It's a Plot!

Remember, you read it here first.

Charles Manson, ostensibly vile, was actually a victim--an unwitting agent of military intelligence, programed to kill. On the other hand, an analysis of the Commie master music plan reveals a hitherto unknown weapon called menticide, concocted by the nefarious K.G.B. to bring about suicide of the mind, rendering a generation of American youth bananas. Hence, the Beatles. Lee Harvey Oswald didn't own a rifle, couldn't shoot worth a damn and was a naval-intelligence officer. Like Dick Nixon. The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye, seeking to obliterate the Christian Ideal in America, counts among its covert backers the past presidents of India and Paramount Pictures, as well as Robert McNamara. The reason the so-called leaders of the world's nation-states can happily indulge in tranquilizers, alcohol and sodomy is that they are merely puppet-prostitutes controlled by the globe's true rulers, "the Jewish syphilis minority."

Hold it.

Your enemy may have another name. The Rockefeller family. Led by Nelson, it deliberately manipulates the world of finance, spreading international chaos and confusion and discrediting democratic governments, as witness the "Impeach Nixon" and Watergate frauds. If Jerry Ford gets in his way, Rockefeller will rub him out. The S.L.A., the black liberation armies and--wait for it--even the I.R.A. are all CIA fronts. The air crash near Chicago's Midway Airport on December 8, 1972, which killed 45 people, among them Mrs. Dorothy Hunt, with $10,000 cash on hand, as well as a purported $2,000,000 in American Express traveler's checks, was an act of sabotage. Robert Kennedy was not murdered by Sirhan Sirhan but was taken out by a second hit man, still at large. There has never been a more colossal and successful deception--nor one that has been so enormously profitable to its perpetrators--than the myth that Hitler killed 6,000,000 Jews. The truth about Chappaquiddick has been suppressed by some powerful organized force of universal scope and character. The same folks, incidentally, transformed nonviolent Martin Luther King, Jr., into a "communistoid" agent. Or, conversely, America is run by an invisible government, comprised of Big Business, military intelligence and the Mafia, working together. Or maybe, just possibly, though none dare call it conspiracy, what we innocently call communism is not managed in Moscow or Peking but is the long arm of a bigger plot controlled in London, Paris and New York by cynical men who use P.I.D. (Poverty, Ignorance and Disease) as a weapon to build a jail for us all.

Spin your conspiracy wheel, pick your plot and pay your dues.

Dick Gregory, for one, is a heavy plot subscriber and proselytizer, often on tour. Pronouncing at Concordia U, Montreal, last autumn, he ventured that the kidnaping of Patricia Hearst was a set-up job by the CIA, the motive being to foment terror, thereby giving security agents more heft, an excuse to expand on their hateful activities. "Remember," said Gregory, "the whole thing happened in the doorway of her apartment. She was wearing only her negligee. When her first tape came in, we knew it was she because it came with her father's credit card. Her driver's license came with later tapes. Now, I don't sleep with many rich chicks, but I wonder whedier they go to bed with their driver's license and credit cards...."

Gregory assured the Montreal students that Rockefeller would kill President Ford if he got in his way, but I have since surfaced, in Beverly Hills, with something more: an affable scriptwriter who actually knows who was behind the plot to kill John Kennedy. It was H. L. Hunt's boy Lamar. "He brags about it openly," said the scriptwriter.

"He does?"

"Yeah."

"What does he say?"

"He says, quote, I am the most (continued on page 179)It's a Plot!(continued from page 133) powerful man in America."

"So?"

"Prick. Only the most powerful man in America could have killed John Kennedy."

America, America, is crawling with conspiracy freaks, impassioned researchers, ranging from outside right to farthest left, and if the theories they clobber you with are more than somewhat contradictory, they do have one blessing in common: certitude. And none is more fiercely convinced of the absolute justice of her cause than Mrs. Mae Brussell, sole begetter of the Conspiracy Newsletter, a feature that has all but gobbled whole the once bracingly skeptical Realist.

Mrs. Brussell, understandably suspicious of visits from strangers, had to be approached obliquely, in my case through the distinct pleasures of a Chinese lunch in San Francisco with her editor, Paul Krassner, of The Realist. Krassner and I got off to a spiky start. As a friend of Ken Kesey's, he objected to a deprecating piece I had written for The New York Times about Kesey's last book, a scissors-and-paste catchall titled Kesey's Garage Sale. And, as I took to Krassner immediately, I felt honor-bound to tell him that I wasn't much impressed witli another friend of his, Tim Leary. Leary, I recalled, had written that he had taken the LSD trip more than 300 times, his appetite just possibly whetted by a pioneering voyage into inner space, wherein, among other illuminations, it was revealed to him that he "may well be one of the wisest men born before 1945." Which struck me as nice, very nice, for Tim, but did create problems in my own earthbound mind. Leary's primary claim was that LSD was mind-expanding, more nourishing for our kids than crunchy granola. Being a nontripper, I couldn't say for sure. But what aroused my suspicions was that if Leary found LSD so incredibly mind-expanding, he had, on the evidence of his published work, the decidedly unfair advantage of there being so much room to begin with.

