American Family Foundation:
The Wardens in—Dirty Bertie’s
‘Lethal Chamber’

Lord Bertrand Russell, one of the honorary chairman of the Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism, spilled the beans on the network's efforts in mass social engineering in his 1951 book, The Impact of Science on Society. But this mind-control dictatorship was not a passing thought; Russell had been working on the idea for decades. Russell describes the program in a 1931 book, The Scientific Outlook —a totalitarian manual:

“In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called 'co-operative,' i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them.”

“Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order,” Russell explained, “members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative....”

Russell issued a strong warning: “On those rare occasions, when a boy or girl who has passed the age at which it is usual to determine social status shows such marked ability as to seem the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it.”

The American Family Foundation (AFF), the secretive organization founded in 1979, and advised by the veterans of the CIA's and Army Intelligence's mind-control programs: MK-Ultra, BLUEBIRD, MKSEARCH, etc., are the “thought police” for Russell's dictatorship. Since its founding, the AFF has functioned as a lead agency in the black propaganda campaigns directed by the Anglo-American elite against Lyndon LaRouche. The central lie employed in this campaign is that LaRouche is the authoritarian leader of a political cult with anti-Semitic views. There is no basis for the allegation; it is merely the attaching of the label of the Frankfurt School's “Authoritarian Personality” onto LaRouche in order to intimidate his supporters, and contain his influence. It is the AFF's assigned role.

The AFF, which purports to be an “educational” and “theoretical” organization in a self-declared war against coercive “cults,” is actually a clearinghouse for the “Reesian psychiatric shock troops” (after Dr. John Rawlings Rees of the British Tavistock Institute) who practice coercive techniques. In tandem with criminalized elements of law enforcement, and Anglo-American intelligence agencies, the AFF's associates, known as “deprogrammers,” ran one of largest kidnapping-for-hire operations in American history. Providing the “theoretical” basis were the veterans of the CIA's MK-Ultra projects in the AFF's stable of experts. The combination of the CCF-MK-Ultra's cultural warfare created the “new religions” cults in the first place; and some of AFF's “anti-cult” experts were directly involed.

The AFF is financed by the Anglo-American financial elite—Wall Street speculators such as the House of Morgan, the Watson family of IBM founder Thomas “Pop” Watson, an overt collaborator of Hitler and Mussolini's, and the ultra-rightwing Scaife Foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife, which funds the network of foundations and think tanks that controls Dick Cheney's war party. AFF also received initial grants from the Pew Foundation; like Watson, members of the Philadelphia-based Pew family were Hitler sympathizers, and were secret funders of pro-Hitler organizations in the U.S. during the 1930s.

The single largest financial promoters of the AFF for the past decade have been the Bodman and Achelis Foundations, providing more than half a million dollars. These two separate foundations have overlapping trustees and officers and are both housed in the New York City law offices of Morris and McVeigh. The key operative for the foundations is John Irwin III, the chairman and treasurer.

Irwin III, a Wall Street speculator who also owns large tracts of land in Arizona and California, specializes in managing the charitable foundations of America's patrician “families,” including the fortune of his grandfather, “Pop” Watson, the super-spook and collaborator with Hitler who headed IBM from the 1930s onward. His father, John Irwin II, was international legal counsel for the Morgan interests, and was Henry Kissinger's chief deputy as Secretary of State. While Irwin III's primary businesses have been two venture capital firms—Hillside Capital and Brookside—he is better known for managing private foundations.

In fact, each of AFF's sponsoring foundations has a long history in dirty Anglo-American intelligence operations. Bodman, for example, funded the infamous New Age project, the “Temple of Understanding” at the United Nations, run by the Lucifer-worshipping Lucis Trust. On the “right,” it funded the International Rescue Committee of neoconservative icon Leo Cherne, and the late CIA director Bill Casey; the Manhattan Institute; Claremont College; and other neoconservative Straussian nests.

Bodman's executive director, Joseph Dolan, is also executive director of the Philanthropy Roundtable, set up by the Bradley Foundation to coordinate grants from all “conservative foundations” in the U.S. in order to win ideological hegemony on the nation's campuses and in its political institutions. Another of John Irwin III's foundations publicly campaigned, post-9/11, for the Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilizations” justification for war against Islam.

AFF's official history claims it was founded in 1979 by a concerned parent, Kay Barney, the retired Raytheon International Affairs Director, and Dr. John Clark of Harvard Medical School, in response to the threat posed by violent and coercive cults, particularly in the aftermath of the purported mass suicides of the members of the People's Temple Church of the Rev. Jim Jones, in Guyana in 1978. In contemporary language, this version of AFF's founding is an “urban legend.” In reality, the AFF's business is mind-control. Three of its “experts,” Robert J. Lifton, Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, and Margaret Singer, did not merely study mind-control—they practiced coercive conditioning in the Nazi-doctor-style horrific secret experiments funded by the CIA's and Army intelligence's MK-Ultra. A fourth MK-Ultra veteran with AFF, Rabbi Maurice Davis, actually financed the psychotic Rev. Jim Jones of the People's Temple suicide church, in Jones's early years in Indianapolis.

