George Seldes
You Can't Do That, 1938
Political Research Associates
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"...fascism is not confined to any specific era, culture or countries. Far from being a phenomenon limited to the European states which have experienced fascist regimes, movements of this type are to be found in practically every western country, and indeed are growing more strident in the leading democratic societies which have never experienced fascist rule--Britain and America."Fascist political movements are experiencing a resurgence around the world. In Eastern Europe, racial nationalism, a key component of fascism, has surfaced in many new political parties. In the United States, the presidential campaigns of David Duke and Patrick Buchanan echo two different strains of historical fascism. Duke's neo-Nazi past resonates, in a consciously sanitized form, in his current formulations of white supremacist and anti-Jewish political theories. Buchanan's theories of isolationist/ proto-fascist ideas of the 1930's "America First" movement and its well-known promoters, Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin. Both Duke and Buchanan blame our societal problems on handy scapegoats, and both feed on the politics of resentment, anger and fear. Most progressives vigorously reject Duke and Buchanan, and are not reluctant to point out fascist elements in both candidacies.Paul Wilkinson
The New Fascists, 1981
But there are other strains of domestic fascism active today, and the siren calls of those movements may mesmerize progressives whose anti-government fervor blinds them to historical lessons. Since the early 1980's, persons from far-right and fascist political groups in the United States have attempted to convince progressive activists to join forces to oppose certain government policies. The fascist right has wooed the progressive left primarily around opposition to such issues as the use of U.S. troops in foreign military interventions, the CIA and covert action, and domestic government repression and civil liberties.
As the far right made overtures to the left, some of the classic conspiracy theories of the far right began to seep into progressive, and even mainstream, analyses of foreign policy and domestic repression. An audience was created for these conspiratorial assertions through public speaking, radio interviews, sales of audiotapes and published articles. This audience elevated to leadership roles those persons who were willing to make the boldest and most critical (albeit unsubstantiated) pronouncements about the U.S. government and U.S. society. As a result, some progressives now confuse demagoguery with leadership, and undocumented conspiracism with serious research, and are unable to determine when an analysis supports or undermines the progressive goals of peace, social justice and economic fairness. This is primarily a problem within the white left, but in some Black nationalist constituencies the same dynamic has also popularized conspiracy theories which in some cases reflect anti-Jewish themes long circulated by the far right.
While there is inevitable overlap at the edges of political movements, the far-right sector being discussed in this study is separate and distinct from traditional conservatism, the right wing of and other political movements sometimes characterized as right wing. The John Birch Society, discussed here, is a far-right reactionary political movement, but it attempts to distance itself from racialist and anti-Jewish theories. Other groups analyzed in this paper, such as the Populist Party, Liberty Lobby, and the LaRouchians, on the other hand, represent a continuation of the racialist, anti-democratic theories of fascism.
The phenomenon of the right wooing the left became highly visible during the Gulf War. Followers of Lyndon LaRouche attended antiwar meetings and rallies in some thirty cities, and other right-wing organizers from groups such as the John Birch Society and the Populist Party passed out flyers at antiwar demonstrations across the country. While these right-wing groups undeniably opposed war with Iraq, they also promoted ideas that peace and social justice activists have historically found objectionable. Many people seeking to forge alliances with the left around anti-government and anti-interventionist policies also promote Eurocentric, anti- pluralist, patriarchal, or homophobic views. Some are profoundly anti-democratic; others support the idea that the U.S. is a Christian republic. A few openly promote white supremacist, anti- Jewish, or neo-Nazi theories.
The John Birch Society, for instance, is highly critical of mass democratic movements for social change, including those that seek equality for women, gay men and lesbians, Blacks, Hispanics, and recent immigrants from Asia and Central America. The Birchers believe most world governments, including the U.S. and the Soviet Union, are secretly controlled by a handful of conspirators they dub "The Insiders."
The Populist Party (and groups to which it has historically been related such as the Liberty Lobby and its Spotlight newspaper), created a national constituency for David Duke and other white supremacist political candidates. Duke was the 1988 Populist Party presidential candidate. These forces believe a conspiracy of rich and powerful Jews and their allies control banking, foreign policy, the CIA and the media in the United States. Like Duke, they also believe in an America controlled by white Christians.
The LaRouchians have supported foreign dictatorships such as the Marcos regime in the Philippines and the Noriega regime in Panama. LaRouche has written that history would not judge harshly those who beat homosexuals to death with baseball bats to stop the spread of AIDS. For LaRouchians the conspiracy consists of secret elite groups engaged in an epic battle between moral forces who want order, and sinister forces who champion chaos. LaRouche claims he can trace the key players in these secret conspiracies decade-by- decade back to Plato and Aristotle--and beyond. A remarkable number of the sinister conspirators turn out to be Jewish.
This study seeks to sharpen the debate over how to handle the phenomenon of the right wooing the left, and is not meant to divide or attack the left, which is being victimized by these approaches. As anti-fascist author George Seldes pointed out over fifty years ago, "The enemy is always the Right. Fascism and Reaction inevitably attack. They have won against disunion. They will fail if we unite."
There is considerable evidence to show that far-right groups are serious about wooing the political left and that their conspiracist theories have been taken seriously in some quarters. Consider the following, all of which will be discussed in greater detail later:
Further confusing matters is the rebirth in Europe of the national socialist wing of fascism, with adherents calling themselves Strasserites or Third Positionists. These groups, which now operate in the U.S., are critical of Hitler's Nazi brand of fascism; they support the working class and encourage environmentalism. They also, however, promote racially segregated nation- states. Third Position groups claim to have evolved an ideology "beyond communism and capitalism," and actively seek to recruit from the left. One such group is the American Front in Portland, Oregon, which runs a phone hotline that in late November, 1991 featured an attack on critics of left/right coalitions.
Conspiracism and demagoguery feature simplistic answers to complex problems. During periods of economic or social crisis, people may seek to alleviate anxiety by embracing simple solutions, often including scapegoating. This scapegoating often manifests itself in virulent attacks on persons of different races and cultures who are painted as alien conspiratorial forces undermining the coherent national will.
In part, the fascist right has been able to forge ties to the left due to a serious lack of knowledge on the left regarding the complex history, different forms, and multiple tactics of fascism. Among those tactics are the use of scapegoating, reductionist and simplistic solutions, demagoguery, and a conspiracy theory of history.
Theories of racialist nationalism and national socialism are not widely known in the United States. If they were, it is unlikely that any serious progressive would be seduced by the right's idea of an alliance to smash the powerful corrupt center, based on a shared agenda critical of government policies. This concept has an unsavory historical track record. The European fascist movements in the 1930's flourished in a period of economic collapse, political turmoil, and social crisis. The German Nazi party, during its early national socialist phase, openly and elitist Weimar government. But when the government began to collapse, powerful industrial and banking interests recruited Hitler to take control the government in order to prevent economic chaos, which would have displaced them as power brokers. In return for state control, Hitler quickly liquidated the leadership of his national socialist allies in a murderous spree called the "Night of the Long Knives." Once state power had been consolidated, the Nazis went on to liquidate the left before lining up Jews, labor leaders, intellectuals, dissidents, homosexuals, Poles, Gypsies (the Romani), dark-skinned immigrants, the infirm, and others deemed undesirable.
