PART FIVE: LaRouche's Private CIA

"Every conspiracy collapses eventually, because . . . of the psychological likelihood that those who are superlatively clever at deceiving others become equally clever at deceiving themselves. Disinformation eats those who create it."

--ROBERT ANTON WILSON

Chapter Eighteen

The Billion-Dollar Brain

When indicted for obstruction of justice in 1987, LaRouche was well prepared. He had hired Bernard Fensterwald, Washington's premier attorney for wayward spooks. In addition to denying the charges outright, LaRouche and his codefendants decided to use the "CIA defense" as other Fensterwald clients (such as Edwin Wilson, the rogue agent who smuggled arms to Libya) had done. The argument went as follows: We thought we were operating on behalf of the government on instructions from high-level CIA officials. But dishonest elements in the CIA set us up, and now we are being hung out to dry. We can prove this to the jury if only the judge will order the CIA to turn over the relevant documents. The prosecution's response was to depict the LaRouchians' intelligence community ties as nonexistent. It argued that three nobodies from Reading, Pennsylvania, had pretended to be CIA agents to get consulting work from LaRouche. These hoaxsters simply invented government sources and wrote fictitious reports out of thin air.

The Reading trio did indeed operate a scam. However, the LaRouchians had a history of extensive dealings with the intelligence community dating back over a decade, entirely apart from this. The NCLC first offered its services to the CIA in 1976. A longtime CIA contract agent subsequently became LaRouche's security adviser and meetings with several retired high-level CIA officials took place. By the early 1980s the LaRouchians enjoyed a wide range of contacts at the CIA, the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former chief of the code-breaking National Security Agency and a consummate intelligence professional, received a steady flow of reports from the LaRouche organization while serving as CIA deputy director in 1981-83, He met personally with Lyn and Helga LaRouche in a little house on F Street in Washington to discuss West Germany's peace movement. After leaving the CIA to head an electronics firm, he talked frequently on the phone with LaRouche security staffers, who regarded him as their "rabbi" and hoped that someday he would become CIA director. Former LaRouche security aide Charles Tate, in his testimony as a prosecution witness in Boston, described taking the incoming calls from Inman to security chief Jeff Steinberg. Tate also claims to have chatted with Inman personally. (Inman's version is that he was merely the victim of a constant bombardment of phone calls from Steinberg, whom he did his best to evade. He believes the LaRouchians were attempting to use him to "establish their importance.")

Dr. Norman Bailey, senior NSC director of international economic affairs, met several times with the LaRouchians in 1982-83, including at least three times with LaRouche. After leaving the NSC he told NBC-TV that LaRouche had "one of the best private intelligence services in the world." Some people suggested Bailey was naive, but he qualifies as a specialist in international politics as well as economics. Brought into the NSC by Richard Allen, he had some acquaintance with the world of covert operations. In the mid-1970s he acted as a supposed business consultant in the Azores when the CIA was preparing for a separatist coup if Portugal went Communist. As a scholar, one of his chief interests was political cultism. He wrote on the role of Opus Dei (a right-wing Catholic society that practices flagellation) in fighting communism in the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world. And certainly Bailey was well aware of the extremism of the LaRouchians, having sued them in the mid-1970s when they accused him of being a "fascist."

Richard Morris, executive assistant to Judge William Clark when the latter was President Reagan's National Security Adviser, met with LaRouche several times, and with LaRouche aides on numerous other occasions. He set up meetings for LaRouche with other top NSC officials, including Dr. Ray Pollock. Such meetings could not have taken place without Clark's approval.

In the mid-1970s the LaRouchians tried to cultivate General Daniel Graham, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and General George Keegan, former chief of Air Force intelligence. LaRouche's ideology put them off, but they both recall his followers as being remarkably well informed. Graham cited an instance when the LaRouchians provided sensitive information on Angola and Mozambique that was unavailable from normal sources. Keegan noted their uncanny nose for the latest military technology.

LaRouche also impressed some European intelligence officials. Brigadier General Paul-Albert Scherer, former chief of counterintelligence for the West German armed forces, recalled in a 1987 speech how intelligence experts in the late 1970s were "amazed at his connections and his access to special information on terrorism, the drug scene, the intelligence services themselves, and on the details of developments in the East bloc countries and in the Middle East." Scherer said that when the LaRouchians asked him to work with them, he checked with "friendly intelligence circles" (apparently the CIA) to see if this would pose security risks. "The fact that I did take [the LaRouchians] up, and can speak publicly about it here, says enough," he pointed out.

