A Short History of NATO Fascism : Greek Tragedies

Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos 

(Greek: Γεώργιος Παπαδόπουλος) 

5 May 1919 – 27 June 1999

He held dictatorial power in Greece from 1967–1973, until he was himself overthrown by his co-conspirator Dimitrios Ioannidis. 

"It has been claimed that Papadopoulos was the first CIA agent to govern a European country."

(Wikipedia)

Prime Minister to

General Scobie

(Athens) Repeated to

General Wilson (Italy)

5 Dec. 44

I have given instructions to General Wilson to make sure that all forces are left with you and all possible reinforcements are sent to you.

2. You are responsible for maintaining order in

Athens and for neutralising or destroying all E.A.M.-E.L.A.S. bands approaching the city. You may make anyregulations you like for the strict control of the streets or for the rounding up of any number of truculent persons.

Naturally E.L.A.S. will try to put women and children in the van where shooting may occur. You must be clever about this and avoid mistakes. But do not hesitate to fire at any armed male in Athens who assails the British authority or Greek authority with which we are working.

It would be well of course if your commands were reinforced by the authority of some Greek Government, and Papandreou is being told by Leeper to stop and help. Do not however hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.

3. With regard to E.L.A.S. bands approaching from the outside, you should surely be able with your armour to give some of these a lesson which will make others unlikely to try. You may count upon my support in all reasonable and sensible action taken on this basis. 

We have to hold and dominate Athens. 

It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary.

Churchill’s Lepidus Complex

For three centuries, the British had tried to dominate Europe and the world through the balance of power. In 1945, instead of being the protagonists of the balancing act, they saw themselves as being balanced, played off against the USSR by FDR. Churchill was always reluctant to hear the allies described as “the Big Three” by Eden or others. At Harrow, Churchill had learned of the second triumvirate of the Roman Republic, with Marc Anthony (lord of the east), Octavian (later Augustus) and M. Aemilius Lepidus. Now, if FDR was Augustus and Stalin was Marc Anthony, Churchill knew that the British would be forced to play the role of the inconsequential Lepidus, the virtual servant of the other two. The British Establishment rebelled against this fate. 

Churchill The Provcateur

By the autumn of 1944, the final defeat of Germany was clearly not far off. Churchill gave increasing thought to sabotaging FDR’s grand design for the postwar world. During the war, Churchill had delayed, sabotaged, and crippled allied strategy with his lunatic plans for an invasion of Europe through the “soft underbelly” of the Balkans, or for “a campaign across the Indian Ocean” when MacArthur was within striking distance of Manila. As World War II in Europe moved towards its end, Churchill began to scheme for ways to provoke a clash between the US and the USSR. 

The first step was to re-assert a British sphere of influence in the Balkans on the basis of virtually nothing, since the entire area, except for Greece, was occupied or about to be occupied by the Red Army. This was Churchill’s mission on his infamous “Tolstoi” solo trip to Moscow in October, 1944. At a meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin, Churchill advanced his “naughty document” giving Moscow and London percentages of control in the Balkans, as if these countries had been targets of a leveraged buy-out. Churchill proposed: 

Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans. Your armies are in Roumania and Bulgaria…Don’t let us get at cross-purposes in small ways. So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Roumania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?

Churchill offered Stalin 75% of Bulgaria as well. He claimed that Stalin made a check mark opposite these figures. 

In Greece, Churchill gave Stalin an object lesson of what “influence” meant. German forces left Greece in October, 1944. Effective control of the country outside of Athens passed into the hands of the EAM-ELAS communist guerillas. Churchill rushed in British troops, with the goal of restoring the monarchy of King George II and a court of Nazi collaborateurs. 

In one of his most infamous dispatches, Churchill told the British commander, Gen. Scobie, to treat Athens like “a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.” Scobie was instructed not to hesitate to provoke a bloodbath. The British soon made clear that their first priority was the disarming of the communist guerillas. On December 3, 1944 EAM-ELAS staged a demonstration in Athens to show its vast support. The British forces opened fire, and fighting raged in Athens. 

To suppress EAM-ELAS, Churchill insisted on withdrawing British forces from nearby Italy, where a real war was still being fought, and shipping them over to Athens. When he tried to commandeer US troop transports, US Admiral King overrode him with an order that no American ships would be used to ferry Churchill’s soldatesca and supplies to Greece. The Stettinius State Department expressed indignation about this British atrocity, and followed up with a rebuff to London for attempting to dictate the internal arrangements in Italy. Congressmen took turns excoriating Scobie. The British Embassy in Washington cabled London that “suspicion of British despotism in Europe is now thoroughly awakened.” [Charmley, p. 597] Hopkins told Churchill that “public opinion here has rapidly deteriorated” towards the British. 

By the end of the year, Americans were more upset by the British crackdown in Greece than by the actions of the USSR in Poland. This, at least, was the finding of a public opinion poll cited to FDR by Secretary of State Stettinius in December, 1944. This poll showed that “Americans distrusted Britain more than they did Russia.” [Gaddis, p. 155] 

The Greek explosion had severely discredited the British in US eyes. In December, 1944 it seemed that the split might be US-USSR against UK. By his brutality in Athens, Churchill had set a standard of behavior against communists which many in the Soviet bureaucracy would claim for their own dealings with pro-British elements not just in Romania and Bulgaria, but in Poland as well. That would make Poland into a showcase of Soviet brutality, and the results could be played back into the US political situation.

    "The CIA that killed President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy," she wrote, "did a test case in Greece on canceling elections. Andreas Papandreou, often compared with John Kennedy, appeared to have a good chance of winning the Greek election in 1967. The U.S. Army, the CIA and government agencies helped replace their elections with a coup d'etat. . . . The significance of the Watergate affair is that every element essential for a political coup in the United States was assembled at the time of the arrests."

     Mae Brussell contends that Nixon's own Watergate plumbers, and the entire intelligence network they represented, were prepared to overthrow Nixon whenever it was deemed necessary by the true powers. Ultimately, she believes, the same men who brought Nixon to power via the Kennedy assassinations were also pulling the strings at Watergate.

    Papandreou wrote to her from exile in Canada: "I am overwhelmed by the amount of work you have done and the documentation you bring to support your thesis. I have tried myself for a long time to bring out the conspiratorial aspects of the Greek coup of 1967. People are now beginning to understand how it happened that Greece went under a dictatorship. Your work is tremendously important. You have understood the framework in which these events take place, but more than that, you have dug out the facts. . ."

     

Paul Krassner

The Mind of Mae Brussell

(from OUI magazine, May 1978)

"The Greek military government that took over in 1967 has not proven itself to be as horrendous a specter to contemplate as most people thought it would."

-- Spiro Agnew

The 

Death of a Democracy - Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of the book The Death of a Democracy: Greece and the American Conscience by Stephen Rousseas

Grove Press, Inc. - 1967, hard cover

Chapter 1The "New" Politics in Greece

On the afternoon of April 20, 1967, in the Old Psychico section of Athens, Andreas Papandreou, a deputy in the Greek Parliament and former minister in the Center Union government of 1964-65, was entertaining a member of the the central committee of the Danish Social-Democratic Party. Greek elections had been scheduled for May 28 and, in anticipation of a major Center Union victory, part of the discussion that afternoon concerned the implementation of an agreement for the training of Center Union politicians in Denmark. Later in the evening, Andreas Papandreou decided to sleep in his own home. It was one of the few times in several months that he had risked the chance since it was well known that the King and his American advisers were very disturbed over the prospects of a Center Union victory in the forthcoming elections and that a military coup by the King's followers was a distinct possibility.
    At 2:30 A.M. on Friday, April 21, a contingent of the American-equipped Greek army surrounded Papandreou's house. A few shots were fired into the air. At the same time, the sound of broken glass could be heard as the front door was smashed in. The immediate reaction of everyone in the house was that a gang of terrorists was breaking in to assassinate Andreas. With the help of his fourteen-year-old son, Papandreou was boosted onto the roof from an outside balcony on the second floor.
    Eight soldiers with machine guns, pistols, and rifles with fixed bayonets charged into the bedroom of Papandreou's twelve-year-old daughter and overturned the bed with her in it. The officers and the men under their command were very unsure of themselves and in a state of extreme nervousness. They ran around wildly, pulling everyone out of bed, shouting and screaming, "Where is Andreas? We want Andreas." They seized Papandreou's security guard and began beating him in the living room, trying to force him to reveal Andreas' whereabouts. After tyrannizing everyone, breaking open closets, and scattering the clothing around at random, they jabbed Papandreou's wife, Margaret, with their pistol butts and threatened to kill Papandreou's son unless he told them where his father was. At that point Papandreou gave himself up. As he jumped down four feet from the roof to the balcony, he cut his knee severely on an outside wall light. The soldiers started beating him and then shoved him into the bedroom and forced him to dress. He was then taken away, together with his security guard, who was later brutally beaten that night and the next day for having "lied."
    When they left, Margaret Papandreou drove up to Kastri, the home of her father-in-law, George Papandreou, the president of the Center Union. The streets were deserted and American Sherman tanks could be heard rumbling in the distance. At Kastri the situation was the same. The army had come for the former Prime Minister.
    At six o'clock in the morning an announcement was made on the radio informing the Greek people that the army had taken over the country in order to preempt a communist takeover. The announcement went on to list the articles of the Constitution which had been suspended by authority of the King. The coup had been carefully planned and swiftly executed. It captured the leaders of most political parties and arrested several thousand additional key members of political organizations on that first day. Since then, more arrests have been made, with approximately 20,000 persons in jail or crowded on a few barren islands in the Aegean which serve as concentration camps for political prisoners.
    The coup had been executed by a military triumvirate of relatively junior officers--Brigadier Stylianos Patakos, Colonel George Papadopoulos, and Colonel Nikolas Makarezos. Lieutenant General Gregorios Spandidakis was brought in at the final stages of preparation, with front-man Constantine Kollias, the chief prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court, providing the civilian facade as Prime Minister.
    The Junta, lacking any popular base of support, started to consolidate its position in a series of edicts. The army was quick to issue its orders to the civilian population.

