The CIA as Cult

The Charter and the Actuality

The central intelligence agency was created by the national security act of 1947, which authorised its establishment as a civilian intelligence-collection and analysis organisation operating under the authority of the newly created national security council. The charter’s statutory language described the agency’s function as the coordination of foreign-intelligence activities and the provision of analysed intelligence products to the executive branch. The charter did not authorise covert action, paramilitary operations, domestic surveillance, or the extensive range of activities the agency has in fact conducted over its subsequent seventy-eight years of operation. The charter’s authorisation of such activities is located in the famous such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the national security council may from time to time direct clause of the 1947 act, which the agency’s lawyers and the successive directors interpreted as a general grant of authority for any operation the council cared to authorise. The interpretation was not challenged by any meaningful oversight mechanism for the agency’s first three decades and has been challenged only partially since.

The gap between the charter and the actuality is the load-bearing feature of the agency’s history. The agency’s operational record — the 1953 coup in iran, the 1954 coup in guatemala, the 1961 bay of pigs invasion, the multiple attempts to assassinate fidel castro, the phoenix program in vietnam, the support for the 1973 coup in chile, the iran-contra affair, the afghanistan operations in the 1980s, the various extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation programs of the post-2001 period, and the large set of activities whose documentation has not yet been released — is the record of an institution whose actual function has been substantially different from the function its charter describes, and whose institutional culture has been organised around the capacity to operate outside the formal legal and political constraints the rest of the federal government is subject to.

The civil-textbook reading of the discrepancy is that the agency’s operations have been authorised responses to real national-security threats and that the discrepancy is the cost of operating effectively in a world in which the country’s adversaries are not constrained by legal niceties. The structural reading is that the discrepancy is the feature not the bug, and that the agency was constructed from the beginning as the institutional mechanism by which a small group of people inside the american state could conduct operations that the formal structure of the state would not permit if they were subject to the formal oversight mechanisms. The identity of the people who control the agency’s operations, the continuity of the control across formal administrative changes, and the relationship between the agency and the older institutional traditions from which its founders were drawn are the questions the structural reading pursues, and the pursuit produces an institution that is recognisable as a cult in the technical sense of the word rather than as an intelligence agency in the functional sense.

The Ivy League Priesthood

The agency’s founding and early leadership were drawn almost entirely from a specific narrow stratum of the american elite: the graduates of the ivy league universities (principally yale, followed by harvard and princeton), the members of the senior fraternal and secret societies of those universities (skull and bones at yale most prominently, scroll and key at yale, porcellian at harvard, cottage and ivy clubs at princeton), and the partners and associates of the major new york law firms (sullivan and cromwell most prominently, where allen dulles and his brother john foster dulles were senior partners before their respective appointments as director of central intelligence and secretary of state in the eisenhower administration). The overlap between the agency’s early personnel roster and the membership rolls of these institutions is extreme. The first seven directors of central intelligence (through the mid-1960s) were drawn from this specific stratum, and the recruitment of the agency’s first generation of case officers and analysts proceeded through the recommendation networks the stratum’s institutions maintained.

The significance of this recruitment pattern is that the agency was staffed from its founding by people who had already been through a formal initiatic process before they joined it. The skull and bones initiation at yale, documented in sufficient detail by former members and by the investigative work of alexandra robbins (Secrets of the Tomb, 2002) and others, involves a series of ritual components — the temporary entombment, the confession of sexual history to the other initiates, the adoption of a ritual name within the order, the oath of lifetime loyalty to the order’s membership — that are recognisable as the elements of a mystery-school initiation in the classical sense. The order’s facilities (the windowless tomb building on high street in new haven) are maintained for the continued operation of the order’s rituals, and its membership rolls across the century and a half of its existence include a startling density of figures who subsequently held positions at the highest levels of the american foreign-policy, intelligence, financial, and judicial establishments, including three american presidents (william howard taft, george h.w. bush, george w. bush), multiple directors of central intelligence, multiple secretaries of state and defense, and a cross-section of the financial and industrial leadership of the country whose density exceeds the density the random-selection hypothesis would predict by several orders of magnitude.

