Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America

[Peter Lemkin]

"The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America"

IMHO, a rather poor review [naive] about a very good book!.......and about a GREAT American researcher!

The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America

Edited by Alex Constantine
Foreword by Paul Krassner
Publisher: Feral House

Review by [B]Mike Kuhlenbeck[/B]

Mae Brussell has been called "the intellectual forbear of the study of parapolitics" by conspiracy writer Kenn Thomas and "the Queen of Conspiracy" by others. This book of articles, interviews and radio transcripts from Brussell's prolific career, however, shows a complex, compassionate woman whose work challenges and compels.

Mae Brussell was born May 29, 1922, in Beverly Hills, her father Rabbi Edgar Magnin of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the man who blessed President Richard Nixon at the White House. Magnin's close connections to Hollywood earned him a nickname: Rabbi of the Stars. Brussell grew up in an affluent, mostly conservative family. She married and had five children. In a 1974 interview with Playgirl, she described years of studying the world through a traditional lens:

I went to Stanford University and got married a few weeks before graduation. I majored in philosophy. We studied Plate, Nietzsche, Emerson, and Thoreau yet the professors didn't seem to understand anything about real life. Those were the war years, 1940 to 1943. Hitler was raising a holocaust all over Europe but we were upper middle-class children, so we studied medieval history … It was as if the world outside didn't exist.

The age of innocence for Brussell ended with rifle shots in Dallas and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. In the wake of that event, Brussell purchased all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission Reportand painstakingly cross-referenced every detail in the report, a task that took eight tedious years and resulted in 27,000 pages of textual analysis. She found an abundance of contradictions, omissions and distortions, casting doubt on the validity of the official investigation into Kennedy's death. She used this work, she says, as her "Rosetta Stone."
"It unlocked every other conspiracy," Brussell told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981.
Brussell channeled her revelations on the radio broadcast Dialogue: Conspiracy (later called World Watchers International) on KLRB, an FM station in Carmel, California. In 1983, she moved her hour-long program to KAZU-FM in nearby Pacific Grove. She produced 851 broadcasts for a devoted legion of listeners, engaging supporters and detractors for 17 years until she died of cancer in 1988 at age 66. She holds the distinction of teaching the first accredited college course in conspiracy, "American Assassinations," this at Monterey Peninsula College.
Before the Internet, Brussell collected her trove of research using old-school techniques. She lined the walls of her home with dozens of bookshelves and 39 four-drawer filing cabinets filled with newspaper clippings, magazines, underground zines, unpublished manuscripts, declassified government documents and other materials. She used these to cross-reference items and talking points she found in mainstream press.
"There are ways to counteract the evil being purposely planned," Brussell said. "Study history. Separate fears and prejudices from facts. Recognize facts from propaganda. Invest energy in fighting for what you believe in. Analyze harder where we are going and what you are doing about it. What do you really believe in? How much do we care?"
She found a supporter in journalist Paul Krassner, founder of the now-defunct counterculture magazine The Realist, who also wrote the introduction to this collection. He affectionately referred to Brussell as the "Bionic Researcher." He published her first full-length article in 1972, a piece on the Watergate break-in. (John Lennon financed it, providing $5,000 for printing costs.) Brussell also published articles in Hustler, People's Almanac, The Rebel and the Berkeley Barb, and assisted with research for Ramparts.
"I thought she was an American hero," Krassner told the San Jose Mercury News. "We should look upon her as a role model for not accepting things that are spoon-fed to us, not accepting it automatically as the truth."
Some critics may charge that Brussell's dusty relics of history have no value in contemporary America. But one need look no further than her issues government surveillance, endless war, the oligarchic control of the ultra-wealthy to see vital connections to our times.
Brussell's conspiracy theories feel remote from those of far-right ideologies that underlie today's so-called conspiracy culture. Brussell inclined her attitudes more toward the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, although she did not allow the "right and left dichotomy," as she put it, to skew her research.
Contemporary conspiracy-mongers (disciples of the John Birch Society; Gary Allen, author of None Dare Call it Conspiracy) thrive on elements of xenophobia and nationalism. Brussell despised this. She focused on the ruling class, what we hear today called "the illuminati," and speculated that it might successfully implement a "divide and conquer" strategy in times of turmoil to distract people from the crimes of those in power. Some thoughts seem eerily prophetic.
I believe that the Nazis and the Minutemen and the Christian movement are going to get very strong, and at the same time there's going to be a massive depression. I see large masses of people around the world being deliberately starved every day. I see terrible things happening to reduce the population of this earth, so that those who control the corporations don't have to provide for the needs of the poor.
These words, spoken in 1978, sound more relevant today than when first uttered.
Pundits, politicians and academics use the term conspiracy theorist to smear the reputations of those who hold unpopular opinions or who challenge a widely accepted narrative. Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey points out in this book's preface that the CIA facilitated the term through media to discredit those who challenged Warren Commission findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in Kennedy's murder.
Civil discourse on conspiracies changed drastically when Obama appointed legal scholar Cass Sunstein to his cabinet in 2008 as administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein co-authored an essay entitled "Conspiracy Theories" that proposed government agents infiltrate groups that promote "anti-government conspiracy theories" to disrupt and disband them in a fashion similar to former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO program.
Sunstein and co-author Adrian Vermeule state in their proposal, "Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories raises significant challenges for policy and law."
Mae Brussell's collection challenges such blind assertions, touching on a wide range of crimes in fact perpetrated by the US government: the FBI's complicity in the assassinations of Black Panther Party leaders; the CIA's recruitment of Nazi war criminals into the agency shortly after WWII; the U.S. military's backing of right-wing terrorist regimes in Latin America.
Many of these events get lost in the memory hole. It takes someone like Brussell to rescue them, to preserve this information and use it to prevent such events from happening again.

