Herbert Quinde aka Herb Kinney, Herb Strong, Herb Goomi, Herb Kurtz, David Feingold, Gerald Kinde...and how many other names on four continents?
By Dennis King
When Herbert Quinde, an ex-security operative for the far-right Lyndon LaRouche organization, was named the acting chief information officer for the Illinois Department of Corrections in 2010, The State Journal-Register in Springfield published an article (read here) that raised legitimate questions about Quinde. Unfortunately, the SJ-R ended up accepting, uncritically, representations by Quinde that are demonstrably--almost ludicrously--false, while leaving unchallenged the glowing statements about him provided by state officials who appear to have mostly been repeating what Quinde himself had told them.
And the SJ-R curiously failed to even mention the charges in Spain's leading daily newspaper in 1995 and in two books by respected Spanish investigative journalists in the late 1980s that Quinde played an important facilitating role, on behalf of LaRouche, in the formation of the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación--a network of death squads, sponsored by the Spanish government, that would kill at least 27 people between 1983 and 1987, resulting in one of the biggest human rights scandals in Western Europe of the past 40 years and toppling the government of Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González. (Details and links below.)
Here is what Quinde told the SJ-R about his years with the LaRouche movement:
"Quinde, 58, admits he worked for EIR [LaRouche's weekly newsmagazine] for nine or 10 years, ending in 1989, several years of which he spent in Europe. But he also said he is not an advocate of LaRouche's ideas.
"'I am not a true believer and never have been,' he said."
The SJ-R went on to describe how LaRouche was sentenced in 1989 to "15 years in prison for mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service in connection with $30 million worth of loans from supporters," but was released on parole after five years. Citing the Washington Post, the article also noted that Quinde had testified for the defense at LaRouche's trial.
"That report [the WaPo article] called [Quinde] 'a member of LaRouche's intelligence and security staff,' though Quinde says that description is untrue.
"'I was not involved in the politics of this,' he told the The State Journal-Register. 'I was involved in the research side of the Executive Intelligence Review unit.'
"Until the 'controversies of the mid-80s,' Quinde said, 'much of the work that I did was research which was published and sold and bought by corporate clients and government clients....Lyndon LaRouche and that whole organization getting into controversy was something outside of the realm that I was involved in at all."
The falsification of reality above is profound, and involves interlocking assumptions. Let's break it down into key elements and examine each in turn:
Quinde's own writings published in EIR and in New Solidarity (the LaRouche organization's now-defunct twice-weekly newspaper) refute these assertions.
First, we have an excerpt from "The Cancer of Pluralism," a speech Quinde delivered at a LaRouchian political conference. The text of the speech, as published in the Jan. 27, 1986 New Solidarity, expresses typical ideological obsessions of LaRouche and his followers, such as hatred of Aristotle, Gnosticism, the Beatles, Henry Kissinger and the Eastern Orthodox Church. It also affirms, vehemently, LaRouche's anti-democratic political views: "[T]he pluralism of fundamentally opposed positions leads to dissolution, destruction, and loss of identity....I think it may be time to start burning witches again." (The latter phrase mirrors the mind of LaRouche, who has long ranted against witchcraft, associating it variously with New Age enthusiasts, feminists, anthropologists (read here) and other targets of his bile.)
Second, we have a 1987 Quinde article expressing the intense homophobia of the LaRouche organization (read here). This article, which depicts the indictment on fraud charges of LaRouche and over a dozen of his followers as being the result of a gay and lesbian plot, is supportive of LaRouche's infamous plan in the mid-1980s to quarantine AIDS patients, and is laced with references to "perversion," "sodomists," "'gay' and lesbian mafia," "whips and chains," etc. Quinde tells his readers that "[s]uspects in homosexual [he means gay on gay--DK] homicides [are] known by law enforcement specialists and forensic specialists to be particularly violent and vicious..."
Third, read "Anti-Defamation League publishes anti-black hate literature," an article by Quinde that expresses the LaRouche organization's anti-Semitism and its support for Louis Farrakhan. It appeared in the Sept. 18, 1992 EIR (but didn't Quinde tell the SJ-R he'd left EIR in 1989??). Quinde's defense of Farrakhan appears side by side with a piece by Quinde's close crony Jeff Steinberg (LaRouche's security chief) defending Nazi war criminals and calling for the disbanding of the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations; read here.
Fourth, we have Quinde's rant against the Jesuits in a book review he wrote for The Campaigner, a LaRouchian theoretical journal, in 1981. The review is based on LaRouche's conspiracy theory about the "Venetian oligarchy"; Quinde says the oligarchy is plotting to reduce the world's population by two billion, using the Jesuits as its tool. He calls the Jesuits "the world's most treacherous espionage agency," "a band of assassins," and an order "created to destroy the Church from within." He closes his rant with the question: "how quickly can we put the Jesuits out of business?" (Read here.)