However, in 1977, when a series of Congressional hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives forced the CIA et al. to close down the covert mind-control programs, Lifton, Singer, West, and others who had worked for years on the covert CIA payroll, were cut loose. They found a new home in the AFF.

To build up AFF, an extensive funding apparatus came into being after many children of the elite crossed class lines and succumbed to the counterculture, joining the Moonies, the Krishnas, the Scientologists, or similar entities that came into being in the counterculture explosion of the 1970s. For every new experiment in irrationality produced by the “Age of Aquarius,” there was to be an equally irrational inquisitor refining and playing with the new belief structures.

AFF's role in furthering the MK-Ultra tradition of mind-control isn't surprising. A faction of the financier establishment has always preferred intelligence operations to be under corporate, not government, control. In fact, after World War II, John Irwin III's grandfather, “Pop” Watson of IBM, planned exactly such a private intelligence empire. A “deputy director of the Office of Strategic Services” approached Watson “with a business proposition,” writes R. Harris Smith in his book, OSS. “Why not form a private intelligence organization and offer its services on contract to the government? The two men raised the initial capital for the venture....” However, the project was sidelined because Federal legislation, the National Security Act of 1947, was already being prepared to create the CIA. As the Iran/Contra affair showed in the 1980s, the financier establishment never abandoned its commitment to private intelligence operations.

The AFF is just such a private operation, which functions, in fact, as the controller of live psychiatric experiments conducted by a network of kidnappers for hire, con men, and body snatchers of limited intellectual means and criminal records who claim to be able to “deprogram” members of cults by application of aversive psychological conditioning techniques—while enjoying protection from prosecution for their activities.

These deprogrammers operate in tandem with a number of known criminal and mercenary-for-hire agencies, which at one time constituted perhaps the largest professional kidnapping ring in modern American history. Often, the kidnapping operations intersected the activities of criminalized segments of the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence community, and this complication allowed some members of the criminal enterprise to escape prosecution. Members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), an organization whose Israeli affiliates are on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, constitute one hard-core terrorist capability employed by AFF-related “deprogrammers.” The Lubavitcher sect, the Hells Angels motorcycle club, and former U.S. Special Forces and British Special Air Services (SAS) commandos have also been employed in kidnapping operations. For example, Galen Kelly, dean of the deprogramming fraternity, who had no professional psychological or other training, utilized JDL terrorists in his kidnappings, and, until the 1990s, was so revered by his sponsors that he was given a seat on the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Another JINSA Board member was Vice President Dick Cheney.

AFF, its close associate, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), and its cohort agency in attacks on LaRouche, the Anti-Defamation League, ran into turbulent times in the 1990s. CAN and its deprogrammer Rick Ross were convicted by a Federal jury of conspiracy and civil rights violations in their abusive kidnapping and deprogramming of Jason Scott, throwing CAN into bankruptcy. Galen Kelly was investigated and prosecuted federally for what Federal prosecutors called a garden-variety industry of kidnappings for hire. The ADL was revealed to be running a massive private political spying operation, collecting dossiers on thousands of Americans and groups whom the ADL viewed as subversive, or a potential threat to the policies of the insane Likud Party in Israel. Frederich Haack, the primary exponent and collaborator of the AFF in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, in November 1980, as international education director for the AFF, imported into Germany the Dennis King and ADL slanders against LaRouche in a collaborative effort with Kurt Hirsch, the editor of PDI (Democratic Press Initiative). Kurt Hirsch, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was exposed as an operative of the hated and feared East Germany intelligence agency the Stasi, specifically, Stasi Division X.

As a result of these scandals, in which Federal prosecutors characterized CAN as little more than a band of extortionists and con men preying on the emotions of frantic parents, and with the deaths of Margaret Singer, former AFF president Herbert Rosedale, and others, the AFF and the CAN network have been reorganized. Deprogrammers now characterize themselves as “exit counsellors” and “interventionists” and foreswear the techniques of the past. The name “Cult Awareness Network” was purchased by the Scientologists in CAN's bankruptcy proceedings, and the organization's former luminaries now operate under several different identities and websites. But AFF has recruited new officers and an international advisory board which extends into Mexico, Spain, Britain, and Europe, and is in a new aggressive mode.

A brief background sketch of the “professionals” who advise the AFF and CAN further demonstrates the project's nature.

