Task Force 157 

As the Black Eagle Trust Fund grew, it was distributed in private accounts across the globe in over 100 banks, and administered by General Earle Cocke, an associate of Bill Donovan, and financial advisor to every U.S. President from Truman to Clinton, until his death.[1] Cocke, a Grand Commander of the Knights of Malta, was the front man for Paul Helliwell. Another key Black Eagle strategist, and friend of Sid Richardson, Robert B. Anderson, after he resumed private life, remained intimately involved with the CIA’s worldwide network of banks, set up after the war by Helliwell.

Helliwell would become the primary covert operations banker for U.S. intelligence, setting up in Nassau Castle Bank and then Mercantile Bank and Trust. According to Jim Drinkhall in the Wall Street Journal, Castle Bank was “set up and principally controlled” by Helliwell, who “was instrumental in helping to direct a network of CIA undercover operations and ‘proprietaries.’”[2] Account holders at Castle Bank included Chiang Kai-Shek, as well as organized crime figures. Some of the most notable clients included John Fogerty and other members of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tony Curtis, Hugh Hefner, Penthouse magazine owner Robert Guccione, and members of the Pritzker family owners of the Hyatt hotel chain. Reputed organized crime members that were customers included “Mr. Las Vegas,” Jewish mafioso Moe Dalitz.[3] In the early 1970s, Castle Bank was investigated by the IRS, but the case was later dropped under pressure from the CIA, who claimed pursuit of the investigation would endanger “national security.”[4]

When Castle Bank needed to be closed, Helliwell set up Nugan Hand Bank, a hornet’s nest of Ted Shackley’s “Secret Team,” which became intimately involved in the Iran-Contra Operation.[5] In the early 1970s, Shackley, Clines and Richard Armitage, the bagman for their Van Pao opium funds into the Phoenix Program, knew that their secret assassination program was going to be shut down in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand in the near future. Thus, in 1973, they established the “Secret Team” to operate privately. They set up a number of front companies and transferred Van Pao opium proceeds to a secret bank account in Australia.

Nugan Hand was an Australian merchant bank which collapsed in 1980 after the suicide of one of its founders, Australian lawyer Frank Nugan, resulting in a major scandal. According to a 1983 Australian government report, and the Wall Street Journal, Nugan Hand was involved in money laundering for international heroin syndicates and secretly aided US covert activities. The bank employed a number of former high-ranking CIA and Pentagon officials, while former CIA director William Colby was its attorney. The bank was founded by Nugan and Michael Hand, a man with a high school degree who had gone to Vietnam with the Green Berets. Hand had served in the 1960’s as a CIA operative in Laos with Thomas Clines, Ted Shackley, Richard Secord and Richard Armitage, all key players in the Iran-Contra scandal.[6]

Secret Team member Edwin Wilson was involved in the Nugan Hand as head of the US Navy’s super-secret Task Force 157. The task force, which operated even outside of the CIA’s oversight, was supervised by Henry Kissinger.[7] The task force was described by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post as “the U.S. military’s only network of undercover agents and spies operating abroad using commercial and business ‘cover’ for their espionage.”[8]

With the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Shackley and Thomas Clines had retained Edwin Wilson to travel to Tehran, Iran. The Van Pao proceeds transferred by Armitage to Tehran were to fund Wilson to head up the Secret Team’s secret assassination program against socialist and communist sympathizers, who were viewed as “potential terrorists” against the Shah of Iran’s government.[9]

Wilson claims Shackley asked him to go to Libya to keep an eye on Carlos the Jackal, the infamous terrorist, who was living there.[10] At the time, a strict sanctions regime was in place against Libya and the country was willing to pay a great deal for weapons and material. During this 1977 to 1979 period, Wilson established contact in Libya with Mohammar Gadhafi and secretly agreed to train Libyan anti-Shah terrorists in the use of deadly C-4 explosives inside Libya. Wilson also recruited a group of retired Green Berets to train Libyan military and intelligence officers. The Libyans used Wilson’s provisions to advance their interests around the world, including training terrorist cells, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) under the command of Ahmad Jibril, who was suspected of being behind the bombing of Pan Am 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.[11]

