The Office of Security: A Tale of Sex, Drugs and High Weirdness Part V

Welcome to the fifth installment in my examination of the CIA's Office of Security (OS). One of the most mysterious components of the CIA, during its heyday the OS was knee deep in a host of the Agency's biggest controversies, including Operation CHAOS, the Watergate scandal and the behavioral modification experiments conducted under Projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. In the first part of this series I considered the composition and politics of the OS, which were distinctly different from the Ivy league-educated Office of Strategic Services (OSS) veterans who dominated the upper hierarchy of the CIA for years. The OS was far more conservative, with the bulk of its members having cut their teeth in either the FBI and/or military intelligence before joining the CIA in 1947.

Beginning with the second installment and continuing on through part four I considered the role the OS played in the Watergate scandal. The second installment primarily focused on James McCord's total bungling of the second Watergate break-in as well as the strong possibility that either he or one of his employees had tipped off D.C. police prior to the break-in (the arresting officer, Carl Shoffler, was assigned to vice and friendly with McCord's long time CIA boss, OS-Security Research Staff (SRS) head General Paul Gaynor).

Part three addressed the likely target of the Watergate break-in: a prostitution ring servicing the DNC and operating out of the nearby Columbia Plaza. The woman who headed this ring, Heidi Rikan, had extensive ties to the Syndicate and Texas oil money. An employee of James McCord's, private investigator Lou Russell, had set up several thousand dollars of bugging equipment at Heidi's operation in the months leading up to the second Watergate break-in.

Heidi

With the fourth and most recent installment I outlined my thoughts on the conspirators behind the Watergate scandal: far right members of the OS working in conjunction with members of the Navy, especially the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Many of the OS personnel linked to the break-in along with Admiral Thomas Moorer and other members of the so-called Moorer-Radford ring (a spy ring allegedly set up by Moorer to keep an eye of National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger) had ties to the notorious American Security Council (ASC). Superficially the ASC was the premier lobby group for the military-industrial complex throughout the Cold War, but it had an even more secretive agenda: industrial security. It effectively constituted a massive private intelligence network that tracked "subversives" seeking employment in America's defense industries. The OS was likely involved in these intrigues, as was noted in that installment.

Now that Watergate is out of the way and the reader has been exposed to the OS' use of sexual blackmail to subvert American politics I can now move along to some of their even more unsavory activities, such as assassinations.

A Peculiar Committee

The official purpose of the OS was to protect Agency personnel from compromising situations and penetrations as well as to investigate potential wrong doings of CIA employees. In other words, it was a kind of safe guard for the CIA. But to fulfill this function, the OS frequently had to get their hands dirty. As such, they were regarded within the Agency as experts at both "black bag" and "clean up" operations. Clean up operations can on occasion turn "wet" and thus the OS would likely have need of professional killers in certain instances.

But in addition to those killers (whom we shall get to in a moment), the OS also seems to have overseen even more exotic methods for "executive actions." For instance Sheffield Edwards, the first Office of Security head, also sat on a particular panel that occasionally dealt in such operations as well as other bizarre actions.

"... the CIA's ironically named Health Alteration Committee, of which [Boris] Pash was a member, along with the CIA's Richard Bissell and Sheffield Edwards. The Health Alteration Committee was responsible for targeting individuals --including leaders of foreign countries --for severe incapaciation or assassination with special weapons, drugs, exotic potions, induced diseases, and other means.

 "The Health Alteration Committee, which interfaced often with SOD scientists on many of its projects, and may survive to this day in another incarnation, operated from about 1952 to about 1968. In 1953, it authorized the LSD dosing of a high-ranking elected official in the Philippines. In 1963, the committee approved sending Iraqi leader Abel Karim Kassem an expensive monogrammed handkerchief that had been dipped into a lethal poison concocted by SOD to kill anyone who used it."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, pg. 69) 

Colonel Sheffield Edwards

The individuals involved in the Health Alteration Committee with Edwards are most curious. Colonel Boris Pash is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of the US intelligence community. He had cut his teeth during World War II in operations relating to nuclear technology.

"The team whose mission it was to learn if Hitler's scientists had developed an atomic bomb was already in Europe looking for key nuclear physicists by the time the other scientific units arrived in 1944. Code-named 'Alsos,' the atomic bomb team was headed by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, whose long and highly controversial career ran the gamut from volunteering to fight in the 1918 Russian Revolution to being accused of running a CIA 'special operations' unit which, according to testimony before Congress, 'was responsible for assassinations and kidnappings as well as other "special operations." ' No evidence was presented at the hearing that the unit carried out assassinations while Pash was in charge. Pash was also security chief for the Manhattan Project during the development of the atomic bomb in the United States."

 (Secret Agenda, Linda Hunt, pgs. 10-11)

Pash was actually the son of a Russian Orthodox priest born in San Francisco in 1900. He returned with his family to Russia in 1912. As indicated above, he fought for the Whites during the Russian Revolution. After World War II, Pash was assigned to the staff of General Douglas MacArthur and his Occupation forces in Japan. At the time Pash was detailed to military intelligence and thus would have likely served under MacArthur's long time intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby, one of the most powerful figures in the history of US intelligence. MacArthur and Willoughby were very close to the American Security Council crew (as noted before here) while another of Willoughby's former officers, Colonel Ermal Geiss, ended up as a high ranking figure in the OS (as noted in part one). Pash and Geiss were both operating in Japan in 1946 and may have possibly known one another. But let us return to Pash's CIA career and that "special operations" unit he was accused of running.

Colonel Boris Pash

The unit in question was Program Branch 7, commonly referred to as PB/7. PB/7 was originally part of the Office of Policy Coordination, established in 1947 as a quasi-independent agency, it effectively became the CIA's Directorate of Plans/Operations by the early 1950s when the OPC was fully integrated into the CIA. The OPC is where many of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Old Boys ended up after the OSS was dissolved, before they completed their take-over of the upper hierarchy of the CIA.

Pash worked for OPC-CIA from 1949 until 1952 and continued to carry out certain projects well beyond those dates. Apparently his unit was initially comprised of what H.P. Albarelli described as "at least five former OSS hit men..." (A Terrible Mistake, pg. 69). So much for Pash.

Let us now consider Richard Bissell. An Old Boy's Old Boy, Bissell was blueblood to the hilt. He was born into a wealthy family in Hartford, Connecticut and would go on to to attend Groton School, Yale (from which he graduated) and the London School of Economics. Apparently Bissell was offered membership in Skull and Bones while attending Yale, which he declined (reportedly his brother William was a member of Skull and Bones, however).

Richard Bissell

During World War II he ended up in the OSS. After the war, he became involved in the Marshall Plan, eventually becoming the Assistant Deputy Administrator for the Economic Cooperation Authority. During the early 1950s Bissell briefly worked for the Ford Foundation before being recruited into the CIA officially in 1954. Initially Bissell oversaw the U-2, selecting Area 51 as the test grounds for the legendary spy plane.

After generating much acclaim for his role in overseeing the U-2 program, Bissell was made Deputy Director for Plans (DDP). For many years this was one of the most powerful positions in the entire Agency, as the DDP effectively controlled the Directorate of Plans/Operations, the department of the CIA primarily charged with overseeing "black ops." Three CIA directors (Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and William Colby) held the post of Deputy Director of Plans while several other storied agents (including Frank Wisner, Thomas Karamessines and Desmond Fitzgerald) also held the post.

The OS, the Syndicate and Castro

Curiously, it was also Richard Bissell who asked his fellow Health Alteration Committee member Colonel Sheffield Edwards to recruit Syndicate figures for the assassination of Fidel Castro.

"In late summer 1960, the CIA's Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Bissell, asked Office of Security chief Sheffield Edwards to contact Mafia members who owned Cuba's numerous gambling hotels and casinos. Bissell thought that the various Mafioso already familiar with the island could most easily get close to Castro...

"Bissell later insisted that it had not been his idea to use the Mafia, and that it had come from J.C. King. King, not surprisingly, denied that the idea was his and told several Agency officials that the Mafia idea had originated in a conversation among Office of Security employee James O'Connell and narcotics agents George Hunter White and Charles Siragusa.

"At any rate, Sheffield Edwards quickly contacted Robert Maheu, a private investigator and former FBI agent who had worked with security officer James McCord when he was also an FBI agent. Edwards asked Maheu if he had any Mafia contacts in Cuba. Maheu, who had performed 'sensitive' contract work for the CIA for years, had excellent contacts among the underworld, not the least of which was dapper mobster Johnny Rosselli, then living in Los Angeles, where Maheu had an office. Edwards and Maheu agreed that Rosselli would be ideal for the Castro assassination job and that Maheu should meet with him as soon as possible. Maheu said that he would contact Rosselli, but that he was concerned about being involved in a job whose objective was to kill Castro. According to the CIA's report, 'Maheu was authorized to tell Roselli that his "client" [whom he was instructed not to identify] were willing to pay $150,000 for Castro's removal.'

"OS chief Edwards named security officer James 'Big Jim' O'Connell as his lead person in overseeing the operation, and assigned him to keep an eye on Maheu. O'Connell, a former FBI special agent, was then Chief, Operational Support Division for the CIA's Office of Security under Edwards. Like Maheu, O'Connell had worked in New York for the Bureau and is reported to have been closely involved in the Agency's cover-up of Frank Olson's death.

"O'Connell and Maheu met Rosselli in New York City on September 14, 1960 and Maheu made his pitch to Rosselli. Rosselli, who had been around the block numerous times, so to speak, was nonetheless reluctant to become involved in the assassination of Castro."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, pgs. 339-340)

Robert Maheu

We have already encountered former Bureau man and private investigator Robert Maheu in the prior installment. Maheu was "recruited" by the OS in 1954, shortly after he had established his private detective firm, and had been carrying out "sensitive" operations for the OS and other CIA branches for several years by the time Edwards and O'Connell approached him about getting the Syndicate to assassinate Castro. Some of these sensitive assignments included procuring prostitutes from the Syndicate to staff a D.C.-based OS safe house that appears to have been used to sexually blackmail the politically-connected. Thus, Maheu would be a logical choice for the OS to turn too to recruit Syndicate hit men.

But back to the matter at hand. Despite gangster Johnny Roselli's hesitancy to embark on the Castro operation and his refusal to take money from the Agency men, he nonetheless set up O'Connell with more of his associates to further discuss the operation. First, however, the DCI was informed of these developments.

"Edwards meanwhile informed Bissell that he had made contact with a private investigator, Maheu, who in turn had contacts with mobsters in Cuba that might offer assistance in getting close to Castro.

"Days later, Bissell and Edwards reported up the chain of command to DCI Allen Dulles and DDCI Charles Cabell on the plan to assassinate Castro. The CIA's report reads: 'Edwards recalls that Mr. Dulles merely nodded, presumably in understanding and approval. Certainly there was no opposition.'

"O'Connell and Maheu met with Rosselli again on September 25 in Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel, where, without O'Connell present, he introduced Maheu to 'Sam Gold.' Gold told Maheu that he had a man, whom he identified as only as 'Joe,' who 'could serve as a courier to Cuba and make arrangements there.' O'Connell observed Gold from afar, but he soon learned that 'Gold' was [Sam] Giancana and that 'Joe the Courier' was Florida Mafia chief Santo Trafficante, Jr., who owned a number of thriving gambling operations in Cuba. Castro had not yet permanently closed the American-held casinos and hotels in Cuba, and, according to the CIA report, Trafficante 'was making regular trips between Miami and Havana' on Mafia business."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 341)

While the Mafioso appeared to be interested in taking out Castro, Sam Giancana rejected shooting Castro out right as being to risky. Instead, the mobsters thought it would be much easier to kill Castro with some type of poison pill.

Sam Giancana

Why the CIA continued dealing with the Syndicate at this point is a bit baffling. The mob carries out hits primarily via small firearms or a weapon of opportunity, not poisons. In point of fact, the CIA surely had its own assassins far more skilled in these arts than the Syndicate, but CIA nonetheless decided to continue with the operation.

It was at this point that the legendary William Harvey, another former FBI man now operating out of the legendary Special Activities Division (SAD) was brought in to oversea the operation. As was noted in the prior installment, Harvey was something of a mentor to  Theodore Shackley, an especially infamous SAD veteran who was very close to "rogue" OS man Ed Wilson. Wilson, like Maheu, seems to have been involved in the OS's sexual blackmail operations (as noted in part four). Thus, this particular network of Office of Security and SAD operatives is quite incestuous even without all the FBI connections (O'Connell, Maheu and Harvey were all former Bureau men).

William Harvey

But back to the matter at hand. Harvey decided to green light to Syndicate's bid to poison Castro:

"One of Harvey's first official acts was to approach Dr. Edward Gunn, the Agency's Chief of Operations in its Medical Services branch. Gunn, according to the CIA report, said that Harvey 'wanted him to consult with Sidney Gottlieb' on whether toxins and chemicals could be effectively used to kill Castro. Harvey was upset because more than half the substances so far considered for use had proven ineffective. Apparently, Gottliab came through fr Gunn because in March 1961 Rosselli passed a packet of lethal pills to Trafficante. Trafficante promptly handed the pills off to Orta, but Orta backed out, telling Trafficante he could not go through with the plan. At least, that is what the CIA's report asserts. Other, non-Agency reports over the past several decades have considered it likely that Trafficante was playing both sides against the middle and was dealing with not only the CIA but also with Castro, to whom he was personally reporting back to on each and every step of the scheme. (In a 2007 interview, Castro said he knew Orta was a 'traitor' at the time, but made no mention of Trafficante.)"

