The Covert War Against Rock

by Alex Constantine

  Dr. Root noted that Parsons had reached “toxic levels of drug intake” and sustained them for weeks. (The source of supply has never been publicly identified. A rumor has it that Gram had been buying drugs from a woman, now deceased.) Dr. Margaret Greenwald, a San Francisco coroner, told Fong-Torres that narcotics accumulate over time in the liver and urine. The morphine and trace deposits indicate not that they killed him, but that “he’d been using [those drugs] for a long period of time,” she explained.5 So the exact cause of death remains a mystery and there is no hope of exhumation to resolve critical inconsistencies because Parson’s cadaver was stolen at the Los Angeles International Airport in transit to New Orleans for burial and burned at Joshua Tree.

  The coffin heist was perpetrated by Phil Kaufman, road manager for the Flying Burrito Brothers. Kaufman was a fledgling Hollywood actor before he met Parsons. In the meantime, he’d been arrested on drug charges and sentenced to Terminal Island Correctional Institute in San Pedro, California. It was here that Kaufman met Charles Manson, then an aspiring rock musician. Kaufman wrote about his first contact with Manson in an autobiography, “there was a guy playing guitar in the yard one day at Terminal Island. And it was Charlie, singing his ass off.” When Manson was released, Kaufman, from prison, put him in touch with contacts in the Los Angeles music industry. Kaufman was released from prison in 1968. He moved in with Manson and lived with him for a couple of months, met and befriended the Rolling Stones that summer, and in August was introduced to Parsons.6 Gram Parsons was one of many unexplained casualties on the periphery of Manson’s cult.

  Many musicians of note shared McGuinn’s suspicion that Big Brother was stalking them. Evidence that they were not suffering from paranoid delusions was deposited in the 1980s at the FBI’s reading room in Washington, D.C., scores of declassified files. This collection included seven pages of notes on Jimi Hendrix, 89 on Jim Morrison, and, oddly, 663 documents about Elvis Presley. (Presley’s file opens early in his career, when “concerned” conservatives petitioned J. Edgar Hoover to “do something” about this swivel-hipped, slack-jawed, decadent despoiler of American adolescents. A former spy ripped off a letter to the FBI in 1956 to complain that Presley had masturbated on stage with his microphone to “arouse the sexual passions of teenage youth.” The complainant confessed: “I feel an obligation to pass on to you my conviction that Presley is a definite danger to the security of the United States.”7)

  But the attentions of Hoover’s agents were lavished not only on Top 40 pop idols. Even a celebrated conductor of Leonard Bernstein’s caliber could be stalked by the Feds—the FBI monitored his every move for more than thirty years.

  On July 30, 1994, the London Times reported: “Intelligence files on [Leonard Bernstein] reveal that the bureau spent countless hours examining his links with associations deemed either Communist or subversive.” Bernstein swore under oath in 1953 that he was not affiliated with the Communist Party in any way, and three decades of unrelenting spying by the Bureau, beginning in the mid-’40s, failed to produce a scrap of evidence to the contrary. “It also observed his support for the civil rights and anti-war movements, in particular the Black Panthers. . . . Bernstein, however, was known by both his friends and family as a man who espoused liberal causes in a totally arbitrary manner.”8 Bernstein was a liberal with an audience that respected his beliefs, and Hoover’s secret police watched him as closely as they would any anarchistic, dope-addled rock idol.

  One agent provocateur on the FBI payroll, Sarah Jane Moore, the would-be assassin of President Gerald Ford, observed the Bureau’s counter-revolution from the inside. She described an atmosphere of cynical acrimony in a note to reporters curious about her motive in the assassination attempt:

  “The FBI directed me to people and organizations seriously working for radical change. . . .

  “There was no coordination not even any communication between these groups. The whole left as a matter of fact seemed disorganized, strife-ridden and weak. And I realized the reason for this was the FBI whose tool I was who clearly and correctly saw the strength and power of the idea of socialism, realized it represented a very real danger to our profit-motivated corporate state and who had declared total covert war against not only denim-clad revolutionaries but also against all progressive forces, even those working for the most acceptable ‘American’ reforms.” She explained:

  I listened with horror once to a bright young agent as he bragged about his abilities in the area of anonymous letter writing and other forms of character assassination, not of big important leaders, but of little people as soon as they showed any leadership potential. The Bureau’s tactic is to cut them down or burn them out before they realize their potential.

  I remember Worthington (my Bureau control) saying: “You don’t seem to realize that this is war!” He thought the next two or three years would be the most crucial in our nation’s history. His greatest fear at that time was that the left would rediscover the documents and ideas from the first and second American revolutions and use them to spark a new revolution.

  He said that these words are as powerful today as ever and that properly used (actually he said “cleverly” used) the people could be aroused by these ideas and would fight again to achieve them. . . .

  That explains my political beliefs. It does not explain why in the name of a dream whose essence is a deep love for people and a belief in the essential beauty and worth of each individual I picked up a gun intending to kill another human being.

