The Family Part VII

Welcome to the most recent installment in my ongoing examination of the elite Christian sect sometimes referred to as "The Family" or "The Fellowship." In part one I briefly addressed Family founder Abraham (Abram) Vereide, the vision that inspired him to sire the organization and the "chance" encounter he had with a "former" military officer of some means the very next day. With the second installment I advanced onto the Family's early political dabblings in Washington state as well the likelihood that it was involved in the murky netherworld of what is generally referred to as "industrial security."

Parts three and four examined the Family's extensive pre-WWII fascist ties and their efforts to rescue any number of "former" Nazis and fascists in the wake of WWII, respectively. The fifth installment considered the deep backgrounds of the next generation of Family leadership as well as Douglas Coe, the man who ultimately succeeded Vereide. The sixth and most recent installment considered the truly international scope of the Family's efforts in the second half of the twentieth century, especially their dealings with the genocidal Suharto regime of Indonesia.

Suharto

With this installment I would like to move along to some of the Family's more recent efforts. It probably goes without saying, but they remain major power players in the international landscape though the more recent dictators they've backed have displayed a bit more restraint than Suharto during the "good ole days."

This sway is aided in no small part by the collection of US congressmen that they've compiled over the years. This collection certainly features some interesting names and has managed to operate in a highly secretive fashion for decades now. It is through this collection, generally referred to as "prayer cells", that the Family's influence has steadily infiltrated the circles of power in both this nation and abroad.

"... The Family is in its own words an 'invisible' association, though it has always been organized around public man. Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas), chair of a weekly, off-the-record meeting of religious right groups called the Values Action Team (VAT), is an active member, as is representative Joe Pitts (R., Pennsylvania), an avuncular would-be theocrat who chairs the House version of the VAT. Others referred to as members include senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee (the powerful conservative caucus cofounded back in 1974 by another Family associate, the late Senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska); Pete Domenici of New Mexico (a Catholic and relatively moderate Republican; it's Domenici's status as one of the Senate's old lions that the Family covets, not his doctrinal purity); Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa); James Inhofe (R., Oklahoma ); Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma); John Thune (R., South Dakota); Mike Enzi  (R., Wyoming); and John Ensign, the conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name. 'Faith-based Democrats' Bill Nelson of Florida and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, sincere believers drawn rightward by their understanding of Christ's teachings, are members, and Family stalwarts in the House include Representatives Frank Wolf (R., Virginia), Zach Wamp (R., Tennessee), and Mike McIntyre, a North Carolina Democrat who believes that the Ten Commandments are 'the fundamental legal code for the laws of the United States' and thus ought to be on display in schools and courthouses...

"... Another principle expanded upon is stealthiness; members are instructed to pursue political jujitsu by making use of secular leaders 'in the work of advancing His kingdom,' and to avoid whenever possible the label Christian itself, lest they alert enemies to that advance. Regular prayer groups, or 'cells' as they're often called, have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.

"The Family's use of the term 'cell' long predates the word's current association with terrorism. It's roots are in the Cold War, when leaders of the Family deliberately emulated the organizing techniques of communism. In 1948, a group of Senate staffers met to discuss ways that the Family 'cell and leadership groups' could recruit elites unwilling to participate in the 'mass meeting approach' OF populist fundamentalism. Two years later, the family declared that with democracy inadequate to the fight against godlessness, such cells should function to produce political 'atomic energy'; that is, deals and alliances that could not be achieved through the clumsy machinations of legislative debate would instead radiate quietly out of political cells. More recently, Senator Sam Brownback told me that the privacy of Family cells makes them safe spaces for men of power – an appropriation of another term borrowed from an enemy, feminism. 'In this closer relationship,' a document for members reads, 'God will give you more insight into your own geographical area and your sphere of influence.' One cell should become 'an invisible "believing group" ' out of which 'agreements reached in faith and in prayer around the person of Jesus Christ' lead to action that will appear to the world to be unrelated to any centralized organization."

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 18-20)

Representative Joe Pitts, a long time staple of the Family

Through this recruitment of senators and men of influence via these cells, the Family has managed to reach into the halls of power in any number of nations aligned to the US empire. Consider, for instance, the work Senator James Inhofe has done for the Family in Africa after his recruitment:

"As a young representative, Inhofe attended the Family's weekly House Prayer Breakfast meeting only out of respect for Oklahoma representative Wes Watkins, its chairman at the time. 'I assumed I was a Christian,' he explain to an Oklahoma evangelical magazine. But that didn't mean much more to him than sitting through a service every Sunday. It was a Christian Embassy missionary, Tom Barrett, who challenged Inhofe to a more zealous faith by suggesting Inhofe was lukewarm towards Jesus...

"He became a Prayer Breakfast loyalist, but it took another challenge to turn him into a missionary. It was Doug Coe who gave it to him. 'Doug has always been kind of behind the scenes, very quiet,' Inhofe told fundamentalist activist Rev. Rob Schenck, in a video Schenck made to defend Inhofe against the Oklahoman. 'He talked me into going to Africa,'  Inhofe said of Coe. 'And I had no interest in going to Africa.' His daughter, a schoolteacher, called him one day to tell him she was going to Africa for school break. 'I said, "Well guess  where Daddy's going? To Africa. And if you go with me, it's free!" ' It'd also be off the books. Although Inhofe would go on to charge his missionary travel to taxpayers, that first trip was paid for by a religious organization, according to a press release. Inhofe never reported it.

"What was his mission? 'I call it the political philosophy of Jesus, something put together by Doug....  It's all scripturally based. Acts 9:15' – the last of the Eight Core Aspects outlined in the document distributed at the Prayer Breakfast, which Inhofe paraphrased as ' "Take my name, Jesus, to the kings." And, of course, if you're a member of the United States Senate in Africa, they think you're important.' He chuckled, slapping the arm of his red leather sofa. 'You're always going to get in to see the kings!'

"His first king? Gen. Sani Abacha, dictator of Nigeria, Africa's largest and most populous nation, not long before Abacha died in bed with three prostitutes in 1998. Abacha was known for two qualities: the greed that led him to steal $3 billion from his country, and the loyalty to the foreign oral companies that made that theft possible. 'You can't help who you are,' said a Family man, defending the group's outreach to the general. 'I mean, can't he have a friend?'

"Inhofe would be that friend. 'We went in there,' Inhofe continues, 'not really knowing what we're doing. He started talking about political things.' But Inhofe had a greater mission. 'I came all the way across the Atlantic and down to sub-Saharan Africa,' he said, 'to tell you in the spirit of Jesus that we love you...'