Krassner, unlike me, did not believe that our time was characterized by inchoate violence, chaos and mindless brutality. Instead, he espied sinister connections everywhere. G. Gordon Liddy, he pointed out, served his apprenticeship pursuing Leary. "Our country is run by an unholy trinity. Organized crime, military intelligence and corporate bureaucracy." Maintaining a Communist threat was "in their interest. "You can't have an anti-Communist regime unless you have Communists to hold up as a specter."

Krassner was, he said, in correspondence with Charles Manson. Though Manson's letters tended to ramble incoherently, they were shot through with genius. "Manson was let out of prisonon a leash and protected, until he did what he was supposed to do, discredit the counterculture."

After lunch, I phoned the elusive Mae Brussell in Carmel. She still wasn't sure she would see me. Her time was valuable, she said.

"Mine, too," I allowed.

"How do I know you're not with the FBI?"

"Aw, come on."

"Or the CIA?"

"I'm a Canadian," I protested, "from Montreal."

"Montreal. There's a foundation up there, Permindex, that runs an assassination school in Mexico."

"You mean like in The Parallax View?"

"That film was telling you something. It was a mind-blower for people new into conspiracies."

"Do you think I'd say I was from Montreal if I had been sent out from thereto, um, kill you?"

"You never know."

Finally, grudgingly, Mrs. Brussell agreed to an interview under certain conditions. It wouldbe taped. I would sign a prepared statement beforehand.

In the end, the interview was not taped, at least so far as I know, but she did present me with a statement, which I duly signed.

That I, Mordecai Richler, a White Male Caucasian, 43 years of age, did on the 20th day of October 1974 introduce, and represent myself upon recommendation of the Playboy magazine to one Mae Brussell ... for the stated purpose of writing an article for the said Playboy magazine having to do with current theories and research projects pertaining to Government conspiracies and assassinations;

That my reason for meeting with Mae Brussell is to put into writing, in an article, the findings of her research of the past 11 years;

That any information shared during this meeting will be credited to her name in any articleswritten by me, Mordecai Richler, on this subject matter;

That all findings and opinions of Mae Brussell will be described as accurately and objectively as possible, stating her findings and opinions;

That I will not follow these remarks with snide suggestions, derogatory statements or generalities and false conclusions;

That these conspiracy theories will not be intended to be accepted as having a basis in fact, inasmuch as I have spent only one or two hours interviewing the said Mae Brusselland have not done the 11 years of research on the subject matter as she has;

That all I will endeavor to do is present my viewpoint and let history decide for itself theaccuracy of the conclusions reached therein;

That in the event this agreement and/or contract is broken or disrespected or dishonored to any substantial degree, I, Mordecai Richler, agree to be sued for breach of this agreement/contract and the good faith of our visit. In addition, in the event of any adverse publicity or jeopardy accruing to the research efforts and good name of one Mae Brussell having no basis in fact, I shall agree to be sued or held liable and expect to make a financial settlement with the said Mae Brussell for no less than $10,000, avoiding the necessity of legal expenses and a long delayed court procedure....

But before actually meeting with the incomparable Mrs. Brussell, I did some homework. Cautionary homework.

Mae Brussell, a divorced mother of four in her 40s, is the daughter of a reform rabbi. She was raised in affluent Beverly Hills and majored in philosophy at Stanford. She first became obsessed with conspiracies after reading and annotating the full 26 volumes of the Warren Report, a study that convinced her the J.F.K. assassination was an intelligence operation and Oswald himself a Government agent. Mrs. Brussell, who devours eight newspapers daily, does an hour-long weekly radio show, Dialogue Conspiracy, for station KLRB-FM, Carmel, and also conducted the first accredited university course in Conspiracies and Assassinations, at Monterey Peninsula College. She has written a piece for the Berkeley Barb, asking, "Is S.L.A.'s Cinqué the first black Lee Harvey Oswald?" as well as several lengthy articles for The Realist, all of which I read the night before I met her.

