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 Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM Yahoo! 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