BLACK TERROR WHITE SOLDIER PART 34

The Seventies Part 2

  The  crisis  in  confi dence  resulting Watergate was then exacerbated by a series of revelations that began to appear in the media. First there were revelations of the US Army’s spying on the civilian population, including the FBI’s COINTELPRO plan to “destroy” the Black Panther party. Then, in 1974, the New York Times published an in-depth article by Seymour Hersh detailing CIA operations over the years dubbed the “family jewels.” Covert action programs involving assassinations and attempts to subvert foreign governments were al

Hersh’s article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information

on the political activities of US citizens.

These  revelations  convinced  many  Senators  and  Representatives

that Congress hadn’t been vigilant enough in carrying out its oversight

responsibilities. When Congress began launching investigations into these

abuses, President Gerald Ford tried to control them with the creation of

the Rockefeller Commission in 1975, headed by his Vice President, Nelson

Rockefeller, brother to David Rockefeller. But it was soon superseded by

other Congressional investigations, most prominently, a Senate Committee

headed by Frank Church. The Church Committee conducted a comprehensive

investigation of intelligence agency abuses, including CIA-sponsored coups,

illegal mail opening and wiretapping, the FBI’s COINTELPRO and harassment

of Martin Luther King, and much more, including the infamous CIA plots to

assassinate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro.

A subcommittee headed by Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart took a fresh

look at the JFK assassination, with regards to how the FBI and CIA worked

with the Warren Commission. The Warren Commission had included among

its members the least trustworthy of all American political leaders, involved

in  overt  conflicts McCloy of of the CFR, interests, and Allen Dulles,  like

CIA Director until he was forced to resign by Kennedy following the failed

Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The CIA was found to have destroyed or kept

From investigators critical secrets connected to the assassination.³² According to subcommittee head Richard Schweiker, upon close examination the Warren Commission had “collapsed like a house of cards,” and the Kennedy assassination

investigation was “snuffed out before who directed the coverup.”³³ At the time of the Church Committee investigations, a bootleg copy of the Zapruder  film,  which  had  bee Life Magazine, by its owner C. D. Jackson, was shown on national television for the first time. Jackson had published individual          frames of  Zapruder’sfilm to be screene stunned to see Kennedy thrown “back and to the left” from what was supposed to have been a shot from the front of the limousine.

Also among the revelations disclosed by Ramparts was that Gloria Steinem, who became nationally recognized as the media spokeswoman for the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, was in the employ of the CIA. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, Steinem’s father was Jewish, her mother was a Scotch Presbyterian, but she was raised in Theosophy. Gloria’s paternal grandmother, Pauline Steinmen, was a reformed Jew active in women’s causes who listed in Who’s Who in America between 1910 and 1925, and was a leading member of the Theosophical Society in Toledo. ³⁴ Steinem was catapulted to fame when she wrote an article titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” in 1969, and then co-founded Ms Magazine, which first  appeared  in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine, which was also funded by the CIA, by way of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation. In the Fall of 1958, Steinem spent a year and a half on a scholarship trip to India, where she met Indira Gandhi, and then received a call asking her to join a CIA operation known as the ISI, or Independent Research Service as it was later renamed. A key contact for Steinem in her ISI publicity work was C. D. Jackson.³⁵

Steinem was hired to organize the attendance of non-communist American youth to disrupt a festivals being held by the communists in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1952. One of these was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Harvard graduate student who would later serve as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, who was described to Jackson by Steinem as “a star member of the Independent Service.” To plan their tactics, there were daily hotel-room meetings. “I remember Gloria lying in bed in a sort of frilly robe while the rest of us sat around the bed strategizing,” Brzezinski recalled, “I thought it was kind of an amusing and slightly eccentric scene.”³⁶ Another potential attendee, Michael Harrington, who later wrote The Other America, about the poverty of millions in the US, showed far more integrity than Steinem, refusing to participate in the CIA’s “dirty games.”³⁷ Rather, in 1967, when the Washington Post published interviews with Steinem in the wake of Ramparts’ expose, she excused her participation by saying, “in my experience the Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent, and honourable.”³⁸

