Overview: Drugs as Weapons Against Us meticulously details how a group of opium-trafficking families came to form an American oligarchy and eventually achieved global dominance. This oligarchy helped fund the Nazi regime and then saved thousands of Nazis to work with the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA operations such as MK-Ultra pushed LSD and other drugs on leftist leaders and left-leaning populations at home and abroad. Evidence supports that this oligarchy further led the United States into its longest-running wars in the ideal areas for opium crops, while also massively funding wars in areas of coca plant abundance for cocaine production under the guise of a “war on drugs” that is actually the use of drugs as a war on us. Drugs as Weapons Against Us tells how scores of undercover U.S. Intelligence agents used drugs in the targeting of leftist leaders from SDS to the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Latin Kings, and the Occupy Movement. It also tells how they particularly targeted leftist musicians, including John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Tupac Shakur to promote drugs while later murdering them when they started sobering up and taking on more leftist activism. The book further uncovers the evidence that Intelligence agents dosed Paul Robeson with LSD, gave Mick Jagger his first hit of acid, hooked Janis Joplin on amphetamines, as well as manipulating Elvis Presley, Eminem, the Wu Tang Clan, and others.
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| Drugs as Weapons Against Us The CIA's Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Leftists by John L. Potash Book |
Drugs as Weapons Against Us The CIA's Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Leftists by John L. Potash Book Read Online Chapter One
Opium Traders Achieve Global Predominance
As early as 3400 b.c., the Sumerians used the opium poppy, which they called the “joy plant,” for its euphoric effects. In The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, University of Wisconsin Professor Alfred McCoy explains that most opium, and its derivative heroin, still comes from poppies grown in the northern section of former Sumerian lands and adjoining territories. Today, this includes a narrow 4,500-mile stretch of mountains extending along the southern tier of Asia, from Turkey through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India, an area known as the “Golden Crescent.” That same stretch of mountains then extends to the world’s second largest area of poppy cultivation in the “Golden Triangle,” where Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand and Laos come together adjacent to Vietnam.1
From as early as 1500 a.d., opium and other drugs played a crucial role in the rise of industrialized powers. Professor Carl Trocki, of Queensland University, Australia, provided this summary of the opium trade:
Accumulations of wealth created by a succession of historic drug trades have been among the primary foundations of global capitalism and the modern nation-state itself. Indeed, it may be argued that the entire rise of the west, from 1500 to 1900, depended on a series of drug trades.2
Professor Peter Dale Scott of the University of California at Berkeley concurred:
All empires since the Renaissance have been driven by the search for foreign resources, and nearly all, including the British, the French, and the Dutch, used drugs as a cheap way to pay for overseas expansion.3
Access to an abundance of opium poppies by Western industrialized countries brought centuries of problems to the East, particularly in China. There, in the early 1500s, the Chinese had only used opium medicinally and in oral form. During this time the Portuguese fleet initiated the smoking of opium in China, discovering that the effects of smoking opium were instantaneous. The Chinese, however, considered the practice barbaric and subversive.4
In the early 1700s, the Dutch took over trade with China and the islands of Southeast Asia, while popularizing the use of a tobacco pipe for opium smoking. In 1729, the Emperor Yung Cheng issued an edict prohibiting the smoking of opium and its domestic sale, except under license for use as a medicine.5
By 1750, the British East India Company had taken control of several opium-growing regions of India, and by the 1790s had developed a monopoly on the opium trade. China’s new emperor, Kia King, then banned opium completely. This failed to stop the British East India Company from increasing their smuggling and sale of opium in China, which grew from 15 tons a year in the earlier 1700s to 3,200 tons a year by 1850.6
American University Professor Clarence Lusane argued that once Britain had developed its empire, it used opium as an important new political tool for conquest. The British, he wrote, used opium to help addict and control the Chinese people en masse, increasing British profits in China and allowing them easier access to China’s resources.7
Statements of high-level Chinese officials support this argument. In 1836, mandarin Hsu Nai-tsi, vice president of the Sacrificial Court, informed the emperor that opium, originally ranked among the medicines, was now being inhaled. Hsu called the practice “destructive … injurious,” and despite its ban in 1799, the foreign “barbarian merchants” helped it “spread throughout the entire empire.” Mandarin Chun Tsu, a member of the Board of Rites, found that within the Chinese army, “a great number of the soldiers were [opium] smokers; so that, although their numerical force was large there was hardly any force found among them.” Chu proclaimed the Chinese needed to oppose the “covetous and ambitious schemes” of the British with their opium sales.8