ARMY STAFF PROCLAMATION

In view of the decree of Law DXTH of 1912 "Concerning a
State of Siege" put into effect under Royal Decree No. 280
of April 21, 1967.

WE HAVE DECIDED AND

ORDER FORBIDDEN

(1) Gatherings in the open country of more than five persons.
(2) Gatherings in closed spaces, excluding public entertainments.
(3) The exercising by any means of anti-national propaganda, as well as the announcement or publication by any means, of information liable to cause anxiety or fear to the citizens and trouble public order.
(4) The carrying of arms and the possession by individuals of arms of any kind, including hunting rifles, munitions, explosives, any kind of fireworks, knives, knuckle-dusters, and any other similar weapons, as well as the construction and use of the same without a special permit from the military or police authority. Licenses given up to today cease to be of any value and those who possess the above articles are obliged, within two days from today, to hand over same to the nearest police authorities.
(5) The temporary medical treatment of persons not residing with the family which gives the treatment, if this is not stated within two hours to the nearest police authority.
(6) The possession, installation, and use of amateur radio stations and any means of receiving and transmitting.
(7) The hoarding and excess pricing of foodstuffs or of any other goods which serve the provisioning needs of the public, or the setting-aside of same for this purpose by anyone.
(8) Hunting. All licenses granted up to now are canceled.
(9) The violators of this order will be tried by the Special Courts Martial and will be punished according to the decree related to a "state of siege."

Athens, April 25, 1967

ANGELIS ODYS

Lieutenant General

Chief of Army General Staff

    In the days immediately following the coup, the radio blared martial music, broadcast talks filled with patriotic fervor, and provided the Greek people with a rationale for the coup--stability. Of a series of eighteen proclamations, two ran as follows.

Greek men and women! The Army's action in taking over the governing of the country was the immediate consequence of all that has happened up to now against our country. For many years Greece has been undermined. And for a considerable time she breathed in agony. She was on the verge of catastrophe. And she deeply felt the need to be saved by whatever means, even strong ones. Then she acted through the National Army. And Greece now lives again. We shall leave behind us all the bad past. And we shall enter upon a period of new prosperity and glory.

Stability is the wish of all Greeks. And the Army took over the governing of the country exactly for this reason. To restore, to stabilize, and to safeguard stability. Political, governmental, social, economic, and currency stability. This it will say: No more partisan dissension, partisan passion; no governmental crises; no spirit of the pavement, marches and clashes; no scandals, no getting salaries without working, no excess profits for the few and misery for the many. All these "nos" make up stability. And they thus constitute a big Yes: The yes to progress. Because without stability in all sectors, there is no progress. Neither economic development, nor work, nor prosperity.

No country progressed by every day changing its prime Minister. No nation advanced by making marches and demonstrations. Only stability brings prosperity and stability is brought by the Armed Forces with a national government which we have given to the country. [Italics supplied.]

    Democracy, clearly, was not to be allowed in the very country from which it sprang. Private as well as public expressions of dissent were not to be tolerated, and Greece, to use Colonel Papadopoulos' imagery, was to be strapped to the operating table and not allowed to rise until cured of her democratic ills. Article 18 of the Greek Constitution was suspended and the death penalty for political offenses was thus reintroduced into Greek political life. Systematically, and in order to "safeguard stability," all political opponents were hunted down. The leadership of the Center Union party was arrested along with those Center Union deputies known to be supporters of Andreas Papandreou. The deputies of the United Democratic Left were rounded up, as well as many other members of that party. One of the first casualties in this initial wave of mass arrests was Nikiforos Mandilaras, the brilliant Athenian lawyer who had served as the principal defense attorney in the politically inspired Aspida (Shield) trial involving twenty-eight army officers accused of high treason.(1) His defense made a shambles of the charges which had been manufactured by the High Command of the Greek army. He exposed their fraudulent base and he paid for this humiliation of the army with his life. His body was found washed ashore on the island of Rhodes.

(1) The Aspida "conspiracy" concerns an alleged plot by left-wing officers to overthrow the monarchy and establish a Nasser-type dictatorship. Andreas Papandreou was accused of being the political leader behind the plot. Details of the Aspida controversy will be covered in subsequent chapters. The original Aspida Report is published in Appendix IV.

    The Junta had expected some resistance to the coup, and, indeed, would have welcomed it as proof of a communist conspiracy to take over the country. Instead, it was greeted with a stony silence. It was caught unprepared in that it had no consistent or well-conceived social program other than the promotion of stability and public order. It began by banning all local elections. Henceforth, local officials would be appointed. Then, through the talkative Brigadier Patakos, it announced the beginning of a puritan orgy of comic-opera proportions. A ban was announced on beards and long hair for men, and mini-skirts for women, tourists included. Church attendance at Sunday Mass was made mandatory for all students. Students were soon instructed to turn in their old history books and to purchase new ones, containing a section devoted exclusively to Greek kings with a full-page picture of King Constantine toward the end. The section on modern history gave glowing accounts of rightist regimes, and George Papandreou's 1944 liberation Cabinet was described as having had six communist ministers in it. One teacher announced to his class that he had been "asked" by the Education Minister to announce that he would deliver two lectures the following week on the reasons for the coup. He then told his class that as soon as the lectures were sent to him, he would give them.
     The need to maintain the racial purity of the Greek race was proclaimed, and some members of the University of Athens biology department began to revise the theories of Darwin and de Vries. Then, apparently in the belief that the fittest do not survive, the hierarchy of the Greek church was purged and the King's personal chaplain was installed as Primate of Greece. To protect Christianity and public order, it announced the revival of a 1942 law, passed during the Nazi occupation, requiring all legitimate theaters to submit scripts to a "Theatrical Plays-Control Board" for approval. The board not only was given the right to order deletions from any script, it was further empowered to rewrite parts of any play submitted to it for approval. Any theater faced with two rejections would be shut down, and any actor deviating in any way from an approved script would be severely punished. All plays of antiquity, by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, were to be similarly censored. The music of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and all other Russian composers was banned. In the name of stability and order, new stop signs and traffic lights were installed and other enforcement measures were taken to bring the traditional chaos of Athenian traffic under control. It was announced, moreover, that any employee of a state-owned or -controlled public utility company who was late for work or otherwise not prompt, courteous, and attentive, would be fired. And in a modern variation on Mussolini's great achievement in making the Italian railroads run on time, the Junta decreed that any airplane of Olympic Air ways not on schedule would be required to pay a fine.
    Greece, in a classic parody of the 1930's, was being quickly transformed into the first fascist-type dictatorship to be seen on European soil since the days of Mussolini and Hitler. This was not, however, Greece's first experience with dictatorship. After twelve years of alternating dictatorships and republican governments (1923-35), and as a result of a rigged plebiscite, the present King's uncle, George II, returned to Greece. Within nine months he lost his short-lived taste for democracy and on August 4, 1936, installed one of his generals as dictator. General Metaxas died in 1941 as the Germans were invading Greece. King George then fled to London and finally to Cairo with a government-in-exile made up of royalist and conservative ministers.
     George II was openly involved in the coup of 1936. The role of King Constantine in the coup of 1967 is a bit less apparent. But one thing which will become clear, as the story of April 21 unfolds, is that Constantine was neither as innocent nor as reluctant as the American press had made him out to be. We shall be concerned throughout this book with the intrigues and the political ineptitude of this very non-constitutional monarch and his American advisers.

II

    The coup of April 21 had as its primary objective the prevention of the elections scheduled for May 28. It was a virtual certainty that the Center Union party would repeat its landslide victory of 1964. It is also clear that the coup would not have taken place were it not for the rapid political ascendance of George Papandreou's son, Andreas. In the short span of two years, Andreas Papandreou had emerged as the most prominent politician in Greece and, on the basis of his program for social and economic reform, he had earned the almost pathological hostility of the Palace, the Greek army, and the U.S. State Department, along with the U.S. Military Mission to Greece, and the CIA. With this powerful array of forces against Andreas Papandreou and his Center Union party, the coup of April 21, 1967, was a foregone conclusion.
    In the thirty-one years since the dictatorship of 1936, Greek politics has been firmly in the hands of the Palace and its right-wing supporters. Despite the volatility of Greek politics and its frequent excesses, this control never wavered and had never been seriously challenged. It is important to understand that Greece is a land where politics is the preoccupation of practically everyone. With the exception of the extreme communist Left, political parties have traditionally lacked any hard-and-fast ideological base. In this ideological vacuum, Greek politics emerged as a very fluid business, with parties tending to swirl around a few dominant personalities, and with the highly individualistic politicians quick to switch their allegiances as they alone saw fit. Party structure and party discipline have always been concepts apparently alien to the Greek mind. New alignments and grand coalitions were frequent phenomena on the Greek political scene. Greek politics had become a very personal game of shells and peas with more peas than shells to hide under.(2)
    In many ways this is a gross caricature of Greek politics and, like most caricatures, it exaggerates the surface of things without coming to grips with the underlying reality. But even if it were an accurate picture, it would have been more relevant for the past than for the future had not the coup taken place. A "new" politics had emerged in Greece. It threatened the old game of surface politics which never disturbed the underlying and controlling power relationships. Since the constitutional crisis of July 1965, which will be described in the next chapter, Andreas Papandreou had become a positive and major political force in Greece. He represented the "new" politics and soon became the nucleus around which a strong party was being formed with a meaningful program for reform and change. This in itself constituted a major threat to the existing economic and political oligarchies which had for so long ruled Greece unchallenged and undisturbed. The "old" game of politics had never threatened the traditional distribution of power. It lacked depth or commitment. In its very shallowness it had become a game of musical chairs, of vying charismatic leaders filled more with pomp than with achievements.

