The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL and Operation Gladio --Update 6/28/15: The Plot Thickens

The facts surrounding the shooting that unfolded in Charleston, South Carolina's historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17th just keeps growing more and more curious. When I first began examining this event I was most struck by the conspiratorial right's all to predictable reaction as well the bizarre synchronicity the shooting shared with the ritualistic death of financier Roberto Calvi. Calvi had been key player in the Vatican banking scandal and an initiate of the notorious Propaganda Due Masonic lodge.

It has long been alleged that the fall out from the banking scandal combined with his involvement with the neo-fascist secret society led his body being found dangling from Blackfriars Bridge on June 17th, 1982. This was thirty-three years to the day of the Charleston church shooting perpetuated by one Dylann Storm Roof.

Calvi's body

In a follow up piece I noted that Roof had apparently been heavily influenced by articles published by the far right wing Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) as well as his use of the Othala rune online. As to the former, the CofCC had its roots with the even more militant Citizens Councils that dated back to the 1950s. The funding for this movement was largely provided by Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, a "former" military intelligence officer and scion of a wealthy New England family with ties to the Bush clan. Draper has been linked to a host of intrigues, as I noted before here, and his presence as well as that of John Trevor Jr., a long time affiliate of the intelligence front known as the American Security Council (which this blog examined at great length before here), raises some very disturbing possibilities as to the ultimate purpose of the CofCC.

As for the Othala rune, this symbol was used by both a Waffen SS division as well as the neo-fascist Italian terror outfit known as Avanguardia Nazionale. The latter was founded by the notorious terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie, a figure long linked to both Operation Gladio and Operation Condor as well as Propaganda Due. Much more will be said on Gladio and Condor in a moment.

Delle Chiaie

Here I would like to address new information that has come to light concerning Roof's geographical proximity to a long time operator in the white nationalist underground. The Raw Story notes:

"Roof also lived for a time in Lexington, just a few miles away, which is home to onetime Aryan Nation leader and Christian Identity pastor August Kreis – whose activity and influence has waned as a result of severe diabetes and his arrest last year on child sex abuse charges."

August Kreis III

August Kreis has gotten around in his day. His ties to the Aryan Nations should immediately raise red flags. During its heyday the Aryan Nations maintained indirect ties to an international organization known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The WACL brought together a curious mixture of "former" US military and intelligence officers, international drug and arms traffickers, various representatives of Third World dictatorships and terror networks, religious extremists of all stripes and the assorted unreconstructed Nazi war criminals. The organization was deeply immersed in drugs and arms trafficking and has been linked to terrorism on multiple continents. This researcher has chronicled the various intrigues of the WACL before here.

As for the Aryan Nations' ties to the WACL, consider:

"The Canadian branch of WACL, the Canadian Freedom Foundation, headed by John Gamble, works closely with the U.S. Counsel for World Freedom ( USCWF) and Singlaub. Together USCWF and the Canadian Freedom Foundation form the North American regional unit of WACL (NARWACL). Gamble and Singlaub alternate as chairs of NARWACL. Gamble was implicated in the Iran-Contra funding network when a firm for which he served as treasurer and director, Vertex Investments, was discovered to have invested in the arms sale to Iran through two of his partners. The Canadian Freedom Foundation (CFF) and Vertex both operate out of Gamble's law office.

"At least two CFF leaders are active anti-Semites: Pat Walsh is the Canadian correspondent for the quasi-Nazi Liberty Lobby newspaper the Spotlight and Paul Fromm helped found the neo-Nazi Western Guard.

"The Western Guard is led by John Ross Taylor, who served fifty-one months in detention for pro-Nazi activities during World War II. Taylor also leads Canadian contingents to Aryan Nations meetings, including a commemoration of the deaths of members of The Order, a paramilitary offshoot of Aryan Nations that engaged in robberies and murder in its efforts to overthrow the U.S. Government."

(Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, Russ Bellant, pgs. 67)

Thus, Aryan Nations was within the sphere of the WACL during the 1980s via the Canada-based Western Guard Party. "Incidentally," this coincided with Aryan Nations' peak years of militancy. In addition to the escapades of The Order (which may have had possible links to P2, as noted before here), the Aryan Nations was also playing host to Vietnam veteran and leaderless resistance advocate Louis Beam and as well as Frazier Glenn Miller.

