THE MONSTER IN THE LABYRINTH
Introduction to THE PRANKSTER AND THE CONSPIRACY
by Adam Gorightly
ParaView Press, 2003
by Robert Anton Wilson
Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear -- and,
behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!
Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now
complain ye, lamenting, that ye've
been left to fight alone.
--"Epistle to the Paranoids," The Gospel According to Fred by Kerry Thornley
Kerry Thornley wrote those words in the mid 1960s and
within 10 years he had become a clinical paranoid himself, in the judgement of almost all of his friends, including Dr Robert
Newport. a psychiatrist who had known Kerry since high
school. The moral of this seems to me: take great care which nut cases you dare
to mock, for you may become one of them.
I do not write in any spirit of smugness or superiority. I became somewhat
paranoid myself, for a while there, or at least experienced acute anxiety
attacks. For several months I literally could not leave my house without
looking around to see if Kerry crouched behind a bush waiting to shoot me.
You see, he had become convinced that I worked for the C.I.A. and served as one
of his "manangers" or "brainwashers,"
but I thought I worked as a freelance writer and considered myself his friend.
As his letters to me grew increasingly hostile and denuciatory,
I began to fear that he might have graduated from "weirded
out" to "dangerous."
This now seems sillly to me -- certainly, an over-
reaction -- but the violence and paranoia of the Nixon years made everbody in this country feel a bit jumpy. A Black Panther
leader in my part of Chicago seems to have gotten shot by the local police
while sedated; the extreme Right and extreme Left both had wild conspiracy
theories about everybody else; anti-war meetings, anti-segregation meetings,
even pot-legalization meetings all had people making nervous jokes about who
the government had infiltrated among us to report on our Thoughtcrimes.
The government not only appeared irrational and out of control, but so did a
large part of the population.
I finally moved to
Looking back, I feel amused and humbled. Like Kerry, I had satirized the
paranoids before the sheer number of them frightened me into acting just like
one of them.
I remember my last phone conversation with Kerry, during which he announced
that just a week earlier I had come to
Finally, Kerry relented -- a bit. "Well, maybe you believe that," he
said. "But that means your bosses have been fucking with your head and
implanting false memories in you too!"
How do you argue that you haven't had your head altered? "Look," I
said, "I'll put my wife Arlen on. She'll tell you I haven't left here in
months. "
"That won't prove anything," he said with the calm certitude of a
Grand Master announcing checkmate. "They probably
fixed her head too."
I don't remember the rest of the conversation. I felt lost in an Escher
painting.
A few weeks, or a few months, before or after that conversation, the police
found a young woman raped and murdered two doors from the house where Arlen and
I lived. A few days before or after that atrocity I attended a meeting of the
Physics/Consciousness Research Group in which the assembled Ph.D.s serously discusssed a quantum
model in which the universe contains only one electron, and everything else,
including this seemingly solid Earth, our own bodies and our "minds"
[if we still think we have "minds"] results from the virtual
interactions of virtual particles, or of probability waves.
So Arlen and I packed up and moved to a land where the wierdest
critter, a six-foot-tall white rabbit, seldom roams far from the fens and
farmlands.
I'm only kidding -- not.
-- Madonna, Truth or Dare
But let us,as the Chinese
say, draw our chairs closer to the fire and examine this soberly.
All the above happened because Kerry and I, with a few others, invented a new
religion; and because Kerry and I and a hell of a lot of others dared to doubt
the official "lone nut" theory of the JFK assassination.
Perhaps I should say something about the religion before getting into the even
murkier waters of the politics.
We called the religion Discordianism and its central catma* declares "All affirmations are true in some
sense,
--------------------
*Other, and hence lesser, religions have dogmas or
absolute beliefs. Discordianism only has catmas or relative meta-beliefs. You'll learn more about
that in the book which follows
--------------------
false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense,
true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and
true and false and meaningless in some sense." We owe this Divine
Revelation to Gregory Hill [Malaclypse the Younger],
the chief architect of Discordian atheology.
In my ministry I have added a rider promising that if you repeat this catma 666 times you will achieve Supreme Enlightenment, in some
sense.
Many people consider Discordianism a complicated joke
disguised as a new religion. I prefer to consider it a new religion disguised
as a complicated joke.
Others consider Discordianism an American form of Zen
Buddhism. I think Kerry held that view most of the time.