(2) One long-time foreign resident in Athens was moved to observe that if the American CIA had any real intelligence, it would have recalled all of its agents and replaced them with a team of clinical psychologists.

    This was all changed by a former U.S. citizen of twenty years standing. Andreas Papandreou was born in Greece in 1919 and was educated at the University of Athens during the Metaxas dictatorship. During his student days at the university he joined a left-wing student organization resisting the dictatorship. He was soon caught, imprisoned, and then exiled. He came to the United States and enrolled as a graduate student in economics at Harvard, where he taught and earned his Ph.D. in 1943. He became a U.S. citizen and volunteered for service in the Navy during World War II. After the war, he became a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, went briefly to Northwestern University, and finally settled at the University of California (Berkeley) where he served as chairman of one of the most distinguished departments of economics in the United States. During his twenty-year stay in the United States, he was very active as a liberal Democrat. In Minnesota he worked for Hubert Humphrey in his Senatorial campaigns and later for Adlai Stevenson in the Presidential campaign of 1956.
     His first contact with Greek politics came in 1960 when he returned to Athens on sabbatical from Berkeley and as the holder of a Guggenheim Fellowship. While there he also served as economic adviser to the Bank of Greece. It was at his office in the bank that he first became aware of the extent of U.S. interference in the internal politics of Greece. Loughlin Campbell was then head of the CIA in Greece. He visited Andreas at the bank and asked him to arrange a meeting with his father, George Papandreou, who at the time was one of the leaders of a nucleus of parties in the process of forming what eventually came to be the Center Union. The stated purpose of the meeting was to discuss the adoption of the "kindred party system" for Greece. In the course of the discussion, it became clear that the real purpose of the visit was not to arrange a meeting with George Papandreou (which did not need the services of Andreas), but to get Andreas, as a U.S. citizen, to apply pressure on his father to accept the CIA-sponsored change in the Greek electoral system.
    Under the kindred party system each political party was to be listed under one of two classifications--nationalist and non-nationalist. The two right-wing parties, the National Radical Union (ERE) and the Progressive party (KP), and the variety of center parties then in existence, were to be grouped under the first category. All remaining parties, that is, the United Democratic Left (EDA) and other socialist and communist-front parties were to be placed in the "non-nationalist" camp. All parties would go into the elections independently of each other. After the election returns were in, the sum of both camps would be compared, winner take all. The parliamentary seats would then be divided among the parties of the winning group (nationalist, of course) on the basis of their relative standing in the nationalist sub-total. This was, obviously, a crude plan for the total disenfranchisement of the Left in Greece. The CIA had become alarmed when the United Democratic Left received 25 percent of the total votes cast in the 1958 elections. A truer figure would have been 33 percent in view of the manipulation of the elections, especially in the rural areas. But this 25 or 33 percent did not represent a communist resurgence in Greece. Much of it was made up of protest votes against the police-state methods of the National Radical Union government then in power--which was subsequently demonstrated by the rapid decline of the EDA votes in the 1963 and 1964 elections when the Center Union party came into power. In any event, the CIA was alarmed, particularly because the electoral system then in operation made the United Democratic Left the official party of the opposition. Under the kindred party system, the Left in similar circumstances would have been denied any parliamentary representation whatever, even if it had succeeded in getting 49 percent of the popular vote!
    Toward the end of the visit, Andreas Papandreou told Campbell that he would arrange the meeting with his father, if that was what the CIA wanted, but that he doubted his father would be sympathetic to such an arrangement; though strongly anti-communist, his father still retained some respect for the democratic system. At this point the head of the CIA mission in Greece stood up abruptly and, pointing his finger at Andreas, replied sharply: "You tell your father we get what we want." The meeting with George Papandreou never took place. In this one instance, the CIA did not get what it wanted. It did much better, however, on April 21, 1967, and before that on July 15, 1965, during the well-engineered constitutional crisis which brought down the Center Union government.
     From 1960 to 1964, when he officially ran for Parliament, Andreas Papandreou alternated between the Berkeley campus and Athens. Through his efforts, and with grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Center of Economic Research and Planning was set up under the sponsorship of the University of California. Andreas Papandreou became its first director. A highly qualified professional staff was hired and a steady flow of foreign economists came as visiting scholars. For the first time in the history of Greece, a systematic program for basic research in economics was undertaken, a plan for economic growth was developed, and a program was started to train qualified Greek economists for key posts in government and industry.
    Andreas Papandreou resigned his professorship at Berkeley to enter Greek politics in the elections of 1964. A great deal of pressure was put on Andreas by his father, but the explanation is not quite that simple. During the grand coalition of the center parties early in 1963, the problem arose over who would be the party leader of the combined forces. The two main contenders were the elder Papandreou (then seventy-six years old) and the relatively younger Sophocles Venizelos, son of the famous Eleftherios, and leader of the dominant Liberal party. As in most coalitions of this sort, the leader of the major party is always feared, and a great deal of opposition arose to Venizelos' candidacy. But rather than break up the coalition, a compromise was worked out whereby the elder Papandreou was designated head of the combined forces, with the understanding that Venizelos would succeed him upon his death.
    Constantine Mitsotakis, a subsequent defector from the Center Union government, led a group of deputies who also pressured Andreas into entering Greek politics--the idea being that he would act as major counterbalance to Venizelos, thereby increasing the chances of another compromise leader in the future, namely, one of themselves. As things turned out, George buried Sophocles, rather than the other way around.
    The Center Union won an absolute majority of the parliamentary seats in the elections of 1964. Andreas Papandreou was given the patronage-controlling position of Minister to the Prime Minister. He quickly came under attack by the far Left, the far Right, and by members of his own party who saw him being groomed as a successor to his father. He was looked upon as an arriviste, an ambitious power seeker. The charge of nepotism was raised, and Andreas Papandreou didn't help matters much by exuding a self-confidence and cockiness which only served to infuriate his opponents. The Left denounced him as a puppet and tool of the United States; it even went so far as to hint that he was a CIA agent.
    Andreas Papandreou was new to politics. After twenty-odd years as a professor, he was hardly prepared for the world of politics--and Greek politics is among the most intense and wildly competitive in the world. Many of his initial appointments, some of whom were professionally trained Greeks repatriated from the United States, turned out to be disastrous. His confidence in people was all too often misplaced. And he was unable to resist the flattery heaped upon him by his newly acquired camp of followers. All told, Andreas' performance as a politician was rather bad--about a grade of C, to gauge him by his prior occupation. And even if he had any innovating ideas of his own, there was always the restraining and vacillating influence of the Prime Minister, his father. In response to pressures from within his own party, he was removed as Minister to the Prime Minister's Office and reassigned as Alternate Minister to the Ministry of Coordination. This post was more in keeping with his professional training, but soon after he was assigned by his father to handle the exploding Cyprus problem.
    Despite its general ineptness and its floundering, the Center Union government of 1964-65 did introduce an air of political freedom which was unprecedented, and it did undertake certain social programs in education, agriculture, and economic development which were far reaching and popular with the electorate. The government, however, could not push its programs too fast. The Center Union government had become aware of the dissatisfaction and rumblings within the Greek army, and it knew that before it could proceed any further it would have to try to impose civilian control over the army. It was this attempt to control the armed forces, compounded by the Cyprus problem, which ultimately led to the constitutional crisis of July 1965 and the downfall of the Papandreou government. Details of these developments will be given in the next chapter.
    The Center Union government was in serious political trouble. It was being led by an old-time politician of doubtful antecedents. George Papandreou was known in Greece as "the Windmill"--a man who was by instinct a compromiser and capable of turning every which way with every change in the political wind--and also as a vain, gregarious, and unpredictable politician who was at the same time an eloquent orator and a powerfully charismatic leader. In the early days of the Center Union government, Andreas Papandreou was the much resented son of an aging politician who, no matter how much he might have disagreed with his father, did whatever he was told.

