Thursday 2 May 2013

Maxwell



They all knew he was a crook
(December 1991)

From Socialist Worker, 14 December 1991.

Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1993, pp.272-3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.



IF I had not already been a socialist, the astonishing events at the Daily Mirror in the last few days would have quickly made me one. They are calling the Maxwell Robbery the greatest financial scandal of all time.

He robbed some £300 million from the workers at the Mirror, either from their company or from their pension fund.

All around there is a great tut-tutting. Newspapers which only weeks ago were describing Maxwell as a ‘swashbuckling buccaneer’ now fall over one another to denounce him for what he was – a revolting crook. Nowhere is the embarrassment greater than in the City.

In 1971 a distinguished lawyer and a distinguished accountant declared after a careful examination of Maxwell’s relations with a company called Leasco that Maxwell was not fit to chair a public company.

In the early 1980s Maxwell became chairman of one of the biggest public companies in the country, the British Printing Corporation.

In July 1984, on what we on the Mirror called Black Friday, he became chairman of the Mirror Group of Newspapers – which ran five national newspapers with a combined circulation of four million copies every weekday and six million every Sunday. How could this happen?

Every reason has been thought of except the right one – that Maxwell was a valuable standard bearer for his class when it was on the offensive in the 1980s. His brash, old fashioned style fitted the needs of the bosses of the Thatcher decade.

In an aggressive cowboy manner much admired by the bankers he had smashed the unions at BPCC and turned the company into profit. Could he not do the same at the Mirror?

Yes, he could. From the moment he came into the building, Maxwell set himself the single task of breaking the trade unions.

Maxwell’s fall, like his rise, was symbolic of the Tory government’s fortunes. Like them he believed the capitalist boom of the 1980s would last forever.

In a sort of frenzy he started buying up everything which came up for sale in the United States, Portugal, Argentine and Israel.

He borrowed and borrowed from his most faithful supporter, the National Westminster Bank, which could never forget the way he smashed the unions at BPCC and saved the bank an embarrassing insolvency.

Up and up went the takeovers and the loans in an endless spiral of megalomania and greed. No one stopped him – not a banker, not an adviser, not a regulator, not a government minister, not a policeman. What did stop him was the fatal flaw in the market system which promoted him.

Suddenly the boom evaporated. The ‘impossible’ recession swept over him. Interest rates climbed and the revenue from his new companies slumped. Squeezed more and more tightly, he turned for final salvation to the huge sums piled up in the Mirror workers’ pension fund.

Long ago Tories and capitalists used to argue that pension funds were proof of the burgeoning economic power of the workers. ‘With so much money in pension funds’, it was said, ‘millions of workers have a stake in the system.’

The argument overlooked the reality of control of the pension funds. The money was paid in by workers, but controlled by a handful of capitalists and accountants who used it to lubricate the Stock Exchange.

Maxwell adored Margaret Thatcher, and Thatcher repaid the compliment. When Julia Langdon joined the Mirror political staff from the Guardian, Thatcher applauded her decision. ‘A dose of Maxwell will do you good,’ she trumpeted.

But Maxwell was not a Tory – he supported the Labour Party. Into his plush inner circle came a clutch of right wing Labour Party supporters, most of them ennobled as Maxwell hoped to be.

There was Lord Donoghue, the biographer of Herbert Morrison, Lord Williams – a city slicker and deputy leader of the Labour peers – former Attorney General Sam Silkin and former Solicitor General Peter Archer. While Maxwell behaved like a Tory, while he broke the unions like a Tory, while he stalked the Mirror and other enterprises he owned with all the arrogance of a Tory grandee, he said he was a supporter of the Labour Party and the Labour leadership glowed with delight.

Now, instead of revelling in his disgrace, instead of exposing it as a disgrace of capitalism like all the other disgraces of recent years – Polly Peck, Ferranti and BCCI – the Labour leaders can only fret and fume and hope the whole thing will go away.

They too are stuck deep in mud of capitalist corruption.

Socialists need not be mealy mouthed. Maxwell was a great fat capitalist. His rise and fall reflected the rise and fall of British capitalism in the 1980s. He went up on backs of workers and down in the crisis of the market system.

This grotesque and apparently immovable statue to modern capitalism has come crashing down and no one wants to put an another remotely like it in its place.




"English libel law is becoming a global disgrace" - Jo Glanville, Director English PEN

"English libel law is a vulture circling the world " - Simon Singh


"Maxwell was no ordinary run-of-the-mill millionaire. Physically a Falstaffian figure, Maxwell had a gargantuan appetite for everything: food, wine and women. Unwilling to enter into any permanent affair, he chose to satisfy his sexual needs through high-priced prostitutes. In every city he visited, his aides had call girls on hand to satisfy his needs. Like many despots, he worked anti-social hours, waking exhausted aides in the small hours to execute some minor whim that had come into his head.

His chauffeur once had to drive half-way across London to bring Maxwell a brand of ice cream that he fancied. On other occasions he would arrive in the newsroom of his flagship tabloid, the UK-based Daily Mirror, and terrorize the night staff by taking charge of production. He sacked people without warning, rewarded others with unexpected gifts. Unpredictable, volcanic in temper, he ruled by fear from which no one was safe. His own sons were publicly abused by him and his wife treated as a drudge.

But to the rich and powerful his lack of manners, his sexual peccadilloes, his unsavory eating habits, his often shambolic dress style: all these were of little consequence because of the power he wielded through his global publishing empire.

Like William Randolph Hearst, he strode the newspaper world like an emperor; like Hearst, Maxwell had a xenophobia, in his case a dislike of the United States. Maxwell was a Zionist. He believed that the United States had not done enough to help the Jews flee from the Nazis in the run-up to World War II. He also resented what he saw as an attempt to Americanize post-war Europe. But, like so much else about him, Maxwell kept such views secret.

All his life, Maxwell had cultivated the rich and famous to help him promote his publishing interests and political aspirations. In Britain in 1964, his contacts with its government had seen him return as a Labor Member of Parliament. His election had opened doors for him in Washington. He became a frequent visitor to the White House.

Among those he came to know was Senator John Tower. Tower had regaled Maxwell with stories of how he had helped to get George Herbert Bush into Congress.

On a visit to Israel, it was to Rafi Eitan [who, for a quarter of a century, had been deputy director of operations for Mossad, Israel’s legendary secret intelligence service] that Maxwell revealed his own dislike of America. Eitan, who had no such antipathy, noted the tycoon’s feelings and decided that “one day that could be useful to know.” "


"English libel law is becoming a global disgrace" 


Jo Glanville, Director English PEN

"Our libel laws allow the rich and powerful to silence their critics and stop the general public from receiving vital information in their interest. We need to reform our libel laws now to protect the freedom of speech of every citizen." 




Kirsty Hughes, the CEO of Index on Censorship:



"English libel law is chilling global freedom of expression, by silencing writers, journalists, bloggers and human rights activists in the UK and around the world. Reforming these antiquated laws is long overdue, which is why it is imperative that the government passes the Defamation Bill." 



Tracey Brown, Managing Director of Sense About Science


Ari Ben-Menashe,
Profits of War: The Senational Story of the World-Wide Arms Conspiracy, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1992.


The author, Ari Ben-Menashe, was an Israeli intelligence officer; Rafael Eitan was a counterterrorism adviser to Menachem Begin. 

This book broke the Iran Contra scandal, but was ignored by the media. It also describes the capture of Mordecai Vanunu, beginning with his approaching the Sydney Morning Herald about his secret photos; that newspaper, instead of scooping the story, contacted ASIO (Australia's equivalent of the CIA). 

Ari Ben-Menashe is lucky to be alive. 

The extracts below describe the development of bugged computer software, and how Israel helped to bring down the USSR with it.

{p. 129} One of Eitan's pet projects was an anti-terrorist scheme involving a sinister, Big Brother-like computer program named Promls. It was through Eitan that I became involved in it. This was not Joint Committee work, per se, but many of the same people who worked on our arms-to-Iran operation worked on Promls also. The most prominent of these was British medla baron Robert Maxwell, who made a fortune out of it. Through some of his companies, the Israelis and the Americans were eventually able to tap into the secrets of numerous intelligence networks around the world - including Britain, Canada, Australia, and many

{p. 130} others - and set into motion the arrest, torture, and murder of thousands of lnnocent people in the name of "antiterrorism."

The frightening story of the Promis program begins in the United States in the late 1960s when communications expert William Hamilton, who had spent time in Vietnam during the war setting up listening posts to monitor the communist forces, was assigned to a research and development unit of the U.S National Security Agency. Fluent in Vietnamese, Hamilton helped create a computerized Vietnamese-English dictionary for the intelligence agency. While working there, Hamilton also started work on an extremely sophisticated database program that could interface with data banks in other computers. By the early 1970s, he was well on the way with his research and realized he had a keg of dynamite in his hands.

The program he was developing would have the ability to track the movements of vast numbers of people around the world. Dissidents or citizens who needed to be kept under watch would be hard put to move freely again without Big Brother keeping an eye on thelr activities.

When Hamilton saw that the program he was building had so much potential, he resigned from the National Security Agency and took over a non-profit corporation called Inslaw, established to develop a software program for legal purposes. The Inslaw program would be able to cross-check various court actions and, through cross-referencing, find a common denominator. For example, if a wanted person moved to a new state and established a new identity before being arrested, the program would search out aspects of his life and cases he had been involved in and match them up. Hamilton put his knowledge to use in Inslaw, and when his bosses at NSA found out, they were not at all happy. Their argument was that as an employee of the agency, he had no right to take knowledge gleaned there to another organization. By 1981 Hamilton came up with an enhanced program. What he had actually done was given birth to a monster. Inslaw was turned into a profit-making organization, and Hamilton copyrighted his enhanced version.

Believing that Inslaw was invaluable for law-enforcement agencies, Hamilton sent Promis to the Justice Department in 1981, offering them leasing rights; the more they used it, the more

{p. 131} profit Inslaw would make. The Hamilton program was sent to the NSA for study, but in time, through arrangements made with Attorney General Edwin Meese III, Hamilton got his program back. The Justice Department declined to lease the program from Inslaw, and, it soon transpired, they were using "their own" Promis. So was the NSA.

