Life in an Occupied Country
Posted Sep 09, 2011
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"Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be." -- Marshall McLuhan
For the past month, I've been pursuing a new obsession: tracing the historical contours of the single largest and most powerful demographic force in United States politics. Despite all the media hype about Red States and Blue States, our American Democracy is completely defined by something else altogether -- the lobby known as Big Apathy.
Everyone I speak to feels strongly that our political process is broken. On this much, Bill Moyers, Noam Chomsky and the Tea Party are all on the exact same page. Why is voter turnout so low in the United States? There's no need to belabor the question with an essay: a majority of Americans just see no point in voting. They don't believe it matters. Put simply, they don't vote because they know better.
Everyone wants to insert a Narrative here, but this is an ecosystem. Be wary of easy answers. Mike Lofgren wrote an excellent essay last week, "Goodbye to All That," and sure enough, he's got a Narrative to sell you, too. It's instructive:
"The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters."
It's a compelling case, so it's instructive to point out he's probably wrong.
One strange constant you'll find in all the opinion polling data on "non-voters" is they're more likely to be satisfied with government, overall, than actual voters. Weird, right? 25% of non-voters claim to be "basically content with federal government," compared to 16% of 2010 voters. A recent Pew study posed the question "Can you trust the government in Washington to do what is right?" 73% of non-voters answered either "Some of the time" or "Never." By comparison, 76% of voters gave the same answers. So clearly, Big Apathy represents a consensus so huge that it reaches into the ranks of Democratic and Republican alike, fusing into a huge super-majority force for total stasis and constant, impotent bitching.
However, it's hard to place much faith in demographics as a precise science. Copywriting and marketing deals with broad strokes, so your typical Pew or Rasmussen numbers are at least good enough to guess with. Of course, guessing never won a war, and so serious demographic data becomes a valuable trade secret. Karl Rove doesn't dick around with four-figure sample groups - he goes wide and he goes deep.
Which leads us to another, more insidious factor: the 21st Century Ressurrection of Jim Crow. Karl Rove doesn't just do opinion polls, Karl Rove builds 1:1 maps and engages in data-mining projects so byzantine the NSA sends him interns. He does this because he's engaged in a decades-long plan to permanently increase the ranks of Big Apathy. It's important to stress that Karl Rove is far from alone, and he gets invoked here as a symptom, not a cause.
Since 1965, white folks have been steadily losing their majority status, dropping from 89% of the US population back in 1965 to around 65% of the US population today. Every step of the way, the GOP's permanent establishment has been working overtime to make sure that ethnic minorities and urban poor aren't eligible to vote.
From scrubbed registration lists to "challenging" voters on election day, the perpetual Block the Vote campaign has become more overt in the past decade. (The War on Drugs represents a parallel campaign to disenfranchise voters, even more blatantly targeted at minorities.) Up next is the state-level barrage of Koch-funded "Voter ID" initiatives. There's big money behind reducing the population of eligible voters, and big money gets impressive results.
The United States Elections Project is a superb resource for raw numbers, but this particular paragraph is some unintentional dark poetry:
"Voter turnout rates presented here show that the much-lamented decline in voter participation is an artifact of poor measurement. Previously, turnout rates were calculated by dividing the number of votes by what is called the “voting-age population” which consists of everyone age 18 and older residing in the United States (the yellow line to the right). This includes persons ineligible to vote, mainly non-citizens and ineligible felons, and excludes overseas eligible voters. When turnout rates are calculated for those eligible to vote, a new picture of turnout emerges, which exhibits no decline since 1972 (the green line to the right)."
In other words, once you take into account the fact we're systematically denying millions of people the right to vote, those voter turnout numbers look several percentage points better! Yes, a bright, shining new day for Democracy. Here's how to really read their graph: simply observe that the gap between the yellow and green line has been growing larger every four years.
Money corrupts politics - of course - but I'm not convinced money is the real problem here. Perhaps language is. It's absurd for pundits, professors or PR professionals to talk about "fixing" or "restoring" our dysfunctional "Democracy" when history makes it plainly clear that the United States of America was never intended to be much of a Democracy at all. The most serious problems with the political process here in 2011 are design features that are centuries old now.
