"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
Yes, , I agree on Storming Heaven. I also remember hearing at the time and then reading proofs later that the CIA was the main supplier of street acid at a certain time, but what they would do is add additoinal drug x in this city and y in that city and different mixes of x, y, z in others and then see how many freak-outs there were; reports of nice or bad trips, duration and subjective effects, etc. They also did involuntary and semi-voluntary testing on inmates, soldiers, and others - in and out of the USA....and that is just the tip of the iceberg and LSD only one of hundreds they tested.
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:I have two well-thumbed paperback copies of Acid Dreams.
As Peter & Magda have stated, it's an important book....
So do I. In my early days of research, I was most intrigued by the career of young Billy Mellon Hitchcock, who had well-connected ties to a group of oil men I was researching in Texas. It's my belief that George Bush was intentionally sent to Texas, at the end of WWII and graduation from Yale, by his father's investment bank, Brown Brothers Harriman, whose senior partner was Democrat Averell Harriman. By that time the bankers were grooming a Republican to take over from Truman and wealthy Texans were hoping to convert their state to the Republican Party. Bush hooked up with the Liedtkes who were also working in the oil boom of the time in West Texas. With their ties to the Mellon oil company, Gulf Oil, they had much in common with Bush, whose father was a partner in the bank which owned Dresser, a company which owned the patent to many products used in oil drilling and oil and gas pipelines.
Quote:From Acid Dreams:
Leary and Alpert returned to the US with their small but energetic band of followers and began to look for an alternative base of operations. During this period they rubbed shoulders with some of the richest jet-setters on the Eastern seaboard, including William Mellon Hitchcock, a tall, handsome stockbroker in his twenties. Hitchcock was the grandson of William Larimer Hitchcock, founder of Gulf Oil, and a nephew of Pittsburgh financier Andrew Mellon, who served as treasury secretary during Prohibition.
...Hitchcock made his family's four-thousand-acre estate in Dutchess County, New York, available to the psychedelic clan for a nominal five-hundred-dollar monthly rent. At the center of the estate sat a turreted
sixty-four-room mansion known as Millbrook, surrounded by polo fields, stables, beautiful pine forests, tennis courts, a lake, a large gatehouse, and a picturesque fountain. Two hours from New York City by car, this idyllic spread served as the grand backdrop for the next phase of the chemical crusade....He threw some wild parties at which everybody was dosed; those in attendance included people from the United Nations whom he knew from his days at the British Cultural Exchange.
...Various methods were devised to facilitate a permanent spiritual
transformation. Since many in the group had backgrounds in behavioral psychology, it came natural to them to keep a scorecard of their changing states of consciousness. On certain days a bell would ring four times an hour starting at 9:00 A.M. The bell was a signal to stop and record what they were doing then, what "game" they were playing. They thought that by paying more attention to shifting motivations and interpersonal dynamics they could learn to transcend their habitual routines. They compared scorecards and rapped endlessly about how LSD was affecting them.
...When reports of this gala event surfaced in the London press, Hollingshead
suspected his number might be up. A few days later the bobbies came to his flat and arrested him for possession of less than an ounce of hash. Hollingshead showed up in court high on LSD and who knows what else, and was sentenced to twenty-one months in Wormwood Scrubs. He managed to smuggle an ample supply of acid into prison, but it was not his custom to turn on other inmates. However, he made an exception in the case of George Blake, the convicted spy who penetrated the highest echelons of British intelligence and passed information to the Russian KGB. Blake was serving the sixth year of a forty-three-year sentence when he met Hollingshead. His interest was aroused as soon as he learned that Hollingshead had hung out with Leary, and they arranged one Sunday afternoon to take LSD behind bars. As the session progressed, Blake became noticeably tense and paranoid. He thought he had been given a truth serum, and he accused Hollingshead of being a secret service agent. The spy finally settled down and spent the last hours of his trip reflecting upon his future and whether he'd be able to stand many more years of incarceration. A few weeks later Blake escaped by scaling the prison wall with a rope ladder. When last heard from, he was living in Moscow and working in the Cairo section of the Soviet Foreign Ministry.
