Welcome to the fourth installment in my examination of the origins of the
Patriot movement. In the
first installment I briefly considered the longstanding ties between super patriot groups and the
US intelligence community, which began in earnest during
World War I. General
Ralph Van Deman, the so-called father of military intelligence, was the chief architect of the nation's industrial security apparatus, which sought to combine the efforts of government intelligence-gathering organizations (i.e. the FBI and the various branches of military intelligence) along with private intelligence networks, some "Overworld" (i.e. the
American Legion, private detective firms, corporate security divisions, etc), some fringe groups (i.e. the
American Protective League, the Church League, the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, etc).
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| General Ralph Van Deman |
The objective of this operation was to ensure that "subversives" (which were increasingly defined as liberals in general as the years went by) were ferreted out of industries deemed vital to the nation's security. Thus, the
blacklist was born. This tradition was carried on by organizations such as the
American Security Council (ASC) in the post-
World War II era, as I noted before
here.
As I wrapped up the first installment I introduced several of the former high ranking military officers (more than a few of whom had a background in military intelligence) who were instrumental in establishing the modern day Patriot ideology after WWII. I also introduced the three primary strands of the Patriot movement, namely the
Liberty Lobby, the
John Birch Society, and the
Posse Comitatus varieties.
In the
second installment I began my examination of these strands starting with the Liberty Lobby. Over the course of that installment and the
one that followed it I revealed that the chief financial backers of
Willis Carto and his Liberty Lobby were a cabal of "former" Nazis and their collaborators as well as Colonel
Wickliffe Preston Draper, another military intelligence officer who also happened to be from an extremely powerful and rich New England family. Besides the Liberty Lobby, Draper was also a major financial patron to the eugenics-centric think tank the
Pioneer Fund (which he founded and left much of his immense fortune to), the above mentioned American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, the
International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, the
Citizens' Councils, and the proto-
Christian Identity "ministry" of
Gerald L.K. Smith, among others.
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| Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, who preferred to be addressed as Colonel Draper, or simply the Colonel, throughout his civilian life |
As I was wrapping up the
third installment I introduced the organization that was most likely behind both the John Birch Society and the Posse Comitatus, namely the
Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem (SOSJ), Knights of Malta, sometimes referred to as the Shickshinny Knights of Malta. The SOSJ was a secret society that did indeed claim descent from the Medieval
Knights Hospitallers, but via the
Russian line of succession. While these claims are highly tenuous the group seems to have long been used as an intelligence front.
It's long time Grand Master, Charles Pichel, was linked to Nazi intelligence in the 1930s and an alleged member of the Order, "Count" Cherep-Spiridovich, was indicted on sedition charges along with
Silver Shirt founder
William Dudley Pelley in 1942. After WWII the Order received an influx of former high ranking military men, more than a few of them with backgrounds in intelligence.
The most powerful of these individuals was General
Charles Willoughby, General
Douglas MacArthur's long time chief of intelligence. In the wake of WWII Willoughby became involved in the recovery of Golden Lilly funds (the looted gold and other precious materials Imperial Japan had accumulated during the war) as well as establishing close ties with
yakuza chief
Yoshio Kodama. Willoughby would also become involved in
wet works (beatings, blackmail, assassinations, etc) in Japan after the war that frequently involved death squads comprised of both US and Japanese soldiers as well as the yakuza itself. Willoughby's suppression of leftists in Japan was so complete that the far right
Liberal Democratic Party (of which Kodama was the chief force behind for decades) has been the nation's ruling party almost exclusively since 1955.
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| General Charles Willoughby, whose men referred to him as "Sir Charles" due to his aristocratical manner |
Willoughby also seems to have played a major role in establishing the
Civil Air Transport/
Air America drug trafficking network as well. Another individual closely involved in this escapade, Admiral
Charles Cooke, was also a member of the Sovereign Order of Saint John. All of this was discussed in the third installment of this series.
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| Admiral Charles Cooke |
With that out of the way, let us move along to the JBS and the Posse Comitatus. I shall begin with the Birchers. First, a bit about the JBS's official background and its role within the framework of the
Cold War to the "Overworld" Establishment (for indeed, it was very much a tool of the Cold War national security state).
"At a time when the U.S. government was formally committed to fighting communism, yet appeared to many observers incapable of doing so, the John Birch Society gave its members an outlet to express their grievances and a compelling, explanatory world view that made sense of contemporary affairs. The Society's conspiracy theories cast even respectable public figures as the puppets of powerful 'Insiders' lurking behind both communism and capitalism. The Society's bizarre ideology and aggressive use of massive letter writing campaigns led critics to characterize Birchers as 'extremists' and supposedly antiestablishment 'radicals.' But while the Society positioned itself as oppositional in relation to elected administrations, its actual program was prototypically both right-wing and state-supportive. The Society supported those government agencies charged with enforcing law and order and global U.S. military supremacy while it opposed government efforts to regulate business, promote civil rights, and provide welfare services.
"John Birch was a Baptist missionary and an air force intelligence operative during World War II. Ten days after the war ended, Birch was killed by Chinese Communists, and thus earned folk hero status as the first casualty of 'World War III.' Among John Birch's admirers was Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer and former director of the National Association of Manufacturers. Before he arrived at the idea of starting the John Birch Society, Welch began making a name for himself by distrusting his own anticommunist writings. Among these was his 1954 manuscript called The Politician, in which Welch called President Eisenhower a conscious agent of the 'communist conspiracy.' (It was not until public exposure of The Politician in 1960 that Welch's conspiracy theories propelled the young John Birch Society into the limelight of controversy.) Welch inaugurated the Society in December 1958 when he invited a group of business associates to spend two days listening to his theories and battle plans. The transcript of Welch's monologue was published as The Blue Book, which became required reading for new members of John Birch chapters starting in 1959."
(The Road to Dominion, Sara Diamond, pgs. 52-53)
It's interesting to note that John Birch, the missionary and Air Force intelligence officer (the Air Force was still under the control of the Army at this point, as was its intelligence service), served under General
Claire Chennault, the famed leader of the
Flying Tigers mercenary force and one of the figures involved in the founding of Civil Air Transports/Air America.
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| General Claire Chennault |
"Incidentally," the birch tree itself seems to have held some kind of significance to the
SS. According to John Bevilaqua in his
JFK -The Final Solution Waffen SS men paid respects to recently interred fallen comrades by placing crossed birch branches over their grave site. Further
Wewelsburg, the Medieval castle that became the headquarters of the SS, was apparently located in the region where the apocalyptic saga of "The Battle at the Birch Tree" took place.
Himmler was reportedly aware of this legend. In some accounts his interruption was shaped by occultist
Karl Maria Wiligut (alias Weisthor), who believed that the legend foresaw the SS as a bulwark against forces from the East.
"The impetus for this changing conception of the Wewelsburg came almost certainly from Weisthor, who had accompanied Himmler on his visits to the castle. Weisthor predicted that the castle was destined to become a magical German stronghold in a future conflict between Europe and Asia. This idea was based on old Westphalian legend, which had found romantic expression in a 19th century poem. This described an old shepherd's vision of a 'Battle at the Birchtree' in which an enormous army from the East would finally be beaten back by the West. Weisthor brought this legend to Himmler's notice, claiming that the Wewelsburg was the 'bastion' against which this 'new Hun invasion' would be broken in the fulfillment of the old prophecy. Karl Wolff, Chief Adjutant of the Personal Staff, recalled that Himmler was very moved by Weisthor's idea, which squared with his own notion of the SS's future role in the defense of Europe in a coming East-West confrontation which he expected in one to two hundred years time. While it cannot be definitely proved that Weisthor influenced the choice of the Wewelsburg in late 1933, his interpretation of the legend and other discussions with Himmler contributed importantly to the new conception of the Wewelsburg as an SS order-castle from 1935 onwards."
(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pgs. 186-187)
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| the interior of Wewelsburg |
So, the John Birch Society label could be an allusion to both military intelligence and the SS --both of which would certainly be consistent with the narrative I'm unfolding. And of course the John Birch Society certainly saw itself as a bulwark against the "new Hun invasion" from the East, i.e. Soviet Communism.
