WHO KILLED CONGRESSMAN LARRY McDONALD? Plenty of people wanted to blow this right-wing fanatic out of the sky. . . but RONALD REAGAN may be holding the smoking gun. by Mae Brussell (from Hustler magazine, February 1984)
In the aftermath of the Korean Air Lines disaster that shocked the world last September 1, the editors of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner dealt with a series of nagging questions and their answers. Prominent among them was the following:
QUESTION: "Is there any reason to believe that an admittedly ultraright U.S. congressman traveling 007, Rep. Lawrence McDonald of Georgia, may have been deliberately assassinated aboard the flight?"
ANSWER: "While the [U.S.] government has made no such charge, McDonald's widow claims that her husband, the national chairman of the John Birch Society, was 'murdered.' She holds that it was no accident that 'the leading anti-Communist in the American government' had been on a plane that was 'forced into Soviet territory' and shot down."
Another question that begs to be addressed is: Why would the Soviet Union wish to make a martyr of Larry McDonald? If the Russians are the experts at terrorism that they're supposed to be, it would seem obvious that they could find an easier way to get rid of the congressman than chasing his airplane over Soviet territory for 2 1/2 hours. They could have easily blown him away anywhere in the world.
Furthermore, it is hard to believe that KAL Flight 007 was forced into Soviet airspace, as if a giant mechanism had sucked McDonald toward his mortal enemy. During those strange 2 1/2 hours that 007 ventured as far as 226 miles inside Soviet airspace, the Russians were testing new kinds of missiles directly below. They didn't need any more problems.
And I doubt that McDonald, as fanatic as he was, deserves the label of "leading anti-Communist in the American government." He would have pretty stiff competition from such individuals as A.G. "Fritz" Kraemer, Sven Kraemer, John Lenczowski, Paula Dobriansky, William Clark, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, William Casey, Henry Kissinger, Dr. Ernest Lefevre, William F. Buckley, James Buckley, Richard Pipes, General Daniel O. Graham and a cast of thousands.
One article that appeared immediately after the shooting down of 007 accused Secretary of the Navy John Lehman of being "one particular culprit in the deaths of 269 over Sakhalin Island." The Lehman design, titled "Horizontal Escalation" in defense circles, outlines a series of provocations against the USSR. Lehman is quoted as saying, "He who gets the signal to fire first in the North Pacific will enjoy a tremendous tactical advantage. This region . . . is most probably where we shall witness confrontation with the Soviet Union."
Thus, while Europe and the U.S. divert the public with NATO missile discussions, plans are being formulated for a first strike in the Pacific. South Korea, Japan and the U.S. are working on these plans together. Sending spy planes over the Soviet Union serves the purpose of provocation.
Five days after the 007 incident former CIA spy Ralph McGehee told a college audience that the Korean airliner was indeed on a spy mission. He also believes that the Russians thought 007 was an RC-135 intelligence plane.
It was Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) – another archconservative ideologue who is anti-union, antigovernment, anti-Communist and an opponent of an international treaty on genocide – who arranged the invitation for McDonald to attend the celebration that would commemorate the 30th anniversary of the official U.S. entry into the Korean War.
Instead of traveling together, however, Helms and McDonald arrived in Anchorage, Alaska – the first stop of the journey to South Korea – on separate planes. The fact that McDonald was the only person in the 36-member American delegation to fly alone seems strange. After refueling, the Boeing 747 carrying Helms arrived at its destination safely. But McDonald – and his fellow passengers on Flight 007 – were not so fortunate.
As depicted in the books by Ian Fleming, 007 was James Bond's "license to kill." In this case who gave the license to kill? Was it the CIA and its Korean counterpart, the KCIA? They were formed at approximately the same time and work together closely.
The fact that McDonald flew on a different plane than Helms brings up several more unanswered questions. Who was sitting next to McDonald? Korean Air Lines must have a boarding pass for that person. If nobody used the seat and if McDonald was accompanied by others in the American delegation, why didn't one of them occupy the seat?
