PART SIX: The Security Staff

"Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things."

--C.S. LEWIS

Chapter Twenty-three

The School of Dirty Tricks

Every totalitarian movement needs a special cadre for secret, illegal, and often violent activities. Heinrich Himmler and his SS played this role for the Nazis during their rise to power in the early 1930s. Depending on circumstances, such a cadre may organize assassinations, rob banks, infiltrate the police, or carry out a variety of tasks aimed at protecting the movement and weakening the enemy's will.

When the NCLC shifted into a fascist mode in the mid-1970s, there was no class warfare raging in American streets. Hence what LaRouche needed as his special cadre were not storm trooper types but clever operatives skilled in primarily nonviolent covert activities, especially of the dirty tricks variety. To meet this need he set up a unit of "counterintelligence agents"--the NCLC security staff (referred to as "Security" by insiders).

In a 1974 memorandum LaRouche explained the "psychological profile" of a good Security operative and how such a person can be controlled. This was ostensibly a discussion of CIA agents, but the description bore an uncanny resemblance to the elite security unit that LaRouche had already begun to create within the NCLC. Agent types, he wrote, are recruited out of university humanities and social studies programs "traditionally free of the obligation to demonstrate anything concerning reality in the outer world." (LaRouche recruited his original cadre among such students, chiefly at Columbia University.) For such individuals the CIA becomes an extension of academia where they can achieve "a sense of power without leaving the home and playground for the actual adult world." The typical agent thus lacks any "inner identity" except his dependence on the CIA. He is highly "suggestible" and plagued by "superstitious fears." Easily manipulated by arbitrary phrases and formulas, he has many features in common with a "synthetic zombie."

Of course this description bore little, if any, resemblance to real CIA agents, but it did fit the NCLC as a cult and the type of tricksters LaRouche needed for his security work-individuals who could totally immerse themselves in petty forms of intrigue in obedience to his will. Indeed, those he placed in charge of Security reflected the profile perfectly.

Security began in 1973-73 as a small karate-trained team to protect NCLC members from alleged Communist Party bullying. It organized Operation Mop Up and began stockpiling weapons, but soon turned away from any truly risky confrontations with the outside world. It was far safer to harass LaRouche's enemies from a safe range via smear leaflets, anonymous telephone calls, and legal frame-ups.

In the wake of the Chris White affair, Security took on the functions of an internal secret police. It watched members for signs of disaffection and harassed any dropout who publicly attacked the organization or tried to get others to leave. The members of Security developed a vested interest in discovering plots everywhere: The more assassins and other enemies they could report to LaRouche, the more power and prestige they gained. Former member Dan Jacobs writes that they effected a kind of "coup" within the organization, with LaRouche's blessings. Jacobs described this as the NCLC's "Thermidor Reaction."

NCLC organizational director Warren Hamerman defined Security's mission in 1976 as being "to detect and investigate enemy deployments against the organization, and to plan and execute offensive counterthrusts." The counterthrusts, generally called "counterpunch deployments," included attacks on public figures whom LaRouche accused of being part of the conspiracy against him, as well as genuine opponents such as journalists or rival extremist organizations.

For years Security operated behind a reinforced steel door and bulletproof glass in the NCLC's Columbus Circle headquarters. The two Security chiefs, Jeffrey Steinberg and Paul Goldstein, maintained daily contact with regional Security officers in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities.

Members of Security were responsible for the NCLC's earliest propaganda attacks on Israel and the "Zionist lobby." Major General John K. Singlaub, after several visits from them in 1977, told The New York Times they were "the worst group of anti-Semitic Jews I've encountered." Former members say that Jewish Security staffers went out of their way to display the most fanatical loyalty-and engage in the nastiest harassment of outsiders-because they never knew for sure if they were really trusted by LaRouche and his top non-Jewish aides. Former Security staffer Charles Tate, a prosecution witness in the Boston trial, testified he never dared question NCLC policy in the presence of Steinberg and Goldstein. "They don't understand doubt. It's not a category that exists for them....So you just don't--unless you want to get in a lot of trouble, you don't say 'I don't believe that'...to those people."

