Sinister Forces
A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft
Book One: The Nine
By Peter Levenda
Copyright © 2005 Peter Levenda. All rights reserved.
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One cannot coerce the Spiritual: if one attempts to enter into the Light without preparation, one always faces the trials and dangers of Darkness. At the very least, an enforced entry into initiation will drive the illegal entrant insane.
— David Ovason, The Zelator
TABLE OF CONTENTS (click go to chapter)
Chapter One — The Dunwich Horror: An Occult History of America ......3
Chapter Three — Red Dragon: The Ashland Tragedy .....................................79
Chapter Six — The Doors of Perception ...........................................................215
Appendix
A STUDY IN SCARLET
“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
— Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887
August 25, 2000 Rome
It is the centenary of the death of Friedrich Nietzsche, but I am in Rome. A week ago, I was in Turin, standing in the plaza where Nietzsche went insane in January, 1889. He saw a horse being whipped and—out of all character—was so moved to compassion that he threw his arms around the horse’s neck and suffered a nervous breakdown on the spot. Since then, psychiatrists have been of the opinion that this spontaneous gesture of compassion was so alien to Nietzsche’s own writings that it precipitated the breakdown.1 Compassion, that most un-Darwinian of emotions, went against everything Nietzsche thought he stood for.
What blond beast, its hour come round at last…
I am thinking of Nietzsche now, in the intense, unforgiving sun of St. Peter’s Square in a relentlessly hot August, escorting an American executive (my employer) and his fiancée on a tour of Rome. In a way I am coming full circle to my childhood from this moment in time, nearly fifty years after my birth and, like Nietzsche, I am confronted with my antithesis. It is not a whipped horse I see before me, however, but as we descend into the crypt below the high altar it is a small casket said to contain the bones of St. Peter himself, the first Pope and the small rock on which Christ is said to have built his church.
Ecce Homo. Nietzsche’s last work, finished in the months before he went mad, titled after Pontius Pilate’s famous words to the crowd as he asked them to spare the accused Jesus Christ: Behold the Man.
St. Peter was murdered, and died a martyr’s death. This pilgrimage to make contact with his remains—remains over which the entire edifice of Roman Catholicism has been built—is for me a confrontation with the Enemy. And, like all true Enemies, in his face I see my own.
Christ was executed, according to the official version of the story (although this has always been in doubt, both among historians and among members of Western secret societies). His chosen successor, Simon Peter—in whose Basilica I now stand—was also executed, and in fact crucified upside-down. St. Peter’s Cross is a reverse crucifix, such as those the Satanists wear, perhaps marking them as more Christian than they would be comfortable knowing. St. Andrew was also crucified, he of the X-shaped cross. And every Catholic church must have the mortal remains of some saint present in the altar stone. It is, with its gruesome crucified Jesus and saints missing eyes and being roasted alive or torn to pieces, a bloody religion: a faith built on aggression and murder, madness and sacrifice. The Passion. The early Christians met in catacombs, in cemeteries and in darkness. And now I pass lines of sarcophagi containing the remains of dead Popes buried beneath the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica. More death: death in everlasting rows, quiet chapels and candles burning alone, in silence. And there is the sarcophagus of Pope John Paul I. He was Pope for a month, and then he died. Mysteriously, to be sure. There is evidence to suggest he was murdered. Volumes of evidence and, as in the Kennedy assassinations, the spoor of conspiracy and hatred.
“A first class relic is a piece of the saint’s flesh or blood or bone. A second class relic is something the saint is known to have touched, such as clothing worn. A third class relic is something touched to a first class relic.” I am describing Catholic ritual and religion to my guests. They are Lutheran and Methodist, respectively. The woman has wanted to visit the Sistine Chapel since she was twelve. We have already done that, me standing aside and staring up at the Creation, and Adam and Eve in the Garden, not looking too closely at the huge Last Judgment, not being the type who slows down on the highway to gaze at accident victims.
If the blood and bones of saints are relics, what are the blood and bones of the common person: the murder victim? the suicide? the casualty of war? What secret power lies forgotten in their graves, their dump sites, their formaldehyde jars on a serial killer’s shelf?