In May 1976, Redstockings, a radical feminist group, was attempting to publish Feminist Revolution, with a chapter titled “Agents, Opportunists and Fools,” which attempted to link the CIA and a number of corporations to individuals connected to Ms. Magazine. In 1979, Steinem and her powerful CIA-connected friends, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas, raised “libel” claims that succeeded in pressuring Random House to remove the chapter. Nevertheless the revelations appeared in the Village Voice on May 21, 1979.³⁹ One of Steinem’s CIA colleagues was Clay Felker. In the early 1960’s, he became an editor at Esquire and published articles by Steinem which established her as a leading voice for women’s liberation. In 1968, as publisher of New York magazine, he hired her as a contributing editor, and then editor of Ms. Magazine in 1971. Ms. Magazine´s  fi rst  publis Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who planned John Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade route. Despite its anti-establishment image, MS magazine attracted advertising from the elite of corporate America. It published ads for ITT despite the fact women political prisoners were being tortured in Chile by the Pinochet regime which it helped bring about through a CIA-assisted coup against Allende in 1973.⁴⁰

  Protest against America’s barbarous excesses in Vietnam provided the much of the pretext for the explosion of terrorism during the 70s against “capitalism” and “imperialism,” linked again ideologically with the Frankfurt School and training from Nazi stay-behind units. While in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood focused their activism against Nasser, the first instances methods of terrorism in the Islamic world came with the rise of Palestinian

nationalism. The most well known Palestinian terrorist organization is the PLO. The violence of the PLO and PFLP was characteristic of many nationalistic movements at that time, including Spain’s ETA, the FLQ in Québec, the Tamil tigers and the Provisional IRA.

In response to mounting Israeli aggression, Nasser called for the creation of the United Arab Command (UAC). Although Nasser had made secret contacts with Israel in 1954 – 55, he concluded that peace with  Israel would  be impossible, considering it an “expansionist state that viewed the Arabs with disdain.” In a move to share responsibility over the Palestine issue, Nasser decided to support the establishment of an entity to represent the Palestinians. In May, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an umbrella group that included various Palestinian factions. Nasser aligned himself with the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) of George Habash and used the PLO to counter support for Fatah among Palestinians.

Yasser Arafat was among several Palestinian refugees who received training in commando tactics for possible use against British troops stationed in the Suez Canal zone from Otto Skorzeny, who planned their initial strikes into Israel via the Gaza Strip⁴¹Inspiredinbythe 1953FLNand–Fanon,1954Yasser.Arafat, the nephew of “Hitler’s Mufti” al Husseini, founded Fatah with members of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954. In 1967, Fatah joined the PLO. The PLO consists of separate factions, the largest of which are Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Abu Iyad organized the Fatah splinter group Black September in 1970, best known for seizing eleven Israeli athletes as hostages at  the  September  1972  Olympics  in  Munich. All          the athletes  and    five Black September operatives died during a gun battle with the West German police. The PFLP, founded by George Habash in 1970, hijacked three international passenger planes, landing two of them in Jordan and blowing up the third. Nazi financier Genoud Francois also believed to have master minded the hijacking of  a  Lufthansa  flight from  Bombay   by PFLP in 1972.

PFLP was also provided support by the Paladin Group, a far-right organization created in 1970 by Otto Skorzeny and former US Colonel James  Sanders. Skorzeny’s operation was based in Albufera, Spain, and lodged in the same building as the Spanish intelligence agency SCOE, which was also an offiCIAce.⁴²Paladinof wastheintended to serve as the military arm of the anti -communist struggle during the Cold War. Ostensibly a legitimate security consultancy, the group’s real purpose was to recruit and operate mercenaries for right-wing regimes worldwide. In addition to hiring many former SS members, the Group also recruited from the ranks of various right-wing and nationalist organizations, including the OAS, the Gaullist militia SAC (Civic Action Service), and the French Foreign Legion. The group’s cover

was  a  Madrid  export-import  firm  M Schubert, formerly of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry.⁴³ After the war von Schubert had been security adviser to the Peron dictatorship in Argentina, and after that a principal agent in Skorzeny’s construction of the Gestapo-style Egyptian security services under Nasser.⁴⁴  The Paladin Group’s other clients included the South African Bureau of State Security and Muammar al Qaddafi They also worked for the Greek military junta of 1967–1974, and the Spanish  Direccion General de Seguridad, who recruited some Paladin operatives to wage clandestine war against Basque separatists.

