Yet it wasn’t until Family members became embroiled in sex scandals in the summer of 2009 that Americans finally started to take note. Even then, faced with the obvious hypocrisy of these men who were allegedly committed to strong Christian family values, no one seriously questioned the ongoing world of the Family. As of this writing, the most scandal-plagued officials associated with the Family—Nevada senator John Ensign and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford—haven’t even seen a need to resign.
In the following interview, Jeff Sharlet discusses a real-life story of a shadowy organization that operates at the highest levels of Washington power—and where the exposure of cultlike activities and loyalties has scarcely moved the needle of public outrage.
Washington is full of political action groups and special interests. How does the Family differ from, say, conventional Christian-right groups?
First, it doesn’t seek publicity. They have a religious idea that God works through elites, not through ordinary people. Their leader, Doug Coe, says “the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have.”
Second, they’re not concerned with the typical Christian-right issues of abortion or same sex marriage. Their focus is on economics, what some in the group call “biblical capitalism,” and on foreign affairs, by which they mean the extension of U.S. power and, by association in their minds, the Kingdom of God.
So what is their vision?
The Family began as a union-busting group in 1935. They were wealthy businessmen who didn’t like Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and who started backing politicians in the Northwest. On the strength of their successes, they moved to Washington where they began organizing congressmen and supporting anti–New Deal legislation.
Their idea was that God will decide who’s wealthy and everyone should accept that. It’s sort of a trickle-down fundamentalism. They wanted legislation that would radically deregulate the economy so that God-chosen wealthy businessmen could do their work unfettered by things like minimum wage laws and health insurance.
Why did they also become involved in foreign affairs?
As the Cold War progressed, they began exporting their ideas overseas, seeking out foreign dictators who exhibited what they saw as strength. When the Family looked at Jesus and read the New Testament, they didn’t see a story about mercy, love, justice, or forgiveness. They saw it as a story about power. In that context, during the 1930s, many were partial admirers of Hitler. They were not Nazis, but they liked his model of strength. They still speak in those terms to this day, saying that the best way to understand Jesus is to look at guys like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. They recognize that these are evil men, but they exemplify the model of power that they’re interested in.
That sounds evil.
They express their vision in very benign terms. They say the reason they’re reaching out to these people is because they’re trying to build a worldwide family of two hundred world leaders who are bound together through invisible bonds—they speak of themselves as an “invisible organization”—and when they are successful, there will be no more war, no more strife, no more conflict, because everyone will be on the same team: their team.
They even use this pretentious Latin phrase, beyond the din of the vox populi, “beyond the voice of the people.” They’re thinking of a worldwide order, an establishment along religious lines.
How much power do these people actually have?
That’s a really important question. And I want to emphasize that the Family are not some sort of secret puppet masters controlling everything. There are multiple power bases. The Family is just one of them.
But you have to look at the guys who are involved today. They run a house on Capitol Hill called the C Street House, which is a former convent they registered as a church where they provide below-market-cost housing for congressmen. Senator John Ensign and Senator Tom Coburn live there. Senator Sam Brownback has lived there, as has Senator Jim DeMint, Congressman Zach Wamp, Congressman Heath Shuler, and Congressman Jerry Moran.
What do they use the house for?
Some live there. Others use it for meetings. Senator Inhofe says he conducts foreign policy meetings there. He travels around the world representing the U.S. as a senator, but, according to him, also promoting “the political philosophy of Jesus” as taught to him by Doug Coe.
Can you give an example of foreign policy initiatives favored by the Family members?
Senator Brownback volunteered an example to me once of something he had been working toward called the Silk Road Act with another Family member, Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania. If the act is passed it will funnel a lot of U.S. foreign aid to various Central Asian republics, most of which are dictatorial regimes.
Brownback explained that the act benefits us threefold. First, he says we’re going to stop radical Islam by buying off dictatorial regimes. Second, we’re going to open up these countries to U.S. investment. And third, where U.S.-style capitalism goes, the gospel follows. Now, whether or not that’s true, the gospel is not a U.S. foreign policy interest. That’s not why we put these guys in office.
What about the Family’s domestic influence?
David Kuo, a special assistant to President Bush during his first term and a supporter of the Family, has written of it as “the most powerful group in Washington that nobody knows.” This is a group that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast every year. Now, if you ask a lot of congressmen, they’ll tell you that the National Prayer Breakfast is an old tradition going back to the founding of the republic. It’s not. It’s a private, sectarian event invented by the Family in 1953. I don’t think they’re setting policy, but I do think that their senators and representatives are able to move things legislatively. They are not the single decisive factor, but they are probably one of the largest unknown factors in American foreign and economic policy.
Before your book came out, how widely known was the Family?
Before the 1960s, the Family wasn’t really all that secretive. But after Doug Coe became leader of the group in 1969 he sent a memo to various associates around the world, saying the time had come “to submerge” the Family’s public profile.