With that out of the way, let us know focus in on the intelligence aspects of the JBS. The JBS as an intelligence operation was not especially evident during the first two decades of the group, when it chiefly focused upon propaganda that perpetuated communist subversion hysteria and reinforced the Cold War national security state. However, there was much membership overlap between the JBS and the American Security Council (as I noted before
here), which was deeply involved in industrial security, specifically blacklisting, up until the 1970s. At that point their was something of a public backlash against private intelligence gathering and organizations such as the ASC and
Wackenhut (which was along affiliated with the ASC) began to back away from such pursuits.
But the far right was still obsessed with the need to blacklist "subversives" and by the late 1970s more fringe groups got in the private intelligence/blacklisting racket. One of the most prominent was the John Birch Society, via an organization known as
Western Goals Foundation.
"Operating out of a quaint townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia's colonial Old Town, Western Goals seeks to keep track of 'subversives' in the United States. It was the brainchild of Representative John P. McDonald, the late chairman of the John Birch Society, who once described Martin Luther King, Jr., as a man 'wedded to violence.' Until his death aboard Korean Air Line flight 007 in September 1983, McDonald watched Western Goals grow dramatically. Today, Western Goals carries on its business; the martyred McDonald's office within the townhouse is preserved as something of a shrine. To his fellow ultra-rights, McDonald was 'the first victim of World War Three.'
"Established in 1979, Western Goals brought together a whole range of rightists who lamented the passing of domestic surveillance of 'subversives.' Among its primary sponsors are Nelson Bunker Hunt, the Texas billionaire who made an unsuccessful bid to corner the international silver market in 1982. On the advisory board are General Singlaub and another member of the United States Council of World Freedom, Anthony Kubek. In Western Goals they are in the company of conservative congressmen (Bob Stump, R-Arizona, and Philip Crane, R-Illinois), retired high-ranking military officers (Admiral Thomas Moorer, General Raymond Davis, General Lewis Walt, and General George S. Patton III) and such McCarthy-era luminaries as redbaiting lawyer Roy Cohn.
"Western Goals is open about its mission: it seeks a return to the internal surveillance practices of the 1950s. One of its 'documentary' films, The Subversion Factor, details the internal security problems that in their view have beset the United States since the late 1950s. It also operates a weekly radio program that is carried by over seventy stations throughout the country and publishes a newsletter and such monographs as D'Aubuisson on Democracy and The War Called Peace, 'a startling account of those who are actually financing the nuclear freeze movement.'
"Not content to merely pine for the past and lament the present, Western Goals has a plan and the means to implement it.
In the field of Marxists, terrorism and subversion, Western Goals has the most experienced advisors and staff in the United States. Acting on the advice of these nationally known professionals, the Foundation has begun the computerization of thousands of documents relating to the internal security of our country and the protection of government and institutions from Communist-controlled penetration and subversion.
"Such a programme hit a responsive chord among the New Right; from a modest budget in 1980, revenues increased over 500 percent the following year. According to the Goal's own records, 29 percent of this came from foundations, with another 14 percent from corporations/ By 1983, it had an operating budget of nearly a half-million dollars."
(Inside the League, Scott & Jon Anderson, pgs. 155-156)
It's entirely possible that a good chunk of the funding for Western Goals also came from off-the-books sources as well, as shall be examined in just a moment. First, two quick points need to be made about the above quote: the longtime JBS chairman and founder of Western Goals was actually named
Larry P. McDonald, and not John. Otherwise everything else the Anderson bros wrote about McDonald is correct, including the patron saint-like status he occupies in the modern day Patriot movement. In fairness, McDonald's death
was bizarre: He died on 1 September 1983 when a flight he was on,
Korean Air Lines (KAL) 007, crossed into Soviet airspace near
Moneron Island. Officially he and all other passengers were killed when the plane went down but rumors have persisted (largely among the Birchers and like organizations) that were were survivors, including McDonald.
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| Representative Larry P. McDonald |
The number of the flight, 007, is especially curious. Besides being the number of
James Bond, it was also reportedly what Elizabethan magician and spy
John Dee signed his correspondences with when he was plying the latter trade. Naturally the conspiratorial right has long seen McDonald's death as the work of the Communist-Masonic conspiracy and indeed it is odd. Was McDonald's death some kind of hit carried out by elements of the Eastern Establishment against the ultras? Did the ultras themselves target McDonald for martyrdom (a possibility not as outlandish was it may sound when one considers the legacy of violent and bloody deaths amongst far right figures as well as the rather cultish reverence paid to said figures after their deaths)? Did some
Trickster-like force simply strike down a wicked man in a synchronicistic fashion? Or was McDonald simply done in by his own cheapness when it comes to airfares? Or is it possible all four things contributed to McDonald's death on some level? I wish I knew dear readers.
Moving along to the second point to be made from the Anderson bros quote: One of the Foundation's chief public backers,
Nelson Bunker Hunt, was the son of
H.L. Hunt, the longtime patron of Charles Willoughby who was also involved in the Civil Air Transport/Air America shenanigans as chronicled the
prior installment of this series.
Another official backer was a wealthy publisher.
"Henry Regnery and Bunker Hunt funded Western Goals, an organization that is now dead. Western Goals reportedly compiled lists of people judged subversive..."
(The Nazi Hydra in America, Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins, pg. 224)
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| Henry Regnery |
Regnery was of course the founder of
Regnery Publishing, a company long involved in producing far right tomes. Regnery was also deeply involved with the American Security Council, as I noted before
here.
There were other JBS affiliates who became involved in the Western Goals intelligence apparatus, most notably the
Freemen Institute.
"W. Cleon Skousen, a former Salt Lake City chief of police and a former agent of the FBI, authored The Naked Communist, which became a classic in Birchist circles. In 1971 Skousen opened the Freemen Institute, a Mormon-staffed political think tank that worked closely with the Birch Society through the latter's affiliated Western Goals Foundation. Headed by U.S. Representative and John Bitch national chair Larry McDonald, Western Goals was publicly exposed in the 1980s as an illegal intelligence gathering operation."
(Roads to Dominion, Sara Diamond, pg. 168)
Skousen is of course another long time darling of the JBS and the conspiratorial right in general, having been the author of
The Naked Capitalist, its selective quoting of
Tragedy and Hope being the only access much of the public had to
Quigley's notorious history for many years. Skousen's involvement in far right causes began when he became the field director of the American Security Council's investigative unit in the mid-1950s. Charles Willoughby was of course a member of the American Security Council as was the Sovereign Order of Saint John, which
was a part of the ASC's Coalition for Peace Through Strength.
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| Cleon |
Skousen left the ASC in 1960 for the JBS where he seems to have performed similar services for the JBS via his Freemen Institute that he had earlier performed for the ASC just as the Council was moving out of private intelligence gathering for PR reasons.
And here, a decade later, are Cleon and other staples like Larry McDonald engaged in an intelligence gathering operation that was meant to fill the gap left by the dismantling of the House of Un-American Activities and precede with noble endeavor of blacklisting "subversives" (i.e. anyone to the left of the JBS). This says more about the JBS's curious concept of "freedom" than this researcher could ever put into words.
But even more curious is a possible source of funding for the Western Goals Foundation: the
Golden Lilly gold bullion. This revelation was made by Robert Curtis, a former banker who founded a successful mining and refining business in Sparks, Nevada. In the mid-1970s Curtis became aware of the Golden Lilly and began to investigate several sites in the Philippines. It was at this point that he was approached by the JBS, who offered Curtis funding to recover some of the gold.