  When I was getting ready to go public regarding my spying activities, a journalist attempting to verify some facts was told by the FBI that if the story appeared I would be in danger.

  This warning was repeated to me by the FBI with the additional suggestion that I should leave town. Charles Bates told me that of course they couldn’t stop me from talking but that I was placing myself in danger if the story appeared. He stated that at any rate he was not going to allow the FBI to be embarrassed. If there was anything they didn’t like in the story they would simply see that it was edited out, that they had done that before, that he had “friends” on that particular paper somewhat higher up than the reporter level.

  I had already had a phone call saying I was next that was just after the murder of a friend. Now friends and foes alike vied with each other to warn me, each claiming to have heard from sources they refused to name that I was to be “offed” or at the very least beaten.

  Beyond a certain point pressure and threats are counter-productive. When one is threatened to a point where one is convinced; that is, when I finally accepted the fact that I was not going to be able to get away—that I wasn’t willing to pay the price—the realization I would probable be killed ceased to frighten—it brought instead a sense of freedom.9

  Conservatives, blind to the slag-pile of political corruption within their own ranks, suspected a Soviet conspiracy in the rising challenge to authority and organized against the storm.

  In 1970, three weeks after Nixon invaded Cambodia, Edwin Meese III—the godfather of the far-right political school christened by the Washington Post (on January 26, 1984) the “Alameda Mafia,” then Governor Ronald Reagan’s legal affairs secretary—observed in a McCarthyesque lecture delivered at a state law enforcement conference, “The challenge is clear. The enemies of society who are here in California are willing to sacrifice a generation of youth to obtain their objectives. They are not only willing but desirous of losing an international conflict. They will not stop at endangering life and indeed they have killed several and injured thousands.” The solution: “Maximum photography, maximum evidence gathering by officers who are not involved in the actual [political demonstration] control activity”—maximum spying, maximum keeping of secret files on private citizens.10

  At the federal level, the CIA was already pursuing similar objectives under the aegis of an illegal domestic operation code-named CHAOS. Among the political targets of CHAOS, count Black Panther Geronimo Pratt, framed for t
he murder of two radicals on a tennis court in Santa Monica, California. Pratt was subsequently released from prison in June 1997, 27 years after his sentencing, because it was proven that a witness had lied on the stand.11 The International Secretariat of Amnesty International issued a press release the following year citing the court’s “failure to disclose crucial information about a key prosecution witness in the trial of Geronimo ji Jaga [Pratt]—a former leader of the Black Panther Party released last year.” This stonewall, insisted AI, “should result in the reversal of his conviction and finally put an end to 27 years of injustice.”12 Pratt is generally considered a target of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s notorious counter-surveillance program, but Pratt is aware since requesting his files under FOIA that CHAOS agents hitched horses with the Bureau to drag the Panther into an erroneous conviction.

  Politically active hippies were also fair game. One victim of the onslaught was the underground press, according to Donna Demac, an instructor in interactive telecommunications at NYU, “that diverse assortment of publications that . . . empowered many of the social movements of the 1960s.” The CIA and FBI “collected information on each paper’s publisher, its sources of funds and its staff members. Many underground newspapers were put out of business when they were abandoned by advertisers who had been pressured by the FBI. The Bureau also created obstacles to distribution, fomented staff feuds and spread false information to create suspicion and confusion.”13

  The Central Intelligence Agency and its military counterparts, covert templars of the ruling caste, watched the dissent movement’s rise with growing anxiety; the Operation was the Agency’s response to civil unrest and cultural upheaval. If nothing else, the word CHAOS implied that officials of The Firm were aware of the social upheaval they were about to unleash upon an unsuspecting proletariat.

  Freedom of Information Act requests for the most sensitive files are consistently denied.

  “During six years [1967–1972], the Operation compiled some 13,000 different files, including files on 7,200 American citizens,” concluded the Rockefeller Commission, which failed to pursue leads to settle critical allegations. The files inspected by the CIA’s in-house committee concerned some 300,000 individuals and political organizations, and the CIA’s Directorate of Operations created an index of some seven million names.14

  Leaks were handled at the top. In April 1972, an article by Victor Marchetti, an ex-CIA officer, “CIA: The President’s Loyal Tool,” appeared in The Nation, charging the Agency with deceiving and manipulating the media, and co-opting the youth movement, cultural organizations and labor. William Colby, then the CIA’s executive director, recruited John Warner, a deputy general counsel, to halt the publication of a book that Marchetti planned to publish on the criminalization of the CIA. Warner turned to White House aides John Ehrlichman, the head Plumber, and David Young, a right-wing extremist from Young Americans for Freedom, a Nazi front for “conservative” agents emigrating to the US from Munich. Together, they obtained approval from President Nixon to drag Marchetti into court where US District Court Judge Albert V. Bryan, Jr. ordered him to submit the book to the Agency for redaction.15

  Operation CHAOS was the inevitable mutation of covert domestic ops conceived during the Eisenhower administration and its directive to monitor émigré political groups on domestic soil. A reformed insider, Vern Lyon, former CIA undercover operative and current director of the Des Moines Hispanic Ministry, writes that the directive led the CIA to establish a network of proprietary companies and covers for its domestic operations. So widespread did the network become that in 1964 President Johnson allowed CIA Director John McCone to conceive “a new super-secret branch called the Domestic Operations Division (DOD), the very title of which mocked the explicit intent of Congress to prohibit CIA operations inside the US.”