The U.S. government had its own plans for Promis. Some American officials thought the Israelis might be able to sell it to intelligence agencies around the world, so in 1982, Earl Brian approached Rafi Eitan. After studying the program, Eitan had a brilliant idea.

He called me in to see him. "We can use this program to stamp out terrorism by keeping track of everyone," he said. "But not only that. We can find out what our enemies know, too."

I stared at him for a moment. Suddenly I realized what he was talking about. "Ben zona ata tso dek!" - Son of a bitch, you're right! I exclaimed. All we had to do was "bug" the program when it was sold to our enemies.

It would work like this: A nation's spy organization would buy Promis and have it installed in its computers at headquarters. Using a modem, the spy network would then tap into the computers of such services as the telephone company, the water board, other utility commissions, credit card companies, etc. Promis would then search for specific information. For example, if a person suddenly started using more water and more electricity and making more phone calls than usual, it might be suspected he had guests staying with him. Promis would then start searching for the records of his friends and associates, and if it was found that one had stopped using electricity and water, it might

{Footnote, p. 131: Hamilton and his wife Nancy sued the Justice Department, charging that Justice stole the enhanced Promis program from Inslaw and gave it to NSA. Justice claimed it did get a program from Inslaw but returned it unused. NSA said it developed its own enhanced program and gave it to other intelligence agencies, but not to the Justice Department. Since the stalling by the Justlce Department had thrown Inslaw into bankruptcy proceedings, the Hamiltons pursued their legal remedies in Bankruptcy Court. The lower courts upheld their claims against the Justice Department, but an appellate court ruled that Bankruptcy Court was the incorrect venue for such claims, requiring them to refile the suit in District Court. A congressional investigation into the matter has also been slowly proceeding.}

{p. 132} be assumed, based on other records stored in Promis, that the missing person was staying with the subject of the investigation. This would be enough to have him watched if, for example, he had been involved in previous conspiracies. Promis would search through its records and produce details of those conspiracies, even though the person might have been operating under a different name in the past - the program was sophisticated enough to find a detail that would reveal his true identity.

This information might also be of interest to Israel, which is where the trap door would come into play. By dialing into the central computer of any foreign intelligence agency using Promis, an Israeli agent with a modem need only type in certain secret code words to gain access. Then he could ask for information on the person and get it all on his computer screen.

According to computer experts I have spoken to in Israel, the trap door is undetectable. Nations receiving Promis might wonder if there was any trickery by Israel, but they would not be able to find anything - especially as it was experts provided by Israel who installed the program.

Rafi Eitan did not want to risk having a trap door developed in Israel. Word might leak back that the Israelis had been bugging software and then handing it out to others. He didn't even suggest that the NSA develop the trap door because he had a great sense of national pride. As far as he was concerned, it was Israel's idea and would remain so. Yet it still had to be kept secret. Eitan decided it would be best if a computer whiz could be found outside the country.

I knew just the man for the job. Yehuda Ben-Hanan ran a small computer company of his own called Software and Engineering Consultants, based in Chatsworth, California. I had grown up with him, but I didn't want him to know that I was scouting him for a possible job. I had to sound him out, to find out if he was a blabbermouth.

When I called on him, I told him I was in California on holiday and had decided to look him up. We chatted about our days as kids, and he introduced me to his wife, a Brazilian Jew. I decided he was right for the job - he was not conspiracy-minded, and it was unlikely his suspicions would be aroused. Five days after I left, he was approached by an Israeli man who hired him to build

{p. 133} an external access to a program. Yehuda wasn't told what the program was all about. He was simply given blueprints and set about his work for a $5,000 fee.

With the trap door in place, Rafi Eitan selected Jordan as the nation on which it would be tested. Earl Brian made the sale through his company, Hadron. Brian accurately represented it as a program that would help stamp out the Palestinian dissidents who had long been a thorn in the side of King Hussein. A team of Hadron computer experts went to Amman and began setting up Promis software for Jordanian military intelligence. They also hooked it up with the various computers that had already been sold to Jordan by IBM in the late 1970s. These computers were linked to the water company, the telephone company, and every other public utility.

The Hadron team did one more thing. They hooked the Promis program to a small computer attached to a telephone line in an apartment in Amman. That apartment was occupled by a buslnessman who had close connections with Mossad. From his home, he was able to dial up various public services, as well as the military, and use Promis to find out everything about everybody - as well as to tap into Jordan's military secrets. Because of his business as an importer-exporter, he often had an excuse to fly to Vienna. He would take the New York-bound Aliya Royal Jordanian Airlines flight from Amman and get off in Vienna. There, he would pass computer disks loaded with information to a Mossad contact.

So what Israel and the Americans learned was that the system was workable. The two countries also found out that the Jordanians had a tracking system of their own which was being used against Palestinian movements. Israel and the U.S. were laughing. The Jordanians tracked the Palestinians, our man tapped into their information, and we knew as much about the whereabouts of one terrorist or another as the Jordanians did.

The Americans came up with the idea of selling this valuable program to governments and their intelligence networks all over the world. But first they had to produce their own version of Promis with the secret trap door. The Americans handed a copy of their program to Wackenhut, a Florida-based company that worked for the U.S. intelligence community. The company also

{p. 134} had a computer development unit located on the Cabazon Indian Reservation in southern California. The Indian reservation was used by Wackenhut, which was contracted by the technical services division of the CIA, for developing special equipment such as special-purpose electronics, anti-terrorist devices, etc., as well as hallucinogeric drugs. It was done on an Indian reservation because there was no state jurisdiction and the federal authorities who would have jurisdiction turned a blind eye to the operation.

It was here that the trap door was built into the U.S. version of Promis, based on Israeli information.

The CIA group that was to use Promis had not handed the program back to the NSA to have the trap door fitted by them for the simple reason that they didn't want the NSA to know about it - interagency competition was fierce. Only this small CIA group, headed by Robert Gates - who was to become head of the Central Intelligence Agency in October 1991 - was in on the secret. So we now had a small group in Israel and a small group in the U.S. that knew about the trap door.

The next step for both Israel and the United States was to find a neutral company through which the doctored Promis program could be sold. It was agreed that the head of the company had to be a man who could be trusted to keep intelligence secrets, who had contacts with both Western and East Bloc countries and who had a respected businessman's image. The man they came up with was Robert Maxwell.

Robert Maxwell, whose body now lies in Judaism's most revered burial ground on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem's walled city, formed his ties with Israel in the early 1960s when a meeting was arranged for him with Yitzhak Shamir, who was then in Mossad operations in Europe. Shamir's was an important role, soliciting information from all the European-based agencies employed by Mossad. The rendezvous with Maxwell was arranged through the Mapam [United Workers] Party in Israel which was part of the labor movement and had close connections with Maxwell's leftwing colleagues in the British Labor Party.

The two men were brought together by Aviezer Ya'ari, a kibbutz member and one of the ideological leaders of Mapam. Upper-

{p. 135} most in Ya'ari's mind was making contact with the Soviets, so it was a natural move to put Shamir in touch with Maxwell, who had intelligence links with the Soviets beginning in World War II. Shamir's past as a Stern Gang terrorist appeared to make this an unlikely pairing, but Mossad was keen to make any connections it could with the KGB, and the belief in Tel Aviv was that Maxwell, for all his pride in faithfully serving in the British Army, remained on good terms with "friends" in the East Bloc.

Maxwell, who had been elected a British Labor MP in 1964, and Shamir shared an antipathy for the Americans, and were to become friends of heart and spirit.

Rafi Eitan knew of Maxwell's long association with Shamir and with Israel, so he suggested that the British mogul would be the perfect front for selling Promis. The approach to Maxwell, on Israeli prompting, was made in 1984 by Sen. John Tower, an old friend of the publisher's, who was close to the then vlce presldent, George Bush - in fact, many years before, Tower had helped Bush get into Congress. Always interested in military and intelllgence affairs, Tower had served as chair of the Senate Armed Servlces Committee. According to Maxwell, when Bush was head of the CIA in 1976, Tower approached Maxwell to connect him and Bush secretly on a person-to-person basis with various Soviet intelligence people. When Maxwell delivered, Tower became his friend for life. With the relationship strengthening over the years, Tower subsequently was appointed a director of Maxwell's Macmillan publishing company in the U.S.

Tower's approach to Maxwell to use his network of companies to market Promis was made on behalf of the CIA group headed by Gates. But it was Rafi Eitan who mapped out the workings of Promis for Maxwell at a discreet meeting between the two men m Paris in 1984. I do not know whether Maxwell was made aware of the trap door and how Israel and the U.S. could use this to gain external access to the computers of whatever agencies were usmg the program. But Maxwell would have been made perfectly aware of the general uses of Promis and how intelligence servlces could keep tabs on anyone about whom they had cause to be suspicious.

Maxwell agreed he was in a perfect position to market Promis for the Americans and the Israelis. After all, his Berlitz language schools were located all around the world. All he needed to do

{p. 136} was set up or buy computer companies through Berlitz Holdings. This would distance him personally from the massive spy project.

A perfect company for Maxwell to take over already existed. Israeli-owned, Degem was a computer business located in Israel, Guatemala, and Transkei, the Bantustan "homeland" controlled by South Africa. The Transkei connection is particularly interesting.

Menachem Begin, Israel's prime minister from 1977 to 1983, had a long-time friend, Yaacov Meridor, who was running various businesses with South Africa through Transkei. A minister without portfolio in Begin's government, he was raking in a fortune in commissions from whatever country wanted to beat the boycott on South Africa by dealing through Transkei. Everything had to go through Meridor or a company he owned. One of these companies was Degem, which was actually controlled by Israel's military intelligence and was providing computer services to the South Africans and to Guatemala.