Simple: the Electoral College system means that our Presidents are chosen by 538 votes. This is significant because statistically, individual votes truly do not matter. It is difficult to argue with cynics when math itself is on their side. From James Madison to Walter Lippmann, the architects of modern American politics have been openly suspicious and disdainful of direct Democracy since the first Constitutional Convention.
How about you? If you think that America is broken, how do you fix it? If you don't trust politicians and you don't believe you have any other options, where does that leave you? More importantly, where does that leave us? What does is really mean when a clear majority of the United States believe they cannot trust their government?
When it comes to that point -- to "What now?" -- we mostly throw up our hands in despair, or we change the subject.
Let's change the subject. The man you see above is Elmo Burns Roper, Jr and his life story weaves together everything we've discussed so far. Roper was born in 1900 and he networked himself into the financial, political and military power bases of a growing United States. He spent over a decade working with Henry Luce, the mythic architect of the American Century, and then joined the OSS with the blessing of Wild Bill Donovan himself. His real legacy, though, was his public opinion polling company, The Roper Center.
When the torch was passed at The Roper Center, it was given to Everett Ladd. "You will decide for yourself what the record shows," he would often repeat to his readers, but yet his writing offers only fully cooked conclusions. Everett Ladd and Elmo Roper are never in the objectivity business. They made a fuss about scientific polling, for sure, but the data has always been subservient to the Narrative. Really innovative pollsters don't just generate spreadsheets, they tell stories and become a part of the political machine, a media priesthood with colorful charts. Ladd was rewarded for his innovations with a long and distinguished career, a parade of Fellowships from Guggenheim to Ford to Rockefeller.
Everett Ladd, in turn, created an accidental protege when he inspired a young Scott Rasmussen, who was in the process of dropping out of the University of Connecticutt in 1975. It would be a decade before Rasmussen graduated college but his time with Professor Ladd changed his life. Today, Rasmussen is a political celebrity, an outspoken Tea Party cheerleader, and one of the most vocal media pundits on life in an occupied country:
"Just 17% of likely US voters think the federal government today has the consent of the governed. Sixty-nine percent (69%) believe the government does not have that consent. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided. We are united in the belief that our political system is broken, that politicians are corrupt and that neither major political party has the answers." He can also do subtlety: "The gap between Americans who want to govern themselves and the politicians who want to rule over them may be as big today as the gap between the colonies and England during the 18th century."
Desperate times make for strange alliances. How else are we to rebuild consensus? Where is there a "national conversation" that isn't a screaming match? How much are we willing to let go of our own beliefs in order to make strategic compromises? Can we assemble a meaningful power base when 64% of the US population has less than $1000 saved up? What are the leverage points available to the over-educated and under-employed?
Semantics, Mere Semantics
Then again, forget langauge, of course money is the problem. Wasn't it always? If we're going to think about our United States as an occupied country, aren't we talking about the fact that Class Warfare is long since over and the top 1% won it all?
More importantly, how can we remind people that facing this reality is not a death sentence but a necessary beginning? How can we import Swaraj to America? As Ghandi correctly observed, "Independence begins at the bottom." Well...here we are. My generation is completely defeated. Does that make us a lost cause, or raw material?
What now?
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Towards a Psychological Operations Reading List
Posted Sep 07, 2011
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"Psychological Operations are conducted across the operational continuum." -- FM 33-1
Defining Psychological Operations is straightforward enough, but determining where exactly it ends is extremely tricky. The US Department of Defense has infiltrated institutions around the world, they expend billions every year on domestic and foreign propaganda, yet they still only represent a single slice of the spectrum. Intelligence agencies, private think tanks and public corporations are all competing for attentional bandwidth, too. PSYOPS has become ubiquitous, metastasized into Standard Operating Procedure for the entire edifice of Western Culture. Our news and our entertainment, scientific studies, history books, political campaigns and activist movements are all just sponsored messages and paid promotions. From advertisements to astroturfing, everyone's got "desired effects" and everyone's got a "target audience" now.
This is a work in progress, a reading list that attempts to outline how far gone we really are. Suggestions are more than welcome -- they're necessary.
Public Opinion
by Walter Lippmann. Propaganda
by Edward Bernays. These earlier works are included for the sake of history and history alone. While they clearly outline the mentality and general theory behind Psychological Operations, they're dated antiques and all the really juicy quotes have been strip-mined out by pretty much every subsequent book on the subject.
