The American Security Council: Cold War joint CIA-FBI-Pentagon front involved in illegal operations

Full membership list plus biographies and sources

""My son was tortured to death in front of my eyes," she finally told me one day, "to force me to tell them where some students were hiding. ... I didn't know, but they killed him anyway. ... He was the one who burned out my son's eyes. Him." The picture was one of Enrique Bermudez."

~ Bermudez, one of the ASC's death squad friends from Nicaragua and Honduras. He was also the boss of Danilo Blandon, responsible for the CIA's crack-cocaine epidemic in the U.S. by selling tons of cocaine at bargain prices to the Bloods and Crips gangs (May 3, 1991, New York Times, 'A Man of Hate Meets His Violent Destiny'). CIA and ASC-backed death squads in El Salvador also in part backfired in the extreme violence used by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang in the U.S.

"A new director's crusade against death squads was followed by the murder of a counselor and six children. ... When [Alejos'] workers complain, they end up in a ditch," said Allan Nairn, a longtime reporter in Latin America and a regional expert. "Soldiers would take the surviving children of the workers to local charities.""

~ CIA death squad leader Roberto Alejos Arzu, a close ASC associate. In partnership with Covenant House, whose head, Father Bruce Ritter, was accused of child abuse and a member of the board of AmeriCares with the Bush family, Brzezinski, Eagleburger (Kissinger man), J. Peter Grace, Colin Powell, Gen. Richard Stilwell of the ASC and ASC chairman Robert W. Galvin (see above picture). Involved an international child trafficking ring, according to Sen. John DeCamp. (October 7, 1990, Newsday (Melville, NY), 'War for the Children Guatemala Covenant House confronts death squads')

~ Note: The ASC is largely the U.S. branch of the Cercle network. ~

"Can we agree to take half of endowment in PAFF and use it to fund WDF for national defense projects in U.S. and Philippines? Examples: Strategic Defense Initiative. Other space programs. B-1 Bomber. MX Missiles. Etc. Etc. Conventional weapons. To in effect build a new military-industrial complex controlled by us? If your answer is yes, I suggest A. Singlaub. B. Schweiter. C. Daniel Graham. D. George Keegan."

~ Hand written note of Alan Foringer, administrative CIA head in Manila, to Robert Curtis. Both were after buried Japanese war loot (gold) on the Philippines. Graham and Singlaub were leading members of the ASC, with Keegan also being close. (photocopy: Seagrave's 'Gold Warriors' CDs).

"In considering the World Anti-Communist League you have entered a world of ideological fanaticism, racialism, ignorance and fear which is almost beyond the comprehension of the average American… Your subject matter is a collection of oriental fascists, militarists, rightwing terrorists who put bombs in civilian aircraft, death squads, assassins, criminals and many people who are as opposed to democracy as they are to communism. You are in some danger yourself."

~ Letter to journalists Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson from a former League member. Reproduced in their 1986 book 'Inside the League'. The American Security Council and Le Cercle are higher level groups in the same network as the WACL.

This article will largely address the conservative establishment. As for the general policy differences between the liberal and conservative establishments that have been described on this site, it's best to take a look at the following quick oversight.

Probably the most important private group during the Cold War that was part of the conservative establishment was the American Security Council. Founded in 1954, for many decades it has had prominent generals, intelligence officers, businessmen and scholars on its various boards. These were not your average run-of-the-mill personalities. Most of these men had been supporters of Senator McCarthy, meaning they had irrationally harsh anti-"communosocialist" opinions, as well as a generally antagonist attitude towards the east coast banking elite surrounding the State Department. Needless to say, most persons in the American Security Council were not known for their diplomatic skills, nor did not have a Princeton, Yale, Harvard or Columbia background. It is almost the exact opposite crowd as the one visiting the Pilgrims Society, another private group described on this site.

One of the more important things to realize is that at the level of the American Security Council, there is little to no difference between what has traditionally been termed the "old right", "new right" and "religious right". In essence they all teamed up to fight communism. The "old right" was anti-interventionist, but in reality this was only due to its support for - or total indifference towards - European and Japanese fascism. Both the eastern establishment (really the "liberal right") and right wingers from across the country ("old right") were organized in groups as the American Legion, the American Liberty League, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Crusaders and the America First Committee. As detailed in General Smedley Buter's book, War is a Racket, both big business establishments were always happy to overthrow a Latin American country for various economic interests:

A schism occurred in the late 1930s when England was threatened and the eastern establishment finally began to push for war with Germany. After the war this group also became increasingly internationalist to prevent another major conflict. However, the group that later ended up becoming the American Security Council had no such loyalties to England or mainland Europe. They continued to favor isolationism and are now considered the "old right".

After World War II, the interventionalist "new right" was magically born. For the most part very little changed. Some right wingers did indeed lean towards a "fortress America"-type policy when it came to dealing with the communists in the early years of the Cold War, but it is rather questionable if scholars should split up over this issue. In the early 1950s, supporters of the "new right" General Douglas MacArthur also backed "old right" Senator Robert Taft. Both opposed the New Deal (which contributed to such "terrible" developments as limiting work hours and abolishing child labor), both openly criticized the eastern establishment, both were extremely anti-communist and both had been completely indifferent towards fascism in the pre-World War II years.

Then there's the religious right, of which one of the major pillars has been Jerry Falwell, a close ally of the American Security Council. Falwell was part of the ASC's Peace Through Strength campaign in 1983, appearing on television along with Fisher and General J. Milnor Roberts. On his Religious Council of 56 all kinds of Cold War activists appeared: General Daniel O. Graham and Clay Claiborne of the ASC; Larry MacDonald of Western Goals; Nelson Bunker Hunt of the John Birch Society; and others. Decades-long president of the American Security Council, John Fisher, was described by the Religious Roundtable as a "close friend", as was Joseph Coors, also of the ASC. Several other prominent religious preachers have allied with the network of the American Security Council and related groups, meaning there's all very little difference between the "religious right", "old right" and "new right".

Already in the 1970s there was a neocon aspect to be found in the American Security Council. The major difference with this branch of the right is its complete loyalty to Israel.

The reality is that the core of the neocons are just a bunch of Jewish scholars who appear to act as liaisons between the intelligence communities of the United States and Israel. The CIA-Mossad connection initially ran through CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton. And it just happens to be Angleton, a co-chairman of the American Security Council in the 1980s, who seems to have had a dominant influence over the group. In 1976, soon after his forced retirement from the CIA, Angleton set up his Security and Intelligence Fund. John M. Fisher, founder and long-time president of the American Security Council, was a founding director of SIF. President was Elbridge Durbrow, who, like Angleton, was a co-chairman of the American Security Council. Then there was General Robert Richardson III, of the ASC's national strategy committee, who served as the long-time secretary/treasurer of SIF. It is not hard to see why some would suspect that Angleton continued his CIA counter-intelligence activities through the American Security Council.

Other career CIA officers on the ASC national strategy board have been Richard Bissell, deputy CIA director under Allen Dulles; covert operations expert Ray Cline, co-chairman of the strategy board; and Daniel Arnold, a CIA officer apparently deeply involved in the drug trade. Then there are more than a dozen others who held brief positions at the CIA.

One interesting thing to see is that senior CIA officers of the ASC tend to have an eastern establishment background. Angleton went to Yale and Harvard, Cline had a Ph.D. from Harvard and Bissell a Ph.D. from Yale. Another example would be Frank Barnett. As vice president of the H. Smith Richardson Foundation, already linked at the time to the CIA [1], he put up crucial funds for the ASC's National Military-Industrial Conferences, along with Fisher and General Robert Wood. [2] Barnett was a Rhodes scholar who held Rockefeller and Ford fellowships.

Eisenhower's 1961 farewell speech to the nation has been cited on many different internet pages. In a brief section of his speech, he warns against the rise of the "military establishment", the "defense establishment" and the one that really stuck with everyone, the "military-industrial complex". However, no one seems to know for sure who Eisenhower was referring to exactly. In the opinion of this author, all three establishments are somewhat different. It has been claimed that the American Security Council represents the "military-industrial complex". This is true to an extent, although it must be said that defense and industrial concerns played a relatively minor role in the funding or steering of the ASC. It does have the full support, however, of these corporations. The ASC is also not completely dominated by the military, as plenty of civilians can be found on the board. The term "defense establishment" is probably the most accurate and this author alternates it with "conservative establishment", because ultimately these kind of persons form the absolute core of the conservative/defense movement. There might be many more less radical conservatives out there, but they are not the ones deciding on foreign policy and covert operations.

General MacArthur and his nephew MacArthur II. An interesting contrast: MacArthur loathed State Department politics while MacArthur II was assistant to secretary of state John Foster Dulles (right) in the 1950s, travelling with him all over the world. However, MacArthur II also supported the Moonies and yakuza/fascist elements released by his uncle in Japan. He represented the CIA in many countries he visited. General MacArthur was a hero of the American Security Council.

General MacArthur was another presidential candidate in 1952, but received little support from the public for his McCarthyite anti-communist views. However, Texas oil men as Clint Murchison, Sr., best friend Sid Richardson and their rival H.L. Hunt, did support |MacArthur - and these were powerful men. The first two were good friends of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and various leading right wing politicians. Murchison had CIA connections [3], Sid Richardson would become involved in the American Security Council and H.L. Hunt and his son Nelson Bunker Hunt became major forces in the John Birch Society.

It was General Robert Wood, of the Sears Rubock fortune, who largely ran the MacArthur-For-President campaigns in 1944, 1948 and 1952. In 1954 this same General Wood became the founder of the American Security Council as the Mid-American Research Library. Other close allies of MacArthur had served under him from World War II to the Korean War. These included General Charles Willoughby, G-2 intelligence chief; General Bonner Fellers, chief of psychological operations and a major Anglophobe; General George Stratemeyer and General Albert Wedemeyer, both of whom gave air support to MacArthur's army in Korea. Another major supporter of MacArthur was Marine Corps General Pedro del Valle. Below a list of private action groups can be found in which these generals, as well as the Texas oil barons, organized themselves during the Eisenhower administration. All of these groups pushed for more hardline policies against the Soviet Union and dissolution of any new deal policies..

First published in 1966 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, of which Gen. Nathan Twining (ASC) was vice chairman at the time. Jeane Kirkpatrick's (Cercle; CSP) husband was editorial advisor of the same publishing firm at that point. Lane later took control of the racist Liberty Lobby and was a lawyer for the Jonestown Cult. He was actually evacuated along with the CIA's Richard Dwyer when cult members were massacred in 1978.

The Shickshinny Knights and the Liberty Lobby are primary examples to show that these men were highly fascist. Inviting leading KKK members to the board is just not normal and we all know about the Liberty's Lobby's crusade against black and Jewish people. The earlier mentioned General Robert E. Wood had been rejected by FDR for having "shown far too great approval of Nazi methods" when the recommendation was made to reinstate Wood for active service at the beginning of World War II. [4] In 1951 General Charles Willoughby proposed the following toast: "To the second greatest military genius in the world [after MacArthur] —Francisco Franco." [5] As the reader will find out, this type of support for fascism is the norm.