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli Jr., pg. 342)

Santo Trafficante, Jr.

At a minimum Harvey was not happy about Trafficante's man backing out. Harvey then requested that Sheffield Edwards put him in contact with only Roselli. Edwards complied and Harvey, Maheu, Roselli and Jim O'Connell all met again in April 1961. Roselli informed the CIA men that he had found another individual who may be able to deliver the poison pills to Castro. Later in the month Harvey again delivered the merchandise to Roselli in Miami.

In turned out, however, that the man Roselli had tapped to assist in delivering the pills in Cuba was already a sometimes CIA contract employee known commonly as Pierre Lafitte. Things had become to hot for Lafitte in Cuba not long afterwards and he had to leave the island for good. Apparently from here the plan never quite got back on track and Harvey called it off in February 1963, shortly after the Bay of Pigs debacle. It is unknown if there were any major developments in this plot throughout 1962.

Presidential Trysts

What is known, however, is that there was some curious fallout from this operation that alerted Robert Kennedy to the fact that the CIA was trying to enlist the Syndicate to assassinate Castro. This sorted affair began with Sam Giancana fearing that his mistress was stepping out on him with Frank Sinatra. Robert Maheu, with the blessing of the CIA, offered to lend his assistance.

"Meanwhile, the anti-Castro plotting produced a comic, sordid shadow play in Las Vegas. Giancana was anguished at one time that his Strip mistress, singer Phyliss McGuire, was cavorting at the Riviera with Sinatara. To keep Sam appeased, Maheu offered to bug the lover's suite, the CIA dutifully paying for the break-in and tapping. But when Maheu's operatives botched the operation --catching McGuire with television comedian Dan Rowan instead of Sinatra --and as a result Maheu faced criminal charges in Las Vegas, the CIA had to suppress the case. Its agent Sheffield Edwards told the FBI that the tap related to a covert operation involving Maheu and Giancana, and Hoover promptly passed that lurid tidbit on to the attorney general in May 1961. Officially, the memo was Bobby's first notification of the CIA-mob alliance, though many scholars later came to believe that he had known for some time of the original government conspiracy with organized crime, and in any case was already embarked on his own covert war against Castro with his own Syndicate allies."

(The Money and the Power, Sally Denton & Roger Morris, pg. 248)

Robert F. Kennedy

RFK was alarmed at these developments and advised the Bureau to keep a close eye on Giancana. This turned up some unexpected developments that were compromising to the President.

"The bureau complied, and its tight surveillance of Giancana turned up a sexual snag of tabloid dimensions. A woman named Judith Campbell was making repeated calls to the White House from the mobster's home phone in Chicago. The calls, it developed, were to the President himself. The shapely Miss Campbell had met JFK through Frank Sinatra and had by her own admission been trysting with him for some months. What made the relationship doubly distressing was the fact that the President's playmate was continuing to see her old Mafia friends Giancana and Roselli. The potential for diaster was unlimited.

"In February 1962, J. Edgar Hoover altered Bobby Kennedy and presidential aide Kenneth O'Donnell to the hot rock. A month later the FBI director arranged a private luncheon with JFK. There the matter was presumably discussed. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee's 1975 report, 'the last telephone contact between the White House and the President's friend occurred a few hours after the luncheon.

"If that took care of Campbell, there remained the considerable problem of Giancana --if prosecuted, he could be expected to tell what he knew about the President's mistress. There ensued some fancy footwork seemingly designed to make the CIA a foil in covering up the mess.

"The day after his lunch with JFK, Hoover fired off a memorandum to Edwards advising that the Justice Department wante to know whether the CIA 'would or would not object to the initiation of criminal prosecutions.' for bugging against Maheu and the man who actually made the installment. Giancana was not mentioned. Edward's reply was predictable. The CIA would object because, as Hoover reported back, 'prosecution of Maheu undoubtedly would lead to exposure of most sensitive information relating to the abortive Cuban invasion in April 1961, and would result in most damaging embarrassment to the U.S. Government.'

"Armed with this 'national security' objection, the Justice Department advised the CIA that it envisioned 'no major difficulty in stopping prosecution.' Naturally none developed. It was at this point that Bobby Kennedy hauled Edwards on the carpet to explain how the CIA had got mixed up with the mob in the first place and in the process was informed of the assassination plotting. Although Bill Harvey had given the poison pills to Roselli only two weeks before, Edwards told Kennedy that the assassination project had been terminated. RFK's rage was confined to his having been left in the dark about Giancana. He did not preach about the immorality of assassinations, and he did not forbid further collusion with the Mafia. He simply ordered that he be the first to know if the CIA again took up with the mob. 'I want you to let me know about these things,' Kennedy is quoted as saying, by Edwards. 

"Edwards realized that he had painted himself into a corner and could not now admit to the attorney general that he had lied about the project's being terminated. Upon his return to Langley he called Harvey and gave him a selective briefing on the session. But to protect himself he wrote an internal memorandum stating, 'On this date Mr. Harvey called me and indicated that he was dropping any plans for the use of Subject (Roselli) for the future.' Harvey found out about the memo when questioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, and he was furious. He declared that it 'was not true, and Colonel Edwards knew it was not true.; the falsification who intended to show that Edwards was 'no longer chargeable' should the operation back fire."

(Deadly Secrets, Warren Hinckle & William Turner, pgs. 138-140)

Johnny Roselli

What then are we to make of this curious series of events? On the one hand there appears to be a strong possibility that the idea to assassinate Castro using the Syndicate originated with the OS, which is hardly surprising. After all, the OS had already been using Syndicate call girls for its D.C. safe house that Maheu procured from Roselli (as noted in part four).

Once RFK found out about this plot, his reaction was rather muted and Sheffield Edwards was easily able to set up Bill Harvey afterwards for the continuation of the plots had the scandal ever turned up again. As noted above, the Castro-Syndicate plot seems to have gone on for at least another year after Edwards' meeting with Kennedy, but little is known of what unfolded during this time.

And what of one of Kennedy's mistresses turning up during these intrigues? As was addressed at length in the third and fourth installments of this series, there are ample indications that the OS regularly used Syndicate call girls to entrap politicians. Was Sam Giancana's girl working such an operation for the OS? As noted above, Maheu already appears to have been serving as a cut out between the OS and the Syndicate for these types of operations for several years prior to these intrigues.

Judith Campbell

The CIA had JFK compromised but J. Edgar Hoover had turned up evidence of the OS' mob plots. RKF likely cut a deal with Hoover to keep the CIA at bay over these developments, but reportedly Hoover then himself blackmailed the Kennedy brothers over the Campbell incident. Hoover was never seriously challenged for the directorship of the FBI during the Kennedy years despite his complete refusal to assist RFK in his crack down on the Syndicate (Hoover for years denied that the Mafia even existed). But such a topic is beyond the scope of this series.

Curious Deaths

With the OS's ties to the CIA's assassination operations established, I would now like to turn to the possibility that the OS was directly involved in ordering and/or carrying out assassinations. There are two especially compelling incidences of this involving Agency personnel whom the OS had begun to suspect the loyalty of. The first we shall consider concerns a close associate of long time DCI Allen Dulles, a slightly built man named James Kronthal.

"The forty-two-year-old Kronthal was a rising star at the CIA, where his profile fit the mold for Dulles's 'very best men.' The son of a prominent New York banker, Kronthal was educated at Yale and Harvard, and served under Dulles in the Bern OSS station during the war. Before the war, he had rejected the banking career that his family had planned for him in favor of teaching art history at Harvard. But Kronthal brought a keen business interest to the art trade, establishing himself in Germany during the 1930s as a broker for Goering, Himmler, and other Nazi leaders who were selling art treasures stolen from Jewish collectors. After the war, he sought to redeem himself by trying to track down the looted art pieces and return them to their rightful owners.

"The slightly built, brilliant young man became a favorite of Dulles, who helped Kronthal take over the Bern station in 1947, after it became one of the CIA's first overseas outposts. When Dulles took charge of the agency in 1953, he brought Kronthal back to the Washington headquarters, with big plans for the young man's intelligence career."

(The Devil's Chessboard, David Talbot, pg. 297) 

Kronthal, in other words, was a budding Old Boy with the inevitable Ivy League connections. In addition to having attended Yale and Harvard, he also went to Lincoln School in New York with Nelson Rockefeller. His overt collaboration with the Nazis would have no doubt appealed to Dulles (who had ample dealings with the Nazi regime both before and after the war), but it was his covert relationship with them, and later the Soviet Union, that led to Kronthal's death. It was the OS that uncovered Kronthal's dark secret life.

"Kronthal's proclivity for the espionage game derived, in part, from a lifetime of hiding his own personal secrets. He was a gay man with a weakness for young boys. The Gestapo discovered his sexual tastes while he was working in the German art market before the war. Later, while Kronthal was running the CIA station in Bern, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police agency, got access to Kronthal's Gestapo files after penetrating the Gehlen Organization. The Soviets set up a 'honey trap' for Kronthal in Switzerland, with Chinese boys as bait. He was secretly filmed and blackmailed, and by the time he returned to Washington in May 1952, Jim Kronthal was a double agent in the iron grip of the NKVD.

"It was Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the former Army intelligence officer who ran the CIA's Office of Security, who informed Dulles that his protege had been turned. Edwards's internal security department was tasked with protecting the CIA against enemy penetration. The security unit was also in charge of what was delicately called 'enforcement,' providing the muscle to eliminate any potential threats or embarrassments to the agency. 

"On the night of March 31, as Dulles confronted Kronthal with the Office of Security's revelations over dinner at his home, two agents from Edwards's department were quietly eavesdropping in an adjoining room. The sense of betrayal was certainly overwhelming for Dulles. But the CIA director, whose fits of rage were legendary, held his fury in check that evening. The spy chief sounded sadly contemplative as he spoke with the traitor in whom he had invested so much hope, remarking on the mystery of personal demons and how they could set flame to the most promising careers.

"After the two men reviewed Kronthal's impossible position and his dismal options, the shattered agent walked back home --a white brick town house with a small garden of spring daffodils in front, just two blocks from Dulles's residence. He was followed by the two CIA security men. When Kronthal's housekeeper arrived the next morning, his bedroom door was still closed and he had left a note that he was not to be disturbed. Later that morning, two men who identified themselves as colleagues of Kronthal appeared at his house and told the housekeeper they needed to bring him to an urgent meeting. When they opened his bedroom door, they found a lifeless Kronthal splayed across his bed, fully clothed, with an empty vial near his body.

"The investigation into Kronthal's death was quickly taken over by Lieutenant Lawrence Hartnett of the Washington D.C., Metropolitan Police, a homicide detective with a history of helping tidy up CIA-related problems. Hartnett revealed that Kronthal had left a letter for Dick Helms, in which he revealed that he was 'mentally upset because of pressure connected with work,' as well as a letter for Dulles. An autopsy concluded that Kronthal had taken his own life, but the report left more questions lingering than it answered, failing to determine the cause of his death or the contents of the vial found in the bedroom. Sometime before his death, Kronthal had mailed a letter to his sister, revealing his homosexuality (which came as no surprise to her) and referring to the 'tremendous difficulties' that his sexual identity posed for him. He then signed off in a perplexing way. Kronthal's final words to his sister were, 'I can't wait till 1984. Love, Jim.' Was it his mordant way of saying that for him, Big Brother's suffocating authoritarianism was already an unbearable reality?"

(The Devil's Chessboard, David Talbot, pgs. 298-299)

Allen Dulles

It has long been suspected that Dulles had given Kronthal the vial found in his bedroom with his lifeless body at dinner the night before. Presumably, Kronthal had been given a choice by Dulles over dinner to either end things voluntarily or wait for the Agency to perform an "executive action." This was likely the purpose of the OS men who followed Kronthal back to his town house from Dulles' place. While many believe Kronthal's suicide was voluntary, much nonetheless was suppressed surrounding the death and the possibility that his "suicide" was assisted is quite plausible. If this was the case, the OS would be a likely candidate for this assistance as it is known their agents followed Kronthal back to his town house on the night of his death.

It is all but certain that the OS played a key role in managing the investigation into Kronthal's death. As indicated above, one of the chief purposes of the OS was to manage and suppress criminal investigations involving Agency personnel. What's more, the OS had ample ties to the D.C. police, as noted before in parts two and three of this series.

In the wake of Kronthal's death, there was another death and a near death that may have also been related to the fall out surrounding Kronthal's recruitment by the Soviets and OS "wet works."

"James Montgomery, an associate of Kronthal's and ostensibly head of the U.S. State Department's Finnish desk, but actually a CIA employee, had been found dead on January 24, 1953 in his Washington D.C. home, apparently strangled. His nude body was found with a bathrobe cord around his neck. Montgomery's death was ruled a suicide by D.C. police, but U.S. Congressman Fred E. Busbey of Illinois had called for a full House investigation into the death. Busbey told the Washington Post six-days after Montgomery died, 'There are stories being bruited about that the police have been told not to talk.' (Busbey's fellow House members declined to take up the investigation.)