PR! - A Social History of Spin
by Stuart Ewen. Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
and Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future
by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. For a basic introduction to this entire field, this right here is where to start. Readable, entertaining and packed full of facts, these three are my top pick for general readers and curious mammals looking to get caught up.
The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America
by HUGH Wilford. This is certainly one of the best books I've read, period. Wilford takes on an insanely ambitious and important subject that's been obscured by secrecy and history. He does it great justice and the writing itself is amazingly good. Once the premise and reality is established, Wilford kicks things into high gear, providing hundreds of pages of eye-opening connections that will change the way you think about the past six decades of US popular culture. It is a source of great amusement to me that so few self-proclaimed "conspiracy theorists" have even heard of this book, because their paranoia pales by comparison to what Wilford is laying out in abundantly documented detail here.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
by Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky. Unfortunately, the 1992 documentary of the same name is far inferior, an over-long and confused muddle of a biopic that focuses far more on Chomsky as media celebrity and public intellectual than the actual subject of the book.
Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential
by James Moore and Wayne Slater. While there are certainly better biographies of Rove in circulation, and I've read them all so far, I'm recommending this one because it's got the juiciest quotes and focuses on what Rove was actually doing to make his unique approach to political science work. I've got six books on Rove in the back room right now, but this is the one that's full of bookmarks, notes and annotations because I keep coming back to it while working on Skilluminati material. Rove is, of course, not the "genius" he's made out to be and his motus operandi is really rather crude. What makes Rove exceptional is his behind-the-scenes strategy and dedication to the pursuit of personal power, not to mention his willingness to take the usual dirty tricks further than most operatives would ever dare. Great reading.
Mirage Men
by Mark Pilkington. While I do think Greg Bishop's Project Beta is one of the best-written treatments of disinformation in UFOlogy ever written, Pilkington's book is a more valuable read because his focus is so much broader. He begins at the same point: the sad saga of Paul Bennewitz. From there, however, he traces a national (and ultimately global) effort by the military and intelligence communities to control the entire field of UFO investigation through faked documents, hoaxed "events" and good old fashioned intimidation and violence. How you feel about the "field" of UFOlogy is quite beside the point -- the book's focus on operational and practical details makes it an essential pick for our purposes here today.
The Deep End
Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda, Third Edition
by Philip M. Taylor. This is essentially The Textbook. That's why it's so expensive. If you care about this subject and take it seriously, you should buy this and then read it, hundreds of times. That is all.
The Gods of Antenna
by Bruce Herschensohn. This deceptively short volume is an in-depth treatment of the subject from an insider of both corporate and military PsyOps, and stays relentlessly focused on the actual techniques of framing, priming, leading and outright deception that makes the magic possible. Loaded with examples and operational detail, this is essential stuff and I'm grateful & surprised it's still in print.
Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War
by Christopher Simpson. This is a collection of historical essays about the role of military money in guiding public research we well as controlling the content of education itself. There is certainly a sequel waiting to be written - hopefully it's already in print? - about how private corporations have taken up the slack as gov/mil money slowed down. I'm including it here because it's very well written and fleshes out the details of something that usually gets brought up as a general theory or vague accusation. Also - it's back in print and far, far cheaper than it was when I had to track down a used copy.
Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960
by Christopher Simpson. This is a dense book of original history and, much like the Carroll Quigley classic The Anglo-American Establishment, it frequently devolves into pages and pages of names and dates. So while it's far from easy reading, it's also an essential source document and I'm certain there are thousands of connections yet to be drawn from the material here.
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
by John Zaller. This is some heavy going and the fact is, I never would have read it unless it was handed to me by a mentor. Years later, I find myself really wishing that I still had a copy because so much of the material was over my head at the time. This is a dense, slow going, top-level academic approach to the central question of Social Control that informs this entire reading list. It's also one of the more thought-provoking books my young brain ever came in touch with. For those of you interested in The Deep End, this is solid source material if you can find it.
A Century of Media. A Century of War
by Robin Andersen. One last recommendation, this time second-hand. I've had a number of folks I really respect tell me I had to get ahold of a copy in recent months, but acute delusions of being a rapper have made that impossible so far. I'm looking forward to picking up a copy, though -- looks ambitious and heavy-duty.
...and? I'm betting there's dozens of hidden gems I have either forgotten or never knew about to begin with. I know the reader base here is a rare and strange breed of autodidact, so I'd like to turn the microphone over to you: what else should have been included here?
