Secret History: From the Fringes to the Mainstream

BY GREG GUMA

Part One: Bilderbergers come to Vermont and the CFR’s school for statesmen

Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Holland, site of the first Bilderberger conference

Exclusive groups with hidden agendas aren’t paranoid fantasies, or just popular plot points for movies. There have been, and continue to be, actual covert schemes and conspiracies, both above and under ground, and secretive elites with hidden, manipulative or sometimes dangerous game plans. Not all of them are bent on destruction; some just want to disrupt the status quo, others may even have altruistic goals. And fortunately, no one of them yet has put all of humanity completely under their thumbs. On the other hand, they are not to be underestimated or ignored.

In the late 1970s, the Trilateral Commission took the lead through President Jimmy Carter, looking toward a global power-sharing arrangement between the US, Europe (led by Germany), and Japan. That plan didn’t get too far. During the Reagan Years, trilateralism gave way to the Heritage Foundation, which developed a more nativist blueprint, a bit like Trump’s Project 2025. Heritage didn’t just promote a militant response to foreign threats. It took direct aim at “the un-American nature of so much so-called dissidence.” Reagan gave the implementation job largely to his chief lawyer, Edwin Meese, who had attended Heritage meetings and reportedly “relied heavily” on its advice as attorney general.

Before either Heritage or the Trilateralists, there was the Bilderberg group, whose mere existence was once hard to swallow. Maybe it was that unlikely name. If you added that it met annually — with no press coverage, and yet made major international policy decisions, the usual reaction was an arched eyebrow. Today, however, with the idea of a “deep state” and “great replacement” conspiracy widely accepted on the right, plus historical revisions being pushed into textbooks and schools, it doesn’t sound as far-fetched.

The name came from the hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland used for the first session in 1954. After that, meetings were held around the world, including a 1971 gathering in Woodstock, Vermont. "The purpose of the conference," said Prince Bernhard, the Dutch aristocrat who promoted the group and chaired meetings for more than 30 years, "is that eminent persons in every field get the opportunity to speak freely without being hindered by the knowledge that their words and ideas will be analyzed, commented upon and eventually criticized in the press." At the time, Bernhard, who married Holland’s Princess Juliana, was a spokesman for NATO as well as Dutch interests in South America. 

Nevertheless, US Senator James Buckley wrote in 1974 that, "I don’t subscribe to the theory that there exists an organization of international bankers called the Bilderbergers." A strange reaction since his brother, William F. Buckley, was on the guest list that year.

Or consider this evasion. In response to an inquiry in 1975 a US Justice Department official said the White House knew nothing about the Bilderbergers. Yet President Ford attended meetings of the group throughout the 1960s, and Donald Rumsfeld, both Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense under Ford, knew the group as "an open forum for the exchange of ideas." 

The Bilderberg Group rarely appeared in CIA files. In 1975, however, declassified staff notes mentioned the conference in one paragraph. They revealed that the event would be held in Turkey that April. Inflation was to be discussed  and UK Prime Minister Thatcher had been invited. 

After the 1971 Vermont session, a hotel employee put it succinctly: "They get together once a year to talk about what is going to happen in the world." 

In May 1958, Joseph Johnson, a member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee, responded to an inquiry by the CIA’s Allen Dulles about the group’s activities. 

Officially, the Bilderberg meeting in Woodstock, convening April 23, 1971, was billed as "an international peace conference." US State Department officials had conferred with Vermont State Police about the security arrangements. The state supplied 30 men in plain clothes to support a private, armed security force, the FBI and Secret Service, even though several Vermont officials claimed they knew nothing about the event. 

One-hundred-fifty guards and officers blanketed what was then a small town of 1,600, sealing off Laurence Rockefeller’s hotel and estate. Everything was set for the arrival of 85 leaders from around the world. Limousines brought them from Lebanon, New Hampshire, where an air shuttle from Boston had been arranged. 

Although Bernhard issued a terse press statement when his plane touched ground at Boston’s Logan Airport, one participant, Francois Duchene of the London Institute of Strategic Studies, who attended with then British Defense Minister Denis Healey, later explained that, "America must face a Western Europe and Japan that are more independent." That fit, since one scheduled topic was, "A change in the US role in the world." 