"The Birch Society was started in 1958 by a group of wealthy businessmen and far right politicians convinced that every closet in America contained communists, Jews, wetbacks, Afro-Americans, liberals and homosexuals. The Birchers were also dedicated gold and silver bugs. They had a longstanding grudge against U.S. presidents, starting with FDR, who had intervened to make private ownership of gold in America a crime, with penalties of heavy fines, confiscation and imprisonment. They also believed that Nixon had sold the United States down the river twice --first by taking America off the gold standard, second by his recognition of Red China. On the other hand, Nixon's actions made it possible for the first time since 1933 for Americans to purchase and own gold legally. So Nixon opened up avenues for the Birch leadership to acquire gold overseas, and sneak it into America through the back door of Canada, where it added to the Society's fund for anti-communist activities. Like other ultra-conservative groups in America... the Birchers had a long-term strategy to create their own right-wing vigilante force. Not something crude like Hitler's Brown Shirts or the Gestapo. More like a private FBI, assisted by elite private military forces. This would cost money, hence the need for large amounts of privately held gold.
"Although he was a conservative, and a patriot, Curtis was not a Bircher. But he shared their fascination with precious metals. Once he joined the Marcos gold hunt, Curtis told the Birch Society board confidentially about the hidden Japanese loot. He described his role in the Leber Group, and his participation with Marcos in sanctifying the god, and in finding discreet channels to market it.
"Curtis did not realize that the inner circle of the Birch leadership already knew about the Santa Romana recoveries, and the roe Robert B. Anderson and John J. McCoy in setting up the Black Eagle Trust. They also knew about the roles of Generals MacArthur, Whitney and Willoughby in the M-Fund, and all the financial manipulations in postwar Tokyo. They knew this because one of the founding members of the Birch Society was Colonel Laurence Bunker, a humorless fellow who had succeeded General Bonner Fellers on MacArthur's personal staff in Tokyo. Bunker became MacArthur's chief aide and spokesmen in Tokyo from 1946-1951 --the years of witch-hunting in Japan that made the McCarthy witch-hunts in America look bland.
"The Birch Society money men who arranged the loan for Curtis were Washington State senator Floyd Paxton and his son Jerry, who ran Kwi Lok Corporation, makers of the ubiquitous plastic clips used to close plastic bags in supermarkets. Another participant, Curtis said, was Jerry Adams of Atlanta, head of the Great American Silver Corporation, a precious metals company associated with the Hunt brothers. Curtis said he was informed by Congressman McDonald and Robert Welch that the loan for Curtis to work with Marcos had been 'cleared' by them personally. They told Curtis he was to deal directly with multi-millionaire Samuel Jay Agnew, who sat on the national council of the Birch Society.
"They agreed to give Curtis three loans totaling $375,000 to cover his expenses in the Philippines. These loans were unsecured except for a promise from Curtis of 22.2 percent of his Leber share, and a 10 percent share in his Bataan refinery near the eel farm"
(The Gold Warriors, Sterling & Peggy Seagrave, pgs. 174-175)
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| recovered Golden Lilly treasure |
Unfortunately for Curtis he was double crossed shortly after arriving in the Philippines by the nation's president,
Ferdinand Marcos, who blocked Curtis from the sites he had planned to excavate. After a time he was sued by the JBS to recover the money they had loaned him even as the Birchers were making their own deal with Marcos.
"Jay Agnew of the John Birch Society took Curtis to court to recover the money loaned to him through the Commonwealth Packaging. Curtis was unable to repay because Marcos now had bankrupted him, with Birch Society help. A Marcos family source source told us that before they sued Curtis, the Birchers already had made a deal with Marcos to market the $20-billion in gold they originally intended to get through Curtis, so the Birch board of directors achieved all they originally sought. The Agnew lawsuit against Curtis, we were told, were a price demanded by Marcos to clinch the deal...
"The FBI, which previously took no interest in Curtis, now ordered an investigation. The Bureau did not seek to indict the Agnews for their part in the scheme, which was to sell the black gold in the Bahamas and smuggle the proceeds into America by way of Canada. Instead, Curtis and MacAllaster were indicted for discussing the details by cable or telephone, based on evidence provided by the Birchers. Their trail was to begin on August 17, 1978, but Curtis and MacAllaster were broke. They also believed their public defender was not up to the job. At a hearing, Curtis plead no contest, and was placed on probation for five years."
(ibid, pgs. 184-185)
As note above, the Western Goals Foundation was established in 1979, seemingly with ample funding out of the gate. Also noted above was the Bircher desire to use the proceeds of the recovered Golden Lilly treasure to fund some type of "private" FBI. Its probably just a coincidence that Western Goals emerged shortly after the Curtis affair was winding down and the Birchers had laundered several billion dollars worth of recovered gold for President Marcos.
Whatever the case, this did not mark the end of the Birchers involvement with the Golden Lilly. By the late 1980s they were once again considering another expedition to the Philippines, this one headed by General
John Singlaub (the chairman of the
World Anti-Communist League during its most militant phase as well as a member of the Western Goals Foundation) on behalf of two private military companies, Nippon Star and Phoenix. Robert Curtis, in what most have been rather awkward for all parties, was also approached to lend his expertise once again.
"To Curtis's astonishment, anger, and dismay, it now emerged that Singlaub had persuaded the John Birch Society to take over funding Nippon Star, and it was Jay Agnew's son Dan who had Foringer recruit Curtis. Foringer's first phone call to Curtis was from the office of Agnew's attorney in Seattle. This was truly bizarre, because it was the Agnews who had destroyed Curtis financially and professionally in 1975... Having ruined Curtis, the Agnews told Singlaub they would only finance Nippon Star recoveries in the Philippines if he and Foringer recruited Curtis, to gain access to his maps and reverse-engineering."
(ibid, pg. 206)
Officially this expedition was as much of debacle as Curtis' first collaboration with the Birchers. Still, these examples of the JBS's dealings with the Golden Lilly strongly imply a link to Willoughby and possibly the Sovereign Order of Saint John as well.
As noted in the
prior installment of this series, Willoughby was deeply involved in with discovery of the Golden Lilly in the wake of World War II. Further, the JBS seems to have been tipped off about the Golden Lilly by Colonel Laurence Bunker, a member of MacArthur's inner circle. As such, it was highly probable that Willoughby (who was extremely close to MacArthur) and Bunker, a co-founder of the JBS, had some type of relationship.
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| Colonel Laurence Bunker, co-founder of the JBS and former MacArthur man |
Then, some 20 years down the road, we find General John Singlaub involved with both the JBS and the Golden Lilly. Singlaub was part of the old "China cowboys" clique of
OSS men who fought with
Chiang Kai-shek in China during the late 1940s before the communists took over the nation. Another member of this clique,
William D. Pawley also seems to have been involved with MacArthur and Willoughby, specifically in regards to the establishment of Civil Air Transport/Air America, an airline involved in smuggling opium for Chiang Kai-shek's
KMT party.
What's more, Singlaub was reportedly a member of military intelligence during the Korean War when Willoughby was the head of all military intelligence in the theater, at least
according to the CIA's official website (which also implies that Willoughby and Singlaub were involved in separate operations, however).
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| General John Singlaub |
These things, combined with the JBS's long time association with the American Security Council (an organization that both Willoughby and the Sovereign Order of Saint John belonged to) seem to imply that there was a strong link between the JBS and Willoughby/SOSJ. Further bolstering this link is the presence of Brigadier General
Bonner Fellers as an early member and backer of the JBS. Fellers was of course a member of the SOSJ as well as one of the chief advocates of the "communist conspiracy" (Fellers' role in the spread of such notions was discussed in
part one of this series).
For instance, Fellers claimed to have realized the Allies were prolonging the war for the sake of the Soviet Union while he was stationed in Cairo as part of the
North African campaign. Fellers' claim is rather amusing considering that he was himself tipping of the Nazis to the movements of Allied troops during this time.
"... During 1941, the OSS stationed Fellers in Cairo. While there to observe the British North African campaign, he broadcast reports to his superiors using the black code. The Italians had broken the black code and within minutes of Feller's transmissions, Rommel knew the position of British forces and their battle plan. Once the Allies discovered the breach in security, the Army transferred Fellers briefly to the States before attaching him to MacArthur's command."
(The Nazi Hydra in America, Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins, pgs. 467-468)
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| General Bonner Fellers |
Given how many other individuals already considered in this series gleefully collaborated with the Nazis, such a possibility is certainly probable as far as Fellers is concerned. Nor was this the only assistance that Fellers rendered to World War II-era fascists. Fellers was also deeply involved in the exoneration of
Emperor Hirohito, an operation that utilized monies from another Golden Lilly-derived slush fund known as the Keenan Fund.