These examples should be contrasted with what Sharon Elman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, said to the SJ-R about Quinde: "He was very forthcoming with everything. There was never any question that there was some Looney Tune LaRouchean background or belief system of any kind..." Now, I'm not going to fault Quinde for neglecting to bring a portfolio of his EIR articles to the job interview, but it does appear that the Department of Corrections' vetting process was not very thorough in this case.
Again, the evidence suggests something a bit different. We have, first, a Nov. 15, 1977 article from LaRouche's New Solidarity which notes that Quinde had run unsuccessfully for the City Council of Hartford, Conn. that year on LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party ticket, and describes how he was attempting to launch a USLP-Republican Party coalition against alleged Democratic voter fraud (read here).
Second, we have a short campaign bio (obtained from the Hartford Courant files with a handwritten 1977 date on it) that was apparently provided by Quinde during his City Council campaign. It says he has "over three years of political organizing experience, concentrating in the areas of economic reconstruction and urban political actions...Quinde has lectured around the state on the History of U.S. Science and Technology." This appears to be a euphemistic reference to prior work with the USLP, which would push the beginning of Quinde's discipleship with LaRouche back to 1974.
And here are campaign designation documents that he filed when he ran again for public office in 1978 as the USLP candidate for the Connecticut State Assembly (5th District).
Now let's fast-forward to Jan. 20, 1992, when Quinde provided an affidavit for an effort to get LaRouche's 1988 loan fraud conviction overturned; in it, he states: "I am a reporter for Executive Intelligence Review..." (read here). This is more evidence that Quinde is shaving years off the record of his sojourn in the LaRouche organization, and it's a sworn statement this time.
So now we have a record of Quinde being a member of the LaRouche organization for a minimum of 15 years, and maybe 18 years. And we don't know when, or if, he ever entirely quit, because (among other things) he has never publicly denounced the organization's ideology of hate, nor has he revealed any of its secrets.
A former member of LaRouche's National Committee recalls Quinde attending conferences of the organization AFTER the 1998 death of his first wife. And here's the Federal Election Commission record of a $250 donation by Quinde to LaRouche's Committee for a New Bretton Woods PAC in 1999.
Indeed, as late as October 2006 we find EIR reprinting the Quinde Affidavit in an attractive layout (read here). Since this is the key document in the narrative of how LaRouche was supposedly sent to prison because of a government frame-up, the LaRouchians would hardly reprint it if they felt Quinde was disloyal and might suddenly denounce the document for the absurdity that is. (More on the Quinde Affidavit below in Section 4 and in Footnote 2.)
Quinde worked from 1999-2001 at Winstar Telecommunications in northern Virginia, where many other LaRouchians and ex-LaRouchians worked. One of them, Roger Maduro (known as one of the LaRouche organization's top crusaders against environmentalism), would provide an endorsement/reference for Quinde in 2008 that was included in an online Quinde resume as of October 22, 2011.
After Winstar went bust, Quinde, while working at other jobs, entered into a partnership of sorts with top LaRouche security goon Paul Goldstein in a business advisory service called Pacific Tech Bridge, LLC. Goldstein by this time had become only a part-time LaRouchian, although he was listed on EIR's masthead as its "counterintelligence director" as late as Feb. 2001. In 2007, after LaRouche drove longtime follower Kenneth Kronberg to suicide (read here), many members of the organization were angry and rebellious. LaRouche induced the hulking, if over-the-hill, Goldstein to pay them visits at their homes--just a friendly little warning. That Quinde would still be associating with the likes of Goldstein as of the early 2000s is yet more evidence that Quinde retained a certain loyalty to the LaRouchian worldview even after ceasing to work full-time for the organization.
I asked a former member who spent decades in the LaRouche's organization's second-tier leadership to respond to this assertion. The ex-member stated: "[T]o say he was on the 'research' side is ludicrous. There was no difference between the 'sides.'" This person added that if Quinde were not a "true believer" that would only make "the stuff he...did even more odious."
And another former member wrote the following about Quinde on a Factnet message board where ex-LaRouchians frequently post:
"Do you honestly believe that you could just punch into the EIR time clock and that existed in a void of Lyn and the rest of the cult's front groups? We used to joke around all of the time about how we would be sitting at a desk and would just 'put on our EIR or War on [Drugs] or FEF hat' when calling contact cards and lists.
"Does anyone think that they could just stroll over to an armed Quinde and voice disagreement with Lyn or how crazy he is and critique the whole Bizarro World without him considering you a threat to Lyn's life? Herb was Paul Goldstein's buddy. There was a whole mess in Security with the marriages of the staff where Lyn would have them literally by the balls. These guys know damn well how crazy Lyn was and they also know how many dirty tricks we did and the types of people whose company Lyn enjoyed."