The American Security Council was founded in 1954 under the name Mid-American Research Library. Although the ASC does not advertise with it, the Mid-American Research Library was the continuation of the library of the American Vigilant Intelligence Federation. Harry A. Jung, head of the federation, fell ill in mid-1954 and died that November.[6] Robert E. Wood, outgoing chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Co., had begun to anticipate that Jung's secretive headquarters in the Chicago Tribune Tower would soon come up for sale and initiated a fundraiser to take it over.[7]

He delegated the task of approaching other company heads to John M. Fisher, vice president of personnel and employee relations at Sears. Fisher was able to bring on board twenty-five other companies, including Motorola, Marshall Field and Illinois Central Railroad. Together these corporations put up the money to buy Jung's library, rebranding it the Mid-American Research Library. Fisher became CEO, with the most important financiers organizing themselves in a senior advisory board.

Fisher changed the name to American Security Council in 1955. This name was much more fitting, as the new foundation was considerably more than just a neutral research library. To begin with, Jung's American Vigilant Intelligence Federation, which had originally been founded in 1919, campaigned against everything from the New Deal to labor unions and U.S. involvement in World War II. He denied it, but there's every indication that Jung was also editor for The American Gentile, an anti-Semite newspaper owned by Russian émigrés from Czarist Russia. These White Russian contacts provided him early on with copies of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and together they worked on an English translation. [8] Certainly Jung was widely accused of being an anti-semite and a Nazi sympathizer. [9] At the very least he was a prominent isolationist and was said to have been in close contact with the leadership of the America First Committee (headed by General Robert Wood), together with his friend Colonel Richard R. McCormack, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. That's the same McCormack who became notorious for leaking U.S. war plans against the fascist nations three days before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Harry Jung, the American Nazi at the basis of what became the American Security Council.

Jung also worked "in close cooperation" with the FBI and on occasion acted as an advisor to junior FBI agents. [10] The primary reason for the FBI's interest in him seems to have stemmed from the fact that he had collected "one of the largest and most complete files on subversive activities" in the United States, stashed at his low-profile headquarters in the Chicago Tribune Tower.  [11] One can wonder if General Robert Wood, who used to be chairman of isolationist America First Committee during World War II, came up with the idea to acquire Jung's library all by himself. Jung appears to have been a friend of J. Edgar Hoover, a notorious red-baiter and blackmailer whose FBI didn't even acknowledge the existence of organized crime until forced to do so in the 1960s. [12] In turn, John M. Fisher, who took control of the library, had retired as a special FBI special agent in 1953, the year before he took over the library. He also picked an army of former FBI agents to run his council. Three early and successive operating directors were all FBI agents with "internal security or counterintelligence experience". The research director had been a FBI agent and so were various members of the senior advisory board: Stephen L. Donchess, who had become a low-level manager at U.S. Steel; Kenneth M. Piper, a former assistant director of the FBI who had become vice president of Motorola; and Russell E. White, taken on by General Electric as a security consultant. Fisher also set up the for-profit firm Fidelifax with offices across the hall from the ASC. The firm's purpose, according to its own official history, was "to bring FBI type background investigations to the corporate sector". Within three months Fidelifax had 32 offices throughout the country, each of them headed by a former special agent of the FBI. Unfortunately, the research agencies did not produce much income for the central library, prompting Fisher to give away his majority stake to his five most important franchise holders.

Evidence really seems to point to the fact that the American Security Council was a joint venture between Hoover's FBI and corporate America. According to Fisher, the companies financing the American Security Council did this to meet their "Cold War citizenship responsibilities" and stop the communist ideal "to put business out of business". [13] Hoover was completely on the side of American corporations and was as extreme to the right as Harry Jung. He ran a massive counter-intelligence program, known as COINTELPRO. With it he infiltrated and disrupted labor unions, civil rights groups, anti-segregation outfits and kept tabs on various left-wing politicians. [14] The early American Security Council had roughly the same aim as COINTELPRO. Membership companies, which grew to about 1,500 corporations in the early 1970s, [15] were able to use the library of the ASC to screen new or existing employees. Although the ASC wouldn't allow any outsiders to view the files, by the early 1970s it was reported that the ASC had information on about 6 million individuals. The information had come from various libraries that had been taken over and was supplanted with information coming from public sources, mainly newspapers. To what extent private researchers and company executives added information to the database seems to be unknown. It is also not known if the FBI cooperated with the ASC in the same way it had done with Harry Jung. It is also not known if applicants have been turned away based on information gathered on them in the library or if employees have ever been fired because of this information. What is known is that in one case a private investigator used the American Security Council "for security checks about political backgrounds with special interest in any communist type activities". [16] The name of this private investigator was Guy Banister, a former FBI agent known to have been the runner of Lee Harvey Oswald of the Kennedy assassination. In this way it seems that ASC, in combination with private investigators, have been providing a service to the FBI that it is ordinarily barred from doing.

The average person may not be worried too much with a group of companies gathering information on communist activity. After all, communism is bad, isn't it? The problem lies in defining what a communist is or what makes a person a suspected communist. Judging from the size of the ASC library, one would be inclined to believe that millions of communists were working to undermine democracy in America.

The ASC was far from the only group that was profiling American citizens based on their political beliefs. The Church League of America, active for many decades since 1937, had a database containing millions of individual names. They added everyone who was "attacking and ridiculing a major doctrine of the Christian faith or the American way of life." [17] Much of the information came from newspapers and books, but the league explained that it also "sat in on communist and leftist meetings" and had agents who "ingratiated themselves with leftists". [18]

The controversial detective and private security firm Wackenhut, ran by an extreme right Christian Scientist, occasionally made use of the files of the Church League. [19] Wackenhut also had its own database of suspects in the 1960s and 1970s, largely based on several unspecified libraries the company bought. George Wackenhut himself estimated that the library "got up to about three million" individual names [20]. To what extent these names overlapped with the databases of the Church League and the ASC hasn't been investigated, but it is likely to have been considerable as Wackenhut was represented on the national strategy committee of the ASC for several decades. A 1968 list - to pick one - reveals that two of the three co-chairmen of the committee at that point were Wackenhut directors: General Bernhard A. Schriever and Lloyd Wright.

In addition, Wackenhut director General Mark W. Clark was a member of the committee. One of Clark's last assignments in the army was as commander-in-chief of United Nations Command in Korea. Under Truman he had been offered the ambassadorship to the Vatican, but was forced to withdraw after protests from various groups. After his retirement he became the oldest and most experienced director of Wackenhut. At the same time he was the long-time head of the Citadel Military College of South Carolina.

Favorite occupation of the ultra right: gathering information on anyone who might threaten their business interests. Looking at their support for overseas death squads it's not hard to imagine what they will do to their own citizens if given full authority.

When Clark resigned from the board of Wackenhut in 1974, his colleague at the ASC, General Bernard A. Schriever, replaced him. Schriever had been the commander of Air Force Systems Command, which produced the Delta, Titan and Atlas rockets. The AFSC program, located at Andrews Air Force Base, was a successful competitor of NASA's Wernher von Braun, whose team produced the Redstone, Jupiter and Saturn rockets. Schriever remained on the board of the ASC until at least the 1980s.

The other co-chairman of the ASC's national strategy committee who could be found at Wackenhut was Lloyd Wright, a lawyer with political ambitions. He had been the committee's initial sole chairman when it was put together back in 1961. A year later he ran for the senate; Ronald Reagan was his campaign manager. Wright was known as an "extremist by any measure" and lost the race to the more moderate Thomas Kuchel. In 1955 his friend, vice president Richard Nixon, asked him to head the Commission of Government Security. Wright's suggestion to penalize any unauthorized disclosure of classified government information was never implemented, as it would have put tremendous restrictions on the freedom of the press. Wright was a major supporter of the John Birch Society and was among the ASC members who were promoting a risky confrontational strategy with the Soviet Union.

The nature of the ASC began to change as a result of Castro's take-over of Cuba in 1959. Dictator Fulgencio Batista ran the island from 1933 to 1944 and again since  1952. U.S. corporations and the American mafia flourished under his rule. When Fidel Castro came to power, he not only kicked out the mafia, but - as communists do - he committed the great sin of nationalizing the assets of American corporations. Oil refineries, sugar and fruit plantations, power companies and the telephone network were all in the hands of American interests - and all were nationalized. Sears Roebuck, the company most prominently invested in the ASC, was among the victims. In response, Fisher would step down as head of the company's corporate security committee to shift the focus of the ASC from countering domestic subversion to foreign policy.  And to do that effectively he needed access to elected officials in Washington.

The first thing Fisher did was open an office in Washington and install yet another retired FBI agent: Lee R. Pennington, who had retired from the FBI in 1953. He was third in command at that point, after Hoover and Tolson. Pennington joined the American Legion, where he did similar work as he had done for the FBI and what was being done at the ASC: gathering information on "subversives". After retiring from the American Legion, Pennington went to work for the American Security Council. His office produced the Washington Report, a bi-weekly and in some years weekly newsletter that was spread to members, local newspapers and added to the congressional record. Interestingly, years later it came out that Pennington was a CIA operative who "had been doing CIA work on Capitol Hill." He was close to James McCord, the former CIA officer who headed the Watergate burglary, and was instrumental in destroying files linking McCord to the CIA. [21] Pennington died from a heart attack several months after the revelations.

Working under Pennington at the ASC's Washington office was retired Rear Admiral Chester C. Ward, who was the editor of its Washington Report newsletter. Not long after joining the ASC, he became one of the nation's most intense fear mongers, together with co-author Phyllis Schlafly. In 1964 the duo published the book The Gravediggers, in which they attacked the New York bankers establishment, claiming it was undermining elections and was exposing the country to danger by reducing defense spending. Two years later their roman Strike from Space: A Megadeath Mystery was published, warning for the possibility of an unexpected sudden nuclear strike from the Soviets. In 1974 they published the best-seller Kissinger on the Couch, criticizing Kissinger's policy of détente and claiming he was an instrument of the Soviets.

Typical American Security Council books, really no different from the John Birch Society.

After setting up the Washington office, the next step for Fisher was to put together a national strategy committee, filled with prestigious military and intelligence officers, as well as a few sponsors. Every single one of them could be found at the ultra right of the political spectrum.

In addition to reorganizations at the American Security Council, members were also involved in setting up Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba (CCFC) in 1963. ASC board members as Edward Teller and Claire Boothe Luce were among the directors. Another, Spruille Braden, soon became chairman. Even John Fisher joined the board in 1964. Leo Cherne was there, a mentor to William Casey and a pioneer in CIA operations through private institutes. Admiral Arleigh Burke and Nicholas Duke Biddle of the elite Pilgrims Society sat on the board. Executive director Paul D. Bethel should be counted among the Kennedy assassination suspects. A CIA man, he was close to David Atlee Phillips and the anti-Castro Cuban underground that carried out sabotage and terrorist attacks against Castro's Cuba.

Throughout the Cold War the conservatives of the American Security Council and related groups were struggling against Kennedy's Limited Test Ban Treaty and Kissinger's proposals of detente and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. Behind all these rather rational policies in the eyes of the vast majority of people, the McCarthyites of the American Security Council saw things differently: all these diplomatic efforts were part of a Soviet-ran grand "communosocialist" conspiracy, designed to take over the United States. They opposed any diplomatic efforts with the Soviets and every attempt to steer the world away from Mutually Assured Destruction. If it had been up to these men, the United States would have used nuclear weapons in just about any major conflict since World War II. In 1950, after his forces were overran by Chinese troops due to his own mistakes, General Douglas MacArthur pushed for the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea and China. His exact words:

MacArthur and Truman: not the best of friends.