The plight of the Palestinians was also regarded by the New Left as part of the Third World liberation movements in whose cause they placed their hope for Marxist revolution. Such groups included the PKK in Turkey, Armenia’s ASALA, the Japanese Red Army, the German Red Army Faction (RAF), the Italian Red Brigades, and, in the US, the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground was a product of the Tavistock Institute, and Weather Underground member Naomi Jaffe was a former undergraduate student of Herbert Marcuse. Also     influenced    by       Marcuse were the  RAF,  or Baader - by Meinhof Gang, founded in 1970 by Horst Mahler, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and his mistress, Hegel’s grand-daughter, Gudrun Ensslin.⁴⁵

The RAF existed from 1970 to 1998, committing numerous operations, especially in late 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as “German Autumn.” The group targeted German politicians and businessmen, as well as US military installations in West Germany. Drawing on its New Left counterparts in the US, the RAF even began to borrow such phrases as “burn baby  burn,”  “right  on,”  and  “off the pig .” Reflecting          the            influence of Marcuse, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, a movie about the group, has Baader expressing the belief that sexual freedom an hand, exclaiming, “fucking and shooting are the same!” The RAF had links with East German intelligence and were      also            influenced    in         their   support         for Third World revolution by the theories of Frantz Fanon. Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof went to Jordan and trained in the West Bank and Gaza with the PFLP and the PLO, looking to the Palestinian cause for inspiration and guidance.

RAF was also infl uenced by Che Gu rural-based guerrilla war and instead situating the struggle in the cities.

  After an intense manhunt, Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were eventually caught and arrested in June 1972. During a collective hunger strike in 1974, Jean-Paul Sartre visited Baader in prison and criticized the harsh conditions of imprisonment. Meinhof committed suicide in 1976, and the remaining leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1977. In October 13 of that year, the PFLP conducted a failed attempt to secure their release with the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, denominated Landshut. Following the capture of the hijackers in Somalia, Baader and Ensslin committed suicide.

  After Nixon was forced to resign in 1974, the neoconservatives allied themselves with two right-wingers in the administration of his successor Gerald Ford, who used the escalation of terrorism as a pretext to adopt a hard line against Soviet communism. They were Donald Rumsfeld, the new secretary of defense, and Dick Cheney, Ford’s Chief of Staff. While Nixon had initiated a period of détente with the Soviet Union, Rumsfeld resuscitated the old paranoia by now giving speeches about the Soviet’s “steadiness of purpose” in building up their military defenses relative to those of the United States. The CIA denied the allegations, confirming that theyRumsfeldwereusedhis positionacompleteto persuade Ford to set up an independent inquiry, which he insisted would prove that there was a hidden threat to America. That inquiry would be run by a group of neoconservatives, one of whom was Paul Wolfowitz, a personal protégé of Kojève student Allan Bloom.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wanted more power over the CIA, and so the neoconservatives chose as the inquiry chairman a well-known critic and historian of the Soviet Union Richard Pipes. The inquiry was called Team B with Wolfowitz as a leading member. The purpose of Team B was to gather a group of outside experts who would have access to the same evidence as the CIA, but to see if they could come up with different conclusions. But because of what turned out to be a lack of evidence, Team B fabricated the assumption that the Soviets had developed systems that were so sophisticated that they were undetectable. According to Dr. Anne Cahn, who served with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, between 1977 and 1980, Team B’s numerous assessments of secret Soviet capabilities were all “fantasy.” She notes, for example, that they proposed, absurdly, that radars were laser beam weapons. The neoconservatives set up a lobby

Team B. It was called the Committee on the Present Danger, which a growing number of politicians joined, including a Presidential hopeful, Ronald Reagan.

