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A Pragmatic Masonic History

A Lodge Elder introduces a new piece of ritual into his lodge workings. How long does it take to become "time immemorial" in the eyes of the members of that lodge? It could be two years or less. It's this ability to pull the wool over our own eyes that bedevils masonic history. The study of masonic history in particular, requires an approach which includes Applied Logic and Social Psychology - two disciplines usually missing in masonic histories, but which I have attempted here.

Someone once wrote: ".nothing vexes people so much, and hardens them in their unbelief and in their dogged resistance to reforms, as undeniable facts and unanswerable arguments." This, I feel, applies in particular to much attempted masonic historical writing.

This paper is an attempt to outline (no more) a very brief history of Freemasonry, from an obscure starting point, through 1717 A.D. - at the formation of the premier Grand Lodge by four London lodges, at the Goose and Gridiron tavern in the shadow of St Paul's - to the present. It applies particularly to the English Constitution - although the basic history is of interest to all constitutions.

As we are trying to avoid "fairy tales" here, it must be pointed out that the insistence by the United Grand Lodge of England that "pure, antient Freemasonry consists of three degrees only.including the Royal Arch." is almost certainly historically inaccurate. Grand Lodges are of course entitled to decide for themselves exactly what their ritual consists of. Thus if the UGLE says it consists of three degrees including the Royal Arch, then they have that right - but I think it is confusing to suggest that their (modern) version is "pure, antient." because this tends to distort the facts.

A Question of Definition

First, let me define what I think "pure, antient" Freemasonry ritual is: It is quite simply the ritual that existed in 1717, when the premier Grand Lodge was formed. Surprisingly, we do have a pretty good idea what that ritual was - it's just that many masonic historians stick their head in the sand and concentrate on an undefined period a few years later, when another degree came into existence. This is an illogical approach. If we accept the date of 1717 as being the start of organized Freemasonry as we know it, then the original ritual must be that which was practiced in 1717. Anything else has to be an addition or innovation.

Do we have any idea of what this ritual was composed of? Almost certainly yes. The most valuable material here is Knoop, Jones and Hamer's book The Early Masonic Catechisms (1975, edited by Harry Carr). This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Craft ritual.

Unlike the Old Charges, which seem to have originated as operative "trade union" charters, and which lodges seemed keen to keep as an indication of history, Early Masonic Catechisms concentrates on what are virtually scraps of paper (one is a mere 20cm by 15cm sheet of paper) upon which are written a form of ritual of a catechism (question and answer) nature. These include the Edinburgh Register House MS (1696), the Chetwode Crawley MS (1700) and the Kevan MS (circa 1715). All, you will note, immediately before 1717.

Having studied the above three manuscripts in detail, the authors state: "These three texts are so much alike in minute detail that it is quite certain that they all purport to describe the same procedure."

In fact, these catechisms have far more in common with our ritual than the Old Charges, which lodges seemed to possess to give themselves a patina of age. Now the point about the Old Charges, is that one could make a case for them being a saleable item; if every lodge were supposed to have one, there would have been steady jobs for scribes producing them. Not so the manuscripts mentioned above; they are loose leaves of paper, usually showing many folds and signs of great use, and which were not designed to appeal to anyone. Just like the scribbled bits of ritual masons have made up for centuries - to this day. In other words, there was no need to produce them except for use - which to me makes them pretty genuine.

What do they teach?

Now the amazing thing about these manuscripts, is that the average mason will find much to relate to: the method of placing the feet; mention of a "prentice" and "fellow-Craft"; the Five Points of Fellowship; the mention of the square, compasses and the Bible in the same context; the porch of Solomon's Temple; the basic penal sign; and of having a part of your body cut out and buried on the beach or thereabouts - there is much to recognize here. This really is beyond coincidence. There's sufficient evidence for it to stand up in a court of law! But only two degrees are mentioned.

The two-degree theory has been accepted for many years. For example take Lionel Vibert's Prestonian Lecture for 1925, titled "The development of the Trigradal System". Early in the lecture, Vibert writes: "By the days of Grand Lodge (1717) this had come to be a system of two degrees only, the Acceptance and the Master's Part." Later he says: "...and by 1730 the trigradal system was definitely established."

More up to date, in his article "Masters Lodges" in the September 1997 issue of the masonic magazine The Square, Yasha Beresiner writes: "Although we have no evidence of the degree work undertaken in Craft lodges before 1730, we know, beyond doubt, that there were only two degrees: that of the Entered Apprentice and Fellow of the Craft (or Master) as the second."

So we have two top masonic historians, with papers separated by over 70 years, agreeing that in 1717 the Craft ritual consisted of only two degrees; most serious historians agree with them.

So, at this point all the evidence points to the existence of only two degrees in 1717. Also, the early masonic catechisms mentioned, describe significant portions of the ritual as we know it today. Thus it is logical to assume that in 1717, speculative masons worked a two-degree system, along the lines of the masonic catechisms described by Knoop, Jones and Hamer.

It is of course interesting to speculate where these original two degrees came from. The Edinburgh House MS (1696) was, we know, an old document from the Court of Session, Edinburgh, found in 1808; the Chetwode Crawley (c. 1700) was discovered around 1900 in Ireland; while the Kevan MS (c. 1714) was discovered in 1954, in Scotland.

Looking through The Early Masonic Exposures, it seems likely that the earliest catechisms derive from Scotland, and slowly filtered through the rest of Britain.

There is a school of thought which suggests that there is a shortage of early English catechisms because they were committed to memory. This is totally illogical; such a system would have meant a great deal of change over the years because of the vagaries of human memory - whereas the amazing thing about the early catechisms mentioned above, is that so much still fits into our current ritual. This could only be achieved by writing the ritual down.

Enter a Third

Serious historians also agree that the third degree was devised or introduced around 1725. It was certainly established by 1730, because it was published in Pritchard's Masonry Dissected on that date, and became the unofficial ritual book of freemasons for decades. This is also virtually the first mention we have of the Hiramic legend. However the storyline itself is mirrored in non-masonic legends down the ages. It's hardly original. But who developed this third degree, how, and why?

The noted Scottish masonic historian Murray Lyon (died 1903), described Desaguliers as the "co-fabricator and pioneer of the system of symbolical masonry." He had a point. Certainly Desaguliers was just about the most influential mason of the period, being Grand Master in 1719, and Deputy Grand Master in 1722 and 1726. This was the period in which the third degree was introduced into the ceremony of the premier Grand Lodge - and logic tells us that Desaguliers, and his masonic friends in the Royal Society, just had to be responsible. Certainly, nothing could have been introduced without their approval.

In fact the Craft changed dramatically while Desaguliers was on the scene. The original Grand Lodge, so far as we can tell, was little more than an annual get-together for a feast or festival. They didn't even keep minutes. The Desaguliers era saw the introduction of the keeping of minutes, an improvement in administration - and the introduction of the third degree.

In fact, a curious set of minutes of Grand Lodge (24 June 1723) tell us that the Duke of Wharton, Grand Master, declined to name his successor, and referred the nomination to the Grand Lodge. Most unusual. This resulted in the nomination of the Rt Hon the Earl of Dalkeith. Dalkeith then stated that in the event of his election, he would nominate Desaguliers as his deputy. Wharton then immediately asked for the Grand Lodge to approve Desaguliers (contrary to regulations). The minutes state: "A division of the (Grand) Lodge was called.there were 43 Ayes in favor of Desaguliers and 42 Noes. Dalkeith was then elected Grand Master - whereupon Wharton declared he had some doubt as to whether the tellers had reported the Desaguliers vote accurately." (Manchester AMR Transactions LXXXIII).

There seems little doubt that almost 50 per cent of those present - not just Wharton - were not in favor of Desaguliers; an indication of distention without doubt. Could this have been because he was "plugging" for a change of direction? People trying to change things are never popular.

How was the third introduced? After all, the slightest alteration in ritual is liable to create hysteria among masons. But remember that these were early days, when the brethren had few lines of communication and were thus ill-informed. I suggest it was introduced as the "revival of the third degree". I say this because almost every degree or order in Masonry is, at the point of origin, declared a "revival". This automatically imparts on the degree/order an artificial veneer of age. Even with the premier Grand Lodge, within a few years "historians" were writing that it was really a revival of an older system. I maintain it would have been easy to introduce a third degree, if it were described as something more ancient that masons had used in the past.

Why? That's more difficult. This was around the time the premier Grand Lodge ceremony and outlook started to become de-christianised. The number three is more evocative than two; it may have been no more than that. What is interesting, is that there is a link - King Solomon's Temple is mentioned in the original two-degree system, and of course in the Hiramic legend; although this does not prove a connection.

If the above assumptions are correct, then it means that three-degree Masonry as we know it, derived from two sources. We know that much of our heritage comes from the material mentioned in the two-degree system outlined in The Early Masonic Catechisms because most of it is still in our ritual. But at some point, a group introduced additional material (the third degree) that is unlikely to have had any real historical connection to the early ritual. It seems probable that Desaguliers and his companions introduced this additional material for a specific reason. Why? I suggest that a closer look at Desaguliers and the Royal Society, in this period, might shed some light on the subject.

The Degree Explosion

The point is that it happened - and I contend that it set in motion a chain of events that reverberate to this day. Because from this point, degrees and orders proliferated until, around 1800, there were literally hundreds - possibly a thousand - degrees. It became a sort of fashion. Indeed, many of the other orders that sprung up in the 1700s, such as the Buffaloes, Druids and Oddfellows, still exist to this day. Social psychologists could have a field day here, for if one traces these degrees/orders downwards from their peak, you arrive back at the period in which the premier Grand Lodge introduced the third degree - causing a virtual tidal wave of fashion for such societies.

In fact Sandbach, in his Talks for Lodge and Chapter writes: "We have to bear in mind the revolution which the coming of the Hiramic (third) degree must have achieved.What it did was turn Freemasonry into a new path." It did indeed. What it did not do is make it "pure, antient".