Not everyone agreed that MacArthur's plan was a "cinch". Confidential State Department files reportedly stated that the United States was only in the possession of twenty nukes at the time (which seems like awfully few and contradicts other information). And it turned out to be impossible to find large enough concentrations of Chinese troops to use the nuclear weapons against. [23] The State Department also advised against using the Taiwanese as they were not strong enough to defend against a Chinese invasion. If the United States would intervene in the conflict at that point, it might well have brought in Russia also. [24] President Truman, who ultimately fired MacArthur for insubordination, was of the opinion that MacArthur was hoping for all out war with the Chinese, an accusation that was obviously denied. The two eventually parted ways with MacArthur calling Truman a "little bastard" who "believes he is a patriot", [25] while Truman referred to the general as a "dumb son of a bitch" who "wasn't right in the head". [26]

What is absolutely true is that the men surrounding MacArthur were very much interested in the idea of a "preventive war" against the Soviet Union and communism internationally. It was on August 29, 1949, just before the Korean conflict heated up, that the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear bomb test. It took two years before another test took place. The third, in October 1951, was the Soviet's first air drop, six years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At this point the Soviet Union was still far behind the capabilities of U.S. Strategic Air Command, which was almost ready to deliver full and effective nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.

It was in this period, in the early days of days of the Cold War, that some senior military officers flirted with the idea of attacking the Soviet Union "preventively", because they were certain that Stalin was going to attack the West as soon as he had produced a significant arsenal of nuclear weapons. The strategy designed under Project Control in the early 1950s at the U.S. Air War College was preferred by this group. It gave the Soviet Union six months to capitulate under terms outlined by the Americans. If the Soviet Union would refuse to comply, the United States would attack it with nuclear weapons.

This study was strongly tied to future American Security Council members. Its head was Colonel Raymond Sleeper, an ASC national strategy committee member. Among the supporters were General Curtis LeMay; his deputy at Strategic Air Command, Thomas S. Power; Air Force General Nathan Twining and Admiral Arthur W. Radford. Another supporter was General George Keegan, whose activities were closely intertwined with the ASC.

LeMay, always eager to start a new world war, had actually begun to implement aspects of Project Control on his own:

American Security Council mindset: Bombs that can wipe out large cities in seconds, burn people alive over 20 miles away and cause radiation fallout that will stick around for thousands, if not millions, of years? Great idea. Let's build thousands and use them "preventively" to take out the communists and the socialists! In that sense we should be thankful that there has been a Kissinger and Rockefeller family to combat that mindset.

As the person who ran the World War II firebombings of Japanese cities, killing more than two million people in the process, LeMay had grown to become completely indifferent to the suffering of innocent people. During his tenure as chief of staff for the air force, Curtis LeMay was a major headache to Kennedy and some of his administration officials. He pushed for a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam while Kennedy had no interest in expanding the war. During the Cuban Missile Crisis LeMay wanted to hear nothing of a naval blockade. Instead, he insisted on being allowed to bomb the Cuban missile sites, not knowing – and possibly not even caring – that Cuba had already received about 100 nuclear weapons and that local field commanders had been given authority to launch their weapons against the U.S. military. [28] Most people regard the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis as extremely fortunate. But not LeMay, who said it was "the greatest defeat in our history". [29] Much of the CIA was of the same opinion. Bill Harvey, station chief in Miami, was even banished to Rome by Kennedy for sending unauthorized commando teams into Cuba during the crisis.

LeMay, his protege Power, and Joint Chiefs chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer, another later ASC strategy board member, were also supporters of the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) which called for a massive retaliation with the entire U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal on Russia, China and all Soviet-allied states, even when only the Soviet Union attacked the United States. Kennedy resented the plan and McNamara ordered it revised in 1962.

There were other persons at the ASC who had learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Sam Cohen was the designer of the neutron bomb and advocated its use in Vietnam. Edward Teller was the father of the hydrogen bomb and a major proponent in the 1980s of using them for his incredibly impractical and irresponsible nuclear X-ray lasers. The idea behind that laser was to blow up nuclear bombs in space, the energy of which would be enough to power lasers that were to shoot down nuclear missiles before reaching their intended targets. The project never reached full development phase.

In 1991 it was General John Singlaub, of the ASC's strategy board, who suggested to use nuclear weapons against Saddam [30] Hussein in the first Gulf War. During Gulf War II speculation arose of developing a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons. Considering the neocons are fully backed by the American Security Council, this was probably not a coincidence.

In 1970 the ASC introduced its "security voting index". Senator Frank Church, who voted against the ABM and would later chair the Church Committee on CIA abuses, not surprisingly, was among those who received a "zero" rating. In 1973 the ASC moved its headquarters to the tiny town of Boston, Virginia, located about 70 miles south-east of Washington. The ASC took their database of alleged subversives with them, placing the records in the Sol Feinstone Library for the Survival of Freedom. It claimed to phase out the use of the library, focusing exclusively on external subversion instead of internal. That may be so, but other organizations, whose leadership overlaps with that of the ASC, continued to focus on the internal aspects. The American Legion's Virginia headquarters was located in the same town, for example. Within a decade the ASC would also have major overlap with the Western Goals Foundation, which was caught in the early 1980s collecting police files on everything from civil liberties groups and anti-nuclear protestors to left-wing judges and politicians. [31] Anthony Kubek, Thomas Moorer, General John Singlaub, General Lewis Walt, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, all of the ASC, also sat on the board of Western Goals. [32] So in essence the ASC never gave up its domestic spying activities.

In 1978 the ASC stepped it up again with the creation of the Coalition for Peace Through Strength. The coalition brought together many hundreds of scholars, law makers and private institutes, as well as over 250 members of congress. Among the private institutes represented were the American Conservative Union, the American Legion, Young Americans for Freedom and Committee for a Free Afghanistan, all groups whose leadership can also be found in the American Security Council.

With the election of Ronald Reagan two years later, for the first time the conservatives got the president that they had always wanted. The public en masse rejected General Douglas MacArthur in 1952. Barry Goldwater lost the elections in 1964. George Wallace, whose running mate in 1968 was Curtis LeMay, never stood a chance (one of his speech writers had been Gary Allen, the famous anti-Rockefeller and Trilateral Commission author). Another darling of the ultra right, Richard Nixon, turned his policies towards communism around by 180 degrees: from a hardline, confrontational approach, he went to following Kissinger's détente policy, which the ASC and Kissinger's old mentor, Fritz Kraemer, were not too pleased about. Senator Henry Jackson, an ASC favorite lost the 1976 Democratic nomination to the Trilateral Commission-backed Jimmy Carter. Interesting detail: during the campaign Nelson Rockefeller, apparently as a favor to Kissinger, helped undermine Jackson's campaign by making up a story that his aides Richard Perle and Dorothy Fosdick were secretly harboring communist sympathies. [33] But then, finally, in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected. And unlike Nixon, he stayed a loyal ultraconservative throughout his presidency.

Favorites of the ASC: Nixon, Reagan and Goldwater. Nixon betrayed the principles of the ASC when he began to support Kissinger's detente and rapprochement policies towards the Soviet Union and China.

It appears that Reagan's election was supported by rather murky elements in the CIA, including Ted Shackley (Le Cercle), future defense secretary and national security advisor Frank Carlucci, General Vernon Walters (ASC), future CIA director William Casey (Le Cercle), future vice president George H. W. Bush and his national security advisor Donald Gregg. [34] Reagan himself had been affiliated with the extreme-right for many decades. As already mentioned, in 1962 he was chairman of the senate race of Lloyd Wright, the John Bircher and Wackenhut director who had been in favor of a preventative war with the Soviet Union. In 1964 he was a public supporter of Barry Goldwater. In 1966, while running for governor, California's Democratic State Committee accused Reagan of being "an extremist collaborator and extremists' candidate". Criticized were his affiliations with the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the John Birch Society, the Church League of America and Young Americans for Freedom. The committee also listed Henry Salvatori and Patrick J. Frawley as contributors to Reagan's campaign. [35] Both members of the national strategy committee of the ASC in the 1960s. Frawley had become a major financier of anti-communist propaganda after his firm's Cuban holding had been confiscated by Castro. In Hollywood Reagan had been the agent of MCI chairman Lew Wasserman (1001 Club), who had high level mob connections. [36] Reagan did favors for Wasserman's company for which the latter supported Reagan in his political career. Based on this quick background of the Reagan administration, it is hardly a surprise that the Reagan years laid the foundation for several major scandals: Iran-Contra, the South Central L.A. crack cocaine epidemic, Iraqgate, BCCI and maybe even the death of journalist Danny Casolaro.

It is generally acknowledged that the renewed arms race under Reagan helped push the Soviet economy over the edge when it tried to keep up with American spending. Ironically, the collapse of the Soviet Union also largely meant the end of the influence of the ASC. At the time it was planning to introduce Eaglenet, which would have alerted members to upcoming votes in congress. It also had a political action committee that provided funds to favorite candidates.  So it is clear that the American Security Council had become a well-oiled lobbying machine by the end of the Cold War, not unlike the Israel lobby. But with the Soviet Union gone, the ASC's funds quickly dried up and it had to downsize considerably. The Institute for American Strategy, a think tank closely affiliated with the ASC, originally set up to organize the annual National Military-Industrial Conferences, had become the American Security Council Foundation a decade earlier. In 1997 the ASC and ASCF merged with each other and continue today as the American Security Council Foundation. Looking at some of the ASCF names today it is clear that there has been a loss of prestige. Almost no big names can be found, in contrast to the Cold War. Examples:

The real post-Cold War continuation of the American Security Council has actually really been the strongly neoconservative Center for Security Policy. It was founded in 1989 by Frank Gaffney, one of the neocons who had worked for Senator Henry Jackson, a beneficiary of the ASC and close friend of the CIA. Gaffney was part of the absolute core of the conservative establishment, as can be gleaned from a speech he held to the Conservative Leadership Conference on November 9, 1990: flanking him were the Pentagon strategist Fritz Kraemer, whose son played a major role in the ASC, and General Graham, a co-chairman of the ASC. Typical subjects were discussed, as the Contras, SDI and SALT. Kraemer, already known as a mystery man, as well as the first mentor to Henry Kissinger, was introduced as follows:

Looking to the board of the Center for Security Policy roughly ten to fifteen years after its founding, it is possible to find many individuals who also sat on the board of the American Security Council. They include Paula Dobriansky, whose father was at the ASC; Edwin Feulner, also a key player in the Heritage Foundation and Le Cercle; Jeane Kirkpatrick, Sven Kraemer, General Bernard Schriever, Edward Teller and William Van Cleave. The board and membership of the Center for Security is also much more prestigious, and has many more CIA and military men on it than today's American Security Council Foundation. [37] Already before George W. Bush was elected president in 1999, all the major neocons he selected to serve in his administration were officers or members of the Center for Security Policy. A brief list:

PART 2: CONTROVERSY

MacArthur's legacy: Black Dragons, Taiwan, germ warfare, and the Moonie Cult

General Douglas MacArthur's activities have already been discussed to an extent, including the flirtations with fascism of him and his associates. But there is considerably more to be found in this area.