Wilson stated that his supplying of weapons to the Libyans was an attempt to get close to them and gain valuable intelligence.[12] However, according to the affidavit of Daniel Sheehan, part of the mission was to carry out the assassination of Gadhafi himself. Wilson’s activities with these Libyan terrorists were actually intelligence-gathering activities designed to expose the enemies of the Shah and their plans. Once identified, Wilson would communicate directives to former Operation 40 operative, Rafael “Chi Chi” Quintero, who was responsible for their elimination.[13]

Shackley was also suspected of being part of Wilson’s Egyptian-American Transport and Services Corporation (EATSCO), a front for his arms smuggling which was also accused of fraudulently billing the Department of Defense. Thomas Clines reportedly made “illicit millions” through EATSCO, but in prosecuting Edwin P. Wilson the U.S. government made a plea bargain that enabled him to escape prosecution, though he had to pay an additional $100,000 to settle civil claims.[14]

Shackley claimed that he would have become CIA director if President Gerald Ford had been reelected in 1976 and that only this investigation kept him from becoming CIA director or deputy director under new president Ronald Reagan.[15] After Nixon resigned, Ford brought in George H.W. Bush as Director of the CIA. Shackley was appointed Deputy Director of Operations, becoming second-in-command of all CIA covert activity. Shackley was hoping to eventually replace Bush as director of the CIA, but when Jimmy Carter was elected president, he replaced Bush with Stansfield Turner, Shackley was relieved of his deputy directorship in December 1977, before officially retiring from the organization in 1979, when the Carter administration announced wide cuts in the CIA’s network of officers and informants. Reportedly, Shackley was forced out of the CIA by Turner who disapproved of Shackley’s involvement with former agent Edwin P. Wilson and Thomas Clines, who were under federal investigation for smuggling explosives to Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya.[16]

Shackley had not given up hope however, and with the aim of getting Carter defeated in 1980, Shackley held several secret meetings with Bush as he campaigned for the Republican nomination. Shackley joined forces with Singlaub, his longtime OSS-CIA ally Ray Cline and Richard Helms to get Jimmy Carter removed from the White House. Cline’ close friend Michael Ledeen, now the Reagan State Department’s expert on terrorism, published an article in March 1980 criticizing Turner for forcing Shackley out of the agency.[17]

Club of Rome

Iran then happened to be under the newly installed Ayatollah Khomeini, then blustering about America as the “Great Satan.” In reality, the installation of British agent Ayatollah Khomeini was orchestrated through an alliance of a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood with two Tavistock affiliated organizations, the Aspen Institute and the Club of Rome.[18] The Aspen Institute is largely funded by foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation. The Club of Rome was a project initiated by the Rockefeller family at their estate in Bellagio, Italy. The founders of the Club of Rome were all senior officials of NATO. The Club of Rome grew out of a 1965 international conference called “The Conditions of World Order,” at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, which was owned by the Rockefeller Foundation, and which was sponsored by the CIA-front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), with a grant from the Ford Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[19] In 1959, Villa Serbelloni had become the property of the Rockefeller Foundation the bequest of  American heiress Helena “Ella” Holbrook Walker, which had been bought in 1939 by her husband, Alessandro, 1st Duke of Castel Duino (1881 – 1937), of the wealthy dynasty of Thurn of Taxis, who long had a relationship with the Rothschilds, the Illuminati and the Asiatic Brethren.

The founders of the Club of Rome were all senior officials of NATO. These included Aurelio Peccei, the chairman of Fiat who was also chairman of the Economic Committee of the Atlantic Institute, and Alexander King, the co-founder, who was Director General of Scientific Affairs of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In late October 1968, only half a year after the founding meeting of the Club of Rome, the OECD, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, held a “Working Symposium on Long-Range Forecasting and Planning” in Bellagio.[20]

An early member and supporter of the Club of Rome was Idries Shah who, as reported by Robert Dreyfuss in Hostage to Khomeini, worked with the Muslim Brotherhood in London. In 1965, Shah founded SUFI (Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas), and dubbed himself Great-Sheikh, not only of the Naqshbandi, but of all Sufi orders. Several presentations were given by scientists like Alexander King to the Institute for Cultural Research (ICR), which was originally founded by Shah in 1965 as the Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas (SUFI).[21] Other visitors, pupils, and would-be pupils included the poet Ted Hughes, novelists Alan Sillitoe and Doris Lessing, zoologist Desmond Morris, and psychologist Robert Ornstein, who co-wrote a book titled On The Psychology of Meditation (1971) with Oscar Naranjo. Over the following years, Shah established Octagon Press as a means of distributing reprints of translations of Sufi classics. Several of Shah’s books, Mulla Nasrudin, considered a folkloric part of Muslim cultures, were presented as Sufi parables, and which were discussed the Rand Corporation.[22]