However, due to the revelations of CIA wrong-doing, the US Congress became determined to restrain its activities, which prevented these neoconservatives from making use of the means of battling this supposed new threat. Therefore, to bypass congressional oversight the CIA formed the Safari Club with the Saudi Arabians, who would now operations on the CIA’s behalf, in their mutual concern against “atheistic” communism.⁴⁶ Essentially, with the formidable wealth accumulated since the Oil Crisis and the establishment of extensive banking networks, the Saudis were in possession of a massive slush fund and ready to heighten their relationship with the CIA, by acting as proxies for the escalation of the CIA’s activities at the end of the Cold War.

Cooperation began with the Saudis funding the Contras, a right-wing

militia in Nicaragua fi ghting the left-government. These activities evolved into what came to be known as the Iran- Contra Operation, whereby the US illegally made use of Israel to sell weapons to Iran. Iran then happened to be under the newly installed Ayatollah Khomeini, then blustering about America as the “Great Satan.” In reality, the installation of British agent Ayatollah Khomeini was orchestrated through an alliance of a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood with two Tavistock affi li the Aspen Institute and the Club of Rome. The Aspen Institute was founded in 1949 by Aldous Huxley and John Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, in commemoration of the 200th birthday of German philosopher and author of Faust and a member of the Illuminati, Goethe. The Club of Rome was a project initiated by the Rockefeller family at their estate at Bellagio, Italy.⁴⁷

  The founders of the Club of Rome were NATO all.These sen included Aurelio Peccei, the chairman of Fiat who was also chairman of the Economic Committee of the Atlantic Institute, and Alexander King, the co-founder, who was Director General Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The Club of Rome’s “limits to growth” philosophy was exploited for overthrow of the Shah of Iran, expressed as an opposition to his expansion of Iran’s nuclear industry. The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth (1972), which sold 12 million copies in more than 30 translations, making it the best- selling environmental book in world history. It predicted a Malthusian scenario where economic growth could not continue

indefi nitely because of the limit oil. In “The Globalists and the Islamists,” Peter Goodgame explained, “With the rise in energy prices the development of the Third World was checked, but the Arab Middle East became greatly enriched. This was when the Globalists turned to their allies, the Islamists, to remedy the situation. Islam would be used to attack industrialization and modernization using the lie that human progress was un-Islamic and a Western plot against the servants of Allah.”⁴⁸

In 1977, the Club of Rome and the Muslim Brotherhood created an organization to pursue the retardation of Iran’s industry, called Islam and the West. Headquartered in Geneva, Islam and the West came under the guidance of Muslim Brotherhood leader and former Syrian Prime Minister Marouf Dawalibi, in addition to Aurelio Peccei. One of the sponsors of Islam and the West was the prestigious International Federation of Institutions of Advanced Studies, whose funders included, in addition to Aurelio Peccei, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and fellow Bilderberger Robert O. Anderson, chairman of the Aspen  Institute  and  founder of the Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. ⁴⁹  

  An early member and supporter of the Club of Rome was Idries Shah, who, as reported by Robert Dreyfuss in Hostage to Khomeini, worked with the Muslim Brotherhood in London. As the secretary to Gerald Gardner, one of the key representatives of Wicca, whose rituals he developed with Aleister Crowley, Shah was responsible for popularizing that European witchcraft, as

well as the occult tradition in gener The Sufis, Shah mentions as a source to which belonged not only Jane Digby’s husband Sheikh Medjuel al Mezrab,

but most importantly, the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Shah’s claim may reveal the hidden basis for the collaboration between the West and Saudi Arabia, which has been the primary source of funding for the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities, conducted on behalf of the CIA.