Mrs. Brussell, alas, is an appalling writer; her syntax is unnerving, her prose muddled, lumpy and uncommonly repetitive. Put plainly, until history decides for itself, the viewpoint of this White Male Caucasian, 43 years of age, is that she writes without wit, style or even a rudimentary grasp of language. But there is no denying that her ferocity, her flat statements, stacked one on top of another, often without connection or qualification, leave me breathless.

Mrs. Brussell is convinced that a web of conspiracies has been strangling this nation. "It is impossible," she writes in The Realist (December 1972), "the way the courts are constructed, to force any revelations that would damage the existing power structure. If Richard Nixon moves out of office, Spiro Agnew moves in and Ronald Reagan will follow him." In the same issue, she observes that "J. Edgar Hoover did not have an autopsy. His body was not removed in a hearse. There was no indication of poor health. There is reason to exhume his remains; the possibility of poison in the apple pie might be discovered as his last American supper," and she goes on to promise a piece, not yet delivered so far as I know, titled, Why Was J. Edgar Hoover Murdered? Meanwhile, she notes that Hoover, who didn't mind helping a couple of Kennedys get killed, did fear a CIA take-over and a destruction of all civil liberties.

In an earlier issue of The Realist (August 1972), Mrs. Brussell states flatly that the CIA killed President Kennedy and that Richard Nixon was offered the money he needed for his 1968 election if he took political unknown Spiro Agnew as Vice-President. Ted Kennedy's car, she writes, was pushed into the water at Chappaquiddick at a time when nobody knew in what capacity Howard Hunt was serving the CIA. Even so, she has no doubts that the entire Chappaquiddick affair "was CIA-staged for the purpose of removing Ted Kennedy as a Democratic candidate." Furthermore, she notes that "the widow of Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson's former boss, could have in her husband's files important information that was passed to J.F.K., on October 28, 1963, saying: 'Cancel Dallas trip. Arrest Lee Harvey Oswald.' Anderson refused to help find this memo, passed it off as 'too farfetched.' " Mrs. Brussell is also of the mind-boggling opinion that "Germany, like England, Italy, France, Austria and other conservative, authoritarian and militaristic ruling class, changed its political system after its World War One defeat. Behind the back of the public ruling class developed an illegal, secretive, sadistic, well-organized second government."

Mrs. Brussell writes that if Sirhan Sirhan and Charles Manson were free to talk, they would shake American "justice" and conspiratorial processes down to their very roots, and yet--and yet--she ventures, in another article, that Sirhan was hypnotized and told to forget the persons who associated with him and controlled him before he became a patsy in the Robert Kennedy murder, and so one can't help but wonder how much he could tell us, if he were free to speak.

In Why Was Patricia Hearst Kidnaped? (The Realist, February 1974), Mrs. Brussell states in her typically unequivocal manner that the S.L.A. was created by die CIA, the goals being no less than World War Three and to plunge die Third World masses into starvation and slavery. Other motives, if needed, were to set up conditions for martial law and prevent free elections in 1976. Furthermore, she writes that we are being brainwashed by the mass media if we believe Ted Kennedy was actually responsible for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

William F. Buckley, Jr., is a CIA agent.

The CIA kidnaped Frank Sinatra, Jr., immediately after the John Kennedy assassination to divert news and attention from political events.

Pass it on.

• • •

Illumination I: Starting out on the two-hour drive to Mae Brussell's house, tooling past the artichoke farms and seemingly endless fields of pumpkins, taking in Pebble Beach, then turning onto the Carmel Valley Road, a sort of munchkin's suburbia, I was sorely tempted (even at the $10,000 risk of appearing irreverent) to apply philosophy major Mae Brussell's logic in order toilluminate the hitherto unexplained connection between the emergence of Fidel Castro, the ultimate transfer of the second Washington Senators baseball franchise to Texas, the boom in Southern tobacco crops, the so-called suicide of Ernest Hemingway and the funding of Rockefeller's enormously expensive campaigns for the Presidential nomination.

Look at it this way: If Fidel, reputedly a good glove man, had not flunked in his tryout with the original Washington Senators, he would obviously not have repaired to the Sierra Maestra, where-from he emerged such a sorehead. Certainly, if it has not already been deep-sixed, a skilled conspiracy researcher should seek out the original scouting report on Castro. Maybe, like countrymen Tony Perez and Luis Tiant, he had the makings of a major-leaguer. Possibly, the CIA dirty (sports) tricks department, recognizing him for a grudgy type, kept him out of the original Washington Senators' undeniably porous infield because it knew he was bound to stir up the Cuban sand lots. Otherwise, how do you explain the fact that the once threatened antitrust laws were not invoked when the Washington Senators skipped to Texas, where John Kennedy had been assassinated at a time when nobody knew what Howard Hunt was up to?

