The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  In other words, the mainstream was absorbing a mind-set that had long been common currency in the counterculture and the New Left. There was nothing like the direct experience of COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and the local equivalents run by Red squads to instill a deep distrust of the government. It was easier to imagine the president ordering a break-in at the Democratic National Committee if you knew that the FBI had repeatedly broken into the offices of organizations devoted to political protest. For that matter, it was easier to think that the government might have murdered Martin Luther King or Malcolm X if you knew that the Chicago cops and FBI had assaulted and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Black Panther Party.10 Documented misbehavior inevitably fueled speculations about undocumented misbehavior.

  As the Vietnam War wore on and domestic politics grew more bitter and violent, there was more critical coverage of the federal government in the mainstream media. The first COINTELPRO revelations, for example, came out after the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the Bureau’s office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, making off with more than a thousand documents detailing the agency’s attempts to infiltrate and undermine the Left. The anonymous investigators mailed the memos to the media, and The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other papers then reported their contents. The FBI soon shuttered the program, though it didn’t end all the activities that had been carried out in the program’s name.

  But the fears that were second nature to protesters didn’t start to flood into the mainstream until five burglars were arrested at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. Over the next two years, a chain of evidence emerged that linked their illegal activity to President Richard Nixon, who resigned from office under the weight of the scandal on August 9, 1974. By then there had been a wide range of revelations about the antics of the president’s dirty-tricks team, and the exposés continued to come after Nixon left office.

  Nixon’s men, it was learned, had sabotaged the campaigns of the candidates believed to have the best chance of unseating their boss in 1972. After the authorities started looking into the Watergate burglary, they had done their best to sabotage that investigation too. When the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War that revealed the government’s deceptions about the conflict, Nixon’s operatives had burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, looking for information that could be used against him. Nixon staffers had assembled a list of the president’s political foes, ranging from the labor leader Leonard Woodcock to the actor Paul Newman. The list’s purpose, White House counsel John Dean explained in a confidential memo, was to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”11 Within the Internal Revenue Service, a group called the Special Service Staff had been regularly used to harass people for political purposes. When a new IRS chief shut the staff down in 1973, the president had immediately attempted to have him fired.

  On top of all that, some of the Watergate conspirators had seriously considered a plan to assassinate the newspaper columnist Jack Anderson.

  Suddenly the New Left’s warnings seemed much more plausible. (An underground paper in Atlanta greeted the Nixon scandals with the headline WATERGATE: EXCUSE US FOR BRAGGING BUT WE TOLD YOU SO!)12 One COINTELPRO memo had declared the need to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles.”13 Now “the paranoia” had spread far beyond “these circles.” In just a decade, the historian Kathryn Olmsted has pointed out,

  the percentage of people who distrusted the government had risen from 22 to 62 percent. Forty-five percent of Americans polled believed that there were “quite a few” crooks in government, up from 29 percent in 1964. The proportion of those who agreed that the country’s leaders had “consistently lied to the American people” rose from 38 percent in 1972 to 68 percent in 1975. . . .

  The proportion of Americans who had a “highly favorable” impression of the FBI had fallen from 84 percent in 1965 to 52 percent in 1973. In 1975, that figure dropped again to 37 percent. Although the Gallup organization did not ask Americans about the relatively anonymous CIA before 1973, the agency at that time was held in lower esteem than the FBI: only 23 percent of Americans gave the CIA a highly favorable rating. In 1975, the figure fell to 14 percent. Among college students, the CIA was highly regarded by only 7 percent.14

  In the 1770s, many Americans had believed that “a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” As the bicentennial neared, that same suspicion grew again.

  Three months after Nixon’s resignation, those suspicious voters elected a reform-minded new Congress. Washington now contained more than the usual number of legislators interested in investigating the national security state, and the FBI and CIA faced more congressional scrutiny than either agency had received to date. An investigative committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church soon issued a report on a host of executive-branch abuses, including COINTELPRO, politically motivated IRS audits, CIA assassination plots, an effort to intercept and read Americans’ mail, and a particularly creepy program called MKULTRA.

  MKULTRA was the CIA’s response to the Korean Communists’ purported success in brainwashing prisoners of war. Its researchers had investigated “chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.”15 Among other things, the Church Committee reported, the operations entailed the “surreptitious administration” of LSD “to unwitting nonvolunteer subjects in normal life settings.”16 More bluntly, the CIA had dosed people with acid without their permission.

  A similar committee in the House of Representatives, chaired by the New York Democrat Otis Pike, took a hard look at the intelligence community’s budget secrecy and its spotty record in foreseeing foreign crises. In the executive branch, a commission chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller covered some of the same ground the Church Committee did, though not as thoroughly or incisively.

