Dear Bill Kelly,
Doing a google search, I saw a posting on a forum where you
discuss the Roy Frankhouser claims about the death of JFK. As it so happens, I've looked into these claims and
Frankhouser's life in some detail. If you wish to read my research, please look at
I have also posted the sections of his FBI file here:
If you feel my research has some merit, could you please
inform other JFK researchers interested in this question? I just don't know the
field very well.
I should also say that I agree with you very much that
Frankhouser is a bit of a "red herring" to put it mildly BUT his role
in actually infiltrating the SWP is quite interesting as an example of a far
rightist posing as a far leftist.
Sincerely,
Hylozoic Hedgehog
Beyond the Grassy Knoll
Introduction
In the summer of 1987 the National Caucus of Labor
Committees (NCLC) submitted a document in a legal action that attempted to
prove that Roy Frankhouser, a well-known KKK member and Lyndon LaRouche's
longtime paid "security consultant," was highly connected inside the CIA .
The document, "Attachment 2," began:
During 1974-75, Roy Frankhauser [sic], claiming to be working
on behalf of the CIA , established contact
with the NCLC. In approximately June 1975, Frankhauser submitted to three days
of intensive debriefings, during which time he provided details of his
employment with the National Security Council on a special assignment to
penetrate a Canada-based cell of the Palestinian terrorist Black September
organization, and other aspects of his CIA
career dating back to his involvement in the Bay of Pigs. 2 Frankhauser
said he served as the "babysitter" for [Mario] Garcia-Kholy [sic],
one of the Brigade leaders who was to have a high government post in a
post-Castro Cuba Moscow
The NCLC reference to a "R. Frankhauser" being in
Moscow in 1962 as somehow relevant evidence that Roy E. Frankhouser was working
for the CIA suggests just how much we have
entered the Mad Hatter's World. As I have shown in previous chapters on
Frankhouser in Smiling Man from a Dead Planet (SMDP), Roy Frankhouser
was living very publicly in Reading , Pennsylvania Moscow Philadelphia
Yet what is of value in "Attachment 2" is the
information that in June 1975 the NCLC spent three full days intensively
"debriefing" Frankhouser. Some months later, the NCLC publicly
declared that Frankhouser's revelations would prove critical in unmasking the
"real killers" of John F. Kennedy. This bold assertion first surfaced
in a 27 October 1975 New
Solidarity story penned by a top member of the group's "Security
Staff" named Scott Thompson, who maintained close ties with select members
of the radical right. 8 On 20
November 1975 , the same Scott Thompson wrote what was billed to be
the first of a series of articles highlighting Frankhouser's claims about a
plot to kill Kennedy. 9
To this day Frankhouser is perhaps most famous for the fact
that in late 1965 the "Jewish Nazi" Dan Burros killed himself in
Frankhouser's Reading, Pennsylvania, home after the New York
Times published an expose on Burros' Jewish roots. Burros' spectacular
death, however, has until now overshadowed a closer look at Frankhouser's
activities inside the far right. Now with the help of newly released FBI files,
we can shed remarkable new light on his subterranean world.
Following the Frankhouser bread crumbs in New
Solidarity, I hope to incorporate new information from FBI and other sources in
order to illuminate the almost unknown underworld of far right politics in the
late 1950s and early 1960s. 10
In so doing, I also wish to advance research first begun by
Professor Jerry Rose who in 1996 first cited Frankhouser's strange saga in the
pages of The Fourth Decade, the journal on the Kennedy assassination that
Rose also edited. 11 I propose to read the two articles in New
Solidarity as a palimpsest of a sort into Roy Frankhouser's eldritch world
in the late 1950s and early 1960s as he blithely slithered into political
organization on both the far left and far right.
In so doing, I hope to shed new light not only on
Frankhouser but also on his associates such as the Klan Bureau of Investigation
(KBI) leader Eugene Tabbutt. Their saga also will take us into the subterranean
universe of a still highly cryptic group called the "Knights of
Malta," a pseudo-chivalric "Order" which maintained ties to key
members of the far-right. There are numerous fascinating links to the Kennedy
assassination involving members of the far right and Frankhouser's story brings
that story more into focus. 12 Finally, Frankhouser's serpentine
sojourn inside the Trotskyist movement raises the real possibility that when
Frankhouser claimed to have met LaRouche during the period he
operated in the world of the SWP he may well have been telling the truth. If
so, the question then has to be asked whether or not the Frankhouser- LaRouche connection
actually began much earlier but only surfaced publicly in the mid-1970s.
However what is of most interest here is a
detailed examination of Roy Frankhouser's attempt -- starting sometime in late
1959 and early 1960 -- to infiltrate a small Trotskyist organization
headquartered in New York City called the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its
youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA. Frankhouser claimed that what
he learned while infiltrating the SWP would prove directly relevant to the question
of who shot Kennedy. He tried at least three times to peddle his revelations;
first to the Warren Commission in 1964, to New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in 1967,
and, finally, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1975, this
last attempt with help from the NCLC. Recently declassified FBI files show that
Frankhouser did in fact infiltrate the ranks of the local SWP in the Philadelphia New York
Frankhouser's saga also includes some eerie links to the
future NCLC. Although the NCLC only officially came into contact with
Frankhouser sometime in either late 1974 or early 1975, Frankhouser claimed
that he had first met Lyndon LaRouche ("Lynn Marcus") while
he was infiltrating the SWP in late 1959-early 1960, an
assertion LaRouche denied.13 Yet one of Frankhouser's key
contacts inside the YSA/SWP, George Larrabee, also happened to be the first
husband of Carol White (nee Schnitzer). 14 After the Larrabees broke
up, Carol became LaRouche's common-law wife and remained so until early
1972.15 She and LaRouche co-founded what became the NCLC in
1966-67.
ROOTS OF A SPY
Born in Reading 11 April 1939 , Royson
Everett Frankhouser, Jr., led a classic troubled childhood. HIs father
– who in the late 1950s made his living as a barber -- had a violent temper and
the family lived in constant fear. Frankhouser recalled that his father – who
he said had once been a musician – also wound up joining the KKK. 16
Frankhouser's father also reportedly served time in a
Federal prison for at least two armed robberies. Frankhouser's mother Lottie,
who divorced her husband in 1950, testified that Royson, Sr., "was always
drinking, was violent and profane, went into rages, threatened suicide often,
and 'always said he hated Jews and Catholics.' He used to shout 'Heil Hitler'
just to annoy the neighbors."
After the divorce, Frankhouser lived with his mother and step-father.
He also may have been at times a ward of the state. A Berks County Juvenile
Probation Officer told the FBI that while Frankhouser "was never placed
under the care of his office by the Court . . . they had supervised him
unofficially because of parental troubles." For his part, Frankhouser
recalled that around the time of the divorce he spent time in a children's home
and he later recalled that "living in a children's home . . . I admired
strength. I lived in a society that seemed to be absolutely weak. They could
break up my family and throw me into a home and where was the all-American
bounty? What kind of country was this?"17
Frankhouser soon became a problem in school, twice flunking
the ninth grade. Around the same time, he began passionately collecting World
War II Nazi regalia. Most likely through his father's old Reading KKK
connection, he met Clarence Seidel, described in the FBI files as a
"former Exalted Cyclops of RDG. [Reading Berks County , Pa. North
Carolina East Point , Georgia Atlanta
FROM THE ARMY TO THE FBI "BOMB SUSPECT LIST"
The little we know about Frankhouser's time in the U.S. Amy
comes from an investigation of Frankhouser's career as a far-rightist/U.S.
government informant extraordinaire conducted by John George and Laird Wilcox
for their book Nazis, Communists, Klansmen and Others on the
Fringe. 19 They report that Frankhouser joined the U.S. Army on 6 November 1956 and specifically
volunteered for the 82nd Airborne Division in order to be sent to Germany July 2, 1957 , Frankhauser stated that
he planned to desert the U.S. Army and join the revolutionary forces in Cuba Miami , Florida July 5, 1957 , to do
precisely that. He was taken into custody shortly thereafter and returned to
his military unit. Army records reflect that Frankhouser was discharged on November 18, 1957 , under the
provisions of AR-635-209 (unfit for military service). 20
George and Wilcox also cite a document which was based on a
series of interviews Frankhouser gave under oath from 13 July to 18 July 1957 after his return to Army
custody:
(FRANKHAUSER) made a decision to infiltrate organizations
such as the Neo-Nazi Party, the Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan, to
determine their motives, identity, the leaders, and report this information to
the proper intelligence agency of the United States Government if their aims
were ascertained to be inimical to the interest of the United
States Fort Bragg United States
At the time he made these astonishing statements, Roy
Frankhouser was 18 years old. 22 After a trip to a U.S. Army facility at Fort
Bragg 18 November 1957 . 23
Needless to say, Frankhouser's claims to military
authorities were made after he was returned to the Army after having gone AWOL
and are no doubt self-serving. Yet he spent the rest of his life shuttling between
extremist groups and U.S. 15 September
1975 article by Norman Kempster in the Washington
Star ("He Says Uncle Sam Was His Partner in Crime") reported:
Although he does not deny sharing the racist views of the
KKK and the Nazis, Frankhouser said he joined many right-wing groups at the
suggestion of state and federal law enforcement agencies – the FBI, the Mississippi
After his discharge, Frankhouser moved back to Reading Atlanta Atlanta Atlanta Reform
Temple 12 October 1958 . The bombing was just one of a
series of attacks on Jewish institutions in the South. 24 The Atlanta
"TRAINING CAMP "
It was also during this same period in the late 1950s that
Roy Frankhouser began cultivating connections to the SWP and other leftist
groups. Frankhouser would later claim that what he learned during this period
would shed new light on President Kennedy's death. Remarkably, Frankhouser's
promised "revelations" about the JFK assassination first surfaced not
in the pages of the NSRP paper Thunderbolt or in some KKK-affiliated
hate sheet but in the pages of the prestigious New York Times.
In a 1November 1965 article on the Daniel Burros suicide,
the Times interviewed Frankhouser at his Reading WCC ) and in
this capacity had infiltrated "Communist and Negro meetings,"
Frankhouser declared that soon after the assassination of President Kennedy he
offered to give the Federal Bureau of Investigation photostats showing that the
Socialist Workers Party had a "training camp" with which Lee Harvey
Oswald, the alleged assassin, was "connected."
Some ten years later, Frankhouser's story became more
elaborate. He now claimed that he had even been asked to testify before the
Warren Commission. In an article by Norman Kempster in the 12 October 1975 issue of the Washington
Star on a renewed investigation by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence into the Kennedy assassination ("Schweiker, Hart Ask JFK
Probe Review"), Frankhouser "said he was subpoenaed to testify before
the Warren Commission but did not appear because the subpoena was
canceled."
THE NEW SOLIDARITY
"REVELATIONS"
A few weeks after the Washington Star story
appeared, the NCLC's New Solidarity announced that the organization had
begun its own probe into the JFK murder. A month later, New
Solidarity would devote a long article to detailing Frankhouser's version
of events leading up to the death of JFK.
Here now in their entirety are both articles:
From the 27
October 1975 New Solidarity:
Right-Winger Murdered
By Scott Thompson
Oct. 25 (IPS ) 25 –
Ken Duggan, a right-wing activist who was in possession of information which
linked the Buckley family to Rockefeller's CIA
domestic terror apparatus, died under mysterious circumstances at Rikers Island
Prison last Friday.
Prison guards told IPS
they believed that Duggan was murdered, citing conflicting statements as to the
cause of death. The first release said Duggan was electrocuted; a subsequent
release listed the cause of death as suicide from hanging. Duggan was slated to
be released in three days on an appeal bond.
A few weeks before his death, Duggan had begun once again to
collaborate with IPS after seeing a friend,
ex-agent Roy Frankhauser, step forward to expose National Security Council
control over most left and right-wing terrorist groups.
Duggan had been framed up on attempted murder charges
brought by George Wilkie, an ex-member of Duggan's organization, the
Provisional National Government, who had been thrown out of the PNG
for being a Buckley spy shortly before the frame-up. 26 Duggan had
not even been present at the shooting for which he was convicted.
Wilkie had been at Rikers
Island New York PNG , Wilkie taught karate for
the Commandoes Libres Nacionales – a small gang of CIA -linked
Gusano terrorists located on both the East and West Coast.
As IPS has elsewhere
documented, the Buckley Family is one of Nelson Rockefeller's main controllers
of fascist terrorist groups. They are known to specialize in the use of Cuban
exile (Gusano) terrorists through William Buckley's partner Howard Hunt.
Through Madrid-based F. Reid Buckley, they control other Latin American and
Eastern European organizations. The Buckleys are in command of sectors of the U.S.
Fought Rocky
Duggan, a leader of the independent, radical-populist right
in New York State
Dissolving the PNG as an
agent-ridden body, he began collaborating with the NCLC, mapping the Buckley
family networks of CIA -controlled right-wing
countergangs.
If you have any information on Ken Duggan's death, forward
it immediately to this newspaper. Other potential sources of information in
Duggan's circle are known to be in danger. It is expected that this
intelligence will fit into an NCLC investigation into the Kennedy
assassination [my emphasis] along lines now being pursued by Sen. Richard
Schweiker of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Next from 20
November 1975 issue of New Solidarity (page 5):
Frankhauser Reveals NSC ,
SWP, Minutemen - Role in Kennedy Killing
By Scott Thompson
Nov. 19 (IPS ) – In a
series of exclusive interviews with IPS over
the past month, former National Security Council operative Roy Frankhauser has
provided information which conclusively demonstrates that the National Security
Council planned and coordinated the Nov. 1963 assassination of President John
F. Kennedy. Frankhauser provided details of numerous assassination teams
organized for the Kennedy and other operations by known agents of the CIA
and FBI within groups ranking from the left-wing Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
and the Communist Party (USA) to right-wing groups such as the paramilitary
Minutemen.
Also included in the preparations for the assassination were
Cuban exile groups (Gusanos), the American Nazi Party, and such top CIA
agents as G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and E. Howard Hunt, the convicted
Watergate burglar and close associate of William F. Buckley. In early 1963,
Frankhauser told IPS , "the word came
down to get Kennedy and agent-led teams began to spring up all over the
place."
No other body than the NSC
had the authority and capability to direct such broad forces. Among the men who
headed the National Security Council at the time of the assassination
were McGeorgeBundy, now president of the Ford Foundation, former Secretary
of State Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, now president of the World Bank, and
former CIA director John McCone, now a
board member of International Telephone and Telegraph. All are top members of
the Rockefellers' policy-making establishment.
This article, focusing on the Kennedy assassination role of
the SWP and the Minutemen, is the first of a series of planned articles which
will present the full story of the NSC -CIA
role in that operation.
SWP Role
Frankhauser confirms that two agents within the SWP
periphery, who also had close ties to the Communist Party USA, were a direct
part of the Kennedy operation. Frankhauser met the two, Ruth and John [sic]
Paine, in 1960 [sic], when he was infiltrating the SWP in New York as an agent
for the Mississippi White Citizens Council and for then-Mississippi [sic]
Governor Patterson. 28 Both Paines have been closely linked to Lee
Harvey Oswald (who described himself as the "patsy" in the Kennedy
killing moments before he was shot in the Dallas
In the months preceding the assassination, the Paines lived
with Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas CIA in front of the Soviet Embassy. She also
took Oswald to New Orleans Cuba
In New York
Actual military training for this group was conducted at Camp
Midvale Ramapo
Mountains New
Jersey
It was during this same period that Frankhauser first met
Oswald at an International Scientific Socialist meeting in New York to which he
was taken by the Paines.
Frankhauser's second meeting with Oswald was at a CIA
training camp near Lake Ponchatrain Louisiana
The Minutemen Case
Beginning in 1961, NSC
agents launched an operation in the right-wing Minutemen – founded a year
earlier to prepare for "guerilla warfare" against an expected
communist takeover of the U.S. – which transformed the organization into a key NSC
center for recruiting and coordinating the psychotic fringe of right-wing
groups into a swarm of assassination teams, some of which were specially
selected and trained for the Kennedy assassination.
This takeover of the Minutemen was conducted under the
auspices of FBI Operation COINTELPRO and CIA
Operation Scorpio, and within a short time the entire Minutemen national
executive committee was composed of agents – with the exception of the
organization's founder Robert DePugh, who has remained a controlled dupe
of the FBI ever since.
Frankhauser, at the time a CIA
stringer, was himself deployed into the Minutemen, eventually becoming East
Coast director of intelligence and national counterintelligence director.
Among the key figures in the Minutemen side of the Kennedy
assassination operation, Frankhauser said, was Ken Duggan, who was assistant
director of Minutemen counterintelligence under Frankhauser. Also a CIA
stringer, Duggan worked within the Buckley family network of Catholic fascist
terrorists, recruiting Gusanos for the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Duggan
also recruited and trained several teams in preparing for the Kennedy assassination.
Duggan, who later denounced the Buckleys, was murdered at New
York Rikers Island
Also suspected in profiling and selecting members of the
Kennedy and other assassination teams were two agents active in the Minutemen:
Vincent De Palma and Eugene Tabett [sic]. De Palma had been a leading CIA
assassination expert in Latin America before being planted in the FBI. The FBI
in turn deployed him into the Minutemen where he quickly became a national
figure. Tabbett [sic] has worked for the FBI in the Klan Bureau of Intelligence
before joining De Palma in Connecticut
Among the other operations of these right-wing assassination
teams, two incidents became public: aborted attempts to assassinate Senator J.
William Fulbright and to poison the United Nations headquarters in New
York
Because of his intimate knowledge, Frankhauser has been a
special target of brainwashing and assassination attempts.
His 1964 subpoena to testify before the Warren Commission
was quashed by the FBI on "national security" grounds. At the time
Frankhauser was threatened by two Reading, Pennsylvania-based FBI agents,
Kaufman and Davis, who told him that "if you release information on the
Paines or the Commission, you'll be in deep trouble with the
FBI."31 One day before their visit, Frankhauser was almost struck by
two bullets fired through the window of his Reading
Two weeks ago, the Philadelphia Secret Service participated
in an attempt to brainwash Frankhauser under the pretext of giving him a lie
detector test. Three days ago, individuals driving a government car and
carrying a carbine were observed waiting in front of Frankhauser's empty house.
New Solidarity's bombshell expose was only rivaled by
the paper's truly astonishing inability to get even basic facts correct
beginning with the name of Ruth Paine's husband (he was Michael and not
"John") to the comical claim that Ruth Paine drove Oswald to Mexico
City and helped him run his one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPFC )
front group in New Orleans. These and other whoppers render Frankhouser's
claims (as reported by New Solidarity) intellectual road kill that is
virtually unusable for anyone hoping to do serious research work into the
Kennedy assassination.
Yet when read with the intent of learning more about
right-wing infiltration by agent provocateurs into groups like the
SWP, New Solidarity's tall tale of Frankhouser's strange odyssey –
although laced with basic errors of fact -- proves surprisingly valuable as we
shall soon see.