Poor Meridor became unstuck - and opened the door for Maxwell - when he was caught up in a huge scandal. Along with a Texan, Joe Peeples, and a Romanian expatriate who claimed to be an energy professor, Meridor drew up a blueprint for using the sun as a source of energy to generate vast amounts of electricity. Although this was theoretically feasible, the Meridor blueprint went far beyond the realm of possibility. However, he and his pals succeeded in selling the idea to the wealthy Hunt brothers of Texas for $2 million. For this price, the Hunts were told they had the rights to sell the scheme in the U.S. Meanwhile, Meridor decided that he would seek a huge loan from the Israeli Treasury, but he slipped up badly. He went on TV and told the nation that he was working on a solar energy system with which Israel would never have to use oil or coal for electricity again. All he needed was a little financial backing.

Expecting the money to come pouring in, Meridor was stopped in his tracks when a scientist from the Weizman Institute went on TV three days later and declared the whole thing a fraud. Joe Peeples, who was not able to give the $2 million back to the Hunts, was jailed for fraud. The Romanian, who had not received any of the money, went free. Meridor lost his job as a cabinet

{p. 137} minister - and his credibility. His Transkei operations were another casualty. And then along came Maxwell who, knowing exactly what he was buying it for, sank his money into Degem.

After the initial success with Promis against the Jordanians, and following Maxwell's agreement to buy into Degem, Promis was put to use in the most horrible way in a number of countries. One egregious example was Guatemala. Pesach Ben-Or, a representative for Eagle, a well-connected Israeli arms-dealing company, had been helping the military regime there set up a computer tracking system to fight the leftist insurgency. But it proved to be inadequate.

In 1984 Israeli intelligence came to an arrangement with the man who was calling himself El Jefe de la Nacion - the Chief of the Nation - General Oscar Mejia Victores. He agreed to allow a warehouse to be used for storing weapons coming secretly out of the U.S. en route to Iran and to allow planes carrying arms from Poland to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua to fly over Guatemala and even land there on occasions. The Israelis, with a wink and a nod from the Americans, had been selling certain arms from Poland to the Sandinistas in their fight against the contras. Of course, there were other factions in the U.S. and Israel - including the Oliver North group - who supplied weapons to the contras.

The price Israel had to pay for this agreement was that the Eagle company, run by Pesach Ben-Or in Guatemala and his associate Mike Harari in Panama, and overseen by Ariel Sharon, would continue selling weapons to the Guatemalan government. On top of that, Israel would install a very sophisticated computer program that would help the military stamp out insurgents. The Mossad chief in Israel, Nachum Admoni, told Sharon not to interfere with the computer program, and in turn the intelligence community would not interrupt Eagle's unofficial sale of arms to the Guatemalan military. It was a case of everyone scratching everyone else's back.

In setting up Promis in Guatemala, Israel employed the services of Manfred Herrmann, a German expatriate in his 60s, who owned an automobile spare-parts company in Guatemala City known as Sedra. It was agreed that Herrmann would represent Israel's arms-running company, Ora, in Guatemala, while his

{p. 138} partner, Baldur K. Kleine, would be the representative in Maitland, Florida, from where he would coordinate all our activities in Central America. Shortly after Maxwell took over Degem, Rafi Eitan asked Earl Brian to meet Kleine in Maitland and give him Promis with the trap door in place.

After Kleine passed the program over to Herrmann, I also provided Herrmann with the Israeli version. If the Americans were going to tap into Guatemala, so were we. Because we were running arms through the country, it was in our interests to keep a general watch on things. However, we soon realized that Guatemala just did not have the computer equipment or skilled operators necessary. For Promis to work, everything in the water company and the electric company had to be computerized. Not only that, lists of identification numbers would have to be updated and a new census conducted. With so much information then available and with suspicious characters going into a central computer, Israel and the U.S. would be able to break in to the central system and learn everything the Guatemalan government knew.

Israel turned to Honeywell, the Israeli franchise of which was owned by Medan Computers Ltd. All the technicians working for Medan were military intelligence reservists and experts on computers. Those at the top were made aware of the Promis program, although they did not know about the trap door. When Medan pointed out that their computers would not be suitable, we arranged for them to act as brokers for IBM equipment in Guatemala.

In that same year, 1984, Guatemala was swept up in a campaign led by El Jefe himself to bring the nation into the computer age. TV radio, and newspapers lauded the move. Computers, it was said, would give jobs to everybody. Common people would no longer have to live in the Dark Ages. Photographs were produced, showing lines of young women sitting behind computers. It was compelling stuff. Every soldier in the army, many of whom could hardly read or write, was taught to use a keyboard. Maxwell's Degem, through Herrmann's Sedra company, moved into offices, railway stations, and airports, and even set up terminals at the most remote roadblocks.

The venture, from the intelligence point of view, was a major success. Suspected dissidents couldn't move anywhere without

{p. 139} Big Brother watching them. Even if they traveled under a false name, various characteristics, such as height, hair color, age, were fed into roadside terminals and Promis searched through its database looking for a common denominator. It would be able to tell an army commander that a certain dissident who was in the north three days before had caught a train, then a bus, stayed at a friend's house, and was now on the road under a different name. That's how frightening the system was. By late 1985 virtually all dissidents - and an unknown number of unidentified innocents - had been rounded up. In a country whose rulers had no patience for such people, 20,000 government opponents either died or disappeared.

And how was it all funded? In 1985 Guatemala started to be used heavily as a drug transit point to the United States from South America. Mejia, the Chief of the Nation, was, in fact, a much bigger drug boss than Noriega. Massive amounts of drugs were shipped into the United States, and part of the revenue went back to Guatemala to help finance the Promis operation. This would all have been impossible without the wink and the nod that the CIA gave.

In Transkei, Degem was of immense help to the white South African regime. Promis was trap-doored because the Israelis were interested in a number of people in South Africa. Promis, in effect, was a killing machine used against black revolutionary groups, including the African National Congress. Almost 12,000 activists were affected by the beginning of 1986 - picked up, disappeared, or maimed in "black-on-black" violence. "Kushi kills Kushi" became a well-known term in Israeli intelligence circles with Chief Gatsha Buthelesi's black death squads doing the dirty work.

It was a simple operation: As a result of Maxwell buying Degem, Promis was installed in the Transkei. It pulled in information on dissidents, and death lists were drawn up and handed over to Buthelesi and his group, who went out on the rampage to finish them off.

At one point a planned strike by black miners was stopped when Promis was used to find the instigators. They all disappeared as Promis tracked them down through their required identity passes. Of course the South African security network just

{p. 140 }loved it. The computer, which had become their ally, had links to the computer in the military compound in Pretoria, and although it was the Israeli version that was being used, the information went straight to the American Embassy for one very simple reason. The embassy has a common wall with the military compound, so it was nothing to string a wire between the two establishments.

The hypocrisy of it all was that Robert Maxwell was officially against any relations with racist South Africa, and his Daily Mirror, which he had bought in 1984 for £113 million, had championed one-man, one-vote, regardless of race. Yet under cover of his Degem company he was actually helping the South African government in a way they had never been helped before. If he had said no to Israel, no doubt some other company would have been used to get Promis going, but at least Maxwell's conscience would have been clear.

Promis was sold all over the world. With their respective intelligence connections, Earl Brian's Hadron and Maxwell's Degem engaged in friendly competition, wiring the world for intelligence purposes. The Americans, through Hadron, sold Promis to a number of countries, including Britain, Australia, South Korea, Iraq, and Canada. Many of the secrets of those nations' intelligence agencies were read through the Promis trap door by the Americans. Moreover, the CIA was making a fortune hawking Promis software. Up to 1989 they had made at least $40 million from that venture alone.

The Israelis, through Degem, sold Promis to the East Bloc and other countries, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Nicaragua. An abridged version of Promis, including the trap door, was also sold by Degem to Credit Suisse in 1985. The Likud Party, which had control over Israel's intelligence network, was very interested in knowing which Israelis might have opened accounts there. After finding out who had lodged rake-off money there, the party could approach the individuals and ask for a "donation" - or threaten exposure.

Maxwell's Degem even sold Promis to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The path had been cleared for Degem to get into the

{p. 141} Soviet Union - in 1986 and 1987, a computer company, TransCapital Corporation, of Norwalk, Connecticut, had been allowed to export high-tech IBM computers to the Soviet Union, even though there was a general ban on selling such equipment to the East Bloc. But the CIA's Robert Gates had lifted the barriers. When the Soviets expressed a desire to have Promis, Degem technicians fitted it to the IBM computers, complete with the tell-all trap door. In early 1991, before the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet military intelligence, GRU, was still using Promis. So whether he knew about the trap door or not, Maxwell gave the Americans a direct line into Soviet military intelligence.

I believe that one of the reasons I was arrested in 1989 on a trumped-up arms charge was that I, on behalf of the Israeli government, threatened to expose what the Americans were doing with Promis if they continued their support of chemical weapons being supplied to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Leigh Ratiner, the attorney who was representing Inslaw and the Hamiltons on behalf of his Washington firm, Dickstein and Shapiro, also had something strange happen to him when he began to find out about the real use of Promis. Suddenly, he was called in by his senior partners and told they wanted him to leave the case and the firm, and they started negotiating his severance agreement. Ratiner received $120,000 a year for five years, provided he agreed not to practice law during that period. Ratiner, who was always puzzled by the abrupt dismissal from a firm he had been with for ten years, assumed that the Inslaw case was the reason, but was not sure why. Some time after his dismissal, he saw a memo from his old firm's files which reported that, a week before he was called on the carpet, an assistant attorney general had been talking to one of the firm's partners and had advised that they ought to get rid of Ratiner. That was all Ratiner learned.

He did not know what I knew. A few weeks before Ratiner's dismissal I had seen a cable that came in to the Joint Committee from the United States. It requested that a $600,000 transfer from the CIA-Israeli slush fund be made to Earl Brian's firm, Hadron. The money, the cable said, was to be transferred by Brian to Leonard Garment's law firm, Dickstein and Shapiro, to be used to get one of the Inslaw lawyers, Leigh Ratiner, off the case. Ratiner, it seems, was removed for doing too good a job for Inslaw.