On December 24, 1948, in a "Christmas amnesty", MacArthur released 17 Class A war criminal suspects. Among those released were Nobusuke Kishi, a future prime minister of Japan; Ayukawa Gisuke, of the Manchuria Heavy Industry Development Corporation (Nissan); Yoshio Kodama and Ryochi Sasakawa, who both came to dominate the yakuza and the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, the dominant party for over 50 years after World War II; Admiral Sankichi Takahashi, Shumei Okawa and Yoshihisa Kuzu. [38] The release of this group caused quite a bit of consternation in Japan. According to Earnest Hoberecht, "Japanese of all classes appeared baffled by the amnesty". Many were complaining that the "real plotters of aggression" were set free and that "the amnesty heightened the possibility of a fascist revival in Japan". [39] The Japanese were especially anxious about the release of Kuzu, former president of the notorious Black Dragon Society. Although the name sounds like it has been taken from a comic book, all these years it was this group that every prime minister feared. With their branch of Shintoism, called State Shintoism or Tennoism, the Black Dragons provided the ideological basis for Japanese fascism. In Tennoism absolute loyalty is demanded to the emperor, as he is considered the physical incarnation of the Sun God Amaterasu. The Black Dragon Society spread this ideology through a plethora of youth groups and other less influential secret societies. They combined this with the idea that all of Asia, if not the entire world, should be made subservient to their Sun God. [40] Its primary tactic was terrorism. Anyone opposing the philosophies of this group was to be assassinated - as so many prime ministers personally experienced in the years before World War II. Its leader, Mitsuru Toyama, a close associate of the royal family, maintained a network of spies throughout the country and even abroad. A description of the Black Dragon Society from the end of World War II reads:

Of those men released on December 24, 1948, and who had all come to know one another in prison, not just Kuzu belonged to the Black Dragon Society. Admiral Sankichi Takahashi was said to be a member, just as private sector spymaster Shumei Okawa. A photograph later surfaced of a Black Dragon Society meeting with Yoshio Kodama sitting next to Mitsuru Toyama. This is particularly interesting because Kodama, together with his friend Ryochi Sasakawa - also released on December 24 - came to dominate Japanese politics through the Liberal Democratic Party for over fifty years after World War II. [42] Basically all Japanese prime ministers in the post-war era can be shown to have been close to Kodama, Sasakawa or the leading Yamaguchi yakuza clan, headed by Kazuo Taoka, a friend of Kodama and Sasakawa. In other cases there are curious ties to the Rockefeller group or Lockheed. [43]

While Kodama mainly operated in the shadows, "Godfather Sasakawa" became a multi-billionaire through his monopoly on Japanese motorboat racing. By the 1980s he had become a close associate of Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger and various other Western elites. Together with BCCI chairman Agha Hasan Abedi he was funding Carter's Global 2000 project and similar sustainable development projects. [44] But the fact is that he remained one of Japan's leading "kuromaku", meaning "power behind the throne".

A good question to ask might be why these men had been released in the first place. Considering how the Japanese behaved during the invasion of China, including the famous Nanking event and the operating of Unit 731 and similar centers, none of the major pro-war supporters should have been released. In case of Kodama and his friend Sasakawa, it seems clear that they were recruited by MacArthur and Willoughby. In an April 1950 letter from Kodama to MacArthur the former was asking for approval to send "me and my numerous trusted friends to South Korea immediately as members of your troops in order to cooperate with your men on the field.", signing off with "I remain your obedient servant." [45] In 1960 Kodama showed he was able to pull an army of 18,000 right-wing thugs and criminals together in an effort to quash left-wing protests during a visit of Eisenhower. [46] Obviously MacArthur could not allow men like these to enter South Korea, but whatever Kodama may or may not have done for him in relation to this particular conflict is unknown. CIA reports from 1952, and published in 2007, give additional confirmation that Kodama and some of his associates had been recruited by Army G-2 in order to help the United States fight communism. Kodama's group sent spies to surrounding communist countries and delivered mercenaries to Chiang Kai-shek's regime in Taiwan. In the documents the CIA also claims that the group was primarily working for themselves and were a great danger to the democratic process in Japan. [47]

Unsurprisingly, MacArthur was a great supporter of Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan, in contrast to President Truman and the State Department. Reportedly, MacArthur, as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, was asked to help put together a plan to remove Kai-shek - but he refused. [48] According to MacArthur in 1951:

Those are interesting observations from MacArthur. The simple fact is that Kai-shek and his troops, while retreating from mainland China to Taiwan in December 1949, had behaved the same way as the Japanese troops a decade earlier in Nanking. Straight from the New York Times:

Despite MacArthur's claim two years later that Taiwan appeared to be a rather prosperous and tranquil society, there's little evidence of that. In the early 1950s Dr. K. C. Wu, governor of Taiwan, was expelled from the island and ended up in the United States. Here he explained that "the secret police of the island have resorted to torture, blackmail and illegal arrests" and that under these circumstances Taiwan could not be an effective ally of the West. [51] But CIA support was always there, of course. One particularly important player seems to have been Ray Cline, an OSS veteran in the Far East alongside men as Richard Helms, General John Singlaub (ASC) and Howard Hunt. From 1958 to 1962 he was the CIA station chief in Taiwan and in later decades a co-chairman of the American Security Council. Cline became a close friend of Chiang Kai-shek's son, intelligence chief Chiang Ching-kuo. Together they were involved in overseeing a rather extreme anti-communist indoctrination program. As one former recruit explained:

So MacArthur and his intelligence chief Willoughby released and recruited notorious Japanese war criminals in December 1948 and allowed Chiang Kai-shek to massacre and subvert the Taiwanese population beginning in December 1949. Korea was their next stopping point. A first present MacArthur took with him to Korea was former Unit 731 head Shiro Ishii and a few of his key staffers. [113] Hated by the Chinese and prosecuted by the Soviets, MacArthur simply employed these monsters in secret so they could continue research in biological warfare, now for the American side. Throughout the Korean conflict, even after MacArthur had been removed, numerous canisters with small rodents, spiders, fleas, beetles, crickets and various exotic insects were released above civilian centers which had been infected with diseases as the Bubonic Plague, Typhus, Yellow Fever and Cholera. [114] In later years, the U.S. Army in Japan, on Okinawa, was also conducting experiments with wiping out the Asian rice crop. [115]

After MacArthur's September 1950 daring amphibious landing on Inchon and conquest of North Korea, his forces were responsible for the liberation of Reverent Sun Myung Moon, who had been imprisoned in a brutal labor camp for having set up his own personality cult. In the decades thereafter the Moonie Cult, in which he served as the messiah, was backed by the Korean CIA, MacArthur-released Japanese war criminals Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa and ultra right forces in the United States, mainly as a lobby to keep a strong U.S. regiment in South Korea. [53] The American Security Council was among the most prominent right wing groups tied to the Moonie Cult. By the 1980s leading ASC luminaries as General Daniel Graham, General David Woellner, Ray Cline, William Van Cleave and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, as well as General George Keegan, were all involved in Moonie Cult fronts as CAUSA and the International Security Council, the latter a rather obvious spin-off from the American Security Council. Other well-known supporters of Moon included ASC-members General Alexander Haig, Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan, as well as Douglas MacArthur II, Arnaud de Borchgrave and CIA deputy director and William Casey friend Max Hugel. In 1991 Regnery Press, belonging to the ASC, actually published a book with the telling title: Inquisition: The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Accusations against the Moonies come from various sources. Among them is Nansook Hong, a wife of one of Sun Myung Moon's sons. She fled the cult after years of abuse, fearing her children were in danger. Her 1998 book In the Shadow of the Moons summarizes the accusations quite well:

Sun Myung Moon and wife. Greatly supported by many ASC members.

Looking at all the times the cult has expressed its appreciation for General Douglas MacArthur, the Moonie Cult could just as well be dubbed the "MacArthur Cult". The cult's "little angels" still regularly conduct ceremonies in honor of MacArthur.

As may seem rather obvious at this point, ASC men as General MacArthur, General Singlaub, Ray Cline and several others largely stood at the basis of the formation of the World Anti-Communist League network. Chiang Kai-shek, Sasakawa and Kodama, the Shah of Iran, leaders in South Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Europe, South America and other locations all visited meetings of the WACL and its closely-linked Asian People's Anti-Communist League. At this point it should also be clear that the accusations of fascist ties should be anything but controversial - it's the norm.

General MacArthur's nephew, Douglas MacArthur II gives us additional insight in the MacArthur family mindset. MacArthur II and his wife have been described by various associates as rather cold and aristocratic. [54] From 1969 to 1972 he was U.S. ambassador to Iran (retired CIA director Richard Helms held this position from 1973 to 1977). At the time the Shah was one of the most important allies of the West. The Rockefeller group was heavily invested in the country and both the CIA and Mossad helped train its secret police. Needless to say, reports of repression and torture were widespread:

Clearly Iran was not the best place in the world to live in. And according to Foreign Service officer Roger C. Brewin, this is just the way MacArthur preferred it:

As an aristocrat, MacArthur was actually very friendly with the Shah and the Iranian business elite responsible for the torture. Remember that the Shah's closest family members had been invited to the 1001 Club, together with the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, Prince Bernhard and other elites. They have also been spotted at Tongsun Park's George Town Club in Washington, together with a host of other elites. This is how a treasury department operative, Arthur F. Blaser, Jr., remembered MacArthur II in Iran:

As an assistant to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the early 1950s, MacArthur II had come to know many important world leaders. In part he also followed into the footsteps of his father, and not just as a business partner of Sun Myung Moon. [57] While ambassador to Japan from 1957 to 1961, he negotiated the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty with prime minister Nobusuke Kishi [58], one of the suspected war criminals that had been released by his father, along with Kodama and Sasakawa. The Mutual Security Treaty was actually so unpopular, that Kishi was forced to resign. [59] This was despite the fact that Kodama, who had been working for MacArthur's father, had put together an army of 18,000 gangsters and ultra right youths to suppress leftist demonstrations.

It seems rather obvious that Kishi and Kodama were working hand in hand here with the U.S. State Department, CIA officers and possibly Army Intelligence, which were actually all personified by MacArthur II. Also during his tenure as ambassador to Belgium from 1961 to 1965, MacArthur was said to represent both the CIA and the State Department and was suspected of involvement in Belgium's strategy of tension - which involved the creation of underground fascist networks. [60]

MacArthur II: Important ties to the Belgian X-Dossiers of the Dutroux Affair, as well as the American Franklin/Craig Spence Affair. And he's not the only one: Gen. Graham and Gen. Richardson, both of the ASC, have similar ties.

It is in Belgium that MacArthur II's ties become even more sinister than those of his father. First of all, MacArthur was a major liaison between the U.S. and Belgian establishments, both as ambassador and in private capacity. During the Congo Crisis in the early 1960s he is known to have attended a dinner at the house of under secretary of state for political affairs Averell Harriman, together with Paul Henri Spaak, Robert Rothschild and Etienne Davignon. [61] Prime minister and defense secretary Paul vanden Boeynants was sucking up to him in the extreme and claimed in one of his letters that both had a mutual friend with the name "Jean Josi". [62] This turns out to be Jean-Marie Josi of Groupe Josi, with past board members as Albert Frere, Aldo Vastapane, Ado Blaton and Pierre Salik. Marie was also a director of Banque Bruxelles Lambert, of Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (financier of the Brussels WTC project), vice president of Brussels Airways under Charlie De Pauw in the late 1960s and vice president of Sobeli, under the presidency of Michel Relecom. [63] His son, Jean-Pierre Laurent Josi, is today a member of Cercle de Lorraine, where Etienne Davignon, Albert Frere, Maurice Lippens, Leopold Lippens and every other Belgian aristocrat can be found.

