Dubbed the “Queen of Conspiracy” and a “modern Sherlock Holmes,” Mae Brussell (1922-1988), the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles rabbi and a Beverly Hills housewife, became one of the 20th century’s foremost researchers of the so-called “deep state.”[1]
The latter concept implies a hidden aspect of the U.S. government dominated by the CIA and FBI working on behalf of the interests of large corporations, which carries out illegal activities with impunity.[2]
Reading some ten newspapers a day, along with hundreds of books on assassination and espionage, Brussell was a pioneer researcher into the John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations.
She was also way ahead of her time in recognizing the hidden CIA involvement in Watergate, the Jonestown massacre, Charles Manson killings, Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and murder of John Lennon among other “deep-state” crimes.[3]
Before CIA whistleblower Philip Agee was writing on the topic, Brussell understood the CIA to be an instrument of a plutocratic elite intent on stamping out progressive movements and anyone who threatened their authority.
The Kennedy assassination, in her assessment, provided a “blueprint of espionage work for any operation.”
Brussell stated that a “linear connection” existed “between [John] Kennedy’s assassination and Bobby Kennedy’s and the incident at Chappaquiddick (involving Senator Ted Kennedy) and Martin Luther King and [the attempted assassination of 1972 presidential candidate George C.] Wallace. It wasn’t just planned for Dallas; it wasn’t just that they didn’t want JFK because of the Bay of Pigs invasion.”[4]
Even as right-wing a figure as Richard Nixon became the target of the “deep state” in the Watergate coup because some of his policies were too liberal.
Considering Nixon to be the “frontman” for a criminal cabal that seized control of the U.S. government in the wake of the JFK assassination, Brussell depicted him as a key figure in Operation Paperclip, under which the CIA recruited Nazis after World War II.
The CIA’s adoption of Nazi methods was evident in the cultivation of germ weapons at its biological weapons laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and its carrying out of medical and psychiatric experimentation on unwitting subjects under Operation MK-ULTRA, where CIA psychiatrists used hypnosis to turn people into zombies that could be programmed to commit political murders.[5]
Additionally, Brussell reported on the CIA’s proclivity to stir revolts, overthrow governments, and support fascist coups like in Greece in 1967 and Chile in 1973, and its development of a wide range of high-tech assassination weapons, including guns disguised as loudspeakers and vapors that could erase human memory.
According to Brussell, much of the political violence of the 1960s and 1970s came from government provocateurs who helped to create a political environment by which civil liberties guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution were suspended and in which an extreme right-wing figure like Ronald Reagan could get elected president.[6]
Long before Donald Trump ordered heavy-handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids while adopting rhetoric out of the Hitler/Mussolini playbook, Brussell warned Americans about the dangers of incipient fascism emanating out of the “deep state.”
She was also ahead of her time in warning of a de-population agenda, stating on one of her radio broadcasts: “I see terrible things happening to reduce the population of this Earth, so that those who control the corporations don’t have to provide for the needs of the poor.”[7]
Though labeled by some as a “paranoid crackpot,” and “far-out kook,” Brussell backed up a lot of her assertions with hard facts, having amassed over 80,000 pages of research material.[8]
Always marking a distinction between supposition and fact, she quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt saying that, “in politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
Much of Brussell’s analysis stands up well over time as new research is carried out and disclosures are made.
The term “deep state” is in fact now all the rage as Brussell’s worldview has become commonplace amidst the orgy of corruption that has marked U.S. politics in the age of Jeffrey Epstein and the second Gilded Age.
Background and Political Awakening
Brussell said that her motivation for researching the dark underbelly of American politics was “a fear and a horror of what America has become.”[9]
Believing that the mass media functioned as “propaganda tools” and “cover-up artists,” she hosted a syndicated radio program on KLRB-FM in Carmel, California, taught a course on assassination and conspiracy at Monterey Peninsula College and wrote articles for counter-cultural magazines such as The Realist, Berkeley Barb, and The Rebel, as well as Penthouse, and Hustler.
Brussell’s devoted followers were called “Brussell’s sprouts” and often helped with her research.[10]
Raised in Beverly Hills affluence during the Great Depression, Brussell first developed her political consciousness on a trip around the world with her family in the mid-1930s where she witnessed people living in terrible poverty along with the onset of fascism in Europe.
In the early 1940s, Brussell attended Stanford University, majoring in philosophy, but dropped out short of graduation to get married and start a family (she would marry twice and have five children) and later received an Associates Degree from the University of California.
Interested at the time in tennis, dancing lessons for her kids and orthodonture, her curiosity was aroused by Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald after the assassination of President Kennedy.
Like many others, Brussell questioned how Ruby was allowed into the Dallas police headquarters and believed that he may have been hired to kill Oswald. Subsequently, she began clipping newspaper articles about the assassination, corresponded with JFK assassination investigators like New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and critically scrutinized the 26-volume Warren Commission Report, which she recognized as a whitewash.
As she furthered her reading, Brussell came across Seymour Melman’s 1958 book, Inspection for Disarmament, which alerted her to the importance of assassination as a tool of fascistic governments.
