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

Welcome to the sixth installment in my ongoing examination of the CIA's mysterious Office of Security (OS). For those of you just joining me or trying to catch up, here is a brief rundown of what has come before:

• part one noted the backgrounds and politics of the OS personnel as opposed to Office of Strategic Services (OSS) "Old Boys" who dominated the Agency's upper hierarchy for decades
• the second installment began to consider the OS' involvement in the Watergate scandal by breaking down OS veteran James McCord's totally bungling of the second break-in and the possibility that he or one of his employees had tipped off the D.C. police off concerning the break-in
• part three focused on the likely target of the Watergate break-in, namely a prostitution ring that was being run in the nearby Columbia Plaza and using the Watergate-based DNC to recruit clients; James McCord appears to have played a key role in setting up this operation
• part four addressed the OS's extensive network of "safe houses" as well as the evidence that more than a few of these safe houses were used for blackmail operations; it also addressed the likely Watergate cabal, which was heavily represented by the OS, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) as well as the notorious American Security Council network (ASC, which this blog addressed at length before here)
• the fifth and most recent installment gave a rundown of the OS's involvement in assassinations and clean up operations (especially in regards to their involvement in the death of Frank Olson) as well a brief assessment of their role in Operation CHAOS

Frank Olson

When last I left off I had just noted that several of the New Left and Black Liberation groups targeted by Operation CHAOS developed militant splinter factions shortly after CHAOS and similar programs were initiated. The OS section that worked most closely in CHAOS was the Security Research Staff (SRS), the same unit that oversaw the notorious BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE experiments (and the same unit James McCord spent much of his CIA career in).

As promised at the end of the last installment, I shall now be moving on to BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE in earnest. Despite the fact that these Projects cast quite a shadow over many of these events already considered in this series, this researcher felt it was best to first address the non-behavior modification controversies surrounding the OS. While typically depicted as a marginal component of the CIA, the OS nonetheless turns up in many of the blackest CIA projects initiated from the Agency's inception up until the Watergate scandal.

The Office of Security was not a marginal CIA department and in fact seems to have been entrusted with many of the Agency's most secretive operations, especially on the domestic front. Reporting directly to the DCI himself (few CIA departments had such a privilege) and charged with protecting the Agency from foreign penetration, the OS can be seen is something of a Praetorian Guard for the Agency during the early days. In this context, it s not especially surprising that the OS was the CIA department entrusted with the Agency's initial forays into behavior modification and enhanced interrogation methods.

Setting the Record Straight on ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA

And that brings us to BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. Before delving into the history of these Projects, one particular point must be made with the greatest emphasis. And that is, in brief:

BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE were in no way, shape or form a component of MKULTRA or its successor programs.

BLUEBIRD was "rolled" into ARTICHOKE some time around 1951, as has long been known, but Project ARTICHOKE did not end with the initiation of MKULTRA in 1953, as is commonly claimed. In point of fact, when ARTICHOKE ended and what happened in the aftermath is shrouded in mystery as well. In A Secret Order H.P. Albarelli cryptically notes: "From 1951 to about 1963, when the Artichoke Project was revamped and renamed..." (pg. 171).

In other words, ARTICHOKE seems to have been active until 1963, the same year MKULTRA was officially ended. Nor was ARTICHOKE the only project of this nature the OS-Security Research Staff (SRS, the branch of the OS that oversaw the behavior modification experiments) operatives were engaged in up until 1963 --the mysterious and little addressed Project QKHILLTOP was also shuttered that year after being active for nearly a decade.

Of course, as researchers of this topic are well aware, MKULTRA did not actually end in 1963, but was "revamped" as MKSEARCH and other projects in 1964. It would appear that the same thing was done to ARTICHOKE around this time as well, but very little is known about the successor program(s?) to ARTICHOKE. It is quite possible that ARTICHOKE continued running in some form or another until 1973, when the fall out from Watergate spurred the CIA to shutter these programs and destroy the records relating to them (part four addressed why Watergate was a factor in these decisions).

Nor were the BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE projects ever under the control of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) or MKULTRA head Sidney Gottlieb, as is commonly claimed. TSS and Gottlieb did have some involvement with ARTICHOKE via the so-called "Artichoke Committee," but this was very minor. Gottlieb himself described the arrangement as thus:

"... It's important to know that I was not on the ARTICHOKE team, in the ARTICHOKE group that the Office of Security or Security Research ran. My knowledge of ARTICHOKE teams stem from my attendance at conferences or meetings at which I represented technical services. ARTICHOKE and technical services were, in nearly every since of the word, separate. They had separate purposes, separate supervision, not all the time in synch with one another... The Church Committee blurred the lines between all these programs, MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE, Bluebird, QKHILLTOP, Chemical Corps, NAOMI, SHADE, all of them became one and I was... I didn't have any problem with answering for them all, but I didn't... I didn't oversee all these projects. Let's leave it at that."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 233)

Sidney Gottlieb

In point of fact, MKULTRA seems to have been started in stealth and led to something of a power struggle between ARTICHOKE head Morse Allen and Gottlieb.

"... ARTICHOKE director, Morse Allen, was engaged in a power struggle with Sidney Gottlieb for control of the project. Allen had earlier told Gaynor he had reliable reports that Gottlieb's OTS, with strong support from Wisner and Helms, was devising its own mind control program to be conducted apart from OS and OSI. Allen was upset about the extent of bureaucratic infighting within plain sight of DCI Dulles and DDCI Cabell, but Gaynor dissuaded Allen from complaining too loudly or going to the top with his unhappiness. Gaynor's advice was good, and it turned out well for Morse Allen to have heeded it. Despite the fact that OTS would soon launch its own 'mind control' program, MKULTRA, Allen would retain leadership of Project ARTICHOKE for at least a decade longer. (Contrary to many publications and written accounts, ARTICHOKE was not replaced by MKULTRA and the two projects continued to run concurrently, at least until 1958, if not longer.)"

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 248) 

Brigadier General Paul F. Gaynor

Gaynor is Brigadier General Paul F. Gaynor, the long time head of the Security Research Staff. Gaynor was something of an expert in the CIA in terms of sexual blackmail, maintaining the so-called "fag files" (noted in part one). Gaynor was also very close to James McCord and was in contact with him throughout the Watergate scandal (as noted before here and here). He also had extensive ties to the far right, especially the American Security Council clique (as noted before here and here).

OSI is the Office of Scientific Intelligence while OTS is the Office of Technical Services, the successor to the Technical Services Staff (TSS). The OSI, unlike the TSS, was a partner with the OS in Projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE and for a brief period in 1952 was even the department directing ARTICHOKE. The Office of Security and the Office of Scientific Intelligence were also beset by differences, however, and a power struggle played out here as well with the OS regaining control of ARTICHOKE and holding on to it until the Project's end. This dispute will be dealt with in greater depth in a future installment.

That future DCI Richard Helms and Frank Wisner, one of the most powerful figures in the early days of the CIA who then held the powerful post of Director of Plans, would encourage Gottlieb to set up MKULTRA as a rival to the OS-controlled Project ARTICHOKE is most interesting. Both men had been very liberal politically during their college days and allegations of Communist sympathies had dogged them ever since. What's more, Wisner had been very close to James Kronthal, the Soviet double agent the OS had uncovered and potentially had "assisted" in his "suicide (noted in part five) in 1953. Apparently Wisner had even been investigated by the Office of Security at one point during this time frame.

Frank Wisner, who ultimately committed suicide after receiving electroshock therapy and other techniques from CIA psychiatrists

This researcher wonders if the far right wing tendencies of the Office of Security personnel may have partly played into the angling of Helms and Wisner to set up Gottlieb and MKULTRA as a rival to ARTICHOKE. Certainly the possibility for abuse with such operations was quite high, and Helms and Wisner may have feared leaving the most reactionary elements of the CIA in complete control of such operations.

Another reason cited for the creation of MKULTRA and the ascension of Gottlieb and TSS in this field was the need for more "scientific control" over such research. The OS, largely comprised of former FBI and military men, had few members with any kind of scientific backgrounds. This reasoning could help explain why MKULTRA experiments seem almost totally void of originality, largely rehashing prior ARTICHOKE experiments.

This was already noted briefly in part four when considering the safe houses. The OS controlled a vast network of them across both the nation and the world and employed several of them for ARTICHOKE experiments that involved both prostitutes and unwittingly dosing subjects with experimental drugs. This of course bares more than a passing resemblance to the notorious Operation Midnight Climax that Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent George Hunter White ran for the TSS, which was initiated nearly two years after the ARTICHOKE experiments had begun. What's more, Morse Allen had known White prior to WWII and may even have recruited him for early ARTICHOKE experiments. Thus, White's purpose with Operation Midnight Climax may have been to merely recreate prior ARTICHOKE experiments.

George Hunter White

Another example of this already addressed was the work of Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, noted in part five. Pfeiffer's research eventually contributed to three separate MKULTRA Subprojects, but his early work at Bordentown Reformatory and later the Atlanta Penitentiary was begun under the auspices of Project ARTICHOKE before seemingly being transferred, or passed on, to MKULTRA, where Pfeiffer continued in a similar vein.

There is a possibility that will be explored over the remaining installments in this series that at least part of MKULTRA's purpose was merely to confirm or deny the conclusions reached by ARTICHOKE experiments. Certainly it seems that many of MKULTRA's experiments had their origins in research already conducted by ARTICHOKE. But moving along.