What Great Beast, its hour come round at last…
Everywhere around me are images of pissed-off prophets: Moses, forever the type-A executive, smashing and smoting and scolding everyone in sight, taking on the Egyptians, a man who has the balls to ask God for a photostat of the Ten Commandments after he, Moses, smashes the first set in anger at his own people. You’ve got to be on pretty intimate terms with the Creator to go up the mountain a second time. Moses, on some statuary, is shown with horns on his head. And then there are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, full of dire warnings and frightening predictions. John the Baptist, not the sort you would want to invite to your GOP fundraiser. Danger is all around us. Trust no one. The presence of Satan is everywhere implicit. But who is he?
Bogeyman. The word comes from the Russian, bog, meaning “god.”
I stand a little apart as the executive and his fiancée approach the glass window that opens out onto St. Peter’s own resting place. It was to Peter that Jesus said, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” I am nervous. The crowds are too thick, this being a Jubilee Year and what the Italian papers are calling La Woodstock del Pape. There is no possibility of silent contemplation of St. Peter’s remains, no chance for a psychic connection with the founder of the Christian organization. I glance to my right. There is a metal box there. Peter’s Pence, it says. You’re supposed to make a donation.
Even St. Peter’s Basilica is not immune. Not even the bones of Peter himself. There is no way to avoid the collection plate, the thick envelope, the outstretched, manicured hand. A few feet away, John Paul I lies in a plain, unassuming box, while all around him the bodies of Popes who went along to get along are buried in carved marble splendor.
Get thee behind me, Satan.
I am thinking of Nietzsche again as we make our way over to the gift shop to organize the purchase of a poster of the Sistine ceiling, or il volto as they say in Italian. The vault. A souvenir of the journey for the fiancée, who believes in vampires and crystals and the Knights Templar and Rosslyn. She already has a poster of that famous scene from the Chapel, the one where God leans over and almost—but not quite—touches the languid fingertip of Adam. I sometimes wonder if Adam and God are actually pointing at each other, challenging the other to take the blame for what can only be a pretty messed up Creation. There is supposed to be tension in that painting, the tension of a gun about to go off. As I once wrote, long ago,
I have respect for God, the same respect I have for a loaded gun, or the hand that holds it.2 and God is the only safe thing to be.3
And Nietzsche wrote,
We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes… Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition. That “savage animal” has not really been “mortified”; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become—divine.4 and The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.5
“Rechristen our evil” …an unintended irony?
We find a taxi to take us back to the Hotel Hassler, that ornate pile atop the Spanish Steps. We are lucky; the day is hot and the pilgrims many. Getting a taxi at St. Peter’s Square is no mean feat; I know, I have struggled many times in the past in all kinds of weather. The visit has been overwhelming: too many statues, too many paintings, too many rooms. But the effect has been to bring me back to my childhood, to the smell of stale incense and dusty cassocks, to Latin conjurations and exorcisms, to the roll call of the dead—the murdered and the suicides—that I have known and survived. To the plots and counterplots and subplots that I have been assiduously recording for the past thirty years. And to that Catholic specialty, guilt.
As I bid the other Americans good evening and take the elevator to my room, I wonder if I can start writing the book I have put off for years, as I did one more bit of research, sought out one more lead, read one more dry volume on psychology, or criminology, or assassination. I feel stronger, more capable, articulate in a way writers have to be.
But in the back of my mind glows the small casket of St. Peter’s remains, a silvered shadow of Satan, and that last crazed moment of Nietzsche in Turin, embracing a startled horse and asking for forgiveness. And love. And going insane.
Like all journeys of a thousand miles, this one began with a single step. It was an article in the Village Voice by Craig Karpel, entitled “Patriotic Witchcraft,” and it was in two parts. The Voice is a weekly newspaper, and I waited eagerly for the following week’s conclusion. It was the time of Watergate, and I was wallowing.
I worked during the day for the Bendix Corporation, at their International Marketing Operation on Broadway in midtown Manhattan. At night, I was a struggling writer. I wrote short stories, poems, and novellas, working my way up to the novel. I had no illusions, though; I knew that getting paid for writing is virtually impossible, so I was relatively content to write “for the drawer.” I had no social obligations, I was single, answerable only to myself. I spent more money on books than on any other item in my modest studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights. I treated friends to meals and long, stately coffee sessions on Montague Street, when I had the money, and we would talk about Vietnam, and the Kennedy assassinations, and Watergate, and the Middle East, and World War II and its aftermath. Across the East River from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, we could watch the doomed World Trade Center towers going up. A few blocks from Montague Street is Atlantic Avenue and the Arab Quarter, and we spent at least one day a week eating at the Lebanese or Syrian or Moroccan restaurants there, and attending parties—replete with belly dancers and bromides—that raised money and consciousness for Palestinian charities. It was a time of paranoia and innocence, a kind of national adolescence.