The book told the story of a dissident Heidelberg mathematician named Emil Julius Gumbel, a left-wing pacifist who documented hundreds of political assassinations carried out by the Nazis in the 1920s.[11]
At this time, Brussell began studying the pattern of Nazis coming to the U.S. after World War II and murders in the U.S. Brussell further examined the corruption in the U.S. criminal justice and judicial systems, which enabled the “deep state” to get away with its colossal crime spree.[12]
Many killings in the U.S., she believed, resulted from CIA brainwashing and mind-control programs that created trained assassins who were programmed to kill on command.
One key figure in these efforts, according to Brussell, was Dr. José Delgado (1915-2011), a Yale neuropsychology professor who developed techniques for electronically controlling human beings.[13]
Brussell believed that the so-called Zodiac killer who attacked young couples in San Francisco in the late 1960s, was among the people pre-programmed to kill as part of a strategy to sow fear in the public and lend support for greater police-state measures.
Additionally, she believed that the August 1971 murder of Black revolutionary George Jackson by San Quentin Prison authorities was designed for similar purposes.[14]
Brussell warned that the pattern of CIA coups and terrorist activities abroad was providing a testing ground for political manipulations going on within the U.S.
Long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was a notorious figure with Mafia links behind the counter-intelligence operation (COINTELPRO) that infiltrated and destroyed left-wing groups.
According to Brussell, Hoover began his career covering up for the assassination of President Warren G. Harding by putting a whistleblower (Gaston B. Means) who tried to expose the truth behind Harding’s arsenic poisoning in prison.[15]
Throughout his career, Hoover used blackmail by amassing dossiers on the sexual proclivities of prominent politicians—a tactic used by other CIA-linked figures such as Howard Hughes, a business tycoon who set up cameras in casinos and hotels throughout Las Vegas.[16]
Pick Your Poison
Though sickened by the rise of Reagan and the far right in the U.S., she recognized that the Democrats were often no better than Republicans.
In a November 1971 radio broadcast focused on Lyndon B. Johnson, Brussell discussed how Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, was a major stockholder in Brown & Root, the Texas-based construction company that made a fortune building military facilities and bases in Vietnam, including the notorious Tiger Cages, in which Vietcong were tortured.
George R. Brown, the owner of the company, was a long-time LBJ donor and confidante.[17]
The self-serving aspect of the “Great Society” was apparent in that Johnson’s Texas friends, like H. Ross Perot, became rich from government contracts (Perot became a billionaire through his data processing work for Medicaid).[18]
The CIA’s illegal interference in U.S. elections was apparent to Brussell when she discovered that Eugene McCarthy’s top fundraiser, Thomas McCoy, had worked for the CIA.
When Johnson dropped out of the 1968 presidential race, McCarthy emerged as a front-runner in the Democratic primary drawing support from the Vietnam anti-war movement. McCarthy, however, was really lukewarm in his anti-war commitment, having supported the Korean War and Cold War and imperial interventions in countries abroad.[19]
Brussell believed it was significant that Jimmy Carter was a Naval Academy alumnus who graduated with L. Patrick Gray, Nixon’s acting director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal.
Gray resigned after admitting to destroying documents he had received from White House Counsel John Dean 11 days after the break-in that had come from the safe of Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt.
Brussell believed those documents would have linked Watergate to the JFK assassination. Stansfield Turner, Carter’s CIA Director, was in the same Naval Academy class, and Brussell believed that the three were intent on covering up “deep-state” crimes collectively.
When asked to comment about Carter’s foreign policy, Brussell said: “Carter’s human rights [which Carter had made into the hallmark of his foreign policy] issue is a sham. He scolds the USSR. We support and fund South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, South Korea, Nicaragua, Iran [and other] feudal Middle-East countries with no trials and much torture.”
Brussell noted that a key figure overseeing Carter’s foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was a Pole tied to the White Russian exile community who had worked for the RAND Corporation, which specialized in behavior modification, and wrote a book, Between Two Ages, that talked about using computers to control human behavior.
Brzezinski had been a member with Carter of the Trilateral Commission, an elite body committed to the restoration of U.S. global power in the aftermath of Vietnam in conjunction with Germany and Japan, which was financed by the Rockefeller family and other large corporate interests.[20]
The Rockefellers headed an international business conglomerate with vast investments around the world who rigged U.S. foreign policy in their favor, according to Brussell, and used their money to control police agencies in the U.S. and to pay off political groups on the left and right as part of a strategy of divide and conquer and in order to control any political opposition.
CIA Director Allen Dulles (1952-1961) had been a lawyer for a Wall Street firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, that represented the Rockefellers’ interest not coincidentally.[21]
Further, the Rockefellers were behind the political ascendancy of Henry Kissinger, a man with a background in U.S. Army intelligence who “put Nazis into power in Greece, Brazil, Chile,” and coordinated a bombing holocaust in Indochina.[22]
Operation Paperclip and the Nazification of America
In a 1972 article in The Realist, Brussell noted that, between 1945 and 1952 under Operation Paperclip, the U.S. brought in 642 German aerospace and weapons experts, along with their families, who were put in key positions in American universities, factories and aerospace programs.