Through the years the LaRouchians developed a reputation among investigative reporters as well as intelligence mavens for their access to occasionally stunning pieces of information. The best illustration is Executive Intelligence Review's scoop on important aspects of the Iran-Contra affair in the spring of 1986, many months before the major media learned about it from a Lebanese daily. An EIR special report asserted in March that a journalist and National Security Council consultant named Michael Ledeen had visited Israel to negotiate a "massive expansion of Israeli arms sales" to unnamed "U.S. allies" whom the Reagan administration "feared to openly arm." Two months later, EIR predicted that a major scandal would soon break, implicating "the U.S. State Department, high Pentagon officials, top figures within the Israeli defense and intelligence establishment, and the Soviet government--in the arming of Ayatollah Khomeini's war machine...." The article provided three key names: Yaacov Nimrodi, an arms dealer and former Israeli military attaché to Iran under the Shah; Al Schwimmer, founding president of Israel Aircraft Industries; and Cyrus Hashemi, a New York-based Iranian banker.

Except for the reference to the Soviets, this was close to the target. The major media belatedly confirmed in November and December that Israeli involvement in the affair resulted from a 1985 meeting between Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Michael Ledeen, and that Schwimmer and Nimrodi acted as the key Israeli intermediaries. As to Hashemi, it turned out that he had participated in early discussions with Iranian middleman Manucher Ghorbanifar and General Richard Secord's business partner, Albert Hakim. (In July 1986, Hashemi died under mysterious circumstances. U.S. Senate investigators have speculated that he was murdered because he knew too much.)

The NCLC's intelligence-gathering prowess of the mid-1980s was the fruit of hundreds of members working at it devotedly for over ten years. LaRouche had first raised the idea of an NCLC intelligence arm in meetings with his top aides in 1971. He proposed that it be set up "along the lines of a 'desk' organization of a major national newsweekly." What eventually emerged was a highly profitable weekly newsmagazine, a global spider’s web of confidential sources, and one of the world's largest collections of private political files and dossiers, compiled through novel but effective snooping tactics.

By 1976 the NCLC had established a smoothly functioning intelligence headquarters in New York, with branches in several European and Latin American cities. Three interlocking units emerged: the intelligence division proper, which mostly did telephone research and monitored the foreign press; the science unit, which operated out of separate offices through the Fusion Energy Foundation; and the security staff, which worked on sensitive matters such as the harassment of LaRouche's opponents.

The intelligence division was designed by NCLC member Uwe Henke von Parpart, a former West German naval cadet who claimed to have worked at NATO headquarters in the 1960s. In its early years it was more like a spoof of a government spy agency. The various "sectors" and "files" representing different regions of the world were crammed into a three-floor complex in a factory building on West Twenty-ninth Street in Manhattan. It was a rabbit warren of shabby offices, such as the "Southern Cone" room, where LaRouche disciples pored over newspapers from Argentina and Chile. When I visited in 1977, dozens of young people in rummage-sale clothing sat hunched over WATS line phones amidst a surrealistic clatter of the telex machine and typewriters. There was a smog-like atmosphere from chain smoking. When an ashtray became full, the contents were simply dumped on the floor. No one had swept up in days. The bathrooms were also in a state of neglect, and the walls were devoid of any decoration. One sensed that the members were so intent on their political tasks that they didn't even notice their surroundings.

The intelligence division was supposed to function with Parpart's Prussian efficiency. Each morning the sector heads deployed their underlings on the basis of instructions from the National Executive Committee. Many of them spent long hours on the phone with news reporters, government officials, Wall Street experts, or college professors to "profile" their thinking and pick up tips. A report on each conversation was filed and cross-filed for future use. Other members clipped newspaper articles, prepared translations from European papers, or conducted searches of the already voluminous files. The more enterprising scooted uptown to the New York Public Library to research the pedigrees of British aristocrats. The result was worked up as daily sector reports and further distilled into the daily "briefing" on the world situation, which was given final approval at the NEC meeting held each evening in the "war room" (a small conference room with a shabby carpet). The text of the briefing was turned over to the communications sector to be telexed overnight to all regional and overseas offices, so that a copy would be in the hands of every LaRouchian in the world the next day. "The ferocity with which they pursue intelligence is almost beyond the ken of outsiders," said a former NCLC security staffer, who described the organization as a "cult of intelligence."