The Watergate revelations were coming fast and furious, and I was amused by the startled and shocked expressions of my friends as each new character took the stand with his or her briefcase full of scandals. None of it surprised me. I read three newspapers every day, and did not own a television set, so I considered myself better informed.
And then the Voice articles, and something ignited inside me.
Karpel was writing about some of the odd dimensions to Watergate that had so far escaped the notice (or fell beneath the contempt) of mainstream journalists. The fact that convicted Watergate “plumber,” and former CIA agent and Bay of Pigs officer, E. Howard Hunt was a part-time novelist who had three occult novels to his credit (á la the Cigarette Smoking Man in the X-Files television series). Or the fact that Richard Nixon had “rushed to judgment” in the case of Charles Manson, declaring him “guilty” while the trial was still under way (a fact that should have caused a mistrial, but didn’t). And the odd set of coincidences that linked Nixon’s resignation date with the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the opening of the Haunted House at Disneyland.
Indeed, it was the very juxtaposition of those words “patriotic” and “witchcraft” that caused some kind of subconscious chain reaction, resulting in the cortical fission that became the idea for this book. Manson, Nixon, Hunt, occultism, Monroe, politics… witchcraft. It was delicious, a kind of Robert Ludlum on LSD experience. Throw in the Church of Satan, Rosemary’s Baby, The Manchurian Candidate and the Kennedy assassinations, and the allure is irresistible.
To what degree does mysticism (including occultism, religious organizations, and secret societies) influence politics? Can it be demonstrated that there is no real separation of church and state, despite most Americans’ belief? Can we show that the world’s political leaders are motivated by (at times bizarre and outrageous) religious or spiritual convictions, thus threatening at the least the very nature of the American way of life… and at the most American lives in general?
Is politics a science? Is it an art?
Or is it religion?
Armed with these uneasy questions, I set out to investigate as much human history as possible to see to what extent—if any—religious or spiritual ideas, convictions, or even regulations have influenced the political lives of nations and contributed to happiness or suffering, peace or war, under the control of visionary leadership. I began with the study of Nazi occultism, since rumors of that were very much in the air at the time. I visited the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and the Library of Congress and fell upon a treasure trove of documentation showing Nazi fascination with occult themes… to the extent of financing research in Tibet and hunting down the Grail. This became the central subject matter of my last book, Unholy Alliance. Here was a perfect example of a nation being ruled by what were called—in any other age—occult leaders and “spiritual” visionaries. From the swastika to the SS, the Nazis were little more than the 20th century’s best organized (and best dressed) cult. A political party? Please.
Simultaneously, I set out to “deconstruct” the Manson phenomenon. I read everything available on the Tate/LaBianca killings, on Manson’s childhood and upbringing, and the backgrounds and relationships of his followers. I reviewed Manson’s history in California with the Beach Boys, and with Angela Lansbury’s daughter and other minor celebrities. Manson’s connection to the Church of Satan and to The Process was also important to my research. And then, a strange thing happened (one of many that will be mentioned during the course of this book): I realized that my first real job in New York was with a company whose owner, Willy Brandt, had a son (gossip columnist Steven Brandt) who was questioned by the police in connection with the Manson killings and who subsequently committed suicide—some say in abject fear that he would be the next victim of the “Family.” In other words, I was only two handshakes away from the Tate/LaBianca killings myself. (It was at this same company that I later discovered I was only two handshakes away from the Howard Hughes disappearance and the Clifford Irving affair. Coincidence piled on coincidence, until I finally realized that coincidence itself is an important, although neglected, factor in history, as we shall see.)
I thought I had all this pretty much nailed, until I decided one day to drive to the town where Manson grew up. I found that a relative of Manson’s had been murdered in Ashland a few months before the Tate/LaBianca killings took place. A kitchen knife had been the weapon used, stabbing Darwin Scott nineteen times and pinning him to the floorboards of his apartment. Clearly there was more to be discovered, and a trip to Manson’s “home town” was in order.