III

    What "made" Andreas Papandreou was the crisis of 1965. From July 1965 to April 1967 he created his own independent identity by stumping the country and showing a remarkable political courage. He broke away from his father's restraining influence, and introduced something new to Greek politics--a consistent, well-thought-out, and far-reaching program for Greece. Coupling this with a sometimes strident nationalism, and helped by the hysterical and all-too-frequent attacks on him by the right-wing press, he succeeded in capturing the imagination of the young people and many members of the professional and intellectual classes--though the latter still regarded him with suspicion as something too good to be believable.
    Above all, he had been dangerously outspoken against the King and had flatly stated that if the King were to trigger the army into a coup, the whole issue of the monarchy in Greece would subsequently be reexamined. He strongly implied, in other words, that in such an eventuality the entire royal household would once again be exiled and Greece transformed into a republic. He was the only politician in Greece who had dared to broach the subject publicly.
    It soon became popular in Greece to link the younger Papandreou with the late President Kennedy--as a man with style, intellect, and a program to get Greece moving again. It would have been more accurate, however, to have viewed him as having been caught in the unfortunate dilemma of being Robert Kennedy plus Hubert Humphrey rolled into one. Andreas, like Kennedy, had clearly set his eyes on the highest political office his country had to offer. Like Kennedy, too, he had risen very fast and had captured the imagination of the people. But, unlike Kennedy, his father was not a man of great wealth. Andreas and his father, by way of contrast, were both active politicians in increasing disagreement with each other. More important, for comparison's sake, the former Attorney General was able to quit Lyndon Johnson's Cabinet and, as Senator from New York, dissociate himself from the President's present policies and failures. Andreas, on the other hand, was more like Humphrey, in that it was very difficult for him to criticize the political leader of his party, who, in this instance, also happened to be his father. Yet the remarkable thing is that Andreas, despite the built-in limitation of his position, was able to generate sympathy for his dilemma and to give the very distinct impression throughout Greece of being far more progressive than his father. By December of 1966, as we shall see, he was on the verge of breaking with his father.
    Andreas' "radicalism," however, was nothing more than a mixture of the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. But for Greece's semi-feudal, Byzantine structure, attitudes such as these are extremely radical, and Andreas was regarded by the far Right as a dangerous communist. The Right had little fear of Papandreou père. They knew him to be manipulable and a member in high standing of the old school of Greek politics; they also knew that he was a compromiser capable of adjusting his position easily under pressure. What the night feared most was that Papandreou fils would someday succeed his father as Prime Minister and carry out the programs he had so frequently publicized in his speeches and in his writings. And it was for this reason that the Right and its many newspapers attacked Andreas so relentlessly and with such abandon from July of 1965 until the coup of April 1967. And it was for this reason that the coup took place.
    The Right, however, was not alone in its opposition to Andreas. The extreme Left, which had stopped criticizing him since the crisis of 1965, regarded him now as a temporary expedient to be supported so long as it served their purposes, and within the Center Union party a few powerful deputies looked upon him as the major stumbling block to power. In all this, Andreas had eclipsed his father and had emerged as the de facto leader of his party. It was largely due to Andreas' meteoric rise, and the political ineptness of the King and his followers, that he emerged as the first serious threat to the Greek establishment in over thirty years.
    Throughout the entire postwar period, Greek politics had been polarized between the extreme Left and the extreme Right. Democratic socialists, liberals, and other political parties in the center had been splintered and ineffective. The extreme Left was well organized but, since the civil war of 1946-49, lacked any real possibility of getting into power through the ballot box or otherwise. The Palace, the army, the right-wing parties, and the U.S. presence were guarantees of that. The Right, therefore, had the held to itself. Occasionally, and only occasionally, a moderate Center government would take over for a very brief period of time. But regardless of what party was in office, the levers of power were firmly controlled by the Right. Thus, a pseudo-democratic, semblance of government was tolerated, so long as no one threatened to tamper with the existing institutional structure and the given distribution of power.
    The Right maintained full control over the machinery of State. The bureaucracy, the police, the rural gendarmerie, and the army were staffed with their own people. Greece, for example, was the only Allied country in which the collaborators were not purged from their official positions. Indeed, in the immediate postwar period, and just prior to the 1946 plebiscite on the return of King George, the army, the bureaucracy, the university, and the security forces were purged of republican job-holders. It is significant that none of the Metaxas appointees or university professors who had collaborated with the Germans were dismissed. But they couldn't have found very many liberal republicans in the 1946 purge. The dictator Metaxas had done a thorough job during his reign of terror and had bequeathed the purged branches of the governmental machinery to the German occupiers, who then turned them over intact to the British who, in turn, after the purge of 1946, handed them over refurbished to the Americans.
    The Center Union government of 1964-65, however, got a little too ambitious. It tried to exercise some control over this sub-level of government which was busily sabotaging its social and economic programs. The duly elected government was then summarily dismissed by the King in July of 1965. Since then, and up to the coup of April 1967, a series of Palace puppet governments were propped into power. When it became obvious that the Center Union party had not been broken and, under the de facto leadership of Andreas Papandreou, would win the constitutionally required elections, the Constitution was abrogated, the politicians were arrested, and an open military dictatorship was imposed upon Greece.

    It is time now to turn to a detailed examination of the series of events which led up to the coup of 1967.

.....

Mae Brussell's Radio Broadcast #16

Transcription of Dialogue: Assassination Broadcast #16 October 13, 1971 Time length: 60 min.

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GLORIA BARON: This is Dialogue: Assassination, with research specialist Mae Brussell. For KLRB I'm Gloria Baron.

Well, Mae, we promised them last week that you would be doing the Manson trial this week. I guess from the looks of things you're ready.

MAE BRUSSELL: Yes. I'm ready and I'm not ready. I would like lots of hours on this, but it's really big and we'll get right into it. I had ten other subjects I wanted to talk about today, but it would delay the Manson story, so we'll go into it, Gloria, right away.

In this world, in this strange world of covert overthrow of the governments and clandestine armies and secret operations, the problem we're facing is that you are working with two realities: you're working with what we assume is the real way to function and move, and we are working with a system of what we call power: exchange of power, economic power, power over people; controlling their lives. In order to do that you disguise certain persons and send them into roles to influence; they become actors on a stage and they influence our minds in a way that is not real but effect a reality that will touch us later.

A propos of the Manson thing: the Oda trial; the murder of the Oda family goes on trial Monday, with accused murderer, Fazier. It's in the paper today. That was not a hippie murder—I've said it before. They took the trial out of Santa Cruz up to Redwood City. We'll do a show on the Oda trial, but the Manson trial effects this particular geographic area, it's close to us; it's close to home.

California was where the flower children were. Big Sur was the home of people like Joan Baez, Henry Miller, free souls, artists. California was an important state in terms of conspiracies to kill candidates and presidents, and to effect national policy. It's part of the military-industrial-complex. I'm going to explain why the murder of Sharon Tate and the other persons in her home was a political massacre. Other researchers have done work on John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. I was the first researcher in the United States to turn the other peoples' minds to the fact that the same lawyers, the same planners, the same teams originated this particular massacre, and what effect it would have on our society.

It had to be planned well in advanced of when it happened. I'm going to give you my conclusions on the Manson—I call it the Manson trial because nobody talks about it being Charles Watson's massacre. That's the boy who killed seven people, but the news media associates the name Charles Manson [with the killings]. He made the picture on the cover of Life; He is the man that you associate with killing Sharon Tate. Many people don't even know the name Charles Watson, because you're not supposed to know it. Right now there's a hung jury in Los Angeles on the decision of whether Charles Watson is guilty of murdering seven people. He was in the home. He did the stabbing forty times. He wrote "death to the pigs" on the door. The jury can't decide if he was guilty.

My conclusions are, number one: that all of these persons involved—the major people—are agent provaceteurs. They come at a time to increase violence, to come down on a segment of our society prior to an election year to make law and order necessary to protect us from the people at large in our society.

Number two: Charles Manson was a patsy. He is identical, historically, to Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and James Ray. Charles Manson killed nobody in the Sharon Tate home or in the La Bianca home. He was being charged with these murders and he didn't kill any one of those seven people. He was used. He was a person who had been in jail twenty-two of his thirty-two years of life. He was the product of our penal system. He was not a hippie or a part of the youth culture. They bought him a guitar, let his hair grow, put a leather jacket on him, gave him money, gave him a bus and credit cards, and told him to do his thing.

It was like James Ray was a part of our penal system. He was in Missouri in jail, he met with certain persons, and the next day he was out and there was twenty, thirty thousand dollars of money spent. He traveled continents and everywhere. He was to be used at a certain time and place.

Charles Manson was identical to James Ray, as a product of our penal system. He was used by the news media to slam down on the hippies. We could do one hour on the news control of how your brain is shaped to believe that Charles Manson made a robot out of a nice white Christian boy from Texas. Isn't this terrible? This kind of a criminal mind? He was used.

Now I'm going into my background of these opinions because they may be startling. People who think they're knowledgeable on our economy, or on the other assassinations, who never believed the Warren Report, throw up their hands. I spoke to somebody just this morning before I came in the studio and said I was doing a show on Manson, and this particular person, educated, informed, said, "That is something I never—I'm not interested in Manson. I'd never think about that particular human being." People turn off on Manson.

This is the way my mind was going in 1963. I told you how I was studying the death of John Kennedy, starting November 22nd. I was studying the use and the misuse of power, after the president of the United states had been killed. I wanted to know who killed him and what kind of people they were. What was their interest? What was their philosophy? What was their politics? How many of them believed Adolf Hitler should have won World War Two? How many of the people involved in that assassination worked in our State Department, defense industry, or had important government positions, like in the Cabinet now? Or in the Republican National Committee? This country that is current today, I've been studying since '63. I studied the Cold War, the military-industrial-complex of the United States. What we formally call capitalism verses communism, which now is a disguised fascism—with the electoral process over—verses communism. I studied the economic and philosophical policies of both systems, and the religious revolution that was going on simultaneously.

