The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

The story struck a chord: The book was a best seller, and the movie did well at the box office.48 Not everyone enjoyed it, though. Friedan stormed out of a screening, denouncing the film as a “rip-off of the women’s movement.”49 Someone had taken her ideas, she fretted, and replaced them with an ersatz Hollywood confection, a superficially similar crowd-pleasing substitute. Call it the invasion of the feminism snatchers.

  Television in the 1970s was more vulnerable to regulation and to ad boycotts than the film industry was, and thus it was less prone to airing stories with radical themes. But the change in what it was possible to see on the small screen was even more pronounced than the change in what it was possible to see in a theater.

  The national security state wasn’t a frequent subject in the sitcoms of the sixties, and when it did appear it was depicted as benign. Consider its cameo on My Three Sons, a long-running comedy starring Fred MacMurray as Steve Douglas, an aeronautical engineer raising a trio of kids after his wife’s death. In a 1963 episode titled “Top Secret,” Douglas is working at home on a classified project. To keep everything secure, the house is put under surveillance.

  “It’s sure a switch,” says one of the watchers, “from public enemies, spies, subversives, saboteurs, kidnappers—to this!”50 A colleague commiserates: “In all my months of training, they never mentioned tailing a ten-year-old kid.” But their boss won’t hear it: “We’ll handle this job as though the Douglas family was out to blow up New York City. Every word, every move, every meaningful silence—that’s our assignment, from Top Level Pentagon.” An apparatus built to combat external and internal threats will be used instead on an ordinary American family, for everyone’s good.

  For the rest of the episode, the feds tap the Douglases’ phone, yielding nothing but the installments of a teenager’s halting love life. They file dreary reports on the family’s movements. (“7 P.M.: Look through window and observe Chip Douglas watch friend Ernie feed white rat.”) Steve Douglas himself engages in a little disinformation to mislead the rest of his household about what’s going on. At the end, MacMurray’s character breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly:

  You know, this security thing was a little tough on my family for a while, but, well, you can see that it was necessary. Of course, now that the project is completed I can tell you what it was all about. You see, what I was really working on was a type of missile—

  And then the words TOP SECRET appear over MacMurray’s face and his next several sentences are scrambled. The security system that hovered over the Douglases turns out to be in our homes too, intercepting information before it can be heard on our televisions. It is difficult to describe this scene without it sounding like a deeply creepy moment, but the show presents it as perfectly benign. There’s even a laugh track.

  Just thirteen years later, Good Times, a Norman Lear sitcom about a black couple raising three kids in the ghetto, aired an installment called “The Investigation.” Like “Top Secret,” “The Investigation” is about an ordinary American family falling under federal surveillance, but this episode takes a rather different approach to the subject. One of the children, Michael Evans, attracts the FBI’s attention when he writes to the Cuban government. Michael has militant tendencies, but his intentions here are patriotic: The letter was a part of a school project for the bicentennial. “I thought I’d compare the American Revolution with the Cuban Revolution,” he says. “They’re a dictatorship and we’re a democracy—except for a couple wards here in Chicago.”51

  Michael’s brother, J.J., blames the correspondence for the fact that he’s just lost his job delivering chicken. His mother, Florida, usually the voice of reason, tells him, “I think we’re letting our imaginations run away with us.” J.J.’s role on the show is to play the fool, and ordinarily the audience would be expected to adopt the mother’s point of view. But then J.J.’s father, James, Sr., walks through the door and announces that he’s lost his job too. A frightened neighbor drops by with a piece of news: The FBI just interrogated her about the Evanses. J.J. starts to worry that the apartment has been bugged, and after he launches a laughable, over-the-top hunt for wiretaps, his parents and sister have a more serious moment, speaking in hushed tones:

  FLORIDA: You think it’s possible?

  JAMES, SR.: Sure, it’s possible. They’ve done it before.

  THELMA: Yeah—to a lot of people.