In 1945, when the Nazi regime collapsed, ex-Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen joined the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and was placed in charge of war-time intelligence for Foreign Armies East. Gehlen’s organization and the OSS eventually became the CIA in 1947.
Brussell’s research into Operation Paperclip led her to the conclusion that fascism was not destroyed in World War II, but went underground with the support of the CIA, whose fascistic methods drew on Nazi techniques.
A key figure in the transition was CIA Director Allen Dulles, who recruited Gehlen and other Nazis, and coordinated coups in Guatemala and Iran and assassination plots around the world.[23]
An important recruit in Operation Paperclip was Wernher von Braun, a Nazi scientist who developed the V-2 rocket using Jewish slave labor, who in 1960 became the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The U.S. drive to militarize and control outer space was a long-held Nazi dream predicated in part on the fact that space satellites could identify minerals and oil deposits that U.S corporations wanted to exploit around the world.
Tricky Dick
Brussell explained that, in 1951, Richard Nixon introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to bring Nikolae Malaxa, a former head of the Iron Guard in Romania involved in Nazi atrocities, into the U.S.[24]
During World War II, Nixon had been assigned during World War II to the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, where he negotiated settlements of terminated defense contracts and assisted in the importation of Nazi specialists into the U.S. defense and aerospace industry under Paperclip.
In reward for his service, Nixon was encouraged to run for Congress by Murray Chotiner, who worked with aerospace industry billionaire Howard Hughes, and Herman Perry, Vice-President of the Whittier, California branch of the Bank of America, against Jerry Voorhis, a Democrat intent on exposing the CIA-Nazi pipeline.
In the 1968 presidential race, Nixon received pivotal funding through a person Brusell identified as a CIA conduit, Tom Pappas, in exchange for his nomination of Spiro Agnew—a reactionary supportive of a CIA-backed fascist coup in Greece—as Vice-President.[25]
Brussell considered Nixon’s prosecution of the Alger Hiss spy case on phony pretexts in the early 1950s as the equivalent of his Reichstag fire (a pretext for the Nazis coming to power).
The mishandling of evidence in the Hiss case “resembled that in the JFK assassination,” according to Brussell. It was a “dramatic lie planned and executed by clandestine strategists” who willed Nixon into high office.[26]
Joseph McCarthy and the Suspicious Death of One of His Acolytes
Nixon’s Nazi ties were paralleled by those of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), the central figure with Nixon in the post-World War II Red Scare.
According to Brusell, McCarthy received financial backing from two known Nazi sympathizers, Frank Sensenbrenner and Walter Harnischfeger, and lobbied for the release of Nazi POWs who had been imprisoned for murdering U.S. soldiers in World War II.
U.S intelligence agencies played a key role in fomenting the Red Scare by providing classified intelligence on leftists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), on which Nixon served.
In the mid 1970s, a computerized database that drew upon illegal surveillance came to be controlled by Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald, a urologist who became head of the extreme right-wing John Birch Society in 1983 and established a foundation whose board of advisers included Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn, and General John Singlaub, a key figure in the 1980s Contra War.
In September 1983, McDonald was killed, along with 245 other passengers and 23 crew members, when a commercial airline he was on crossed into Soviet air space and was shot down by a Soviet missile.
Brussell believed that the plane was sabotaged by the CIA and deliberately sent into Soviet air space to be shot down to silence McDonald. He was about to be subpoenaed and was a threat to expose how Ronald Reagan and some of his top CIA-linked associates were involved in illegal surveillance of private citizens when Reagan was governor of California.
Brussell noted that the South Korean co-pilot of McDonald’s plane had boasted about carrying out special tasks for U.S intelligence and may have been subjected to mind-control techniques that got him to fly the plane into Soviet air space where it would be shot down.
Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov had blamed the U.S. for a “sophisticated provocation masterminded by U.S. Special Services,” which Brussell believed to be true.[27]
White Russians
In addition to the German scientists, Brussell noted that White Russians with oil interests, who wanted their holdings returned, were brought to the U.S. in significant numbers after World War II. Many were agents for General Gehlen’s spy outfit under Hitler, and were moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area via Allen Dulles’s CIA.
According to Brussell, the White Russians participated in espionage activities and right-wing politics and were closely related to defense, oil exploration and warfare.
Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey’s wife, was part of the White Russian community; her father had been a Czarist officer. After JFK was murdered, her diaries were published in Life magazine as part of her husband’s frame-up and attempt to cast him as a leftist defector to the Soviet Union.[28]
According to Brussell, Marina gave fraudulent testimony before the Warren Commission to implicate her husband and contradicted herself in 40 FBI interviews.
Brussell believed that Lee and Marina’s marriage was one of convenience arranged by their espionage handlers. They only met three times before the marriage and Marina’s family did not attend the brief wedding ceremony.
The reason Marina may have betrayed Lee was because she was threatened with the removal of her U.S. visa which would have resulted in separation from her children.
In 2010, Marina asked Jesse Ventura: “Would you sacrifice your children for the truth?” Clearly she chose the latter, and so Brussell’s assessment was right.