The MKULTRA Red Herring

The more one studies ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA, the more one is left with the impression that the MKULTRA revelations were largely designed by the CIA to draw attention away from Project ARTICHOKE. Certainly there has been a nearly five-decade long campaign of disinformation on the part of the Agency to depict ARTICHOKE as a mere predecessor to MKULTRA that was eventually rolled wholly into it. Over the past decade, evidence of such a plot has begun to emerge in the form of what was informally called "Operation Dormouse." Concerning "Dormouse," Jeffrey Kaye and H.P. Albarelli provided the following details on Truthout in 2010:

"Contemporary torture's earliest, deepest and most influential roots are found in the CIA's Artichoke Project. Indeed, it is Project Artichoke that encapsulates the CIA's real traveling road show of horrors and atrocities, not MK/ULTRA which, although responsible for its own acts of mindless cruelty, pales in comparison. 

"That MK/ULTRA received, and continues to receive, the lion's share of the media's attention and public outrage over CIA mind control programs was a deliberately planned outcome on the part of the Agency. This outcome was the central objective of a never before revealed covert operation launched in 1975 and informally code-named Dormouse.

"Dormouse, operated out of the CIA's Security Research branch, had its genesis in the 1975 Rockefeller Commission report and in the subsequent Congressional hearings into CIA illegal activities chaired by Senators Frank Church and Teddy Kennedy. Following the initial revelation of Frank Olson's alleged "suicide" by the Rockefeller Commission, a number of high-level meetings occurred between President Gerald Ford's White House and CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston.

"Houston, who had served the Agency as its doyen general counsel for over 25 years, secretly huddled on at least two occasions in June 1975 with Ford's chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief assistant, Richard Cheney. Houston impressed upon both men that any prolonged and intense media scrutiny of Project Artichoke would lead to opening a Pandora's box of legal, institutional, international and public relations problems that could destroy the CIA.

"Houston explained that the Agency's MK/ULTRA program was far less problematic for the CIA because it had been a research-based program that initiated 153 contracts to colleges, universities and research institutions nationwide. These contractors, all stalwart and prestigious institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Tulane Universities, could serve as viable buffers to any harsh outside attacks.

"Houston stressed that deliberate exposure of the MK/ULTRA program by essentially offering it to the press would serve to placate the brewing feeding frenzy over so-called mind control projects, and would divert any investigative attempts into the multi-faceted Artichoke Project.  

"Houston additionally explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that, along with the release of MK/ULTRA details to the media, the names of a few former CIA employees, such as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, would also be released to the press. Incredibly, when the subject of possible federal prosecutions of CIA officials for capital crimes and felonies, such as murder and drug trafficking, came up in their discussion, Houston informed Rumsfeld and Cheney that there was little cause for concern...

"Without doubt, as the extant record clearly reveals, the CIA's Dormouse Operation, as expressed by Houston, was remarkably effective. Information released on the Agency's MK/ULTRA program more than sated the media's curiosity for mind control details, and even a few random Artichoke Program citations in a couple released documents failed to draw any concerted examination by anyone in the press..."

Richard Cheney, then a rising star in the American deep state

Thus, it would seem that the Security Research Staff's rivalry with MKLULTRA and Gottlieb even extended into the cover-up, with the SRS effectively laying responsibility for virtually everything relating to behavioral modification experiments at the feet of Gottlieb and MKLULTRA. While Gottlieb and MKLUTRA were certainly responsible for their fair share of barbarism, there are ample indications that Gottlieb and company were choir boys compared to their counterparts in ARTICHOKE. There may have been a hint of anti-Semitism behind the Jewish Gottlieb being offered up as a sacrificial lamb for the CIA's behavioral modification experiments as well. As was noted in part one, longtime SRS head General Paul Gaynor had many racist associates and even resorted to anti-Semitism during the CIA's investigation of journalist Jack Anderson, whom he accused of being a part of the "liberal-Zionist-Mafia" cabal (noted in part four).

BLUEBIRD and Pelican

With those disclaimers out of the way, let us now begin our examination of BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE in earnest. The origins of BLUEBIRD, the predecessor to ARTICHOKE, are some what murky, but seem to date to around 1949. This was of course not the first time the United States security services had officially investigated behavior modification and enhanced interrogation methods, however. The OSS had famously experimented with "truth serums," including cannabis, with the assistance of the above-mentioned George Hunter White during the WWII years. Elsewhere, the Army employed a special interrogation unit known as the "Rough Boys," part of its Counterintelligence Corps, in the post-WWII years up until at least the early 1950s. The Rough Boys employed both drugs and electroshock, two latter staples of the so-called "Artichoke Treatment."

The Navy had begun to investigate potential truth serums in 1947 as part of Project CHATTER.

"... Described as an 'offensive' program, CHATTER was supposed to devise means of obtaining information from people independent of their volition but without physical duress. Toward this end Dr. Charles Savage conducted experiments with mescaline (a semi-synthetic extract of the peyote cactus that produces hallucinations similar to those caused by LSD) at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. But these studies, which involved animals as well as human subjects, did not yield an effective truth serum, and CHATTER was terminated in 1953.

"The navy became interested in mescaline as an interrogation agent when American investigators learned of mind control experiments carried out by Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II. After administering the hallucinogen to thirty prisoners, the Nazis concluded that it was 'impossible to impose one's will on another person as in hypnosis even when the strongest dose of mescaline had been given.' But the drug still afforded certain advantages to SS interrogators, who were consistently able to draw 'even the most intimate secrets from the [subjects] when questions were cleverly put.'.."

(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shalin, pgs. 5-6) 

possibly Dr. Charles Savage, one of the key early researchers in CHATTER

As we shall see, CHATTER was not the only behavior modification project to comb Nazi archives for techniques in such fields. As such CHATTER in some ways laid the foundation for was to become BLUEBIRD.

"... Project Bluebird, which operated for about two years, 1949 through the summer of 1951, and primarily concentrated its efforts on former American POWs returned from the Korean War. These servicemen were placed as patients in several Army hospitals, including Valley Forge Hospital in Pennsylvania and the Walter Reed facility in Washington D.C. There, former POWs were subjected to various 'behavioral modification' programs involving the use of experimental drugs, hypnosis, and special interrogation methods, all for what the CIA deemed 'offensive objectives.' Joining the CIA in Project Bluebird as formal partners were the Army, Navy and Air Force. The FBI declined to participate in Bluebird. 

"Reads one April 1951 Bluebird Project report:

" 'The Navy's research efforts in regards to Bluebird objectives had actually begun at Bethesda Naval Hospital. There, according to the Navy's Bluebird designees, J.H. Alberti and Lt. Cmdr. Hardenburg, extensive experiments had been conducted using both drugs and medical aids (polygraph machines, surgical means, hypnotism). Besides Bethesda hospital, the Office of Naval Research conducted a project in partnership with the University of Indiana, which in essence [was] a search for valid indications of deception other than the mechanical indicators now being used.' "

(A Secret Order, H.p. Albarelli, Jr., pgs. 168-169)

As noted above, CHATTER was begun in 1947 but there may have been an even more mysterious Naval operation closely connected to BLUEBIRD that was begun in the late 1940s as well.

"... an intense, covert program operated by the CIA in tandem with Naval Intelligence, aimed at 'identifying and testing the effectiveness of suspected Soviet Russians, or satellite countries, activity in the areas of physical, psychological, mechanical and medical interrogation techniques.' Initially code-named Pelican, and then Operation Boomer, and finally Project Bluebird..."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 202)

The reference above to Project Pelican is most curious. This researcher has only been able to find one other reference to it and that has to do with the incredible comments made by Lieutenant Commander Thomas Narut, a Navy psychologist, in the wake of a NATO conference in Oslo during 1975. Afterwards Narut got into a conversation with a journalist from the Sunday Times and made some shocking revelations about an assassination program being run by the Navy.

"When pressed by Watson to explain the details of this kind of conditioning, Narut said that he had worked with 'combat readiness units' which included men being programmed for commando-type operations and for undercover placement at U.S. embassies. These, Narut said, were 'hit men and assassins' (Narut's words) made ready to kill in selected countries should the need arise...

"The conditioning of Narut's assassins was accomplished by audio-visual desensitization, a standard behavior modification process. These men were 'desensitized' to mayhem by being shown films of people being killed or injured in a number of different ways. At first the films would show only mild forms of bloodshed. As the men became acclimated to the scenes of carnage, they would see progressively more violent scenes. The assassin candidates, Narut explained, would eventually be able to dissociate any feelings they might have from even the goriest scenes they viewed."

(Operation Mind Control, Walter Bowart, pg. 163)

a later account of Narut's remarks

Apparently the treatments these would be assassins were given was very Clockwork Orange-like. They were even strapped into chairs, their heads clamped so that they could not look away from the screen and a device preventing them from closing their eyes was even employed. Narut alleged that the techniques he had described were conducted at the Naval Neuropsychiatric Laboratory Center in San Diego, California.

After the Sunday Times article was published, several American journalist attempted to interview Narut. This proved easier said than done as the Navy rapidly closed ranks. The Navy of course denied everything Narut had said, but some interesting comments were made off the record by an alleged military source.

"... Eventually, one persistent journalist was informed off the record that the Navy 'kept elite units of trained assassins at secret locations across the world,' and that the overall designation for some of the units was Project Pelican. 'The project is a matter of national security,' said one Navy official in the Pentagon...."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pgs. 346-347) 

Was Project Pelican the designation for the Navy's contributions to BLUEBIRD and later ARTICHOKE? Certainly there are indications that developing assassins was an objective of BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, as we shall see. But moving along for now.