Ashland, Kentucky is not a place where nice New York City boys like me hang out. Although it is well-known as the birthplace of Naomi and Wynonna Judd, and Chuck Wollery of The Love Connection, it is a small town dominated by the petroleum and chemical refineries that bear Ashland’s name. I noticed that serial killer Bobby Joe Long came from Kenova, West Virginia, which is a smaller town only a few miles from Ashland, and that serial killer Henry Lee Lucas was born in a Virginia town on the West Virginia border. I wondered what it was about this particular location—this Bermuda Triangle of depravity—that seemed to breed serial killers and mass murderers. Was it the water?
So I rented a cool, cherry-red Ford Mustang convertible and made the drive from New England to Ashland, Kentucky, stopping off first in Washington, D.C. and then in the hollers of rural West Virginia during a thunderstorm. The tale of that trip comes later in this book. Suffice it to say that I found more than I bargained for in Ashland:
• Ancient “Indian” burial mounds in the center of town;
• A large house that was moved entire from its original site to one a few streets over, directly on a line with burial mounds and sporting a pair of griffins on its roof, mythical creatures—according to the town’s own brochure—designed to ward off evil spirits;
• The Ashland Tragedy and Massacre: a savage killing of three children on a Christmas Eve in the late nineteenth century, the subsequent arrest of three suspects, and a massacre of townspeople by militia detailed to protect the suspects from a lynching; and
• Oddest of all, the fact that a Manson relative and sometime petty crook—Darwin Scott—was brutally murdered with a kitchen knife in Ashland a few months before the celebrated Tate/LaBianca killings… a murder case that has never been solved.
It is said that “Kentucky” is an Indian word that means “dark and bloody ground.” I wondered if it was true, if a physical place could be evil, could hold a curse that would affect generations of residents to come. Did the Indians know something we didn’t? Or did we unconsciously suspect that the earth held some sinister secret? Indeed, the name first proposed for the Commonwealth of Kentucky was… Transylvania.
And then I remembered the words of Cotton Mather, he of the Salem witch trials in seventeenth century Massachusetts, who said that America had been the Devil’s land before the Europeans came, and wondered if he meant more than simply that the Native Americans were not Christians.
And then there were the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, the father of Gothic horror, who felt that there was something ancient and evil beneath the hard-scrabble New England soil, a concept amplified by Shirley Jackson in her stories of New England haunted houses and depraved villages.
After all, America has had its share of misery and tragedy, regardless of the beautiful words and even more beautiful intentions of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Why would a fertile and bountiful land, colonized by pious and fervent European Christians of every variety, descend into that maelstrom of civil war, slavery, mass murder, assassinations, and day-to-day violence that shocks the rest of the world, even as the rest of the world has had to deal with its Kaisers and Hitlers and Mussolinis and Stalins and Maos and Hirohitos? Do we have more than our share of violence, or is it simply that we get more PR?
Was the answer to be found in unraveling the skein of violence itself, like the scarlet thread of murder in the very first Sherlock Holmes story, running through the fabric of our history like a timeline? …Was I wrong to look at religious history? Occult history? It bore such interesting and convincing fruit in my Nazi study. Yet surely the roots of American violence and American evil could not grow from the same metaphysical soil?
And as I poked through the debris of American history—the autopsy photos and the police reports and the political manifestos and the trial transcripts and the confessions and the lies and the declassified documents and the bureaucratic memoranda—I saw that American history could not be separated from my own history or from world history, that, as Americans, we can’t look objectively at our own story. Like that famous conundrum in quantum physics, the observer changes the event observed. Is the Kennedy assassination a particle, or a wave?
During the Watergate era a somewhat unsettling revelation was made:that for twenty-five years (or more) the CIA had conducted psychological experimentation upon both volunteers and unwitting subjects—both at home and abroad—to find the key to the unconscious mind, to memory, and to volition. Their goal was to create the perfect assassin and to protect America from the programmed assassins of other countries. This project was known by the name MK-ULTRA, but it had its origins in earlier forms of the same “brainwashing” agenda: Operations BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. To me, this was astounding. A US government agency was conducting what—to a medievalist—could only be characterized as a search for the Philosopher’s Stone, for occult power, for magical spells and talismans. Indeed, some of the CIA’s subprojects included research among the psychics, the mediums, the magicians and the witches of America and beyond. And the Army was not far behind in its mind control testing, as we shall see.