These are all extremely familiar names for those who have read ISGP's articles on the Dutroux affair. Vanden Boeynants, Vastapane, Blaton, De Pauw, Davignon and the Lippens brothers have been accused of child abuse, often by multiple witnesses. MacArthur's connection to Michel Relecom is equally significant. After his retirement from government service in 1972 he and his wife went to live (at least part time) in Belgium, because their daughter was married to a Belgian and had a child there. MacArthur joined Banque Bruxelles Lambert as a director. [64] By the 1980s he sat on the board of the Belgian brewery firm Unibra, controlled by Relecom. Unibra owned a peculiar security advisory firm with the name European Institute of Management (EIM), headed by MacArthur from August 1981 to February 1985. Administrative director of EIM was Colonel Rene Mayerus, founder and head of Belgium's Diana Group, the Belgian version of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team or SWAT. He was close to Major Jean Bougerol of the PIO intelligence network overseen by Baron de Bonvoisin and Paul vanden Boeynants. Some of his PIO men also showed up at EIM. [65]

The Diana Group had been founded in the early 1970s as a response to international terrorism. Then-defense minister Paul vanden Boeynants oversaw the creation of the unit, along with Mayerus. What has become clear over the years is that the Diana Group was a major link in an underground fascist (Nazi and Francoist) network in Belgium that has been linked repeatedly to false flag terrorist operations and assassinations. Purely by coincidence, the same group of people was also tied to a pedophile entrapment network, which included ritual abuse, the production of snuff movies and the hunting of children on various castle domains. A partial summary of the accusations reads:

Sybil, the first major book on Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder, first published in 1973 by Henry Regnery Press of the ASC. Regnery Press also published books of Friedrich A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, the fascist poet Ezra Pound (the mentor of Eustace Mullins), UFO authors as Jacques Vallee, J. Allen Hynek and Raymond Drake, as well as books criticizing FDR and supportive of the Moonie Cult. William Regnery used to be a prominent member of the America First Committee, along with ASC founder General Robert Wood.

Names have largely been stripped from the book just cited here, but the men accused of involved in hunts on children include Paul vanden Boeynants, his best friend Baron de Bonvoisin, Colonel Rene Mayerus and Colonel Gerard Lhost. [67] Fascist technology-savvy gendarme officers as Bouhouche and Amory were doing the dirty work for these men, which included guarding the domains where this type of illegal activity was going on. Bouhouche's private research firm ARI maintained close ties with EIM, with Mayerus helping Bouhouche getting various contracts for ARI, including one from CIA-front Intertel. [68]

De Bonvoisin was the major financier of the underground fascist movement and knew at least three of the pedophile pimps whose names came up in the aftermath of the Dutroux case. The fact that he was invited to attend at least one meeting of the top level and super secret Cercle group, is one of many indications that de Bonvoisin was CIA. Other invitees to Le Cercle were friends running the Belgian chapters of the World Anti-Communist League and Western Goals. It is not known if de Bonvoisin also knew MacArthur, although it's more than likely. Ray Cline once remembered that Major Jean Bougerol of PIO had received counter-insurgency training in the United States [69] while Arnaud de Borchgrave was the one to introduce Bougerol to de Bonvoisin. [70] It was also said that de Borchgrave, who comes from an aristocratic Belgian military intelligence family seemingly also linked to child abuse, [71] was de Bonvoisin's CIA contact. This relationship is significant, because Ray Cline, de Borchgrave and MacArthur II were all three supporters of the Moonies. Cline's son-in-law Roger Fontaine, de Borchgrave and MacArthur II served on the editorial board of the Moonie Cult's Washington Times in the 1980s while Cline, a co-chairman of the ASC, and de Borchgrave shared the board of the U.S. Global Strategy Council. [72] And it appears that the Belgian friends of these men were involved in this extremely sadistic child abuse network.

There's more. From at least 1981 to at least 1983 MacArthur II, together with the ASC's Thomas Moorer, was also serving on the five-man-board of Washington lobbying firm Hill & Knowlton, founded and headed by Robert Keith Gray. [74] In 1966 Gray had been a key founder of the George Town Club, together with questionable businessman Tongsun Park and with funds provided from the Korean CIA. The board was stacked by CIA men (and one woman), a Catholic priest and at least one person seemingly involved in MKULTRA experiments at Edgewood Arsenal. [75] Gray himself was tied to the combined Franklin/Craig Spence child abuse scandal by Senator John DeCamp:

True or not, when it comes to these kind of accusations of child abuse we always end up with the same elite conservative and liberal networks. Roy Cohn served on the board of the Western Goals Foundation, together with half a dozen prominent ASC members. [77] He was also implicated on another occasion of child abuse, along with J. Edgar Hoover. [78] Almost certainly Roy Cohn was a director the CIA-Mossad front firm Permindex, where Clay Shaw, famous for his at least superficial ties to Lee Harvey Oswald, was a known director. Shaw was deeply involved in the New Orleans network linked to MKULTRA with strong hints of a sadistic child abuse ring operating in the background, not the least at Shaw's own home where hooks suspended from the ceiling with bloody palm prints were found. [116] The New Orleans network had various ties not only to the Rockefeller group in New York, but also Le Cercle and the American Security Council. Shaw himself counted the House of Savoy and the Borghese family [117] among his associates. Both families, and both almost certainly linked to the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei, were deeply involved in running the underground fascist armies that carried out the CIA's strategy of tension in Italy. Most worrying of all, Shaw counted among his associates Princess Jacqueline de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, a member of the family named in the Dutroux X-Dossiers as having organized elite child hunts at their domain in southern Belgium. We just described how Douglas MacArthur II was a friend and associate of the Belgians accused of these exact practices. Clay Shaw's connections are discussed in ISGP's article on the Kennedy assassination.

As for Robert Keith Gray, he provided another hint to his involvement in child abuse networks when assisting Father Bruce Ritter of Covenant House in 1989 for a fraction of the usual fee to protect the priest from accusations of child abuse. [79] Ritter sat on the board of the Knights of Malta-linked charity AmeriCares with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lawrence Eagleburger (Kissinger Associates), members of the Bush family, J. Peter Grace, Colin Powell, Richard Stilwell of the ASC and ASC chairman Robert W. Galvin. The major patron of the Guatemalan branch of Covenant House was ran by Roberto Alejos Arzu, a CIA and ASC-affiliated death squad leader. There was widespread corruption at this Guatemalan branch, with children and overseers being murdered when a new director tried to turn things around. According to DeCamp:

Did General Graham receive sensitive information from Edwin Wilson's illegal spy operations in order to pressure government officials into accepting expensive, possibly unnecessary weapons systems? Whatever this information consisted of, Graham had curious ties to alleged pedophile blackmailers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Together with ASC strategy board member General Robert Richardson, a close friend of James Angleton, Robert Keith Gray also served on the board of Consultants International, a firm owned by his friend Edwin Wilson. [81] In the late 1970s and early 1980s Wilson is said to have ran a large scale illegal spy operation on politicians, churches and police departments, providing any interesting information to "private corporations who were developing weapons for the Department of Defense." This is what the so-called Edward Cutolo affidavit reads (update: this document is largely bogus). [82] These companies were encouraged to use the personal information gathered on congressman and senators to pressure them into approving new weapons systems at whatever costs these systems incurred. Wilson did not give the names of the corporations that received the information, but did provide details on three products that they were developing at that point.  The first was "an armored vehicle", which could be anything. Possibly it was the M1 Abrams, which entered service in 1980, but this remains a wild guess. The second system was "an aircraft that is invisible to radar", almost certainly the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk. The first Have Blue prototype of the F-117 flew in December 1977. The B-2 Spirit only existed on paper in the late 1970s. The description of the third weapons system read: "a weapons system that utilizes kinetic energy". Cutolo got the impression that this system was being developed for "use by NASA or for [anti-]CBR purposes", with CBR standing for "chemical, biological and radioactive". This appears to be a very clear description of Brilliant Pebbles, promoted by General Daniel Graham and his deputy General Robert C. Richardson at High Frontier, both of the ASC. In other words, if anyone would be in a good position to carry out blackmail operations, as Gray has been accused of doing, it would be Gray and some of his closest associates.

Like Douglas MacArthur II and Clay Shaw, General Daniel Graham and General Robert Richardson actually have a rather sinister Belgian connection too. In the 1980s both were sitting on the board of the Institut Europeen pour la Paix et la Securite, a Belgian pro-SDI outfit. Co-founders of the institute in 1983 were Cercle visitors Jacques Jonet, a Habsburg lawyer; Paul Vankerkhoven, head of the Belgian branch of the World Anti-Communist League; General Robert Close, president of the World Anti-Communist League and Western Goals Belgium; and Nicolas de Kerchove, another representative of Otto von Habsburg and Paul vanden Boeynants. Among the other directors were former Cercle chairman Brian Crozier; Cercle visitor and Habsburg representative Count Hans Huyn, also a director Western Goals Europe; Willy De Clercq and Jean Gol. [83] All these persons were basically extremely questionable. Besides belonging to Opus Dei for the most part, these men have endless ties to covert activity and pedophile entrapment as described in the X-Dossiers of the Dutroux affair (much additional material can be found in individual biographies of those accused). They know all the important men accused in these dossiers very well.

So not only MacArthur II has been linked to alleged sadistic child abusers on both sides of the Atlantic, but the same thing goes for General Daniel Graham and General Robert Richardson, as said, both of the American Security Council national strategy board in the 1980s. Left out until now is an alleged private statement of a former CIA deputy director of operations, Robert Crowley, that Allen Dulles, the brother of the man MacArthur II was an important assistant to, is the one who initially set up this pedophile entrapment network, about a decade after he was recruited into the Knights of Malta when serving as OSS chief in Switzerland. This aspect is discussed in the Robert Crowley section of ISGP, however, as still a really good look needs to be taken at the reliability of this claim, despite that it is exactly what ISGP has always assumed. If true, it is important to know that Dulles' deputy, Richard Bissell, sat on the national strategy board of the American Security Council, as did James Angleton, all important allies of Dulles at one point. The Crowley transcripts also name the earlier-mentioned Robert Keith "Bobby" Gray as one of the most important CIA assets of his day.

The controversial Colonel Michael Aquino. Has interacted with ASC president John Fisher and somehow was listed by USA Today as an ASC advisory board member. Denies having been a board member or knowing anyone or anything even remotely connected to the ASC, actually to the point that it becomes a little unbelievable. Never heard of James Woolsey? This while having a background in psychological warfare, a former boss and friend (Paul Vallely) who is a good friend of Woolsey, and while having been published twice by the AFIO - of which Woolsey is honorary co-chair? Stretches the imagination a little bit. Update: Aquino visited a 2009 AFIO symposium.