• Rabbi Maurice Davis: Advisor to AFF and CAN, participant in the CIA's MK-Ultra mind control program in Lexington, Ky., and sponsor of the development of the Jim Jones cult in Indianapolis prior to Jones's move to Guyana and the ensuing mass suicide;
  
  
• Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West: Advisor to AFF, psychiatrist participating in the CIA's MK-Ultra LSD experiments and mind-control program in Oklahoma. West wrote that the government should supply drugs to control populations. “This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.” West directly collaborated with Huxley in drug experiments throughout the 1950s and early '60s.

In 1961, in a speech at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley elaborated his vision. “There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it,” lulled by “brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” After the 1960s race riots in the U.S., West promoted implanting electrodes in people's brains and chemical castration to control violence and political activity.

• Dr. Margaret Singer: Advisor to AFF and CAN. Singer got her start as an Army psychiatrist studying Chinese society, Korean War veterans, and prisoners of war in association with A.H. Schein and Robert J. Lifton in the 1950s. The impetus for these studies came from “journalist” Edward Hunter's sensationalist account of “Brainwashing in Red China, the Calculated Destruction of Men's Minds,” and subsequent accounts of Korean “brainwashing” methods. Hunter worked for Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination in the CIA, and his propaganda campaign was used to justify the entire MK-Ultra mind-control program. Otherwise, Singer's writings were cited by the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, Inc., a CIA front operating at the same time as the CCF. Singer and Jolly West often collaborated, including on profiling the Haight Ashbury hippie drug “culture,” interviewing drug-crazed hippies about their LSD-induced religious experiences. The LSD initially came from CIA and related intelligence projects.
  
  
• Eugene Methvin: An early board member of AFF and editor of the Reader's Digest. Methvin was a key promoter throughout the 1950s and '60s of utilizing private organizations to do the government's dirty work against “subversive threats.” Methvin believed that the methods of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, in using “guilt by association” and “calumny” to induce the desired popular opinion about targetted groups and individuals, were the appropriate “attack” prototypes.

While foundation money and media attention flowed to AFF for its activities, the theories of psychological coercion and cult activities advanced by Singer et al. on behalf of AFF were persistently rejected as being without scientific basis, in particular by the American Psychological Association (APA).

The AFF's definition of cults is drawn directly from Robert J. Lifton and his descriptions of “totalistic” environments and charismatic leaders—descriptions which themselves were developed in the CIA MK-Ultra context cited above and which also derive directly from Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and the Frankfurt School. Lifton states that the assumption governing all “totalistic” cults is “not so much that man can be God, but rather that man's ideas can be God; that an absolute science of ideas (and implicitly an absolute science of man) exists.” Lifton credits the Frankfurt School's Hannah Arendt as his mentor on this subject. Lifton, a dedicated existentialist, otherwise characterizes his work as the study of evil, and shared with Margaret Singer a fascination with the creation of schizophrenia.

As described earlier, the Frankfurt School saw as its historical task the destruction of Western civilization itself, first by undermining the Judeo-Christian legacy through an “abolition of culture,” and at the same time bringing into being new or counter cultures designed to increase the alienation of the population, creating “a new barbarism.” In the “authoritarian personality project,” funded by the American Jewish Committee ostensibly to explore the potential for anti-Semitism in the U.S., they attacked the “authoritarian character” of the American nuclear family, the “problem” of the American people's belief in a transcendent monotheistic God, the underlying “fascist” character of all forms of American patriotism, and American culture's excessive reliance on science, reason, and “abstract ideas.”

To transform the rational and productive society which was the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they proposed “techniques for overcoming resistance developed mainly in the field of individual psychotherapy,” and proposed that Eros be the major emotional source of “democracy.” To hold the “fascist impulse in check,” people must be able to “see themselves” and “be themselves.” Thus was born the erotic, perverse matrix of drug abuse, sexual perversion, and the glorification of violence which permeates our culture today. In one of the first newspaper slanders of Lyndon LaRouche in the Washington Post, a February 1974 article, reporter Paul Valentine opined that LaRouche must be authoritarian because he rejects “the free-wheeling self-indulgence of ... the radical counterculture.”

It is no wonder, then, that in 1987, the American Psychological Association categorically rejected the theories of Singer and her AFF friends. Singer, Jolly West, and Dr. Michael Langone, an executive with AFF and editor of the AFF's Cultic Studies Journal, had managed to sit on an APA task force to study Singer's theory of “Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control” (DIMPAC). But when the DIMPAC task force issued its report, on May 11, 1987, the APA's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility (BSER) issued an official memo, saying it was “unable to accept the report of the [DIMPAC] Task Force....” It lacked “the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for the APA imprimatur.” The decision stands to this day.