What was even more disturbing was the revelation that nearly all records of this incredible and superhumanly ambitious project were destroyed in 1973 on orders of CIA director Richard Helms himself. In his testimony, he claimed that MK-ULTRA did not come up with anything worthwhile, and that the project had been terminated. Then why were the documents shredded?
We do not know who the test subjects were. We don’t know what was done to them. We don’t know how they have been programmed, if at all. We don’t know what they might do.
Or what they have already done.
We do know, however, that some of our more colorful criminals have spent time at the same institutions receiving CIA MK-ULTRA funding for this “special testing.” People like Charles Manson and Henry Lee Lucas, for instance, as well as “Cinque,” the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army that kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. It is entirely possible, given the evidence at our disposal, that convicted serial killer Arthur Shawcross is also such an example.
As I stood in the park at Ashland, staring at the ancient burial mounds and looking up at the house with the griffins, I realized that I was standing at a nexus of American history and culture: Charles Manson, unsolved homicides, mind control experiments, mass murder and massacres… and I wondered what Indian burial mounds and griffins, movie stars and spies, witches and Washington, even UFOs and occultists, had to do with any of it.
Our culture in the West—formed as it is by a faith in science, a reliance on the technological—has convinced us to ignore the unseen. There is a web of connections between visible events and visible, measurable phenomena that we cannot see, cannot measure—so our response has been to ignore this web in favor of what we can see and measure. The blind leading the blind. The drunk looking for his keys under a lamp post because the light is better there. We know—can describe—the stages of growth of flowers, animals, people… but not the life force itself, the drive: what engineer, inventor and mystic Arthur Young called “the quantum of action.” Of this we know nothing, and are happy to know nothing. And thus we become victims.
University of Chicago Professor Ioan Culianu was able to show that the technique of secret links and correspondences between objects and events discovered by a Renaissance magician—Giordano Bruno—are applicable to mind control and psychological warfare today. Charles Manson declared himself to be a reincarnation of Bruno,6 an oddly sophisticated choice for the nearly-illiterate convicted murderer. Professor Culianu himself was murdered in 1991, another crime that has never been solved.
The people we trust are those who can measure the measurable. The people we distrust are those who point to the invisible and shout to get our attention. Our world is marching calmly to an obscure and unknowable end because we, the people, hear the drum, feel the beat, know our place in line. That’s better, somehow, than jumping off the path into the dark forest where God dwells like a hungry tiger. There is too much personal responsibility in jumping out of line, and if you then try to jump back in, you will find you have lost your place and your fellow marchers no longer want you to join them. You are dirty; you are crazed; you have seen what they are afraid to see.
In order to conduct this investigation I would have to dig very deep, below the surface of official reports, trial transcripts and conspiracy theories. I would have to dig deep below the surface of the American psyche, and trace pieces of evidence back down through several layers of meaning and relevance to find the connective tissue that would make sense of our history, our politics, our collective weirdness. This would have to be nothing less than a deconstruction of our most cherished beliefs and ideals.
Academia frowns upon historians who get “involved” with their subject personally. It is believed such activity ruins objectivity, makes the historian’s findings suspect. The “New Journalism” changed that somewhat for journalists, but not for historians. Yet, it is virtually impossible for any American my age—born in 1950—to approach such subject matter as the Kennedy assassinations or the Manson killings with pure, detached objectivity. We lived through it all. We either marched on Washington or marched in the jungles of Southeast Asia. We know where we were when Kennedy was killed—and when the World Trade Center went down. We are connected to these events and cannot extricate ourselves from them, even when we let the documents and the primary sources speak for themselves. For there are documents, and there is blood. Politics and religion both are born of documents and of blood. And both documents and blood form the primary sources of the following investigation.
This is a book about evil. Evil ordinary and extraordinary. Evil vigilant. Evil militant. Evil triumphant. Evil ancient and modern, violent and discrete, beautiful and obscene. Evil in the face of God, of man and woman, of children. The evil of vainglorious men and their hollow minions. Evil unseen and fierce. The evil of bodybags and spent cartridges. Of mass graves and crematoria. Of crimes against nature and against heaven. The evil of death and derangement, of murder and madness, of suicide and satanism. This is the evil that is older than humanity, but reflected in our children’s eyes. The evil we can’t grasp, cannot punish, cannot destroy. The evil that contaminates souls as well as bodies, nations as well as people. This is a book about the evil spirits that haunt America. About the sinister forces that rule the world of our dreams, our nightmares, and our sober, trembling, waking reality.