Where were the staff or advisory members of McDonald's Western Goals Foundation, a data bank in Alexandria, Virginia, that serves as a national right-wing clearinghouse for negative information about leftists and radical groups and individuals? Why was McDonald left to die literally alone?
Who really gained by Flight 007's violation of Soviet territory? Not the Russians. They were preparing for the following week's meeting in Madrid, Spain, between U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, as well as the resumption of arms-reduction talks and the annual United Nations meeting. An incident of any kind would – and did – set world opinion against them at a critical time.
On the other hand, the U.S. government benefited first by gathering valuable military information about Soviet radar and defensive capabilities during the hours that preceded the crash. Later benefits the State Department and the Pentagon simultaneously maneuvered included favorable MX-missile and binary-nerve-gas votes from a knee-jerk Congress.
Clearly, Larry McDonald did not die at the hands of Soviet planners. The most important explanation for his tragic demise has to do with recent revelations about his clandestine activities. An earlier relationship between McDonald and President Reagan had started to surface before the crash. Their government espionage, concealed behind a cloak of righteous Americanism at any price, was about to be exposed.
The media, along with many other institutions and individuals, had purposely withheld the darker side of Reagan's years as California governor from the 1980 Presidential campaign. Now the dirty laundry of the past was starting to leak out.
Key backers, financiers and appointees of Ronald Reagan have always been involved in political spying – and worse. California was ripe with intrigue. Nixon and Reagan were from California. And California is where the bubble burst.
The trail leading to the connection between Reagan and McDonald is long and winding. But the facts prove collusion between informers hired by Reagan when he was governor and the activities of McDonald's Western Goals Foundation. The method – and even the people involved – were the same in both cases.
The first indication that something was even more rotten than usual in California came on August 15, 1980, when Warren Hinckle – the former editor of Ramparts magazine – noted that the snooping of Jerry Ducote appeared to involve members of Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial staff. (Ducote was a former sheriff's deputy employed by Reagan's backers, who infiltrated suspected subversive groups.)
"What is happening in Santa Clara County today is the germ of the biggest scandal of the next 1 1/2 years," Hinckle said. "People thought that with Watergate it was all over. But this is the next layer of Watergate."
On January 4, 1983, nearly 2 1/2 years after Hinckle's prediction, Detective Jay Paul of the Los Angeles Police Department supplied a weary team of investigators with what was going to be the connection between Larry McDonald and Ronald Reagan. That day marked the end of McDonald's usefulness to the larger network he served. He had become a liability to some very important people.
What brought down a carefully constructed web of deceit were massive numbers of files illegally assembled on law-abiding citizens by the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID). These files were ordered destroyed in 1975, but it was later discovered that LAPD officers kept the data-bank information.
Enraged by this disobedience, the Los Angeles Police Commission officially requested the files. But by then, Lieutenant Thomas Scheidecker had stolen at least 10,000 pages of documents. And PDID Detective Jay Paul had moved a huge batch of files into the garage of his Long Beach, California, home, where his wife – attorney Ann Love – was being paid $30,000 a year to feed a sophisticated, $100,000 computer this information that had been ordered destroyed.
The information eventually wound up in the computer of the Western Goals Foundation. And lo and behold, the man who paid Ann Love was Representative Larry McDonald, head of Western Goals.
Also caught up in the web was John Rees, editor of the Western Goals Foundation and a longtime associate of Jerry Ducote through their common bosses and similar methods of accumulating data. Both acted as agents provocateurs.
"An agent provocateur is a police agent who is introduced into any political organization with instructions to foment discontent . . . or to take a case in order to give his employers the right to act against the organization in question," according to Victor Kaledin, a colonel in the Imperial Russian Military Intelligence.
Ducote was employed in such activities by Ronald Reagan's backers and by the John Birch Society. Rees worked with the Birch Society and virtually every other right-wing group, feeding them information they could use to harass and embarrass those who opposed their point of view.