"Just seven days after Kronthal's death, Frederick E. Crockett, a CIA security analyst with whom McCord was familiar, had been discovered on April 8, 1953, in a semi-conscious state in his gas filled D.C. apartment on Wisconsin Avenue. Police had ruled Crockett's condition an 'attempted suicide,' and the CIA told reporters at the time that 'there was no reason to believe' that Crockett's attempt had anything to do with Kronthal's death. (Crockett survived the incident and lived until January 17, 1978)."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 123)

Crockett's attempted suicide is addressed on the top right

Montgomery, a CIA man close to Kronthal, had been murdered a little over two months prior to Kronthal's "suicide" while Crockett was found seven days after Kronthal's body had turned up. This is of course a curious series of events. The possibility that Montgomery's death was in some way related to Kronthal's seems to be quite high. As was noted in the first installment, there are also indications that Montgomery's death was related to his name ending up in SRS head General Paul Gaynor's "fag files." That the OS may have "assisted" Montgomery with his suicide, or used his homosexuality to drive him to suicide, is a distinct possibility.

Less is certain about Crockett. There are no real details available concerning the motive for his attempted suicide. But the fact that he had been detailed to the OS at a time the department appears to have been deeply engaged in "clean up" operations that may have raised moral qualms is interesting.

On the topic of clean up operations and possible assassinations the OS played a role in, few are more notorious than the events surrounding the death of chemist Frank Olson in November of 1953, a little over eight months after Kronthal's death.

The Strange Death of Frank Olson

Frank Olson is of course the most legendary causality of the CIA's behavioral modification experiments after he allegedly committed suicide by flinging himself out of the window of the Statler Hotel and meeting his end on the pavement of New York City several stories down. It is widely believed that Olson was murdered and that his death was related to being unwittingly dosed with LSD at a meeting of Army and MK-ULTRA personnel at a Deep Creek Lake lodge in Maryland a little over a week prior to his death.

Olson's death has fascinated researchers for years and has inspired several in depth examinations of the circumstances surrounding it. It is vastly beyond the scope of this present series to even attempt an in depth account, so the rundown here will be very brief. As many of the people likely to read this blog at least have a passing familiarity with the Olson case, this researcher will not bother contrasting different accounts.

Easily the most informative examination of Olson's death is H.P. Albarelli Jr.'s groundbreaking and epic A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, which also provides the most plausible explanation for Olson's dosing and later death. It is Albarelli's narrative that this researcher shall follow in examining the OS's role in Olson's death and the cover-up that followed.

highly recommended

Olson's death seems to have been linked to the bizarre events that unfolded in a small village in France during the early 1950s.

"In 1951 hundreds of respectable citizens in Pont-Saint-Esprit, a small French village, went completely berserk one evening. Some of the town's leading citizens jumped from windows into the Rhone. Others ran through the streets screaming about being cased by lions, tigers, and 'bandits with donkey ears.' Many died, and those who survived suffered strange aftereffects for weeks. In his book The Day of St. Anthony's Fire, John C. Fuller attributes this bizarre outbreak to rye flour contaminated with ergot."

(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, pg. 13n)

Albarelli's CIA sources attributed Olson's death to this curious event, which was actually the result of a joint operation conducted by the CIA and the Army's Special Operations Division (SOD), located in Fort Detrick.

"According to Albert and Neal, Frank Olson had been brought to remote Deep Creek Lake as part of an informal gathering whose purpose was, among other things, to observe the effects of the potent psychochemical LSD. By late 1953, however, the CIA had dosed hundreds of unwitting subjects with LSD and well understood its effects. Thus, it was not necessary to drug Olson or any of his colleagues in order to learn about the powers of LSD. Nonetheless, the sources recounted... that Olson had been given a small amount of LSD --about 70 micrograms --'mixed with Meretran.' As Sidney Gottlieb had previously explained to the author, Meretran was added as a 'pressure mechanism in interrogations' to 'loosen tongues and persuade subjects to speak freely about matters they otherwise wouldn't share.' As noted earlier, the CIA and the Army in the 1950s commonly employed LSD mixed with Meretran to enhance interrogations in what they jointly termed 'ARTICHOKE sessions.' 

"Olson had been drugged at Deep Creek Lake not to explore the drugs, but because he had been talking to 'the wrong people' about a top-secret SOD experiment that had taken place in France in the summer of 1951. The CIA and Army, deeply concerned about security violations, wanted to know the full extent of his indiscretions. Frank Olson had been given the drugs at Deep Creek Lake to 'enhance' his interrogation.

"... the 'TOP SECRET' operation Olson had talked about had been the highly sensitive experiment conducted in Pont-St.-Esprit, France under the innocuous code name, Project SPAN ('SPAN' presumably because the French word pont means bridge). The experiment had gone awry, killing several people and injuring numerous others. This was the 'un-American' activity referred to in the Colby documents; this was Olson's 'possible security violation' that was alluded to in the cryptic note found at Fort Detrick. It also explains Lovell's peculiar remarks about Olson having 'No inhibitions. Baring of inner man,' meaning Olson had wrongly spoken out about Pont-St.-Esprit, revealing his arrogance and recklessness..."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.p. Albarelli, Jr., pgs. 686-687)

presumably one of the victims of the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident

 Later on, Albarelli recounts a question and answer session with one of his source in which the CIA department behind the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was revealed:

"Was Pont-St.-Esprit solely a SOD operation?

"No. It was a pre-ARTICHOKE joint operation between SOD and CIA's security branch."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 690)

Albarelli goes on to reveal that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was not caused by ergot, but a "potent LSD mixture" that was both administered by air via aerosol spraying as well as by being placed in local food products. The experiment was reportedly a disaster and deeply troubled Olson for some time afterwards.

Olson himself was involved in this pre-ARTICHOKE operation with the Office of Security and would later sit on its Artichoke Committee, but Olson was not a part of ARTICHOKE. In point of fact, he was a civilian Army employee detailed to MKNAOMI, a joint Technical Services Staff (TSS) and SOD operation under the control of MKLUTRA head Sidney Gottlieb.

Sidney Gottlieb

Gottlieb was at the Deep Creek Lake meeting, superficially a conference between SOD and TSS employees, in which Olson was dosed with the LSD-Meretran combination and then subjected to an interrogation away from the other guests. Interestingly, the interrogation seems to have been conducted by Allen Hughes, who would later go on to work from Robert Maheu's private detective agency. At the time, however, Hughes was detached from Army CIC to the TSS and was under Gottlieb's direction. It is possible, however, that Hughes had been involved with ARTICHOKE during his time in Army in the early 1950s when he was detailed to Germany and France.

It is most likely, however, that Olson's interrogation was handled under the auspices of MKULTRA as Gottlieb was ultimately Olson's superior and may have wanted to keep the lid on the fact that Olson was accused of leaking information concerning a controversial experiment conducted by the Office of Security. Otherwise Olson would have almost surely have been interrogated by the OS, who were the Agency branch most often tasked with interrogations.

Regardless, the interrogation backfired and Olson became even more unhinged due to it in the weeks that followed. It was then decided that something must be done with Oslon. Albarelli's sources insisted that the original plan had not been to kill Olson at the Statler, but rather to have abducted him and institutionalized him at a CIA-linked hospital were he could have been "treated." Olson resisted and a struggle ensued. This led to Olson being "pitched" out the window.

Frank Olson

Reportedly Robert Lashbrook, another key figure in the MKULTRA program and Olson's roommate that night in Statler, had arranged for Olson's abduction by Pierre Lafitte and Francois Spirito, a French gangster. Lafitte, as noted above, occasionally did work for Johnny Roselli, whom the OS had recruited to assassinate Castro via Robert Maheu. Lafitte frequently collaborated with MKULTRA's most notorious asset, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent George Hunter White, as well. White was originally the one slated to handle Olson's abduction, but the sudden death of his mother left White unavailable.

Lafitte took White's place and brought Spirito with him. This proved to be disastrous. Spirito had established a vast criminal empire in France centered around white slavery and heroin trafficking. It was through the former that he had originally met Lafitte. During WWII, Spirito had collaborated with the Nazis during their occupation of France. After the fall of the Nazi regime, Spirito fled to Spain and later South America before ending up in Montreal. From there he began to reconstruct his criminal empire in North America until his arrest in the United States in 1951. When Spirito went to assist Lafitte at the Statler that night, he had only been out of prison for a week. Nor was this the only curious thing concerning Spirito.

"... things did go wrong after Lafitte brought Spirito to back him up with the Olson assignment. Why or how Lafitte enlisted the assistance of Spirito is unknown. What we do know is that Spirito had been unexpectedly released from federal prison in Atlanta and had journeyed to New York the week before Olson arrived there with Ruwat and Lashbrook. Spirito's long acquaintance with Lafitte is a matter of historical record...

"At some point during Olson's last night in New York, Neal explained, Lashbrook had become concerned that 'Olson was once again becoming unhinged.' Before Olson and Lashbrook retired for the night, the decision was made that 'it would be best' if Olson was transported to Maryland for confinement at Chestnut Grove, as Abramson had recommended, but by means other than the commercial flight Lashbrook had booked for the next day.

"The alternative plan involved Lafitte and Spirito, apparently as personal escorts for Olson. Said one source, 'White would have been the ideal alternative, perhaps along with Lafitte, but he was in California.' That Spirito had just been released from prison in Atlanta where he had been a subject in Dr. Carl Pfeiffer's 'psychotic experiments' was either overlooked or unknown. 'I don't think anyone knew where he had come from or where he had been; he was recruited by Lafitte,' said Albert."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli Jr., pg. 692)

Francois Spirito is the one on the bottom

Naturally, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer's experiments at the Atlanta Penitentiary were a part of the CIA and Pentagon behavioral modification experiments. Here are some more details about Pfeiffer's work, both at the Atlanta prison and another facility:

"The Bordertown facility is significant, because during World War II, and from 1951 to 1964, it was the site of secret CIA and U.S. Army behavior-modification and mind-control experiments. Dr. Carl C. Pfeiffer of Emory University in Atlanta and the University of Illinois Medical School oversaw some of these experiments, which were intended to both trigger and study 'a model psychosis characterized by visual and auditory hallucinations.' Pfeiffer later refined his objectives with extensive experiments in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Questioned about these experiments in 1981, the CIA's Dr. Sidney Gottlieb said, 'We learned a lot from the Atlanta experiments. The Agency learned that a person's psyche could be very disturbed by those means.' "

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pgs. 17-18) 

Dr. Carl Pfeiffer

As was noted in part three of this series, the reformatory in Bordentown was one of the sites used for the original ARTICHOKE experiments. The Atlanta Prison experiments may have initially begun under these auspices as well.

But back to Spirito. Apparently, the United States had interred a vast amount of underworld figures fleeing from Europe to the United States in the wake of WWII at Ellis Island (including Spirito). During the early 1950s, many of these figures were given the choice of participating in drug experiments in exchange for reduced sentences.

"Some of the drug traffickers and criminals held for deportation at Ellis Island were given the option of staying in the United States indefinitely if they 'volunteered' for various secret government projects, including CIA-funded Project Artichoke experiments that were just beginning at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and various mental hospitals in Louisiana. At Tulane University in New Orleans, Dr. Russell R. Monroe was just beginning his research on neurological brain dysfunctions in the minds of criminals and psychopaths. The CIA and the military, which were quickly drawn to the program, were becoming intrigued with the possibility of creating what were then referred to as 'aggressive soldiers' and now are called 'super soldiers.' "

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 14)

There's a lot to taken in here. For starters, it has long been alleged that Pfeiffer and his work at the Atlanta Penitentiary were conducted under the direction of MKULTRA. In A Terrible Mistake, Albarelli reports that the Pfeiffer's research began as MKULTRA Subproject 9 and eventually expanded to include Subprojects 26, 28, and 47.There's just one problem with this claim, however: Pfeiffer's work for the CIA began in 1951 while MKULTRA was not initiated until April of 1953. Thus, as Albarelli indicates above, Pfeiffer's work at Bordertown and later the Atlanta prison was almost surely begun under the direction of Projects BLUEBIRD and/or ARTICHOKE and not MKULTRA. Whether Pfeiffer was working for ARTICHOKE or MKLULTRA at the time of Olson's death is unknown, but it is quite possible he was working for both projects on different experiments as there was frequently overlap between ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA scientists.

As noted above, the MKULTRA personnel involved with Olson on his final day apparently had no idea that Spirito had been used in Pfeiffer's experiments. Certainly it seems curious that Lafitte would just happen to select a man who had recently been released from Pfeiffer's experiments to serve as his back up in moving Olson. While Lafitte frequently collaborated with MKULTRA man George Hunter White, White himself insisted that Lafitte was involved in potential intelligence projects White was unaware of.

Could Lafitte have been approached by ARTICHOKE members to deal with the Olson matter in a more satisfactory way than the MKULTRA team had so far managed? This researcher is unaware of any links between Lafitte and the ARTICHOKE team, but clearly the OS had extensive underworld contacts, including Johnny Roselli, whom Lafitte occasionally did work for (as noted above). What's more, Lafitte was working in the Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans during the early 1960s, around the same time Lee Harvey Oswald was employed there. As was noted in part one, ARTICHOKE bosses General Paul Gaynor and Morse Allen were both close to William B. Reily, one of the co-owners of the Reily Coffee Company.

William B. Reily

It seems most probable, however, that the TSS was again behind this botched operation that led to Olson's death. The only reason why Spirito was at the Statler in the first place is because George Hunter White was in California attending to his mother's death. There are no indications that this was anything other an unfortunate event. It is possible, however, that the OS had been waiting for an opening to kill Olson. Olson had become increasingly paranoid about his safety, yet he didn't seem especially concerned by TSS man Robert Lashbrook being with him constantly during his final days. Perhaps there was another branch of the CIA Olson was concerned over, though this is pure speculation on the part of this researcher.