One obvious error in the story comes when Roy Frankhouser reportedly
said that he infiltrated the SWP on behalf of the "Mississippi White
Citizens Council," and "Mississippi Governor John Patterson."
John Patterson, however, was the governor of Alabama, not Mississippi. (It is
possible that New Solidarity simply mixed up its Pattersons since one
of the founders and leading members of the Mississippi WCC
was named Robert "Tut" Patterson. Tut Patterson also wrote for
numerous anti-Semitic publications including the National Renaissance
Bulletin. 32 ) Yet another oddity is that Frankhouser told
the New York Times a decade earlier that he had worked for the
Virginia (and not the Mississippi) branch of the WCC
at the time he infiltrated the SWP.
The New Solidarity claim, then, may have been yet
another Scott Thompson error since it seems hard to believe that Frankhouser
would not have known something as basic as the name of the governor of Alabama Alabama Alabama Shelton
From Patsy Sims book, The Klan:
Patterson retained the Klan's political favor by awarding a
$1.6 million government tire contract to B.F. Goodrich with the understanding
that Shelton
In 1963 the UKA shifted its support to George Wallace. Again
from Sims:
Wallace ensured Klan endorsement for future gubernatorial
and presidential campaigns by pressuring a Mobile
construction company doing business with the state docks to hire Shelton Shelton Alabama
Starting the mid-1950s and continuing well into the1960s,
supporters of segregation tried desperately to argue that integration
("race mixing") was a subversive communist plot. Southern state
governments -- as well as groups like the KKK, NSRP, and the White Citizens
Councils – also accused the extreme left of promoting violence. Thus when we
read New Solidarity's claim that when Frankhouser was in New
York
…it seems more than reasonable that we are reading either a
complete fantasy or pure disinformation from a textbook agent
provocateur.36 Yet as we shall see later, Frankhouser did in
fact meet someone named "George Payne." "George Payne," it
turned out, was the "party name" for an YSA/SWP supporter named
George Larrabee. He, in turn, happened to be married to LaRouche's future
wife, Carol.
As for Frankhouser's statement in New
Solidarity that he also met the real Lee Harvey Oswald at an
"International Scientific Socialist" meeting in New
York Russia Europe from New
Orleans 20
September 1959 to France Russia United
States port
of New York 13 June 1962 . Oswald stayed in New
York Dallas New York
City New York Russia
Was it possible that Frankhouser really did believe he had
met the "Paines" simply because he knew George Larrabee, who used the
pen name "George Payne?" 37 Could Frankhouser have
misremembered the spelling and made an honest mistake? There can be no doubt
that the "Payne" Frankhouser really did meet was the pen name of
George Larrabee. Nor can there be any confusion over the way to spell the name
since Larrabee himself spelled it ""Payne." In its 19 December 1960 edition, the SWP
paper the Militant published a letter to the editor by Larrabee which he
signed "George Payne."38 The name is also spelled
"Payne" in a letter Larrabee and Frankhouser wrote and which we shall
now examine.
PAPER TRAIL
In 1965 Frankhouser told the New York Times that
while he was infiltrating the SWP he came into the possession of certain
documents that he said would shed new light on the Kennedy assassination and
which he said he showed to the FBI sometime in 1964 only to have the Bureau
summarily reject both them and him.
But just what were those documents?
Thanks to FBI reports now available on the Mary Ferrell
Foundation website, we now know the content of the photostats that Frankhouser first
tried to peddle to the FBI shortly after the Kennedy assassination and then a
few years later to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.39 Curious
as to what Frankhouser might have had up his sleeve, the FBI – clearly through
the use of informants – obtained copies of the documents Frankhouser wanted to
send to Garrison. The lead FBI Philadelphia Office FBI Agent on the 1967 case,
William Edward Davis, may even have been the very same "Agent Davis"
that Frankhouser mentioned in the 20
November 1975 New Solidarity article.40
From an FBI summary of Frankhouser's activities dated 16 June 1967 :
Roy E. Frankhouser of Reading ,
Pennsylvania Pennsylvania
Attached memorandum disclosed Frankhouser had located the
letters of interest and plans to send them to Garrison. A source close to
Frankhouser has made copies of the data available to the Philadelphia Office.
The contents do not make sense and do not appear to be related in any way to
the assassination of President Kennedy.
The FBI files also show how the Bureau first became aware of
Frankhouser's claims.41 From an FBI summary dated 28 June 1967 by Special Agent Davis: 42
FRANKHOUSER claims he has information of value to the New
Orleans DA GARRISON in his investigation of the KENNEDY assassination. . .
.PH-T-I stated on March 31, 1967 ,
that ROY FRANKHOUSER had expressed a desire to get from his (FRANKHOUSER's)
files and records, which are in a secure place but not readily available, some
letters from a man named PAYNE (phonetic). FRANKHOUSER stated that he intends
to send them to New Orleans Parish District Attorney GARRISON for his
assistance in the investigation he is conducting into the assassination of
President KENNEDY. FRANKHOUSER did not say what connection these letters had
with the assassination, if any.
PH T-6 advised April
5, 1967 , that ROY FRANKHOUSER attended a meeting of about 60 to 75
people in Media , Pa. March 23, 1967 , at which
he publicly stated that he had given information to two FBI agents concerning
the assassination of President KENNEDY. He said that he had offered to testify
before the Warren Commission but was never called because the FBI suppressed
his evidence, which had to do with a man named PAYNE. FRANKHOUSER said he had
met PAYNE while infiltrating communist training schools in the area.
FRANKHOUSER also claimed he had met with Russian Agents in the apartment of
HELENA RUBENSTEIN while acting as a double agent.
PH-T-1 on May 13, 1967, advised that FRANKHOUSER had made
further inquiries regarding what he referred to as the "PAYNE
letters." FRANKHOUSER insisted they had to be in his files because they
could only be there or in the custody of ED LOTZ, and LOTZ denied having them.
FRANKHOUSER said that he had been in touch with "GARRISON" and he
expected to be subpoenaed. It is very urgent that he find these letters.
PH T-1 advised May 16, 1967, that an exhaustive search had
been conducted of FRANKHOUSER's correspondence files, which contain mostly very
old material, including propaganda of many white supremacy groups, but that
nothing had been located relating to the assassination of President KENNEDY,
New Orleans, or Dallas, or anything else that appeared to be the material
FRANKHOUSER said he had. The name PAYNE, or any variation thereof, had not been
located in any of FRANKHOUSER's material.
Just a few days later, however, a source informed the FBI
that Frankhouser finally found the material that he had been seeking:
PH T-1 advised on May 20, 1967, that FRANKHOUSER had located
the following material:
1) A membership card in the Young Socialist League (undated)
in the name ROY HOUSER.
As for the second item, here now is the complete letter that
the FBI managed to photocopy from one of its informants: 43
March 23, 1960
Dear Comrade BARRETT:
Hearing of the formation of the Socialist Discussion Club at
the University of Iowa
This is because, like yourself, we are former paratroopers
(82nd Airborne Division) and thought it fitting that we should let you know
that former members of a military brotherhood that you once belonged to are
also with you in a youth movement that opposes Militarism and War but
which nonetheless may be called upon in the carrying out of
its liberoly task to display courage and daring even greater than
that required by the Paratroops. 44
GEORGE LARRABEE (PFC 105th A.T.R. 82nd Airborne [19]51-53)
is an editorial Board Member of the Young Socialist and Young
Socialist Supporters National Committee under the name of GEORGE PAYNE. (See Young
Socialist March issue cartoon.)
ROY FRANKHOUSER ( ) 45 still jumps with the
Pennsylvania Airborne Rangers, but only as part of the air rescue branch of the
Rangers, not the commando end of it. The air rescue team will parachute to the
assistance of any plane crash survivors irrespective of their military or
civilian status.
As an organizer for the ILGWU and as a Socialist, I, GEORGE
LARRABEE, have met three veterans of the World War II 82nd Airborne, two
union organizers, the other a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Having met
many other veterans in these categories, and looking upon ourselves, could this
mean something?
/s/ GEORGE LARRABEE
GEORGE LARRABEE
New York City, N.Y.
/s/ (unsigned)
ROY FRANKHOUSER, JR.
The FBI report continues:
The above-mentioned source advised June 9, 1967, that ROY
FRANKHOUSER had reviewed the above two items and appeared overjoyed that they
had been located.
FRANKHOUSER indicated that these were the items he had been
looking for to send to New Orleans District Attorney GARRISON in the near
future. This source pointed out, as he has in the past, that FRANKHOUSER is a
liar, a braggart, and often makes impressive statements he never carries out.
After reading the letter, the FBI remained utterly mystified
as to what any of it had to do with the murder of John F. Kennedy.
"ROY
Although the FBI couldn't understand what Frankhouser was up
to, he clearly was thrilled to find these two items. The first, his membership
card in the Young Socialist League (YSL) under the name "Roy Houser,"
was no doubt proof positive that he had indeed infiltrated the New York Left.46 As
for the YSL, it functioned as the youth organization of the Trotskyist
International Socialist League (ISL). The ISL's longtime leader Max Shachtman
had been a former leading member of the SWP. In April 1940, however, Shachtman
broke with the SWP and created the Workers Party, later renamed the ISL in the
1950s. By the late 1950s Shachtman felt there was no point to continue to
embrace to old Leninist model of revolution. As he gradually became more
favorable to aspects of U.S. policy in the Cold War, he looked towards
organized social democracy and in 1958 Shachtman dissolved the ISL into the
Socialist Party. Yet not every one of Shachtman's followers agreed with his
decision. According to one Shachtman biographer:
About a third of the Socialist Youth League refused to
follow him into the Socialist Party. About half of the Socialist youth rejected
his turn to the Democratic Party. The Young Socialist Alliance (linked to the
Socialist Workers Party), the third-camp journal New Politics, and the
Independent Socialist Clubs were all founded in these years, turning away from
Shachtman's social democratic outlook toward the radical impulses of the
1960s. 47
The most radical minority in the YSL led by Tim Wohlforth,
Shane Mage, and James Robertson now gravitated to a new project launched by the
long-time radical A.J. Muste. In the wake of the Soviet 20th Party
Congress, Muste founded the American Forum for Socialist Education in New York
to try to develop a new radical movement composed of former CPUSA supporters
who had left the party over revelations about Stalin, the SWP, and other
independent militants.48 Future SWP leader Barry Sheppard recalls:
The YSL minority, about 30 people, joined in this process of
"regroupment." One result was the launching of united independent
socialist election campaigns in California and New York, in which the SWP
played a major role. . . .The most important result of regroupment was the
formation of Young Socialist newspaper and the Young Socialist
Alliance in New York. The leaders of the YSL minority had been won over to the
SWP and they became the leadership core of the YSA. The new youth group was
called an "alliance" because its members came from the YSL minority,
the younger members of the SWP, ex-LYL [former members of the Communist Party's
Labor Youth League] and previously unaffiliated youth. 49
The attempted CP-SWP "regroupment" first bore
fruit at a 1957 May Day rally held at Central Plaza Hall in the East
Village
"Roy Houser," then, really did infiltrate into
this world through the YSL and the New York-based Young Socialist Alliance
which published Young Socialist. As for the Larrabee-Frankhouser letter to
the head of the socialist discussion group at the University of Iowa, it was
written on 23 March 1960 or just a few weeks before the official founding of
the YSA at an inaugural conference held in Philadelphia from 15-17 April
1960.51 As it also just so happened, Philadelphia also was where
Frankhouser's infiltration of the SWP first began.
FRANKHOUSER'S TRAIL: PART 1 – "COMRADE ROY
Thanks to newly-declassified FBI files, we now know far more
about Frankhouser's role in the SWP, an affiliation that may even have had its
roots in Reading
After returning to Reading from the Army, Frankhouser began
reading SP-SDF literature. The FBI learned in early May 1959 that Frankhouser
had two local SP-SDF publications. One was a small booklet entitled "The
Parable of the Water Tank" by the famed late 19thcentury American
socialist Edward Bellamy that the SP-SDF distributed. He also had an SP-SDF
leaflet entitled "Unemployment Hurts Everybody." Tellingly,
Frankhouser wrote on the back of the leaflet, "It's too bad that too many
Socialists don't understand that the Negro means the end of both Civilization
and that means the end of Socialism too." Frankhouser, then, may have been
genuinely interested in some of the policies of socialism even as he fought
integration.52
"THE GREATEST ARMY IN THE WORLD"
In June 1959, just as Frankhouser was becoming involved with
the Left, a bizarre incident happened which was soon reported to the FBI.
During this time Frankhouser was a regular at the local Civil Air Patrol (CAP )
and he also practiced parachute jumping with the Berks County Parachute Club.
On 30 June 1959, the Ranger Team Commander of the local Civil Air Patrol (CAP )
group called the "Para-Rangers" telephoned the FBI to report a strange
incident: Last weekend the CAP had
a practice problem in night tactics, in preparation for forthcoming exercises.
The group was split up and some of them attempted to infiltrate positions
protected by the remainder of the group. FRANKHOUSER was one of the men
assigned to attempt penetration of the "enemy lines," and was sent
off alone.
One of the men in the group later reported to Captain ____
that he had been near FRANKHOUSER when the latter apparently thought he was
alone, because suddenly subject stood up, extended his clenched fist and said
aloud, "I am now a member of the greatest Army in the world, the United
Armies of the Soviet Union ."
Yet another report on Frankhouser's statements to his CAP
Para-Ranger comrades was reported by the same CAP
commander on 31 March 1960 .
This time he told the FBI that:
Subject is also reported to have told some of the other
Rangers about a month ago that he would like to go to Cuba to join (FIDEL)
CASTRO. On this same occasion which occurred when the Rangers were temporarily
snowbound while on an overnight hike near Hawk
Mountain
Needless to say, all this only reinforced the FBI's view
that Frankhouser might well be insane. As one FBI agent commented upon reading
the report about Frankhouser's praise of Russia, "The above action on the
part of subject seems to substantiate previous indications that he is mentally
unbalanced. . . ." Yet Frankhouser's interest in both the Soviet Union and
Cuba may have had even deeper roots. On 18 January 1960, the FBI received a
report that Frankhouser carried out regular telephone conversations with one
Fred Polzin of Parkesburg, Pennsylvania, located in Chester County, and not
very far from both Reading and Philadelphia. From the FBI report:
___ exhibited a few items which ROY had left lying around
and several were from the aforementioned ___. A letter addressed to ROY at __
home bore the return address of ______, Parkesburg, Pa. Literary Agent and
Importer of Foreign Publications. The letter proper, which is dated January 11,
1960, reads: "—Thanks for your call this evening. It's good to hear from
one with similar interests. I'm usually home after 5, Saturday afternoon and
Sunday, but better call or drop a card before to be sure. Enclosed is some
printed matter. I hope to have a new booklet out within a week.
The FBI report then continued:
___ stated that she had seen several items ROY got from ___,
but could only find one, a leaflet from the April, 1958 RIGHTNewsletter,
described as Tract #5 advertising an article by FREDERICK CHARLES F. WEISS
Middletown, N.Y. WEISS is described as a German, " Rightist," and
mentions "Western Decadence" but in terms of combating this decadence
to prevent defeat by Russia. One copy of this leaflet is attached. She also
recalled that one pamphlet was captioned "Quo Vadis, Homo?" which she
admitted she did not understand.
She stated that ROY ROY
Fred Polzin owned a printing press and he regularly printed
tracts by his friend Fred Weiss. Polzin also served as the secretary
of Truth Seeker, a "scientific racist" and proudly atheist
publication out of New York City run by Charles Lee Smith.53 Truth
Seekeralso held regular "racist forums" in Manhattan which served in
part as a "cover" for meetings by the far-right National Renaissance
Party (NRP), officially led by James Madole but which had been bankrolled for a
long time by Fred Weiss. Not surprisingly, Polzin also was a member of the NRP.
Polzin regularly published and distributed Weiss's writings while Truth
Seeker issued the first American edition of Francis Parker Yockey's classic
far-right manifesto Imperium in 1962 with support from Fred Weiss.
The Truth Seeker/NRP network in New York served as a key connection for
Roger Pearson's Northern League for Pan-European Friendship whose American
headquarters in Newport News, Virginia, also doubled as the headquarters for
the Virginia White Citizens Council. Frankhouser, a proud member of the
Northern League, also attended NRP events in New York City
For our purposes, however, what is most important about
Frankhouser's ties to Polzin is that Polzin – whose father the FBI discovered
had been a member of the Pennsylvania Communist Party in 1943 – promoted the
Weiss-Yockey argument that the radical right should align with Russia Soviet Union and
Cuba
"ROY HAUSER" GETS "CARDED"
As we have seen, just at the time that Frankhouser became
interested in the Left first through the SP-SDF, the organization was
undergoing a major shift as the left wing of ISL resisted the merger with
Norman Thomas's SP. This same group (led by Tim Wohlforth and James Robertson)
later become the first national leadership of the SWP's YSA just two years
later.
The SWP's role in the emergence of the YSA dates back to the
"regroupment period" after the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU.
In an attempt to unite the left following the 20th Party Congress
revelations about Stalin, the Young Socialist Forum (YSF) was formed in New
York City. It included leftist youth from many different political points of
view from Trotskyists to American SP members to former members of the
"Gates faction" of the CP who had left the party to circles around
the National Guardian. Some of the most active youth were members of
American Youth for Socialism, the Left Wing Caucus of the Young Socialist
League (YSL), and former members of the CP's Labor Youth League (LYL). The YSF
included among its members Frankhouser's future friend George Larrabee.
In October 1957, those individuals from the Young Socialist
Forum who were most drawn to the SWP's brand of Trotskyism created their own
paper entitled Young Socialist, which was published as a monthly out of
New York City. In essence, this group functioned as part of the leadership of
the SWP's new youth organization, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), which had
yet to become a fully national organization. In an attempt to help launch the
YSA on the path to a national organization, a national conference of
"Young Socialistsupporters" was held on 27-28 December 1958 to lay
the grounds for a new nation-wide youth movement.
Frankhouser's involvement with this "new left" led
him to spend his weekends in the Philadelphia
"According to ____, subject [Frankhouser] is becoming
increasingly interested in Socialism, and has been going to Philadelphia
Frankhouser gravitated to the SWP local in Philadelphia
During this same month Frankhouser obtained his "Roy
Hauser" membership card in the Young Socialist League. We know this
because he later showed his card to FBI agents in the FBI's Reading office on
23 January 1960 when Frankhouser suddenly appeared to talk about his activity.
According to a 25 January 1960 FBI report: Subject exhibited a small yellow card with red printing on
it reading "Young Socialist Supporter." The number "243"
was typed on it and the date and name "10/12/59" and "ROY
HOUSER" were printed on it in blue ink. Subject at the time said he used
the alias HOUSER to conceal his real identity, and attended this meeting only
to get ideas. He is not in agreement with the Communists or Socialists ideas,
especially their pro-Negro and anti-segregationist feelings. He belongs to the
groups, the Northern League and the White Citizens Councils, and stated that he
is attempting to adopt the best features of these groups, and by a process of
education promote segregation.
