The United States of Paranoia (49 page)

14
. Kathryn S. Olmsted,
Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI
(University of North
Carolina
Press, 1996), 17.

15
. Quoted in Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate,
Foreign and Military Intelligence
(U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 389.

16
. Ibid., 391.

17
. Lasky at one point received $20,000 from the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, which should put to rest any suspicion that he was an unbiased observer. For a balanced assessment of what his book got right and wrong, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Call It a Tradition,”
Inquiry
, November 21, 1977.

18
. Victor Lasky,
It Didn’t Start with Watergate
(Dial Press, 1977), 220.

19
. Nicholas B. Dirks,
The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
(Harvard University Press, 2006), 30.

20
. For an account of Felt’s actions and intentions during the Watergate scandal, see Max Holland,
Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat
(University Press of Kansas, 2012).

21
. For some problems with the idea that investigators were putting agents’ lives at risk, see Jesse Walker, “Agee’s Revenge,” July 14, 2005, reason.com/archives/2005/07/14/agees-revenge.

22
. On the use of the charge of McCarthyism against congressional and journalistic investigators, see Olmsted,
Challenging the Secret Government
, 126, 131–32, 138, 164.

23
.
The Final Assassinations Report: Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House of Representatives
(Bantam Books, 1979), 100.

24
. Roscoe Drummond, “Revived Theory of a ‘Conspiracy’ Still Resting on Tenuous Grounds,”
Observer-Reporter
(Washington, Pa.), January 23, 1979.

25
. I first encountered the Skeleton Key online in 1990 or so, on a proto-Internet at the University of Michigan called the Michigan Terminal System. I got the impression even then that people had been forwarding it around cyberspace for a while already.

26
. Robert Eringer, “Dossier on Conspiriologists: Mae Brussell & Peter Beter,”
Critique
5 (Autumn 1981). The conversation took place in late 1977 or early 1978. Eringer’s article doesn’t identify the publication that he telephoned, but he informed me, looking back more than three decades later, that he was “reasonably certain” it was a magazine called
It
. Robert Eringer, e-mail to the author, April 16, 2012.

27
. Paul Krassner,
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture
, 2nd ed. (New World Digital, 2010), 224.

28
. Mae Brussell, “From Monterey Pop to Altamont—OPERATION CHAOS: The CIA’s War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture” (1976), maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Operation%20Chaos.html.

29
. John Judge, “Why Everybody Is a Government Patsy” (1978), in New Yippie Book Collective,
Blacklisted News: Secret Histories from Chicago to 1984
(Bleecker Publishing, 1983), 546. Judge’s article originally appeared in the
Yipster Times
.

30
. Stephen Hall, “ ‘Robot’ Behavior of Ryan Murder Suspect,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, November 28, 1978.

31
. Mae Brussell, tape 365, December 1, 1978. A transcription of the tape can be found at maebrussell.com/Transcriptions/365.html.

32
. Quoted ibid. Lane did not reply to a request to comment on the quote’s accuracy.

33
. Quoted in “ ‘Crusader’ Mark Lane,”
The Lawrence Daily Journal-World
, November 29, 1978.

34
. Brussell, tape 365.

35
. That said, Brussellesque ideas could surface in surprising places. A popular biography of the rock star Jim Morrison, for example, included this passage:

Still other theories claimed Jim was the victim of a political conspiracy aimed at discrediting and eliminating the hippie/New Left/counterculture lifestyle (actually this is supposed to have been a vast, pervasive, connected set of conspiracies that included the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, the riots at Isla Vista, the Weathermen bombings, the stiff prison sentences given to Timothy Leary and the Chicago Eight, the Charlie Manson murders—not to mention the deaths of Hendrix and Joplin and more than two dozen Black Panthers).

      Rather than mocking the theory, the authors commented that “Jim was certainly popular enough and, more threateningly, smart enough to cause the powers that be ample reason to take some sort of action to prevent his subversive influence.” Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman,
No One Here Gets Out Alive
(Warner Books, 1981), 372.

36
. The code’s commands started to lose their force in 1952, when the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects motion pictures. Movies gradually grew more adventurous, and the code finally died when a ratings system replaced it in 1968.

37
. Interview at youtube.com/watch?v=fRiZtqVPJ9U.

38
. Fredric Jameson,
The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System
(Indiana University Press, 1995), 55.

39
.
The Parallax View
, directed by Alan J. Pakula, screenplay by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., from a novel by Loren Singer, Paramount Pictures, 1974.
The Parallax View
is also notable for including one of the most chilling and bizarre brainwashing sequences ever set in celluloid.

40
. Olmsted,
Challenging the Secret Government
, 102.

41
.
Executive Action
, directed by David Miller, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, from a novel by Donald Freed and Mark Lane, National General Pictures, 1973. Freed’s other notable contribution to conspiracy cinema was to coscript Robert Altman’s Nixon movie,
Secret Honor
(1984).

42
.
Scorpio
, directed by Michael Winner, screenplay by David W. Rintels and Gerald Wilson, MGM, 1973. Winner’s previous film,
The Mechanic
(1972), had a similar story. In both pictures a professional assassin takes on an understudy who in turn tries to kill him. But
The Mechanic
’s protagonist works for a group called “the organization”—presumably the Mafia, though that is never stated outright—and we never learn much about why his victims have been slated to die.
Scorpio
gave the story line an explicitly political edge.

43
.
The Domino Principle
, directed by Stanley Kramer, screenplay by Adam Kennedy from his novel, AVCO, 1977.

44
.
Network
, directed by Sidney Lumet, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, MGM/United Artists, 1975.