And Then There Were Four

Some time around 1730, the ceremony we now know as the Royal Arch was developed. We know little about its origin, except that it was a great favorite with a group of mostly Irish masons who became known as the Antients. Anyone wishing to research the Antients, should read Sadler's Masonic Facts and Fictions.

We must bear in mind, again, that the introduction of degrees and orders at this time was starting to become a phenomenon. Most of the degrees that have been passed down to us, or of which we have evidence of the ritual, seem to slot somewhere into a biblical chronology of sorts. They are basically similar in construction.

To my mind the introduction of the Royal Arch could have been something extremely simple: if we accept that the premier Grand Lodge introduced the third degree, in which the word was lost - then the next logical progression would be to find it again: the vault and the Royal Arch.

In fact the storyline was already circulating. In one of his lectures, titled "The Mark and the Royal Arch", the noted historian Wallace McLeod writes, regarding the RA. "Actually the story.comes from the ancient Greek historian Philostorgius of Cappadocia (circa 400 AD) who wrote a History of the Church. Philostorgius tells the following story: The Roman Emperor Julian ordered the Temple at Jerusalem to be rebuilt.when the foundations were being readied, one stone, that had been laid in the bottom of the course was dislodged and revealed a cavern built into the rock.they could not see inside.The overseers wanted to know the truth, so they fastened one of their workmen to a long rope and let him down.feeling around, in the centre he discovered a block of rock projecting.when he put his hand on it he found a scroll. He picked it up and gave a signal to be pulled up.the scroll astonished both Gentiles and Jews, for when it was opened it displayed the words In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

McLeod goes on: ".it (the story) was picked up by the French journalist and writer Louis Travenol. He published it in 1747 in a revelation of the so-called Masonic secrets."

Then McLeod adds, in a masterpiece of understatement "This is certainly a tale calculated to raise our eyebrows". Indeed, I can see no other alternative but to assume that the Antients, desperate to keep a Christian influence in Masonry, came upon the Greek story and immediately adopted it to fill in the "loss" described in the new third degree.

An Antient Heritage

As mentioned, "degree fever" eventually become a social phenomenon of the 1700s. But not with the premier Grand Lodge (called the "Moderns") because they insisted, for over 70 years, that Masonry consisted of three degrees only - and that most certainly did not include the Royal Arch. To take just one example among many, in 1767 Samuel Spencer, Grand Secretary of the premier Grand Lodge, replying to a query about the Royal Arch, wrote: "The Royal Arch is a society which we do not recognize and which we hold to be an invention to introduce innovation and to seduce the brethren."

It's almost certain that Spencer himself didn't know the truth when decrying the Royal Arch as an innovation, because the premier Grand Lodge called the Antients "innovators" - when in fact they had lit the fuse themselves with the introduction of the third degree. On the other hand, the Antients - and others - embraced the degree ethic with enthusiasm.

The Antients used to open in a "fourth degree" and in this mode worked many other degrees until, around 1800, they had a degree structure of around 26 - and many more optional. We know this from the works of the likes of John Knight, who detailed the degrees and rituals in many hand-written books. It is also recorded that quite a few Moderns lodges used to work many, if not all of the Antient degrees - it is a fact that Knight himself was technically a "Modern" (he was a friend of Dunkerley) even though he worked the Antient structure and even Druid ceremonies.

As mentioned, the plethora of degrees and orders that sprung up show an amazing similarity in structure. Many masonic writers have commented that our antient brethren had fertile imaginations; whereas in truth they were virtually devoid of imagination. The format of obligations etc all show signs of emanating from the same source, with the same monotonous regularity. There is rarely any attempt at originality. Even as these other degrees developed, they retained a "traditional" structure. To this day, most of these "outside" degrees are similar in form and are recognizable; even repetitive. Even the orders outside the Craft suffer the same fate. The Gardeners (originated in the 1700s) for example possessed three degrees: the first featured Adam, the second Noah and the third King Solomon. In the Improved Order of Red Men (American), the opening shows the same structure as that of Freemasonry - and this is repeated through all the Red Man degrees.

The fact that most degrees or orders - within and without Freemasonry - are so similar in structure, is further evidence that they were created in a wave of "fashion". They all intimate that there are great secrets to unfold to the dedicated follower; yet none of them have fulfilled their promise - and that includes the "blue" degrees.

An examination of the Antient structure seems to show that it was decidedly chivalric, with a preponderance of "Knight of." degrees. In my opinion it still exists in a reasonably recognizable form in the American York Rite, which seems to contain many of the Antient degrees and orders, with the main exception of the Rose Croix or Rosy Crucian, which now languishes for some reason in the Ancient and Accepted or Scottish Rite. In England many of the remaining degrees are scattered around several other orders, such as the Holy Royal Arch Knight Templar Priests. But this is an avenue we shall go into at some future date.

Such was the success of the Antient structure, that many Moderns lodges performed them, totally disregarding what the premier Grand Lodge said. So much so that in 1766 a group within the Moderns forced through a "Charter of Compact" or separate Royal Arch Grand Chapter. This enabled Moderns lodges to carry out Antient degrees without having to compromise their "three degrees and no more" philosophy.

A Time for Compromise

This Antient structure - from the fourth or Royal Arch onwards - was the main stumbling block towards the union of the Moderns and Antients in England in 1813.

The Moderns - the premier Grand Lodge - had for 70 years insisted that Freemasonry consisted "of three degrees only" and of course it would have been a loss of face for them to have accepted any other. The Antients, on the other hand, insisted that the Royal Arch was the very essence of Freemasonry - and of course the key to the highly prized chivalric orders.

In the end a "nonsense" compromise was created in Article II of the Act of Union, which said that Freemasonry ".consists of three degrees and no more, viz., those of the Entered Apprentice, the Fellow Craft, and the Master Mason, including the Supreme Order of the Holy Royal Arch." I quite honestly believe that such a ridiculous compromise could only have survived in Freemasonry - in any other organisation it would have been "laughed out of court". But this, it must be emphasized, applies only within the English Constitution so far as I know; and there is no doubt that this bizarre compromise was the only one which could have saved the Union.

However, this was not the end of the story, because the political machinations within the premier Grand Lodge were still active. They had literally been forced to accept the Royal Arch, but were determined to go no further. As Sandbach points out in his Talks for Lodge and Chapter: ".if we look at the original statement in the Act of Union, we find that the quotation (.three degrees and no more, including the Royal Arch.) is incomplete, because Article II in fact goes on to say: "But this Article is not intended to prevent any Lodge or Chapter from holding a meeting in any of the Degrees of the Orders of Chivalry according to the constitutions of the said orders." Those words quite clearly gave permission to Lodges and Chapters to confer degrees additional to the three Craft degrees." Yet this has never been allowed by the United Grand Lodge of England - despite the fact that I have seen no evidence to suggest that it was ever rescinded. Why?

It is patently obvious that, having fudged a compromise of sorts, the Moderns were determined to sweep aside all those "orders of chivalry" into oblivion. This they did with regard to the Craft; but luckily the Knights Templar and others had by this time developed administrative structures of their own, and mostly survived. But that is another story.

A Precis

Bearing all the above in mind, we are now able to construct a brief example history of Freemasonry. It certainly won't please everyone; but it is a pragmatic reasoning - not one based on fairy stories.

A fairly simple, two-degree masonic ceremony originated in Scotland, and gradually spread throughout England. This was the one in general use in 1717, when the premier Grand Lodge was formed in London.

Around 1725, Desaguliers and others within the premier Grand Lodge, decided that the ceremony needed to be dechristianised - possibly to make it attractive to a wider membership - and they added a third degree.

Several years later another group - termed the Antients - added a fourth (Royal Arch) degree; and in this "mode" also carried out a wide variety of decidedly Christian and chivalric ceremonies. None of these were accepted by the premier Grand Lodge (Moderns).

However the Antient structure proved so popular with many Moderns lodges, that in 1766 the premier Grand Lodge formed a separate Royal Arch Grand Chapter, so that their members could conduct "Antient" degrees without infringing the Craft ceremonies. Indeed, so popular was this "Antient" practice of a multitude of degrees, that there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, created outside Freemasonry.

In 1813 the two rival English Grand Lodges came together, and achieved the compromise of "fusing" the Antients' Royal Arch onto the Craft third degree - then proceeded to ignore the rest of the Antient degrees.

Some Conclusions

It has to be emphasized again that the 1813 "compromise" applies only to the English Constitution. Everywhere else in the world, it is recognized that the Craft consists of only the three "blue" degrees, without the Royal Arch. However, the rest of the world has also got it wrong, because "pure, ancient" Freemasonry consisted of two degrees only. All the rest is innovation!

What are we to make of the above, on the assumption that it is reasonably correct? The main one is that there is no Grand Design. The first and second degrees almost certainly originated from a different source to that of the third; and the Royal Arch also came from somewhere else. It seems highly likely that the Royal Arch story originated in Greece around 400 AD - and the third degree could well have been adapted from one of many biblical stories.

This is important, because there is a general acceptance among masons (even Grand Lodges) that our ceremonies have a fixed, if slightly esoteric, meaning taken as a whole. That our ceremonies have been passed down unaltered through the centuries - and that there is a message, even a great secret, bound up in the complete "parcel". This, obviously, is not the case, because as we can see from the above, the overall picture is derived from several different sources, and the whole structure "just grew" - it really wasn't planned.

What we originally had, has been expanded dramatically over the centuries. It is generally recognized that the three degrees as "exposed" in Pritchard's Masonry Dissected, are a fair representation of the degrees at that time (1730). Just compare them with the three degrees we have now, and it's obvious that something which was originally fairly simple, became repetitive, convoluted, pompous and bloated in the period from 1717 to 1813. We have not - most definitely not - "always done it that way". Bearing in mind the considerable decline in membership of the major masonic countries (USA, Britain, Australia etc) could it be time to get back to basics?