JFK Assassination
Brussell saw clear evidence that Oswald was a CIA agent who, as she told Playgirl magazine in 1974, was “expendable…a throw-away person [who] was framed, defamed and then murdered.”[29]
The Warren Commission’s attempt to pass him off as a communist was among its many distortions. Brussell’s careful review of the 26 volumes of transcripts and evidence determined that the Warren Commission Report quoted as factual testimony from witnesses that were sometimes unreliable and that Commission members never heard or had a chance to cross-examine because they were not present at the hearings.
A 1984 article that Brussell wrote for The Rebel suggested that JFK’s real assassins were ex-Nazis working with the CIA who had been brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip.[30]
Discovery of the diary of CIA assassin Pierre Lafitte indicates that one of those ex-Nazis was Otto Skorzeny, a former top-level SS Gestapo officer.[31]
New research points more though in the direction of Lyndon B. Johnson and a cabal of oil barons linked to the Air Force and CIA being behind the assassination.[32]
The existence of a covert operation was apparent to Brussell in the use of Oswald body doubles and destruction of evidence and suppression of records after JFK was killed.
One of many oddities that Brussell pointed out was that Governor John Connally’s clothing was sent immediately to dry cleaning and destroyed as evidence (for bullet entry and exit wounds). Oswald’s State Department records were also suspiciously burned.[33]
The CIA’s direct involvement was given added weight by the identification of CIA operative Edward Lansdale by General Victor Krulak and Fletcher Prouty, the CIA’s former Air Force liaison, as well as Lansdale’s wife Pat Kelly, in a photo taken around Dealey Plaza just after JFK’s assassination.
That Oswald was not Kennedy’s assassin is apparent in the fact that he was identified by his boss, Roy Truly, as being on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository calmly drinking a coke less than two minutes after the shooting. A secretary had also identified Oswald in the same place just before the shooting and no one saw him coming down the staircase.[34]
Brussell believed that Oswald may have been hypnotized and pre-programmed, as with other patsies the CIA set up, probably during his time in the military or when he was hospitalized for three weeks during a mastoid operation.[35] MK-ULTRA experiments were known to have been carried out at the Atsugi base in Japan where Oswald was for a period based, with a member of Oswald’s Marine unit claiming to have been a human subject.[36]
Brussell emphasized that Marina was a CIA asset who had access to drugs working as a pharmacist, which she could have used on Lee.
Jack Ruby was believed to have been under the control of two hypnotists when he killed Oswald, including David Ferrie, a CIA asset involved in anti-Castro operations, who flew drugs and guns out of Central America and worked in Ruby’s Carousel gentleman’s club.[37]
As part of the JFK assassination cover-up, Brussell pointed to the deaths of dozens of people under suspicious circumstances. Some of the details were exposed in a book by Texas journalist Penn Jones that Brussell recommended on her radio broadcasts.[38]
CIA Targeting of Other Kennedys
Five days before Richard Nixon’s would-be adversary, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles in June 1968, Brussell handed a letter to Rose Kennedy, expressing her fear of imminent danger to his safety.
Brussell immediately recognized that Sirhan Sirhan was a “Manchurian candidate” who had been brainwashed by CIA hypnotists and programmed to shoot at Kennedy.
In 1978, Brussell told an interviewer, in a view embraced now by Robert Kennedy Jr. and supported by updated scholarship: “The FBI and Los Angeles Police Department have photographs labeled that prove ten or more bullets were fired in the Ambassador Hotel the night Sen. Robert Kennedy was killed. Sirhan Sirhan’s weapon only fires eight shots. There is no indication or proof that any of Sirhan’s bullets went into Kennedy. The fatal shot came from behind the Senator, into his head. A guard from Lockheed, Thane Cesar, fired his gun that night.”[39]
A month before Mary Jo Kopechne died on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts in July 1969 in a staged accident that Teddy Kennedy was blamed for, Mae warned Kennedy of “the nest of rattlesnakes” that wanted to abort his presidential possibilities in 1972.[40] Brussell’s warnings again proved to be prophetic.
James Files, a CIA-Mafia hit man recently told author James Manning that Frank Sturgis, a CIA operative and Watergate “plumber” held Kopechne down while E. Howard Hunt put a bag over Mary Jo’s head and asphyxiated her. Kopechne’s dead body was then placed in the car and, Files said, he drove it off the Cape Cod pier.
Files said that, after murdering Kopechne, Sturgis threw Ted in the water so he was all wet but then helped him get out and drove him back to the Shiretown Inn where he was staying and told him to keep quiet or members of his family would suffer more “accidents.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., Assassination
Brussell understood instinctively that the official story about King’s murder made no sense and that James Earl Ray was framed for the murder.
In her radio broadcasts, she noted how Ray was being controlled and told where to go by intelligence handlers, like a man named Raoul with whom he had been put in contact in Montreal after the engineering of his escape from prison. The evidence did not indicate that Ray was King’s shooter. The prosecution’s main witness, Charles Quitman Stephens, was dead drunk at the time of the shooting, and his common-law wife, Grace Walden, said that she heard the shot come from outside her window in the rooming house where Ray was said to have been.