By not making Fidel a bonus baby, cheap even at 200 laundered thou, the CIA, at a stroke, accomplished the following:

1. Established a bona fide Commie menace in the hemisphere, which enabled the CIA budget to leap millions, maybe billions.

2. Which led, inevitably, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, making for higher TV Nielsen ratings, at least for slumping news shows, and, therefore, more profits for NBC, a network in which the Chase Manhattan Bank has an interest; that is to say, the ubiquitous Rockefellers, who were consequently enabled to bank-roll Rocky's campaigns, not to say his no-fault loan program to Henry Kissinger, among others.

3. In the sudden absence of Monte Cristos and other fine Havana cigars, there was a boom in inferior Southern tobacco crops. Payola for Nixon country.

4. And, most likely, murdered former Cuban resident and onetime fellow traveler Ernest Hemingway, who, if you remember, in his last days was convinced that he was being pursued by IRS agents. Paranoia? Or did Hem know too much?

• • •

Even as I ruminated over these terrifying possibilities, I found myself at Mae Brussell's door.

"May I see your driver's license?" she demanded.

"Why?"

"How do I know you are who you claim you are?"

Good thinking. Sheepishly, I turned over my tattered license. Mrs. Brussell noted the numbers on a pad and then we sat down to coffee and her delicious banana cake.

"This country," Mrs. Brussell said, "is run by bullets and blackmail."

"If," I said, quoting from one of her articles in The Realist, "J.F.K. was, indeed, the victim of a CIA plot, why didn't his brother Robert speak up?"

"The Kennedys had a proclivity for promiscuity. Robert's dalliances would have been revealed had he talked."

"Well, maybe.... But he would have had to have been especially vile, don't you think, to acquiesce to his brother's murder merely to conceal some commonplace adultery?"

"Why do you think they killed Marilyn Monroe?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"She was murdered. Absolutely. It was set up by military intelligence to look like suicide. In fact, it was a warning for Robert."

"Well, OK, then after he was killed, why didn't Ted speak up?"

"He was warned, too. Or don't you recall the private-plane crash where he injured his back? Then they set up Chappaquiddick."

"You mean...?"

"His drink was drugged. They put something in it. He still doesn't know what happened that night."

Before I could put in a supplementary, Mrs. Brussell was into the Manson case. "You realize that was also a military-intelligence operation. They groomed and protected him, putting him on a leash...."

"Why?"

"A new generation of antiwar kids had arisen, there were the communes, and if they caught on, it would have meant an end to consumer society as we know it. Manson was used to discredit the counterculture. Murray Chotiner was murdered, too; they're getting rid of the old-timers. Why, Oswald never even owned a rifle."

"But I remember the famous photograph of him holding a rifle."

"That's a fake. A cropped photograph. His head, another man's body. Now, what's your angle? Who else are you talking to?"

"Well, I've already spoken to Nicholas Von Hoffman in Washington and--"

"He's a CIA agent."

"Can you prove that?"

"It doesn't matter whether he's actually on the payroll, his columns clearly reflect their line. There are the agents and the assholes. An asshole," she explained, "is anybody who spins the CIA line."

"I see. Now, when we talked on the phone, you mentioned a foundation in Montreal, Permindex...."

"Yes. They run an assassination school in Mexico."

"Could you give me their address, please? I'd like to look into that."

"Remember what happened to the reporter in The Parallax View?"

"Ha, ha."

Even so, she let me have the address. Later, I discovered there is no Permindex listed in the Montreal telephone book; in fact, there is no such address. Clever bastards, those conspirators.

"One final question. If so many have already been murdered because they knew too much, how come you...?"

"If I were reaching more people, I wouldn't be alive."

• • •

Illumination II: Playboy has a circulation of 6,500,000, which means maybe 20,000,000 readers. Shit. What if Arthur Kretchmer, Playboy's Editorial Director, were a CIA agent, like Buckley, like Von Hoffman, and had cunningly brought me down from Canada only so that Mae Brussell could reach enough people to justify her being killed? That would make me an accomplice to murder worse. An asshole.

• • •

Los Angeles. To those of us who live smugly and bemused in North America's attic, it seems, increasingly, that America, America, is going paranoid. Maybe, after all, the center won't hold, everything flying apart. Certainly, my sojourn in post-Manson Beverly Hills was far from reassuring. The canyons echo not only with fabled affluence but also with terror. Electrified fences, Doberman pinschers, private security guards. But, above all, the fear that the coming crash, manipulated by the gnomes of Zurich, the Jewish syphilis minority, the CIA, the cynics who control P.I.D., or whoever, may shortly render all monies, all properties equally worthless.