BLUEBIRD, ONI and the Nazis

One of the most curious aspects of BLUEBIRD that is much remarked upon by researchers is the both date in which the program was officially launched and the individual who green lighted it. Consider:.

"Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter was the first Director of the CIA; he was also later to become a member of NICAP, that organization of professional scientists, military men, engineers and civilians created to uncover the truth about UFOs. Hillenkoeter remained convinced about the reality of the phenomenon all his life. But on April 20, 1950 --ironically enough, Hitler's birthday --he approved the creation of a special project to discover a means to combat the Russian mind weapons, whatever they were. This project was called BLUEBIRD."

(Sinister Forces Book One, Peter Levenda, pg. 187) 

the mysterious Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter

Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter, himself a long time member of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), is one of the most curious and overlooked CIA directors. As I'll already indicated in the previous section and in part four of this series, there appears to have been rather close collaboration between the Office of Security and ONI. The Navy was already active in behavior modification research at the time the CIA was founded, so Hillenkoeter likely would have brought a passing familiarity with such projects within him to the CIA. What's more, the eventual head of BLUEBIRD and the long time head of ARTICHOKE, Morse Allen, had served in the ONI during WWII. Allen had spent much of WWII in the Pacific Theater while Hillenkoeter was the chief of intelligence for the staff of Admiral Chester Nimitz's Pacific fleet. Thus, there is certainly a possibility that Hillenkoeter was aware of Allen even before both men had joined the CIA.

Hillenkoeter's activities with NICAP are also interesting for our purposes here as there is compelling evidence that ARTICHOKE had an interest in UFOs, as shall be addressed in a future installment. For now, it is interesting to note that there was quite a bit of overlap between the membership of NICAP and the American Security Council (ASC), a vast private intelligence network as well the leading lobby group for the military industrial complex throughout the Cold War era. As was noted in part one, long time Security Research Staff (SRS, the section of the OS that oversaw BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE) head Brigadier General Paul Gaynor had close ties to the ASC while in part four it was revealed that the ASC likely played a key role in the Watergate scandal along with the OS and ONI. Certainly then the presence of so many ASC men, including Council founder John Fischer, in NICAP along with Hillenkoeter is rather curious, especially in light of ties both Hillenkoeter and the ASC had to BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. But moving along.

The timing of BLUEBIRD's official launch is most curious as well. Certainly the date of Hitler's birthday (April 20, 1950 would have been Der Fuhrer's sixty-first) is most ominous, especially in light of the fact that Nazi records had become studied prior to the official launch of BLUEBIRD for techniques that could be put to use in the fledgling project.

"... In 1949, Frank Wisner, Office of Policy Coordination assistant director, created a scientific steering committee to conduct a complete inventory of all chemical and biological weapons then in existence, including those employed by the Nazis and Japanese during World War II. Based on that inventory, Wisner instructed the committee to come up with 'ideas in the areas of chemical, biological and radiological warfare' and 'if concept is deemed workable the Committee will recommend competent scientists and engineers to supply detailed information to round out any such plans. Wisner said the committee would work closely with selected personnel from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Camp Detrick, military intelligence, and the CIA's Division A."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 209)

Presumably the Committee mentioned above is what eventually became the "Artichoke Committee." Some of the military personnel involved in the Committee had ties to the Nazis as well.

"A combined CIA-military intelligence project code-named 'Bluebird' and later renamed 'Artichoke' was set up... Significantly, the key military intelligence agency involved with this project --the Joint Intelligence Committee --had been involved in Paperclip from the beginning. The JIC members included U.S. Army Director of Intelligence Alexander Bolling and Brigadier General John Alexander Samford, the chief of Air Force intelligence who later headed the National Security Agency."

(Secret Agenda, Linda Hunt, pg. 164)

General Alexander Bolling, a participant in both Paperclip and BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE

Reportedly some of the Paperclip scientists such Freidrick Wilhelm Hoffmann were used as part of the initial BLUEBIRD experiments and may even have contributed to ARTICHOKE for years afterwards.

And this point this researcher would like to take a moment and stress the joint nature of BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. While the CIA is largely perceived as being wholly responsible for these projects, this is HARDLY accurate, as I hope some of the previous sections have indicated. The fact of the matter is that the US Military, especially the Army and Navy, were not only willing participants but had even embarked upon research of this nature that pre-dated the CIA's involvement. BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE were very much collaborations between the CIA and the Pentagon, with the latter developing its own particular uses for the research conducted as part of BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE.

BLUEBIRD and Twilight Language

Another curious aspect of BLUEBIRD is the project's name. Conventional accounts hold that there was nothing especially significant about BLUEBIRD's name. H.P. Albarelli, for instance, notes: "The code named BLUEBIRD had resulted from a comment made at a 1950 planning committee meeting of the Office of Special Operations (OSO) --that the objective of improved interrogation techniques was to get the subject 'to sing like a bluebird.'.. " (A Terrible Mistake, pg. 208).

The great Peter Levenda, examining BLUEBIRD through the prism of "twilight language," suggested a far more disturbing inspiration for BLUEBIRD's name.

"There is a phrase which is perhaps not used so much these days as it was in the tender years of the twentieth century: 'the blue bird of happiness.' What many people do not realize --and did not realize even then --was that this term had its origins in a play and a novel written by the Belgian Nobel Prize-winning author and dramatist, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949). Maeterlinck was surrounded by the Symbolist movement (forerunners of the Surrealists) in fin-de-siecle France, and was a friend of Sar Peladan, a noted Rosicrucian of the day. Indeed, Maeterlinck was something of a mystic himself and a firm believer in occult phenomena, as his other writings such as The Other World (1942) amply demonstrate. He was also a keen observer of nature and natural phenomena, in The Life of the Bee (1901), in which the concept of the 'meme' is introduced, to a wider audience (after its creation by a relatively-unknown German psychologist --Richard Sauder --years before, the same psychologist who created the 'engram,' made famous by L. Ron Hubbard). His writings were very popular in Europe, being a mixture of the profound with the child-like, such as his most famous work The Blue Bird 1909). In this play, first performed in the Russian language in Moscow on September 30, 1908 and later in English in London and New York, two children set off on a search for the Blue Bird of Happiness. This search leads them on many adventures --a kind of initiatic quest for the Grail --and the author was startled to realize that many of the motifs of Maeterlinck's play are repeated in the CIA's search for a Manchurian Candidate, a search that began with Project BLUEBIRD. It is this strange set of correspondence that leads the author to the opinion that Sheffield Edwards's agenda itself was far more profound than simply a search for a truth serum or a psychological defense against it, or that at least Edwards understood the implications of what he had set out to do in BLUEBIRD...

"The story, which begins on Christmas Eve, involves two children --Tyltyl and his younger sister Mytyl --who set out on a quest to find the Blue Bird of Happiness. Impoverished children of a woodcutter, who lives across from a great house with very rich children, they understand that they are too poor to receive Christmas presents that year. They go to sleep with the lamp out. Then, in the middle of the night, a light shines through their house from outside, the lamp lights itself, and the children awake. (It is like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, similar in detail to descriptions of UFO landings.) There is a knock at the door, and an old woman --who later introduces herself as the Fairy Berylune --asks them if they have 'the grass that sings, or the bird that is blue.' It appears that Berylune has a sick daughter who will not get well unless the Blue Bird of Happiness is found. The children, eager to help, then set off on a quest for the mysterious Bird... and to visit their dead grandparents, with the Fairy's help. In order to visit the dead, however, they have to pass through the Land of Memory which is on the way to the Blue Bird."

(Sinister Forces Book I, Peter Levenda, pgs. 187-188) 

Maurice Maeterlinck

While BLUEBIRD would certainly prove to be quite a journey into the "Land of Memory," Levenda's premise is very dubious. Still, there is compelling evidence that the conservative men of the Office of Security would develop quite an interest in mysticism during their work on BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, as shall be addressed in a future installment.

And of course, there are also the persistent allegations that certain articles of pop culture have been used as kinds of "triggers" in the Pentagon/CIA behavior modification experiments. Common examples of this are The Wizard of Oz, Catcher in the Rye (the author of which, J.D. Salinger, had served in the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) during WWII; CIC was also deeply involved in Operation Paperclip and had their own "enhanced interrogation" unit in addition to being participants in BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE), and The Turner Diaries. But again, there is no real credible evidence behind these allegations.

Agendas and Early Experiments

Before wrapping up, a few more points shall be made about the early days of BLUEBIRD. Let us begin with the Project's founding agendas.

"... Simply put, the initial objectives of BLUEBIRD were to devise the most effective means possible for obtaining specific information from unwilling subjects. The project focused almost exclusively on situations deemed 'Special Interrogations' or 'SI' in which the quick and complete 'inducing of full disclosure' was paramount.

"At BLUEBIRD's inception, CIA officials made it clear that no method of obtaining information was taboo from consideration. Documents from the project's earliest meetings reveal a laundry list of methods, including the use of 'ego-depressant' drugs like heroin and morphine; polygraph; electro-shock therapy; the use of 'mechanical aids'; lobotomies; hypnotism; fatigue; isolation; sensory deprivation; and torture."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 208)

A few paragraphs down Albarelli quotes at length a proposal from the BLUEBIRD committee that indicates an even more sinister agenda:

"After the research programs have been developed, it is recommended that BLUEBIRD conduct experiments and develop techniques to determine the possibilities and practicability of positive use of SI on willing and unwilling subjects for operational purposes. Positive use of SI would be for the purpose of operational control of individuals to perform specific tasks under post hypnotic suggestion and, in addition, would cover research in training fields and defensive conditioning against the application of SI by unfriendly elements. This field, if it is found that the application of SI is possible and practicable, offers unlimited opportunities to operating offices."