Reagan's man (Ducote) and Larry McDonald's crony (John Rees) worked together at the San Francisco-based Western Research, also known as Research West. Ducote secluded himself behind unmarked doors, running a blacklisting service for industry. The results of his spying were added to a repository of information used by Governor Reagan to screen out potential state employees with leftist political tendencies that were contrary to his own beliefs.
At the same time, photographs of rallies and demonstrations – along with copies of underground newspapers – were being supplied to Western Research by agents of the Los Angeles Police Department. In turn, Western Research sold background information about employees, advising corporations about possible risks.
Research West, as it was later called, maintained close ties with law-enforcement agencies and private data banks, using its spies to supply information to utility companies anxious to identify anti-nuclear activists. Clearly, blacklisting hadn't ended with the death of Senator Joseph McCarthy years before. The witch hunt never ceased.
Last January in Los Angeles the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of 131 law-abiding groups and individuals who were illegally spied upon. Among the defendants in this case are 54 police officers who are members of the LAPD's Public Disorder Intelligence Division.
The law firm representing these defendants – its highly sensitive files were being funneled to Representative Larry McDonald's Western Goals Foundation – is Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher. Curiously enough, Attorney General William French Smith was a partner in that firm. And none other than President Ronald Reagan is a client of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher for all personal matters.
In any event, time was running out on Larry McDonald's many years of stealing, bugging and compiling. He was about to be subpoenaed by a Los Angeles County grand jury. His testimony, particularly the portions telling of how his Long Beach computer was being fed with illegal police intelligence files, could embarrass and even damage a great number of powerful people.* * * Several weeks following the destruction of Flight 007, Soviet President Yuri Andropov blamed the United States for what he called a "sophisticated provocation, masterminded by U.S. special services, an example of extreme adventurism in politics."
How could the United States have written such a script? Larry McDonald was going to necessarily embarrass President Reagan if too many of the documents from California were exposed. They shared common spies and common enemies. So let's assume that the CIA, FBI and all federal agencies that worked with McDonald – particularly the Pentagon – wanted him silenced immediately. At the same time, because McDonald was so violently anti-Communist, why not make the Soviets responsible for his murder? A New Right martyr could be created for the fight against communism. Remember the Pueblo?
The scenario might have continued in the following way:* There would be a celebration in South Korea early in September. McDonald had strong ties to Korean-born Reverend Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church (the Moonies), and the South Korean military. Get McDonald to attend that celebration in South Korea.
(Dorothy Hunt, CIA officer and wife of Watergate defendant E. Howard Hunt, was blown up in a commercial airliner over Chicago, and nobody seemed to care. Undoubtedly, her murder scared into silence primary witnesses who could have embarrassed President Nixon at the time he was paying off these witnesses to "plead guilty" before sinking his Presidency. Incidentally, the espionage activities of both E. Howard Hunt and Congressman McDonald somehow become entangled with the Los Angeles Police Department. See "The Facts Behind a Sinister Connection," on page 43.)
* We send spy planes over the USSR continuously. The Soviet Union does not appreciate such flights violating their territory. By putting McDonald on a commercial airliner and timing its incursion inside Soviet airspace with spy-plane operations happening at the same time, an attack by Soviet missiles would be assured.
One of the many mysteries of Flight 007 is the total lack of conversation between its pilots and U.S., Korean and Japanese listening posts. This is known as maintaining radio silence.
Furthermore, 007 left Kennedy Airport in New York with both a defective radio and a defective navigational system. When the pilot who flew the first segment debarked in Anchorage, he assumed the plane's malfunctioning parts would be repaired. But this didn't happen.
It is common knowledge to all pilots flying over Soviet territory that aircraft going beyond a certain point inside Russian borders will be forced to land or be shot down. If the CIA and the National Security Agency wanted Larry McDonald dead, thereby assuring an international incident, isolating the pilots from instructions or warnings would be essential. The way to accomplish this is either to tamper with radio transmissions or the pilots' minds – or both.