If it is true that the gods of one religion become the demons of the one that replaces it, then we in America must deal with generations of demons once worshipped here who now wander the countryside, the city streets, the interstate highways and dead end roads, the theme parks and fast food restaurants, the shopping malls and parking lots, the peepshow parlors and cathedral aisles, like hungry ghosts on a mission from Hell. We gaze with horror on their crimes, and don’t understand. We stare into the eyes of their hideous creatures, and don’t understand. We clean up the crime scenes and mop up the blood, and don’t understand. We imprison, institutionalize, execute to make it all go away… and don’t understand.
This book is an attempt at understanding. The premise is one that has been embraced by psychoanalysts like Jung and physicists like Pauli: the existence of another mechanism in the universe that binds together events seemingly unrelated. The perspective offered is unique, dangerous, incredible, possibly offensive. The subject matter—serial homicide, genocide, assassination, terrorism, multiple personalities, satanism, sexual savagery, demonic possession, depravity, insanity—makes it impossible to be anything else. We cannot begin to heal until we have identified the disease; we cannot identify the disease until we have studied the anatomy of the body politic. Freud, in order to understand the workings of the human mind, focused on its pathology. We, in order to understand America—and America’s place in the world—must do the same. We must plumb the depths of the American psyche, the American unconscious, and dredge up whatever we find before it’s too late.
How late is it? Listen in the middle of the night. Turn off the television, the radio, the CD player, the computer. Unplug the telephone. Turn off the lights. What do you hear? Beneath the silence and the stoic beating of your humble heart, what do you hear? Can you hear your soul singing?
Or is it Satan laughing?
Endnotes
1 See, for instance, Anacleto Verrechia, “Nietzsche’s Breakdown in Turin,” in Nietzsche in Italy, edited by Thomas Harrison, Anma Libri, Stanford University, 1988
2 Levenda, Citadel, unpublished novel
3 Ibid.
4 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1966, Vintage Press, NY p. 158
5 Ibid., p. 86
6 Charles Manson, “The Black/White Bus,” in The Manson File, edited by Nikolas Shreck, Amok Press, NY, 1988, ISBN 0-941693-04-X
For Rose
BY JIM HOUGAN
Just when the 20th Century went amok, and why, is difficult to say, but the creation of the CIA would seem to have been, at the very least, a contributing factor.
Born in the septic afterglow of World War II, and in keen anticipation of its successor, WW III (a/k/a “the Big One”), the Agency was shaped, in part, by transformative events that had taken place earlier in the century. These were the efflorescence of psychiatry as an important medical practice, and a turn-of-the-century occult revival that reached a crescendo in the 1920s.
Taken together, these events conspired toward unforeseen ends, not the least of which was the conversion of the American heartland into a laboratory experiment in “psychological warfare.”
As Peter Levenda, the author of this extraordinary and deeply scary book, points out, the term is a translation of a German word, Weltansschauungskrieg (literally, “world-view warfare”). By way of example, one battle in this war got under way in 1953, when the Central Intelligence Agency convened “a prestigious group of scientists” (watch out, dear Reader, whenever you see that phrase) to discuss the problem of UFOs. There were waves of sightings at the time, and people, in and out of government, were getting nervous about them. Meeting behind closed doors, with CIA security guards at the ready, the so-called “Robertson Panel” (named for Dr. H.P. Robertson, a physicist and weapons expert at Caltech) studied the Tremonton sightings and other films of lights in the sky, and listened patiently to the reports of experts from the private sector, the Air Force and Navy.
Soon, it became apparent that the experts were in disagreement. Some claimed that the lights could be explained in terms of natural phenomena (e.g., sunlight on the wings of sea-gulls). Others, such as the Navy’s Photo-Interpretation Laboratory, insisted that, on careful study, the same objects appeared to be “self-luminous,” and therefore intelligently guided.
So it was a question of seagulls or rockets or spaceships. Or something.
No matter. Since the experts could not agree on the meaning of the evidence in front of them, the scientific problem was redefined in political terms. Whatever was zipping around in the skies over America, it hadn’t killed anyone (at least not yet, at least not directly). So there didn’t appear to be a military threat.
