Start of Interview
Kerry Cassidy (KC): This is Kerry Cassidy and Bill Ryan, and we’re with Project Camelot. We’re here on Thursday, February 12, 2009, and we’ve got Peter Levenda. He is a wonderful researcher and author. He’s very well known for his book, Sinister Forces, which apparently is a three-book series. Also for his previous book called Unholy Alliance, delving into the background of the Nazis.
Peter, I just want to say hello. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today. I have to say I am incredibly impressed by your writing style as well as your honesty as a researcher in the way that you write. You actually remind me a little bit of Richard Dolan, and I think you know who he is because you cite him a couple of times in your work.
Peter Levenda (PL): Certainly. And thank you, thank you very much for the introduction. I’m very happy to be part of this.
KC: Great. So what we wanted to do is give the listener basically a background on where you come from, how you come at this material, because I think that’s really important -- the fact that it dovetails with a lot of what Richard Hoagland, Jim Marrs, Joseph Farrell, and others are delving into, but may even have pre-dated some of their work and their realizations in this area.
And we’re talking about how the Nazis, how mind control, and how... the direction America’s going and why we might be going in a certain direction, and what the underpinning occult significance is of all that. And I think your background is just really stellar in this regard. So please just go from here and tell us where you come from and where you’ve been going with all of this.
PL: Well, I’ll try. I tried, back in the 1970s, during the Watergate era, to write a book that was going to explore the relationship between religion and politics, which is a nexus that’s always fascinated me. We tend in the United States to think of them as two separate entities.
But during Watergate I began to see a lot of the same personalities crop up that we had run across during, oh, the Kennedy assassinations and all of that, and I started to see deeper and deeper parallels.
So there was a book that came out in 1960, long before Watergate, called The Morning of the Magicians. It was written by two Frenchman, Pauwels and Bergier, and it talked a great deal in there about a Nazi / occult connection, but it was not documented at all. And I thought: That would make a great chapter [Kerry laughs] in the book that I was planning. Let me write something about the Nazis and religion, or Nazis and occultism or mysticism.
And I went down to the National Archives in Washington, DC. This was right at the height of Watergate. Nixon was still in power. He was about to leave. It was a month or two before he left, so the whole thing was at fever pitch in Washington.
But, oblivious to that in a sense, I was at the National Archives looking at captured German documents. As I was in the National Archives, the archivist there, a very famous archivist -- anyone who studied the Nazis back in the ’70s and ’80s would have known about Dr. Wolfe -- when he found out what I was trying to do, he suggested that I look at the records of an organization called the SS Ahnenerbe, which was actually a division of the SS that was specifically concerned with occult and mystical research. I was stunned.
He led me to the microfilm rolls. I started going through the machines. And here I realized -- my jaw dropped -- I was looking at the actual documentation of a full-fledged Nazi program to investigate occultism.
Other authors had talked about a Nazi / occult connection. The book, The Morning of the Magicians, talked about it at length, but there was no documentation at all. And some of the other books that had come out at that time, for instance, The Spear of Destiny, and some of the others, talked extensively about this but there was no documentation.
So it seemed like speculation until suddenly I’m staring at all the documents -- page after page after page of research in Tibet, Tibet expeditions. There was research to find the Holy Grail. There was all sorts of bizarre SS programs that were being financed heavily by the Nazis during World War Two.
So it got me thinking that maybe there is a lot of documentation in the world. Maybe you can find evidence of all of this without having to speculate too much. So the Nazi documentation got me very excited.
I lived in New York City at the time. I’m from New York City. I was talking to a lot of friends of mine who had their roots in Latin America and South America. I read a book by Ladislas Farago called Aftermath, which is about the survival of war criminals, Nazi war criminals, in South America.
And I came across the mentioning of a weird establishment in Chile called Colonia Dignidad the Colony of Righteousness. This was supposed to be a kind of Nazi safe-house which was also a weird religious group, high up in the Andes Mountains. And I thought: This is just too good to pass up.
So here not only do I have the documentation from World War Two, but now I have a real live Nazi sanctuary in South America which is also a religious operation, which is exactly what I was writing about.
So I decided to go to Chile -- this was in 1979 -- and see this place for myself. This was during the time of the Pinochet dictatorship. There was martial law in the country, but I managed to make my way down to a small town halfway down the coast of Chile called Parral. And close to this small town is the colony, Colonia Dignidad.
I managed to go up there. The story is told at length in my book, Unholy Alliance. But I managed to go there on a Sunday morning in June of ’79, and I as briefly detained. I was kept there. I was forbidden to leave. My passport was taken. The film was taken out of my camera.
I was told by the Germans -- These were Germans. These were not Chilenos. These were not Spanish people -- I was told by the Germans that I was not welcome in the country, that I had to leave Chile immediately.
And as I was allowed to leave, which was touch-and-go for a while, all the way back to Santiago, to the capital where I had my hotel room, I was stopped along the way. I was in a bus and I was stopped along the way by troops who had set up roadblocks, who were making sure that I was on that bus. When I got back to my hotel room, there was a note waiting for me that said I was on the next plane, that a reservation had been made.
So the amount of influence that the Nazi network had in 1979... ’79 was so many years after the end of World War Two, you know. We’re talking 25 years later. They still had such great influence in a country so far away as Chile that I began to see there was a lot more going on than even I suspected. And that eventually became Unholy Alliance.
I began to see the connections between governments in Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, an extensive Nazi network, a lot of money that had left the Third Reich when the Nazis had lost the war.
I began to realize that the Nazi Party was not a political party the way we understand political parties, but that the Nazi Party was a cult. If you look at it from that point of view, you can understand the true nature of this kind of evil, because the Nazi Party is... they’re not going to go away simply because they lost the war.
The old war criminals who escaped -- and some of them are still alive. A few of them have died recently in South America, in Chile and Argentina. They have their followers. They have their philosophy, their ideology.
Bill Ryan (BR): Forgive me for interrupting you, Peter.
PL: Sure.
BR: But it sounds implicit in what you’re saying, then, that they have support from deep within the governments of those South American countries.
PL: Well, sure. I mean, it depends on which regime is in power at any given time. But let’s take the example of Bolivia. Klaus Barbie, who was the “Butcher of Lyon” in France, who was a man responsible for all sorts of war crimes in France, at one point became the chief of the secret police of Bolivia. I mean, he had a federally-appointed position in that government.