(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pgs. 208-209)

After roughly a year of research, official BLUEBIRD teams became active just a few months after Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter had green lighted the project. Many of these headed overseas to test suspected double agents.

"Three months after the Director approved BLUEBIRD, the first team traveled to Japan to try out behavioral techniques on human subjects --probably suspected double agents. The three men arrived in Tokyo in July 1950, about a month after the start of the Korean War. No one needed to impress upon them the importance of their mission. The Security Office ordered them to conceal their true purpose from even the U.S. military authorities with whom they worked in Japan, using the cover that they would be performing 'intensive polygraph' work. In stifling, debilitating heat and humidity, they tried out combinations of the depressant sodium amytal with the stimulant benzedrine on each of four subjects, the last two of whom also received a second stimulant, picrotoxin. They also tried to induce amnesia. The team considered the tests successful, but the CIA documents available on the trip give only the sketchiest outline of what happened. Then around October 1950, the BLUEBIRD team used 'advanced' techniques on 25 subjects, apparently North Korean prisoners of war."

(The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate", John Marks, pg. 25)

Many of these tests were likely conducted at the Naval base in Atsugi. ARTICHOKE personnel visited the Atsugi location throughout the 1950s to conduct experiments there, though not anywhere to the extent some sources claim.

There were also tests conducted in Europe, especially Germany, but apparently the most common test subjects in the early days were U.S. military personnel. This was already noted briefly a few sections up, but here are a few more details concerning early BLUEBIRD experiments on GIs:

"Bluebird... experiments conducted at Edgewood or the Army intelligence base at Fort Holabird, Maryland. The participation of the CIA and the JIC in the project was kept hidden using a University of Maryland contract with Edgewood as a cover. At least a thousand soldiers... were given up to twenty doses of LSD to test the drug as a possible interrogation weapon --even though Edgewood scientists already knew it could cause serious physical reactions in humans...

"Nonetheless, test subjects at Edgewood or Fort Holabird were given LSD and other drugs, then subjected to hostile questioning by intelligence officers to deliberately create an extreme state of fear and anxiety. One soldier fought his way out of a locked box in stark terror during a Fort Holabird experiment. Several soldiers were seriously harmed by the tests. One man suffered a grand mal seisure; another went into an acute state of paranoia and had to be hospitalized for a week. Three others developed a history of epileptic seizures after the experiments..."

(Secret Agenda, Linda Hunt, pgs. 166-167)

And this was the kind of "vision" that gripped BLUEBIRD in its inception. And things were only going to become more brutal and bizarre as time went on. While Sidney Gottlieb is typically held up as the dark alchemist who oversaw these workings, in the next installment we shall meet the true black magician that inspired much of the mysticism in the early behavioral modification experiments. Stay tuned.

The Al Cisneros Mysteries Part I

The first and only time I've been fortunate enough to catch Al Cisneros live occurred during Scion Rock Fest 2012 in Tampa Bay. Cisneros was performing as a part of the reunited stoner rock legends Sleep before an absolutely packed crowd in Ybor City's the Ritz --per Cisneros, it was the first time the group had played in Florida in over 17 years. Original drummer Chris Hakius had retired from music several years earlier, but Neurosis' Jason Roeder ably filled in and the sight of bassist/vocalist Cisneros trading riffs again with guitarist Matt Pike is one few metalheads would be able to pass up.

More than any other show I've seen over the course of my life, this one certainly warranted labels such as Dionysian and comparisons to the ancient Roman festival known as the Bacchanalia. The set opened with only Pike on the stage, along with his trusty six string and what appeared to be a good buzz. Shirtless and already drenched in sweat, he began to crank out the opening riff to "Dopesmoker", the hour plus, album spanning epic that many fans consider to be the group's magnum opus. .

The crowd was utterly hypnotized all the while clouds of cannabis smoke rose heavily into the air. Joints began to flow amongst the audience like water despite the best efforts of the heavy handed security. With each sequel Pike coaxed out of his axe the smoke seemed to grow heavier and heavier, the stage growing hazy. One couldn't shake the impression that Pike should have had goat legs.

Pike at Scion 2012

When Cisneros and Roeder joined Pike on the stage they briefly posed almost like soldiers at attention, with their arms crossed before their chests before taking up their instruments and lurching into the song properly. It certainly gave an air of ritual to the proceedings, as though they were bearing witness. And certainly the debauchery that ensued was something to witness, least of all from Pike himself: he periodically drifted off the stage for shots and to snort something off of a mirror that a roadie conveniently held up to his face while he continued to play guitar.

It was the man's fortieth birthday and he unsurprisingly checked into rehab a day or two after the show.

And so it goes in the hazy universe inhabited by Cisneros, easily one of the most compelling figures in the modern heavy metal scene as well as in music on the whole. Over the course of this series I plan on examining the man's efforts with his two primary, Sleep and Om, in depth. Cisneros also did compelling work with Shrinebuilders, a kind of sludge/doom metal super group also featuring Scott Kelly of Neurosis, Dale Crover of the Melvins and Scott "Wino" Weinrich of Saint Vitus and the Obsessed (as well as Spirit Caravan and the Hidden Hand).

Shrinebuilders, from left to right: Cisneros, Wino, Kelly and Crover 

As I've already written on Kelley (here) and Wino (here) before, it seems inevitable that Shrinebuilders will also be tackled at some point, but for now I would like to focus on Cisneros' main gigs. So on with the show.

Cisneros hails from San Jose, California. According to the man himself, he took up the drums initially before shifting to bass and first attempted to form a band around the age of 13 or 14.  Presumably his discovery of Black Sabbath, a longstanding muse, also occurred around this time frame.

Cisneros (right) and Pike (left) during their high school years

It was in 1989, at the age of 16, that Cisneros founded the doom metal outfit Asbestosdeath along with Hakius and guitarist Tom Choi. Soon Cisneros' high school classmate Matt Pike joined on guitar and it was this nucleus that spawned what would become Sleep. The great Julian Cope provides a good rundown of Sleep's early days:

"So here’s the dope, dopes… Once upon a time, there was a punk rock band called Asbestos Death who came from San Jose that featured Luke Cisneros (bass, vocals), Chris Hakius (drums) and Tom Choi (guitar). They hooked up with Matt Pike (guitar) and changed their name to Sleep after a coupla singles when Choi left and was replaced by the religiously minded Justin Marler. Sleep signed to the same tiny Tupelo label that had fortuitously picked up the European rights to Nirvana’s BLEACH and for production hauled in the excellent Billy Anderson, deffo the Eddie Kramer of proto-doom, nay of all things heavy."

Marler

Note that Cope referred to Cisneros as "Luke" in the above quote. Cope claimed that this was Cisneros' original name that he had potentially changed it to "Al" for some type of mystical reason:

"... Bass player Luke Cisneros now became the sole singer of the band, wrote an album’s worth of meaningless (and it has to be admitted mainly SHIT) lyrics and changed his name to Al Cisneros (which means in Spanish ‘towards those who work with swans’3). In Al’s new guise as the stalker of the swan people, he immediately became not the Ozzie vocal clone we could have anticipated but the Alpha Shaman driving ur-force behind an entirely destiny-led troupe of demented masters of reality..."

In the footnotes, Cope goes on to note:

"Suspicious that this was the possible meaning, I asked my good friend and Spaniard Annexus Quamm about the translation. He wrote: ‘Yes, literally cisnero would be a person who works or deals with swans, like vaquero works with vacas (cows) and porquero with cerdos (pork, pigs) both rather old-fashioned terms. [This] makes sense to me in a literal way.’ " 

Al Cisneros: swan wrangler?

I'm not sure why then Cope found such significance in Cisneros changing his name from Luke to Al, but regardless this is inaccurate. As far as this researcher can determine, Cisneros first name has always been Al. But he does seem to have used the name "Luke" for a time in the early 1990s, and not for especially mystical reasons. The Quietus notes:

"Q: One last thing Al, just before I let you go, I heard a funny story from Matt Pike the last time I interviewed him where he was talking about the early days of Sleep and he mentioned that for a period where you decided to call yourself ‘Luke’ – for about two years or something – what was that all about?

"AC: [laughs] Well, it was a joke really, that was my name in the band; It was an over appreciation of the second title of ‘War Pigs’ on Paranoid, ‘Luke’s Wall’, and so I was just amazed, like 'Why is everybody only calling it "War Pigs"? It’s also called "Luke’s Wall"!' But whatever man, it makes no sense!"

But moving along. After one album of subpar doom metal (Volume One),  guitarist Justin Marler departed the group... to join a monastery (seriously). Sleep opted to soldier on as a power trio and with their sophomore outing, Sleep's Holy Mountain, the group latched upon the sound that would make them underground legends. Imagine a group of musicians locking themselves in a studio with vintage amps, massive amounts of cannabis, the first four Black Sabbath and a Dungeon and Dragon's player handbook, and you essentially have the sound of Holy Mountain.

"Dragonaut", later used in the film Gummo, sets the stage: a stately Sabbath groove drugged out to the max and punctuated by Cisneros almost chant-like lyrics evoking dragons and space travel. The lyrics, such as they are, run the gauntlet of the sci-fi and fantasy lexicon. Space travel of course appears again, as do druids, gypsies, unspeakable cults, Atlantis and of course magic potions. King Solomon is referenced in "Evil Gypsy/Solomon's Theme", but never quite works his way into the lyrics. Only "From Beyond", with its allusions to "stoner caravan from deep space" hint at the far more striking mythos that would appear in the next album.