Some defectors have said that LaRouche's brainwashing was what kept them in the offices twelve to sixteen hours a day. In part this was true. Members also endured a certain amount of psychological bullying from martinet types in the leadership. But many NCLC members had fun playing spook. LaRouche gave them titles like "intelligence officer," "sector chief" and "counterintelligence director." He told them they were part of a secret elite that would ultimately--indeed, soon--be called on to save the nation. Security staffers could thus imagine a five-minute phone conversation with a Pentagon public affairs officer as being Stage One of the global triumph of Neoplatonic humanism. They developed an extraordinary persistence and chutzpah: They would keep calling and calling a selected military officer or Wall Street banker until he agreed to talk to them.

The national intelligence staff's work was supplemented in a somewhat less organized fashion by the regional NCLC staffs, which sent to New York daily telex reports regarding their local organizing and snooping. When I asked a LaRouche aide in 1978 about the policies of the White House Office of Drug Abuse Policy, he referred me to an Ohio NCLC member, who had detailed information about the role of drug experts close to the administration in lobbying for a drug decriminalization bill in the Ohio legislature. The Ohio NCLC member referred me to a top Cincinnati police official, who confirmed the story and was as impressed with the LaRouchians' information as I was--he had gone to Columbus at their urging to lobby against the bill (When I checked the story with the bill's sponsor, I found it was all true, and more.)

In 1974 three NCLC members incorporated the New Solidarity International Press Service (NSIPS), and the various LaRouchian intelligence offices in the United States and overseas were renamed as NSIPS news bureaus. This provided light journalistic cover--press passes and easy access to officials who otherwise might not have given them the time of day. The NSIPS invested in a telex network to link its offices and began publishing an intelligence newsletter to supplement the NCLC's New Solidarity. From the outset, this cost millions of dollars a year, and where LaRouche obtained start-up capital of this magnitude has never been adequately explained. As the money poured in, the newsletter was turned into Executive Intelligence Review, an attractively printed weekly newsmagazine along the lines envisioned by LaRouche in 1971. The NCLC intelligence director, Nick Syvriotis (real name Criton Zoakos), took the title of EIR editor-in-chief, and the various intelligence division sector chiefs became the EIR intelligence "directors" in their respective areas.

Field research was done by NCLC organizers (like the young man in Ohio) and by reporters for LaRouche publications. NSIPS gained White House press accreditation during the Ford administration, and both Carter and Reagan repeatedly took questions from them at presidential press conferences. EIR reporters sought interviews with public figures (and, even more important, with obscure experts) all over the world. The publication opened news bureaus in major foreign capitals, eventually establishing bureaus in thirteen cities from Bangkok to Stockholm that collected news as busily as their mainstream media competitors.

The effect was incremental. By the early 1980s, LaRouche operatives had been working the phones seven days a week for almost ten years, calling hundreds of contacts a day from New York headquarters and the regional and overseas offices. They had conducted hundreds of face-to-face interviews a year with influential people in Washington and around the world. Winnowing through this mass of names and faces, they had found individuals who, either because of naiveté, vanity, closet-fascist proclivities, or most often simply a desire to trade information, became part of the ''briefing network"--a list that was phoned regularly for exchanges of gossip on a first-name basis.

Meanwhile, the security staff made thousands of undercover phone calls to the "enemy": left-wing activists, liberal Democratic Party politicians, and Jewish leaders. The reports on the most fruitful phone calls were filed away in what the LaRouchians called "raw and semi-finished files." Snippets of information from these files could then be traded with police detectives, investigative reporters, scholars, the Ku Klux Klan, and European and Third World intelligence agencies.