The record of Quinde's involvement in the electoral politics of the organization dates back to the period he spent with the USLP in Connecticut. But in the years he worked for EIR, his activities were drenched in a less conventional brand of politics: promoting death squads via meetings with Spanish police officials, cozying up to murderous generals in Guatemala, working on intelligence reports and dossiers aimed at establishing alliances of the LaRouche organization with various far-right forces around the world, and (as documented above) spreading the LaRouchian ideology and political stances through his own writings.
Just how closely Quinde's research activities were interlocked with the LaRouche organization's political efforts--even in relatively low-key day-to-day work--is shown in a 1994 report compiled by Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, who has tracked the LaRouche organization since the mid-1970s. Berlet devotes a section of his report to Quinde and describes, among other things, how Quinde tried to intice investigative author Carl Oglesby into an information sharing arrangement, then tried to sign him up as a speaker for a LaRouchian antiwar conference (read here).
It is widely known among ex-members--and almost universally known among those who were on the national staff in Leesburg, VA--that Quinde was a key figure on LaRouche's security staff. This unit's duties over the years have included providing physical security for LaRouche; compiling background reports on, spying on, harassing and threatening people believed to be hostile to LaRouche and the organization; intimidating members and ex-members; carrying out dirty tricks against politicians (especially liberals); compiling detailed reports on rival extremist groups (and anyone else disliked by Larouche) to be passed to police departments around the country; and providing special intelligence reports and dossiers to sinister foreign clients such as former Panamanian cocaine dictator Manuel Noriega. (For further details on the workings of LaRouche's Security staff, read chapters 23 and 24 of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.)
Quinde's work from the late 1970s until he went part-time at some point in the 1990s fits the pattern of a Security staffer. Ex-members say he was part of the team that protected LaRouche during the 1980 New Hampshire Democratic primary campaign. (The Washington Post has described here how LaRouche went to the offices of the Manchester Union-Leader that year with his security team and, when asked by reporter Jon Prestage about his intelligence-gathering network, said "you can't use that" and warned Prestage that "we have ways of making it very painful for people." When the story ran anyway, "three [of Prestage's] cats were left dead on his doorstep over three days.")
When LaRouche rented a mansion on Sutton Place in Manhattan in 1982, a reporter for the East Side weekly Our Town did an article on the community's new resident. Calls by reporter Tom Popper to various LaRouche offices established that Quinde was one of the people involved in providing security at the house (read here). Also serving on the team (according to a former NYPD officer who worked at the house for an independent security outfit) was Roy Frankhouser, grand dragon of the Pennsylvania Ku Klux Klan, who would later become LaRouche's official security adviser.[FN 1]
Quinde took to using a variety of pseudonyms to call up journalists regarded as hostile to the LaRouche movement, or to approach them in person (Quinde got into a conversation with me on the New York-Washington shuttle, introducing himself as "David Feingold"). The intent of such Security tricks (used by many other LaRouchians, not just Quinde) was to profile the targeted persons, find out their plans, and attempt to intimidate them. In a phone call to NBC Nightly News field producer Bob Windrem, Quinde pretended to be a freelance researcher for the Newark Star-Ledger. In a phone call to Arch Puddington, director of the League for Industrial Democracy, Quinde pretended to be writer Chip Berlet. I happened to be in Puddington's office at the time, took the call, and instantly recognized Quinde's voice. When I challenged him, he became angry, told me "we know where you are," and accused me in very crude language of engaging in homosexual acts with an Anti-Defamation League official.
Stories about Quinde's trickery and that of other LaRouchians can be read in a March/April 1985 Columbia Journalism Review article by Patricia Lynch, and--focussing solely on Quinde--in Our Town articles here and here. But the evidence is not just anecdotal: Quinde, in his Dec. 8, 1988 testimony as a defense witness in LaRouche's trial for mail fraud and conspiracy in Alexandria, VA, admitted that he often used aliases to gain information for his leader. "If they knew who I worked for, they wouldn't give me any information," he said, according to an Associated Press article the following day.
LaRouche's indictment along with a dozen of his followers in 1986-87 came after a lengthy FBI investigation of nationwide loan and credit-card fraud complaints. The investigation, the Grand Jury process, and the subsequent period of pretrial maneuvering spurred a fanatical campaign by the Security Staff to counter the FBI and the prosecutors. Members of Security, including Quinde's closest pals but not Quinde himself, would be indicted for their efforts to obstruct justice--along with Klansman Frankhouser, who'd advised them that "paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit."