Two of the tracks, "Some Grass" and closer "Nain's Baptism", are instrumentals while  "Druid" features but one shouted verse. Outside of those three numbers, none of the other songs on the album are under five minutes. Musically, the album rarely ventures beyond the murky depths of Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer and possibly the Flower Travelin' Band aside from the faintest hints of psychedlia.

the classic Holy Mountain cover

It should have never worked --simply writing about this album can make one cringe in the right mood. Everything about it is ridiculous and over the top. The riffs lumber along like some prehistoric dinosaur, as though they had been written by cavemen and were just waiting for the right moment to be rediscovered. And the lyrics --the average D & D game surely exerted more quiet dignity than Cisneros' lyrics.

And yet work it did. The album is practically a monument to 70s heavy metal culture in its pristine state before the inane ramblings of numerous fundamentalist ministers laid the foundation for Slayer, Venom and the rest of the faux Satanism that would come to dominate so much of modern heavy metal. But in Holy Mountain the Old Ones found redemption. It was as though every fantasy ever played out in a reefer soaked basements featuring ample amps, vinyl and magic dice was given life in the 1992 issue's nine classic tracks.

Again, it should have never worked. But somehow Cisneros and co had stumbled upon a formula that had very real myth making potential. But it was not till the follow-up album, initially entitled Jerusalem but now known but its original title Dopesmoker, that this potential was realized. Within the metal community, even the making of this album has become somewhat legendary. The great Julian Cope broke it down thus:

"After SLEEP’S HOLY MOUNTAIN caused a big stir and they’d invented the term Stoner Rock (I believe, I believe!), some pretty heavy management took over control of the band and signed them up to London Records, who saw the promise of a big underground band and laid upon them extreme amounts of loot. Now, a note on booklet of SLEEP’S HOLY MOUNTAIN: ‘If you have Orange amplification for sale contact Sleep through Earache Records’ should have maybe forewarned everyone, but Sleep now took the cash and laid out thousands for this Holy Grail amplification (all in delightful orange ‘70s cases, as my contemporaries will so well know). When most groups sign to a major label, they become (in the words of Mark Smith) ‘like peasants with free milk’. The records are made to suit the company, and some bands even freely admit to working for the man (Mott the Hoople always referred to Island Records as their ‘employers’ and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s second LP even featured a song entitled ‘Working for M.C.A.’), so it must have come as a something of a surprise to London Records when their new power trio signing from San Jose chose to spend all their money on new equipment and pot and delivered an album that contained only one single 52-minute track entitled ‘Jerusalem’… Gone was the generic lyrical vapidness of much of SLEEP’S HOLY MOUNTAIN (gypsies, druids, dragons, whatever) and incoming was the type of sacred coding that ‘Al Cisneros’ had previously alluded to only on the song ‘From Beyond’, on which he intoned: 'Stoner caravan from deep space arrives.’ "

The original version of "Dopesmoker" was over 60 minutes long and was only pared down to 52 after the record label initially refused to release it. The edited version was also rejected and the album was not released until 1999 under the title Jerusalem in a bootlegged version. By that time the band had already broken up, but Dopesmoker was well on its way to becoming the stuff of legends.

While Holy Mountain established the group's legacy, it was Dopesmoker where they truly moved beyond the shadow of Black Sabbath and discovered their own voice. For the record the group, while remaining firmly entrenched in their Sabbathian origins, brought a surprisingly diverse amount of influences into the sessions. The writing of "Dopesmoker" itself would prove to be incredibly difficult as well and no doubt contributed the epic vibe the work radiates.

"...  Jerusalem is quite simply one of the heaviest psychedelic rock records ever made. Released in 1998, it consists of one fifty-two minute track – massive, monolithic, and lumbering like a brontosaurus stomping through the bog. 'Earache [Records] sat on Holy Mountain forever, and that fucked with us real bad,' Pike recalled. 'It took us about four years to get out of that and during those four years we wrote the song 'Jerusalem.' Al had said, 'Gee, don't you think it would be awesome just to cut through the bullshit and do one huge gigantic piece – like Beethoven, but make it different?' Our influences were real monotone, real Indian-sounding, real dub-reggae. It's pot music, you know what I mean? We were smoking like... God, dude, two to four ounces a day!'

"Not for nothing does the back cover depict one of the funkiest homemade bongs ever photographed. But Jerusalem isn't merely stoned self-indulgence or a particularly inspired jam preserved for posterity. After its four-your genesis, it was painstakingly recorded during two months of intense studio sessions. 'Man, it took a long time,' Pike told me. 'When I was playing that slow intro, that was a bitch to play the whole thing through and keep the time perfect. And then once the drums and bass come in... there were like fucking math charts on the wall, everything. There was so much to remember.' This included the mystical lyrics that would do the Cult of the Illuminatis proud. 'It was a real spiritual, holy thing for all of us. All of us are very unorthodox Christians and amateur theologians; we like to study different religions but kind of believe in one God. I give a lot of that album's doing to Him. Without a lot of prayer and without a lot of marijuana and our past psychedelic experiences, that album wouldn't have happened.' "

(Turn on Your Mind, Jim DeRogatis, pgs. 549-550)

the 2003 edition of Dopesmoker

Your humble researcher will go out on a limb and speculate that not many recent heavy metal albums have been credited to God, cannabis and "past psychedelic experiences." Certainly this is but one of the unique aspects of Dopesmoker, a kind of loose concept album/song following the plight of the Weedian. Presumably the Weedian are a race of pot smoking extraterrestrials who have come to Earth, and may possibly have seeded the human race if lines such as "Judgement soon come to Mankind/Green herbsmen serve rightful king" are taken to their logical extreme.

the Weedian

Cannabis worshiping ancient aliens mythos? Julian Cope certainly seems to have gotten something from the sixty minute juggernaut:

"Furthermore, the lyrics (all ten repeated lines or so) were the kind of accessible pseudo-religious genius that started genuine religions...

"New lows in redundant amphibian shamanism or watt, Motherfucker! Gimme gimme gimme, and then gimme some more. When I was a kid making 1/72 scale model plane kits by Airfix and Revell, I used to paint flies with Humbrol gloss and watch them drag themselves around slower and slower until they… finally… dried up underneath the sheer weight of the glossy overalls I’d painted them into. Now, listening to DOPESMOKER, I was a fly dying of paint inhalation and loving every exoskeletally en-crisping moment. Lying comatose and aware of nothing but the thousands of glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling, I wondered what could have been behind such a fundamentalist statement as DOPESMOKER. Of its three creators, I visualised them (in my hash-mashed mind’s eye) inhabiting a world in which the first four Black Sabbath LPs - BLACK SABBATH, PARANOID, MASTER OF REALITY and VOLUME 4 – had become sacred testaments on which to base their entire belief system (this wasn’t really too hard to envisage – Mormonism and Rastafarianism were based on far less). But then, as I sunk deeper into Sleep’s San Jose psyche, I began to think… imagine that you first came to these four Sabs LPs not in their British Vertigo swirl guises, but in their U.S. Warner Brothers versions, with the first LP losing its gatefold and (therefore) controversial inverted cross, but (more positively) side two opening not with the original slightly incongruous Fontana 45 ‘Evil Woman, Don’t You Play Your Games with Me’ but with the far more typically doomaholic stop-start Iommi-heavy multi-parted B-side ‘Wicked World’ – an altogether more auspiciously damned beginning to side two of such an iconic rock’n’roll debut. Imagine, if you will allow me to continue this metaphor, that being a teenage American stoner and already of the opinion that, being in possession of the aforementioned 4 LPs, you have your hands on some sort of holy sonic reliquary umpteen times greater than Islam’s piece of sacred meteorite at the centre of Mecca’s Haram enclosure, you begin as time goes by to read more and more into the titles of those ‘extras’ that Warner Brothers had insisted Black Sabbath added to their tracklisting to stop the general public from thinking they wuz buying some too-short LPs. And imagine that the addition of those extra U.S.-only titles on BLACK SABBATH (‘Wasp’, ‘Bassically’), PARANOID (‘Luke’s Wall’, ‘Jack the Stripper’), MASTER OF REALITY (‘The Haunting’, ‘Step Up’, ‘Deathmask’) and VOLUME 4 (‘The Straightener’, ‘Everyday Comes and Goes’) to the already murky official Sabbath tracklisting contributed further confusion to the thorny question of exactly when songs ended and others began, so much so in fact that each already oft-changing riff-o-thon now appeared to meld seamlessly and tidally, each into the next until your teenaddled stoner cranium saw, heard and inhaled it all as a single ever-undulating ever-spiralling ever-squirming Midgardian Worm of sonic oil spill building and building layer upon relentless layer on a seashore until the whole beachscape, complete with sunbathers, coastguards and concession stands, had been lacquered under a one-metre-thick obsidian black layer of petrified chemo-gunk… I visualised Sleep in their pre-Sleep configuration, their teenage stoner minds fixating collectively on these first four Sabbath LPs to such an extent that certain repeated words in the song titles became iconic mantras to be treated (Brigit Riley-stylee) as repeatable motifs almost in the psychedelic manner of 6,000-year-old Western Atlantic passage grave art. In this mood, titles such as ‘Sweetleaf’, ‘Behind the Wall of Sleep’, ‘Planet Caravan’, ‘Under the Sun’, ‘Warning’, ‘Snowblind’,1 ‘Luke’s Wall’, Supernaut’, ‘A Bit of Finger’, ‘Tomorrow’s Dream’, ‘The Wizard’; each becomes a useful jugglable commodity on which to hang your own variant of Geezer’s lyric, of Iommi’s heavy up-the-neck wound-string S.G. riffs and of Bill’s Bible-throwing drum fills. I heard evidence within these Sleepian grooves that a genuine cult had grown up in San Jose, a cult dedicated to the results of Black Sabbath’s controversial decision to rip off2 a song title (‘Sweetleaf’) from Clear Blue Sky, their eighteen-year-old Vertigo label-mates, and write it not as a soft homage to grass but as a riff-heavy ‘Pot as THEE Sacrament’ John Sinclair/MC5ian-type Odin-receiving-the-wisdom-of-Urd’s Well thank you thank you you-saved-my-life Shaman’s gift to the Goddess eulogy. I imagined that on hearing Ozzie’s echoplex’d coughs at the beginning of the song, and the desperation in his voice when he sung to Sweetleaf ‘I love you… you know it… my life was empty… my life was down… my life is free now’, the Cult-that-would-become-Sleep had heard it as such a rallying cry from within that it finally motivated their otherwise Total Pot Refusenik Butts enough to get up from the couch long enough to lay down some extreme sonic monotony on behalf of the Vegetation Goddess who had spoken so eloquently to them, their few close stoner mates, and Messrs. Osbourn, Butler, Iommi and Ward. But after I’d imagined all of the above, I had to stop imagining such things because this thing had actually happened and the results were amazing."