The order’s function, in the structural reading, is the transmission of a particular ethos and a particular set of operational principles from one generation of the american governing class to the next through a formal initiatic mechanism whose continuity bridges the administrative and political changes the visible surface of american politics displays. The ethos is not fully public, and the principles are not documented in any text the order has released. The outline is available in the published writings of the members who have written memoirs (henry stimson, dean acheson, mcgeorge bundy, among others) and in the biographical record of the members whose careers display the common features. The common features include: a commitment to the maintenance of anglo-american leadership of the global order, a willingness to conduct operations that the formal legal-political structure of the country would not authorise if the operations were subject to its normal oversight, a disdain for the democratic legitimacy of the population the order administers, a conception of the order’s members as a natural aristocracy whose judgement on matters of state is superior to the judgement of the electoral-democratic mechanisms, and a commitment to the discreet continuity of the order’s influence across the changing administrations the electoral cycle produces.

The agency, in the structural reading, is the operational arm of this order. The recruitment of the agency’s senior personnel from the order’s membership is not a coincidence or a historical accident. It is the institutional expression of the order’s decision, in the immediate post-war period, to consolidate its historical informal influence over american foreign policy into a formal institutional mechanism that could conduct the operations the order had previously had to conduct through ad-hoc arrangements. The agency was the formalisation of a pattern that had existed in less institutionalised form for decades before 1947, and its continuity with the earlier office of strategic services (OSS) under william wild bill donovan (himself drawn from the same ivy-league-law-firm stratum) is the direct lineage. Donovan’s OSS, in turn, was constructed in close coordination with the british special operations executive and with the older british intelligence traditions from which the american intelligence establishment was descended through personal and institutional relationships that went back to the first world war and earlier.

The OSS and the British Lineage

The office of strategic services, established in 1942 under donovan’s direction, was the immediate institutional predecessor of the agency and was constructed in close consultation with the british intelligence establishment whose institutional traditions had been developed over the previous centuries of british imperial operations. The british services — the secret intelligence service (MI6), the security service (MI5), and the special operations executive (SOE) created for wartime direct-action work — were themselves the institutional form of a set of older intelligence traditions running back to the elizabethan period and the role of the walsingham-dee network in the early modern english state. The continuity of these traditions across the centuries has been the subject of substantial academic literature (principally in the british school of intelligence-history scholarship), and the continuity across the institutional changes of the formal services’ names and structures is greater than the surface history of the services suggests.

The OSS was staffed, at the operational level, by direct collaboration with the british services. The british station in new york (british security coordination, BSC), under william stephenson (intrepid), operated during the pre-1942 period to conduct the british intelligence operations the U.S. neutrality laws technically prohibited, and BSC’s operations included the covert shaping of american public opinion toward intervention in the european war through the placement of stories in the american press, the penetration of american political and business circles by british-aligned operatives, and the provision of operational intelligence to the OSS once it was established. Stephenson’s own account (william stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid, 1976) is the most detailed single source on the operation, and despite the book’s popular framing, its documentary basis is substantial and is not seriously contested in the academic literature on british intelligence operations of the period.

The OSS’s formal training was conducted in part at camp X in ontario, canada, a joint british-american facility that trained allied agents for clandestine operations in occupied europe. The curriculum included the standard tradecraft — communications, weapons, escape and evasion, resistance organisation — and the less-standard components that are relevant to the cult reading: the systematic psychological conditioning of the trainees to operate outside the moral frameworks of the societies they came from, the breaking of the trainees’ emotional attachments to the norms of civilian life, and the construction of a new loyalty to the service and its mission that was intended to survive the subsequent return to civilian environments. The training was recognisably similar in its structure to the initiation of members of the older esoteric orders — the passage through stages, the deliberate disorientation and re-orientation, the formation of the new identity — and the operatives who emerged from it were, in the structural sense, initiates of a mystery order whose mysteries were the techniques of covert operations and whose ethos was the ethos the order’s senior members had transmitted.

The transition from OSS to CIA in the 1946-1947 period was not a complete break. Most of the OSS’s senior personnel either joined the successor agency directly or remained in the informal network that supported the agency’s operations from outside the formal institution. The personal and institutional continuity with the british services was maintained through the subsequent decades in the form of the special relationship that the two services have operated inside since, and the specific individuals who managed the transatlantic liaison at the senior level — kim philby on the british side during the period of his service before his final exposure and flight to moscow in 1963 (his recall and resignation from SIS in 1951 opened the surveillance years; the defection came at the end of them), james jesus angleton on the american side for two decades as chief of counterintelligence, from 1954 to 1974 — are the figures whose careers illustrate the nature of the relationship and its internal complications.

