The John Train “Salon” Delivered Perjured Testimony in the “Get LaRouche” Trials
Among the crucial evidence illegally withheld from defense attorneys in both the Boston and Alexandria federal prosecutions of Lyndon LaRouche and associates was a June 26, 1986 FBI memorandum from the SAC Boston to the FBI Director. The document was only released, in redacted form, on April 5, 1991, as the result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by LaRouche.
The documents is now on file with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. as part of the 2255 motion still pending on appeal.
The FBI memo constituted another critical piece of evidence of the role of the John Train "salon" in not only orchestrating a government-linked slander campaign against LaRouche, but in also foisting perjured testimony for use by federal prosecutors. The withholding of the document constituted yet another instance of fraud upon the court by federal attorneys. Had the three-page FBI memo been made available to defense attorneys in Boston or Alexandria, many of the most important prosecution witnesses—all former LaRouche associates—would have been hopelessly discredited as witting perjurers, in some cases exposed as "victims" of "deprogramming" and other forms of behavior modification carried out by federal agents, by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), by the ADL-allied nationwide kidnap-for-hire ring, Cult Awareness Network (CAN), and by key players in the Train salon, including NBC-TV producer Pat Lynch and Dennis King.
The FBI document revealed that: "Over the past three months, through contacts developed by the UNITED STATES ATTORNEY'S (USA'S) OFFICE, Boston, and Bureau OCPA, Boston has identified a series of disaffected former LAROUCHE insiders who have tentatively expressed their willingness to provide information....
"On June 22, 1986, Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) JOHN J. MARKHAM was introduced to one of these cooperating disaffected LAROUCHE members, [next ten lines of text redacted]
"From this contact [redacted] and from interviewing several other former LAROUCHE supporters, Boston feels that it is fair to characterize them as deprogrammed members of a cult."
The reference to "Bureau OCPA" as a source of the "disaffected former LAROUCHE insiders" provided another critical piece of evidence withheld by Boston and Alexandria prosecutors. The FBI's Office of Congressional and Public Affairs, headed by Assistant FBI Director William Baker, had been contacted on April 2, 1986 by NBC-TV producer Lynch and provided with information about prospective witnesses against LaRouche who could be produced for a then-ongoing Boston federal grand jury. The Lynch call was memorialized in a memo dated April 4, 1986 from ASAC Edward W. Ludemann to SAC Boston. That document was also withheld from defense attorneys and only declassified on April 17, 1991 as the result of the same LaRouche FOIA case. It, too, is now on file at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
NBC-TV producer Pat Lynch was a pivotal participant in the John Train salon sessions, as was New York City "journalist" and paid ADL informant Dennis King. Both attended the initial April 23, 1983 gathering of the Train-assembled collection of 25 journalists, ADL officials and government agents, where a string of libelous slanders against LaRouche was mapped out. At the first of the three known Train salon meetings, Train personally helped arrange financing for King's booklength slander of LaRouche via the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) and the U.S. intelligence-linked Smith-Richardson Foundation. As a direct outgrowth of the Train gathering, Lynch produced the March 1984 20-minute "First Camera" TV news magazine slander of LaRouche, which provided pretext-cover for the FBI's launching of a national security probe of the LaRouche organization under the guidelines of Executive Order 12333.
The first formal activation of the national security probe of LaRouche came at the January 15, 1983 meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), where three close allies of Henry Kissinger—Edward Bennett Williams, David Abshire and Leo Cherne—all pressed for a formal probe of LaRouche on the phony grounds that LaRouche had suspected hostile foreign intelligence ties.
The Train salon "active measures" propaganda campaign was instigated as part of the PFIAB effort, a fact corroborated by the presence of PFIAB consultant Roy Godson at at least one of the three known Train meetings. According to two other participants, the Train salon sessions were also attended by other unnamed government agents, believed to be representing the FBI and the IRS. The PFIAB discussion of LaRouche was itself the outgrowth of five months of intensive personal lobbying by Henry Kissinger, who first approached FBI Director William Webster to launch a pretext prosecution of LaRouche in July 1982 at the annual meeting of the Bohemian Grove. The evidence of the Kissinger-Webster correspondence was never provided to LaRouche attorneys by government prosecutors, despite its obvious exculpatory nature. It, too, was only declassified and released via FOIA suits.