At the time Miller, another Vietnam veteran, had already been present at the Greensboro Massacre as a member of the National Socialist Party of America while still a member of the Army and would soon found the White Patriot Party after being discharged form the service. Members of the White Patriot Party were latter implicated in the murders of three individuals at an adult bookstore in Shelby, North Carolina on January 17, 1987 (another appearance of the number 17, which is littered with esoteric significance).

While other members of the White Patriot Party were implicated in the murders, rumblings have emerged recently that Miller himself played a role in the killings (a fact that that doesn't seem to have deterred the FBI from enlisting Miller as an informant). More recently Miller shot up a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas on April 13, 2014. Three people lost their lives in this event.

Miller

Also in attendance at some Aryan Nations meetings during this era was Colonel William Potter Gale, a "former" military intelligence officer who essentially created the Posse Comitatus movement. Gale is another figure linked to numerous intrigues, as noted before here.

So needless to say, this "grass roots" happenings with the Aryan Nations during the 1980s seemed to have attacked a decent amount of former military men, more than a few of them with "deep" backgrounds. And in the background there were possible channels to the World Anti Communist League as terrorism connected to the Aryan Nations was at its peak.

But back to August Kreis. Kreis, another former military man with ties to Vietnam, did not become involved with the Aryan Nations until some point in the 1990s when it was largely a shell of its former self. But before that, he had been involved with the Posse Comitatus movement. During that time he made some interesting associations. The New York Daily News reports:

"He trained for his current post under his klan-mate mentor, Pennsylvania's Mark Thomas. This Christian Identity preacher exposed by the Daily News three years ago grew quiet after two disciples, skinhead brothers Bryan and David Freeman, pleaded guilty in December to murdering their parents and brother in February 1995. Kreis helps another pal, Jim Wickstrom, run the local Posse Comitatus. Wickstrom served three years of a 38-year prison sentence after his conviction for conspiracy to pass counterfeit money to build a racist guerrilla army..."

James Wickstrom

James Wickstrom was, according to researcher Cheri Seymour in her groundbreaking The Committee of the States, a close friend of Colonel William Potter Gale and had been his longtime alley in the Posse Comitatus movement. Together that they had steadfastly opposed ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government), or some such shit, for many years. Wickstrom was implicated for attempting to counterfeit money in France and Italy, home of Propaganda Due. During the late 1980s Wickstrom made a startling revelation concerning the Posse:

"James Wickstrom published an Intelligence Update in February, 1989, in which he wrote: 'ZOG thought the "Posse Comitatus" was just a tax rebellion movement. But to their surprise some years later, ZOG found that the movement was loaded with former military officers being used in an advisory manner. In Wisconsin alone, Posse Comitatus officers from 36 states were trained in all types of leadership positions in guerrilla warfare. Other training sites handled the other states.' "

(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pg. 169)

While mainstream researchers have largely scoffed at such claims, there were, as noted above, a considerable degree of "former" military personnel involved with the movement at this point. This state of affairs has continued to this day. And certainly "guerrilla warfare" is not the worst label one could apply to the activities of the Posse/Aryan Nations network during the 1980s if one is being very charitable. But moving along.

Another associate of Kreis' noted above, Mark Thomas, is even more interesting. Thomas would offer key assist in the formation of the Aryan Republican Army during the mid 1990s.This group was sometimes known as the Midwest Bank Bandits due to the spree of armed robberies they pulled off during that era

"Richard Lee Guthrie Jr., son of a CIA employee, discharge from the Navy for painting a swastika on the side of a ship and threatening superiors, his childhood friend Peter K.  Langan, and Shawn Kenny, went on to form the nucleus of a group known as the Midwest Bank Bandits. The group stole more than $250,000 from 22 banks between January, '94 and December, '95 in a spree that led them across Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri. The four member group would often wear FBI jackets to taunt the Bureau, and create diversions to foil police, including leaving behind inert pipe-bombs to slow pursuit. The bandits even had a macabre sense of humor, wearing a Santa Claus suit during a hold up around Christmas, and an Easter basket with a gold painted pipe-bomb left inside a bank in Des Moines.