Frankhouser was convicted; the separate prosecution of LaRouche and his co-defendants resulted in a mistrial. LaRouche was then convicted in a separate trial in Alexandria, VA federal court of mail fraud (regarding fraudulent loans), conspiracy, and income tax fraud. Six of his followers were also convicted in this trial. Other felony convictions of LaRouche followers were won by prosecutors in Virginia and New York state courts.
Quinde's chief role in the defense efforts, apart from writing about how the New York prosecutors were supposedly lesbians, child molesters, etc. (see above), was to construct through his pretext phone calls to LaRouche opponents, a conspiracy scenario in which the prosecution of LaRouche was the result of a secret 1983 meeting of journalists and rightwing moguls at the home of East Side Manhattan investment banker John Train. Quinde's phone calls would form the basis of the "Quinde Affidavit" (see above), a document that was filed as an exhibit in LaRouche's unsuccessful appeal of his conviction. The Quinde Affidavit is often quoted on the internet by conspiracy theorists, and is used within the LaRouche movement to explain away LaRouche's fraud conviction to young recruits, but Quinde has yet to repudiate this absurd document.[FN 2]
When sent overseas, Quinde also engaged in activities that fitted with Security's political efforts rather than just "research." Australian scholar Rodney Gouttman, in a study of the far right, noted how Quinde (whom Gouttman described as a "LaRouche bodyguard") was once "dispatched to Melbourne to blacken the names of prominent members of the Jewish Community." "Pernicious vision: Challenge from within Australia’s extreme Right," Australian Journal of Jewish Studies," XV (2001).
And in Europe, Quinde's activities turned very serious indeed--as in his dealings with Spanish counterterrorist officials in 1983. Other serious, and potentially deadly, channels of influence were established by Security with police and military figures in human-rights-abusing regimes in Latin America; for instance, LaRouche operatives worked for cocaine dictator Manuel Noriega of Panama (according to U.S. Senate subcommittee testimony), and the payment were delivered in cash by Panama's military attache in Washington (read here). The LaRouchians also formed a close alliance with the sinister Argentine "dirty war" commando Col. Mohamed Alí Seineldín (read here), who would launch two unsuccessful coups--hailed by the LaRouchians as heroic events in the struggle against Bolshevism--in an effort to stop a democratically elected Argentine government from prosecuting military officers for human rights abuses under the previous junta.
Little is known about Quinde's many visits to Latin America in the 1980s, except that he and LaRouche security chief Steinberg popped up in 1985 as the guests of Guatemala's murderous death-squad regime and went along on "Operation Guatusa"--a foray into the countryside staged for carefully selected foreign observers during which large quantities of marijuana were seized. (It is not know what happened to this lucrative booty.) Operation Guatusa was the linchpin of a quasi-public relations scheme cooked up by the LaRouchians to persuade the U.S. government to escalate its aid to the Guatemalan Army, which was slaughtering Indian villagers on a vast scale as part of the supposed war against communism. Many members of the U.S. Congress were opposed to such aid because of the regime's human rights violations; LaRouche figured that these considerations could be bypassed by repackaging the aid as part of President Reagan's War on Drugs (read here).
So far we have focused in this section on Quinde's role as a Security staffer. But he also disputed the Post's description of him as serving on an "intelligence" staff--an objection that would be absurd even if one accepted Quinde's claim that he was just a nonpolitical researcher.
LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees possessed, as early as the mid-1970s, a well developed private intelligence capability through which it produced daily teletype briefings for LaRouche and the membership. I myself toured their headquarters in 1977 and was shown the warren of offices--each representing a different country or region--where members were busily reading and clipping newspapers in multiple languages. And already they were selling confidential reports to foreign governments. According to The New York Times (1979) they had prepared intelligence reports for apartheid South Africa's Bureau of State Security, the Shah of Iran's Savak, and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Admiral Bobby Ray Inman told the media in 1984 that he had received a steady flow of reports from the LaRouchians during his brief sojourn (1981-82) as CIA deputy director. When Norman Bailey of the National Security Council was asked about the LaRouchians by NBC-TV in 1984, he described them not as publishers of a newsmagazine but as "one of the best private intelligence services in the world." Many would dispute Bailey's use of the adjective "best," but no one has disputed his use of the phrase "private intelligence service."
As to EIR, its name is Executive INTELLIGENCE Review and its masthead included, in the years Quinde worked for it, a list of "INTELLIGENCE directors." Much of its work went into producing expensive reports for small groups of subscribers; these reports were structured basically as intelligence analyses and dossiers, not as news reports. Its staff of intelligence directors in the 1970s and 1980s reflected the actual structure of the organization's intelligence "sector" and that sector's "files" (e.g., the Asia file). The editor in chief of EIR in that period was also the head of the intelligence sector. (This formal structure has broken down in recent years as old-time members leave the organization, or die, and are replaced by LaRouche Youth Movement members who have not yet learned intelligence gathering skills.)