Hollingshead wasn't the only one in legal trouble. Leary had been busted in
December 1965 after he and his daughter were caught transporting three ounces of pot across the Mexican border into Laredo, Texas.
...Billy Hitchcock, the millionaire padrone, never really entered into the close
camaraderie of the Millbrook circle. He lived a half-mile from the "big house" in his own private bungalow, a four-bedroom gardener's cottage with a Japanese bath in the basement. There he carried on a social life befitting a scion of one of the country's wealthiest families. Hitchcock never totally broke with his old routines even though he had begun turning on. He still kept in close contact with his friends from New York and with various brokers and investors who visited his bungalow for private parties. Some of these people were introduced to LSD through Hitchcock, but it became a running joke at Millbrook that you should not turn on your lawyer or anyone who had to take care of business for you, lest he drop his briefcase and head for the psychedelic sunset. Hitchcock would usually be on the phone all morning talking with Swiss and Bahamian bankers, setting up business meetings and fast-money deals. By afternoon he had taken care of his monetary affairs and would occasionally join the scene at the mansion. Why Hitchcock decided to throw his weight behind the psychedelic cause is still something of a mystery. Was he simply a millionaire acid buff, a wayward son of the
ruling class who dug Leary's trip? Or did he have something else up his sleeve?
...Hitchcock's interest in LSD did not appear to be a simple matter of spiritual enrichment. He was not one to wax poetic over the prospect of merging with the Oversoul. When asked at the outset of one group session what question he wanted answered by the acid trip, he replied, "How can I make more money on the stock market?"
...Psychedelic Rangers.
Michael Bowen was a member of this group. At Cooke's instruction a half-dozen Rangers were dispatched to various psychedelic hot spots in North America and Europe. Bowen went to Millbrook to try and influence the thinking of Leary's clan and lure some of them back to Mexico where Cooke was leading séances while high on acid. Among those who are said to have visited the crippled psychic were Ralph Metzner, songwriter Leonard Cohen, Andrija Puharich, who conducted parapsychology and drug experiments for the US military in the late 1950s, and Seymour ("The Head") Lazare, a wealthy business associate of William Mellon Hitchcock's. Following Cooke's "master plan," the Psychedelic Rangers targeted selected individuals for high-dose LSD initiations. They employed 2,000 to 3,000 micrograms
(100 to 250 micrograms is usually sufficient for a full-blown acid trip) during a single session in an effort to bring about a rapid and permanent transformation of psychological disposition. Bowen claims he furnished acid to a number of well-known public figures, including comedian Dick Gregory and Jerry Rubin, the future Yippie leader. He also turned on certain journalists (among them a reporter for Life magazine) with the hope that they might see the Clear Light, as it were, and present a more favorable picture of LSD in the press. Cooke and his Psychedelic Rangers believed that by spreading the LSD revelation they were helping to enlighten mankind.
...The dealing operation was already in high gear when Timothy Leary decided to pull up roots and head for the West Coast, the Mecca of hippiedom. By the spring of 1967 the Millbrook scene was collapsing. Three rival religious sects (the League for Spiritual Discovery, the Neo-American Boohoo Church, and a Hindu-oriented ashram) had taken up residence at the acid commune, and the entire place was under round-the-clock surveillance by the police. California beckoned, and Billy Hitchcock, the Millbrook patron, decided to move to the Bay Area. He gave Leary a parting check for
$14,000 and sent him on his way after evicting everyone else from the estate.