A third figure belongs in any honest account of the agency’s early covert-action apparatus: frank wisner, head of the office of policy coordination from 1948 and the operational architect of the first generation of black operations — Radio Free Europe, the support networks for émigré resistance organisations across eastern europe, the facilitation of the paperclip absorptions, the catastrophic albanian rollback operation of 1949–1950 that sent agents to their deaths because the british side was already penetrated by philby. wisner ran more black operations in the first decade of the cold war than any other single figure in the american service. the hungarian uprising of 1956, which his Radio Free Europe broadcasts had encouraged and which the eisenhower administration chose not to support once it began, produced in wisner a documented psychological breakdown that progressed through hospitalisation and electroconvulsive therapy to his suicide in october 1965. the man who had most fully embodied the agency’s early operational ethos — that covert action could reshape the world — was destroyed by the gap between that ethos and the consequences it produced when it met reality.

Allen Dulles, the Founding Pope

Allen welsh dulles is the figure whose career most exemplifies the cult reading of the agency. Dulles was born in 1893 into the american foreign-policy aristocracy; his grandfather john watson foster had been secretary of state under benjamin harrison; his uncle robert lansing had been secretary of state under woodrow wilson; his brother john foster dulles became secretary of state under eisenhower. Dulles himself attended princeton (class of 1914), served in the diplomatic corps during the first world war, attended the 1919 paris peace conference as part of the american delegation, joined sullivan and cromwell in 1926, and operated during the 1930s as a leading american lawyer for international business interests whose clients included major german industrial firms and whose operations in pre-war germany involved continuing business relationships with the senior members of the nazi regime that the american public and the american government were at various stages of learning to regard as enemies.

The sullivan and cromwell years are the period in which dulles’s worldview was formed, and the worldview that emerged from them is the worldview the agency’s operations have reflected throughout its subsequent history. The firm’s clients included the major american and european financial and industrial houses whose interests spanned the boundaries between the contending political blocs of the 1930s and 1940s, and whose business continuity across those boundaries was the primary consideration the firm’s lawyers served. Dulles’s role as the firm’s berlin office head in the 1930s involved him directly in the management of the american business interests’ relationships with the nazi regime, and the operations he conducted in that role included facilitating the continued flow of capital and strategic materials between american-based clients and german-based counterparts during periods in which the official american position was one of increasing distance from the regime. The documentation of these operations is extensive in the sullivan and cromwell firm records, in the dulles personal papers at princeton, and in the work of the historians who have pursued the question (the most detailed recent treatment is david talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, 2015, which is mainstream-credentialed and devastatingly documented).

The wartime OSS assignment dulles received — chief of the OSS station in bern, switzerland, from 1942 through 1945 — placed him in charge of the operation through which the american intelligence services maintained their contacts with the german resistance, negotiated the operation sunrise surrender of german forces in italy in the final months of the war (in secret talks with SS general karl wolff, conducted without the knowledge of the soviet allies and against the explicit wishes of president roosevelt), and coordinated the initial post-war arrangements through which the surviving german intelligence apparatus under reinhard gehlen was transferred, intact, into the service of the american intelligence establishment — a transfer whose personnel gave the american-sponsored west german BND some of the most compromised agents in cold-war history. heinz felfe, an SS officer brought into the gehlen organisation, operated as a KGB double agent inside the BND for a decade before his arrest in 1961. franz alfred six, an SS-Brigadeführer convicted at nuremberg of war-crimes charges, was absorbed into the network. klaus barbie, the ‘butcher of lyon’ whose wartime record of torture and deportations was among the most documented in the SS’s files, was kept on as a CIA asset through the 1950s before being resettled in south america. the institutional willingness to absorb these figures — and to protect them from the war-crimes investigations that ran parallel to their employment — is the operational baseline against which the agency’s subsequent conduct must be read. The operation sunrise episode, the gehlen organisation transfer, and the broader paperclip program through which nazi scientific and intelligence personnel were absorbed into the american post-war establishment were all operations dulles was directly involved in at the operational level, and the operations’ common feature is that they were conducted in pursuit of a continuity — the continuity of the anti-communist and anti-soviet posture the dulles network had maintained before and during the war, and the continuity of the business and intelligence relationships that posture had depended on — across the formal break that the war’s end represented.