Ray’s travels had to have been funded by someone, Brussell said, and he would have had no way of knowing that King was staying at the Lorraine motel, and had to have been instructed to check into the rooming house from where he allegedly shot King. On the run, Ray had visited a hypnotist and was found with books on hypnotism, which indicated that he had been subjected to some kind of mind control experiment.
After Brussell passed away, the King family lawyer, William F. Pepper, gained admissions from key witnesses and pieced together more details of the conspiracy behind King’s killing—and those of other members of his family—which traced back to the FBI.[41]
Watergate—A Tale of Lies and Liars
Brussell saw Watergate not as just some “third-rate burglary” or “caper”—as the media depicted it at the time—but part of a criminal operation reflecting the moral rot of the Nixon administration. Key “deep-state” operatives who had been involved in the JFK assassination, such as James McCord, E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, were not coincidentally involved.
Though purporting to be working for Nixon, the CIA burglars sold him out by staging the crime scene so they would get caught. Unbeknownst to most people today, Watergate was an ultra-right coup in which Nixon was the target.
Brussell’s understanding of the events has been confirmed by key recent books on Watergate, such as Nick Bryant’s The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars.
Bryant shows how a Washington, D.C., police officer linked to the CIA named Carl Shoffler was tipped off about the Watergate Hotel break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters, and that Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, who was given credit for breaking the Watergate story, was told what to write by the CEO of the Robert E. Mullen Co., a CIA front Brussell wrote about and for which Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt worked.[42]
More Suspicious Deaths
In a July 1976 article for Midnight magazine, Brussell wrote that, in the four-year period after the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, there were 30 strange deaths of people associated with the Watergate scandal.
The odds of all these people having died natural deaths, she said, was at least one hundred million billion to one. The deceased included:
- Beverly Kaye, a Secret Service secretary whose job had been to store and preserve White House tapes;
- Murray Chotiner, a long-time Nixon associate who had access to secret tape recordings made inside Democratic National Committee headquarters;
- William O. Mills, a Republican congressman from Maryland who had failed to report a $25,000 campaign contribution to him from President Nixon’s re-election finance committee which Brussell believed came from a secret fund for “dirty tricks”;
- Hale Boggs, a Democrat from Louisiana who had sat on the Warren Commission and whose plane crashed in Alaska in 1972 after The Los Angeles Times reported that he had “startling revelations on Watergate and the assassination of JFK”;
- Lee Pennington, a CIA agent who had been sent to ransack Watergate burglar James McCord’s home after the break-in and was thought to have seized and destroyed documents that showed a link between McCord and the CIA; and
- Dorothy Hunt, E. Howard Hunt’s wife, who died in a suspicious plane crash en route to Chicago to pay off witnesses in an attempt to save her husband from going to jail. What secret Dorothy had about the CIA and Watergate went with her to her grave.
Thirty years after Brussell’s article, the Hunt’s son, Saint John, wrote a book presenting further evidence that Dorothy Hunt’s plane was sabotaged. Numerous people involved with the Watergate scandal were on the plane that went down in what was clearly not an accident.[43]
Attempted Assassination of George Wallace
Brussell was sure that Nixon and other elements of the “deep state” were behind the May 1972 attempted assassination of George Wallace, the former segregationist Alabama governor who ran as an independent for president in the 1972 election, in Laurel, Maryland.
Brussell quoted from a study by R. Frank Salant that suggested that the FBI planted left-wing literature in accused assassin Arthur Bremer’s home to make it look like a left-wing plot, and fabricated a diary like they had done with Sirhan Sirhan.
Bremer had been subjected to behavior modification and psychological programming like other CIA assassins and spent a lot of money in the period before the shooting which someone obviously gave him.
The familiar figure of E. Howard Hunt played a key role in the black operation designed to frame Bremer, as the day after the assassination attempt, Hunt had been ordered by Charles Colson to break into Bremer’s apartment.
Witnesses pointed to the existence of additional shooters, one of whom, Dennis Cassini, was accused of being a CIA agent. (Cassini died in Toronto of a heroin overdose though was said to have never used drugs in his life.)
Symbionese Liberation Army
Brussell wrote a series of articles in The Realist pointing to the CIA strategy of creating an ultra-radical leftist group in the Bay area called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) that would engage in counter-productive forms of protest so as to alienate the public and turn them off left-wing politics.
The group’s leader, Donald DeFreeze, was a petty crook from Cleveland who was subjected to hypnosis and mind-control experiments at Vacaville medical facility in California directed by Colton Westbrook, a mind-control expert who worked with CIA Director William Colby.
DeFreeze was told he would be a new Black leader to replace Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Once it was formed, the SLA kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst and brainwashed her and got her to commit crimes with them.
The group’s most dastardly act was the murder of Oakland Unified School District Superintendent Marcus Foster after the CIA had planted false information with SLA members that depicted him as a turncoat to the civil rights movement.
After a standoff with police, DeFreeze and other police informants within the SLA were shot and burned to death in the company of agents from the Defense Department.
Brussell’s assessment was corroborated in a well-researched 2016 book by Brad Schreiber, Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA (Skyhorse), which adds new layers to the story that Brussell told.