By 1839, the British East India Company’s shipments of opium to China reached 1,400 tons per year. The Chinese premier tried to outlaw foreign ships from bringing opium into Chinese ports for sale. Chinese officials confiscated 15,000 chests containing 95 tons of opium from foreign merchants, including 10 tons from the American firm Russell & Co. They dissolved the opium in a trench of water with salt and lime.9
Unwilling to lose the political power opium had given it, Britain attacked China in the first Opium War, which lasted three years until 1842. China then signed a peace treaty giving Hong Kong to Britain. China kept opium illegal, but stopped confiscations. However, when Chinese officials tried to enforce the prohibition of British opium sales, tensions led to the second Opium War (1856-1858). Once more China lost and had to comply with British demands to legalize the opium trade.10
In 1865, Scotsman Thomas Sutherland started the Hongkong Shanghai Banking Company (later HSBC). A senior Chinese government official had issued a warrant for future HSBC board member Thomas Dent in 1839, to close his opium warehouses. This helped spark the first Opium War. France’s Le Monde Diplomatique said that “HSBC’s first wealth came from opium from India, and later Yunan in China.” Yunan is in the Golden Triangle area. The first Opium War forced China to cede Shanghai to Western powers, transforming it from a fishing village to China’s largest, most modern city with a network of opium smoking dens. Prof. Alfred McCoy would eventually call Hong Kong “Asia’s heroin laboratory,” and HSBC would become the world’s second largest bank.
By 1900 China had an estimated thirteen million opium addicts. Six years later, 27% of all adult males in China smoked opium. This astounding rate of addiction has never since been equaled. Other Asian countries developed similar public addiction issues when forced to participate in the drug trade by European powers. Corrupt, foreign-supported leaders in these countries may have also been motivated to make money on the side through taxing opium sales.11
However, the opium-trafficking families of the U.S. and Europe made the most money, as they bought most of the 35,000 metric tons of raw opium being produced in 1906 and sold it at a premium once it was processed. This was 85% of the world opium production that year and more than four times as much from any other single source in history. Most of this opium production took place in southern China, adjoining the area considered the Golden Triangle of opium production in Laos, Thailand, Burma (now Myanmar) and Vietnam.12
British rulers appeared to also use opium against British citizens who struggled to better their living conditions. Famous British resident Karl Marx coined the term “opiate of the masses” about opium abuse and addiction keeping people politically asleep. The timing of the ill effects of the industrial revolution—worker displacement, starvation and rioting in the early 1800s—suggests that British rulers promoted opiates to help quell the masses of poor and struggling workers, many of whom joined protests.13
After a particularly turbulent eight years of rioting and protest, in 1819 British Parliament passed the Six Acts, turning Britain into a police state. These acts prevented public meetings, restricted newspapers, sped up the judicial process and restricted access to firearms. Within ten years, street patrols of police were introduced. In 1827, the first commercial batches of the opium derivative morphine were produced.14
Opium distribution for medicinal and recreational use in industrialized European countries led to problems among their own poor and working classes. Professor Lusane cited Karl Marx in Capital, which stated that in 1861, 26 percent of deaths among English children resulted from their working-class parents treating the children’s ailments with opiate medicines. As Prof. Al McCoy also reported, mass addiction to opium became a significant feature of the late 1800s in England.15
U.S., British Traffic Opium As Workers Organize
Starting in the 1700s, the British East India Company acquired a number of partners among American families from New England. The opium merchants’ power and loyalty extended to their American partners, and the American anglophiles showed their continued commitment to Britain by becoming part of the reported 15% of Americans who fought for the British as Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War.16
In his book, Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs, Professor Clarence Lusane argues that British aristocracy and many of America’s wealthiest families used alcohol and drugs as weapons, not only in the East, but also in Africa and in the Americas, with New England families dominating the rum trade. Lusane notes that prior to European influence, Africans traditionally drank only palm wine. Other intoxicants were used medicinally and in moderation. European traders introduced rum, tobacco and opium to Africa for economic gain, swindling African traders when gathering captured slaves, and also introduced rum in the Americas to lead a large percentage of Native Americans into dysfunction.17