To Major Glenn Davis of the Vermont State Police it was "a hairy scene. No one seemed to know just who was in charge of what." But in the conference room, once all employees had been cleared from the building, order reigned. Seating was arranged alphabetically with Bernhard at the head of the table. Remarks were normally limited to five minutes, with two "working papers" as discussion foci. 

Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s National Security Advisor, missed the first session, but became the main event when he delivered a briefing on US plans. Months later, he was charged by conservatives with leaking news about an upcoming China trip by President Nixon and a devaluation of the dollar. After the 1971 conference banks and major corporations shifted capital out of the US, mainly to West Germany. Nixon’s China initiative eventually became public information. In December, the dollar was devalued, resulting in gains for people who had already converted to European currency. A "change in the US role" was under way, Bilderbergers may have helped make it happen, and clearly knew in advance. 

When I wrote about it later, Marcellus Parsons, news director at WCAX, Burlington’s leading TV station, complained to my editor about the story. The event wasn’t so secret, he claimed, comparing my coverage to a story in the conservative Manchester Union Leader, which headlined it as “Secret Meeting in Secluded Resort.” Journalists just couldn’t get in to cover it, he argued. “These meetings are not as secret in Europe as they are here,” Parsons added, but mainly because the US press “really didn’t give a damn.” And what was so wrong, he concluded, with economic and political leaders “who just want to sit down for a giant off the record bull session.”

The truth is that private groups like the Bilderbergers, which helped to build a post-war system of de facto global management, didn’t often actually discuss peace. Rather, their main concern was managing the world economy. Originally, Bilderberg meetings were meant to strengthen the Atlantic alliance, and gradually became an open conspiracy to develop consensus among political and business leaders beyond the power of nation states. In the 1950s, Prince Bernhard brought the idea to the CIA, and with its assistance won support from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. The money flowed through the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, whose director, Joseph Johnson, coordinated US Bilderberg activities. 

Over the years the group became a model for transnational diplomacy, lending support to European integration and oil company policies. Its steering committee was a who’s who of international finance; David Rockefeller, Gabriel Hauge (Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust), Emilio Collado (Standard Oil, later Exxon), and international lawyers such as Arthur Dean and George Ball. All US steering committee members were also members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which had dominated US foreign policy planning since World War II. 

One key member was George Ball, a long-time CFR member, director of the Trilateral Commission, Undersecretary of State, and lawyer with Lehman Brothers. Another was Arthur Dean, CFR member, and partner in the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, whose other partners included John Foster and Allen Dulles. Before World War II Sullivan and Cromwell had worked with German chemical and steel monopolies. By the time the Bilderbergers began to meet, attorney Allen Dulles had become CIA director.

The Council on Foreign Relations had ties to the financial empires of Rockefeller, Rothschild and Morgan. Although its philosophical roots can be traced back to Fabian Socialism, it was later instrumental in creating the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. For decades, its resident members and "international citizens" formed an aristocracy of financiers, academics, lawyers, journalists and public officials who profoundly influenced US foreign policy from the 1940s to the rise of Trump. It still publishes a monthly journal, Foreign Affairs.

Columnist Joseph Kraft, a CFR member, once called this semi- secret elite a "school for statesmen." For more than half a century, its main objective  was to create a “new international order." To many leftists that read as US imperialism; to right-wingers it translated roughly as world government.

The CFR was born at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, May 19, 1919, just as the World War I peace talks were winding down. The meeting to create an international planning group was called by "Colonel" Edward Mandell House, Texas oil man, power broker and presidential advisor, whom Wilson called his "alter ego." The Colonel’s Paris conference was geared to generate support from finance czars (the gold and dollars alliance of Rothschild and Rockefeller) and liberal internationalists. 

By 1950 CFR members and influencers filled many American cabinet posts. Its members were a new nobility: Nelson Rockefeller, Averill Harriman, Dean Rusk, Walter Lippman, and Allen Dulles, to name but a few.  

When Dulles died in 1969, President Nixon said, "In the nature of his task, his achievements were known to only a few." Dulles’ main tasks from the 1940s on were intelligence gathering, spreading disinformation and staging covert operations. He viewed this as a craft, and managed to elevate espionage to professional status. As much the architect as the prosecutor of the Cold War, he handled many of the CFR’s and CIA’s "dirty tricks." 

