Unholy Matrimony: The Tie Between the Cult of Intelligence and the Cult of Oligarchy
Recently
the Central Intelligence Agency added yet another scandal to its
ever-growing list. The scandal involved the outsourcing of torture. The
following news article elaborates: Two nations in support of the White House’s 2003 invasion of Iraq – Poland and Romania – are at the heart of a European Union investigation on human rights abuses and torture claims at camps allegedly run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Poland and Romania, along with Bulgaria, have indicated this week they intend to withdraw troops from Iraq saying the economic and image costs have run too high.
The White House doesn’t directly comment on whether or not the CIA is running secret prisons in Europe to house and torture al Qaeda captives, but vows the claims warrant an investigation.
However, more information from Europe has uncovered at least two CIA special flights landed in France in 2002 and again in 2005, but investigators did not know the final destination of those flights, which used a CIA Learjet and Gulfstream III. But the European Union says more than 300 flights in total have involved clandestine CIA activities. (No pagination).
Soon after the EU allegations, the ACLU, a left-of center American legal group, came forward with charges of their own:
As news broke of the European-led investigation the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) went to court to sue the CIA to “stop the transportation of terror suspects to countries outside” of the United States. The ACLU suit claims the CIA has violated international human rights laws.This is not the CIA’s first criminal and morally bankrupt act. The problematic intelligence organization seems to have been engaged in nefarious activity since its inception. What is the explanation for the Agency’s seemingly systemic corruption? Anti-government writers claim that CIA corruption stems from the fact that the Agency is an organ of a corrupt government. However, this contention is a gross oversimplification. While the Agency does have a government charter, it can only be considered a quasi-governmental organization. For the most part, the Agency is the enforcement arm of its “founding fathers.” While these “founding fathers” use national governments as their personal prostitutes, they inhabit a stratum that exists above governments. The “founding fathers” are the power elite.
Charges include abduction, detention without communication, beatings, use of narcotics on detainees, and transportation of suspects across country borders without just cause.
Some of the men under protection of the ACLU claim they were flown by the CIA to Syria (currently a country at odds with the White House) and Egypt where detainees were tortured, sexually assaulted, and drugged. The federal government denies such activity could ever have taken place and vows to defend itself “vigorously,” but added that under presidential order the CIA is absolved of presenting secret procedures in a court of law in the name of national security. (No pagination)
What is being examined here is an unholy union. The first spouse is the Cult of Intelligence, which is the CIA. Despite its fierce secrecy, many, if not all Americans, are aware of this Cult’s existence. After all, it has a definite geographical location, which is Langley, Virginia. The major news media and the government also acknowledge its existence. On the other hand, the Cult of Oligarchy, which is the power elite, is not so easily detected. This cult constitutes a “virtual state.” Philip Bobbitt defines this term:
The virtual state has many of the characteristics of other states (a trained standing army and intelligence cadre; a treasury and a source of revenue; a civil service and even a rudimentary welfare system for the families of its fighters) but is borderless; it declares wars, makes alliances with other states and is global in scope but lacks a definable location on the map. (No pagination)This status as a “virtual state” has allowed the Cult of Oligarchy to pass right under the radar of most Americans. Mention the cult’s various congregations, such as the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, or the Bilderbergers, and the average person will shrug in blissful ignorance. However, this “virtual state” still must be examined, because it has been wedded to the Cult of Intelligence since the CIA’s inception.
Robert Lovett
The oligarchical origins of the Agency begin with the Lovett Committee. Created on October 22, 1945 by the Secretary of War Robert Patterson, the function of this committee was “to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of the U.S. intelligence activities” (Tarpley and Chaitkin 67). Lovett’s recommendations would create a renegade organization acting as an extension of the United States government. Under a national security cover, the new organization could pursue objectives that were not always in the best interests of the American peoples. Tarpley and Chaitkin describe Lovett’s recommendations:Lovett decided that there should be a separate Central Intelligence Agency. The new agency would “consult” with the armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings. (67)It is obvious that the Agency, as conceived by Lovett, would be able to head off on rogues trajectories with little oversight and with the official sanction and blessing of the United States government. Whose interests was Lovett serving? In all likelihood the answer can be found with a Yale-based secret society.