...But Owsley had kept him on a short string financially, and Scully lacked the necessary resources to set up an underground laboratory. His search for monetary support led him to Billy Hitchcock, who was then living in Sausalito, a scenic tourist town just north of San Francisco. Hitchcock and Scully first became acquainted when the young chemist passed through the psychedelic menagerie at Millbrook in the spring of 1967. They hit it off immediately, and Hitchcock was pleased when Scully called on him again in Sausalito a few months later. They agreed to form a business partnership. Hitchcock would
lend him money for supplies and equipment, and Scully would synthesize LSD and other psychedelics. At first Scully proposed that they give the acid away free of charge, but his financial mentor would hear nothing of it. People wouldn't appreciate what they didn't have to pay for, Hitchcock argued, and after all, he was the boss.
...Hitchcock bought some property in Windsor, a small town sixty miles north of San Francisco. He helped Scully move to the premises, hauling large metal drums and wooden crates full of glass beakers, Bunsen burners, flasks, rubber tubing, chromatography columns, vacuum evaporators, and bundles of semiprecious compounds—all the equipment necessary for a sophisticated drug lab. In January, 1969, Sand and Scully went to work, each on a modest $12,000 yearly retainer from Hitchcock. Scully was absolutely meticulous, keeping hour-by-hour logs whenever he made a new batch of acid so there'd be no chance of mistakes. His LSD was said to be purer than Sandoz.
...But the image of the Brotherhood as saintly dealers did not tally with the seamier side of the fast-money crowd that gravitated around Billy Hitchcock, the sugar daddy of the LSD counterculture. Hitch-cock, ostensibly acting as a broker for a small investment firm called Delafield and Delafield, managed his business affairs by phone from Sausalito. His specialty was setting up tax shelters for various business associates, and he knew exactly what to do with the proceeds from the Brotherhood's missionary work. The dirty cash would be laundered through Bahamian slush funds in the same way professional criminals hid their gains. Hitchcock served as banker for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, although later he insisted he was nothing more than a financial adviser. In truth he had a lot to say about how things were done. According to Scully, he was involved in numerous planning sessions at his house in Sausalito. (Sometimes after these meetings they all got stoned and played Monopoly; Mr. Billy always won.) But Hitchcock never expected to make big money from LSD. He was in it more for the adventure. He enjoyed his status as the behind-the-scenes facilitator who brought people together and made connections. Most of all he liked to party, and he wanted to see more folks turn on to acid.
In the spring of 1968 Hitchcock and acid chemist Nick Sand journeyed to the
Bahamas, where they stayed at the spacious mansion of Sam Clapp, chairman of the local Fiduciary Trust Company. Clapp was a college chum of Hitchcock's and they had been doing business together for years. They arranged for Sand to open an account under a false name at Clapp's bank.
...Fiduciary's hermetic banking provisions also appealed to the likes of Bernie Cornfeld and Seymour ("The Head") Lazare, directors of the Swiss-based Investors Overseas Services (IOS), a fast-money laundry for organized crime, corrupt Third World dictators, wealthy expatriates, and freelance swindlers. Cornfeld and Lazare were both acid veterans.* Like everyone else, these hippie arbitrage experts needed a broker, and they found the boyish Mellon heir irresistible. Hitchcock took full advantage of his unlimited borrowing privileges at Fiduciary. At Clapp's urging he poured over $5,000,000 into unregistered "letter stocks" (the kind that aren't traded
publicly but tend to show dramatic gains on paper) associated with the Mary Carter Paint Company, later known as Resorts International. It was the single largest chunk of money raised by Resorts, an organization suspected of having ties to organized crime.† Resorts International proceeded to build a casino on an exclusive piece of Bahamian real estate called Paradise Island....James Crosby, president of Resorts International, contributed $100,000 to Nixon's campaign. Crosby and Bebe Rebozo, Nixon's best friend, mingled with a bevy of movie stars, jet setters, gangsters, and GOP faithful. Billy Hitchcock was also there, idling among the heavies with drink in hand.