"On that February day in 1983 the call to William Hamilton from Brewer thrilled the Hamiltons. As the Justice Department Project Manager, Brewer had considerable power over the future of Enhanced Promis. In one of the many twists the story was about to assume, Brewer had once worked for Inslaw. Bill Hamilton had fired him because of “good cause.” A circumspect man of few words, Hamilton had never elaborated in public his feelings towards Brewer. For his part, Brewer had maintained a stoic silence. But on that February day all was cordial between both men.



During the call, Hamilton was to recall Brewer had said that the Justice Department would have no objection to Inslaw going into “all necessary detail” to how Enhanced Promis worked to the visitor that Brewer was going to send over by cab from the Justice Department. His name was Dr. Orr and he was from Tel Aviv.

To Bill Hamilton his forthcoming visitor was potentially further proof that “Justice was going to go on playing it fair and square.”

Bill Hamilton had written a letter to the Department of Justice detailing the improvements made to the original, public-domain Promis, asking the Department to waive rights it “might claim to the Enhanced version.”

On August 11, 1982, a Justice lawyer replied: “To the extent that other enhancements (beyond the public domain Promis) were privately funded by Inslaw, and not specified to be delivered to the Department of Justice under any other contract or agreement, Inslaw may assert whatever proprietary rights it may have.”

The Hamiltons saw the letter as clear-cut: Enhanced Promis was their creation to profit from. They would later be comforted by the clarification offered by the then deputy attorney-general Arnold Burns, that “our lawyers (at DOJ) are satisfied that Inslaw’s lawyers could sustain the claim in court that we had waived those proprietary rights.”

Completely reassured that profits that would accrue from the considerable sums they had invested in Enhanced Promis were theirs alone, Bill and Nancy Hamilton had constantly updated Enhanced Promis. In his submission to the Justice Department, Bill Hamilton had eloquently argued that the need for such software was all too evident:

“The United States government, the most powerful government in the world, has internal information systems which are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. There is a Department of Justice database, an Attorney General’s database, and an IRS database. Every arm of government has its own database. But none of them can share information. That makes tracking offenders almost always difficult and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task.”

Hamilton acknowledged that in the past efforts had been made to deal with the problem when Inslaw had been a non-profit corporation funded entirely through government grants and contracts. Its prime client in those days had been the Law Enforcement and Assistance Administration, LEAA. Through public funding Inslaw had developed the original program, calling it Promis.

When President Carter closed down the LEAA, the Hamiltons bought and converted Inslaw to a for-profit corporation. They set to work using their own money to continue to upgrade the original Promis. So significant had been the many improvements made that the Hamiltons had renamed the software Enhanced Promis.

The technically-minded at the Department of Justice readily understood how significant the changes had been to create Enhanced Promis…. everyone at the Department of Justice grasped that Enhanced Promis had a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, allowing it to integrate with innumerable databases without a need to reprogram.

In essence, Enhanced Promis could convert data into priceless information on a scale never before imagined. Hamilton, long accustomed to the ways of the government, knew that “anyone in Washington will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, is power—and Enhanced Promis is the most powerful of computer tools.”

No one at the Justice Department disagreed with him."







"Tetris just so happened to be distributed in Budapest, Hungary, where Robert Stein, owner of Andromeda Software, was thoroughly interested by the game. He therefore contacted Alexey Pajitnov in order to secure the deal.

BUT, before the deal was looked into and finished, Stein had sold rights already to Spectrum Holobyte, a company in the U.S., and Mirrorsoft, owned by Robert Maxwell's son, Kevin Maxwell.

Both companies were interested by the game as well, wanting PC rights - rights that Robert Stein did not even have. Even worse, Robert Stein failed to settle a deal with Pajitnov, then going for a licensing with the Hungarian programmers who made it. However, at that point, Spectrum Holobyte was already developing and selling their version of Tetris on the IBM PC in the U.S.

What happened? The version was an absolute smash, garnering money all over the area.

Now, the real confusion started to begin.


Through the sending of rights, Spectrum Holobyte actually distributed the rights to many different companies, all claiming they had the rights, when in actuality they didn't.

One of these companies who thought the rights were in general was a sub-division of Atari Games, Tengen (the Japanese console games maker). Tengen had signed rights for an arcade version of Tetris with proper dealings with Elorg.

However, having thought this meant for all arcade-related objects, Tengen created a version of Tetris for the NES, a game console made by video game company Nintendo. In actuality, they had no proper copyrights and were selling an illegal game in Japan and U.S., lying to Nintendo about the rights, unbeknownst to them.

It all started to really heat up when Nintendo would find out through some unorthodox investigation.

Kevin Maxwell, after hearing that Stein was going to Russia, decided that Stein never had the rights in the first place, angered and frustrated by this backstab.

Hoping to get the rights himself before anyone else can, Maxwell went to Russia himself as well.

All three men, Robert Stein, Kevin Maxwell, and Henk Rogers, flew to Russia at the same time. Stein and Maxwell had their own personal limos and such to get them towards Elorg, but Rogers didn't.

"Man, It was a total adventure game," he said, "It was just grey and dull. I didn't even know how the hell I could get to where I needed. People around were just very quiet."

Interesting help arrived in the form of the actual creator, Alexey Pajitnov.

Having known who actually created Tetris from the signed rights before, Rogers managed to into contact with Pajitnov. Through some discussion, and the acquiring of a friendship between the two, they set off to help Henk win the rights from Elorg.

From the word's of Rogers, "It was basically...they were interviewing Kevin Maxwell, but not Robert Stein because of previous deals, so it was my turn to have meetings with the Russians, and then others were having meetings. I mean, we were all having meetings, completely suspenseful!"

Rogers' turn arose, in which he explained that he didn't have as much money as the Maxwell's, but that he could give them a much fairer share of the profit as well as a good pay.

Because of this down-to-earth answer, with the addition of Pajitnov's friendship with Rogers, Elorg gave the handheld rights to Henk Rogers and Nintendo.

As the dealings were finishing, the head Russians spotted the NES cartridge of Tengen's version of Tetris that Rogers carried, asking as to the meaning of this. Rogers explained that Tengen made it for NES.

The Russians, however, said that they hadn't given such rights to anyone. Total silence came from Rogers, who said later,

"It was then that I was like.....oh.....crap. I was sitting here, they thought I was one of the companies that had been pirating the game because they didn't give rights to anyone. And, so, I just thought that they could send me to Siberia or someplace to jail now. Truly terrifying, I mean."

However, the Russians didn't get angry and instead asked Rogers if he wished to sign for both the handheld and console rights. Rogers slowly realized this and his thoughts were 'absolutely "Hot potato!"'. Rogers proudly left Russia with the rights of Tetris for console and handheld, as well as the knowledge that Tengen had been making illegal and pirated versions of Tetris the whole time.

Robert Stein and Kevin Maxwell, however, left with nothing, with Maxwell all the more furious that a person like Rogers got the rights.

Having no other options to turn to, Kevin turned to his media mogul father, Robert Maxwell, to do something about the rights.

Robert Maxwell, in turn, then asked for an appointment with then-USSR Head of State Mikhail Gorbachev, which would happen with a result of Robert Maxwell asking Gorbachev to do something about it, due to it breaking the pride of the Soviet Union......

That is, until an earthquake happened on the day of the appointment, therefore never letting the Maxwell's speak out because of Gorbachev evacuating the area."

Maxwell's body found in sea
By Ben Laurance and John Hooper in Tenerife, David Sharrock and Georgina Henry
Wednesday 6 November 1991

Robert Maxwell, the flamboyant head of one of the world's biggest media empires, was discovered dead in the sea yesterday after disappearing from his yacht off the Canary Islands.

As London business analysts were predicting the break-up of his business empire under the pressure of £3bn debts, his widow Elizabeth and their son Philip flew to Gran Canaria and identified his body at the Gando air base. They later flew to Tenerife, where the inquiry into the death will be held.

The body of the Daily Mirror publisher was winched from the Atlantic by a Spanish helicopter 20 miles south-west of Gran Canaria. Spanish national radio said he was unclothed and showed no sign of violence.

At a hastily-improvised midnight press conference at Reina Sofia airport in the south of Tenerife, the island's Civil Governor, Angel Delgado, said Mr Maxwell's motor yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, left Santa Cruz in the north of the island at 10pm on Monday and put into Puerto de los Cristianos at 9am yesterday.

But, he said, Mr Maxwell's body was found by a fishing boat floating 19 to 20 miles from Gando on the other side of the neighbouring island of Gran Canaria - more than 100 miles from the obvious route between the points of departure and arrival. Asked to explain how the body could have got there, Mr Delgado replied: "That's a good question."

He said that according to the crew Mr Maxwell was last seen at 4.25am yesterday. "His absence was noted when the boat arrived at los Cristianos at 9am," the governor added. According to other versions, Mr Maxwell was found to be missing at around 11am when he failed to answer a telephone call to his cabin. Licinio Alonso, the director of the Maritime Safety Centre at the Spanish Ministry of Transport, said the alarm was not raised until 1pm by a satellite telex via Norway.

A post-mortem examination will be carried out this morning.

An air and sea search was launched after the captain of the 55-metre Lady Ghislaine notified the Spanish authorities that the 68-year-old chairman of Maxwell Communication Corporation and Mirror Group Newspapers had disappeared.

On BBC 2's Newsnight programme last night, the Mirror Group editorial director, Charles Wilson, said he could not imagine any situation that would cause Mr Maxwell to take his own life since "he had too much of the arrogance of his own ability to conceive of such a thing."

Mr Maxwell's son Ian faced the cameras outside the offices of the Mirror Group last night to say that the sadness of his father's death would touch not only his family, but also the 15,000 to 20,000 employees, and the shareholders of the company which had lost "its publisher, its chairman, and its saviour".

Shares in MCC and MGN were suspended yesterday at the companies' request after Mr Maxwell was reported missing. Ian and another son, Kevin, were appointed acting chairmen of the companies.