While conditions in the United States may only faintly echo the financial and social turmoil of the Weimar regime, the similarities cannot be dismissed lightly, nor should the catastrophic power of state fascism and the repression of an authoritarian government be confused.
Some people who consider themselves progressive even argue that a fascist government could not be any worse than the Reagan and Bush Administrations, with their devastating effects on the poor and persons of color. Because current policies are nearly genocidal, they say they will work with any ally to smash the status quo. This view dangerously underestimates the murderous quality of fascism. Similarly, other progressives argue in favor of supporting Duke or Buchanan for President in order to draw votes away from Bush and thus elect the Democratic candidate. While Duke and Buchanan currently have little chance of election, any progressive support for their candidacies minimizes the dangers involved in supporting a national political movement which uses fascist themes.[f-1]
The largest problem, however, remains the unnerving ability of fascist and right-wing conspiracists to attract a left audience through attacks on the government and its policies. There are four separate but related dilemmas posed by the phenomenon of the fascist right wooing the left:
In some cases progressive groups have begun to address the problems created by this courtship by the right. Radio station WBAI aired several hours of programming within a week of discovering that their broadcasts had included interviews with persons whose right-wing affiliations were not disclosed to the listeners. The progressive periodicals Guardian and In These Times have run articles and commentaries on the situation. KPFK and KPFA in California, however, waited months before their listeners even learned there was a debate over these issues. The Christic Institute has been especially reluctant to renounce publicly attempts by the fascist right to imply an alliance with their organization.
While some information provided by the far right may be factual, other material is unsubstantiated rumor or lunatic conspiracy theories. Some material is bigoted. Widely publicized examples of right-wing conspiracism creeping into popular critiques of government misconduct can be found to varying degrees in the "October Surprise" story, the Christic Institute's "Secret Team" theory, and the late writer Danny Casolaro's "Octopus" theory. While some of these conspiracy theories are very attractive on the surface, and are undeniably entertaining, they ultimately serve to distract people from serious analysis. All of these theories share elements of traditional right- wing conspiracy themes in which sinister global elites secretly manipulate world LaRouchians, the John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby and its Spotlight newspaper.
Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories usually start with a basis in fact and relate to a legitimate issue. The current phenomenon traces back to the rise of counterinsurgency as an arm of U.S. foreign policy, and the role it played in the Vietnam War. The public debate over this issue expanded in 1973 with publication of The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World by retired Air Force Colonel and intelligence specialist L. Fletcher Prouty. In the book, Prouty criticized the CIA's penchant for counterinsurgency and clandestine operations, which he argued prolonged the war in Vietnam and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many U.S. soldiers.
The Liberty Lobby's Spotlight newspaper took Prouty's thesis and overlaid it with a conspiracy theory regarding Jewish influence in U.S. foreign policy. Sometime in the 1980's, a number of right-wing critics of U.S. intelligence operations began to drift towards the Spotlight analysis. The "Secret Team" apparently became the "Secret Jewish Team" in their eyes. They began to feed information from their sources inside the government to publications with an anti-Jewish agenda.
While the Liberty Lobby network was recruiting Fletcher Prouty, Bo Gritz, longtime CIA critic Victor Marchetti, and assassination conspiracy researchers Mark Lane and Dick Gregory, the LaRouchians were probing government misconduct and linking U.S. political elites to their global conspiracy theory.
The LaRouchians were among the beneficiaries of the information flow from right-wing anti-CIA circles. LaRouche's periodicals mix anti-Israel views with anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, but they also were among the first publications in the U.S. to cover aspects of the covert Contra aid network, although their coverage included typical LaRouchian distortions. Many reporters in the mid 1980's were contacted by LaRouchians who offered assistance and documents to help research the Iran-Contra story.
Critics of the Christic Institute say undocumented conspiracy theories, perhaps first Spotlight, were inadvertently drawn into Christic's lawsuit against key figures in the Iran-Contra Scandal. The Christic Institute no longer uses the "Secret Team" slogan, which it employed for the first few years of its Iran-Contra lawsuit, Avirgan v. Hull. The suit, filed in 1986, is also called the La Penca case, after the Nicaraguan town where a 1984 bombing killed three journalists and at least one Contra and wounded dozens, including television camera operator Avirgan and the intended target, Contra leader Eden Pastora. The named plaintiffs in the Christic La Penca case were Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey. According to Avirgan, "There were, indeed, numerous undocumented allegations in the suit, particularly in Sheehan's Affidavit of act. As plaintiffs in the suit, Martha Honey and I struggled for years to try to bring the case down to earth."
Dr. Diana Reynolds, an assistant professor of politics at Bradford College in Massachusetts, read thousands of pages of depositions taken during the Christic case and has concluded, "Leaving out the circumstances of the La Penca bombing and the specific Iran-Contra material, I think it is fair to say that some right- wing conspiracy theories were woven into the theory behind the Christic case."
Author Jane Hunter, editor of Israeli Foreign Affairs, worries about the rise of conspiracism on the left, including some of the allegations made in the Christic lawsuit. "If you keep looking for all the connections, all you are going to see is something so powerful that there is no way to fight it. We have to look at the system that produces these covert and illegal operations, not who knew so and so three years ago."
Hunter and some two-dozen other progressive researchers (including the author) have been discussing these issues for several years. The one point of agreement is that this is a problem long overdue for debate. As Hunter explains, "In my speaking engagements I have found in audience questions an alarming increase in conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism." She also is worried that as conditions for African-Americans in the U.S. have continued to deteriorate, there has been an increase in the scapegoating of Jews by to conspiracy theories is a common phenomenon in communities experiencing financial or social stress, it should never be tolerated.
It is important to differentiate between the fascist right and persons on the left who in a variety of ways have been lured by the overtures of the fascist right and its conspiracist theories, or who have ended up wittingly or unwittingly in coalitions with spokespersons for the fascist right, or who have contact with the fascist right as part of serious and legitimate research into political issues.
Nonetheless, there is substantial evidence to suggest that the circulation and tolerance of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories by groups such as the Christic Institute and Pacifica Radio stations has created a large audience, especially on the West Coast, that gullibly accepts undocumented anti- government assertions alongside scrupulous documented research, with little ability to tell the two apart. In some cases, people who believe themselves to be progressive activists see no moral problem with alliances with the fascist right, so long as the shared enemy is the Bush Administration. Furthermore, rightists such as Bo Gritz and Craig Hulet continue to imply that they work closely with Daniel Sheehan and Father Bill Davis of the Christic Institute, while the response from the Christic Institute has been tardy and equivocal. The most troublesome and widespread aspects of this phenomenon have occurred in California where some radio hosts have promoted Sheehan and Davis of Christic along with right-wing persons in Liberty Lobby and the conspiratorial right as jointly working together to expose the government's corrupt maneuverings. Radio personality Craig Hulet has encouraged this belief in interviews by warning of attempts to criticize those who are "kicking George Bush." Hulet, in fact, specifically named Sheehan, Davis, Marchetti, Prouty, Gritz, and himself as researchers who needed to be defended against those who criticized coalitions between the left and the right.