Despite evidence eventually produced regarding the PFIAB meeting and eyewitness accounts of the John Train salon sessions, throughout the federal prosecutions, government attorneys denied that there ever was an E.O. 12333 probe of LaRouche. However, on July 6, 1989, once again as the result of an FOIA suit, the FBI finally acknowledged that it had maintained an entire investigative file on the LaRouche organization that remained classified under E.O. 12333. Under E.O. 12333, which only dealt with foreign counterintelligence and international terrorism, not even the case number of the investigation could be declassified. LaRouche attorneys had contended during the Boston and Alexandria trials that the government had run unjustified national security probes of LaRouche as a means of illegally disrupting the legitimate political activities of LaRouche and his political association. The contents of the E.O. 12333 files on LaRouche and associates are still classified to this day.
Defector and Grand Jury Data
Following the contact with FBI Deputy Director Baker, but prior to the June 26, 1986 FBI memo, Lynch and King collaborated to pen a lengthy smear, which was published in the Wall Street Journal on May 27, 1986. The article was based on confidential Boston federal grand jury material that should never have been made available to Lynch and King. It was also based on interviews with two of the LaRouche organization "defectors," who would later play pivotal roles in the federal and state prosecutions.
The two "defectors," Konstanin Kalimtgis and Charles Tate, were identified in the articles by pseudonyms, but the content of their interviews, the descriptions provided by King and Lynch, and their subsequent role in the prosecutions, made their identities evident to LaRouche attorneys.
The Lynch-King Wall Street Journal "story," one of a dozen major media slanders against LaRouche that were commissioned at the Train salon sessions, attended by U.S. government officials as well as reporters and at least one ADL employee, Mira Lansky Boland, provided nearly verbatim formulations that would be used by federal and state prosecutors in Boston, Alexandria, New York City and Roanoke.
Tate, Kalimtgis, and a third former LaRouche associate, Steven Bardwell, would provide government agents with access to a score of ex-members of various LaRouche organizations who would be screened and subjected to intensive psychological conditioning by government specialists as well as agents of the purportedly "private" organization, CAN. The result would be a pattern of knowingly perjured testimony by these former LaRouche associates at all of the subsequent grand juries and trials.
Train Salon Spawned Halloween Party
On October 6, 1986, 400 federal, state, and county police descended on Leesburg, Va. ostensibly to serve two search warrants and four arrest warrants against longtime LaRouche associates. FBI officials, as well as Loudoun County deputy sheriff Donald Moore, attempted unsuccessfully to get U.S. Attorney's authorization for a search of a farm outside of Leesburg where Lyndon LaRouche was then residing.
Slightly more than three weeks after the raid, approximately 40 of the former LaRouche associates gathered at the Hastings-on-Hudson, New York home of Steven and Gail Bardwell. The guest of honor at the Halloween party was Kalimtgis, who flew in from Florida for the event. According to one eyewitness account, the purpose of the party, as spelled out in a several-page invitation and handout provided to all attendees, was to line up witnesses for the pending trial of the LaRouche organization in federal court in Boston.
The Halloween event was a direct outgrowth of the Train salon. It was the sources drawn together by Lynch, King and the ADL—on behalf of the PFIAB-ordered E.O. 12333 "active measures" campaign against LaRouche and associates—who organized the event and played the pivotal role in lining up new witnesses for the prosecution. By the time the Halloween party took place, a number of the "insider" witnesses had already been brought before the Boston grand jury.
Bolstering the eyewitness account was a series of handouts distributed to all of the party guests. One of the handouts, marked "GAME ONE," was labeled "Pin the Rap on LaRouche." It read:
"BACKGROUND: Lyndon H. LaRouche (aka L. Marcus) has been implicated in a worldwide confidence scheme involving a Panamanian drug-runner. Many of his shells (NCLC: dba USLP, EAP, LODF, COL, etc.) have been indicted by federal prosecutors. One of these prosecutors who has high hopes of burying the undead, will be taking testimony.
"RULES: You have one minute before the cameras to testify as to the single most serious crime committed by L. LaRouche.