Skull and Bones
Lovett was a member of the Yale-based secret society known as Skull and Bones. This secret society has alarmed both religious and non-religious researcher with its occult rituals that thematically celebrate death. What is even more disturbing is the fact that Skull and Bones recruits the offspring of blueblood dynasties and acts as an elite conduit. The Skull and Bones’ connection to the elite is found with the group’s founder, William H. Russell. Tarpley and Chaitkin explain the connection:Skull and Bones – the Russell Trust Association – was first established among the class graduating from Yale in 1833. Its founder was William Huntington Russell of Middle town, Connecticut. The Russell family was the master of incalculable wealth derived from the largest U.S. criminal organization of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, the great opium syndicate.As Tarpley and Chaitkin made clear, the opium families operating through Russell and Company constituted part of a blueblood power bloc known as the “Boston Brahmin.” The blueblood families that fall into the Skull and Bones orbit provide textbook examples of elite criminality and elite deviance. This situation did not end with the introduction of new line families to the Bones fold. Many of the “Johnny-Come-Latelies” are almost dirtier than the old-line families. In all likelihood, Robert Lovett’s membership in Skull and Bones exposed him to the philosophies that motivated the nefarious activities of Russell and his gang of drug-pushers. So, it comes as little surprise that Bonesman Lovett played an integral role in the genesis of the CIA, an organization that has been the center of so much scandal. It also comes as little surprise that the CIA landscape is littered with Bonesmen.
There was at that time a deep suspicion of, and national revulsion against, freemasonry and secret organizations in the United States, fostered in particular by the anti-masonic writings of former U.S. President John Quincy Adams. Adams stressed that those who take oaths to politically powerful international secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic.
But the Russells were protected as part of the multiply-intermarried grouping of families then ruling Connecticut. The blood-proud members of the Russell, Pierpont, Edwards, Burr, Griswold, Day, Alsop and Hubbard families were prominent in the pro-British party within the state. Many of their sons would be among the members chosen for the Skull and Bones Society over the years.
The background to Skull and Bones is a story of Opium and Empire, and a bitter struggle for political control over the new U.S. republic.
Samuel Russell, second cousin to Bones founder William H., established Russell and Company in 1823. Its business was to acquire opium from Turkey and smuggle it into China, where it was strictly prohibited, under the armed protection of the British Empire.
The prior, predominant American gang in this field had been the syndicate created by Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, an aggregation of the self-styled “blue bloods” or Brahmins of Boston’s north shore. Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins sibling and children. The Perkins opium syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families. By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium racket. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes, and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under the Russell auspices.
John Quincy Adams and other patriots had fought these men for a quarter century by the time the Russell Trust Association was set up with its open pirate emblem-Skull and Bones. (118-9)
The CFR Connection
The CIA was brought into existence by the National Security Act of 1947. Supervision for the writing of this act was provided by John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles. Allen would later serve as the Agency’s DCI until he was fired by Kennedy for the Bay of Pig fiasco. Both men were members of the elitist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Allen Dulles would even act as the CFR’s president for a time. The CFR remains closely connected to the CIA to this very day. Former executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA Victor Marchetti and former State Department analyst John Marks elaborate:The influential but private Council, composed of several hundred of the country’s top political, military, business, and academic leaders, has long been the CIA’s principal “constituency” in the American public. When the agency has needed prominent citizens to front its proprietary companies or for other special assistance, it has often turned to Council members. (267)The CFR obviously plays an important role in the CIA’s story. Therefore, it is important to look into the background of this elitist organization. The CFR’s story begins with an elitist named John Ruskin. In 1870, John Ruskin “hit Oxford like an earthquake,” proselytizing students in the imperialistic gospel of the British Empire (Quigley 130). In Tragedy and Hope, Dr. Carroll Quigley provides a brief summation of this gospel:
Ruskin spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the privileged ruling class. He told them that they were possessors of a magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom, decency, and self-discipline, but that this tradition could not be saved, and did not deserve to be saved, unless it could be extended to the lower classes in England itself and to the non-English masses throughout the world. If this precious tradition were not extended to these two great majorities, the minority of upper class Englishmen would ultimately be submerged by these majorities and the tradition lost. To prevent this, the tradition must be extended to the masses and to the Empire. (130)Among one of the undergraduates who wholeheartedly embraced this message was Cecil Rhodes, who would keep his longhand copy of Ruskin’s inaugural lecture for thirty years (Quigley 130-31). Inspired by Ruskin, Rhodes established his scientific dictatorship in South Africa, where he monopolized the diamond fields through DeBeers Consolidated Mines (Quigley 130-31). Instrumental in the formation of this diamond cartel were Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, who provided Rhodes with financial support (Quigley 130-31). Yet, the borders of Rhodes’ African empire did not end there. Cecil also:
rose to be prime minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1896), contributed money to political parties, controlled parliamentary seats both in England and South Africa, and sought to win a strip of British territory across Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt and to join these two extremes together with a telegraph line and ultimately with a Cape-to-Cairo Railway. (Quigley 130-31)Cecil Rhodes not the only adherent of Ruskin’s imperialistic message. Evidently, others had taken to heart the Anglophilic gospel of Ruskin and, eventually, became associated with Rhodes. Together, this network would establish a secret society devoted to the cause of British expansionism. Carroll Quigley elaborates:
Among Ruskin’s most devoted disciples at Oxford were a group of intimate friends including Arnold Toynbee, Alfred (later Lord) Milner, Arthur Glazebrook, George (later Sir George) Parkin, Philip Lyttelton Gell, and Henry (later Sir Henry) Birchenough. These were so moved by Ruskin that they devoted the rest of their lives to carrying out his ideas. A similar group of Cambridge men including Reginald Baliol Brett (Lord Esher), Sir John B. Seeley, Albert (Lord) Grey, and Edmund Garrett were also aroused by Ruskin’s message and devoted their lives to the extension of the British Empire and uplift of England’s urban masses as two parts of one project which they called “extension of the English-speaking idea.” They were remarkably successful in these aims because of England’s most sensational journalist William Stead (1849 – 1912), an ardent social reformer and imperialist, brought them into association with Rhodes. This association was formally established on February 5, 1891, when Rhodes and Stead organized a secret society of which Rhodes had been dreaming for sixteen years. In this secret society Rhodes was to be leader; Stead, Brett (Lord Esher), and Milner were to form an executive committee; Arthur (lord) Balfour, (Sir) Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert (Lord) Grey, and others were listed as potential members of a “Circle of Initiates;” while there was to be an outer circle known as the “Association of Helpers” (later organized by Milner as the Round Table organization). Brett was invited to join this organization the same day and Milner a couple of weeks later, on his return from Egypt. Both accepted with enthusiasm. Thus the central part of the secret society was established by March 1891. It continued to function as a formal group, although the outer circle was, apparently, not organized until 1909-1913. This group was able to get access to Rhodes’ money after his death in 1902 and also to funds of loyal Rhodes supporters like Alfred Beit (1853-1906) and Sir Abe Bailey (1864-1940). With this backing they sought to extend and execute the ideals that Rhodes had obtained from Ruskin and Stead. Milner was the chief Rhodes Trustee and Parkin was Organizing Secretary of the Rhodes Trust after 1902, while Gell and Birchenough, as well as others with similar ideas, became officials of the British South Africa Company. They were joined in their efforts by other Ruskinite friends of Stead’s like Lord Grey, Lord Esher, and Flora Shaw (later Lady Lugard). In 1890, by a stratagem too elaborate to describe here, Miss Shaw became Head of the Colonial Department of the Times while still remaining on the payroll of Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette. In this past she played a major role in the next ten years in carrying into execution the imperial schemes of Cecil Rhodes, to whom Stead had introduced her in 1889. (131-32)When Rhodes died, the continuation of his imperialistic vision fell upon the shoulders of chief Rhodes Trustee Alfred Milner. Under Milner’s coordination, the Rhodes network would establish a stateside surrogate organization that would come to be known as the Council on Foreign Relations. Quigley continues:
As governor-general and high commissioner of South Africa in the period 1897-1905, Milner recruited a group of young men chiefly from Oxford and from Toynbee Hall, to assist him in organizing his administration. Through his influence these men were able to win influential posts in government and international finance and become the dominant influence in British imperial and foreign affairs up to 1939. Under Milner in South Africa they were known as Milner’s Kindergarten until 1910. In 1909-1913 they organized semisecret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief dependencies and the United States… In 1919 they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for which the chief financial supporters were Sir Abe Bailey and the Astor Family (owners of The Times). Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period of 1919-1927. (132-33)The CFR would eventually find its way into the halls of the United States government in 1939 with a project known as the War and Peace Studies Project. James Perloff describes this penetration of the halls of officialdom:
In September 1939, Hitler’s troops invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany; World War II had begun.The CFR used its temporary position as a government adjunct as a conduit for spreading its members throughout the government. The State Department was particularly infested. In fact, the CFR’s influence over State led to what can only be described as the privatization of foreign policy. American foreign policy became little more than a vehicle for the agendas of bankers, corporations, globalists, and elitists. The CIA has provided this privatized foreign policy with muscle through covert operations. Manley’s Jamaica provides a good example of this fact.