Walter Rauff lived for a very long time in Chile. Walter Rauff was the man who designed the mobile gas chambers, the vans that were used to re-channel the exhaust into the vans to kill prisoners.
I mean, all of these people found safe haven, not only in South America, but in the Middle East and in Asia as well, and to a certain extent in Australia.
KC: And in the United States as well.
PL: Absolutely. Certainly. Of course we’ve had many cases here in the United States of war criminals that we’ve found, uncovered, and occasionally shipped back.
A famous one, which got me very involved in the story, was the man who for a long time was the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the United States. Here was an Archbishop who during World War Two had been a member of the... what was the name... the Iron Cross? The Iron Arrow, I think, a Romanian Nazi organization, who had tortured prisoners.
Here was a man who was a devoted Nazi, who after the war was over fled to the United States, and although he had no seminarial training as far as I’ve been able to uncover, he managed to take over one branch of the Romanian Orthodox Church in our country, in the Midwest, and was not even discovered until maybe 20 years ago, when he was forced to leave the country.
So yeah, we’ve helped a lot of people escape. The Catholic Church, also, to a certain extent was involved in that, in an operation called Caritas during World War Two, which provided Vatican passports to help some of the more famous war criminals escape to South America. So there was a lot of collaboration.
And even in our own country, in the United States, we had Operation Paperclip, in which we brought Nazi scientists over to help with our space program, among other things.
So that got me working on what eventually became Sinister Forces. I began to wonder how was it that we in the United States could have sold our souls so easily to something as heinous as a criminal organization like the SS, and to the Nazis in general, to bring their scientists over here, to make them work for us, and really to give them great jobs, to give them positions in our industry.
Walter Dornberger is an example, who held a job on the board of directors of Bell Helicopter. All sorts of people. People who worked for the Space Medicine Program in Texas, at Randolph Air Force Base. There’s a very big story there.
KC: Right. And that has tentacles that go to the whole mind control aspect. I think that you cover that really wonderfully in Sinister Forces. I mean, I can’t imagine what you do in Book Two and Book Three, but I have to say that that’s really a huge story.
PL: Well, I develop the same ideas. In Book Two I focus a lot on the Charles Manson family, as a kind of quintessential example of what sinister forces might be from the behavior modification / mind control aspect.
And then in Book Three I sort of lay out what I think is the whole story and how this works. I connect serial killers to mind control operations and try to understand.
I mean, our country, the CIA in particular in the 1950s, 1960s, all the way up through until about Watergate, until the 1970s and the Rockefeller investigations, was involved in one of the most bizarre experiments of modern times.
I mean, here we were, trying to figure out how the human consciousness worked, how to understand memory, volition. How do we erase a person’s memory, implant new memories? How do we make a person do something they would not ordinarily do -- for instance, commit an assassination? And then forget about it and not know why they did it?
I mean, this was something like a medieval king, you might think, hiring alchemists and magicians, you know, to contact the other world. We were doing that in the 1950s and ’60s and probably still are today.
We have operations in which we are trying to understand how the mind works and then to control it. Like a sorcerer’s apprentice, our intelligence agencies stuck their fingers into human consciousness and started playing around with the contents.
BR: What’s the answer to your own question, Peter, which you posed just a couple of minutes ago? About how... I think the words you used were: How America could have sold its soul to the extent where it not only brought these Nazi scientists over to American shores to give them great jobs but actually, seemingly, embraced their whole agenda and took it much further?
Were there evil forces at work in America during the Second World War? Or was this something that was opportunistic because they realized the magic that they certainly held in their hands and thought that they could use this to their own ends, and it was too great a temptation to resist?
PL: Well, I think, as usual, the causes take place on different levels simultaneously. I think to point in one direction only might be a mistake. I think sometimes it’s desired that we do look in a certain direction and not look in another one -- the idea of misdirection.
I talk about sinister forces. I mean, that’s the title of my series, and I took that title from Watergate because that’s how I started this research. And “sinister forces” were blamed for that famous 18.5 minute tape gap on the Oval Office tapes, on Nixon’s office tapes, where there was suddenly a big gap and no one knew what he had said.
I think it was Alexander Haig or Buzhardt who had said the tape, the hissing sound on the tape was the result of sinister forces. And I liked that idea, that there was something darker at work.
I think that in many cases what we see around us is theater, a kind of theater, and that there are forces that are deeper, darker, less visible, manipulating events. Or I like to think that what we call coincidence and synchronicity is evidence of the action of a darker force or a deeper force.
BR: And are these forces also much more ancient? Because of course there are many researchers, possibly yourself, who conclude that this whole thing, this whole dark agenda, had its roots 2,000 or even 3,000 years ago and it’s been growing steadily since then.
KC: Well actually in your book you’re talking about going back into the mounds in America, so you’re going back thousands if not millions of years. Right?
PL: Certainly.
KC: And there’s also the allusion to Egypt and the pyramids. And you’re talking about, you actually have to get to possible off-world cultures, and how we humans, how humanity began on this planet, when you go that deep, really.
PL: Well, when I started looking at the burial mounds... The idea of the Indian burial mounds came to me sheerly by accident, because I was researching Manson and I decided to go where Charles Manson had grown up, which was a town called Ashland in Kentucky.
I was struck by the fact that there were Indian burial mounds right in the center of town. And I started to research that, wondering what did that mean? I had never really come across this before. This was brand new to me.
I started to look at the fact that these mounds are all over the United States, especially east of the Mississippi, but also west of the Mississippi to a certain extent.
I was struck by the fact that there was actually an ancient civilization in America, in North America, that we have no clue about. It was just as ancient as anything that was taking place in the Middle East. The earthworks that they built were in some cases more grand and a lot larger than the pyramids, and we know so little about it.
I began to look at America as a kind of haunted house, and I began to ask myself: What forces are there really at work here?
The coincidences that we come across, especially a conspiracy theorist... Anybody who begins to investigate -- the Kennedy assassination is probably the most famous example -- will come across dozens and then hundreds and then maybe thousands of “coincidental” connections, between people, places, and events, which drives them crazy.
A regular historian, a mainstream historian’s going to say: Well, that was a coincidence; and that was a coincidence; and that was a coincidence, and dismiss them all because he cannot see a real cause-and-effect relationship.