  Then Federal Agent Lloyd knocks on the door. It’s an “unofficial visit,” he tells them, not looking very happy. The family starts to explain that the Havana letter was nothing but a homework project, but Lloyd cuts them off. “I know,” he says. The studio audience reacts with a horrified noise.

  “I’m sorry,” Lloyd continues, “but we were asked to find out who was receiving Cuban propaganda in the mail. Just routine.” The father chews out the agent, who responds with a defensive apology: “We had to ask questions. We never thought your boss would react this way.” James is relentless: “Well, how the hell do you expect him to react, man? The FBI comes nosing around asking him questions, he figures there’s gonna be trouble, he’s got enough already, so good-bye James Evans.”

  The FBI persuades James’s employer to rehire him, but even that happy resolution is undercut. “Well, I got my job back, that’s good,” the father says. “But how about all them people who ain’t so lucky, huh? How about them?” Someone in the audience yells “Right on!” and there’s a big burst of applause.

  By the end of the show we’ve learned that the FBI talked only to James’s boss, not to J.J.’s—the son lost his job on the merits. But that isn’t an exculpation; that’s just J.J. providing comic relief while his dad bears the burden of the drama. After the G-man leaves, James puts his arm around his wife and says, “You know something, Florida? I still got the feeling that somewhere, someplace, my name is still in somebody’s file.” Then he looks directly at the camera, like Fred MacMurray at the end of “Top Secret.” This time there’s no laugh track.

  In 1975, a different TV broadcast was mentioned in a curious New York Times article by Clifton Daniel. After listing several CIA operations that had been exposed, Daniel observed that the “agency has even been suspected of assassinations. Last night NBC television showed a 1973 fiction movie, ‘Scorpio,’ in which six murders are carried out by C.I.A. agents or hired gunmen.”52 Daniel didn’t cite any other sources for those suspicions—just a movie that had been on TV. Talk about thin sourcing.

  But there’s a backstory here. Daniel and other high-ranking Times staffers had recently attended a private luncheon with President Gerald Ford. Intent on explaining the need for limits on the intelligence investigations, Ford had declared that the CIA had secrets that it couldn’t reveal. Stuff that would “ruin the U.S. image around the world.”

  “Like what?” asked one of the reporters.

  “Like assassinations,” replied Ford. Realizing what he had let slip, he immediately added, “That’s off the record!”53

  The paper decided to follow Ford’s wishes and suppress his gaffe, but some of the people present still wanted to write about what they’d heard. So Daniel used Scorpio to allude to a fact that he knew but could not say aloud.

  Revelations in the real world had given popular culture a darker, more skeptical tone. Now pop-culture paranoia was expanding Americans’ framework for discussing real-world events. Like Mae Brussell’s Jonestown fantasy, the conspiracy thrillers weren’t just fiction. They were myth.

  8

  THE LEGEND OF JOHN TODD

  . . . no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax.

  —H. P. Lovecraft1

  On a Sunday night in 1978, a storyteller came to the Open Door Church in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Four hundred or five hundred people were there to hear him. It was a respectable turnout, though not an overflowing one; the auditorium had space for more than a thousand people.

  Some of the men and women in the room’s
uncushioned pews may have had a particular interest in the speaker, an intense young visitor from California named John Todd. But mostly this was the standard Sunday crowd, and they probably didn’t think they’d hear anything peculiar. Guests were always stopping in to talk about how they’d been saved. The churchgoers might have heard that this fellow had a more unusual background than the others—that before he became a Christian, he’d been a witch. But the man on the stage soon announced that he had been much, much more than that.

  “Many things I say are strange to Christians,” Todd warned. “Most of you grew up in Christian homes, or even if you were in the world you were not very close to what I was into.”2 But he knew about the wickedness that was out there, and he had come to tell them about it. At that very moment, he said, the witches were meeting in Washington, D.C. “It was in all the front pages of the newspapers down there,” he announced. “Christians across the United States say, ‘You don’t really expect us to believe that witches are that organized.’ No, they’ve just got senators and congressmen and top witches down there all in one convention. They are not that organized, not at all!”

  Then he told the story of his life.