Security's duties included providing bodyguards and servants for Lyn and Helga. When the couple moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx in the late 1970s, Security staffers were assigned to sit with a shotgun at the apartment door. Many had never handled weapons before and presumably knew no more than to point it at any intruder and pull the trigger. A frequent visitor recalled that "LaRouche was waited on hand and foot by Security. They cooked for him, they made his bed, they did his laundry."

LaRouche called for more and more protection during and after his 1980 presidential campaign. A multitiered system evolved, including off-duty and former police officers operating through a New York private detective agency, the Reading nightriders, Mitch WerBell's mercenaries, and the Security staff itself. LaRouche claimed to be constantly threatened by such enemies as Mossad, the KGB, the Knights of Malta, the Yippies, the Freemasons, and Henry Kissinger. Helga decided that she too was a target of lethal intentions after a near traffic accident on an autobahn in Germany. The NCLC came to spend millions of dollars each year on the bodyguards who followed Lyn and Helga everywhere in both the United States and Europe.

Ultimately the Security setup was a good investment, for it kept the NCLC membership in the paranoid frenzy that LaRouche had learned was most conducive to maximum results in fund raising. But protection bred more protection, as the outside hired guns encouraged increasingly wild fantasies in order to get more overtime. Although believing these fantasies, Steinberg and Goldstein were also swept up in the profiteering fever. They established two corporations, SSG International and Cincinnatus Associates, to receive payments for campaign security services, as well as to recycle reports on LaRouche's enemies to multinational corporations.

When LaRouche moved to Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1983, he deployed as many as ten guards on each twelve-hour shift at his estate. Supposedly the guards, armed with Walther PPKs and MAC-10s, were prowling their respective free-fire zones under all weather conditions. But LaRouche didn't seem to really care how vigilant they were. In cold or rainy weather, they just stayed in the guardhouse. The electronic alarm was routinely ignored, since branches brushing against the fence in a breeze would often trigger it. Any enterprising hit man could have slipped under the barbed wire that kept the neighbor's cows from fertilizing Lyndon's lawn. (Security precautions were tighter at LaRouche's villa in Stradecken-Elsheim, in West Germany, which was protected by a ten-foot-high wall topped with barbed wire, television monitors, electric grids, and floodlights-the very model of a high-tech bunker.)

The major vendor providing guards with police backgrounds for the Leesburg estate was Metro Executive Protection and Security Consultants, Inc., a New York firm headed by former NYPD officer James Powers. According to Phil Perlonga, a former Powers assistant, LaRouche was the firm's principal client in the early 1980s. Its success in serving him helped it expand into other areas. For instance, it developed a clientele among Manhattan landlords by gathering evidence for eviction proceedings against tenants of rent-regulated apartments. (In 1986, Powers told The New York Times that his firm had prepared background reports on 5,000 tenants; many were for landlords planning co-op conversions.)

Shortly after the move to Leesburg, several Security staffers set up Premiere Services, Inc., a front for obtaining firearms permits. Among the firm's officers was Robert Kay, who claimed to be a graduate of WerBell's counterterrorist school, as well as the American Security Training Institute in Chicago and the Lethal Force Institute in Long Beach, California. According to Loudoun County records, some of the Security staffers were walking arsenals; for instance, Rick Magraw, who owned a Colt Commander 45, a Sig-Sauer P.380, a Browning 9 mm, and a MAC-10 submachine pistol.

When the permits came up for renewal in 1985, the sheriff's office was fed up with the NCLC's intimidation of local residents. Premiere Services said it needed the permits to protect LaRouche, but Deputy Don Moore told the court that the threats to LaRouche's life were "nebulous to the point of unreality," and "chiefly intended to promote a 'bunker mentality.'" Eventually the judge granted the renewals subject to restriction: LaRouche's armed guards would have to inform the Sheriff's Department whenever they planned to accompany LaRouche outside his estate. (In 1987 their request for renewal was denied outright.)

Some members of Security were skeptical that LaRouche was really in danger from international assassins. But it was their job to provide the evidence, and they did so, for otherwise LaRouche would have removed them from their relatively cushy jobs and sent them back to field duty-the boring, low-status work of manning literature tables at airports or running boiler-room loan rip-offs. Charles Tate recalls often writing security reports or passing along rumors from informants that he knew to be nonsense, simply to avoid hassles. However, Steinberg and Goldstein spent long hours on the phone soaking up the latest preposterous tips from "Clay" (Roy Frankhouser), "the Major," "the General," "Leviticus," and assorted other paid "consultants."