Dulles’s appointment as deputy director of central intelligence in 1951 and as director in 1953 put him in institutional control of the agency during its formative decade, and his tenure — the longest of any DCI in the agency’s history — was the period in which the agency’s institutional culture, recruitment patterns, operational doctrine, and relationships with the other components of the american and allied security establishment were fixed in the form they have substantially retained since. The iran coup (1953), the guatemala coup (1954), the early phases of the vietnam involvement, the U-2 program, the bay of pigs planning, the initiation of the mk-ultra program, and the relationships with the major american industrial and financial houses that supported the agency’s operations — all of these were dulles’s work, and the agency he shaped is the agency that has existed since.

The founding-pope framing is not literary. It is the structural description of a figure whose personal authority over the institution during its formative period, whose connection to the older traditions from which the institution was drawn, and whose continuing influence over the institution’s direction after his formal departure (he was fired by kennedy in 1961 after the bay of pigs but remained in the informal network of former agency senior figures whose advice the subsequent directors consulted, and was appointed to the warren commission that investigated kennedy’s assassination despite his known hostility to kennedy) were sufficient to shape the institution as his personal instrument in a way few individuals have shaped institutions of comparable importance.

The Kennedy Assassination

The assassination of john f. kennedy in dallas on november 22, 1963, is the event in american history that most directly tests the structural reading of the agency. The official account — that lee harvey oswald, acting alone, shot kennedy from the sixth-floor window of the texas school book depository using a mail-order italian rifle, and that oswald was himself killed two days later by jack ruby in the basement of the dallas police headquarters without having been subjected to any legal proceeding — is the account the warren commission endorsed in 1964 and the account that the mainstream press has defended since. The account has been subjected to sustained criticism from the moment of its publication and has been found wanting by every subsequent investigative body that has seriously examined the evidence. The house select committee on assassinations, in its 1979 final report, concluded that kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy, a conclusion that is logically incompatible with the warren commission’s lone-gunman finding and that the mainstream press has chosen not to emphasise in its subsequent treatment of the case.

The structural reading of the assassination — the reading that identifies the agency as the principal institutional actor behind the event — depends on several components that can be held separately but that cohere into a single account when held together. The first component is kennedy’s documented conflict with the agency over the course of his administration: the post-bay-of-pigs firing of dulles and several senior agency officials, kennedy’s reported statement that he would splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, his decision to withdraw american forces from vietnam (encoded in national security action memorandum 263, october 1963, which the subsequent johnson administration reversed immediately after the assassination through NSAM 273), his moves toward rapprochement with cuba through back-channel negotiations with the castro government in the autumn of 1963, his documented friction with federal reserve chairman william mcchesney martin over monetary policy, and his broader conflict with the network of institutional interests the agency represented.

The second component is the documented behaviour of the agency in the days and weeks before the assassination, including the movements of specific personnel through dallas, the reported presence of agency assets in positions consistent with operational preparation, and the subsequent pattern of witness deaths, evidence suppression, and institutional resistance to investigation that characterised the post-assassination period. The third component is the warren commission’s own operation: the commission was chaired by chief justice earl warren under johnson’s pressure, its membership included allen dulles (whom kennedy had fired and who had every motive to direct the investigation away from his own institution), its investigative work was conducted principally by FBI personnel reporting to j. edgar hoover, and its access to the relevant agency records was limited by the agency itself to the documents the agency chose to provide. The commission’s conclusions were reached within a year, on a timetable that precluded serious investigation of any hypothesis incompatible with the lone-gunman finding, and the documentary record of the commission’s internal deliberations (released in stages over the subsequent decades under FOIA pressure) shows the commission’s staff reaching the lone-gunman conclusion by a process of narrowing the permissible hypotheses rather than by pursuing the evidence where it led.

The fourth component is the pattern of subsequent assassinations and mysterious deaths that removed, one by one, the figures whose continued existence might have produced the institutional challenge to the agency that kennedy’s survival would have produced. Robert f. kennedy in june 1968, in the california democratic primary campaign that was widely expected to produce his nomination and likely election to the presidency, shot by sirhan sirhan under circumstances (multiple shooters suggested by the ballistic and acoustic evidence, sirhan’s documented dissociative state at the time of the shooting that his later psychiatric evaluations characterised as consistent with hypnotic programming) that the authorised biographies treat as coincidence and the structural reading treats as the second act of a continuing operation. Martin luther king jr. in april 1968, whose assassination the 1999 civil jury verdict in the memphis case (king v. jowers) formally identified as the product of a conspiracy involving governmental agencies, a verdict the mainstream press declined to report at any length. The earlier deaths of the relevant witnesses and participants in the kennedy case — dorothy kilgallen, mary pinchot meyer, and the long list of other figures whose deaths during the period after the assassination were documented by jim marrs and others — form a pattern whose density the coincidence explanation has to stretch to cover.