  The Left felt affirmed. The center felt shaken. And though much of the Right reacted to the revelations by defending the embattled national security agencies, Republicans also delighted in digging out dirty deeds by earlier administrations and throwing them back in the Democrats’ faces. One conservative book of the era, Victor Lasky’s It Didn’t Start with Watergate (1977), made an unpersuasive effort to defend Nixon from the charges against him. But it also included a spirited recital of ugly facts about previous presidents: how Franklin Roosevelt had used the FBI to spy on the critics of his foreign policy; how Harry Truman had owed his career to Tom Pendergast’s corrupt, vote-stealing political machine; how John and Robert Kennedy had steamrollered civil liberties in their pursuit of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa; how Lyndon Johnson had used the CIA—including the future Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt—to spy on Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. (Lasky, alas, added some more dubious allegations to the mix as well.)17

  The result was an argument not so different from a set of positions taken by Noam Chomsky and other radicals of the Left: that political repression had been a bipartisan project, that Richard Nixon’s troubles had begun because he had directed that repression at powerful people instead of outsiders, that with Nixon out of office we would soon be back to business as usual. Chomsky acknowledged the convergence when he commented that Kennedy’s and Johnson’s illicit FBI operations had been “incomparably more serious than anything charged in the Congressional Articles of Impeachment” against Nixon, and that Nixon’s defenders therefore “have a case.” Lasky, in turn, quoted Chomsky’s words in his book.18

  But in the mainstream media a simpler story line was taking hold, one in which Watergate was an unfortunate aberration and Nixon’s downfall proved that the system worked. A similar sentiment attached itself to revelations about the FBI and the CIA: Yes, crimes were committed, the argument went, but that’s just a sign that the CIA had gone rogue and that J.
Edgar Hoover was out of control. It’s not as though the scandals represented systemic problems.

  Chomsky and Lasky were closer to the truth. Just a decade after the program formally known as COINTELPRO ended, the FBI was using some of the same old tactics against a leftist protest group, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador: tapping its phones, intercepting its mail, and (perhaps) burglarizing its offices. Similarly, the Iran-Contra scandal that made headlines in 1986, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to the Islamic dictatorship in Iran and used the proceeds to illegally fund guerrillas in Nicaragua, made it clear that the post-Watergate investigations had not brought a stop to illicit covert operations overseas. In a different context, the anthropologist Nicholas Dirks once described public scandals as “ritual moments in which the sacrifice of the reputation of one or more individuals allows many more to continue their scandalous ways, if perhaps with minimal safeguards and protocols that are meant to ensure that the terrible excesses of the past will not occur again.”19 He was on to something.

  Years later we would learn that Deep Throat, the mysterious anonymous source who leaked Watergate tips to the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, was FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, whom a jury would later find guilty of conspiring to violate Americans’ constitutional rights—one of just two Bureau officials to be convicted for COINTELPRO crimes. Felt’s motive in talking to Woodward was not to stop wrongdoing in high places but to become director of the FBI. (He hoped that Nixon, angry to see so many leaks from the Bureau’s investigation, would fire FBI chief Patrick Gray and hire Felt for the job instead.)20 Put that together with Hoover’s self-interested motives for blocking the Huston Plan, and it’s not hard to see the convulsions of the 1970s as the sparks set off when one set of high-ranking criminals clashes with another.

  In establishment circles, though, the Chomsky/Lasky line wasn’t welcome. Enemy Above stories were becoming disreputable again, particularly when they indicted more than one political party. Important media figures began to fret that the press had taken their probes too far. The executive branch went on the offensive, charging investigators with hamstringing the nation’s defenders, with endangering the lives of American agents abroad, even with McCarthyism.21 (The key component of McCarthyism was not, apparently, Joseph McCarthy’s willingness to ruin people’s careers because of their opinions or age-old associations. It was the fact that he was investigating the State Department.)22 Congress’s interest in examining intelligence agencies had largely played itself out by the dawn of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and the chief exception—the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which looked into the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King—would peter out without much effect.

  The assassinations committee did raise some eyebrows by concluding, on the basis of acoustic evidence, that a second gunman had fired a shot at President Kennedy in 1963 and that this established “the probability that a conspiracy did exist that day.”23 Later analysis of the same evidence would come to a different conclusion, but even before then the finding didn’t do much to change establishment opinion on the Kennedy killing. One syndicated columnist reacted to the report by writing that a second gunman “is not in itself evidence of conspiracy; it is simply evidence that another person, besides Oswald, may have wanted Kennedy dead.”24 The investigatory era was coming to an end.

  But the era had left a mark. The Washington Post and The New York Times were getting warier about what they published, but alternative outlets—Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Inquiry, a host of urban weeklies, even Hustler and Penthouse—kept up the skeptical coverage. The door was open for well-grounded investigative journalism. It was open for shakier theories as well.

  There was a new wave of assassination books. One of the less plausible efforts, Michael Canfield and A. J. Weberman’s Coup d’État in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1975), claimed to contain photographic evidence that a group of tramps arrested in Dallas on the day JFK was shot included the future Watergate conspirators E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis. The photos’ resemblance to Hunt and Sturgis is, to put it kindly, fleeting. (Weberman, who had already attracted some notoriety as an obsessed fan of Bob Dylan, was a self-proclaimed “garbologist” who believed he could decode Dylan’s life and lyrics by rooting through the trash outside the singer’s home. So he was experienced at reading meaning into data.)