The Cover-Up

It was the OS, however, who were ultimately charged with covering up Olson's death. The man tasked with this duty was likely someone we have already considered at length.

"The special agent dispatched by security chief Sheffield Edwards to the Statler Hotel to assist Robert Lashbrook has been identified in CIA documents only as 'Agent James McC.' In 1999, a former CIA official speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the author that this was James W. McCord, Jr. The name will be familiar to readers who recall McCord's June 1972 arrest for breaking into the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee..."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Alnarelli, Jr., pg. 86)

Ah yes, our old friend James W. McCord, Jr. At the time of this assignment McCord was already attached to the Security Research Staff within the OS.

"... Subsequently, in the summer of 1953, he would be transferred to Washington. D.C., where he was assigned to the Security Research Staff (SRS), an Office of Security branch, directed by retired Brigadier General Paul F. Gaynor. In this position, McCord was primarily responsible for detecting foreign attempts to penetrate the CIA, interrogating defectors and suspected spies, and operating several 'behavior modification' programs that were part of the CIA's top-secret Bluebird and Artichoke Projects, which predated Project MKULTRA."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 88)

James McCord

McCord was likely dispatched because of his experience with BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. Otherwise the SRS would not generally be the branch of the OS to handle such an incident. Curiously, Lashbrook never addressed his work with MKULTRA during his interview with McCord and the future White House Plumber never brought it up, though McCord had surely been briefed on Olson's work with MKNAOMI before being sent to the Statler. In OS reports concerning the Olson incident, the impression is given that the OS was totally unaware of the MKULTRA projects and makes no reference to the fact was engaged in similar experiments under ARTICHOKE. When OS chief Sheffield Edwards briefed CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick on the Olson incident a few weeks later he also made no mention of ARTICHOKE even when questioned about LSD.

One is left with the distinct impression that OS reports concerning Olson were deliberately avoiding ARTICHOKE so as not to raise the possibility that his death was in some how related as well as casting the SRS's chief rivals in the behavior modification racket, the TSS, in a bad light. As Olson's breakdown may well have been spurred by the OS' joint operation with SOD in Pont-Saint-Esprit, it is easy to understand why the OS opted to censure its work on ARTICHOKE from the Olson investigation.

While OS as a whole were deeply involved in developing a sanitized report on Olson's death for their colleagues in the CIA, McCord took the lead in suppressing the police investigation into Olson.

"Security agent James McCord had assured Edwards that the detectives, James Ward and David Mullee, as well as Detective John Scaffardi, who had also worked the Olson case, would cooperate with the CIA in any way needed. Edwards had initially been very concerned about the crime scene report filed by patrolman Joseph Guastefeste, the uniformed police officer in charge. Guastefeste had formally requested that 'the case remain active' for further investigation 'in view of the facts set forth.' Put a lid on this, Edwards had instructed McCord, trusting that his special agent's years of experience and contacts in Manhattan would work the desired magic.

"Which they did. Ward and Mullee closed the case. Olson's death was ruled a suicide, and the supplemental police report identified Lashbrook only as 'a consultant chemist' with the War Department's Defense Bureau. Detective Ward had even been so helpful as to tell McCord that a few reporters had been sniffing around the precinct house trying to get more details about Olson's death, but that McCord could count on him and Mullee to handle things properly. However, the detectives had played it safe and forwarded details of the case to the FBI's New York field office, speaking directly with special agent George Dalen. But, of course, McCord, a former FBI agent, knew Dalen, and Edwards was confident that McCord would manage Dalen."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pgs. 147-148)

And manage him he did. McCord did such a thorough job in covering up the Olson incident that knowledge of the circumstances surrounding his death would not be revealed to the public or Olson's family until the mid-1970s and now, nearly 70 years after the fact, much of it still remains shrouded in mystery.

Was McCord's work on the Olson incident the reason why he was seemingly tapped by General Paul Gaynor, his long time boss on the Security Research Staff, to handle the Columbia Plaza operation that led to the Watergate scandal? Certainly McCord had demonstrated an uncanny ability to cover up sensitive operations when he handled the Olson incident. This could also explain why Richard Helms opted to destroy the ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA files a few months after McCord's arrest. Had the press or congress dug deep enough, some very curious things would have likely come out concerning McCord.

Operation CHAOS

Before wrapping up I would like to address one final, controversial program the OS participated in: Operation CHAOS. I can not go into great depth concerning Operation CHAOS as I have found little concerning it in my extensive library and, on the whole, there does not seem to have been many in depth examinations of it. This is most surprising, as Operation CHAOS was one of the most flagrant violation's of the CIA's charter and one with especially disturbing implications. For the uninitiated, here's an overview of CHAOS:

"During the Nixon presidency the CIA stepped up its domestic operations even though such activity was outlawed by the Agency's charter. In 1969 the CIA prepared a report entitled 'Restless Youth,' which concluded that the New Left and black nationalist movements were essentially homegrown phenomena and the foreign ties to American dissidents were insubstantial. That was not what President Nixon wanted to hear. The 'Communist conspiracy' had become an idee fixe in the White House, and Nixon pressed Cia director Richard Helms to expand the parameters of Operation CHAOS (an appropriate acronym) and other domestic probes. In addition to monitoring a wide range of liberal and left-wing organizations, the CIA provided training, technical assistance, exotic equipment, and intelligence data to local police departments. The Agency also employed harassment tactics such as sprinkling 'itching powder'... on public toilet seats near leftist meetings, which drove people wild for about three days after they sat down."

(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, pgs. 224-225)

CHAOS had its origins in the Johnson administration. LBJ shared Nixon's belief that the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements were being manipulated by the Soviets. LBJ ordered the CIA to investigate these developments and this led to several operations such MERRIMAC, RESISTANCE, and Project 2. Here are a few details about these operations:

"... In 1965, when American youth began to protest against the Vietnam War and the Black liberation movement grew more militant, the CIA --contrary to Congressional approval but with the approval of President Johnson --secretly set up a Domestic Operations Division. Its first project, code-named 'Resistance', co-opted local police 'Red squads' under the guise of providing security for CIA college recruiters.

"This was soon supplemented by 'Project Merrimac', which monitored groups campaigning against CIA research facilities on the campuses. The brief of Resistance and Merrimac required that all anti-war activists and other 'dissidents' be identified and monitored. It also gave agents the green light to indulge in harassment, burglary, electronic surveillance, black propaganda and other dirty tricks known in the trade as 'rat fucking.' "

(Acid: A New Secret History of LSD, David Black, pgs. 105-106)

And as for Project 2:

"Project 2 was an operation that entailed infiltration of the Black Power and antiwar movements in the United States, supposedly for the purpose of training CIA undercover agents for assignments abroad. The operation got under way in 1969 and, apparently, was terminated in 1974."

(Secret Agenda, Jim Hougan, pg. 12, n38) 

Many of these operations were initially directed by the Office of Security, though James Jesus Angleton and his Counterintelligence Staff in the Directorate of Plans had ultimate control over them. Hougan describes this arrangement as thus: the OS "worked as the principal collection agent for the domestic spying project, Operation Chaos, carried out under the nominal auspices of the counterintelligence staff" (Secret Agenda, pg. 12). The OS, in other words, appears to have provided most of the actual agents carrying out these operations in the field while the CI staff (which was rather small during this era) oversaw things from afar.

James Jesus Angleton

Under Nixon all of these operations were merged into CHAOS. For our purposes here, one of the most curious aspects of CHAOS was the lengths the CIA went to infiltrate New Left and Civil Rights groups and the specific ones they infiltrated:

"In July 1968, the CIA, then headed by Richard Helms, unified all anti-dissident domestic operations into an infamous programme called Operation Chaos. The CIA sent a large number of agents overseas to establish their revolutionary credentials for agitation activities in the US...

"The CIA's assessment of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical left coalition that flowered in the mid-to-late sixties, was more in tune with reality that the political perspective of the revolutionary student factions, who seemed to spend more time fighting each other than subverting the system. A CIA situation report in the run-up to the SDS convention of June 1969 clearly foresaw the coming split and collapse: 'The SDS prize continues to be fair game for take-over by any organised communist group on the American scene with the power, prestige and cunning to do so... It can be predicted that such efforts will continue until someone succeeds. Then SDS will split and their influence on the American campus can be expected to diminish.'

"For many participants in the New Left, experiences with LSD were an essential dimension of political development. Ironically, in the case of the Weathermen, an 'ultra-radical' spin off from the SDS, belief in the drug as a 'politiciser' mirrored the CIA's interest in its properties as a 'truth drug.' "

(Acid: A New Secret History of LSD, David Black, pgs. 106-107)

The notorious Weather Underground emerged in 1969 as a break off faction of the SDS. The CIA had of course predicted that the SDS would fracture if it was approached by a group with "the power, prestige and cunning" to fracture it. No doubt the CIA report was referring to the KGB, but the CIA itself would more than fit the bill. Interestingly, the Weather Underground emerged a year after Operation CHAOS had gone into over drive and the year Project 2 was initiated.

the Weather Underground logo

Nor was the Weather Underground the only militant left wing group to emerge from an organization infiltrated as part of Operation CHAOS and similar programs. The Nation of Islam was also a target and in 1973 the brutal "Zebra killers" (which this blog examined at length in an early and flawed series before here) emerged as an offshoot of the Nation in San Francisco. They would operate until 1974, just as Project 2 was being wrapped up. The Black Panther Party also appears to have been increasingly militarized after 1967 and by 1970 it had a violent splinter group known as the Black Liberation Army (BLA). The BLA operated until 1981, but the peak of its activities were doing the early 70s, tapering off after 1973. This was at the same time CHAOS and Project 2 were winding down.

Interestingly, the same branch of the OS responsible for the behavior modification research also played a key role in infiltrating the New Left and Black liberation movements:

"At the heart of many of these activities, a tabernacle within the inner sanctum, was the Security Research Staff (SRS), a cadre within the Office of Security. Headed by the late General Paul Gaynor, Watergate spy James McCord's immediate superior for many years, the SRS managed the literally mind-boggling Bluebird and Artichoke programs, and coordinated many of the domestic spying activities associated with Operation Chaos and Project 2..."

(Secret Agenda, Jim Hougan, pg. 12)

Was all of this merely a coincidence? Certainly it seems that, as far as the OS is concerned, all roads lead back to BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, whether it involves Watergate, "clean-up" operations, assassinations or Operation CHAOS itself. As such, the remaining installments in this series will be dedicated to an in depth examination of these programs. Stay tuned dear reader.

Le Cercle: Fratelli Neri

Welcome to the sixth installment in my epic examination of the highly secretive European network at times known as Le Cercle, Pinay Cercle or the Pinay Group (that latter of which in some accounts is held to be an inner circle of Cercle). During part one I examined the geopolitical implications of Cercle, noting its ties to the Bilderberger Group and Eastern Establishment luminaries such as David Rockefeller (who was recruited into the group around 1967 and who allegedly had no prior knowledge of its existence). These ties have led many American researchers to dismiss Cercle as nothing more than auxiliary of Bilderberger, but this would be a mistake. In point of fact, it was dominated by reactionary Catholic groups such as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and Opus Dei since its founding in the early 1950s. Rockefeller and co later broke with Le Cercle over its extremist positions.

With the second installment I considered the backgrounds of the two Frenchmen chiefly responsible for turning Le Cercle into a major international power: some times namesake and former French prime minister Antoine Pinay and his close associate, Jean Violet. Violet is a most curious figure. As was noted in that installment, Violet had ties to the intelligence services of France, West Germany and the Vatican. What's more, he was believed to have been a member of the proto-fascist La Cagoule terror network in 1930s France. La Cagoule in turn was held to have been spawned by the occult underground of Martinism and synarchy.

Part three moved on to two curious organizations that were crucial to the Cercle complex: the Brussels-based Academie Europeenne des Sciences Politiques (AESP, often referred to simply as the Academy) and Briton Brain Crozier's 6I network. Effectively these two groups served as private intelligence networks for Le Cercle. The Academy came first and dominated most Cercle's intrigues during the 1970s. However, upon the death of founder Florimond Damman in 1979, much of the Academy was rolled into Crozier's 61 network (which was founded around 1977). 6I would remain quite active until the mid-1980s. Of especial note are the ties both the Academy and 6I had to pedophile networks in Belgium and the UK respectively. The Belgium network first faced mass exposure in the wake of the Dutroux affair (noted before here, here and here) while the Britons were linked to the Westminster allegations that emerged during Thatcher's reign.

The fourth installment considered a host of groups that comprised the Cercle complex, including the World Anti-Communist League (WACL, addressed at length on this blog before here), the American Security Council (ASC, addressed at length here), Aginter Press (noted before here and here), Propaganda Due (P2, addressed at length here), the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture (ICDCC), the Family/Fellowship (addressed before here), the Unification Church (addressed before here), the Heritage Foundation and the Safari Club. These groups all played an enormous role in the conservative revolution that broke out in the West towards the end of the 1970s and led to the rise of Reagan and Thatcher. Cercle played an especially key role in creating the modern American Christian fundamentalist movement as well as paving the way for Islamic extremism in the Third World.

With the most recent installment I began by considered two final organizations linked to Cercle: Georges Albertini's network and Chile's notorious Colonia Dignidad (typically referred to as simply the Colony and which was addressed before here). Albertini was a key early member of Cercle who, like Jean Violet, appears to have been involved with synarchy in France. He was also a member of the Information Council for the Americas (INCA), a group linked to the Kennedy assassination. As for the Colony, it was a kind of commune that would develop into a full scale torture center in Pinochet's Chile.