FRANKHOUSER AND FARRELL
DOBBS
Just one month after Frankhouser became a
"card-carrying" Young Socialist supporter, he organized a meeting in Reading
"It will be noted that ___ and ___ have advised that
FARRELL DOBBS, the SW
P National Secretary, spoke at a house residence in Reading ,
Pa. 11/16/59 , possibly at the residence of one (FNU) [first
name unknown] ____, Reading , Pa.
The FBI received a detailed description of the two-hour
forum from one of its Reading informants. She told the FBI that in organizing
for the Dobbs talk, Frankhouser "had been in touch with the NAACP,
and with DARLINGTON HOOPES, and a few Negroes may attend, as well as HOOPES.
Roy also expects several Albright College students to
attend." Unfortunately, since Dobbs' talk only was attended by about
10 people, "the poor attendance made ROY so angry he went out and sat
alone on the front porch for a time." As for "Dobbs," the
informant reported that: his speech was very quiet and not the "rabble rousing
type" she had expected. ___ stated that the speech was completely over her
head, and she had difficulty following its trend. DOBBS quoted statistics
extensively, and mentioned that in 1960 the working class should have a
political party of their own to combat capitalism. DOBBS repeatedly referred to
the poor farmers and the poor workers. . . .___ advised that apparently DOBBS
was speaking over the heads of all present, except possibly ___. He used the
term "militant" several times.
In the question and answer period that followed, __ asked
what "militant" meant, and DOBBS explained that the workers must
fight for their rights, instead of letting the capitalist bosses work them to
death. DOBBS said something to the effect that "no one wants war, but we
must use force if necessary, and if we are in the majority to accomplish our
ends." The meeting ended about 11 PM . . . . ___ could not elaborate
further on what transpired as it was most boring and confusing to her, and she
had trouble staying awake.
THE MOUNTAIN SPRINGS CAMP
Despite the poor attendance at the Reading Reading New Jersey
From an FBI report dated 23 November 1959 :
___, Reading, Pa., telephonically advised as follows:
Yesterday (11/19/59) she observed ROY FRANKHOUSER with a mimeographed paper
describing a "Socialist Encampment" to be held November 20-22, 1959
at Mountain Spring Camp, N.J. The paper described the affair as a Young
Socialist Encampment, and gave directions for reaching Mountain Spring Camp,
indicating it was about two (2) miles from Washington, N.J. The fee for the
full 2-1/3 days was $10.
___ stated that ROY tried to borrow $10 from her and being
unable to do so packed his duffle bag, sleeping bag and took some staples and
canned food. He told her he was going to attend this meeting and left, saying
he was going to hitchhike. If anyone else was going with him, subject did not
say.
The Mountain Springs conclave was attended by members of
Young Socialist Supporter Clubs from Boston , New
York Philadelphia Baltimore
When Frankhouser finally returned to Reading, the FBI
learned that he brought back a long list of books including Economic and
Philosophical Manuscript of 1844, Critique of the Gotha Program, The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, as well as On
Capital, The Revolutionary Act. Military Insurrection or Political and
Economic Action (an Engels' pamphlet published by the Socialist Labor
Party's New York Labor News Co. that came with an appendix by Daniel De Leon)
and tracts like Socialism Answers and Underneath
Antisemitism (both by the Socialist Labor Party's Eric Hass)
and Economics for Beginners by John Keracher, the founder of the
Proletarian Party of America in the 1920s and whose members later ran the famed
U.S radical publisher Charles Kerr and Co. After returning from Mountain
Spring, Frankhouser also attended local SWP functions like the Militant Labor
Forums held at 1303 West Girard Avenue which doubled as the headquarters of the
Benjamin Franklin Masonic Lodge of the AMORC Rosicrucian Order, and from which
the SWP apparently rented space for talks.
Looking back on New Solidarity's distorted tale,
it seems very likely that the camp Frankhouser mentioned really was Mountain
Spring although given that Frankhouser claimed that he also was a member of the
American Communist Party it is possible that he did visit Camp Midvale at some
period. Yet as clearly shown by FBI files, Frankhouser's closest associations
were with the SWP. In fact, in the FBI files for this period, there is no
report documenting any close link between Frankhouser and the CPUSA.
GEORGE LARRABEE A/K/A "GEORGE PAYNE"
While the extent of Frankhouser's activities inside East
Coast left remains murky, George Larrabee's history is a bit clearer. In the 6
February 1966 issue of New York Times, the then 31-year old Larrabee was
interviewed at one of the early anti-Vietnam war protests by former Vets.
Larrabee stood out at the rally because he was holding an American flag
embroidered with a large "76" on it. Larrabee told
the Times that he came from an old Vermont family that traced its
roots back to the Revolutionary War. "There were at least four Larrabees
in the Battle of Bennington in 1776," he explained, "so I thought it
would be appropriate to bring this personal trophy along today." Larrabee
further stated that he had been a member of the 505th Airborne of the U.S. Army
which was a brigade unit of the 82nd Airborne. He also told
the Times that he was now working as a commercial artist in New
York City
However the most detailed description of Larrabee political
views comes from the fall 1957 issue of International Socialist
Review (18/4), the SWP theoretical journal.
Although the cite is fairly long and somewhat cumbersome to
read, I quote it in full because it is the only real summary of Larrabee's
thinking about leftist politics during that time. From theInternational
Socialist Review:
Among the items that have reached our desk since last issue,
we would like to single out a circular signed by George Larrabee,
Organizational Chairman of the National Committee for a United Socialist
Alliance, which is headed by the Rev. Hugh Weston of Boston. Larrabee, who is
deeply interested in the regroupment of socialist forces in America Boston New
York
He reports encouraging developments in America
He urges "unstinting support" for the Young
Socialist Forum and asks those who are interested to write Tim Wohlforth, 305
E. 21st St. , New York City
"On the adult plane of the Left regroupment
question," Larrabee continues, "since I have been in New York I have
been more and more drawn towards the idea of building unity around some one of
the existing parties, one with a clear and honest program, with a serious and
determined policy, rather than a mere plea for unity in the abstract, on a
vague and programless call for unity. We have just about passed the stage where
we have to call for a discussion of unity ... those who have made up their
minds for or against it by and large are not going to change. So now the
questions of who we can actually unite with, rather than who we WANT to unite
with, have come to the fore, and on what basis, on what principles."
In Larrabee's opinion a radical party is needed, "made
up of several similar groupings, in the democratic American tradition, but
completely united on the important questions that really count."
The tradition Larrabee would like to see embodied in the new
party begins with Thomas Paine, Sam Adams, Jefferson and Lincoln
"For guidance in 1957 we should look to the modern
adherents of Lenin and Trotsky and investigate the ideas of such anti-Stalinist
(anti-bureaucratic degeneration) Communists and Left Socialists as George
Lukacs (Hungary, now in exile within the Soviet orbit) and Wolfgang Harich
(Communist professor imprisoned by the East German regime) and Milovan Djilas
of Yugoslavia, whose new book The New Class is being falsely hailed
as a work against Communism." Larrabee declares that he "might not
agree on everything with them" and that "all such theorists and
leaders who have recently broken with Stalinism (or Rightist Socialism, for that
matter) should be measured against those ORIGINAL Bolsheviks who stood up
against Stalin while at the same time refusing to capitulate to the Right, the
Trotskyites."
To Larrabee, Peter Fryer, "who broke with Stalinism in
the midst of the Hungarian revolt as a Daily Worker reporter in that
country ... symbolizes the world-wide coming together of principled Left
Socialists with Communists and Soviet sympathizers breaking with Stalinism,
taking up the banner so long upheld by a comparative handful of isolated and
vilified Trotskyists."
After investigating, Larrabee says that he changed his mind
about the Socialist Workers party, which represents the Trotskyist viewpoint in
America
"I previously regarded the SWP as a hidebound,
dogmatic, moss-grown and sterile little sect, but I have changed my views on
it, and can see that between the pro-Democratic Party Stalinist-dominated sect
called the Communist Party and the respectability-seeking reformists called the
ISL and SP-SDF, it is the only clear-cut and substantial party worth rallying
to."
Larrabee urges "all socialists who are honest with
themselves to seriously take up and study the literature of the Trotskyist
movement if they would like to make genuine contributions to the unity process
and the creating of an eventual mass party of Socialism. I do not say this as a
Trotskyite myself, for ... I have not had the opportunity to study the vast
works of Trotsky as I would like to.
"I have merely been able to read a little and talk with
members of the Socialist Workers party enough to become certain that here we
have the opportunity to find the answers to many burning questions and that
here we have serious-minded and dedicated people to work with toward common
goals. SWP members are sincere and devoted people with firm ideas, not being
marked by cynicism and 'sophistication' that we find in other socialist
circles, not concerning themselves with clever schemes for 'advancing'
Socialism via Norman Thomas and the Democratic party, quiet Fabian societies or
other allegedly 'realistic' methods."
"For further clarification on these questions, I
suggest that you read How to Build an Anti-Monopoly Coalition in the
summer issue of the International Socialist Review ... The article
begins ... with William F. Warde'sThe Rise and Fall of Progressivism but I
found the second part ... by Joseph Hansen, What the Job Takes, the most
enlightening. Both Warde and Hansen are expert Marxists, and people who have been
reading only The Worker, the National Guardian, or theMonthly
Review are depriving themselves of some really penetrating thought if they
have not been reading theInternational Socialist Review. A debate between
Harvey O'Connor and the editors in the spring ISR is another article
that I suggest reading."
While he holds that the SWP is still too "narrow and
purist" and not the "broad Lenin-Debs party that I want to see,"
Larrabee believes that "it is flexible and democratic enough to eventually
become a party" attractive to varied types.
We are willing to admit that we found Larrabee's report
pleasing as well as instructive. We especially liked his enthusiasm over what
the Trotskyist movement has to offer. We hope the account of his experience
will help convince others of the need to investigate this much misrepresented
movement as he did. 54
George Larrabee's comments reflect the views of an extremely
well-read member of what would evolve into the "New Left" in the
1960s. But while Larrabee's comments are quite interesting in understanding the
very early origins of the New Left, I have quoted them in their entirely for a
very different purpose. Does anything that Larrabee wrote either
toInternational Socialist Review in late 1957-- or for that matter either
in his letter to the socialist forum leader at the University of Iowa in
March1960, or his 19 December 1960 letter to the editor of the Militant
--suggest someone so delusional that he would become involved in a secret
paramilitary plot to break Martin Luther King out of jail as well as to plan
the murder of both Birmingham, Alabama, Sheriff "Bull"
Connor and President Dwight Eisenhower?
On the other hand, the SWP did put out policy statements
almost guaranteed to attract segregationist wrath. On 21 May 1963, for example,
the New York Times reported that the SWP's National Committee
demanded that President Kennedy supply weapons to blacks in Birmingham,
Alabama. According to the SWP, "Able-bodied men chosen by Birmingham
The SWP had long supported the right of blacks in the South
to arm themselves against attack, a position the party held as far back as 1958
when the SWP publicly embraced Robert F. Williams, a leftist U.S. Army veteran
who became the militant leader of the NAACP chapter in Monroe ,
North Carolina
ROY AND LYN AND
CAROL AND GEORGE?
Finally, we must ask how Roy Frankhouser could believe that
a membership card in the YSL and a letter to the head of a socialist forum at
the University of Iowa
It may be that Frankhouser thought that by
"proving" he had some connection to the New York SWP in the late
1950s, he could sell a far more convoluted story about a leftist plot to kill
Kennedy. In February 1964 – around the time Frankhouser says he tried to
approach the Warren Commission – the far right leader and virulent anti-Semite
Revilo P. Oliver published the first of a two part series of articles in the
John Birch Society journal American Opinion (wittily entitled
"Marxmanship in Dallas") where Oliver tried to argue that Kennedy was
killed by a communist plot.57 Frankhouser may have believed that those two
pieces of paper that he finally found in June 1967 were
a passé-partout that would open all doors and allow him to spin a
grim story of conspiratorial Marxist murder mayhem to one and all. It is also
possible that Frankhouser really did think he met a "Lee Harvey
Oswald"—if not the real Lee Harvey Oswald -- just has he had met
"George Payne," a possibility that we will explore later.
Yet another bizarre fact given the Labor Committee's future
connection to Frankhouser is that at the time Frankhouser worked with George
Larrabee, Larrabee was married to the woman who would soon become
Lyndon LaRouche's common law wife. Did Carol and George Larrabee also
invite Frankhouser to attend an "International Scientific Socialist"
meeting in New York? In1960 the Larrabees were members of the YSA/SWP. The SWP
regularly held Friday night talks in New York City under the title
"Militant Labor Forums." They took place at the SWP's national headquarters
at 116 University Place not far from Union Square in Greenwich Village. These
talks were free and open to the public. The Friday night talks and other local
leftist events were regularly advertised in the "Weekly Calendar"
that appeared in each issue of the Militant. If the Larrabees took
Frankhouser to a Militant Labor Forum talk or another SWP event
where LaRouche was present, it is just possible that Frankhouser was
telling the truth when he said he first met LaRouche ("Lynn
Marcus") during his time in New York.58 LaRouche, however, denies it.
What we do know is that George Larrabee and Roy Frankhouser
remained friends at least till the late autumn of 1960. An FBI report dated 22
November 1960 reports on a letter postmarked 31 October 1960 and sent from New
York to Frankhouser's Reading address. According to the FBI report, 'the letter
is purportedly written by ____, New York, 14, N.Y., who is a professed
Socialist, a member of the ILGWU and a former ___. From the tenor of the letter
he and Frankhouser are fairly well acquainted." Clearly the sender of the
letter was Larrabee who earlier had identified himself in the letter he and
Frankhouser were to co-sign as "an organizer for the ILGWU." Hence it
seems almost certain that Frankhouser maintained his YSA/SWP connections to
Larrabee throughout most of 1960.59
PAST PROLOGUE?
Following Roy Frankhouser's paper trail, there can be little
doubt that the strange 20 November
1975 New Solidarity story about the JFK assassination did
in some way reflect reality like a fun house mirror. Yet at the end of the day,
the mystery as to why Frankhouser thought his experiences had any bearing
on the Kennedy assassination still remains utterly obscure. To add to the
strangeness of it all are the blatant mistakes in the New
Solidarity article from the misspellings of names to other errors of basic
fact. What is certain, however, is that this article helped signal the NCLC's
decision to publicly embrace Frankhouser as a close ally.
From at least the summer of1975 to the NCLC's trial in Boston
When Frankhouser claimed inside knowledge about the Kennedy
assassination, had he actually stumbled upon some kind of strange network
inside the YSA/SWP that he simply misunderstood? Was he really approached by a
mysterious organization and falsely assumed that the man who used the name
"Payne" was actually Michael Paine? Or was Frankhouser himself part
of some kind of plan to create such an organization as some kind of
"cover"? Could Frankhouser also have discovered something about LaRouche?
In short, was the strange New Solidarity article purportedly about
Frankhouser's knowledge of the Kennedy assassination really more like a distant
mirror reflecting a series of events that dated back to the late 1950s? Or was all
this really and truly just a strange coincidence that had no bearing
on LaRouche's later embrace of Frankhouser?
FRANKHOUSER'S TRAIL: PART 2 – SPIES, LIES, "JEWISH
NAZIS" AND "OSWALD"?
Starting sometime in 1959 and continuing well into 1960, Roy
Frankhouser cultivated connections inside the American Left and the SWP in
particular. At that very same time, Frankhouser worked for a series of far
right groups, the most important of them being the violent National States
Rights Party (NSRP), the KKK and the White Citizens Councils (WCC ). 61
Frankhouser (like Willis Carto) also joined the Northern
League for Pan-European Friendship sometime in either 1958 or 1959. The
Northern League, although little known today, served as a critical link between
the West European and American far right.62 In 1961 Frankhouser even
helped arrange for his closest comrade in Reading (and fellow Northern League
and NSRP member) to visit England for a one-month visit starting on 29 April.
His friend spent his time in the company of the British Nationalist Party (BNP )
before attending the "Northern European Camp" sponsored by "the
Northern European Ring" on 20-26 1961.63 The FBI reported that the
Northern European Ring – whose liaison office was at 74 Princedale Road in
London -- was said to be the "international counterpart of the BNP "
with particularly close ties to the Swedish Nordiska Riksparteit.
The Northern European Ring also published a journal
entitled The Northern European.
As for Frankhouser, his rise inside the ranks of the NSRP
was so meteoric that at an NSRP national conference held on 26-27 November 1960
he was officially appointed as the NSRP's "National Organizer."
Frankhouser also tried to build up a White Citizens Council branch in Reading.
When the NAACP on 23 April 1960 picketed two Reading "Dime Stores"
with some thirty protesters, they were met by two counter-demonstrators, one of
them Roy Frankhouser. He also worked with William H. Osmond who helped
coordinate WCC activities in the Philadelphia
At a time when the SWP sang the praises of Algerian FLN
radicals in the pages of theMilitant, Frankhouser wrote a 28 January 1960 letter to the editor of
the Reading Eagle in which he bitterly attacked De Gaulle for
betraying French white settlers in Algeria REF ,
Jr."), Frankhouser stated:
It seems that the papers here failed to bring out that the
basic issue behind the Algerian civil strife is the same one we were told to
hang our heads in shame about the time of Little Rock, that little matter of
race, or shall we say "race consciousness." . . . The betrayal of the
white supremacy of the French settlers in Algeria would lead to the ruination
of the European type of civilization that they have built up there. . . . The
peace of civil rights in the shadow of bayonets is an uneasy one. 64
Frankhouser's "internationalist perspective"
didn't stop with Algeria Johannesburg
SPYING ON ROCKWELL
At the very same time Roy Frankhouser was infiltrating the
SWP, he was also spying on George Lincoln Rockwell's World Union of Free
Enterprise National Socialists (WUFENS)/American Nazi Party. The FBI files also
show that Rockwell was despised both by the White Citizens Councils and the
NSRP. The NSRP particularly resented Rockwell's praise of J. Edgar Hoover and
his FBI. The NSRP may even have supported Dan Burros and John Patler's
anti-Rockwell American National Party for just this reason. For his part,
Rockwell hated both the NSRP as well as the "Yockeyists" aligned with
Fred Weiss and the National Renaissance Party because of their professed
sympathy for Russia. (Rockwell put "Free Enterprise" in the title of
the WUFENS to distinguish his views from that of groups like the NRP. 65 )
Believing that the FBI had Rockwell's Arlington, Virginia,
headquarters under surveillance anyway, in his 20 April 1960 unscheduled
meeting with the FBI, Frankhouser stated that he had spent the previous two
weekends at Rockwell's headquarters and that he had visited Rockwell's
headquarters four times. Frankhouser then said that:
he was not in sympathy with ROCKWELL and his group, and he
believes ROCKWELL is hurting the cause of segregation. He is attempting to
infiltrate the ROCKWELL group, and then sends all the information he can to the
Associated Citizens Councils [the WCC ], the
group he is really in sympathy with. FRANKHOUSER claimed he had made several
outdoor speeches in the area on behalf of the Citizens Councils.