Back in 1919 Dulles had attended the Paris talks with “Colonel” House, then joined the US State Department. By the late 1920s he had become a partner in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which worked with Adolph Hitler’s financial agent to acquire the largest German monopolies, steel and chemicals, as clients. Dulles joined the board of the Henry Schroeder Trust banking group in the 1930s, while Schroeder helped to bankroll the Nazis. 

But allegiances changed when the war began. Dulles left the firm and began spying at a high level in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a new US intelligence and subversion network that evolved into the CIA. In 1944 the spymaster worked on two key covert missions: liquidating the Fuhrer and working out peace terms with other Nazis without letting Russia find out.

Also on Center for Global Research

Part Two: Spy Games, the Kennedy Case, and Secrets of the Illuminati 

Espionage is the business of secrecy, manipulation and deception. It breeds conspiracies, including hidden networks of mercenaries that transcend national interests. The Reagan years brought the public exposure of a “secret team” that pursued covert operations around the world for decades. But long before that, in the summer of 1944, another covert network blanketed Europe as the Allies broke into German territory. 

One spy on the job was George deMohrenschildt, a career agent who knew German intelligence well from work with the Abwehr 2 (Nazi spies within the US) before the war. In the 1940s he shot film in Poland, built ties with French and German agents, and scouted for oil interests. 

Allen Dulles was running OSS operations in Switzerland, while another agent, Joseph Retinger, promoted Polish liberation from Germany. Like deMohrenschildt, Retinger also had oil contacts; his were Mexican, dating back to the 1920s. He had worked in London with the exiled Polish government. In August 1944, at age 58, he parachuted into Nazi territory near Warsaw just before liberation, bringing money to Polish nationalists. 

Meanwhile, Dulles, who had urged US entry into the war on grounds of "enlightened selfishness," was handling other parts of the plan. With German Abwehr and diplomats he tried to assassinate Hitler, and although the plots failed, Hitler soon died — presumably a suicide. A year later, following Retinger’s lead, Dulles helped to launch the Cold War by scheming to cut Russia out of the surrender negotiations. The larger point is that the old networks did not simply dissolve, and may have led to President Kennedy’s death. 

The daring Joseph Retinger went on to become the philosophical father of a united Europe, as well as the man who urged Prince Bernhard to launch the Bilderberg conferences. Allen Dulles, of course, went well beyond the OSS, which amassed a $75 million budget and developed a worldwide network by the time Truman disbanded it. Dulles attended Bilderberg sessions, drafted the plan for the CIA, and ran the agency for nine years, beating back legislative drives to crack the web of secrecy. 

Dulles’ friends said he had a "zest for conspiracy." Be that as it may, he believed that, "We cannot safely limit our response to the Communist strategy of take-over solely to those cases where we are invited in by a government still in power." He felt so strongly about taking the initiative that the CIA secretly helped to oust liberal regimes in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.

Five years later the CIA saw a new threat: Fidel Castro. That’s where deMohrenschildt fits in. After the war, he resettled in Dallas, and renewed his ties with other anti-Communist Russians. He worked on contract with both the CIA and oil companies, his cover occupation "petroleum geologist." His walking tour from Dallas to Panama in 1961 landed him in Guatemala City, where he made contact with anti-Castro Cubans and mercenaries revving up for a failed invasion eventually called the Bay of Pigs. 

Two years later, working with money from right-wing Dallas oil baron H.L. Hunt, a core of CIA agents unhappy with Kennedy’s crackdown on "the company," and some bitter Bay of Pigs survivors, deMohrenschildt found a new mission: helping to orchestrate the assassination of a president. Coordinating things for him locally was an FBI informer, Jack Ruby. 

When John Kennedy visited Dallas in November, 1963 the American dream was shattered, the beginning of a slow but inexorable disillusionment with democracy. Ever since, millions have searched for the how and why of his assassination. Over the last 50 years, between 60% and 80% of Americans have accepted some kind of JFK conspiracy theory. A 2023 Galuppoll indicated that 65% believe others were involved. Only 29% thought Oswald acted alone. But even if it was a group, who was involved? The CIA, Cuba, mafia hitmen, all of the above? What role did Jack Ruby play? How about the cops or FBI?