In April 1967 the Greek government was overthrown by a military Junta. There is a book—I tell you, have your pencil ready for the program. I want you to write down this book. It's pertinent to the Manson-Sharon Tate massacres. It's called Death of a Democracy: Greece and the American Conscience. It's written by Stephen Rousseas. When Greece was overthrown, the excuse for the Junta to take power and end the electoral process was that there was tension and chaos. And they had to prevent that. They had to prevent the May election.

The man who was running to be the president of Greece was Papandreou who captured the imagination of the young people. Now I'm reading a quote from the book Death of a Democracy:

"...Papandreou captured the imagination of young people and many members of the professional and intellectual classes....He was popular in Greece..." and he was linked psychologically "...with the late President Kennedy." He was "...a man of style and intellect."

They thought that for the first time in thirty years they would get a program growing where they'd have a democratic government. The people in power felt that no one should tamper with their existing institutional structure. They kept the power and canceled the elections.

The edicts in Greece, when Greece was overthrown, were the following: If it was an economic problem, or political problem, like We don't want communists. We've got to save you from communists, that's one thing. But the edicts I noticed in April 1967, when Greece was overthrown, [showed me that] the United States had exchanged power. I copied my newspaper right away. I was reading the daily papers because I was studying power and the exchange of power. I was studying Greece; I study every country. These were the edicts:

• No gathering in the open country of more than five persons.
• No gathering in any close space at all.
• No anti-national propaganda, such as anti-war or anything against a public official.
• No marches or dissensions.

And we will now have what Rousseas describes as a puritan orgy: there would be no beards or long hair on the men. No mini-skirts on the girls. Everyone in Greece had to attend a Sunday church, [including tourists]; Sunday church was mandatory. They called it a Christian coup, because the Jews traditionally do not go to church on Sunday. But if you did not go to church on Sunday you could be exiled to an island and arrested. It was similar to the inquisition in Spain. The students were to turn in every old history book they had, and it would be replaced with a new one. Racial purity was proclaimed. And the theories of Darwin and de Vries were thrown out. They were ordered to protect their Christianity, on a public order that was passed in 1942 by the Nazis; It was revived again.

All legitimate theaters were to submit their scripts.

Does this sound—I'll end the quote for one minute—does it sound like our own theater where they're asking Powerplay recently in the theater in town here in Carmel, where the director was removed because they wanted to examine the scripts?

Now let's get back to the other book; back to the quotation:

They wanted the right to delete scripts or rewrite scripts anywhere from the Greek tragedies to the modern. Every play from antiquity to the present was to be censored.

Music would be selected. Bob Dylan, the Beatles wouldn't be allowed at all. No music from Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, any Russian composer, even prior to the Russian Revolution.

And Greece was quickly transformed into the first fascist dictatorship on European soil since Mussolini and Hitler.

Now I looked at those edicts and I knew that the one problem in the United States was going to be a revolution that was coming along in our country. Because, just as I analyzed in 1963, on November 22nd, I said to myself, "Is Jack Ruby in that jail to kill Oswald to silence him?" My brain began to work with what I was reading about the edicts in Greece, because these were not communist edicts, this was a sociological thing.

I knew in the summer of '67—this was the spring when it was happening—that something very big in the United States was coming to ahead. Because I live in the Peninsula here; I'm close to a movement that was growing. Going back and forth from San Francisco to Big Sur, spending my summers at Sur, I could see something really good in a true Judao-Christian tradition of people making it, sharing their housing, sharing their food, rapping. I realized that in this country we had a revolution. There was a revolution of hair-style, clothing, cosmetics, transportation, housing, value system, churches—there was an economic revolution. It effected the cosmetic industry, canned foods, grocery revolution, dietary habits, dwelling, the use of land. No longer needing dwelling; meeting outdoors, no high rent for each separate family; sharing one place. People were delivering their own babies instead of spending $250 for the obstetrician. They were recycling old clothes; going to the Good Will, making their own things, wearing burlap, sharing, doing without, withdrawing from spectator sports or amusements; they weren't sitting and watching people throw a pigskin ball back and forth.

These are revolutions: economic and sociological. They were breaking the boundaries where white and black could rap. They lived together. They slept together. You didn't know somebody's background, if they were rich or poor. You didn't know if they were Jew or Gentile. Those boundaries were thrown out the window in '67. Greece was putting them back, but America was throwing them out the window. And the country club thing was going by the wayside. Zoning laws were ignored; if you have a zoning place in a fancy residential [area], the children are leaving those homes. They are living where there is no zoning. They are up on the land in the communes. They've left their parents in their big homes and they leave the zoning laws behind; they just split. Real estate values are effected because the kids aren't going to buy the house with the picket fence any longer and live two people in that dwelling.

Now this was an economic, sociological necessity in our system as it existed in terms of capitalists, and whether to survive. The Rand Corporation and other think tanks in America decide what to do for the United States of America.

This was the year of the Beatles. It was the summer of Sgt. Pepper, the Monterey Pop, Haight Ashbury, the Renaissance, make your own candle, turn off your electricity, sit and turn on with your friends and rap it over: What is life about? The generation was born with an atomic bomb over their heads. They weren't going to live long anyway, so there wasn't that much time for hate. They were really making it. My car was filled with kids; hitch-hikers everywhere; I picked strangers off the streets. They slept in our home, slept in the yards, too. Monterey Pop came that weekend. We were there everyday and I picked people off the road and our house was filled. It was the most beautiful thing. I still have yard furniture; they all painted chairs and tables and everyone pitched in. It was just—it was human beauty and they were making it together.

But that isn't the way it was meant to be made by U.S. Steel and General Motors and Kaiser Aluminum. They want to sell you your own car, your own house, and your own washing machine and dryer.

So in my cross-filing system—because you see this is the summer of '67 and I've been on the assassinations for four years—I started a file called Greece. I didn't watch Greece at all until the coup. I said: Is this a test case of what the United States could do to its people if it had to? Because those edicts were set up very strangely if it were a communist verses a right-wing coup. I did all of the research right up to the present day; anything that comes about Greece. Melina Mercouri was on a national television show this morning. I watched her talking about Greece. It's current.

So I watched who overthrew Greece. I watched the Pompus (?) Foundation. We've talked about them on the air. They're the men that siphoned the money—Standard Oil of New Jersey, linked with Richard Nixon, Donald Nixon, Spiro Agnew. Agnew's in Greece today as we talk.

I have a file that started in '67, and every article from all the magazines or books that I could get follows up who overthrew Greece: the Litton Industry, the fascists in this country put those edicts in there. Now if they put them in there and it worked they could put them down on us.

I have another file I started in 1967. I told you before I have 1600 subject categories of current news. And I started a file called Hippies. Because articles in '67 were coming out. It was a sociological phenomenon. And in the envelopes that I have I began articles like:

Who recognizes something good in this movement?

Who was putting it down?

What is their philosophy?

Hippies that were interviewed in magazines like Ramparts or New York Times.

What are they saying about themselves?

What are people saying about them?

I realized that it was going to be stopped in some way, because it was taking hold; It captured the basic good that is in people. I don't believe in the doctrine of original sin, I believe in original goodness. And these children had it; They have it. Somebody was going to have to get them.

Yesterday's paper had an article that the head of the whole Navy of South Vietnam said: You are going to have to rule out sex. They have a Navy of 40,000 men. And he said, You were going to have to rule out sex. It's decadent. If you want to fight the communists you've got to stop that. You're a bunch of filthy worms," he said. The head of the Navy in Vietnam said, "In order to really fight the communists you've got to stop youre sexual activity," the Navy [in Vietnam] was told yesterday.

Now these are the same people: Mr. Key(?) and the fascists, and the same people in Greece, and the people in South Vietnam, who are coming down on the kids. Their sexual fantasies, their fears that their kids could do what they never could do. I'd like to do a whole show on sexual repressions and fascism and coming down.

I had a friend I met who worked at the Diggers, and they were being handed bad acid by disguised agent provaceteurs, to begin to burn their bellies out and rob their minds. [And that's the way] the Diggers were [being treated] up there. This can be documented. I know that the federal government were throwing things out at pop festivals. They allowed people like Melvin Belli—who worked with Jack Ruby—was the man in on the Altamont thing. That brings the pressure. We'll go on to that some other day; on pop festivals and music, and what happened to the music scene, and the musicians at the Monterey Pop Festival.

So I was watching how the hippie scene would be put down and what evidence there was that they had to crack it. I've mentioned on two different programs that in my neighborhood a man moved in from Texas. I think he gets tired of me talking about this, so this is the last time I'll mention him. He was dressed as a hippie, but he wasn't a hippie. He brought his children into this community. He lived a block from my house. He wrote a book for Henry Kaiser called Children of Change. (I'm repeating for somebody who hasn't heard the show.) A non-hippie from Texas, he lived here for about one or two years, walking down the coast, going the music scene. And he wrote, just prior to the Sharon Tate murders, that, "...the hippies would have made it..." —this is what Henry Kaiser published— "...would have made it if, number one: they had a sense of humor. And number two: they weren't so violent.