October Surprise

At a November 1977 Lisbon conference sponsored by the Interreligious Peace Colloquium—an organization set up by Cyrus Vance and Sol Linowitz—Peccei conspired with several leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly with Seyyed Hossein Nasr of Teheran University, who was highly active during the Iranian revolution of 1979.[23] In 1974, Farah Pahlavi Empress of Iran commissioned Nasr, her personal secretary, to establish the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, the first academic institution to be conducted in accordance with the intellectual principles of the Traditionalist School.

Nasr also had close associations with several important American scholars such as Huston Smith. Wikileaks has recently published four cables relating to Nasr which establish his connections to Henry Kissinger and CIA Director Richard Helms, back in 1976.[24] Nasr, who was a close friend of the Shah of Iran, is Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. During the days of the Shah, Nasr directed the academy’s journal, Sophia Perennis. Nasr offered Peter Lamborn Wilson—also known as Hakim Bey, who founded the Moorish Orthodox Church of America (MOCA)—the position of editorship of the journal, which he edited from 1975 until 1978. Nasr is the father of Vali Nasr, who is currently Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, and a Senior Fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. He appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Due to the accuracy of his political predictions, Nasr has been hailed as a shrewd forecaster.[25]

The Carter Administration, prompted by his National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, had collaborated with the British to topple the Shah and install Khomeini. In November 1978, President Carter had named George Ball, also a member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommended that the US drop their support for the Shah in favor of Khomeini.[26] Soon after, in November 1979, David Rockefeller became embroiled in an international incident when he and Henry Kissinger, along with John J. McCloy and Rockefeller aides, persuaded President Carter through the U.S. Department of State to admit the Shah into the United States for hospital treatment for lymphoma. This action precipitated what is known as the Iran Hostage Crisis, when students belonging to the Fedayeen took over the American embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, where 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days.

According to Barbara Honegger, who served as a researcher and policy analyst with the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign, William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign had made a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections, promising them that they would get a better deal if they waited until Carter was defeated. She alleges that arms sales to Iran were a part of that bargain.[27] The hostages were released twenty minutes after Reagan’s inaugural address.

In an interview with the state-owned Radio Audizioni Italiane (RAI), the biggest television company in Italy, Richard Brenneke, claiming to be a former agent of the CIA, maintained that Gladio was also involved in the October Surprise conspiracy, to stall the release of the American hostages in Iran, as well as in the Iran-Contra operation. He further alleged that P2, under the guidance of Licio Gelli, used some of the finance made available by the CIA to set up agencies in West Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He also maintained that George Bush, then director of the CIA, not only knew about these CIA activities in Italy, but was in fact one of the masterminds behind them.

On January 20, 1981, at the moment Reagan completed his twenty-minute inaugural address, after being sworn in as President, the 52 American hostages were released by the Iranians into US custody, having spent 444 days in captivity. However, as revealed by Gary Sick, a US Navy officer who served on the National Security Council staff under Ford, Carter and Reagan, in October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan, the Reagan campaign for the presidency had involved secret talks with Iranian leaders to stall the release of the hostages in order to undermine Carter’s credibility. The deal involved US and Israeli arms shipments, which the Iranians needed for their war with Iraq, thus beginning a series of transactions that would burgeon into the Iran-Contra operation.

Peace Through Strength 

Despite his retirement in 1979, controversy continued to follow Shackley over his alleged involvement in great scandals of the Reagan era, including October Surprise, and later the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s.[28] Reagan was a long-time member of the ASC before his election to the presidency.[29] Two prominent backers of the ASC, oilmen A.C. Rubel and Henry Salvatori, were also part of the trio of Los Angeles millionaires who had launched Reagan into politics after the Goldwater defeat of 1964.[30] Reagan credited the ASC numerous times for providing the overall theme for the administration of his presidency.[31] A co-chairman of the ASC in the 1980s was James Jesus Angleton. In 1976, soon after his forced retirement from the CIA, Angleton set up the Security and Intelligence Fund (SIF). John M. Fisher, founder and long-time president of the ASC, was a founding director of SIF. Other career CIA officers affiliated with the ASC strategy board included Richard Bissell who was deputy CIA director under Allen Dulles, former Deputy Director of the CIA Ray Cline who was co-chairman and member of Shackley’s Secret Team, and Daniel Arnold, a CIA officer apparently deeply involved in the drug trade.

After Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, the ASC began to organize opposition to his plans to ratify the SALT II treaty. For that purpose, the ASC and the ASCF formed the Coalition for Peace Through Strength (CPTS) in 1978, also in order to galvanize a network of right-wing support to defeat the Democratic Party’s nominee in 1980. John Singlaub was Chairman of the CPTS, which, as detailed by Russ Bellant in Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, had links to Le Cercle and also served as a connecting point between Nazi collaborationists, fascists and the Reagan Administration.

Peace Through Strength (1952) was the title of a book about a defense plan by Bernard Baruch, godfather of the Military-Industrial Complex, who was listed among the founders, benefactors and strategists of the ASC.[32] As a presidential candidate Reagan joined the CPTS in 1978, and after his 1980 victory, the ASC was heavily represented on the transition teams and in his new administration. The CPTS favored military superiority over the Soviet Union, in flagrant violation of the SALT II treaty which was under consideration by the Congress at that time. The ASC produced Attack on the Americas! which was aired on 28 stations in the winter of 1980. The film showed urban scenes of violent military conflict with a voice-over talking about the spread of communism and the threat to the U.S. from Cuba and Central America. A second film, made for the CPTS by the ASC, was entitled The SALT Syndrome, which was aired more than 1000 times.[33] The ASC produced a number such films for television promoting new weapons systems, usually funded partly by major defense contractors.[34]

While the CPTS became more involved in elections and lobbying for Reagan Administration priorities, the number of organizations in the Coalition grew from about forty in 1978 to 171 in 1986. An important member of the Coalition was the Republican Heritage Groups Council (RHGC), whose founding chair was Laszlo Pasztor, former member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross and he founding chair of the Republican Heritage Groups Council (RHGC). The vice-chair of the RHGC was Philip A. Guarino, Republican National Committee advisor, and an honorary American member of the infamous P2 Masonic lodge. Both Michelle Sindona and P2’s Gelli were associates of Guarino.[35] Appointed chairperson of RHGC in 1987 was Anna Chennault, the wife of General Claire Chennault, who gained fame in the 1950’s and 60’s as an ardent advocate of Chiang Kai-Shek's dictatorship on Taiwan. She was also a member of the China Lobby, which for years has been closely linked to the authoritarian Taiwan regime.

The activities of RHGC head Karol Sitko’s were conducted in concert with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which served as a common milieu in which many CPTS members associated and networked.[36] The ABN took its current name in 1946 and claims direct descent from the Committee of Subjugated Nations, which was formed in 1943 by Hitler’s allies, including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Sitko was also the organizer for the West German branch of the Western Goals Foundation. When Yaroslav Stetsko, a prominent figure in the OUN who headed the ABN, visited the White House in 1983, his wife Slava Stetsko, who lived in Munich, West Germany, called on the ABN to support Reagan’s re-election. She repeated the call to ABN chapters during 1984 as well. The Reagan campaign cooperated with ABN, including scheduling an appearance by RHGC chairman Michael Sotirhos, head of Ethnic Voters for Reagan-Bush Campaign 1984 as well as the RHGC, at the 1984 ABN conference in New York City. Sotirhos said in an interview that “The Council was the linchpin of the Reagan-Bush ethnic campaign… The decision to use the Republican Heritage Groups was made at a campaign strategy meeting that included Paul Laxalt, Frank Fahrenkopf, Ed Rollins, and others.”[37]