MCC has been struggling to emerge from debts put at £1.3bn; other debts may take the group total to over £3bn. Financial experts in the City and on Wall Street became increasingly nervous about the stability of the companies.

Mr Maxwell's death marks the end of an extraordinary career. Born into poverty in Czechoslovakia, he was decorated for his bravery in the second world war before going on to establish a vast media and publishing empire.

A Labour MP in the 1960s, the socialist millionaire counted many world leaders among his friends and associates, including Eastern bloc leaders.

Mr Maxwell was taking a break after a bruising round of allegations about links with the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, and speculation over the health of his business empire.

He said the allegations made by American Pulitzer prize-winning author Seymour Hersh were "ludicrous, a total invention". But he sacked the Daily Mirror foreign editor, Nick Davies, for issuing false denials about a meeting with an American arms dealer.

A statement issued by MGN last night said Mr Maxwell flew to Gibraltar where he joined the Lady Ghislaine.

A Maxwell company spokesman said last night: "His last conversation that I can find was with his son Ian, who spoke to him at 11 o'clock last night when they had a normal business and family conversation and he was in a perfectly good mood."

Richard Stott, editor of the Daily Mirror, said: "He went out to the boat at the weekend because he had a cold. I spoke to him last night and he seemed OK."

Speaking on BBC television news, he said Mr Maxwell had not been depressed. "He was very angry about allegations contained in the Seymour Hersh book," said Mr Stott.

Politicians were swift to pay their tributes. The Prime Minister said Mr Maxwell had given him "valuable insights" into the situation in the Soviet Union during the attempted coup. He was a "great character", Mr Major added.

Neil Kinnock spoke of the former Labour MP for Buckingham, from 1964-70, as a man with "such a zest for life . . . Bob Maxwell was a unique figure who attracted controversy, envy and loyalty in great measure throughout his rumbustious life. He was a steadfast supporter of the Labour Party."

Mr Maxwell had four sons and five daughters but a son and daughter died.



Boston: The Truth Seaps Through into the Mainstream






Better.



But the problem with Mirandarisng Gitmo detainees of course, is that the Gitmo detainees - most of them - have committed aboslutely no crime...






This is poetry.

http://www.corbettreport.com/





"Those who have studied history know that nothing invigorates and empowers an authoritarian regime more than a spectacular act of violence, some sudden and senseless loss of life that allows the autocrat to stand on the smoking rubble and identify himself as the hero. It is at moments like this that the public—still in shock from the horror of the tragedy that has just unfolded before them—can be led into the most ruthless despotism: despotism that now bears the mantle of "security."

Acts of terror and violence never benefit the average man or woman. They only ever benefit those in positions of power.

This is why Nero fiddled while Rome burned: it gave him a chance to throw the Christians to the lions and rebuild the capital of the Roman Empire in his own image.

This is why Hearst and the warmongers of the emerging American Empire were delighted by the destruction of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor: it gave them the excuse they needed in order to rouse the public into supporting the Spanish-American War.

This is why Israel attacked the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967 during the Six Day War, strafing and torpedoing it relentlessly for hours in a vain attempt to send it to the bottom: the Israelis believed that the loss of the Liberty could be blamed on Egypt and draw the Americans into war.

This is why there are hundreds of documented examples of governments staging attacks in order to blame them on their political enemies. In every civilization, in every culture, in every historical period, authoritarians have known that spectacular acts of violence help to further consolidate their own power and control. And sadly, throughout history there have been all too many willing to allow attacks to occur, to pretend that attacks have occurred or even to attack their own population in order to further their political agenda.

To think that such staged provocations and false flag attacks no longer occur would be as unrealistic as believing that human nature itself has changed, that powerful people no longer seek to increase their power, that influence is never used for deceit or manipulation, that lies are no longer told to satisfy greed or slake the thirst for control. It is to believe that our society is immuned from those things that we have seen in every other society in every other era. In short, it is a dangerous delusion.

The people are once again learning the power of this delusion. They are learning the extent to which they have been lied to. They are once again studying their history.

The Russians are learning how the FSB was caught planting bombs in Moscow in the 1990s during a terror scare that swept Putin into power and stirred the public into supporting the Second Chechen War. They are learning how their autocratic ex-President came to power campaigning on the graves of those his old FSB cronies had killed.

The Israelis are learning how Mossad has been caught time and again posing as the very Muslim terrorists they claim to be opposing. They are learning how Israel uses the specter of terror to further extend their blank cheque drawn on American funds to expand their police state at home and maintain their hardline stance, the world's sixth-largest nuclear superpower supposedly threatened by the possibility that one of their neighbours may one day obtain a single nuclear weapon.

The British are learning how their SAS officers were caught dressing up as Arabs in Iraq, driving around with trucks full of munitions, shooting at police to stir up ethnic tensions and insure that permanent bases could be built in the region. They are learning how Haroon Aswat, the supposed mastermind behind the 7/7 bombings, was working for British Intelligence.. They are learning how British military intelligence took part in IRA bombings.

The Indians are learning how the Mumbai attack was helped by an U.S. Agent who is cooperating with investigators so that he won't face questioning by foreign authorities.

The Canadians are learning how their own provincial police dressed up as protestors in 2007 and threatened violence against other police in order to force a crackdown on peaceful protests.


And the Americans are learning that there were multiple bombs found, dismantled and taken out of the Alfred P. Murrah building on April 19, 1995. They are learning that Timothy McVeigh had written a letter to his sister in which he claimed to be in the Special Forces for the U.S. Army. They are learning the bombing was being directed by FBI informants, just as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was. They are learning about 9/11 and the Gulf of Tonkin and Operation Northwoods and their own Army Counterinsurgency Manuals that teach officers how to commit false flag attacks to blame on their enemies.

In short, the people are learning the truth.

And now we see the same build-up to a false flag event taking place that we saw in 1995. At that time the U.S. had a corporate media desperate to fling mud at anyone concerned by the actions of their government, and it had a government that was desperately unpopular in the face of growing dissatisfaction. Today we see the exact same factors at play.

If anything, the situation today is worse than it was in the run-up to the Oklahoma City Bombing, with media consolidation meaning that groups of concerned citizens like the Oath Keepers are being attacked by the controlled minions on both the left and the right. And now it is not just the militia that is being demonized by the establishment: it is veterans and gun owners, third party supporters and libertarians, anti-war protestors and human rights campaigners, people who are upset with the government giving trillions to the banks that have engineered our current financial crisis in the first place. In short, everyone is now a potential terrorist, according to the governmental and media agencies that deign to limit our range of acceptable opinion and control dissent.

Even the word 'terrorist' means something more than it did back in 1995, after the false flag anthrax attack allowed the passage of the Patriot Act, after the boogey of Al-CIAda gave the NSA the opportunity to announce that they were collecting everyone's emails and everyone's telephone calls, after the former Homeland Security Secretary came out and admitted that the Bush administration had made up terror threats in order to scare the people into supporting the government, now we know what the real definition of terrorism is. It is governments scaring their own populations into line.

But there is something else that's different now from what it was in 1995. The people are learning something else about terrorism: they are not terrorists for speaking out against their government. They are not terrorists for wanting the government to stop selling their children into servitude to pay bankers their bonuses. They are not terrorists for pointing out that the FBI and the CIA and Mossad and MI6 are behind every major terrorist event.

The people are not terrorists because they do not want to see more death. They do not want more destruction, the spilling of the blood of their fellow citizens is not in their interests. Death and destruction only ever serves the governmental and financial and industrial interests who always grow in power and wealth in the wake of every tragedy. Time and again, the people pay with their lives, and the governments and the banks and the war machine only grows and prospers.

The people do not want terrorism because it does not benefit them. It only benefits the existing power structure.

And this time, if there is another staged event to blame on the government's enemy of the day, the people will know who to blame."


James Corbett, 2010



























Wednesday 1 May 2013

The Process






"I sent some people to England; I couldn't go myself..."





"My prophecy upon this wasted earth and upon the corrupt creation that squats upon its ruined surface is: THOU SHALT KILL."

- from Jehovah on War by Robert DeGrimston aka Christ


The black-caped, black-garbed, death-worshiping Process Church of the Final Judgment arrived on the Los Angeles scene in early 1968. They stayed in public view till a few days after Robert Kennedy's assassination in June of '68, after which they dropped from sight in Los Angeles.

And for what purpose were these noble Englishmen journeying to the United States? Gore and world-end. They had made a decision to travel around the world to make converts and plant the seeds of their cult. They had spent quite a bit of time in a remote beach lagoon on the Yucatan peninsula and there they had discovered Satan and sacrifice-full moon frolics in which they paid obeisance to gore. From there the Process moved into southern California to collect violence-prone adepts-a form of human that just loves southern California, the home of weird cults.

And now it was the spring of the Year of the Pig 1968 and they were swarming the streets of Sunset Strip, trying to convert psychedelic merchants, seeking out movie stars and especially they doted on the hell-oriented bikers and bike gangs that frequented Hollywood.

The Process really grooves with war. Among their many publications, founder Robert DeGrimston has published three books on the subject of war, Jehovah on War, Lucifer on War and Satan on War, alleging that the words are from the three gods themselves as operating through the mouth of Robert DeGrimston. It is interesting to note that as things got hot for the Process, they toned down some of the violent language in later editions of the same books, particularly Jehovah on War.

In Satan on War, for instance, Robert DeGrimston urges humans to:


Release the fiend that lies dormant within you, for he is strong and ruthless and his power is far beyond the bounds of human frailty.


It is necessary, unfortunately, to devote a few words of description to this depressing unsalvation army, these black-garbed DeGrimston-zombies, in order to describe yet another sleazo input which warped the mind of Charlie Manson.

The Process Church of the Final Judgment is an English occult society dedicated to observing and aiding the end of the world by stirring up murder, violence and chaos, and dedicated to the proposition that they, the Process, shall survive the gore as the chosen people. Sound like Manson? It was formed by two fierce occult death-freaks, Mary Anne Maclean DeGrimston Moor and Robert Sylvester DeGrimston Moor. At his wife's suggestion, they dropped the name Moor, except when they want to travel incognito, and do so using the surname Moor. She is now around forty, if she is still alive, and he is around thirty-six years of age.