What is needed now, is to concentrate on the three distinct divisions of masonic ritual - the first two degrees; the third; and the Royal Arch - and work out the history of each as a separate entity. In that way we may start to unravel the complex structure that is Freemasonry. To attempt to imagine the first, second, third and Royal Arch as an integral whole historically, is inaccurate and will only tend to confuse - unless you prefer fairy tales.

Crypto AG: The NSA's Trojan Whore?

It may be the greatest intelligence scam of the century: For decades, the US has routinely intercepted and deciphered top secret encrypted messages of 120 countries. These nations had bought the world's most sophisticated and supposedly secure commercial encryption technology from Crypto AG, a Swiss company that staked its reputation and the security concerns of its clients on its neutrality.
The purchasing nations, confident that their communications were protected, sent messages from their capitals to embassies, military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the world, via telex, radio, teletype, and facsimile. They not only conducted sensitive albeit legal business and diplomacy, but sometimes strayed into criminal matters, issuing orders to assassinate political leaders, bomb commercial buildings, and engage in drug and arms smuggling.

All the while, because of a secret agreement between the National Security Agency (NSA) and Crypto AG, they might as well have been hand delivering the message to Washington. Their Crypto AG machines had been rigged so that when customers used them, the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted with the enciphered message. NSA analysts could read the message traffic as easily as they could the morning newspaper.

The cover shielding the NSA-Crypto AG relationship was torn in March 1992, when the Iranian military counterintelligence service arrested Hans Buehler, Crypto AG's marketing representative in Teheran. The Iranian government charged the tall, 50ish businessman with spying for the "intelligence services of the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America." "I was questioned for five hours a day for nine months," Buehler says. "I was never beaten, but I was strapped to wooden benches and told I would be beaten. I was told Crypto was a spy center" that worked with foreign intelligence services.

Despite prolonged interrogation, Buehler - who had worked for Crypto AG for 13 years and was on his 25th trip to Iran - apparently maintained his ignorance. "I didn't know that the equipment was bugged, otherwise the Iranians could have gotten it out of me by their many methods."

With millions of dollars in contracts and a major international spy operation at stake, the company was eager to make the incident and Buehler go away, even though the salesman had brought in 40 percent of Crypto's 100 million Swiss franc sales revenue. Crypto bought Buehler's freedom with a $1 million payment to the Iranians, returned him to Switzerland, and then, astonishingly, fired him and ordered the bewildered salesman to repay the bond.

The cover-up backfired, however, when current and former Crypto employees came to Buehler's defense and shared their first-hand knowledge of manipulated cipher equipment.

"I hold proofs [sic] of the rigging of code machines," said an unidentified former Crypto AG engineer. "Fifteen years ago, I saw American and German engineers doctoring our machines. It took me some time until I was certain about the manipulations. The proofs: technical documents. ... I put them in a bank safety deposit box. Then I informed the federal prosecutors office in Berne. There were many conversations. Suddenly, these contacts were broken off and the affair petered out."

The engineer told another reporter: the schemes and the cipher keys were created by them [NSA and BND (Bundesnacrichtendienst, the German intelligence service)]. I immediately, discreetly, notified the Swiss prosecutors. There was an investigation. I was never able to find out the result. Today, the Buehler affair brings everything out in the open again. And, I'm afraid. What happened to Hans Buehler could happen to any other salesperson of Crypto AG. It's not a question of attacking this company; it's a question of saving lives....

When the Swiss media began to reveal the background of Buehler's story, Crypto AG responded with a lawsuit in an attempt to quash the story and muzzle Buehler. The suit was settled days before former Crypto engineers were to testify that they thought the machines had been altered. The parties agreed not to disclose the settlement and Crypto sought to reassure its clients. Informed sources in Switzerland and the Middle East confirmed that Crypto AG settled because it, and the NSA and BND, didn't want to reveal anything in court.

Nevertheless, the damage to Crypto AG's credibility was already done. Customers from Saddam Hussein to the Pope grew nervous. Informed of the details around the Hans Buehler incident, the Vatican -- which uses Swiss cipher machines to secure diplomatic communications transmitted from the Holy See to the many papal nuncios around the world -- showed a marked lack of charity. An official branded the perpetrators "bandits!"


Swiss Cheese Neutrality
Although the Iranians may have been technically wrong about Buehler's complicity in the massive deception, they were right that something was rotten at Crypto AG. And even before the firing of Hans Buehler, some of Cypto's engineers were ambivalent about secret deals with the NSA.
" At first, I was idealistic," said Juerg Spoerndli, who left Crypto in 1994. "But I adapted quickly. ... The new aim was to help Big Brother USA look over these countries' shoulders. We'd say, 'It's better to let the USA see what these dictators are doing.' " Soon, however, Spoerndli grew apprehensive over the manipulation. "It's still an imperialistic approach to the world. I don't think it's the way business should be done." Ruedi Hug, another former Crypto AG engineer, was also critical. "I feel betrayed," he declared. "They always told us, We are the best. Our equipment is not breakable, blah, blah, blah. ... Switzerland is a neutral country. "

Apparently not. A document released in 1995 by Britain's Public Records Office indicates that Switzerland and NATO concluded a secret deal in 1956.

The "Top Secret" document, dated February 10, 1956, with the reference "prem 11/1224," was written by the famous British World War II figure, Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. While "Monty" was a vice-commander of NATO, he discussed a secret alliance with Swiss Defense Minister Paul Chaudet. In peacetime, Switzerland would be officially neutral, but in wartime, it would side with NATO.

A US document released in 1995 shows Switzerland's importance to US national security. A Presidential directive on national security prepared for President Truman states that "Switzerland ... delivers precision instruments and other materials necessary for the armament of the USA and NATO countries [emphasis added]." Germany's BND, too, has apparently cooperated with the US encryption rigging scheme through Siemens Defense Electronics Group of Munich.

A previous director of Siemens called Crypto AG a "secret Siemens daughter," while a former Crypto AG financial director said, "the owner of the firm [Crypto] is the Federal Republic [of Germany]."

The Siemens connection to Crypto was remarkably incestuous. Siemens provided technical assistance for the machine manipulation process. Suspicion about the German electronics giant's role in Crypto's operations was heightened when it was reported that Siemens helped raise the $1 million to spring Buehler from his Teheran prison cell.

In fact, after revelations of the Crypto-Siemens association hit the Swiss press, Crypto's managing director Michael Grupe informed the employees that the advisory board to Crypto's board of directors was being dissolved. The two advisers -- Alfred Nowosad and Helmut Wiesner -- were both full-time Siemens employees. With the world media describing the company as a silent partner of German and American signals intelligence (sigint) agencies around the world, Grube announced that "Crypto is changing its profile."

The German government's contribution to the encryption rigging scheme also included its pressuring another Swiss firm, Gretag Data Systems AG, to allow a "red thread" program to be installed in the encryption software. "Red threading" is the software equivalent of sending in a Greek Trojan horse. Once owned by AT&T, this encryption manufacturer was acquired in 1995 by Information Resources Engineering (IRE), Inc. of Baltimore, Maryland.19 Interestingly, IRE is staffed by a number of ex-NSA cryptographic engineers. A third Swiss encryption company, Info Guard AG, was fully acquired by Crypto AG on June 16, 1994. Info Guard, which had been 50 percent owned by Crypto AG, primarily sells encryption units to banks in Switzerland and abroad.

Although German and American sigint agencies were involved in manipulating Crypto's cipher machines, Motorola, one of the NSA's major US contractors, performed the actual technical lteration, according to a former Crypto AG chief engineer who was personally involved in the manipulation process.


Crypto Huddle
Once the cipher machines were rigged to include the secret decryption key, the BND and NSA codebreakers could use the transmitted key to read any message sent by Crypto AG's 120 country customers. One previous Crypto AG employee contends that all developmental Crypto AG equipment had to be sent for approval to the NSA and to the German Central Cipher Bureau (Zentralstelle für Chiffrierung [ZfCH]), now the Federal Information Security Agency (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik [BSI] which is also Department 62 of the BND) in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn.
In other cases, Crypto AG was apparently forced to market encryption equipment manufactured in the US, sent to Crypto, and passed off as Swiss equipment. In the 1970s, as Crypto was moving from electro-mechanical to computerized crypto units, a former Crypto AG engineer in Switzerland inspected one of the first prototype computerized machines sent from the US. He remarked that since the code could be easily broken, he found the machine useless. But when he told his superiors that he could improve the encryption process if he was given access to the mathematical functions, two US cryptographic "experts" refused to disclose the information.

According to a confidential Crypto AG memorandum, one of the NSA "experts" may have been Nora L. Mackabee, an NSA cryptographer who is now retired on a horse farm in Maryland along with her husband Lester, another retired NSA employee. Between August 19 and 20, 1975, three Crypto AG engineers huddled with Mackabee (identified as representing "IA", most likely "intelligence agency") along with three Motorola engineers and one other American, Herb Frank. One Motorola engineer recalled that Frank was probably from another US intelligence agency based in northern Virginia but described him as a non-technical person who seemed to be making the administrative arrangements for Mackabee.

Crypto engineer Juerg Spoerndli, who was responsible for designing the firm's encryption equipment, had heard from older engineers about the visits in earlier years by mysterious Americans. He concluded that NSA was ordering the design changes through German intermediaries. He confirmed the manipulation and admitted that in the late 1970s, he was "ordered to change algorithms under mysterious circumstances" to weaken his cipher units.


Privacy? Ha!
Although the Buehler incident lent credence to the NSA Trojan Horse theory, it was not the first time that suspicions were raised. Teheran had become concerned in 1987 when US official claimed "conclusive evidence that Iran ordered the kidnapping" of ABC News Beirut correspondent Charles Glass. Washington's alleged proof was coded Iranian diplomatic cables intercepted by the NSA between Teheran and the Hezbollah (Party of God) terrorist group in Lebanon via Iran's embassies in Beirut and Damascus.
The next year, when a terrorist bomb brought down PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, it seems the NSA gained information by intercepting the communications of Iranian Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. It was apparently these messages that implicated Iran, not Libya.