The activities of RHGC head Karol Sitko’s were conducted in concert with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which served as a common milieu in which many CPTS members associated and networked.[36] The ABN took its current name in 1946 and claims direct descent from the Committee of Subjugated Nations, which was formed in 1943 by Hitler’s allies, including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Sitko was also the organizer for the West German branch of the Western Goals Foundation. When Yaroslav Stetsko, a prominent figure in the OUN who headed the ABN, visited the White House in 1983, his wife Slava Stetsko, who lived in Munich, West Germany, called on the ABN to support Reagan’s re-election. She repeated the call to ABN chapters during 1984 as well. The Reagan campaign cooperated with ABN, including scheduling an appearance by RHGC chairman Michael Sotirhos, head of Ethnic Voters for Reagan-Bush Campaign 1984 as well as the RHGC, at the 1984 ABN conference in New York City. Sotirhos said in an interview that “The Council was the linchpin of the Reagan-Bush ethnic campaign… The decision to use the Republican Heritage Groups was made at a campaign strategy meeting that included Paul Laxalt, Frank Fahrenkopf, Ed Rollins, and others.”[37]

Reagan regarded his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also popularly known as the “Star Wars” program, a key project of the ASC as a cornerstone of his Peace through Strength strategy.[38] SDI resulted from the efforts Le Cercle contact, retired Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, who was Co-Chairman of the CPTS. A Knight of Malta, Graham was also a member of the ASC, and a close associate of John Singlaub, as well as a member of the Heritage Foundation. Graham was previously Deputy Director of the CIA under William Colby from 1973-1974, and then Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency DIA in 1974-76.[39] Graham was also Vice-President of the American branch of WACL and held posts on honorary committees of the America Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.[40] In 1976, a year after the foundation of the US Committee of the ISC (USCISC), Bush asked Richard Pipes to work on the staff of Team B Graham.[41]

In March 1982, Graham and Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner outlined the results of a study that urged the Reagan administration to adopt an all-out effort to develop both military and peaceful uses of space. On 23 March 1983, Reagan announced SDI in a nationally televised speech. In 1984, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was established to oversee the program. As Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould explained, SDI was: “…the central military goal of the right-wing movement, as expressed by analysts of the Hoover Institution and the Heritage Foundation, strongly conservative members of congress, and right-wing organizations such as the American Security Council. SDI brings together the sometimes feuding strands of the conservative movement: the traditional right, the New Right, the neoconservatives, and the military Right.”[42]

LaRouche Movement

CPTS partners included numerous organizations connected to the ASC and involving Nazi collaborationists, the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, also known as the Shickshinny Knights, the Liberty Lobby and the LaRouche organization, headed by conspiracy wingnut Lyndon Larouche. Curiously, LaRouche claimed that Reagan’s SDI was his idea. The claim wouldn’t be so implausible if it wasn’t for the fact that LaRouche was in contact with members of Shackley’s Secret Team. LaRouche served as a non-combatant in the US army in the World War II, after which he was briefly associated with the Communist Party USA, before joining the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1949. Within the SWP, LaRouche was part of a faction called the Revolutionary Tendency which was later expelled by the SWP in late 1963 and early 1964. LaRouche then joined the Spartacist League before founding the National Caucus for Labor Committees (NCLC), a group which previously had posed as left-wing but in fact harassed anti-nuclear and other left-wing demonstrations with the help of Western Goals, which was founded in 1979 by Singlaub with backing from Nelson Bunker Hunt.[43] The NCLC aimed to gain control of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but the SDS expelled the NCLC in 1969.

LaRouche founded the US Labor Party in 1973 as the political arm of the NCLC. The LaRouche movement has included many organizations and companies around the world, which campaign, gather information, and publish books and periodicals. The publications included Executive Intelligence Review, founded in 1974. Other periodicals included New Solidarity, Fusion Magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology, and Campaigner Magazine. LaRouche-affiliated political parties have nominated many hundreds of candidates for national and regional offices in the US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Australia and France, for almost thirty years. LaRouche has run for U.S. president eight times, in every presidential election from 1976 to 2004. The first was for his own US Labor Party. In the next seven campaigns he ran for the Democratic Party nomination.