The pilot in command of 007, Chun Byung In, held the rank of colonel in the South Korean Air Force. He was considered reliable enough to have flown the Korean president to the U.S. in 1982 and to fly overseas routes linking Southeast Asia and the Middle East, Paris and Los Angeles, and New York and Seoul. Co-pilot for 007 was Lieutenant Colonel Sohn Dong Hui.
According to news reports, Chun boasted to close friends that he was carrying out special tasks of American intelligence, and he even showed them some of the plane's spy equipment used for surveying Soviet military installations. Such spying was sometimes part of regularly scheduled commercial flights that began in New York City and ended in Seoul.
After the 007 disaster there were explanations that Koreans flew over Soviet airspace to reduce fuel expenses. But spy cameras with the ability to photograph Soviet military bases are a more plausible reason for Korean jets losing their way so often.
Reports indicate that Korean Air Lines concluded a secret agreement with the CIA in the early 1970s to carry out intelligence surveys of Soviet territory. These reports further indicate that when Flight 007 was shot down, the U.S. intelligence mission utilized a reconnaissance satellite that was programmed to pass overhead at the same time. This allowed the U.S. to record electronic traffic denoting the whereabouts of Soviet air-defense systems as they were activated to meet a presumed threat.
After triggering off the radar warning of a threat to the USSR, the pilot of a U.S. RC-135 reconnaissance plane used maneuvers and tricks typical of American spy planes as he attempted to frustrate Soviet air defenses. Eventually, he dove below the radar cover off the Kamchatka Peninsula to distract air-defense crews and allow Flight 007 to enter Soviet airspace undetected.
Meanwhile, attempting to dodge Soviet fighter planes 226 miles inside the USSR, pilot Chun requested permission to elevate to 35,000 feet. Moments later he shouted, "Rapid . . .a rapid decompression" as 007 was hit by a missile.
Chun's last words –"one-zero, one-zero-delta"– left everybody confused, as did the plane's final radio transmissions. Neither Matsumi Suzuki, head of Japan's Sound Research Institute, nor the Japanese broadcast network NHK could explain what delta meant. Was that Chun's "Rosebud"?
The first reports following the tragedy, noting the apparent loss of contact with 007's pilots, suggested that the plane had been hijacked. A second report said that the two pilots and the navigator may have been asleep – a dubious theory considering the crew's unblemished record of professionalism.
A more likely possibility is that the crew had been the victim of hypnosis and mind control – receiving instructions in advance, before they left Anchorage, that could not be picked up on any messages recorded later.
If this seems farfetched, consider the experience of Candy Jones – a famous model and radio personality – who described in her biography how the CIA programmed her mind for spying and various activities related to espionage. A single phone call from an unseen person would have been enough to implement previously implanted instructions to kill herself.
These revelations came to light at the height of the Watergate scandal, along with evidence that she had previously done errands for the CIA. Only the intervention of her husband saved Candy Jones from certain death.
The issue of 007's defective navigational system also came under close scrutiny following the disaster. Reports filed with NASA revealed that at least 25 times during the past five years U.S. airline pilots relying on the same navigational equipment used by 007 had strayed off course – once as much as 250 miles. Cited among the causes for such problems were computer malfunctions and human errors.
"It's easy to become complacent [on long flights]," said Pan American World Airways pilot Thomas Foxworth. "It's a human failing. The record is replete with numerous incidents of a guy just falling asleep."
What if the "human failing" cited by Foxworth was actually mind-controlled planning?
Two of the 007 crew might have been asleep – or even dead. But the one who said "delta" was obviously awake until the end. His response to what was going to happen, given his years of experience and expertise, was that of a programmed zombie instructed to fly continuously – disregarding any external sights or sounds on the flight equipment.
As long ago as November 1974 the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights – headed by then-Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina – issued a 645-page report titled "Individual Rights and the Federal Role in Behavior Modification," which indicated the advanced state of CIA mind work and testing.
Three years later the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Sub-committee on Health and Scientific Research published a report titled "Project Mkultra: The CIA's Program in Behavior Modification."
The upshot of these reports is that the Pentagon had the capability, if it so desired, to link mind control with satellite defense systems. And a logical use of mind control, of course, would be to program a pilot – perhaps even turning a normal flight into a kamikaze mission.