One intelligence summary, prepared by the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, cites Iran's Mohtashemi as the mastermind. Released in redacted form pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by lawyers for the bankrupt Pan American Airlines, it states: Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid 10 million dollars in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb PanAm Flight 103 in retaliation for the U.S. shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus. Mohtashemi has also spent time in Lebanon.

An Israeli intercept of Iranian diplomatic coded communications between Mohtashemi's Interior Ministry in Teheran and the Iranian embassy in Beirut (where Mohtashemi once served as ambassador) revealed more than two years before Buehler was arrested by Iran that the Shi-ite cleric transferred $1.2 to $2 million used for the bombing of PanAm 103 to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command headed by Ahmed Jibril. Such revelations must have made the Iranians extremely suspect of the security of their diplomatic traffic.

The role of Israel may be explained by a little-reported intelligence alliance. NSA maintains a link with the Israeli sigint entity, "Department 8200," located in northern Tel Aviv at Herzliya. The sigint link is said to involve the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) base on Cyprus. Israel's ability to crack the Iranian Crypto AG codes indicates that Israel had access to the key decoding programs. The ease with which the West was reading Iranian coded transactions obviously meant that someone in Israel's sigint services possessed the decryption keys.

Then in 1992, Buehler was arrested. As the Swiss authorities struggled to put the pieces together, they at first believed that the Iranian secret services were retaliating for the arrest in Switzerland of Zeynold Abedine Sarhadi, an employee of the Iranian embassy in Berne and a nephew of former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Swiss police had arrested Sarhadi in early 1992 and were planning to extradite him to France to face trial for the 1991 assassination in Paris of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar.

On August 7, 1991, one day before Bakhtiar was found dead with his throat slit, the Teheran headquarters of the Iranian Intelligence Service, vevak, transmitted a coded message to Iranian diplomatic missions in London, Paris, Bonn, and Geneva, inquiring "Is Bakhtiar dead?"

The Iranians concluded from Western press reports that British and American sigint operators had intercepted and decoded the message (as reported by L'Express of Paris) and knew that Teheran was behind the assassination. They realized that their code had been broken, looked to their Crypto AG cipher machines, and picked up Buehler.

According to one European source, they may also have been tipped off by Stasi files of the ex-East German regime that found their way to Iran and revealed the Crypto AG ruse. In any case, the Iranians immediately began grilling prisoner 01228-1 about the role he and his company played in giving Iranian and Libyan codes to the US.

Iran knew that Bakhtiar's assassination had compromised the intelligence functions of the Iranian UN mission and embassy in Geneva. The NSA had already identified one of the assassins, Mohammed Azadi, from intercepts of his phone calls from a pay phone in the town of Annecy in Savoy and an Istanbul apartment to the Iranian diplomatic mission in Geneva.

On December 6, 1994, a special French terrorism court convicted two Iranians of murdering Bakhtiar, but strangely, it acquitted Sarhadi. "Justice has not been entirely served [for] reasons of state," complained Bakhtiar's widow bitterly. Those "reasons" may have included a tacit agreement among France, Switzerland, the German BND, and the NSA to spare Sarhadi in order to avoid producing captured transmissions and preserve the questionable secrecy surrounding the Crypto AG cipher manipulation program. It was not only the "rogue states" that were targeted.

During the sensitive Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1985, the NSA's British counterpart, the GCHQ, was able to decipher the coded diplomatic traffic being sent between the Irish embassy in London and the Irish Foreign Ministry in Dublin. It was reported in the Irish press that Dublin had purchased a cryptographic system from Crypto AG worth more than a million Irish pounds. It was also reported that the NSA routinely monitored and deciphered the Irish diplomatic messages. Later, during the Falklands War, British GCHQ operators were able to decrypt classified Argentine message traffic because the Argentineans were using rigged Crypto AG cipher machines. Former British Foreign Office minister Ted Rowlands publicly stated that GCHQ had penetrated Argentine diplomatic codes.


US: Crypto Bully
If it turns out that the extent of communications interception is as broad as suspected, the international implications are profound. Every country in the world that used secure communications is potentially affected. Some have sought to abandon Crypto AG, but found their options limited.
The US had at times required purchase of specific machines as a condition for favors. Pakistan was allegedly granted American military credits with only one provision, that it buy its encryption equipment from Crypto AG. Additionally, "It is not unheard of for NSA to offer preferential export treatment to a company if it builds a back door into its equipment," says one person with long experience in the field. "I've seen it. I've been in the room."

Several countries abandoned Crypto AG but failed to ensure secrecy. The Libyans switched to Gretag units after the NSA cited secret communications to allege Libyan involvement in the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin. One senior US official said the fact that the Libyans were making their codes more difficult to crack would "make our job tougher." But the NSA seemed to have the Gretag base covered as well. According to one knowledgeable cryptographic industry expert, NSA's program to co-opt the services of encryption manufacturrs probably extends to all those within reach of NSA operatives. US cryptographic companies would be definite candidates for such participation.

The NSA program also likely extends to companies in NATO and pro-US countries which have close relationships with GCHQ, NSA, and the BND. Even neutral countries_ firms are not off-limits to NSA manipulations. A former Crypto AG employee confirmed that high-level US officials approached neutral European countries and argued that their cooperation was essential to the Cold War struggle against the Soviets. The NSA allegedly received support from cryptographic companies Crypto AG and Gretag AG in Switzerland, Transvertex in Sweden, Nokia in Finland, and even newly-privatized firms in post-Communist Hungary.

In 1970, according to a secret German BND intelligence paper, supplied to the author, the Germans planned to "fuse" the operations of three cryptographic firms-Crypto AG, Grattner AG (another Swiss cipher firm), and Ericsson of Sweden. Securocrats often turn to the boogeyman of "rogue" nations in order to justify the expense and ethical necessity of eavesdropping on all forms of international communication, but in reality many intercepts involve messages by neutral or allied nations.

NSA's 1993 release of the World War II era "magic" intercepts under FOIA pressure revealed that US military intelligence read not only messages by Axis nations, but also intercepted and decrypted the top secret communications of Allied and neutral nations. Switzerland was among the more than 30 countries whose messages were being read. Since Swiss-made cipher machines were used by many governments at the time, it is likely that the US has been reading such messages for over half a century. An early example is the use of top secret intercepts by the US delegation to the 1945 founding convention of the United Nations in San Francisco.

Fifty years of intercepted communication have given the US and its co-conspirators trade, diplomatic, economic and strategic advantages. By intercepting the "bottom line" negotiating positions of foreign governments, they have been able to shape international treaties and negotiations in their own favor: They will know, for example, the exact health status of the king of Saudi Arabia, the secret financial transactions of the president of Peru, the negotiating position of South Africa's trade delegation to the World Trade Organization, or the anti-abortion strategy of the Pope in the United Nations. Such information, presented daily to the president and the secretary of state in their intelligence briefings, is extremely useful and allows the US to play high-stakes diplomatic poker with a mirror behind everyone else's back.

CIA Planned To Crash Venezuela President’s Plane

CIA Planned To Crash Venezuela President’s Plane

From: Vheadline.com & SF.indymedia.org

Venezuelan Military Intelligence says overwhelming evidence the CIA planned to bring down Chavez Frias’ airplane en route to United Nations in New York.

Details behind the sudden decision to cancel President Hugo Chavez Frias’ next-week trip to Washington D.C. and New York (to deliver a speech to the United Nations) are being revealed by security services who say they have "overwhelming evidence" of a CIA-backed plan to "bring down" the Chavez Frias’ airplane during the scheduled flight to the United States from Caracas. Sources in Venezuela’s Military Intelligence Directorate (DIM) have told VHeadline.com that "presented with overwhelming evidence of Washington’s planned attack on the Presidential flight, it was decided that the President’s personal security was preeminent and that he should not go!"

State Security & Political (DISIP) police agents were involved in a gun battle in Plaza Altamira Friday night as they moved to detain a suspect now named as Jorge Rojas Riera, for the Friday morning bombing at the Casa Militar barracks, across Avenida Urdaneta from the Miraflores Presidential Palace. It is reported that President Hugo Chavez Frias was working at his desk when the 1:00 a.m. blast went off but that his life had never been put in danger as many gleeful wire-service reporters had immediately cabled to their North American publishers.

Reports say that some 60 DISIP and National Guard (GN) officers were able to take the suspect into custody but only after a skirmish with opposition-controlled Chacao municipal police officers and gunmen identified as former army officers who had been dismissed the service after they participated in the April 11, 2002, coup d’etat. Police say Rojas Riera was detained after officers were forced to use an electronic stun gun to capture and ’cuff him. Little is known of the detainee other than that he has been identified having been employed at Plaza Altamira as a "security agent" by opposition organizers ...

meanwhile he has told interrogators that he acted independently in the Friday morning’s grenade attack.

Rebel army officer Felix Moreno was reportedly wounded in an exchange of gunfire. Chacao Mayor Leopoldo Lopez says part of the blame has to be laid on DISIP agents who did not identify themselves ... he says they arrived to Plaza Altamira just before midnight and were heavily armed but were not in uniform. "there was a lot of running-around and another gun-battle close to Torre Britanica (south of Avenida Francisco Miranda) in which a DISIP wagon was overturned.

Strong rumors are circulating today that the man arrested had earlier sought political asylum at the Dominican Republic embassy in Caracas but had been asked to return later.

In an Associated Press (AP) dispatch the United States government has said it will open up an investigation into allegations made by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez Frias relative to conspiracy to assassinate him. Chavez Frias has said that "terrorist groups" in southern Florida have allied with Miami-based anti-Castro radicals.

Amazingly US Ambassador to Venezuela, Charles S. Shapiro says "it is not necessarily a crime ... but we are in the full process of collecting information and we must follow all legal procedures ... if there is anyone to blame, our government knows what to do!"