  According to Todd, he was a scion of the Collins bloodline, the family that had brought witchcraft to America. He had started studying for the witches’ priesthood at age thirteen, and when he was fourteen he had been initiated into the outer court of a coven in Columbus, Ohio. (“When the service is over,” he added, “I will be glad to talk with any Mason present, and I will compare my initiation to witchcraft, word for word, action for action, with yours. They are identical.”) At eighteen he had become a high priest. That had made him exempt from the draft, but he had enlisted anyway because “it was important to get witchcraft started at the different military bases.” Then he had a drunken shoot-out with an officer in Germany, right in the middle of downtown Stuttgart. The officer had died, and Todd had expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

  Instead, one day “my cell door opened. And there stood a senator, a U.S. congressman, a couple of generals, and an honorable discharge.” His court-martial records had been destroyed, his file had been classified top secret, and he still had his rank and grade. When Todd got home to Ohio, he was handed an envelope containing $2,000 and a first-class ticket to New York. There he learned that witchcraft wasn’t just another religion. It was the religion of a powerful political organization called the Illuminati.

  The chiefs of the Illuminati were the Rothschilds, the infamous banking dynasty. Beneath them in the hierarchy was the Council of 13, the Rothschilds’ private priesthood; below them was the Council of 33, consisting of the world’s most powerful Masons; and below them was the Council of 500, drawn from the wealthiest circles of the ultrarich—Rockefellers, Kennedys, Du Ponts. The Illuminati controlled Standard Oil and Shell Oil, Chase Manhattan and the Bank of America, Sears and Safeway. They controlled the National Council of Churches and the Satanic Brotherhood of America, the Federal Reserve and the American Civil Liberties Union, the Knights of Columbus and the Junior Chamber of Commerce, the John Birch Society and the Communist Party. In the United States, the Illuminati called themselves the Council on Foreign Relations.

  Todd was initiated into the Council of 13 and was given a thirteen-state area to run from a base in San Antonio. He was also put in charge of Zodiac Productions, which he told the crowd was the country’s biggest booking agency for rock bands. There he learned the secrets of the music industry. (Elton John, for instance, “has never written a song that was not written in witch language.”) And he was shown an eight-year plan for the Illuminati to take over the remainder of the world, a scheme scheduled to conclude in December 1980.

  “About twelve years ago,” Todd explained to the crowd, “Philippe Rothschild ordered one of his mistresses to write an eleven-hundred-page book that would describe to all witches how they would take control of the world through the Illuminati. It was called Atlas Shrugged. One of the things in it is happening on the front pages of the newspapers across the United States right now. In fact, it spent a third of the book describing how they would raise the oil prices and later destroy the oil fields and then they would also completely shut down the coal. . . . Their sole purpose is to bankrupt their own companies until they destroy the currency of the entire world and still be so financially strong that they would withstand it.”

  Meanwhile, Charles Manson (“an old buddy of mine”) was assembling an Illuminist army in America’s prisons. “They have been promised weapons,” Todd exclaimed. “Military weapons!” Congress was preparing a bill to confiscate Americans’ guns, leaving us at the mercy of Manson’s army. “Manson,” Todd warned, “will either be released next year or the following year, they have not decided yet.” Then he and his followers would sweep across the country, butchering a million people and giving the government a rationale for imposing martial law.

  Soon the Illuminati would cut off all the electricity on the east coast. “Atlas Shrugged ended with this: ‘When the lights of New York City go out for the last time, we will have the world,’ ” Todd said. “Now, that meant this: They are going, towards the end, to cut the cities off completely.”

  At the peak of the chaos, a savior would present himself, a man the Illuminati believed to be the son of Lucifer, “a person so fantastically powered that he could convince people that he was their only salvation.” And then their control would be complete.

  Todd walked away from all that. In 1972, when he was near the top of the grand conspiracy, he saw the evangelical exploitation movie The Cross and the Switchblade. As he left the theater in a daze, someone handed him a tract. It was “Bewitched,” a minicomic published by the Christian cartoonist Jack T. Chick. Todd stumbled into the Greengate Club, an old burlesque joint that had turned itself into a Baptist church. There he got saved, and now he was out to tell the world about the conspiracy.