There is little agreement among progressive researchers and journalists on how material from far-right sources should be handled. Some progressive researchers are suspicious that government intelligence agents and rightist journalists to achieve a right-wing political goal, perhaps as part of a faction fight over government foreign policy strategies.
Journalist Russ Bellant is highly critical of those who tolerate or apologize for people who work with the LaRouchians, the Populist Party or the Liberty Lobby network. "I think you discredit yourself when you work with these bigoted forces," says Bellant, "and mere association tends to lend credence to these rightist groups because people assume the group can't be that bad if a respected person on the left is associated with them."
This study begins with a brief overview of several paranoid conspiracy theories prevalent in contemporary right-wing circles.
It then examines the right wing's anti-government critique and rightist influences on Christic Institute's theories of Iran- Contragate.
There is an extensive examination of the LaRouchians' attempts to penetrate the progressive antiwar movement, as well as a brief look at the activities of other far-right groups (both pro-war and anti-interventionist) during the Gulf War. This section includes a discussion of the surprising involvement of some formerly prominent civil rights leaders with LaRouchian and other neo-fascist groups.
This is followed by a discussion of how prejudice, racism and anti-Jewish theories are enmeshed in a variety of political movements in the U.S., especially the Populist Party. The next section examines the emergence of anti-Jewish bigotry within Black nationalist movements.
A discussion of left/right coalition building is followed by a preliminary attempt to establish some criteria for discussion of these complex political issues, including sections on logical fallacies and the pitfalls of unsubstantiated conspiracism.
Finally, there is a brief discussion of the overall dilemma and a suggestion that further study and open discussion are needed to sort out the complex and confusing issues raised by but, alas, not answered by this report. Paranoid conspiracy theories have been U.S., and were analyzed by historian Richard Hofstadter in his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The most useful general sources of information on U.S. right-wing conspiracy theories and the basis for understanding the role of reductionism and scapegoating in these movements are:
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics New York: Knopf, 1965);
George Johnson, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics (Los Angeles: Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin, 1983);
Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and The American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985).
"The central preconception of the paranoid style," wrote Hofstadter, is the belief in "the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character."
Political movements with paranoid conspiracist theories have garnished the American political scene since the Salem Witch Trials and the anti-Masonic hysteria in the 1700's. Adherents of these conspiracy theories remain a small isolated minority except during times of economic or social stress when a mass following develops to blame selected scapegoats for the problems besetting the society.
Groups at various times scapegoated as the engines behind the global conspiracy include: Jews, bankers, Catholics, communists, Black militants, civil rights activists, anarchists, the Bavarian Illuminati society, Jesuits, the Rockefellers, the Council on Foreign Relations, Israeli secret police, Trilateralists, the Bilderberger banking group, and Soviet KGB agents.
In such philosophies, the world is divided into us and them. Evil conspirators control world events. A special few have been given the knowledge of this massive conspiracy and it is their solemn duty to spread the alarm across the land. In recent years the three main centers of this paranoid conspiracism on the right have been the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby and the LaRouchians.
the phrase "New World Order" used by the Bush Administration is proof of their assertion that a long-standing conspiracy promoting "One World Government" and collectivist society controls all major world governments. They point to the Masonic emblems and slogans on the back of the U.S. one dollar bill as evidence.
The John Birch Society (JBS) has in recent years tried to avoid anti-Jewish rhetoric, instead basing its theories on the belief that all major world powers are controlled by a covert group of "Insiders," such as members of the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Blue Book of the John Birch Society has been given to each new member since Belmont, Massachusetts candymaker Robert Welch founded the group at an Indianapolis meeting of twelve "patriotic and public-spirited" men in 1958.
According to the Blue Book, both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same conspiratorial international cabal of bankers, corrupt politicians and other evil-doers. In recent years the Society has dubbed them the "Insiders." In Birch theory, communism is merely one scam used by the Insiders to control the world.
Among the most influential ultra-right groups in the U.S. is the virulently anti-Jewish Liberty Lobby. With its newspaper Spotlight, Liberty Lobby spreads racialism across the U.S., and serves as a bridge to the paramilitary and neo-Nazi right. The Washington Post has described Spotlight as a "newspaper containing orthodox conservative political articles interspersed with anti-Zionist tracts and classified advertisements for Ku Klux Klan T-shirts, swastika-marked German coins and cassette tapes of Nazi marching songs." That description is actually mild.
Spotlight claims it is neither anti-Jewish nor pro-Nazi, but one article referred to the Waffen SS, the elite corps of ideological Nazis, as a "multinational anti-communist mass movement, which was, in fact, the largest all-volunteer army in history." The Spotlight also celebrates neo-Nazi skinheads and the apartheid government Liberty Lobby, Spotlight, the International Revisionist Conference, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), Noontide Press, and IHR's Journal of Historical Review are all projects of Willis Carto, one of America's most influential racial theorists. Carto is described by the London-based anti-fascist magazine Searchlight as the "leading U.S. publisher of anti-semitic, racist and pro-nazi material."
Carto and Liberty Lobby were influential in creating the racialist Populist Party and were primarily responsible for elevating David Duke to national attention as an electoral candidate. In the spring of 1985 the Populist Party held a major meeting in Chicago where the armed and confrontational activities of racist and anti-Jewish groups in rural America were saluted as "heroic," according to persons who attended the meeting. One group of rural farm activists from the midwest left the meeting after complaining that too many of the attendees were obsessed with Jews. (A series of political and financial schisms has ended the relationship between Liberty Lobby and the Populist Party, although both groups still share many of the fundamental anti-Jewish and racist theories.)
The pseudo-scholarly Institute for Historical Review is a "revisionist" research center and publishing house that popularizes the calumny that the historical account of the Nazi Holocaust is a Jewish hoax, an idea central to Carto's worldview. According to researcher Russ Bellant, early in his career Willis Carto produced the magazine Western Destiny, which grew out of the Nordicist Northern World and a vociferously anti-Jewish magazine called Right. Right recommended support for the American Nazi Party and was edited by E. L. Anderson who was associate editor of Western Destiny. Critics and co-workers of Carto claim E. L. Anderson was a pseudonym for Willis Carto.
Liberty Lobby staff and supporters helped stage the 1978 meeting of the World Anti-Communist League, a group that networks fascist movements around the globe. According to the Washington Post, Liberty Lobby workers distributed publications including Spotlight at the WACL meeting. A few years later, after a change of leadership and some mostly-cosmetic housecleaning the leadership of retired General John "Jack" Singlaub. Singlaub used WACL to raise money and support for the Contras, and Singlaub and WACL were implicated in the Iran-Contra hearings for having served as a cover and money laundry for the activities of Oliver North.