With typical Washington cover-up rhetoric, Shapiro shakily admits that he has received information that "some Venezuelans have been receiving military training in the United States." He further admits that the information was also published in a Miami newspaper a year ago ... but remains remarkably silent as to why no action was taken by proper authorities Stateside. "We’re not going to take action against anybody ... we haven’t been able to make any headway!"

President Chavez Frias was forced to cancel his scheduled trip to the United Nations in New York on September 24 after intelligence agencies revealed a CIA-backed plot against the President’s plane en route to the General Assembly. Chavez asked the United States to investigate his allegations, at the same time reiterating earlier requests that President George W. Bush should stop interfering in Venezuela’s affairs.

"They are conspiring against Venezuela in the United States," Chavez Frias said in a national television broadcast ... "the peoples of this continent need to know that their (USA) terrorists are preparing an attack against Venezuela!"

Bush & Bin Laden

The world now associates the bin Laden name with Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect be hind the terror atrocities of Sept. 11. As President George W. Bush leads an intense international manhunt for Osama, few Americans realize that Osama's eldest brother, Salem, was one of Bush's first business partners.

A photograph from 1971 has surfaced and been printed in English papers showing Osama, age 14, and his brother Salem, age 19, enjoying a summer holiday at the Astoria Hotel in Falun, Sweden. Christina Akerblad, the hotel owner, told the Daily Mail, "They were beautiful boys, so elegantly dressed. Everybody loved them."

Osama embraced Islamic fundamentalism and is now the world's most wanted man. "Salem went on to become a business partner of the man who is leading the hunt for his brother," the Daily Mail's Peter Allen said. "In the 1970s, he and George W. Bush were founders of the Arbusto Energy oil company in Mr. Bush's home state of Texas."

President Bush and the bin Laden family have been connected through dubious business deals since 1977, when Salem, the head of the bin Laden family business, one of the biggest construction companies in the world, invested in Bush's start-up oil company, Arbusto Energy, Inc.

James R. Bath, a friend and neighbor, was used to funnel money from Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, to set up George W. Bush in the oil business, according to The Wall Street Journal and other reputable sources.

Through a tangled web of Saudi multi-millionaires, Texas oilmen, and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Bush was financially linked with the bin Laden family until Salem met an untimely end in a freak flying accident near San Antonio in 1988.

The infamous BCCI was shut down in 1991 with some $10 billion in losses.

In June 1977, George W. Bush formed his own oil drilling company, Arbusto Energy, in Midland, Tex.

"Arbusto" actually means "shrub" in Spanish, but the Bush family interpreted it as "bush".

Salem bin Laden, a close friend of the Saudi King Fahd had "invested heavily in Bush's first business venture," according to The Daily Mail (U.K.).

Arbusto later became Bush Exploration, when Bush's father became vice president. As the company neared financial collapse in September 1984, it was merged with Spectrum 7 Energy Corp. in an effort to stay afloat.

The 50 investors who propped up the Bush company with $4.7 million were "mainly friends of my uncle" who "did pretty good" in Bush's words, although they lost most of the money they invested in the company. Jon Bush, George's uncle, raised money for Arbusto from political supporters of the Reagan-Bush administration.

"These were all the Bushs' pals," family friend Russell Reynolds told the Dallas Morning News in 1998. "This is the A-Team."

The "A-Team" limited partners contributed $4.67 million to various Bush funds through 1984 but got only $1.55 million back in profit distributions, and $3.9 million in tax write-offs.

William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, two staunch Reagan-Bush supporters, owned Spectrum 7.

Despite his poor track record, the owners made Bush president of the company and gave him 13.6 percent of the parent company's stock.

surprise deal

As the hard times continued, Spectrum merged with Harken Energy in 1986. In 1990, Harken received a contract from the government of Bahrain to drill for offshore oil although Harken Energy had never drilled a well overseas or anywhere in water.

"Knowledgeable oil company sources believe that the Bahrain oil concession was indeed an oblique favor to the president of the United States but say that Saudi Arabia (home of bin Laden) was behind the decision," according to The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of the BCCI, by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne.

It raised oil-industry eyebrows when the Persian Gulf state announced it had chosen tiny Harken to explore an offshore site for gas and oil. Bahrain officials said they had no idea President Bush's son was associated with Harken, a claim oil-industry sources ridicule.

The Bahrain deal was brokered in part by Arkansas investment banker David Edwards, one of Bill Clinton's closest friends. The Bahrain oil project resulted in two dry holes and Harken energy abandoned the project.

Two months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, on June 20, 1990, the younger Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock, 212,140 shares at $4 a share-for a total of $848,560.

"That was $318,430 more than it was worth," Dr. Arthur F. Ide, author of George W. Bush: Portrait of a Compassionate Conservative, said. "George W. broke the law to do this since the transaction was an insider stock sale."

Eight days later, Harken finished the second quarter with losses of $23 million and the stock went "into a nosedive" losing 75 percent of its value, finishing the year at a little over $1 a share.

"Like his father who made his fortune in the oil business with the money of others, George W. founded Arbusto with the financial backing of investors, including James R. Bath," said the late James Howard Hatfield, author of a "controversial biography," Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Mak ing of an American President.

Hatfield, 43, was found dead of an apparent prescription drug overdose in a hotel room in Springdale, Ark. on July 18, 2001. Police declined to investigate.

Bath became friends with George W. during their days together in the Texas Air National Guard. Bath "confided that he was an original investor in George Bush Jr.'s oil exploration company," according to The Outlaw Bank.

Bath found investors for Arbusto and "made his fortune" by investing the money of two BCCI-connected Saudi sheiks, Khalid bin Mahfouz and Salem bin Laden. Mahfouz was one of the richest men in the world and a controlling shareholder in BCCI.

Bill White, a former real estate business partner of Bath, said: "He had put up $50,000 to help George, Jr., get started in oil business" at a time when "Bath had no substantial money of his own," according to The Outlaw Bank.

Bath received a 5 percent interest in two Arbusto-related limited partnerships controlled by Bush, although Bush told The Houston Post in 1990 that he had "never done any business" with Bath. However, Bush said Bath was "a lot of fun."

Bath told White that he was in the CIA and that "he had been recruited by George Bush himself in 1976 when Bush was director of the agency . . . he said Bush wanted him involved with the Arabs, and to get into the aviation business."

White contends that the Saudis were using Bath and their huge financial resources to influence U.S. policy during the Reagan and Bush administrations, according to the Houston Chronicle of June 4, 1992. Such representation by Bath would require that he be registered as a foreign agent with the Department of Justice, which he was not.

Shortly after Bush's father was appointed director of the CIA, Salem bin Laden appointed Bath as his business representative in Texas. According to The Houston Chronicle, Salem bin Laden, heir to one of the largest building companies in the Middle East, signed a trust agreement appointing Bath as his Houston representative in 1976.

In 1978 Bath purchased Houston Gulf Airport on behalf of Salem bin Laden. When bin Laden died in 1988, his interest in the airfield passed to bin Mahfouz.

There was also a political aspect to Salem bin Laden's financial activities, which played a role in U.S. operations in the Middle East and Central America during the 1980s, according to Public Broadcasting's Frontline report.

As head of Binladen Brothers Construction (now the Binladen Group), a company that later helped build U.S. airfields during Operation Desert Storm, bin Laden was close to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and "a good friend of the U.S. government," a San Antonio attorney, Wayne Fagan, who represented Salem bin Laden from 1982 to 1988, told the San Antonio Express-News.

When the family patriarch, Sheik Mohammed bin Laden, died in 1968, he left an industrial and financial empire and a progeny of 54 sons and daughters, the fruit of a number of wives. In 1972, Salem bin Laden, the oldest son, took over the estate as his father's successor, with the assistance of several brothers.

With over 40,000 employees, the Bin Laden Group is represented in the major cities of Saudi Arabia and the Arab capitals of Beirut, Cairo, Amman, and Dubai. The company builds highways, housing units, factories, hangars, and military bases, some of which are part of the U.S.-Saudi "Peace Shield" agreement.

The story of the Bush involvement with bin Laden and the BCCI scandal involves "trails that branched, crossed one another, or came to unexpected dead ends," according to The Outlaw Bank.
FREAK ACCIDENT

Salem bin Laden came to an "unexpected dead end" in a Texas pasture, 11 years after investing in Arbusto, when the ultralight aircraft he was flying crashed into power lines near San Antonio on Memorial Day, 1988.

On the morning of May 29, 1988, almost immediately after takeoff, Salem bin Laden's aircraft struck and became entangled in power lines 150 feet high before plunging to the ground.

"He was a very experienced pilot. He was a good pilot. We just can't understand why he decided to go right instead of left," recalled airstrip owner and former Marine Earl May field, who cradled bin Laden, bleeding from the ears.

That day, bin Laden took off in a southeasterly direction into the wind. He surprised onlookers by turning west to ward power lines less than a quarter-mile away.

"Nobody could figure out why he tried to fly over the power lines," said Gerry Auerbach, 77, of New Braunfels, a retired pilot.

Bin Laden had more than 15,000 hours of flight experience.

The police report concluded "freak accident."

World History: Plan or Accident?

Will we get another failed Democratic administration? A scandal as disgraceful as Nixon's fall? When Robert P. Johnson (William Barr) told Clinton in a bunker in Arkansas that "you are our fair-haired boy, but you do have competition for the job you seek. We would never put all our eggs in one basket. You and your state have been our greatest asset.... Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you, that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you are number one on our short list for shot at the job you always wanted."

So, you have William Casey -- CIA Director, George Bush's campaign manager and Sovereign Knight of Malta -- speaking through the proxy of George Bush's last Attorney General to George's rival in the 1992 federal elections. Is it all just a show and sham for U.S. hoi polloi?

Perhaps so, if there exists the type of control over the electoral process as told by Mae Brussell and the suppressed book "VoteScam," written by Jim and Ken Collier:

"...Your vote and mine may now be a meaningless bit of energy directed by preprogrammed computers-which can be fixed to select certain pre-ordained candidates and leave no footprints or paper trail.