The FBI also picked up other reports of far right hostility
to Rockwell. Frankhouser was a tremendous admirer of the WCC 's
then-famous rabble rouser John Kasper. The WCC 's
man in Philadelphia also was described in the 17 February 1957 edition of
the Philadelphia Inquirer as a front man for Kasper whose job was to
establish a Philadelphia chapter of Kasper's Seaboard WCC ,
which in turn was affiliated with Roger Pearson's Northern League. The FBI also
learned that Kasper so disliked Rockwell that he finally disbanded his Seaboard
WCC "to prevent GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL
from using it."
ROBERT JOSEPH BURROS
Even as Roy Frankhouser worked in Philadelphia New York City
On 23 February 1965 ,
Robert Burros contacted the FBI to request a meeting which then took place on 4 March 1965 . At the time Robert
Burros lived with his mother at 215 First Street in Newburgh, New York, where
he had been born on 29 November 1937. Burros first made it clear to the FBI
that he had contacted them with the permission of the NRP's leader James
Madole. Burros then told the FBI about the NRP and its program and said he had
come to the FBI to provide it with names of possible Communists in the area.
Burros also gave the FBI a radical publication that he felt they should know
about. From the 3 March 1965 FBI report on the meeting:
Enclosed with the memorandum is the publication
"Bulletin of International Socialism." It is volume #2, Issue #4,
dated 2/22/65 . He said that
he had sources in NYC which furnished him this publication. He merely wanted to
bring this publication to the FBI's attention.
The obscure Bulletin of International
Socialism was the factional publication of a tiny group called the
American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI) headed by Tim Wohlforth.
Wohlforth had been the key member of the youth wing of the International
Socialist League who refused to merge with the Socialist Party-Social
Democratic Federation and instead became the leader of what would ultimately
become the SWP's Young Socialist Alliance. In 1964, however, Wohlforth's
faction inside the SWP/YSA – which by then had been replaced by a new youth
leadership group led by future SWP leader Jack Barnes – left the SWP. However
Wohlforth continued to maintain ties with at least one SWP member who also
wrote for the Bulletin. This individual was LyndonLaRouche.67
Curious about what Burros was up to, the FBI consulted its
files. The agents then discovered that this very same Robert Burros in the late
1950s strongly supported the SWP's Farrell Dobbs for President Campaign! In the
late 1950s, Robert Burros lived
in both Woodside and Elmhurst Queens . The FBI found that the leftist National
Guardian on 31 October 1960 had published a statement "supporting
[Farrell] Dobbs & [Myra] Weiss in 1960 election" which Burros had
signed. This same statement also appeared in the 31 October 1960 issue of
the Militant. On 16 January 1961, Burros wrote another letter to
theMilitant "criticizing [the] Federal Radiation Council report and
advising readers to readWorld Without War by [the famed scientist and
long-time member of the British Communist Party] Dr. John Desmond Bernal."
On 9 April 1962 Burros had yet another "letter to the paper telling of
letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy criticizing his use of
the McCarran Act against the CP." Burros' final letter to
the Militant that the FBI recorded appeared on 27 August 1962. It was
a letter "criticizing Rockefeller." Burros' earliest letter, however,
was to the CP paper the Worker. On 8
November 1959 Burros penned a "letter to the editor praising
the Peoples Republic China Tibet
THE OTHER "JEWISH NAZI"
During the same period Burros was writing his letters, he
was actively working with the NRP. The NRP and other racists even held a stormy
protest in his home town of Newburgh on 4 August 1961 at a time when Newburgh's
attempt to implement draconian restrictions on access to welfare won fulsome
praise from many on the right.68
In late 1965 Burros' political activities were overshadowed
by another startling revelation: he was Jewish. In the wake of Dan Burros death
at Roy Frankhouser's Reading home on 31 October 1965 – an event played out on
the front page of the New York Times – a local Middletown New York
paper became curious about Robert Burros. Although he was born in Newburgh and
spent part of his high school years at the Newburgh Free Academy, Burros
transferred to Middletown High School in his junior year. He graduated from Middletown
High School
As it so happened another long-time Middletown Mount
Hope Middletown Soviet
Union which Pennsylvania
In a 4 November
1965 article entitled "Local Nazi Jewish
Too," Middletown Times Herald Record reporter Helen Bloom broke
the news in a front page story that began:
"Robert Joseph Burros, regional director and organizer
of the extreme right-wing, Neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro National
Renaissance Party (NRP) was born Jewish and was at one time a leftist.
Contacted by phone in the party's New
York City
The Times Herald Record, however, discovered that
Robert Burros was born in Newburgh 29 November 1937 and
that his parents were Harry and Marion Burros and that his "religious
affiliation" was with a Reform Jewish synagogue, Temple Beth Jacob.
According to records supplied to the paper by Rabbi Norman Kahan, Joseph Burros
had his bar mitzvah on 26 January 1951 at Temple Beth Jacob. Rabbi Kahan also
recalled that in 1957 Burros had written to him and identified himself as the
person whom the Rabbi had conducted a bar mitzvah for at Temple Beth Jacob.
Rabbi Kahan then recalled that Burros:
"wanted to talk to one of our temple organizations,
and, at my request, he sent me some literature he had written. . . . The
pamphlet was on the extreme left wing. Burros himself said he was a socialist
and that the pamphlet was submitted in an international socialist competition
on world peace." Rabbi Kahan said he turned al the information and
pamphlets to the FBI at the time "because of the extremism in the
literature."
The Times Herald Record also tracked down a former
high school classmate of Robert Burros named Ronald Cushing. Cushing recalled
bumping into Burros on a New York City street in 1961. Cushing told the paper:
"I mentioned that I had voted for President Kennedy in
1960 and he said I was wrong to have done that and that I should have voted for
the candidate of the Socialist Workers Party. . . . He mentioned Cuba and this
was at a time when the United States had broken off diplomatic relations with
Cuba, and he was very critical of the American action against Cuba. He called
(Fidel) Castro a great man and liberator. I finally said to him that if he
liked that type of government as well why doesn't he move to East
Germany Cuba
Rather than denying these encounters, Burros told reporter
Helen Bloom: "I was gathering information as part of my duties with the
radical right, which I subsequently turned over to the FBI." When asked
about contacting Rabbi Kahan and sending him socialist literature, Burros
responded, "That was part of my modus operandi. The whole thing was a
cover, an experiment to snare the left." Needless to say, there is no
indication at all that Burros had any link to the FBI except the one he himself
created.70
"DISTANT COUSINS"?
On 5 November 1965 ,
the New York Times reported that the leadership of the NRP had
decided to remove Robert Burros from his post as Madole's number two man but
allowed him to continue as a regional leader. The Times said the
party had taken this action because Burros concealed the fact that his father
was Jewish.
Robert Burros was a "tall blond" who looked like
an "Aryan." (Dan Burros also was blond haired and blue eyed.71 )
Robert Burros told the Times Herald Record his mother was a "pure
Aryan" of Lithuanian descent who also supported his NRP activities. He
also said his late father – although Jewish -- hated Zionism as well as Jews in
general:
My father was Jewish, but he saw the viewpoint of the
National Renaissance Party. . . .My father was an American patriot, my father
always advocated America
After Dan Burros died, Robert Burros naturally was asked if
he had been related to him. Not surprisingly, Robert Burros – who was intent on
concealing his own Jewish background – denied any relationship and said the
whole thing was merely a coincidence. Nor did the ADL, the American Jewish
Committee (AJC), the FBI and the New York City police have any
"information that would show any blood relationship between the two
men," according to a 5 November 1965 New York Times report.
Yet when Robert Burros met the FBI on 4 March 1965 , he told a different story. At that
time – a period when Dan Burros' racial identity still remained unknown – Robert
Burros stated that he was in fact related to Dan Burros. From the FBI report of
Robert Burros' interview: "He [Robert Burros] said that Major DAN BURROS,
who was arrested in connection with NRP activities in New York City last year,
is related to him as a distant cousin." Were Robert and Daniel Burros
"distant cousins" as well as political comrades? Again, it is
impossible to say. All that we know is that with the exception of this one
interview, Robert Burros always denied any link.
Looking at the strange story of Robert and Daniel Burros, we
are confronted with what sometimes sound like part of a rough draft for a
Robert Ludlum novel. Robert and Daniel Burros both were born in 1937. Both had
blond hair and blue eyes. Both had fathers who were descended from Russian
Jews. Both also claimed that they had "Aryan" mothers although in the
case of Dan Burros this claim was proven false. For our purposes, however, what
is most striking is the fact that Robert Burros seems to have followed a
similar script in New York Philadelphia
"STEPHEN L'EANDES, YOUR MAN
ON CAMPUS"
Finally, although Frankhouser's fantastic claim of meeting
Lee Harvey Oswald in New York City New York City Russia
On 22 November
1963 , the day President Kennedy was shot, a strange far rightist
who called himself "Steven Yves L'Eandes" (sometimes spelled L'Andes
in the press) but whose real name turned out to be Stephen Landesberg made a
similar claim about "Oswald."73 Using the name "James
Rizzuto," Landesberg told the FBI that "Oswald" had accompanied
him to left-wing events in New York City. On at least one occasion while
Landesberg tried to disrupt one of these gatherings, he claimed that
"Oswald" sat in the back of the room quietly taking photos.74
On 29 November
1963 , the front page headline of the New York
Post screamed "Oswald Pal Hunted Here."
The Post reported that FBI agents were searching Greenwich Village
"for a Mississippi-born segregationist who has been linked to Lee Harvey
Oswald." The New York Times, Newsday and
the Village Voice all ran similar stories.75 The press
reports focused on the FBI hunt for the mystery man "Stephen Yves
L'Eandes."76 The reporters explained that the FBI probe had been
triggered by an "informant" who had contacted radio stations and
the Village Voice on the day of Kennedy's assassination. The next
day, the informant, "James Rizzuto," told the FBI that L'Eandes and
Oswald had been active in New York City in 1962 disrupting liberal meetings.
The FBI then began to search for the mysterious Mr. L'Eandes. The FBI knew that
L'Eandes was a real figure because there were previous press reports about his
disruptive activity in Greenwich Village. L'Eandes had even been a guest on
Barry Gray's WMCA radio program on 17
November 1961 where he took part in a panel discussion on "CORE
Activities in the South."77 At the time L'Eandes presented himself as
a representative of the far-right National States Rights Party.
"Steve L'Eandes" first attracted attention at a
pro-integration rally held at PS 41 in Greenwich Village
in December 1961 that featured then-New York State
Assemblyman Mark Lane SDS .
Speaking in a convincing Southern drawl and claiming to be an ex-Marine,
L'Eandes was such a distracting presence that the police were called. Nor was
he acting alone. According to The Village Voice, he was part of a Asmall
minority@ of protestors that included a young woman who got into a physical
altercation at the event. L'Eandes next surfaced at a 10 January 1962 meeting
called by the American Jewish Congress (AJC) to protest an attack by some
self-avowed Nazis on a local Greenwich Village rabbi named Kurt Flascher. The
39-year-old Rabbi Flascher was a member of the executive committee of the
Congress for Racial Equality (CORE ). After a
CORE meeting in the Village, he and a few
other CORE members were in a restaurant on
Seventh Avenue discussing the Eichmann case when "two young men
approached, one shouting 'Hitler should have killed all the Jews.' They beat
the rabbi, overturned tables and chairs, and fled" according to a report
in the 20 December 1961 New
York Times.
The 10 January meeting to protest the attack on Rabbi
Flascher was particularly important because L'Eandes told the FBI that while he
was heckling the proceedings, "he was assaulted by an individual and
photographs of this assault [were] taken by Lee Harvey Oswald. This photo was
published in the Thunderbolt magazine. Also believed to be at meeting
was one Earl Perry, an associate of Oswald." 78 The FBI's
Birmingham, Alabama, office then examined back issues of the NSRP's paper,
the Thunderbolt, to determine if any such photo existed but with no
success.
Later that same month, L'Eandes appeared at the office
of The Village Voice intent on placing an ad celebrating Robert E.
Lee's birthday. He gave Voicereporter J. R. Goddard his card:
"Stephen L'Eandes, Your Man on Campus." It also included a Grand
Central Station PO Box. L'Eandes then talked about his links to a mysterious
group he called "the Magnolia Rifles."79 On 7 March 1962,
"L'Eandes" heckled Hubert Humphrey at a Democratic Party rally in the
Village. That same spring, he showed up at the ultra-liberal Judson Memorial
Church for a gathering held at the Church's "Hall of Issues." He also
attended an NAACP meeting in the Village where he got into yet another
fistfight. However, from that point on, he seems to have dropped out of sight.
The FBI finally determined that its informant "James
Rizzuto" was really Stephen H. Landesberg of Forest Hills ,
Queens , a/k/a "Steven Yves L'Eandes."
Landesberg, who at the time was living in the Village, was arrested for lying
to the FBI and sent to Bellevue hospital for observation. On 6 December 1963,
the New York Times ran a brief story on the case under the headline
"New Yorker Is Held for Tricking F.B.I.":
A 23-year-old man who had led the Federal Bureau of
Investigation on a futile search for a supposed friend of Lee Harvey Oswald was
arrested yesterday on a charge of giving false information. Steven H.
Landesberg of 66 West 10th Street Bellevue
Hospital
Landesberg, also known as Steven Yves L'Eandes and James F.
Rizzuto, was discharged from the Marine Corps after eight months for a physical
disability. His service conduct was officially described as "bizarre"
and "unusual." On Nov. 23, the day after the assassination of
President Kennedy, Landesberg went to the New York office of the
F.B.I.80 He said his name was Rizzuto and he had served with Oswald and
L'Eandes in the Marines. He said L'Eandes was a paid agitator. At least once,
he said, Oswald photographed a disturbance created by L'Eandes. The agency
began an intensive search for L'Eandes in Greenwich Village
only to discover, it said, that Landesberg, L'Eandes, and Rizzuto were the same
person.
Some obvious questions need to be asked. Why did the FBI
take "James Rizzuto" so seriously? After all, the government must
have been deluged with crank tips in the wake of President Kennedy's
assassination. Second, the New York police department's "Red Squad"
known as the Bureau of Special Services and Investigation (BOSSI) maintained a
remarkably tight surveillance and informant operation inside the extreme right
as well as the extreme left. Although Dan Burros and John Patler's tiny
American National Party, for example, "did not get much press attention .
. . it did fascinate the special anti-subversive squad of the police department
of New York City. The squad knew the names of every member of the party and
spot checks were kept on each."81 BOSSI detective Tony Ulasewicz was
personally assigned to monitor New York neo-Nazis and Minutemen extremists. He
even planted a BOSSI agent in the New York branch of the American Nazi
Party.82 Presumably, then, BOSSI would have had its own thick
"L'Eandes" file that the FBI could have easily checked. Such a file
obviously would have included either a photograph or some other kind of
physical description.
One man who doubted the FBI's story almost immediately was
Joachim Joesten. In Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy, published in 1964 by the
Soviet-subsidized leftwing publishing house Marzani & Munsell, Joesten
cited a Newsday story which reported that after Rizzuto went to the
FBI, government agents "made the rounds of bars in Greenwich Village
showing a 'color snapshot of a dark-haired, bearded man in his early, or
mid-20s.'" In a later essay, "The Case against J. Edgar Hoover,"
Joesten cites a story in the 30
November 1963 New York
The man the FBI is looking for has been described as about 5
foot 10, slender build, handsome, with brown hair and a large brush-type
mustache. He is said to have once described himself as being a member of the
Magnolia Rifles, reportedly a Mississippi segregationist group. He has been a
frequent figure in the Village during the last two years and has been involved
in a number of brawls over racial issues.
Joesten also cites the 6 December 1963 issue of Newsday:
A 23-year-old self-styled student of philosophy, accused of
hoaxing the FBI into a massive two-week search for a non-existent Greenwich
Village buddy of President Kennedy's assassin, was arrested yesterday and
committed for psychiatric observation at
Landesberg identified himself yesterday as a student of
philosophy at Columbia University Columbia University 111-50
76th Rd. Forest Hills .
Joesten then asks: It is evident that the FBI would not have
launched a massive search, lasting two weeks, for a "non-existent"
person without some pretty solid data to go upon. If Landesberg was an
imposter, the FBI, with its immense facilities for research and verification,
would have spotted him as a phony within hours, if not minutes. It is a
certainly, therefore, that the information which Landesberg had imparted to the
FBI was both credible and of great importance to set in motion the vast sweep
through the Village described in Newsday and the Post. Why then did the
FBI suddenly "determine" that the whole thing was a hoax and that the
elusive L'Eandes was none other than Landesberg himself?
Newsday also published a photo of Landesberg in its 6 December 1963 issue. According to
Joesten, it showed a man who appeared to be both Jewish and clean-shaven which
prompted him to ask: "Would he be identical with a racist and
segregationist from Mississippi
As for Landesberg, when the FBI finally confronted him with
the evidence that he really was "L'Eandes, and then after admitting that
he himself was "L'Eandes," the FBI report continued:
"LANDESBERG then began to state that the information he
had furnished to the Federal Bureau of Information on November 22, 1963 , was furnished to him by
someone else, at which time he began to stutter and become incoherent."
When Landesberg first met with the FBI, his "Stephen
L'Eandes" persona had been dormant for well over a year as the last
reported "L'Eandes" sighting took place in the spring of 1962. Landesberg
was enrolled in a philosophy course at Columbia University when Kennedy was
killed. So why did he create his "James Rizzuto" pseudonym to tell
his strange story?
One obvious possibility is that Landesberg already was a
mentally unbalanced individual who became even more unhinged at the shocking
report of Kennedy's death and on that very day created an elaborate fantasy for
reasons known only to him. Was it also possible that Landesberg had been used
by someone else to funnel his story to the government as he tried to claim? Or
could it be that during his bizarre adventure in the far right, Landesberg came
across (or thought he came across) some tidbit of information that he really
did think was reverent to the death of President Kennedy and he then constructed
a story around it in the belief that the FBI would not be able to crack his
"James Rizzuto" cover story?
As weirdly interesting as Landesberg's story remains, I cite
it here most of all as evidence that when Frankhouser told the New York
Times on 1 November 1965 that the SWP had a "training camp" and
that Lee Harvey Oswald was "connected" to the camp, his statement
came in the wake of Landesberg's claim two years earlier that there indeed was
an "Oswald" in New York. This "Oswald" was clearly linked
to the NSRP and he went to Jewish and leftist meetings but he stayed in the
background in an apparent attempt to gather information on the participants.