Mary Anne DeGrimston is a baleful lady who dotes on groveling followers. She has assumed various names such as Hecate and the Oracle and possibly Circe.

Both are devout reincarnationists. According to one account, Mary Anne DeGrimston believes she is the reincarnation of Goebbels. But in the era of Manson she was known as Hecate, an apt appellation. Hecate in ancient lore was the queen of ghosts and magic, she haunted crossroads, she was attended by hellhounds, she was the protectress of enchanters and witches.

Robert DeGrimston is thought by the cult to be Christ. He was born on August 10, 1935, in Shanghai, China. Before waxing weirdo, DeGrimston studied architecture. Bob and Mary Anne met at the Hubbard Institute of Scientology on Fitzroy Street, London in 1963 or 1964. They had been training to become scientology auditors or instructors. They were married in

1964 and left the Hubbard Institute a few months later, to seek some sort of spiritual salvation together.

At the time, Robert DeGrimston was powerfully built, tall, blond with a well-cut beard. He was known as a sharp dresser. He had been educated at Winchester and had received preliminary architectural training at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Mary Anne DeGrimston worships spank-spank. She was born on November 20, 1931, in Glasgow, Scotland, an illegitimate child. In her youth, she was slapped into reform school. At some point she moved to the United States, where she became engaged to the former boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson. After breaking up with Sugar Ray Robinson, she went back to London, where she was a dance-hall hostess and a prostitute. She set up hooker headquarters at 31 Lesusington Street in London where she was a kept woman for several influential men, including one gentleman who was later to become the lawyer for the Process. She was energetic during the Christine Keeler era at sado-sodo in London.

Mary Anne, in the manner of all occult ladies who dote on worship, possesses that fixed gaze of imminent punishment. Her hair has been in the past coppery red in color. Her vehement fingernails have been known to be long and painted silver. Process members are trained to fawn and grovel at the very thought of her. And, of course, none but the most trusted are ever allowed to see her in person.

Together Robert and Mary Anne DeGrimston formed something called "Compulsions Analysis." The purpose of this group was to study the reasons behind compulsive behavior, to remove the need for such behavior and to set people free from such behavior. A key point in the group was that an individual is totally responsible for his acts, that even birth defects were chosen by an individual, including any characteristics held over from alleged prior lives. Mary Anne was always saying that Jews died in the Nazi camps through free choice.

Their charismatic and diligent efforts created around them a circle of followers, mostly young and perturbed English youth. They specialized in attempting to attract wealthy people, for they charged considerably for trying to find the causes of various neurotic behavior. And the two founders, as they are known, just loved to fly first class and gobble up that hotel room service.

In March of 1966 they secured the lease on a luxury mansion on Balfour Place in the exclusive Mayfair district of London. Twenty- five young followers were required to leave their homes at once and move into the mansion. In addition, they were required to turn over all their money and worldly possessions to, guess who, Bob and Mary Anne.

Mr. and Mrs. DeGrimston encouraged complete emotional dependence from their group of followers. The Founding Couple, as they were called, established themselves in the top apartment of the Balfour Process Palace, to which only the inmost group was admitted.

"When Bob and Mary Anne came down, they descended like gods. She was the resident deity, he her consort." So deposed an acolyte of that era.

Mary Anne DeGrimston took care never to be seen alone, but always as the center of a crowd, always as the magical matriarch. One day, after she and Bobby DeG. moved into the Balfour mansion, they each got a large, vicious Alsatian dog, a variety of German shepherd. Other member puppets also acquired the Alsatians, to the point where a dog pack was assembled.

It was decided to go abroad with the full membership of the burgeoning cult. So, on June 23, 1966, having sent out an advance party to prepare their arrival, Mary, Robert, eighteen Processans and six Alsatian dogs went to Nassau in the Bahamas.

They encountered some difficulty there, so they looked around for a more suitable location for their group. In August of 1966 they secured a large property in Xtul, Mexico, a village of the Gulf of Mexico on the north coast of the Yucatan peninsula, near Merida. There they acquired an estate for $175 a year, which included four miles of seashore, a palm tree jungle, a lagoon and the roofless, gutted, stone remains of a salt factory, plus various wooden huts. It was desolation alley.

Because of the tendency of the DeGrimstons to attract the young sons and daughters of wealthy, aristocratic Englishmen, several parents hired lawyers to attempt to get their children back from Mexico. So in November of 1966, lawyers, representing the parents of converted adepts, Hew to Xtul, Mexico, to bring back several young people. The Sunday Telegraph of London, a newspaper, printed an article entitled: "The Mind Benders of Mayfair," dealing with the return of the youth-pack from the jungle lagoon.

It was at Xtul where the Process got into satanism. Up to then, their "gods" were Lucifer and Jehovah. They added Satan, evil Satan, the god of human sacrifice, bloodshed and rip-off.

At Xtul they coined a word "xtummie," evidently an adjective denoting a satanic state of preparedness. A "good" satanist exists in periods of depravity, periodically "exploding in dynamic action" i.e., cruelty. Oo-ee-oo.
Even though many of the Process members returned to London, some stayed behind or returned to Xtul to continue experiments in the new modes of psychedelic satanism.
The concept of a Process Church was also formed in Xtul. This formative period was recounted to all new converts.

"Xtul ...was a place of revelation. It was a time of revelation. The basic church formed itself at that point," recalled Brother Ely in an interview. The grim experiences of Xtul had more or less divided the Process group. The issue seemed to be whether to proselytize or to become a very inner-directed group. One of their members had inherited a considerable amount of money, so evidently they used about $80,000 of it to buy a yacht in Greece, in order to crisscross the seas in secret comfort between the Mayfair mansion and the Satanic Lagoon in Mexico.


In London, in the spring of 1967, the Process was into fixing up their stately mansion in Mayfair. They had opened up an all-night coffee bar, where they showed art movies to attract the intellectuals. They made forays into the pop field, attempting to attract the Beatles and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. They held lectures, demonstrations, telepathy classes and outdoor soapbox rant sessions in Hyde Park. They opened up a book store. They began to publish expensively produced tracts and philosophical works. They began to put out a magazine called Process that, gradually as the issues oozed out, became more and more murderous. The magazine eulogized Hider, slaughter and carnage, adorning itself occasionally with pictures of battlefield death. Somehow, they managed to attract for a while Marianne Faithful, the singer and actress, into their circles. In Process magazine number 3, they showed Marianne Faithful lying down, holding a rose, as if she were dead. The story goes that Mick Jagger was instrumental in weaning Miss Faithful away from the cult.

In the latter half of 1967, the DeGrimstons seem to have made a tour of the Far East and Turkey.

In October of 1967, perhaps during his travels in the East, Robert DeGrimston recorded or wrote a book called As It Is. On the front page of As It Is is a seven-sentence gibberish plexus, declaring the unification of Christ and Satan, in order to snuff the humanuniverse. It is this:


Christ said: Love thine enemy. Christ's Enemy was Satan and Satan's Enemy was Christ. Through love, enmity is destroyed. Through love, saint and sinner destroy the enmity between them. Through love, Christ and Satan have destroyed their enmity and come together for the End. Christ to judge, Satan to execute the judgment.


They have printed this statement in several of their subsequent publications, although, to soften it a bit, they have added, after the final word "judgment," the words: "Salvation or doom."

The title, As It Is, and the last line of the thirteen-page tract, "So be it," became a sort of hosanna of the cult, which they would repeat over and over to each other when they met each other in the corridor or halls or streets: "As it is, so be it," almost like a "hello" and "good-by."

From Xtul or the Far East or somewhere, DeGrimston and Hecate arrived from their proselytizing travels and the Process celebrated their return by printing a handbill for a meeting called "Christ Has Returned," which was held on November 24, 1967. Shortly there-after, the Process ran into trouble with the police. They kidnapped a recalcitrant follower and zapped him with some shock treatment and/or torture. There was a fall 1967 freak scene, since which Robert DeGrimston and Mary Anne DeGrimston have not been seen in public, except in shuttling anonymously back and forth from airport to airport in their world travels.

From this point forward, it was a go-ye-forth and convert scene. There is a picture published in an issue of their magazine in late '67 showing eleven Processors sitting around a table, dressed in black, all looking intently at their leader Robert DeGrimston aka Christ. A globe of the world sits in the center of the table, perhaps indicating a meeting to plan where on earth to send their cult's spores.

It was the game of the gods. Here is Brother Ely talking:

"The gods set up the game a long time before the players came onto the scene. And part of the way, the gods have set up this game, as if there are certain beings who are the gods (Lucifer, Jehovah, Satan) , beings who are servants of the gods, whether they know it or not, consciously or unconsciously, they serve and do their part. What the Process did was sweep through the whole world and when they went into each area, those beings who were of the gods, those beings who were serving their purpose...those beings that were in the service of the gods came magnetically attracted to the Process in that area. So in going through the world systematically, they've picked up those people who are of the gods, who are servants in the destiny of things. And they've picked those people up. Some stayed with the Church, some were taught, and in that way, the seeds were planted."


The Process had now become firmly subdivided into three groups, the Luciferians, the Satanists and the J ehovans. The Luciferians were of this world; they were fun-Ioving, they celebrated tranquility, harmony, order, peace and sensuality. The Jehovahs were up-tight, narrow-minded, rectitudinous, anti-sex, zealous and austere. They beat each other as punishment and were into self-flagellation according to a girl who once was associated with the group. And Satanists-well, the Satanists were both cold and calculating, and cruel, and violent; they were the goons.

According to his desires, an individual could become an advocate of any of the three. It didn't really matter because all were going to unite at the End-i.e., for the world-wreck.
In late 1967 the Process spores spewed out to America. They also sent a contingent to Germany, always a fertile ground for death-freaks.