If anybody had a sense of humor that generation did. Because there wasn't much to be funny about—the way the Cold War was going after Korea and everything like that. I have a button collection. People who've been to my home see it. I started this around those years, and I have a whole wall with thousands of buttons. And it's funny. They did have a sense of humor. The kids were beautiful. And they laughed. There were very funny things. If you read the button it says sociological things. I have the sense of humor of that generation. And I collected the car bumper stickers for a while, but it got too expensive, so I save the buttons.

They did have a sense of humor and there was no violence at all. This same particular man referred to his wife and hippie-women as witches. And she wasn't a witch. She was a very establishment Texas girl who is the wife of this man that was dressed as a hippie.

He is now at the Navy post-graduate school; He's Navy. He had to be Navy Intelligence. How did he get into the Navy post-graduate school if his undergraduate school was being a hippie on Big Sur road, walking back and forth on the highway?

So this particular man had his gun and his scopes and his knives and things. And I watched, and there was no massacre. And I was watching the phenomena. How was our government going to handle it?

In the summer of 1969 there was a murder in Hollywood, California in which Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Mr. Frokowski, Abigail Folger, Steve Parent, and Mr. and Mrs. La Bianca were stabbed forty-four times. The newspaper did not know who did the murders, but it read in my mind like a military ambush. It could be no other way. It was described by people later as a military ambush. And for the reasons as this: These many people were slaughtered; nobody heard a sound; there were dogs on the grounds that didn't say boo; there was a caretaker in a guest cottage who didn't hear one gun go off, and guns went off; they didn't hear any screaming; nobody saw a getaway car; the place was completely destroyed; there was time to put hoods over the people, ropes on their neck, leave signs and symbols that would come down on a particular group of our society—two groups—and split. And no, not a dog was killed or barked. The fellow that lives on the grounds said he slept through it. And they shimmied up the telephone poles, cut the wires, left all this obvious evidence, and split. And the way the wires and the lines were cut I felt that it had to be a military type ambush.

The total effect was to appear, or wanted to appear, that if they didn't catch the murderers of these people they would come down on the blacks—that was their hope.

It's very interesting in my research on the assassinations that the very first man to publish an article on the Sharon Tate murder in my collection of the murders, before they had a suspect—the murders were in August, and they found the suspects in December—was a man named Ed Butler. In October '69 he wrote an article. The man who publishes the newspaper that he writes for is Patrick Frawley of Schick Razor and Technicolor, who is one of the third largest supporters of Richard Nixon—a far right-wing person. And he hires Ed Butler to write articles for him. Ed is an agent provaceteur who worked with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans. When Oswald had the cover story that he was a communist, Ed Butler made a record for him. [This was] when Oswald said he was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba [Committee]. And he was the only member of the New Orleans area, and Ed Butler knew it. Ed Butler worked with Lee Harvey Oswald, so it's interesting that in 1969 the first person who has an opinion on who murdered these seven people would be Ed Butler; In my collection of articles we have Ed Butler. Now, what is this article called? It says Did Hate Kill Tate? And he goes into the fact that the Black Panthers are tied into the communists, and the evidence is that the Panthers killed these people; [they came] into middle class America and spread terror.

This is what we call provaceteurs, agent provaceteurs, clandestine governments: where somebody is the first one in, and he's tied with all these other people and links. And he is taking your brain now and your gray matter. In the event they don't have a suspect, he is saying here are the clues:

Number one: the hood over the draped bodies—was it a turn about for the Ku Klux Klan?

Number two: the rope found around their bodies, strung body to body is an ironic reminder to lynchings.

Number three: the words "death to pigs" that were scrawled with the human blood over the front door—was that a challenge to Blue Meanies?

Remember the Beatles made a movie about Blue Meanies. He's throwing the whole thing in.

And number four: Time magazine quoted an article that Jay Sebring was supposed to be anti-black.

So you see, Ed Butler has you in the palm of his hand. If they don't have a suspect, you're going to think that the blacks come into fancy residential homes and massacre these lovely white people.

To make that even worse, when the people were arrested they admitted on their own volition that they took the credit cards from Mr. and Mrs. La Bianca after they cut their bellies open and stuck—they went to the ice box to eat, and then took their forks and stuck the forks in their stomachs. They took out their credit cards and left them in the black part of town in Los Angeles so the people would think the blacks killed the La Biancas.

To back up my own feelings, every word from what these people said afterward confirms what I knew they were doing. They could come down on two groups, one for sure. And if they're caught they'll come down on the second. So the first group was to press fear that the blacks are now in our part of town, that they're communists, and they hate the rich.

Ed Butler goes into their motives, and he says, "Well, one of the things is that Mr. Polanski is an ex-patriot from communist Poland, and we know the Panthers are communists." And he said the hate and propaganda they have will make other people want to continue these murders. He said that the Panthers were doing this kind of murdering to test the stomach of America for future violence. Ed Butler: the authority on riots. He comes out all the time in the news. He said that they want to see how many of these massacres people will take. He's convinced that the blacks did this murder. But he is covered because when the actual facts came out it turns out that it wasn't the blacks at all. So what are you left with now? You're left with a hippie group; You're left with this great hippie clan. This is where the real problem comes in, because, as I said before, and I'll say it over and over today, Charles Manson was not a hippie.

When they arrested Charles Manson, Sue Atkins was in jail for stealing some parts to an automobile, and the chicks squealed. The police department didn't even have any clue in this murder at all; They didn't even want it; I know the Los Angeles Police Department didn't want to find them. But this particular girl broke down in jail and told another woman, and that's how they were found; The police department did not find them; Just like the FBI did not find James Earl Ray; Scotland Yard did it; when Ray just had just one foot on the plane and one foot to Rhodesia where he would never be extradited, Scotland Yard did it; the FBI didn't do it.

What happened was that the police had to go to where the Manson Family lived. And what did they find there? They found what the newspaper described as a ritualistic killing done by self-confessed hippies, in what they called a military-style commune.

First, the news media should define the word hippie. Because the hippies that I knew from '67 to '69 didn't mean a military operation in any sense of the word, nor in anybody else's mind in the world. Nor did it to the Rand Corporation, or the President of the United States, or John Mitchell. Hippiedid not mean military; it was anti-military; it was anti-war; it was the let's get it together generation.

So when they found the real killer and he has this beard and guitar, we just can't call him an ex-convict. They have to call it a military-style commune.We must have military-style communes in Vietnam if a commune is where people all live together and you are military; it's a military commune. It certainly isn't a hippie commune, but they have to make it a hippie thing.

Now what did they have in the commune? They had shacks with lookout points; they had telescopes; they had walkie-talkies; they had military field telephones; they had collections of knives and shotguns; they had four-wheel drive [dune buggies]. The neighbors turned them in for threatening them. They drove all night and made so much noise that the neighbors said, "You know, you keep us awake." And they said, "Oh, we'll kill you if you don't shut up." They threatened their lives.

Then the news media picked up right away that evidently the crime had all the marks of premeditation. They mentioned then that the telephone wires were cut at the Tate home. I remember that in August, but in December when they were discovered, they went into the shears and the problem of the weapons.

Sheriff Tom Montgomery of Colin County in Texas was taking care of his cousin at the time that the police came into this little commune that Sue Atkins was talking about. Cousin Charles 'Tex' Watson was safe in Texas. He was watched by this first cousin of his. He was described as clean-cut with short hair. He was living a happy life. His girlfriend testified they were having pleasant sexual relationships. He was normal in every sense of the word. Those seven massacres that he did didn't seem to bother him at all. He didn't even mention them to her. He was not mentally sick. He was not depressed. He had a good job. And when Charles Manson and the others were arrested in Los Angeles they put this young boy, Charles Watson, in the jail with his cousin to take care of him.

Now we're going into 'Who was Charles Manson?'

GLORIA: All right, we'll do that in just a moment. You're listening to Dialogue: Assassination, with Mae Brussell. This is KLRB, stereo FM, Carmel by the Sea.

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MAE: Now we're going to talk briefly about Charles Manson and Charles Watson, the implications in this particular case, how I follow it, and why it's of interest to me. Because every case beyond what the news media tells you, you're looking for facts. Like in the Oswald case, they tell you that Oswald was a communist, or he was a misfit in society. But then when I see my documents, that he had cameras, walkie-talkies, electronic devices, and security clearances—then I want to know more about Lee Harvey Oswald. And I want to know more about Charles Manson, because he was thirty-two and he did spend twenty-two years of his life in jail.

A prominent attorney by the name of George Shibley who works with groups in the Middle East—in Beverly Hills he has powerful connections—met with Charles Manson just before he got out of jail in Treasure Island. No one will know what conversation transpired between Mr. Shibley [and Manson], or why he was up there. Or why Charles Manson is unknown. This illegitimate child of a sixteen year-old girl, no family or kin. No one would know how Charles Manson would get such a famous Beverly Hills attorney to visit him before he was paroled. No one will ever know the conversation that transpired between those men. But what we do know is that when Charles Manson got out of Treasure Island in 1967, at the height of the Haight Ashbury scene, he got a large bus. And he did not buy it. He did not have a job, and he had credit cards for gasoline. In the trial some subject was made up that one of the girls stole a credit card from her family to buy Charlie gasoline. I am sure the parents would have had him arrested before long; you can't go for two years on a stolen credit card. Charlie was never arrested. And one of the questions in one of the articles I have is, it simply said: He had a credit card. In order to do a study of a covert operation, or a murder, or a simple murder: Who paid for the gasoline for Charlie Manson?

