The Ludlow Massacre
The United Mine Workers had asked for higher wages and better living conditions for the miners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, one of the many Rockefeller-owned companies. The miners—mostly immigrants from Europe’s poorest countries—lived in shacks provided by the company at exorbitant rent. Their low wages ($1.68 a day) were paid in script redeemable only at company stores charging high prices. The churches they attended were the pastorates of company-hired ministers. Their children were taught in company-controlled schools.
The company maintained a force of detectives, mine guards, and spies whose job it was to keep the camp quarantined from the danger of unionization. When the miners struck, JDR, Jr., then officially in command of the company, and his father’s hatchet man, the Baptist Reverend Frederick T. Gates, who was a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, refused even to negotiate. They evicted the strikers from the company-owned shacks, hired a thousand strikebreakers from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, and persuaded Governor Ammons to call out the National Guard to help break the strike.
Open warfare resulted. Guardsmen, miners, their women and children, who since their eviction were camping in tents, were ruthlessly killed, until the frightened governor wired President Wilson for federal troops, who eventually crushed the strike. The New York Times, which then already could never be accused of being unfriendly to the Rockefeller interests, reported on April 21, 1914:
A 14-hour battle between striking coal miners and members of the Colorado National Guard in the Ludlow district today culminated in the killing of Louis Tikas, leader of the Greek strikers, and the destruction of the Ludlow tent colony by fire.
And the following day:
Forty-five dead (32 of them women and children), a score missing and more than a score wounded is the known result of the 14-hour battle which raged between state troops and coal miners in the Ludlow district, on the property of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the Rockefeller holding. The Ludlow is a mass of charred debris, and buried beneath it is a story of horror unparalleled in the history of industrial warfare. In the holes that had been dug for their protection against rifle fire, the women and children died like trapped rats as the flames swept over them. One pit uncovered this afternoon disclosed the bodies of ten children and two women.
Thorough Facelift
The worldwide revulsion that followed was such that JDR decided to hire the most talented press agent in the country, Ivy Lee, who got the tough assignment of whitewashing the tycoon’s bloodied image. When Lee learned that the newly organized Rockefeller Foundation had $100 million lying around for promotional purposes without knowing what to do with it, he came with a plan to donate large sums, none less than a million, to well-known colleges, hospitals, churches and benevolent organizations. The plan was accepted. So were the millions. And they made headlines all over the world, for in the days of the gold standard and the five cent cigar there was a maxim in every newspaper office that a million dollars was always news.
That was the beginning of the cleverly worded medical reports on new “miracle” drugs and “just-around-the-corner breakthroughs” planted in the leading news offices and press associations that continue to this day, and the flighty public soon forgot, or forgave, the massacre of foreign immigrants for the dazzling display of generosity and philanthropy financed by the ballooning Rockefeller fortune and going out, with thunderous press fanfare, to various “worthy” institutions.
The Purchase of Public Opinion
In the following years, not only newsmen, but whole newspapers were bought, financed or founded with Rockefeller money. So, Time magazine, which Henry Luce started in 1923, had been taken over by J. P. Morgan when the magazine got into financial difficulties. When Morgan died and his financial empire crumbled, the House of Rockefeller wasted no time in taking over this lush editorial plum also, together with its sisters Fortune and Life, and built for them an expensive 14-story home of their own in Rockefeller Center—the Time & Life Building. Rockefeller was also co-owner of Time’s “rival” magazine, Newsweek, which had been established in the early days of the New Deal with money put up by Rockefeller, Vincent Astor, the Harriman family and other members and allies of the House.
The Intellectuals, a Bargain
For all his innate cynicism, JDR must have been himself surprised to discover how easily the so-called intellectuals could be bought. Indeed, they turned out to be among his best investments. By founding and lavishly endowing his Education Boards at home and abroad, Rockefeller won control not only of the governments and politicos but also of the intellectual and scientific community, starting with the Medical Power—the organization that forms those priests of the New Religion that are the modern medicine men. No Pulitzer or Nobel or any similar prize endowed with money and prestige has ever been awarded to a declared foe of the Rockefeller system.
Henry Luce, officially founder and editor of Time magazine, but constantly dependent on House advertising, also distinguished himself in his adulation of his sponsors. JDR’s son had been responsible for the Ludlow massacre, and an obedient partner in his father’s most unsavory actions. Nonetheless, in 1956, Henry Luce put Junior on the cover of Time, and the feature story, soberly titled “The Good Man,” included hyperboles like this: “It is because John D. Rockefeller Junior’s is a life of constructive social giving that he ranks as an authentic American hero, just as certainly as any general who ever won a victory for an American army or any statesman who triumphed in behalf of U.S. Diplomacy.”