The Process, or members of it, visited Los Angeles late in 1967 around the same time as the DeGrimstons sent Process members to San Francisco. In Los Angeles they spent several weeks at a house operated by the Diggers on North Highland just south of Sunset
Boulevard, then they headed north. Meanwhile, an advance party of Jehovans consisting of Father Alban aka Christopher Alfred Fripp and Father Aaron Tubal-Cain, with his dog Lucifer, voyaged to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, arriving in November 1967, just about the time Manson was driving his school bus full of girls toward Hollywood.

Father Aaron, once called Hugh Mountain, had given over a hundred thousand dollars to the Process. He was a founding father. Eager were they to win over the Haight. They visited the offices of the San Francisco Oracle, the underground newspaper of the Haight, wearing their black capes and their black suits and their silver crosses, but were hooted off the set.

Father Alban gave a lecture on the Berkeley campus of the University of California sometime in that fall of 1967. For his lecture, there was an advertisement in the Berkeley campus newspaper. Attending the Process recruiting meeting was a former dental student, Victor Wild, a twenty-seven-year-old dropout from Los Angeles. Wild had been attending dental school in Chicago and had experienced a vision on LSD that involved a Christ-figure telling

Wild to gather up a group of followers and go to California. Later he associated this vision-wraith of Christ with Robert DeGrimston.

He went to San Francisco in 1967 where he found employment servicing artificial kidney machines. He had been graduated in 1964 from UCLA with a degree in zoology.

Evidently Wild lived at 407 Cole Street near Panhandle Park. He was living in a commune where other ripe plums for the Process also lived. He saw the ad for the Process meeting on the Berkeley campus and decided to attend. It was the answer to his prayers.

After the meeting Wild brought Father Alban back to meet the members of his commune on Cole Street. Process members have claimed that Father Alban almost wept at the sight of such a large group of people waiting for the word. He went Jaweh-batty with happiness.

Victor Wild turned over his followers and his possessions including almost a thousand dollars to the Process. In due time, after proper instruction, Wild was renamed Brother Ely.

And no one was as gung-ho for the Process as Victor Wild aka Brother Ely.

In quick order, Processans began to Hood into San Francisco. At first the Process stayed at 407 Cole Street. But they were eager to set up a "processcene"- a center where they might have church "services" and proselytize. The cult acquired a house at 1820 Oak Street where they ate and slept and did their thing. Members would rise at 6 A.M. in silence. There was a morning invocational service of obeisance to Jehovah and Satan. Internal members of the Process wore black robes, silver crosses and what was known as a "Mendez goat," a triangular red magical sign, the goat symbol of Satan, sewn on their cult-capes. As for a church, they located a basement at 2416 Geary Street where they poured pillars and painted the walls red and black and set up lighting as befitting a chapel.

Bob and Hecate sent Luciferans to proselytize in New Orleans, Louisiana. There is indication that the Satanists continued to operate on the beaches of Xtul, Mexico. They tried to incorporate in New Orleans as the Church of the Process of Unification of Christ and Satan, but they weren't allowed to use the name Satan.

Instead at 1:35 P.M. on January 29, 1968, under the name "The Process Church of the Final Judgment," the Process incorporated in New Orleans as a non-profit religious scam. Their address listed on the corporation papers was 1205 Royal Street.

In New Orleans, the Process rented a large house in the French quarter. The eight Luciferans from the London home church, with Alsatian dogs, began to run a coffee house and serve home-made brownies, attempting to relate to the hippie community. One night a week they ran telepathy sessions. They talked about the Gray Forces of moderation which needed to be annihilated. They also talked about some of the Process "work" On the Yucatan peninsula.

There is some indication that while in New Orleans they became interested in voodoo.

In early 1968 Processans left New Orleans for California. Reports from two people, one a former Processan, say that they encountered trouble with the local authorities in New Orleans. In any case they were summoned by Robert and Hecate to San Francisco.
There developed in San Francisco considerable strife between the dope-loving, sensual Luciferans and the austere sexless self-flagellating Jehovans, according to witnesses. There was talk among the Luciferans of gang-banging the "prissy Jehovan bitches." People were accusing one another of being anti-Christ-the ultimate sin in a cult whose leader is thought actually to be Christ.

It was decided by Hecate and Christ to abandon, at least publicly, San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the DeGrimstons were in Los Angeles where they located a real estate operator named Aarons with offices on Robertson Boulevard who showed sympathy for the group. Father Christian aka Jonathan dePeyer claims that it was John Phillips who located Artie Aarons for them and that Phillips, a songwriter and pop singer, offered them aid and comfort.

Once a week the Process would go around and clean up and do repairs and small construction jobs at the various properties owned by Mr. Aarons. In exchange for this work service, the real estate operator agreed to permit the Process the use of a large, two-story house at 188.2 Cochrane in south central Los Angeles. It was a fifteen - to twenty-room house which now is a rest home for the aged. At that time, it was far from a rest home.

One night in early March 1968, DeGrimston called from Los Angeles and gave the Process two days to pack up and come to Los Angeles. Around March 10, 1968, a convoy of seven Process automobiles containing thirty people and fourteen Alsatian dogs journeyed toward Los Angeles. The Process moved into the South Cochrane house with all their dogs and their black turtlenecks and black pants and black capes with pictures of the devil sewn on them.

In the following week they went around to various mansions, cleaning them up, in order to pay for their rent. One such mansion that the Process work group visited while working for Artie Aarons was the John Barrymore mansion, located at 1301 Summit Ridge Drive.

It is a large, four-story mansion located several blocks down the hill from where Roman Polanski rented his house at 1600 Summit Ridge. Early in 1968, a young man from Baton Rouge, Louisiana named Kim was living at 1882 South Cochrane with a few friends of his from Louisiana. He was employed in some capacity by Artie Aarons, the owner of the property at 1882 South Cochrane.

In February of 1968 Lawrence Kim, because of the heavy freakiness-ratio at the house on South Cochrane, got permission from Artie Aarons to move into the so-called John Barrymore mansion at 1301 Summit Ridge Drive, in the Hollywood Hills.

A few days later the Process Church of the Final Judgment moved into the house owned by Artie Aarons on South Cochrane. Kim remembered that Processans would come to see Aarons.

"They were trying to get him to move them over to a Pasadena property he had because it was a lot bigger and they were expecting more of the followers in or something." He already had a caretaker for that property, a woman and her son, so he was loath to turn it over to the Process.

The Process spent some time at the Barrymore mansion, and may have attended parties there for show business personalities. Mr. Aarons did not actually live at the Barrymore property but rented parts of it out, and there were parties aplenty there- In March '68, the Process held public meetings to recruit dupes at the former Digger house on North Highland. They flooded the streets to whisper about the end of the world and to hawk their magazines.

At the time, there were approximately six grades or degrees of status in the Process. The first and lowest was that of acolyte, which was the status of a person just joining up with the group. The next step was that of initiate, which lasted for about six weeks of intensive training for the nascent cultist. The next step was that of messenger, where one acquired his or her cult name. The next step was that of prophet and then priest, and finally the highest rank in the order, that of master.

The cult used the family unit as a model. Those of the degree master were called Father this and Mother that. After a few months of intensive training with the group the Founding Couple (Christ and Hecate) chose a cult name for new converts, such as Sister Sarah or Brother Reuben, and they left their legal names far behind.

Like any cult, information was not shared. Practices of the upper grades were not known by the lower punks. How convenient. It is known that in the early phases of the initiation sexual celibacy is practiced. Further on, however, in the trek toward higher ranks, all sorts of bunch-punchings take place. At one stage the Processans are required to enter into a prolonged worship of Satan, involving satanic ceremonies and blood sacrifice. They engage in various telepathy meditation sessions and are into psychometry, a form of group telepathy. They sit in a circle and exchange personal objects in order to scan each others' personal vibes and to communicate via telepathy.

Mary Anne liked giving rings to people for the psychometric effect-a practice used by Manson, who once gave Dean Martin's daughter a ring at Dennis Wilson's beachhouse.
Every night at midnight the inner Processans hold a worship service for Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer. Twice a month on Wednesday nights, the Processans sit in a circle and summon the gods Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer, who talk through the mouths of the cult members. 

Oo-ee-oo.

Their vicious Alsatian dog-pack accompanied the group. It is interesting to note that the dogs were considered members of the group and were given special names and even oaths to bind them to the group. They pimped the psychedelic merchants. For instance, the Brother Joshua and Brother Reuben, a recent convert from New Orleans, came into a psychedelic shop on North Cherokee called Stick It in Your Ear and tried to convert the proprietor, Ron Mathes. They backed off when they discovered he was a practicing Gurdjieffan.

Doubtless you ask, what publications were they hawking on the streets of Los Angeles? The main publication at that time was issue number 4 of the Process magazine, the so-called "sex" issue, which depicted on its front cover a ceremony involving an inverted cross and a naked girl upon an altar surrounded by hooded snuffoids, one bearing what appears to be a sword. In another part of the front cover a long-haired young man raising a sword is walking across a beach or a desert toward the full moon, perhaps a reference to Process full-moon beach ceremonies. On the back cover of the Process magazine a large winged skeleton is hovering atop a mound of shrieking suffering naked bodies evidently dead or in hell. Inside the magazine contained a hodgepodge series of articles about sex, an article about black masses and corpse violation, and various pain-streaked items of confused writing.

One place that spring where the Process distributed their literature was at the Omnibus Restaurant on North LaCienega Boulevard. A lot of the bikers that later associated with Manson hung out there. Rick, "a biker," brought in Process material to the Omnibus. Rick
worked at a Shell station on Sunset across from Whiskey A Go-Go. The Process tried to deal with the Satan-oriented bike groups but had to be content with stirring them up. One girl associated with the cult then said this: "They tried, you know, getting them [the bikers] to come to meetings and you just can't do nothing with a motorcycle rider. So they decided to use them and it would be easier to sort of incite them and get them to do what they wanted done. That is the thing, you know, figuring they were the forces of Satan. "

They, or at least Brother Ely, had great visions of the bikers becoming Process assault squads. Sound like Manson?