When Shah’s associate, and Gurdjieff disciple, J. G. Bennett, visited Sheikh ad Daghestani in Damascus in 1953, ad Daghestani gave Bennett an enigmatic message relating to the coming to his home in the West of “a Messenger from God,” which Bennett interpreted to mean Bapak Muhammad Subuh, the Indonesian leader of cult named Subud.²⁰ Bennett believed that the “The Reappearance of Christ” as the “Avatar of Synthesis” prophesied by Alice Bailey must refer to Subud, and Bennett and many followers of Gurdjieff were initiated into the cult. When asked as to its purpose, Muhammad Subuh himself had said: “What is the purpose of spreading Subud? Well, primarily… it concerns the work people have come to call the… United Nations.”⁵⁰ At the time of Subuh’s death in 1987, the chairman of the World Subud Council was Varindra Tarzie Vittachi. In 1973, he had been appointed director of the UN World Population Year, after which he became director of information on public affairs for the UN Population Fund (1974-79). From 1980, until his retirement, he was deputy executive director of UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund.

Shah’s  first Subud published appears in his book mention The Way of  the  sufi, published in the mid 1960s, claiming that Subud is of Qadiriyya and Naqshbandi origin. Shah slowly separated from Subud and started to gather

his own disciples. In 1965, Shah founded SUFI (Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas), and dubbed himself Great-Sheikh, not only of the Naqshbandi, but of all Sufi orders. scientists like Alexander King to the Institute for Cultural Research (ICR), which was originally founded by Shah in 1965 as the Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas (SUFI).⁵¹ Other visitors, pupils, and would-be pupils included the poet Ted Hughes, novelists Alan Sillitoe and Doris Lessing, zoologist Desmond Morris, and psychologist Robert Ornstein. Over the following years, Shah established Octagon Press as a means of distributing

reprints of translations of Sufi clas considered a folkloric part of Muslim and which were discussed by the RAND Corporation.⁵²

Shah’s student, Claudio Naranjo along with Oscar Ichazo, were fi g the Human Potential Movement, and developed the Enneagram of Gurdjieff

into  a  pseudo-psychological  personali Naranjo, belonged to the inner circle at Esalen, where he became one of the three successors to Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy. Naranjo was also a member of the TavistockClubofRome,andin-1969affihewas soughtliated out as a consultant for the Education Policy Research Center, created by Willis Harman at SRI. Naranjo is regarded as one of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, for integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions through the introduction of is introduction of Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” teachings.⁵³

Naranjo was also a close friend of Carlos Castaneda, who is famous for having written a series of books that describe his alleged training in shamanism and the use of psychoactive drugs like peyote, under the tutelage of a Yaqui “Man of Knowledge” named Don Juan. According to Kripal, like Price, what Claudio Naranjo became known for was a creative synthesis of Asian meditation and western psychotherapy. Though his ideas were developed from Tantric Buddhism, he interpreted them in terms of Shamanism, and derived from what he called his “tantric journey” which involved a Kundalini experience, which he compared to both being possessed by a serpent and an alchemical process. As Kripal explains:

The “inner serpent” of kundalini yoga is simply a South Asian construction of a universal neurobiology; it is “no other than our more archaic (reptilian) brain-mind.” The serpent power “is ‘us’-i.e., the integrity of our central nervous system when cleansed of karmic interference, “the human body- mind restored to its own native spontaneity.

Put a bit differently, Naranjo’s “one quest” is a religion of no religion that has come to realize how “instinct” is really a kind of “organismic wisdom” and how libido is more deeply understood as a kind of divine Eros that can progressively mutat freed from the ego.⁵⁴

Naranjo had become disillusioned with Gurdjieff, and tu became a student of Idries Shah, another member of the Club of Rome. Naranjo co-wrote a book entitled On The Psychology of Meditation (1971), with Stanford University psychologist professor Robert Ornstein. Both were associated with

the University of California, where Ornstein was a research psychologist at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. Ornstein, along with fellow psychologist Charles Tart and eminent writers such as Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and Nobel- Prize-winning  novelist  Doris  Less Realizing that Ornstein could be an ideal partner in propagating his teachings, adapting them into the language of psychotherapy, Shah made him his deputy (Khalifa) in the United States. Ornstein was also president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK), established in 1969, with the aim of publishing books on ancient and new ways of thinking for American readers, and become the sole American distributor of Shah’s works of published by Octagon Press. Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness (1972) was enthusiastically received by the academic psychology community, as it coincided with new interests in the field, achieve shifts in mood and awareness.⁵⁵