Finally, even if one were to define EIR as just a newmagazine, the characterization of its staff as an intelligence operation in the years when Quinde was involved would still hold true. Because EIR truly was (and still is to a lesser extent) a cover for intelligence gathering. The title of EIR "correspondent" has allowed LaRouche followers to get access to, and run profiles on, public figures and government officials around the world who otherwise would be off-limits to them.
Quinde knows this as well as I do. That is why, after saying that it's "untrue" to describe him as having been part of an intelligence operation, he proceeds blithely to contradict himself by saying that he did "research which was published and sold and bought by corporate clients and government clients." If one takes into consideration EIR's research methods and the subject matter of its reports, then Quinde's description is precisely that of a private intelligence service!
The allegations about Quinde and the formation of the GAL death squads appeared in a 1995 article in El Mundo (Spain's leading daily--read a translation by Darrin Wood, one of the article's co-authors, here); the books Amedo: el Estado contra ETA by Melchor Miralles and Ricardo Arques and Los GAL al Descubierto by Javier Garcia (translations of the relevant passages here); and a recent further article by Wood here. (Additional background information can be found in Lyndon LaRouche Watch's full menu on LaRouche and the Spanish death squads here.)
In the spring of 1983, Quinde--then operating out of LaRouche's Wiesbaden, Germany intelligence offices--participated in several meetings in Madrid with Spanish counterterrorist officials about how to crush the insurgency of the Basque separatist group ETA. These meetings were part of a larger planning process dominated by hard-line police officials--including notorious torturers--who had learned their trade under Franco. The LaRouche organization had been cultivating such people for an extended period; indeed, LaRouche boasted about his contacts with them (calling them Spain's "old crowd") in a January 1983 meeting with the CIA's director of European analysis.[FN 3]
At one meeting Quinde brought along a top official of the French gendarmerie (identity still unknown) who provided names, addresses, and photographs of alleged terrorists hiding out as refugees in France. According to Miralles and Arques--and confirmed by El Mundo via its own police sources--Quinde offered at this meeting to help find "professional killers" to carry out actions against ETA. Shortly thereafter, Spain's top counterterror experts held a meeting where they made the decision to launch the GAL.
Within months, the mayhem began with the kidnapping of a Basque businessman in France (he turned out to be innocent of any ETA connection but was held blindfolded for 10 days while the police debated over whether to kill him anyway). The second operation was the kidnapping of two young ETA members named Laza and Zabala who had fled to France where they were seeking refugee status. The two were taken back to Spain where they were tortured for weeks with almost unbelievable barbarity at an abandoned villa and then taken to a remote location, executed gangland style and buried in quicklime.
Things were getting ugly fast, but Quinde had the temerity to write in EIR in December 1983 (read here) that the Spanish police were not moving rapidly enough and not taking a sufficiently tough line. Quinde did, however, express approval of the rehiring of one Manuel Ballesteros, who just happened to be Spain's most notorious torturer. This was not just Quinde's opinion, but LaRouche organization policy. In the introduction to an interview with Spanish Interior Minister José Barrionuevo that was published on June 21, 1983, EIR's editors praised Barrionuevo (who would ultimately be sentenced to prison for his role in the GAL conspiracy) for opposing a proposal in Spain's Parliament to adopt a "British-style habeas corpus law that would inhibit the questioning of prisoners."
Over the next five years at least 27 people were killed by the GAL through a variety of means; at least a third of them turned out to have no known connection to ETA. As more and more information came out in the late 1980s and into the 1990s about the killings, and the attendant torture and cross-border kidnappings, the evidence of culpability began to point to the office of Prime Minister Felipe Gonzáles. A storm of protest emerged, fueled by investigative articles in El Mundo and other media. In 1996, the Spanish people voted González and his Socialist party out of office. Barrionuevo and state security director Rafael Vera were given lengthy prison sentences. Four members of the Guardia Civil (two of them high officials) plus the governor of a province in the Basque region were sentenced to a total of 365 years in prison for the murder of Laza and Zabala.
According to Corrections spokeswoman Sharon Elman in her conversation with SJ-R:
"Quinde stayed with the LaRouche publication because he could covertly collect information that was shared with the U.S. intelligence community..." How could Elman possibly know this about Quinde's motives? And why didn't the SJ-R ask her how she knew it? As to the LaRouchian practice of "sharing" information with the "U.S. intelligence community," this is hardly something noteworthy. For decades they've frantically circulated their EIR reports all over Washington. Whether, or to what extent, this information has been really useful to the intelligence community is another question. Indeed, one could argue that if Quinde regarded this information as so important to the U.S. government that he kept on working at EIR for years rather than getting a much higher paid job elsewhere, that in itself is de facto evidence that he was still locked into the LaRouchian worldview.