But to me, and it happens to all of us who investigate these things, we find ourselves bedeviled by these coincidences.
I mean, I was researching Sinister Forces for a while in Asia. I was in Southeast Asia in remote areas and I would walk into an old second-hand bookstore and find books that I needed for my research. They were books maybe on Charles Manson or something that I had never heard of before. Scholarly texts would suddenly appear. Or texts would appear that had been written and printed privately by someone involved with the group that I call “The Nine”.
All of this stuff would fall into my hands even though I was in the middle of nowhere, nowhere near any sort of academic structure, nowhere near a Barnes and Noble bookstore or anything like that, [laughs] but just really in the middle of nowhere.
So the multiplication of these events, to me, is an indication that something else is at work, that maybe we need a quantum consciousness approach to history itself, not just to our own minds in a kind of theoretical way or a spiritual...
KC: Absolutely. Absolutely.
PL: History. Yep.
KC: You’re talking about Puharich. I’m not sure how you say his name.
PL: Puharich.
BR: Puharich.
KC: And that opens a can of worms around the mind control and how the mind control itself seems to stem from those early beginnings and the consciousness that supposedly Puharich actually got into contact -- those “Nine” people -- of which there are people that have written books since then and gotten involved in supposedly being in contact with, if not those intelligences, then others. Some call them the Giza Intelligences. So it’s all going back to somewhere back there, as well.
PL: Well, yeah. I mean, if you begin with Puharich, you can see the contours of what I’m talking about quite clearly, because here was a man who was a researcher into the paranormal, but he was also a captain in the U. S. Army and a medial doctor, all of these things all together. And this was all during the Korean War.
Here was a man who was giving lectures to the military on how to weaponize ESP, you know, how to use man’s telekinetic and telepathic powers as a weapon in the fight in the Cold War.
At the same time, he’s holding a séance or a series of séances at a farmhouse in Maine to which he’s invited a handful of people. But the people he’s invited are some of the wealthiest families in America, the most powerful families in America, “blue-bloods”, I mean, who are descended from the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The thing that fascinates me about this is that this is thoroughly documented stuff. There’s no speculation about this at all. Anyone can go and look it up and find out for themselves that these people did meet, they conducted the séance, they were in contact with some extraterrestrial or supernatural group of beings which called themselves “The Nine.”
And we’re talking about people who were also tangentially involved in the Kennedy assassination which would take place ten, fifteen years after these events. I mean, it’s stunning. I mean, you ask yourself: What is the connection? How could this possibly be?
BR: Yes. What did you think of Picknett and Prince’s book, The Stargate Conspiracy, that you must have read as part of your research?
PL: I did read The Stargate Conspiracy and I wanted to shout at Picknett and Prince: Just go a little bit further! Go just a little bit more and you will see the connections right back to the Kennedy assassination.
I was thrilled that they were writing about these events, about “The Nine” also. They were writing about Puharich. They had mentioned him. They had mentioned this group, but they had not drawn the connection. They had not connected the dot between, for instance, Arthur Young, who was a prominent member of “The Nine”, a man who invented the Bell Helicopter, which I had mentioned just a little while ago as having been involved with Nazi scientists...
BR: When you talk about “The Nine”, are you talking about a human group, or an off-world group? Or is this an allusion to two groups of nine?
PL: Well, when I talk about “The Nine”, I’m focusing first on the human group because those are the names of the people that we know. But of course they were considered to be the Earthly representatives of this spiritual or extraterrestrial group that called themselves “The Nine.”
BR: OK. What is that Earthly group of nine?
PL: Well, “The Nine” included families -- for instance, Arthur Young and his wife, Ruth Forbes Paine Young, who is a relative of John Kerry’s, as a matter of fact – John Forbes Kerry. So we have Arthur Young and his wife, Ruth Forbes Paine Young.
We have a DuPont, we have an Astor, all as part of this group as well as Puharich. So the Astor family was there -- a very wealthy American and British family, the Astors. Of course everyone knows the Astors and the Waldorf Astoria, etcetera, etcetera. John Jacob Astor was on the Titanic. So we have the Astor family.
We have the DuPonts, of course – extremely powerful, wealthy, influential American family. And we have the Forbes -- as in Forbes Magazine, Steve Forbes, and all of that. That family was represented.
Her name was Ruth Forbes Paine. Paine was one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence. She is a direct descent along that line by marriage. And Arthur Young himself, the inventor of the Bell Helicopter.
So you have a family grouping here of some of the most aristocratic family names in America. If we had royalty, they would DuPonts and Astors, Forbes, and Paines.
BR: Did they call themselves “The Nine”? Or is this your term for them? I mean, did they have an agenda or some kind of thesis or reason for being together and were recognized as a group of that size?
PL: Well, they called themselves “The Nine” in this fashion: They held a séance. Puharich was conducting a séance. He had a medium from India, a Dr. Vinod, and Vinod was in telepathic communication with a group of beings that was somehow in space, hovering over the Earth, and there were nine of them.
And they told the group of nine individuals: We are nine, and you are nine, therefore you are the Brahmins who are going to bring a new wave of enlightenment, or a new wave of evolution to the planet. We’re going to use you as our vehicle for causing this kind of spiritual evolution, this jumpstarting of evolution, if you will.
BR: OK.
KC: And this was also a take-off on basically what the Illuminati had been, their philosophy since the beginning of the group that we call the Illuminati, of which these families are all part?
PL: Well, that’s the implication. I mean, otherwise... Why are these people, as I said before, some of the wealthiest individuals in the United States, in Maine, in a barn, in the woods, on New Year’s Eve, when they could have been anywhere else in the world? They had the money, they had the wherewithal, they had the connections. Instead, they’re holding séances in the freezing cold, in the winter, in this barn.
What is the motivation for this? What is the purpose? How did they know each other? We don’t know so much about that. We know that Puharich was the guy bringing them all together for the séance and they willingly went and took part in this endeavor, not just once but several times.
So their motivation, on their own? I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to speculate except to say we’re talking about the most powerful people in our country at the time.
BR: And the analogy that you’re drawing here is that there’s good evidence that the Nazis were doing something similar, both before and during the war, and yet you’re saying that this practice of powerful individuals from powerful families in a powerful nation-state are suddenly doing the same thing several decades later.