" 'Wild Bill' Guthrie also admitted to a West Virginia sheriff that he had held Butler's Aryan Nations raise another quarter million dollars through fraud. Both Guthrie and Langan were regular visitors to the Hayden Lake compound...

"Interestingly, the Secret Service recruited Langan as an informant in August 1993 to keep an eye on his friend Guthrie, who had made threats against the lives of Presidents Clinton and Bush. Langan was released from his Georgia jail cell (serving time for robbing a Pizza Hut with Guthrie) and set up in a house in Ohio, where he was to assist the Secret Service in locating his old friend...

"Langan went south on the Secret Service six weeks later, and soon located his old friend Guthrie. The two set themselves up in a safe house in Pittsburg, Kansas, from which they were alleged to have launched their notorious crime spree.

"In November, '94, Mark Thomas, the local Aryan Nations representative, united the two with others of their kind. Thomas' farm, located rather appropriately next to a toxic waste dump, has been the site of skinhead and neo-Nazi rallies such as White Pride Day and the annual Hitler Youth Festival, where participants enjoyed such wholesome activities as pagan rituals and cross-burnings.

"Thomas introduced the pair to Pennsylvania native Scott Stedeford, a rock musician and artist, and Kevin McCarthy, bassist in a white-power band name 'Day of the Sword.' Thomas was instrumental in helping the men form an alliance which they would call the Aryan Republican Army (ARA)...

"The Pennsylvania Posse Comitatus leader would also introduce Stedeord and McCarthy to Michael Brescia, a Philadelphia native and rock musician who would go on to form a speed metal band with McCarthy and Stedeford called 'Cyanide.' The rock 'n' roll bank robbers decided to recruit the 24-year-old La Salle University student after planning the heist of a large bank in Madison, Wisconsin, which the trio robbed on August 30, 1995.

"The three men came to know 'Grandpa Millar' at Elohim City courtesy of Thomas, and Brescia was soon engaged to Millar's granddaughter, Ester. Brescia wound up living at the reclusive compound for two years. It was there that he would meet his new roommate, Andreas Carl Strassmeir, the mysterious German who settled there in 1991. It was also at Elohim City that Brescia would meet Timothy McVeigh..."

(The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, David Hoffman, pgs. 119-121)

So, to recap: Mark Thomas assisted the son of a CIA employee and a Secret Service informant to establish the Aryan Republican Army. He also had ties to Elohim City, which Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh has long alleged to be tied too. As this researcher addressed extensively here, the Oklahoma City bombing is littered with indications of US intelligence manipulations.

So yes, August Kreis seems to have connections to individuals with murky backgrounds. And here is Kreis, who was recently indicted on pedophilia charges, living in an area close to Dylann Storm Roof, an avid Internet connoisseur of white supremacy. If Roof was aware that the former head of the Aryan Nations and a key figure in the Posse Comitatus lived near by, would he have been intrigued enough to contact Kreis?

This is of course all speculation on my part. But given the extensive ties the old Aryan Nations/Posse Comitatus network has to terrorism, it is most curious that Kreis would reemerge so near to Roof. Frazier Glen Miller recently returned form his own obscurity to commit the Jewish Community Center shooting, which may indicate that this network has been activated again.

But if so, under what auspices?

One of the most compelling candidates is what is commonly referred to as "Operation Gladio." This mysterious program is still widely ignored in the American media, even amongst "alternative" sources, despite is existence having been confirmed by numerous European parliaments. Here is a brief rundown of Gladio (which was actually the name of the Italian wing of this operation, but is used as a general term for the Europe-spanning network):