However, Security's work was not just a game (although even the make-believe part served a serious function in maintaining the NCLC's controlled environment and motivating the membership to work hard). Security developed imaginative and effective techniques for gathering intelligence and harassing enemies. Most important was the undercover phone call or interview. Although there were many variations on this tactic, basically it meant a staff member calling or visiting an outsider (usually an enemy) under false pretenses or using a false identity. It was first employed in 1973 when the NCLC was at war with black-nationalist Amiri Baraka. Paul Goldstein sent a directive to "all locals" urging them to set up meetings with "individuals of [the] Baraka type" in order to "pump them for information." He suggested posing as an "innocuous radical or interested sympathizer."

LaRouche himself, during his 1980 New Hampshire primary campaign, told the Associated Press that his followers used "all kinds" of covers and impersonation tactics to investigate their enemies. "Where a press is running a direct operation against us...," he said, "that's an open target. We can impersonate them all we want to because they are doing it to us. It's just an open field." Charles Tate testified he saw his fellow Security staffers make hundreds of undercover calls in the early 1980s, often with tape recorders running without the callee's knowledge. "They were pretending to be priests, ministers, rabbis, newspaper reporters, doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs," he said.

The late Canon Edward West of New York's Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine was the victim of two LaRouchian imposters posing as freelance writers. They interviewed him and took his picture while preparing a dossier on the Knights of Malta. Later, they wrote an abusive article suggesting he was a homosexual and saying his office reminded them of "Dracula's castle." The reason for the abuse was obvious from the text of the interview. Asked what he thought of the LaRouche organization. Canon West denounced it as "terribly anti-Semitic" and added, "I have violent feelings about anti-Semitism."

The impostures sometimes were clumsy. Herbert Quinde called up NBC Nightly News producer Bob Windrem claiming to be "Herb Kurtz," a reporter interested in LaRouche. Windrem smelled a rat, and after meeting with Quinde was able to identify him from a Hartford Courant photo. (Quinde had run as a LaRouchian candidate in Hartford.) But Quinde once followed me onto the shuttle from New York to Washington, took the seat next to me, and convincingly introduced himself as "David Feingold," a fictitious AFL-CIO researcher.

In 1981 one "Jean-Claude Adam," an alleged French Defense Ministry official, gained interviews with William Bundy and Winston Lord at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also called several journalists who had written about LaRouche, trying to find out who their sources were. Photographed after one such meeting, "Jean-Claude" was identified as Laurent Murawiec, an EIR editor.

The most sinister undercover efforts were directed against anti-Klan groups. According to Tate, collecting this information was a "regular fixation" and reflected the Security staff's friendly ties with violence-prone white supremacists such as Bob Miles. In 1981 an NCLC member pretending to be a civil rights activist infiltrated an anti-Klan conference at Howard University. The LaRouchians then published a list of the attendees, which must have been interesting reading for the Klan. Tate said that a Security staffer was assigned to make undercover phone calls every few days to the National Anti-Klan Network in Atlanta to "get snippets which would be given to Roy Frankhouser." He recalled a "swap" in which "we gave Roy all our files on the Jewish Defense League and we got from him in return a batch of Klan publications." Tate said he personally photocopied the files on the JDL for Frankhouser. In general, Frankhouser (who was in constant contact with Miles) had unrestricted access to Security's files, "If he said 'our people need to see such and such,' he'd be given it," Tate said.

Security staffers sometimes claimed to be stringers for Intercontinental Media Service, with offices in the National Press Building in Washington. The operator of this shadowy outfit was Edward von Rothkirch, a friend of the Liberty Lobby. Charles Tate testified in the 1987 trial of Frankhouser that von Rothkirch, who was called "the Baron" by Security, "would accredit somebody with a press card to appear as though he was a real reporter working for real newspapers so that he could do interviews." According to former Metro employee Phil Perlonga, the Security staff in 1982-83 had "stacks of blank press cards" from IMS. When a card was needed, Goldstein would sign von Rothkirch's name. Perlonga was given an IMS card and instructed to use it to gain entrance to Henry Kissinger's birthday party and serve legal papers on him. Perlonga took the card, but says he managed to evade serving the papers.