Gold, that's the stuff. The overachiever's security blanket. Or is it?

The president of one of Hollywood's major studios, an astute man, told me that for months he had been professionally consulting a broker who had written a best seller about how to make money when everyone else was losing his. They never met, but spoke on the telephone, often for an hour at a time. Again and again, the broker argued for selling absolutely everything and converting to gold. Finally, the dancing to bullion stopped. There was a breakthrough. "Look here," said the broker, "I get the feeling, after all our talks, that you're a sophisticated man."

"Sure."

"Don't buy gold. It's a load of shit. It's my bag and I've got to peddle it, but the truth is there's only one thing to do. It's a four-point plan."

"Shoot."

"How many niggers did you see on your way to work this morning?"

"Well, I--I'm not sure."

"You saw lots."

"OK."

"And where do you think they're going to be when the shit hits the fan? Out on the streets, that's where."

"Uh-huh."

"You've got to get yourself four guns, get it, and lots of ammo. Sink all your cash into canned and dried foods. Then you hunker down somewhere to wait it out. Me, I recommend Utah; the Mormons don't like niggers, and my guess is they can hold that territory."

"Trouble is I'm a boat man myself."

"Can you get to your yacht in twenty minutes?"

"Yes."

"The only problem is you'd be inclined to sail south. Right?"

"Right."

"No good. Those fucking Mexicans will be out there, pirating. Running amuck. On the other hand, if you got yourself a couple of bazookas, that would certainly surprise them when they pulled alongside."

• • •

Definitions.

It strikes me as neurotic, maybe, yet still reasonable, to be charged with terror on any airplane flight; but if, like me, you also tread in fear, even crossing the street, that you might be struck by an errant, possibly anti-Semitic missile, then you are more than likely paranoid.

Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials. Digging into my childhood, I can recall that my father was utterly convinced of the Detroit plot and could embellish on it lovingly at the kitchen table. Dunking his bagel into hot milk, he would assure us that they had long ago developed an automobile engine, that required no more than a pint of gas to run 100 miles, but the bastards were keeping it under wraps to protect the oil industry. A chip off die old block, I quickly grasped as I grew to pimply adolescence myself that any neighborhood girl who wouldn't "go the limit" with me was clearly a part of the lesbian conspiracy. In our home, nobody's fools, we also learned early to appreciate that the gentiles were constantly plotting against us, though a joke current at the time did much to undermine this thesis.

It's the story of the Jewish boy, a would-be radio announcer, a rank-one scholar, who studies at the very best diction school, working day and night, graduating at the top of the class, before he finally goes to New York, only to be rejected by the three major networks.

"Why? Why? How could they turn you down?" wails his mother, slapping her cheek, appalled.

"B-b-b-because they're a-a-all a-a-anti-Semites," he replies.

Many Canadian writers, most of whom tend to feel unfairly neglected, are convinced this is not due to any inadequacies of their own. They are not published abroad, they insist, because London is a closed faggot's shop and the New York literary scene is no less than a Jewish cabal. Even more of my countrymen, especially those inclined toward nationalism, can smell a Yankee plot wherever they turn. In fact, one of 1973's best-selling novels in Canada, the appalling Ultimatum, a book with characters so wooden they could be used for splintering, had to do with an American plot to seize what they did not yet own of our natural resources, and many were those readers who subscribed.

Writers everywhere, myself included, are most commonly paranoid about their mail and tend to sniff conspiracy on those sour mornings that yield no offers, not to say royalty checks, or at least letters of appreciation. A friend of mine, a well-known writer, his sanity undoubted, actually mails himself letters from time to time, if only to test the continuing integrity of the postal system.

The vast and burgeoning literature of paranoia is something else again. In our time, it runs from Kafka's Castle, through Evelyn Waugh's Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and Saul Bellow's Victim, to, most recently, Joseph Heller's Something Happened, wherein the protagonist tells us on the first page, "I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely..." and only nine pages later observes, "In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of 20, and each of these 20 people is afraid of six people, making a total of 120 people who are feared by at least one person."

Earlier, the popular John Buchan, First Lord Tweedsmuir, governor general of Canada and author of The Thirty-Nine Steps and other Richard Hannay novels, was also obsessed widi vile plots but felt no need to equivocate as to who was behind them. We are barely into The Thirty-Nine Steps when we are introduced to Scudder, who tells Hannay that behind all the governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement, engineered by a very dangerous people; that is to say, the Jews. "The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the back stairs to find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it, the first man you meet is Prince von und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton and Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog.... But if you're on to the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a Bath chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now...."