Whether one considers Discordianism a joke, a new
religion or Yankee Zen, it emphatically does not belong in the same arena as
Aristotelian logic or criminal law, yet the life of Kerry Thornley
dragged it into those precincts and I can find no way to disentangle them in disccussing him. Everybody who ever looked into "the Thornley case" feels a strong need for basic either/or
answers to such questions as: Guilty or Innocent? Sane or
Insane? Victim of the C.I.A. or victim of his own delusions?
All I can say consists of a devout wish that logic could stretch to include a maybe,or a phalanx of
probabilities, between the Aristotelian yes and no, and that our law could
include the Scotch "not proven" between guilty and innocent.
I think it entirely posssible that Kerry went bananas
on his own, due to genetics and/or traumatic early imprints and/or Too Damned
Much LSD and/or other causes unknown, with no help from the C.I.A. at all. I
also think it entirely possible that the C.I.A. did subject Kerry -- and his
Marine Corps buddy Lee Harvey Oswald -- to some form of "Manchurian
Candidate" mind control and that his seemingly "psychotic" words
and actions represented an intelligent man's attempts to break the strings of his
puppet masters and find his way back to a world that made sense again.
In short, I regard all his brilliant satires and all his "psychotic"
rants as true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense,
true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and
meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.
For instance, you will read in this book about Kerry's "delusions"
concerning fascist manipulations of the C.I.A. and/or Naval Intelligence. Pure nonsense, right?
Wrong. Let me illuminize you a bit.
Nazi worms began to infest the
Gehlen seems not only a master spy but a wizard
negotiator. Within a week, he got out of his Nazi uniform and into a U.S. Army
General's uniform; the
You see, their leader and Gehlen's major
"asset," General Andrei Vlassov, had a
fervent belief, not just in common or garden Tsarism
but especially in the "mystical Tsarism"
espoused in the later half of the 19th Century by the anti-Semitic novelist
Dostoyevsky and even more by Konstantin Pobedonostsev,
an advisor to two Tsars [Alexander III and Nicholas II].
Pobedonostsev, popularly called "The Grand
Inquisitor" because of the vast platoons of spies, snoops, agents
provocateur and informers he unleashed upon the Russian people
, combined theological obsessions with reactionary politics, always an
explosive and nefarious mixture.
"Mystical Tsarism" deserves a whole book in
itself. especially since it now rules our own country;
but we must remain brief here. This holy religion, or superstition -- as you
will --has two major tenets: (1) The Tsar is guided by God and can do no wrong
(2) Science "is" cold and inhuman, faith "is" warm and
human; therefore we should ignore reason and guide ourselves by faith in the
Tsar, our "Little Father," who receives his orders directly from a
gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft called "God."
I don't think any of Pobedonostsev's crew actually
believed in the Tooth Fairy, though.
Gen. Gehlen and Gen. Vlassov
formed what became the Gehlenapparat, the CIA's main
source of info on Soviet affairs; Gehlen became the
fulcrum of the CIA's "Soviet penetration" sector, working under James
Jesus Angleton, Chief of Counter-Intelligence, breeder of prize orchids, lover
of the arts, and a devout Catholic.
Since the U.S. government based its foreign policies on CIA reports, and the
CIA based its Soviet reports on Gehlen and some other
former Nazis, plus a crew of Mystical Tsarists, as filtered and interpreted by
a Papist intellectual, the U.S. government's ideas and actions became
increasingly "wierd, " bizarre and frightening,
in the view of the rest of the world. The results seem very sad and very funny.
In a nutshell, most of the planet thinks we've gone batshit
crazy. "Tsarists and Nazis and spooks, oh my!"
As Harry Browne, Libertarian Party candidate for president in 2000, wrote in July 2003, "The whole world is now
afraid of
Although James Jesus Angleton served as Gehlen's
alleged supervisor, data indicates that the Gehlenapparat
engaged in many activities, including kidnapping, extortion, murder etc. about
which Angleton either did not know or devoutly did not want to know.
But James J. Angleton seems to me a pathological case of some sort himself; he
often hid his middle name because it revealed his half-Hispanic genes. An
exceptionally intelligent and sensitive student of modern literature while at
Yale, Angleton adored Ezra Pound, T.S Eliot, I.A. Richards, e e cummings
and other SuperStars of Modernism; he met most of
them personally. They collectively influenced Angleton's fascination with
multiple perspectives, Byzantine ambiguity and the eternal uncertainty of all
inferences and "interpretations."
These modernist tendencies, which also appeared in science
and philosophy at the same time, blossomed into obsessions and, perhaps, raging
madness when Angleton systematically applied them to the spy-game. After
all, modernism really begins with Wilde's "The Reality of Masks" and Yeats's hermetic theory that the world we know emerges from
interactions of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, and Anti-Self: which may or may not fit
all of us or all the world but certainly fits the
world of spooks and snoops that Angleton created.