...Castle Bank was no ordinary financial institution. Originally set up by the CIA as a funding conduit for a wide range of covert operations in the Caribbean, this sophisticated "money wash" was part of a vast worldwide financial network managed by American intelligence. Specifically the Agency used Castle Bank to facilitate the hidden transfer of huge sums to finance subversion, paramilitary operations, an occasional coup d'etat, bribery, and payments to foreign informants. Castle played a key role in funding the CIA’s secret war against Cuba—a campaign that drew upon the "patriotic" services of Mob hit teams assembled at the behest of the Agency to assassinate Fidel Castro. The Syndicate, seeking to return to the days when Havana
was the brothel of the Caribbean, had a score to settle with the Cuban president. They also had much to gain from a cozy relationship with the CIA, whose clandestine financial network provided a perfect shield for criminal activities. In effect Castle Bank was an intelligence front that covered for the Mob.*
* Castle Bank was founded and controlled by Paul Helliwell, a Miami lawyer with long-standing ties to American intelligence. Helliwell's career as a spook dates back to World War II, when he served as chief of special intelligence in China with the OSS. He stayed in the Far East when the CIA was formed and bossed a bevy of spies, including E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame. In the early 1950S Helliwell organized Sea Supply, a CIA proprietary company that furnished weapons and other material to anti-Communist guerrillas in the hills of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. Based in the Golden Triangle, this mercenary army cultivated fields of opium poppies, and the CIA was drawn immediately into the drug connection. Helliwell also served as paymaster for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. A few years later he set up Castle Bank, serving in a dual capacity as CIA banker and legal counsel for the Cuban Mafia, which prospered by selling Southeast Asian heroin in the US. Helliwell's law firm also represented Louis Chesler and Wallace Groves, both partners in Resorts International.
...A number of Mellons served in the OSS, notably David Bruce, the OSS station chief in London (whose father-in-law, Andrew Mellon, was treasury secretary during the Depression). After the war certain influential members
of the Mellon family maintained close ties with the CIA. Mellon family foundations have been used repeatedly as conduits for Agency funds. Furthermore, Richard Helms was a frequent weekend guest of the Mellon patriarchs in Pittsburgh during his tenure as CIA director (1966-1973).
...Hitchcock, who had been called to testify before the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding Fiduciary Trust, quickly shifted his assets—which included the Brotherhood's drug profits—into a series of new accounts (no names, just numbers) in Switzerland. A total of $67,000,000 illegally sloshed through Paravacini Bank in Berne.
Then something went amiss. Charles Rumsey, Hitchcock's bagman, ran afoul of Customs as he reentered the US in the summer of 1969 with $100,000 in cash. Rumsey choked and fingered his boss, revealing that the money came from various Paravacini accounts in Switzerland. Customs officials alerted the IRS, which already had a thick file on Billy Hitchcock. Freddie Paravacini, owner of the bank, produced a letter stating that the money was a loan, but his credibility was suspect among federal agents. He and Hitchcock had garnered millions from fraudulent stock manipulations. The scam buckled later that year when they gambled on some chancy issues. Both men took a bath, and Paravacini was eventually forced to sell his bank. Most of the LSD booty was squandered in the process—much to the chagrin of Nick Sand and the Brothers. A large chunk of Owsley's money, which Hitchcock had been
managing, was also lost due to stock market chicanery.
~~~~~~~
Despite the fact that they misspelled the name of the banker with whom Mellon set up the Swiss bank, Acid Dreams laid an amazing foundation for further study into how drugs helped to finance military intelligence and covert operations off-the-books. Pete Brewton first published the connection between Hitchcock and the Houston oilmen when he linked Paravicini to the Capital National Bank in Houston. I picked up from that point:
In the same year that Zapata and Pennzoil were moving toward hostile takeovers, a new Swiss bank opened in Houston with J. Hugh Liedtke and George Bush's securities adviser, W.S. Farish III, among the directors. Called "Bank for Investment and Credit Berne" (BICB), its stock was owned by Capital National Bank and Paravicini Bank, but investors included Seagrams, Boeing, Minute Maid in Zurich, the London subsidiary of Brown and Root and the Schlesinger Organization of London and Johannesburg. These investors are more than interesting in light of the fact that Paravicini is a descendant of the Venetian Pallavicini family, whose attorney in Rome,
Carlo d'Amelio, was the general counsel to Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), the Italian arm of Permindex. CMC was incorporated in Berne Switzerland, and D' Amelio sat on the board of directors during the time that Seagrams' attorney, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield of Montreal, was chairman of Permindex. When the role of CMC in the attempted assassination of President DeGaulle of France was discovered, it fled Europe and re-emerged in Johannesburg, South Africa. However, the parent company, Permindex, continued to be managed from Montreal by Bloomfield. Clay Shaw, the man prosecuted in New Orleans by Jim Garrison for his role in the Kennedy assassination, was also a board member of CMC, with which his International Trade Mart had connections....