Did Frankhouser and "Stephen L'Eandes" also cross paths in New York
in the early 1960s? And did Frankhouser's claim to have meet "Oswald"
have any connection to "L'Eandes" strange tale?
FRANKHOUSER'S TRAIL: PART 3 -- FROM THE KKK TO THE
"KNIGHTS OF MALTA
The 1975 New Solidarity article also stated that
Frankhouser said he had met "Oswald" yet again at the Minuteman Lake
Ponchatrain camp in New Orleans.84 We, however, can only assume that
Frankhouser could not have met the real Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans for a
second time when he never met him in New York City for the first time. For the
rest of this chapter, then, I propose to look at Frankhouser's references in
the New Solidarity article to his three Minutemen cronies, Ken
Duggan, Vincent DePalma and Eugene Tabbutt. Since I have already
examined Ken Duggan's career in the "Unity Now" chapter in Smiling
Man from a Dead Planet, there is no need to repeat the same information
here.85 As for the even more mysterious Vincent DePalma, the only
information I have been able to locate on him is summarized in "Note
2" at the end of this chapter. Although the information
on DePalma comes directly from the U.S. House Select Committee on
Assassinations, it deals with the circumstances surrounding the murder of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., and not President Kennedy.
EUGENE TABBUTT: KKK SUPERSPY?
This leaves us with the third man in Frankhouser's unholy
trinity, the Philadelphia
Tabbutt also had considerable experience for the post of KBI
head. From 1958 to 1963, for example, he ran his own National Detective Bureau
out of Philadelphia. In an 11 October 1965 letter to NY KKK members promoting a
talk by Tabbutt, then KBI member Dan Burros trumpeted Tabbutt's investigative
expertise this way:
The Imperial Director of the KBI has forty years of police
experience. He was once chief of a military intelligence agency, was a
government investigator, was with the Philadelphia Police, was an investigator
for the state of Penn. and has considerable electronics experience. This very
knowledgeable man will address our meeting, and later will hold a special
course for N.Y. KBI personnel only. 86
(After Burros died in Frankhouser's Reading home, the police
found among his remains papers "identifying him as a member of the Klan
Bureau of Investigation and Security Guard of the KKK."87 )
Given that Tabbutt already enjoyed a decades' long
connection to the KKK, his detective agency may have been employed by
government-sponsored espionage agencies in states like Louisiana, Alabama and
Mississippi like the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the Alabama
Department of Public Safety to infiltrate and spy on the American Friends
Service Committee (AFSC), the CP, the SWP and similar "pro-integration"
leftist organizations as part of a broader attempt both to genuinely gather
information as well as to discredit the civil rights movement in general as a
"communist inspired" plot.88 In a 22 October 1965 interview with
the Reading-based newspaper Eagle, Frankhouser also declared that the
Negro civil rights movement has been taken over as a tool of communism and that
there is a "definite plot to destroy America." . . . the Klan
movement is growing because the government has failed to crack down on
Communists working within the Negro and civil rights movement. 89
The employment of private eyes by the far right to spy on
leftist was by no means uncommon. Former FBI Special Agent Guy Banister's New
Orleans-based detective agency, Guy Banister Associates, also monitored leftist
activists in the Big Easy. Frankhouser, who in 1960 would be just 21 years old,
also may have found employment as a youthful infiltrator through a far-right PI
network in the Philadelphia
The use of private investigative agencies as a cover for
political espionage was so embraced by Tabbutt that he tried to establish an
entire network of such agencies. In the HUAC hearings on the KKK, the Committee
questioned a leading Ohio UKA member named Bobby Stephens who had met Tabbutt
at a KKK gathering on 26 September 1965 at a Holiday Inn in Zanesville, Ohio.
From the Hearings:
Mr. MANUEL. Mr. Stephens, you testified that Eugene Tabbutt
was in attendance at the September 26 meeting. . . . Did he say he had a
position in the United Klans of America?
Mr. STEPHENS. Yes, sir; he was head of the KBI.
Mr. MANUEL. That is the Klan Bureau of Investigation?
Mr. STEPHENS. Yes, sir.
Mr. MANUEL. And he made that claim in front of Mr. Shelton?
Mr. STEPHENS. Yes, sir; he was one of Mr. Shelton's direct,
shall we say, right-hand men in it and mentioned the fact about a protective
agency which he had set up, which would be a front for the KBI.
Mr. MANUEL. Was this to operate in the State of Ohio?
Mr. STEPHENS. He was going to make arrangements to have an
office in Columbus, which he assured me that he could use my knowledge, and the
records, on different civil rights leaders and different activities going on in
Columbus. 91
CLOAK AND DAGGER WITH
"THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA
Tabbutt's position as Security Chief for Shelton Monaco Vaduz Liechtenstein Shickshinny Pennsylvania
The bizarre history of the Pichel-led Knights of Malta can
be found elsewhere.92 For our purposes, it is important to note that in
1958 Tabbutt was listed as the Knights "Chief Security Officer." In
1965 – the same year that Tabbutt took over the KBI -- he became the Knights
"Security General."93 The full extent of the ties between
Frankhouser and his KBI crony Dan Burros and Pichel's Knights remains an open
one. However it is worth noting that when Burros met his last girlfriend, the
first present he gave her was "a black enamel pendant in the form of a
Maltese cross."94
In early September 1978 Eugene Tabbutt's involvement in the
Knights even surfaced in the pages of New Solidarity. Just a few weeks
earlier, LaRouche engaged in open Holocaust-denial when in a 22
August 1978 New Solidarity article he wrote:
Granted, the Nazis did not kill six million Jews, but they
did kill upwards of a million and a half. . . Whether Hitler killed one and a
half million Jews or more, which he did, or six million Jews which he did not,
really makes little difference."
LaRouche's statement seemed astonishing at the time to many
NCLC members because so many cadres – including some who held senior positions
inside the group – knew so little about the true nature of the ties between the
ultra-right and the NCLC. From 1974-75 on, these overtures
between LaRouche and the far right were implemented by a very small
and carefully chosen group that operated out of the NCLC Security Staff. Yet a
fuller understanding of the NCLC relationship with Pichel's Knights may well
prove extremely significant in understanding the hidden history of the NCLC.
What is obvious is that starting in the late summer of 1977 in particular,
more and more far right and anti-Semitic references began appearing in the
pages of New Solidarity, almost all of them byLaRouche personally or
by his clique in the Security Staff.
The links between the NCLC's Security Staff and the Pichel
Knights became so close that one Knight named Edward von Rothkirch -- who also
maintained close ties to the Liberty Lobby -- let the Security Staff use his
Washington, D.C.-based Intercontinental Media Services (IMS) press cards to
attend public events. Dubbed "the Baron" by NCLC Security, von
Rothkirch gave the Security Staff a stack of blank IMS press cards with the
permission to forge his signature on them whenever Security needed access to
some event open to the press that it wished to infiltrate.95
In late 1978, this clique was angry that Tabbutt and his
fellow Shickshinny Knight Frank Capell – yet another quasi-private rightwing
spook who ran his own journal called Herald of Freedom -- had broken
with the group's long-time leader Charles Pichel and instead pledged allegiance
to another spinoff from the Knights headed by the exiled King Peter of
Yugoslavia.96 Capell also attacked the Labor Committee (also known at the
time as "the U.S. Labor Party") in the pages of Herald of
Freedom as a wacky Marxist organization that the right should avoid at all
cost.
Capell was just one of many on the far right (including
Minuteman leader Robert DePugh) who allied themselves with the views of
Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald, a John Birch Society leader and head
of the rightwing Western Goals Foundation. On 26 January
1977, McDonald inserted into the Congressional Record a
research report that tried to link the NCLC with Communist subversion. Yet
another well-known John Birch Society author named Gary Allen wrote a December
1977 article in the John Birch Society journalAmerican Opinion in which he
argued that the NCLC was a subversive Marxist organization intent on
infiltrating the right, possibly at the behest of the Rockefeller family.97
In the 10 October 1978 New Solidarity, an article
appeared that was written to promote a series of reports in the
NCLC's Executive Intelligence Review (EIR )
issue for 10-16 October 1978.98 One of the stories was billed as a special
report on the Minutemen by Scott Thompson. The New Solidarity article
stated that the White Citizens Council leader Medford Evens had written a piece
in the September 1978 issue of American Opinion that favored support
of "Zionism." Even worse: Evans and Bircher leader
Larry McDonald, a Democratic Congressman from Georgia
Thompson – not surprisingly -- cited "former Klan
leader Roy Frankhouser" (whose name for once was spelled correctly) as a
key source. Thompson reported that Frankhouser had "already revealed
aspects of the collaboration" between "certain Klan leaders, Zionist
lobby forces" and Kennedy's "chief civil rights troubleshooter, John
Doar" to "unleash a series of assassinations" against both sides
"of the black-white struggle" with the intent of pitching the U.S.
LAROUCHE'S "MARXIST" ANTISEMITISM
With Scott Thompson's 1978 reference to Roy Frankhouser and
Eugene Tabbutt, we have now come full circle. As I have shown, Frankhouser's
claims about the Kennedy assassination as reported in New
Solidarity can easily be shown to be false. Yet New
Solidarity's 1975 faux "expose" can still help us better
understand the complex dynamics of the American radical right, although in a
way one imagines that neither the Labor Committee nor Frankhouser would
appreciate.
The role played by
the LaRouche and the Labor Committee's Security Staff from 1973
on also eerily echoes the role played by the far right in the early 1960s. The
NCLC aggressively spied on and collected "intelligence" about various
leftist groupings, some of which it offered to law enforcement circles. The
group also launched physical attacks on other leftists, above all on members of
the American Communist Party. The NCLC's attack on Eugene Tabbutt as being too
friendly with the "Zionist lobby" and its FBI collaborators also
echoes earlier ultra-right polemics against George Lincoln Rockwell for being
too cozy with the FBI. Roy Frankhouser's position as a paid "Security
consultant" to LaRouche literally embodied this broader political
axis.
The NCLC's initial covert alliance with the far right
apparently began sometime in either 1973 or early 1974.99 What the new
Frankhouser files suggest, however, is the possibility that LaRouche's
bizarre decision to steer the NCLC into a coalition with the likes of Willis
Carto, Robert Miles and Roy Frankhouser may have had its origin in a far earlier
period.
In the late 1950s after LaRouche returned to the
active ranks of the SWP -- after having effectively dropped out of the
organization for a few years -- he reports that he conducted research on
ancient Babylonian society and that this research led him to a deeper
understanding of Judaism as a "caste"
pseudo-religion.100 LaRouche says that he discovered that Judaism was
not a "real religion" but the production of a "caste" of
merchant usurers initially based in Babylon. These merchant usurers then
imported their pseudo-religion back to the Holy Land .
Jewish "usury," in short, long predated the Christian period and was
in fact fundamental to Judaism's very construction as a religion.
LaRouche clearly glossed some of his arguments from
Karl Kautsky and other "assimilationist" Marxists from both the
19th and 20th centuries. These theorists claimed that Judaism was so
linked to European medieval society that the disappearance of medieval feudal
society with the growth of capitalism also heralded the end of Judaism.
As Kautsky put it in Rasse und Judentum -- a work
that strongly argued against "racial" pseudo-science theory --
"We will not have completely emerged from the Middle Ages as long as
Judaism still remains among us. The more quickly it disappears, the better it
will be for society and for the Jews themselves." 101 Or to
quote the Austrian Socialist leader Victor Adler, the elimination of both
private property and the power of money "would finally lead the Wandering
Jew to his tomb."
Neither Kautsky nor Adler were "political
anti-Semites" and as leading Social Democrats they strongly opposed the
anti-Semitic political parties of their time. Yet their crude economic
reductionist interpretation of Judaism led both of them to dismiss demands for
cultural and political autonomy that emerged from the Yiddish Renaissance
movement in places like Austrian Galicia and Bukovina
even as the Austrian Social Democrats supported the creation of Czech language
schools in Vienna Bohemia
The Western Left's view of the actual anti-Semitic parties
was surprisingly
cavalier particularly when one recalls that this also was
the time of renewed violent pogroms in Russia Eastern Europe . The expression of anti-Semitic views
even was written off as just a "first naïve form of anti-capitalism"
in the words of Austrian Socialist Otto Bauer.102Nor, of course, was the
reduction of Jews and Judaism to narrow economic categories unique to the
Socialists. Max Weber, for example, defined "the Jews as a 'caste' or a
'pariah people' (Pariavolk) rooted in a form of "capitalism oriented
toward speculation, a capitalism of pariahs'
(Pariakapitalismus)."103 Neither Kautsky nor Weber could ever imagine
the coming of the Holocaust since they viewed both
Judaism and anti-Semitism as relics of a medieval past rooted in pre-capitalist
agrarian society. The fact that the worst pogroms took place in the most
backward parts of Europe only seemed to prove the point.
LaRouche, however, fully developed his own views on
"the Jewish question" in the late 1950s, a little more than a decade
after both Auschwitz and the creation of the new state of
Israel.104 Yet LaRouche's views were far worse precisely because he
didn't see the role of Jewish "usury" as a product of the Jews
position as a minority grouping in the Christian world. Instead he clamed that
Judaism itself was a pseudo-belief constructed by a caste of usurers from
ancient Babylon
All we can say for sure is that in the late
1950s LaRouche reports that he had come to see Judaism itself as a
"caste" or fake religion first developed in Babylon
Although A.D. Judaism is an outgrowth of the development of
Christianity (e.g., the first such rabbi, Philo of Alexandria), there was a
preceding Hebrew faith of sorts, elements of which were syncretically
assimilated in the successive phases of manufacture of post-Philo Judaism. The
earlier Hebrew doctrine is itself a synthetic hodgepodge of chiefly
Mesopotamian legends. Rabbi Ezra, the author of the fictional personality of
Moses, is exemplary of the circumstances and contents of Hebrew doctrine—a
creation of Achaemenid [Persian] protection and edict. Ezra's Persian version
of Hebrewism was, in turn, significantly influenced by an earlier,
pre-Pentateuch version, created in conformity with Babylonian edicts . . . From
Ezra onwards, and even before, Hebrewism was an assimilationist doctrine
developed to provide special juridical status (and ideological self-image) for
a caste of merchant-usurers within a pre-capitalist society.
Ancient Judaism (or "Hebrewism") was not a
"real" religion but an ideological concoction designed for a special
caste of "merchant-usurers" in oligarchic pre-capitalist Babylon.[my
emphasis]106
As for "A.D.
Judaism," LaRouche continues in a similar vein, Judaism is not a
true religion, but only a half-religion, a curious appendage and sub-species of
Christianity . . . Judaism is the ideological abstraction of the secular life
of Christianity's Jew, the Roman merchant-usurer who had not yet evolved to the state of Papal enlightenment, a
half-Christian, who had not developed a Christian conscience, etc. Judaism is
the religion of a caste of subjects of Christianity, entirely modeled by
ingenious rabbis to fit into the ideological and secular life of Christianity.
In short, a self-subsisting Judaism never existed and never could exist. As for
"Jewish culture," otherwise, it is merely the residue left to the
Jewish home after everything saleable had been marketed to the Goyim.
In other words, Judaism at best is just "a
half-religion" since it is merely the "ideological abstraction of the
secular life of Christianity's Jew, the Roman merchant-usurer." Under
Christianity, Judaism was "entirely modeled by ingenious rabbis" to
adapt to Christian society following the blueprint first developed by Rabbi
Ezra. Judaism therefore is the "half religion" of a special
caste of merchant-usurers.[my emphasis]
Did LaRouche and Frankhouser's world
overlap in the late 1950s at the same time thatLaRouche was developing his
own "insights" into Judaism?
Although Frankhouser said he
met LaRouche during this time, LaRouche denies it. What
can't be denied is that they both moved in surprisingly narrow
circles. LaRouche reports that the late1950s he pushed for the
formation of a new SWP-backed radical youth movement based on his "long
term perspective" of a coming economic collapse whose first signs he saw
heralded in the severe 1957 recession. (LaRouche used a similar "Long
Term Perspectives" argument in the mid-1960s when he created his own
"youth movement," the NCLC.) What is also beyond dispute is
that LaRouche knew Tim Wohlforth from Wohlforth's days as a leader of
the "youth realignment" in the late 1950s.LaRouche also knew
Murry Weiss, the SWP's coordinator of both the "youth turn" as well
as a key player in the SWP-backed Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPFC ) largely becauseLaRouche's first wife, Janice, was
a close personal friend of Murry and Myra Tanner Weiss. LaRouche also
almost certainly encountered Carol and George Larrabee around this same time as
well since Carol Larrabee became LaRouche's common law wife after both
their marriages ended in the early 1960s.
Looking back at Roy Frankhouser's early strange
sojourn into the tiny world of postwar organized American Trotskyism, we have
to ask some basic questions. Was the fact that Frankhouser became a key advisor
to LaRouche and his Security Staff the end result of a series of
events that began in the 1970s? Was Frankhouser's earlier involvement with the
SWP more or less just a weird coincidence? Or was there some earlier
subterranean association that only publicly resurfaced well over a decade
later? The best we can say for now is that the new FBI revelation of
Frankhouser's role in the YSA/SWP – while still not solving the mystery – make
the latter possibility a far more viable proposition than could have previously
been imagined.
CONCLUSION: PALIMPSEST WORLD?
Finally, although New Solidarity's tale
of Roy Frankhouser has served as a palimpsest of sort for my attempted
reconstruction of the historical "text" behind the literal text, is
there anything more to be learned from Frankhouser's strange odyssey? Could his
story prove to be yet another palimpsest of a sort, an even more distorted echo
of something far more sinister? At the core of Frankhouser's cryptic tale is
the claim that he knew about a mysterious paramilitary leftist organization
that planned to kill its opponents from Birmingham
Students of the Kennedy assassination know only too
well the famous (infamous) supposed pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a
rifle in one hand and in the other the Communist Party paper
the Worker and the SWP paper the Militant. Oswald also created
his own one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPFC ) front group in New Orleans
Now imagine it is 1963 instead of 1960. Suppose
some naïve individual, a classic marginal man with undeniable ties to Soviet
Russia and a delusional image of himself as a world historical actor, was
approached by a fellow Army or Marine veteran and told about an elite radical
underground movement (a kind of home-grown American FLN) committed to truly
fighting the rise of domestic fascism at home and American imperialism abroad
not with mere talk but with weapons. A group committed to combat American's
version of the French OAS, the armed Minutemen and far right Nazis who openly
worked with equally violent armed Cuban exiles. Perhaps he even heard whispers
that this secret vanguard enjoyed the covet support of the still-endangered
Cuban revolution. And then imagine that as a first initiation test of his
fidelity, that individual was ordered to strike a blow against a leading member
of the fascist far right. Only this time the target was not Sheriff Bull Connor
but General Edwin Walker.