Furthermore, if Quinde stayed at EIR simply as a favor to the intelligence community, why did he continue to associate with the LaRouche movement--for years--after ceasing to work as an EIR "researcher"?
And then there's the view of another Illinois state official, as quoted by the SJ-R:
"[Elman's] view of Quinde was also backed by Christine Cegelis, the assistant director of the state's Department of Central Management Services, where Quinde began working in September 2009 before moving to the Corrections unit. Cegelis, who had previously worked with Quinde at a software firm [Evolutionary Technologies International, or ETI], stated:
"'I can honestly say that Herb felt that he was working in a way to serve his country, to gather intelligence, and that that intelligence was in fact shared with our government and that was found useful to them. I have always found Herb to be a very honorable and good man.'" For Cegelis, the operative word here is "Herb felt"; in other words, Cegelis doesn't know if in fact Quinde was serving his country. But if she doesn't know that, how can she know what he really felt? It would appear that the State of Illinois' view on Quinde is a closed loop that always returns to Quinde's own sanitized narrative that nobody really questioned.
It should be noted that Cegelis is a well-known anti-war activist who obtained the Democratic nomination for Congress in Illinois' Sixth C.D. in 2004 and narrowly lost the Democratic primary for the same nomination in 2006. Cegelis, whose political endeavors have been strongly supported by peace activist Cindy Sheehan, is a member of Progressive Democrats of America, a blogger for the Daily Kos, and a supporter of the Secular Franciscan Order (Catholics who support peace and social justice--just the types the LaRouchians have urged violence against in Latin America). Oh, and Cegelis received a $250 campaign donation from Herbert Quinde in 2005.
Here is what may have convinced the SJ-R that they didn't need to look deeper into Quinde's past:
"[Cegelis] said Quinde was brought to [ESI] by retired Navy Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, a former director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the CIA, who chaired ETI.
"'He (Quinde) was responsible for growing our business in the federal contracts area, particularly in the defense and intelligence community,' Cegelis said. [Uh, this is Cindy Sheehan's friend speaking???]5. Quinde and the Spanish death squads.
6. Is Quinde really some kind of patriotic secret agent?
7. Quinde and Bobby Ray Inman.
"Inman in March wrote a letter of recommendation for Quinde to Jerry Stermer, Gov. Pat Quinn's chief of staff.
"'Herb is a person of high integrity, responsibility, energy and creativity,' Inman wrote. 'He shines in situations that demand quick turnarounds and continuous improvement. In recent years, Herb worked in an executive leadership position with one of our portfolio companies. He has broad knowledge of enterprise systems especially in the area of data management and integration....Herb's interests extend beyond IT to international affairs and social policy. He also has a deep interest in social justice.'"
I do not dispute Quinde's technical competence for his job, which I have verified with people who worked with him at WinStar. For the rest, a little background is called for:
Admiral Inman--who is 80 years old and has been out of the official intelligence community for almost three decades--served as deputy director of the CIA for 16 months in 1981-82. During this period, he not only received reports from the LaRouchians (especially about Latin America) but also met with Lyndon and Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a house on F Street in Washington to discuss the threat of West Germany's peace movement.
After leaving the CIA, Inman kept up contact with the amateur spooks in LaRouche's Security Staff, according to testimony by Charles Tate, a former Security member, in the 1987 federal trial of Roy Frankhouser (read my guide to Tate's testimony in this trial, then go to pages 59-124 of the transcript).
In December 1993, President Bill Clinton announced the appointment of Inman as Defense Secretary. High-level members of the LaRouche group were thrilled, ex-members say. But William Safire of The New York Times wrote a powerful column questioning Inman's fitness for the position. Some commentators have suggested that Safire was motivated solely by Inman's well-known hostility to Israel; however, Safire also raised questions about Inman's mental balance, ability to judge character, and financial propriety. Within days, journalists were looking into Inman's curious past, including his relationship to the LaRouchians. Safire was vindicated when Inman held a bizarre press conference in January 1994 to announce his withdrawal from the nomination and to blame it all on a conspiracy involving Safire and other Jewish journalists (although, in naming them, he did not directly identify them as Jews), while alleging that Safire was acting in concert with Republican Senator Bob Dole.
One of Safire's comments about Inman in his Dec. 23, 1993 Times column may be relevant to Inman's 2010 letter of recommendation for Quinde:
"As a judge of character, [Inman] is a naif. After he quite the CIA, Inman went on the 'proxy board' of International Signal and Control to manufacture cluster bombs for the Pentagon. The company was run by James Guerin, a longtime Inman intelligence source, now in a Florida prison, convicted of transferring military technology to Iraq and South Africa [Safire means apartheid South Africa]. Inman's 1992 letter to the sentencing judge, which can be found in Appendix B of Alan Friedman's Spider's Web, attests to this con man's 'patriotism toward our country.'"