"In short, computers are covertly stealing your vote.

"--For almost three decades the American vote has been subject to government-sponsored electronic theft.

"--The vote has been stolen from you by a cartel of federal "national security" bureaucrats, who include higher-ups in the Central Intelligence Agency, political party leaders, Congressmen, co-opted journalists -- and the owners and managers -- of the major Establishment news media, who have decided in concert that how America's votes are counted, by whom they are counted and how the results are verified and delivered to the public is, as one of them put it, 'Not a proper area of inquiry.'

"--By means of an unofficial private corporation named News Election Service (NES), the Establishment press has actual physical control of the counting and dissemination of the vote, and it refuses to let the public know how it is done."

Is the American electorate subjected to cyclic propaganda, pre-selected candidates and winners, and psychological warfare to alienate Americans from the institutions established to serve them by the Constitution? Are the Democratic and Republican National Parties used for a Hegellian experiment in controlled conflict?

Pamela Churchill Harriman, Averil's wife, is one of the Democratic Party's biggest fund-raisers. She once gave Bill a job as director of her "PAM PAC" when he was defeated for governor in 1980. Bill paid her back by appointing her as Ambassador to France.

Another Harriman/Bush friend, Eugene Stetson ('34), was an assistant manager for Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers, Harriman's New York office. He organized the H. Smith Richardson Foundation. The foundation, in the late 1950s, participated in the MKULTRA, the CIA's domestic covert psychological warfare operation. The Richardson Foundation helped to finance the testing of psychotropic drugs, including LSD, at Bridgewater Hospital in Massachusetts, the center of some of the most brutal MK-ULTRA experiments.

During the Iran-Contra operations, the H. Smith Richardson Foundation was a "private donors steering committee," working with the National Security Council to co-ordinate the Office of Public Diplomacy. This was an effort to propagandize in favor of and run cover for the Iran-Contra operations, and to coordinate published attacks on opponents of the program.

The H. Smith Richardson Foundation also runs the Center for Creative Leadership at Langley to "train leaders of the CIA," as well as another center near Greensboro, North Carolina, that trains CIA and Secret Service Agents. Almost everyone who achieves the military rank of general also gets this training.

This is just the tip of an iceberg. You also have eugenics and population control, suppressed history and technology, yearly retreats, profitable partnerships with brutal dictators, deals with "terrorists", the involvement of the Knights of Malta, war-mongering and profiteering, mind-control, secret societies for teens, ritual magic and more -- all spinning the dark threads in the web of conspiracy that our spinning blue ball has gotten caught in.

We've got a whole new crop of "Bonesmen" coming up, including George H.W. Bush's son George W. Bush ('68), Governor of Texas.

When Don Schollander ('68), the Olympic gold-medalist and only known Skull and Bones member living in Portland, was contacted by Willamette Week reporter John Schrang regarding his involvement in the Order, he said, "It's really something I can't talk about."

Not wouldn't, but "couldn't".

In wake of Antony Sutton's first ground-breaking exposes of the Order, the Sterling Library at Yale has refused to allow any other researchers access to the Russell Trust papers.

Daniel Gilman, like most Bonesmen, makes no mention of Skull & Bones or the Russell Trust in his memoirs or biographies.

So, are we all just 'fodder" for a secret society with satanic overtones that is attempting to form a one world government with themselves at the helm? Or is the Order of Skull and Bones just a bunch of frat boys from Yale? Wanna bet your future on it?

Skull & Bones = Illuminati?

Is the Order of the Skull & Bones part of the Illuminati?

When a person is initiated into Skull & Bones, they are given a new name, similar to the practice of the Illuminati. And many recorded Illuminati members can be shown to have contact and/or strong influences with many of the professors that taught "Bonesmen" in Berlin.

When a secret society conspires against the sovereignty of a king, they need to organize, raise funds, make their plans operational, and hopefully bring them to fruition.

Could we have in the United States a secret society that has used the "National Security State" as a cover for their nefarious plans?

From "George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography":

"That September [1951], Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as secretary of defense. Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual Security Agency, making him the U.S. chief of the Anglo-American military alliance. By now, Brown Brothers, Harriman was everything but commander-in-chief.

"A central focus of the Harriman security regime in Washington (1950-53) was the organization of covert operations and 'psychological warfare.' Harriman, together with his lawyers and business partners, Allen and John Foster Dulles, wanted the government's secret services to conduct extensive propaganda campaigns and mass-psychology experiments within the U.S.A., and paramilitary campaigns abroad....

"The Harriman security regime created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director of the PSB [was] Gordon Gray.... Gordon's brother, R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray Jr., was also a naval intelligence officer, known around Washington as the 'founder of operational intelligence.' Gordon Gray became a close friend and political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray's son became for Prescott's son, George, his lawyer and the shield of his covert policy."

So you have the Whitney/Stimson/Bundy clan and the Harriman/Bush boys wielding a tremendous amount of influence on the political, economic and social affairs of America and the world. Then you have Prescott Bush's buddy Richard Nixon as an activist vice-president. Then, a nation-chilling assassination, some time under LBJ with the Bundy boys keeping things in line, then Nixon as President with "Bonesmen" aides Ray Price ('51) and Richard A. Moore. Some time out for a Trilateralist-Democrat-patsy president, followed by Prescott's son as an activist vice-president under Reagan. Next, we get a Skull and Bones president who declares a "New World Order" while beating up on his business partner, Saddam Hussein.

After twelve years of Republican administrations, Bush passes the reins to his drug smuggling buddy from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who studied at Yale Law School. According to some researchers, Clinton was recruited as a CIA operative while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Could this be the "old Hegallian historical dialectic process"?

The Illuminati: Subverting the Body Politic

Why this attack against our body politic?

In 1785, a bolt of lightning struck a courier en route to Paris from Frankfort-on-the-Main. A tract written by Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, "Original Shift in Days of Illuminations," was recovered from the dead messenger, containing the secret society's long-range plan for "The New World Order through world revolution".

The Bavarian Government outlawed the society and in 1787 published the details of The Illuminati conspiracy in "The Original Writings of the Order and Sect of the Illuminati."

In Adam Weishaupt's own words:

"By this plan, we shall direct all mankind in this manner. And, by the simplest means, we shall set all in motion and in flames. The occupations must be so allotted and contrived that we may, in secret, influence all political transactions."

There is disagreement among scholars as to whether or not the Illuminati survived its banishment. Nevertheless, the group had been quite successful in attracting members and had allied itself with the extensive Masonic networks.

The Illuminati was publicly founded May 1, 1776 at the University of Ingolstadt by Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law. It was a very "learned" society; Weishaupt drew the earliest members of his new order from among his students.

On December 5, 1776, students at William and Mary College founded a secret society, Phi Beta Kappa. A second chapter was formed, at Yale, in 1780. The anti-Masonic movement in the United States during the 1820s held groups such as Phi Beta Kappa in a bad light. Because of pressure, the society went public. This is noted by some researchers as the direct cause of the appearance of Yale's Order of Skull and Bones.

In "The Cyclopedia Of Fraternities", a genealogical chart of general Greek-Letter college fraternities in the United States, shows Phi Beta Kappa as "the parent of all the fraternal systems in [American] higher education." There is only one "side" lineal descendant: the Yale chapter of 1780. The line then continues to Skull and Bones in 1832, and on through the other "only at Yale" senior societies, Scroll & Key and Wolf's Head.

Phi Beta Kappa is the "first three Greek letters, for 'Philosophia Biou Kubernetes' or 'Love of wisdom, the helmsman of life'." A skull homophone is scull, a quick, gliding boat and part of Skull & Bones first nomenclature.

John Robison, a professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University in Scotland and a member of a Freemason Lodge, said that he was asked to join the Illuminati. After study, he concluded the purposes of the Illuminati were not for him.

In 1798, he published a book called "Proofs Of A Conspiracy":

"An association has been formed for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments and overturning all the existing governments.... the leaders would rule the World with uncontrollable power, while all the rest would be employed as tools of the ambition of their unknown superiors."

"Proofs of A Conspiracy" was sent to George Washington. Responding to the sender of the book with a letter, the president said he was aware the Illuminati were in America. He felt that the Illuminati had "diabolical tenets" and that their object was "a separation of the People from their government."

In "Proofs Of A Conspiracy", Robison printed the ceremony of initiation of the "Regent degree" in Illuminism. In it "a skeleton is pointed out to him [the initiate], at the feet of which are laid a crown and a sword. He is asked 'whether that is the skeleton of a king, nobleman or a beggar.' As he cannot decide, the president of the meeting says to him, 'The character of being a man is the only one that is importance'".

This is, essentially, the same as the writing in the Skull & Bones "tomb":

"Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich."

Which reads:

"Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death."

Motives for the Conspiracy

So, why would an intelligence agency/secret society want to smuggle drugs and assassinate JFK?

Well, they make a lot of money, and they garner intelligence assets through their participation. There's also the rationale that the world is a seamy and unseemly place, and if you're going to be the 'big boy' on the block, you better know what's going on. And what better way of knowing than by running it yourself? There are also some who theorize that the covert drug trade fits with plans to destabilize American families and society. Through demoralizing and fracturing the body politic, they can impose their will using psychological warfare and the political alchemy of the Hegellian dialectic.

James Shelby Downard's article, "Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism ," an underground classic, links American historical events with a wild, numerological, grand occult plan "to turn us into cybernetic mystery zombies". The assassination of JFK, this article contends, was the performance of a public occult ritual called The Killing of the King, designed as a mass-trauma, mind-control assault against our U.S. national body-politic.

During Operation Sunrise, Operation Blowback, Operation Paperclip and others, thousands of Nazi scientists, researchers and administrators were brought to the United States after World War II. Many were "smuggled" into the country against direct, written, orders from President Harry S. Truman.

Project Monarch was the resumption of a mind-control project called Marionette Programming, which started in Nazi Germany. The basic component of the Monarch Program is the sophisticated manipulation of the mind, using extreme trauma to induce Multiple Personality Disorder.