Less than two weeks later, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, and Walter Mallory, the CFR’s executive director, met in Washington with Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith. They proposed that the Council help the State Department formulate its wartime policy and postwar planning. The CFR would conduct study groups in coordination with State, making recommendations to the Department and President. Messersmith (a Council member himself) and his superiors agreed. The CFR thus succeeded, temporarily at least, in making itself an adjunct of the United States government. This undertaking became known as the War and Peace Studies Project; it worked in secret and was underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. It held 362 meetings and prepared 682 papers for FDR and the State Department. (64)
Target: Jamaica
In 1972, Jamaica democratically elected a new government made up of the People’s National Party and headed up by Prime Minister Michael Manley (Phillips 475-76). Manley became a problem for the elite, namely those behind four U.S. aluminum companies: Kaiser, Reynolds, Alcoa, and Revere (477). Jamaica was one of the world’s largest exporters of bauxite, the mineral that is processed into aluminum (477). All four American companies and the Canadian company Alcan had dominance over the Jamaican Bauxite industry (477). Manley’s government had begun to tip the power balance by negotiating for 51 percent controlling interest in Jamaica’s bauxite industry (477).Manley was going toe to toe with multinational corporations, which act as the locus of power for elites. This, of course, incurred the wrath of the oligarchs. The CIA was employed in a destabilization campaign against the Manley government. Phillips elaborates:
…toward the end of 1975 and during the first half of 1976, a concerted plan (later exposed as “Operation Werewolf”) was put into effect by agencies within the U.S.-apparently including the CIA-acting in concert with forces within the JLP, the major opposition party (misappropriately called the Jamaican Labour Party). In January 1976, a series of increasingly violent events began. People by the dozens were burned out of their homes (whole areas were torched) while paid gunmen shot or threatened those trying to escape. Most of the victims were PNP supporters. Food supplies were poisoned, and rumor of poisoning of water supplies were rife. The police and defense Force uncovered guns, explosives, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition of a kind never seen before in Jamaica. The violence escalated until Manley, exercising his constitutional powers, declared a state of national emergency in June, hinting strongly that outside forces were at work. The foreign Western press, especially in the U.S., picked up on the theme of violence in Jamaica, often misrepresenting or distorting the actual facts of events. Later, Manley, his ministers, and the leaders of several other Caribbean nations (including Guyana and Barbados) charged that a plot to “destabilize” the Jamaican government was under way. (478-79)Is their any wonder why the CIA has been called “the private army of the Fortune 500″? Manley’s Jamaica makes it painfully clear that the oligarchic mentality was transmitted from the power elite and into the intelligence community.
Conclusion
Probably the best solution for dealing with CIA corruption is to dismantle the Agency and start over from scratch. The question is who has the guts and the clout to accomplish such a feat. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated shortly after he made clear his intentions of scattering the Agency to the four winds. More than a few people doubt the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Kennedy was a victim of a lone assassin. Skeptics even included President Richard M. Nixon. On tapes of the first six months of his second term in office, Nixon said that the Warren Commission was “the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated” (Kevin Anderson, no pagination). While Nixon did not elaborate, one need only examine the Zapruder film to understand why the Warren Commission would be considered a “hoax.” On the film Kennedy’s head flies backwards from what could only be a bullet impact from the front. This flies straight in the face of the Commission’s contention that Kennedy was shot by Oswald up and behind to the right in the book depository.The Dealey Plaza knockout lesson was not lost upon future politicians. Furthermore, the lesson was reinforced with the strange death of former DCI William Colby. On April 27th, 1996, Colby disappeared from his vacation home in Maryland. A neighbor who came to check on him found his radio and computer still on (“Ex-CIA director believed drowned” 1). Investigators also discovered dinner dishes on Colby’s table and clam shells in the kitchen sink (“Colby was a man of contradictions”1). Ten days after his disappearance, Colby’s body washed up on a sandbar of the Wicomico River located a short distance from his Maryland vacation home. His death was ruled an accident. No one thought to ask what compelled the man to leave his computer and radio on, his dinner in the sink, and go canoeing. Such behavior is far too erratic for a man who was described as precise and orderly. Colby’s good friend and pupil, former state senator and Vietnam war hero John Decamp, is convinced that the former DCI’s death was neither an accident nor a suicide (DeCamp 386).
These examples should prompt activists and patriots to proceed with more caution. However, they should not cause people to disengage. The Cult of Intelligence and the Cult of Oligarchy are powerful, but they are not invincible. Like most cults, they are made up of fanatics. Even the most cunning fanatic makes mistakes and can even get wreck less. If the American people took this fact to heart, they would cease being humans playing at being insects and would actually begin to see progress in the right direction.
Sources Cited
- Anderson, Kevin. “Revelations and Gaps on Nixon Tapes.” BBC Online. 1 March 2002
- Bobbitt, Philip. “Get Ready for the Next Long War.” Time. 1 September 2002
- “CIA Denies Using Torture, Europe Demands Response.” Think & Ask. December 2005
- “Colby was a man of contradictions.” Springfield News-Sun. 7 May 1996: 1,7.
- DeCamp, John W. The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska. Nebraska: AWT Inc., 1996.
- “Ex-CIA director believed drowned.” Springfield News-Sun. 30 Apr. 1996: 1, 8.
- Marchetti, Victor and John D. Marks. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. New York: Dell Publishing, 1974.
- Perloff, James. The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline. Wisconsin: Western Islands, 1988.
- Phillips, James. “Renovation of the International Economic Order: Trilateralism, the IMF, and Jamaica.” Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, Holly Sklar, ed., Boston: South End Press, 1980, 468-91.
- Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time. New York: Macmillan, 1966.
- Tarpley, Webster Griffin and Anton Chaitkin. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992.
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