PL: Well, yes. I mean, less than ten years later. If we count the end of World War Two as ’45, these people were meeting in the early 1950s.
And what Himmler was doing, himself... I went and visited in Germany the castle that he had renovated called Wewelsburg. It’s near the town of Paderborn in Germany. And this castle was developed by him to be a kind of Vatican for the SS. It was going to be their spiritual headquarters.
He was conducting very similar rituals there. He had duplicated a kind of “Roundtable”, a sort of Arthurian, Camelot kind of idea. There would be 12 knights around it, which were the highest ranking SS officers.
They would gather in meditation at this table, in a room which was directly over a crypt, and in the crypt would be placed urns containing the ashes of SS officers as they died, the high ranking ones. There was special niche for each one. There were swastikas engraved in the floors, and the whole nine yards.
And so, the similar idea of meditation, of trying to contact supernatural beings to guide the SS, was now being duplicated by a group called “The Nine.”
And if we think in terms of race -- you know the SS, like all the Nazis, were obsessed with race and racial purity -- suddenly with “The Nine” we have, as I said, the blue-blood of American families, DuPonts, Astors, Paines, Forbes. We have this gathering of the... for want of a better word, the most racially acceptable, to the Nazis, grouping in guided meditations in the woods doing the same thing. Except there were not twelve in this case. There were nine, very specifically.
So I’m not trying to draw too close a connection between what the Nazis were doing and “The Nine.” The practices were quite similar. It was a group séance. It was a meditation. It was something to do with evolution of the race. So you have a lot of the same themes.
KC: OK. But what you also, I think, continued to investigate is to find out where that information that they were receiving from “The Nine” went from there. Because I believe there is a trail that connects through SRI [ed note: Stanford Research Institute] and Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann...
PL: Sure.
KC: ...remote viewing, and actually then circles back and also has to do with people that were involved in mind control then utilizing some of that information? And/or is it guiding, for example, the agenda of the Illuminati to this day?
PL: Well, it certainly did make that route that you just described, and the connective tissue in all of this, of course, is Andrija Puharich. Puharich was the man largely credited with having discovered Uri Geller, for instance, the famous Israeli psychic. He brought Geller to SRI in California to be tested.
There was also a connection with SRI and that grouping, with the people at Jonestown. The connections are vast with all of this, and if you start pulling at the threads, you become extremely paranoid.
BR: What’s the connection with Jonestown?
PL: Well, yes. In Volume Two I have about 100 pages alone just on Jonestown because the amount of work that has yet to be done just to decode that event is still leaning on us. We really know very little about what really happened at Jonestown.
Slowly but surely more and more information has been revealed over the last 20 years or so, some of it by a good friend of mine called Jim Hogan, an investigative journalist who spent a lot of time researching Jonestown and came up with some of the CIA documents to verify that Jim Jones himself was some kind of contract agent with the CIA. He had what’s called a 201 File at CIA. So we know there was a connection there.
But as far as the connection with SRI, I think it was Russell Targ -- if I’m not mistaken, I believe it’s Russell Targ who was the man who was involved with both Jonestown and SRI and Hal Puthoff.
BR: Yes.
KC: There’s also the link back to Puharich as working for the CIA.
PL: Yes. As far as Uri Geller was concerned, Geller always said that Puharich was his handler for the CIA. He made that statement several times.
But as far as SRI’s concerned, Russell Targ, the physicist who was part of the SRI group, by his own admission was involved with a group of Jonestown survivors. He was director of counseling at their Human Freedom Center in Berkeley and left them to join SRI to study psychic phenomena.
The group that he was working with, Elmer and Deanna Mertle, after he left them, a few weeks after Targ left them to join SRI, the Mertles were found dead, murdered execution-style in their home. So the connection between Targ, SRI, and Jonestown is definite. What it means, we don’t know.
But we do know that Targ worked with the Mertles, which was a group of survivors of the Jonestown massacre, people who had left the Jim Jones church, The People’s Temple, and were trying to raise consciousness against it. They had written a book about The People’s Temple and Targ was working with them. He left to join SRI and a couple of weeks later, the Mertles were dead, murdered execution-style.
KC: So you have to also say that with all of this what happens is some people will fall on working for the positive and some will be working actually for the negative agenda, within the fact that there are connections between these organizations -- because there is very definite connection between the CIA and SRI. And between Puharich and CIA. So you get all these connections with CIA. Gordon Novel, the Kennedy assassination. All of these link back to the CIA. So it gets really convoluted. It’s really fascinating.
I know that you’ve studied the occult in great depth. Have you come to any conclusions? Are you going down some trails now that perhaps are not publicized?
PL: Well, not publicized to the point that I don’t quite know how to explain all of this yet in any way that makes any kind of sense from an academic point of view, but it has occurred to me during this kind of research... As I mentioned before, I consider coincidence and synchronicity to be evidence of the operation of these forces.
I think that these forces are there and I think that groups of human beings from time to time make a conscious effort to contact these forces, to manipulate them, to use them for their own advantages.
I think that the CIA did that with MKULTRA and Operation Bluebird and all of the mind control experiments they did.
If you take a human being and you try to manipulate their consciousness, you try to erase their memories, replace their memories, program them as assassins, as an example, then what you’re doing is, you’re essentially initiating that human being.
I mean, you’re putting them through a kind of spiritual initiation, but with none of the safeguards, with none of the spiritual preparation that a person would normally go through to become protected against whatever demons are invoked in the process. So it was a very irresponsible, callous, cruel program that the CIA had undertaken at that time.
KC: Irresponsible or actually intentional? I mean, that’s really the question, isn’t it, of the heads of the CIA, If they knew what they were getting into? And they were invoking these negative forces, in essence, and bringing them into the bodies of programmed assassins -- and some of which are actually sleeper agents that may indeed be part of our society at the moment, sitting around waiting to be triggered.
In essence what you’re looking at could be an intentional agenda. And that’s where it gets very interesting when you’re starting to look at the future and what we’re actually faced with.
PL: Well, yeah. I mean, I think one of the good indications of just how bad it got was the man who was for a long time in charge of this program at the CIA, called Sydney Gottlieb, Dr. Sydney Gottlieb... When the MKULTRA project was “disbanded” by Richard Helms in the mid-1970s, Gottlieb went a little weird. He at one point became a Buddhist monk. He went to India. He tried to essentially pay for his sins.