While the John Birch Society trumpets jingoistic patriotism laced with conspiracy theories, according to scholar John Mintz, the Liberty Lobby voices "racist and anti-Semitic beliefs in addition to conspiracism."
Mintz explains:
"Structurally, the Lobby was a most unusual umbrella organization catering to constituencies spanning the fringes of Neo-Nazism to the John Birch Society and the radical right. It was not truly paramilitary, in the manner of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis, but was more accurately an intermediary between racist paramilitary factions and the recent right. "
Former staffers at both the Liberty Lobby and LaRouche's group claim both outfits have cooperated closely on several projects. In the March 2, 1981 issue of its newspaper Spotlight, Liberty Lobby cynically defended the relationship this way:
"It is mystifying why so many anti-communists and `conservatives' oppose the USLP [U.S. Labor Party--LaRouche's original electoral arm, ed.]. No group has done so much to confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left as they have...the USLP should be encouraged, as should all similar breakaway groups from the Left, for this is the only way that the Left can be weakened and broken. More recently, Spotlight has distanced itself and Liberty Lobby from the LaRouchians over the issue of the LaRouchians' questionable and illegal fundraising activities. "
The LaRouche organizations believe the world is under the control of a sinister global conspiracy of evil-doers. LaRouche traces this conspiracy back to the Babylonian goddess society, and says the historical battle between good and evil is exemplified in the philosophical division between Platonic order and Aristotelian chaos. The of England ("a dope pusher"), George Bernard Shaw, Jimmy Carter ("a hundred times worse than Hitler"), Playboy magazine, Milton Friedman, Fidel Castro, Jesuits, Masons and the AFL-CIO.
In the early 1970's, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. took his followers from the political left and guided them into fascist politics. LaRouche's cadre roamed the streets of New York, Philadelphia, and other cities with clubs and chains beating up trade union leaders, activists, socialists, and communists. At the time they still proclaimed themselves leftists, but the mainstream left shunned the LaRouchians. Then LaRouche began to adopt some of the economic theories of early national socialism. He thought that to make the revolution, there had to be a strong working class, and a strong working class, he figured, required full-employment. Full employment, he reasoned, would best be accomplished by developing a strong, modernized industrial base in the United States. LaRouche then concluded that development of a strong industrial sector was being hampered by the high interest rates demanded by the main sectors of finance capital in the U.S. and overseas.
LaRouche launched an unsuccessful 1976 Presidential bid when he paid cash for an hour of network television air time to warn the nation of a Soviet/ Rockefeller/British plot to destroy the world using Jimmy Carter as a puppet. LaRouche's attack on the centers of finance capital during his presidential campaign drew applause from parts of the American political far right, including those forces that equated finance capital with Jewish banking families.
LaRouche's shift toward a Jewish conspiracy theory of history came shortly after the ultra-right Liberty Lobby began praising a 1976 USLP pamphlet titled "Carter and the International Party of Terrorism." The pamphlet outlined the "Rockefeller-CIA-Carter axis," which was supposedly trying to "deindustrialize" the U.S. and provoke a war with the Soviet Union by 1978. (At this point LaRouche had not yet discarded his support for the Soviet Union, nor announced his support for "Star Wars" defense against his perceived threat of imminent Soviet attack.)
In an overall favorable review of the USLP conspiracy, Liberty Lobby's newspaper, Spotlight, complained that the report failed to mention any of the "major Zionist groups such as the notorious Anti-Defamation League" in its extensive list of government agencies, research groups, organizations and individuals controlled by the "Rockefeller-Carter-CIA" terrorism apparatus.
LaRouche never was one to miss a cue, and soon his newspaper New Solidarity was running articles with bigoted views of Jews and Jewish institutions. The shift regarding who controlled the worldwide conspiracy came at an opportune time, since Nelson Rockefeller's untimely death had left a major hole in LaRouche's theoretical bulwark.
While often hidden or coded, sometimes the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the LaRouchians stands out clearly. In the December 12, 1990 issue of New Solidarity, a letter to the editor asks why the newspaper "scarcely mention[s] the Warburg and Rothschild families, the most important International Bankers. Is it because they are of Jewish ancestry?" Editor Nancy Spannaus responds:
"We do attack the Warburgs and the Rothschilds for the evil they do and did. But they are not the highest level of the international financial oligarchy. That requires looking at the Thurn und Taxis family, the British Royal Family, and so forth. These guys love to use the so-called Jews as their front men. "
According to LaRouche, one and a half million Jews, not many millions, perished during the Holocaust, and they died from overwork, disease, and starvation in work camps rather than from a planned program of extermination. This denial of the Holocaust is coupled with pronouncements in LaRouchian publications such as these:
"The first, and most important fact to be recognized concerning the Hitler regime, is that Adolph Hitler was put into power in Germany on orders from London. The documentation of this matter is abundant and conclusive. (1978) "
"America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other British agents from the councils of government, industry and labor. (1978) "We shall end the rule of irrationalist episodic majorities, of British liberal notions of `democracy.' (c. 1980) "
"Zionism is the state of collective psychosis through which London manipulates most of international Jewry. (1978) "
"Judaism is the religion of a caste of subjects of Christianity, entirely molded by ingenious rabbis to fit into the ideological and secular life of Christianity. in short, a self-sustaining Judaism never existed and never could exist. As for Jewish culture otherwise, it is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim. (1973) "
Sexism and homophobia are central themes of the organization's conspiracy theories. LaRouche announced that women's feelings of degradation in modern society could be traced to the physical placement of sexual organs near the anus which caused them to confuse sex with excretion. A September 1973 editorial in the NCLC ideological journal Campaigner charged that "Concretely, all across the U.S.A., there are workers who are prepared to fight. They are held back, most immediately, by pressure from their wives...."
LaRouche has propounded ideas which represent outright racism. LaRouche, for instance, targetted the Hispanic community in a November 1973 essay (published in both English and Spanish) titled "The Male Impotence of the Puerto-Rican Socialist Party." An internal memo by LaRouche asked "Can we imagine anything more viciously sadistic than the Black Ghetto mother?" He described the majority of the Chinese people as "approximating the lower animal species" by manifesting a "paranoid personality....a parallel general form of fundamental distinction from actual human personalities."
There are many groups and individuals who tour the country promoting conspiracy theories in lectures and radio talk show interviews. One of the most loathsome is a lecturer who deserves special mention -- Eustace Mullins. Mullins' tours are promoted in ads placed in the Spotlight.
In his pamphlet The Secret Holocaust, Mullins have been victims of the historic massacres. The Jews, when they did not do the killings themselves, as they always prefer to do, were always in the background as the only instigators of these crimes against humanity. We can and we must protect ourselves against the bloodthirsty bestiality of the Jew by every possible means, and we must be aware that the Christian creed of love and mercy can be overshadowed by the Jewish obsession that all non Jews are animals to be killed.