LaRouchian security and intelligence staffers often have impersonated real reporters. In 1981, U.S. News & World Report filed a $1.5 million suit against EIR and New Solidarity after a LaRouchian posed in phone interviews as its White House correspondent, Sara Fritz. In 1983, pursuant to a settlement agreement, a federal district judge in Washington issued a permanent injunction barring staff members of EIR and New Solidarity from henceforth impersonating any U.S. News & World Report staffer. Jeff Steinberg later said the NCLC had stopped using this tactic. In fact, Security staffers gained interviews just as easily by using their own names and identifying themselves as freelance writers or college students working on a research project. Indeed, when they openly identified themselves as EIR reporters they sometimes received the same deference as members of the mainstream press. Some targeted persons would not have heard of EIR before and would assume it was a legitimate newsmagazine. Others would know of its LaRouche connection, but would talk anyway out of politeness or to demonstrate their broad-mindedness. (EIR gained a 1982 interview with Philip Klutznik, former World Jewish Congress president and Secretary of Commerce in the Carter administration; he commiserated with the interviewer over how people are sometimes unfairly accused of anti-Semitism.) Security staffers also openly called people they had previously harassed or were involved in litigation with. Such victims would stay on the phone, hoping to find out just what LaRouche was planning against them next.

A brash and hardworking Security staffer can conduct a phone "sweep" of LaRouche's opposition in a single day. He may openly identify himself as a LaRouchian, use a fictitious identity, or pretend to be a real person, depending on the targeted person's vulnerabilities. A frequent pretense in the early 1980s was to be Chip Berlet, an anti-LaRouche journalist in Chicago. Since Berlet was a freelancer who did not keep regular office hours, it was difficult for the callee to check this out.

By staying on the phone long hours and making one call after another with the speed of a telephone sales solicitor, Security staffers rapidly pick up large amounts of information-not only from what the victims say but also from what they don't say. For instance, a May 5, 1982, Security document entitled "Harassment Networks" summarized twelve phone calls to alleged LaRouche enemies across the political spectrum, all apparently made by the same person. Among those called were Berlet, Dana Beal of the Yippies, Arch Puddington of the League for Industrial Democracy, Jerry Eisenberg of the Jewish Defense League, Sheldon Ranz of The Generation After/Holocaust Survivors USA, Justin Finger of the Anti-Defamation League, and Fred Eiland of the Federal Election Commission. The list also included a National Jewish Community Relations Council staff member, Detroit financier Max Fisher's secretary, and a rabbi who deprograms Moonies. In most cases the caller elicited bits of information about the targeted person's whereabouts and/or current activities and/or contacts with other targeted persons-information which could then be "cross-gridded." When Berlet refused to talk, the caller gloated in his notes that "Berlet is currently paranoid as hell." In fact the encouraging of suspicious attitudes among LaRouche opponents was one of the benefits of the telephone sweeps. Some journalists simply would not discuss LaRouche with any caller unless they had time to thoroughly check his identity first.

The LaRouchians also used the telephone as a psychological assault weapon. In 1980, reporters in New Hampshire obtained a copy of a special LaRouche "New Hampshire Target List" of state political figures to be harassed. The names included the governor, the attorney general, the secretary of state, and the mayors and city clerks of several towns. "These are the criminals to burn-we want calls coming in to these fellows day and night," the instructions said. Attorney General Thomas Rath received about fifty phone calls at his home on the Sunday prior to primary day. The callers would say things like "We know where you live."

When the Federal Election Commission was investigating LaRouche's 1980 campaign finances, the LaRouchians made threatening phone calls to Charles Steele, the commission's general counsel. In federal court testimony in 1987, former NCLCer Tate recalled the Steinbergs arriving late at the Security offices one morning. "They said that the reason...was because [Mr. Steele] had been receiving late-night phone calls and had received threats on his life very, very late at night; and that even though they were kind of late that day, they were sure that Mr. Steele's day was going to be even worse and that he had slept even worse...."