He wouldn’t talk about this program anymore but he became a kind of recluse and was obviously trying to live simply. He was living off the land. He was living in a farmhouse, I believe in Virginia, after he came back from India. He was a man who was shattered by the realizations of what he had done, by the sins that he had committed against other human beings.
So if the leader, if the creator, or the handmaiden of this operation felt that way, I wonder what the actual day-to-day perpetrators felt, the people who were actually involved in the day-to-day programming of these individuals.
I think there is a tremendous amount of evidence to suggest that Sirhan Sirhan was just exactly one of those assassins who had been created. I’ve gone through Sirhan’s diaries, the diaries he was keeping up to the point he was arrested for the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.
BR: And he has no idea what happened, does he?
PL: He doesn’t. I mean, he admits he did it because he figures, you know, he did it. I mean, if he’s arrested for it and he was there, he must have done it. But he has no memory of it. And his diaries are extremely suggestive of someone who’s been through a behavior modification program, something like a mind control program. It’s fascinating stuff.
BR: I read a wonderful book which I’ve got. I also had the experience of what I guess you could call the International Library Angel suddenly depositing a book at your feet when you’re traveling. [laughs] It was a book by Long John Nebel who was the Art Bell radio host of his day, who operated in the 1950s, who wrote an amazing book about the Control of Candy Jones. You must be familiar with that.
PL: Yeah, I do. I’m fascinated by that account as well and I think it’s genuine. It’s been attacked, of course, by other researchers and authors by saying that Long John Nebel kind of made it up or Candy Jones never went through this.
But if you really go through as I do, which is the thing that I do, is I go through and I try to document what goes on. I met Candy Jones a couple of years before she died. I was actually interviewed by her on radio in New York City.
And from my point of view, what she discusses, especially her trips in Asia and Taiwan, have the absolute ring of truth. I mean, I lived in Asia for a long time. I traveled in those countries. The things that she discusses I believe actually did occur. I think that she did not make them up. I can recognize the places she’s talking about.
BR: I read that book several times and it rang very, very true to me.
PL: Yeah. It was not a sensationalistic thing that she was making up. I really do believe what she said happened had happened.
KC: So where are you going now with everything? Because you don’t really keep your blog up. You had been talking about McCain as a possible mind control victim, and I think there’s great evidence to that effect. I’d be interested to hear what you have to say about Obama. I don’t know what your current situation is. The Powers That Be, are they aware of you? Have they made your life difficult? Because you seem to be one of the best researchers actually pulling these threads together in one place.
BR: And what does this mean for us at the beginning of 2009, looking at the next few years, and what this may mean for this country and the world?
PL: Yeah. These are very good questions. I took a little time out for a while to get a graduate degree in religion and the thesis that I wrote, I published as Stairway to Heaven, which came out about a year ago. I have another book on the Freemasons which is coming out in April. I’ve kept my hand in all of this but I’ve been doing a lot of academic-type work on the one hand, and then a lot of investigative work, on the other.
The political situation: The way I look at it these days, as I mentioned before, is theater. It is basically theater. We are watching a play being acted out in front of us, and we’re all willing or unwilling audience members in this play.
I think we have to not believe a lot of what we see, as being “real.” It’s a kind of consensus reality. We all kind of agree that certain things are real and certain things are not.
And I always like to talk about the root of the word reality, because the word comes from a very interesting Indo-European root which also gives us royal. It gives us what is real and what is royal. And basically what that means is, to me: “Whatever the king says is real is real.”
In other words, there’s a kind of agreement that we all enter into, a kind of contract where we agree that certain things are, and certain things are not, real. And I think we’ve come to the point where we have to revisit what we call real. We have to revisit reality to a certain extent. We have to come up with a new paradigm, a new way of looking at reality, because it’s not working for us, the old way of looking at it.
We’re too easily manipulated. Our country has made a science of the manipulation of reality since at least the Korean War, if not before.
Communication science, which is being taught in the universities all across the country, came into being as a result of World War Two and psychological warfare studies. I mean, the same guys who created psychological warfare for use during the war were the guys who in the private sector developed programs for teaching advertising, marketing, and communication.
BR: Mm hm.
PL: So we are really struggling with psychological warfare being directed against by manipulating our reality.
KC: Right. A form of propaganda and mind control in and of itself, just as television becomes in a sense a mind control tool.
PL: On a massive, massive scale. I used to live, as I mentioned, in Asia, and we would get CNN out there. I don’t want to single out CNN particularly for opprobrium, but they are sort of an international news organization that you can pick up on cable channels all over the world.
There was one particular instance where I’m in Kuala Lumpur and there was a riot going on on CNN, on television, in a restaurant. It was being carried live. And we’re looking at the television screen, and we’re at the site where this riot is supposed to be taking place. And there’s no riot there! [Kerry laughs]
We’re watching and we’re all looking at each other. We’re watching the screen and we’re saying: What is this?
It turns out there were three or four people in a corner somewhere and a camera was on them. And the way it looked, it looked as if there were all of these really angry people rioting.
I was getting a phone call from friends of mine saying: Go away! Get out! There’s a riot taking place. We can see it on television. And we’re all sitting in the restaurant saying: Well, where’s the riot?
You know, there is no riot. I mean, it was manufactured news, essentially. And if that happened that one time, how many other times has this happened? How much of our news is being manipulated or controlled or created, you know, as we watch it?
KC: Right, but as a researcher going into this as deeply as you have, you must be able to look towards the future and come to certain conclusions, and / or think about certain uninvestigated trails to look down.
I am curious: Do you think, for example, there are sleeper agents? Because, you know, we keep having these incidents happen and they seem to be evidence of mind control operations, in which you have school kids suddenly flipping out, and so on and so forth. Where’s it all headed?
PL: Well, if we characterize the agents of this madness as individual human beings, we might be missing something darker and something deeper. I believe that there are individual agents, of course, and that’s what I investigate. That’s what I write about. That’s where the evidence leads me.
But sometimes I think that there is something else at work here. I think that there is a kind of level of consciousness that is creating this for us as well, and that we’re victims of it because we haven’t learned how to fight back. We haven’t learned how to take control of our own consciousness. We’re essentially allowing others to do that for us.