"Was it Jesus who changed the dictator's heart? The rest of the world might be inclined to say it was oil. Forty-four percent of Nigeria's went to America. The ninth largest oil producer, Nigeria became a pariah nation under Abacha's rule, officially condemned by Washington since the time of his overthrew of a democratic government, in 1993. But Abacha  launched a $10 million lobbying campaign in the capital that won him Democratic as well as Republican allies. He already had four very important American friends: Mobil, Chevron, Ashland, and Texaco. Inhofe, winner of a Lifetime Service Award from a petroleum industry group, was another good friend to have. 'Democracy advocates,' wrote an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus in 1997, the year of Inhofe's mission, 'worry that Abacha will interpret Washington's willingness to dialogue as a signal that Washington will not follow through on its threats to impose oil sanctions.'

"None of that mattered to the senator. All he was trying to do was help 'millions and millions of poor people,' he told Rev. Schenck in the video. And for him, that began with helping General Abacha, one of the kings of Acts 9:15, through his leadership in a successful effort to block sanctions. More recently, in 2008, Inhofe pledge military aid to the government of Nigeria's President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, who'd stolen his election the previous year.

"But it didn't end in Nigeria..."

(C Street, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 121-124)

Abacha

Inhofe's reach throughout Africa has become quite extensive indeed. Sharlet goes on to write:

"... The goal, according to the 'Vision,' was to identify five for each of the 192 countries in the world by the end of 2008. Did they succeed? Not likely. But the 'Vision' has gone far and wide with the help of men such as Inhofe, and the Work goes on. The Family apostate sent me a 2004 budget for funds to be raised by businessmen around the country for Inhofe's missionary work. Not his travel – the government would cover that – but  that of his protégés, the five men for each country he was to select with the help of a local leader. The budget covered eleven African nations (Inhofe has since said he stepped it up to twelve) : Benin, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, Cote d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the site of the worst war on the planet at the moment,  Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mauritius, Rwanda and Uganda. For each country, the local liaison is listed. In all but Ethiopia and Mauritius, it is the president. Then the U.S. leader: Inhofe, down the line. The sums that follow are small, but that's the point: power, not cash, is the Family's currency. Costs for 2003 were mostly covered; for 2004, the budget projected between $20,000 and $40,000 for each country, except one, Uganda, for which $70,000 was to be raised."

(C Street, Jeff Sharlet, pg. 127)

James Inhofe

By all accounts the money the Family has funneled into Uganda has been well spent as the organization seems to view it as a model Christian nation (at least until recent outrage over the "kill the gays" legislation). Certainly the Family's involvement in Uganda has instigated a kind of change.

"Uganda, which following the collapse of Siad Barre's Somalia became the focus of the Family's interests in the African Horn, has been the most tragic victim of this projection of American sexual anxieties. Following implementation of one of the Continent's only successful anti-AIDS program, President Yoweri Museveni, the Family's key man in Africa, came under pressure from the United States to emphasize abstinence instead of condoms. Congressman Pitts wrote that pressure into law, redirecting millions of dollars from effective sex-ed programs to projects such as Unruh's. This pressure achieved the desired result: an evangelical revival in Uganda, and a stigmatization of condoms and those who use them so severe that some college campuses held condom bonfires. Meanwhile, Ugandan souls may be more 'pure,' but their bodies are suffering; following the American intervention, the Ugandan AIDS rate, once dropping, nearly doubled. This fact goes unmentioned by activists such as Unruh and politicians such as Pitts, who continue to promote Uganda as an abstinence success story.

 "The actual fate of Ugandan citizens was never their concern. Pitts, in the Family tradition, may have had geopolitics on the mind: with Ethiopia limping along following decades of civil war and dictatorship and Somalia veering towards a Taliban state, tiny, Anglophone Uganda has become an American wedge into Islamic Africa. But the American uses and abuses of Uganda are still more cynical: Christian Africa has been appropriated for story with which American fundamentalists argue for domestic policy, a parable detached from African realities, preached for the benefit of Americans...."

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pg. 328)

Yoweri Museveni

Yet again we see the curious overlap between concerns of the Family and US foreign policy. Certainly the Family's missionaries have displayed an uncanny knack for inserting themselves into nations considered vital to US foreign policy.

Unsurprisingly, the Family's influence is rather evident in Uganda's "kill the gays" legislation that has garnered so much outrage in recent years. Consider:

"On October 14, 2009, the Ugandan MP David Bahati introduced legislation called the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Among its provisions:

•  three years in prison for failure to report a homosexual within twenty-four hours of learning of his or her crime;  

•  seven years in prison for 'promotion,' which would include not only advocacy but also even simple acknowledgment of the reality of homosexuality;

•  life imprisonment for one homosexual act;

•  and, for 'aggravated homosexuality' (which includes sex while HIV-positive, sex with a disabled person, or simply sex, more than once, marking the criminal as a 'serial offender'), death.

"Bahati, the secretary of the Family's Ugandan branch, called his bill traditional, Ugandan 'family values.' Both the disease – homosexuality, that is – and its diagnoses have been exported from the West, said Dr. James Nsaba Buturo, Uganda's minister of ethics and integrity and the chair of the weekly Family meeting in Parliament. But the solution, he added probably, was Ugandan, an idea the came from the people...

"Winston Churchill called Uganda 'the pearl of Africa.' The Family thinks it is, too. In the last ten years, it has pour millions into 'leadership development' there, more than it has invested in any other foreign country. A Family leader takes credit for turning on the tap of U.S. foreign aid through which billions have flowed into Ugandan coffers. Or private bank accounts, as the case may be. The government of Yoweri Museveni, hailed by the United States as a democracy since the general marched into Kampala twenty-four years ago, in 1986, is ranked 130th on the most reliable corruption index – better than Belarus but just behind Lebanon. 'Corruption is not just an element of [the] system,' observed Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda, 'it is "the system." '

"Every year, right before Uganda's Independence Day, the government holds a National Prayer Breakfast, modeled on the Family's event in Washington. It's organized, with Washington's help, by Bahati's Parliament prayer group called the Fellowship – also modeled on the group in Washington. Americans, among them Sen. Jim Inhofe and former attorney general. John Ashcroft, both longtime Family man, and Pastor Rick Warren, are a frequent attraction at the weekly meetings of the Parliament group. Inhofe and Ashcroft are nearly defined by their anti-gay beliefs...

(C Street, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 130-132) 

Family man Bahati

While most Americans will no doubt dismiss such developments as products of the "Dark Continent" powerful figures within the Family and affiliated groups consider Uganda to be a model nation for the United States to emulate. And what's more, they have powerful backers capable of raising a considerable war chest for these endeavors.

One such of these affiliate groups is an organization known as "the Gathering." Over the past three decades the Gathering has emerged as one of the major financial powerhouses active in the political spectrum today. The Daily Beast notes:

"The Gathering is an annual event at which many of the wealthiest conservative to hard-right evangelical philanthropists in America—representatives of the families DeVos, Coors, Prince, Green, Maclellan, Ahmanson, Friess, plus top leaders of the National Christian Foundation—meet with evangelical innovators with fresh ideas on how to evangelize the globe. The Gathering promotes “family values” agenda: opposition to gay rights and reproductive rights, for example, and also a global vision that involves the eventual eradication of all competing belief systems that might compete with The Gathering’s hard-right version of Christianity. Last year, for example, The Gathering 2013 brought together key funders, litigants, and plaintiffs of the Hobby Lobby case, including three generations of the Green family.