  Oscar Ichazo, whose Esalen is influenced legendary, was heavily involved at in psychedelic drugs and shamanism, and according to John C Lilly, who had been  through  Ichazo’sthe Aricafi training,rstIchazolevelsclaimedto  of have “received instructions from a higher entity called Metatron” and that his group “was guided by an interior master,” the “Green Qutb.”⁵⁶ Lilly, a friend to Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, is known for his work on dolphin-human

communication, as well as his experim in isolation tanks. Lilly apparently gave dolphins LSD and told a story of one dolphin who seduced a man into having sex with her in a holding tank.⁵⁷ The 1980 movie Altered States, starting William Hurt, is partly based on his life. Naranjo, who studied with Oscar Ichazo in Chile, passed on the Enneagram teachings to Jesuit Bob Ochs, who then brought it into Roman Catholic circles at Esalen, where Naranjo taught. However, the Christian tradition derived from Gurdjieff was one that rejected the belief in Jesus as a historical person, and instead insisted that religious experiences were derived from psychoactive substances.

At a November 1977 Lisbon conference sponsored by the Interreligious Peace Colloquium—an organization set up by Cyrus Vance and Sol Linowitz— Peccei conspired with several leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly with the well -known Iranian “court philosopher” who was highly active during the Iranian revolution of 1979, Seyyed Hossein Nasr of Teheran University, a personal friend of the Shah of Iran.⁵⁸ Nasr wrote the foreword to Sheikh Kabbani’s The Golden Chain, which reported that Sheikh ad Daghestani had initiated Gurdjieff into the mystery of the Nine Points. Sheikh Hisham Kabbani is the son-in-law and deputy of Sheikh Nazim al Haqqani, leader of the Naqshbandi -Haqqani Order, who had also been a student of Sheikh ad Daghestani, and who went to Britian where made contact with Bennett’s circle from whom he developed his  first        group  of      followers ⁵⁹ Al Haqqani trace his lineage back to the Abdul Qadir Jilani and Jalaluddin Rumi. His maternal and paternal grandfathers were sheikhs in the Qadiriya and Mevlevi orders, respectively. Kabbani serves as Chairman of the Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufi Order of America.

Nasr is a Perennialist in the school of Guénon’s Traditionalism. He was initiated into the Shadhili by Ahmad al-Alawi (1869-1934), who had been recommended to him by Guénon. Al-Alawi had founded the Alawiyya branch of Shadhili (which has no relation with the Alawis of Turkey and Syria), after being instructed to adopt the name for the order and himself in a personal vision of Ali, the Prophet Muhammed’s son-in -law. During the days of the Shah, Nasr directed the Sophia Perennis, the name of the Journal of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy.

Nasr was a student of Guénon’s leading disciple Frithjof Schuon who established the Maryamiyya branch of the Shadhili in Europe and North America. Through his many books and articles, Schuon became known as a spiritual teacher and leader of Traditionalism. Some of Schuon’s most eminent students include supposed converts to Islam, Titus Burckhardt and Martin Lings. Lings is best known as the author of a very popular and positively reviewed

biography of Muhammad,  first  published  in  1983 . But according to            Andrew

 Rawlinson, in Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions,  Schuon was not as a pious Sufi  but as a charlatan. Shuon was also interested in Native American sacred traditions, and was adopted by a Sioux family and  Crow medicine man and Sun Dance chief. The author of Against the Modern  World :  Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth CenturyMark  Sedgwick’s interest in   Traditionalism was piqued when he discovered photos

sent to him by Rawlinson, showing Shuon dressed up as a Native American  chief, surrounded by young women in bikinis. Another showed  Schuon naked,  except for what looked like a Viking helmet. Another showed a painting by  Schuon of a nude Virgin Mary, who is known as Myriam in the   Quran, after  which his order is named. Burckhardt expressed concerns about   Schuon and  episodes “involving women,” but reminded other Maryiamis that the followers  of a Sheikh      [Sufi master] should judge him by his teachings, not his actions!