The kennedy case is the load-bearing event for the cult reading of the agency because it is the event at which the agency’s conflict with a sitting american president was resolved by the sitting president’s death. The resolution is the signature of an institution that is not subordinate to the formal structure of the american state but that exists parallel to that structure and has the capacity to override the structure when the structure’s output conflicts with the institution’s preferences. The institution that has that capacity is not an intelligence agency in the technical-functional sense. It is a political actor of a different order, and the cult reading is the attempt to identify the order in the terms the structural evidence permits.

MK-Ultra and the Initiatic Research Program

The mk-ultra program, authorised by dulles in 1953 and conducted under sidney gottlieb’s technical services staff until its formal shutdown in 1973 (with the subsequent destruction of most of its documentary records on gottlieb’s order before leaving the agency), is the most documented single research program in the agency’s history that connects directly to the cult reading. The program was the third iteration of a succession that began earlier: Project Bluebird (1950), renamed Project Artichoke (1951), was consolidated under the MK-Ultra designation in 1953; the overseas operational arm ran in parallel as MK-Delta; and the successor programs — MK-Search (1964–1971) and MK-Often/MK-Chickwit (1967–1973) — continued the core research agenda after MK-Ultra’s nominal closure. The succession of cryptonyms is itself evidence of the institutional pattern: the program was repeatedly renamed and reorganised without the underlying research objectives being terminated. The program’s official framing was that it was an investigation of the mind-control techniques the agency suspected the soviet and chinese intelligence services of using against american prisoners during the korean war, with the purpose of developing countermeasures and, secondarily, of developing american capacities to conduct similar operations against foreign adversaries. The framing has been the standard apologetic account of the program since its public exposure during the 1975-76 church committee investigation.

The actuality of the program, as reconstructed from the surviving documents and from the testimony of participants, is substantially different from the framing. The program’s research encompassed the systematic investigation of chemical, pharmacological, electrical, hypnotic, and trauma-based techniques for altering human consciousness and behaviour, with the specific objectives of producing subjects who could be induced to perform actions against their conscious will, to retain no conscious memory of the actions after performing them, and to be subsequently available for further operations under the same compartmentalised dissociative structures. The research was conducted on a large number of subjects including agency employees (some of whom did not know they were being subjects of the research — the frank olson case, in which a senior agency biochemist was dosed with LSD without his knowledge by gottlieb and a small group of agency and army colleagues at deep creek lake, maryland, in november 1953, and who died nine days later in a fall from a window of the hotel statler in new york city under circumstances the subsequent investigations have treated with varying degrees of scepticism), american military personnel, american civilians (including prisoners, mental-patients, children in orphanages and schools whose administrators cooperated with the agency’s researchers, and the clients of the george white operation-midnight-climax safehouses), and canadian civilians (principally through the ewen cameron psychic driving experiments at the allan memorial institute in montreal, which cameron conducted with agency funding and which produced substantial and well-documented lifetime damage to a number of patients whose families later sued the agency).

The initiatic reading of mk-ultra is that the program was not, at its deeper level, primarily a research program into mind control techniques for operational purposes against foreign adversaries. It was a research program into the techniques the agency’s senior figures understood to be the operational core of the mystery-school traditions from which they were drawn — the techniques by which the psyche can be deliberately destabilised, restructured, and reconstructed to a form the restructurer specifies — and the program’s purpose was the development of a formalised operational capacity to do at scale what the older traditions had done case-by-case through the initiatic process. The subjects of the research were the material through which the techniques could be refined; the operational applications were the immediate payoff; the deeper purpose was the construction of a body of operational knowledge about the deeper levels of the human psyche and the techniques available for working at those levels.