I think that we have a kind of responsibility, perhaps now more than ever, because the information is available to us, of fighting back by taking control of our own minds, and taking back control of our own consciousness, of trying to deprogram ourselves, if you will, away from what we’re being fed on an almost hysterical basis.
I mean, things have ramped up to the point where paranoia, fear, anxiety, stress levels have increased so exponentially, it’s as if someone wants us to have this collective nervous breakdown. We have to take a stand and fight against it.
I think that if my research has shown nothing [else], it’s shown that humans who are involved in this quite often don’t really understand it that well themselves. I’m talking about the CIA.
I don’t think that the people who ran MKULTRA really understood the full ramifications of what they were doing. They had a very narrow focus. They wanted to create deniable assassins, as an example, and that was their focus. They didn’t realize the other forces they were unleashing at the time.
And I think that there are paths, there are shamanistic paths, there are paths in the occult that might be actually beneficial for us to investigate to understand how we’ve been manipulated, how our consciousness has been manipulated, our reality itself has been manipulated. I think we have a chance because there is such an amount of information available.
But we are headed into a very dangerous impasse, a very dangerous place. I agree. But I think that we don’t realize how much power we have as individual human beings, or as small groups of individual human beings, to combat this madness. And I think we can take back our minds and our lives from these forces, from these sinister forces.
BR: Are you able to say anything, do you feel, about the role of the Vatican?
PL: Ah... [laughter] How much time do you have?
BR: You know about the work of Eric Phelps and that large body of research that he, among many others, represents. I just wondered if you could pull some of those threads together once again for the benefit of our listeners who would like to see as much of a summary of the big picture as you are able to present here.
PL: Right. I grew up as a Roman Catholic. I was born into a Catholic family in the pre-Vatican II days. And when Vatican II happened, I was actually kind of disappointed. I didn’t like all of the, you know, guitar-playing Masses that were taking place and all this stuff. I felt a little cheated of the mystery, somehow.
But then, as I started to research the Nazi information, that’s when Phase One of my disenchantment or dis-enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it, took place.
And that was understanding the degree to which elements within the Vatican had assisted war criminals with hideous records to escape; how they protected them at safe-houses throughout Europe and then in Latin America; how they gave them Vatican passports; how we had the spectacle of Nazi war criminals dressed as priests entering Argentina, entering Brazil, in one case performing a marriage ceremony as a priest.
I mean, I can’t even imagine what that poor family would have felt, had they known that it was a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of people blessing their union as a fake priest. So all of this began to... that was Phase One.
Phase Two was realizing that what we’ve been told about Christianity itself, particularly about the Catholic Church, is based on so much disinformation and so much manipulation of history and historical facts that we really don’t know what the Catholic Church is any more, or what it ever was. We don’t know what’s going on there.
I mean, the Vatican scandals... The Masonic scandals, the Propaganda Due, the P2 Masonic scandal alone should have alerted people to the degree of perfidy and cupidity that was taking place within the Vatican.
I mean, we had Licio Gelli and Roberto Calvi, all of these characters who were heavily involved in the Vatican and at the same time financing right-wing terror squads, assassination squads, in Europe, in Latin America, working with Francisco Franco -- the dictator of Spain for so many years -- heavily involved with fascist organizations and operations.
It was mind-numbing, the extent to which this was taking place. So I have a very hard time. You know, I’m thankfully a very lapsed Catholic. You know, I want to stay that way. I can’t believe that I would go to the Bishops, Archbishops of the Catholic Church and accept spiritual guidance from people whose own morals and ethics I have to question on almost a daily basis.
KC: Well, also there’s a link between the Vatican, the Illuminati, and the US government, apparently. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because when you’re talking about the Nazi influence in America, and you’re talking also about The Powers That Be with Paperclip, the Ultimate Space Program, and all of the levels at which the Vatican is involved... From what I understand their secret service was basically the model upon which secret services all over the world have been built.
PL: Well, sure. In fact, even the SS... the Nazis emulated the Jesuits. I mean, Himmler wanted to create a Jesuit Order for himself, and that was what the SS was, hence the black uniforms, and the rituals in the churches, and the rituals at night in the forests, and all this other stuff. It was a kind of pagan Jesuit Order that Himmler was trying to create.
I mean, people may have disliked or even hated the Catholic Church or the Vatican, but there was so much of it that they wanted to emulate, that they wanted to duplicate. But the problem is that we have so much information to discuss that it would take hours to get into it. I’ll just bring up one or two points that will be enough to scare you, and probably...
I think the place to look in the beginning, if you want to see the connection between the Vatican, Nazis, and even the Illuminati, would be the Knights of Malta and some of the other chivalric orders that the Vatican maintains and supports.
I won’t even go into Opus Dei which is a whole other kettle of fish by itself. I mean, we’re talking about a man who created that order who had pro-fascist, pro-Franco sentiments. I mean, there’s no question about it. And how he could be canonized is absolutely beyond me.
But anyway, look at the Knights of Malta. Look at the connection between the leaders of the CIA, many of whom were Roman Catholics, members of the Knights of Malta or members of one of the other chivalric orders around the Vatican.
When I was growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s, I saw with my own eyes the influence that churches had with intelligence agencies, and intelligence agencies with the churches. I mean, I witnessed it as a young man of 18, 19 years old, working with a church in the Bronx that was heavily involved with intelligence operations, which was actually a front for intelligence operations.
And that brings us back again to David Ferrie and Jack Martin and the Kennedy assassinations, because I met the Bishops who ordained and consecrated David Ferrie, Jack Martin, all these peripheral figures that you saw in the movie JFK, you know, being played by Joe Pesche, being played by Walter Matthau, I think.
These were people who were heavily involved in a church. They were also involved in intelligence activities. They were also involved in anti-Castro Cuban activities and considered to be involved, in one way, shape, or form, with the assassination of a president in Dallas.
So the nexus between religious organizations and intelligence organizations is thick. It’s just thick, you know.
And like I say, I saw it with my own eyes. I know the church that Ferrie and Martin belonged to in 1968 when Jim Garrison was starting ramping up that investigation into the Kennedy assassination. David Ferrie died mysteriously, but he was a priest and a Bishop with one of these churches. So...