Records indicate that the Oswald who enlisted in the Marines was 5'11".
Comrade Oswald, who went to
-- Richard Belzer, UFOs, JFK and Elvis
Another CIA officer, Edward Petty, described Angleton
as "a lone wolf" and "a strange bird"; every other source I
have found bluntly calls him "paranoid." He suspected everybody else
in the CIA, and in "our" government generally, of being KGB moles,
and he operated with so much modernist ambiguity and hidden trapdoors that, in
Petty's words, "nobody really knows" what he was doing most of the
time. In short, he became as esoteric as the poets he admired, and remade the
C.I.A. and, increasingly, our whole nation into a theatre of impenetrable
mystery.
A.J. Weberman, a leading Kennedy assassination buff,
thinks Angleton personally organized the JFK hit, an idea also strongly hinted
at by Norman Mailer's documentary novel, Harlot's Ghost, in which Angleton
appears as "Hugh Montague." If James Jesus really arranged the JFK
assassination, he had probably identified Kennedy as the top Soviet mole of all,at least to his own
satisfaction.
Why not? Angleton had Tsarist agents in all sorts of nooks and crannies of the
Soviet system, and he knew the KGB was smart enough and tireless enough to
reciprocate by planting their own Masks and Anti-Masks in his own backyard, or
maybe under his bed at night. According to Edward Jay Epstein, J.J.A.s endless search for Soviet moles nearly destroyed
the C.I.A. itself. Certainly, everybody in "the Company" learned to
distrust everybody else.
Imagine a U.S. Caine with not one Queeg
as captain, but a whole crew of Queegs, each worrying
about what the others might be plotting. Angleton created that ship of
shape-shifters in the C.I.A. and then by osmosis it spread through the
government, evolving into the Tsarist Occupation we now endure.
In short, the government cannot trust us, because it can never know with
absolute certainty what mischief we may hatch; and every sentence we speak into
a bugged phone may have as many possible meanings as Eliot's "The rose and
the fire are one."
"Trust No One," the motto of X Files, seems the only safe rule in the
world Angleton created.
We even have a Tsar of our own now, who supervises American medicine.
Allegedly, this official knows what drugs, herbs etc. you should use for your
medical problems better than your doctor knows, and our Tsar knows this without
doing any physical examination, blood pressure readings, other scientific tests
etc. that your doctor does, and often from a distance of 3000 miles -- without
even looking at you.
This makes sense if and only if we have a devout faith that our Tsar, like the
Russian Tsars, recives guidance directly from
"God;" the government accordingly spends more and more of our tax
money financing "faith-based organizations." Without faith we might
relapse into scientific or rational thinking.
Tsarism represents an intermediate form between
European monarchism and Asian despotism, being, possibly, closer to the latter
of these two.
--
How much of this did I dream up the way Kerry Thornley
[I still insist] imagined my own C.I.A. activities? For objective info on the Gehlenapparat, and Nazi /CIA links, see The Yankee and
Cowboy War by Boston University historian Carl Oglesby [Berkeley Medallion, NY,
1977] On fascist/CIA/Mafia links, excellent books include The Strange Death of
God's Banker by Foot and della Torre[ Orbis, London, 1984] and The Calvi
Affair, by Larry Gurwin, of the Financial Times [Pan,
London, 1984]
CIA/Mafia "ghost banks" and their strange links with real banks,
including Chase Manhattan, are discussed amply in In
Banks We Trust, Doubleday, NY, 1984, by Penny Lernoux.
For CIA involvement in general -- and Angleton's personal involvement -- in the
JFK hit see http://webermancom, probably the largest site on the World Wide
Web.
Our most recent Tsar's responsibility for barbaric war crimes -- as bad as any
of Thornley's "fantasies" -- appears well
documented in "Overwhelming Force," by Seymour Hersh,
The New Yorker, 22 May 2000.
Or -- you can find most of the data on Tsarist/fascist infiltrations of
"our" government, in one form or another by simply surfing the web.
Set your search engine for "Rheinhold Gehlen," "Cisalpine Bank,""Licio
Gelli," and "Gladio"
to start with and follow the links where they lead you. I promise you will find
the journey as startling as anything in this book.
I have no certitude about how "crazy" to consider Kerry Thornley on any given day of any year, but I don't believe
he ever became a simple damned fool. He unnderstood
the government of this country better than 99% of its citizens.