It was the casualties of the Vietnam war that crystallized a right-wing critique of U.S. foreign policy for its reliance on covert action, counterinsurgency and political deals as tactical alternatives to military confrontation to achieve geo-political goals. The right-wing analysis raised questions that many citizens were asking. If we didn't want to fight a war to win in the traditional sense, then why did all those soldiers have to die? What was the purpose? Where was the benefit to the U.S.? Who gained from this process? These questions were not asked only by persons on the right, but the answers and theories the right developed were far different than those proposed by the left.
Fletcher Prouty's 1973 book The Secret Team was among the first wave of non- left treatises to take a critical view of the U.S. intelligence establishment's role in designing the failed counterinsurgency policies in Vietnam.
Liberty Lobby and the Spotlight took the Prouty thesis and combined it with its bigoted conspiracy theory about Jewish control of U.S. foreign policy. Since writing the book, Prouty has drifted far to the right, as has another CIA critic, Victor Marchetti, and both now have allied themselves with the Liberty Lobby network. Prouty's The Secret Team was recently republished by Noontide Press, the publishing arm of the historical revisionist Institute for Historical Review (IHR). IHR promotes the theory that the accepted history of the Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by Jews. In 1974, Marchetti, a former executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA, co-authored The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, a well-received best-seller and the first book the CIA tried to suppress through court action. By 1989, however, Marchetti had been recruited into a close alliance with Carto's Liberty Lobby network. In 1989, Marchetti presented a paper at the Ninth International Revisionist Conference held by the Institute for Historical Review. The title of Marchetti's paper, published in IHR's Journal of Historical Review, was "Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History." Marchetti edits the New American View newsletter, which as one promotional flyer explained, was designed to "document for patriotic Americans like yourself the excess of pro-Israelism, which warps the news we see and hear from our media, cows our Congress into submission, and has already cost us hundreds of innocent, young Americans in Lebanon and elsewhere."
Marchetti describes himself as a person whose "intelligence expertise and well-placed contacts have provided me with a unique insight into the subversion of our democratic process and foreign policy by those who would put the interests of Israel above those of America and Americans." Marchetti is also the publisher of a Japanese-language book ADL and Zionism, written by LaRouche followers Paul Goldstein and Jeffrey Steinberg.
Marchetti was co-publisher of the Zionist Watch newsletter when it was endorsed in direct mail appeals on Liberty Lobby stationery by the now deceased Lois Petersen, who for many years was the influential secretary of the Liberty Lobby board of directors. The October 5, 1987 Spotlight reported that Mark Lane had been named associate editor of Zionist Watch, which is housed in the same small converted Capitol Hill townhouse as Liberty Lobby/Spotlight.
While concern over Reagan Administration participation in joint intelligence operations with Mossad is legitimate, the use of anti-Zionism as a cover for conspiracist anti-Jewish bigotry can be seen in an article in the August 24, 1981 issue of Spotlight:
"A brazen attempt by influential \j Reagan administration to extend their control to the day-to-day espionage and covert-action operations of the CIA was the hidden source of the controversy and scandals that shook the U.S. intelligence establishment this summer. "
"The dual loyalists, whose domination over the federal executive's high planning and strategy-making resources is now just about total, have long wanted to grab a hand in the on-the-spot "field control" of the CIA's worldwide clandestine services. They want this control, not just for themselves, but on behalf of the Mossad, Israel's terrorist secret police. "
While the Carto empire was recruiting Prouty, Marchetti and other critics of the CIA, the LaRouchians were probing government misconduct and linking U.S. political elites to their worldview in which the oligarchic families of Great Britain are the font of all world evil. Over the years LaRouchian literature has maintained that political leadership in Great Britain is really controlled by Jewish banking families such as the Rothschilds, a standard anti-Jewish theory that influenced such bigots as Henry Ford and Adolph Hitler.
In their book [f-2] first published in 1978, the LaRouchians assert that the oligarchy in Great Britain is in league with Jewish bankers to control the smuggling of drugs into the United States. Arch-rightist and former U.S. intelligence operative, the late Mitchell WerBell said the book was of "outstanding importance," because it told "the history of a political strike against the United States in an undeclared war being waged by Great Britain."
LaRouche's publications were among the first periodicals to run articles exposing aspects of the covert Contra aid network, well before a fateful plane crash first tipped off the mainstream press to the full extent of the story. Right-wing coverage of government intelligence abuse is not unique to the LaRouchians. Other far-right groups such as Liberty Lobby and its Spotlight newspaper have also circulated similar information.
The LaRouchians, says that in the 1980's the LaRouchians were contacted by a group of disaffected former and current intelligence specialists who Quinde referred to as "the Arabists." Both government and private sector analysts confirm that there are persons critical of current U.S. foreign policy reliance on Israel whose ideas are discussed in policy meetings. These persons are sometimes referred to as "Arabists." They represent a minority viewpoint in government circles that needs to be factored into political equations. Most of these persons are geo-political pragmatists who think that oil is the key to the Middle East and so support for Israel is misguided since Israel doesn't have oil. Others simply support a more even-handed policy in the Middle East, especially concerning Palestinian rights. The so-called "Arabists" are more accurately seen as a diffuse and broad theoretical tendency rather than an ethnic group, pro-Arab faction, or specific political organization.
Some of these persons, however, have fierce anti-Jewish views and have sought alliances with overt bigots and persons who circulate paranoid conspiracy theories in which Jews are believed to control the world. Their theory at its most paranoid believes Great Britain's intelligence services have influenced U.S. intelligence agencies since the inception of the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. Great Britain's intelligence empire is seen as predominantly Jewish, riddled with communists and homosexuals, and with an open line to Moscow. Mossad is believed to manipulate U.S. foreign policy and direct much of U.S. intelligence activity. The CIA is believed to be full of moles, probably inserted by a Anglophile/Jewish/Communist network. True patriots are urged to try to expose this "dual loyalist" reality and push the U.S. to ally with its real friends in the Middle East, the Arab monarchies and familial oligarchies.
These theories have little to do with democracy, social justice or peace in the Middle East, and they use legitimate criticisms of Israeli policies and U.S. pro-Israel policies as a screen to cover prejudice against Jews.
Many reporters were contacted by the LaRouchians offering assistance and documents to help \j Executive Intelligence Review even gets a passing nod from author Ben Bradlee, Jr. in his Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North. Bradlee acknowledges the help of EIR in decoding the shorthand used by North in his notebooks.
Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall and other authors who researched the Iran-Contra story say that in the mid to late 1980's, LaRouchians such as Herb Quinde, who had researched the Oliver North network, were involved in the traditional game of the Capitol press corps--circulating documents and trading theories.
During the late 1980's the LaRouchians covertly sought to expand their contacts with the left and attempted to link up with progressive groups over issues such as anti-interventionism, covert action, government domestic repression, civil liberties and Third World debt. Many progressive researchers report that during this period they began to receive telephone calls from LaRouchian operatives suggesting joint work or offering documents or story ideas.