I know being locked up for twenty-two years you may have a strong sexual drive. It may be fun to have twenty or thirty chicks around you, but they still have to eat; they still have to have housing. Who was buying the machine guns, the walkie-talkies, and the dune buggies? He was on the edge of the Mohave Desert. They didn't steal all of it; none of them were hardly ever arrested for anything. They have parts of expensive cars. They had material things that are warfare things, and they never got arrested. And the gasoline.

Once in a while as punishment the girls would have to go out and take food out of garbage cans—that was their punishment for maybe not sleeping with Charlie or a guest or something like that. But for the most part none of them suffered any malnutrition; they had healthy babies; they seemed to be doing very well. They had guests at the ranch.

Where was this money coming from, from the day he left that jail until the Sharon Tate murders? Just like I follow the money from the James Ray case: from the day he left the Missouri jail he went right to a trailer the first night it was open. There was wine there; there was everything but the welcome sign, and maybe that was there. And within a day he had a car. Pretty soon he was on his way up to Canada and a resort motel and fancy place.

Where did the money come from the time Charlie Manson was in jail until the Sharon Tate murder?

Now we go to Charles Watson: This was a clean-cut boy who did these murders. He came from Texas. And the questions are: Where was he approached? How did he get into this case? Was it of his own volition?

Last week on the Monterey Peninsula there was an article in the paper that a boy was picked up as a hitch-hiker in Santa Cruz. He was thrown out of the car near the highlands, and we talked about that a littler bit on this show. He was almost killed. And the subject of the conversation was that one of the four men who just about killed him said, "I'm from the Manson Family in Texas." That caught my interest because something very big in the planning stage of this particular massacre took place in the state of Texas.

So I went to Community Hospital to discuss with this boy. This boy attended five years of College and the American system of education. He was about to go into the Peace Corp and go to the Philippines the next week. He was almost dead out at Community Hospital after just going down our beautiful coast and being picked up and roughed up by somebody who claimed to be from the Manson Family in Texas.

We don't know much—because it's never brought out at these trials—about the background of Charles Watson, except that he did appear with a beard and became part of the Manson Family. When Charles Manson was arrested, a law firm sent two lawyers who went to Texas to see this particular boy, Charles Watson. Judge David Brown said to the lawyers from Beverly Hills, California, "You take the next plane back to California. I will put you in jail for seventy-two hours or fine you if you don't get back to California." And the lawyers said, "Well, wait a minute, that's our client. We want to see him." The lawyer that wanted to see Charles Watson was named Mr. DeLoach. He called a press conference at a Dallas Hotel, and DeLoach said this at the press conference: "I came to see my client." Charles Watson had been in his office in Los Angeles, California thirty or forty times prior to the killing of Sharon Tate and the other six people in Los Angeles. DeLoach said his own background was that he was a Republican candidate for the State Assembly in 1964, and he was chairman for the Young Republicans. He belonged to a law firm on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. At the jail to keep Mr. DeLoach from seeing Charles Watson were twenty Texas highway patrolmen and sheriff's deputies guarding him. And they fought the extradition for eight months.

When you're talking about conspiracies, Watson's defense has to go into every avenue to develop his claim that Charlie Manson masterminded him and programmed the group; that the hippie-youth-magic, Satan kind of thing, controlled him to use his knife to kill these people. Prior to meeting Manson, he was not involved in any kind of violence or altercation.

I have seen no record, publicly, that Mr. Watson had a traffic violation or any kind of problem. This twenty year-old boy needed an attorney from the Young Republican Committee forty times. I know what the expenses are to meet with any attorney, even for one hour. People use attorneys or public defenders if they have small altercations. But to go to a prominent law office of a man named Mr. DeLoach thirty to forty times prior to the time that you're going to kill seven people is worth investigating. And it's particularly worth investigating because the boy isn't even really considered a criminal or a murderer. When the trial for Charlie Manson took place this boy was in Texas, and they fought the extradition, and he later wouldn't be associated as part of that clan but as the robot or the product of that society.

The psychiatrist claims that when the decision was made to remove Charles Watson to California he became a catatonic, schizophrenic vegetable in a fetal position. Eight months in Texas he was doing just fine; he didn't lose a pound; he didn't lose a night's sleep; he was just having a good time. And when the decision came to bring him to California he became very sick. The prosecution claims that he was faking this; that when the psychiatrist looked the other way he would take a different posture and he would talk to people. The jury has been out for two days trying to decide if Charles Watson was guilty of those murders. They have to deliberate two days when it is common knowledge that he was in the homes and he did the murders. And Manson was never in the homes where those seven people were killed.

If that isn't a topsy-turvy, crazy world I don't know what it is.

How does your mind get effected to only associate the murder with one man, and let the other man get off the hook like this? I'm going to read headlines from this particular case, from just a few days in December, the way they were reading, coming off the press.

The first article I told you about was in October '69: Did Hate Kill Tate?That was the first opinion about who did it by Ed Butler.

In November there was a very objective article saying: The Grand Jury is to End the Probe of these 7 Deaths. That they don't know what to do.

Now, in December they began to describe Watson as a, in quotes, "man".They called him a man. And that Manson was the "hippie", that "guru Satan" that influenced the man. The man did the killings, and that hippie guru Satan influenced him.

They have on December 2nd: Nomadic hippies in the Tate murders.

December the 3rd: 3 Suspects in Tate Case Tied to Guru.

December the 4th: Accused Killers Live Nomad Life with Magnetic Guru.

December the 4th another paper said: Hypnotic Killers - Hippie Bands, They're Controlled by an Evil Genius.

Another headline: Father Became a Hippie, Looking for Sharon Tate Clues. Sharon Tate's father, dressed as a hippie looked around with drug addicts and vagabonds for four months. He was in Army Intelligence, and he was looking for the hippies who killed his daughter.

Another headline—These are headlines, not sentences from the articles: A Move to Indict God.

Another headline: The D.A. Asks Hippie-cult Indictment.

Another one: Inside the Desert-cult Hideout - Family Members Talk of Black Magic, Sex, Murder.

You see, the headline is putting all of these things in your heads, but it's not telling you, like the early articles, about the military type of killing that it was.

Another headline: Charles Manson - Nomadic Guru, Flirted with Crime.

Another one: Hippie Family Member Describes the Murder.

Another describes the murders as bizarre, twisted.

Cult Leader Plotted the War Between the Races – The cult leader.

"Mystic Hippie"... in quotes ...Used Dune Buggies Mounted with Machine Guns to Trigger a Negro vs. White War.

Another headline: Hippie Satan Clan is Indicted.

Talk of Cult Leader Arraigned in Slayings.

Another headline: Leader of a Hippie Cult Held in Isolated Cell.

Hippie Leader in Tate Case in Maximum Security. If they want to say the alleged murderer is in maximum security, he's the hippie leader in security; He's the hippie leader in an isolated cell.

Another article: The Hippie Mystique

Another one: The Love and Terror Cult, The Dark Edge of Hippie Life

Life magazine published a cover of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a gun. The shadows—the discrepancies of the murder are horrendous. They implant in your mind: This is the boy, This is the gun. None of it was true. Lifemagazine had a cover of James Earl Ray—This poverty-ridden, depressed prisoner who killed Martin Luther King. They said he was an orphan. None of that was true; Remember, his father was living; All of that was untrue.

Life magazine, December the 19th, has a large cover of Charlie Manson's eyes all blown up. Not in Texas. Not wanting to understand the American phenomena of hostility behind a blue suit and a white shirt and a neck tie and short hair—the killer. Not wanting to know how the Whitman boy is killed; how the college people kill. The brain children, one of the brightest children in this town—Charles Watson. Nobody's doing psychological, sociological studies on the actual killers. No. Life magazine has a cover of Manson. Nobody would sleep at night or give a kid on the road a ride if and when you saw Manson's eyes. Not a chance. They call it Love and Terror Cult.

Then Richard Nixon comes into the act. Headline: Here a man is guilty or indirectly of 8 months without reason. They hadn't even come to a verdict in the trial. Richard Nixon was in on the act. And John Mitchell got into the act.

Then—headline: Manson's Race Theory Rested on the Beatles. Then began a long attack on the Beatles.

Now those are the headlines of one month in December. That went on for one year. The consequence is in Carmel Valley or down to Big Sur: How many people would you pick up today? How many people do you put in your car? Or give a lift to? Or take into your home? Who would you trust? Who is disguised as a hippie with a knife that is going to come down on you?

I was in my neighbor's home across the street from me one day and we were talking about something, and a man from the police force in Seaside—a black man—had come there, and he didn't know who I was. We were rapping. He had been down at Lime Kiln Creek and he had lived with hippies for two weeks, and smoked their grass, and probably enjoyed the sex and the relationships and the vibe. And he was going home; he was on his way home to Seaside to clean and shave, and then go back down and make a bust on those people. He was going to take his beard off. I have seen it. I've lived with it. You can't give a lift because the agent provaceteurs, the covert government, is working. It's working in our city. And I can say it works on a national scale.

You read in the paper yesterday, maybe, how much of the Pentagon Papers is not being published and why it's being withheld. The large part of it is the covert relationship to Vietnam, the agents in disguise in Laos, or in Vietnam; our hidden war. The Manson thing is a hidden war. It's a hidden war against the youth, and it worked. If you take enough agents and give [kids] blades, or give them money, or give them the assurance that if they're arrested they'll get off, these kids will mess up.