In 1976, ex-agent Robert Morrow told his version of Kennedy’s murder to the House Assassination Committee. The assassination team, he claimed, combined CIA agents and anti-Castro Cubans with whom he had previously worked on schemes to run guns and pump bogus money into Cuba. On November 22, 1963, according to Morrow, it went this way: 

Three teams were in place by 12:30, linked via walkie-talkie to Guy Bannister, a former Chicago FBI chief who handled anti-Castro operations in New Orleans. Two men were stationed behind a stockade fence near the grassy knoll, with another two inside the county court building overlooking Dealey Plaza; one of them was Jack Ruby. 

Ruby had worked in Chicago in the 1950s, a mafia soldier accused at the time of murdering the treasurer of the Waste Handlers Union. In Dallas Ruby built ties with police while running a bar, and ran guns to Cuban exiles under orders from alleged CIA agent Clay Shaw. Ruby also worked with George deMohrenschildt, the veteran spy with ties to H.L. Hunt. 

Lee Oswald, the fall guy, was in the Texas Book Depository that day, according to Morrow, but probably on the second floor — while a "second Oswald" fired from the sixth-floor window. 

Ruby’s police contacts came in handy after the job. In The Assassination Tapes, researcher George O’Toole revealed that Ruby knew Sgt. Gerry Hill, who not only found the rifle shells used in the murder but arrived early at the shooting of Officer Tippit and helped to arrest Oswald. He may have arranged evidence to implicate Oswald before the investigation began. 

The coverup was almost instinctive. Hoover and the FBI were embarrassed at having used Oswald as an informer. The CIA was directly implicated, since several conspirators had worked on covert Cuban projects, even after the Bay of Pigs. False trails threw investigators off the scent, the most insidious of these promoted by a journalist, Lonnie Hudkins, shortly after Kennedy’s death. Hudkins asserted that the President was killed in retaliation by Cuban agents, including Oswald, when they learned about US plots to assassinate Castro. But Hudkins was a friend of Jack Ruby’s, working with him in gun smuggling days. He was also a former employee of both the CIA and H.L. Hunt. 

Morrow claimed that it wasn’t Cubans, but a group within the CIA that wanted to stop Kennedy’s drive to subordinate "the company" to the Defense Intelligence Agency. They and Cuban exiles also held a specific grudge — namely, that Kennedy had held back on naval support during the Bay of Pigs invasion. But oil interests and organized crime also had much to gain: a "liberated" Cuba open to investments and an end to organized crime investigations. 

Of course, that’s just Morrow’s take on the tragedy.

Since the 1960s countless theories have been advanced about the assassination. One that received more favorable press coverage was the work of Edward Epstein, He received $500,000 from Reader’s Digest for a tale about Oswald as a Marxist, who supposedly gave U-2 spy plane secrets to Russia and then worked through the FBI to kill Kennedy. But it was similar to Lonnie Hudkins’ version.

In the 1960s, when New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison started to investigate the Kennedy plot, Epstein had attacked him. That drew praise from CIA chief Richard Helms, a friend of Shaw’s, who circulated the writing as a model debunking of the prevailing conspiracy theory. While Epstein prepared his book, Legend, in the late 1970s, several important sources died suddenly, either shortly before or after meeting him. 

In March 1977, for example, deMohrenschildt talked with Epstein, and within minutes was found dead of gunshot wounds. The old spy had apparently agreed to testify on his part in Kennedy’s death. But digging into those events could have led to a new surge of suspicions. Like secret agents before him, deMohrenschildt turned out to be a disposable asset.

Kerry Thornley, who was in the Marines with Oswald and later founded the "Discordian" religion, developed an even stranger theory. He believed the culprits were the Bavarian Illuminati, a 200-year-old secret society. Oddly enough, Jim Garrison thought for a while that Thornley was the "second Oswald." In time, Thornley came to think that Garrison, and even his own friends, were Illuminati agents. 

"All conspiracy buffs are persecuted eventually," joked Robert Anton Wilson, author of an imaginative conspiracy-based trilogy of novels, Illuminatus. Wilson knew Thornley and watched his obsession consume him; yet Wilson managed to transcend paranoia, transforming the strange, divergent theories surrounding Kennedy’s death — and other conspiracies — into inventive satire. 

In Illuminatus the death of Kennedy is part of a speculative history which begins in Atlantis and extends into politics, mythology, and the occult. The central mystery is the true identity of the Illuminati: Are they defunct, a secret society founded in 1776 and suppressed by the Bavarian government within 10 years? Was the eye in the pyramid on US currency an Illuminati symbol given to Thomas Jefferson by a stranger in a black cloak? Is the Council on Foreign Relations a more recent manifestation of the original Illuminati? Are they controlled by bankers or anarchists, Jesuits or Satanists? Were they revived by the Nazis, or are they instead extraterrestrial visitors who want to help humanity evolve? 