Progressive activists also were targetted. For instance, LaRouche organizers involved themselves in an international anti-interventionist conference held in Panama, and have worked behind the scenes around the issue of U.S. involvement in Panamanian affairs ever since. Although conference organizers say they tried to isolate the LaRouchians at the conference, there is little doubt that the LaRouchians managed to leave the impression with some activists that they were a key component in the alliance against U.S. intervention in Panama.
Former U.S. Attorney Gerneral Ramsey Clark has become a vocal opponent of U.S. intervention and was a major critic of the U.S. invasion of Panama. Clark has regularly worked in the same anti-intervention projects as the LaRouchians, where their presence would have been difficult not to notice. While there is no evidence (or even a reasonable suspicion) that Clark willingly works with the LaRouchians or shares any of their bigoted views, it is clear the LaRouchians delight in implying that just such a relationship \j since Clark agreed to represent the LaRouchians in filing legal appeals flowing out of a series of federal criminal convictions of LaRouchian fundraisers and LaRouche himself.
The ability of the LaRouchians to inject themselves into mainstream debate around the issue of Panama is astonishing. For instance, at the April, 1991 conference of the Latin American Studies Association in Washington, D.C., a panel on Panama included LaRouchian expert Carlos Wesley. Wesley was not the first choice. Two panelists from Panama who were originally scheduled to appear did not receive funding to attend the conference, so panel co-coordinator Donald Bray from California State University in Los Angeles then called a person he respected as an expert on Panama for advice on a last minute replacement. "I called Carlos Russell, a Panamanian who now teaches in the U.S., and who was a former Ambassador to the OAS for a former Panamanian government," explains Bray. "He said `you are not going to believe this, but I am going to recommend a LaRouchite, Carlos Wesley.'" A slightly bemused Bray says he knew Wesley from long ago and knew he was a reporter for LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review. Still, this was a recommendation from a credible Panamanian source so with some misgivings Bray scheduled Wesley as a panelist.
Wesley was identified as a correspondent for Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) but, according to author Holly Sklar, who attended the session, many in the audience were not aware that EIR was a LaRouche publication. "Of course if we had identified him as a LaRouchian, nobody would have paid any attention to what he said," explained Bray.
The ties between LaRouche and Panama go back several years to when LaRouche intelligence collectors began trading tidbits of information with Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. Following Noriega's indictment for conspiracy in drug deals, journalist William Branigin, writing in the Washington Post of June 18, 1988, noted that among Noriega's few supporters in the United States was "political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., who has praised the general as a leader in the war on drugs."
According to a January, 1990 Associated Press \j indictment, telling the dictator "I extend to you my apologies for what the government of the United States is doing to the Republic of Panama." LaRouche told Noriega "I reiterate to you what I have stated publicly. That the Reagan administration current policies towards Panama are absolutely an offense to your nation and all of Latin America." This type of rhetoric shows how the LaRouchians can adopt a critique of U.S. foreign policy ostensibly similar to that of the left, while weaving in an apologia converting a drug-running dictator into a drug-fighting humanitarian. LaRouche also has high praise for other dictators, including the late Ferdinand Marcos. The LaRouchians claim Marcos actually won his last election.
Another example of ideological cross-fertilization involves Cecilio Simon, a Panamanian who is an administrator at the University of Panama. Simon spoke along with Ramsey Clark and others at the April 6, 1990 "Voices from Panama" forum held at New York City's Town Hall auditorium. Simon later spoke at the LaRouchian "Fifth International Martin Luther King Tribunal of the Schiller Institute," on June 2, 1990 in Silver Spring, Maryland. These incidents demonstrate how the LaRouchians continue to insert themselves into anti-interventionist work and gain credibility on the left.
The problem of conflating documentable facts with analysis and conclusions and then merging them with unsubstantiated conspiracy theories popular on the far right has plagued progressive foreign policy critiques for several years. The Christic Institute's "Secret Team" theory is perhaps the most widespread example of the phenomenon. While many of the charges raised by Christic regarding the La Penca bombing and the private pro-Contra network are documented, some of their assertions regarding the nature and operations of a long-standing conspiracy of high-level CIA, military, and foreign policy advisors inside the executive branch remain undocumented, and in a few instances, are factually inaccurate.
There are two related questions in this matter. \j properly with regard to the actual clients, Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan. The other is how much unsubstantiated conspiracism was made part of the case and its surrounding publicity. This paper will focus on the issue of the undocumented conspiracy theories.
It is arguable that while Christic pursued the broad conspiracy of the "Secret Team", the bedrock portions of the case involving the actual La Penca incidents took a back seat. A few weeks before the case was slated for trial, the Christic Institute still had not diagramed the elements of proof, a legal procedure where the text of the complaint is broken down into a list of single elements that have to be proven with either valid documentation, a sworn affidavit, or a live witness. This had created problems for researchers and lawyers who had no master list of what needed to be proven when devising questions for depositions and witnesses.
When a special meeting was convened shortly before trial, it turned out that for some of allegations concerning the alleged broad "Secret Team" conspiracy, the only evidence in possession of the Christic Institute was newspaper clippings and excerpts from books--and in a few instances there was no evidence other than uncorroborated assertions collected by researchers.
Raised at the meeting was the issue of whether or not the case had unwittingly incorporated unsubstantiated conspiracy theories from right-wing groups such as the LaRouchians. The staff was warned that some defendants would likely prevail at trial due to lack of court-quality evidence and would then likely pursue financial penalties (called Rule 11 sanctions).[f-3]
These matters are important because Christic press statements have fueled the idea, and many Christic Institute supporters believe, that the dismissal of the case was just another example of a massive government conspiracy and cover-up. It is undeniable that the presiding judge was hostile to Christic and stretched judicial discretion to the breaking point in dismissing the case. The dismissal was unfair. However, according to a statement issued by Christic client Tony Avirgan, the Institute must share at least "partial responsibility for the dismissal \j
"It's sad that these issues have to be raised by `outsiders' such as Berlet. But the truth is that criticism-self criticism, an essential tool in any social movement, has never been tolerated by the leaders of the Christic Institute. Those who criticized the legal work of Sheehan were labelled as enemies and ignored. "
"There were, indeed, numerous undocumented allegations in the suit, particularly in Sheehan's Affidavit of Fact. As plaintiffs in the suit, Martha Honey and I struggled for years to try to bring the case down to earth, to bringing it away from Sheehan's wild allegations. Over the years, numerous staff lawyers quit over their inability to control Sheehan. We stuck with it--and continued to struggle--because we felt that the issues being raised were important. But this was a law suit, not a political rally, and the hostile judges latched on to the lack of proof and the sloppy legal work. "
"The case, before it was inflated by Sheehan, was supposed to center on the La Penca bombing. On this, there is a strong body of evidence here in Costa Rica. It is enough evidence to get a reluctant Costa Rican judiciary to indict two CIA operatives, John Hull and Felipe Vidal, for murder and drug trafficking. Unfortunately, little of this evidence was successfully transformed into evidence acceptable to U.S. courts. It was either never submitted or was poorly prepared. In large part, this was because Sheehan was concentrating on his broad, 30-year conspiracy. "
"The exercise Berlet suggested--breaking each allegation down and compiling evidentiary proof for it--was indeed undertaken by competent lawyers on the Christic Institute staff. But it was an exercise begun too late. The case had already been spiked by Sheehan's Affidavit. "
"We feel that it is important to openly discuss these things so that similar mistakes are avoided in the future. "
Jane Hunter of Israeli Foreign Affairs agrees that some of the Christic research is problematic. "As a researcher I have over the years found nothing in the Christic case worth citing," says Hunter. A number of other \j harsh criticisms of some of the allegations made in the Christic case. David Corn, for instance, wrote a stinging assessment of the Secret Team theory for the Nation. Other criticisms were aired in other Jones.