The LaRouche movement is seen as a fringe political cult.[44] LaRouche expected members to devote themselves entirely to the party, and place their savings and possessions at its disposal, as well as take out loans on its behalf, and party officials would decide who each member should live with.[45] Members all over the world would send information to NCLC headquarters, which would distribute the information via briefings and other publications. LaRouche organized the network as a series of news services and magazines, which critics say was done to gain access to government officials under press cover.[46] In 1984, LaRouche’s research staff was described by Norman Bailey, a former senior staffer of the United States National Security Council, as “one of the best private intelligence services in the world.”[47] At first the party was “preaching Marxist revolution” but by 1977 they shifted from left-wing to right-wing politics. As LaRouche stated in 1978, “It is not necessary to wear brown shirts to be a fascist… It is not necessary to wear a swastika to be a fascist… It is not necessary to call oneself a fascist to be a fascist. It is simply necessary to be one!”[48]

Carto’s Liberty Lobby and elements of the Ku Klux Klan established contacts with LaRouche’s ostensibly Marxist organization in 1974.[49] The Liberty Lobby defended its alliance with LaRouche by saying his US Labor Party had been able to “confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left.”[50] Roy Everett Frankhouser, Jr., a former member of Rockwell’s American Nazi Party who became Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, was a security consultant to LaRouche. Frankhouser was also an organizer of the Minutemen and a member of the National States' Rights Party, the National Renaissance Party, the Liberty Lobby, and the White Citizens Council. Frankhouser’s homosexual lover and associate was Dan Burros, who was listed in Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book. [51] Burros committed suicide in 1965 in Frankhouser’s apartment when his Jewish background was revealed in the New York Times.

In 1972, Frankhouser marched down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan wearing a black storm trooper’s uniform in defiance of the city’s ban on wearing Nazi outfits in public. That same year, Frankhouser approached the FBI about working as an informant, offering information on groups such as black militants, the Jewish Defense League (JDL), the Irish Republican Army and Black September.[52] The National Security Council approved a mission in which he was sent to Canada to infiltrate Black September, but he was unsuccessful.[53] Frankhouser was convicted of conspiring to sell 240 pounds of stolen dynamite in 1975 which were used in the bombing of a school bus in Pontiac, Michigan that killed one man. During the trial he revealed he was a government informant, saying that he was acting on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), though the government denied the assertion.[54] LaRouche initiated a legal defense on Frankhouser’s behalf. When the LaRouche movement learned that Frankhouser was an informant, it saw that as evidence of the “FBI-CIA-Rockefeller-Buckley” control of the extreme Right.[55] Frankhouser became a security consultant for LaRouche in 1979 after he convinced LaRouche that he was actively connected to U.S. intelligence agencies.[56]

LaRouche hired Mitchell WerBell, a paramilitary trainer, arms dealer, and a colleague of the ASC’s John Singlaub from their OSS days together in China.[57] WerBell had recently evaded separate indictments for arms smuggling and drug trafficking. WerBell was also in touch with Secret Team members such as Ted Shackley and Richard Secord, and allegedly was paid once through the Nugan Hand Bank.[58] According to Peter Dale Scott, ten days before his retirement, Singlaub attended a meeting of right-wingers who “Didn’t think the country was being run properly and were interested in doing something about it.”[59] WerBell introduced LaRouche to Singlaub, who later said that members of the movement implied in discussions with him that the military might help “lead the country out of its problems.”[60]

WerBell was working as the “personal security adviser” to Lyndon LaRouche on a purported coup plot.[61] As noted by Peter Dale Scott, “What makes this disturbing is that the LaRouche movement was then suspected of looking for a dissident general to lead a military coup.”[62] WerBell also introduced LaRouche to Larry Cooper, a police captain in Powder Springs, Georgia, where WerBell was running a counterterrorist training camp for members of the LaRouche organization. According to Cooper, LaRouche had proposed the assassination of Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Joseph Luns, and David Rockefeller.[63] Frankhouser also testified that members of LaRouche’s organization had asked him to assassinate Henry Kissinger.[64] However, in 1984, LaRouche said the allegations coming from WerBell’s circle were fabrications that originated with operatives of the FBI and other agencies.[65] “I think they’re a bunch of kooks of the worst form, Singlaub later wrote of the LaRouche organization. “I’ve been telling WerBell that if they’re not Marxists in disguise, they’re the worst group of anti-Semitic Jews [sic!] I’ve encountered. I’m really worried about these guys; they seem to get some people.”[66]