The American families smuggling opium into China alongside the British included the prominent Russell family of Connecticut. The Russells intermarried with other rich families, including the Pierponts, the family that later spawned tycoon Julius Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan. Over a half-dozen of the richest families, including the Cabots, Cushings, Astors, and Perkinses, gained huge wealth in the opium trade and went on to attain positions of power in the U.S. In just one single year (1840) these New Englanders brought 24,000 pounds of opium into the U.S.18
The Russell family helped found Yale University, and in 1833, one of the Russells founded Yale’s elite secret society, Skull and Bones. A member of the Cabot opium-trafficking family founded Harvard’s Porcellian Club, called the Porc or Pig Club by critics. The Russell Company unabashedly used the skull-and-bones pirate symbol in its international opium shipping. In 1856, a Skull and Bonesman, Daniel Coit Gilman, co-incorporated the Russell Trust Association, the opium-trafficking Russell family’s fund, which then started bestowing money to Skull and Bones members. The Russell Trust reportedly granted each Skull and Bonesman $15,000, the equivalent of $255,000 in 2010 dollars, upon their graduation. In time, many of these Bonesmen rose to the ranks of the most powerful people in the world.19
In 1874, a British chemist turned the opium derivative, morphine, into heroin. By 1898, the Bayer Company of Germany introduced heroin as a commercial product. Bayer introduced its milder pain reliever, aspirin, one year later. Both drugs were mass-marketed on a similar scale, with heroin being touted as a “non-addictive” cure for adult ailments and infant respiratory diseases. Other companies followed suit and mass marketed heroin throughout Europe and America, with the American Medical Association’s approval of heroin as a non-addictive morphine substitute.20
The next thirty years were a time of great political upheaval in the United States. Socialist and anarchist newspapers thrived both in the cities, particularly among recent immigrants, and in the rural areas where homegrown leftist activists gained a readership. This widespread radical leftist political activism came on the heels of the American Industrial Revolution, which followed a few decades after Europe’s Industrial Revolution.
In the European countries, the newly rich industrialists stood in opposition to the old money of the royal families. Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven described how these European industrialists and royal families competed for the workers’ allegiance. This gave the workers more leverage to gain concessions, such as better workplace conditions and national health care.
Piven and Cloward noted the marked difference between European and American labor history. When the industrialists rose up in the U.S. after the 1860s Civil War, there was no aristocracy standing in opposition to them. As workers in the factories tried to organize for better wages and conditions, the industrialists initially used violence against them, but soon employed more sophisticated strategies.21
The opium-trafficking families ramped up their importation of drugs by the end of the 1800s. Companies marketed much of the imported opium and its first derivative, morphine, in medicines. But at least a quarter of imported opium was intended for smoking. By 1900 over 1% of the U.S. population was addicted to opium. Addiction to opium, particularly heroin, rose “at alarming rates” in 1903, in parallel with a rise of worker activism.22
During this time period, women organized for the right to vote. In the 1870s, police arrested Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth for their efforts in this cause. In 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association was created to promote women’s voting rights. Many of these activist women also fought for anti-lynching laws and formed groups fighting for better working conditions.23 By the 1890s and early 1900s women made up two-thirds to three-quarters of opium addicts.24
Opium Profiteers Buy Media, Push War
Yale University Professor David Musto wrote that opiate addiction reached its peak in the early 1900s, rising to a level never since equaled in this country. The opiate-addict population nearly doubled the rate of addiction today. It is unknown how many only “abused” opiates without developing a full-fledged addiction. Abuse alone could generally be enough to fill up users’ free time and disincline their political and social activism.25
At the turn of the century, cocaine addiction became almost as widespread as opiate addiction. This appeared to have its genesis in 1886 when, during the early stages of the Progressive Movement, the Georgia counties of Atlanta and Fulton passed alcohol prohibition legislation. In response, a Georgia pharmacist, John Pemberton, developed Coca-Cola, a non-alcoholic version of French Wine Coca. He developed the original formula for Coca-Cola, containing 2.5 mg of cocaine per 3.3 ounces of fluid. The syrup had 5 ounces of coca leaf per gallon of syrup, an addictive amount for those with the susceptibility. This formula was sold as a headache cure and stimulant.26
A wealthy Atlanta pharmacist, Asa Candler, bought exclusive rights to the Coca-Cola formula and incorporated Coca-Cola in 1892. Manufacturers sold cocaine in a wide range of patent medicines, tonics, elixirs and fluid extracts at that time. Asa Candler and his wealthy investors put massive amounts of money into advertising his new drink for sale in popular drug-store fountains all over the U.S. and Canada. It soon became America’s most popular drink.