Of course in a palimpsest world there are other
possibilities as well. What if you are an agent working for a far-right
anticommunist detective agency. Only this one operates out of New Orleans Philadelphia
Instead of laboriously infiltrating a targeted
group as Frankhouser did, wouldn't it just be easier, cheaper, and a whole lot
quicker to create, let's say, a "notional" Fair Play for Cuba
Note I: Who was Eugene Tabbutt?
A summary of Tabbutt's FBI files contain this information:
Tabbutt, Eugene Harry
1. (Portland Maine Philadelphia PA
182-16-2874 45
B: 04-30-03
(Lubec , ME
D: 08-71
1958 -- Chief Security Officer of Col. T. Pichel's
ultra-right wing Shickshinny , Pennsylvania Malta
1924-1929 -- Special Investigator to 4 former Directors of
Public Safety, Philadelphia PD
1925 – Becomes KKK member
1929-1933 -- Investigator for law firm in Connaughton &
Updike in WDC
1933-1937 -- Investigator in Charge of American Detective
Agency, Philadelphia PA
1937-1939 -- Investigator, PA Dept of Justice
1940-1941 -- Investigator in Charge of US Army Signal Corps
Intelligence:
HQ 157-4292, #7 re: 1942 investigation report by Signal
Corps:
Evidence disclosed by this investigation indicates that
subject's integrity and discretion, as well as his general character, are
highly questionable. He is reported to have done investigative work for the KKK,
to have attended an America First meeting, and to be on the mailing list of the
German Library of Information, although there is no other evidence to question
his loyalty, except reports that he will do anything for money. Termination was
recommended and Tabbutt resigned.
1941-1945 --Investigator, Aetna Casualty & Insurance Co.
1945-1948 -- Owned/operated National Detective Bureau, Philadelphia
1950-1956 – Captain of Security Force, Philadelphia Piers,
Inc.
1958-1963 -- Owned/operated National Detective Bureau, 5835
Willows Ave. , Philadelphia PA
May 1963 -- Name appeared on list of ANP (American Nazi
Party) Associate members
09/65 – KKK leader Shelton
With respect to Tabbutt and Frankhouser, there is a document
in Tabbutt's file which contains a "name-deleted" and the number of
spaces could easily be Frankhouser's name, especially since it also refers to
this person as having "friends and supporters on the Reading PA Police
Dept." There is also a barely readable handwritten notation near this
person's name describing him as being associated with UKA.
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
1. "Tabbutt advised...he moved when still young to Portland
Maine Philadelphia
Because of enemies made during one Grand Jury investigation,
he decided that he had no future in the Philly PD and resigned. He has been a
private detective ever since with the exception of a period in 1940-1941 when
he was employed by the Federal Government in a security capacity at the Philly
Signal Depot...In Sept 1965, he was appointed chief of the Klan Bureau of
Investigation by Robert Shelton, head of the United Klans of America, Inc.,
Knights of the KKK."
2. Note: The Bureau's review of Federal personnel records
indicated
that in July 1942, during his service at the Philly Signal
Depot he was "suspended without pay for administrative reasons"
pending an investigation concerning his suitability and then subsequently
terminated 5/11/43 as a "resignation" --- but the resignation was due
to his KKK membership and a report from PA Motor Police which stated that
Tabbutt "has a bad reputation, poor character, and is dishonest."
FBI INTERVIEW OF TABBUTT 9/23/65 FOR INFO RE:
MINUTEMEN, KKK, ETC .:
Tabbutt acknowledged membership in both groups but.....
"At this time Tabbutt claimed that he had an ulterior motive in
participating in both the above-named groups. This motive was to gather inside
information concerning both groups for a book he is writing.
He also stated that he had an obligation to furnish any
information developed to a local leader of B'nai B'rith."
"During this interview, Tabbutt advised he was born in
1903 in Lubec , Maine New York Reading PA.
THE FBI AGAINST TABBUTT
Another source on Tabbutt comes from an essay entitled
"'A negative and unwise approach': Private Detectives, Vigilantes and the
FBI Counterintelligence, 1910-72" by Professor John Drabble and published
in the book Police Detectives in History edited by Clive Emsley and
Haia Shpayer-Markov (Burlington , VT
Drabble reports on page 246 of his essay that in late 1965
Tabbutt convinced Robert Shelton to appoint him head of the KBI, a post that
would allow him to interrogate prospective Klan members as well as carry out
electronic surveillance operations for the KKK. At the same time, Tabbutt
reportedly approached both the ADL and the American Jewish Committee with an
offer to sell them tapes of KKK meetings. He also said he could show a network
of far right groups like the Minutemen and the John Birch Society and the
nature of their relations with the KKK. He further stated that the Minutemen
were developing deadly weapons such as one that looked like an ordinary pipe
but that could fire a cyanide bullet.
Drabble then writes: "From the perspective of the FBI,
Tabbutt had a questionable past."
Either Tabbutt claimed (or the FBI reported) that he had
infiltrated the KKK in the late 1930s to discover any connections between the
KKK and the German American Bund. He was also reported to have burglarized the
KKK's offices in Pennsylvania Washington Philadelphia
CONCLUSION
Exactly why the FBI would not only decline Tabbutt's offer
but actively launch COINTELPRO measures to have him expelled from the UKA
remains a mystery that Drabble does not explore. Surely the fact that Tabbutt
had "an unsavory background" would not be sufficient grounds for the
FBI not to hire him as an informant. After all, as head of the KBI, Tabbutt was
the UKA's "James Angleton." He was the man literally in charge of finding
out FBI penetration agents and informers for the UKA leadership.
If I had to guess, the FBI may have been afraid that Tabbutt
would actually be in a perfect position to use the FBI to weed out certain
individuals that he didn't want in the UKA and to plant others that he did. It
is even possible that Tabbutt had an informant relationship with another
federal agency. Or perhaps they just didn't trust him and feared that Tabbutt
would entrap the Bureau if it made any deal with him. Finally, Tabbutt's prominent
role in the Shickshinny Knights of Malta may have influenced the FBI's
decision. Again, without further investigation it is impossible to know for
sure just why FBI headquarters turned so strongly against an individual who –
at least on paper – would seem like the perfect informant for the Bureau.
Note 2: Who was Vincent DePalma?
Although Vincent DePalma's background remains
mysterious, his name crops up in a fascinating way in the 1979 Final
Report of the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations in its section
on Martin Luther King, who had been assassinated on 4 April 1968.107 From
the HSCA Report (pgs. 375-77):
- RIGHTWING EXTREMIST ORGANIZATIONS
The committee investigated rightwing, segregationist,
extremist groups and individuals to find out if their outspoken opposition to
Dr. King and their demonstrated propensity for violence might have resulted in
their involvement in the assassination. FBI files on the Minutemen, Ku Klux
Klan, and other extremist organizations were examined and while the committee
found no evidence that these organizations had anything to do with the
assassination, the committee did discover conspiracy allegations that warranted
additional field investigation beyond that performed in the original
investigation.
(a) The Minutemen
A review of F131 files on the Minutemen revealed a possible
plot against Dr. King's life that had received some attention by law
enforcement officials shortly before Dr. King's death.
On January 15, 1968 ,
Vincent DePalma, a close associate of Robert B. DePugh, the founder
of the Minutemen, told a Denver United
States
According to DePalma, the Minutemen also planned to
incite race riots in the summer of 1968. After it received this information
from the ATF, the FBI attempted unsuccessfully to locate DePalma, who had
said he was moving to Oregon Seattle , Wash.
The FBI made no further attempts to investigate the threat
until shortly after Dr. King's assassination, when one of DePalma's
Minutemen associates, Edward Baumgardner, told a reporter that the artist's
drawing of the suspected assassin resembled DePalma.
Baumgardner was interviewed several times by the FBI. He
said that he and DePalma were members of a Minutemen strike team that had
been formed at a training camp in Colorado
DePalma was located by the FBI several days after Dr.
King was killed. He again detailed information on the Minutemen strike teams
that had targeted Dr. King and on Minutemen plans to precipitate race riots in
the summer of 1968 as a means of facilitating a takeover of the Government.
Work records showed that DePalma was in Newport ,
R.I. April 4, 1968 . Information he furnished during 3 days of
interviews was verified by several FBI offices. DePugh and his chief
associate in the Minutemen, Walter Peyson, remained fugitives until their
capture in July 1969. There was nothing in the FBI files to reflect they were
ever interviewed regarding possible involvement of the Minutemen in the
assassination of Dr. King.
The committee found that the DePalma lead had not
been fully investigated by the FBI, so it examined it anew. It found
that DePalma had been murdered in an unsolved gangland slaying in
January 1978 in Los Angeles Colorado
Although Brooks told of other assassination plots by the
Minutemen and of intelligence files on Dr. King and other
"subversives," Tollerton claimed that these activities were not
serious. Tollerton added that DePugh had trouble keeping the
organization together in 1968 while avoiding capture, so he could not have been
involved in Dr. King's assassination. Walter Peyson and Robert DePugh,
brought to Washington
They insisted that all discussions of assassination plots
and strike teams were mere paper propaganda. Both Peyson and DePugh also
explained that because DePalma and Baumgardner were believed to be
infiltrators, they were often fed false information.
As a final investigative step, the committee compiled a list
of all individuals associated with the Minutemen in the cities visited by James
Earl Ray following his escape in April 1967 from the Missouri State
Penitentiary. This list was cross-checked against a list of known or possible
Ray associates. The results were negative.
Based on the testimony it heard, interviews with the
assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted DePugh and Peyson in 1966 and
ATF agents who had encountered DePugh, extensive file reviews and the Ray
associates name check, the committee concluded there was insufficient evidence
to indicate that the Minutemen were involved in Dr. King's death.
Unfortunately the HSCA found it impossible to determine if
there was a real plot led by the Minutemen (as DePalma claimed) or
if DePalma himself was acting as an agent or infiltrator of some sort
who tried to implicate the Minutemen leadership in just such a plot either to
cast law enforcement suspicion on the Minuteman after Doctor King was shot in
Memphis or if he wanted to try to intimidate the government not to
prosecute DePugh or for some other opaque reason. Still it is curious
that DePalma went to agents from the ATF, the federal agency that had
an earlier close relationship with Frankhouser to offer them his information.
Had DePalma worked as an ATF informant as well? If DePalmawent to
the ATF in an attempt to cast suspicion on the Minutemen before the
assassination of Dr. King, it raises the possibility that he may have been
trying to build a "paper trail" to lead federal investigators from
others on the far right who may actually have wanted to kill King and induce
race riots in an attempt to drive America to the right in a key election year.
Notes
1 The late Roy Frankhouser's last name is so commonly
misspelled "Frankhauser" that I have left the variation stand instead
of correcting the original texts. Anyone looking at his career, however, should
search under both spellings.
The most important source on Frankhouserthat I used for this chapter is a series of FBI files of approximately 500 pages covering his early history. The first batch of files (some 178 pages) is now posted on LaRouche Planet. For access to the files and for information on Eugene Tabbutt, I very much want to thank a freelance researcher who specializes in FBI file declassification. The other FBI files that I cite from the middle 1960s can be found on the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
See http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/JFK Assassination.
FBI files on the Stephen Landesberg case also can be found via the Mary Farrell
Foundation.
For Frankhouser's appearance before HUAC as well as mention of Eugene Tabbutt, see "Activities of the Ku Klux Klan Organizations in the
2 On Frankhouser and "Black September," seehttp://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php.
3 While I have no idea what the article means by Frankhouser
"babysitting" Mario Garcia Kohly, it should be noted that Garcia
Kohly was an important Cuban businessman who played a major role in anti-Castro
organizations. At one point he headed the anti-Castro council of Cuban exiles.
On 28 August 1963 , the New
York Times ran an article entitled "Cuban Underground Warns
President." The Times reported that a telegram had been sent to JFK in the
name of eight Cuban underground organizations that declared "they would
not accept any government 'imposed' by the United
States
The Times report was followed by another one just a month later on the role of far-right governments in Latin America and their promotion of the most hard-line elements in the exile community. From a
Fears have been expressed by high officials from
The Kennedy administration's attempt to shift its support to more moderate Cuban exile leaders was linked to the government's crackdown on a right-wing paramilitary training camp. On
The arms cache and camp could well lead back to Guy Banister's Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean (
Banister also had close ties to the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean (
Frankhouser certainly encountered far right Cubans in the extreme right underground. One FBI file reports that John Sullivan, the
In 1959 Filipe Rivera, head of the CAN, fled
4 Now available on the web at Dennis King's website,http://lvndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-cia3.pdf.
5 See the chapters on the NCLC and the radical right athttp://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Librarv.UnitvNow1 andhttp://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Librarv.UnitvNow2.
6 Frankhouser was arrested by Philadelphia 23 December 1962 .
See Hearings, 3346.
7 When the NCLC Security Staff met Frankhouser, they could
have easily had a Russian speaker there to confirm if he in fact spoke Russian.
8 For references to Duggan, see the "Unity Now"
chapter in SMDP.
9 The Scott Thompson story has never been picked up in print
by any other author that I am aware of with the sole exception of Michael
Collins Piper in his book Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK
Assassination Conspiracy (Washington, DC:
The Center for Historical Review, 1998), 319-21. Piper is a long-time associate of Willis Carto. Not surprisingly, his book attempts to prove that JKF was killed by a Jewish conspiracy. In a brief "Appendix 2" (entitled "The Man from the Klan"), Piper reprints the20 November 1975 New Solidarity article in
full. However he also writes that the "Inclusion of this material is in no
way intended by the author of Final Judgment to serve as an endorsement of the
information related therein, but is simply provided so that there may be as
complete a record as possible of the little-known areas of the JFK
assassination conspiracy research can be examined by independent-minded
individuals who are truly interested in finding out the truth." (319.)
Piper later remarks: "How much of what Frankhauser claims is true is
beyond the scope of this volume." (321.)
The Center for Historical Review, 1998), 319-21. Piper is a long-time associate of Willis Carto. Not surprisingly, his book attempts to prove that JKF was killed by a Jewish conspiracy. In a brief "Appendix 2" (entitled "The Man from the Klan"), Piper reprints the
10 The FBI documents I discuss here from the mid-1960s were
found on the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
11 See Rose's article "Der Fuhrer Blows in the
Stormtroopers" in The Fourth Decade, 3/6 (September 1996). On Frankhouser
and the SWP, see Rose's note 8, page 26. Also see Jerry Rose, "Oswald and
the Nazis," The Fourth Decade, 3/2 (January 1996).
In the latter article, Rose wondered whether or not Oswald could have gotten the location for the American National Party - which ex-American Nazi Party members Dan Burros and John Patler created and whose address Oswald included in his notebook -from reading something in the left press. Although Rose thought it unlikely, it now seems certain that Oswald came across the information in the CP
In the latter article, Rose wondered whether or not Oswald could have gotten the location for the American National Party - which ex-American Nazi Party members Dan Burros and John Patler created and whose address Oswald included in his notebook -from reading something in the left press. Although Rose thought it unlikely, it now seems certain that Oswald came across the information in the CP
paper The Worker. See Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day:
Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York:
Autonomedia: 1999), 616-17. Coogan reports that the article in question was
from the 20 March 1961
issue of The Worker written by Mike Newberry and entitled "American Nazis
Establish Their National Headquarters in Queens ."
12 Robert A. Surrey, for example, served as General Edwin A.
Walker's personal assistant and was the critical witness to the reported
shooting of Walker by Oswald in Dallas on 10 April 1963. At the time of the
shooting, Surrey doubled as the head of George Lincoln
Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP) branch in Texas Surrey
took as his ANP party name "Max Amann" in honor of the Nazi Party's
main printer in Germany Surrey 's
Nazi views personally. Minuteman leader Robert De Pugh also claimed that Rockwell's
Nazis in Texas Surrey and
the ANP, see Frederick Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and
the American Nazi Party (Urbana: IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999) and
Jeffrey A. Kaplan (ed.), Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the
Radical Racist Right (Walnut Creek , CA
Yet another odd connection to the ANP appears in
In "Oswald and the Nazis," Jerry Rose writes (p,
24):
That the NSRP might have been behind the formation of the American National Party is quite intriguing. Whether or not this was the case, it is certainly a fact that the NSRP leaders were familiar with Patler, Burros and their
For more on Michael Slatter, see page 5 of an article in the Canadian Jewish
Review from 12
April 1963 which reads:
The commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising takes place at a time of intensified neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist activity in many countries of the world. They are also working toward their combination into international units, with the purpose of establishing world-wide bodies. All this could probably be epitomized in the example of Michael Slatter, son of the late British Air Marshal, Sir Leonard Slatter, who proclaimed that he had taken over the leadership of the British National Socialist movement after their leader, Colin Jordan, was jailed for his Nazi activities. "I am proud to be a member of the National Socialist movement and I admire Hitter as a great man," said Michael Slatter. Seehttp://www.multiculturalcanada.ca/node/127546.
The commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising takes place at a time of intensified neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist activity in many countries of the world. They are also working toward their combination into international units, with the purpose of establishing world-wide bodies. All this could probably be epitomized in the example of Michael Slatter, son of the late British Air Marshal, Sir Leonard Slatter, who proclaimed that he had taken over the leadership of the British National Socialist movement after their leader, Colin Jordan, was jailed for his Nazi activities. "I am proud to be a member of the National Socialist movement and I admire Hitter as a great man," said Michael Slatter. Seehttp://www.multiculturalcanada.ca/node/127546.
13 Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New
American Fascism (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 199.
14 For a reference to "Carol Larrabee," see Tim
Wohlforth, The Prophet's Children: Travels on the American Left (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 130. Wohlforth
knew LaRouche as well. See http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Library.ManvTheoriesofLMarcus.
15 For more on Chris and Carol White, see the discussion of
"the Chris White Affair" in Smiling Man from a Dead Planet.
16 Rosenthal and Gelb, 183. For a study of the Pennsylvania
KKK, see Philip Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania Reading Reading Philadelphia
17 Rosenthal and Gelb, 183.
18 Thayer, 42.
19 John George and Laird Wilcox, Nazis, Communists,
Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992),
especially pages 284-91 and 318-321.
20 Ibid., 288.
21 Ibid., 286.
22 Frankhouser was born in 1939. (King, 197.) A Philadelphia 4 November 1939 . (Hearings, 3346.) However the FBI files
give the date as 11 April 1939 .
(The confusion may be because the FBI gives the format for the date as "4-11-39 " with "4"
being the month. It seems the police read "4" as meaning the day and
not the month.) Frankhouser also told the police he also served in the Army as
a paratrooper "in 1959 and 1960" but Army documents clearly show that
Frankhouser was discharged from the Army on 18 November 1957 . (George and Wilcox, 288.) Frankhouser
was, however, active in the CAP in 1959-60.