"The Gathering was conceived in 1985 by a small band of friends at the Arlington, Virginia, retreat center known as The Cedars, which is run by the evangelical network that hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast. This stealthy network is known as The Family or The Fellowship. Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power described it in great detail... 

"The evangelical right financial dynasties and foundations that meet each year at The Gathering dispense upwards of $1 billion a year in grants. But even that is overshadowed by the bigger sums that The Family and The Gathering have managed to route from the federal and state government to fund their movement via the Faith-Based Initiative program, USAID, PEPFAR and other multibillion-dollar programs."

the Cedars mansion, a location the Family has gotten a lot of use out of over the years

The so-called "Faith-Based Initiatives" have been a longstanding goal of the Family and the Christian Right on the whole. The present system was first envisioned during the Reagan years.

"...  The Family's interests always tended towards foreign affairs, but faith-based initiatives embody a core philosophy of governance fundamentalists have long sought on every front. During the 1980s, Attorney General Ed Meese and Gary Bauer, Reagan's domestic policy advisor, corresponded with Coe about creating a federal, faith-based response to poverty – a broad application of the methods Coe had experimented with a decade earlier by backing the Black Buffers as an alternative to black power. Meese's plans never came to fruition, but the outlines of compassionate conservatism... began to cohere in these letters."

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 381-382)

From these humble beginnings has emerged one of the greatest political activism cash cows in recent history. The public was first given a glimpse of the massive transference of public funds into religious organizations and agendas by former Bush administration official David Kuo, one of the architects of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. In 2007 Kuo authored a tell-all book called Tempting Faith.

"When Kuo discovered that Bush's faith-based rhetoric was for the most part just that – lost in the shadow of the Iraq War, the program never received anywhere near the $8 billion Bush had once spoken of – he resolved to prove its value to the money men. Tempting Faith is, most damningly, the story of how he and a few others transform the Office of Faith-Based initiatives into the very Republican vote-getting machine its critics have accused it of being from the beginning. 'We laid out a plan whereby we would hold roundtable events for threatened incumbents with faith and community leaders,' he writes. In 2002, those roundtables contributed to nineteen out of twenty victories in targeted races. In 2004, the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives repeated the trick on the presidential scale. By that time, Kuo was going. He had quit. 'We were good people forced to run a charade, to provide political cover to a White House that needed compassion and religion as political tools.'

 "It was a startlingly honest admission. The media celebrated Kuo as a truth teller and his book as the first big crack in the Christian Right's alliance with the Republican Party. By 2007, the press was declaring the Christian Right dead and evangelicalism a waiting force in American life, despite the fact that by Kuo's own confession, the machine he helped build will likely continue to lurch along after Bush is gone. Bush never provided it the funds he had promised in idealistic speeches aimed at evangelical voters, but he did something more significant: through administrative changes made by executive order, he transformed Clinton's 1996 welfare reforms into a wedge with which to drive irreparable cracks into the wall of separation between church and state. Suddenly, there were faith-based offices not just in the Department of Health and Human Services but also in the Department of Justice, not only in the Department of Education but also in the Department of Commerce. The Small Business Administration gained a faith-based office; so, too, did the Agency for International Development, to which the United States distributes its imperial largesse, the diplomacy of foreign aid. None of these offices have much money, but then, they didn't need to. Their budgets didn't matter so much as the budgets of the departments and agencies in which they were housed, huge portions of which could now be tapped for faith-based ends even if the money didn't flow directly through the faith-based office. The real achievement of faith-based initiatives was not to launch flashy programs or even to buy voters for Republicans; it was to open the door for religious groups to the whole treasure house of federal social-services funding."

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 383-384)

Kuo

Its quite likely that social services was not the only thing the Family was worked towards privatizing either. Note that one of the early advocates of faith-based initiatives in the 1980s was Reagan domestic policy advisor Gary Bauer. While Bauer seems to have had a relationship with the Family since the 1980s, nearly a decade early he forged close ties with what has become one of the major scions of the Christian Right: the Prince family. Family patriarch Edgar Prince was a major financial backer of one of Bauer's most influential endeavors.

"In 1988, Gary Bauer and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson began building what would become the Family Research Council (FRC), the crusading, influential, and staunchly conservative evangelical organization that has since taken the lead on issues ranging from banning gay marriage to promoting school vouchers for Christian schools to outlawing abortion and stem-cell research. To get it off the ground, though, they  needed funding, and they turned Edgar Prince. '[W]hen Jim Dobson and I decided that the financial resources weren't available to launch FRC, Ed and his family stepped into the breach,' wrote Bauer. 'I can say without hesitation that without Ed and Elsa and their wonderful children, there simply would not be a Family Research Council.' Young Erik would go on to become one of Bauer's earliest interns at the FRC..."

(Blackwater, Jeremy Scahill, pgs. 71-72)

Bauer

The above-mentioned "Young Erik" is none other than Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary firm once known as Blackwater. Bauer was not the only Family connection to Erik Prince either. Another interesting connection is long time Family man and former Watergate burglar Charles W. Colson. While Colson was serving time over his Watergate escapades he apparently found his calling... with the assistance of Doug Coe.

"In prison, Colson claims, he gave up politics for God. But in a June 11, 1974, letter defending his conversion to his parole board, Colson wrote, 'That which I found I could not change or affect in a political or managerial way, I found could be changed by the force of a personal relationship that men develop in a common bond to Christ.' Doug Coe, in a letter to the board dated one day later, wrote that Colson's freedom was necessary so that a group of Christian men could put him to work on a program for 'reaching youth' in juvenile delinquent homes. Upon his release, the two men collaborated on what would become the model and inspiration for what may well be a generation or more of 'faith-based' governmental activism.

"The story of Prison Fellowship – the largest ministry for prisoners in the world, with 50,000 employees and volunteers dedicated to helping convicts become law abiders – has been recounted in short, inspirational burst many times since Colson founded it with Coe's help and the Fellowship's money shortly after his own release from prison in 1975..."

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 232-233)

Colson

Erik Prince also seems to have been quite taken with Colson's Prison Fellowship. In 2000 he gave $500,000 to the organization. Colson has referred to Erik Prince more than a time or two publically and has indicated that he had an influence on the ideology that has shaped the mercenary's empire.