By 1902, cocaine-related products provided many ways to access the drug on a daily basis. This led to an estimated 200,000 cocaine addicts in the United States. Between 1900 and 1907, U.S. coca leaf imports tripled. Hundreds of early Hollywood silent films depicted scenes of drug use and trafficking.27
Meanwhile, leftist workers organizing for better work conditions gained help from investigative magazines that exposed corrupt companies. Together, these organizers and writers helped bring the reform-minded president Theodore Roosevelt into office in 1901. Roosevelt, who also founded the Progressive Party in 1912, helped gain the passage of anti-trust laws to break up the robber barons’ monopolies over certain industries. When these tycoons bought out all their competition in an industry, they could raise prices as high as they liked. During the Roosevelt administration, many laws and regulations were instituted to give the average American a “Square Deal,” or a chance to make a fair living without getting robbed by the rich.28
Professor Musto detailed how the Progressive Movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s brought about “federal laws … improving the nation’s morals and resisting the selfish actions of the rich and powerful.” Most pertinently, it led to the prohibition of opium for non-medicinal purposes by 1914, and the more problematic prohibition of alcohol a few years later.29
In seeming reaction to these progressive political developments, the Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan families bought out all the top investigative magazines that contributed to American political reform.30 By 1915, J.P. Morgan also bought out the major newspapers. The Congressional Record revealed that in 1915, J.P. Morgan’s “‘steel, shipbuilding and powder interests’ had purchased control of twenty-five great newspapers … to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States.”31
Control of the media aided the Rockefellers, the J.P. Morgan family, and their fellow intermarried, wealthy families. In 1917, they swayed public opinion and influenced the United States to aid England in World War I. While tens of thousands of Americans died after the U.S. entered the war, these wealthy families made huge profits from moneylending, steel manufacturing for armaments, and oil sales for trucks, tanks, railroads and airplanes.32
Media Promotes “Red Scare”
Control of the media aided the creation of the first “Red Scare.” Researchers say the Russian Revolution of 1917 scared the wealthiest in all the capitalist countries. The Russian Revolution took land from the wealthy and redistributed it to the poor. It took ownership of the factories and gave it to councils of workers. In response, to make sure nothing fomented in the U.S, the corporate owners, including the Rockefellers, Russells, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Harrimans and Bushes, helped propagate a Red Scare through the media. Their tactics led to the Sedition Act of 1918, which criminalized many behaviors formerly seen as merely unpatriotic. Legislators also passed laws directed at immigrants, leading to imprisonment and deportation of people for radical or anarchist political beliefs.33 Evidence supports the case that U.S. intelligence framed Italian anarchist organizers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti before their trial and execution.34
In 1919 and 1920, U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, and his young functionary J. Edgar Hoover, started a mass arrest of immigrant workers nationwide. These were known as the “Palmer Raids.” Hoover led the “Alien Radical” division of the vastly expanded Bureau of Investigation (soon the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI). Estimates of the numbers of Italian, Russian and other immigrants arrested for “radical subversion” in one massive dragnet ranged from 3,000 to 19,000 persons.35
Some of the still-independent press complained, as did some members of Congress. The Immigration Act of 1920 initially sought to help victims of the Palmer Raids. It ended up making possession of radical literature, and even sympathy for activist causes, punishable offenses for immigrants, referred to as “aliens.” Criminal syndicalism charges started in most states, and were used to repress socialist and anarchist political organizing. In 1903 the State Militias had been organized by Congress into what would become the National Guard, for additional peacetime repression.36
Yet again, toward the end of the 1940s, U.S. intelligence, politicians and journalists created a second Red Scare. The U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), along with a similar Senate committee led by Senator Joe McCarthy, held hearings to root out Communists, suspected Communists, and “fellow travelers.” Many were jailed, thousands more were blacklisted, even for leftist leanings, making it impossible for them to find jobs in their fields, most notably in the film industry and the arts. The FBI visited employers and warned them not to hire such people.37 They also interrogated friends and relatives of suspected “pinko” targets. The CIA appeared to attack such targets out of concern for anyone infringing on their own attempt to mold people’s hearts and minds.38