  It was risky. There was a price on Todd’s head: “They start at ten-thousand-dollar bounties and work up to several hundred thousand.” That’s one reason why witches are afraid to exit the occult, he explained. Just a few years earlier, an actress in California had tried to leave the craft. The Illuminati had cut her throat and left her hanging by a foot, a tarot-card tableau that told every witch who heard the news that she had died for betraying the faith. The dead woman’s name was Sharon Tate.

  So Todd and his allies were starting a retreat, a place in the wilderness where witches who came to Christ could live without fear of assassination. “We need fifty thousand dollars,” he told the congregation, “and in the month and a half since we have been trying to raise the money my pastor has received twenty five dollars.”

  The Chambersburg congregation took up a collection for the cause, and Todd walked away with about $1,000.3

  Dino Pedrone, the pastor at the Open Door Church when Todd came to speak, says there was a fair amount of buzz about Todd in the weeks after his testimony. “We’ve had many great preachers in our pulpit,” he later told Christianity Today, “but there was more talk around town after he left than with any other preacher we’ve had.”4 That doesn’t mean the talk was all positive: By Pedrone’s recollection, Todd inspired more skepticism than belief. “This guy is giving his testimony, you want to believe what he’s saying,” he recently remembered. “But I think as time wore on, it just didn’t add up.”5

  Still, Todd did attract believers. You don’t raise $1,000 from an audience without convincing at least some of the people in the pews that you’re telling the truth. And he wasn’t convincing them just in Chambersburg; he was speaking at some of the biggest churches on the East Coast, and thousands of his tapes were circulating. “I just remember my dad coming home from a church event at which one or more of Todd’s tapes was played and describing in great detail, and with a straight face, Todd’s account of an Illuminati/Rothschild hierarchy culminating in Satan,” recalled Gary Chartier, a legal scholar at La Sierra University who was raised in an Adve
ntist household in Corona, California. Chartier’s father wasn’t an ill-educated fool. He had an MD and an MBA, and he passed his CPA exam on the first try: an intelligent professional who found Todd persuasive.6

  Put yourself in the shoes of a churchgoer in Chambersburg or Corona looking for more information about Todd and his tales. Maybe you’d pick up one of the comic books that Jack Chick made with Todd’s input, or maybe you’d track down some of his tapes.

  If you did, you might have heard him saying more about Atlas Shrugged. “It was written by a woman named Ayn Rand,” he told one audience. “She was already a well-known writer, and her books sell nationwide—mostly people who read her are Communists. . . . They are extremely mad because just this year alone, they sold several million of them—mostly to Christians. And they don’t like that. In fact they’ve tried to stop printing it but people don’t want to stop printing it, they’re making so much money.” The book included about five pages’ worth of sex scenes, he cautioned, but “you can tear them out and throw them away. . . . They’re stuck in there on purpose to stop Christians from reading the book.”7 The character John Galt was a stand-in for Philippe Rothschild, Todd added, and Galt’s retreat in the Colorado mountains was, when decoded by Todd, the Bermuda Triangle.

  You might have heard Todd talking about a book that would be harder to acquire: the “Necromonicon,” which he called “the original occult bible.” Only three copies existed, he said—one in Glasgow, one in London, one in St. Petersburg Cathedral in the USSR—but he had seen it, and he knew it had been a direct inspiration for both the witches’ Book of Shadows and the Mormons’ Book of Mormon.

  You might have heard Todd explain the occult symbols the Illuminati use to mark the companies they control. “They have Sunoco with an arrow through it because that’s the sign of casting a spell, the arrow,” he explained. “They use 76 because May 1, 1776, is their birth date of the Illuminati. . . . The winged horse in Marathon, Pegasus, is the messenger of the gods. . . . The eightfold path of what a witch must master to be a powerful witch—that’s the symbol of Denny’s.”