Another interesting person related to child abuse programs who has not been mentioned yet is Colonel Michael Aquino, reportedly one of the most important MKULTRA type child abusers active for the military and the CIA. [84] I specifically looked for a connection between Aquino and the American Security Council and found it rather quickly. He appears to have known ASC president John Fisher [85], who, just as General Richardson, served on James Angleton's Security and Intelligence Fund, and in the 1980s was reported to be a member of the advisory board of the American Security Council. [86] In addition, he appears to have the same hawkish political stances as the ASC while his former boss, General Paul Vallely, a close associate of the ultra-connected CIA spook James Woolsey and Angleton protege Neil Livingstone [87], became a prominent figure in the Center for Security Policy. Aquino, however, denies knowing absolutely anyone even remotely connected to the ASC, claims he never was an advisory board member and basically says that all he did was pick up an offer of the ASC to send him newsletters. As for why Fisher appeared in his source-appreciations, he doesn't know "specifically why" he put him in there. His amnesia and non-involvement is all just a little too convenient for me and I have trouble buying it, especially after claiming never to have even heard of James or Suzanne Woolsey. I mean, this is an intelligence officer who has credited the CIA and DIA with providing him information for his papers. This is a person trained as a psychological warfare specialist. And he never heard of former CIA director James Woolsey - who held a position at Offutt Air Force Base in 1987-1988 and whose wife, a psychologist by training, had already known Warren Buffett for at least 10 years previously? The same Warren Buffett who was very close to the leadership of Offutt and had access to the base? Maybe we should remain a little skeptical for the time being. [88]

Actually, although he refused to acknowledge it, later on I found out that Aquino most definitely has attended at least one AFIO symposium. According to Colonel John Alexander's wife, she and her husband first met Aquino and his wife at a 2009 symposium of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO). Since this first meeting the two couples have become great friends, but one has to wonder to what extent Aquino and Alexander have been moving in the same circles before they met. Alexander has many high level friends in the American Security Council, the AFIO and the OSS Society. He is a leading player in the AFIO's Las Vegas chapter, located at Nellis Air Force Base, home of Area 51. T.D. Barnes, another AFIO member and decades long Area 51 veteran, is among Alexander's close friends. Both Aquino and Barnes have been plugging Alexander's book on UFOs. And despite Alexander's fringe interests, it appears this had the backing of some high level CIA people. CIA deputy director John McMahon, for example, is known to have visited one of Alexander's private spoon bending parties in the early 1980s.

Leading AFIO member Col. John B. Alexander, a superstar at the Coast to Coast AM "cult", with: 1) CIA veteran General Richard Stilwell, a later president of the AFIO, a board member of the child abuse-linked Knight of Malta outfit Americares, a member of the American Security Council and the equally fascist, child abuse-linked Cercle group, ran by Otto von Habsburg's Opus Dei clique; (Stilwell transferred Alexander to INSCOM under the authority of Gen. Stubblebine) 2) Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein, a relative of the Habsburgs, reported chief financier of Opus Dei, and certainly key financier of the most negative aspect of the alien abduction phenomenon; 3) Scientologist Hal Puthoff, Edgar Mitchell's colleague at Bechtel-controlled SRI International and beyond; 4) the wife of C.B. Scott Jones, a long-time employee of Laurance Rockefeller and Hans Adam in the financing of UFO, alien abduction and new age theories; 5) CIA veteran General John Singlaub, former chair of the American Security Council, the World Anti-Communist League and later, the OSS Society - all notorious for activities involving death squads, drugs,   terrorism, coups and pedophile entrapment; 6) AFIO member Colonel Michael Aquino, a cult-oriented former American Security Council advisor accused of running a sadistic child abuse network; 7) General Jack Sheehan, accused of involvement in a sexual perversion ring by Kay Griggs who is friends with David Rockefeller's clique; 8) 4-star general Carl Stiner, also accused by Kay Griggs and said to run illegal black operations involving terrorism and assassination; 9) Edward Teller, H-bomb inventor and American Security Council extremist; 10) William Perry, among the most connected elites in the world with the deepest possible ties to high technology black programs. 11) Colonel Philip Corso, a loyal member of General MacArthur's ultra-fascist staff with its links to the Black Dragon Society, the Moonie Cult, and Opus Dei's child snuff networks. Corso also worked under Nelson Rockefeller. All ties of these men can be found in ISGP's Superclass Index and index of institutes. ISGP's experiences with Kay Griggs' information is discussed here.

Annual specops symposium of the National Defense Industrial Association, formerly the National Security Industrial Association. Very hard to get names on, but Admiral Robert W. Berry of the ASC was a regional director, John S. Foster, Jr. of the ASC has been on the advisory board and ASC vice chair Russell E. White has been a former chairman. Interesting detail: Bob Amick, security director of E-Systems reportedly responsible for intimidations and the killing of problematic personnel, went here. Among the claims of one of his targets was that the well-connected Bobby Ray Inman (ONI, NSA, CIA), reportedly an E-Systems director, was a pedophile.

Did Aquino have similar high level contacts as his friend Alexander? How deep do his ties really go to John Fisher and other American Security Council board members? Or maybe Center for Security board members as Paul Vallely? Impossible to say at this point and Aquino, unlike Alexander, is unwilling to brag about any connections he may have had. Also not unimportant to note: the AFIO is loaded with Air Force personnel that has held senior positions at Offutt Air Force Base. Of course, to ISGP Aquino claimed to have never visited Offutt, but if he has it's obvious he would deny it. Maybe time will reveal additional connections of Aquino. The accusations against him, even when it comes to ritual abuse, simply do not stand on their own. We can go on for ages it seems. Not mentioned yet is that author Alex Constantine, when a journalist in 1988, claims to have stumbled on a Satanic/ritual abuse network in San Francisco that involved a (ranking?) Bechtel employee and had ties to the Reagan administration and Strategic Defence Initiative. [118] In England we have rumors of high level involvement in the Satanic Friends of Hekate cult. [119] In the Netherlands there's a police report about the high level Westerflier cult, seemingly also involved in Satanic ritual abuse. [120] And on it goes.

Going back MacArthur II for a second, he joined the board of Maurice Greenberg's AIG in the first half of the 1980s and stayed on until his death in 1997. [89] The company, which has decades long CIA connections, may well have played a major role in the destruction of the World Trade Center - but that subject will be left for another article.

Personally I never really knew what to think about the story of gold recoveries from the Philippines. David Guyatt, Sterling Seagrave and Rodney Stich are among the authors who have written about the subject.

The story begins with World War II, when Japan's shipping routes to the homeland were cut off by the allies. This resulted in Japan not being able anymore to bring back additional gold from all the Asian countries they were looting. In response all the remaining gold was hidden in secret stashes across the Philippines, with the hope that the war would be won and the loot could still be recovered at some point in the future. It was General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the military commander of the Philippines, who was put in charge of this operation.

"Legend" has it that it was an intelligence officer working for General Charles Willoughby, Santa Romana, who witnessed heavy boxes being unloaded from a Japanese ship that were carried into a tunnel, after which the entrance was blown up. Upon inspection this tunnel turned out to contain large amounts of gold. Romana and his superiors soon figured out that it was Yamashita who was creating secret gold caches all over the Philippines. After the allies captured Yamashita's driver, it were General Lansdale and Santana, on orders of MacArthur, who forced him to reveal the location of a dozen additional caches. Both MacArthur and Lansdale would later become involved in the American Security Council.

In total several billion dollars of gold was discovered. Instead of returning it to the various countries that rightfully owned it, the gold was resmelted and stashed in 176 banks in 42 different countries. The funds were put at the disposal of the CIA to help finance its covert operations around the world.

General Tomoyuki Yamashita, reportedly responsible for having hidden billions worth of gold in the Philippines back in World War II, after the allies cut off Japanese shipping routes to the mainland. Yamashita was hanged for having committed war crimes.

By the 1970s it was Ferdinand Marcos who began his own secret excavations of remaining tunnels. He reportedly retrieved $14 billion in gold. The CIA, through men like General John Singlaub, also continued to look for gold over the years. Occasionally rumors of Marcos' recoveries made the news, but apparently it's still somewhat of a controversial assumption that Marcos did, in fact, find billions worth in gold.

The fact is that this story would have been skipped, were it not that it is so closely linked to members of the American Security Council and that there is some evidence that these gold recoveries were actually made. Marcos' dictatorship fell in 1986. Around this period reports began to surface that retired General John Singlaub was digging for gold on the Philippines [90] - seemingly a clear indication that the CIA was back in the business of retrieving Yamashita's gold.

The files of Robert Curtis give us additional insight into the activities of Singlaub in the 1980s. Curtis was a Nevada mining engineer, whom Marcos had hired in 1975 to resmelt his gold and bring it up to more modern standards. Curtis had also been able to decipher Yamashita's maps, leading to the discovery of the Teresa 2 gold catch, containing $8 billion in gold bars. After Curtis was suspected of feeding the U.S. press with stories about the gold discovery, Marcos tried to have him killed and in any case bankrupted him.

In January 1987, a year after Marcos' downfall, Curtis somewhat reluctantly went back in the gold digging business with a group of private CIA spooks, merging his C & B Salvage & Investment firm with Phoenix Exploration Services Limited and Nippon Star Limited. Phoenix was ran by Alan Foringer, administrative head of the CIA station in Manila, and his deputy John Voss. Nippon Star was headed by John Harrigan, a CIA operative and Christian right-winger whose wife later married Singlaub. Apparently Singlaub himself, at the time chairman of the World Anti-Communist League and a strategy board member of the American Security Council, had been using the ultra right John Birch Society to finance Nippon Star. Section 7 of the joint venture's agreement read:

Singlaub and friends had big plans with all the potentially recovered gold from the Philippines. A hand written note of Alan Foreinger to Robert Curtis read:

Apparently the group was expecting to retrieve $100 billion worth of gold, which would mean approximately $16 billion dollars to fund their "own" military industrial complex. [93] The names given are interesting. General Graham was on the strategy committee of the American Security Council with Singlaub, while serving as vice chairman under Singlaub at the World Anti-Communist League. General Keegan was of the exact same ilk as these men and also very close to the ASC. Schweitzer was a director of U.S. Global Strategy Council, along with Graham. Schweitzer's close associate, Ray Cline, the CIA covert operations expert mentioned several times before, was co-chairman of the American Security Council and head of the U.S. Global Strategy Council. Cline was also involved in the Philippine politics. In November 1986 he traveled to the Philippines with Schweitzer to prevent then-defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile from leading a coup against the newly elected president Corazon Aquino. Cline was also involved in the clandestine retrieval of gold, taking over the original work of General Edward Lansdale, General Douglas MacArthur and General Charles Willoughby. These names also appear in the files of Robert Curtis:

Another document from Robert Curtis gives additional details, including the recovery of one large cache of gold and a reference to the involvement of General Edwin Black, yet another strategy board member of the American Security Council. Black was also on the board of the Nugan Hand Bank, the notorious CIA bank deeply involved in laundering the proceeds of Golden Triangle opium. [95] The document reads:

Having looked through the files on Sterling Seagrave's CD's, I'd say these are among the only documents really worth reading. It's just enough to confirm that gold has been retrieved, but many of the details are still unclear.