a fan in a Weedian Halloween costume

In case you're wondering dear reader, yes, the sound of Dopesmoker is so vast, so expansive, that run on sentences and rambling, page-spanning paragraphs seem the only way to adequately do it justice. I had considered writing an equally combobulated paragraph probing its depths, but why bother when Cope has already managed the job so elegantly?

But as much of a curiosity as Dopesmoker might be, it is not a work in and of itself that warrants an in depth discussion on a blog so esoterically obsessed as this one. It is, however, important to note these early spiritual musings, for after leaving the music scene for several years Cisneros would unleash one of the most metaphysically oriented bands to emerge in recent years. Stay tuned for the curious ruminations of Om in the next installment dear reader.

Bavaria, the Thule Society, the SOSJ and the Making of a Revoltionary Faith Part VI

Welcome to the sixth installment in my examination of the legendary Thule Society. Part one of this series was geared toward dispelling some popular misconceptions of Thule (i.e. Vril forces, UFOs, etc) while part two broadly outlined some of the individuals, groups and movements that influenced Thule. The third installment was an extensive breakdown of the background of Thule's founder, Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff, with a special emphasis on his occult studies in the Near East prior to World War I.

With part four I finally began to address Thule in earnest, mainly focusing on its early days. With the fifth installment I made a digression to broadly outline the Freecorps movement that sprang up in Germany following the nation's disastrous defeat in WWI. The Freecorps were reactionary paramilitary groups raised by the fledgling Weimer Republic and wealthy individuals to combat the spread of communism in Germany following the Russian Revolution. Eventually many of the premier Freecorps became involved with various secret orders, most notably the Germanenorden (which was detailed a bit in part two), the parent organization from which Thule derived. Thule itself would also play a key role in establishing the Freecorps as well, and practically at the onset of the German Revolution.

Freecorp men in action

Thule was based out of Bavaria, a region long considered the artistic and cultural heart of Germany. Bavaria's temperament was viewed as being more mild than that of the northern German states, most notably Prussia, and for this reason the push towards Marxism was comparatively stronger here than other parts of the nation (though still rather pathetic by any standard). Thus, socialism was proclaimed in Bavaria early in the game. Naturally the Thulists and their largely aristocratic allies were horrified.

"On Saturday evening, 9 November 1918, there was a 'musical rehearsal' in the Thule rooms. During the previous forty-eight hours there had been a bloodless revolution in Bavaria. The Wittelsbach royal family had made a hasty and ignominious flight, the wartime government had resigned, and the Soviet Workers' and Soldiers' Consuls had assumed authority. The Bavarian revolution preceded that in Berlin by two days and was headed by a bohemian Jewish journalist. Kurt Eisner had been prominent as a pacifist and the leader of the Independent ('minority') Social Democrats in Munich. He had played an important part in the anti-war strikes of January 1918 for which he was gaoled until October. Against the background of domestic collapse in the defeated country he proclaimed a Socialist Republic, assuming the premiership and ministry of foreign affairs in a cabinet consisting of both 'majority' and 'minority' socialists. The members of the Thule Society, in common with others on the political right-wing in Munich, were dumbfounded by these unexpected and traumatic events. Germany was defeated, the Kaiser and ruling princes were abdicating, while republics were proclaimed by Jewish socialists. The volkisch fatherland for which they had fought so long and hard had vanished overnight.

"It was in response to this disaster that Sebottendorff delivered an impassioned oration to the Thule that evening. The alleged text betrays a striking mixture of monarchical, anti-Semitic and ariosophical sentiment:...

"... [Yesterday we experienced the collapse of everything which was familiar, dear and valuable to us. In the place of our princes of Germanic blood rules our deadly enemy: Judah. What will come of this chaos, we do not know yet. But we can guess. A time will come of struggle, the most bitter need, a time of danger... As long as I hold the iron hammer [a reference to his Master's hammer], I am determined to pledge the Thule to the struggle. Our Order is a Germanic order, loyalty is also Germanic. Our god is Walvater, his rune is the Ar-rune. And the trinity: Wotan, Wili, We is the unity of the trinity. The Ar-rune signifies Aryan, primal fire, the sun and the eagle. And the eagle is the symbol of the Aryans. In order to depict the eagle's capacity for self-immolation by fire, it is coloured red. From today on our symbol is the red eagle, which warns us that we must die in order to live.]

"Sebottendorff's references to the Ar-rune... and the mystical resurrection of the eagle, which should become the militant symbol of the Aryans, are evidence of an unmistakable Listian influence. In 1908 List had claimed that the Ar-rune denoted the sun, the primal fire, the Aryans and the eagle, while also alluding to the death and resurrection of the eagle as a specifically Germanic symbol of rebirth. He also described the trinity of Wotan, Wili, and We in his Germanic-theosophical cosmology of 1910. The name Thule may also be traced to ariosophical inspiration. The term derived from the name given to the northernmost land discovered by Pytheas in about 300 B.C. Sebottendorff identified his 'Ultima Thule' as Iceland; as the supposed outpost of Germanic refugees in List's works, this country held an eminent position in the Armanist doctrine. Exhorting Thule members to fight 'until the swastika arises victoriously out of the icy darkness,' Sebottendorff closed his speech with a racist-theosophical poem written by Philipp Stauff. On the basis of this fustian rodomontade and its ariosophical mumbo-jumbo, one might be tempted to dismiss both Sebottendorff and the Thule Society. However, Sebottendorff subsequently emerges as an important organizer of the nationalist reaction to the Eisner government and the succeeding Communist Republics at Munich in journalistic, military and political fields. Ariosophy had found a leader in the counter-revolution."

(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pgs. 144-146)

von Sebottendorff

As was noted in part three of this series, the date of 9 November is highly significant in the history of fascism as well as being von Sebottendorff's birthday. Whether the date added an extra air of mysticism to von Sebottendorff's call to fight "until the swastika arises victoriously out of the icy darkness" is impossible to say, but by all accounts the Thulists were quick to spring into action and begin laying the groundwork for a counterrevolution.

"The Thule Society may well have the distinction of founding Germany's first Freikorps, the Thule Combat League (Thule Kampfbund), on November 10. The weapons provided by Thule associate Julius Lehmann, a leading publisher of eugenic and Pan-German literature, transformed Thule's rooms in the Four Seasons into an armory. The Society became a deadly lending library for all volkisch radicals, even nonmembers. Sebottendorff wrote of providing pistols and ammunition to Hans Steigler, a volkisch author who opened a Munich printing shop and headed an obscure club called Urda.

"Thule's activities aroused some suspicion, it's cover story of being an innocent study group notwithstanding. By Sebottendorff's account, Thule's offices were searched for weapons in December 1918 by the Schutzwehr, an ostensibly pro-Republican Freikorps commanded by Alfred Seiffertitz. Later, Seiffertitz's force conspired with the Thule Combat League in the unlucky Palm Sunday Putsch on April 13, 1919. Sebottendorff's favorable references to Seiffertitz indicate early linkage between Thule and Schutzwehr. One authority maintains that the state railroad official Friedrich Knauff, who later headed the Thule Society after Sebottendorff's departure, was a go-between for the two groups. In his memoirs Sebottendorff claims to have returned on intuition to the Four Seasons in time for the Schutzwehr's arrival. The incident was described in slapstick terms, with guns concealed under the eyes of the security force. It is not unlikely that Seiffertitz scheduled the search with Sebottendorff ahead of time. Despite the Schutzwehr's inability to discover weapons, Sebottendorff was taken into custody. Playing the card of his Turkish citizenship, Sebottendorff secured a speedy release.

"The Combat League tried to arrest Eisner on December 4, 1918, as he spoke at a public hall in the resort community of Bad Aibling, where Sebottendorff maintained a residence. Sebottendorff suggested that two Social Democrats in Eisner's cabinet, Interior Minister Erhard Auer and Justice Johannes Timm, sympathized with the plot. It is possible that Thule intended to proclaim Auer prime minister after seizing Eisner. Sebottendorff held out hope from the first days of the Bavarian revolution that an understanding could be reached with Auer. On November 9, 1918, the Beobachter pointed to a speech Auer had recently made to his Bavarian party congress, proving 'that there is a strong current within the Social Democrats into the volkisch mainstream. It is up to us to use this current...' 