"... Documents we found in the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, show that MacArthur and Bonner Fellers conspired with former president Herbert Hoover to guarantee that Hirohito would escape punishment of any kind, and that General Tojo would falsify testimony to take all responsibility for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Intermediaries, including Admiral Yonai, were paid large sums from the Keenan Fund to negotiate with Tojo and guarantee his perjury. In his papers, General Fellers proudly describes his meeting with Yonai to set up the false testimony. (During the war, incidentally, Admiral Yonai was the immediate superior of Rear Admiral Kodama.)
"A number of key witnesses who resisted subornation died violently, or under suspicious circumstances..."
(Gold Warriors, Sterling & Peggy Seagrave, pgs. 112-113)
Fellers also then seems to have had dealings with the Golden Lilly. This combined with the fact that he was one of the chief sources for alleged collaborations between prominent Americans and the Soviet Union seems to indicate that he was a major figure within the JBS, as well as the post-WWII conspiratorial right in general.
And with that out of the way I shall now turn to the Posse Comitatus. While the links between the John Birch Society and the Sovereign Order of Saint John are somewhat circumstantial, the same cannot be said of the Posse Comitatus. Prominent members of the SOSJ were directly involved in establishing the Posse and its ideology, as shall be discussed in a moment. First, however, we need to briefly consider the man chiefly responsible for the spread of the Posse Comitatus as well as its vast influence on the modern day conspiratorial right.
Contrary to public reports, the Posse was not founded by former Silver Shirt member Mike Beach, but by a former military intelligence officer who served under Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines during World War II: Colonel William Potter Gale.
"... Gale hoped to lay the groundwork for a violent revolution by creating a paramilitary group known as the Posse Comitatus. Latin for 'power of the county,' the term refers to the medieval British practice of summoning a group of men to aid the sheriff in keeping the peace by pursuing and arresting lawbreakers. While the historic role of the posse comitatus had been to aid civil authorities in suppressing violence and vigilantism, Bill Gale's revision stood this ancient principal on its head --his posse was devoted to promoting armed insurrection. Under Gale's definition, anyone could call out the Posse, not just the sheriff, and if government officials attempted to enforce 'unlawful' legislation the Posse could arrest and put them on trial with a 'citizen's jury.' Although others later claimed the credit, it was Bill Gale who first developed and popularized the strategy. And it was Gale's encouragement that promoted right-wing militias to form local Posse chapters to mobilize against blacks, Jews, and others perceived enemies of the Republic, including government officials they said were subverting the intent of the Constitution. Building on the bigotry of Christian Identity theology and his involvement with the radical right after he left the army in 1950, Bill Gale popularized a set of ideas that have influenced anti-government activists to the present day. After founding the Posse Comitatus in the 1970s, Gale helped launch the Christian Patriot movement in the 1980s. And long before the first so-called 'citizens' militias' appeared in the 1990s, Gale had introduced the concept of private armies and the 'unorganized militia.'
"Of course, there was nothing original in a right-wing group that cloaked itself in patriotism while instructing its followers to take up weapons, enforce white supremacy, root out communist subversion, and resist the evils of central government. But Bill Gale added a new and important twist that made the Posse Comitatus novel and attractive. His message was embellished with elaborate legalistic rhetoric that invoked, among other things, the Constitution, Magna Carta, and medieval principals of British law in order to legitimize his violent call to arms. Gale's Posse also was unique because it successfully bridged the gap between the anticommunist and segregationist movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the paramilitary movements of the 1990s. And during the early 1970s --when other right-wing organizations were collapsing --the Posse thrived by disseminating its ideas and spawning successive waves of violence. Unlike the paramilitary Minutemen of the 1960s, which was disabled after many of its leaders were prosecuted for illegal firearms possession, the Posse was largely unaffected by Bill Gale's death in 1988, seventeen years after its founding. Lie children grown to maturity, the forces he shaped have fueled the radical right to the present day...
"Undergirded by the twin pillars of racism and anti-Semitism, fear of communist subversion and advocacy of states' rights became the rallying cry of the radical right in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the genius of Bill Gale's invention of the Posse Comitatus was the way in which he took these themes and repackaged them in psuedoreligious legalism that emphasized individual and 'natural rights.' For decades, the Ku Klux Klan and its various allies had created social movements and sought political power based upon explicit appeals to racial purity and Christian Nationalism. Bill Gale was no less fanatical in his devotion to 'white survival' or his denunciations of world Jewry. But Gale fashioned an elaborate, American-sounding ideology that married uncompromising anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and white supremacy with the appealing notion of the extreme sovereignty of the people. By emphasizing the idea that white Anglo-Saxon Christians were joined together by natural and 'lawful' rights that trumped those of a (racially) corrupt state, Bill Gale's Posse Comitatus reached a new constituency of conservatives who would be reluctant to embrace an ideology that revolved solely around crude bigotry."
(The Terrorist Next Door, Daniel Levitas, pgs. 2-4)
There is compelling evidence that not only did Gale became involve in paramilitary activities well before 1971, but that he was actively involved in recruiting from other veteran and patriot groups in a bid to establish a network that spanned across a wide spectrum of mainstream and far right organizations. Two early organizations he was involved in that seem to have served as fronts for this network were the Christian Defense League (CDL) and the California Rangers. The CDL was founded by
Gerald L.K. Smith, the former
Silver Shirt member and proto-Christian Identity minster who had long been bankrolled by Wickliffe Preston Draper (among others). Another member of the CDL and close Gale associate (until the late 1960s) was
Wesley Swift, a former Klansman, long time Gerald L.K. Smith associate and one of the earliest Identity minsters.
"One of the driving forces in the CDL in its early days was retired Lieutenant Colonel William P. Gale, who had trained guerrilla bands in the Philippines during World War II. In the late 1950s Gale formed the small, paramilitary California Rangers, which the California attorney general's office alleged was 'designed as a secret underground guerrilla force... linked with other non-military organizations by by a common ideology and leadership.' Gale's strategy was to try to recruit members through veteran's organizations, but it backfired in 1963 when the Long-Beach Press-Telegram exposed his efforts to convert the American Legion Post in Signal Hill into a Ranger front, and one of his Rangers was arrested for selling a machine gun and Sten gun to undercover agents. In 1963, when a wealthy Los Angeles benefactor put money into the CDL, Gale tried his hand at improving its fortunes (at the same time professing 'the ministry of William P. Gale' from the pulpits of Swift's churches.
"The CDL's activities stepped up under Gale's leadership. According to an infiltrator who later supplied surreptitiously made tape recordings to radio station KLAC in Los Angeles: 'I was the security agent for the CDL national director. I guarded the security building and the files therein, the files which extended through most every state in the union. Members of the Klan, members of all other extremist groups who joined in to help make the Christian Defense League the central group, the reporting group, for all those organizations. The very sister and co-worker in this, of the CDL on the West Coast, is the National States Rights Party.' On the night of June 10, 1964, he related, Swift and his associates met in Reseda with George Lincoln Rockwell to discus 'a merger for the purpose of exchanging and compiling intelligence information; to make and keep an up-to-date roster of agents, double agents and other informers,' and to devise a command order. California Deputy Attorney General Thomas McDonald has advised that there has been a 'real coalescence' between the Swift complex, the NSRP, and Klan-like groups in Southern California.
"As for the paramilitary aspect, the infiltrator revealed: 'We had occasion to have with us, from time to time, people who sold illegal guns for the rightist groups, without the proper registration procedure. In many cases these weapons were hidden in holes in the ground where they might be dug up later, in what they called defense against communism and against aggression, even by the FBI, the federal forces, or the National Guard.' About this time California law enforcement encountered a rash of arms episodes..."
(Power on the Right, William Turner, pgs. 102-103)
Earlier Turner, a former FBI agent, had also alluded to Gale taking over a portion of
Robert DePugh's
Minutemen.