Accusations of drug trafficking already existed when the American Security Council-linked Air America was still known as Civil Air Transport. CAT had been supplying the anti-communist forces of General Chiang Kai-shek in China since 1946. By 1949 the general had to withdraw to Taiwan and CAT was having financial difficulties. The owners approached Colonel Richard Stilwell, head of the CIA Far East division, after which it was decided that the airline would be bought up by the CIA. A year later Civil Air Transport and Sea Supply Corporation, another CIA-owned airline set up by Stilwell's predecessor, Paul Helliwell, began delivering arms to KMT forces in Burma. The KMT forced the local population into poppy cultivation. The proceeds were flown out using the planes of CAT and Sea Supply. [97]

At the time, the pro-Chiang Kai-shek "China Lobby" financed full page ads claiming that the communist Chinese were behind the opium trade. In 1952 it was found out that the opposite was true, leading to the dismissal of CIA chief Richard Stilwell. Incredibly, the Asian People's Anti-Communist League took over the operation from the CIA, likely even using the same airplanes. Important to note here is that all these elements would sooner or later become part of the American Security Council. Rising to the rank of general, Stilwell would end up on strategy board of the ASC, in addition to becoming a frequent visitor of Le Cercle. Ray Cline, a top-level CIA operative and co-chair of the ASC's strategy board in the 1980s, is suspected to have been an important founder of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League. With Helliwell he was involved in setting up the Sea Supply Corporation and related CIA fronts. General Singlaub of the ASC board was also active for the KMT in Burma at the time. Marvin Liebman, a prominent ASC member in the 1960s, was seen as one of the leaders of the China Lobby. He was secretary of the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Red China to the United Nations. In 1959 he co-founded the American Emergency Committee for Tibetan Refugees, several years after the CIA had begun supporting the Dalai Lama in their struggle against communist China. Liebman also became involved with the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, the World Anti-Communist League, the Friends of Free China, pro-Pinochet American-Chilean Council and was a co-founder of the American Conservative Union.

American Security Council members have been major supporters of Chiang Kai-shek, but a more important conclusion here is that many key CIA officers involved in the early Far East drug trade could later be found on the ASC strategy board. The primary examples are General Stilwell, Ray Cline and General Singlaub. These men also played roles in other intrigues, from secretly retrieving the Japanese war loot to the sponsoring of coups around the world.

Nice movie, but maybe not entirely historically accurate.

In 1959 CAT changed its name to Air America. Admiral Felix B. Stump, the recently-retired commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, became chairman of the airline at that point. The admiral would also head Air America's subsidiary Air Asia and Air America's holding, Pacific Corp., holding these positions until at least 1970. [98] Stump also joined the strategy board of the American Security Council during this period. Air America moved supplies and troops around between Taiwan, Vietnam, Laos and Burma during the Vietnam war. Like CAT and Sea Supply, it was accused of transporting opium. Most of the accusations were linked to General Vang Pao in Laos. Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, Paul Helliwell and General Richard Secord were suspected key operatives in the trade.

Looking at the 1983 strategy board list of the ASC, there appears the name Daniel Arnold, the CIA chief in Thailand until 1979, who was accused of trafficking heroin that originated from the Shan State. Implicated with him was Ted Shackley, the CIA chief in Laos and Saigon during the Vietnam War. [99] Shackley had become a major player in Le Cercle at the time of the allegations. The names come from drug lord Khun Sa, who was trying to show goodwill to American authorities by giving up his former partners-in-crime. At the time Khun Sa was asking the United States, and George H. W. Bush in particular, to help turn his Shan State in Burma into an independent country with a legitimate economy. However, he never received any help. Also mentioned by Khun Sa was CIA agent Richard Armitage, a person who later occupied high level Defense and State Department positions.

As if there is no end to drug trafficking involvement, also on the 1983 strategy board was General Edwin Black, formerly the Hawaiian director of the Nugan Hand Bank, headquartered in Sidney, Australia. Nugan Hand went down in 1980 amidst allegations that it was laundering Golden Triangle heroin funds. One of the two founders, Michael Hand, had worked as a green beret in Laos under Shackley, using Air America to fly out opium produced by the Montagnard hill tribe. Shackley and Secord themselves dealt extensively with the new bank. So did Paul Helliwell. Lawyer to Nugan Hand was William Colby, who had earlier ran the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, working closely with Shackley. Colby and Shackley were two key CIA operatives visiting Le Cercle in this period.

Soon after facing charges of stock fraud in 1980, Frank Nugan was found shot to death in his car. Michael Hand began to intimidate the shareholders of Nugan Hand. As one director explained Hand's threats: "If we didn't do what we were told, and things weren't handled properly, our wives would be cut into pieces and put in boxes and sent back to us." The operations that were carried out behind Nugan Hand were actually moved to the Hawaii-based Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham and Wong (BBRDW). The ASC's Edwin Black moved over to the new bank, and so did a number of other officers. Investigative author Rodney Stitch later found out that George H. W. Bush, William Casey and the previously-mentioned Richard Armitage had opened CIA accounts at the bank. Casey is known to have visited Le Cercle, although he was not a regular, while his family was deeply involved in the Center for Security Policy.

There's quite a bit of additional overlap with the American Security Council and closely related groups, mainly in relation to the Nicaraguan Contra affair of the 1980s. At the time the CIA-allied anti-communist Contras largely paid for their arms with cocaine that was sold in the United States, sparking the crack-cocaine epidemic. Interesting to see is that those responsible for that epidemic from the Latin American side could be found in the American Security Council: Contra leader Colonel Enrique Bermudez, Adolfo Calero and death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, to name a few. It was Bermudez and his associates who were working with Danilo Blandon, the Contra operative and former Somoza official who sold the cocaine to "Freeway" Rick Ross.

A full history of CIA drug trafficking was finished a few years after this article. For more information on the subject, it is advised to go there.

Guy Banister, the notoriously right wing retired FBI agent who ran Lee Harvey Oswald as a pro-communist agent in New Orleans, was plugged into the database of the American Security Council. Ed Butler, who debated Oswald on his radio station along with Carlos Bringuier, was a board member of the ASC. What a small world this is.

General Edward Lansdale, already identified as a person involved with the ASC, is a good place to start this section. As a CIA operative, Lansdale ran the 1953 election campaign of soon-to-be president Colonel Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines. He then went to French Indo-China to advise the French on how to counter the guerilla attacks on their forces. It didn't do much good. The French were still driven out. Now Lansdale began to play a key role in bolstering the regime of the Catholic dictator Ngo Dinh Diem by training the Vietnamese National Army and driving all Catholics to the South of Vietnam. He became a close friend of Diem in the process. Meanwhile, the head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) during the Kennedy years was General Paul D. Harkins. An enthusiastic proponent of napalm, Harkins was later also invited to the national strategy committee of the American Security Council.

On October 2, 1963, there appeared an interesting report in the Washington Daily News. The basis of the report was a dispute between the newly-appointed ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge (Pilgrims Society), and the chief of the CIA in South Vietnam, John H. Richardson. Richardson was refusing to implement policies Lodge was bringing from Washington. Lodge went to his boss, secretary of state Cyrus Vance, who tried to resolve the issue with CIA head John McCone, but to no avail. Right when the Washington Daily News brought out its damaging report on the CIA, Vance and McCone were waiting for Kennedy to resolve the issue. The report appears to have been a minor State Department coup against the CIA, because Richardson had to be replaced now that his name had become known to the public. The story read:

Monk who may have single-handedly been responsible for the fall of Ngo Dinh Diem, a darling of the CIA and the military, as well as the American Security Council. They did not agree with Kennedy's decision to allow a coup against the dictator.

A major problem was that the CIA was financing the special forces of Diem's brother, who brutally suppressed any leftist elements, as well as the Buddhist community. In one August 1963 incident 1,400 priests were arrested and hundreds estimated killed. This caused a tremendous backlash against the Diem regime worldwide when priests began to set themselves on fire.

A group of generals were ready for a coup against Diem by late October 1963. They were waiting for approval from the United States to take out Diem. Opposition grew and the U.S. had a dilemma. If a coup against Diem would be successful, there would be a fall-back in efficiency. If a coup failed and the U.S. had supported it, they would probably be kicked out of South Vietnam. Letting Diem stay on the throne, however, is likely to cause more and more PR problems in the future. The CIA and the military, as well as the American Security Council and the John Birch Society, were supporters of Diem. Ambassador Lodge and the State Department were anti-Diem. Kennedy remained on the fence for a while, but ultimately approved the coup. Diem and his brother were killed in the process.

Lansdale claimed that he was fired from the DOD in 1963 for not supporting Kennedy in allowing the overthrow of Diem. That may not have been the only reason, however. The year before the death of the Diem brothers - as well as Kennedy - Lansdale and General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented Operation Northwoods to President John F. Kennedy. The briefing paper consisted of a long list of suggestions on how to start a war with Cuba under false pretexts. Among the suggestions that appeared in the document were:

Kennedy did not approve of Operation Northwoods and even fired General Lemnitzer for supporting the use of false flag attacks. And you guessed it, after his retirement Lemnitzer could soon be found at the national strategy committee of the American Security Council.

A decade after Northwoods, a report in the Turkish press surfaced about U.S. Army Field Manual 30-31B, which described a top secret U.S. Army Intelligence counter-insurgency program for countries that the United States took an interest in. Reading the manual's appendix B, most of it is not at all shocking. It describes the way in which U.S. Army Intelligence forges ties with host country governments, intelligence agencies and the conservative aristocracy. Part 11 is very worrisome, however, because it clearly describes that "violent or non-violent" false flag operations are considered acceptable U.S. policy.

The field manual's appendix B is signed off with "By Order of the Secretary of the Army: W.C. Westmoreland". This was General William Westmoreland, who, the same year that the manual was written, was said "to be willing to make speeches whenever [the ASC] needs him." [103] Despite the fact that the "Westmoreland Field Manual" is not particularly shocking, government agencies have widely regarded it as a Soviet-produced forgery. On the other hand, Ray Cline and P-2 head Licio Gelli have acknowledged that it is a genuine document. And personally I see no real reason to assume that it is a forgery either. The information is hardly shocking enough for it to have been worth the KGB's troubles - they could have done a better job.

False flag operations appear to be the norm in history for starting a war, likely because politicians always prefer to argue to their own people that it certainly wasn't them who initiated the war, or at the very least that they certainly didn't have a choice. It makes it much easier to coerce the masses into fighting your war. In addition, any politician who acknowledges to be the aggressor, will become extremely vulnerable to peace protests and lawsuits. Whatever human casualties, economic and political upsets, or long-term morale problems the war leads to, you'll be to blame once you acknowledge it was you who initiated the war. You might well spend the rest of your days in prison for it, or even end up with the death penalty. No, it appears to be safer to create a false flag, whether it's a major terrorist event or an impossible political situation, and demonize the enemy in the public's eye. And there exists plenty of evidence that even the United States has engaged in such plots.

To illustrate, in mid 1964 the United States relentlessly and secretly agitated the communist North Vietnamese government in Hanoi to coax it into making a first overt attack. In July 1964, for example, CIA director John McCone suggested "limited air strikes on North Vietnamese targets by unmarked planes flown exclusively by non-US aircrews." In September national security advisor McGeorge Bundy suggested "actions that would tend deliberately to provoke a DRV reaction, and a consequent retaliation by us." Looking at these memos, it's not hard to see why the Gulf on Tonkin incidents of August 1964 were interpreted so hawkishly by the LBJ administration: it was looking for any excuse to start bombing Vietnam, the primary and secret reason being the containment of what was increasingly seen as an imperialist China.

These tactics and motivations of the LBJ administration were exposed by the Pentagon Papers, leaked to the New York Times and other newspapers in June 1971 by RAND Corporation whistleblowers Daniel Ellsberg, a major "liberal CIA" asset, and Anthony "Tony" Russo. These papers also revealed that LBJ had been lying throughout his election campaign about not escalating the conflict in Vietnam. He was actually accusing American Security Council favorite Barry Goldwater of wanting to do exactly that. It's a perfect example of how treacherous politicians can be, and clearly without the slightest consequences because LBJ was never charged with anything.