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An Invocation Against the Inevitable
Posted Sep 01, 2011
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“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” - McLuhan
Skilluminati Research has been a very cynical project...until now. Change of policy: there are no sufficient excuses for inaction. There is no point to all this research if I'm not capable of using it for something real. What interests me now is Synthesis. How can we build a politics that takes all of this horrible shit for granted and still provides a master plan?
In 2011, Hope and Change are hollow brand names and representative Democracy itself is hollowed out, broken for decades. Distrust of government has gone from a fringe position to a bipartisan consensus. If you think all that adds up to a "Now is the Time" pep talk, you're not hearing me at all. We are more fucked than ever. The situation is not "ripe," it is fundamentally out of control and irreversible. ...so what then?
The Machine is bigger than you can think. It snakes through every aspect of your life, it networks an entire planet of political powerbrokers, banking cartels, intelligence agencies, arms dealers, cult leaders, secret societies and royal families. From cynical operatives to true believers, from corporate boardrooms to secret bases, the Machine is too vast an ecosystem to model accurately. Both in human terms and hardware specs, much of the infrastructure is classified -- and that's just the stuff the military is doing. Every serious effort to reform this system to date has gotten nowhere. ...so what now?
Most dangerously, our language is broken. Not only broken, but weaponized against us. Human beings are depressingly easy to manipulate in large numbers. Your brain, not to get too technical, is a buggy piece of shit. Despite being a three pound patty of Universe-making miracle meat, our brains leave us very vulnerable to each other. Our broken cultural dialog is a cascading feedback loop of confirmation bias, narrative framing, visual cues, and paid disinformation -- and that's just the stuff the Democratics are doing. Even starting the conversation about "fixing the system" or "improving quality of life" is difficult now. This is a testament to the power of demographic targeting, segmented messaging and persuasion engineering. Mind control is a very mundane science these days.
And...so what? I can at least say this: there is a way - in fact, thousands of Ways - and we will find them, and we will use them. I'm still sketching out the details, but it's there and I'm far from the only monkey in the Zoo who sees it.
Every 24 hours, the global situation gets more unstable, and we have less time to fix it. The imperative weight of what our generation must accomplish is crushing, and for most of us, paralyzing. What is being asked of you is both unfair and unrealistic. To be clear: I'm not going to tell you that you have to do it, I'm just explaining where I will be located through 2012.
"One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman: two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question." -- William Morris
Everybody wants to change the world...and that makes this a dangerous conversation to have. I can understand why bloggers get touchy about being labeled "Enemy Combatants" by DoD documentation like the Information Operations Roadmap, but I also don't think the Pentagon is exactly wrong, either. We all think our motives are pure, so when we talk about "changing the world" we seldom hear the resemblance to, for instance: Christian Dominionists, al-Qaeda, Jeff Skilling from Enron, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In fact, the langauge is identical, and any serious political reform effort is essentially a non-violent revolutionary act.
Enemies are too easy, though. I would like to play a different game now. I am here to learn from everyone, but please don't mistake that for an invitation. I learn on my own terms -- as Wyndham Lewis never said to Marshall McLuhan, "The secret of success is secrecy."
With that approach in mind, I will be tinkering with changes to the format here at Skilluminati Research. This will still be home to long-form essays, but the back end architecture will be changing into something more useful for other researchers. Certainly, my source documentation is more valuable than my moron opinions. I also intend to make this more of a network hub, with more outbound links and spotlights on worthy endeavors being waged elsewhere.
Suggestions welcome. As always: Thank you for your time.
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Ronald Hadley Stark: The Man Behind the LSD Curtain
Posted Dec 02, 2010
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"...revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science for the few who are competent to practice it. It depends on correct organisation and above all, on communications." -- Robert Heinlen
11/30/11 -- The curse of doing research out here in Weirdoland is that the really fascinating people are nearly impossible to do research on. For instance, when you're covertly running the world's largest LSD manufacturing and smuggling operation for the CIA, you're not going to be doing interviews in Newsweek or publishing an autobiography. That's precisely the problem with Ronald Hadley Stark, who is one of the most insane characters in the history of LSD -- and that's really saying something, don't you think?
This article has been updated considerably since I first published it. Stark's life story is beyond belief, so I think it's important to be meticulous. There are, no doubt, still hundreds of errors here.