"Eisner was unshaken by Sebottendorff's intended coup; indeed, it was little more than a scuffle. The Bad Aibling adventure was led by Sebottendorff and one of his Thule initiates, Lt. Hermann Sedlmeiser, a young Bavarian officer who had served in the same regiment as Hitler and would found the Freikorps Schaefer in 1919 before settling down as the owner of a Munich cafe. A fifteen-man Combat League detachment accompanied them to carry out Eisner's arrest.

"A counterrevolutionary manifesto was hastily printed for the occasion at the shop of Klaus Eck's anti-Semitic newspaper, the Meisbacher Anzeiger. Although published in the small Upper Bavarian town of Miesbach, the paper would soon gain notoriety throughout Germany for its 'violence and vulgarity.' A getaway car waited outside the hall in Bad Aibling to spirit the captive Eisner to the mountains, where he would be kept 'until the new government was formed.' Thulists circulated through the neighborhood on bicycles, encouraging the peasants to attend Eisner's speech, for Sebottendorff anticipated support from the rural population. He did not anticipate the presence of a strong contingent of radical leftist workers from nearby towns. The Combat League lost heart, and the coup fumbled in it's opening moments."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, pgs. 108-110)

Kurt Eisner

While Thule's first attempted coup was quite pathetic subsequent attempts would become progressively more ambitious. By January 1919 the Thulists had erected a much more formidable resistance movement.

"At the time the Soviet Republic was proclaimed, the Combat League was divided in two detachments, operating separately and unaware of the other. The first detachment, including Eching and the other agitation centers, was commanded by 1st Lt. Heinz Kurz, who went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy before joining the SS as an officer. It was primarily a recruiting depot for Freikorps Epp, whose commander, Col. Franz Ritter von Epp (1868-1946), was a grim-visaged, steel-helmeted figure who had formally served with the Bavarian Life Guards. Epp led the most prominent of the Bavarian Freikorps, whose main depot was the former army training grounds at Ohrdruf in neighboring Thuringia. Freikorps Epp was founded in January 1919 at the behest of Ebert's war minister, Gustav Noske. Initially numbering seven hundred men, Freikorps Epp became the spearhead of Hoffmann's military forces. Epp recruited several members of Thule, including Hans Frank and Rudolf Hess, both destined for prominence in the Nazi movement. Epp later joined with the Nazis (1928) and was appointed governor of Bavaria after 1933.

"The Combat League's second detachment acted as Thule's self-styled 'intelligence service.' It was commanded by Lt. Edgar Kraus, the seventeen-year-old son of Augsburg's state prosecutor and a resourceful leader, despite his youth. According to Sbottendorff, the commander of the Bavarian Red calvary was an agent of the service, and virtually every Soviet unit and committee was infiltrated by Kraus's men. Thule operatives usually acted as stenographers and clerks. Every evening the spies brought their reports to the Four Seasons, where the information was correlated and dispatched to Bamberg via Augsburg on the night train. Urgent information was telephoned to Bamberg. It would not occur to the Reds to sever or monitor phone lines until after the failed Palm Sunday Putsch. Kraus's detachment also waged a campaign of sabotage against the Reds by disabling automobiles and planes at the Schleissheim airfield. Sebottendorff admitted that some of his own agents were susceptible to the lure of leftist ideology, explaining that his 'whole power of persuasion was often necessary' to keep them from straying. It was an acknowledgment that many Germans, disoriented by recent events and the collapse of political and economic stability, were willing to lend one ear to the far left and the other to the far right if either provided compelling explanations for the bitter present and the promise of a better future. Sebottendorff also claimed that his intelligence service helped spirit out of Munich the gold reserves at the Reichsbank and the Prussian legation, but the assertion cannot be confirmed."

 (Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, pgs. 123-125)

von Epp

By February 1919 Thule's infiltration of the Reds seems to have borne fruit. A little over midway through the month a bizarre putsch was launched by soviet sailors that none the less showed signs of Thule's meddling.

"Demonstrations by Munich's unemployed turned violent in the early weeks of January 1919, and the new year was greeted by other politically motivated exchanges of gunfire. One of the most curious episodes of leftist Bavaria was the so-called Sailor's Putsch on February 19. Marching at the head of six hundred seamen who had recently arrived from Wilhelmshaven, Sailor 1st Class Conrad Lotter, a member of the soldiers' soviet, led the coup. His forces seize the Landtag, the railroad station, and the telegraph office, arresting Munich's army commandant and police president. A brief shoot-out between Lotter's men and Eisner loyalists on the Bahnhofplatz took the life of a streetcar passenger. Suddenly, at the insistence of the Social Democratic ministers, his force retired, declaring that their action had been 'an error.' There was talk of Krupp financing for the aborted coup. Lotter was arrested and spent a few months in Stadelheim prison.

"Auer had brought Lotter and his sailors to Munich on the pretext of using them to maintain order. The minister was widely accused of stage-managing the affair; though his role in the putsch was never proven, the password of the rebellious sailors was 'Auer.' A member of the Thule Combat League, Lt. Edgar Kraus, helped Lotter engineer the coup attempt. Oddly, Sebottendorff never mentioned the incident in his memoirs.

"In the confused weeks that followed, Thule offices were raided again and again. One search for anti-Semitic pamphlets was led by police president Pallabene. Tipped off by an informant in the Schutzwehr, Sebottendorff claimed he struck up an understanding with the police official by the end of the encounter. The two men agreed to share information. On another occasion, a Thulist hawking a satirical paper called Rote Hand (Red Hand) was pursued by leftist to the Four Seasons, where the assailants were beaten off by Combat Leaguers wearing the red armbands of the soviets. The Thule Society had not only infiltrated the ostensibly centrist Schutzwehr, but it had also made inroads into the Red Guards as well.

"Long-standing radical group stood beneath Sebottendorff's wide umbrella, taking advantage of his cover story and his financial generosity. The charismatic Sebottendorff augmented his own resources with a successful fund-raising effort among Bavaria's industrialists, nobility, landowners, and right-wing intellectuals. Among the organizations meeting at Thule's offices to conspire against Eisner, and whose personnel often merged into the Society, were Julius Lehmann's Munich branch of the Pan-German League, Hans Dahn's National Liberal Party, Franz Dannehl's chapter of the Reichshammerbund, Wilhelm Rohmeder's German School Association, and the Fahrenden Gesellen (Wandering Journeymen), a youth league dedicated to long hikes and communion with nature as part of its repudiation of bourgeois society. Gottfried Feder was a regular hangar-on at the Four Seasons. In Thule's offices, the poet and playwright Dietrich Eckart, to whom Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf, produced his mimeographed newspaper Auf gut deutsch (In Plain German) beginning in December 1918. Regular contributors to Eckart's paper included Feder and the young Baltic emigre Alfred Rosenberg, whose role as official philosopher for the Nazi Party resulted in the death sentence from the Nuremberg tribunal. Although angry at Sebottendorff for not paying for the printing of Auf gut deutsch (Sebottendorff claimed his resources were already spread thin by the Thule Society), Eckart also wrote for the Munchener Beobachter and by some accounts lavished high praise on Sebottendorff. Operating from the Four Seasons, in its guise as a sports paper, the Beobachter was the bulletin board for the activities of diverse rightist groups. The 'Thule Society was a state within the state, a collection point for all reactionaries.' Virtually all organized anti-left civilian resistance in Munich was traceable to Thule, which provided 'a sort of common leadership.'"

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, pgs. 111-113) 

Dietrich Eckart

Despite managing to create a large and well organized resistance movement in a mater of months, Thule's work was seriously tested by the hasty actions of an individual who was denied membership in the Society. It led to the assassination of Eisner and the rise of more radical leftist elements.

"Eisner had been assassinated on 21 February by Count Arco auf Valley, a young Jew resentful at his exclusion from the Thule who wished to prove his nationalist commitment. Disorder was henceforth endemic. A shaky coalition government was established by 'majority' Social Democrats under Johannes Hoffmann, but the cabinet was compelled to flee to Bamberg as the situation deteriorated in early April. On 6 April a group of anarchist intellectuals proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic, inspired by the example of Bela Kun in Hungary, who had sent a wave of red inspiration up the Danube to defeated Austria and Germany. After this quixotic administration had fallen within a week, a more serious Communist band seized power on 13 April. Leadership was vested in the Russian émigrés Levine-Nissen, Axelrod, and Levien, who had been blooded in the 1905 Russian revolution. Their reign of terror was mitigated only by its inefficiency: violent decree followed decree; drunken soldiers of the 'Red Army' ran through the streets plundering and looting; schools, banks, and newspaper offices were shut."

(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pg. 148)

Count Arco auf Valley

Another attempted coup featuring Thulists, this one known as the Palm Sunday Putsch, was responsible for the second Bavarian Soviet Republic that came into being on April 13, 1919. This attempted coup was something of a debacle as well.

"On April 13, the Schutzwehr, and ostensibly pro-Republic Freikorps commanded by Alfred Seiffertitz, a supporter of the Thule Society, staged the Palm Sunday Putsch in a bid to overthrow the Soviet regime from within Munich. The Schutzwehr broke into the former royal Residenz before dawn and arrested several members of the Central Soviet. Among those rounded up were the eccentric Foreign Commissioner Lipp and Erich Muhsam, a cabaret writer and essayist who had been part of the first Bavarian Soviet Republic's leadership, and would later die in the Nazi concentration camp. The coup was supported by Hoffmann and his comrade-in-arms, Schneppenhorst...