I tend to agree with Wilson, who argues that the world is full of competing conspiracies, the sacred and profane, and has the good sense to maintain a dark sense of humor about them all. 

Pursuit of hidden knowledge leads naturally to belief in one conspiracy or another. Since I began looking into this complex web of connections, the theories have moved from the political fringe to the mainstream. Trump’s MAGA movement, not to mention QAnon, thrives on them, while his core supporters, advisers and allies look more and more like an open conspiracy of corporate gangsters and grifters. They have even begun to rewrite history. In Oklahoma, for example, history teachers will soon have to teach the so-called “theory” that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 presidential election from Trump. In several states educational gag orders have been proposed to limit the teaching and discussion of certain topics.

As Shelley Wolfe, the psychopathic oligarch in my sci fi novel, Dons of Time, explains, “We’re going to own history.” His goal, using advanced technology, is to decide which moments are “suitable for public consumption, and which to bury or ignore.” Or as Trump puts it, “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening." The phrase "fake news" is Trump’s way of telling people to rely on him and disbelieve anything inconvenient.

Personally, I continue to think that instability, chaos and lies, being stoked by elites and demagogues in a quest for cultural dominance and both political and economic power, could ultimately backfire, becoming the prologue to some evolutionary progress, an overdue awakening from primal fear. That doesn’t lessen the pain or impacts of repression and abuse in the meantime. But perhaps the current crisis can  open new possibilities and help point the way. 

If humanity does develop higher (as opposed to artificial) intelligence, the fear of conspiracies must be challenged and disarmed at its roots — secrecy and deception. This calls for more trust, compassion and positive energy than we appear to possess at the moment, something visionary, inclusive and empathetic to combat the cynicism, myopia and control inherent in the lust for power. 

"Positive energy is as real as gravity," wrote Wilson. If that epigram contains a vital kernel of truth, the antidote to negativity, secrecy and lies is to come back with all the positive energy you can muster. He called that the final secret of the Illuminati.

Earlier versions of this material were published by the Vermont Vanguard Press (1978), Upstart (1998) and Toward Freedom (2005).

Exposing State Secrets: From Treason to Whistleblowing

For decades federal agencies in the US conducted secret operations, questionable experiments and selective assassinations that had little to do with the public platitudes of political leaders. But now Tonio Wolfe knew, for example, that DARPA, the agency supposedly launched in response to Russia’s Sputnik, was really an R & D wing of the military industrial complex. 

And its publicly-acknowledged projects represented only a fraction of what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had been doing for the last half century.

From Dons of Time, Chapter 7: Secrets

WOOD-RIDGE, 2010

The conversation was bland until coffee and dessert. Against his better judgment Tonio accepted an invitation to attend dinner with the family over the holidays. But the latest stories about kids, vacations and home improvements were followed by inevitable arguments.

As a child he’d enjoyed family rituals, despite the disputes of the era — Carter energy prices, the hostage crisis and Reagan, the meltdown at Three Mile Island and the nuke plant in East Shoreham near Long Island Sound. They would gathered in Bayside at the palatial home where Shelley, Giancarlo and their three siblings grew up. Among Tonio’s earliest childhood memories was Roman Wolfe presiding at a bountiful table in the formal dining room. 

Tonio didn’t remember much about two of his uncles — Alek and Georgie — both dead when he was around two. But he was close with Gianni and appreciated the sunny disposition of his aunt Vivian. After dinner they would spend hours opening presents, one by one, enjoying each reaction and anticipating the next surprise.

But this was Wood-Ridge and not Bayside, and Shelley was not the man his father was, a war-hardened Croatian immigrant who left Yugoslavia in the fifties with little but knowledge of construction, the phone number of a family associate in New Jersey, and a flexible attitude toward the use of illegal means and violence to achieve the American Dream. By the time Tonio was born, Roman Lupinjak, who changed his name to Wolfe, was the owner of Wolfe Enterprises, a construction business that concealed involvement in pornography, prostitution, money laundering and murder.

To Tonio he was Grandpa, the benign family patriarch who distributed candy and provided unconditional love.