The specific researchers gottlieb recruited into the program are consistent with this reading. The program’s roster included psychiatrists and psychologists with prior research interests in hypnosis (morse allen, ewen cameron, louis jolyon west), chemists with expertise in psychoactive compounds (gottlieb himself, the connections to the sandoz pharmaceutical company that produced the LSD the program used, the relationship with albert hofmann who had synthesised LSD in 1938), and the broader circle of academic researchers at the major american universities whose departments received agency funding through cutouts. The funding channels included sources whose involvement the official framing did not advertise: the scottish rite of freemasonry’s schizophrenia research foundation funded MK-Ultra-affiliated research, confirmed in the 1977 kennedy subcommittee hearing records and in marks (1979) — the oldest american masonic order providing financial infrastructure for the CIA’s consciousness-modification research program. The tangential case of occult adjacency is the parsons-hubbard babalon working (january–march 1946): the ritual was parsons’s operation, conducted at the parsonage (parsons’s home at 1003 s. orange grove, pasadena) where he served as lodge master of the OTO agape lodge; L. ron hubbard participated as the scribe rather than as the initiating figure. The composition of the roster is consistent with the reading that the program was assembling the kinds of expertise the initiatic research would require, and the composition is not fully consistent with the narrower framing that the program was limited to operational countermeasures.

The program’s continuing influence on the agency’s culture, after its formal shutdown in 1973, is the feature the cult reading emphasises. The knowledge the program generated did not disappear when the formal program was ended. Documented continuations include the Edgewood Arsenal program (Department of Defense, human chemical-agent testing on approximately 7,000 soldiers, running through 1975), and the 1984 proposal by louis jolyon west — one of the program’s original researchers — for a UCLA Violence Center that would have applied behavioural-modification research under federal funding, eleven years after the nominal termination. The 1977 kennedy subcommittee hearings confirmed that the agency had shifted the program’s funding channels from direct CIA disbursement to Department of Defense, NIH, and private-foundation routes, a structural migration that continued the research while insulating it from the oversight the church committee had applied to the direct programs. The knowledge was also transferred to entirely separate institutional locations: the CIA-funded consciousness-research programs at stanford research institute in the 1970s — the Stargate/remote-viewing program, directed from 1972 by physicist harold puthoff — drew their initial talent pool from OT-level scientology practitioners (ingo swann, hal puthoff, pat price were all OT VII scientologists at the time of their recruitment), the most concrete documented instance of an intelligence program and an existing initiatic organisation sharing operational personnel. Puthoff himself continued the institutional through-line: the same contractor networks that ran the SRI remote-viewing research for the CIA in the 1970s were contracting with the advanced aerospace threat identification program (AATIP) in the 2000s–2010s, and puthoff co-founded To the Stars Academy in 2017 alongside former DIA official luis elizondo — an unbroken arc from the MK-Ultra era’s consciousness research to the present UAP disclosure apparatus. The more recent operations whose features the mk-ultra research would have prepared the agency to conduct — the extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation programs of the post-2001 period, whose published documentation confirms that the techniques used on the detainees were substantially continuous with the techniques the mk-ultra research had developed — are the further evidence that the knowledge survived the formal shutdown and remains in operational use.

The Franklin, Finders, and Epstein Cases

The darkest components of the cult reading are the cases that involve the systematic abuse of children by networks that include agency personnel, and whose investigation has been repeatedly obstructed by agency intervention. The pattern of these cases is difficult to reconcile with any reading of the agency that treats the agency as a functional intelligence organisation. It is more readily reconcilable with the cult reading, in which the abuse is the initiatic operation itself and the networks that conduct it are components of the order whose operations the agency exists to facilitate.

The franklin case (also called the franklin scandal) centred on larry king, the omaha nebraska savings-and-loan executive whose credit union was revealed in 1988 to have been the financial front for a child-trafficking operation whose victims’ testimony implicated figures at the highest levels of the reagan-era federal government in the systematic sexual abuse of children and adolescents brought from nebraska to washington D.C. for entertainment of the network’s senior members. The investigation was conducted by nebraska state senator john decamp, whose 1992 book The Franklin Cover-Up is the principal source for the case’s documentation. The federal grand jury that examined the evidence returned indictments against the victims for perjury (a highly unusual action against the purported victims of abuse) rather than against the alleged perpetrators, and the case was effectively shut down by the federal intervention. The discovery channel documentary Conspiracy of Silence, produced in 1994 as part of a larger investigative series, was cancelled before broadcast; copies of the film survived through unofficial channels and have been in circulation in the alternative-research literature since. The cancellation itself is documented. The reasons for the cancellation are not fully public.