23 It is possible that Frankhouser got a "general
discharge under honorable conditions" which ranks below a regular
honorable discharge and usually indicates good service but some kind of
aberrant behavior or character trait. Dan Burros also received a "general
discharge under honorable conditions."
24 On the bombing, see [[http://www.southernspaces.org/2009/counterblast-how-atlanta-temple-bombing-strengthened-civil-rights-cause]].
25 "IPS " stands
forthe "International Press Service." It was later renamed the
"NSIPS" as in "New Solidarity International Press Service."
27 The Illuminator at one time served as part of the
Minutemen network and its Patriotic Party front. For a brief mention of The
Illuminator, see Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Rabb, The Politics of Unreason
(Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1978), xx, 337.
28 Students of the Kennedy assassination know that Michael
Paine (not "John Paine") was married to Ruth Hyde Paine.
As for Governor Patterson, he was actually the governor ofAlabama WCC
did help create the State Sovereignty Commission whose agents would "tape
sermons and lectures of ministers and professors who were suspected of being
soft on segregation; it had a pack of informers to weed out the unfaithful in
colleges and schools . . ." (Thayer, 121.)
Investigative organizations like the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the Alabama Legislative Commission to Preserve the Peace, and the security division of the Alabama State Police would no doubt welcome information from groups like theWCC , NSRP and KKK-allied
networks in the North with the capacity to spy on the very leftist and civil
rights groups who were sending activists into the South. Frankhouser could well
have been working for both the Mississippi Alabama WCC
network. Frankhouser, however, told the New York Times that he was working for
the Virginia WCC - and not the Mississippi WCC
- when he infiltrated the SWP. It would seem reasonable to assume that he was
part of some broader coordinated grouping that funneled information into the
segregationist network in the South.
As for Governor Patterson, he was actually the governor of
Investigative organizations like the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the Alabama Legislative Commission to Preserve the Peace, and the security division of the Alabama State Police would no doubt welcome information from groups like the
29 The SWP had its own camp in rural New
Jersey
." Nor was the camp or its location a secret. It was
regularly featured in the pages of the SWP party paper the Militant. The
Militant also ran pictures of the camp showing just what a bucolic site it
really was. For more background on the camp, see Barry Sheppard, The Party:
Volume 1; The Sixties: A Political Memoir (Chicago
As for the CP's Camp
Midvale Camp Midvale Camp Midvale 22 September 1966 , J. Edgar Hoover also claimed that Camp
Midvale 31 October
1966 , the New York Camp Midvale New York State Camp
Midvale
30 It should be noted that these charge came from the
testimony of Jerry Brooks, a former Minutemen who testified for the government.
During a 1966 trial of Minutemen leader Robert DePugh in Kansas
City 10 November 1966 New York Times article,
"U.N. Plot Traced by Ex-Minuteman."
31 If Frankhouser had any direct encounter with the FBI in
connection with the JFK assassination, it may be because in April 1964 the
Bureau received a report that a local Philadelphia-area Nazi named Theodore
Thesing said he was glad Kennedy was killed. Thesing showed two local FBI
Special Agents his membership card #55 in the American Nazi Party. Thesing's
name was also sent to the FBI by George Lincoln Rockwell shortly after
Kennedy's death as one of a number of former American Nazi Party types whom he
felt might be potentially dangerous. Another name on that list was Frank
Rotella, who later became the head of the KKK in New
Jersey 27 November 1963 letter to Hoover
32 Thayer, 111-12.
33 During the 1958 campaign, George Wallace ran to the left
of Patterson and he aggressively attacked Patterson for his backing from the
Klan until his advisors convinced him it was a losing issue. After Wallace took
power, he courted the NSRP and used the head of the Alabama Department of
Public Safety, Al Lingo - who also ran the state police - to work with NSRP
leader Ed Fields. See Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the
Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton
Rouge Louisiana
State University
Press, 1996), 139, 164-169.
34 Patsy Sims, The Klan (New York: Stein and Day, 1978),
112.
35 Ibid., 113. The Klan Bureau of Investigation (KBI) was
the KKK's internal security organization.
36 It should also be noted that the FBI had numerous
informers inside the SWP's ranks. The FBI also repeatedly carried out
"black bag" break-ins to the SWP's national headquarters to copy
documents. The SWP was the first organization targeted forCOINTELPROaswell. On
the extent of the FBI operations against the SWP, seehttp://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Librarv.TheSWPYears.
At no time did the FBI discover anything remotely like a secret paramilitary
camp, much less one dedicated to assassinating President Eisenhower.
37 To make matters even more confusing, there was a real
"George Paine" in New York
It should be noted that the real Ruth and Michael Paine lived in thePhiladelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia U.S. Bristol Liberty America Philadelphia
It should be noted that the real Ruth and Michael Paine lived in the
From August 1954 to May 1955, Ruth Hyde was associated with the Young Men's Hebrew Association and the Young Women's Hebrew Association where she worked with the elderly. She then taught at the
Given the fact that Ruth and Michael Paine (for whatever
reason) did move in left-liberal
circles like the AFSC which had a strong presence in Philadelphia Philadelphia Philadelphia Texas Philadelphia
38 The letter appeared on page four of the 19 December 1960 issue of the
Militant and is entitled "On the SLP." The letter reads as follows:
On the SLP Editor:
I am glad to see the question of the Socialist Labor Party being taken up at last. This has been long overdue. There is no doubt in my mind that the SWP will win the debate with the SLP since the contemporary SLP is far more rigid and sectarian than De
A reform is a concealed measure of reaction when it is used as a substitute for socialism. By isolating itself from the class battles of the workers, the SLP only guarantees that these battles will degenerate in substitutes for socialism. George Payne
39 The Mary Ferrell Foundation archive includes on the
printouts "FBI JFK Assassination File (62-109060)" on some of the
documents.
40 In early 1964 FBI agents interviewed various far right
extremists in the Philadelphia
41 One FBI informant may have been a friend of Frankhouser
named John Canaris. He had some of Frankhouser's files which Frankhouser had
given him for safe keeping according to an 18 May 1967 FBI report. Another Frankhouser contact who
might have had the documents was named Ed Lotz. Exactly where Frankhouser
eventually found the two documents is not clear from the FBI documents.
42 The field office number was 105-4158 while the Bureau
File # was 97-4262.
43 The FBI file number on the document dated 12 June1967
from the Philadelphia FBI Office is 157-916.
44 I believe "liberoly" ("free the
oppressed") is the motto describing the mission
of the 82nd Airborne.
45 Presumably this is where Frankhouser was supposed to
supply information about his time in the military. The fact that Frankhouser
never filled in his information and that he kept the letter suggests that
Larrabee wrote the letter and sent it to Frankhouser to fill in the details of
his military service and then expected Frankhouser to send the letter on to
Barrett. However it is also possible that Larrabee both wrote and signed the
letter on behalf of both of them and as a courtesy sent Frankhouser a copy.
46 The FBI checked its sources about the Young Socialist
League or YLS. Here is a summary of what the FBI obtained on the group:
The 3/1/59 issue of the Young Socialist Challenge published on page 3 of Labor Action, an official publication of the Independent Socialist League (ISL), contained an article concerning the creation of the YSL, which pointed out that at a unity conference occurring 2/12-14/54, at Labor Action Hall, New York, N.Y., a merger conference between the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) and the Socialist Youth League (SYL). The new organization was named the YSL.
T-1 on
The YSL has frequently worked in close sympathetic cooperation with the ISL toward similar objectives, although each major issue given mutual consideration is decided upon by these organizations individually. The YSL serves as an apprenticeship for the ISL, but ISL selection of members from YSL ranks is made on an individual and personal basis. In many instances YSL members are also members of the ISL. The YSL and the ISL utilize the same printing house at
The
47 Peter Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist's
Odyssey Through the "American Century" (New Jersey: Humanities Press,
1994), 263.
48 On the creation of the American Forum for Socialist
Education, see 13 May 1957 New York Times article "New Leftist Unit Set
Up; Reds in It" by Harry Schwartz.
49 Sheppard,21-22.
50 See the 2 May
1957 New York Times.
51 See the 25 April
1960 issue of the Militant for a front page story written by David
Stevens about the launching of the YSA as a national organization at the Philadelphia
52 Put another way, Frankhouser more or less became a
"National Socialist" in that he took seriously radical critiques of
"plutocracy" but he combined these views with a strong
"racial" outlook that he claimed was rooted in scientific theory. For
the FBI and its informants, however, Frankhouser's fascination with both the
far right and far left seemed further proof that he was psychotic. The NSRP
also had a "left" side. George Thayer quotes NSRP leader Ed Fields as
saying, "'We differ from conservatives ... in that we do not oppose TVA,
Social Security and Medicare. We call ourselves the 'Farmers and Workers
Party.' We have a Social Security program that is much more generous than the
present program." Thayer, 42.
53 The following analysis of the world of Polzin, Fred Weiss
and the NRP draws heavily on Kevin Coogan's biography of Francis Parker Yockey,
Dreamer of the Day. For specific references to Polzin in that text, see Coogan,
478, 486, fn. 5.
54 The text is available athttp://www.marxists.org/historv/etol/newspape/isr/vol18/no04/after.htm.
It is in a section entitled "After Investigating" on pgs. 106-07.
55 On Williams and the SWP, see Timothy Tyson, "Robert
F. Williams, 'Black Power,' and the Roots of the African American Freedom
Struggle," The Journal of American History, 85/2 (September 1998), 553-54,
560.
56 Williams was later smuggled out of Monroe - where he was
almost certainly going to be either arrested by the FBI on bogus
"kidnapping" charges or killed by white racists - by an underground
network that brought him first to New York City, and then to Canada and finally
to Cuba. Besides Tyson, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert F.
Williams.
57 See http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/Marxmanship1.html.
Oliver was expelled from the John Birch Society for his extreme anti-Semitism.
58 However Frankhouser could not have
met LaRouche at the one Militant Labor Forum presentation
that LaRouche gave in the SWP since it took place some two years
later. On 2 March 1962 , LaRouche (a/k/a
"Lynn Marcus") gave a talk entitled "Freud and Marx. Their
Theories of Knowledge" at a Friday night Militant Labor Forum. The notice
forLaRouche'stalk appears in the 26
February 1962 issue of the Militant on page 2 of the paper in the
"Weekly Calendar" section. Lyndon LaRouche had been
recruited to the SWP in 1949 in Lynn , Massachusetts 5
January 1959 about the New York New
York New York
59 An FBI document dated 2 May 1960 whose subject is "Young Socialist Club
of Philadelphia IS-C," lists Frankhouser as a member of the YS Club as of 15 April 1960 .
60 For more, see Greg Rose, "The Smarmy Life and Times
of the NCLC" first published in the 30 March 1979 National Review and now available athttp://lvndonlarouche.org/larouche-national-review.PDF.
On the NCLC, the NRP and Iraq
61 By 1962-1963 Frankhouser also become a leading figure in
the East Coast branch of the Minutemen and in particular its "intelligence"
and "counter-intelligence" branch.
62 On the history of the Northern League and its leader
Roger Pearson, see Coogan, 468-489.
63 An FBI report on Frankhouser's friend said he spent $500
of funds he had in a savings account which had been given to him by his
grandmother to go to Europe . "While in England England England England England France Germany 6/1/61 ."
Frankhouser's friend had been a student at Reading
High School
64 Dan Burros and John Patler's tiny American Nationalist
Party also endorsed the OAS. The 13
April 1962 New York Times reported that the OAS in Oran ,
Algeria America New York Louisiana 97-15
190th Street Queens ."
Just who were the "eleven" members in Louisiana
65 The name was later changed to the World Union of National
Socialists (WUNS).
66 See "Neo-Nazi Party Demotes Aide Who Hid Jewish
Background," 5 November 1965
New York Times.
67 For more on this period and the ACFI more specifically,
seehttp://laroucheplanet.info/pmwi
ki/pmwiki.php?n=Librarv.ManvTheoriesofLMarcus.
68 The eighty-something Charles Smith, head of Truth Seeker,
was arrested at the Newburgh protest and charged with
disorderly conduct.
69 The Middletown Times Herald Record story may have been
inspired by a short earlier report in the 2 November 1965 edition of the
Evening News of Newburgh which in a piece entitled "Background of Burros
Reported" first broke the news using records from the Newburgh Free
Academy (where Robert Burros had gone to school) that Burros "was
religiously affiliated with Temple Beth Jacob, Newburgh."
70 Deliberately making contact with the FBI and then
offering the FBI information seems to have been a calculated ploy. For example,
when one of Frankhouser's fellow Civil Air Patrol members in Pennsylvania New York City
71 On Robert Burros' features see the 5 November 1965 New York Times. On Dan Burros
being blond and blue-eyed, see One More Victim, 185.
72 Rosenthal and Gelb, 171-72.
73 More information on the Stephen Landesberg case can be
found on the Mary Ferrell Foundation's website. When I cite an FBI report on
Landesberg, it comes from files found at the Mary Ferrell Foundation's website.
Also see Stan Weeber, "Stephen H. Landesberg and the Greenwich Village
Hoax," The Fourth Decade, 2/3 (January 1995); Weeber's letter to the
editor about the Landesberg case in The Fourth Decade, 3/4 (May 1996); and Carleton
W. Sterling, "Stephen Landesberg: Another Media Cover-Up," The Fourth
Decade, 3/6 (September 1995).
74 During this period, members of the radical right
frequently disrupted leftist meetings. Dan Burros and John Patler's New
York-based American National Party (ANP) regularly tracked and disrupted
leftist gatherings. "Burros and Patler followed Rockwell's technique of
keeping an eye out for any left or liberal meeting they could picket. . .
Burros would pore over the newspapers for word of a meeting . . . and when he
could round up a few people would appear, after having notified the newspapers.
. . . Most of the time, the newspapers ignored the picketers except for a word
or two. The only assured way to break into print was to start enough rumors to
attract the police and perhaps get arrested." Rosenthal and Gelb, 151 -52.
75 See Edith Ashbury, "F.B.I. Checks Reported
Oswald-Rightist Link" in the 30
November 1963 New York Times; "Was Oswald in the
Village," The Village Voice, 28
November 1963 ; and "FBI Searches the Village for Pal of
Oswald," New York 30 November 1963 .
76 Landesberg's first name also is spelled both as
"Stephen" and "Steven" although I believe 'Stephen" is
the correct spelling.
77 After Kennedy's death, Landesberg called Barry Gray whose
show he had been on two years earlier, to tell him about Oswald being in New
York 23 November 1963 . The report
continues:
The FBI accordingly dispatched Agents to Barry Gray's offices where they questioned an individual who gave his name as James F. Rizzuto who claimed he had served in the United States Marines with Stephen Yves L'Eandes and Lee Harvey Oswald . . .. Rizzuto told the FBI Agents that L'Eandes was an individual who went around trying to break up integration meetings by heckling tactics and that Oswald had accompanied L'Eandes to a number of such meetings.
The FBI accordingly dispatched Agents to Barry Gray's offices where they questioned an individual who gave his name as James F. Rizzuto who claimed he had served in the United States Marines with Stephen Yves L'Eandes and Lee Harvey Oswald . . .. Rizzuto told the FBI Agents that L'Eandes was an individual who went around trying to break up integration meetings by heckling tactics and that Oswald had accompanied L'Eandes to a number of such meetings.
At the meeting in Gray's office with FBI Special Agents Wayne Morse and Leonard H. Me Coy, "RIZZUTO was very nervous and advised he did not want to be contacted again if possible and also reiterated that he had no known address."
Since the Agents met "Rizutto" in Barry Gray's office, wouldn't Gray recognize the fact that "Rizutto" was the same "Stephen L'Eandes" that he had on his radio show to discuss
78 The FBI could not locate an "Earl Perry" who
fit the L'Eandes story. Of course since almost everyone in the far right used
false names and elaborate cover stories to begin with, finding "Earl
Perry" would not be easy, even assuming he existed outside of Landesberg's
imagination. Again, if there was one government agency that might have known
about him, it would have been BOSSI.
79 This may have been a reference to the Mississippi WCC .
One of the founders of the Mississippi WCC ,
Judge Brady, proposed calling the group the "Sons of the White
Magnolias." See: Neil Me Millen: The Citizens' Council: Organized
Resistance to the Second Reconstruction (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 18.
80 The FBI records, however, indicate that Landesberg was
actually interviewed in Barry Gray's office.
81 Rosenthal and Gelb, 158.
82 Tony Ulasewicz, The President's Private Eye (Westport,
Conn.: MACSAM Publishing, 1990), 129-44.
83 Joesten was wrong about Columbia Columbia 9 December 1963 issue of the Columbia
Daily Spectator which is reprinted in Sterling
84 See fn. 3 for a discussion of the Lake
Ponchatrain
86 Hearings, 3359. Burros then added, "We will also
have as a guest the Grand Dragon of Penn. This man is a real hero of ours, who
had his eye torn out by gangsters in the pay of communists." This was Roy
Frankhouser who also first recruited Burros into the KKK in the summer of 1965.
87 Rosenthal and Gelb, 228.
88 The local Alabama Alabama Birmingham Montgomery
In 1963 alone, theBirmingham Alabama Birmingham
In 1963 alone, the
89 Hearings, 3352.
90 Nor was Roy Frankhouser completely in the dark when it
came to PI work. In ''LyndonLaRouche and the New American Fascism'',
Dennis King writes about Frankhouser: "His late stepfather was a private
detective for whom Roy
91 Hearings, 3394-95.
92 For background on the Knights, see especially Coogan,
598-615. Also see another essay by Coogan on the far right Defenders of the
Constitution (DAC) whose leaders also had ties to the Knight entitled "The
Defenders of the American Constitution and the League of Empire Loyalists: The
First Postwar Anglo-American Revolts against the "One World Order"
available at http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/downloads/coogan.pdf 
. Also see Dick Russell, The Man Who
Knew Too Much (NY: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1992). There are internet
sites devoted to the various groups claiming to be the true Knights of Malta.
. Also see Dick Russell, The Man Who
Knew Too Much (NY: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1992). There are internet
sites devoted to the various groups claiming to be the true Knights of Malta.
93 Coogan, Dreamer, 605. Yet another Pichel Knight was
a former CIA official named Herman Kimsey.
In 1970 Kimsey was listed as the Pichel group's "Associate Director of
International Intelligence."
94 Rosenthal and Gelb, 190.
95 On Rothkirch and IMS, see King, 226. As for Rothkirch's
ties to the Pichel Knights, see Russ Bellant, ''Old Nazis, the New Right, and
the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and Their Effect on U.S. Cold
War Politics'' (Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, 1988), 99, fn.
139. According to Bellant, Rothkirch also helped set up Truth-in-Press, a
Liberty Lobby 501 (c) 3 tax-exempt group.