"A few years earlier, in the 2002 speech in which Colson praised Erik Prince, the former Watergate conspirator talked extensively about the historical foundation and current necessity of a political and religious alliance of Catholics and evangelicals. Colson talked about his work, beginning in the mid-1980s, with famed conservative evangelical Protestant minister turned Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus and others to build a unified movement. That work ultimately led in 1994 to the controversial document 'Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.' The ECT document articulated the vision that would animate Blackwater's corporate strategy and the politics practiced by Erik Prince – a marriage of the historical authority of the Catholic Church with the grassroots appeal of the modern conservative U.S. evangelical movement, bolstered by the cooperation of largely secular and Jewish neoconservatives. Author Damon Linker, who once edited Neuhaus's journal, First Things, termed this phenomenon the rise of the 'Theocons.' "

(Blackwater, Jeremy Scahill, pgs. 83-84) 

Prince

Through Colson's relationship with the Prince family, was the Family subtly encouraging the privation of military services as well? Certainly it would be in keeping with the group's ideology.

But even more striking is Colson's involvement with above mentioned "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" document. This seems to be an agenda pursued by the Family in recent years as well. It is most evident in one of the group's most noted members: Sam Brownback, the current governor of Kansas, former  US representative and senator, and a 2008 presidential candidate that remains extremely popular among social conservatives. In addition to the Family, Brownback has made some other interesting alliances in recent years.

"Although Brownback's 2002 Catholic conversion was through Opus Dei, and ultra-orthodox order that, like the Family, specializes in cultivating the rich and powerful, the source of much of his religious and political thinking is Chuck Colson. 'When I came to the Senate,' Brownback remembers, 'I sought him out. I had been listening to his thoughts for years, and wanted to get to know him some.' The admiration was mutual. Colson spotted Brownback's potential not long after Brownback joined a Family prayer cell..."

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pg. 269)

Brownback

Sam Brownback, an operative of both the Family and Opus Dei? Certainly such a truly unholy union would bring to bear a staggering degree of wealth in the hands of especially reactionary strands of Christianity. And here to lurks Family man Chuck Colson, a longtime friend of the Prince family, the same Prince family's whose Blackwater employed at least one senior member with membership in the equally elitist Sovereign Military Order of Malta. To say that these organization are phenomenally powerful, wealthy and heavily connected to the US national security apparatus would be a gross understatement. In short, these are organizations with the means to operate in a fashion that the conspiratorial right has long accused the New Age movement of acting in.

But even with out these other groups, the Family and its affiliates remain a major force in the US political landscape and, more importantly, a crucial tool of the Pentagon and CIA. The militant faith proclaimed by the Family has become a crucial component of the US empire, both domestically and abroad, providing a rationalization for the clasping domestic standards fussed with imperial over reach overseas. This constitutes a form of psychological warfare that the "truth tellers" of the conspiratorial right largely refuse to even acknowledge while the public at large remains utterly blind to the truly revolutionary aims that lay behind the old time religion guise used by the Family.

What it amounts to is that while conspiracy theories are as popular and widely believed as ever, this is one rabbit hole few are ready to explore. And the repercussions of this may well be truly horrific in the very near future. But for now I shall sign off on this subject. Until next time dear reader.

The Family Part VI

Welcome to the sixth installment in my examination of the elite Christian sect variously known as "The Family" or "The Fellowship." Founded in 1935 by a man named Abraham (Abram) Vereide, this highly secretive network seems to have established ties with both the US deep state as well as major corporate powers from a very early date. By the 1950s it had arrived as a major political powerhouse --every US President since Dwight Eisenhower has attended the group's annual National Prayer Breakfast.

Part one of this series considered the alleged spiritual experience that spurred Abram to found the Family as well as the well connected "former" military officer who assisted Vereide get the organization off the ground. The second installment considered the group's likely ties to the murky netherworld of industrial security as well its early political manipulations in Washington state. Part three looked at the group's extensive ties to the pre-WWII fascist underground while part four concerned he group's postwar efforts to recruit numerous "former" Nazis and fascist in Europe. The fifth and most recent installment considered the deep backgrounds of the next generation of Family leadership as well as Douglas Coe, the man who succeeded Veriede as the organization's head.

Coe, center, with George H.W. Bush to his left

With this installment I would like to focus in on the group's truly international ambitions in the second half of the twentieth century. Under Coe, Haiti became an early "beneficiary" of these ambitions. Naturally Coe's sights may have been set on Haiti due in part to one of the man's great passions: golfing.

"...  One of his first conquest was Haiti, then just entering a long darkness of dictatorship that still reverberates today. Winning Catholic Haiti's acquaintance to U.S.-style Cold War evangelicalism had been a Fellowship ambition since 1955, when an Abram associate had declared it a 'soft spot of communism' that would require the ministrations of 'Magnificent Americans' preaching a new equation of Christ and free markets. 'I have been expecting to hear that you are making this your personal prospect,' joked one of Coe's Oregon friends, a man who claimed to have been led by the Lord into building a small trucking parts empire. It wasn't God, though, who the trucking boss thought would draw Coe to island nation, one of the poorest in the world. 'Am told they have wonderful golf courses.'

"Coe counseled a Haitian senator and then Haiti's ambassador to the United States, easing both into commitments to a Christ-led nation, with the understanding that the Christ Coe preached led not towards the socialism that tempts any bitterly poor people but towards an economics of 'key men' who would share their wealth as God instructed them. Senators Frank Carlson and Homer Capehart, both members of the Foreign Relations Committee, did the follow-up work, leading a Fellowship delegation of twelve businessmen to instruct the Haitian parliament in prayer cell politics. Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, who would declare himself not only president for life but also the nation's official 'Maximum Chief of the Revolution' and 'Electrifier of Souls' – he was the weirdest and most vicious dictator in the Western Hemisphere – impressed the senators with his spirituality.

"Perhaps he told them, as he was fond of saying, that he literally personified Haiti, that he was a stand-in for God. A personality! That was the Fellowship's whole theology in a nutshell, so they didn't bother to ask questions about his Vodoun-driven militia, the Tonton Macoute assassins. Instead, they promise to twist arms in Washington on Papa Doc's behalf: foreign aid, exemptions on sugar tariffs. It wouldn't be a hard sell. The Cold Warriors in State, under Ike and every administration that followed, preferred Papa Doc's public proclamations of Christian brotherhood to a free black nation that might seek support from the Soviet Union."

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 215-216)

Family-backed Senators Frank Carlson (top) and Homer Capehart (bottom); Capehart was already addressed in part four, where it was noted that he assisted the Family in their efforts to save numerous "former" Nazis in the wake of WWII

Interestingly (if unsurprisingly), the only real challenge to Papa Doc's rule seems to have come from the Kennedy administration.

"In the winter of 1956-57 Haiti, the poorest nation in this hemisphere, erupted in violence, and the president was deposed. The country reeled into chaos, with successive governments tumbling like bowling pins. Haiti's nearest neighbor on the east, Rafael Trujillo, decided to throw secret support behind a forty-nine--year-old country doctor named Francois Duvalier as the best bet to restore stability. The mild-mannered Duvalier, who had studied at the University of Michigan, easily won the September 1957 election.