Or was there?
The question arose as to what might happen if the Soviets tried to exploit the phenomenon, preying on the superstitions and weaknesses of the man in the street. A “War of the Worlds” panic might easily result. “Mass hysteria” would set in, and emergency reporting channels would be overloaded. Air-defense intelligence sources would be compromised.
The Reds could walk right in! If not to Washington, then West Berlin. Something had to be done.
It was decided, therefore, that the subject had to be “debunked.” That is to say, UFOs needed to be made intellectually disreputable in the hope that they would eventually become unthinkable. In this way, the problem (if not the lights themselves) would be made to disappear.
So it was that a covert operation was mounted, with the Ozzie & Harriet world of Middle America as its target. Celebrities such as Arthur Godfrey were enlisted to make fun of the subject and ridicule those who were interested in it. UFO watchdog groups, such as Wisconsin’s Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), were placed under surveillance and infiltrated. The Jam Handy Organization, which produced World War II films for the American Army, was retained, along with the Walt Disney organization. Journalists working for Life and the Saturday Evening Post were dragged into the fray, as was the Navy’s Special Devices Center on Long Island.
It took a while, but UFOs eventually became a kind of in-joke among those who hoped to be taken seriously. To raise the issue in public was to invite ridicule and trigger snickers. By 1960, curiosity about mysterious lights in the sky was regarded by many as evidence of mental “instability.” While an expression of interest in the subject would not be enough to get you committed, neither would it enhance your resume.
Other psy-ops followed, at home and abroad. Levenda discusses many of them, including Gen. Edward Lansdale’s manipulation of the vampire myth in the Philippines, and the CIA’s scheme to eliminate Fidel Castro by persuading his constituents that he was, in fact, el Anticristo.
The JFK assassination was, of course, a focal-point in the world-view war waged by the CIA. Just as the Agency conspired to make curiosity about “flying saucers” a litmus test for an addled mind, excessive interest in the President’s murder was made to seem “ghoulish” and trivial. For a journalist or historian to write critically about either subject was professional suicide.
Eventually, psy-ops like these combined to redefine the parameters of acceptable discourse in America. Principal among the notions placed beyond the Pale was the practice and theory of “conspiracism”—which soon came to include criticism of mainstream reportage. More than a matter of seeing cabals behind every murder, it was a way of thinking, a stance toward the networks, the press and the feds. Anyone who looked too deeply into events, or who asked too many questions, was dismissed as “a conspiracy-theorist.” (This, after MK-ULTRA, Iran-Contra, BCCI and the destruction of the World Trade Centers.)
In some ways, it is as if the century itself has been encrypted, so that if an historian would be honest, he must also become an investigator reporter. Failing that, we are left at the mercy of ambitious academicians and journalists, stenographers to power who are themselves complicit in an astonishing string of cover-ups and atrocities that stretch from Dealey Plaza to Watergate, Waco to 9-11.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet and film director who was stomped to death by a street-hustler in 1975 (unless, as some insist, he was beaten to death by a gang of fascists) understood. Fascinated by the 20th Century vectors of politics and violence, Pasolini despaired of the way in which the age has been encrypted. Writing in Corriere della Sera, a left-wing newspaper, he declared,
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters...
I know the names of the powerful group...
I know the names of those who, between one mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection...
I know the names of the important and serious figures who are behind the ridiculous figures...
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids...
I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of...
I know. But I don’t have the proof. I don’t even have clues.
Well, here they are: the clues, seething in the evidentiary equivalent of what the French call “a basket of crabs,” in the first volume of what promises to be a virtual encyclopedia of clues. Levenda calls Sinister Forces “a grimoire,” or manual for invoking demons.
Certainly, there are demons enough in its pages: Charles Manson and Richard Helms, Aleister Crowley and David Ferrie, Jack Parsons and the Son of Sam. The “usual suspects,” you say? Well, yes, of course. But the suspects are served up with an entourage of angels and demons you may never have heard of: Arthur Young and C.D. Jackson, Andrija Puharich and The Nine, not to mention a claque of “Wandering Bishops” and the proprietors of Music World in Wilder, Kentucky (surely the model for the nightmare-cantina in Quentin Tarantino’s “From Dusk Til Dawn”).