[Dawn Meredith]

I thought the review was ok. It gives her credit as a pioneer and incredible researcher.
Mae demonstrated that one person can truly make a difference.
Dawn

[Peter Lemkin]

Mae Brussell quotes
[back]
The main Brussell thesis, if I dare risk commit the sin of summary on her complex work, was that an
ex-Nazi scientist-Old Boy OSS clique in the CIA using Mafia hit men changed the course of American
history this past quarter-century by bumping off one and all, high and low, who became an irritant to
them. She believed the Manson family was set up by counterintelligence types to blacken the image of
anti-war-music-and-youth longhairs who were becoming a threat to the dominant culture and that
Jonestown was a medical and mind-control experiment in getting rid of undesirables. [1988] CIA-Mafia
conspirators can rest easier by Warren Hinckle
"Without control of labor and energy you cannot maintain power over people" CARMEL CLOSEUP:
Mae Brussell
"I am against the constant destruction of evidence in criminal matters and political assassinations. Prime
witnesses are murdered before or after testifying. Diaries are forged and planted in obvious places.
Doubles are created to confuse. The Police Departments manipulate facts in cooperation with
conspirators. I am outraged that our judicial system since 1947 has been patterned after Nazi Germany." -
Mae Brussell
The U.S. Army got interested in LSD for interrogation purposes in 1950. After May, 1956, until 1975, the
U.S. Army Intelligence and the U.S. Chemical Corps "experimented with hallucinogenic drugs."
The CIA and Army spent $26,501,446 "testing" LSD, code name EA 1729, and other chemical agents.
Contracts went out to forty-eight different institutions for testing. The CIA was part of these projects.
They concealed their participation by contracting to various colleges, hospitals, prisons, mental hospitals,
and private foundations.
The LSD I will refer to is the same type of LSD that the CIA used because of the similarity of
symptoms between their reports and what happened to musicians or hippies after 1967. We shall be
speaking of CIA-LSD, not pure LSD.
Government agents and the ability to cause permanent insanity, identical to schizophrenia, without
physician or family knowing what happened to the victim.
"No physical examination of the subject is required prior to the administration of LSD. A physician need
not be present. Physicians might be called for the hope they would make a diagnosis of mental-breakdown
which would be useful in discrediting the individual who was the subject of CIA interest. Richard Helms,
CIA Director, argued that administering drugs, including poisonous LSD, might be on individuals who
are unwitting as this is the only realistic method of maintaining the capability considering the intended
operational use to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly be
unwitting."---Senate Report to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities",
Book I, page 401, April 1976.
When the first reports came out that the CIA could administer a tasteless substance into the beverage of
one of their most responsible co-workers, and drive that man into a mental institution, or cause him to
jump out of a window to his death, all existing CIA records were destroyed.
Hippies and musicians, previously normal and creative, with families and loved ones identical to Dr.
Frank Olson, responded in the same manner as Dr. Olson after their introduction to the same drugs.
U.S. agents were able to destroy any persons reputation cause by inducing hysteria or excessive
emotional responses, temporary or permanent insanity, suggest or encourage suicide, erase memory,
invent double or triple personalities inside one mind, prolong lapses of memory, teach and induce racism
and hatred against specific groups, cause subjects to obey instructions on the telephone or in person,
hypnotically assure no memory remains of the assignments.
While pure LSD is usually 160 micrograms, the CIA was issuing 1600 micrograms. Some of their LSD
was administered to patients at Tulane University who already had wired electrodes in their brain.
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Was being crazy an occupational disease of being a musician? Or does this LSD, tested and described
in Army documents, explain how a cultural happening that was taking place in 1967-68 could be halted
and altered radically? [1976] OPERATION CHAOS The CIA's War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture
by Mae Brussell
Imported narcotics, on CIA planes and otherwise, serve three purposes important to the federal