"One of his first moves was to have some of his most loyal aides fitted with weights and dumped and the Gulf of Gonave, the Papa Doc version of starting with a clean slate. Another was to seek even more United States support. In 1958 Marine 'advisers' arrived, and by the end of 1961 some $20 million in aid was in his coffers. In January 1962 Haiti  in effect sold its vote in the Organization of American States to the United States for a $5 million price.

"But the Kennedy administration was unable to stomach Papa Doc's chamber of horrors for long. Late in 1962 it dispatched a psychiatrist to Port-au-Prince, and had the embassy arrange a private dinner with Papa Doc. The psychiatrist returned to Washington with the diagnosis, 'Duvalier is a psychopath – there are unmistakable symptoms of paranoid megalomania. He is a very sick man.'

"At first the Kennedy administration tried to persuade Duvalier to clean up his act, but when the futility of reform became clear, a virtual ultimatum was delivered by Ambassador Raymond Thurston. As Duvalier later recounted it to European journalist, 'Ambassador Thurston appeared one evening to tell me plainly that I must go. He came and said that the country was in revolt and my enemies were about to seize power, but that the United States would save me personally provided, of course, that I give no trouble and went quietly.' This was the same type of unofficial word that had been given the Batista and Trujillo, and the result was even more empathic no. Duvalier gave Thurston twenty-four hours to pack and leave.

"The White House reacted by suspending aid and recalling the Marines and diplomatic mission. It had already cut off arms. Papa Doc seized the occasion to deliver a rambling speech soothsaying doom for John Kennedy. When Kennedy was struck down at Dallas in November 22, 1963, Duvalier planted the rumor that he had sent zombies to Texas.

"Under Lyndon Johnson relations with Haiti were repaired somewhat, although it was not until the next administration took over that the old status quo was restored. The event was symbolized by the appearance of Nixon envoy Nelson Rockefeller in Port-au-Prince in 1969.

"Economic and military aid ensued. In November 1970 Washington secretly lifted the arms ban and granted export licenses to a Miami firm, Aerotrade, Inc. A major stockholder in the company was Haitian Defense Minister Luckner Cabronne, who was once quoted as saying that 'a good Duvalierist stands ready to kill his children or children to kill their parents.' Despite these ravings, Cabronne had solid business instincts. He controlled the tourist resort at Ibo Beach, the country's taxi system, and Air Haiti. The Marines were again sent in, but this time they were superannuated ones on Aerotrade's payroll who were to serve as advisers. Weapons, munitions, and a half dozen patrol craft were also imported.

"The concept of using Haiti as a dagger pointed at the heart of Cuba was nothing new, as we have seen. What was new was the idea of using Haiti without Duvalier. During the six-year hiatus between the severance of normal relations by JFK and their resumption by Nixon, that benighted nation was the target of some half a dozen invasion plots in which the CIA was not a totally innocent party."

(Deadly Secrets, Warren Hinckle & William Turner, pgs. 283-285)

Papa Doc

Several business and political interests hailing from the state of Texas and long linked to the Kennedy assassination by numerous researchers had dealings with Papa Doc at the same time to Family was lobbying on his behalf.

"... Although there was no confiscations of American property, no Castro-style agrarian reform, American businessmen faced repeated shakedowns and harassment from the Duvalier government. Foremost among the entrepreneurs rooted in Haiti was the Texan Clint Murchison, Jr. To be on the safe side, Murchison registered in Washington, D.C. as a lobbyist for Duvalier.

"Murchison owned flour mills ('Caribbean Mills'), and a mammoth meatpacking business called HAMPCO, 'Haitian-American Meat and Provision Company, S.A.' At the flour mills, grey flour was ground for the poor out of imported surplus wheat. In the fiscal year ending June 1962 HAMPCO shipped 1,609,886 pounds of meat; between July 1, 1961 and September 30, 1963, 5,237,242 pounds of meat left Haiti.

"Sanitary conditions at HAMPCO were sub-standard. There were no health inspections, and the meat was unfit for the U.S. market. Instead, it was shipped to Puerto Rico where regulation was non-existent.

"When 'certain deficiencies' finally led to a HAMPCO being denied in import certificate even to Puerto Rico, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson secretary, Bobby Baker, made the trouble evaporate – for a commission of one cent per pound. Johnson received his kickback. The scandal was being investigated in late 1963 by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who planned to add this example of Lyndon's malfeasance to his growing list of justifications for removing Lyndon Johnson from the 1964 presidential ticket.

"Nor was Lyndon Johnson, Murchison and Bobby Baker the only Texans reaping profits from Haiti. George H.W. Bush's partner in Zapata Off-Shore oil, CIA operative Thomas J. Devine, working out of New York, was also doing business in Haiti. By 1985, cheap labor and tax concessions would result in the presence of two hundred and forty factories in Haiti owned by US businessmen. The minimum wage was now only three dollars a day.

"Still, American corporations concluded that Duvalier was to blatantly corrupt and unreliable. It was not so much Duvalier's corruption that made the U.S. uneasy. They had dealt with corruption before. Rather, it was the fear of the nationalization of American businesses, along with an unreasonable tax burden, and unpredictable shakedowns for cash, that by 1963 lead CIA to enter into serious discussions about how most efficaciously to remove Papa Doc."

(Our Man in Haiti, Joan Mellen, pgs. 9-10)

Murchison Jr.

After 1963, when JFK cut off Haiti, assistance continued to arrive to Papa Doc and company via the Mafia, who have also long been linked to the Kennedy assassination as well. But despite the Kennedy administration being the chief one to seriously push for Duvalier's overthrow, several individuals linked to the Kennedy assassination also became involved in these intrigues. Easily the most notable was the truly enigmatic figure of George de Mohrenschildt (whom I've written much more on here), Lee Harvey Oswald's dear "friend" from his first stint in Dallas.

"The House Committee added to what was known about the de Mohrenschildts' intelligence connections. It revealed that, when leaving Dallas in May 1963 for Haiti, the de Mohrenschildts travel to Washington and took part in a Pentagon-CIA meeting with de Mohrenschildt's business ally, a Haitian banker named Clemard Joseph Charles. A former CIA contract agent has since suggested that one of de Mohrenschildt's purposes in moving to Haiti was to oversee a CIA-approved plot to overthrow Haitian dictator Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier.

"This seems quite possible. Clemard Charles did advocate the overthrow of Duvalier in the Washington meeting...; and in 1967, the year in which the de Mohrenschildts were smuggled secretly out of Haiti, Charles was reportedly jailed for his role in an anti-Duvalier plot. Charles was jailed again for having financed an abortive military revolt of April 1970, in which a major role was played by the French intelligence agent Andre Labay, later arrested as a major drug trafficker. At the time of the meeting in May 1963, a U.S. task force of eight ships with 2,000 Marines was menacing Duvalier by their presence just outside of Haitian waters.

