by Jim Marrs
REAGAN, A FORMER spokesman for General Electric Company, stocked his administrations with current and former members of globalist groups, the very people he had criticized while campaigning.
During the 1980 presidential campaigns, Reagan verbally attacked the nineteen Trilaterals in the Carter administration and vowed to investigate the group if elected. While competing against George H. W. Bush for the nomination, Reagan lambasted Bush’s membership in both the Trilateral Commission and the CFR and pledged not to give Bush a position in a Reagan government.
Yet during the Republican National Convention, a strange series of events took place. With Reagan secured as the presidential candidate, there was a contentious fight to see who would be vice president. In midweek, national media commentators suddenly began talking about a “dream ticket” to be composed of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President (the former president) Gerald Ford. It was even suggested that since Ford had been president, he should choose half of the Reagan cabinet.
Faced with the prospect of a split presidency, Reagan rushed to the convention floor late at night and announced, “I know that I am breaking with precedent to come here tonight and I assure you at this late hour I’m not going to give you my acceptance address tonight…. But in watching at the hotel the television, and seeing the rumors that were going around and the gossip that was taking place here…[l]et me as simply as I can straighten out and bring this to a conclusion. It is true that a number of Republican leaders…felt that a proper ticket would have included the former president of the United States, Gerald Ford, as second place on the ticket…. I then believed that because of all the talk and how something might be growing through the night that it was time for me to advance the schedule a little bit…. I have asked and I am recommending to this convention that tomorrow when the session reconvenes that George Bush be nominated for vice president.”
For one brief moment, the power of those who control the corporate mass media was revealed. Reagan never again uttered a word against the globalist groups such as the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. Following his election, Reagan’s fifty-nine-member transition team was composed of twenty-eight Council on Foreign Relations members, ten members of the elite Bilderberg Group, and at least ten members of the Trilateral Commission. He even appointed prominent CFR members to three of the nation’s most sensitive offices—Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan. Additionally, he named Bush’s campaign manager James A. Baker III, who then served as a chairman of the Reagan-Bush campaign committee, as his chief of staff. Baker is a fourth-generation member of a family long connected to Rockefeller oil interests.
After Reagan won in November, it was alleged that Bush, along with CIA Director William Casey, had privately cut a deal with Iranian leaders to hold American hostages until after the November election, thus assuring a Reagan victory. Later testimony confirming this “October surprise” came from several people involved, including Richard Brenneke and Heinrich Rupp, who claimed to have flown Casey to a meeting with the Iranians and the Iranian foreign minister. Because of his damaging testimony, Brenneke was tried for perjury but found not guilty. Jury foreman Mark Kristoff stated, “We were convinced that, yes, there was a meeting, and he was there and the other people listed in the indictment were there.” Despite this verdict, no action was taken by the Reagan-Bush administration, thanks primarily to debunking by a House Task Force led by Congressman Lee Hamilton, the same man Bush’s son would name to cochair his 9/11 Commission in late 2002.
On January 20, 1981, claims of this “October surprise” conspiracy were further supported by the facts that just minutes after Reagan was sworn into office, the American hostages were released, and within weeks, military supplies that Carter had withheld from Iran began moving to that nation. Then, just two months after taking office in 1981, President Reagan was shot by would-be assassin John W. Hinckley, who exhibited the symptoms of brainwashing and whose brother had scheduled dinner with Neil Bush the very day Reagan was shot. For many weeks, while many Americans prayed for Reagan’s recovery, the son of Prescott Bush ran the nation.
Bush had exerted his influence to have Alexander Haig appointed secretary of state, and only days before the attempted assassination of Reagan had named Haig to head a special emergency preparedness committee. Haig, a ranking globalist member of the Council on Foreign Relations, was Nixon’s chief of staff from 1973 to 1974. It was Haig who finally advised Nixon to resign. Haig was also NATO commander from 1975 to 1979.
Was it sheer coincidence that Hinckley’s brother had scheduled dinner with Bush’s son Neil the very night Reagan was shot, or that Hinckley’s father, a Texas oil man, and George H. W. Bush were longtime friends? It should also be noted that Bush’s name—including his then little-publicized nickname “Poppy,” which has caused many to wonder if this referred to his parenthood or the narcotic plant—address, and phone number were found in the personal notebook of oil geologist George DeMohrenschildt, the last known close friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. Many researchers view these seemingly small, unconnected, and little-reported details as being beyond coincidence. Some saw Hinckley’s action as an attempt to bring Bush to power eight years before he was elected president.
“This I believe was a coup,” stated assassination researcher John Judge, cofounder of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA). In a 2000 interview, Judge stated his belief that “loyalists won the concession that Reagan will be allowed to stay alive but Bush would come into power and at that point Haig emerged from the situation room to the press and said, his famous quote, ‘Gentlemen, I am in charge here until the vice president returns.’ That meant two things: number one, that they were going extra-constitutional—beyond the twenty-fifth amendment, a military takeover, and [number two] Haig in this office of preparedness, prior to Bush, and basically he’s taking charge. The press was questioning, ‘What does this mean?’ What they don’t understand is all that constitution stuff is pushed aside once they declare national emergencies. Then they go into FEMA and they have whole other orders of succession that have to do more with the military and the Pentagon than with any of the civilian sector.” Constitutionally, the next in line in the order of succession is the vice president, then the speaker of the House, then the Senate president pro tempore, then the secretary of state. Vice President George H. W. Bush was flying from Texas at the time of Haig’s proclamation.