government.
First, it is good business, exceeding war profits. The drug dealers work with the intelligence and
military in many ways. Profits gained from drug traffic help support racist projects, including political
conspiracies and assassinations.
Second, provocateurs and police agents purposely push narcotics into the ghettos to control the
minorities. According to Louis Tackwood, the Los Angeles Police Dept. supplied drugs, as do other
police agencies.
Third, the necessary violence and crime in the streets caused by supporting drug habits requires more
police, local helicopters, surveillance, arrests without warrants, framing selected patsies by planting
evidence on the premises, and makes the law enforcement agent protector of our life and property. [1973]
Why Is the Senate Watergate Committee Functioning As Part of the Cover-Up? by Mae Brussell
"When JFK made peace overtures with Khruschev or Castro, or talked about banning nuclear weapons,"
this presented a loss of cheap labor, of nuclear power over people, and of special interest groups' hope to
regain their lost landholdings (the White Russians). He had to be done away with.
The CIA, she says, "assassinates heads of states and rulers of countries wherever people had a chance
for liberation Greece, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, etc. They supply military assistance, send in
arms and assassinate their leaders."
........... "John Kennedy's coat and the X-rays are locked up for 75 years. We should be able to see if there
are any more holes in it. I resent that we can't see these things. The material should be available to any
expert in forensic medicine. When you have secrets, you have more deaths."
...............She continues: "I want a list of the people who destroyed physical evidence. Kennedy's car was
airlifted to Washington and then to Dearborn, Michigan where the interior was completely ripped out and
destroyed. There was no ballistic examination of the seats or dashboard. How many bullets were there and
from what direction did they come? Who gave the order to destroy the interior of that car?
"There was a lamppost and a street sign removed from in front of the school book depository. Governor
Connally's clothing was sent immediately to the dry cleaners and thus destroyed as evidence (for bullet
entry and exit wounds).
"Oswald's State Department papers were burned 'as a result of Thermofaxing.'
"You can only solve a murder by knowing who's destroying the evidence.
"I want to find out who destroys it. And who controls the trials on these men (the assassins)? CARMEL
CLOSEUP: Mae Brussell
I personally believe the JFK assassination was an intelligence operation, and that Oswald was a
government agent. I'd like to do a book on Oswald, showing how our society can take a person into
military service, train him, set him loose, and use him -- then turn its back, lock him up, or kill him when
he has done his work. Oswald was expendable; he was a 'throw-away person.' If you care for my view, he
was framed, defamed, and then murdered.
.................The biggest problem for the researcher is that the average person can't even conceive of the
possibility of conspiracies. But if enough people realized the truth, they could end the devastating process
that has kept us constantly at war to protect the financial interests of a small group of people. Playgirl
Interview
Bowart's allegations about the CIA using ultrasonic waves on the human brain to control the behavior
pattern of entire cities confirms information I received in 1974 about the same project. A reliable source
of information told me that a radio tower and a tall bank tower in San Francisco were going to extend a
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beam to have virtual radio control of that entire city. He informed me that the radio frequencies would
make meditation impossible. The radio towers were being utilized for future control of our minds. The
same week that I received this information, an article in the Los Angeles Times appeared mentioning the
use of radio beams over large cities to control the population. Conspiracy Digest newsletter interview
with Mae
She had alleged in a radio broadcast that the Manson Family was working with the Los Angeles Sheriff's
Department to commit mass murders. Conspiracy Theorist Mae Brussell Dies of Cancer
As a quick introduction to some major members of the "Secret Team" that Mae began to not only adroitly
identify, but also, pin down their team position ... do the names Richard Secord, John Singlaub, Thomas