Mr. Downward feels that the perpetrators purposefully murdered JFK in such a way as to affect our National identity and cohesiveness -- to fracture America's soul. Even the blatancy of their conspiracy was designed to show "their superiority" and "our futility".

There have been studies that show a correlation between the JFK assassination and the rise in violence in society, distrust of government and other extensions of social ills.

George Bush, Skull & Bones and the JFK Assassination

Rodney Stich's book "Defrauding America" tells of a "deep-cover CIA officer" assigned to a counter-intelligence unit, code-named Pegasus. This unit "had tape-recordings of plans to assassinate Kennedy" from a tap on the phone of J. Edgar Hoover. The people on the tapes were "[Nelson] Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, [Lyndon] Johnson of Texas, George Bush and J. Edgar Hoover."

Could George Bush be involved in the JFK assassination?

In 1963, Bush was living in Houston, busily carrying out his duties as president of the Zapata Offshore oil company. He denied the existence of a note sent by the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover to "Mr. George Bush of the CIA." When news of the note surfaced, the CIA first said they never commented on employment questions, but later relented said yes, a "George Bush" was mentioned in the note, but that it was "another" George Bush, not the man who took office in the White House in 1988.

Some intrepid reporters tracked down the "other" George Bush and discovered that he was just a lowly clerk who had shuffled papers for the CIA for about six months. He never received any interagency messages from anybody at the FBI, let alone the Queen Mary.

It is also worth noting that a CIA code word for Bay of Pigs was Operation Zapata, and that two of the support vessels were named Barbara and Houston.

Many say that George Bush was high up on the CIA ladder at the time, running proprietorial vehicles and placed in a position of command, responsible for many of the Cubans recruited into "service" at the time. All through the Iran-Contra affair, Felix Rodriguez, the man who captured and had Che Guevara killed for the CIA, always seemed to call Bush's office first.

From The Realist (Summer, 1991):

"Bush was working with the now-famous CIA agent, Felix Rodriguez, recruiting right-wing Cuban exiles for the invasion of Cuba. It was Bush's CIA job to organize the Cuban community in Miami for the invasion.... A newly discovered FBI document reveals that George Bush was directly involved in the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. The document places marksmen by the CIA. Bush at that time lived in Texas. Hopping from Houston to Miami weekly, Bush spent 1960 and '61 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion....

"George Bush claims he never worked for the CIA until he was appointed Director by former Warren Commission director and then president Jerry Ford in 1976. Logic suggests that is highly unlikely. Of course, Bush has a company duty to deny being in the CIA. The CIA is a secret organization. No one ever admits to being a member. The truth is that Bush has been a top CIA official since before the 1961 invasion of Cuba, working with Felix Rodriguez. Bush may deny his actual role in the CIA in 1959, but there are records in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that expose Bush's role..."

On the Watergate tapes, June 23, 1972, referred to in the media as the 'smoking gun' conversation, Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, were discussing how to stop the FBI investigation into the CIA Watergate burglary. They were worried that the investigation would expose their connection to 'the Bay of Pigs thing.' Haldeman, in his book "The Ends of Power", reveals that Nixon always used code words when talking about the 1963 murder of JFK. Haldeman said Nixon would always refer to the assassination as 'the Bay of Pigs'.

On that transcript we find Nixon discussing the role of George Bush's partner, Robert Mosbacher, as one of the Texas fundraisers for Nixon. On the tapes Nixon keeps referring to the 'Cubans' and the 'Texans.' The 'Texans' were Bush, Mosbacher and Baker. This is another direct link between Bush and evidence linking Nixon and Bush to the Kennedy assassination."

The War on Drugs: An "Intellectual Fraud"

Before the Vietnam "War", the Golden Triangle was run by French Intelligence and Corsican mobsters. After the French bailed out and America moved in, the triangle was run by U.S. intelligence, with aid from Sicilian mobsters. This narcotics network is well documented in "The Politics of Heroin in S. E. Asia" by Alfred McCoy, "The Great Heroin Coup" by Henrik Kruger and "Double-Cross" by Sam and Chuck Giancana.

Vice-President George Bush, as Chairman of President Reagan's cabinet-level working group and as Director of the National Narcotics Interdiction System, was the highest U. S. governmental official involved in the "war on drugs".

Frances Mullen, Jr., former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), called Bush's efforts "an intellectual fraud" and "a liability rather than an asset". Soon after these statements, Mullen resigned and the resultant General Accounting Office (GAO) report was buried.

In July, 1985, the suppressed GAO paper reported that there were "no benefits from the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, directed by George Bush. In fact, the overall effect was to encourage supply...."

Monika Jensen-Stevenson, a "60 Minutes" producer, quit her job after the CBS news program refused to air the story she had uncovered relating to the covert drug trade. Her book, "Kiss The Boys Goodbye", details how our intelligence community used the apparatus of the POW/MIA governmental agencies as a cover for the trafficking of opiates from the "Golden Triangle".

President Reagan appointed Reform Party founder and Texas billionaire Ross Perot to the President's Advisory Council on Foreign Intelligence. Reagan made Perot a special presidential investigator, looking into America's POW and MIAs from the Vietnam "War".

Ross took the job to heart and spent considerable time and money in pursuit of the quest. He was given special clearance and access. He asked questions and interviewed everyone he could find.

From "Kiss The Boys Goodbye":

"Relations between Bush and Perot had gone downhill ever since the Vice-President had asked Ross Perot how his POW/MIA investigations were going.

'Well, George, I go in looking for prisoners,' said Perot, 'but I spend all my time discovering the government has been moving drugs around the world and is involved in illegal arms deals.... I can't get at the prisoners because of the corruption among our own people.'

"This ended Perot's official access to the highly classified files as a one-man presidential investigator. 'I have been instructed to cease and desist,' he had informed the families of missing men early in 1987."

The wholesale importation of cocaine into the U.S. during "Iran/Contra" is also well documented. George Bush, is known "to be in the loop" with many of the players keeping in contact directly with his office.

Also, there has been much speculation as to the use of the off-shore rigs, pipelines and other assets of Zapata Offshore being used for narcotic trans-shipments.

Narcotics such as cocaine and heroin cannot be manufactured without the precursor chemicals. One of the largest makers of these precursor chemicals is the Eli Lilly Company of Indianapolis, Indiana. The Quayle family is a large stockholder, and George Bush has been on the Board of Directors. Eli Lilly is also the company that first synthesized LSD for the CIA.

China and the Opium Wars

Why all this interest in China? Well, China, among other things, is one of the largest producers and users of opiates in the world.

For a while, in the 1800s, the Yankee Clippers in Connecticut and Massachusetts were the fastest ships on the ocean. Speed was crucial to the opium trade; whoever made the trip from Turkey/India to Macao/Hong Kong/Shanghai first got the most for their goods.

During the Opium Wars, the U.S. chose to stand on the sidelines and cheer for the English and French, knowing that treaty obligations would bring the U.S. a share in the spoils. Russell and Company was at times the only trading house operating in Canton and used the opportunity to developed strong commercial ties and handsome profits.

Powerful national interests were behind the drug trade, because American traders were badly in need of some article the Chinese would buy, since by this time the seal breeding grounds had been nearly wiped out. If the Chinese had not bought opium from Americans, then United States imports of silk, porcelain and tea would have to paid in precious coin, which was in short supply. In 1843, when the Port of Shanghai was opened, Russell and Co. was one of its earliest traders.

In 1903, Yale Divinity School set up a program of schools and hospitals in China. Mao Zedong was among the staff. During the intrigues of China in the 1930s and '40s, American intelligence called upon the resources of "Yale in China", and George Bush's cousin and fellow "Bonesman" Reuben Holden.

After stints as UN Ambassador and Chairman of the Republican National Committee for the beleaguered Richard Nixon, George Bush was sent to look after the "China trade". The Bush family is still very much involved in the economic activities of "Red" China.

Many researchers contend that George Bush has been with CIA since the early 1950s, and that one of his jobs was to consolidate and co-ordinate the worldwide narcotics industry, the largest industry on Earth. Some say that one of the reasons behind the Vietnam "Police Action" was a cover for the consolidation of the "Golden Triangle".

Name Roster of the Secret Establishment

There were so many "Yalies" in the OSS that Yale's drinking tune, the "Whiffenpoof Song", became an "unofficial" song of the OSS. Many in the OSS were "Bonesmen" or belonged to the other Yale senior societies.

Robert Lovett ('18), Harriman's childhood friend, had been tapped into Skull & Bones by Prescott Bush's cell of '17 and was a director at Brown Brothers, Harriman.

Again, from "George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography":

"On October 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of U.S. intelligence activities.... The new agency would 'consult' with the armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings. Lovett appeared before the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy on November 14, 1945.... Lovett pressed for a virtual resumption of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS).... The CIA was established in 1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter Island."

Gaddis Smith, a history professor at Yale, said, "Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion." And "Bonesman" have been foremost among the "spooks" building the CIA's "haunted house."

F. Trubee Davison ('18) was Director of Personnel at the CIA in the early years. Some of the other "Bonesmen" connected with the intelligence community are:

Sloane Coffin, Jr. ('49)

V. Van Dine ('49)

James Buckley ('44)

Bill Buckley ('50)

Hugh Cunnigham ('34)

Hugh Wilson ('09)

Reuben Holden ('40)

Charles R. Walker ('16)

Yale's 'unofficial' Secretary of War, Robert D. French ('10)

Archibald MacLiesh ('15)

Dino Pionzio ('50), CIA Deputy Chief of Station during Allende overthrow

William and McGeorge Bundy

Richard A. Moore ('3?)

Senator David Boren ('63)

Senator John Kerry ('66)

...and, of course, George Herbert Walker Bush. Bush tapped Coffin, who tapped Buckley.