Hinckley was whisked off to Quantico Marine Base, then sent for psychiatric evaluation at Fort Butner, South Carolina, which Judge described as “the first mind-control experimentation prison in the country.” All this time, Hinckley was under military control, not civilian. He was eventually brought to court and declared not guilty by reason of insanity for the assassination attempt.
“The patterns are always the same. You have a patsy that takes the blame. You have a second gunman that never comes to light. And you have an ascendance of power. That’s what I think happened after that point: that Reagan was basically allowed to function but Bush was president,” said Judge.
And Bush was virtually unassailable, due to his hidden but powerful support base. Robert Parry, a former investigative reporter for the Associated Press and Newsweek, noted: “Even when—or maybe especially when—Bush found himself in a corner on what appeared to be an obvious lie, he was a master at turning the tables on his critics. Coming to Bush’s defense was an impressive network of friends in high places. They rarely failed him…. When that happened, it was wise not to ask too many questions.”
ANOTHER INDICATION THAT the Reagan administration may have been under the influence of fascists came in May 1985, when the president laid a wreath at a soldiers’ cemetery in Bittburg, Germany, where many Nazi SS officers were buried. It was also the former site of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Although a hue and cry went up from veterans organizations and Jewish groups prior to his visit, Reagan followed th
rough with his plan to honor war dead. In his remarks, he placed the blame for Nazi atrocities on “the awful evil of one man,” an obvious reference to Adolf Hitler. This effort to foist off all the blame for Nazism onto one person was perhaps an indication of the influence of pro-Nazi elements within his party.
Meanwhile, throughout the 1980s, Republican Party leaders continued their policy of bringing former Nazis and Nazi-minded foreigners into the party’s camp. According to investigative reporter Christopher Simpson, author of Blowback, Nazi émigrés brought into the USA by the CIA were placed in prominent positions within the Republican Party through “ethnic outreach committees.”
Online Journal is a reader-supported Web zine that was established in 1998 to “provide uncensored and accurate news, analysis and commentary.” According to their reporter Carla Binion, a convicted Nazi war collaborator named Laszlo Pasztor served as an adviser to Republican Paul Weyrich, who founded the powerful conservative Heritage Foundation and is considered by many to be one of the founders of the “New Right.” Weyrich garnered large support by appealing to Christian fundamentalists and anticommunists. Pasztor built up the GOP émigré network and was founding chairman of the Republican Heritage Groups Council. Pasztor reportedly belonged to the Hungarian Arrow Cross, a group that helped liquidate Jews there during the war. Interestingly enough, Pasztor’s efforts to make the Heritage Groups Council an effective branch of the GOP coincided with George H. W. Bush’s term as head of the Republican National Committee.
“After Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, he ordered a general house cleaning on the basis of loyalty,” stated John Loftus and Mark Aarons in The Secret War Against the Jews. The authors quote Nixon as telling John Ehrlichman, “Eliminate everyone except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause.” Indeed, it was the elder Bush who fulfilled Nixon’s pledge to make émigrés with Nazi backgrounds a permanent part of Republican politics. “It is clear that George Bush, as head of the Republican National Committee in 1972, must have known who these ‘ethnics’ really were,” the authors concluded.
Based on the research of journalist Russ Bellant, author of the 1991 book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, other Nazi collaborators involved with the Republican Party included:
Radi Slavoff, executive director of the GOP’s Heritage Council and leader of “Bulgarians for Bush,” who was a member of a Bulgarian fascist group. Slavoff created a Washington public event for writer Austin App, who in 1987 revealed his pro-Nazi sympathies by writing, “The truth is that in WW II, the Third Reich fought for justice, and the Allies fought to prevent justice.”
Florian Galdau, who directed a Republican outreach program among Romanians and would head “Romanians for Bush” in 1988. Galdau was a supporter of Valerian Trifa, convicted of war crimes when he headed the Romanian Iron Guard in Bucharest.
Nicholas Nazarenko, a former SS officer, who was the head of a Cossack Republican ethnic unit during the Nixon years. Although accused of hanging Jews in Odessa, in the 1980s Nazarenko organized an anticommunist demonstration in New York City.
Method Balco, who headed the Slovak-American Republican Federation of the GOP’s Heritage Groups Council and during the 1950s organized annual memorials to the pro-Nazi regime of Slovakian Josef Tiso, a creation of Hitler’s after the division of Czechoslovakia in 1939.
Walter Melianovich, head of the GOP’s Belarusan ethnic unit, who was closely connected to the Belarusan-American Association, an organization rife with transplanted fascists, and in 1988 became national chairman of “Belarusans for Bush.”