Clearly, Time’s editorial board wasn’t given the choice to change its tune even after the passing of Junior and Henry Luce, since it remained just as dependent on House of Rockefeller advertising. When in 1979 one of Junior’s sons, Nelson A. Rockefeller died—who had been one of the loudest hawks in the Vietnam and other American wars, and was personally responsible for the massacre of prisoners and hostages at Attica prison—Time said of him in it obituary, without laughing: “He was driven by a mission to serve, improve and uplift his country.” Perhaps it was all this that professor Peter Singer had in mind when telling the judges in Italy that the Rockefeller Foundation was a humanitarian enterprise bent on doing good works. One of their best works seems to be sponsoring professor Peter Singer, the world’s greatest animal friend and protector who claims that vivisection is indispensable for medical progress and for more than 20 years refuses to mention that legions of medical doctors are of the opposite view.
Millions of Dollars Free Publicity
Another interesting revelation in the article of Time was that many years ago already Singer “was pleasantly surprised when Britannica approached him to distill in about 30,000 words the discipline that is, at its heart, the systematic study of what we ought to do.”
So now we touch the subject of sponsorization and patronage. They don’t always mean immediate cash but, more important, longterm profits. Many decades ago the Encyclopaedia Britannica moved from Oxford to Chicago, because Rockefeller had bought it to add much needed luster to the University of Chicago and its medical school, the first one he had founded.
Peter Singer, “the world’s greatest animal defender” who keeps a door permanently open to vivisection and the lucrative medical swindle, gets millions of dollars free publicity thanks to the worldwide engagement of the Rockefeller Foundation and the media-makers who are in no position to oppose it.
From the article in Time we also learned that Singer’s mother had been a medical doctor in the old country, which could mean that little Peter started assimilating all the Rockefeller superstition on vivisection with his mother’s milk.
Published in issue 3 of The Dot Connector Magazine
(May-June 2009).
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
IN PONT SAINT ESPRIT
CIA’s secret chemical warfare experiment on unwitting inhabitants of a French village
By H. P. Albarelli, Jr.
On 13 February 2010, French TV channel Fr
ance-3 broadcast the TV film Le Pain du diable (The Devil’s Bread; director Bertrand Arthuys, story by Olivier Dutaillis), which meticulously reconstructed the sinister incident happened in 1951 in the village of Pont Saint Esprit in southern France. It described the strange mass insanity that seized the village, as well as the interest of certain officials to cover up what really happened. A month later, on 13 March 2010, another French TV channel, France-2, has mentioned H. P. Albarelli Jr’s new book, A Terrible Mistake, in the evening news, and even talked to the author on the phone… All this only to declare “pas convaincants” (non-convincing) his arguments that the inhabitants of Pont Saint Esprit were used as guinea pigs in a CIA-conducted mind control experiment which involved the aerosol spraying of LSD. Over sixty years after, the outbreak of madness in Pont Saint Esprit, which affected nearly five hundred people and caused 7 deaths, remains a “mystery” for the mainstream media…
***
For decades now, the seemingly unrelated mysteries of Dr. Frank Olson’s strange and alleged “suicide” in New York City in 1953 and the bizarre hallucinogenic outbreak of madness in a small French village in 1951 have independently provoked and perplexed serious investigators. As related in countless accounts on the internet and in televised news features, Olson’s death has long been suspected to be a government-sponsored murder, but no plausible murderers or motives have ever been positively identified.
The outbreak of madness in the village of Pont St. Esprit in southern France has baffled scientists for decades, with many discounting strong suspicions of some sort of covert LSD attack simply because the means and motives were not believed to exist.
In 1995, I began to seriously investigate the death of Dr. Frank Olson, an American bacteriologist at the U.S. Army’s top-secret biological warfare center at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Little did I suspect that my discovery that Olson was murdered would collide head on with the horrible events at Pont St. Esprit in August 1951.
My 900-page book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,[1] explains in painstaking detail how the two events collided. Recent reports that “a major diplomatic and political scandal is erupting that could have significant import for French-American relations” over my book’s explanation about and documentation of the Pont St. Esprit outbreak causes me to provide an explanation here for those that are curious about the two events.
The strange outbreak of insanity in Pont St. Esprit affected nearly five hundred people, causing the deaths of at least five, and the suicides of two. For over sixty years, the incident has been tentatively attributed either to ergot poisoning, meaning villagers consumed bread infected with a psychedelic mold, or to mercury poisoning. The vast majority of credible scientists that examined the outbreak until recently have stated that the cause remains a mystery. A French newspaper at the time of the bizarre incident wrote,
It is neither Shakespeare nor Edgar Poe. It is, alas, the sad reality all around Pont-St-Esprit and its environs, where terrifying scenes of hallucinations are taking place. They are scenes straight out of the Middle Ages, scenes of horror and pathos, full of sinister shadows.
A brief article in Time magazine, then a major U.S. news journal with extremely close ties to the CIA, stated,
Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies.
Other newspapers that converged on the scene described people throwing themselves from rooftops, women and men throwing their cloths off and running the streets naked, and children complaining that their stomachs were infested with coils of snakes.