The chairman of this Houston-based international investment bank, BICB, whose investors included Seagrams and the Schlesinger mining interests in South Africa, was Johan F. (Fred) Paravicini. Vice-chairman was L.F. McCollum, Sr.-a long-time Humble Oil employee, who headed Conoco and founded Capital National Bank of Houston in 1965. The bank's president was Baker Lovett, cousin of James A. Baker III, and grandson of the first president of Rice University, Odell Lovett, a friend of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton....In addition to its investment in the BICB set up by Conoco's chairman, Seagrams also owned a great deal of stock in Conoco and caused a major eruption with DuPont in 1981 over who would control the company. Seagrams was interested in Conoco because it owned a 53% interest in Hudson's Bay Oil and Gas Co. in Canada. Since it had recently received $2.3 billion cash profit from the sale of Sunoco stock, with which it had tried and failed to purchase control of DuPont's St. Joe Minerals, the Scottish-financed liquor barons at Seagrams saw another chance to grab something prized by the New Englanders-control of Conoco. In 1969 W.S. Farish III was 31 years old and was a partner in the investment companies of Underwood Neuhaus and W.S. Farish & Co., through which he handled millions of dollars of his family's wealth in addition to George Bush's blind trust.
...The decision to form a partnership with Paravicini may have also been influenced by another Lehman representative-William Mellon Hitchcock--grandson of William Larimer Mellon, founder of Gulf Oil, and nephew of banker Andrew Mellon. Bush's partners in Zapata were the sons of William Liedtke, Sr.-one of the "highest ranking lawyers in Gulf Oil Corp."
Billy Mellon Hitchcock worked from 1961 to 1967 for "his father's mentor," Bobby Lehman of Lehman Brothers in Manhattan. Fred Paravicini began an illegal trading relationship with Billy in 1965, for which they were not indicted until 1973-Hitchcock in February and Paravicini in June. Hitchcock pled guilty in April. He then appears to have disappeared from sight.
...Billy's training as an investment banker had taken place at the English branch of Lazard Freres, which has been shown to be closely tied to one of George Bush's original investors, Eugene Meyer, and to Everett DeGolyer, a Dresser director who had spent most of his career working for Sir Weetman Pearson (Viscount Cowdray). DeGolyer left his job at Amerada Petroleum in New York and moved to Dallas where he established a geological consulting firm called DeGolyer and MacNaughton and served from 1954 until his death in 1956 on the board of Dresser Industries in Dallas. He was replaced on the board by his partner, Lewis W. MacNaughton, who remained until 1969. Lewis MacNaughton was also a director of Empire Trust, a company whose largest single holding of stock was comprised of Loeb-Lehman, Bache and Bronfman holdings, in which Edgar Bronfman became a director in 1963. Edgar Bronfman, Sr. married the daughter of John L. Loeb (Loeb, Rhoades), who was himself married to a Lehman. A vice-president of Empire Trust in Dallas was Jack Crichton (also president of Nafco Oil & Gas, Inc.) who was connected with Army Reserve Intelligence.
The book I'm now working on is one which will document the history of what happened in Texas before Bush arrived and explain how Col. House of Texas set up the network that Bush took over from LBJ.