Even then, however, death was no stranger to the family. In 1974 uncles Al and George perished in a plane crash during their return flight from a Florida construction site. Inconsolable, Roman deteriorated and suffered a fatal stroke in 1977. Tonio was only five years old at the time. Five years later uncle Gianni died. He never accepted the official explanation of that, a sudden heart attack at forty-two while on his regular jogging route.

Over coffee Tania, one of Vivian’s kids, brought up Wikileaks, the whistleblower group that had released a slew of State Department documents shortly after Thanksgiving. “All their dirty little secrets are out,” she chirped, “all in one big, stinking dump.”

“Tanny, that’s disgusting.”

“That’s what they call it, mom, a document dump. They released over 250,000 cables. Now we know the truth.”

“Oh really,” Shelley sniffed. “What truth is that, honey?”

He was asking for trouble. Tania, a college junior majoring in political science, was prepared to defend her position.

“The truth? Our embassies around the world are involved in spying, that’s one. Also, we’ve bribed countries into accepting detainees in exchange for aid, and then let them be tortured. Or how about this? Did you know we support the Kurdish Workers Party in Turkey? The Turks and the US say it’s a terrorist group. I mean, total hypocrisy.”

“And oh, in 2003 the CIA kidnapped a German citizen, and then took him to a secret prison in Afghanistan, and they tortured him and held him there for months. And when they were done they just dropped him off on a hillside in Albania. Afterward, they pressured the Germans not to prosecute the agents who did it.”

She was just getting started but Shelley’s hand wave said enough. “Where are you getting this?” It came off as an accusation.

“Newspapers, Julian Assange. Where have you been, gramps?”

“Oh that one, he should be in prison, that one. It’s treason, what he did.”

A few years earlier Tonio would have said nothing. More accurately, he would have had nothing much to add. But what he had learned since taking on the first serious work of his life made it more difficult to accept Shelley’s knee-jerk blustering. Tania was being provocative but she was on the right track. Tonio was no longer so willing to swallow his feelings or conceal his contempt.

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he said, “that’s what G used to say. And he worked for the State Department.” He glared at Shelley. “It was State, right? I agree with Tanny. We need whistleblowers. We wouldn’t know about the secret prisons without them. And the body armor — we had troops in battle without decent armor until someone said something. Some things need to be secret, no argument. But the reason some of it stays secret is because it’s embarrassing, or against the law.”

Shelley wasn’t happy. “It’s a free country so we can have a civil discussion here,” he offered, trying to sound flexible while simultaneously playing Alpha dog and family patriarch. “But I say he has blood on his hands, Assange. I like Steve King’s idea — treat him like an enemy combatant, get him and take him to a military tribunal.”

Tonio hit back. “So, you’d rather not know what the government is doing?”

“In our name,” Tania added supportively.

“Don’t be naive,” Shelley snapped. “Things need to be done, in business, in government, in private. Not everything belongs on the Internet. Gianni knew that, by the way. He was a patriot. And he would have been the first to go after an anarchist like that albino. He worked on important projects.

“It’s always better to surprise your enemy than to be the one who gets surprised,” he finished. “G appreciated that.”

It was accurate, as far as it went. But working with Danny and Angel had introduced Tonio to a more complex and cynical view. For decades, he’d learned, various federal agencies conducted secret operations, questionable experiments and selective assassinations that had little to do with the public platitudes of political leaders.

He now knew, for example, that DARPA, the agency supposedly launched in response to Russia’s Sputnik, was really an R & D wing of the military industrial complex, engaged in everything from hypersonic research to lightweight satellites. In recent years it had been working on high-energy lasers, advanced aircraft, automatic target recognition, submicrometer electronic technology, electron devices, the Strategic Defense Initiative — also known as Star Wars — and a congressionally-mandated particle beam program directly related to Tesla’s original research. But Danny said the publicly-acknowledged projects represented only a fraction of what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had been doing for the last half century.

One example among the many was the suspected use of children in a series of top-secret experiments known as Project Pegasus. The name had triggered the memory of a trip with Gianni to Nutley, and standing in another cavernous room with a gang of kids to see what was described to them as the latest innovation in 3D filmmaking.

Shelley had mentioned his brother’s “important” work. “What projects?” Tonio asked, “do you know?” He had been waiting to pose the question for months. In hindsight, the likelihood that his uncle worked for the State Department looked slim. He wasn’t the type for purely diplomatic missions. More like a field operative, a guy you sent in with a team to rescue hostages or conduct sabotage.