But that’s just for openers. Levenda’s study is broad and deep, a life’s work that runs to volumes. What distinguishes it from other efforts, such as those of Pasolini, is not merely its comprehensiveness. Rather, it is Levenda’s realization that a matrix of politics and violence is incapable of explaining the demented century that shuddered to an end in Manhattan, not so long ago. What’s needed is a third dimension, and that dimension, he tells us, is “the occult.”
By this, Levenda means something broader than a mix of magic and religion. When he writes of the occult, he means to include whatever is secret, hidden, or unknown. Add this dimension to those of politics and violence, and the century shivers into focus. Sinister Forces is about evil in what is now the digital age: Evil 2.0.
Time magazine long ago, and famously, posed the question: “Is God Dead?” Implicit in Levenda’s study is a related inquiry: Did the Devil survive Him? If he did not, then how are we to explain a century of recreational homicide and political mayhem?
Perhaps with reference to what seems to be a Fortean element: the pattern of coincidence that enfolds these highly strange events, adding a distinct “woo-woo factor” to Levenda’s study. Whether it is Lee Harvey Oswald’s habit of hanging out at the Bluebird Cafe in Atsugi, Japan (“Bluebird” was the code-name of a CIA mind control program to produce “programmed assassins”), or the famous chain of coincidences surrounding the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations, (eg., Lincoln’s secretary named Kennedy and Kennedy’s secretary named Lincoln each warned the President not to make his fatal sojourn). It seems almost as if an early warning system is embedded in the passage of time itself, or in what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious. And that system would seem to be sending a stream of warning signals, enciphered as synchronicities.
Exploring topics like this is what makes Sinister Forces: The Nine one of the darkest and most provocative books that you are ever likely to read (pending publication of Book II). That said, it also one of the most enjoyable, easy to pick up (start reading on any page), and hard to put down. Levenda’s intuitions are a delight, and his choice of subject-matter unerring. Both a compendium of 20th century evil and an investigation of it, Levenda’s study is deep, intuitive (and, often, droll).
It is, in other words, parapolitics at their most bizarre and, I suspect, their most illuminating. Like UFOs, conspiracies and assassination, serial killers, mind control and the occult, “evil” isn’t something that serious people are supposed to think about. If they did, the emergency reporting system would soon be overloaded. And you know what happens when that occurs.
All hell breaks loose.
3
In the colonial period, when religious creeds, institutions, and communities exerted a major impact on life and work, there was bound to be some spillover into politics. Because the contribution of religion to American political culture covers such important beliefs as obedience, the design of government, and the national mission, the religious roots of American political culture merit close investigation.
— Kenneth D. Wald1
Beware when the righteous prepare for the practice of evil.
— Kenneth Patchen2
In absurd terms, as we have seen, revolt against men is also directed against God: great revolutions are always metaphysical.
— Albert Camus3
Possession and exorcism had always symbolized the rhythms of the historical process.
— Stuart Clark4
THE DUNWICH HORROR: AN OCCULT HISTORY OF AMERICA
When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
— “The Dunwich Horror,” H.P. Lovecraft5
Lovecraft was writing in the 1920s, when most of his more famous stories were published. He was writing of a New England that, in his imagination, had ancient roots in unknown cultures; where Druidic circles and pagan chants would infest the countryside; where a kind of subterranean culture existed, parallel to the world of our own reality. He peppered his stories with references to the works of archaeologists and anthropologists (some real, some fictitious), and connected the American Indian culture to the worship of strange, perhaps extraplanetary or extradimensional beings who viewed humans as little more than undercooked hors d’ouevres. His work has attracted a great deal of attention in the past 30 years or so, oddly enough in France where—like the films of Jerry Lewis—he is an adopted obsession, but also certainly in America where he maintains a cult status even now, more than sixty years after his death. He has attracted serious, albeit fringe, attention from academics and historians of both literature and mysticism, and has even been graced with an anthology of his work prefaced by no less a literary light than Joyce
SINISTER FORCES
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THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS: AMERICAN PREHISTORY AND THE OCCULT
To wrangle the Devil out of the country, will be truly a new experiment: Alas! we are not aware of the Devil, if we do not think, that he aims at inflaming us one against another; and shall we suffer ourselves to be Devil-ridden? or by any unadvisableness contribute unto the widening of our breaches?
— Cotton Mather1
Religious insanity is very common in the United States.