Gregory Rose, a former chief of counter-intelligence for LaRouche and who became an FBI informant, said that while the LaRouche movement had extensive links to the Liberty Lobby, there was also extensive evidence of a connection to the Soviet Union.[67] As Dennis King details in Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, from 1974 to about 1983 members of the LaRouche network also repeatedly met and shared information with KGB officers and other Soviet officials. The LaRouchites claimed that they served as “the ‘open channel’ through which the KGB could pass ‘policy-relevant’ information to the CIA, and vice versa.”[68]

LaRouche’s associates had for some years been in contact with members of the Reagan administration about LaRouche’s space-based weapons ideas, or what became the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).[69] His proposal was that the United States and Soviet Union could jointly develop systems which would, in due course, eliminate the danger of a ballistic missile attack. Between February 1982 and February 1983, with the approval of the National Security Council, LaRouche met with Soviet embassy representative Evgeny Shershnev to discuss the idea. LaRouche later attributed the collapse of the Soviet Union to its refusal to follow his advice to accept Reagan’s offer to share the technology.[70]

 Concerned by the threat of SDI, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev tried repeatedly at his four summits with Reagan to block its development and deployment. Gorbachev finally conceded that Russia could not compete with the United States in an arms race, and agreed to end the Cold War. Although many factors contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians are agreed that one of the most salient one was Reagan’s commitment to SDI. [71]

[1] Brigadier General Erle Cocke’s deposition in US District Court, Southern District of New York, April 13, 2000, April 13, 2000; Sterling & Peggy Seagrave. Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold (Verso, 2005), pp. 96-99.

[2] Jim Drinkhall. “CIA Helped Quash Major, Star-Studded Tax Evasion Case.” Washington Post (April 24, 1980).

[3] “Are Bahamas Banks Offering Tax Haven?” The Pittsburgh Press (December 30, 1975).

[4] Jim Drinkhall. “CIA Helped Quash Major, Star-Studded Tax Evasion Case.”

[5] Sterling & Peggy Seagrave. Gold Warriors, pp. 94-96.

[6] Paul DeRienzo. “Interview with Alfred McCoy.” Bear Cave (November 9, 1991).

[7] Joan Coxsedge. “Nugan Hand.” The Guardian: The Worker’s Daily. Issue #1765 (February 15, 2017).

[8] Bob Woodard. “Pentagon to Abolish Secret Spy Unit.” Washington Post (May 18, 1977).

[9] Affidavit of Daniel P. Sheehan.

[10] Peter Carlson. “International Man of Mystery.” Washington Post (June 22, 2004) p. C01.

[11] Billy Waugh & Tim Keown. Hunting the Jackal (HarperCollins, 2005). pp. 133–154.

[12] “Edwin Wilson.” Telegraph (September 28, 2012).

[13] Affidavit of Daniel P. Sheehan.

[14] Joseph J. Trento. Prelude to Terror, pp. 170, 261-62, & 267-68.

[15] Marshall, Dale Scott & Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 41.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Robert Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini, (New Benjamin Franklin House, June 1981).

[19] Frances Stonor Saunders. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 291.

[20] Matthias Schmelzer. “Born in the corridors of the OECD’: the forgotten origins of the Club of Rome, transnational networks, and the 1970s in global history.” Journal of Global History (2017), 12, p. 34.

[21] Elizabeth Hall, “At Home in East and West: A Sketch of Idries Shah,” Psychology Today 9 (2): 56 (July 1975).

[22] Idries Shah (Presenter), “One Pair of eyes: Dreamwalkers,” BBC Television, (19 Dec 1970).

[23] Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini.

[24] Wahid Azal. “Wikileaks on Seyyed Hossein Nasr.” wahidazal.blogspot.ca (December 1, 2016).

[25] Louis A. Delvoie. “Sunnis, Shias: Enemies forever?” TheWhig.com (January 15, 2016).

[26] William Engdahl. A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Dr. Bottiger Verlags-GmbH, 1992), p. 171-174.

[27] Jack Sarfatti. “In the Thick of It,” MindNet Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2A.

[28] Peter Dale Scott. “How a Deep State Plot Sank Jimmy Carter.” Who What Why (November 2, 2014).

[29] Lee Norrgard & Joe Rosenbloom III. “The Cold Warriors,” Common Cause Magazine, Jul/Aug 1985; “American Security Council.” Right Web (accessed January 24, 2004).

[30] Marshall, Dale Scott & Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 61.

[31] Ronald Reagan. Peace Through Strength Campaign Commercial 1980.