“He couldn’t talk about it,” barked Shelley. “And he didn’t. Like I said, he was a patriot. He followed orders. Loyalty, duty — that used to make a difference.”

“Did he ever talk about DARPA?”

Shelley flinched but tried to conceal his reaction with a joke. “Yeah, I remember him dating somebody with that name.”

“It’s a government agency,” Tania injected.

Now Tonio knew Shelley was holding back. One of his own companies was a subcontractor involved in building the agency’s new headquarters in Arlington, just a few miles from the Pentagon. Shelley’s clumsy evasion added to the growing suspicion that his uncle never completely left the military, and instead went into a defense project like DARPA. It was even possible that the official version of his death was a cover up.

Read Excerpt - Enemy of the State, Part One: https://muckraker-gg.blogspot.com/2013/10/enemy-of-state-dons-of-time-preview.html

Part Two: http://muckraker-gg.blogspot.com/2013/10/enemy-of-state-2-dons-of-time-preview.html

Read Excerpt - Human Traffic: https://gregguma.blogspot.com/2015/03/human-traffic-in-queen-city-dons-of.html

Read Excerpt - Bloody Sunday and the Matchgirl Strike:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/19th-century-protest-and-the-matchgirls-strike-1888-annie-besant-londons-first-wonder-woman/5573731

Follow Dons of Time on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GregGumaMedia/

To read chapter one or buy the book: Dons of Time

UNWITTING: Finding Truth in an Invisible War

When Vermonter William Pierce’s troubles began he had no solid evidence that mind control projects were being pursued by the government. But once MKULTRA documents were declassified in 1977 his personal experiences —from the McCarthy era to the Cuban missile crisis — began to look uncannily close to the CIA’s experiments. And when he was involuntarily committed in 1962, he found himself in the care of Louis “Jolly” West. One of the leading MKULTRA doctors, West had just killed an elephant with LSD. 

Chapter Eight: End Games

(The Secret War on William Pierce)

After hours of interviews and a careful review of Pierce’s writing and documents, I concluded that he was certainly paranoid and in need of psychiatric help. And yet, his underlying complaint — that he had been the unwitting victim of a psychological attack — was supported by strong circumstantial evidence and a series of inexplicable coincidences. Something or someone did get him. 

Beginning in the mid-1950s, government agencies had indeed conducted top secret research on how to manipulate behavior, including the use of disorienting drugs and micro-transmitters. And Pierce had been harassed at various times for his liberal leanings and outbursts. But it was impossible to determine whether he was purposely drugged or harassed with a tiny transmitter. During the Cuban Missile crisis, however, he was involuntarily committed with a flimsy excuse, held for months under the supervision of an MKULTRA pioneer, and released despite an unchanged diagnosis, possibly because he was annoyingly rational and continued to make trouble. The entire experience had shattered him, and possibly induced psychosis.

Sure, he came across as unstable and defensive, and sometimes thought unnamed forces were still harassing him. But his story didn’t vary, the dates and most of the people checked out, and he had kept receipts in the form of documents and detailed accounts. Plus, his analysis of the threat, the thing that had driven him from the start, was on the mark. And chilling. One report, dated August 9, 1964, written while he was living at home in Lyndonville after his Oklahoma ordeal, was presciently titled “New Threats to Privacy and Civil Liberties.” It began:

“Modern science poses unusual new threats to the traditional privacy and freedom of Americans. Bugging and other snooping devices have come into widespread misuse… Psychological conditioning and organized scientific sociology have been used for political purposes in the academic establishment. In particular, ambitious opportunists have exploited the public concern about Communism to organize attacks on alleged Reds, subversives, and other “undesirables.” One of the most alarming developments had been the underground alliance between right-wing extremists and security personnel.”

He even had a basic action program: expose the facts, protect the rights of individuals, and develop legal safeguards to keep “Brave New Science” honest and safe. Armed with his sources, my research, and the available facts, it no longer sounded so delusional to me.

   

Hoping to discover more in government files, in early 1980 I composed letters for Pierce to eight federal agencies, requesting documents under the Freedom of Information Act. These notarized requests asked for anything related to his time on the faculty at four universities, as well as his work for the NSA in 1953. Not surprisingly, all the agencies claimed to have nothing in their files. But a brief reply from NSA was unintentionally revealing. Even though Pierce had worked there, Information Policy Chief Charles Sullivan claimed that they were “unable to locate any files listed under your name in this Agency’s systems or records or files.” It was less than convincing.