A government memorandum showed CIA plans to set a particular example of two Communist activists. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of treason for giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. They became the only people executed for treason during peacetime. Later, published evidence supported the possibility of their innocence.39 These events demonized Italian and Jewish leftist communities and left them fearful of participating in activism.40
Politicians further directed legislation at workers’ organizations, such as the Industrial Workers of the World, nicknamed the Wobblies. The Wobblies used sitdown strikes to gain many workers’ rights. Starting in 1917, the U.S. Justice Department and War Department, with many high posts held by the Rockefellers, Harrimans and Bush tycoons, ordered troops to invade Wobbly headquarters, broke up Wobbly meetings, and took Wobblies hostage without charges. The Postmaster suspended scores of second-class mailing permits for progressive newspapers and magazines, based on minor infractions, while the Justice Department closed down socialist newspapers and deported the Italian immigrant publisher of the top anarchist paper.41
Opium’s Role in Genocidal Eugenics, Nazi Atrocities
In 1902, Daniel Coit Gilman, the man who incorporated the Russell Trust Association for America’s top opium-trading family, moved on from his assistance to opium traffickers and accepted the first presidency of the newly founded Carnegie Institution of Washington. One of Gilman and the Carnegies’ first projects was the genocidal “eugenics” agenda. Award-winning syndicated columnist Edwin Black wrote about the Eugenics Movement exhaustively in his book, War Against the Weak. Black had his manuscript for the book peer-reviewed and corrected before publication. He noted that the word “eugenics” derived from the Greek for “well born.”42
Black described how the Rockefellers, Harrimans, Carnegies, and the J.P. Morgan family used their money and influence to pass laws in a majority of American states that led to the sterilization of poor people and immigrants. The wealthiest enlisted military researchers to invent biased IQ tests, called Alpha and Beta tests. These tests used wealthy white cultural examples from the early 1900s, such as asking what was missing from a tennis court or bowling alley. The tests purported to prove that “47% of whites generally, 70% of Jews and 89% of Negroes were deserving of elimination.” Asian and Latino immigrants were also targeted as inferior.43
Officials further used sly and unsavory means to kill poor Americans. Incoming patients at certain hospitals were fed milk from tubercular cows, resulting in a thirty- to forty-percent annual death rate. Such hospitals and institutions were often the only ones in poor areas, like the Illinois Institution for the Feebleminded in the Chicago area in Lincoln, Illinois.44
Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford, Johns Hopkins and others, received funding from eugenicists to lend legitimacy to the fraudulent pseudoscience. The Journal of the American Medical Association supported eugenics in many of its articles, aiding the passage of sterilization legislation in 27 states. These states also passed legislation against mixed-race marriages.45 The Eugenics Movement had its founding national office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York.46
Black’s extensive research exposed that during the 1920s, the rising fascist revolutionary, Adolph Hitler, regularly communicated with American eugenicists. The Carnegies and Rockefellers helped fund eugenics institutions in Europe, particularly in Germany, to spread genocidal racist ideology.
In 1928, the Ford Company and the Rockefellers interlocked their companies with the giant German chemical company I.G. Farben (which included heroin-introducer Bayer). All three companies played major roles in Nazi Germany. I.G. Farben gave massive funds for Hitler’s election, helped him initiate and wage his wars, and ended up running the largest concentration camp—Auschwitz. Also, the U.S. Justice Department eventually cited Rockefeller’s Standard Oil for exclusively providing their sought-after synthetic rubber process to Nazi Germany’s navy. Black further documented that the Ford Company used slave labor from the Buchenwald concentration camp.47
London’s Guardian reviewed U.S. documents and found the Harriman and Bush families joined these other groups in helping fund the rise of the Nazis. George H.W. Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, managed the elite British-American banking venture, Brown Brothers Harriman. BBH worked behind the back of the British government on behalf of the government’s opponents, the British royalty. Former Brown Brothers partner Montagu Norman, a Bank of England Governor, was reportedly a Hitler supporter. The bank also worked behind the back of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. BBH and Bush-Harriman steel and shipping companies kept up joint ventures with German steel mogul, Fritz Thyssen. In his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, Thyssen boasted of helping finance Hitler’s rise to power.48 Brown Brothers Harriman’s Silesian Steel owned German steel and coalmines, and their Hamburg-Amerika shipping line spread pro-Nazi propaganda in the U.S. and Germany.49