"OBJECTIVE: ... to further the career objectives of the prosecutor who is serious about burying the undead."
One of the former LaRouche associates, Mark Stahlman, did in fact videotape the "party." Eyewitnesses reported that Kalimtgis, one of the "sources" for the Train salon-foisted Lynch-King Wall Street Journal story, spoke individually with all of the party guests, sizing up their willingness to cooperate with AUSA Markham in the Boston and later Alexandria prosecutions.
Yet, when attorneys representing LaRouche in the federal trial in Boston attempted to interrogate government witnesses Tate and the two Bardwells about the Halloween event, all three suffered memory lapses and claimed alternately that the Stahlman videotape had been destroyed, or that the videotaping had never taken place.
Nevertheless, the evidence presented to the jury about the Halloween session had a significant impact on the jurors. After over 90 days of trial, interrupted by a judge's order for a renewed search of government files for exculpatory evidence withheld during the pre-trial proceedings, the Boston trial ended in a mistrial. Jurors, stung by the government's abuse of prosecution, polled themselves after being dismissed, and convened a press conference to announce that they would have acquitted all the defendants on all 124 counts in the indictment. The jurors had been convinced that if any crimes had been committed, they were committed by the government against the LaRouche movement.
Six months after the Boston mistrial, through fraudulent means, the government had shifted the case to Alexandria, Va. under a "new" indictment. Throughout the Alexandria trial, Federal District Court Judge Albert V. Bryan, Jr. blocked defense attorneys from pursuing questions about the Halloween party, claiming that brief testimony by Charles Tate was sufficient to show the jury that there was malice towards the defendants.
Malice or Witness Tampering?
Yet, what the June 26, 1986 FBI memorandum, which was withheld from defense attorneys, showed, was that the Halloween party participants were not merely hostile to the LaRouche movement. According to the FBI document, the witnesses were officially considered "deprogrammed members of a cult."
The FBI formulation was a straightforward admission that the "insider" witnesses had been tampered with, via aversive behavior modification techniques broadly labeled "deprogramming." For the most part, the tracking and initial conditioning of the "defector" witnesses was handled by participants in the Train salon, including Lynch, who was already in active contact with the Cult Awareness Network, a nationwide kidnapping and deprogramming outfit, at the time of the 1984 LaRouche civil suit versus NBC and the ADL.
Beginning in September 1992, details of the "deprogramming" effort began to surface with the indictments of CAN operator Galen Kelly, Loudoun County deputy sheriff Donald Moore and several others, on charges they plotted to kidnap LaRouche associate Lewis du Pont Smith, an heir to the DuPont family fortune. Smith's father, Newbold Smith, was one of the individuals indicted.
Although Kelly, Moore, Smith and the others were acquitted on the conspiracy case, Kelly and Moore were later convicted of kidnapping in another case. Kelly is in jail and Moore is awaiting sentencing.
The CAN prosecutions unearthed details of the "deprogramming" techniques used by such individuals as deputy sheriff Moore and Galen Kelly to "prepare" witnesses for the LaRouche trials in Boston and Alexandria. The methods included sleep deprivation, encounter sessions, sensory deprivation, physical and sexual abuse.
Chain of Command Under E.O. 12333
The slander and witness-tampering efforts of the John Train-led salon were sanctioned by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, under the pretext of Executive Order 12333, giving government intelligence agencies extra-legal authority to deal with foreign intelligence agents and international terrorists. The guidelines were wittingly abused under heavy pressure from Henry Kissinger personally.
Wall Street broker and Anglophile intelligence operator John Train took charge of key aspects of the propaganda and witness tampering in the Get LaRouche drive beginning in April 1983, working in league with the Project Democracy apparatus inside the Reagan-Bush administration. Train operated under the illegally invoked umbrella of Executive Order 12333.
Through key salon figures including NBC-TV producer Pat Lynch, and with financial backing of tax exempt foundations later implicated in the entire Iran-Contra "secret parallel government," such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Mellon-Scaife funds, Train oversaw the recruiting and "aversive conditioning" of key "insider" witnesses who appeared at every subsequent LaRouche-linked trial.
Evidence detailing this top-down frameup was systematically withheld from defense attorneys, constituting a serious case of fraud upon the court.
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