For anyone unfamiliar with the tangle of political, scientific, cultural and covert forces behind spread of LSD, this article could get confusing. Ronald Stark is a central figure in David Black's book ACID: A Secret History of LSD,
but the best overall introduction to this material would be Acid Dreams,
by Lee & Shlain. It's short and very readable, laying out the overall history in clear terms. For more serious seekers, I highly recommend HP Albarelli's masterpiece, A Terrible Mistake,
which is meticulously documented and considerably broader than mere LSD history.
The Super-Context
Stark had been working with US intelligence agencies for at least 9 years by the time of his most infamous moment, a legendary meeting with the "hippie mafia" drug syndicate called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (no joke.) They were looking for a new supplier and Stark kicked off the meeting by showing them a kilogram of liquid LSD -- for US readers, that's 2.2 pounds of acid. Needless to say, his resume was persuasive. He claimed to have a dedicated lab in France, but it's his political philosophy that really makes Stark such an interesting character:
"He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics."
The Brotherhood was sufficiently impressed to bring Ronald Stark into the fold, and what followed was the Golden Era of cheap, high-quality LSD. From 1969 through 1973, Stark and the Brotherhood dosed a generation and got away with it, too.
According to a figure quoted by everyone and verified by nobody, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD in his career. Hippie lore generally gives Owsley Stanley the crown of the Acid King, but by Stanley's own estimates, his total production was a half kilogram. That might not sound like much -- but it adds up to over 5 million hits of acid. You can see why the Army and Navy were so interested in this compound: it is unusually powerful as drug molecules go.
Although the LSD story is closely associated with the Sandoz pharmaceutical corporation in Switzerland, most of the CIA's supply was actually domestic. Since at least 1954, the Eli Lilly Company was working under secret contract to keep the various MKNAOMI and ARTICHOKE research projects stocked up with magic mindfuck juice. The figures on their total LSD output are classified.
David Black: "Before clinching the deal with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute."
Obviously this was a big money business, and organized crime involvement was inevitable. Since small batches of LSD have a literally exponential commercial profit margin, technical expertise was highly rewarded. Consider the case of Clyde Apperson, a specialist in quickly setting up a fully functional manufacturing lab just about anywhere. More importantly, he could take them down even faster. For set-up, Apperson would charge $100,000 in cash -- take downs were only $50,000. He was finally busted working in the infamous abandoned missile silo with William Leonard Pickard in 2000.
Everyone's always getting busted, though. The history of LSD is full of incredibly intelligent men making highly stupid decisions. Yet through it all, from Operation Julie to the Sand-Scully case, Ronald Stark just kept on trucking. He was a calculating cameo artist: always on the scene, never holding the bag.
Until he suddenly was: "Whatever game Stark was playing took an abrupt turn in February 1975 when Italian police received an anonymous phone call about a man selling drugs in a hotel in Bologna. A few days later at the Grand Hotel Baglioni they arrested a suspect in possession of 4,600 kilos of marijuana, morphine, and cocaine. The suspect carried a British passport bearing the name Mr. Terrence W. Abbott. Italian investigators soon discovered that "Mr. Abbott" was actually Ronald Stark."-- Source: Acid Dreams, pg. 213
Terrence W. Abbott was holding a genuine British passport, number 348489A, which was issued in 1973. The story of how he got it will never be told -- British intelligence refused to release his files. The FBI refused to share their files on him with the DEA's investigation, and the US State Department has actively interfered with many foreign attempts to extradite or prosecute Stark. The man led a charmed life.
"...the picture of Stark's activities began to broaden with the discovery of a vial of liquid and a cache of papers kept in a Rome bank deposit box. The vial was sent for forensic examination. The scientists reported back that they could not precisely identify the drug it contained. At best, they put it close to LSD. Perhaps it was the synthetic THC Stark had dreamt of creating; the papers included formulae for the synthesis. There were also plans for the bulk purchase of hemp seeds and calculations for shipments, investments and plant installation. Some of the papers went back to the Brotherhood days but they gave no details of his LSD operations after the Belgian episode. They did show that his range of interests in the drug world had expanded to include narcotics. There were details of the synthesis of cocaine." Source: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Stark's time in Italy is the strangest and bloodiest chapter of his odd history. Although most accounts frame his 1975 arrest as a "bust," one commentator who does not is worth mentioning here: Phillip Willan. His view of Stark is shaped not by LSD folklore, but through earnest journalism and research into the history of political terrorism in Italy. The Ronald Stark that Willan presents is not a drug lord getting taken down, so much as an intelligence asset deliberately changing venues.
