-Caveat Lector-
Tuesday, July 19. 2005
The Bishop and the Boys - Part One
The number of American clergy or misionaries [sic] used by the CIA
has been small. The CIA has informed the Committee of a total of 14
covert arrangements which involved direct operational use of 21
individuals. In six or seven cases, the CIA paid salaries, bonuses,
or expenses to the religious personnel, or helped to fund projects
run by them.
-- The Domestic Impact of Foreign Clandestine Operations: The CIA and
Academic Institutions, the Media, and Religious Institutions,
(Section X of the Church Report), p. 202
In 2001, investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker published Barry
and the Boys: The CIA, The Mob and America's Secret History. One of
the first authors to concentrate on the life and times of Barry Seal
( a dope smuggler and CIA operative who began his career as a cadet
in the Civil Air Patrol with such dubious luminaries as Lee Harvey
Oswald and David Ferrie) he also explored the gun-running career of
David Ferrie himself in the same volume. It is a book full of new
information on Seal, Ferrie, and the anti-Castro Cubans of Miami, as
well as on the mysterious goings-on at Mena, Arkansas. He followed
this up with the publication, in 2004, of Welcome to Terrorland:
Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-Up in Florida, a book about the
terror attacks that should be on everyone?s bookshelf.
But there is another aspect to Ferrie that has so far escaped most
modern investigators and researchers, probably because it is just too
weird ... even for conspiracy theorists and Congressional
subcommittees. This is the area of his life we might term the
"spiritual".
Since it is our intention to investigate the spirituality of our most
notorious political figures and the religio-mystical ambiance in
which both covert and overt policy is planned and executed, we can
have no better starting point than the life and times of David
Ferrie. Ferrie will lead us to Jack Martin, to Thomas Edward Beckham,
to Fred Lee Crisman, to Thomas Jude Baumler, to Carl Stanley (now
"Saint Christopher Maria"), to Walter Propheta and, eventually, right
back to J. Edgar Hoover himself. It will also lead us to William
Bryan, the hypnotist suspected of complicity in the assassination of
Senator Robert F Kennedy. It will also lead us to the Iran-Contra
affair. It will also lead us to the civil war in the former
Yugoslavia and "ethnic cleansing".
This is the world of the wandering bishops and, gentle reader, you
will only hear about this from me. No one else has covered this
story. No one else has delved very far into the shadowy world where
intelligence agents and archbishops meet. Although I was there, and
saw some of this first hand, I will base most of what is told in
these pages on the documents themselves: Warren Commission records,
FBI interviews, HSCA documentation, etc. It's all there, if you know
where to look.
Because of the separation of church and state guaranteed by our
Constitution, it is easy for anyone in America to set up their own
church. In countries where there is a state religion this is
virtually impossible. In other countries, such as Mexico, we find
laws enacted that curtail the practice of religion in certain ways.
And in communist countries, the free expression of any form of
religion is frowned upon or outlawed altogether.
But in America...
Some of the world?s newest faiths were created out of whole cloth in
the United States. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints --
better known as the Mormons -- was an invention of Joseph Smith, Jr.,
a ceremonial magician who combined myths about the Indian burial
mounds, the lost tribes of Israel, and Masonic ritual into a unique
amalgam of Christianity, Judaism, and occultism. The Spiritualist
church was created out of the experiences of the Fox sisters in
upstate New York. The Theosophical Society was created in New York
City in 1875, and out of that was formed the Liberal Catholic Church.
And so on.
As popular as many of these religions have become, however, there is
another world of created church about which most people are unaware,
and properly so: the leaders of these churches often do not
evangelize. They are not interested in congregations or parishes,
theology or liturgics. They have other agendas, and the clerical
collar and pectoral cross of the clergyman serve to disguise and
obscure actions and projects that have far-ranging historical and
political repercussions.
These men (and some women) have been found involved in everything
from the assassination of a president to the assassination of his
brother, to Iran-Contra. And they are with us today, changing
denominations, titles, and even names like sacerdotal chameleons as
they shape-shift through the political landscape. Their story is told
in some detail in Sinister Forces, Book One: The Nine (and nowhere
else). We will build and expand on that detail to tell the following
story.
The American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC) had several
incarnations. The version created in June of 1964 (by Bishops
Guthrie, Roebke, Zeiger and Stanley) in the American midwest was one;
the version created about the same time in New York City by Bishop
Walter Propheta was another.
Propheta was a Ukrainian Orthodox priest and noted anti-Communist in
the 1950s who appeared on the Dave Garroway television program
speaking about the Katyn Forest Massacre (the murder of Ukrainian
soldiers by the Soviets). He was so well-known at the time that, had
Dewey actually won the 1948 presidential election away from Truman,
Propheta would have been the White House chaplain. When I knew
Propheta, he showed me both the Dave Garroway footage and the letter
he received from Dewey promising him the post. It seems that Propheta
helped Dewey politically in New Jersey, working for the Republican
Party there and garnering support for Dewey's presidential bid.
No matter. Eisenhower became President in 1952 and was re-elected for
a second term in 1956. During his Republican administration, Propheta
faired well although not as well as he would have under Dewey. Then,
the disastrous events of 1960 when Vice President Richard Nixon lost
the election to the youthful, Catholic and Democratic, Jack Kennedy.
Propheta and his anti-Communists had the wind knocked out of their
sails, and with the unfolding of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban
Missile Crisis, it appeared that the Captive Nations (of which
Ukraine was one, along with Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and other Soviet satellites) would
stay captive.
Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963. Within months, Propheta
had formed his own church in New York City and, at the same time,
another was being formed in Denver, Colorado. Both were called the
American Orthodox Catholic Church, the idea being the creation of an
Orthodox Church for Americans. Previously, most Orthodox churches in
the United States were ethnic churches in which the services were
celebrated in the language of the immigrants who formed the
congregations, whether Greek, Syrian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, etc. An
American Orthodox Catholic Church would focus on Americans of
whatever ancestry, joined by a common belief in the Eastern Orthodox
faith and furthermore joined by a common liturgical language,
English. It was a noble concept, and for awhile it seemed as if the
Colorado contingent were actually carrying out this ambitious
project. In New York, however, these sentiments were honored more in
the breach than the observance.
While the assassination of President Kennedy served to advance the
agenda of the hawks and anti-Communists in Washington and the
Pentagon, there was still a Democratic President -- Johnson -- and a
strong Democratic presence in the government. Kennedy was considered
"soft on Communism", but Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam to show
his determination to take the fight to the enemy. The mounting
opposition to the war at home, however, gave rise to the growth of
anti-war movements and a variety of revolutionary organizations. The
FBI and CIA saw these groups as puppets of the Soviets -- and, in
some cases, they were probably right (as revealed by the Mitrokhin
Archive, among other sources) -- and measures were taken to
infiltrate and destroy everything from the Black Panthers and the SDS
to the Ku Klux Klan.
At the same time, anti-Castro operations were running at an all-time
high. With the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, Cubans
in the United States had vowed to carry on the struggle with or
without US government approval or support.
Out of this miasma of politics, paramilitary groups and rage emerged
a man called by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison "one of
history?s most important individuals": David Ferrie. One of the least
understood and most underreported aspects of Ferrie's career is the
inescapable fact that he was a member of the American Orthodox
Catholic Church and, indeed, for awhile one of its clergy.
In fact, New Orleans had more than its fair share of AOCC bishops and
clergy.
And they all seemed to work for Guy Banister.
Posted by Peter Levenda at 13:02
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