"DePugh's future as the titular head of the paramilitary right depends not only on his ability to tread water while in jail, but on the result of current shakeouts and realignments taking place. Some splinter groups calling themselves Minutemen seem to be gathering strength. One, New Orleans-based, is headed by a retired Army colonel. Another, centered around Hollywood and Orange County, calls itself the 'Real Minutemen' and functions within a church structure; one of its members, who served in military intelligence during World War II, privately claims to have a close relationship with the FBI. The main split between these versions of the Minutemen and DePugh is that they view Moscow, not Washington, as the principal enemy, and consequently cooperate with federal authorities."
(ibid, pg. 99)
As Gale was a former military intelligence officer who was living near Hollywood and had recently founded his own Identity church around this time frame, it seems rather certain he is the individual in question. Further collaborating this connection was a letter sent to researcher Kenn Thomas by former Minuteman "Reverend" Bob LeRoy (who was yet another military man who served under Douglas MacArthur) which briefly outlines the history of DePugh's Minutemen:
"The Minutemen [group] was national and split into three regions: East Coast; Central States (my area); and West Coast. Had over 30,000 readers of a newsletter called 'On Target,' went out in the late 70s. 1962-1980... Nearly all of the 'Christian Identity' leaders came to our annual conventions in Kansas City, MO from 1973-1980. I have met them all at one time or another. I was one of the few Baptist ministers who fully supported the Minute Men from 1962 to 1982. Now the new militia movement has taken over most of the old Minute Men. DePugh and I both believed like Gerald L.K. Smith. But we were not as anti-Jewish or anti-Negro as Smith and also the New Identity pastors. The Identity people under Sheldon Emry; Colonel Bill Gale of California; Gordon Kahl of Harvey, ND; Bob Miles of Michigan; Richard Butler of Idaho; James Ellison of Arkansas; Louis Beam of Texas; Mr. J.B. Stoner of Georgia; Larry McMurry of Montana; K.A. Badynski (KKK) of Tacoma, WA; Col Jack Mohr of Mississippi; Rev. Thorn Robb of Arkansas; and Dr. Ed Fields of Georgia; etc. were all leaders and editors of small newsletters like myself. Some are still at it after 40 years.
"Colonel Gale and I both fought the Japs together in Leyte and Luzon (1944-1945). He was about five years older than I. The youngest Captain (and Major Colonel later) in the U.S. Army. I was a mere PFC, LM gunner and parachutist for 3 years with the 511th P. Inf. Reg. There.
"The movement got its start under Wesley Swift of California during World War II and grew under R. Butler and Colonel Gale, who studied under his teachings. Rev. Sheldon Emry operated on his own in Arizona. Others in other states did the same. So like the Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Pentecostals and Methodists, etc. they are split-up into dozens of right-wing factions nationally."
(JFK & UFO, Kenn Thomas, pgs. 107-108n35)
 |
| Robert DePugh |
DePugh seems to have been on the outs with Gale during the 1960s (probably due to the fact that DePugh was busted by the FBI while Gale was dropping hints that he was an informant for the Bureau), but they same to have patched things up in later years as the above indicates.
What then are we to make of this seemingly nation spanning network that brought together elements of the Minutemen, the KKK, and the Christian Identity movement? And what of Gale's alleged ties to the FBI and his attempts to recruit from the American Legion? As explained in depth throughout my examination of the American Security Council, industrial security was originally a joint FBI/military intelligence operation that utilized both "Overworld" elements such as the American Legion as well as fringe, "super patriot" groups such as the American Protective League. Is it possible then that Gale was engaged in some type of industrial security operation?
I've already established that the JBS-linked Western Goals Foundation was engaged in such and operation and indeed former FBI agent William Turner alluded to the possibility in his classic
Power on the Right that the American Security Council was receiving reports from the Minutemen during the 1960s. Turner also indicated in one of the above quotes that Gale was establishing an intelligence network among far right groups. Did the reports from such a network also end up in the files of the ASC?
Beyond that, was there even a more sinister purpose than intelligence gathering? If so, it likely involved only a small fraction of the 30,000 individuals the Reverend LeRoy claimed were affiliated with the Minutemen. Recluse suspects that Robert DePugh's Minutemen was used as both a front and a recruiting ground for the "Real Minutemen," a group of individuals likely far more serious and disciplined than the buffoons that were generally attracted to DePugh's Minutemen and most paramilitary right wing groups in general. Thus, there was a kind of "Overworld" Minutemen (the DePugh organization) and an underground Minutemen that Colonel Gale, a former military intelligence officer with experience in guerrilla warfare, was deeply involved in.
In fairness, it should be noted that many "serious" researchers (i.e. mainstream liberals that dismiss any and all conspiracies on principal) have strongly disputed Gale's military background, and thus his ability to organize some type of underground force.
"In September 1943, Gale was a young major just two months shy of his twenty-seventh birthday when he shipped out to Australia. A specialist in logistics, he had spent the preceding months in Washington D.C., procuring tanks, trucks, and equipment for the war against the Japanese. Gale's role was to help supply American forces aiming to seize islands in the Central and Southwest Pacific, but he did not stay long enough to accomplish much. After just two weeks of duty he complained of liver trouble and jaundice and was hospitalized. Aside from a case of hookworm, his medical tests came back negative but he still spent nearly three months recuperating in the hospital. Not long after resuming his duties in early 1944, he complained again of jaundice. Though he may have had liver problems, army doctors were more concerned by the growing anxiety they observed in the young officer and they diagnosed Gale's condition not as hepatitis, but as 'psychoneurosis... manifested by abdominal pain, indigestion, weakness, insomnia and fatigue.' Gale was flown back to the United States in April where he remained until a medical board let him return to the Pacific the following month. Despite the diagnosis of army doctors, Gale's superiors still considered him 'a willing officer, anxious to learn and be of value,' and dubbed him 'exceptionally loyal.' In November 1944, Gale was appointed director of supply for the army's Pacific Section Headquarters on the northwestern coast of New Guinea. It was from this vantage point that Gale grandiosely claimed he spent six months planning 'every operation in the Philippines,' outfitting and training Filipino guerrilla units and serving in combat on Leyte and Luzon. These events were described in theatrical and overblown detail in a 1991 biography of Gale by Cheri Seymour, a California journalist who befriended the aging rightist shortly before he died in 1988.
"... Gale also claimed to have rescued thousands of American prisoners of war from behind enemy lines in daring operations at Los Banos and Cabanatuan in the Philippines, but Gale's military records offer scant support for his version of events. In a further effort to embellish his war record, Gale said he had been shot in the shoulder, which simply wasn't the case. In fact, he was never wounded during the war and he received no medals for injuries suffered in battle. Of the seven citations and awards he did receive, all but one were simply for military service during wartime in the Pacific theater, and none were given for having faced enemy fire.
"By August 1945 Gale was back in an army hospital, complaining of jaundice, and the following month he was evacuated to the U.S. Gale later claimed he was so ill that the army shipped him home with his coffin. Meanwhile Josephine had given birth to a second child --a girl, Kathleen --and the couple's third child, Bill Jr., was born in October 1946, the same month Bill left for Tokyo. The family spent the next two years in Japan while Bill worked with the staff of General Douglas MacArthur, helping to supervise the U.S. occupation forces in Japan. It was Gale's most significant military assignment, and his family enjoyed the excitement and prestige of life overseas. Although Gale's superiors classified his performance as 'excellent,' they also commented on his lack of stamina, and in January 1948 Gale restated his habitual complaint of hepatitis. However, as with his previous hospitalization, liver tests showed no evidence of disease, again begging the question of his psychological state. By August he was back in California."
(The Terrorist Next Door, Daniel Levitas, pgs. 18-20)
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| Gale after his service ended |
Levitas goes on to note that the circumstances surrounding Gale's retirement from the army in 1950 were every bit as mysterious as the rest of his service.
"After twelve cumulative years of army service, Lieutenant Colonel William Potter Gale was pronounced permanently unfit for military service and classified as disabled due to hepatitis, despite repeated medical tests to the contrary. Gale never disclosed the real reason for his forced retirement, and he lied when he said he'd left the army at the rank of full colonel --a claim he repeated incessantly until his death in 1988.")
