of Love.
Still eclipsed by federal classification are the tactics of the
U.S. intelligence sector in the destabilization of the lives of
politically-active musicians and counter-cultural activists, as revealed in
a Senate Intelligence Committee report released on April 26, 1976:
"Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their
habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in
women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana
charges. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send
articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free
sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of
their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups
into rivalries that MAY RESULT IN DEATH."
Death was, without question, considered a sound option by an
intelligence sector embroiled in suppressing the popular backlash to
military-industrial authority and the lucrative war overseas. One covert
operation proposed by the President Nixon's Plumbers unit,, a CIA cadr�,
involved the bombing of 100,000 demonstrators at a rock concert in Mission
Bay, San Diego during the 1972 Republican convention (an event subsequently
moved to Miami, where the same White House special operations unit planned
to provoke a riot to be blamed on the Left, per Harper's magazine for
December 1972, until the whistle was blown by FBI informant and Green Beret
vet William Lemmer before a Florida grand jury).
The music industry of the Vietnam period was the binding force of a
rising cultural revolution. "War," Mick Jagger reflected, "stems from power
mad politicians and 'patriots.' Some new master plan would end all these
mindless men from seats of power." Mick Jagger's audience sang his
revulsion, but their enmity toward the warfare state was mutual.
Without question, political assassination was held to be an
agreeable option by the Nixon administration. From the "Whatever happened
to ..." file comes the tale of one narco-soldier in the Nixon camp's
storming of the White House, an undiluted and unadorned glimpse of a
virulent underground of political assassination, secret military operations
and narcotics trafficking:
Man Claims CIA Tied to Speed Ring
Dallas Morning News
September 13, 1989
By Lee Hancock
A methamphetamine ring based in Mesquite was set up by a CIA operative to
funnel money to the Nicaraguan contras, one of the alleged participants has
testified in federal court.The testimony came during a hearing in Tulsa,
where Loran Eugene Hall, Jr. [a name well-known to students of the John
Kennedy assassination] appeared Monday to plead guilty to drug charges.
He told the court that his father, Loran Eugene Hall, Sr. of Mesquite was a
CIA agent who recruited him and others to manufacture speed to raise money
for the contras, said Jack Morgan, assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern
District of Oklahoma....
Court documents indicate the ring was broken when the Oklahoma
State Bureau of Narcotics investigators and Mesquite police trailed
Loran Hall, Jr. after he purchased glassware and chemicals at a Grand
Prairie chemical store.
Mr. Hall and another man were arrested in Noble County, Okla., as
they were carrying those items and several high-caliber forearms to
Kansas in a stolen truck, according to the indictment....
Mr. Morgan, a Mesquite police investigator and defense attorney
representing Hall family members all said there was evidence
suggesting that Loran Hall, Sr. worked for the CIA in some capacity.
"He has a long history of involvement with the CIA attempts to
overthrow Castro," Mr. Morgan said. "He was involved in the ill-famed Bay
of Pigs invasion. In 1961, he got arrested with a truckload of guns
in Texas, and he was transporting them from California to Florida for that
invasion." His name also has surfaced in congressional investigations of the
John F. Kennedy assassination. The elder Mr. Hall was described in a
1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations report as a onetime resident
of
Cuba with ties to anti-Castro groups in the United States and organized
crime on both countries.
And, Mr. Morgan said, his name is the subject of a chapter in the
book Coup d'etat in America, which speculates about CIA involvement in a
plot to kill President Kennedy. The chapter, titled "Loran Hall and
the Free Cuba Committees," details allegations of CIA financing and
orchestration of a plot by anti-Castro groups to kill President Kennedy."
"In the last few years, he supposedly was involved with CIA attempts
to overthrow the Nicaraguan government," Mr. Morgan said.
Loran Hall, Jr., told detectives that his father had been a CIA
officer for 17 years, had run guns to Central America and participated in
incidents in which helicopters appeared at his father's Kansas farm bearing
"men with automatic weapons who answered to military titles such as colonel
and major"...
"There's quite an extensive history on his father's CIA
involvement," Mr. Heflet said. "My client told me that a lot of his
dad's involvement - specifically in the Kennedy
assassination - has been sealed up, and we never may
find out what it was."
Mr. Morgan said federal officials believe the elder Mr. Hall may be
hiding in Kansas, Honduras or Costa Rica.
"This is a pretty strange case all around," Mr. Morgan said.
The darkest channels of the intelligence world swarmed with crooks
and killers. This genr� belched forth the late Robert Hall (no relation to
Loran Eugene Hall), an associate of Robert Vesco and Howard Hughes, a
private investigator in L.A. summed up by former Harper's editor Jim
Hougan: "tough, reasonably brave and decidedly larcenous ... a father, a
wiretapper, an informer, a dope peddler and a double agent" (Spooks,
William Morrow, 1878).
Hall followed Sal Mineo, the aging teen idol and son of a coffin
maker from Sicily, one evening in 1976 ... the very night the actor was
stabbed to death in the parking garage beneath the apartment complex he
lived in, just off Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. Newsweek reported on
February 23, 1976 that "long-whispered reports of the actor's alleged
bisexuality and fondness for asadomasochistic ritual quickly surrounded his
murder." There was no evidence of a robbery.
Mineo had signed on to play Sirhan Sirhan in a film about the
murder of Robert F. Kennedy - in it, CIA assassination and post-hypnotic
programming were to be prominently featured themes (Mae Brussell, Operation
Chaos, unpublished ms.).
[end part 1 of 3]
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