Its founder, Paul Scahfer, was a German immigrant  who had collaborated with the Nazi regime. Numerous other notorious Nazis, including Otto Skorzeny, Gerhard Mertins, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, and Josef Mengele, were guests of the Colony, which was comprised entirely of former German nationals. Schafer was also an arch pedophile who was eventually convicted of molesting twenty-five children. He had previously been accused of child abuse in Germany before fleeing to Chile in the early 1960s. Dark rumblings of children going missing around the Colony and being imported to it from Germany have abounded for years.

Schafer

As I was wrapping things up, I also noted the possible ties Le Cercle had to two other pedophile networks. One of these was allegedly run by Larry E. King, the manager of the Omaha-based Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, and a prominent figure in both the Nebraska and Washington political scenes. As the allegations of King's child abuse first came out in the wake of a federal investigation being launched against his credit union, this incident is frequently referred to as the Franklin scandal.

While ties to this ring were not especially strong, the presence of close Cercle associate William Casey and his trusted aide, Max Hugel, to King is eyebrow raising. Casey was close to Brian Crozier, the head of 61 which, as noted above, was closely linked to the alleged Westminster ring. Hugel may have known Douglas MacArthur II, who has been linked to the Belgium ring (noted before here and here), as well.

With this installment I shall pick up where I left off and consider the other network that may have had ties to Le Cercle. This one is one of the least commented upon and most disturbing aspects of the Kennedy assassination.

The Dark Life of David Ferrie

Easily the most bizarre figure linked to the Kennedy assassination (and that's saying something) is David Ferrie. Here's a bit about Ferrie's background and ties to the nation's most notorious assassination:

"...  Made memorable by Joe Pesci's performance Oliver Stone's JFK, Ferrie was an improbable person. Had a novelist invented him, the genre would have to be either science-fiction or fantasy, or perhaps something avant-garde and experimental. In actuality, everything one reads about Ferrie is usually understatement. An Eastern Airlines pilot, an amateur cancer researcher, possibly an anti--Castro gunrunner and certainly (by his own admission) an associate of Sergio Arcacha Smith of the anti-Castro underground as well as of Mafia overlord Carlos Marcello, he was also in charge of Lee Harvey Oswald's old Civil Air Patrol unit in Louisiana. He had no facial hair at all, due to a condition known as alopecia, so he would paste on false eyebrows in a shocking shade of red and wear a red wig.... Ferrie came to the attention of District Attorney Jim Garrison when the latter was ramping up his investigation into New Orleans's connection with the Kennedy assassination. Ferrie's name had been dropped as a friend of both Guy Banister and Lee Harvey Oswald by one Jack Martin, who worked for Guy Banister (he of the FBI UFO files) as some sort of ersatz investigator. Martin himself worked with Ferrie on an investigation involving diploma mills and fraudulent ecclesiastical papers. Well, they claimed it was an investigation. It was obviously more than that. It seems that both Martin and Ferrie were only too happy to acquire these paper dignities themselves. Ferrie and Martin had both come to the attention of the Warren Commission briefly, and then were dropped as suspects. They both came under Jim Garrison's microscope later on, but Ferrie he died before he could testify. Garrison claimed that Ferrie was one of the most important people in history, but that might have been hyperbole. He was certainly one of the strangest."

(Sinister Forces Book I, Peter Levenda, pg. 275)

Carlos Marcello

Aside from this garden variety strangeness as well as his likely involvement in Kennedy assassination, Ferrie had another, even darker secret: he was an arch pedophile.

"The investigation into David Ferrie's unlawful and perverse activities with young boys would quickly become extremely complex, involving well over 20 young boys, and Ferrie and Arcacha Smith, as well as several unidentified Cubans, making strong-arm efforts to suppress evidence and threatening bodily harm to several of the young boys interviewed by detectives. Indeed, Arcacha Smith and an unidentified Cuban, according to police files, visited at least one boy at his place of work telling the young teen that he would seriously regret talking any further to investigators about Ferrie. The convoluted case would also provoke a number of issues that, today, remain unexplained and strange.

"First, a number of the boys interview by New Orleans police stated that they had traveled to Cuba with Ferrie and others a number of times after the island's takeover by Fidel Castro. One youth, Al Landry, according to police reports, said, 'that he had been to Cuba on several occasions since the revolution and stated that America should wake up because the Russians are 90 miles away.' Unknown is why Ferrie took these youths to Cuba in 1960 and 1961, and what they did in Cuba while there.

"Another youth told police that David Ferrie had taken several boys to Honduras 'to do some mining' and that additional trips to Latin America were planned by Ferrie. When police officers executed a search warrant on Ferrie's residence on August 23, 1961, they discovered a passport taken out in the name of Albert Paul Cheramie on August 2, 1960 (Cheramie is another of the boys Ferrie is believed to have sexually molested, and was reported to be a distant relative of Rose Cherami.) Why was Ferrie taking young boys to Honduras? What sort of 'mining' were they doing there?"

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, pg. 79)

Sergio Arcacha Smith

Ferrie's use of the name "Cheramie" and his alleged abuse of Albert Paul Cheramie is most curious. As noted above, Albert was reputedly a distant relative of Rose Cherami, another enigmatic figure who appears in the JFK assassination saga. Cherami was a prostitute mixed up with Carlos Marcello's network (as noted above, Ferrie worked for Marcello). On November 20, 1963, Cherami was found by the side of road in Louisiana injured and suffering from heroin withdraw.

Upon being picked up by authorities, she informed them that she was being transported from Florida to Texas as part of a drug and sex trafficking racket. She also claimed that President Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas soon, a notion she apparently picked up from the two gangsters that were transporting her. Needless to say, he prediction proved to be quite accurate on the twenty-second.

Rose

While Rose claimed the men who were transporting her were Italians, other witnesses identified them as Cubans. One of the individuals was specifically identified as Sergio Arcacha Smith, Ferrie's above-mentioned associate who tried to strong arm kids into recounting their allegations of abuse at the former pilot's hands. Rose also claimed that she was a part of an interstate sex trafficking ring run by the Syndicate. Much more information on this topic can be found here.

Needless to say, it seems rather odd that two years prior to Rose's bizarre trip, Ferrie was accused of abusing a distant relative of hers' and that the same man (Arcacha Smith) who tried to cover-up Ferrie's misdeeds back then was identified as one of the individuals transporting Rose cross country in what was reputed to be an interstate prostitution ring. But back to Ferrie's abuse:

"David Ferrie, when questioned by the police on August 21, 1961, said that he had 'a degree in psychology, but only gave advice' to people and treated nobody. Neighbors who live near Ferrie's home told detectives that they 'understood that Ferrie was a psychologist' and that 'a steady stream of boys were in and out of Ferrie's home' for what some thought was help with problems.

"A number of the boys sexually molested by Ferrie were taken by law enforcement authorities to the Youth Study Center in New Orleans. The Center is a division of the city's Human Services Department, chartered 'to provide secure detention to youths ages 8-16 that have been arrested and are in pre-trial status.' The Center, which remains open today, also provides educational classes for housed youth. Since some of these boys molested by Ferrie had not been arrested, the reason for taking them to the Center is unclear and unexplained by police reports. 

"According to a former New Orleans resident, who is closely related to two of the boys sexually molested by Ferrie and today lives in northern New York: 'The Youth Study Center has been a hotbed of corruption, sexual abuse, police brutality, and God only knows what else for decades. I understand that it all still goes on today.[David] Ferrie used to go there posing as a doctor of some sort, some sort of sham, to recruit kids.... He [Ferrie] took a lot of kids to Cuba, Guatemala and Honduras. Why? I don't know... He was an amateur hypnotist, learned out of a book, I guess, and he practiced trance stuff on a lot of boys. I understand that, besides Youth Study Center visits he went to the East [Louisiana] State Hospital a lot, where some of his boys were taken for treatment. There were rumors and stories for years before I left [Louisiana] that Ferrie was in bed, no pun intended, with one of the doctors there, who was a drug addict.... Ferrie wanted the doctor to not treat the boys... the crazy rumor was that the hospital was treating the boys with LSD to stop them from becoming homosexuals and Ferrie hated that.' "

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, pgs. 79-80)

The notion that Ferrie was taking sexually abused children to Guatemala is especially curious in light of another scandal that would involve an organization closely linked to the Cercle complex  and which did not unfold until the late 1980s. More on that in the next installment, so do keep the Guatemala connection in mind dear reader.

The East Louisiana State Hospital appears on at least two other occasions during the JFK saga. Located in Jackson, Louisiana over 100 miles from New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald (who had no car and was perpetually broke) found himself applying for a job at the hospital at some point in the late summer of 1963. He was apparently brought to Jackson in a black Cadillac and was accompanied by two other men. Witnesses identified these two men as David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, the head of New Orleans' International Trade Mart and the man Jim Garrison brought charges against in his bid to expose the Kennedy assassination.

the East Louisiana State Hospital

Rose Cherami had also been confined there, but two years prior, in 1961. Interestingly, several of the youths Ferrie was accused of abusing were taken there at the same time Cherami was being held there. Whether or not one of these boys was her alleged distant relative Albert Paul Cheramie is unknown.

In A Secret Order, Albarelli reports that shortly after Oswald's strange appearance at the hospital in 1963 a Dr. Alfred T. Butterworth went to work there. Butterworth had previously worked for Sidney Goettlieb at Fort Detrick as part of Project MK/NAOMI. He had also administered LSD at the NIMH Kentucky Addiction Farm (an institution used as part of Goettlieb's "behavior modification" experiments) prior to his employment at East Louisiana State Hospital. He would go onto administer LSD at Louisiana's notorious Angola prison. But moving along.

In addition to Ferrie's pedophilia, he was alleged to have been a bishop while also standing accused of conducting bizarre rituals performed in his apartment. Accounts of these acts are quite incredible:

"... According to Perry Russo – one of Jim Garrison's witnesses during the Clay Shaw trial, and not necessarily the most reliable or credible of those witnesses in the eyes of many investigators – Ferrie conducted the equivalent of Black Masses in his apartment at the appropriately-numbered 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway, New Orleans. James Kirkwood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Chorus Line, conducted his own informal investigation in New Orleans during the Clay Shaw trial, published as American Grotesque in 1970. Kirkwood was unequivocally pro-Shaw and anti-Garrison, so although his lengthy study makes for entertaining reading, his conclusions are not always above reproach, but it is worth quoting his transcript of Perry Russo's description of Ferrie's weekly Black Masses:

The chalice featured animal blood, the wafer consisted of some kind of raw flesh, instead of cake or bread. He wore a little black toga, solid black. He wore nothing underneath.... He called it the American Eastern Catholic Orthodox Church... After all the ritual, shouted ritual... It ends up and it's a brutal thing, sadistic quality to it – bloodletting, chicken killing, stuff like that.... "

(Sinister Forces Book I, Peter Levenda, pg. 281) 

Perry Russo

Black masses? And supposedly on behalf of an organization Russo referred to as the "American Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church. Ah dear reader, this brings us to quite a murky netherworld.

the AOCC and the Old Roman Catholic Church

The great Peter Levenda has long alleged that the church Ferrie was reportedly a member of was in fact the America Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC). Levenda himself was briefly involved with the sect in his late teens and thus his claims must be taken seriously.

The AOCC was one of several curious churches that crop up in the Kennedy saga (a topic I briefly delved into here). Many of these churches were quite obscure and dominated by what are typically referred to as "wandering bishops." These are alleged holy figures with dubious consecrations that may have been driven into fringe sects due to their inability to confirm to orthodoxy (many wandering bishops were homosexuals) or because they were simply hucksters with some other covert agenda. The AOCC seems to have attracted a bit of both. Here's some background information concerning its origins and deep history:

"... the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC) had its origins in Eastern Orthodoxy, which was in disarray after the Russian Revolution. In the 1960s, Bishop Carl Stanley was one of the church's leaders in the Midwest. He participated in the consecration of Jack Martin and David Ferrie, two of the more notorious members of what New Orleans Distict Attorney Jim Garrison decided was a conspiracy of anti-Castro Cubans, right-wing zealots, intelligence agents (and others) to murder the President. Stanley himself, according to documents in the National Archives, was a convicted felon with a substantial rap sheet. He was under investigation by the FBI after the assassination, evidently because Stanley himself had reported on his relationship with Ferrie and Martin and his suspicion that the two men were involved in killing the President. Garrison picked up on these threads during his own investigation in 1967-68, and cast a wider net: eventually, he would be seeking to depose wandering bishops as far afield as Canada, including one Earl Anglin James, who had consecrated the bishop who consecrated Stanley in the first place. From the aristocratic Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia to the somewhat sleazier American Orthodox Catholic Church, the ties to the Kennedy assassination were numerous and suggestive.

"One of Stanley's associates, the man who would take over the AOCC as its 'patriarch' a few years later, was Bishop Walter Myron Propheta. Stanley was based in Kentucky at the time, and Propheta in the Bronx... 

"Propheta was a hard-line anti-Communist who had supported Dewey during the campaign against President Truman. A Ukrainian by birth, he had been a priest with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – another staunchly anti-Communist organization, since the Ukrainian people had suffered tremendously under the Moscow regime, which he tried to exterminate their language and culture along with a number of their political activists – and had left that Church to form his own congregation. The reasons for this are a little murky, and may have had more to do with politics than religion, since leaving the Church led by Bishop Bohdan and joining a suspect group that has been dismissed by most commentators as a kind of 'bishops mill' could not be seen as a particularly intelligent move.