In the case of Quinde, however, it's not just Inman's judgment of people that is called into question but also his judgment regarding beliefs and principles. If the Admiral's concept of a proponent of "social justice" is someone who hangs out with police torturers in Spain, hobnobs with military psychopaths in Guatemala, and writes articles reviling gays, lesbians, Jews, witches and Jesuits within the framework of a totalitarian ideology that emphasizes harsh repression of enemies of the state, then we should be thankful that Inman never became our Secretary of Defense.[FN 4]
Herbert Quinde, as one of the top members of LaRouche's Security Staff, was involved in some of the most secretive and sinister intrigues of the LaRouche organization, especially in the 1980s. In a command structure where sensitive tasks (such as meeting with officials of human-rights-abusing governments and with leaders of neo-fascist and ultranationalist groups) are compartmentalized and where potentially damaging information often never trickles down to the rank and file, or even to the mid-levels of leadership, Quinde is one of the very few who were in a position to know it all--about what LaRouche operatives were really up to in countries like Spain, Guatemala, Argentina, El Salvador and Mexico; about who they were working for in Germany (and why, today, the German authorities are covering up the wrongful death and possible murder of Jewish university student Jeremiah Duggan while he was attending indoctrination sessions at EIR's Wiesbaden offices in 2003); about the real motives behind the LaRouchians' decade-long smear campaign against Olof Palme in Sweden that ended only with Palme's assassination in 1986; about the LaRouche organization's ties to the late Victor Gunnarsson (the most likely suspect in the still-unsolved Palme slaying); and many other secrets known only to LaRouche's Security elite.
If Quinde ever were to come forward with what he knows, the resulting media and government investigations, lawsuits and prosecutions would probably destroy the noxious, cult-like LaRouche movement forever. LaRouche's dream of it surviving and growing in influence after his death thanks to the fanaticism of his "LaRouche Jugend" would be quashed. Hundreds of young people whose thinking has been twisted by elaborate and brutal indoctrination methods could break free from what otherwise might become a lifetime of servitude to an ideology of hate. The parents and siblings of these young people would be liberated from the agony of separation from loved ones whose personalities have been changed so drastically by the LaRouche Jugend's brainwashing methods. And the parents of Jeremiah Duggan could finally achieve the justice they have sought for so long.
If Quinde is the "honorable and good man" that Christine Cedelis says he is, he will do the honorable thing and reveal the LaRouche organization's secrets to the world. If he fails to do so, it should be assumed that he is still protecting that organization, and hence is still loyal to its ideological principles.
------------------------- [2] I was present at this informational event--part of a series regarding extremist groups that John
Train sponsored for journalists and think tankers. The presentation, so far as I can recall, was simply aimed at providing an accurate analysis of the LaRouche movement for those who might decide to write about it. No plans for getting LaRouche indicted--or for any political operation against LaRouche--were devised or even discussed. There was nothing conspiratorial about the gathering--unless one thinks that the exercise by journalists of their First Amendment right to combat political extremism by writing cautionary articles for the free press of a democratic country is de facto evidence of a plot.
At that time, in 1983, I knew nothing (and I presume no one else at the meeting did either) about the specific LaRouchian financial scams that would eventually result in Federal prosecutions. The indictment of LaRouche three years later was the result of his adoption of these new "fundraising" scams in 1983-84 involving credit card double billing and misleading telephone solicitations (his callers offered senior citizens 20 percent interest on loans to organizations that were essentially corporate shells). Whipped on by the apocalyptic exhortations of LaRouche and his wife, LaRouchian fundraisers began to use illegal methods on a very large scale, and complaints flooded in to state authorities from Alaska to Florida, as well as to the FBI, from lenders who were not being repaid. Law enforcement could not have ignored complaints on this scale--involving tens of millions of dollars--even if they had wanted to.
The Quinde Affidavit, which can be found on multiple conspiracy-oriented websites, does not address the financial crimes for which LaRouche was judged guilty in 1988 by a jury of his peers. Instead it simply changes the subject and attempts to impress the reader with a mass of details about the many "defamatory" articles about LaRouche that appeared in the 1980s, suggesting that these articles were evidence that the Train meeting had been part of a government plot involving assorted intelligence officials or former intelligence officials. That LaRouche had made himself into a newsworthy topic during this period (indeed, was doing everything he could to obtain media publicity) and at the same time was engaging in financial and political activities of a nature that almost guaranteed negative coverage is never addressed in the Quinde Affidavit.