The methods of the MK-Ultra Nazi doctors come directly from the Frankfurt School, the CCF, and a project known as “the Cybernetics group,” which was the umbrella under which the CIA and British intelligence conducted their mass experimentation with psychedelics, including LSD-25, which eventually spilled out onto the streets of America's cities, and every American college campus, giving us the counterculture paradigm shift of 1966-72.

On the government side, MK-Ultra was created by the same people who created the CCF: CIA Director Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). MK-Ultra was one of a dozen psy-ops programs with similar names using LSD-25, other hallucinogens, electroshock, planting of electrodes in the brains of subjects, sensory deprivation, and a host of other techniques in mind-control. The human guinea pigs were often unwitting. Dozens of deaths resulted, but the real number will never be known because then-CIA Director Richard Helms, who had worked with Dulles and Wisner, destroyed the files in 1977, when the U.S. Congress began an investigation.

But “the Cybernetics group,” which was intertwined with the Authoritarian Personality project of the Frankfurt School crowd, was much higher-level—and private. Two of the Authoritarian Personality project's directors, Max Horkheimer and R. Nevitt Stanford, who headed up Stanford University Institute for the Study of Human Problems, were directly involved in the LSD-25 mind-manipulation scheme.

Horkheimer was not only central to the CCF, he was also a leading participant in “the Cybernetics group,” which began its work on mind-control, financed by the Josiah Macy Foundation, in 1942. The Cybernetics group was also known as the “man-machine project” because of its study of Artificial Intelligence based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The leading participants in the Cybernetics group were Warren McCulloch, from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT; Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist who became the director of research at the Veterans' Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., where he ran secret MK-Ultra experiments; Bateson's wife, Margaret Mead, the anthropology “earth goddess” who became renowned as a proponent of negative population growth and primitive cultures. Several other leaders of the Cybernetics group were deeply involved in the CCF: John Von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and Paul Lazarsfeld.

The MK-Ultra quacks also developed the arguments used today by George Soros's massive drug-legalization apparatus. CIA mind-manipulator R. Nevitt Stanford, who was part of the MK-Ultra programs, makes the argument in his forward to the book Utopiates: The Use and Users of LSD-25, published by the Tavistock Institute in 1965. “Only an uneasy Puritan” could support treating drug addicts “as a police problem instead of a medical one, while suppressing harmless drugs such as marijuana and peyote along with the dangerous ones.”

In fact, the two primary operatives employed by the AFF and the ADL in operations against LaRouche since 1978—Chip Berlet and Dennis King—are both lower-level operatives of the MK-Ultra-created drug legalization lobby. King was a featured “expert” speaker at AFF's October 2003 meeting. “Chip” Berlet's real name is John Foster Berlet, so named by his father because of the latter's admiration for John Foster Dulles. Early in his career, Chip was exposed as working for the CIA at the National Student Association and WIN magazine—both productions of the CCF's Tom Braden and Cord Meyer. King, a former Maoist, was directly sponsored in his early defamatory activities against LaRouche by Roy M. Cohn, the notorious counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In 1983 and 1984, when the Anglo-American Synarchists needed to contain LaRouche, who had influenced then-President Ronald Reagan to adopt a policy of strategic defense and cooperation with the Soviet Union, they turned to Manhattan investment advisor John Train, a trusted CCF hand and former OSS operative. Train, who had been prominent in the CCF's Paris Review and worked with the likes of Stephen Spender, convened a salon of journalists, private foundations, and U.S. government national security officials in New York City for the purpose of creating and executing a sustained and massive media assault on LaRouche. The declared aims of the Train meetings were to destroy LaRouche's political policy influence, disrupt his political organization, and set the stage for state and Federal prosecutions. A massive black propaganda barrage ensued from these meetings.

At the Train meetings were representatives of the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, NBC television, Reader's Digest, the ADL, Freedom House (a direct offshoot of the CCF run by Leo Cherne and operative Melvin Lasky in his later years), and Richard Mellon Scaife. Roy Godson, then employed by the National Security Council and heavily enmeshed in the Iran/Contra operation, was a leading participant. Godson, the son of CFF's Joe Godson and inheritor of networks controlled by the CIA's agents in the trade unions, Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, had played a major role in operations against LaRouche dating back to 1975. Biographies of CIA counterintelligence head James Jesus Angleton say that he was engaged in a “vendetta” against LaRouche at this time; and Angleton was a source in some of the stories which flowed from the Train meetings.

Chip Berlet and Dennis King's attendance at the Train meetings was financed by British spook John Rees, a notorious rightwing police and FBI spy, who moved to the United States. And financing of King's book-length diatribe against LaRouche by the powerful neoconservative Smith-Richardson Foundation was arranged at the Train meetings.