"History records that the Money Changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance." --James Madison
I'm sure Obama's proposals to "go after" tax havens from the Caribbean to Switzerland will quietly drop off the agenda. He must know who he'd be taking on...
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
Yes, Linda you pulled-out some of the best parts from the book. Leary was both a participant and a research subject of others [partly aware of this, and in part not, IMO]. How he got him money and mansion - not to mention access to LSD, etc. is most interesting. Ditto his relationship with Meyers and the turning-on of JFK (IMO used behind the scenes, by some, as the rationale for removal of a 'psychologically unfit' head of government - along with his being 'unfit' for standing-up to the Secret Government.) Leary's turning-up with Cleaver later is a whole other story...could be another thread.
"I was also a courier for the underground and that gave me a sense of importance, perhaps illusory. I delivered messages to Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman and most importantly to Eldridge Cleaver in North Africa in an attempt to mitigate the damage that Dr. Timothy Leary had caused. In September 1970, the Weather Underground aided and abetted Leary's escape from minimum-security prison in California, then sent him on his own way to Algeria, where Eldridge persuaded the government to grant him sanctuary -- as a political dissident from the USA. "The Weatherman Underground has the honor and pleasure of helping Dr. Timothy Leary escape from the POW camp at San Luis Obispo, California," Bernardine Dohrn wrote in the fourth communiqué -- one of the briefest -- from underground.
She went on to say that the organization committed itself to freeing "all prisoners of war in Amerikan concentration camps" -- but that was mostly all talk with little if any action. Before long, Bernardine's sense of honor and pleasure had turned to alarm. Leary broke a promise of silence and confidentiality. He talked about how he'd escaped from prison and who had helped him -- naming names. The safety and security of the organization was at stake and something had to be done to fix the damaging leak. Accordingly, I delivered a message from the underground to Cleaver warning him not to trust Leary. Cleaver promptly placed Leary under house arrest, which didn't help matters. Eventually, I came back to New York feeling that both Cleaver and Leary were as mad as could be and that the underground's liberation of Leary had backfired. Indeed, it seemed opportunistic, a kind of public relations ploy to win over followers of Leary and the drug culture. Abbie Hoffman would always say he was "leery of Leary," but his words had gone unheeded." http://www.sdonline.org/41/raskin.htm
Linda that sounds most intriguing. Hurry up and keep writing. That House guy is one I have always found most intriguing given his anglo ties, his association with Lippman and Carnegie Endowment in getting US in WWI on side of Brits and also in the Lipp-Synching of 14 Points.
It sounds like you might be onto a much earlier Cowboy and Yankee Teatime than some many others might have suspected! Cant wait.
22-02-2009, 09:58 AM (This post was last modified: 22-02-2009, 10:08 AM by Ron Williams.)
In the Winter 1988/1989 issue of his Project journal Lloyd Miller has a little blurb about Acid Dreams and he included a reprint of an interview with one of the authors, Martin A. Lee, that was in High Frontiers magazine (not sure what issue). Here is what he wrote:
[COLOR="Blue"]Drugs, the Occult and the Conspiracy
In this issue we are printing an interview entitled: “The CIA, LSD, and the Occult.” The interview and the interviewee’s book, Acid Dreams, contains many facts, theories, and speculations relevant to Project research.
Though the author is very fearful of “grand conspiracy theories,” this is just where his data leads him, kicking and screaming!
As a first priority, regardless of the cost in ruined lives of the drug addicted and crazed, the Catholic Church must be destroyed or, at least kept at bay. What better way than through the “Super Ego” destroying plague of drugs? Only when the super-ego, the brain’s antennae to receive commands from the social organism, is destroyed is the social organism of the old order really destroyed. Only then can the “New Age” social organism be built on the ruins of the old. (The Project, Winter 1988/89, Volume VI, Number 1, pp 1, 4-8)[/COLOR]
Interesting find Ron. I've tried to locate the piece but it's not available it seems. Pity.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