In 2013, when I conducted a follow up online search, one piece of correspondence between Pierce and the CIA did turn up. Dated August 1, 1960 and addressed to him at the Syracuse Math Department, it included this statement: “Mr. Dulles (CIA Director at the time) asked me to acknowledge and thank you for your letter of 9 July 1960 enclosing a message to Dr. Glennan of NASA and Mr. D.H. Lewis. The thoughtfulness in bringing our attention to your proposal is indeed appreciated.”

What was his proposal? Electronic mental telepathy, Pierce called it. “Though the technical requirements have already been met, the process and application are new,” he explained. It was really a fishing expedition, an attempt to discover whether his suspicions were true. In the referenced letter to NASA, he pointed to the work being done at the Aviation Medicine School in Texas, where tiny transmitters were being used for research, as well as cybernetic work underway to assist with space exploration, and “extensive use of various voice analyzers and signal separators.” 

Every agency we contacted in 1980, including NASA, NSA and CIA, denied ever hearing from Pierce or knowing anything about him. Nevertheless, he had clearly gotten their attention.

While studying the first amendment that summer in southern California under a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, I was able to verify most of Louis West’s career highlights. After his early assignments at Lackland AFB and posts in Oklahoma during the 1960s, he had moved to Los Angeles in 1969 and established himself as a leading figure in neuropsychiatry. He was also connected with the Brain Research Institute, Israeli Center for Psychobiology, National Academy of Religion and Mental Health, California Alcoholism Council, Pavlovian Society, and White House Conference on Civil Rights.  

But before I could share the new information and insights, along with some FOIA documents I obtained on Subproject 43, word arrived that Pierce was dead. At 59 years old, he passed away around October 12, 1980. His body wasn’t discovered until almost a week later. According to the medical examiner, the specific cause of death wasn’t clear. But he confirmed that Pierce had suffered from advanced cirrhosis of the liver and inflammation of the pancreas, both related to alcoholism, and coronary arteriosclerosis.

A few weeks earlier, Pierce had shared a final truth about himself, one that may help explain why he was targeted in the first place. He was gay and in the closet. His 1962 medical records revealed only hints about “predisposing factors.” The most obvious clue was this brief description: “Obese child who lived with widowed mother and who has functioned in a passive dependent manner.” During the 1950s discovery of such a secret, combined with his incessant letter-writing, could have placed an invisible target on his back.

His doctor lived another 18 years. But in late 1998, Jolly

Louis “Jolly” West, MKULTRA’s
LSD mind games doctor, was
in control until the end.   

West learned that he was dying of cancer and told his son. At 75 years old, hip pain had led to an X-ray. “It took me about ten seconds to register what I saw. There were metastases throughout my skeleteon. Cancer everywhere. I realized I was looking at a death sentence.”

As usual, he wanted to stay in control. And he had a plan. “If I knock off a little ahead of schedule, nobody’s going to know the difference,” he told his son, “and I’ll have saved myself a hell of a lot of pain.” Then he added, “But I’ll need you on board, to help me.” John West agreed.

On January 2, 1999, the two men followed through. After the younger West picked up a prescription for enough Seconal to do the job, the elder West combined them with assorted pills he had on hand — a bathroom pharmacy that included methadone, heptabarbital, Ambien, and morphine. From falling asleep to respiratory/cardiac arrest, it took only twenty minutes to die. “Mr. Totally in Control,” as his loving son sometimes called him, had done it again.

Less than six months later, on the same day Jolly West’s portrait was hung in the foyer of the Louis Joylon West Auditorium at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, John West’s mother Kathryn asked him to do her the same favor, assist with her suicide. Again he complied. 
As West explained in his bittersweet book about their final days, “I believe, as they did, in freedom of choice, the right to personal privacy and self-determination.” Unfortunately, the same rights were denied to William Pierce.

Previous chapters

One: Wrong Turn

Two: Naming Names

Three: Unwanted Voices

Four: Chung's Way

Five: Mastering Minds

Six: The Doctor from MKULTRA

Seven: Bad Medicine

This and previous chapters will appear in the forthcoming book, Informed Dissent