IBM also offered huge support to the Nazis. Edwin Black’s bestseller, IBM and the Holocaust, detailed how IBM first used its Hollarinth punch cards to systematize the extermination of Europe’s Jews, gypsies, Communists, socialists, anarchists and homosexuals. IBM employees conducted door-to-door censuses, and processed all of the information onto punch cards. These cards acted as the key codes to the earliest versions of computers, and kept the data necessary for identifying and speeding up the execution of so many people. Six million Jews and five million people from these other groups were killed on the spot or sent to one of at least 300 concentration camps. There, Nazis etched tattoos on prisoners’ arms with numbers corresponding to their punch card numbers.50
Other U.S. major banks and corporations also aided Nazi Germany. Chase Bank helped the Nazis exchange the money stolen from Jewish bank accounts. General Motors supplied Hitler with tens of thousands of inexpensive military Blitz trucks and worked with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and I.G. Farben to build advanced ethyl plants for the Nazis.51
Throughout WWI and WWII, the Russell Opium Trust-funded Skull and Bones folks were omnipresent in power positions. They included Skull and Bonesman Henry Stimson, who served as President W.H. Taft’s Secretary of War, President Hoover’s Secretary of State, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of War. Roosevelt selected the aging Stimson to appease the Republicans by making his cabinet more bipartisan after entering WWII.52
Henry Stimson took direct control of the atomic bomb development, overseeing the Manhattan Project.53 He pushed President Harry Truman to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese twice in several days, against the wishes of most military commanders who said it was by no means necessary.54 Such actions appeared indicative of the continued Eugenics extermination philosophy.55
Oligarchs Foster the CIA
Within the WWII intelligence group, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), were members of America’s wealthiest families, including J.P. Morgan’s sons, the Mellons, Vanderbilts and Duponts.56 Later, other key Skull and Bones members gained important positions in U.S. intelligence including Prescott Bush, father of President George H.W. Bush. These families played the major role in helping pass the legislation titled the National Security Act of 1947. This act founded the Central Intelligence Agency and gave the CIA preeminence among the other fourteen-plus intelligence agencies developed thereafter.57
The highest-ranking CIA whistleblower, former Assistant Deputy Director Victor Marchetti, was a 14-year CIA veteran. Marchetti joined British magazine editor Frances Saunders in finding that virtually the entire CIA leadership and middle ranks were filled with members of the white, Protestant, wealthiest families, with the most connections coming from the Rockefeller family and Foundation. It remained that way into the 1970s with few exceptions. Brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles were close friends with the Rockefellers. John headed the Rockefeller Foundation before becoming President Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State (1953-61). Allen would become the longest serving CIA Director (1953-61).58
Nearly one quarter of a million federal documents released in the post-WWII time period exposed the facts that the CIA, along with MI6, its British equivalent, hired Nazi war spies and other war criminals following the war. These included five key associates of infamous Nazi leader, Adolph Eichmann, and top Nazi spy, Renald Gehlen. The CIA helped Gehlen and his advisors retain their leadership in West Germany’s intelligence network. A New York Times article revealed that the CIA gave at least two of these Nazis citizenship. Many Nazi war criminals were charged with mass murders. Yet MI6 also hired many Nazi agents, including one responsible for killing close to 100 British agents.59
Researchers in the 1980s revealed other extensive aspects of CIA/Nazi work. Award-winning investigative reporter Christopher Simpson’s 1988 book, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis, listed hundreds of government archival files and thousands of documents, among its copious citations, describing a half-dozen U.S. intelligence operations protecting and employing Nazis. One, code-named “Sunrise,” was comprised of former Nazi spies. Another, of Nazi scientists, was code-named “Paperclip.” Simpson named Robert Lovett, Allen Dulles and OSS agent Frank Wisner as U.S. intelligence leaders who pushed the hiring of Nazis to do CIA work in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Simpson summarized, “hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of such recruits were SS [Nazi elite guard] veterans.”60
A whistleblowing former chief prosecutor of the Justice Department’s Nazi War Crimes Unit, John Loftus, reported that under Operation Sunrise, CIA director Allen Dulles helped smuggle some 5,000 Nazi Gestapo and SS agents to South America for U.S. intelligence work.61 As detailed later, these Nazis would help the CIA create vast drug trafficking networks in Central and South America.