The clear progenitor of these conspiracies is the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which first appeared in western Europe in 1920 and had, by 1930, been circulated throughout the world in millions of copies. The Protocols were used to incite massacres of Jews during the Russian civil war. They were especially helpful in fomenting the pogrom at Kishinev in Bessarabia in 1903. From Russia, the Protocols traveled to Nazi Germany.

The 24 protocols purport to be made up of lectures delivered to the Jewish secret government, the Elders of Zion, on how to achieve world domination. Tangled and contradictory, the main idea is that the Jews, spreading confusion and terror, will eventually take over the globe, their only present rivals, if Robert Welch, the 75-year-old founder of the John Birch Society, is to be believed, being those irrepressible goyim, the Rockefeller family, and their minions. Interviewed by Philip Nobile of the Chicago Sun-Times in 1973, Welch said: "Among the Insiders who are working toward world government ruled by the Communists are Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford II, Ted Kennedy and Henry Cabot Lodge." His best guess about Watergate, he added, was "that Rockefeller planned the whole thing behind the scenes. He wants to get rid of Nixon and become President in 1976."

It is also worth pointing out that a latter-day, somewhat sanitized variation of the Protocols plot surfaces in some of the most popular novels of our time, the late Ian Fleming's James Bond books, wherein the intrepid 007 usually does battle with one or the other of two world-wide conspiracies, Smersh or Spectre.

Smersh, first described in Casino Royale, is the conjunction of two Russian words: Smyert Shpionam, meaning, roughly, "Death to spies!"

Spectre is the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, a private enterprise for private profit, and its founder and chairman is Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Blofeld has a Jewish-sounding name, as does another primary Bond villain, Auric Goldfinger. For the rest, the illdoers are occasionally yellow (Dr. No) or black (Mr. Big).

• • •

Illumination III: Flying over Salt Lake City, a defensible sanctuary should the niggers run amuck, it occurred to me that just possibly nothing, absolutely nothing was what it appeared to be. Looked at closely, life isn't absurd, after all. There are no accidents. The sound, the fury, Bill Shakespeare notwithstanding, does signify something. We are, to come clean, being manipulated by conspirators, and once you grasp that ineffable reality, all mysteries resolve themselves. There are no more conundrums.

Take, for instance, the hitherto unrevealed connection between the Front for Liberation of Quebec (F.L.Q.), the Tupamaros and Queen Elizabeth II's New Year's honors list.

Remember, as Mae Brussell has already pointed out, having solved one assassination, the others slip readily into place. A sagacious conspiracy buff knows exactly what to look for. The same, I think, can be said of terrorist groups. If, as Mrs. Brussell has ventured, the S.L.A. is a CIA front and terrorists everywhere are encouraged in order to coerce hoi polloi into pleading for martial law, then surely the Tupamaros and the F.L.Q. should be looked at again in this light.

The Tupamaros, of course, are ostensibly Uruguayan urban guerrillas and the F.L.Q. represents the most violent and extreme of French-Canadian separatists. In 1970, the F.L.Q. kidnaped Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte, (continued on page 188)It's a plot!(continued from page 185) subsequently murdered, as well as James Cross, the senior British consular officer in Montreal. And Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, fitting neatly into Mrs. Brussell's thesis, hastily invoked the Draconian War Measures Act, which effectively revoked most Canadian civil liberties, albeit temporarily.

A year later, the Tupamaros kidnaped Geoffrey Jackson, the British ambassador to Uruguay.

Cross was held for 59 days and shortly thereafter awarded the O.B.E. in the Queen's New Year's honors list.

Jackson was held longer, for 244 days, and won a knighthood in the honors list.

Coincidence, no; payola, yes.

An asshole, it's true, might feel that Cross narrowly escaped being murdered and that, in 244 days of imprisonment, Sir Geoffrey Jackson kept his cool in circumstances of privation, filth and, worst of all, uncertainty. But blessed with insight, I now realize that MI5, taking a leaf from the CIA dirty-tricks book, was behind both the Cross and the Jackson so-called kidnapings.

In a stroke, they did much to discredit both the F.L.Q. and the Tupamaros and managed to reward poorly paid, undistinguished associates with flattering titles.

Clearly, on the new scale of honors-list obloquy, British foreign-office types based abroad now understand that if they are "kidnaped" and held for from one to 59 days, they will qualify for an O.B.E.; but if they can endure detention for 244 or more days, it's worth a knighthood.

The mind reels.