KC: Don’t you also get into, maybe, what’s going on with the agenda, in terms of how this plays out? For example, in the economy of the world going downhill, and the desire for the One World Government. And how there’re certain problems being created so that a solution can be created, as you know possibly David Icke’s work in that area?
So what I’m wondering is, are you following those threads? Obviously you see the economy going down in America and around the world. There are sacrifices, blood sacrifices. Some of these things, or maybe even all of them, are actually planned as some kinds of sacrifices to these hidden, dark entities in order to make certain things happen upon this planet.
PL: Well, if we don’t characterize the economic situation as a purely economic situation, I think we can see more clearly what’s taking place. In a previous era, this might have been a vast military conflict. It might have been a World War Three, or a World War Four or something.
Now we’re fighting that same war but we’re using economics to do it. This is a different approach to the same type of general control that’s being exerted over the world.
I mean, the whole world cannot go broke. The money is somewhere. That’s the funny thing. The humorous part of this thing, if you want to be funny about it... that fact, you know, we’re thinking the whole world economy is going down. But basically what happens, especially with capitalism, is somebody gets rich and somebody gets poor. So who’s getting rich?
During Watergate we were told to follow the money. And I think if we follow the money today, we can find out who’s doing what to whom. We can find out who’s actually doing this kind of control.
I’ve been looking at it. I’ve been trying. Following the money in today’s economy is extremely difficult to do. I think even members of congress are finding themselves totally unable to even explain what’s happening. Some of them are not able. Some of them are strictly not willing.
But if we can follow the money, if we can start pulling the threads on the money over the last 12 to 18 months, we can probably figure out who’s behind this thing.
For me, it’s been very difficult to do although I’ve been trying to cover it. I think the answer is out there. I think, as Fox Mulder used to say: The truth is out there. But we have to look at the evidence, and the evidence is there. It’s just it’s very hard to figure out.
If we’re talking about manipulation of the world economy, it’s because we’re being prepared for something else. Obviously there’s an agenda. It’s not strictly to make some people rich at the expense of others. That’s been going on forever. We don’t need a collapse in the world economy to do that.
So if a collapse is being engineered in the world economy, it’s to create a circumstance or a set of circumstances conducive to another phase of action which has nothing to do with the economy. As you said, it might be a One World Government -- possibly. It might be something more heinous than that.
A collapse of the economy may be a way to keep in place the types of controls that were put into our government during the last eight years. It may be a way of preempting any kind of change that we thought we were voting for -- some of us anyway. So there may be a way to...
As 9/11 essentially was a Reichstag fire which gave the president total control of the government, in terms of the Patriot Act and everything else, the collapse in the economy is essentially another 9/11, and it’s going to give the government additional powers that it never had.
BR: It’s just another kind of controlled demolition.
PL: It’s another kind of controlled demolition. It’s a... what’s the word I’m looking for... a consolidation of all of this.
If we put the Patriot Act and some of the other things that took place -- the wiretaps, the illegal stuff that’s been going on -- and we now couple that with government control of banks and corporations, you know, we have fascism.
Some people are talking about creating socialism or communism here, but fascism is also a wedding between the state and the corporation. It’s not just socialism that we’re talking about.
The one thing that nobody wants to talk about is the fact that we’ve been creeping closer and closer to fascism in the last 40 or 50 years. And that scares me, believe it or not, more than socialism does or even communism. What frightens me most is a kind of fascism, an American style of fascism.
KC: Well, I mean, this is the premise of Jim Marrs’ book, as you know.
PL: Yes.
KC: And it is a basically a fait accompli in the minds of many, even behind the scenes, with Richard Hoagland and his investigation into NASA and the symbolism there, and the Paperclip background behind, you know, the space program. So the agenda seems to have been a kind of fascism that stemmed out of World War Two and is being continued today.
But where is that going? Once they have total control, then what? You know, it’s almost like they already have total control as it is. One wonders: What next?
And the only thing we’ve gotten so far in our study of this mystery is the idea of population elimination. In other words, they want to eliminate large segments of the population. They haven’t been able to do so with other means, with viruses and so on.
In other words, this control you’re talking about has to lead to some thing, because control is something they’ve, in a sense, always had. But they’re tightening it, and as you say, they’re consolidating it. So with what purpose in mind?
PL: Well, that’s another good question and it’s something, too, that would probably take a long time to try to analyze. I think that “The Powers That Be” are not 100% happy yet. They don’t really feel they have the kind of control they would like.
Part of the reason for that is the explosion of technology, which seems to be getting out of control. You don’t notice it perhaps as much in this country as you would overseas where this kind of technology, the internet in particular, has given people at the grassroots level a voice they never had before.
So the governments in those parts of the world, especially in developing countries, are struggling very hard to control the technology and control access to information.
Right now we are talking over the internet and this will be available on the internet, so people who want to can hear it. But this kind of control eventually will probably have to be extended over what we’re doing over the internet, over the free exchange of information.
I think it’s already started and I think it’s going to continue until there is control over information. And once you control information, you control reality. You control consciousness. Once the independent operators are gone, once they’ve been closed down, there will only be the party line that’s left.
BR: That’s 1984, isn’t it?
PL: Well, it is 1984. Some people listening to this are gonna say to themselves: You know, these are the aluminum hat people. You know, the tin-foil hats. We’re all worried about vast conspiracies taking control.
I want to tell you something, to the listeners who maybe think that at times this is out in left field. I was on somewhat friendly terms with a man called Norman Mailer, a famous author, one of America’s most famous novelists and journalists and authors, who passed away recently -- a man I admired very much. He was kind enough to praise my own work and write a foreword to Unholy Alliance.
He spoke in my presence about the fact that America was heading towards fascism. Many people of that social setting, other authors, some of them Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, people who are understood to be great thinkers, great members of the intelligencia, have all said the same thing to me or in my presence, that we are heading towards fascism, that America...
According to Norman mailer, back a couple of years ago, he said America was in what he called a pre-fascist condition, but that we were heading inexorably towards fascism. Other authors since then have said the same thing.
So this is not something that only a handful of people on the absolute fringe are feeling. These are things that are being felt on other levels by other people who are not involved in this kind of investigation, people who are not doing this kind of research, people who have just opened their eyes and who’ve looked around and said: My goodness, this is what’s going on. We’re becoming a fascist country.