Shortly after the incident, in September 1951, scientists writing in the highly respected British Medical Journal declared that “the outbreak of poisoning” was produced by ergot mold. This explanation, however, was based almost solely upon the findings of biochemists dispatched to the scene from the nearby Sandoz Chemical Company in Basle, Switzerland. Included in the contingent from Sandoz was Dr. Albert Hofmann, the man who had first synthesized LSD on November 16, 1938. At the time of the Sandoz group’s visit to Pont St. Esprit only a handful of scientists worldwide, estimated to be no more than eight-to-ten, knew of the existence of the man-made drug LSD. Of perhaps equal, if not greater, importance was that virtually nobody in France in 1951, apart from a select few officials at Sandoz Chemical, was aware that the company was secretly working closely with the CIA. Sandoz was both supplying the CIA with ample amounts of the drug, and consulting with the agency on possible defensive and offensive uses for LSD, including secret experimentation in the United States and Europe.
To grossly summarize the long story told in my book, the outbreak at Pont St. Esprit had actually been produced by a top-secret, joint Army-CIA experiment conducted as part of the Project MKNAOMI, an adjunct project to the CIA’s ultra-secret Projects ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. Indeed, the very unit that Dr. Frank Olson directed, the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, oversaw the experiment in France.
Suffice it to say I found the entire solution to the Pont St. Esprit mystery remarkably sensible and coherent, but also quite shocking, and I do not shock easily.
With further investigation the story became even more remarkable in its subtle features and obvious nature. Even today, a U.S. Department of Justice website on the dangers of LSD states that, in the early 1950s,
… the Sandoz Chemical Company went as far as promoting LSD as a potential secret chemical warfare weapon to the U.S. Government. Their main selling point in this was that a small amount in a main water supply or sprayed in the air could disorient and turn psychotic an entire company of soldiers leaving them harmless and unable to fight.
Not to mention, of course, an entire small town or city. Indeed, as I dug further into the overall story, I discovered once secret FBI documents that reveal that Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division had, one year prior to the Pont St. Esprit experiment, targeted New York City’s subway system for a similar experiment. Reads an August 1950 FBI memorandum,
The BW [biological warfare] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September 1950 have been indefinitely postponed.
When I discussed the FBI memoranda with former Fort Detrick biochemists, they confidentially informed me that the New York City experiments “were delayed until after the experiment was conducted in France.”
Said one former Special Operations Division scientist:
The overall results of the experiment in southern France were good, but there was also an adverse effect, or what would now be called a “black swan” reaction. That several people died was unexpected, completely unexpected. It wasn’t supposed to turn out that way, so it was back to the drawing boards.
The same scientists confirmed that, following the Pont St. Esprit experiment, Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division returned to New York City in 1956 to conduct experiments under Operations Big City and Mad Hatter. These were covert projects that involved the aerosol spraying of chemicals through the exhaust pipe of an automobile that was driven by CIA and Army scientists around New York City. Prior to this, in 1952 and 1953, smaller experiments were conducted within New York subway cars by George Hunter White, a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, who secretly worked as a contractor for the CIA. On at least two occasions, White detonated specially devised aerosol devices filled with LSD. The CIA destroyed White’s written reports covering these experiments in 1973.
Stepping backward for a moment to the time before I discovered the true cause of the southern France outbreak, perhaps the very first solid clue I had that something was amiss about the incident was a CIA confidential informer’s report I had been given in 1999. That report, dated December 1953, concerned a meeting the unidentified informer had with an official of the Sandoz Chemical Company in New York City. The informer wrote that after “having several drinks” the Sandoz official blurted out, “The Pont Saint Espri
t ‘secret’ was that it was not the bread at all.” Continued the Sandoz official, “For weeks the French tied up our laboratories with analyses of bread. It was not the grain ergot, it was a diethylamide-like compound.” By this, of course, the official meant a man-made drug had provoked the Pont St. Esprit outbreak.
The CIA informer then asked, according to his report, “If the material wasn’t in the bread, then how did it get into the people?”
To this, the official responded, “An experiment.” Now concerned, the informer asked, “An experiment?” To which the Sandoz official coyly responded, “Maybe by the French government,” knowing that most likely the American informer well knew the identities of the actual perpetrators of the experiment. It was all an act of high political drama and subterfuge that concluded with the Sandoz official saying, “One small reason I’m here in the U.S. is to dispose of our LSD. If war breaks out, our LSD will disappear.”
My next major clue in the chain of assembled evidence was a copy of a letter I was given that had been written by a Federal Narcotics agent who was also working for the CIA in the 1950s. This was George Hunter White. The letter written in October 1954 specifically referenced the Pont St. Esprit experiment, referring to it as “that little French village’s Stormy epidemic.” In White’s veiled parlance with the CIA, “Stormy” was code for LSD.
Lastly, in the chain of evidence was an undated White House document that appeared to be part of a larger file that had been sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 by President Gerald Ford to investigate the CIA abuses. The document contained the names of two French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA, and made direct reference to the “Pont St. Esprit incident” linking a former CIA biological warfare expert and the chief of Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division. This document, along with one other, in my view, comprised the smoking gun.
Consensus Trance Page 17