At the end of the book, Schreiber details how the LAPD torched the SLA safe house where DeFreeze went, in violation of police protocol, and shot SLA members fleeing from the wreckage in the back as part of the effort to prevent the truth from coming to light.
Manson Family Killings
Brussell believed that the CIA’s creation and then destruction of the SLA went hand in hand with the orchestration of the Manson family murders, which she described as a “political massacre” carried out by government provocateurs under the CIA’s Operation Chaos, whose purpose was to blacken the image of the anti-war and youth counter-culture movement of the 1960s.
Brussell stated: “The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments by which enemy forces could attack and discredit hippies and critical American youth who had dropped out of the establishment.”
Brussell’s intuition about the Manson killings was validated in a 2019 book published by Tom O’Neill entitled Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties.
The book shows that Manson was a police informant, that he crossed paths with CIA doctors such as Jolyon West who were involved in Operation MK-ULTRA, and that other CIA-linked figures such as Reeve Whitson may have helped stage and cover up the truth behind the murders.[44]
On her radio program, Brussell interviewed an LAPD officer who told her that the LAPD gave orders not to arrest Manson or anyone at the Spahn Ranch where he stayed with the “Manson girls” even though crimes were being committed there, including rape of underage women.
After he was released from prison for previous offenses, Manson was set up at the Spahn Ranch with all kinds of amenities, including the girls, as part of the payoff for doing the bidding of the “deep state.” The career criminal was given a hippie image and taught to play guitar even though he had nothing to do with the counter-culture.
Brussell believed that Manson was not actually guilty in the Tate-LaBianca and Abigail Folger murders but that he was set up as a patsy, like Oswald and James Earl Ray, and that Charlie “Tex” Watson was more important in carrying out the killings than Manson.
The victims of the murders, according to Brussell, were carefully selected for the political effect, and hippie slogans were deliberately written on the walls after the killings.
The spectacular killings were part of a “strategy of tension” by which fear of disorder provided a pretext for suspending constitutional liberties and undermining progressive social movements and democracy—as occurred in Greece in the 1960s and other countries subjected to CIA-backed coups.[45]
Jonestown
The November 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana, where hundreds of followers of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple drank poisonous Kool-aid, was another staged event in Brussell’s view that was part of the CIA’s campaign to destroy the 1960s counter-cultural movement and New Left.
Brussell quoted author Jesse Walker who wrote: “the deaths at Jonestown, a colony that until its destruction had presented itself to the world as a multiracial socialist utopia, marked the end of the sixties, a moment even more deflating than the Charles Manson murders or the Rolling Stones’ lethal concert at Altamont.”
Though presenting himself as a progressive who attracted hippies to his church and strove to bring Blacks and white together, Jones, Brussell determined, was a con man who had worked for the CIA in Brazil in the 1960s and used Jonestown as a place for extended MK-ULTRA mind-control and drug experiments.
The latter had started at a mental institution Jones set up in Ukiah, California, where the People’s Temple was based, called Happy Acres.
Huge amounts of hypnotic drugs associated with MK-ULTRA experiments were found on the Guyana compound after everyone was killed. People there were subjected to sensory deprivation, a favored CIA technique, and visitors noticed that residents of Jonestown, many of whom were African American, acted like zombies who had been hypnotized and drugged.[46]
Brussell recognized that the people had not been induced to commit suicide but were murdered, in part to cover up the nefarious mind-control experiments that had been going on and, in part, to discredit the counter-cultural movement, which was associated with Jones and his cult.
As far-fetched as Brussell’s theory sounds, the evidence to back it up is strong.
In October 2022, CovertAction Magazine published an article, which confirmed that a) Jones was indeed outed as a CIA agent in Brazil; b) medical experiments associated with MK-ULTRA had been carried out in Jonestown; and c) Jonestown land was used to train mercenaries who were later sent to fight against left-wing Cuban-backed forces in Angola.
Additionally, it is clear that a) the people who died at Jonestown were murdered; b) the CIA and State Department were involved in the cover-up, as they had gained advanced knowledge of the killing and were there well before the local police; and c) Jones himself may have gotten away and been given a fake identity so he could resume a new life.[47]
Brussell had been on to the significance of the Layton family in helping to oversee and finance the Jonestown project.
The patriarch of the family, Laurence, was chief of Chemical and Biological Warfare research at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah during the Korean War, where he worked with toxic nerve agents and other army projects that devised novel methods to kill people.
Laurence had also been involved with Operation MK-ULTRA. His wife, Lisa, came from a Nazi family who allegedly claimed later to have been Jewish, which did not escape Brussell’s attention.[48]
Brussell saw Jonestown as another manifestation of the Nazification of the American government. Residents there were subjected to slave labor conditions on top of the medical and drug experimentation and mind control.[49]
When Leo Ryan, a congressman who had advanced a law in Congress to rein in the CIA, was lured to Jonestown, he was murdered by a Special Forces soldier dressed in military fatigues. This killing also appeared to have been at the instigation of the CIA.