Another surrogate assault weapon is the LaRouchian printing press, which churns out smear leaflets and articles against journalists and other enemies, often featuring outlandish sexual charges. In this, LaRouche and his top aides have much practice-they have routinely accused their own rank-and-file followers of sexual misconduct, repressed homosexuality, etc., ever since the ego-stripping days in the early 1970s. The first public smear sheets were directed against a faction that quit in 1974. They had naively discussed details of their sex lives during NCLC psychological sessions. Upon their resignation, New Solidarity printed up a smear sheet that went into graphic detail. Much of it was taken from a "confession" written by a former member of the faction who remained with the LaRouchians and was pressured to prove his loyalty by tattling on his former comrades. Thousands of copies of the smear sheet were passed out on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where leaders of the faction lived.

As Security became bolder, it ceased to worry about obtaining "confessions" from anyone. It simply made up the smears out of thin air. Russ Bellant, a Detroit freelancer, came home one evening in the late 1970s to find that his neighbors had received invitations to a "gay coming-out" party at his house, Marcie Permut, a twenty-two-year-old researcher for NBC-TV's Chicago affiliate, was working on a LaRouche story in 1984 when leaflets appeared on car windshields on the block where she and her parents lived. The leaflets claimed she was a prostitute and gave her parents' phone number.

The cynicism behind such allegations was revealed most clearly in the 1984 deposition of Jeffrey Steinberg in LaRouche v, NBC. Asked by Phil Hirschkop (the attorney representing Chip Belet and myself) for proof of NCLC allegations that William F. Buckley was a "sodomist," Steinberg alleged that he had heard it in the mid-1970s from Gregory Rose, a Security staffer who later defected and incurred LaRouche's wrath by exposing the NCLC in a cover story for Buckley's National Review. Hirschkop then peeled away Steinberg's pretensions as an investigator:

Q: In New Solidarity, are you familiar that Rose has been termed a "pathological liar"?
A: Sure.
Q: Would you agree that he is a "pathological liar"?
A: Yes.
Q: Why, then, would someone in your organization repeat the allegation made by Rose that Bill Buckley is a sodomist?
A: I merely cited Rose as one source....We wouldn't have even probably considered the issue if he hadn't originally provided lurid detail to that effect and proposed that as an area to be considered, but there is other additional material--
Q: What material?
A: Information from confidential sources.
Q: Name the sources.

Steinberg's attorney directed him not to answer this question on "national security" grounds. Hirschkop then continued:

Q: These sources, did they give that information directly to you?
A: No.
Q: To whom did they give that information?
A: To other people who maintained them as confidential sources.
Q: Which people have told you that Bill Buckley is a sodomist?
A: I don't recall.

What Steinberg didn't "recall" was that much of his information about Buckley actually came from the Liberty Lobby, which hated Buckley because of his strong stand against allowing anti-Semites to infiltrate the conservative movement.

The Security staff went beyond smear tactics in their 1980 attempts to intimidate Jon Presstage, then a reporter for the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire. LaRouche came to Presstage's office for an interview, bringing several bodyguards with guns. ''They told me there were certain things I could not say in my stories," Presstage recalled on NBC's First Camera. LaRouche "told me that he would make it very painful for me if I wrote certain things. And I asked him, well, what do you mean by painful? And he kind of chuckled with the rest of the people there and said we have ways of making it painful beyond lawsuits." Presstage's family had three cats. "On successive days following the articles," he said, "the cats were found on my doorstep, dead."

To assist in Security's harassment campaigns the NCLC maintains a staff of in-house paralegals and has brought in "hired gun" attorneys to assist with aggressive lawsuits. The extralegal motive of such suits was indicated by a Security memorandum sent out to local NCLC offices in 1984 under the heading "Make the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] Pay Everywhere." It called for filing libel suits and complaints to government agencies against the ADL in every part of the country: "Go to your best and most political [sic] well-placed contacts and have them recommend lawyers who have a reputation for competence, meanness, and who like a good brawl." The memo then ordered that calls be made to local news reporters, giving them an ultimatum to either divulge the "ADL source" of their anti-LaRouche "operation" or else face a libel suit. The goal would be to build a "massive national dossier" on the ADL and tie it down defending itself.