• • •

Illumination IV: In a modest, decaying duplex on the South Side of Chicago, I finally meet Sherman Skolnick, self-styled legal researcher and chairman of the Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts. Skolnick, 44 years old, a paraplegic, is attended by a gentle aide, David Hoffman, 30 years old, also crippled, his left arm severed below the elbow. Later, we are joined by the truculent Alex J. Bottos, Jr., chief staff investigator and self-proclaimed former infiltrator of a notorious airplane-robbery gang.

Skolnick, like Mrs. Brussell, is convinced that the S.L.A. is a CIA front and that Patty Hearst was apparently brainwashed. The Hearst family was made a CIA target because, in the Forties, their newspaper chain led an attack on the Rockefellers, which family was "active in seeing to it that the atomic secrets were given to the Soviets in the early Forties before the U. S. had completed its first bomb." Even so, the ubiquitous Rockefellers were a principal force behind the creation of the CIA and took umbrage when, in 1973, the Hearst Corporation, through its Avon Books Division, brought out one of the first attacks against the CIA. The Glass House Tapes. Hearst, fully aware of what's going on, doesn't protest because, since 1912, his publishing business has thrived on gangster lore.

I sat with the curiously touching, heavy-set Skolnick in his tiny kitchen, canned foods stacked everywhere, as he flicked on his tape recorder and told me, his manner self-conscious, that he didn't come from "an elite background." His father, a ladies' tailor, had left him a small trust fund, inadvertently sparking Skolnick's interest in corruption and the courts. The trust, he said, was managed by a crooked broker, and Skolnick pursued him through the courts for nine years, studying law on his own. In 1963, he founded the Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts to probe cases that were in the public interest. "We live on a shoestring," he said.

"Ours," said Hoffman, "is a quasi organization. It can't be infiltrated or taken over."

Skolnick told me he was working on a story for The Realist. "I'm writing about the dozens and dozens of people who were murdered or died under odd circumstances in the wake of Watergate. We have contacts all over the Western world, Europe, Canada...."

"Who have you got in Canada?" I asked. "Anybody I could see?"

"Well, for one thing, we don't openly discuss contacts. Some are strategically placed newsmen...."

Skolnick went on to say that from Dallas, through Watergate, to now, the networks, the media, have known the facts about Oswald but wouldn't dare print them. I asked him. as I had asked Mae Brussell, why Robert Kennedy hadn't spoken up if there had, indeed, been a plot to assassinate John Kennedy.

"Robert Kennedy couldn't protest," said Hoffman. "It's like a bank robber gets caught, he has nobody to complain to."

"Simple-minded people," said Skolnick, "those who are not profound researchers, like Mae, ask why the Kennedys don't speak out."

Taking his point, I changed the subject and asked Skolnick about the crash of the United Airlines plane, near Midway Airport, with Dorothy Hunt on board. "Can you prove it was sabotage?"

"The mass media have time and again tried to protect United Airlines. They've made statements that our case is unsupported. Why? They have United Airlines as an advertiser. We have more than thirteen hundred pages of documents; they say we have no proof. Rockefeller, you know, owns all three networks, through the Chase Manhattan Bank, and the family is a major stockholder in United. So they are going to put us down, which has been our problem for two years. There are angles and angles and angles...."

"What evidence have you got that Mrs. Hunt was carrying two million in traveler's checks as well as ten thousand in cash?"

"I don't know a quick answer," said Skolnick. "But our chief investigator can tell you a lot about that."

Within minutes, he was with us in the crowded kitchen.

"Here he is," said Skolnick, "Alex Bottos; one day after appearing with me in public, he was in jail on a frame-up."

"What were you in jail for?" I asked.

Bottos, his manner icy, replied: "Does there have to be a reason today?"

"They put him in what we call Clockwork Orange, Missouri, the behavior-modification plant. He was there for forty days."

Immediately, Bottos presented me with a tape. An hour long, it began with spooky music, reminiscent of radio's Inner Sanctum. A girl's voice announced that we would hear things new and startling from Bottos, our host. Bottos, she said, was a student of advanced experimental psychology and had personally observed brainwashing with his battalion in Korea, before being forced to submit to it himself right here in America. "We strongly suggest," she said, "you don't play this tape immediately before a meal. It is brutal, shocking, at times disgusting, but also true."

Alas, like many a poster for a porno flick, the girl's promo promised better than the tape paid. It was, for the most part, a pontifical sermon, delivered by Bottos in a slow, mournful voice. "Words," he began, "how flippantly we learn to use so many of them...." It was difficult to pinpoint, he said, when this country went wrong. But, clearly, we had reached a new low and were now "the victims of mental and sexual despots." There are many ways to assassinate a man, he continued lugubriously, but the most insidious is called zombiism. Total degradation. "I have sickening news for you. As a matter of policy and law, our Government is now practicing zombiism, and doing it in your name," and then he described the technique.