  Then there was “A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File,” an elaborate conspiracy narrative that roped together drug smuggling, the Kennedy assassinations, hypnosis, the Mafia, the fate of Howard Hughes, and more. The document was periodically reprinted in the alternative press; it would later become an Internet mainstay.25 It both inspired and attracted a lot of paranoia, as the freelance writer (and future FBI operative) Robert Eringer discovered when he called an outlet that had published it:

  The “reporter” who answered my call became almost hysterical at the mere mention of Gemstone. . . . What was I trying to do, get them all murdered? Was I crazy?

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “They’ve killed six of us already!” he screamed.

  “Who’s They?”

  “THEM!” he cried. “Don’t you understand?!”

  “Perhaps you would explain?”

  “What? Over the phone? ARE YOU CRAZY??” he wailed. “THEY’RE LISTENING RIGHT NOW!!!”26

  The anxiety that COINTELPRO had gone out of its way to encourage was now occurring on its own.

  Dig deeper and you’d find people like Mae Brussell, a California mom whose friend Paul Krassner once described her as “plump and energetic, wearing a long peasant dress patchworked with philosophical tidbits, knitting sweaters for her children while she breathlessly described the architecture of an invisible government.”27 Brussell’s interest in the death of John F. Kennedy had sprawled into an elaborate counterhistory of the postwar United States, one where surviving Nazis were deeply embedded in the national security state; where violent left-wing sects such as the Symbionese Liberation Army were government fronts created to discredit the Left; where America’s invisible government had murdered the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jimmy Hoffa, John Lennon, and even the Chico and the Man star Freddie Prinze, among others. (“Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass Elliott, Steve Perron choking from their vomit?” she wrote in 1976. “I doubt it!!”)28 She hosted a weekly program that sometimes had a home on the radio and sometimes existed only in the form of cassettes mailed to subscribers. She inspired a small army of fans, dubbed Brussell Sprouts, who extended her work and offered each other research tips. (You should “talk to people, all the time,” Brussell’s protégé John Judge advised. “I was explaining Tom Pappas’ role in securing Agnew’s position in the ’68 election, and his connection to heroin from Greece, to a hitchhiker who turned out to be a blood relation.”)29

  One subject that fascinated Brussell was mind control. Drawing on the MKULTRA revelations, she revived the Manchurian Candidate scenario of a brainwashed assassin, putting the CIA in the place of the Communists. At the same time, the counterculture had set off a boom in new and unfamiliar religious sects, which in turn had inspired a cult scare comparable to the fears that had seized many mainline Protestants during the Second Great Awakening. Brussell absorbed those anxieties, and then a tragedy in South America allowed her to combine them with her MKULTRA scenario.

  In November 1978, a mass murder-suicide left 918 people dead in and near Jonestown, a religious colony in Guyana founded by Reverend Jim Jones of a church called the Peoples Temple. One of the dead was California Congressman Leo Ryan, who had flown to the community on a fact-finding mission after hearing from some of his constituents that family members were being held against their will.

  The mainstream press had greeted the new religions of the era with deep suspicion; the mesmerizing prophet and his zombie followers became a media cliché. And the families of the people involved in the massacre were often eager to
minimize their relatives’ responsibility for what had happened. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the San Francisco Chronicle would run a story, headlined “ ‘Robot’ Behavior of Ryan Murder Suspect,” that sounds like something out of a body-snatching movie:

  [R]elatives said Larry [Layton], 32, acted as if he were in a “post-hypnotic trance” as he was drawn further into the Peoples Temple, which he joined in 1968. . . . “The thing I wonder about,” said Tom Layton, 36-year-old brother of the suspected gunman, “is if the Peoples Temple ordered Larry to do whatever he’s done. I wonder if the Peoples Temple is in any way going to support his defense in court, since he was a loyal servant following orders. . . .”

  “He was a robot,” said father Laurence Layton, a flat distant timbre in his voice.30

  Leaping on the story, Brussell offered her take on the Peoples Temple murders. Jonestown had existed, she concluded, so the secret government could “experiment on black people; mind control; electrodes; sexual deprivation; fear; mass suicides.” Layton, “a robot in the hands of Jim Jones,” had assassinated Ryan to keep the truth from coming out, and the mass slaughter that followed had been a part of the cover-up.31

  Not every conspiracist shared Brussell’s interest in brainwashing. In 1975, the JFK assassination theorist Mark Lane allegedly told her that he’d “never appear with you publicly. People know you’re crazy. There’s no evidence of mind control in the United States.”32 But Lane had a Jonestown connection of his own: He had been one of the Temple’s attorneys, and he had argued shortly before the massacre that “American intelligence organizations” were making “a deliberate effort” to “destroy the Peoples Temple, to destroy Jim Jones, and to destroy Jonestown.”33 Brussell could now quote Lane’s words of praise for the Guyana settlement (“It makes me almost weep to see such an incredible experience with such vast potential for the human spirit and soul of this country to be cruelly assaulted by our intelligence agents”) as she painted her old rival as a part of the grand machine. “I’m very proud to say that I’ve hated his guts and tried to expose him for years,” she told her audience.34