Reporters did investigate the Family in the 1970s and 1980s, but their stories didn’t gain traction. In 2002, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Lisa Getter uncovered some amazing things, including the fact that the Family acted as the middleman between the Reagan administration and Central American despots. The Los Angeles Times put the story on page one. They thought they had a big scoop. But there was very little response.
Even when my book came out, NBC Nightly News got hold of it and found a video of Doug Coe talking about Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels and that model of leadership. They, too, thought they had a major scoop. But no one in the rest of the media followed the story.
Most of the press really didn’t start paying attention until the sex scandals in the summer of 2009, involving Senator John Ensign and Governor Mark Sanford.
Why did no one act earlier?
Frankly, I think we have a religiously illiterate press.
If a politician says he is guided by prayer, and that he has a prayer group that guides him in his decisions, it is respectful and appropriate to ask him more about that. But, generally, the press does not. They don’t say, well, what do you pray for? Who do you pray to? Who do you pray with? What are your beliefs on the nature of prayer? When you start asking these questions of the Family, you get some answers that I think are frightening.
The Lost Symbol plot is predicated on the idea that it is vital to stop a videotape showing Washington power brokers involved in secret Masonic ceremonies from leaking onto the Internet. Do you think there would be a scandal if that were to happen?
When NBC Nightly News found a video of Doug Coe talking about the Family’s power model of Hitler, Himmler,
and Goebbels, we thought, boy, this is going to blow the lid off everything. But nobody cared. So, not to steal the thunder from Mal’akh, but it’s very hard to convince people that there may be something deeply problematic going on.
We did notice one parallel between one of the ideas in The Lost Symbol and your research into the Family. And that was the idea, from noetics, that human thought has the power to change matter. The Family appears to have a very similar idea about the power of prayer.
This is one of the interesting connections between the Family and The Lost Symbol. One of the big financial backers of the Institute for Noetic Sciences is a former oil executive named Paul Temple, who is also a longtime participant in the Family. This idea that you can have a direct impact on things through prayer is very important. But one of the things that the members of the Family emphasized to me is that it’s not so much belief that matters, it’s obedience. You obey God and things work.
So is the Family a conspiracy?
It is not really a conspiracy. It’s an idea of how power should work.
People will say they loved my book and then compare me to Dan Brown, saying they learned all about Opus Dei from The Da Vinci Code and all about the Family from my book. I think fictional conspiracy theories are great entertainment. But the people who read Dan Brown’s books and mistake fiction for fact distract from the real work of open democracy and holding politicians accountable.
The truth is that they didn’t learn about Opus Dei from The Da Vinci Code, they read an entertaining novel. If you want to understand how Opus Dei or the Family really works, if you want to push back against invisible power structures in our society, that’s a different project altogether.
Geography, Holography, Anatomy
Plot Flaws in The Lost Symbol
by David A. Shugarts
Dave Shugarts was the first to perform a detailed analysis of plot flaws and factual errors in The Da Vinci Code, in an essay that appeared in our 2004 book, Secrets of the Code. He reprised this type of analysis for Angels & Demons in our 2005 book, Secrets of Angels & Demons. Shugarts ended up practically creating a whole new cottage industry, one that was in full flower for The Lost Symbol. He was invited back for the hat trick, taking his Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass to Dan Brown’s latest novel.
In keeping with his tradition of leaving errors strewn throughout his books, Dan Brown has delivered plenty of them in The Lost Symbol. Since Brown has had ample time for news of the errors in Angels & Demons or The Da Vinci Code to percolate up to him, not to mention the funds to hire an army of research assistants, it’s beginning to look as though he either just doesn’t care, or is deliberately making mistakes to see how many of them people will catch. Since many, many bloggers, critics, and others have now joined the hunt for flaws in Dan Brown’s books, there surely will be dozens and dozens of them unearthed in TLS. Here, we will just cover some of the highlights:
Science and Technology
One of the really glaring blunders comes early in the book, as Brown describes Katherine Solomon’s laboratory, saying it enjoys “full radio-frequency separation from the rest of the building” and that it is “isolated from any extraneous radiation or ‘white noise.’ This include[s] interference as subtle as ‘brain radiation’ or ‘thought emissions’ generated by people nearby.” It is also intended to block eavesdropping by would-be spies.
Yet, only a few pages later, Katherine is making and receiving cell phone calls and text messages inside the lab! This may be because the room’s shielding is constructed with “a stiff mesh of titanium-coated lead fiber,” apparently a complete invention of Dan Brown’s that isn’t used in actual shielded rooms. Most shielded rooms today are made of copper or steel, combined with specially shaped foam insulation panels, depending on the frequencies of the different kinds of radiation being blocked.
When Mal’akh prepares to destroy Katherine Solomon’s lab, the TLS narrator tells us he retrieves a “Pyrex jug of Bunsen-burner fuel—a viscous, highly flammable, yet noncombustible oil.”