"The key word here is 'intelligent,' for it seems that the AOCC – particularly under Propheta – was just that: a front for an intelligence organization. As suspected by Jim Garrison, the AOCC was hand in glove with a number of covert intelligence operations being run in the United States and abroad, the Church providing 'cover' in the form of authentic-looking religious documents, clerical outfits, and a widespread network of wandering bishops who for the most part were all rabidly right-wing. David Ferrie and Jack Martin were only the tip of the iceberg, for Propheta found himself involved in everything from the Biafran civil war to the Italian elections in the 1960s. One of his successors is not believed – by Italian military intelligence – to have been involved in money laundering for Serbian terrorists during the latest crises in Bosnia and Kosovo.

"Indeed, the AOCC was not the only such 'wandering' denomination so involved. The Old Roman Catholic Church had connections to intelligence activities at home and abroad as well, including a famous hypnotist who was said to have been the man who 'programmed' the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan..."

(Dead Names, Simon, pgs. 61-64)

The above-quote comes from the mysterious "Simon," who was either another priest involved with the AOCC around the time Peter Levenda was (i.e. 1968-69) or a pseudonym for Levenda himself. Simon first came to public notice in the late 1970s with the publication of what is typically referred to as the "Simon Necronomicon." Simon alleged to have discovered this work amongst a collection of works that were stolen from an Orthodox denomination though most believe it was a hoax to cash in on the fictional Necronomicon that appears in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and others.

As for the famous hypnotist from the Old Roman Catholic Church, it is first useful to note the connections that this fellow sect had to the AOCC. They chiefly revolved around the above-mentioned Earl Anglin James, a Canada-based bishop who also became ensnared in Jim Garrison's investigation. James does not seem to have been a member of the AOCC, but was close to Stanley and Propheta (as well as Jack S. Martin, another alleged AOCC member who worked with Ferrie in investigating these "bishop mills"):

"According to the paper's report, James had been a bishop of the Old Roman Catholic Church in 1945, but had been excommunicated two years later. The story is more interesting than these bare-bones would indicate, however.

"James was indeed consecrated – on June 17, 1945 – by the infamous Henry Carfora, the guiding light behind the Old Roman Catholic Church and its policy of consecrating all and sundry in those days. Carfora was assisted in this consecration by the indomitable Hubert Augustus Rogers. Thus James' pedigree is firmly in the wandering bishop camp. 

"To make matters if possibly any more complicated, Christopher Carl Stanley – the bishop who was being 'investigated' by Jack Martin and who consecrated David Ferrie a bishop – was himself consecrated by the same Earl Anglin Lawrence James. 

"Thus we have a direct line of apostolic assassination succession from Carfora to James to Stanley to Ferrie: the latter three all at one time or another suspects in the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. This is not to forget the line that goes from Carfora to Stanley to Propheta."

(Sinister Forces Book I, Peter Levenda, pg. 285)

Earl Anglin James

Thus it would seem that Stanley and Propheta --the two chief figures in the AOCC during this era --with both consecrated by members of the Old Roman Catholic Church. In Dead Names, Simon/Levenda  notes that he had helped repair relations between the AOCC and the Old Roman Church, implying that relations were not especially close, during the late 1960s. But there does appear to be one peculiar connection between the AOCC and the Old Roman Catholic Church at this time: David Ferrie and his ties to the above-mentioned hypnotist.

As I'm sure many readers have already guessed, this hypnotist is none other than the notorious William Joseph Bryan. Here's some background on Bryan and his deep ties:

"... A large, bearded man who taxed the scales at nearly 400 pounds, he was even stranger in his appearance than hairless Ferry; a fat man who expected his secretaries to sleep with them, and who used hypnosis to sexually exploit still others. He demonstrated his hypnotic powers in public on many occasions, even putting noted defense attorney F. Lee Bailey under, along with two other lawyers, in a seminar organized by Melvin Belli... He also consulted on many famous criminal cases, and had hypnotized accused serial killer Albert DiSalvo (the 'Boston Strangler') in his cell.

"Bryan worked in the Los Angeles area, out of an office on Sunset Strip in Hollywood, after checkered career in which he was once a drummer for Tommy Dorsey's band and then, during the Korean War, worked for the US Air Force in what he termed 'the brainwashing section.' If this was, in fact, true and not some of Bryan's notorious hyperbole, then he certainly came to the attention of the CIA, which had just geared up Operation BLUEBIRD at this moment and had sent agents to Korea to investigate the brainwashing phenomenon and to come up with ways to protect American servicemen against it... As an admittedly powerful hypnotist, Bryan would been scooped up by the CIA almost at once. Hypnosis – along with drugs – was the CIA's immediate strategy in the development of the 'Manchurian Candidate,' and they were working with hypnotists in New York and elsewhere in the attempt to develop a workable protocol. If the records of Bryan's success are anything to go by, then he already had the system down pat. According to Bryan's associates, he admitted to working for the CIA; the only question is, for how long?

"Bryan had a flamboyant personality and lifestyle that would have been vulnerable for an ordinary intelligence operative; Bryan had no qualms about discussing his sexual exploits, however, so he was a poor target for blackmail. From available evidence in the public record, if Bryan was involved with the CIA as he claimed, it was probably in the capacity of a consultant, although one can imagine cases in which he would have been called in to perform a tricky hypnotic maneuver. This is, in fact, the belief of investigators such as Turner and Christian, as well as Political Science Professor Philip H. Melanson (The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, 1991, 1994). They believe sufficient evidence exists to suggest the Bryan was the hypno-programmer of Sirhan Sirhan."

(Sinister Forces Book I, Peter Levenda, pgs. 312-313)

Sirhan Sirhan

Sufficient evidence now exists to tie Bryan to the CIA. The great H.P. Albarelli notes:

"... Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Bryan was associated with several ultra-conservative right wing groups and through these associations came to the attention of the CIA's Morse Allen, a staunch proponent of the use of hypnotism and intelligence activities. One CIA Security Office document, from the early 1950s, details a lengthy meeting in New York City between Allen and Bryan, during which Allen sought assurances that Bryan could employ hypnosis in order to control selected, unwitting subjects..."

 (A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, pgs. 151-152)

Morse Allen was the head of Project Bluebird and later Project Artichoke. These programs were conducted out of the Office of Security and were separate from the much more well known Project MK-Ultra, which was headed by Sidney Gottlieb and hailed from the Directorate of Science and Technology. The divide and rivalry between these two programs was addressed briefly before here.

Albarelli notes, however, that Bryan does seem to have had ties to MK-Ultra, as well. In 1955 Bryan had founded the American Institute of Hypnosis, which in some of its publications from 1959 and 1961 credited the Granger Research Company with "technical assistance" and other things. Granger was actually a CIA front company that had been co-founded Sidney Gottlieb and other individuals involved with MK-Ultra around 1954. But moving along.

Bryan has other curious skeletons in his closet as well, most notably his relationship to Ferrie and his fondness for underage girls:

"Steven Duffy and Greg Parker research on William Bryan, Jr.: Hypnotist Bryan died under very strange circumstances in a motel room in Las Vegas. The details of his death vary and are quite unclear. Some reports assert that he died of heart attack; others state he was shot to death, and still others claim he committed suicide after having a three-day party of sorts with two underage prostitutes. One additional report states that Bryan was killed by a prostitute after he told her he had hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan to murder Robert Kennedy. (Some readers may recall that in the past 25 years at least ten CIA employees have died under strange circumstances in various motel rooms across the country.) Bryan was once charged in Nevada (his home state) for furnishing liquor to a young girl under the age of eighteen while he was attempting to convince her of the merits of 'free love.' In 1961 Bryan was extradited to California to face charges filed by District Attorney William Raggio, who was a close friend of Frank Sinatra. Reportedly, Bryan was very close to Sinatra. Bryan told a number of people that Sinatra was responsible for his being hired as a consultant on the film, The Manchurian Candidate. Bryan lost his license to practice medicine in California. Bryan, like Dr. Renatus Hartogs before him, was once found guilty of sexual misconduct with four female patients. Reportedly, he paid another woman $50,000 to not file a sexual misconduct complaint against him. There are also claims the Brian hypnotized and programmed would-be-assassin Arthur Bremer to kill Gov. George Wallace in Maryland. And last, but not least, Bryan was a close associate David Ferrie, having taught Ferrie hypnosis. Bryan, like Ferrie, was a member of the Old Catholic Church."

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, pg. 435n)

As far as this researcher is aware, the above-mentioned Duffy and Parker are the only individuals who have alleged that Bryan personally knew Ferrie and had even trained him in hypnosis. Still, William Turner (a former FBI agent) and John Christian in researching their classic The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and the Cover-Up, had turned up evidence that Bryan and Ferrie had belonged to the same branch of the Old Roman Catholic Church. Given there involvement in far right wing politics as well, the possibility that Ferrie and Bryan had known each other is quite strong.

We are then left with the implications that these two individuals, who by all accounts were first rate hypnotists with intelligence ties, were active in this underground network of wandering bishops during the 1960s and both happened to become mixed in the assassinations of JFK and RFK respectively. What's more, both men appear to be pedophiles as this is not the first time I've encountered evidence that Bryan had a thing for underage girls.

Certainly this is all rather curious. But what does it have to do with Le Cercle, the reader may be asking. Well, to answer that question, I must now turn my attention to an obscure order of knighthood that was very briefly noted in the third installment of this series.

The Sovereign Order of Saint John

Quite a bit of information concerning the Sovereign Order of Saint John (SOSJ) has already been published on this blog, so I shall be brief. Some times referred to as the Shickshinny Knights of Malta due to its headquarters in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, the order unsurprisingly claimed descent from the Medieval Knights Hospitallers via the Russian line of succession. As the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM, an organization we have encountered repeatedly throughout this series) is acknowledged by the Vatican as the official successors to the Knights Hospitallers, the claims of the SOSJ are largely dismissed as a hoax.

When the group was founded, however, is something of a mystery. Most accounts hold that the SOSJ did not come into existence until 1956 when the order was incorporated by its long time Grand Master, Charles Pichel. Others have cited 1908 for the group's founding as this is reportedly when its Grand Priory was established in Luzerne County (home of Shickshinny). This researcher has found reliable references to the order dating back to the 1930s, but not earlier than that (though Pichel was involved in at least one other esoteric order as early as the 1920s).

Charles Pichel is quite a curious figure. He was suspected of being an agent for the Nazi regime during the 1930s as well as being accused of drug trafficking. As I noted before here, here and here, there is compelling evidence that Pichel and early members of the order may have had ties to the infamous Thule Society. These connections came from a group far right wing White Russians that ended up in Germany and later the United States following the Russian Revolution. Thus, while the SOSJ likely does not have nearly a thousand year legacy dating back to the Crusades it may well have existed since at last the 1930s and had origins with the Thule Society.

While generally dismissed as a marginal organization, the SOSJ has nonetheless been linked to both the assassination of JFK (as noted before here) as well as the Oklahoma City bombing (for these links, check here). It also played an enormous role in creating the modern America patriot movement (and especially the militia movement), which has been extensively linked to terrorism (as noted before here). This is hardly surprising consider the type of "talent" the organization attracted.

The SOSJ was at the height of its prowess during the 1960s and 1970s. By this time it had accumulated a roster of initiates littered with "former" high ranking military officers, including at least nine generals and eight admirals by 1970 of the US military. Quite a few of these initiates had deep backgrounds with intelligence connections.

There was of course Admiral Charles Cooke, who played a key role in bringing the military and CIA into KMT drug trafficking (noted before here). And then was Herman E. Kimsey, a former Chief of Analysis and Research for the CIA. Meanwhile Admiral Sir Barry Domvile was a former head of British Naval Intelligence until his Nazi sympathies led to his internment during WWII. And then there was Colonel Philip J. Corso whose military career researcher Kevin Coogan described thus: "... a 20-year Army Intelligence operative who retired in August 1963. He seems to spend some of his time in military working on a Operation Gladio-type operation in Germany in the 1950s" (Dreamer of the Day, pg. 605). As was noted here and here, both Propaganda Due (P2) and the intrigues in Belgium were linked to Operation Gladio (as well as Le Cercle, as noted before here).

And who could forget about General Charles Willoughby, Douglas MacArthur's chief of intelligence. Willoughby was effectively the most powerful US intelligence officer in the Far East from 1941 until 1951, at which point both the Pipe and Willoughby were drummed out of the Army by Truman. As I noted before here, Willoughby would go on to offer his services to Allen Dulles in 1955 and would shortly there after pop up in a host of organizations with intelligence applications.

One of these organizations was the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture (ICDCC), which was addressed in part four of this series. As we saw there, it is likely that the ICDCC was an auxiliary of Le Cercle. Willoughby would have been in contact with Antoine Pinay himself as part of this group and may well have been a member of Le Cercle.

At this point I would like to pause and point out to the reader the similarities between the SOSJ and the Brussels-based Academy (addressed at length before here and here). Both organizations effectively seemed to have severed as bridges between elite policy-centric organizations and street level operatives. Above the Academy was Le Cercle and elements of the united Europe movement (i.e. Paneuropean Union, Habsburg's CEDI and even the Bilderberger Group to some extent) who work active in the organization. But also active were terror networks like Aginter Press and the Belgian fascist militias such as Front de la Jeunese (FJ) and the Westland New Post (headed by Paul Latinus, an asset of the DIA as noted before here).