"From the outset Clemard Charles may have had mob contacts and assistance for his intrigues in Haiti. His influence there increased in 1964, when he helped Duvalier break a U.S. arms embargo and acquired two T-28 fighter planes, possibly with help from U.S. organized crime. After his exile to the United States in late 1970s, Charles's business deals involved a number of intelligence  and organized crime figures. In 1979 Charles discussed yet another possible ouster of Duvalier with veteran guerrilla warfare expert Mitchell WerBell III, a veteran of Cuban exile missions against Castro, and a representative of the Nugan Hand Bank, a bank involved in both intelligence operations and the financing of drug deals. During the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s, Charles laundered money for Mario Renda, a leading mob moneybroker for failed savings-and-loan banks, a number of them control by alleged Carlos Marcello associate Herman Beebe. Charles also became an officer or director of Florida corporations with Albert Krieger, the attorney for convicted drug figures Larry Freeman and Jack DeVoe, and with Frank Sturgis...

"De Mohrenschildt was also in contact with the dubious milieu of Herman Beebe and his associates, from as early as 1960...

"In other words, George de Mohrenschildt, so often described in assassination books by his intelligence connections, may have had links to the world of crime as well. But such intriguing connection should not make us forget that first and foremost de Mohrenschildt was an oil exploration geologist, and that his travels overseas were above all to countries like Haiti where oil was being sought. His repeated visits to Haiti in 1956, 1961, 1962, and March 1963, led to a proposal for a holding company with Charles for various investments, including a casino... De Mohrenschildt's self-described role in the deal was to obtain the support of oil companies, along with U.S. aid sources in Washington...

"So de Mohrenschildt was not just a 'spook,' as he has often been described; and his operation in Haiti should not be projected abstractly as an intelligence plot, or even an intelligence-mafia plot, so much as another export overseas of the U.S. way of doing business..."

(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 78-80)

De Mohrenschildt

It would seem that by and large business interests like the Murchisons, the Bushes and those represented by the Family, were generally content to do business with Papa Doc. Even during the peak years of CIA operations in Haiti, which occurred during the mid-1960s, attempts at overthrowing Duvalier were often comically inept. At one point the TV station CBS was even conscripted into such efforts as part of a documentary that became involved in the notorious "Project Nassau." Thus, just how serious the American deep state truly was about overthrowing Duvalier is highly debatable. But moving along.

After its early "successes" in Haiti, the Family really began to stretch out. Next up were inroads to South Korea and Ethiopia.

"And so it went through the 1960s, Coe and Halverson and Robinson and dozens of lesser brothers traveling the world for the Fellowship, almost always finding their way through Christ leading to the next hot spot in the Cold War. Not only did South Korea host a prayer breakfast, but it's dictator, General Park Chung Hee, tried to use the Fellowship to channel illegal funding to congressional candidates of Nixon's selection. (Nixon's representative, a Fellowship man named John Niedicker, declined.) Coe and Carlson double-teamed Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, a strategic prize in the struggle between United States and the Soviet Union. Selassie, who like Papa Doc considered himself an embodiment of the divine, depended on his Fellowship brethren to represent his interests in the United States.

"Those interests were considerable. For two decades, the United States provided more aid to Ethiopia than to the entire rest of the continent. In return, the emperor granted the National Security Agency basing rights for the largest overseas intelligence facility in the world, a high-tech 'listening post' from which the United States could keep tabs on the Middle East. He also deeded the Fellowship a prime parcel in downtown Addis Ababa from which to proselytize the rest of Africa. Just like dominoes, Coe wrote home to Salem."

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pg. 216)

Haile Selassie, the long time emperor of Ethiopia

South Korea of course had long standing ties to the far right wing group of military officers who surrounded General Douglas MacArthur and who continued to wield enormous influence within the US deep state well into the 1970s, discussed briefly in part four of this series and more extensively here.

By the late 1950s the Fellowship's influence had become both vast and very concentrated on Cold War hot spots. Journalist Wayne Madsen, writing for Insider magazine, notes:

"By 1957, ICL had established 125 groups in 100 cities, with 16 groups in Washington, DC alone. Around the world, it had set up another 125 groups in Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Northern Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Ethiopia (where Emperor Haile Selassie gave ICL property in Addis Ababa to build its African headquarters), India, South Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Guatemala, Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Bermuda. ICL’s international activities coincided with activities in countries where the CIA was particularly active – an obvious by-product of the close cooperation between Vereide and the CIA’s Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton. Angleton and his close associate, Miles Copeland, favored using private businessmen to conduct operations that the CIA was barred from conducting statutorily. The ICL fit the bill very nicely. And although the Fellowship despised homosexuals, that did not stop FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who was strongly rumored to have been gay, writing a prayer for Vereide."

the infamous James Jesus Angleton, whom the Matt Damon character in The Good Shepherd was based upon

Easily the most disturbing result of the Fellowship's ever expanding relationship with the US intelligence and business communities was its role in Indonesia.

Indonesia is a nation that rarely concerns Americans despite having one of the most curious (and longest) history's on earth. In recent years growing evidence has begun to emerge that the island archipelago may well have been the cradle of civilization and that many of the world's great myths originated from there. In more recent times the largest Islamic nation on Earth has been at the center of political intrigues both before and especially after the Second World War. While all of this is far beyond the scope of this present series, a word should probably be said about the extensive Nazi presence in the island nation that dated from the 1920s.

The Nazi party in Indonesia was founded by a man named Walther Hewel. Hewel had joined the Nazi party before Hitler himself and had become a close friend of the future Fuhrer as well as a devoted party member from an early date. Hewel marched with Hitler at the Beer Hall Putsch when he was only 18 and then would serve time with the Fuhrer at Landsberg Prison. Upon his release he became a kind of international agent for the party.

"Beginning with his sojourn in England, Hewel  – a committed Nazi and true believer – was active in promoting Nazi ideals. Encouraged by Rudolf Hess to form alliances with British fascists, he then went on to create an active Nazi Party in Indonesia starting in March 1927 and remained in Java until called back by Hitler at the end of 1935 to serve as ambassador to Spain and then as a special advisor to Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop (who was hanged at  Nuremberg). The positions in Spain and in Indonesia are suggestive, since they would form an important – but largely unrecognized – leg of the Ratline.

"While in Indonesia, Hewel formed Nazi Party units throughout Java: in Jakarta (then known as Batavia), Bandung, Medan, Padang, Semarang, Makassar... and Surabaya. In fact, Hewel was known to Bunker inhabitants as 'Surabaya Wally...