Bohdan Fedorak, who during the war was a top U.S. representative of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—Bandera, a group that committed atrocities in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine—and in 1988 became national vice chairman of “Ukrainians for Bush.” As a ranking member of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Fedorak lobbied Congress trying to stop Justice Department prosecutions of pro-Nazi Ukrainian war criminals.
Allan A. Ryan Jr., former director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, said he found Bellant’s reporting “well-documented and reliable.”
Just weeks before the 1988 election, the Washington Jewish Week revealed that several Nazis and Jew-haters were involved in the coalition supporting Bush’s Republican campaign. When this news broke, at least four of those mentioned by name were forced to resign. The Nazi connections to the Republican Party cited by Bellant and the Jewish publication were confirmed by an investigation by reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer in September 1988.
Online Journal reporter Carla Binion wondered aloud if Reagan, Bush, or Reagan’s CIA director William Casey realized they were being aided and supported by Nazis and Nazi collaborators. The available evidence indicates they were. “One thing is certain,” Binion concluded, noting that Bush had preceded Casey as a CIA director, “The intelligence agencies know the scope and extent of Nazi involvement with the political right in this country. It is a shame they keep it hidden from the majority of the American people.”
This charge is confirmed by a list of nearly two thousand “Former Nazi and Fascist Individuals Entering the U.S. under Official Auspices,” recently released by the National Archives after being locked away for years by presidential order.
Peter Levenda also has studied the connection between old Nazis and ranking Republicans. After noting the prosecution of Prescott Bush for being a financial frontman for Hitler, he wrote, “We cannot, of course, hold former President Bush responsible for the sins of his father; nor can we hold his son responsible. Yet, we can expect a higher degree of moral responsibility in their actions as men and as political leaders. Unfortunately…in the 1988 presidential campaign, George H. W. Bush was happy to accept support from a range of Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers in his quest for the White House, and was just as happy to keep them on in the administration even after they had been identified as such.”
Writing about a streak of anti-Semitism in the globalist individuals and companies that supported Hitler and continued to support Nazism even after the war, Levenda stated, “I believe that the entire racial theory of Nazism was a comfortable environment for these men. They were, after all, from privileged backgrounds: old money, power, prestige, the right companies, the right schools, the right fraternities (such as the infamous Skull and Bones at Yale, to which generations of the Bush family belonged). The Nazis embodied the secret dreams and unspoken loyalties of these men, the public acknowledgment of all that the American elite held dear.”
DURING THE REAGAN years, as most Americans were lulled into a false sense of security, the minions of the fascist globalists took steps to change the power structure of America.
James Mann, former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and a senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, took note that during the 1980s, when Bush was in virtual command of the White House during Reagan’s hospitalization and recuperation, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were conspicuously absent at least once a year. Cheney and Rumsfeld, along with several dozen federal officials and one member of the cabinet, would travel to Andrews Air Force Base, usually in the middle of the night, and from there would proceed to a remote location in the United States, such as a decommissioned military base or an underground bunker.
Mann reported that “Cheney [Gerald Ford’s chief of staff and a former director of the CFR] was working diligently on Capitol Hill as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford’s secretary of defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area—where, as the head of G. D. Searle and Company, he dedicated time and energy to the success of such commercial products as NutraSweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number to use in ca
se of emergency.”
Cheney and Rumsfeld were involved in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan administration, a program that called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession. This “continuity of government” program was created by a secret executive order from Reagan.
According to Mann, one of the program’s participants told him, “One of the awkward questions we faced was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them. For one thing, it was felt that reconvening Congress, and replacing members who had been killed, would take too long.”
Mann continued: “Within Reagan’s National Security Council the ‘action officer’ for the secret program was Oliver North, later the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal. Vice President George H. W. Bush was given the authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government agency with a bland name: the National Program Office. It had its own building in the Washington area, run by a two-star general, and a secret budget adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. When George H. W. Bush was elected president, in 1988, members of the secret Reagan program rejoiced; having been closely involved with the effort from the start, Bush wouldn’t need to be initiated into its intricacies and probably wouldn’t reevaluate it. In fact, despite dramatically improved relations with Moscow, Bush did continue the exercises, with some minor modifications.”
Although the elder Bush gained his own time in the White House in 1988, it was limited to one term due to the controversies and conspiracies swirling about him, not the least of which was his father’s pro-Nazi background. It was to escape this heritage that, in 1949, young George had moved from his ancestral home in Connecticut to the more receptive environs of Texas.
During the Clinton administration, those who knew about the “continuity of government” plan considered it an outdated relic. Though it was neglected, it was not abolished. After September 11, 2001, the creators of this plan moved into action. Mann reported that, in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House, Cheney told President Bush to delay his planned flight back from Florida, while at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instructed Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to leave Washington for the safety of one of the underground bunkers. “Cheney also ordered House Speaker Dennis Hastert, other congressional leaders, and several cabinet members (including agriculture secretary Ann Veneman and interior secretary Gale Norton) evacuated to one of these secure facilities away from the capital,” added Mann.