Dr. Diana Reynolds is one of the many critics of portions of the Christic thesis. Reynolds thinks undocumented conspiracy theories hurt the case. She believes there is much solid evidence concerning the actual La Penca bombing and aftermath, and some specific Iran-Contra material, but she thinks "it is fair to say that some right-wing conspiracy theories were woven into the theory behind the Christic case." Reynolds read thousands of pages of depositions taken by the Christic Institute while she was researching a story on federal emergency planning, later published in Covert Action Information Bulletin. According to Reynolds:
"It is clear to me from the depositions of Ed Wilson and Gene Wheaton that the notion of a broad conspiracy conducted by the so-called Enterprise, beyond the La Penca bombing and the specific Iran-Contra scandal, has many holes. I am thoroughly convinced that those two depositions contain the nub of the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, and I have said this for a very long time. When we get into the Christic allegations regarding the Middle East and Asia and the Camp David accords and forty years of conspiracy, their thesis falls apart. "
Reynolds suggests it is fair to ask whether or not Christic was manipulated by right-wing persons associated with factions in the intelligence community. "It is curious that Wilson is a former intelligence operative, and that Wheaton, at the same time he was working for Christic, was also alleged by Mr. Owen in his Christic deposition to be passing information to Neil Livingston at the National Security Council to protect some of the people who were implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal," says Reynolds. At least two former Christic investigators say they warned Sheehan not to rely on conspiratorial analysis and to be suspicious of material from right-wing sources. Nevertheless, Sheehan was rebuked by his own staff and others in Christic leadership for repeatedly lapsing into an overly conspiratorial analysis in public appearances, \j could not document or otherwise support when responding to follow-up inquiries by reporters.
While the allegation that right-wing conspiracy theories were woven into the case is hotly denied by Christic, the contacts by the LaRouchians during the mid and late 1980's are not disputed. According to a Christic spokesperson:
"In conducting investigations historically we have sometimes had to get information from persons with whom one would not normally associate. People like drug dealers, mercenaries and intelligence agents. During our investigation, there were some meetings with LaRouche staffers conducted by Lanny Sinkin and David MacMichael. The information was always viewed very skeptically and none of it found its way into our casework or courtroom materials. All those contacts were stopped by 1989. We take seriously the view that the LaRouche organization is an organization with whom progressives should be very wary. "
David MacMichael and Lanny Sinkin are no longer affiliated with the Christic Institute. Sinkin says his contact with the LaRouchians while at Christic was limited to a few brief conversations. MacMichael, a former CIA analyst turned agency critic who now writes and lectures on covert action, has had a more extensive relationship to the LaRouchians. MacMichael and Sinkin, however, were not the only Christic investigators who received information from the LaRouchians. Christic investigator Bill McCoy also received information from the LaRouchians as did at least one other Christic researcher, according to former staffers.
Sheehan was warned by his own staff in 1988 that contacts with the research circles around LaRouche and Liberty Lobby were a problem on both factual and moral grounds. Later Danny Sheehan vappeared on the Undercurrents program broadcast on WBAI-FM and other Pacifica and progressive radio stations. Christic told the radio audience that it was untrue that LaRouchians had supplied information to the Christic Institute, and blasted a passing reference to this matter in Dennis King's book, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. Shortly after Sheehan's statements, an offer to promote King's book as a \j for the radio station was withdrawn. King believes Sheehan's unequivocal denial undercut the credibility of his book and was responsible for WBAI withdrawing the original offer.
Christic no longer uses the "Secret Team" slogan, but for the first several years of the case, the Christic Institute used the term "Secret Team" to describe the legal conspiracy they alleged in court (a copy of the Prouty book sat in Sheehan's personal bookshelf in his Christic office). There is no dispute that the "Secret Team" theory came from the political right. The "Affidavit of Daniel P. Sheehan" filed on December 12, 1986 and revised on January 31, 1987, refers frequently to the "Secret Team," and states explicitly that the term came from right-wing sources.
"...I was contacted by Source #47, a right-wing para-military specialist, former U.S. Army pilot in Vietnam and military reform specialist in January of 1986. "
"Source #47, the Specialist, who was unaware of my investigation, informed me that he had met--at a right-wing function--a former U.S. military intelligence officer, Source #48...this source began to discuss with Source #47 the existence of a "Secret Team" of former high-ranking American CIA officials, former high-ranking U.S. military officials and Middle Eastern arms merchants--who also specialized in the performance of covert political assassinations of communists and "enemies" of this "Secret Team" which carried on its own independent, American foreign policy--regardless of the will of Congress, the will of the President, or even the will of the American Central Intelligence Agency. "
Critics of the Christic thesis say the "Secret Team" was not a cabal operating against the will of the president or the CIA, but was an illegal, secret government-sponsored operation established by CIA director William Casey and coordinated by White House aide Oliver North, with assistance from a network of ultra-right groups who were determined to circumvent the will of Congress. This "Enterprise" at times worked closely with the Mossad and carried out clandestine counterinsurgency missions. Some of these counterinsurgency missions were based on the same \j and clandestine CIA operations in Vietnam. It is just this emphasis on counterinsurgency and clandestine operations rather than direct military battles that forms the basis of criticism in Fletcher Prouty's book Secret Team. Prouty criticized the CIA for promoting covert action techniques which he traced to the influence of the British intelligence service MI5 on the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA. Prouty said such meddling and convoluted efforts at fighting communism resulted in the needless deaths of American servicemen. There is no evidence of any obvious anti-Jewish conspiracy theories in the Prouty book.
Some of the undocumented conspiracy theories regarding the CIA and U.S. foreign policy that were widely circulated in progressive circles before the Iran-Contragate scandal hit the headlines seem to have appeared first in the LaRouchian's Executive Intelligence Review or New Solidarity (later New Federalist), or in the pages of Liberty Lobby's Spotlight newspaper.
The Spotlight for instance carried the first exclusive story on "Rex 84" by writer James Harrer. "Rex 84" was one of a long series of readiness exercises for government military, security and police forces. "Rex 84"--Readiness Exercise, 1984--was a drill which postulated a scenario of massive civil unrest and the need to round up and detain large numbers of demonstrators and dissidents. While creating scenarios and carrying out mock exercises is common, the potential for Constitutional abuses under the contingency plans drawn up for "Rex 84" was, and is, very real. The legislative authorization and Executive agency capacity for such a round-up of dissidents remains operational.