The sole evidence of a "conspiracy" arising from the Train meeting (although one which, if it had really existed, would still have been totally irrelevant to the issue of LaRouche's guilt or innocence in the swindling of senior citizens) came from two 1983 telephone conversations between one of Quinde's associates in Security and economist Michael Hudson, who had been present at the meeting. Annoyed by the caller's trickery, Hudson determined to tell the LaRouchians what they wanted to hear: yes, there's a conspiracy against you and it's huge. Hudson, a personal friend of mine, described to me afterwards how he'd spun the LaRouchians a story about Train's meeting filled with exaggerations and fabrications. Considering that the LaRouchians had welched on a $75,000 loan from him a few years previously (they told him they were going to launch an economic history publishing project but instead spent the money on LaRouche campaign tracts) and then had denounced him in print as a "KGB agent" when he demanded repayment, I was not about to take issue with his payback prank then, and will not do so now.
The best refutation of the Quinde Affidavit is Wikipedia's comprehensive account of the "LaRouche criminal trials" which explains objectively the real issues and the complicated process through which LaRouche was finally convicted.
[3] Lest anyone think this constitutes evidence that the CIA was involved in the GAL conspiracy, the CIA memo summarizing the meeting (which was held at LaRouche's request, not the CIA's) presented a very negative view of LaRouche's theories and allegations. Read it here.
[4] Inman's lack of judgment in this respect is also revealed by his sojourn in the 1980s on the board of directors of the Wackenhut Corporation, which operated around the world at that time in a manner not too different from the LaRouchians, albeit without the conspiracist ideology. Gerry O'Sullivan, co-author (with Edward S. Herman) of The "Terrorism" Industry (1990), wrote in The Humanist magazine in 1994:
"During the heyday of Reagan's foreign policy, Inman served on the board of directors of the Wackenhut Corporation, based in Coral Gables, Florida. TWC is and always has been more than what it pretends to be--the biggest private rent-a-cop agency in the world. Such basic security services are a low-margin business, however, and TWC has never been afraid to venture out into sexier and more profitable ventures. This entrepreneurial spirit has led TWC to involve itself in security operations throughout Latin America, most notably in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. According to Jefferson Morley of the Nation, back in 1988 several employees of TWC helped members of El Salvador's death squads hatch and carry out an elaborate scheme to kidnap the then-U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin Corr. The plotters hoped to pin the blame on the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), but the intrigue failed. News of the conspiracy--which, if successful, would have been an international incident--and Wackenhut's hand in it were seemingly lost in, and on, the U.S. press (see Jefferson Morley, 'The Vanishing Kidnap Plot,' the Nation, July 30-August 6, 1988).
"Wackenhut employees seem to have a thing for indigenous paramilitaries. In the late 1970s, TWC sought and obtained special permission from the Belgian government to operate there. By 1982, however, the company had succeeded in hiring several neo-Nazi thugs from Belgium's notoriously violent and anti-Semitic Westland New Post. One such employee was Marcel Barbier, who Wackenhut assigned to guard a synagogue (!) on the Rue de la Regence in 1982. The synagogue mysteriously blew up on Barbier's watch.
"Ah, you may say, but Barbier was just a low-level employee. Unfortunately, TWC's local director for the city of Brussels turned out to be Jean-Francis Calmette, who both trained and armed members of the Westland New Post. Not surprisingly, some other like-minded TWC employees were caught luring immigrant children into basements and beating them (see Jan Capelle, 'Westland New Post: Ombres et Lumieres,' Article 31, Belgique, July 30, 1987). Wackenhut beat a hasty retreat out of Belgium shortly after these disclosures.
"For more on Wackenhut, have a look at the late Frank Donner's books, The Age of Surveillance and Protectors of Privilege. And while you're pondering the case of TWC, ask yourself another question: might someone [at the Senate confirmation hearing for Inman if it had taken place] have quizzed Inman about his role on TWC's board? Could someone have asked Inman about TWC's operations around the world? Perhaps--but now we'll never know."
[1] When former police officer Phil Perlonga was working for Metro Security (an outside contractor) at the Sutton Place house, the LaRouche in-house security team was feeling extremely jumpy. Perlonga, in charge of a Metro security detail, told me that someone phoned in with a report that District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's detective squad was on its way to arrest LaRouche. LaRouche's in-house people immediately "came downstairs, put on bulletproof vests, and checked their .45s. I took the Metro guys outside, and told them to stay there and if the police came, to tell them there were crazy people armed inside and that they should communicate through me. I then went back inside; I was prepared to blow LaRouche's guys away if they fired on police officers." But the DA's squad never arrived--the report was just a prank. (Based on material in Chapter 26 of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.)