BR: One of the things that confuses people sometimes, as you must be well aware, is the idea that somehow there’s a spectrum with socialism on the left and fascism on the right and the two are very different. Actually, they meet in the middle, kind of loop round in a kind of circle, one going to the left and one going to the right. Extreme socialism and extreme fascism are actually very similar.
PL: That’s the point I was just going to make. To have fascism or to have socialism, you have to have a marriage between the state and business. I mean, that’s how it’s done.
Either the government owns the means of production as it does in a socialist or a communist country, or the state and the corporations have a working relationship, a nice working relationship, as Eisenhower warned us about when he left office. He talked about the military / industrial complex and how frightened he was that that was happening. That is fascism.
So, does it matter to the average person whether or not the government owns the means of production or the government and the state and the corporations are in bed together? Does it really matter to us on the street?
It’s going to be the same effect. We’re still going to be controlled. Our economy’s going to be controlled. Our freedoms are going to be drastically curtailed. So in the end, what difference does it make?
I’ve talked to people about 9/11 a lot. There’s been, of course, a lot of discussion about 9/11. And I’ve always said it was a Reichstag fire. It’s what happened in Germany. How Hitler took complete control of the government was the Reichstag burned down and he blamed the communists for it.
And my point was, do we really care who burned down the Reichstag at this point? All we really care about is the fact that it brought Hitler to power.
So in our case, what did 9/11 do? It pushed all of these heinous attacks on our liberty and our privacy. It pushed them right into the forefront. It made it acceptable. That’s what happened. That was the real effect of all of this.
We can talk about 9/11 -- for instance, we can talk about conspiracies. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that what happened, the effect of it, was that we lost more liberty, we lost more privacy.
KC: Right. And so then that gets back to the overall agenda.
PL: Yes
KC: And it’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a conspiracy fact when you look at all the evidence. And what’s happening is that this particular agenda is being rolled out.
And, of course, it’s very heartening that you do talk about how consciousness and the role of consciousness was getting out of the hands of the people in MKULTRA, such that people like Gottlieb himself, who was certainly one of the masterminds behind all of that, goes on his own sojourn to India, looking for some kind of spiritual way out, I think, of the responsibility for which he... You know, it’s basically like walking around in some kind of living hell, I’m sure, being inside that guy’s head.
And so, in essence, all of this is playing out in the microcosm around the globe, not just America, because I see it in many countries. In fact, England has the best surveillance system on the streets, cameras, etcetera. So what’s happening is, on some level it seems to be manifesting in America sort of in a more overt way. But in a covert way, it’s actually existed in small countries, under despots that were financed by the CIA, and then across the globe, masterminding the governments behind countries like Switzerland, and so on.
PL: Well, I mean, what’s very amusing to me in a sardonic sort of way is the fact that in the United States if you talk about conspiracies, you’re pooh-poohed. You’re shot down. It’s considered, you know, paranoid fantasy.
And yet we recognize without hesitation the fact that conspiracies like this exist in every other country on the planet. Right? So when Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was gunned down last year in Pakistan, everyone said of course it was a conspiracy. There were elements of the Pakistani secret police involved. Al Quaeda may be involved, or the Taliban, or who knows what. But automatically it was a conspiracy.
However, according to mainstream historians, not a single person assassinated in this country has ever been assassinated by a conspiracy! [laughs] No conspiracy. Nothing to see here. Move along. Right? We have this idea somehow that the U. S. is immune to these events.
And yet we overthrow dictators in foreign countries. We’ve overthrown and committed assassinations in Guatemala, in Iran back in the days of the Shah. We overthrew the government of Allende in Chile. We put Pinochet in power. All of these things we do on a regular basis and we’ve done it for years and years and years. And yet somehow it doesn’t take place inside the United States. Why is that? Why is it so impossible to believe?
KC: Right. And I think, though, nowadays it’s a lot easier to sort of get people to, not so much believe, but really understand the roots of conspiracy. And ever since the death of Kennedy I think that America’s eyes have slowly been opened along those lines, at least many. Although certainly 9/11, you still get people not able to accept the possibility that a conspiracy took place there.
So again, I guess we’ve gone full circle with you. In many ways we’re going over some material here that is just... the roots are everywhere. The conspiracies, if you will, are everywhere.
It’s very heartening to know that you are behind the wheel, investigating all of this and documenting it and pulling as many threads together as you are. I encourage people to follow your work. I certainly want to read a lot more that you’ve written.
PL: Where I’m going now? I’m still in the midst of all of this, you know? I’m still in the midst of researching. I don’t know what my next book will be.
As I had mentioned, I have a book on Freemasons coming out in April, which is kind of a look at the connection between the Masonic society and the Mormons, and some of the occultism that was taking place in our country before, during, and after the Revolution, the American Revolution. So I look at the connections that were there.
It’s kind of a general look at Freemasonry. I’m not a Freemason myself, of course. That’s coming out in April.
Stairway to Heaven was really more about Kabbalah and Chinese alchemy and that sort of thing, a very spiritually oriented book trying to understand some of the implications of some of the ancient writings.
So, where I’m going to go from here? I’m constantly collecting information. I’m constantly building up files of data, trying to see more connections, and I’m sure I’ll have something like this to share with you soon.
KC: That’s fabulous. One thing I do want to ask you, the book you were talking about that you investigated the occult quite deeply...
PL: I was involved with it. Yeah. The Necronomicon. Of course. I mean, I made no secret of that. I’ve done some interviews based on that. That was an occult work that, I think today it’s one of the critical texts, probably, of the mid-20th century on occultism. It’s been reviled by a lot of people. People claim it’s a hoax. Other people say it’s a very terrible book, or it’s a very powerful work.
I look at it as the survival of an old Middle Eastern occult practice which involved a process of initiations, going through a series of “gates”, gaining greater and greater illumination or enlightenment at each time, each passing of the “gate”. It’s an interesting book and the events around it were interesting as well.
KC: We’ll have to revisit that with you because I’m fascinated by that as well.
PL: Sure.
KC: Well, thank you, Peter. This has been fascinating. We’re both really very interested in what you’re gonna be doing in the future, as well as to get into your work after this conversation. And thank you for taking the time today to talk to us.
PL: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.
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