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In 1976, the Traditionalist views of the Maryamiyya featured prominently in in the World of Islam Festival in Lodon. It involved Queen Elizabeth II, who opened the festival, as well as the archbishop of Canterbury who received Guénon’s protégé, Abdel Halim Mahmoud, Grand Imam of Al Azhar, who was an important infl uence on the Musl the newly-rich United Arab Emirates and was administered by a trust dominated by Englishmen, including Harold Beely who had been British ambassador to Egypt under Nasser. Seyyed Hossein Nasr organized the exhibition of Islamic science and technology at the Science Museum. Martin Lings oversaw the exhibition of Islamic manuscripts and calligraphy at the British Library. Though books by Traditionalists and Maryamiyya featured throughout, the festival generated much favorable publicity for “traditional” Islam.

Burckhardt is read by Prince Charles, and according to Sedgwick, “Traditionalist infl uences are inc explains rumors of his supposed conversion to Islam.⁶¹ Prince Charles has also written a foreword to Lings’ book on the esoteric meanings in Shakespeare’s plays. Prince Charles’ close friend and spiritual mentor, Sir Laurens van der Post, a friend and follower of Carl Jung, introduced him to Temenos, a publication of Schuon’s followers. One of these was English poet and literary critic Katherine Raine, who studied spiritual magic with a group she from the Golden Dawn. Prince Charles then encouraged Raine to establish the Temenos Academy, within his own Prince’s Foundation.

  Instructions were passed from the Club of Rome and Aspen Institute to Professor Ali Shariati to intensify his political activity. “More than anyone else,” says Robert Dreyfuss, “Shariati was the guiding light behind the Iranian students and intellectuals who brought about the Muslim Brotherhood revolution.”⁶² Shariati introduced Iranian students to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus, Jacques Berque and Louis Massignon, all writers of the anticapitalist existentialist camp, and all funded and guided by the same Club of Rome networks that gathered at Persepolis. Among these was one of the most famous proponents of Postmodernism, Michel Foucault, who in 1979, soon after the Iranian Revolution, made two tours of Iran. In the tradition of Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, Foucault had embraced the artist who pushed the limits of rationality, and seeing the same in the Iranian revolution. Both Foucault and the revolutionaries were highly critical of modernity and sought a new form of politics, and both admired those who risked their lives for ideals. Foucault wrote that the new “Muslim” style of politics could signal the beginning of a new form of “political spirituality,” not just for the Middle East, but also for Europe. He wrote:

As an Islamic movement, it can set the entire region afire, overturn the most unstable regimes, and disturb the most solid. Islam which is not simply a religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a civilization, has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men… Indeed, it is also important to recognize that the demand for the ‘legitimate rights of the Palestinian people’ hardly stirred the Arab peoples. What it be if this cause encompassed the dynamism of an Islamic movement, something much stronger than those with a Marxist, Leninist, or Maoist character? (“A Powder Keg Called Islam”)⁶³

To understand the kind of nihilism existentialism potentially tends to, Foucault tragically concluded his life with a rampage through the San Francisco gay scene, indulging in promiscuous sex and sado-masochism, which he described as “the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously.”⁶⁴ More disturbingly still, he claimed that the Marquis de Sade, a fanatic Satanist who inspired the most vile perversions and pleasure through violence, “had not gone far enough.”⁶⁵ Foucault fi nal of AIDS in 1984.