  The classified charter of the DOD mandated the exercise of “centralized responsibility for the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operational activities within the United States.” This would include break-ins of foreign diplomatic sites at the request of the National Security Agency (NSA). Lyons: “The CIA also expanded the role of its ‘quasi-legal’ Domestic Contact Service (DCS), an operation designed to brief and debrief selected American citizens who had traveled abroad in sensitive areas.” The DCS also helped with travel control by monitoring the arrivals and departures of US nationals and foreigners. In addition, the CIA reached out to former agents, officers, contacts and friends to help it run its many fronts, covers and phony corporations. This “old boy network” provided the CIA with trusted personnel to conduct its illicit domestic activities.16

  A massive destabilizing effort was waged against the peace and civil rights movements. The Army’s Counter-Intelligence Analysis Branch collected personality profiles, mug shots and compiled “blacklists” of anti-war activists, stored them on computer-files and microfilm reels. The Pentagon’s intelligence operatives, disguised as reporters, gathered information at peace demonstrations—the “Midwest Audiovisual News,” an Army intelligence front, interviewed Abbie Hoffman at the 1968 police riot in Chicago.17

  The military program came complete with “operations centers,” direct lines to local police, teletype machines to field intelligence units, street maps, closed-circuit video, and secure communications channels. A 180-man “command center” appeared in 1968 following the riots in Detroit. By 1969, the center was housed in a $2.7-million war room in the cellar of the Pentagon.18

  This was the year Richard Helms prepared a CIA research paper on the antiwar movement entitled “Restless Youth” for Henry Kissinger. The cover letter explained, “in an effort to round out our discussion of this subject, we have included a section on American students. This is an area not within the charter of this agency, so I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive this makes the paper. Should anyone learn of its existence it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned.” But a small group at the CIA’s Office of Security was already monitoring student organizations in the Washington, D.C. area. Helms expanded the domestic spying operation with the creation of the Special Operations Group (SOG), directed by Richard Ober, one of the “Deep Throat” candidates, to conduct “counterintelligence.” This was the direct precursor of CHAOS. SOG operatives provided the CIA Office of Current Intelligence with scuttlebutt on the peace movement. Within a couple of years, domestic operations swelled to meet the perceived threat to military-industrial rule, even paralleling the growth of antiwar protest.19 But invisibly, in the shadows of the resistance.

  In 1974, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh exposed CHAOS in the New York Times. Hersh reported that the CIA had conducted a massive spying and covert operations program on domestic soil. The story inspired the Church and Pike hearings of 1975. These investigations verified Hersh’s allegations. But the media, especially the leading newspapers and news weeklies, ridiculed and reviled Hersh. The Washington Post, Newsweek and editorial pages across the country actually questioned his sanity and dismissed the story as a whimsical “conspiracy theory.” Time rushed to the Agency’s defense: “Many observers in Washington who are far from naive about the CIA nevertheless consider its past chiefs and most of its officials highly educated, sensitive and dedicated public servants who would scarcely let themselves get involved in the kind of massive scheme described.”20

  NOTES

  1. Peter Wicke, a music historian at Hummboldt University in Berlin, emphasizes that the Nazi suppression of jazz and swing was motivated largely by economics: “January 30, 1933 marked a deep cut for some forms of popular music under the fascist dictatorship in Germany. The new ruling powers left no doubt about their role in the arts with the renewal of Germany. A once flowering European center of music expired into the Agony.” Propaganda expenditures directed against the emergent musical movements “targeted the economic competition of the American music industry,” and, oddly enough, “the Jewish population—who had less to do with jazz than the other subpopulations of Germany
.” American recordings were banned, but Telefunken Studios artists Peter Kreuder’s Orchestra, Heinz Wehner’s Swing Band and Kurt Widmann were promoted in Nazi Germany, and the business of jazz recording continued after the prohibition was enacted against imports, “not undisputedly, but evenly, without closer inspection, minus the annoying competition from overseas.” The corporate influence on Nazi policies concerning jazz and swing music contributed to “a beautiful banknote of private feeling” in Germany. See Peter Wicke, “Populäre Musik im Faschistischen Deutschland,” http://www2.huberlin.de/inside/fpm/ wicke2.htm.

  2. Bruce Pollock, When the Music Mattered: The Musicians Who Made it Happen Tell How it Happened, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983, p. 86.

  3. Randal Morton, “Alan Munde’s Interview,” Clarence White Chronicles, no. 14, September 13, 1998.

  4. Ben Fong - Torres, Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsons, New York: St. Martin’s, 1991, p. 228.

  5. Fong-Torres, pp. 200–201.