Clines, Theodore Shackley or Fritz Kraemer mean anything to you? Have you noticed any peculiar
connections? Richard Secord is a senior Air Force General, John Singlaub a highly placed Army
General, and both are identified with official Joint Chiefs of Staff decisions. Thomas Clines and Theodore
Shackley both are former CIA operatives specifically involved with clandestine operations (most of which
are so covert that the Congress was never informed.)
Fritz Kraemer for many years was Plans Officer at the Pentagon. Mae identified him as "Number One"
most powerful person in the United States. She suspected that he was the very same Fritz Kraemer who
was very high up in Hitler's regime and personally responsible for extremely strategic fascist atrocities in
WWII. Mae believed they were the same man, but she never had any solid evidence and she always made
the distinction between supposition and proven fact. All of these men are identified as being major players
in what Mae, and increasingly more, political analysts have called "The Secret Team". Mae believed and
was prominent in the movement to prove the existence of a covert power group comprised of military, and
more significantly, major corporate business concerns. They (the Secret Team) are a chain of
wide-ranging, long standing, government over-riding (sometimes usurping) corporations and
governmental structures throughout the Western "Free World" sphere of influence. Generally they
operated within, and/or in the crevices of, the U.S. government heirarchy. Eyes Wide Open
"Once the people are terrorized, you can force a police state on them. The San Francisco Chronicle
recently ran an article with the headline, "A Constant Watch on Radicals Urged." The article talks about a
report made to a California Senate Subcommittee, based on the recommendations of a 63-page manual.
Where did this manual come from? They don't even know who or what the S.L.A. is yet, but the manual
is there, and the report is ready within five weeks of the Hearst kidnapping. They recommend increased
security for homes and offices, a constant watch on "radicals" such as blacks, chicanos, and labor
organizations, and a neighborhood spy on every block. This is Nazi Germany."--Mae Brussell INSIDE
THE HEARST KIDNAPPING
There is a tendency to simplify the culprits, such as trying to blame the C.I.A. alone for the Watergate
affair, or other political assassinations and conspiracies. The fact is that the Pentagon, all branches of the
armed forces, and the combined intelligence agencies work together in these plots. Extermination,
murder, brain mutilation, electrode implants, and torture are nothing but a continuation of policies begun
in Nazi Germany and imported into the United States during World War II. Mae Brussell INSIDE THE
HEARST KIDNAPPING
The evidence of planned genocide is there, right in front of us, if we take the trouble to piece it together.
Mae Brussell INSIDE THE HEARST KIDNAPPING
The FBI has been behind every domestic conspiracy for the past thirty years. The intelligence agencies
provided the safe houses, the agents, the weapons, and the funding. Mae Brussell INSIDE THE HEARST
KIDNAPPING
Lawrence Kwong made an assassination attempt against Jim Dunbar, a well-known radio personality in
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San Francisco. Kwong held a weapon up to a glass window at KGO, while Dunbar was on the air. The
alarming statement that a killer was at the window went out over the air. Then Kwong went inside the
building, and killed an employee named Ben Munsen. Following that, he ran down the street and
committed suicide. There is good reason to believe that Kwong was surgically programmed to commit
this violence. Secrecy regarding his purchase of the weapon, previous hospital care, trip to Hawaii, and
autopsy strongly suggest a conspiracy in this case. The "official" investigation was very hushed up, and
left more room for doubts than questions answered. Mae Brussell INSIDE THE HEARST
KIDNAPPING
This serves as an alternative to some of the recent elaborate plane crashes, involving the deaths of
hundreds of innocent people, which have been arranged to disguise the murder of the one or more people
aboard who were the real targets. Mae Brussell INSIDE THE HEARST KIDNAPPING
The usual pattern is for the media to clumsily reveal about half of the story. The other half -- such as
evidence that conspiracies exist -- is carefully covered up. Only enough is "revealed" to program the
public, convince them they are being told what is going on, confuse them, and throw them off the track.
Mae Brussell INSIDE THE HEARST KIDNAPPING