(ibid, pg. 21)
Does this mean Gale was a quack then?
Hardly. In point of fact, his contradictory military record --which combines frequent phantom medical claims with almost uniformly complementary praise for his performance --is a strong indication that he was involved in something curious. If Gale was trying to fake his way out of military service by making up illnesses, as Levitas seems to be implying, then why did his superiors constantly give him favorable reports? Why was he brought back to Japan to work with MacArthur's staff? And what of the Reverend Bob LeRoy's claims of having served with Gale at Leyte and Luzon, as noted above?
It's entirely possible that if Gale really was engaged in "
unconventional warfare" (as he called it) in the Philippines as he claimed that the military would falsify his records as such operations frequently include activities and deeds that the American public would not be accepting of. The way Gale's record is presented as it stands both disproves his guerrilla warfare claims as well as bringing his credibility into further question by playing up his mental instability. Such a presentation would be especially likely if he was engaged in truly sensitive operations. But so much for Gale's involvement in paramilitary affairs for the time being.
Not only was Gale one of the chief architects of the modern paramilitary movement amongst the far right, but he also seems to have been among the first individuals to spread the concept of Common/
Admiralty Law that is the central tenet of the modern day
sovereign citizens and freeman-on-the-land movements. While Gale was probably not the individual who spawned these doctrines he clearly had an enormous influence of their spread, particularly be de-emphasizing the racial aspect of this doctrine in favor of vague concept of individual freedom. But be assured, the whole sovereign citizen concept was initially based upon race.
"According to this doctrine, a 'sovereign was not just any individual born and residing in the United States. Instead, sovereigns were those originally mentioned in the Preamble to the Constitution in the phrase 'We the people.' And as any high school student should know, at the time the Constitution was written, 'We the people' meant 'we the white people.' The (white) racial definition of citizenship had then been reaffirmed in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which reads in part: 'A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a 'citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution.' By repeating these arguments, the Posse Comitatus and its Christian patriot look-alikes stood on solid historical, if morally shaky, ground. Before the Civil War the United States has indeed been a 'white Republic.'
"After the Civil War, however, the Fourteenth Amendment had countermanded Dred Scott and guaranteed the rights of citizenship to the newly freed slaves and all others born in the United States. The racial definition of citizenship had been changed. Like many unreconstructed Confederates and a host of other far-right propagandists, Christian patriots believed the Fourteenth Amendment had not been passed in a constitutional fashion. The southern states had been under military occupation at the time, they argued.
"Christian patriot ideologues took their arguments took their argument a step beyond constitutional validity. The Fourteenth Amendment had created a special class of citizens, they charged. This special class received its rights from the government through the individual's contract with the state. Sovereigns, on the other hand, those descended from the original (white) sovereigns, still received their rights (and responsibilities) from God. By this logic, inconsistent as it might be, sovereigns could either join the compact or asseverate themselves from it."
(Blood and Politics, Leonard Zeskind, pgs. 80-81)
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| one characteristic of sovereign citizens is their insistence on issuing their own licences plates |
This isn't to say that there isn't something nefarious about the
Fourteenth Amendment. Through clever wording (almost surely inserted by the Eastern banking and industrial interests who bankrolled the Union during the Civil War) it did effectively guarantee the rights of flesh and blood human beings to corporations, a fact that the
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling recently reaffirmed. But the Posse Comitatus attempted to take this historical fact and combine it with bizarre Biblical and legal interruptions combined with equally bizarre racial doctrines that created an entirely separate legal frame work for those who knew how to claim their "sovereignty." In the case of William Potter Gale, this ideology even incorporated beings from outer space.
"... But Gale, like his mentor Wesley Swift, had a peculiar obsession with creatures from outer space, and his texts included phantasmagorical theories about the role of otherworldly beings in establishing racial hierarchies on earth. According to Gale, Adam and Eve and their descendants were celestial beings of 'pure seed' whose Aryan character was demonstrated by their fair complexion and ability to blush, a trait absent from nonwhite races. The racial prospects of the divine first family were shattered, however, when Eve was seduced by the devil and gave birth to Cain who then murdered his brother, Abel, and became the ancestral father of the Jews."
"Gale's interpretation of the Book of Genesis contained a novel twist on the story of 'original sin.' According to conventional Christian theology, 'the fall' of woman and man occurred when the serpent convinced Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and Adam followed suit. While the cause and meaning of 'the fall' have been debated for centuries, including its obvious sexual connotations, Identity believers like Gale were the first to define 'original sin' as race-mixing.
"In contrast to the pure offspring of Adam and Eve, Cain's children were the product of the sexual union of Eve and the devil, and as such were 'a pollution of the Holy and the Celestial seed.' They also multiplied rapidly, 'had no morals... and were evil.' To prevent further race-mixing, God instructed Adam and Eve to separate themselves from Cain's offspring. Satan, on the other hand, was constantly luring them into the ranks of the 'Enosh' --nonwhite, 'kinky-haired,' fallen angels who had originated on other planets and been brought to Earth by Lucifer after he was cast out of God's Kingdom. According to Gale --who probably got these ideas from Wesley Swift --the arrival of the so-called Enosh predated the Creation of Adam and Eve by hundres of thousands of years, hence their designation as 'pre-Adamic' and essentially nonhuman..
"According to Gale's biblical genealogy, nearly all of Adam's descendants polluted their celestial bloodline by intermarrying with either the nonwhite Enosh or the satanic children of Cain... Gale's scheme of biblical racial classification translates thusly: The white, true Israelites of the Bible who mixed with the pre-Adamic Enosh transformed themselves into 'non-white races,' while the offspring of those who took Canaanite wives sometimes retained the appearance of Adamic people, but nonetheless acquired the satanic character of their Jewish ancestors. The true Israelites called the Canaanites and their descendants 'Edomites' or 'Yehudi,' which translates simply as 'Jews' in Hebrew but which Gale claims means 'the cursed ones...'
"While the non-white Enosh were barbaric primitives and descendants of Luciferian aliens from outer space, and the Jewish Edomites were malevolent agents of the devil, the pure descendants of Adam were a master builder race who, among other things, used 'atom-powered space vehicles' and 'divine knowledge' to build the Great Pyramid of Giza.'
"Viewed through the lens of Christian Identity, Gale saw all of history as a Manichean struggle between white, divine, Anglo-Saxon Christians, and Satanic Jews. It was Europe, Gale wrote, that the devilish Yehudi gained control of the wealth of the nations they invaded and acted as 'destroyers from within.' America, in contrast, was a 'New Jerusalem,' divinely ordained to advance the interest of Aryan, 'Adamic Israelites' through its thirteen colonies that were formed from the 'thirteen tribes[sic]' of ancient Israel. Echoing themes that would later become cornerstones of Posse ideology, Gale wrote that America was founded by English immigrants fleeing religious persecution was 'one of Satan's lies.' Gale even regarded the Boston Tea Party as an anti-Jewish protest, saying that those colonists who opposed the English stamp tax did so because they knew the tax would enrich the 'money lenders' of England and Europe, who were children of Cain. And repeating a long-standing anti-Semitic myth, Gale claimed that George Washington foresaw the invasion of America by 'Cain's children' in a vision. This heavily recycled anti-Semitic canard was only one many promoted by Gale. He also wrote that the Jewish celebration of Yom Kippur --the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar --disqualified Jews as American citizens. For Jews, the holiday emphasizes atonement, forgiveness, and self-improvement, but according to Gale, the observance proved Jews were dishonest and disloyal. That is because the traditional Kol Nidre prayer recited on the eve of the holiday asks that any impulsive and unfulfilled vows made during the previous year be nullified. Although the prayer refers only to pledges made between an individual and God, anti-Semites like Gale contended that it was a ruse to enable Jews to secretly renege on agreements with Gentiles...