Super-Rich Control Media at Home & Abroad
U.S. intelligence abided by the famous dictum of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who said the aim was not about controlling people physically but controlling their hearts and minds. British magazine editor Frances Saunders reviewed troves of buried archival U.S. intelligence documents that explained their goals. In a 1950 “NSC Directive,” the U.S. intelligence umbrella group, the National Security Council, described it as
psychological warfare … [through] propaganda … to influence [people’s] thoughts and actions … [so that] the subject moves in the direction [controllers] desire for reasons which he believes to be his own.62
U.S. intelligence leaders developed such extensive control over American media that they boasted about it. In the late 1940s, the CIA’s Frank Wisner, at the Office of Policy Coordination, oversaw 302 people on their payroll. The Office conducted psychological warfare operations through its “Propaganda Assets Inventory.” Wisner boasted he could, “play the media like a mighty Wurlitzer [music organ].” Wisner supervised an increasing staff that rose to 2,812 locally in 1952, along with 3,142 overseas contract personnel. The budget also rose in that period from $4.7 million to $82 million.63
While it is unknown exactly what Frank Wisner’s employees were doing, various investigators shed some light on their work. Watergate muckraking reporter Carl Bernstein wrote a seminal 1977 exposé on the media. Despite his earlier ’70s Watergate fame, only Rolling Stone magazine published this revealing article. Bernstein wrote that a Senate Intelligence Committee forced CIA Director George H.W. Bush, to admit, “more than 400 journalists had lived double lives, maintaining covert relationships with the CIA.” Others in the CIA told Bernstein the number was far higher. Bernstein listed the Senate Committee findings that owners of virtually all of the leading media companies worked with the CIA. They also had top executives, editors and journalists on the CIA payroll willing to reprint CIA-written articles verbatim under their names.64
The CIA’s control of the media appeared to increase each year. Before his retirement, veteran CIA agent Ralph McGehee obtained a CIA memo in 1991 claiming the Agency had representatives in every media outlet in the country that helped to spin and censor the news.65
The Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan interests had already bought control of the most influential newspapers and investigative magazines. Ben Bagdikian, Dean of the University of California/Berkeley Journalism School, set forth the ways in which multinational corporate owners continued to gain even tighter controls over public information in his book The Media Monopoly, describing how the ever-consolidating world of media ownership approached near-monopolization by a few companies.66
He explained that most major media outlets have directors on their company boards who also sit on the boards of major multinational corporations. For example, the Board of Directors of Time magazine and the industry standard-bearer New York Times also sit on corporate boards involved in defense contracting, oil, and pharmaceuticals, as well as banks, finance and insurance companies. Under law, “The director of a company is obliged to act in the interests of his or her own company.”67 Thus, the directors of media further the interests of the interlocked multinational companies.
In the 1970s and 1980s, to further tighten the elite’s control of public information, U.S. intelligence gained direct ownership over the vast majority of magazine and journal information sources. One of their own publications, Armed Forces Journal International, revealed that the Pentagon (military intelligence) published 371 magazines in 1971, making it sixteen times larger than the nation’s next biggest publisher. This number increased to 1,203 different periodicals by 1982.68 These 1200 magazine and journal titles straddled many areas of life, controlling information that could make it to the pages of news, fashion and sports magazines crowding book chain outlets.
In 1975, a Senate intelligence committee issued a report revealing the taxpayer-funded CIA owned outright “more than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazines, and book publishing complexes,” according to Professor Michael Parenti in his book, Inventing Reality, and Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz in his book, Power, Inc. Mintz quoted a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities 1976 report that showed how the CIA promoted its own propaganda. It said a book written “by one CIA operative was reviewed favorably by another CIA agent in the New York Times.”69
Dan Rather, one of the best-known media insiders, described the media’s conservative censorship in stark terms. Rather’s career included reporting for United Press International, working as the CBS Southern Bureau chief and then a position as anchorman on the CBS Evening News in 1981. He remained in that position until 2005. In 2002, the British Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Rather about the media’s aid in the suppression of dissent in the United States. Rather said, “What you have here is a miniature version of what you have in totalitarian states.”70
As detailed later, this kind of control over people’s access to information would allow American rulers to manipulatively promote certain dangerous drugs. It would further hide the use of Nazis in various U.S. intelligence-related operations. And, it would influence people to fight wars to control other countries’ drug crops, while leading people to believe they were fighting for freedom and democracy.
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