The criminal conspiracy section of the L.A.P.D., described by Louis Tackwood in his book, "The Glass
House Tapes," sent DeFreeze to the California Medical Facility, at Vacaville, which is famous for its
behavior modification programs.
Since DeFreeze had been certified by the L.A.P.D. as a man who "had no identity of his own," the
behavior modification people at Vacaville decided to give him one. They profiled him after Ruchell
Magee, a student of law, a black man who is serving time at San Quentin prison. DeFreeze took the name
of "Cinque," a black slave leader, which was also Magee's chosen name for himself. Mae Brussell
INSIDE THE HEARST KIDNAPPING
Around the time that Kennedy died in Dallas, Jack Ruby had been in the company of two known
hypnotists. One of them was CIA agent David Ferrie, from New Orleans. The other was Billie Del Mar,
who was then entertaining in Jack Ruby's Carousel Club. Del Mar fled from Dallas the day of the
Kennedy assassination, and was never called to testify before the Warren Commission. Mae Brussell
INSIDE THE HEARST KIDNAPPING
The extent and scope of these methods of ordering behavior and erasing memory, following these acts of
murder, has to be exposed. You can erase the memory of a murder from a person's mind through hypnosis.
You can also implant the conviction that a man has committed a murder, when in fact, he has not.
This happened in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, where it was suggested to Sirhan Sirhan, by
his psychiatrist, how he killed Robert Kennedy. Evidence exists to disprove this theory. Mae Brussell
INSIDE THE HEARST KIDNAPPING
Hundreds of political assassinations related to minority races, labor leaders, spokesman against Fascism
have taken place in the U.S. since World War II. In 1963 the political assassination of President John
Kennedy in Dallas became necessary for our own hidden, clandestine government to maintain control.
The candidate for President in 1968, Robert Kennedy, was murdered by the same people on the night of
his victory in election primaries. United States law courts, plus the Supreme Court, have supported this
clandestine government and military regime by lending their name to the concealment of the conspiracies
to murder our leaders. They refuse to examine documents that exist, allow truth to remain locked in the
National Archives on the basis of the lie, "national security." How Nixon Actually Got Into Power
Adolph Hitler declared war in 1941. By 1942 Allen Dulles was moved to Switzerland for the purpose of
rounding up and importing to the United States, German "specialists." Two years before the war ended, or
its fate was decided, the United States was making arrangements for Nazi scientists, arms experts to come
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to our democracy (for which the boys were fighting and dying at that moment).(12) How Nixon Actually
Got Into Power
"We are going to see a great number of articles in the future from so-called experts and public officials.
They will warn about more violence, more kidnappings, and more terrorists. Mass media, the armed
forces, and intelligence agencies will saturate our lives with fascist scare tactics and 'predictions' that have
already been planned to come true." ---'Conspiracy theorist' Mae Brussell, 1974 (sourced)
From 1945 until 1952 the U.S. military brought over 642 alien "specialists" and their families from nazi
Germany. They were known collectively by the code name "paperclip." German missile and rocket
experts, munition makers, war experts were carefully selected and located into aerospace programs, war
industries, armament factories, defense and warfare manufacturing.(13) How Nixon Actually Got Into
Power
Richard Nixon, like Adolph Hitler, is a patchwork quilt. Both men represent the sum total of all murders,
secret plans, behind-the-scene covert imaginations that created their existence. They were hand-sewn and
designed by identical masters. It was a community project between persons from Nazi Germany and the
United States military and intelligence agencies.
They are in power today, continuing mass murders, political assassinations. How Nixon Actually Got
Into Power
Over FOUR HUNDRED POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS of legitimate government officials from various
agencies in Germany took place during that period. These murders were necessary for the desired power
and position the hidden German government needed. German law courts, plus their Supreme Court,
assisted the growing military regime from 1920-1933. How Nixon Actually Got Into Power