"The Faith of Our Fathers championed states' rights by attacking the Fourteenth Amendment and repeating an argument popular among Southern segregationists --that the Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection under the law regardless of race, had never been legally ratified by the states. Gale also asserted that blacks were not citizens and therefore had no right to vote..."
(The Terrorist Next Door, Daniel Levitas, pgs. 79-82)
The interest Gale and Swift both had in extraterrestrials may well have stemmed from Silver Shirt founder
William Dudley Pelley, who was one of the first figures to combine Ufology with occult teachings in the post-WWII era. Indeed, Pelley may even have been one of the
first individuals to advocate an early concept of ancient aliens. It's interesting to note that Pelley
was indicted for treason in 1942 along with suspected Sovereign Order of Saint John member "Count" Cherep-Spiridovich. Nor was this the SOSJ's only brush with UFOs --during the Willoughby era one of its members was a military intelligence officer named Colonel
Philip J. Corso.
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| Colonel Philip J. Corso |
Yes, the same Colonel Philip J. Corso, who became involved with the
Nazi "ratlines" in Italy after the war; the same Colonel Philip J. Corso who hinted at helping organize an
Operation Gladio-style network in Germany during the 1950s; the same Colonel Philip J. Corso who was working for the staff of segregationist Senator
Strom Thurmond in the 1960s; and the same Colonel Philip J. Corso who wrote
The Day After Roswell and spent years promoting any number of the classics of UFO lore.
In fairness, it should also be noted that Gale also had a long time association with Freemasonry. Indeed, his "church" held it services for 13 years at a Masonic Temple in
Glendale. Gale claimed that one of his earliest followers,
Aryan Nations founder
Richard Butler, was a
Master Mason when Gale introduced him to Identity theology. What's more, Gale alluded to one of his financial patrons as being a powerful Hollywood figure and Freemason.
"Gale collected himself and slumped forward, his elbows on his knees. 'Anyways, I had just been introduced to that element, you might say, living in Hollywood and meeting with people I didn't even know were connected with them. Like one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood...
"'My offices were in his building when I was with Waddell and Reed. He owned the Outpost Estate development; I bought my home through his real estate agency. He owned the Masonic Temple on Hollywood Boulevard --he built it. He owned the First Federal Savings and Loan building on Hollywood Island.'
"'What was his name?' Seymour asked.
"It was a long German name. I sent him some material, from my office to his executive suite, and he said, "Oh, are you a friend of Gerald Smith" I said, "Yeah." And he said "So am I, but don't let anyone know it." He liked me and he liked Douglas MacArthur. Gerald Smith had all those millionaire people supporting him.'"
(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pg. 85)
The individual Gale is alluding to can be no other than
Charles E. "Mr. Holltwood" Toberman, who developed many of Hollywood's major landmarks including the
Hollywood Bowl,
Grauman's Chinese Theater,
Grauman's Egyptian Theater,
El Capitan Theatre, the
Roosevelt Hotel and of course the
Hollywood Masonic Temple. Gale alleged that Toberman supported him until the time of his death in 1981.
 |
| Charles E. Toberman (top) and his Hollywood Masonic Temple (bottom) |
I find Gale's claim in this case to be highly probable. Gale was a successful businessman in the 1950s who initially worked for
Hughes Aircraft Company after leaving the army before he went to
Waddell and Reed. He did indeed own a house in
Outpost Estate and reportedly his children played with the offspring of celebrities such as
John Wayne. What's more, Gale continued to have ample funds even after his extremist views drove him out of the corporate world and despite the fact his "ministry" never attracted more than a handful of followers. Naturally, "serious" researchers such as Daniel Levitas have chalked up Gale's financial prosperity to his ability to sale life insurance to widows.
Further, while Gale was certainly prone to embellishments from time to time, there is not seemingly a logical reason for him to claim that one of his chief patrons was a wealthy and influential Freemason. Masonry is almost universally despised by the conspiratorial right, the chief audience for Gale's ideology. Such a revelation could have easily thrown his credibility into question amongst such circles, which is probably why he only acknowledged it at the tail end of his life.
Even stranger is that Gale himself was also partly Jewish, a fact researcher Daniel Levitas exhaustively documented in
The Terrorist Next Door. Gale went to great lengths to keep this little detail hidden throughout his life, as one would imagine. Colonel Gale is hardly the only ideologue of the racist far right to have a trace of Jewish ancestry, however. For instance, author Kevin Coogan, while researching his ground breaking
Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, also came to suspect that
Yockey had Jewish relations as well.
 |
| Saint Francis the Jew? |
Gale's Jewish ancestry is especially curious when considering his arrest and trial in the mid-1980s. Gale, after nearly three decades in far right causes with an explicatively paramilitary bent, was finally arrested for conspiracy (among numerous other things) in 1986. Gale's arrest was part of a broader legal action targeting an organization he had founded in the early 1980s known as the Committee of the States.
While this endeavor seemed superficially less militant than that of the Posse its impossible to tell what Gale's true objective for it was as his health began to rapidly deteriorate shortly after it's founding in 1982. By the time he was arrested in 1986 he only had two years to live and his pending death was rather evident by the time his trial began to unfold in 1987.
 |
| Gale around the time of his trail |
His followers, including his wife Roxanne, believed a conspiracy was at hand due to several key dates during Gale's downfall: His arrest in 1986 and the onset of his trail in 1987 occurred during
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. What's more, the trail verdict read just hours after
Yom Kippur began in 1987.
Gale was sentenced to three years in prison, but he never lived to serve any of it as he shed his mortal coil on April 28, 1988, two days shy of the forty-third anniversary of Adolf Hitler's death. Had the Jewish conspiracy finally caught with the partly Jewish Gale? Or was his arrest and trail a ready made martyrdom for a man who may have already realized he was dying some time beforehand?
It's especially interesting to note that Gale's trail unfolded at the same time as the Federal government's sedition trail against Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, Texas Klansman
Louis Beam (who brought the "
leaderless resistance" strategy to the Patriot movement), and eleven other Patriot leaders who were by and large more vital than Gale at that point as well as far more militant (several of the individuals indicted had been linked to
Robert Matthews' "
Order"). They were all acquitted on April 7, 1988, shortly before Gale returned to his celestial Aryan beings, in what many have described as a shocking defeat for Federal prosecutors.
 |
| Louis Beam |
Thus, a dying Gale achieved martyrdom almost simultaneously as several of the guiding lights of the next generation of Patriots were acquitted of sedition and were allowed to carry on Gale's vision. Such is the way the Jewish conspiracy rolls, I suppose.
But let us get back to Gale's ideology and the million dollar question: Where exactly did Gale pick up this curious beliefs? According to Gale himself, it was from the United States Army.
"'We published a little Identity publication at that time; it was a bunch of military officers who asked me to put it out... Colonel Ben (Von) Stahl and Admiral Crommelin and General P.A. Del Valle of the Marine Corps. We had a meeting and they said, "You know, the people should know a little about this law, Posse Comitatus." The military police school in the army had been teaching it for years.'"
(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pg. 86)
Yes dear reader, the above mentioned General P.A. Del Valle is the same General Pedro Del Valle of the Defenders of the American Constitution and the Sovereign Order of Saint John. According to Grand Master Charles Pichel himself in his
History of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta Colonel Ben von Stahl was also a member of the Order (see page 192 of that work for a full list of military men affiliated with the Order circa 1970).
But before getting to this mysterious group of military officers Gale mentions above, let us first consider the possibility that the US military was responsible for indoctrinating officers with this ideology. As outlandish as it may sound, it is not beyond the realm of possibility. It is beyond a doubt now that the army deliberately indoctrinated officers in deeply racist and anti-Semitic ideology prior to World War II.