45
. Another popular Spielberg film,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977), offered an alternative to the era’s apprehensive atmosphere by imagining a Benevolent Conspiracy.
Two
benevolent conspiracies, actually: There are the aliens who want to welcome humanity to the larger cosmic community, and there are the government officials who plant disinformation and cover up important facts for the citizens’ own good.

      In 1982, widely perceived as a time of greater faith in public institutions, Spielberg returned to the cinema of suspicion with
E.T.
, a sentimental but sometimes terrifying tale in which children have to hide a friendly extraterrestrial from the government. The agents of the American state are portrayed here as a fearsome squadron of secret police. The liberal pundit David Sirota later criticized
E.T.
for “depict[ing] the government as a faceless menace,” arguing that this amounted to propaganda against intervention in the economy: “Yeah, we think, why should we let those jackbooted federal sentries from
E.T.
make our health care decisions?” David Sirota,
Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything
(Ballantine Books, 2011), 86, 93. For a critique of Sirota’s book, see Jesse Walker, “That ’80s Show,”
Reason
, July 2011.

46
. Ira Levin,
The Stepford Wives
(Random House, 1972), 50.

47
. Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
(Dell, 1963), 234–35.

48
. The
Stepford Wives
movie was the basis for three made-for-TV follow-ups.
Revenge of the Stepford Wives
(1980) changed the scenario somewhat: The town’s women are drugged and brainwashed rather than replaced by robots, a sign that possession and imposture are close enough in spirit for Hollywood to treat them as interchangeable. The story ends with two liberated women seizing the means of mind control and inducing a Stepford riot. In
The Stepford Children
(1987) the conspiracy is back to using androids, and with
The Stepford Husbands
(1996), predictably, the tables are turned.

      The franchise returned to theaters in 2004, when a muddled
Stepford Wives
remake attempted to update Levin’s story for an era when gender equality wasn’t as controversial as it was in the seventies. That take on the tale features androids
and
mind control, as though the screenwriter couldn’t quite make up his mind what was happening. Fittingly for a film in which people are reduced to puppets, the picture was directed by the veteran muppeteer Frank Oz.

49
. Quoted in Judy Klemesrud, “Feminists Recoil at Film Designed to Relate to Them,”
The New York Times
, February 26, 1975.

50
. “Top Secret,”
My Three Sons
, ABC, December 26, 1963.

51
. “The Investigation,”
Good Times
, CBS, January 27, 1976.

52
. Clifton Daniel, “The Rockefeller Panel and Its C.I.A. Mission,”
The New York Times
, January 20, 1975.

53
. Quoted in Olmsted,
Challenging the Secret Government
, 61.

Chapter 8: The Legend of John Todd

  1
. Quoted in Robert M. Price, “With Strange Aeons: H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos as One Vast Narrative,” in
Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives
, ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (MIT Press, 2009), 242.

  2
. Todd’s Chambersburg testimony is transcribed at textfiles.com/occult/jtc1.txt. A slightly different rendition appears in Christopher A. LaRock,
John Todd: Beyond the Legend
(Lulu, 2011). I have not always followed either transcriber’s punctuation and capitalization.

  3
. The $1,000 estimate comes from Edward E. Plowman, “The Legend(s) of John Todd,”
Christianity Today
, February 2, 1979. The same article claimed that about a thousand people attended Todd’s talk, but the church’s then pastor, Dino Pedrone, today estimates that the total was four hundred or five hundred. It is possible that Pedrone’s memory is playing tricks on him, but it is also possible that Plowman confused the number of people the auditorium could seat with the number it seated that day.

  4
. Quoted ibid.

  5
. Author’s interview with Dino Pedrone, May 15, 2012.

  6
. Gary Chartier, e-mail to the author, June 28, 2012.

  7
. Recordings of Todd’s talks have been posted on several websites; I downloaded them from kt70.com/~jtamesjpn/articles/john_todd_and_the_illuminati.htm. The quotes in this paragraph and the next two paragraphs come from the recording labeled tape 3A. None of the aforementioned sites list dates for the tapes, but a passage quoted from this speech is dated March 30, 1978, in Darryl E. Hicks and David A. Lewis,
The Todd Phenomenon: Ex–Grand Druid vs. the Illuminati, Fact or Fantasy?
(New Leaf Press, 1979), 23.

  8
. Todd, tape 1B. According to Hicks and Lewis, this one was recorded in Canoga Park, California, in the summer of 1977.

  9
. “Spellbound?”
The Crusaders
10 (1978). This comic book was produced by Jack T. Chick with Todd’s input. Todd himself appears as a character under the name Lance Collins, an alias he sometimes used; the quoted text is one of Collins’s lines in the comic.

10
. Todd, tape 3B. According to Hicks and Lewis, this was recorded in Philadelphia in February 1978. The quotation in the following paragraph comes from the same source.

11
. Though Todd claimed that every president since Wilson had been in the Illuminati, he also claimed that the Illuminati had favored George McGovern in the 1972 election and that “Nixon defied the Illuminati when he made peace overtures to Red China,” a country the conspiracy had “slated for total destruction.” Quoted in Hicks and Lewis,
The Todd Phenomenon
, 43.

12
. Todd, tape 1A.

13
. Todd, tape 4A. According to Hicks and Lewis, this tape was recorded on March 31, 1978.

14
. Quoted in Michael Saler,
As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality
(Oxford University Press, 2012), 146.

15
. Todd, tape 3A. This may be the only time a Roger Corman production has been recommended as a guide to the external world.

16
.
Donahue
, WGN-TV, January 1, 1979. The host went on to ask the questioner who the Illuminati were. She replied that they were “the international bankers, Rothschild, the Rockefellers, and all the Bilderbergers.” Donahue took that to mean she thought Rand’s ideas would lead to “capitalist control.”

17
. Hicks and Lewis,
The Todd Phenomenon
, 71–72.