The LaRouche organization's effectiveness was not just a result of collecting masses of data. It also was a matter of intelligence analysis. Even prior to the Reagan administration, EIR developed an underground reputation on Wall Street and among some government people for its maverick focus on important issues which the major media were ignoring, such as beam weapons research and the international "debt bomb." Sooner or later LaRouche twisted every analysis to fit into his anti-Semitic worldview, but the original groundwork retained its validity, and EIR staff writers were skilled at keeping factual analysis and propaganda separate when necessary. LaRouche had launched his organization in the late 1960s by recruiting from the best and brightest on elite college campuses and among well-educated upper-class youth in Europe and Latin America, They might not have been streetwise, but they were probably smarter in an iconoclastic academic sense than their civil service counterparts at the CIA. They read a wide range of foreign languages, thereby giving the organization access to news reports generally unavailable to anyone outside the intelligence community or academic research institutes. They also knew how to squeeze the last clue out of research library special collections. Several possessed, like LaRouche himself, acute analytic minds. NEC member Fernando Quijano produced "The Coming Bloodbath in Chile," a 1972 New Solidarity article that explained with compelling logic how and why Salvador Allende would be overthrown. David Goldman and other members contributed research in the late 1970s on the IMF and the "debt bomb" which LaRouche synthesized into Operation Juarez, a report designed to influence government officials and economists throughout Latin America. In the midst of the Falklands war in 1982, Uwe Parpart produced an analysis of Argentina's strategic blunders (based in part on Argentine government sources) that was far superior to the mainstream media's coverage.

According to LaRouche, revenues from EIR sales and other NSIPS activities reached $4 million in 1979. This presumably included EIR's subscribers paying $396 for their annual subscriptions, (Some members of the briefing network received it free.) LaRouche was out to develop a select readership rather than mass circulation. EIR served basically as a come-on for more expensive spin-off products such as book-length special reports ($250 each), the weekly Confidential Alert ($3,500 a year), secret reports for individual clients (upwards of $10,000), and annual retainer services (whatever the traffic would bear). LaRouche's West German organization launched the weekly Middle East Insider, which boasted of "reports from the Middle East and North Africa that no one else dares to publish."

The NCLC intelligence division would have been impressive enough if it had been simply a United States-based operation. However LaRouche operatives overseas worked just as hard to build up briefing networks and compile their own files and dossiers, to which New York headquarters had full access.

In the early 1960s LaRouche had aspired to found a Fifth International to replace the Trotskyist Fourth International. What he ended up building was the International Caucus of Labor Committees (ICLC), a network including the NCLC, the Mexican Labor Party, the North American Labor Party (today the Party for the Commonwealth of Canada, dedicated to dumping Queen Elizabeth as ceremonial head of state), the Andean Labor Party with branches in Peru and Colombia, and the European Labor Party with branches in Italy, France, West Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, The combined membership outside the United States is probably no more than 1,000, yet these foreign LaRouchians are, like their American counterparts, talented, educated, and well funded. Each member organization has, like the NCLC, an electoral arm, propaganda organs, and local fund-raising sources. Each also has plenty of corporate shells and private bank accounts into which funds from the United States, brought over by courier, can disappear without a trace. Finally, each has its own intelligence division (the local EIR "bureau") which develops information-trading relationships with the local police and military, thus multiplying the amount of information available to the NCLC intelligence division whenever it is preparing a confidential report to impress some CIA or other government official.

Especially important is the Wiesbaden intelligence command center. Wiesbaden is the headquarters of the European Labor Party, and LaRouche has a villa nearby. Already in the early 1970s the ELP's German contingent began to cultivate military and intelligence officials. Defectors say that LaRouche aides met with the late Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's Eastern Front military intelligence chief, who, after the war, founded the BND, West Germany's version of the CIA, and staffed it largely with former SS officers. Gehlen was already retired from the spy business when he met with the LaRouchians. He reportedly found them still too leftwing to be taken seriously. According to Charles Allen, a well-known writer on Nazi war criminals and German revanchism, the LaRouchians had more success with the BND after their swing to the right. They also nuzzled up to military counterintelligence, which was headed in the mid-1970s by General Scherer, who would become, after his retirement, a close personal friend of LaRouche.

The director of LaRouche's German intelligence staff, Anno Hellenbroich, is the younger brother of Heribert Hellenbroich, chief of West Germany's Federal Bureau of Constitutional Protection (BfV) from 1981 to 1985. The BfV, West Germany's equivalent of the FBI, supposedly watches extremist groups but removed the LaRouche organization from its list. Heribert told Der Spiegel that it wasn't extremist enough and besides, Anno had assured him it was not anti-Semitic.