"The professional officers corps... was even more exercised that the 'real Americans' were losing control of their own country; as one officer wrote in 1920, 'the "Master Race" is... gradually ceasing to be master in its own house, it is being swamped by... Mongrels, greasers, whelps, and hounds.' Such opinions were part of an official, institutional culture in the military at the time, pervasive among officers... The Army War College, which prepared selected officers for positions of command, invited scientists such as Davenport and McDougall to lecture on race, and Earnest Sevier Cox's White America was assigned to part of the coursework. Another regular visitor, even well into the 1930s, was Madison Grant protege, Harvard-educated T. Lothrop Stoddard, whose books were recommend reading. In The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, for example, prospective command officers could learn of the need to maintain 'white political domination' in the face of the colored threat --not so much from blacks, who were dismissed as inferior savages, but from 'Asiatics,' the yellow race, who according to Stoddard, constituted the main danger in an impending struggle for control of Africa and 'mongrel-ruled' South America. Up until the outbreak of war, Stoddard continued to lecture on 'World Affairs' at the college, praising the racial policies of the Third Reich and encouraged similar, legally mandated measures for segregation and antimiscegenation in the United States, based on 'increasing knowledge of the true nature of race by modern science.'
"The inner circles of the officers corps were particularly concerned over the threat to Nordic culture posed by the influx of Jews. As Joseph Bendersky has recently demonstrated in The "Jewish Threat," during the teens and twenties racial anti-Semitism among military leaders was 'not only prevalent and open but considere morally,politically, and even scientifically warranted.' The military culture adhered strongly to every anti-Semitic stereotype: Jews were physically weak, cowardly, and incapable of loyalty to anyone but themselves --'a disgrace to the flag,' according to one Colonel in 1918, and the only people in the 'world without moral honor or character.' In addition, they were the controlling force behind every movement for world domination, from Bolshevism to international finance. Predicting 'such massacres of the Jews... as have never been thought possible' by the Russians after World War I, one officer observed that 'nothing they can do [to the Jews] is bad enough to fit the case.' These views became common at the highest levels through the next three decades, as midlevel officers in the World War I era assumed upper-echelon positions. In 1940, recently retired deputy chief of staff General George Von Horn Moseley offered to join the America First Committee only if it first agreed 'to eliminate... all Jews and Jewish influence' from the organization and to 'come out before the nation with a definite statement against the Jew and all he stands for'; after the war, he called for a policy to 'give the Jews a limited time in which to close their affairs and leave our shores.' In 1945, General George S. Patton did not consider 'the displaced person... a human being,' especially 'the Jews who are lower than animals...'"
(The Funding of Scientific Racism, William H. Tucker, pgs. 27-29)
Needless to say, if the military was indoctrinating future high ranking officers with such doctrines as the need to maintain "white political domination," some form the Posse Comitatus ideology would not be out of place. Further collaboration of this possibility is provided by the esteemed historian
Alfred W. McCoy, who recently noted a mysterious policy the
Army War College embraced circa 1919.
"... In October 1919 an Army War College conference on domestic security described the United States as an 'Anglo-Saxon nation' facing the specter of revolt by ethnic radicals, making it imperative to implement 'War Plan White,' a color-coded strategic scenario that the War Plans Division have prepared in the event of a Russian-style revolution by an estimated 1.5 million American radicals. Making the racial prism explicit, another War Department report stated that the greatest threat were pan-Latinism, pan-orientalism, and bolshevism, which had 'an intimate connection of the Jews and Jewry.'
(Policing America's Empire, Alfred W. McCoy, pg. 314)
Is it possible that the race-based paramilitary forces former military men attempted to create after World War II were some how related to this mysterious "War Plan White'? This was a policy after all that military intelligence, especially that relating to industrial security, was deeply involved in. Vigilante, racist groups spread like the plague in the United States in the wake of the First World War, with a few such as the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies having been founded by former military intelligence officers such as
John Trevor Sr. While there was a crackdown on such groups during World War II they seemingly made a vigorous comeback as the Cold War set in, the Posse arguably being the most successful of such groups.
And indeed, prominent Posse members have long claimed that military officers were the chief force behind the movement from the very beginning.
"A noteworthy and generally unpublicized aspect of the radical right's history is the military involvement since the movement's inception, James Wickstrom, head of Posse Comitatus, wrote in a 1989 Intelligence Update circulated from Pennsylvania that '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,' wrote Wickstrom, 'Posse Comitatus officers from 36 states were trained in all types of leadership positions and guerrilla warfare...'
"Indeed, Seymour discovered that in addition to Colonel Gale's paramilitary training and lecturing excursions across the country, other retired World War II and Korean war officers such as Colonel Benjamin [Von] Stahl from Nebraska and Colonel Jack Mohr from Mississippi conducted nationwide training exercises."
(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pgs. 218-219)
It would seem that SOSJ member Colonel Benjamin von Stahl was still involved with the Posse in the 1980s. But then again, former military officers seem to have actively been organizing an underground paramilitary network as early as the early 1960s, possibly sooner (remember, Sovereign Order of Saint John members Pedro Del Valle and Bonner Fellers was already attempting such things with the 1950s-era Defenders of the American Constitution). Journalist Dick Russell would allude to the possibility that both Pedro Del Valle and Charles Willoughby were behind Gale's early 1960s efforts to organize a paramilitary underground.
"Willoughby's publisher and friend Billy James Hargis was a short, portly, double-chinned fellow in his midthirties who gained much of his financial support from H.L. Hunt and other wealthy oilmen. Along with Willoughby, who was his Washington eyes and ears, another Hargis' advisory committee members was retired lieutenant general Pedro del Valle, U.S. Marine commander in the Pacific during World War II. After the Korean War, del Valle had become vice president of ITT's Latin American operations.
"In September 1961, Hargis announced that a secret fraternity to coordinate right-wing activities would soon be formed. Then, on March 21, 1962, a carefully selected group was called together in Washington. No press representatives were allowed at the founding session of the Anti-Communist Liaison, which brought together about on hundred delegates representing some seventy-five right-wing groups at the Washington hotel. Named as its chairman and operating head was Edward Hunter, a National Advisory Board member of Young Americans for Freedom.
"The new group's insider was U.S. representative John Rousselot, a John Birch Society spokesman and Christian Crusade board member from Los Angeles. It also had a Southern Californian 'outsider,' Colonel William Potter Gale, yet another ex-MacArthur man. In 1962, as California state chairman of the Constitution Party, Colonel Gale announced his candidacy for the governorship on a platform calling for the abolition of all income taxes. He also organized, soon after the pivotal springtime meeting in Washington, a paramilitary outfit.
"Willoughby, del Valle, and a number of other military officers put together Gale's tactical guide, or manual of arms of the future. It suggested that 'patriotic underground armies should be created, named the "Rangers" who should train to assassinate, sabotage, and overthrow the "People's Democracy."'"
"A Long Beach Press-Telegram expose called Gale's Rangers 'a secret guerrilla group composed of persons devoted to extremist racial and religious beliefs.' Not long after their spring 1962 formation, the Rangers would begin to attract a wide range of wanderers along an L.A.-to-Miami route..."
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 111-112)
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| the Reverend Billy James Hargis, one of the trailblazers of the modern day fundamentalist Christian movement and a close associate of Charles Willoughby |
By Gale's own admission, as noted above, Sovereign Order of Saint John members General Pedro del Valle and Colonel Benjamin von Stahl were among the individuals who suggested the founding of the Posse. As noted in
part one of this series, Gale was also a close friend of Sovereign Order of Saint John member Bonner Fellers, who also seems to have shaped his ideology. Given that del Valle and Fellers were both involved with the Defenders of the American Constitution it would certainly seem both had an interest in establishing a paramilitary network even before they met Gale.
Then there's SOSJ member Charles Willoughby, who would have been Gale's commanding officer during World War II. Russell seems to strongly indicate that Willoughby himself was also actively engaged in this bid by former military officers to create an underground force, a most ominous sign. As noted in the third installment of this series, Willoughby had run a highly effective terror campaign in postwar Japan that so thoroughly crushed dissidents that the party he and MacArthur backed, the Liberal Democratic Party, has remained the ruling party almost exclusively since 1955.
Conventional histories would have you believe that Willoughby was incompetent and a buffoon. Few have seriously considered the possibility that the intelligence network he created has had an effect on the course of America's contemporary history. But as we shall examine in future series, there is indeed compelling evidence that several of the holy grails of conspiracy culture bear the traces of Willoughby and the SOSJ crowd. Stay tuned.