Security waged elaborate counterintelligence campaigns (known among insiders as "damage control operations") to derail media exposes. When it found out The New York Times was preparing an article in 1979, Goldstein and an associate pretended to be defectors and arranged to meet with reporter Howard Blum, They brought along a concealed tape recorder and attempted to provoke Blum into saying something compromising. At the end of the conversation a third Security staffer snapped Blum's picture. The NCLC then called a press conference to announce that it would sue the Times. In fact, LaRouche did name the Times as a defendant in a suit he launched several weeks later against the Manhattan East Side weekly Our Town, which published a LaRouche series by me while the Times's story was still in preparation. Security launched a wave of harassing phone calls to Our Town's offices, while also attempting to jam lines at the Times. One caller to Our Town pretended to be a Times staff attorney seeking information about Our Town's legal strategy. Smear leaflets about Our Town publisher Ed Kayatt were circulated throughout the East Side. Our Town's advertisers and banks where the paper was distributed were threatened with lawsuits. A crude setup also was attempted: A man alleging to be an executive of LaRouche's computer company, Computron, dropped by the office and offered to sell the newspaper stolen financial records. The offer was declined.

For the next few years Our Town experienced mysterious acts of harassment, including bomb threats, the disappearance of office files, and visits from imposters requesting information about LaRouche. In 1983, after hard-hitting anti-LaRouche editorials, the offices were broken into, the typesetting and copying machines and other equipment were smashed, and acid was poured on the wreckage. Although Kayatt could not prove the LaRouchians were behind these actions, he knew of no one else with a sufficiently strong motive.

Security's trickery was used in tandem with legal action against NBC's 1984 First Camera report on LaRouche's ties to the Reagan administration. Prior to the show LaRouche filed a $150 million libel suit to delay or halt it. Security directed Roy Frankhouser to shadow NBC reporter Patricia Lynch around Manhattan, and picketers appeared in front of her office with signs and leaflets calling her a "KGB whore." While she was filming in the Washington, D.C., area, they found out she was scheduled to meet with Senator Moynihan. Pretending to be a Moynihan aide, a LaRouche follower called Lynch's researcher several hours before the interview-ostensibly to get background material for the senator-and probed for sensitive details about Lynch's sources. The LaRouchians then tried to intimidate Moynihan by threatening to publish defamatory material about his family.

LaRouche became worried that his former chief of staff, Gus Kalimtgis, might be cooperating with NBC. Charles Tate has testified that one day in early 1984 LaRouche "came downstairs to the security area in his home at Woodburn and he ordered members of the Security staff to call [Kalimtgis] at his home and threaten his life." Tate said that several staff members dutifully made the calls in LaRouche's presence.

Kalimtgis has confirmed that he received several calls threatening himself, his wife and children.

The damage control operation against NBC is closely documented by several hundred pages of Security printouts and notebooks which Tate kept after leaving the NCLC. A dossier on NBC reporter Brian Ross described efforts to obtain information from former targets of his investigative journalism. "Calls [are] out to Teamster networks," it said.

LaRouche's suit against NBC, Lynch, Ross, and the ADL went on trial in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, in October 1984. The jury found for the defendants and awarded NBC $3 million in punitive damages on a counterclaim relating to Security's attempt to sabotage the interview with Moynihan. (The judge later cut the award to $200,000.)

The outcome might have been quite different had an alleged Security attempt to buy a witness succeeded. One of the issues at the trial was whether NBC libeled LaRouche by reporting that he had urged the assassination of Jimmy Carter and other public officials in 1977. Lynch had several sources for the story, including New Orleans private investigator Gordon Novel. According to Novel, Jeffrey Steinberg offered him a large cash payment if he would recant his story and testify for LaRouche. Novel said he rejected the offer and promptly informed Lynch about it. Steinberg, in his deposition later that year, denied offering money, but said he did remonstrate with Novel over the phone, accusing him of telling a "bunch of lies." Although Novel had appeared on First Camera as an unnamed source with voice disguised, he was sufficiently incensed by Steinberg's tactics to allow the use of his name in a subsequent airing of the presidential death threat charge on NBC Nightly News. (Charles Tale, who served as the "liaison" between Security and LaRouche attorney Odin Anderson during the NBC suit, has testified that everyone in Security knew Novel was telling the truth about the kill-Carter incident.)