WNP head Paul Latinus is on the right

The SOSJ was in much the same position. Above it was the American Security Council, comprised of numerous "former" high ranking CIA, FBI and military men as well as ample funds provided by many of the largest defense contractors in the nation (i.e. General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, etc). But the SOSJ also had extensive ties to the America militia movement, as especially the Minutemen and the Posse Comitatus (as noted before here), that would be linked to acts of terrorism for decades.

As was noted above, both the Belgians and the P2 in the Academy had ties to Operation Gladio. As noted above, SOSJ initiate Colonel Philip J. Corso may have been involved in organizing a Gladio network in Germany prior to his time in the SOSJ. This researcher has long suspected that the SOSJ was effectively the command center for the American wing of Operation Gladio and its ties to Le Cercle (which seems to have been quite active in the Gladio networks to say nothing of Operation Condor [noted here], which was effectively South America's version of Gladio) and the fact that at least one SOSJ member seems to have been actively engaged in planning Gladio only reinforces this researcher's belief. There is another curious connection as well:

"... an arrangement for the creation and support of right-wing 'stay-behind' groups in Europe to combat the risk of Communist takeover. This arrangement in Italy, known later as Operation Gladio, led in turn to a shadow system of parallel intelligence agencies, shielded from the overview of Italy's public and more centrist government. These CIA-linked agencies developed a strategy of tension in which a series of lethal terrorist bombings, falsely presented as left-wing, were used to drive Italy further to the right...

"Guido Giannettini, one of the Italian authors of the strategy of tension (and of the Piazza Fontana bombing eight years later), came to America in 1961 to lecture at the Naval War College on 'Techniques and Possibilities of a Coup d'Etat in Europe.' In March 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared their own documents developing Giannettini's strategy. This was Operation Northwoods, which many books have cited as a 'precedent' for 'U.S. complicity in the attacks of 9/11.' As journalist James Bamford wrote of Northwoods: 'The plan, which had been written with the approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets.' "

(The Road to 9/11, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 14) 

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff  (JCOS) who approved Northwoods was General Lyman Lemnitzer. The same year that Lemnitzer approved Northwoods he was shipped off to Europe to become the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. JFK had firmly rejected Northwoods and it has been speculated that Lemnitzer's removal as Chairman of the JCOS stemmed from the disgust Kennedy felt towards the Northwoods scheme (as noted before here). Nonetheless, Gladio operations in Europe would begin to kick into high gear by the end of that decade. Richard Cottrell in Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe compellingly argued Lemnitzer played a key role in escalating Gladio.

General Lyman lemnitzer

What does this have to do with SOSJ? Well, consider who invited Guido Giannettini to lecture at the Naval War College:

"In November 1961, Giannettini had been invited by General Pedro del Valle, commander the United States Central Naval Academy at Annapolis, to conduct a three-day seminar on 'The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup d'Etat in Europe.' His audience included both Pentagon and CIA representatives. This appears to have established Giannettini as a respected figure among NATO spy chiefs."

(Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, Stuart Christie, pg. 26) 

General Pedro del Valle

General Pedro del Valle was not just a member of the SOSJ, but also a member of its Supreme Court. What's more, he was reportedly one of three men who Colonel William Potter Gale alleged to have instructed him to establish the Posse Comitatus (noted before here). Another of these men was Colonel Benjamin von Stahl, another SOSJ initiate. Was this a component of Operation Northwoods? Certainly these connections are compelling, but I have digressed enough. Back to the matter at hand. 

The SOSJ and the Wandering Bishops

With Willoughby as a bridge between Le Cercle and the SOSJ, the question then becomes: was there a tie between the SOSJ and the AOCC or the Old Roman Catholic Church? And the answer does indeed seem to be in the affirmative.

While Peter Levenda has long insisted that David Ferrie was a member of the American Orthodox Catholic Church, there is but one problem with this claim: the AOCC did not in fact exist at the time Ferrie was consecrated. There was an older version of the AOCC active in New York during the 1930s, but it seems to have been totally defunct by the 1950s. It was until 1964 that Stanley and Prophets would revive the church. This was a good three years after Carl Stanley has consecrated Ferrie a bishop. So while Ferrie may have ultimately been a member of the AOCC after 1964, he could not have been a member at the time of his consecration.

David Ferrie

So what then was the church that Ferrie was consecrated in? Stephen Roy, who is acknowledged as one of the best Ferrie researchers out there and who is very skeptical of his role in the Kennedy assassination, did a lot of research into this question. He came up with the following answer:

"The group Martin and Ferrie were associated with was the 'Byzantine Primitive Catholic Church, Old catholic Church in N.A., Apostolic, Orthodox, Catholic, Order of Saint John,' according to the consecration certificates. The group Ferrie alone was associated with was the 'Society of the Domestic Missionaries Of Saint Basil the Great', according to his membership card."

The "Byzantine Primitive Catholic Church, Old catholic Church in N.A., Apostolic, Orthodox, Catholic, Order of Saint John" --the same Order of Saint John we have just been considering? It appears so. This well-sourced website concerning frivolous orders of knighthood notes the following about Carl Stanley, the bishop who consecrated Ferrie:

"V. Sovereign Order of St.John of Jerusalem, Knights Hospitaller, Priory of the Holy Saviour (1960)

"This group is one of the many scissions of the Shickshinny operation (see II). It was headed by the Rev. Christopher Carl Jerome Stanley of the Old Catholic Church. Stanley was consecrated by J.F. Assendelft-Altland, a highly controversial 'episcopus vagans' and self- styled Patriarch of the Ancient Catholic Byzantine Church. According to Formhals,(5) Stanley initially styled himself 'Bishop' later 'Archbishop'. Somewhere along the line he also acquired the titles of 'Count of Durazzo' and 'Prince of the Holy Roman Empire'. The prioral seat was originally located in Louisville, then moved to Seattle, and finally to Texas. After Stanley’s death the group disappeared from the American chivalric scene."

note that Stanley has a Maltese cross on his cloak, the insignia of Knights Hospitallers and their successors

"One of many scissions of the Shickshinny operation..." And up above, the Order of Saint John is listed as part of the title of Stanley's church. Is it possible then that this "Byzantine Primitive Catholic Church... " began as an auxiliary of the SOSJ? This is certainly possible as according to Michael W. Cuneo in The Smoke of Satan, the SOSJ operated about fifty chapels across the country that performed the Traditional Mass circa 1993. Did Stanley's church start out as one of those chapels before he broke with the SOSJ and formed his own rival order of knighthood?

What's more, how serious was this break with the SOSJ? Peter Levenda, in an article entitled "The Bishop and the Boys Part III" that originally appeared on his Sinister Forces website (and which is only available now in cut and paste form here), made the following statement:

"One of the other bishops of the American Orthodox Catholic Church – Homer Ferdinand Roebke, an associate and colleague of Carl Stanley – consecrated one Forest Ernest Barber on March 7, 1965, less than five months after the Forbes consecration. As I am informed by investigator David Guyatt, Barber was a member of the Augustan Society (an 'International Genealogical, Historical, Heraldic and Chivalric Society' with some interesting associations) as well as of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta, a far-right organization and secret society that numbered among its initiates such intelligence notables as the rabid right-winger Major General Charles A. Willoughby (the former Adolf Tscheppe-Weidenbach and member of General MacArthur’s intelligence staff during World War II) as well as Colonel Philip J Corso, a man with a long background in intelligence dating from the war who was the author of The Day After Roswell, a controversial memoire of his experiences in the aftermath of the UFO crash in New Mexico."

Archbishop "Sir" Forest Ernest Barber, a "former" military intelligence officer and an SOSJ initiate involved with the AOCC; he was also reputedly a co-founder of the Augustan Society which allegedly received support from Le Cercle member Otto von Habsburg

So it would seem by 1965 at least one member of the SOSJ was admitted into Stanley's church, now the AOCC. This, just a little over a year after the founding of the AOCC. Given the close ties the SOSJ had to the Traditional Catholic sects, this researcher suspects that contact may have continued between Stanley (who was apparently an SOSJ initiate) and the SOSJ during the early 1960s. And if not with Stanley, possibly with other members of the AOCC.

Another possible tie between the SOSJ and the AOCC comes via Willoughby's frequent corespondent and fellow member of the ICDCC: Theodor Oberlander. Oberlander was briefly addressed in part four of this series, but I have since come into more intriguing information concerning this "former" Nazi. According to David Teacher in his groundbreaking examination of Le Cercle entitled Rogue Agents, Oberlander became involved as a "patron" of Karl Friedrich Grau's Frankfurt Study Group very early in its existence (i.e. prior to 1960). Grau was for years one of the Cercle's primary German partners and a regular attendant of their meetings. His Frankfurt Study Group was another propaganda network along the lines of Brain Crozier's Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC, noted briefly here), but geared toward the German-centric regions of Europe.

Oberalnder was also on the Executive Committee of an organization known as the European Freedom Center (EFC), a group closely linked to the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Paul Vankerkhoven would also sit on the Executive Committee during the mid-1970s. He was a close associate of Florimond Damman, the founder of the Academy. Damman himself would also be active in the EFC as well.

Oberlander

Thus, it would seem that Oberlander had quite close ties to Le Cercle, ties that may even have pre-dated his activities with Willoughby in the ICDCC during the early 1960s. For our purposes here, however, it is Oberlander's links to Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (one of the organizations behind the founding of the World Anti-Communist League, as noted before here) that are of great interest:

"Theodore Oberlander, the German commander of Ukrainian Nightingales, has continued his partnership with Yaroslav Stesko through the World Anti-Communist League. A staunch Nazi, Oberlander joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and was made an honorary officer of the Nazi SD (Gestapo) in 1936. The Ukrainians accused of carrying out many of the purges in the Lvov area in June 1941 were under his command."

(Inside the League, Scott & John Anderson, pg. 44)

In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell notes that Oberlander and Stesko were "two of Willoughby's closet European associates" (pg. 595). Both men were deeply involved in anti-Communist Ukrainian groups for decades. Indeed, Stesko was arguably the most powerful figure in the expat Ukrainian community for decades after WWII.

Yaroslav Stesko

As was noted above, Bishop Walter Propheta was himself Ukrainian and a long time priest in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He was also quite active in anti-Communist activities for decades after leaving his homeland. The possibility that Propheta and Stesko knew one another is quite high. Indeed, this researcher suspects that there is a strong chance Propheta was active in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) at least during the early days.

There is also a strong chance he knew Oberalnder (who commanded Germany's Ukrainian forces during WWII and would be deeply involved with them for years afterwards via his work with West Germany's refugee affairs division and later through the ABN and WACL) as well. And both Stesko and Oberlander were in regular contact with Willoughby. Thus, the possibility that Willoughby and Propheta were acquainted with one another is quite strong. It is interesting to note that a little over a year after Propheta seems to have become involved with Stanley (who had likely broken with the SOSJ around 1960) a SOSJ member would join the AOCC in 1965, as noted above. But moving along.

Propheta

There is also a strong possibility that the SOSJ also had close ties to the Old Roman Catholic Church (which Ferrie and Bryan may have been members of by the mid-1960s) as well. Peter Levenda indicates as much in his The Hitler Legacy, noting: "... the Shickshinny Knights of Malta: a group founded in the 1950s by one Charles Pichel, who had Old Catholic Church connections and a desire to replace the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta with his own group, headquartered in the town of Shickshinny, Pennsylvania" (pg. 273). As was noted above, Stanley's Byzantine Primitive Catholic Church was said to be a part of the Old Catholic network in North America.

Another of these ties may have been SOSJ initiate Father Gerard G. Shelley, who was the head of the entire Old Roman Catholic Church in Britain. He also had extensive ties with the Old Roman Catholic sects in North America and was the head of the SOSJ's "Old Roman Catholic Section." In Is the Order of St. John Masonic another SOSJ initiate, Father James F. Wathen, hints (though never implicitly states) that there is a tie between the SOSJ and the Old Roman Catholic Church as well.

SOSJ initiate Gerard G. Shelley

All of this tends to strongly indicate that the SOSJ had quite extensive ties to both the AOCC (and its predecessors) as well as the Old Roman Catholic Church.

The INCA Connection

At this point we must now consider the Information Council for the Americas (INCA), first addressed in part five. There it was noted that one member of the INCA's "International Advisory Committee" was none other than Georges Albertini, a very close associate of Brain Crozier and a long time member of Le Cercle. Like many of Le Cercle's non-British/American members, Albertini had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II during France's Vichy regime. Afterwards he was imprisoned for this collaboration along with the infamous banker Hippolyte Worms.

Worms himself along with various officers of the Banque Worms were cited by William L. Langer (an OSS veteran) in his Our Vichy Gamble as being enamored with the ideology of synarchy, which was closely linked to Martinism (as was noted in part two). This so-called "Worms clique" was said to be greatly involved in the spread of this ideology amongst the French elite. Whether or not Albertini became involved in these affairs is unknown but he would acquire a position with the Banque Worms after the war that he would hold for decades. Albertini was also alleged to have been friendly with French military officers linked to La Cagoule (a proto-fascist militant secret order said to based upon synarchy and Martinism) in the pre-war years.

As I noted in part two of this series Jean Violet, one of the co-founders of Le Cercle and a major force behind it for decades, was said to have been a member of La Cagoule during the 1930s. Thus, two of the key figures from Le Cercle's French wing potentially had ties to synarchy and one of them happened to be a part of the New Orleans-based INCA that has also been linked too the Kennedy assassination.