Rothkirch's history is utterly bizarre. Apparently born
Edward T'Kach in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1919, he fought to change his birth
certificate to "Eduard von Rothkirch" because he claimed his real
father was a German World War I spy named von Rothkirch who fathered him while
he was in St. Paul and then left him to be raised with the T'Kach family (also
spelled in some reports Tkach). (In another variation of the story, the German
spy changed his name to T'Kach to fool Russian agents.) Rothkirch was convicted
on fraud charges in the early 1950s and he spent time in the Wisconsin
State Hospital
One of the strangest mentions of von Rothkirch appears in
the 9 May 1948 article in
theNew York Times by C. Brook Peters entitled "Future Uncertain for
General Cernius." The story reported that the last former prime minister
of an independent Lithuania New Jersey America England Midwestern College Minnesota Hillman Bastogne Battle
As for our Rothkirch, he said he was a police magistrate in Morrison
County , Minnesota Minnesota California Minnesota
Rothkirch next told the Times that he also was a
leader in an "underground railroad" that got refuges out of East
Europe and that he has spent some $80,000 of his own money on the
cause. He also helped dissident Russian military men to escape. He said he did
so "in collaboration with the War Department" and that the Russian
press dubbed him "the American Scarlet Pimpernel." When asked about
his own military service, he said he was a captain in the U.S. Army Air Force
in World War II but he was put on an inactive status and later reactivated as a
bombardier-observer and discharged as a warrant officer. He further claimed
that he had taken part in guerrilla warfare fights in East Europe .
Rothkirch also admitted that while Midwestern
College Brazil Europe and South America .
The course on international relations will be without equal in any American
college." The Times checked Rothkirch's story and found that on 7 August 1947 incorporation papers had
been filed for Midwestern College 10 May 1948 , the Times ran a follow up story.
Now Rothkirch backtracked and said he really wasn't working "in
collaboration with the War Department" in Eastern Europe
but that he supplied information to "certain individuals" in the War
Department. He said one such individual was Maj. Gen. John H. Hilldring, a
former Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas. (On Hilldring,
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John H. Hilldrinq.)
For another discussion of Rothkirch's Midwestern
College Wisconsin Midwestern
College U.S.
Captive Nations movement.
Finally, Rothkirch appears in a book by Robert Morrow
entitled First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA -Mafia
Murder of President Kennedy (New York: Spi Book, 1992), 280-82. Morrow
says that Rothkirch used to work for a Washington CIA and the
Mafia, both of whom were reportedly backing Kohly against more liberal elements
inside the U.S. State Department. Kohly also had close ties to Richard Nixon.
Morrow uses Rothkirch as his key source for the claim that Nixon encouraged
Kohly to jump bail and "go underground" after he was convicted in
1964 on charges of forging Cuban currency. Morrow believes Nixon wanted Kohly
out of the picture so he couldn't testify before the Warren Commission or any
other body about the various CIA -Mafia plots
against Castro.
96 On King Peter, see http://www.orderstiohn.orq/kposi/kphist.htm.
As for Frank A. Capell, he was a right-wing Catholic who had
spent decades in the anti-communist demimonde. Capell briefly became known for
his book The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe (Staten Island: NY: The Herald of
Freedom, 1964) that tried to link the Kennedy family to her demise. He also
published Henry Kissinger, Soviet Agent (Zarephath, NJ: The Herald of Freedom,
1974). The notion that Kissinger was a Soviet agent came from a high defector
from Polish intelligence named Michael Goleniewski who went on to become the
"Imperial Grand Master" of Pichel's Knights after Goleniewski claimed
that he was the hemophilicson of the last living Tsar, Nicholas II, and should
be called Romanov. On Goleniewski,
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael Goleniewski.
Although Capell accepted Goleniewski's claims that Kissinger was a Soviet
agent, he broke with the Pichel Knights and followed a rival knightly order led
by Paul II of Yugoslavia
97 In November and December 1977, American Opinion -the
flagship magazine of the John Birch Society - published a two part series by
Allen entitled "They're Catching On." Allen was a leading proponent
that America CFR .
The cabal worked closely with Russia America CFR ,
and even Skull and Bones. He said that finally we are seeing discussions in the
larger liberal-left media about the real power elite that controls the nation.
But Allen singled out the Labor Committee for criticism despite the fact that
it attacked the Rockefellers: "This is not true of the National Caucus of
Labor Committees (NCLC), also known as the U.S. Labor Party (USLP). What makes
this group dangerous is that while it is an avowedly Communist organization, it
has carefully patterned its conspiracy theory after that of The John Birch
Society. What the US Labor Party does, however, is to so twist, distort, and
exaggerate the situation that it has the effect of making the whole thing look
bizarre and absurd."
Allen also commented on the cult nature of the NCLC and
remarked that LaRouche's "psychological hold" over its members
"has been compared with that exercised by the leaders of the Moonie and
Hare Krishna cults." Also "participation in any activity which does
not serve the party's interests generally results in the matter being turned
over to its version of the GPU , known as the
Security Staff. The NCLC is not a social club for dilettantes."
Allen's main critique of the LC is
that LaRouche is either putting forward "a comic parody of the
Americanist view of Conspiracy" or one is "being subjected to the
ravings of a maniac." Yet, incredibly, the LC has "hoodwinked a few
ill-informed Conservatives" after the 1976 elections where the LC claimed
vote fraud and said Carter stole the election from Ford. The LC also used this
period to do some fund-raising scams. Allen cites an article from the
Washington Post by William Chapman which states that there are allegations that
some LC fundraisers had been "telling contributors the Labor Party had official
Republican support" even though it wasn't true. How does the LC do it
especially since their members don't deny that the LC is Marxist? "But
they respond that 'pure Marxism' has never existed anywhere and that at this
point in history capitalism is still a viable system. They claim to be
Constitutionalists, and go so far as to assert that theoretical Marxism is
really very close to the ideals of America Soviet Union and
other Communist countries. The Labor Party has never denounced the tyrants who
rule the Soviet Union , Red China, Cuba Washington , D.C. Moscow Number One Karl Marx Square
All this raises the question of who is really funding the
NCLC since its operation budget is some $50,000 a week and it runs expensive
WATS lines and has teletype links to Europe , etc.
"The source of money for this multimillion-dollar
venture is unknown. Each branch of the party is given a weekly quota of funds
to raise. For example, an intelligence source reports that the Baltimore
Is it the Rockefellers?
"Oh, it gets curiouser and curiouser. The NCLC has
borrowed eight-six thousand dollars from the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank
- a sum which, surprise, it has not repaid. Chase Manhattan says it is all a
big mistake, that it meant to loan the NCLC eight thousand dollars on a secured
loan but by 'mistake' the computer spat out a check for eighty-six thousand
dollars instead. Did a bank ever make a mistake like that when YOU borrowed
money? Not me either."
Hence this gives rise to suspicion that perhaps "that
the Rockefellers are as usual financing agent provocateurs among their enemies
with the idea of making legitimate criticism of their activities look
ridiculous."
Allen cites Caroll Quigley as saying that the Morgan
interests tried to buy into the Left as well decades earlier. According to
Quigley, "More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate
the Left-wing political movements in the United
States
Now, today, "the Rockefellers are fully capable of
repeating the Morgan game. The evidence that this is happening is mostly
circumstantial" but if one looks at what the LC is actually doing it makes
some sense. The LC anti-Rockefeller hysteria is "largely a parody of
carefully researched Americanist materials. It is an obvious attempt to make
legitimate Americanist scholarship involving the Rockefellers seem absurd to
keep the public from investigating far more serious charges." And this
whole effort, perhaps not so accidentally, is taking place just as the
mainstream media is picking up on Americanist ideas attacking the Wall Street/CFR -Trilateral
Commission power elite. This trend is "something the INSIDERS of the
Conspiracy cannot afford." Therefore, Allen concludes, "no radical
who is a member of an avowedly Communist party is a legitimate prospect. Such
persons not only lack the character our movement requires but are either
dangerously confused or enemy agents."
NOTE ON GARY ALLEN'S SOURCES
Gary Allen's book Kissinger The Secret Side of the Secretary
of State published in 1976 by 76 Press based in Seal Beach ,
California CIA
especially played a role in watergating Nixon. Allen also used the claims of a
former Polish defector named Michael Goleniewski who argued that when he was in
Poland Germany
LARRY MCDONALD - IS THE LABOR COMMITTEE A COMMUNIST SPY
OPERATION?
As for the late Congressman Larry McDonald, his
comments on the LC appeared in the "Extension of Remarks" section of
the Congressional Record for 26
January 1977 (pp. 2428-2430). Unlike Allen, who tries to
suggest LaRouche may have been covertly aided by the
Rockefellers, McDonald implies that the sinister forces behind the LC
are East Germany Soviet Union . McDonald's insert on the
LC most likely came from John Rees, a professional
anti-communist/ant-subversive who was close to McDonaldand Western Goals.
From McDonald's concluding remarks: "NCLC/USLP has demonstrated by its own
record that it is extreme, violent, and controlled only by the whims and
fantasies of its leader, Lyndon LaRouche. Its covert operations are tied
to several foreign Communist or totalitarian governments; and it is noted that
it has never denounced either the Soviet Union , Cuba
McDonald began his remarks noting that the NCLC had
even begun sending its members into the corridors of Congress where they
harassed legislative aides with their propaganda. Meanwhile the group's
leadership whose members held past membership in Moscow-dominated and other
Marxist groups had been directing a large "political and economic
intelligence gathering" operation "which could be of use to foreign
communist governments, such as the East Germans" with whom the LC
leadership has developed some kind of relations.
McDonald then launches into a long a detailed history
of the LC. He states that "NCLC organizers have repeatedly and publicly
stated that the organization believes an armed revolution is necessary to
overthrow completely America
EARLY NCLC HISTORY
McDonald provides a brief bio
of LaRouche which erroneously states that LaRouche left the
SWP in 1957 when he actually left in 1965. Another error comes when a New York
Times report is cited which has LaRouche married to "a
psychiatrist" in the 1950s. He then mentions LaRouche's relationship
to Carol Schnitzer (later Carol White) who was a member of the YSA/SWP. The
statement then offers a long list of members of the Free University of New
York/Alternate U where LaRouche/"Lyn Marcus" gave his first
course. The FUNY catalog described him as a "professional economist and
Marxist" who in 1967 was a "cofounder of Village CIPA - Committee for
Independent Political Action -and author of 'Third Stage of Imperialism.'"
The Congressional Record insert then
describes LaRouche giving his class on "Elementary Marxist
Economics" at the SDS Summer Liberation
School SLS
- at Columbia SLS catalog as "the
development of Marx's method from the German Ideology to the 'tendency for the
rate of profit to fall.' Pre-Marxian, Marxian, and recent theories of value;
elementary models of economic growth." Another course was offered by Carol
who identified herself as "C. LaRouche." This SLS
course was on "U.S. Economic Growth and Political History." The
Congressional Record insert also states that in the early
1970s LaRouche "increasingly insisted on one man rule while
depending on a curious cabal of Greek and German NCLC members, several of whom
are not U.S.
SINISTER FORCES AND
STRANGE ALLIES
According to McDonald: "In confidential reports to
members, the NCLC/USLP has boasted of having close associations with the East
German Communist leadership, Colonel Quaddafi, the Libyan dictator and sponsor
of international terrorist operations, and the Iraqi Government which is the
sponsor of the Palestine Liberation Organization's 'rejectionist front'
terrorists. NCLC/USLP has been conducting industrial intelligence information
particularly in West Germany Libya
McDonald next expresses amazement that the LC had even
managed to gain inroads with the leadership of the GOP, in particular RNC
Executive Director Eddie Mahe over LC claims of pro-Democratic vote fraud in
the November 1976 elections.
The McDonald insert cites an article in the 19
November 1976 issue of the Right Report edited by Morton Blackwell as well as
an article in the 25 November 1976 Washington Star on the same topic. The NCLC
even set up the National Fund for a Fair Election "which has its account -
No. 0314-1343 at Citibank, Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, New York City."
[In other words just a few blocks from the NCLC National Office, then located
at 231 West 29th Street Denver
The CR entry notes that the NCLC's "far left rivals
have denounced the group as agents provocateur" and they have since
claimed that the NCLC "is some secret Government-financed 'COINTELPRO'
plot against revolutionaries. The actions of conservatives in associating with
this violent and bizarre radical group can only lend pseudo-credence to those
allegations."
FUNDING
"NCLC has operated for nearly four years on a monthly
budget of from $30,000 to $40,000. This sum has been raised by loans to NCLC's
Campaigner Publications; by heavy dues extracted from members; by wealthy NCLC
members contributing their trust funds and savings; and from sales of NCLC/USLP
publications" which include "the strange combination of fact and
impure fantasy called 'Carter and the Party of International Terrorism' sold by
the NCLC for $2 and by the Liberty Lobby for $5.50."
98 For the full Thompson EIR
text, seehttp://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1978/eirv05n39-19781010/eirv05n39-19781010
055-how klan Zionist terror operates.pdf.
99 See http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Librarv.UnitvNow1 on
this issue.
100 On LaRouche's "Marxist" views of Jews and
its roots in the late 1950s, see [[http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwi ki/pmwiki.php?n=Librarv.MvstervBabylon1http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Librarv.CONCLUSIONRealKarlMarx.
andhttp://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Librarv.WhatKautskvReallvSaid]].
101 Kautsky quoted in Enzo Traverse, The Marxists and the
Jewish Question: The History of a Debate (1843-1943) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1994) Also see Robert S. Wistrich, "German Social
Democracy and the Problem of Jewish Nationalism 1897-1917," in the Leo
Baeck Institute's/.B/ YearbookXXl (1976).
102 Traverse, 66.
103 Ibid, 213.
104 LaRouche's "explanation" of the Holocaust also
reflected the crudest level of economic determinism which Tim Wohlforth pointed
out in a polemic against LaRouche("Lyn Marcus"). In a 16 December 1968 attack
on LaRouche, Wohlforth pointed toLaRouche's complete dismissal of
anti-Semitic ideology. From ''Smiling Man from a Dead Planet'' Wohlforth next
turns to what he labels Marcus's "most preposterous theory to date."
This was the notion that the Nazis killed six million Jews out of a
"rational economic policy of primitive accumulation" and that Nazi
race theory was merely an excuse for a logical capitalist policy. In contrast,
Wohlforth pointed out that the Nazis used millions of non-Jewish foreign
workers as forced labor while they sent the Jews to death camps. In reality,
the persecution of the Jews actually wasted German resources that could have
been rationally used for the war effort.
See http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Librarv.ManvTheoriesofLMarcus. LaRouche repeats
his same "explanation" of the Holocaust. See Lyn Marcus, Dialectical
Economics (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1975), 408-11.
Here LaRouche writes: The Nazi military machine
and its operations represented the armed force that sustained German capital as
capital. The Second World War was absolutely not an adventure undertaken by
Hitler to appease the inclinations of the Wehrmacht High Command. Germany
As for the concentration camps, they were merely the logical
extension of the turn of German capitalists to an "auto-cannibalistic
economy." According to LaRouche:
As a further measure of capitalist economy, the welfare
rolls within the concentration camps were successfully reduced by the mass
extermination practices applied to the weak, the aged, women, children,
depleted slave labor, and other unemployables. (409)LaRouche can not bring
himself to admit the fundamental ideological role of Nazi anti-Semitism in the
creation of the extermination camps. Instead he wants to pretend that all this
is simply an example of capitalism at work. In his ostensible discussion of the
causes of the Holocaust, he can't even bear to utter the word "Jew."
By the late 1970s, LaRouchewould declare that Hitler was more or less a
pawn of the Rothschilds.
Possibly the closest parallel to LaRouche's view can be
found in the ultra-leftist writings of Amadeo Bordiga, the Italian Marxist
sectarian widely believed to be the author of the 1960 "Auschwitz ,
or the Great Alibi" first published in a French Bordigist journal called
Programme Communiste. Some leading French Bordigists (most prominently Pierre
Guillaume) later became active in the Holocaust Denial movement in France
105 Using the same logic, LaRouche also tried to
reduce Catholicism to the worse expression of the most backward elements of
feudalism in his Campaigner essay on Ludwig Feuerbach which also included his
notorious attack on Judaism as a pseudo-religion. A similar argument against
Catholicism also came from Howard Scott's Technocracy, Inc.
Because LaRouche has always rejected biological
determinism, he is neither a Nazi nor a neo-Nazi. Nor was anti-Semitism
invented by Adolf Hitler. (On this issue, see both the Introduction and
Conclusion to Smiling Man from a Dead Planet.) Yet it is also clear
thatLaRouche's hateful views of Judaism paved the way for his alliance with
some of the most extreme pro-Nazi elements of the extreme right.
It is also important to understand for an organizational
history of the NCLC thatLaRouche's peculiar views on Judaism only first
appeared in his very long footnote on Judaism in the December 1973/January 1974
Campaigner article "The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach" (part one.) This
article - actually a long diatribe against Roman Catholicism -appeared at a
time when the NCLC was in chaos in the wake of the failure
MORE ON STEVE LANDESBERG (“Steve L’Eandes”)
ReplyDeleteIn his book Fug You (NY: Da Capo Press, 2011), poet and Fug Ed Sanders mentions Steve Landesberg (a/k/a “Steve L’Eandes”). One of Sanders close friends was a poet named Al Fowler. Fowler became involved in anti-war circles in the early 1960s and in 1962 he took part in a “World Wide General Strike for Peace” sponsored by the anarchist Lower East Side-based Living Theater. In the early 1960s, Fowler also joined a small sect called the “Free Catholic Church.” Fowler “now and then sported a clerical collar, a big silver cross on this chest, and a round red anarchist button on the lapel of his frock coat.”
After Landesberg went on the radio claiming to have known Oswald, the FBI discovered that L’Eandes had once lived at 11 Waverly Place in the Village. Sanders also heard from Fowler that he had known L’Eandes and he had “witnessed L’Eandes create a disturbance at a meeting of the Socialist Labor Party at the Militant Labor Forum on University Place, and he’d seen L’Eandes hanging out around the headquarters of the General Strike for Peace in early ’62, located at the Living Theater.” (Sanders, p 63)
Sanders made a mistake in his memoir because the group L’Eandes actually disrupted was the Socialist Workers Party (NOT the Socialist Labor Party), which held Militant Labor Forums on University Place. The SWP was heavily involved as well in Fair Play for Cuba. Sanders quotes Fowler as saying about Landesberg/L’Eandes:
The last conversation I had with L’Eandes prior to the big snuff [Kennedy’s death] took place in a diner on Sheridan Square. He talked then about Fair Play for Cuba. His whole shuck was that he was a Cajun, and that his whole family, in the main, was around New Orleans. He even gave me a dissertation on the French Quarter. (63-64)
Hylozoic Hedgehog