The finders case surfaced in 1987 in tallahassee florida, when local police investigating a report of suspicious adults in charge of a group of poorly-supervised children discovered evidence pointing to a larger organisation based in washington D.C. whose activities, as documented in the initial police reports, included practices of ritual abuse, animal sacrifice, and photographic documentation that were consistent with the systematic ritual-abuse operations the alternative-research literature has been documenting for decades. The subsequent federal investigation of the finders organisation was conducted by the U.S. customs service, and the customs service’s investigative report (released under FOIA in 2019, decades after the events) confirms that the customs investigators found substantial evidence of the alleged activities, that the case was subsequently transferred out of customs jurisdiction on the instructions of higher authorities who cited national security concerns, and that the CIA was directly involved in the redirection of the investigation away from prosecution. The customs report’s own language is the documentation. The customs investigators’ frustration at the redirection of the case is documented in the report, and the identity of the agency as the institution responsible for the redirection is documented in the report. The finders case is therefore the documented case in which the agency intervened to prevent the prosecution of a network engaged in the specific activities the alternative literature has been claiming exist.

The jeffrey epstein case, which reached public attention through the 2018 miami herald reporting by julie k. brown and subsequent 2019 arrest and august 2019 prison death of epstein, is the most recent and most public example of the pattern. Epstein’s operation — a trafficking network that provided underage girls to the senior figures of the financial, political, scientific, royal, and entertainment establishments, with the trafficking apparently combined with photographic and video documentation of the encounters that could subsequently be used for leverage over the participants — is established by the documentary record in sufficient detail that the basic facts are no longer contested. The identity of the senior figures who participated, documented in epstein’s little black book, in the flight logs of his private aircraft, and in the limited prosecutorial materials that have been released, is the part the mainstream press has been most reluctant to pursue with the persistence the story warranted. The ghislaine maxwell trial in 2021 produced the conviction of epstein’s principal associate on trafficking charges but did not produce the prosecution of any of the senior figures named in the documentary record.

The agency-connection reading of the epstein case has several components. Epstein’s own origins are anomalous — his rapid rise from a teaching position at the dalton school (from which he was fired without explanation in 1976) to a trading position at bear stearns (from which he was separated in 1981 for reasons that remain unclear) to independent wealth-management operations on behalf of clients whose identity was never fully disclosed and whose legitimate business justification for the wealth-management relationship is difficult to reconstruct — is consistent with the pattern of an intelligence asset whose cover included a financial-services business. His subsequent acquisition of residences, private aircraft, and the private island (little saint james in the U.S. virgin islands) was funded in ways that outrun the documented business income of his stated operations. The alexander acosta 2008 plea deal that protected epstein from federal prosecution in florida — and that acosta later reportedly justified to the trump transition team with the statement that he had been told epstein belonged to intelligence (reported by vicky ward in 2019, citing anonymous transition officials) — is the strongest single piece of evidence that the agency connection was operational rather than speculative. The 2019 death of epstein in federal custody at the metropolitan correctional center in new york city, with the reported failure of the facility’s surveillance cameras during the relevant window, the reported absence of the regularly scheduled checks by guards, the questions raised by the autopsy regarding the specific injuries’ consistency with the suicide framing, and the subsequent failure of any serious investigation into the death, are all the signatures of the kind of operational response the agency has used in similar cases through its history.

The cult reading holds that the epstein operation was not a private trafficking enterprise that incidentally employed a former intelligence asset. It was a continuation of the older pattern in which the leverage-and-compromise function (the old kompromat vocabulary is the russian translation of the same concept) was used systematically by the agency and its allied services to maintain control over the senior figures whose cooperation the agency required, and the children used in the operation were the material through which the leverage was generated. The alternative-research literature has been making this claim for decades, against the mainstream press’s refusal to engage, and the epstein case is the point at which the mainstream press was forced to acknowledge the basic outline of the claim while continuing to resist the fuller reading.

The Withdrawal

The structural counter-operation the theater-state framework supplies for the agency as cult is the withdrawal of the population’s epistemic deference to the agency’s pronouncements and the refusal of the institutional framings the agency has been issuing through its access-journalist channels for seventy-eight years. The withdrawal is not the adoption of a reflexive contrarianism in which the opposite of whatever the agency says is treated as the truth, because the agency’s operational repertoire includes the use of false flags and controlled opposition in which the agency’s own opposition is the agency’s own production. The withdrawal is the development of independent epistemic practices that do not rely on the agency’s adjudications at any stage, combined with the clear-eyed recognition that the agency is a political actor with its own institutional interests rather than a neutral intelligence service whose outputs can be read as approximations of the truth about the world.