"Hewel would remain in Dutch-controlled Indonesia for nine years, during which time he saw the Nazi Party in that country grow and expand, largely among ex-patriate German and Dutch communities in those cities..."

(Ratline, Peter Levenda, pgs. 86-87)

Hewel

As noted in part four, the possibility that the Family was involved in the so-called "Ratlines" is one that should be more vigorously pursued by researchers with the resources to do so. But back to Nazism in Indonesia: the island archipelago became a crucial meeting point for the armies of Germany and Japan during the Second World War.

"While Japan extended its authority over most of East Asia from Korea and China to the Philippines, Singapore, Malaya, Indochina and Indonesia, it had virtually no direct contact with the armed forces of Germany. It did, however, control important natural resources in those territories – like rubber, tin and other commodities – that were essential to the war effort in Europe. Rubber, in particular, was necessary for the production of tires and other components of tanks, trucks, jeeps and aircraft parts, and rubber was abundant in Malaya and Indonesia, areas under Japanese control.

"Thus, a system was established whereby the Germans would transport jet engine technology, machine tools and raw materials the Japanese did not have – such as uranium – in exchange for rubber, tin, tungsten, and whatever else was needed by the German war machine. The method of transportation was the U-boat. The port of call was Penang on the western coast of Malaya, with the first such shipment arriving on July 15, 1943 via German U-boat U-511. The submarine was actually a gift to the Japanese Navy by Adolf Hitler himself, in return for a Japanese submarine shipment of desperately-needed war material on Japanese sub I-30. Thus we have the rather bizarre image of Nazi U-boats bearing the swastika on their conning towers sailing into Asian ports halfway around the world from Germany.

"The Asian U-boat bases represented the only occasion in the entire war when the Germans and the Japanese actively cooperated militarily. German U-boats would refuel in the Indian Ocean on their way to and from Malaya, out of range of British bombers, in an operation that was conducted quickly and efficiently. The submarines themselves had been outfitted more as cargo ships than as engines of destruction, and towards the end of the war they were carrying V-2 rocket components to the Japanese. There has been much speculation that the Japanese were working on their own version of the atomic bomb at the time and, had they managed to build the V-2 rocket using German blueprints and parts, they would have had not only the bomb but also an effective delivery system.

"As the British grew in strength in Asia in 1944, and using India as a base, they began to bomb Penang in order to disrupt the U-boat traffic from Europe and also to deny the Japanese that important port that controlled the sea lanes in the Melaka Straits. At that time the decision was made to move the base to Indonesia, to Batavia (now Jakarta), as well as Surabaya, and the shipments carried on as before.

"Aside from the Nazi U-boat presence, in 1943 a Gestapo team arrived in Indonesia to coordinate their activities with the Japanese and against whatever Dutch resistance there was in the archipelago. The Netherlands had been invaded in 1940, and the Dutch in Indonesia were cut off and without any support or resources from their homeland. The Japanese promised Indonesians their independence from Holland if they would support Japan in its project of wiping out Dutch resistance, and future Indonesian leaders like Sukarno were cooperating with Japanese for the oldest of reasons: 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend.'

"The Gestapo then began rounding up whatever Jews they could find, for arrest and imprisonment...

"Thus, we have a documented Nazi presence in Indonesia going back to the 1920s (long before Hitler came to power in Germany) and which does not disappear until the end of the war in the Pacific, for the Nazi U-boats that were stranded in Indonesia after the German surrender were commandeered by the Japanese for their own use. That meant  that U-boat crews were also stranded in Indonesia and many found themselves unable – or unwilling – to return to Germany.

"Many U-boat crewman discovered Indonesia to be a relatively congenial berth after the rigors of submarine warfare on the losing side. Although they were taken prisoner by the Allies once Japan surrendered, some managed to escape and others were charged with guarding the Dutch against the Indonesian rebels. Some became active in the Indonesian revolt against the Dutch, who returned Indonesia in force after the Japanese surrender. Several died in Indonesia and are buried in what has to be one of the strangest cemeteries in the world – Eight Hundred Statues."

(Ratline, Peter Levenda, pgs. 90-92)

wreck up a U-boat found near Indonesia

The graveyard Levenda noted above, the Eight Hundred Statues, is located in the region of Bogor on what was a tea plantation owned by two German brothers, Emil and Karl Theodor Helfferich. Theodor had been killed in a train wreck in Switzerland in 1925, but during World War I he had been Vice Chancellor of Germany and Secretary of the Interior. He was also responsible for the development and construction of the first German submarines.

the Eight Hundred Statues graveyard, located near Bogor, Indonesia

Emil Helfferich was both a Nazi Party member and an intimate of high ranking Nazi officials. Interestingly, he was a member of an organization known as Freundeskreis Himmler ('the Friendship Circle of Himmler"). This mysterious organization featured some interesting figures: Hjalmar Schacht (the infamous banker who played a key role in reviving Germany's economy after WWI), Ernst Schafer (the famous explorer who led the legendary SS-Tibet Expedition), Wolfram Sievers (chief of the mysterious Ahnenerbe) and Otto Pohl (the SS general in charge of the concentrations camps as well as SS shrine of Wewelsburg). As was noted in part four, Pohl was one of the Nazis the Family intervened on behalf of after the war. In his case their intervention was not enough as Pohl was ultimately hanged in 1951.

Pohl

Hjalmar Schacht would become involved in Indonesia after the war when he became an economic advisor to Sukarno. While the nationalist Indonesia leader had flirted was fascism prior to the end of World War II, Sukarno moved progressively further to the left and the Communist camp throughout the 1950s.

Sukarno

Support from "former" Nazis elements withered away by the early 1960s as did whatever protection JFK gave Sukarno prior to his assassination. By 1965 regime change was in the air and it would be one of the most brutal the Pentagon and US intelligence community ever engineered.

"Indonesia's 1965 coup followed a very different trajectory. Since the Second World War, the country had been led by President Sukarno, the Hugo Chavez of his day (though minus Chavez's appetite for elections). Sukarno enraged the rich countries by protecting Indonesia's economy, redistributing wealth and throwing out the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which he accused of being facades for the interests of Western multinationals. While Sukarno was a nationalist, not a Communist, he worked closely with the Communist Party, which had 3 million active members. The U.S. and British governments were determined to end Sukarno's rule, and declassified documents show that the CIA had received high-level directions to 'liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities.'

"After several false starts, the opportunity came in October 1965, when General Suharto, backed by the CIA, began the process of seizing power and eradicating the left. The CIA had been quietly compiling a list of the county's leading leftist, a document that fell into Suharto's hands, while the Pentagon helped out by supplying extra weapons and field radio so Indonesian forces could communicate in the remotest parts of the archipelago. Suharto then sent out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his 'shooting lists,' as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. Embassy received regular reports on their progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesian left have been annihilated. One of the people involved in the operation was Robert J. Martens, who worked for the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. 'It really was a big help to the army,' he told the journalist Kathy Kadane twenty-five years later. 'They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.'

