[1] The full story of Operation Mop Up — LaRouche’s 1973 campaign of violence against leftists — is told in Chapter 3 of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (read it here).
[2] The London inquest (November 2003) into Jeremiah Duggan’s death resulted in a finding by the coroner, Dr. William Dolman, that Jeremiah had not committed suicide, and that he had “earlier been in a state of terror.”
[3] "Revenire" seems to have totally failed to understand that "Earnest One" was not describing the specific events in the Duggan case but rather how, in general, a cult might generate feelings of fear and despair in a resistant recruit. In Earnest One’s story, the bridge and the crowd are symbols — not representations of an actual bridge or an actual crowd.
[4] Reality check: Over two-thirds of the people who joined or allied themselves with the LaRouche movement at one time or another over the last 40 years ended up severing all ties with the group as a result of disillusionment and/or disgust. We are talking (re the United States alone) about hundreds of people who were cadre and thousands who were on the periphery — not just a “couple” of bitter individuals. More than 100 of such “dropouts” (as revenire scornfully labels them) have written articles or resignation statements, signed collective resignation letters, sued for lost money, filed fraud complaints with state attorneys general from Alaska to Florida, testified against LaRouche and his deceptive fund raisers in court, spoken confidentially or openly with journalists, or posted on the web their personal warnings and complaints about LaRouche (for numerous examples, read here).
[5] Reference is to The Campaigner, a former theoretical magazine of LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees published monthly (or sometimes every two months) during the 1970s and 1980s. It included in its pages some of the movement’s most notorious anti-Semitic screeds.
[6] If the LaRouche follower “revenire” is not a resident of the Leesburg, Va. area where the cult’s national offices and LaRouche’s home are located (and he assures his co-discussants on Skull/Bones that he is not), he almost certainly has not been a target of the kind of nonstop one-on-one verbal and emotional abuse from LaRouche that Kronberg suffered for over a decade. Furthermore, the statement in the April 11, 2007, briefing that the organization’s Boomers might as well commit suicide was linked to an explicit charge that the “print shop [Kronberg's business] was the worst” (meaning, the worst offender against LaRouche’s aims and desires). Kronberg would instantly have recognized this phrase as the signal for all-out “war” against himself, his family and his business; indeed, he had earlier predicted to his wife that LaRouche was preparing a major campaign of vilification and scapegoating against them. There is nothing in the memo to suggest that a similar personal threat against non-Leesburg resident revenire (or any other specific individual) was contained in the memo. Furthermore, the fact that revenire has not himself committed suicide is irrelevant to the Kronberg case on logical grounds. The LaRouchians, however, have never shown much respect for logic, which they regard as part of an evil Aristotelian plot.
[7] Note the implication: if it’s not in the police report, it’s not worth considering. But the point of the Justice for Jeremiah campaign is that the police rushed to a suicide judgment and thus never investigated basic questions such as why Jeremiah’s passport was not on his body when the police arrived at the death scene but was instead in the possession of the Schiller Institute; and why the passport had his blood on it — blood that had to have been deposited BEFORE his purported death on the motorway.
[8] “Ridiculous”? Read here a 1974 account from the New York Times of how several LaRouchians held a young woman named Alicia Weitzman captive in an apartment in upper Manhattan (she escaped by throwing a note out the window urging passers-by to call the police). Ironically, Ms. Weitzman at the time was 22 years old — the same age as Jeremiah when he died.
[9] A CIA “agent” is a civil servant, directly employed by the CIA, whose job entails certain covert activities in the interest of national security. Earnest One should have used the term “asset” for the likes of LaRouche. But in what sense was LaRouche ever really a CIA asset? The amount of information on this subject is full of gaps. Most ex-LaRouchians who have spoken about life in the cult were never entrusted with details on its private spookery — which involved not only gathering intelligence to be offered to the CIA and other spy agencies but also the encouragement (probably not, given the timing, at the CIA's behest) of right-wing death squads in several countries — and thus have been unable to provide much insight. The relatively few ex-LaRouchians who do have in-depth knowledge of the cult's covert activities because of their own involvement, have yet to come forward and reveal the full story. Here’s what I’m prepared to say based on the information currently at my disposal:
First, much of the intelligence gathering and garbage in/garbage out analysis the LaRouchians performed was at the behest of con men who claimed to be working for the CIA, but probably weren’t (LaRouche paid them, rather than the other way around). Second, some of the work was done at the behest of (or to curry favor with) retired intelligence officers, such as James Angleton, or individuals with murky ongoing relationships to the intelligence community (alleged contract agents, people operating CIA business proprietaries, etc.). It could be argued (but has never been proven) that some of the people in the latter category served as cutouts between LaRouche and elements in the official intelligence community.
But leaving the above categories aside, it is undeniable that the LaRouche organization offered, and the CIA (especially when Admiral Inman was DDI) eagerly accepted, information gathered by correspondents of LaRouche’s EIR News Service in Latin America and elsewhere. Thus one could say that some staffers of LaRouche’s private intelligence-gathering news service functioned as CIA assets (while also working for the security services of Germany, Argentina and several other countries). Anyone who doubts this should just look at what Herbert Quinde has been doing the last few years.
As to LaRouche himself, since he was the founder and unofficial proprietor of EIRNS, I suppose you could say he also was a CIA asset of sorts. Was he a “paid” asset? I have long suspected, but cannot prove, that he received start-up money for his intelligence operation indirectly from the CIA at the end of the Ford Administration. But in subsequent years the CIA didn’t really need to give him money (although they may have done so), because what he really wanted was something else — evidence to feed his delusion that he was an important player in national security circles. So government people would meet with his followers who had useful information to impart, but would also grant LaRouche and his wife courtesy meetings (thus “paying” them in the currency of ego gratification).
As to actual direct payments from a government, it’s sufficient for the nonce to know that LaRouche received cash “donations” from cocaine dictator Manuel Noriega’s G-2 in the mid-1980s by way of a Panamanian military attaché in Washington (read here).
[10] Individuals held captive and subjected to sleep deprivation and intensive psychological and emotional abuse in the form of LaRouchian ego-stripping (all the while thinking their families would be physically harmed if they tried to escape), have every right to describe their experience as “torture” — even in the absence of thumbscrews.