The practical form of the withdrawal includes the serious study of the documentary record the agency has been forced to release over the decades of its existence (the church committee documents, the FOIA releases, the declassified programs whose documentation is now in the public domain), the development of the historical knowledge required to place the agency’s operations in the longer context of the anglo-american intelligence tradition from which the agency was descended, the reading of the credentialed mainstream scholarship (talbot, weiner, prados, kinzer) and the alternative-research scholarship (marrs, decamp, sutton) together as sources that inform one another’s claims and that neither of which is sufficient alone, and the cultivation of the epistemic discipline required to distinguish the claims supported by the documentary record from the claims that depend on unverifiable testimony, without treating the unverifiable testimony as automatically discreditable on that ground alone.

The deeper form, in the rendering frame, is the withdrawal of the population’s participation in the consensus narrative the agency’s operations have been shaping since 1947. The narrative — that the world is organised around a conflict between the free west and its various designated adversaries, that the agency’s operations are the necessary defence of the first against the second, that the agency’s methods can be judged by the same standards that apply to the rest of the state only with exceptions for the emergency conditions the agency’s opponents force upon it, that the population’s trust in the agency is a condition of the country’s survival — is the narrative the agency has been generating at the level at which it requires the population’s acceptance. The population that withdraws its acceptance is the population for which the narrative no longer has the load-bearing function it has had for the previous three generations, and the condition for the withdrawal is the recognition that the narrative was always a narrative generated for operational purposes and never the straightforward description of the world the agency has presented it as.

The agency, in the structural reading, is the contemporary form of an old pattern. The pattern is the existence, within every sufficiently developed state, of a shadow institution that conducts the operations the state’s formal structure does not permit and that maintains its continuity across the formal changes of government through its own recruitment, training, and institutional cohesion. The specific form the pattern takes varies with the state and the period. The specific form it has taken in the post-1947 american state is the central intelligence agency and the broader network the agency coordinates, and the specific features that make the agency recognisable as a cult rather than as a conventional bureaucracy — the initiatic recruitment, the operational impunity, the institutional continuity across administrative changes, the relationship to the older esoteric traditions from which the founders were drawn, the pattern of behaviour that is more consistent with the operations of a mystery order than with the operations of an intelligence service — are the features the cult reading identifies and the reading the structural evidence permits. The withdrawal is the move the population actually has available, and the move is the move that works at the level at which the agency is actually operating.

References

Talbot, David. The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. HarperCollins, 2015. The mainstream-credentialed detailed documentation of the dulles network.
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Doubleday, 2007. The pulitzer-winning mainstream history that confirms the basic outline of the agency’s operational failures without pursuing the structural implications.
Prados, John. Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Ivan R. Dee, 2006. The mainstream academic history of the agency’s covert-action programs.
Kinzer, Stephen. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War. Times Books, 2013. The twin biography of the dulles brothers and their joint operation of the american foreign-policy apparatus.
Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. John Wiley, 2003. The 1953 iran coup.
Kinzer, Stephen. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt, 2019. The mainstream-credentialed treatment of the gottlieb-mk-ultra operation.
Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. Times Books, 1979. The early post-church-committee documentation of the mk-ultra program.
Ross, Colin A. The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists. Manitou Communications, 2006. The clinical-research dimension.
Sutton, Antony C. America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones. Liberty House Press, 1986. The documentary history of the yale order and its intelligence-policy connections.
Robbins, Alexandra. Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power. Little, Brown, 2002. The mainstream journalistic treatment of skull and bones.
Church Committee. Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. U.S. Senate, 1976. The foundational documentary source.
DeCamp, John W. The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska. AWT Publishing, 1992.
Marrs, Jim. Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Carroll and Graf, 1989. The documentary-oriented treatment of the kennedy assassination.
Douglass, James W. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Orbis Books, 2008. The most recent detailed reconstruction of the kennedy case by a mainstream-acceptable author.
Lane, Mark. Rush to Judgment. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. The first major critical response to the warren commission’s findings.
Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. University of California Press, 1993. The academic treatment of the kennedy case as a deep state event.
Stevenson, William. A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. The account of british security coordination in new york.
U.S. Customs Service. The Finders Investigation Report. 1987, released under FOIA in 2019. The documentary confirmation of the agency’s intervention in the finders case.
Brown, Julie K. Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story. Dey Street Books, 2021. The miami herald reporter’s book-length treatment.
Dershowitz, Alan M. (various writings). For the counter-case that the alternative readings of the epstein operation overreach.
Griffin, G. Edward. The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve. American Opinion Publishing, 1994. See The Federal Reserve for the parallel financial-side operation.

The CIA as Cult.