As was noted in part five, the INCA is mainly known for promoting a radio interview between Lee Harvey Oswald and the INCA's Edward Butler (among others) in which Oswald proclaimed himself a Communist. Researchers such as Edward Haslam and Judith Vary Baker have alleged that the INCA head Dr. Alton Ochsner (a famed surgeon and cancer researcher) was engaged in research with Dr. Mary Sherman to develop biological weapons to be used against Castro for the US intelligence community. David Ferrie was said to be a part of this team.

The research of Haslam and especially Baker is highly controversial, however, and cannot be described as a reliable source. This researcher is unaware of connections Ferrie had to the INCA outside of Haslam and Baker's research, though certainly Ferrie traveled in many of the same anti-Communist circles as the INCA crowd. And there is quite compelling evidence linking Lee Harvey Oswald himself to Ferrie.

Dr. Alton Ocshner

There is little dispute, however, that Alton Ocshner knew Clay Shaw, Jim Garrison's chief suspect. As was noted in the prior installment, several witnesses spotted Shaw with David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald near Clinton, LA and later Jackson in the late summer of 1963. Indeed, quite a few witnesses have come forward over the years to assert that their was a relationship of some kind between Shaw and Ferrie. What's more, there are also indications that Shaw was friendly with Ferrie's boss during the early 1960s, former FBI man turned private detective Guy Banister (much more information on Banister can be found here).

"... The Information Council of the Americas chief sponsor was another New Orleans rightwing patrician, Dr. Alton Ocshner. Through this author's field investigation in New Orleans, there is no doubt Banister knew Ochsner, and so did Clay Shaw. In fact, there is a photo in the New Orleans Public Library of Shaw with Ochsner..."

(Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio, pg. 157)

In the same work, DiEugenio indicates that Shaw also knew Sergio Arcacha Smith, the above-mentioned Cuban who reportedly helped cover-up Ferrie's abuse of children in New Orleans during 1961: "He [Arcacha Smith] relates to Clay Shaw since Shaw donated funds to the CRC and, during the Garrison investigation, Shaw made direct calls to Arcacha Smith's lawyer" (pg. 185). DiEugenio also reports that Arcacha Smith was friendly with INCA's Edward Butler as well. In general it seems that there was much overlap between the INCA and Guy Banister's network (which included Ferrie, Arcacha Smith and almost surely Oswald himself).

Clay Shaw was also a member of the notorious Permindex trade organization originally based out of Basel, Switzerland and alleged to be a front for the CIA. It has long been linked to the Kennedy assassination. As I noted before here, there are allegations that Propaganda Due Grand Master Licio Gelli was also a member of Permindex. In other accounts, it is held that close associates of Gelli and not Gelli himself were involved in Permindex. This potential connection will be even more curious in a moment.

Gelli

On the topic of European associates, the great ISGP also reports that Shaw reportedly knew several families linked to terrorism and even one tied to Belgium's pedophile networks::

"Shaw was deeply involved in the New Orleans network linked to MKULTRA with strong hints of a sadistic child abuse ring operating in the background, not the least at Shaw's own home where hooks suspended from the ceiling with bloody palm prints were found. [116] The New Orleans network had various ties not only to the Rockefeller group in New York, but also Le Cercle and the American Security Council. Shaw himself counted the House of Savoy and the Borghese family [117] among his associates. Both families, and both almost certainly linked to the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei, were deeply involved in running the underground fascist armies that carried out the CIA's strategy of tension in Italy. Most worrying of all, Shaw counted among his associates Princess Jacqueline de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, a member of the family named in the Dutroux X-Dossiers as having organized elite child hunts at their domain in southern Belgium. We just described how Douglas MacArthur II was a friend and associate of the Belgians accused of these exact practices."

The Borghese family was responsible for Junio Valerio Borghese, the so-called "Black Prince" linked to a possible coup in Italy circa 1970. Borghese was very close to the notorious Italian neo-fascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie, who in turn was closely linked to Propaganda Due (noted before here and here) Borghese and his family may also have been linked to the Belgium network, as I noted before here.

And that brings us to one of the most bizarre accusations against Clay Shaw, a homosexual and apparent sado-masochist. During his arrest in 1965 some curious things were found:

"The 'evidence' produced from Clay Shaw's home were a black gown, a net hat, a black hood and cape, a chain and five whips. Several of these items had been part of Shaw's Mardi Gras outfits in previous years — he was wearing the robe and carrying a whip when he met Layton Martens during Mardi Gras in 1965, as Martens would later describe (Milton Brener, The Garrison Case, 156). Other friends of Shaw's would also recalled the costume, including Mrs. Lawrence Fischer (James Kirkwood, American Grotesque, 27; see also Epstein, 186; Kirkwood, 49; Lambert, 76, 76 fn.)."

Clay Shaw

It is interesting to note that the above-mentioned Layton Martens that Shaw encountered while wearing a robe and carrying a whip was allegedly one of the children Ferrie had molested. This lends further credence to the possibility that Ferrie was involved in some type of pedophile ring in New Orleans, one that may have been linked to Belgian networks. Certainly Shaw seems to have been near to Ferrie as well as several alleged European pedophiles of noble blood in addition to his sado-masochism. For our purposes here, however, what is most noteworthy were the allegations that Shaw owned a black hood and camp. This shall be most curious (more so that it already is) in a moment dear reader.

Black Friars 

Let us return now to William Joseph Bryan, the famed hypnotist with CIA connections who was also a priest (or bishop) in the Old Roman Catholic Church. Easily the most bizarre account of Bryan appears in a worked called Project Artichoke by one David M. Silvey. Many of Silvey's claims are quite incredible though H.P. Albarelli, easily the most credible researcher on Artichoke and MK-ULTRA active today, found some Silvey's claims compelling.

"... writer David M. Silvey, in his book, Project Artichoke, provided some very provocative leads on hypnotist William Bryan and FBN agents George White and Ira Feldman. The latter owned property near Silvey's family home and knew Silvey's mother. Incredibly, Silvey's book links one of the victims of the infamous Zodiac Killer with Bryan, the CIA, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy. When this author read Silvey's book, it brought to mind my conversation about George Hunter White with San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery, who closely covered the Zodiac story – as depicted in the film, Zodiac, starring Robert Downey, Jr. (who played Avery). Having also written an excellent article on George White, Avery remarked to this author that he had long been suspicious of White's possible connections to the brutal Zodiac killings. Avery, now deceased, remarked that there had been other incidents of violence connected to White and Feldman that 'troubled' him, and that the activities of the two MK/ULTRA operative 'nagged' at him, as if they were 'trying to tell me something.' "

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, pgs. 155)

This researcher had independently began to come to some of the same conclusions as Silvey does in Project Artichoke, namely that there was a connection to Zodiac, the Manson family and white supremacist terror groups like the Order (which was very briefly addressed before here). He indicates that Bryan and the Old Roman Catholic Church were part of this network. At one point he gives a description of a ritual involving this network and Bryan:

"We had to be there at midnight of course, I was surprised to see Dr. Bryan dressed up in a black KKK looking gown with the pointed hood, the movie cameras and lighting was all in place and generators were running. There was an armed triple roving perimeter. This is going to sound stupid but just like in the movies as it got closer to midnight dark clouds started to form just above us. A God fearing – devil worshiping ceremony was about to bring Al Hilal and Four P into The Order."

(Project Artichoke, David M. Silvey, pg. 83)

"Four P" was said to be an inner circle or splinter group of the Process Church of the Final Judgement

I'm sure many of you at this point are wandering where I'm going with this. Well, consider Silvey's description of Bryan's ritual regalia: "a black KKK looking gown with the pointed hood."

Now, consider these images of La Cagoule (which literally translates to "the hood"; sometimes the group was known as La Cagoulard, "the hooded ones") from 1930s France:

a 1930s cartoon of La Cagoule

another 1930s cartoon

members of La Cagoule during a party in 1937

Now, consider these images of a Propaganda Due initiation ceremony:

Isn't it rather odd that these fascist secret societies seemed to have adopted black cloaks and head gear resembling a Klansman's hood for their regalia?

Of course, a tie between La Cagoule and P2 is quite likely. As was noted before here, P2 initiate Giancarlo Elia Valori was active in the Academy during the 1970s at the same time Jean Violet was also playing a major role in it --the same Jean Violet accused of being a member of La Cagoule in the 1930s. And indeed, there were numerous other ties to P2 and the Academy, as was noted in that article.  According to ISGP, a "strictly confidential" report written by a Belgian magistrate has recently turned up verifying a tie between Violet and the P2. 

And here we find William Joseph Bryan described as also dressing up in such attire. The same William Joseph Bryan who was a priest in the Old Roman Catholic Church, which was also linked to the Sovereign Order of Saint John.  And of course there's Charles Willoughby of the SOSJ active in the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture (ICDCC) with Antoine Pinay, the sometimes namesake of Le Cercle. 

And of course the SOSJ was likely connected to the American Orthodox Catholic Church of which David Ferrie was a member. And, as noted above, reportedly Ferrie and Bryan knew one another. Certainly they would have had much in common, least of all their interest in hypnotism and pedophilia.

Bryan

And of course there are all of those pedophile rings linked to Le Cercle, which also seems to have had prominent members with ties to synarchy (the ideology reputedly behind La Cagoule) active from its very inception. One of them, Jean Violet, was very close to Antoine Pinay, who was active with Willoughby in the ICDCC. And what of Clay Shaw, a man who apparently had black robes and a hood in his possession, and his ties to Dr. Alton Ocshner, who was active in the INCA with Georges Albertini, one of those Le Cercle members linked to synarchy? And what of Shaw's friendship with one of the boys Ferrie was accused of molesting? And of course, there's the possibility that P2 Grand Master Licio Gelli was involved with Permindex with Shaw. As I noted before here, there are allegations that Gelli and P2 were involved with Martinism and synarchy as well. 

Is all of this a mere coincidence? Certainly the presence of black robes and a hood in occult activities is the epitome of a cliche and it would be ridiculous to claim that this alone is evidence of a network. But what of these black Klansman's hoods and black robes? The Klan itself at times employed black hoods and black robes, but this was primarily for the so-called "Nighthawk" component (a security section, apparently). These were mostly low ranking members and it is unknown if the black robes were even employed by the Klan when La Cagoule adopted them.

Outside of La Cagoule, P2 and Silvey's description of Bryan, this researcher is unaware of such regalia being used as the standard apparel for a secret society. And the degrees of separation between these three instances are not especially great.

What's more, there is a certain modus operandi that connects these three occurrences. La Cagoule was a proto-fascist paramilitary group that actively employed terrorism to destabilize France. Later, alleged La Cagoule member Jean Violet would become involved with the Academy, a Brussels-based group with ties to neo-facist militias such as the above-mentioned Front de la Jeunese (FJ) and the Westland New Post (WNP) that employed acts of terrorism to destabilize Belgium (noted before here). Propaganda Due, as noted before here and here, was very close to neo-fascist Italian paramilitary networks that used terrorism to destabilize the Italian state. And the Old Roman Catholic Church that Bryan was active in almost certainly had ties to the Sovereign Order of Saint John, an organization that was still being linked to "patriot" militias engaged in terrorism as recently the early 1990s. And all of these different networks appear to be united by the mysterious Cercle complex.

a sketch of a costume the Zodiac killer allegedly wore

the symbol of the Zodiac killer, which seems to be a play on the ancient solar cross emblem

For these reasons, this researcher believes that this may constitute a kind of secret society or even a cult within Le Cercle. I have dubbed it "Fratelli Neri" --Italian for "Black Friars." In some accounts this is what initiates of P2 referred to themselves within their meetings. It was also the name of the bridge where Roberto Calvi's body was found hanging from, as noted before here. It seems especially appropriate considering the possibility that Old Roman Catholic Church members also employed this type of regalia as well.

both the Knights Templar and the Knights of Malta used the solar cross; above is coat of arms of Sovereign Order of  Malta with a solar cross present

the Paneuropean Union, which was very close to the Academy and Le Cercle (as noted before here and here) used the solar cross as its logo

So, to recap: Over the course of this series I have demonstrated a tie between Le Cercle and reputed elite pedophile networks in Belgium and the UK (noted here). I have also indicated a possible connection between Le Cercle and the alleged Franklin ring of Larry E. King (noted here). With this installment I have sketched out a possible pedophile ring active in New Orleans during the 1960s involving David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, though all of this is circumstantial. I've also demonstrated how this ring could have been connected to Le Cercle via either the SOSJ or the INCA.

In a previous installment, I also noted the ties between Le Cercle and Chile's Colonia Dignidad, which was run by another arch pedophile for decades. Whether this constituted a ring is unknown, but certainly the Colony appears to have been involved in "behavioral modification" techniques (noted before here). David Ferrie was also alleged to have been a first rate hypnotist. He was possibly a priest in the same church as William Joseph Bryan, another accused pedophile and skilled hypnotist. Bryan was so skilled that he was recruited by Morse Allen into Project Artichoke. As noted above, there's a strong chance Bryan could have been linked to Le Cercle via the SOSJ as well.

If this was not disturbing enough, there is also the specter of Operations Gladio, Northwoods and Condor (Condor's ties to the Colony were noted here) lurking in the background of these intrigues, to say nothing of the hypothetical Fratelli Neri secret society/cult.

And with that I shall wrap things up for now. With the next and final installment we shall consider instances of pedophilia amongst groups closely linked to Le Cercle and the possible belief system(s) within the organization. Stay tuned.