"The Palm Sunday plan called for Schneppenhorst and his men to liberate Munich once Seiffertitz's Schutzwehr occupied key positions. Schneppenhorst gathered six hundred infantry, cavalry, and artillery for the operation at Ingolstadt, a city on the Danube thirty miles north of Munich. The propaganda aspect of the putsch was well planned. In the days before Palm Sunday, airplanes from Bamberg showered Munich with the following leaflet, which Sebottendorff claimed the Thule Society reprinted and distributed throughout the city...

"Seiffertitz's claim to represent the Munich garrison was spurious. He could count only on support of Thule Combat League units within the city. An alleged eyewitness account, an anonymous letter supposedly written by Seiffertitz himself, was critical of Thule's contributions to the coup. It claim that only a dozen Thulists arrived at the barricades. One of them was a captain 'in gala uniform! Patent leather riding boots, riding whip, monocle!' Sebottendorff claimed that his forces returned to headquarters after seeing the hopelessness of the situation, realizing that the loyalty of the Munich garrison to the Reds (or at least their indifference to the Whites) and the failure of Schneppenhorst's forces to advance doomed the adventure. Schneppenhorst claimed his trucks were stuck in the April mud. Others murmured that his plan had been sabotaged.

"Many soviet officials escaped arrest, warned by frantic phone calls from the wife of Erich Muhsam. After a five-hour gun battle, which began in the Marienplatz where the Schutzwehr was opposed by a crowd of armed workers, revolutionary sailors, and the pro-Red 1st Infantry Regiment, the Schutzwehr retreated through the railroad station. Enduring shelling by Red mortars, the counterrevolutionaries fled by train before the end of the night to Bamberg, taking with them some twenty officials arrested that morning. The Palm Sunday Putsch claimed more than twenty deaths and a hundred injuries."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhhssen, ps. 125-127)

Undeterred by the defeat of the Combat League, Sebottendorff was already engaged in founding a new Freecorp, the Freikorps Oberland, on April 16. By April 20 (the birthday of Adolf Hitler) he was already procuring supplies for the militia after having slipped out of Munich upon orders being issued for his arrest. The rest of the Thule were doing the same and with little difficulty given how thoroughly their intelligence services had infiltrated the Reds.

insignia of Freikorps Oberland

Sebottendorff began assembling his forces in Eichstaett, a small town forty miles northwest of Munich. He was not the only one. The Von Epp Freecorp, which as noted above had close relations with Thule, was also preparing to march on Munich. But this was not all. Berlin had also dispatched between 7,500 and 12,000 Freecorps men from northern Germany to the far north of Bavaria where they began to assemble. Several of the most notorious Freecorps, including the Guards Calvary an the Ehrhardt Brigade (who would later march on Berlin with swastikas painted on their helmets during the Kapp Putsch of 1920), were among the forces.

the notorious Ehrhardt Brigade

A few Thulists had remained in Munich to continue to gather intelligence. Several of them were captured days before the Freecorps began their march on Munich. In panic, a massacre ensued that only hastened the advance of the Freebooters. Bizarrely, it unfolded on April 30, the date of Walpurgis Night, considered in myth to be one of the holiest days of European witchcraft and paganism. Known as Beltane in Celtic countries, Walpurgis Night is one of the "cross quarter" dates, falling between the spring equinox and the summer solstice.

"After trying unsuccessfully to build a counter-revolutionary army at Bamberg, Hoffman was forced on 15 April to invite the aid of the Von Epp and other Free Corps, whose anti-Republican sympathies had previously led to their being banned in Bavaria. As the ring of White troops tightened around Munich, the Communists rated nationalist strongpoints within the city. They broke into the Thule premises on 26 April and arrested the secretary Countess Heila von Westarp and in the course of the day six more members were taken. The Red commandant Egelhofer proclaimed the next day that 'a band of criminals... of the so-called upper classes... arch reactionaries, agents and touts for the Whites,' had been captured. The hostages were taken to the cellar of the Luitpold Gymnasium, which had served as a Red Army post since mid-April. The seven Thule members and three other men were shot on 30 April as a reprisal for reports of the killing of Red prisoners by Whites at Starnberg. Four of the seven Thulists were titled aristocrats, including Prince Gustav von Thurn und Taxis, who was related to several European Royal families. Munich and the world looked on aghast."

(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicolas Goodrick-Clarke, pg. 148)

The presence of a member of the House of Thurn und Taxis in Thule is most interesting. Thurn und Taxis remains one of the wealthiest of the old aristocratic families in Europe to this very day, with a strong base in Germany and Italy. Several members of Thurn und Taxis were members of the highly secrative 1001 Club, an organization concerned with "conservation" that was founded by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (who notoriously founded the Bilderberg Group as well) and several other Europe aristocrats in 1971. The mysterious 1001 Club has been linked to the intelligence services of several Western nations as well as various reactionary elements the world over.

the coat of arms of Thurn und Taxis

Thurn und Taxis members have also been linked to individuals involved with Europe's Gladio network (as was noted in part three von Sebottendorff himself had ties to the Grey Wolves, a Pan-Turkish terror organization long tied to Gladio, from his time in Turkey as well). Even more curious, Thurn und Taxis has also been tied to the Sovereign Order of Saint John (SOSJ), a bizarre secret society originating from the White Russian diaspora that later forged ties with far right wing elements within the US military and intelligence community. Much more will be said on the SOSJ in future installments of this series. But back to the matter at hand.

The deaths of Thurn und Taxis and the other aristocratic hostages hastened the White advance. The Freecorps entered Munich on May 1, quickly dispatched of the remaining Red forces that hadn't already deserted, and unleashed a reign of terror that made the Luitpold Gymnasium massacre look like child's play.

"On the morning of 1 May, while Socialists and Communist round the world celebrated international Labor day, the Freikorps entered Munich. They encountered almost no organized opposition. Most of the Red Guards had thrown away their weapons, torn off their armbands and melted away. The long columns of Freikorps soldiers arrogantly goose-stepped into the captured city, to be greeted by joyful middle-class and escstatic Catholic clergy, who promptly celebrated a Te Deum thanksgiving service and an open-air Mass for their liberators.

"A Freikorps squad moved into the Mathaser beer Hall, where Eisner had proclaimed his government and which had since become the HQ of the Communist workers' council, and guided it with flame-throwers. Only Egelhofer, with a few Red diehards, put up a last-ditch resistance in the area of the main railway station. After an artillery battle, Egelhofer attempted to flee in a car. He was stopped and immediately shot dead. He was luckier than one of his former government colleagues, Gustav Landauer. The anarchist philosopher and literary critic was found hiding in his friend Kurt Eisner's former home. He was brought to the Stadelheim prison by Freikorps soldiers who beat in his face with rifle butts and shot him in the head as he lay choking in his own blood. The former Commissioner for Public Education continued to breathe, causing the Sergeant in charge of the patrol to jest: 'The putrid thing has two lives,' before he pumped another bullet into the body. The boots of the Freikorps finally kicked and trampled the remaining life out of Laundauer. His battered body was left lying in the prison yard for two days.

"This killing was typical of many perpetuated by the Freikorps army, who made full and liberal use of Noske's license to do as they pleased in the conquered city. Angry at the loss of sixty-nine comrades during the re-conquest, the Freikorps gave full rein to their murderous instincts, until the White Terror outdid in horror the Red Terror that had preceded it and sickened even the Munich citizenry who had originally welcomed their liberators. The lead for the indiscriminate slaughter was given by the adjutant of the Lutzow Freikorps, Major Schulz, who told his officers: 'Anyone who doesn't understand that there is a lot of hard work to be done here, or whose conscience bothers him had better get out. It's a lot better to kill a few innocent people than to let one guilty person escape. You know how to handle it... shoot them and report they attacked you or tried to escape.' True to his promise, after his 'pep talk' Schulz sent one of his officers, Lieutenant Georg Polzing, to the town of Perlach outside Munich to terrorize the population. Polzing chose a dozen people, apparently at random, brought them back to the Hofbrauhaus – the famous Munich beerhall were Hitler launched his putsch in 1923 – and had them shot out of hand. Brought to trial seven years later in 1926, Polzing was acquitted of all charges, despite the fact that none of his victims have been Communists.

"The worst single atrocity occurred two days later, on 6 May, when a group of Catholic workmen belonging to a religious club, the St. Joseph Society, holding a regular meeting to discuss the innocuous subject of Education and Theater. This harmless gathering was suddenly disrupted by a Freikorps patrol led by a Captain Alt-Sutterheim who picked out thirty men and had twenty of them shot, beaten and bayoneted to death as 'Communist terrorists.'

"So many victims perished during the purge that Munich's harassed undertakers were overwhelmed and bodies were left to decay in the streets. Mass graves were dug and the carcasses were piled in. This makes the calculation of the number of victims difficult. The Freikorps themselves claimed 600 but this figure represents only the number of 'official' executions. 'Unofficial' murders totaled 1200, according to Freikorps propagandist Freidrich von Oertzen, and this figure is almost certainly an underestimate."

(A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis, Nigel Jones, pgs. 155-157)

By May 7 Munich was described as "purified" to the Ebert government. This episode marked the high point of Thule, but hardly the end of his its influence. In the next installment we shall consider the influence Thule had on the Nazi Party and its fortunes after the Battle of Munich. Stay tuned.