The Layton’s son Larry was convicted for Congressman Ryan’s killing, though Brussell believed him to be another drugged-up Manchurian candidate, whom eyewitnesses said had looked like a zombie and whom a member of the Jonestown medical staff admitted to drugging.[50]
John Lennon Murder
On her weekly radio broadcast of December 7, 1980, the night before the killing of John Lennon, Brussell stated that “the old assassination teams are coming back into power.” In an interview months later, she explained: “The very people responsible for covering up the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Reverend Martin Luther King, for Watergate and Koreagate, and the kidnapping and murder of Howard Hughes, and for hundreds of other deaths, had only six weeks before they would again be removing or silencing those voices of opposition to their policies.”
The latter was a reference to the fact that Lennon was murdered six weeks before Ronald Reagan’s presidential inauguration. Brussell noted that, before his tragic death: “Lennon was coming out once more. His album was cut. He was preparing to be part of the world, a world which was a worse place since the time he had withdrawn with his family. It was a sure bet Lennon would react and become a social activist again [as he had been when he was the Beatles lead singer in the 1960s and thereafter]. That was the threat. Lennon realized that there was danger coming back into public view. He took that dangerous chance, and we all lost!”[51]
According to Brussell, Lennon’s alleged assassin Mark David Chapman fit the archetype of “deep-state” assassins in that he came from a conservative military family, somehow traveled widely and stayed at fancy hotels when he was supposedly a moribund, unemployed youth, and showed signs of having been hypnotized/brainwashed under Operation MK-ULTRA.
Brussell found out that Chapman had worked in Beirut, Lebanon, where the CIA ran guerrilla training camps, and came into contact with CIA officials working with South Vietnamese refugees in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas.
The town where Chapman grew up for a period and attended a community college, Decatur was in DeKalb, Georgia, home to right-wing networks that had plotted the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Brussell’s assessment about a conspiracy behind Lennon’s murder has recently been corroborated in David Whelan’s book Mind Games: The Assassination of John Lennon (2023).[52]
It showed that Chapman could not have been Lennon’s killer but was set up, like Lee Harvey Oswald as a patsy, to take the blame. The real killer was much closer to Lennon when he was shot than Chapman, and escaped through a back room.
That Chapman was a Manchurian candidate was evident in his connection to CIA psychologists who were involved in grooming other CIA assassins.
The story had been spread that Chapman had been obsessed with J. D. Salinger’s book Catcher in the Rye and believed that Lennon was a phony, though Chapman never mentioned the book Catcher in the Rye at any time after the night of the murder, and it is uncertain if he ever read it.
Killing the 1960s Counterculture
Brussell rooted Lennon’s assassination in the pattern of mysterious deaths suffered by rock ’n’ roll artists who helped inspire the 1960s counter-cultural movement and adopted subversive lyrics.
Brussell noted that the CIA was tasked with “investigating the music industry” and, by 1968 included among its long list of domestic enemies “Advocates of New Lifestyles,” “New Left,” “Apostles of Non-Violence and Racial Harmony” and “Restless Youth.”[53]
The list of suspicious deaths included those of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Phil Ochs.[54]
Brussell believed that some artists who died of drug overdoses may have had their drugs laced with poison. The CIA had carried out extensive testing on LSD as part of Operation MK-ULTRA and may have been the one to push it on youth to divert their activist energies, damage their brains and put them on a path to self-destruction.[55]
Significantly, LSD proselytizer Timothy Leary admitted to being a CIA agent.
Brussell wondered why so many artists at the peak of their creativity and fame—who led wonderful lives—would wallow in self-doubt and despondency, as the media made it seem.[56]
Significantly, people hanging around the artists often had strange backgrounds and were suspect.
Brussell wrote: “The nine years in which the musicians allegedly overdosed, drank themselves to death, drove over cliffs, hung themselves, choked, crashed their motorcycles, went insane, or freaked out without any reasonable explanation, were the same years that the FBI and CIA waged a domestic war against any kind of dissent.”[57]
In an interview after John Lennon’s death, Brussell stated: “Rock musicians had an ability to draw together youth at a time when protest meetings were being broken apart, and the hippie, anti-war youth became too visible with their own, unique art form at Woodstock. The Senate investigation documented that persons seeking ‘racial harmony’ and ‘social protest’ were defined as enemies of the state. Only people like Sonny and Cher, the Osmonds, John Denver and the Captain and Tennille make it as role models. They either have to tame you or kill you.”[58]
Identifying Trump As a Deep State Operator
Brussell would see the current Trump administration as a continuation of the same Nazi-linked, corporate-controlled, CIA-managed, fascist dictatorship she identified as the hidden hand behind the assassinations of the 1960s.
In the 1980s, Brussell was wise to Donald Trump’s relationship to Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and Trump’s attorney, whom she knew to be part of the cabal responsible for the JFK assassination.