Willan: "Stark's arrest in Italy was prompted by a mysterious phone call to the police and he seems quite happy to go to prison, where his time was gainfully employed in winning the confidence of captured Red Brigades leaders, given that he turned down the opportunity of bail in August 1978."
Stark was no mere snitch, though. He was actively setting up infrastructure, teaching the principles of operational security and preaching the virtues of the "cell" structure. "He also provided them with a cryptographic system for coded radio communications," Willan says, although it should be assumed that Stark was also passing that system on to his secret employers. Prison records show that he met with Italian police and intelligence agents many times while he was networking there. It was in Italy that a large part of Ronald Stark's operation collapsed into the visible world. The facts that emerged are an education in covert warfare and intelligence operations.
Some Heavy Dudes
"...his preferred to keep his range of contacts ignorant of each other's activities. Oftentimes he concealed the fact he was an American. His European associates were not privvy to his affairs in Africa, and those in Asia knew little about his work in the states. The brothers, for example, had no idea he was running a separate cocaine ring in the Bay Area." -- Acid Dreams, pg 250
Researching Roland Stark, I was reminded of people like Porter Goss, Henry Karl "Andijra" Puharich, or Barry Seal: it is unreal how much this guy got around. He stayed in close contact with the founders of "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," which is another hub in the Dark Network of occult history.
They began as a splinter group who broke ranks from Scientology, which meant they were waging spiritual war with L. Ron Hubbard from 1965 through 1974, which was a pretty bad year for "The Teacher," Robert DeGrimston. He was booted from his own cult and his wife divorced him on her journey to starting a successful chain of "Best Friends" animal shelters. (No joke.)
All of which sounds way more lurid than it was. Stark was ultimately a drug dealer so beyond being Very Interesting, his link with the Process Church doesn't imply any shared philosophy...and doesn't exclude it, either. The oddball sociologist William Sims Bainbridge studied the group for months, and he didn't exactly make it sound like a blood magick sacrifice: "there was no violence and no indiscriminate sex, but I found a remarkably aesthetic and intelligent alternative to conventional religion." Then again, the Solar Temple was full of wealthy and sophisticated people who held refined parties and had very high-level conversations right up until the mass murder, mass suicide thing.
(For considerably more detail on the Process, refer to the Bainbridge essay Social Construction from Within: Satan's Process.)
Timothy Leary was a perfect avatar for the Age of Horus: playful, brilliantly creative and blissfully unaware of the bad consequences he was unleashing. Although there is little evidence to tie Leary himself to the drug smuggling and merchandising activities of the Brotherhood, there is no question he quickly became the spiritual center of the group. For what it's worth, Leary himself downplayed their significance:
LEARY: "The whole concept of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is like a bogeyman invented by the narcs. The brotherhood was about eight surfer kids from Southern California, Laguna Beach, who took the LSD, and they practiced the religion of the worship of nature, and they'd go into the mountains. But they were not bigshots at all. None of them ever drove anything better than a VW bus. They were just kind of in it for the spiritual thrill."
Maybe so -- but probably not. In September 1970, Leary escaped from prison in a complicated deal exposing just how serious the Brotherhood network had become. Money from Ronald Stark was paid to the Weather Underground, which is the precise point where the "hippie mafia" became connected to actual hippie terrorists. Leary himself wound up in Algeria under the (very) armed watch of Eldridge Cleaver, himself in exile. A year later, Leary and his wife were in Switzerland, living under the protection of the arms dealer Michel Hauchard. For a story about spiritual thrills, there's definitely a lot of guns involved here.
At one point, though, maybe the Brotherhood really was just a group of hippies with a couple trunks full of weed. The Weather Underground were harmless student activists for awhile, too. Once Stark was brought into the Brotherhood, he quickly took change of the entire operation, establishing secure shipments and managing every aspect of their finances. "Stark warned them that buying real estate openly, as they had done, was much too risky -- but his lawyers could remedy the situation by hiding ownership in a maze of shell companies."