The Vietnam Study Task Force, as the Pentagon Papers were officially known, was a project initiated by secretary of defense Robert McNamara in June 1967. The task force members wrote an entire history of the Vietnam War until that point based on internal Department of Defense files. The study was carried out in total secrecy, with LBJ, secretary of state Dean Rusk, and national security advisor Walt Rostow purposely not being informed of the project. 15 copies were produced of the final 7,000 page report. Two of them were deposited at the RAND Corporation think tank. One could only gain access to the report if at least two of the three study leaders, Leslie Gelb (a future CFR president), "liberal CIA" and Soros operative Morton Halperin, and Paul Warnke, authorized it. Gelb and Halperin authorized Ellsberg, who worked on the study in 1967, to have access to it in 1969, which eventually led to the release of the Pentagon Papers.

While the story of Ellsberg is relatively well-known, his partner-in-crime in the release of the Pentagon Papers, Anthony Russo, has been almost forgotten. That's unfortunate, because as a member of RAND's so-called Vietcong Motivation and Morale Project, Russo had a lot of interesting things to say. We'll recap his story here.

After the death of Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963, the U.S. government sent the RAND Corporation to Vietnam to study enemy combatants in what became known as the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Project. As said, Russo was among RAND's team of researchers. The team carried out extensive interviews with over 100 Vietcong prisoners and defectors. In late 1964 the two chief political scientists of the study briefed John T. Naughton, McNamara's assistant secretary of defense for internal security affairs on their findings. According to them, the Vietcong maintained high moral standards, was very idealistic, and very dedicated, prompting Naughton to remark: "If what you say in that briefing is true, we're fighting on the wrong side."

Needless to say, neither the military brass nor the Johnson administration was waiting for this message. So in January 1965 they fired the study group's leaders and replaced them with someone who would tow the party line. This became RAND scientist Dr. Leon Goure, a future national strategy committee member of the American Security Council. Over the next couple of years Goure would provide both the military and the Johnson administration with the only message they wanted to hear, namely that:

• the U.S. military effort was hitting the North Vietnamese hard;
• especially the air campaign was successful;
• napalm and defoiliation agents were acceptable forms of warfare;
• NLF morale was falling as a result;
• poor South Vietnamese villagers were being intimited by the Vietcong, but in reality were loyal to the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government, and;
• any kind of socialist measures by the South Vietnamese government to redistribute wealth would only have negative effects;

Goure had been appointed the new head of the M&M study in no small part due to his friendship with the notoriously hawkish General Curtis Lemay, who in 1965 was the outgoing Air Force chief of staff. In this period, the Air Force was financing two-thirds of the RAND Corporation's budget. Goure was aware of this and knew he was hired to promote lies, as evidenced by what he privately stated to one of RAND's Saigon-based administrative assistants upon his first arrival in Vietnam: "When the Air Force is footing the bill, the answer is always bombing."

Goure was a first-rate propagandist for what outgoing president Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 labeled the "Military-Industrial Complex". In 1961 Goure gained national fame with his claims that the Soviet Union was taking widespread civil defense measures that would allow 50 million of its citizens to survive a nuclear exchange with the United States. Nothing of it was true. Goure would just cling to little bits and pieces in individual reports and for the rest ignore everything contradicting it. But this is exactly what his superiors wanted him to do. Goure was allowed to brief all the top military brass and then come over to Washington to repeat his message to Lyndon Johnson, national security advisor Walt Rostow, and defense secretary Robert McNamara, followed by statements to the press. Meanwhile, Goure would disparage the original project leaders of the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Study. McNamara was so pleased with him after receiving his first briefing in June 1965, that he instantly offered to up the budget of the "M&M" study from $100,000 to $1,000,000.

It didn't take all that long before top officials began to doubt Goure's statements. Westmoreland expressed some doubt about the effectiveness of the air campaign in late 1965. McNamara voiced his first concern in February 1966. In August 1967 he repeated his skepticism during a senate hearing. With the Tet Offensive in January 1968 the ineffectivity of Rolling Thunder became evident to everyone. It wasn't until immediately before the elections, on November 1, 1968, that LBJ halted Operation Rolling Thunder. It would take 3.5 years before the bombings in Vietnam continued.

While Goure was relieved from his job as head of the M&M study, he continued to be involved in Vietnam. His primary protector in Washington, D.C. was Walt Rostow, LBJ's national security advisor. Rostow was one of these rare hawkish Eastern Establishment neoconservatives, Paul Nitze and James Woolsey being other examples. Starting out as a professor at Yale Law School and Balliol College, Oxford and working for the State Department he ended up as chairman of the executive committee of the Committee on the Present Danger, 1976-1981 and 1986-1992, as well as a director of the CIA-linked National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) and an advisory board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). The American Security Council also lists him as one of their "benefactors."

Then again, in the mid-1960s even the so-called liberal Eastern Establishment was hawkish on Vietnam. Defense secretary Robert McNamara, linked to Ford Motors, the Pilgrim and the Rockefellers, was hawkish. National security advisor McGeorge Bundy, soon the president of the Ford Foundation, was hawkish. In 1965 David Rockefeller set up the Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia (CEDPA) that helped sell the Vietnam War to the public through a New York Times ad. Besides David, other Pilgrims on the committee were John McCloy, C. Douglas Dillon, Arthur Dean, Dean Acheson and Eugene Black. Nelson was such a good friend of LBJ, that LBJ asked him to run for president as his successor. The only one with reservations on the Vietnam War was John F. Kennedy and we all know how his story ended in November 1963.

Intriguingly, already in 1963 the anti-imperialistic and anti-Vietnam War "new left" group Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) was founded by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, the former an aide to national security advisor McGeorge Bundy and the latter an aide to John McCloy at the State Department. For those not aware, McCloy was a mentor to David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase National Bank 1953-1960, chairman of the CFR 1953-1970, chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation 1946-1949, 1953-1958; and chairman of the Ford Foundation 1958-1964. James Warburg was among the initial financiers. Unsurprisingly, over the decades the Institute for Policy Studies was financed by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations to the tune of millions and later also by George Soros' Open Society Foundations, the Ted Turner Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. This financing is quite fascinating, considering IPS was the greatest domestic enemy of the FBI, the CIA and the LBJ and Nixon governments. Once again we have evidence that the Eastern Establishment is financing controlled opposition. Daniel Ellsberg, who in similarly ironic fashion used to be part of the murderous, drug trafficking Ted Shackley CIA clique in Vietnam, became deeply part of this new left activist network (to this day). Noam Chomsky was appointed a scholar of IPS in 1999.

As for Goure, he ended up in the same circuit as his protectors as Lemay and Rostow. In 1969 he transferred from RAND to the Center for Advanced International Studies at the University of Miami, where he became director of Soviet Studies. He attended American Security Council meetings in this capacity and by the 1980s sat on its national strategy committee. At this point he had joined the giant defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), also as director of Soviet Studies. In addition, Goure is known to have attended the Moonie Cult-sponsored International Security Council and to have been involved in Rostow's Committe on the Present Danger.

Vietnam War III: Containment vs rollback

In his 2001 eulogy to Katherine Graham of the Washington Post, Kissinger stated that "societies thrive not by the victories of their factions but by their ultimate reconciliations." There's hardly a better example of this problem than the LBJ administration's conduct of the Vietnam War. The administration literally took away all power from the military, hardly would listen to military advice, and ran the war down to the tiniest detail from the White House. They had their Tuesday luncheons in which LBJ, McNamara and a number key aides would authorize or reject every single proposed target of the military. Airstrikes were strictly forbidden anywhere near the vicinity of Hanoi and Haiphong harbor for fear of hitting Chinese or Russian personnel and drawing these countries into the war, potentially a nuclear war.

Obviously the military and members of the American Security Council couldn't agree less. They figured that the only way to win the war was to flatten North Vietnam and force it into a surrender. As we saw earlier in the Detente vs Nuking the Planet chapter, American Security Council members as General Douglas MacArthur, General Nathan Twining and General Curtis LeMay were not too worried about any potential nuclear exchange. A major difference between the LBJ White House and this group is that it believed in the policy of Rollback, meaning that every square inch of land occupied by the communists had to be taken back under any circumstance.

One of the most important aspects of the conservative establishment has been its support for space-based weapons. The U.S. effort to develop these type of arms goes back to a 1970 book entitled The Strategy of Technology: Winning the Decisive War. The book was written by Pentagon strategist Dr. Stefan T. Possony. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Possony was invited to join the national strategy committee of the ASC, together with Edward Teller. Both men would serve on the board for more than two decades.

Possony's book was very popular among hawkish Pentagon officers and became required reading at the Air War College and the National War College. It advocated for the development of a defense program that would be too high-tech and costly for other nations to reproduce or counter without collapsing their economy. Two important projects that grew out of this economy were Strategic Defense Initiative and the stealth program. The latter was developed by companies as Lockheed and Northrop, both corporations with membership in the American Security Council but with little representation on any of the council’s boards. With Strategic Defense Initiative it is somewhat different.

The principal lobbying firm for SDI, or Star Wars, was High Frontier, set up in 1981 by General Daniel Graham, a member of the national strategy committee of the ASC. His deputy at High Frontier became General Robert C. Richardson III, another member of the strategy committee. General James Abrahamson, a member of the ASC and a visitor of Le Cercle, was director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization from 1984 to 1989. Another prominent ASC member was Karl R. Bendetsen, chairman of the SDI Panel for Reagan at the Heritage Foundation from 1980 to 1984. His deputy was General Graham. Edward Teller was also part of the study group. In late 1981 the group began to split over the type of designs that should be supported. General Graham and his High Frontier group wanted to built a system with "off the shelf" components. Other members pushed for more complicated systems that would require much more research: rail guns, particle beam weapons, chemical lasers, etc. The father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, further complicated matters by insisting "on the inclusion of third-generation weapons powered by nuclear bombs". Teller's idea of the nuclear X-ray laser was to detonate nuclear weapons in space in order to power "up to 100,000 separate laser beams at 100,000 targets in space". [104] This estimation seems to have been a bit of an overstatement. The project was canceled after inconclusive test results. Outside experts were of the opinion that the nuclear explosion would only be able to power a few dozen lasers at most. Many also thought it to be more practical and ethical to go with the non-nuclear option.

Bendetsen and his camp that pushed for more exotic weapons, like lasers, railguns and particle beam weapons (Gen. Keegan actually tried to convince members of government that the Russians already had these weapons), were the favorites of Reagan, but it was Graham's Brilliant Pebbles system that was ultimately seen as the most practical of all SDI systems. Brilliant Pebbles relied on space-based pods filled with small missiles that would take out enemy ICBMs. The missiles didn't have any active warheads - kinetic energy was enough to destroy the targets. However, the program was eventually canceled in 1994 under the Clinton administration, which saw these systems as unnecessarily expensive and potentially destabilizing. It is only in modern times that the United States has been looking again for potentially interesting space-based weapons systems.

All this talk about space-based weapons like lasers, railguns and particle beam weapons will undoubtedly remind some readers of all the rumors surrounding UFO back-engineering programs. Have I seen any evidence of this after so many years of researching these elite Pentagon and State Department networks? No, I have not, and to me Roswell appears to be a first rate scam. American Security Council veterans as General Nathan Twining [121] and Curtis LeMay [122] have actually acknowledged the UFO phenomenon as being real, but anything more than that I'd ignore if I were you.

PART 3: NAMES

High level CIA officers

Latin America

Africa

Asia

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Full membership list plus biographies and sources

Full membership list plus biographies and sources

American Security Council documents

Newspapers articles

Full membership list plus biographies and sources