[Tracy Riddle]

I didn't realize until recently that Mark Lane was definitely not a fan of her work. He even called her and Sherman Skolnick "nuts."

[Drew Phipps]

Peter: Can you provide a link to, or reference one of her writings with respect to the "White Russian" community remark above?

[Lauren Johnson]

The targeting of Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac) in Munich, March, 1970. Classic example.

[Tracy Riddle]

The targeting of Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac) in Munich, March, 1970. Classic example.

That's a sad story. Peter Green was such an amazing guitarist/singer/songwriter. But I'm not sure why they would target Fleetwood Mac. They weren't a political or revolutionary band in any way. At the time, they were just doing straight blues.

[Lauren Johnson]

That's a sad story. Peter Green was such an amazing guitarist/singer/songwriter. But I'm not sure why they would target Fleetwood Mac. They weren't a political or revolutionary band in any way. At the time, they were just doing straight blues.

The two who went after Green, were part of the German extreme left, which it seems to me should raise suspicions. FM was very popular in Europe at the time. Here is the wiki version:

Fleetwood Mac were an extremely popular band in Europe at the time. However, Peter Green, the frontman of the band, was not in good health. He had taken LSD in Munich, which may have contributed to the onset of his schizophrenia.[SUP][18][/SUP] German author and filmmaker Rainer Langhans mentions in his autobiography that he and Uschi Obermaiermet Peter Green in Munich, where they invited him to their "High-Fish-Commune". They were not really interested in Green; they just wanted to get in contact with Mick Taylor: Langhans and Obermaier wished to organise a "Bavarian Woodstock". They wanted Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones to be the leading acts of their Bavarian open air festival. They needed Green just to get in contact with The Rolling Stones via Mick Taylor.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP]

PS Whether Green was the specific target or not, it seems as though they had the CIA version of LSD.

[Magda Hassan]

PS Whether Green was the specific target or not, it seems as though they had the CIA version of LSD.

Yes this is the key. Poor Green just collateral damage and a way to get to bigger fish.

[Magda Hassan]

I didn't realize until recently that Mark Lane was definitely not a fan of her work. He even called her and Sherman Skolnick "nuts."

Me either. And Skolnik's work is also very good.