This is a repeated pattern in Stark's operations: he is always ready to create an organization where none exists. After Owsley got busted and the Brotherhood went international, many of the original bay area chemists got wise to what Stark was really doing. "We were definitely very gullible in believing the stuff he told us," as poor Tim Scully would later observe.
The Brotherhood got plugged into Stark's global underground very quickly: massive marijuana imports from the Middle East, shadow bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, and he was somehow micro-managing everything. Once he had flooded the West Coast with Afghan weed, Stark turned his attention to New York City, which was completely unprepared for the sheer quantity the Brotherhood supplied. From distribution to organizing street-level dealers, Stark was there, establishing Ordo Ab Chao is his own specific way.
Skilluminati readers may already be familiar with Mr. Nice, the Welsh arms trader and Hashish entrepreneur who paved the pipeline that brought Afghanistan's finest exports into the hands of hippies and other connoisseurs all around the world. His real name is Howard Marks and his pioneering work in cultural exchange was the foundation for everything from the Cannabis Cup to Afghanistan's ongoing civil war, although of course neither was actually Howard's fault. Unlike Stark, he's made a modest living telling colorful and contrite stories of his drug dealing days. Part of the Mr. Nice gig, of course, is that he swears he's never used violence or trafficked in "hard drugs" -- which was probably an even bigger factor in his early retirement than getting busted by the DEA. Afghanistan, of course, got very heavy very quick and Mr. Nice was steamrolled out of the picture in short order.
Howard Marks was very much a hippie. Ronald Stark was something else altogether.
Giorgio Floridia
Most of what's known about Ronald Stark today is through an Italian magistrate named Giorgio Floridia, who released Stark from Italian prison in 1979. After Stark had gotten himself caught in 1975, he busied himself trying to convince anyone and everyone that he was operating with the blessings of the United States government. Four years later, he finally managed to persuade Floridia, who cited "an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs" that Stark had given him.
At his appeals trial Stark changed identities once again, this time passing himself off as "Khouri Ali," a radical Palestinian. In fluent Arabic he spelled out the details of his autobiography, explaining that he was part of an international terrorist organization headquartered in Lebanon, called "Group 14." Stark's appeal failed, and he was sent back to jail.
But Italian police took a renewed interest in his case after they captured Enrique Paghera, another terrorist leader who knew Stark. At the time of his arrest Paghera was holding a hand-drawn map of a PLO camp in Lebanon. The map, Paghera confessed, had come from Stark, who also provided a coded letter of introduction. The objective, according to Paghera, was to forge a link with a terrorist organization that was planning to attack embassies.
Floridia also claims Stark worked for the Defense Department from 1960 on, and recieved paychecks from Fort Lee, in New Jersey. It is worth considering that Stark might have exaggerated his role and connections, and even fabricated evidence, in presenting his case to the magistrate who was in a position to free him. Either way, it worked. Stark was released on parole....and disappeared days later.
In terms of Floridia's motivation, it's worth considering the fate of the guy who came before him:
In June 1978 a Bologna magistrate, Graziano Gori, was assigned to investigate Stark and his astounding web of associates. A few weeks later, Gori was killed in a car wreck.
That, of course, might be the most "impressive proof" of all.
Somehow Not the End
Ronald Stark turned up in Holland in 1982. There's not a lot of published details, but it clearly involves 16 kilos of hasish and a Lebanese cover identity. He was busted en route to New York City. He got deported the next year and apparently died in custody -- because when Italy requested that he be extradited on terrorism charges, the US replied with a copy of Stark's death certificate.
(You guessed it -- "heart attack.")
His paper trail comes to an end here, although the reader can be forgiven for assuming his crusade continued covertly. There was certainly no retirement for a man like Stark. His mission was too important, too huge for a mere career.
...but then again, what was his mission, after all? Is it a mistake to place any stock in what he told the Brotherhood of Eternal Love? Perhaps not. Although Ronald Hadley Stark was many things to many people, the sole constant that emerges is Revolution. From the Weather Underground to the Red Brigades, from the PLO to the IRA, Stark was consistently moving in circles where the overthrow of government and the liberation of the people were central themes...circles that today would be considered "Terrorist." Certainly, Stark manipulated and lied to his contacts every step of the way, and it's safe to assume the speeches he gave to the Palestinians and Italians were much different from the picture he was painting in 1969 for the Brotherhood.