Dr. Jose Delgado, the father of military-and-defense mind experimentation who worked with the CIA and Navy Intelligence, perfected such procedures as far back as 1971. In one instance he surgically implanted a receiver in the brain of a Spanish fighting bull. Later in a Madrid arena, when a tiny radio-controlled electrode delivered a minute surge of current to the enraged beast's mind, the bull braked to an abrupt halt.
Delgado also pioneered a method of shooting mood drugs into the brain, which could then be calmed by a remote computer that sensed oncoming anxiety, depression or rage and then flashed back inhibitor signals by radio.
"The [programmed] individual may think that the most important fact of reality is his own existence," Delgado wrote. "But that is only his personal point of view, a relative frame of reference which is not shared by the rest of the living world."
The reason for perfecting physical control of the mind was to enable outside forces to determine how to use a person's body by activating his brain and directing it beyond that person's control – in spite of any conscious efforts he might make.
KAL Flight 007 was equipped with the latest pathfinding technology. Three computer-driven inertial-navigational systems, which tell the airplane seven times per second where it is supposed to go, had been installed a year earlier.
Only the following elements could have coordinated the death of Representative Larry McDonald with the Soviet missile response: (1) human factors; (2) altered instruments in New York City or Anchorage; or (3) mind control over the Korean Air Force pilots.* * * Exactly who was Larry McDonald, the strange and complex individual who wore so many robes? At first he was a doctor, specializing in urology, who prescribed the discredited drug laetrile to cancer patients. He was also a man who concealed the ownership of 200 guns. In 1974 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and he later became chairman of both the tax-free Western Goals Foundation and the John Birch Society.
The Larry McDonald pie (see page 40) is a suggestion of segments in his complicated secret life that reveals his unmistakable links to military and law-enforcement agencies throughout the world.
The best way to describe most people is to understand who their heroes are. McDonald reportedly kept two photographs on the walls of his Congressional office that give some clues to his mental state.
One picture was of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The other was of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Senator McCarthy began his Senate career after World War II with financial assistance from two known Nazi sympathizers in Wisconsin – Frank Seusenbrenner and Walter Harnischfeger. Fred J. Cook's book The Nightmare Decade details the pro-Nazi backers of McCarthy and how the senator knew of their "passionate ultra-rightism and admiration for Hitler."
Harnischfeger's nephew, in fact, often displayed an autographed copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. He also flaunted a watch-chain swastika.
In December 1946, 43 of Hitler's top military officers received death sentences or long prison terms at the Dachau Trials for the bloody massacre of American soldiers at Malmedy, France. One of McCarthy's primary objectives as he entered the Senate was to facilitate their release. By 1949, thanks to Congressional hearings he directed and other maneuvering, McCarthy's efforts paid off. The 43 Nazis were freed.
When McCarthy conducted his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in 1953 and began accumulating data banks on law-abiding citizens for future fascist purposes, most of his information came from combined United States intelligence and Nazi war criminals. He also drew upon the extensive files of a spy network known as Odessa, which was formed between 1943 and 1945 when it became obvious the Third Reich could not win the war against the Soviet Union.
After McCarthy died in 1957, it is reasonable to assume that Larry McDonaid – through Louise Bees – took over the massive computerized files that now contain millions of names worldwide.
Louise Rees – the wife of John Rees, editor of McDonald's Western Goals Foundation – worked for McCarthy and Roy M. Cohn, counsel for the senator's 1953 Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee. Western Goals lists Roy M. Cohn, now a New York lawyer, on its advisory board. And when McDonald went to Washington as a representative from Georgia in 1974, Louise Rees became his paid staff aide.
McDonald's admiration for his other major hero, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, can be explained in part by the fact that both of their careers benefited from the support of international fascist organizations. And there is evidence that Nazis in Chile had funded McDonald's Congressional campaigns since 1974, at Pinochet's direction – just as Nazis were the source of funds for McCarthy in Wisconsin.