"The shooting lists covered the targeted killing; the more indiscriminate massacres of which Suharto is infamous were, for the most part, delegated to religious students. They were quickly trained by the military and then sent into the villages on instructions from the chief to the navy to 'sweep' the countryside Communist. 'With relish,' wrote one reporter, 'they called out their followers, stuck their knives and pistols in their waistbands, swung their clubs over their shoulders, and embarked on the assignment for which they had long been hoping.' In just over a month, at least half a million and possibly as many as 1 million people were killed, 'massacred by the thousands,' according to Time. In East Java, 'Travelers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with body; river transportation has at places been impeded.' "

(The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, pgs. 67-68)

Suharto

The Family had not yet begun its relationship with Suharto at the time of the initial genocide that brought him to power. But they had had a relationship with the general for almost a decade by the time of his invasion of East Timor in 1975. This marked one of the most brutal chapters of Suharto's reign.

"... It declared independence; nine days later Suharto's army invaded, on the pretext that its neighbor was communist. Two hundred thousand people – nearly a third of the island's population – were killed during the long occupation, to which the United States gave its blessing. Gerald Ford, the only president to have been a member of an actual prayer cell (when he was in Congress, with Representatives John Rhodes, Al Quie, and Melvin Laird, a cell that reconvened in 1974 to pray with Ford about pardoning Nixon), told Suharto, 'We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have.' Kissinger, with Ford in Jakarta, added, 'It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly because the use of U.S.-made arms could create problems.' Suharto did not succeed quickly – the killing continued for decades – but he never lacked for champions in the U.S. Congress, which saw to it that American dollars kept his regime in bullets until he was driven out in 1998.

"The massacre of Indonesia preceded Suharto's friendship with the Family, but the slaughter and slow strangulation of  East Timor coincided with it. A document in the Family's archives titled 'Important Dates in Indonesian History' notes that in March 1966, the Communist Party was banned and Campus Crusade arrived in April. Suharto wasn't a Christian, but he knew that where missionaries go, investors follow. He also wanted to use God – any God --to pacify the population. In 1967, Congressman Ben Reifel sent a memo to other Fellowship members in Congress noting that a special message from Suharto calling on Indonesians to seek God, discover his laws, and obey them was broadcast at the same time as a Fellowship prayer session in the Indonesian parliament for non-Christian politicians. The Fellowship never asked Indonesians to renounce Islam, only to meet around 'the person of Jesus' – considered a profit in Islam – in private, under the guidance of the Fellowship's American brothers.

"By 1969, the Fellowship claimed as its man in Jakarta Suharto's minister of social affairs, who presided over a group of more than fifty Muslims and Christians in parliament. Another Fellowship associate, Darius Marpaung – he'd later claim that God spoke through him when he told a massive rally that the time had come to 'purge the communist,' an event that helped spark the massacre – led a similar group in Indonesian's Christian community. 'President Suharto is most interested and would like to increase his contact through this medium with the other men of the world,' wrote Coe's first follower, Senator Mark  Hatfield, in a memo to Nixon that year. 'He has indicated he would like to meet with the Senate [prayer] group if and when he comes to the United States.'

"In the fall of 1970, Suharto did both. Coe often boasted that nobody but congressman, himself, and maybe a special guest attended such meetings, but this time Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the Indonesian dictator. In October 1970, Coe wrote to the U.S. ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry. Suharto had just become the first Muslim to join the Fellowship's off-the-record Senate prayer group for a meeting 'similar to the one we had with Haile Selassie,' the emperor of Ethiopia...

"In 1971, Coe entertained a small gathering at the Fellowship House with stories from his most recent round of visits to international brothers, 'men whom God has touched in an unusual way.' Among them was General Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of South Vietnam, who arrange for Coe to tour the war zone in the personal plane of his top military commander; the foreign minister of Cambodia, 'most eager to carry out our concept'; and Suharto. In Cliff Robinson's telling, 'Doug and I were escorted up the steps of the palace, no attempt to make any secret of it, and the president there so warmly welcomed us and the first thing he said as I walked into the room was to express his appreciation for what had been done, and to say that the momentum that we had seen started in this must not be allowed to slacken... Along toward the end, one of the men suggested it would be good if we had prayer together. And Darius Marpaung suggested that the businessman who was there would lead us in a prayer. And I think I have seldom been in a meeting where the prayer was so God-inspired.'

 "Coe and Robinson weren't the only representatives of the Fellowship to seek such inspiration with Suharto. In 1970, a memo to Fellowship Congressmen from Senator B. Everett Jordan, a North Carolina Dixiecrat, reported that Howard Hardesty, the executive vice president of Continental Oil, listed as a key man in the Fellowship's confidential directory, had traveled to Indonesia to spend the day with the Fellowship prayer cells and join Suharto for dinner. The following year, Senator Jordan himself traveled to Jakarta on the Family's behalf, where a special prayer breakfast meeting of forty parliamentary and military leaders was assembled for him by the vice president of Pertamina, the state oil and gas company that functioned like a family business for Suharto. Such corporate/state/church chumminess was hardly limited to the dictatorial regimes. Jordan may well have traveled to the meeting on a plane provided that year for congressional members of the Family by Harold McClure of McClure Oil, and the year previous, he boasted in a memo to congressional Family members, oil executives and foreign diplomat had used the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington to meet for 'confidential' prayers.

"By 1972, some of Abram's old hands were concerned about the moral vacuum the Family now called home. Elgin Groseclose, the American economist who'd help the Shah run Iran in the 1940s, worried that Muslims who saw through the façade of the 'brotherhood of man' would ask, 'Down what road am I being taken?' And, perhaps, decide to take Americans for a ride instead. 'This is been one of the aspects of the... movement that has long troubled me,' concluded Groseclose. 'Where does politics end and religion begin?'

"Poor Groseclose. He could not grasp power. Suharto got it. 'We are sharing the deepest experiences of our lives together,' Cliff Robinson wrote of his brother the dictator. 'It was at this point when I was with President Suharto of Indonesia that he said, "In this way we are converted, we convert ourselves – no one converts us!" ' "

(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 246-249)

induced famine was a favorite tactic of Suharto's in East Timor

And yet the genocide raged on despite Family man Robinson sharing one of the "deepest experiences" of his life with the dictator.

Perhaps it is here that the most perfect manifestation of Douglas Coe's concept of Jesus plus nothing emerges. Stripped of all ideology and context, even an Islamic genocidal maniac like Suharto had a place as a "key man" of Christ. And so it went with Jesus plus nothing throughout the Cold War. After the fall of the Soviet Union the Family never quite managed carnage on the scale of Indonesia but they've certainly planted some promising seeds for such in the future. In the next installment we shall look at the more recent intrigues of the Family. Stay tuned.