Crucial to the overthrow of the Shah was the Iranian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been set up in the 1940s, known as the Fedayeen-e Islam. Their name, as noted Bernard Lewis, was borrowed from the eleventh century Assassins. ⁶⁶ The group was founded in 1945 by Ayatollah Kashani, Khomeini’s god-father and mentor, who had assisted the CIA and MI6 in their overthrow of Mossadegh in 1951. Kashani was funded by the CIA, according to John Waller, who had joined the OSS in World War II, ran US operations in Iran from 1946 to 1953 and then served in the CIA until the 1970s. The CIA, says Waller, saw Kashani as key to mobilizing the religiously-minded lower classes: “it was money both to Kashani and to his chosen instruments, money to fi nance his communication ch the people of south Tehran.” Waller added, “I think he was truly religious, but forgive me for being a cynic. Being religious doesn’t distract you from political or commercial reality, or from sex.”⁶⁷

Kashani was no exception. The British had maintained long-standing ties with Iran’s clerics, in their desire to safeguard their cherished asset, Anglo Persian Oil,  later  renamed        Anglo-Iranian Oil  and  finally  British Petroleum  (BP). Ashraf Pahlavi, the deposed Shah’s twin-sister, wrote in her memoirs, “Many influential clergymen formed a powers, most of them British, and there was in fact a standing joke in Persia that said if you picked up a clergymen’s beard, you would see the words ‘Made in England’ stamped on the other side.”⁶⁸ Similarly, Fereydoun Hoveyda, who served as Iran’s ambassador to the UN until 1979, said the British, “had financial deals with the mullahs. they would help them. And the mullahs were smart: they knew that the British were the most important power in the world. It was also about money. The British would bring suitcases full of cash and give it to these people.”⁶⁹

During 1978, negotiations were under way between the Shah’s government and British Petroleum for renewal of the 25-year old extraction agreement. By October 1978, the talks had collapsed over a British offer which demanded exclusive rights to Iran’s future oil output, while refusing to guarantee purchase of the oil. The Carter Administration, prompted by National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, then collaborated with the British. In November 1978, President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, also a member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski . Ball recommended that the US drop support for the Shah of Iran in favor of the Ayatollah Khomeini.⁷⁰

The Ayatollah Khomeini was a longtime member of the Fedayeen-e Islam.⁷¹ Up until his exile from Iran in 1964, Khomeini was based at the religious city of Qom, where, according to Radio Free Iran, as reported by Dr. Coleman, he received a “monthly stipend from the British, and he is in constant contact with his masters, the British.” ⁷² When he was kicked out of Iran he settled in Iraq, where he lived until the Iraqi government arrested and deported him in 1978. French President D’Estang was then pressured to offer Khomeini refuge in France, where his stay Genoud .⁷³was As Coleman  writes, “Once  Khomeini was installed at the Chateau Neauphle he began to receive a constant stream of visitors, many of them from the BBC, the CIA and British intelligence.”⁷⁴ The BBC then became the Ayatollah’s main promoter.

Dr. Coleman writes:

It was the BBC, which prepared and distributed to the mullahs in Iran

all of the cassette tapes of Khomeini’s speeches, w peasants. Then, the BBC began to beam accounts of torture by the Shah’s SAVAK to all corners of the world. In September and October 1978, the BBC began to beam Khomeini’s revolutionary ravings directly to Iran in Farsi. The Washington Post said, “the BBC is Iran’s public enemy number one.⁷⁵

   Soon, a large segment of the Iranian population, most of them young students, became opposed to the Shah and were convinced that a return to “pure” Shia Islam under the Ayatollah Khomeini’s leadership was the only way to save their country. By 1979, political unrest had transformed into a revolution which, on 16 January, forced the Shah to leave Iran. The new ruler, Khomeini, acknowledged his debt to the revolutionary philosophy of Sayyed Qutb by placing his face on one of the postage stamps of the new Islamic republic. Soon after, the Iranian monarchy was formally abolished, and Iran was declared an Islamic republic. In his memoirs, looking back on the events that removed him from power, the Shah lamented, “The Americans wanted me out… I was never told about the split in the Carter administration [nor] about t viability of an ‘Islamic Republic’ as a bulwark against communism.”⁷⁶

Soon after, in November 1979, David Rockefeller became embroiled in an international incident when he and Henry Kissinger, along with John J. McCloy and Rockefeller aides, persuaded President Jimmy Carter through the US Department of State to admit the Shah into the United States for hospital treatment for lymphoma. This action precipitated what is known as the Iran Hostage Crisis, when students belonging to the Fedayeen took over the American embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, where 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days.