It's worth revisiting, though: "...in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people." Now, Hadley's chosen network makes it pretty clear that he viewed automatic rifles and firebombs as equally valid tools for "inducing altered states of consciousness," and it's unlikely that a realist like Stark honestly believed that LSD was going amount to much more than a profitable business. Setting that aside, overthrowing both capitalism and communism sounds like an authentic statement of Stark's overall goals, or at least one that fits his sketchy and fast-moving modus operandi.
Stark was an infiltrator, creating back channels for communication between intelligence and police agencies and the underground movements that were trying to fight them. The fact he was so successful and so prolific is what makes him a remarkable character. Throughout his documented life, Stark is relentlessly working with, for and against dozens of competing players. He travels constantly, juggles multiple identities and stays actively involved in multiple conflicts simultaneously.
Looking over his strange, tangled career, it's hard to avoid thinking that LSD was really not the point. The single biggest producer of raw LSD the world has ever known was not a True Believer, he was just passing through on his way to bigger and better things. His work for US intelligence agencies had less to do with blowing minds than establishing connections. Vast quantities of acid was perhaps more of a bona fide, a calling card to establish himself as a legitimate criminal figure.
Which brings us, finally, full circle.
A Harsh Mistress
In 1966, Putnam & Sons published a new novel from Robert Heinlein named The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The plot concerns a worker's revolution on a Lunar colony, organized by a small group of people with considerable assistance from a self-aware supercomputer that controls the colony's infrastructure. Written in a distinctively abbreviated "Moonspeak," the book goes into remarkable detail about secure, secret communication networks. Stark was seldom without a copy and spoke highly of it around the world. Perhaps the closest we can ultimately get to unraveling his motives and beliefs is within the pages of a sci-fi story, rather than the life he left behind.
It's impossible to write about the character of Ronald Stark without discussing the character of Professor Bernardo de la Paz. As the brains behind the Lunar revolution, the Professor has several extensive monologues about the design principles behind covert operations. "Revolution," the Prof says, "is an art I pursue, rather than a goal I expect to achieve."
The end of the novel is pure Chinatown. The revolution gets subverted like revolutions always do, and Heinlein was really writing a love song about The Frontier itself. Revolution is the flame that extinguishes itself, for simple and practical reasons: "Every new member made it that much more likely that you would be betrayed," as the Prof puts it.
"Organization must be no larger than necessary -- never recruit anyone merely because he wants to join. As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy; therefore structure is small, secret and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal -- since there are always betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented."
The Professor goes on to propose a mandala of three-member cells, all reporting through a single Leader node back towards the center. This compartmentalized approach allows the founders to both monopolize information flow and insulate themselves against exposure. The concept is simple and effective, and it has been proven here in the real world for decades, from terrorist networks to intelligence agencies to evangelical Christians. It is staggering to think of how much Ronald Stark was connected to, assuming he rigorously pursued the Professor's blueprint, as Art for Art's sake. It is sobering to realize that the long, wide trail of covert history I've outlined here was just a couple of cells that got busted, part of a larger picture that is gone completely here in 2010.
His greatest achievements were the successful conspiracies, the completed operations that will never get traced back to his careful planning and constant hard work. There are too many huge gaps and unanswered questions to leave much doubt that Ronald Hadley Stark had a very impressive batting average. He was in a line of work where invisibility is the goal, and his true legacy is hiding behind headlines we will never understand, out here in the herd.
pg 77 "Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror. I hope you will forgive me if I say that, up to now, it has been done clumsily."
Further Reading
Sorry, no LSD recipes here. Handy safety test: if you need to google the instructions, you're not qualified to perform them. Don't play with fire, kids.
Be sure to check out the Cult of the Dead Cow's review of Acid: A New Secret History of LSD" -- full of further information on Stark.
The always-excellent Gary Lachman offers a sober and detailed take on The Process Church.
If you want to learn more about the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, that's good: you should. There's an outstanding book on the subject, predictably titled The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
I recently read a new book on the subject, Orange Sunshine,
which wasn't nearly as good.
Finally, for deep background on WTF Ronald Hadley Stark was doing in Italy during those mysterious final years of his life, Philip Willan's book is essential: "Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy
."
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. Here's Lyndon Johnson running a Texas clinic on ectomorph 