From its inception the European Labor Party concentrated much of its energy on tracking, compiling dossiers on, and harassing politicians in Germany and Scandinavia who were critics of U.S. policy or advocates of Ostpolitik. They conducted a smear campaign against former Chancellor Willy Brandt, putting up posters depicting him in a Nazi storm trooper uniform with a swastika prominently displayed. (Brandt sued them and won.)

In 1982-83 the ELP went after Petra Kelly, leader of Germany's Green Party and a strong advocate of removing U.S. missiles from German soil. Various smear articles called her a Communist, a terrorist, and sexually promiscuous. An article entitled "Did You See This Whore on Television?" described her alleged affairs with married men. She sued the LaRouchians for libel in New York federal court. Her attorney, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, said the LaRouchians had engaged in a "vicious campaign that made it difficult for her to appear in public. The campaign became physical at times. They cornered her on a train, they shoved her grandmother around....They abused her most fundamental rights of privacy, dignity, physical integrity, and reputation."

The LaRouchians also built up a strong intelligence apparatus in Paris, where the head of the ELP branch was Jacques Cheminade, a former Foreign Ministry official. In 1984 the Paris ELP publicly disclosed a classified French cabinet memo discussing possible links between the LaRouchians and the KGB. The disclosure created a minor flap over government security, since the memo had been distributed to fewer than a dozen top French officials. Whoever leaked it had to have access to a wide range of government secrets. (According to a CIA memorandum on file in Boston federal court, LaRouche had boasted of his French presidential palace sources at a meeting at CIA headquarters a year before this incident.)

LaRouche came to regard himself as a spymaster of the highest skill. In a 1979 report he rated nine of the world's major intelligence services, distinguishing between what they really know and what they report to their nation's leaders. (In his view, which is probably accurate, spy agencies always withhold information from their own government leaders.) He claimed to take into account not just official agencies such as the CIA and the KGB, but each nation's total intelligence capability, "a mixture of private, official, and semi-official institutions," implicitly suggesting that the NCLC should be considered part of the team. He placed the NCLC's three great "enemies"--Great Britain, Israel, and the Swiss bankers--at the top in terms of quality of knowledge. In terms of quality of information released, he rated the United States at the bottom. Apparently he was suggesting a pressing need for his services and was petulant that the CIA was not reciprocating his flow of reports.

LaRouche tried to instill in NCLC members a sense of superiority over the CIA and other government intelligence agencies. He boasted that the NCLC often outperforms "those poor, plodding philistines, with their morose sense of a careerist's sort of duty, and their hunt-and-peck methods of deduction." The CIA thinks "arithmetically," but the NCLC reasons "geometrically." In general, CIA agents lack culture, A proper intelligence agent should be steeped in poetry, because intelligence is poetry. Agents should be "trained in Kepler, Leibnitz, Monge, Carnal, and the methods of Alexander von Humboldt’s protégés at Berlin and Göttingen...Greek classics, music...."

LaRouche's most revealing article on espionage is couched in the form of a short story, "The Day the Bomb Went Off." On the surface, it is intended to indoctrinate his followers in cultish views, and the hero is LaRouche himself. But on a deeper level the story is a satire that pokes fun at its author, his associates, his epistemology, the CIA, and the entire zany world of espionage. Whether or not the satire is entirely conscious is anyone's guess, but like LaRouche's writings on brainwashing, it suggests he cannot be dismissed as a paranoid kook in the grip of uncontrollable compulsions. Inside LaRouche there is certainly a mind of extraordinary cunning, laughing at all the suckers and even at himself.

The story depicts an imaginary crisis facing the NCLC intelligence division. The security staff hears on the radio that a bomb threat has been received by the Chicago Sun-Times and that its offices have been evacuated. They call the Chicago police, nothing. They call the Federal Emergency Management Agency, nothing. They call each other, nothing. Then they call LaRouche. No one gives him a single fact to go on, but he uses his famous "hypothesis of the higher hypothesis": "Let us assume," he says, puffing on his pipe, "there is a suspect who signed a blackmail note....Let's assume he's a talented technologist...." LaRouche goes on to infer that this villain is suffering from "megalomania" and is "trying to reorder world events with the aid of some clever sort of infernal machine." Confirmation of LaRouche's theory comes weeks later, in the form of subtle inferences from a remark by a CIA cutout to a LaRouche aide in Washington. Not only was LaRouche right, but also Henry Kissinger was involved!