Some other prominent Bonesmen include:

Henry Luce ('20), Time-Life

John Thomas Daniels ('14), founder Archer Daniels Midland

Gifford Pinchot ('89), President Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester

Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser ('96)

Harold Stanley ('08), founder of Morgan Stanley, investment banker

Alfred Cowles ('13), Cowles Communication

Henry P. Davison ('20), senior partner Morgan Guaranty Trust

Thomas Cochran ('04) Morgan partner

Senator John Heinz ('31)

Pierre Jay ('92), first chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

George Herbert Walker, Jr. ('27), financier and co-founder of the NY Mets

Artemus Gates ('18), President of New York Trust Company, Union Pacific, TIME, Boeing Company

William Draper III (50), the Defense Department, UN and Import-Export Bank

Dean Witter, Jr.('44), investment banker

Senator Jonathan Bingham ('36)

Potter Stewart ('36), Supreme Court Justice

Senator John Chaffe ('47)

Harry Payne Whitney ('94), husband of Gertrude Vanderbilt, investment banker

Russell W. Davenport ('23), editor Fortune Magazine, created Fortune 500 list

Evan G. Galbraith ('50), Ambassador to France and Managing Director of Morgan Stanley

Richard Gow ('55), president Zapata Oil

Amory Howe Bradford ('34), husband of Carol Warburg Rothschild and general manager for the New York Times

C. E. Lord ('49), Comptroller of the Currency

Winston Lord ('59), Chairman of CFR, Ambassador to China and assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton administration

Ever since Nixon re-established America's political relationship with China, many of our ambassadors to that country have been Bonesmen, including George Bush, the first Chief U. S. Liaison Officer to the Peoples Republic of China.

Networks of Power

In his book "America's Secret Establishment," Antony Sutton outlined the Order of Skull and Bones' ability to establish vertical and horizontal "chains of influence" that ensured the continuity of their conspiratorial schemes.

The Whitney-Stimson-Bundy links represent the "vertical chain".

W. C. Whitney ('63), who married Flora Payne (of the Standard Oil Payne dynasty), was Secretary of the Navy. His attorney was a man named Elihu Root. Root hired Henry Stimson ('88), out of law school. Stimson took over from Root as Secretary of War in 1911, appointed by fellow Bonesman William Howard Taft. Stimson later became Coolidge's Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, Hoover's Secretary of State, and Secretary of War during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

Hollister Bundy ('09) was Stimson's special assistant and point man in the Pentagon for the Manhattan Project. His two sons, also members of Skull and Bones, were William Bundy ('39) and McGeorge Bundy ('40) -- both very active in governmental and foundation affairs.

The two brothers, from their positions in the CIA, the Department of Defense and the State Department, and as Special Assistants to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, exercised significant impact on the flow of information and intelligence during the Vietnam "War."

William Bundy went on to be editor of Foreign Affairs, the influential quarterly of the Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR). McGeorge became president of the Ford Foundation.

Another interesting group of "Bonesmen" is the Harriman/Bush crowd. Averil Harriman ('13), "Elder Statesman" of the Democratic Party, and his brother Roland Harriman ('17) were very active members. In fact, four of Roland's fellow "Bonesmen" from the class of 1917 were directors of Brown Brothers, Harriman, including Prescott Bush ('17), George Bush's dad.

Since the turn of the century, two investment bank firms -- Guaranty Trust and Brown Brothers, Harriman -- were both dominated by members of Skull and Bones. These two firms were heavily involved in the financing of Communism and Hitler's regime.

Bonesman share an affinity for the Hegellian ideas of the historical dialectic, which dictates the use of controlled conflict -- thesis versus anti-thesis -- to create a pre-determined synthesis. A synthesis of their making and design, where the state is absolute and individuals are granted their freedoms based on their obedience to the state -- a New World Order.

Funding and political maneuvering on the part of "Bonesmen" and their allies helped the Bolsheviks prevail in Russia. In defiance of federal laws, the cabal financed industries, established banks and developed oil and mineral deposits in the fledgling U.S.S.R.

Later, Averil Harriman, as minister to Great Britain in charge of Lend-Lease for Britain and Russia, was responsible for shipping entire factories into Russia. According to some researchers, Harriman also oversaw the transfer of nuclear secrets, plutonium and U. S. dollar printing plates to the U.S.S.R.

In 1932, the Union Banking Corporation of New York City had enlisted four directors from the ('17) cell and two Nazi bankers associated with Fritz Thyssen, who had been financing Hitler since 1924.

From "George Bush; The Unauthorized Biography":

"President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 [11/17/42] seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, Note #4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the 'Thyssen family' of 'Germany and/or Hungary' -- 'nationals ... of a designated enemy country.'

"By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corporation were legally 'front men for the Nazis', the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way 'were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed, and instructed by' the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? ...

"4. New York Times, December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: 'The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.'

"The Times omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government's Alien Property Custodian."

After the war, Prescott went on to become a U. S. Senator from Connecticut and favorite golfing partner of President Eisenhower. Prescott claims responsibility for getting Nixon into politics and takes personal credit for bringing Dick on board as Ike's running mate in 1952.

Secrets of the "Tomb"

The Order flourished from the very beginning in spite of occasional squalls of controversy. There was dissension from some professors, who didn't like its secrecy and exclusiveness. And there was backlash from students, showing concern about the influence "Bones" was having over Yale finances and the favoritism shown to "Bonesmen."

In October of 1873, Volume 1, Number 1, of The Iconoclast was published in New Haven. It was only published once and was one of very few openly published articles on the Order of Skull and Bones.

From The Iconoclast:

"We speak through a new publication. because the college press is closed to those who dare to openly mention 'Bones'....

"Out of every class Skull and Bones takes its men. They have gone out into the world and have become, in many instances, leaders in society. They have obtained control of Yale. Its business is performed by them. Money paid to the college must pass into their hands, and be subject to their will. No doubt they are worthy men in themselves, but the many, whom they looked down upon while in college, cannot so far forget as to give money freely into their hands. Men in Wall Street complain that the college comes straight to them for help, instead of asking each graduate for his share. The reason is found in a remark made by one of Yale's and America's first men: 'Few will give but Bones men and they care far more for their society than they do for the college....'

"Year by year the deadly evil is growing. The society was never as obnoxious to the college as it is today, and it is just this ill-feeling that shuts the pockets of non-members. Never before has it shown such arrogance and self-fancied superiority. It grasps the College Press and endeavors to rule it all. It does not deign to show its credentials, but clutches at power with the silence of conscious guilt.

"To tell the good which Yale College has done would be well nigh impossible. To tell the good she might do would be yet more difficult. The question, then, is reduced to this -- on the one hand lies a source of incalculable good -- on the other a society guilty of serious and far-reaching crimes. It is Yale College against Skull and Bones!! We ask all men, as a question of right, which should be allowed to live?"

At first, the society held its meetings in hired halls. Then in 1856, the "tomb", a vine-covered, windowless, brown-stone hall was constructed, where to this day the "Bonesmen" hold their "strange, occultish" initiation rites and meet each Thursday and Sunday.

On September 29, 1876, a group calling itself "The Order of File and Claw" broke into the Skull and Bones' holy of holies. In the "tomb" they found lodge-room 324 "fitted up in black velvet, even the walls being covered with the material." Upstairs was lodge-room 322, "the 'sanctum sanctorium' of the temple... furnished in red velvet" with a pentagram on the wall. In the hall are "pictures of the founders of Bones at Yale, and of members of the Society in Germany, when the chapter was established here in 1832." The raiding party found another interesting scene in the parlor next to room 322.

From "The Fall Of Skull And Bones":

"On the west wall, hung among other pictures, an old engraving representing an open burial vault, in which, on a stone slab, rest four human skulls, grouped about a fools cap and bells, an open book, several mathematical instruments, a beggar's scrip, and a royal crown. On the arched wall above the vault are the explanatory words, in Roman letters, 'We War Der Thor, Wer Weiser, Wer Bettler Oder, Kaiser?' and below the vault is engraved, in German characters, the sentence; 'Ob Arm, Ob Beich, im Tode gleich.'

The picture is accompanied by a card on which is written, 'From the German Chapter. Presented by D. C. Gilman of D. 50'."

Daniel Coit Gilman ('52), along with two other "Bonesmen," formed a troika which still influences American life today. Soon after their initiation in Skull and Bones, Daniel Gilman, Timothy Dwight ('49) and Andrew Dickinson White ('53) went to study philosophy in Europe at the University of Berlin. Gilman returned from Europe and incorporated Skull and Bones as Russell Trust, in 1856, with himself as Treasurer and William H. Russell as President. He spent the next fourteen years in New Haven consolidating the order's power.

Gilman was appointed Librarian at Yale in 1858. Through shrewd political maneuvering, he acquired funding for Yale's science departments (Sheffield Scientific School) and was able to get the Morrill Land Bill introduced in Congress, passed and finally signed by President Lincoln, after being vetoed by President Buchanan.

This bill, "donating public-lands for State College for agriculture and sciences", is now known as the Land Grant College Act. Yale was the first school in America to get the federal land scrip and quickly grabbed all of Connecticut's share at the time. Pleased by the acquisitions, Yale made Gilman a Professor of Physical Geography.

Daniel was the first President of the University of California. He also helped found, and was the first president of, John Hopkins.

Gilman was first president of the Carnegie Institution and involved in the founding of the Peabody, Slater and Russell Sage Foundations.

His buddy, Andrew D. White, was the first president of Cornell University (which received all of New York's share of the Land Grant College Act), U.S. Minister to Russia, U.S. Ambassador to Berlin and first president of the American Historical Association. White was also Chairman of the American delegation to the first Hague Conference in 1899, which established an international judiciary.

Timothy Dwight, a professor at Yale Divinity School, was installed as president of Yale in 1886. All presidents since, have been either "Bonesmen" or directly tied to the Order and its interests.

The Daniel/Gilman/White trio was also responsible for the founding of the American Economic Association, the American Chemical Society and the American Psychological Association. Through their influences on John Dewey and Horace Mann, this trio continues to have an enormous impact on education today.