There are several things wrong with this description. First and foremost, a Bunsen burner does not use liquid fuel. It uses gas, such as natural gas (e.g., methane), that is usually piped into a lab. And there is not much point to a fuel oil that is noncombustible. But further, a Pyrex jug would be made of glass, which would be considered very unsafe for storing a fuel, and certainly wouldn’t be used in a laboratory. However, it’s not totally clear that Dan Brown knows Pyrex is a type of glass, since only a few pages later, the perimeter security guard sees not a glass jug, but “what appeared to be a metal can of some sort. The can’s label said it was fuel oil for a Bunsen burner.”
When lab assistant Trish Dunne can’t trace an Internet protocol (IP) address, she calls in a computer network hacker. He comes back with a quick assessment: “This IP has a funky format. It’s written in a protocol that isn’t even publicly available yet. It’s probably gov intel or military.” This makes no sense, since an IP address that did not conform to the IP format would not even be visible on the Internet. If it really had a “funky” format, Trish Dunne would have immediately detected it, and even her merest attempt to trace it would have been rejected by her own software.
In general, it looks as though Dan Brown is mixing terms and concepts of the Internet that were current circa 1999, with other terms and concepts that applied in 2009. Trish’s use of “traceroutes” and “spiders” and “delegators” is relatively old, while mention of an iPhone or Twitter is relatively new. Twitter was founded in 2006 and the iPhone went on sale in 2007. This may be a sign that much of TLS was written by 2005 or 2006, but certain passages and later chapters may have been written in the past two years.
There are some similar telltale chronological fingerprints on other subjects. Brown mentions two real-life entities doing noetics-related research (besides Katherine Solomon’s lab). One of them—the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS)—is still in operation, and has been deluged with new interest since the publication of TLS. But the other—Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR)—was shut down in early 2007.
Further, when Brown wants to sound leading-edge, he describes Katherine’s laboratory early in the book as using “redundant holographic backup units” for data storage, enclosed behind “three-inch-thick shatterproof glass” within a “temperature-controlled vault.” There are two units that are said to be “synchronized and identical.” There were some expectations by 2004 that holographic discs would emerge as a leading technology. In reality, the long-heralded advent of holographic data storage has never quite materialized. Although some of these devices have been developed, there has been no real market for them, since conventional magnetic hard drives have constantly dropped in cost and increased in capacity. Also, although most high-tech storage rooms are temperature and humidity controlled, there is nothing about holographic storage that would call for three-inch-thick glass.
Late in the book, after Katherine’s lab is blown up and her data presumably lost, her brother, Peter Solomon, reveals that he has been keeping backups of her data—apparently not needing the special holographic drives. “I wanted to follow your progress without disturbing you,” he explains. If her research is so data-intensive (nothing in the description tells us why the data storage needs of noetics research are so much greater than any other kind of lab work), why doesn’t Peter need climate-controlled holographic storage media as well?
This brings up a list of ethical issues that surround Peter Solomon. Not only did he keep sneaky watch over his sister, but also, she will eventually realize that Peter refused to acknowledge the secret that resulted in the death of their mother. For years, he has failed to admit to Katherine that he knew what “pyramid” the intruder was seeking. Further, Peter Solomon has surely committed a number of breaches of standard government ethics and conflict-of-interest policies, as well as downright criminal acts
, by misusing the Smithsonian’s facilities for Katherine’s secret lab, even if he used his own private money to fund it.
Geography
In his prior books, Dan Brown often has Robert Langdon rushing in the wrong direction in Paris, Rome, or London. The tradition continues in Washington with TLS.
Early in the tale, Langdon looks up at the change of road noise as his limo crosses Memorial Bridge into Washington. As Dan Brown describes it, “Langdon gazed left, across the Tidal Basin, toward the gracefully rounded silhouette of the Jefferson Memorial.” In the real world, when you are on the [Arlington] Memorial Bridge and headed directly at the Lincoln Memorial, as the book recounts, the Jefferson Memorial is on the right, not the left.
In chapter 92, Langdon finds himself racing “northward” from the National Cathedral on the way to Kalorama Heights. This is quite a trick since Kalorama lies to the southeast of the cathedral. At another point, as Langdon and CIA agents approach the House of the Temple along S Street, which runs along the north side of the building, Dan Brown calls it the east side.
But one passage reveals just how confused Dan Brown is about geography. Apparently, he doesn’t even have a basic grasp of how longitude works. The clue calls for Langdon and Solomon to go due south from the House of the Temple. Langdon says that’s too ambiguous, because “due south of this building could be anywhere on a longitude that’s over twenty-four thousand miles long.”
From this comment we can infer that Dan Brown believes that a line of longitude, also known as a meridian, circles the globe at the poles. But that’s not how it works. A distinction is made between an east and west meridian, the former running through the U.S., the latter through Asia. This means a single line of longitude runs from the North to the South Pole, a distance of about 12,430 miles (not 24,000). The distance from the House of the Temple to the South Pole is about 8,890 miles and that’s the farthest south they could possibly travel on that longitude. (The distance to their actual destination, as it turns out, is less than two miles, making the reference to a longitudinal line 24,000 miles long wrong but moot.)
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 38