The April 23, 1984 Spotlight article ran with a banner headline "Reagan Orders Concentration Camps." The article, true to form, took a problematic swipe at the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith along with reporting the facts of the story. The Harrer article was based primarily on two unnamed government sources, and follow-up confirmations. Mainstream reporters pursued the allegations through interviews and Freedom of Information Act requests, and ultimately the \j substantially accurate account of the readiness exercise, although Spotlight did underplay the fact that this was a scenario and drill, not an actual order to round up dissidents.
Many people believe that Christic was the first group to reveal the "Rex 84" story. According to the 1986 Sheehan "Affidavit" revised in 1987:
"During the second week of April of 1984, I was informed by Source #4 that President Ronald Reagan had, on April 6, 1984, issued National Security Decision Directive #52 authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency director Louis O. Giuffrida and his Deputy Frank Salcedo to undertake a secret nation-wide, `readiness exercise' code-named `Rex 84....' "
The impression left is that a Christic source exclusively developed this information and quietly handed it over to Sheehan. In fact, the second week of April 1984, the "Rex 84" story was bannered on the front page of the Spotlight and available in coin-boxes all over Capitol Hill. Spotlight had previously reported extensively on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other government initiatives that threatened civil liberties.
Sheehan has told reporters that the "Rex 84" story did not come from Spotlight, but would not respond to questions as to whether or not Source #4 could document where the information came from. This is important because in at least one other instance, previously published research was attributed by Sheehan to Source #4. According to the 1986 Sheehan "Affidavit" revised in 1987:
"In early May of 1984, I was supplied by Source #4 with a number of documents describing, in some detail, a project supervised by then Special Assistant California State Attorney General Edwin Meese code-named "Project Cable Splicer"...part of a larger program, code-named "Project Garden Plot"--which was a nation-wide war games scenario...to establish a nation-wide state of martial law if Richard Nixon's "political enemies" required him to declare a State of National Emergency. "
While the descriptions of Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are accurate, the source is deceptively obscured. The original story of Cable \j press in 1975 in an article by Ron Ridenhour with Arthur Lublow published in Arizona's New Times. Garden Plot was also the cover story for the Winter 1976 issue of CounterSpy magazine. Dozens of pages of the unedited official documents from Garden Plot and Cable Splicer were reprinted in the magazine. Copies of the official documents were made available to trial teams in several cities litigating against illegal government intelligence abuse.
Several former Christic staffers, who asked to remain nameless, suggest that, at the very least, a critical reevaluation of some allegations made in the Christic case would be beneficial in light of the possibility that material from far-right, conspiracist or anti-Jewish sources was uncritically woven into the original "Secret Team" Christic thesis. They say that the Christic theories need to be reassessed with the ulterior motives and credibility of those sources in mind.
The Christic Institute was supplied with the text of the criticisms raised in this section of the report, as well as an extensive list of written questions. With the exception of the quote regarding the LaRouchians, they chose not to respond.
In many way the LaRouche organization, with its slickly repackaged conspiracy theories, serves as a nexus for a number of tendencies on the political right, ranging from ultra-conservatives to outright fascists and white supremacists. LaRouchian material on AIDS, for instance, is cited by homophobic organizations such as the fundamentalist Christian group Summit Ministries. It seems clear that the LaRouche network reaches out to many constituencies, including some that seem improbable on the surface, including some on the left.
Over the past few years the LaRouchians have solicited contacts with a number of critics of U.S. foreign policy and intelligence agency practices, sometimes with surprising success. In many cases, it is the LaRouchian intelligence network that serves as a broker for information flowing between left-wing and right-wing groups. LaRouchians appear to have first penetrated the \j information on covert action and CIA misconduct. The LaRouchians were early critics of the Oliver North network. In the early 1980's, LaRouche intelligence operatives such as Jeffrey Steinberg maintained close ties to a faction in the National Security Council which opposed Oliver North's activities. At the same time the LaRouchians quietly began providing information to mainstream and progressive reporters and researchers.
The Christic Institute and the Empowerment Project which distributes the film "CoverUp: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair" are major promoters of Barbara Honegger's theories regarding an alleged "October Surprise." The October Surprise was the term used among Reagan campaign aides to describe the possibility that the Iranian government might arrange for the release of U.S. hostages prior to the election which pitted incumbent Jimmy Carter against challenger Ronald Reagan. Barbara Honneger alleges in her book October Surprise that Reagan campaign aides did negotiate with representatives of the Iranian government to delay any hostage release until after the 1980 election. Substantial circumstantial evidence exists to suggest such a charge might be true, but there is little incontrovertible proof.
Honneger's research and analysis are questionable. In the 1989 edition of her book October Surprise, Honneger cites frequently to LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review. While some material in EIR is factual, other material presented as fact is unsubstantiated rumor or lunatic conspiracy theories. Some anti-fascist researchers also assume that information in EIR occasionally represents calculated leaks by current and former government intelligence agents and right-wing activists to achieve a desired political goal. This practice is a common tactic in power struggles and faction fights over policy.
While Honneger sometimes cites to progressive periodicals such as In These Times and The Nation,, more than six percent (49 out of a total 771) of the footnotes in Honneger's book cite LaRouchian publications such as EIR, New Solidarity, and New Federalist. In one chapter on "Project Diplomacy," Honneger LaRouchian cites account for over 22 percent of the total number.
Honneger also makes assertions that strain credulity. She quotes without comment the claim of Eugene Wheaton that the CIA is actually secretly controlled by a group of retired members of the OSS.
In the July/August 1991 issue of The Humanist, both David MacMichael and Barbara Trent of the Empowerment project defend Honneger and suggest PBS refused to show "Coverup" because it contained serious charges against the U.S. government. As Trent put it:
"It was no big surprise that there was a problem getting `Coverup' on PBS. Programs that address U.S. foreign policy in particular and are not in agreement with the policies of the sitting president rarely get much of a chance on TV. "
In fact, PBS has aired on the "Frontline" series programs about the October Surprise and CIA involvement in drug trafficking. PBS has also aired two Bill Moyers specials on Iran-Contragate that concluded that Reagan lied repeatedly and may have committed impeachable offenses, and that evidence exists to suggest that Bush's role in the Contra resupply operation was far more direct than he has admitted. The primary difference between the shows broadcast by PBS and "Coverup" is the reliance in "Coverup" on Barbara Honneger and Danny Sheehan and their unsubstantiated and undocumented charges. It would have been difficult for PBS to justify running Honneger's assertions given her reliance on material supplied by neo-Nazis with a history of circulating unreliable information.
"Coverup" also promotes the Christic theme that Iran-Contragate was caused
by a long-standing conspiracy of individual agents. In contrast to this
individualistic formulation, the Moyers programs stress a systemic failure:
that the lack of congressional oversight over foreign policy and covert
action has created a Constitutional crisis where the balance of powers between
branches of government has been skewed toward the executive branch.