"As the Cold War ended, following juridical investigations into mysterious acts of terrorism in Italy, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to confirm in August 1990 that a secret army existed in Italy and other countries across Western Europe that were part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Coordinated by the unorthodox warfare section of NATO, the secret army have been set up by the US secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6 or SIS) after the end of the Second World War to fight communism in Western Europe. The clandestine network, which after the revelations of the Italian Prime Minister was researched by judges, parliamentarians, academics and investigative journalists across Europe, is now understood to have been code-named 'Gladio' (the sword) in Italy, while in other countries the network operated under different names including 'Absalon' in Denmark, 'ROC' in Norway and 'SDRA8' in Belgium. In each country the military secret service operated the anti-Communist army within the state in close cooperation with the CIA or the MI 6 unknown to parliaments and populations. In each country, leading members of the executive, including Prime Ministers, Presidents, Interior Ministers and Defense Ministers, were involved in the conspiracy, while the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC)...  coordinated the network on the international level. The last confirmed meeting of ACC with representatives of European secret services took place on October 24, 1990 in Brussels.

"As the details of the operation emerged, the press concluded that the 'story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller.' The secret armies were equipped by the CIA in the MI6 with machine guns, explosives, munitions and high-tech communication equipment hidden in arms caches in forests, meadows and underground bunkers across Western Europe. Leading officers of the secret network trained together with the US Green Berets Special Forces in the United States of America and the British SAS Special Forces in England. Recruited among strictly anti-Communist segments of the society the secret Gladio soldiers included moderate conservatives well as right-wing extremists such as notorious right-wing terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie and Yves Guerain Serac. In  its strategic design the secret army was a direct copy of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which during the Second World War had parachuted into enemy-held territory and fought a secret war behind enemy lines.

"In case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe the secret body of soldiers under NATO command would have formed a so-called stay-behind network operating behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in enemy-held territory, evacuating shot-down pilots and sabotaging the supply lines and production centres of the occupation forces with explosives. Yet the Soviet invasion never came. The real and present danger in the eyes of the secret war strategists in Washington and London were the at-times numerically strong Communist parties in the democracies of Western Europe. Hence the network in the total absence of a Soviet invasion took up arms in numerous countries and fought a secret war against the political forces of the left. The secret armies, as the secondary sources now available suggest, were involved in a whole series of terrorist operations and human rights violations that they wrongly blamed on the Communists in order to discredit the left at the polls. The operations always aimed at spreading maximum fear among the population and ranged from bomb massacres trains and market squares (Italy), the use of systematic torture of opponents of the regime (Turkey), support for right-wing coup d'etats (Greece and Turkey), to the smashing of opposition groups ( Portugal and Spain)..."

(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pgs. 1-2)

a patch used by Italian Gladio assets

Operation Gladio was not restricted to Western Europe, either. Similar projects such as Operation Condor and the Phoenix Program have been revealed in Latin America and Vietnam, respectively. In the case of Condor, numerous figures associated with Gladio such as the above-mentioned Stefano delle Chiaie and former SS man Klaus Barbie would also turn up in Condor operations. Theodore Shackley, one of the most notorious figures in the history of the CIA, has been linked to all three programs.

Shackley

It has been theorized that the organization that coordinated these various "stay behind" armies on an international level for many years was the World Anti-Communist League.

"... In 1966, a significant (and lasting) development occurred, namely the establishment in Taiwan – following on plans later earlier in the South Korean capital, Seoul – of the CIA-sponsored World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The organisation arose from a previous regional effort, the Asian People's Anti-Bolshevik League, sponsored by the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang regime. Financial backers for the new anti-communist world ring included cash-hungry Korean cult tycoon Sun Myung Moon, whose recruitment methods and renowned mass nuptials uncannily mirrored certain CIA experiments in brainwashing. The tentacles of this sprawling octopus eventually extended to all corners of the planet. This was visibly the Fascist International, the huge global Gladio ... It was charged with  the ... brief to 'overcome and eliminate' any governments or forces considered sympathetic to communism. The means were not precisely specified, save for talking about warfare in psychologically political terms. Yet WACL was tracked to Operation Condor, death squads in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, the twin Kennedy assassinations and general oiling of Iran-Contra in life-after-death mode. So, it would not be surprising to discover WACL fingerprints thickly plastered all over The Enterprise of drug and arms dealings in its latter-day formation. In Europe, WACL was tied up with various neo-fascist fronts, particularly Licio Gelli's  P2/Gladio activities, in Italy as well as South America. The liquidations of both Aldo Moro (communist fraterniser) and Olof Palme (Iran-Iraq meddler, irritating Palestine interloper) have been cited as promoted in some degree by WACL."

(Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe, Richard Cottrell, pgs. 123-124)

a meeting of the WACL

This is the same WACL that had indirect ties to the Aryan Nations during the height of its terror activities. The WACL also had ties to Wickliffe Preston Draper via Roger Pearson. Pearson headed the WACL in the late 1970s and also served for many years with the Pioneer Fund, an NPO established by Draper for the perpetuation of "scientific racism." This was the same Wickliffe Preston Draper that also provided much of the funding for the Citizen Councils that eventually merged into the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC). The same CofCC whose website seems to have made such an impression on Dylann Roof Storm.

Draper

"Incidentally," one of the victims of the Charleston church shooting was Clementa C. Pinckney, a liberal South Carolina State Senator. Pinckney, whom some have described as a rising star in the Democrat Party, had recently come out as a proponent of body cameras for police in the wake of the Walter Scott shooting. A charismatic figure, Pinckney's assassination removed a potential opponent of an increasingly militarized America police force. Certainly this bares more than a striking resemblance to projects Gladio has long been alleged to play a role in.

All of this is of course conjecture on my part. But each day seems to bring forth a new detail that puts this shooting spree in an especially disturbing light. And naturally, the conspiratorial right has been to busy clouding the issues to note the potential intrigues that unfolded on June 17, not unlike their response thirty-three years earlier to the death of Roberto Calvi.

Pinckney

UPDATE 6/28/15:

It would seem that Dylann Storm Roof name checked the writings of yet another individual closely linked to the old Posse Comitatus/Aryan Brotherhood network noted above in his manifesto. Raw Story reports:

"Dylann Roof refers to Harold Covington’s white separatist group, the Northwest Front, in his alleged manifesto. The rightwing sci-fi writer distances himself from the shooting, but his followers speculate if his work influenced Roof’s actions..

"The racist manifesto and photos apparently posted by Roof makes mention of the Northwest Front, created by Covington, a former member of the American Nazi party who traveled to South Africa and Rhodesia in order to agitate for white power. In the accompanying photos, Roof wore patches with Rhodesian and apartheid-era South African flags on them...

"The Roof killings are not the first time Covington’s name has come up in connection with an allegedly racist murder. Covington was part of a group of white supremacists in the 1970s who massacred black people at a rally in Greensboro (Covington didn’t kill anyone and wasn’t in attendance on the day of the violence). He was also at one time close with  Frazier Glenn Miller, who is charged with killing a one woman, a 69-year-old Jewish man and that man’s 14-year-old grandson in front of their temple last year..."

The American Nazi Party has been linked to deep intrigues, as I noted before here.

Covington's one time close friend Frazier Glenn Miller was also enlisted as an FBI informant for a time. Covington, who like many of the white supremacists considered in this article, is a former military man. During the mid-1970s he turned up in South Africa and later Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he claimed to have worked as a mercenary. There is no evidence for this claim but he did indeed play a role in creating the Rhodesian White People's Party as well as a group called South African Friends of the Movement. The above-mentioned World Anti-Communist League (WACL) and American Security Council (ASC) had extensive dealings with the governments of Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia during this time, but I have been unable to link either of Covington's groups to either international lobby group. But certainly they would be in keeping with the types of groups the WACL and ASC aligned themselves with in that part of the world.

Its also interesting to note that several of Covington's former allies in the white supremacist underground accused Covington of being a CIA asset shortly after the Greensboro massacre (which he was present for, along with Frazier Glenn Miller). Despite being sought by the FBI for questioning for his role in the massacre he was able to return to North Carolina unfettered. Much more on Covington and these allegations can be found here.

an image from the aftermath of Greensboro

Again, I would like to emphasize that there is no evidence at all indicating that Roof made contact with Covington, August Kreis or the Council of Conservative Citizens. But it certainly seems to stretch coincidence that Roof's interests would intersect with some many groups and individuals with possible deep backgrounds.

Covington