Somebody came to my home a few weeks ago who had hitch-hiked across the country, and it was really scary. He went to some town in Idaho and a sheriff said, "Oh, did we have fun last night. We took this nigger-hippie and tied him up and dumped him in the river and got rid of him forever." And this is what I am hearing because I am talking about these things. When I talk I get feedback. People come to me and say, "Right on. This is what's happening."

So, I'm just showing you if you multiply one month of headlines and you sat with my collection you can see how the news media comes down on you.

Now, who were the lawyers involved in these cases? How do they overlap? Joseph Ball, from the Warren Commission, was in with Sue Atkins, the girl who's to turn state evidence.

A man named Lawrence Schiller made a record with Jack Ruby on January the 2nd, 1967, in which Ruby said there was no conspiracy to kill Oswald, and he was not a part of a conspiracy. It was made for Capital Records. I knew that Ruby would be dead within days because it was now recorded for history that there was no conspiracy. No one could see Jack Ruby except Capital Records. The only person who could see him was Lawrence Schiller.

January the 4th, two days later, Ruby was dead. The morning I read in my paper that Capital Records got into that hospital room and got this recording of Ruby's voice, I knew then that now Ruby could leave this earth. You see, it's all down for posterity.

This same Lawrence Schiller is the man who gave Sue Atkins $150,000 to turn the state's evidence to say that Manson masterminded the murders. She made $150,000. It was described as an unusual legal trick. Joseph Ball, who worked with the Warren Commission, was with parties involved in the Sharon Tate massacre. George Shibley, who worked with Sirhan—and McKissick was in his office—they worked with the Sirhan case. They were in on the Sharon Tate case. The lawyers overlap.

Lawrence Schiller wrote a book about the Sharon Tate massacres, and this is the way his book starts. He paid a huge amount to Sue Atkins to turn state's evidence. I'm going to read you what he had to say. I read you what Ed Butler, who worked with Oswald, said. Here is Schiller, he said:

Where did it all start?...we can see them going to San Francisco with flowers in their hair...the "flower children"... The Haight-Ashbury hippie... linked together in the history of America's 1960's.

I'm going to stop the quote now to say this is where we started this hour. I began in '67 with those flower children and started a file in my filing system on the flower children, knowing that within two to three years everything would break down on their heads. Now, it's interesting that Lawrence Schiller begins his book:

Where did it all start?...We see them on the road.

He said:

...a movement which sprang from multiple revolutions of the sixties, the new morality, the revolt of the youth. The middle-class watched, relieved, happy to be spectators.

When the Sharon Tate murders happened, he says it was because two out-groups fell upon the other. The people that were making it with their loose sex (he implies) and the drugs. It was two out-groups hitting at each other.

Now he goes into:

Young people had always followed pretty much the precepts of their forbearers until the 1960's came...But mass communication changed our youth. They could travel, they had experiences, information, money...How could young people thus inundated with the facts of life believe the puritan ethic.

I'm going to digress again; stop the quote. We talked about Greece. I was watching Greece for two years. I was watching the hippies. Here is Lawrence Schiller in on the thick of everything, telling you just where I was two years earlier watching how it was going to come down. Now we're getting back to his quotations:

The young people, having rejected the ethics, rejected the laws which were based upon them. They were ripe for new liberation...

And then he perverts the whole thing and says when Charlie Manson came along, he was the chemical messiah. And the essence of their lives were anti-establishment. They had thrown down the puritan ethics and the laws.

He implies they could become lawless and amoral and throw around their sex and their bodies, and they latched on to what he calls the "chemical messiah."

Now who bought the LSD and the chemicals? Did our government pay Charlie's way? His bus? His gas? Was he a chemical messiah, or was he designed out of Texas? Or Mussel Sholes, Alabama, where everything else is designed, and the lawyers are sent? Who designed Charlie Manson? Lawrence Schiller is telling you he's a chemical messiah. I'm saying somebody bought his chemistry; he didn't; It wasn't all handed to him. The government brought it to him and put on his costume; his leather coat and his guitar, and said, "Charlie, get on the road."

Schiller says Manson drifted into the hippie scene. And he admits he's another ex-con seeking protective coloration from the hippies. I claim he was an ex-con who went into the hippie scene to pick up the jargon, to do a job like the mafia does a job like we do in Vietnam, like a soldier goes out to kill. We send boys out to Fort Ord for six weeks training, chanting: "Kill the commies!" They pick up the jargon of the jungle because they're gonna be in the jungle. They didn't arrive that way, we teach them the jargon. Charlie Manson was taught because he was going to pretend to be a hippie. He hated being called a hippie—the book mentions it; He disliked being called a hippie.

So they put him in a beat up school bus and they called it the Manson Family and they headed south. Manson learned to play the guitar, to sing, and write music. That was his last occupation. This is what he was trained for in the federal prison. Lawrence Schiller tells you in a federal prison they rehabilitate you to go out on the street. They bought Charlie a guitar. He had an inkling for music, and he was a natural. He's probably horny as hell and wanting to get on the road anyway. He had all this hostility. He said, "I did it because I wanted to make it look like the blacks were doing it. I want to speed up a race war." He's violently anti-black. And he could sing a song and carry a tune. He had the natural hatred. And he loved the chicks. He was just perfect for the role; he was just ripe for it.

Schiller went on that his livelihood, when they let him out of prison, was that he was going to be a musician. Lawrence Schiller says:

...here was Charles Manson, a year out of prison, mingling with Hollywood stars in 1968... The Manson Family was, somehow, making it with the Establishment...And Manson was going to some of Hollywood's plushest parties.

Lawrence Schiller is telling you that a year later Charlie is right in there with the biggest people of all. That's pretty interesting considering the lawyer that he saw before he got out of Treasure Island, and the lawyer that Tex Watson is seeing before these crimes are committed. These boys were wined and dined in the music scene, in the art scene, by certain people before the massacres took place.

Lawrence Schiller says:

...in the true sense of the word, the Manson Family weren't hippies... Manson didn't like being called a hippie. The hippies don't like it either.

Well, I guarantee Lawrence Schiller that the hippies didn't like it either. He knows they didn't. He said the hippies didn't like it. I know they didn't. It ended everything that was really good that was coming down. And then he concludes the introduction to his book on Sharon Tate saying:

It was a strange Satanic whim that sent those people into Benedict Canyon.

And I claim it was more that a satanic whim, that the book Mr. Kaiser puts out in Oakland, and advertises in Esquire magazine, and the use of this word Satan and witchcraft is a conceived program that disguises the covert government to come down on this generation. And it has succeeded. Nobody really feels safe in the area or around the country. The effect that they wanted has happened, you see.

I gave just a sentence from an article last week. I'm going back to conclude with a few remarks of Marshal Singer. It was an article that was printed in April, 1970:

Observations on the Sharon Tate massacre and Charlie Manson

He says:

Charlie Manson is certainly an enigmatic. Is he a victim or a monster? He's equal parts of Charlie Chaplan and Jack the Ripper. He had been arrested thirty-seven times in his thirty-five years.

And Manson said:

I'll tell you I'm not from your society. I've spent most of my life in a world of bars and solitary confinement. And my philosophy comes from underneath the boots and the sticks and the clubs that they beat people with, who come from the wrong side of the tracks. People like me are society's scapegoats.

And this is James Ray, the same thing: society's scapegoats.

Jack Ruby is society's scapegoat. He can be used. He's Jewish. He's poor. He's kicked around by the anti-Semetics, the rich oil people. He's used when they want. He's stepped on when they want. He is just a pushed-around kid who wanted to make it in this world and be recognized as just what he is. And always carrying this heavy load of anti-Semitism, an underdog, playing a game with the military and the mafia and the oil people for approval and affection: "If I do your work will you love me now?" The minute he shot Oswald, Jack Ruby said, "I wanted to prove to them that I had guts." And he took the challenge.

And Manson is saying: "People like me are society's scapegoats."

The article by Marshall Singer goes on to say that Lawrence Schiller got the confession of this Atkins girl. She was twenty-one, pretty, and she would say that she was victimized by Manson. She had to hold Sharon Tate in her arms so Charles 'Tex' Watson could stab this particular female who was pregnant, and all the other people.

Manson had a lot of hostility. He tells you he was kicked around. His plans were to assemble these dune buggies and have an armada against the pigs, against the black people, against the cops; he would kill cops. He'd been arrested all these times. He'd been in isolation. He would kill them, but he would make it look like blacks did it. He would be getting even with blacks and cops at the same time. He hoped to wipe out both groups that he hated so much.

The article does say that in the early sixties we had our own magical potions, and we had a handsome young president who held out promises. And when he was killed a lot of the dreams went away. When people like Manson break in with us it is a reality too complex and to banal to understand.

In one hour it's hard for me to really rap up the complexity of this because each week we talk about the covert government, the overthrow, change in the economic system. This is what the Sharon Tate massacre is about. I hope that in this one brief hour you can understand how minds all over the world can be effected by killing just seven people, and perverting the news media everyday and every hour to keep this image going. The truth of the murders is different than what the news is saying.

GLORIA: Thank you, Mae. I don't see how you got it in one hour, but you seem to do it. Thank you.

MAE: Okay.

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