Ironically, the very night that McDonald was killed, his CIA-supported hero – Pinochet – was being taunted by rioters in Chile. The Chilean people also want their nightmare decade to end.
Pinochet is responsible for DINA, Nazi-like death-squad terrorist teams that are part of the Chilean police and are necessary to maintain his repressive regime. Without DINA's methods of fear and torture, the U.S. puppet government in Chile would not last another day.
Pinochet also does nothing to interfere with Colonia Dignidad, a haven for Nazi war criminals located on the border between Argentina and Chile. Colonia Dignidad serves as a torture center where dissenters who oppose Pinochet are mutilated and fed to dogs while still alive. Armed guards discourage snoopers. Amnesty International is currently investigating this deplorable situation.
Larry McDonald's unsavory Chilean connection was further exposed when Robert Byron Watson presented attorneys from the House Select Committee on Assassinations with an alleged affidavit detailing McDonald's dealings with Fuad Habash Ansare in Santiago de Chile. In this alleged affidavit Watson claimed that Fuad Habash is the brother of Arab terrorist leader Dr. George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine! This is the organization that is said to work with our CIA as it arranges Arab terrorist murders around the globe.* * * A far more sinister organization, Larry McDonald's Western Goals Foundation, was formed in 1979. Members of its advisory board are listed in brochures and newspaper advertisements. They include the following:
Jean Ashbrook, Mrs. Walter Brennan, Taylor Caldwell, Roy M. Cohn, Congressman Philip M. Crane (R-Illinois), General Raymond Davis, Henry Hazlitt, Dr. Mildred F. Jefferson, Dr. Anthony Kubek, Robert Milliken, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, E. A. Morris, Vice-Admiral Lloyd M. Mustin, Mrs. John C. Newington, General George S. Patton III, Dr. Hans Sennholz, General John Singlaub, Dan Smoot, Robert Stoddard, Congressman Bob Stump (D-Arizona), Mrs. Helen Marie Taylor, Dr. Edward Teller, General Lewis Walt and Dr. Eugene Wigner.
The executive staff of Western Goals consists of Linda Guell, director; John Rees, editor; and Julia Ferguson, research associate.
Two members of Western Goals bear special mention. According to Seymour Hersh's recent book The Price of Power in the Nixon White House, Admiral Thomas Moorer masterminded the surreptitious removal of sensitive data from President Nixon's office. Working through Yeoman Charles Radford, Moorer stole papers clearly marked "President's Eyes Only" and had them delivered to the Pentagon.
His reward for stealing these top-secret documents was a promotion to the prestigious Joint Chiefs of Staff. Merry Christmas, Cambodia! Bypassing every member of Congress, Henry Kissinger and Admiral Moorer conducted their own private war against that country – which has not fought the United States at any time – gleefully selecting bombing targets that cost the lives of millions of innocent people.
It later developed that the Los Angeles Police Department files on 2 million Californians were assessed by Moorer's and McDonald's Western Goals computer.
So it comes to pass that the criminal keep track of the innocent. Information about you is probably already filed and computerized in their secret data banks. Would you trust people like this with your good name?
A second Western Goals advisory-board member worth noting is Edward Teller, Hungarian-born father of the hydrogen bomb. The same day that McDonald made the front page of the Washington Post – when Western Goals was ordered to answer the stolen-documents subpoena in Los Angeles – Teller was attending a European seminar on nuclear warfare that was critical to America's future foreign policy.* * * There is no beginning or end to the Larry McDonald tragedy. His right-wing fanaticism drew him to the crueler side of blackmailers, burglars, assassins, terrorists, wiretappers, and people dedicated to waging a future war with the Soviet Union.
And there he was, last August 31 and September 1, apparently sitting all alone on Flight 007. If that was by Soviet design, then all of his entourage were Communists who knew in advance.
But since the American delegation was screened and cleared for travel with a congressman, then the CIA and U.S. agents knew something they wouldn't share with him – even if it was going to save his life.
So what's it all about, Alfie?
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