[32] Paul Gottfried. “Consensus Historian.”

[33] Amanda Spake. “Time To Talk Back To Your TV Set,” Mother Jones, (June 1981).

[34] Lee Norrgard & Joe Rosenbloom III, “The Cold Warriors,” Common Cause Magazine, (Jul/Aug 1985).

[35] Bellant. The Coors Connection, pp. 16-17.

[36] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 45.

[37] Ibid., p. 24.

[38] Lee Edwards. “How Star Wars Went from Fantasy to Fact.” Newsweek (December 19, 2015).

[39] Teacher. Rogue Agents.

[40] Ibid., pp. 472-475.

[41] Ibid., p. 100.

[42] Thomas Bodenheimer & Robert Gould. Rollback!: Right-wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), p. 135.

[43] Marshall, Dale Scott & Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 67.

[44] John George and Laird Wilcox. American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996).

[45] Howard Blum. “U.S. Labor Party: Cult Surrounded by Controversy.” The New York Times (October 7, 1979).

[46] Donald Bruce Johnson. National Party Platforms: 1960–1976 (University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 189.

[47] “Some Officials Find Intelligence Network ‘Useful.’” The Washington Post, (January 15, 1985).

[48] Lyndon LaRouche. “Solving the Machiavellian Problem Today.” New Solidarity (July 7, 1978).

[49] Peter Spiro. “Paranoid Politics: Your tax dollars at work.” The New Republic (February 6, 1984). pp. 10–12.

[50] George Michael. Willis Carto and the American Far Right (University Press of Florida, 2008), pp. 110–111.

[51] “Jewish Infiltration into the Nationalist Movement in the United States.” The Guguello Report (1976?).

[52] Joyce Gemperlein. “LAROUCHE PROBE SNARES MAN WITH A PAST OF HATE.” Philadelphia Inquirer (November 10, 1986), p. A.1.

[53] James Lateer. Three Barons: The Organizational Chart of the JFK assassination (TrineDay, 2017).

[54] Patsy Sims. The Klan (University Press of Kentucky, 1996). p. 63.

[55] Dennis King. Lyndon LaRouche and the new American fascism (Doubleday, 1989).

[56] John Mintz. “Defense Calls LaRouche, Followers ‘Most Annoying’; Trial Begins for Leesburg Group Accused of Obstructing Probe Into Its Fund-Raising.” The Washington Post (December 18, 1987), p. A18.

[57] John Simkin. “John K. Singlaub.” Spartacus Educational (September 1997).

[58] Ibid.

[59] Marshall, Dale Scott & Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 67.

[60] Howard Blum and Paul Montgomery. “One Man Leads U.S. Labor Party on Its Erratic Path.” New York Times, Metropolitan Report (October 8, 1979), p. B1.

[61] John Simkin. “John K. Singlaub.” Spartacus Educational (September 1997).

[62] Marshall, Dale Scott & Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 66.

[63] “NBC upheld in appeals decision on LaRouche case.” Broadcasting. 110 (Jan 20, 1986): 234(2). Gale.

[64] Dan Kelly. “Longtime Klansman from Reading dies in nursing home,” Reading Eagle (May 16, 2009).

[65] “NBC ‘assassination plot’ a total lie.” EIR (March 20, 1984).

[66] New York Times; cited in Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott & Jane Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection (Black Rose Books Ltd., 1987), p. 66.

[67] Gregory F. Rose. “The Swarmy Life and Times of the NCLC.” National Review (March 30, 1979).

[68] William Dennis King. Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (Doubleday, 1989).

[69] Ibid., p. 61.

[70] Lyndon LaRouche. “Answers From LaRouche.” larouchein2004.net (accessed October 11, 2003.

[71] Lee Edwards. “How Star Wars Went from Fantasy to Fact.” Newsweek (December 19, 2015).

Volume Five

1. Team B

2. Secret Team

3. The Reagan Doctrine

4. Reaganomics

5. Second New Right

6. Project Monarch

7. Down Under

8. Sex, Lies and Wiretaps

9. Noosphere

10. Project Stargate

11. New Age

12. Psychic Warriors

13. Disclosure

14. Christofascism

15. The Clash of Civilizations

16. Black Order

17. Sacred Geopolitics

18. Third Secret of Fatima

19. Order of Eurasia