"You toss a human being, naked, into a four-by-six cell block, no sink, no toilet, nothing, and you control the lighting, sound and temperature. You keep him there for seventy-two hours to a week, creating fatigue, fear and disorientation. High temperature is induced with drugs and if this doesn't work, you mix brutality with sexual perversions. You force the man, through beatings, to perform unnatural sexual acts and to have others perform them on him, until he is so docile he will perform the worst kind of perversion willingly."

Bottos then went on to play an excerpt from The Manchurian Candidate, after which he suggested that Lee Harvey Oswald, like Laurence Harvey, may have been brainwashed. "Lee Harvey Oswald," he said, "was employed at number five Krashniya Street, Moscow, the Experimental Section of the Electrotechnical Institute in the Building of the Advanced Sciences. Then, at ten A.M. on March 30, 1961, he was entered in a hospital in Minsk, Russia, for an adenoidal operation, which strangely took 12 days, for he wasn't released until April 11, when he mysteriously received a visa, enabling him to return to the United States."

Our criminal mental-health laws, modeled on Beria's, Bottos said, were introduced by the CIA, and once again the fabled Rockefeller brothers, who wish to introduce world government, sharing control of the globe with Russia. Too bad, Bottos continued, that we didn't heed the warning of California journalist Frederick Selig, who, in June 1964, tried to tell us about the seriousness of homosexual penetration within our Government. Homosexuality, Selig wrote, "was a practicing religion, world-wide, their ultimate goal to be a total control of the population and--through thought control--to condition us lo believe that normal relations between men and women were a crime."

So it goes.

• • •

And yet--and yet--before interviewing spiky Mae Brussell or sitting with the obsessed Skolnick in his kitchen, I had sought out Art Buchwald in Washington. "The trouble with conspiracy theories," Buchwald said, "is that so many of them have proved to be right. For years, I laughed at my left-wing friends when they told me their telephones were being tapped or that Nixon was a crook, and now, look, they were right all along."

And, he might have added, though few of us would have believed it before, the truth is that idea man Liddy actually did sit in Attorney General John Mitchell's office and propose an offshore floating whorehouse wherein delegates to the Democratic Convention could be tempted and taped. There were, there's no denying, the "plumbers" and the so-called White House horrors we all now know too much about. And one of the late J. Edgar Hoover's pet projects, it has now been revealed, was Cointelpro, which meant no less than FBI infiltration of left-wing groups such as the S.L.A. The Warren Report, it must be said, leaves too many questions unanswered. Writing in The Washington Post on September 27, 1974, Von Hoffman observed, "If it should ever be discovered that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Cuban agent, it takes no effort of the imagination to think that Fidel Castro might have dispatched the killer to Dallas to avenge the CIA's attempts on the Cuban boss's own life. When three major political figures are murdered and another is nearly so in the space of a decade, it becomes harder and harder to accept the idea they were all gunned down by lonely nuts acting out the murderous and private fantasies of sickened minds." Furthermore, from the beginning, the CIA was up to dirty tricks, some of them murderous, others ugly, more merely incredibly childish. In The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, authors Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks write that for several years the agency subsidized the New York Daily Worker. "In fairness to the Worker's staff, it must be noted that they were unaware of the CIA's assistance, which came in the form of several thousand secretly purchased prepaid subscriptions. The CIA apparently hoped to demonstrate by this means to the American public that the threat of communism in this country was, indeed, real."

My problem with the conspiracy theorists is that given a yard of provable dirty work, they want us to run another 99 with them to fantasy touchdowns. Something uglier. Like Senator Joe McCarthy before them, they deal irresponsibly in rumor and innuendo. Before I saw him, poor Skolnick suspected I was an FBI informer and, afterward, he telephoned Playboy to say he could prove I was, in fact, a Canadian government agent. Given his and Mae Brussell's technique, I can help by making the circumstantial case for them.

In 1958, and again in 1965, I was awarded generous grants by the Canada Council, ostensibly for writing. But the chairman of the council at that time was Peter Dwyer, a wartime agent with M15.

Mm.

Rooted in England for 18 years, I wrote for, among other magazines, Encounter, then considered a leading intellectual journal and since revealed to have been secretly funded by the CIA.

Since my return to Montreal two years ago, I have traveled to Ottawa once a week, officially a visiting professor at Carleton University, bill unofficially....

A drinking companion of mine in Ottawa is one Don Wall, formerly advisor on security to the cabinet.

"How do I know," Mae Brussell asked, "you are who you claim you are?"

How, indeed?