"When it really gets going, we'll have a mobile conversion unit with messengers in jack boots on black Harleys, wearing black leather jackets with the Process symbol [ an inverted swastika] in studs on the front and the cross in studs on the back." This is what a dropout from the Process says that Brother Ely told him in the summer of 1968, following the breakup of Process activities in Los Angeles.

It was the message of the unity of Christ and Satan that Manson grooved with. "Christ and Satan through love dissolved the enmity that existed between them and the unity of Christ and Satan is what the process is all about. They've come together to usher in the end of the world," said Brother Ely to a reporter from an English occult magazine.

The unification of Christ and Satan is exactly what Manson was getting into at that time, when the family was roaming Hollywood in the black bus. The Process decided to make it big in the entertainment business, so they formed a rock and roll group called The Black Swan. Some Process members claim that the rock group was actually called the Voice of the Process. The Black Swan consisted of Brother Joshua on guitar-Brother Joshua had been in a pop group in London for quite a while-and Brother Benedict, the satanist, on drums. Brother Ely on flute and Brother Bamabas on string bass. Says Father Ely: "Brother Barnabas was a really good string bass player. You know, he was doing lounge shows in Las Vegas. Very professional bass player.

"We never made much money. We used to pass the hat. Sometimes we'd get a couple of bucks, but that's about all." The Black Swan, the world's only rock group that believed in human sacrifice, at least publicly, would play in various clubs and bars, generally filling in between the main acts.

"We went into a biker bar one time. They took up a collection for us. They really liked us," said flutist Ely. The biker bar was on Sunset Boulevard near the Strip.
The Process sought out rich and successful people. Father Christian of the Process has claimed, for instance, that the Process managed, in addition to John Phillips, to meet Warren Beatty and Cass Elliott. To understand this phenomenon, all anybody has to do is create a hit record or a successful film and watch the money-grubbing psychopaths come aswanning.

They approached Terry Melcher right around the time Melcher was meeting and grooving with Manson at Dennis Wilson's house on Sunset Boulevard.

It is known that the Process tried to make an appointment to see Joey Bishop who then had a talk show on ABC-TV. It is interesting to note that there was an employee of the Joey Bishop show living at the Barrymore mansion at the time the Process was above ground in Los Angeles.

The Process members, most of whom were English citizens, had been allowed into the United States on three-month visitor's permits. Apparently they tried to get permission to stay by saying that they were students of the Church of Scientology. There was talk about a $100,000 bond that the group was going to have to put up in order to stay in the country.

In the third week of May 1968, the U.S. Immigration office in Los Angeles forwarded the Process rues to New York for deportation proceedings.

At the house on South Cochrane they scraped possessions together and held a garage sale to raise money. Artie Aarons, the owner of the house, complained that they sold some of his stuff also in the sale. They moved out. Some of them seem to have gone to New York to work on their immigration problems. There was talk of going to Toronto.

Others went into hiding. Some may have been staying at the Barrymore mansion on Summit Ridge when the vicious dogs went after Roman Polanski.

On Monday, June 5, an official for the Church of Scientology - evidently an English citizen went to apply for an immigration permit to the United States. The scientology official's application was refused because "Twelve members of the Church of the Process of Scientology" had been ordered to leave the country by June and supposedly had fled the set. The Church of Scientology waxed miffed and evidently made attempts to locate the Process because as long as the Process got away with posing as scientologists, things would be grim for scientologists trying to come to America.

It is possible that the Process had a baleful influence on Sirhan Sirhan since Sirhan is known, in the spring of '68, to have frequented clubs in Hollywood in the same turf as the Process was proselytizing. Sirhan was very involved in occult pursuits. He has talked several times subsequent to Robert Kennedy's death about an occult group from London which he knew about and which he really wanted to go to London to see.

There was one Process member named Lloyd who was working as a chef for one of the large Los Angeles hotels, either the Ambassador or the Sheraton. Lloyd was around fifty years old and was always complaining of the penurious life of the Jehovans while Bob and Hecate cruised the world in jet comfort.

It is probably a coincidence that Sirhan seems to have visited a friend who worked in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel the day before he shot Senator Kennedy. Sometime in mid or late June, the Process was holding internal meetings at a Hollywood motel. Some people interviewed claim that the gatherings were public recruiting meetings for new followers. But others say it was for internal Process members only. The motel may have been the Yucca Motel, a known Process haunt on Hollywood Boulevard. This may have been the motel where Robert DeGrimston caused a Process member to freak out and require sedation, merely by being in the same hotel as the member. It will be remembered that the ace selling point of the Process, besides being the "chosen few," was that DeGrlmston was Jesus Christ snuffing the world. The DeGrimstons were never seen by the underlings of the cult. Cult members were expected to have the attitude of fawning dogs wetting in fear.

This is what our trusty informant tells us about the event: "They were not allowed to see Robert because they were on the bottom floor of this one hotel and he was on the top floor and they were just all shaking and crying because he was so powerful. One of the men happened to see him and just ran back into the room and had hysterics and they had to sedate him: "We discovered the Process group staying in a Hollywood motel... and reported it to immigration authorities," said Reverend Gordon Mustain, a Deputy Guardian of the Church of Scientology.

Some sort of raid ensued but the wily Processans had already hit the bricks. Some members of the Process, including Robert and Mary Anne DeGrimston, went to New York, where they set up a church there for a while. Others went underground and traveled north to San Francisco and to the Santa Cruz Mountains and evidently to King City and points here and there. Their subsequent activities will be recounted later.

Brother Ely aka Victor Wild went to San Francisco and then to San Jose, where he opened up a leather shop and became rich.



This chapter was omitted after the first edition press of Ed Sanders' book "The Family" due to a lawsuit by The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. Copyright 1971.

WTC Steel



"Evidence that this cover-up was continued by NIST is provided by its treatment of a provocative finding reported by FEMA, which was that some of the specimens of steel were 
“rapidly corroded by sulfidation” 
(FEMA 2002, Appendix C). 

This report is significant, because sulfidation is an effect of explosives. FEMA appropriately called for further investigation of this finding, which the New York Times called 
“perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation” 

(Killough-Miller, 2002). 

A closely related problem, expressed shortly after 9/11 by Dr.Jonathan Barnett, Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is that 

“[f]ire and the structural damage . . . would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated” 


(Glanz, 2001). 

But the NIST report, in its section headed “Learning from the Recovered Steel,” fails even to mention either evaporation or sulfidation. Why would the NIST scientists apparently share Mayor Bloomberg’s disdain for empirical studies of recovered steel? 

One more possibly relevant fact is that then Mayor Rudy Giuliani, talking on ABC News about his temporary emergency command center at 75 Barkley Street, said: 

"We were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse, and it did collapse before we could get out of the building."

This is an amazing statement. Prior to 9/11, fire had never brought down a steel-frame high-rise. The firemen who reached the 78th floor of the south tower certainly did not believe it was going to collapse. Even the 9/11 Commission reported that to its knowledge,

“none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible”
(Kean and Hamilton, 2004, p. 302). 

So why would anyone have told Giuliani that at least one of the towers was about to collapse?

The most reasonable answer, especially in light of the new evidence, is that someone knew that explosives had been set in the south tower and were about to be discharged. It is even possible that the explosives were going to be discharged earlier than originally planned because the fires in the south tower were dying down more quickly than expected, because so much of the plane’s jet fuel had burned up in the fireball outside the building

This could explain why although the south tower was struck second, suffered less structural damage, and had smaller fires, it collapsed first---after only 56 minutes. That is, if the official story was going to be that the fire caused the collapse, the building had to be brought down before the fire went completely out.

We now learn from the oral histories, moreover, that Giuliani is not the only one who was told that a collapse was coming. At least four of the testimonies indicate that shortly before the collapse of the south tower, the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) had predicted the collapse of at least one tower. The director of OEM reported directly to Giuliani.

So although Giuliani said that he and others “were told” that the towers were going to collapse, it was his own people who were doing the telling.

As New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer has pointed out, the 9/11 Commission had access to the oral histories.[64] It should have discussed these facts, but it did not.

The neglect of most of the relevant facts about the collapses, manifested by The 9/11 Commission Report, was continued by the NIST Report, which said, amazingly:

"The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the "probable collapse sequence," although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached. . . . [Our simulation treats only] the structural deterioration of each tower from the time of aircraft impact to the time at which the building . . . was poised for collapse"
(80n, 140).

Steven Jones comments, appropriately:

"What about the subsequent complete, rapid and symmetrical collapse of the buildings? . . . What about the antenna dropping first in the North Tower? What about the molten metal observed in the basement areas . . . ? Never mind all that: NIST did not discuss at all any data after the buildings were “poised for collapse.” Well, some of us want to look at all the data, without computer simulations that are “adjusted” to make them fit the desired outcome." 

(Jones, 2006)


Cargo-747 Crash Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan 29th April 2013



Kara Milovy: You were fantastic! We're free!

Timothy Dalton: Kara, we're inside a Russian airbase in the middle of Afghanistan...

Though there were no indications of a rebellious activity near the area, the US National Transportation Safety Board and the Afghanistan Civil Aviation Authority are conducting their investigation on what caused the plane crash.


National Air Cargo, the carrier of the cargo plane, released a press statement regarding the accident on their web site and it reads:

"A National Airlines B747-400 cargo plane was involved in an accident at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan oday. At approximately 7 a.m. EST, National Flight NCR102 from Bagram to Dubai, UAE with seven rewmembers on board crashed on takeoff. None of the crew members survived. This was a purely cargo flight and no passengers were aboard. Cargo consisted of vehicles and routine general cargo."

National Airlines President Glen Joerger assured that they will cooperate with the investigation in determining the cause of the plane crash. "Safety is always our top priority at National Airlines. This is a devastating loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with our crewmembers and their families," Joerger stated.

"Our focus at this time is on the family members of those we've lost and on assisting the NTSB and Afghanistan Civil Aviation Authority in their investigations. As of now, the cause of the accident is unknown," the National Airlines President further added.