In her radio broadcasts and 1984 article “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination” (published in The Rebel), Brussell cited a 1969 report, “Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal” (written by William Torbitt), that listed Cohn as a principal financier of Permindex, an arms manufacturer involved in the JFK assassination and earlier attempts to murder French President Charles de Gaulle.[59]
In a 1985 broadcast, Brussell reported that Donald Trump would earn $47 million from the purchase of ABC, a company he owned stock in, by CIA Director William Casey’s Capital Cities, making sure to remind her listeners that Roy Cohn was connected to Casey through the CIA.[60]
Brussell would have noted another link between Trump and the “deep state”: Stephen B. King, Trump’s ambassador to the Czech Republic in his first term and then CEO of the 2024 Republican National Convention. While working security for Nixon’s 1972 election team, King beat, drugged, and kidnapped Martha Mitchell, the wife of Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) Director John Mitchell, to stop her from talking to reporters about the break-in at the DNC headquarters at the Watergate office building.[61]
If Mitchell had been allowed to speak freely with White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who she was on the phone with when King ripped it out of the wall, she might have exposed the secret CIA machinations behind Watergate and the “dirty business” of James McCord, who had been Martha’s personal security guard.
Some Blind Spots
Brussell was a maverick for her time and a dedicated researcher, whose writings and radio commentaries provide an invaluable resource for historians seeking to uncover the dark side of American politics.
This does not mean that Brussell did not have some blind spots in her analysis.
For one thing, she gave short shrift to the role played by Lyndon B. Johnson in the JFK assassination, predicated on the fact that Johnson was going to be dropped from the ticket in the 1964 election.[62]
For another, Brussell tended to idealize John F. Kennedy, presenting him as someone intent on withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, splintering the CIA, making peace with the Russians and transforming U.S. foreign policy.[63]
While some aspects may be true, detailed scholarly works have cast doubt on this interpretation—showing how Kennedy had been a zealous proponent of counter-insurgency warfare who angered the CIA in part because he took power in foreign policy decision making away from them when he established the Special Group on Counterinsurgency, headed by Bobby Kennedy, whom the CIA old guard thought was hot-headed and too young to have so much power.[64]
In analyzing the post-war political triumph of the far right, Brussell would have been well-served to have highlighted the importance of the coup at the 1944 Democratic Party Convention that resulted in the replacement of Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s vice president with Harry Truman.
Wallace was a left-leaning New Dealer who favored peaceful cooperation with the Soviets, the conversion of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, and closure of overseas U.S. air bases.
He further proposed as an alternative to the “American Century” a “People’s Century,” where there would be neither imperialism nor war and in which developed countries would help developing ones to industrialize instead of exploiting their natural resources.
After he was ousted from the vice-presidency (a sure pathway to the presidency since FDR was ill at the convention), Wallace was fired as Commerce Secretary and smeared as a communist when he tried to run for the presidency on a third-party ticket in the 1948 election. That was the beginning of McCarthyism.[65]
Wallace was a much stronger anti-imperialist and foe of the “deep state” than JFK, who had supported the Truman Doctrine while serving in Congress and mocked Wallace for his left-wing and pacifistic views. JFK, additionally, was a leader of the Vietnam lobby that backed U.S. aid to the fledgling state of South Vietnam in the 1950s and early 1960s, greatly expanded the military presence there, and ordered the first Agent Orange sprayings under Operation Ranch Hand.[66]
That Wallace was not on Brussell’s radar seems to reflect the legacy of McCarthyism, which wiped out left-wing movements in the U.S. and political consciousness about them and their significance.
Wallace had himself warned about an incipient American fascism spearheaded by right-wing demagogues who wrapped themselves in the flag.[67]
Brussell’s analysis would have been strengthened by addressing how the far right associated with the “deep state” was able to gain a political stronghold in post-war America precisely because of the implosion of the radical labor movement and political left, which represented the main potential counterweight to the unfettered triumph of corporate power and penetration of the government by organized crime.
Seeing Just How Far Things Were Going
Brussell said that, some time in the 1970s, she received a call from a man who told her that intelligence agents listened to her radio program, Dialogue: Conspiracy.
When Brussell responded by asking the man what they thought about it, he allegedly said that “they think it’s right on, that they can understand. That it’s also a safety valve for them, something that lets them know just how far things are going.”[68]
Predictably, at Brussell’s funeral in 1988, some guests raised suspicions about foul play. The CIA was known for having developed a drug that could induce cancer, which caused Brussell’s death.[69] Similar questions emerged when one of Brussell’s daughters, Bonnie, died in a tragic car accident.
Brussell’s death occurred around the time of the Iran-Contra scandal, which confirmed many of her prophecies about a nefarious secret power group carrying out repeated criminal operations.
Brussell had traced the involvement of key figures in Iran-Contra to the 1973 fascist coup in Chile, Phoenix Program and drug-smuggling operations in Indochina, establishment of the drug and money laundering Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, and 1986 bombing of Libya.[70]
Had Brussell lived a few more years she could have helped expose the murder of journalist Danny Casolaro, who coined the term “The Octopus” to describe the activities of the rogue CIA cabal involved in Iran-Contra that stole computer software, which enabled them to more efficiently launder money, smuggle drugs and spy on the public.
Two generations after Iran-Contra, the “deep state” that Brussell helped expose has grown even more out of control, as the fascism that Brussell warned about has come more into the open.
Today Brussell should be remembered as a visionary who tried to educate the public about gross injustices perpetrated by the American power elite, which destroyed functioning democracy.
Now more than ever we need a new generation of Brussells who will methodically scrutinize the hidden workings of the U.S. government and help explain it to the public so that a more effective opposition movement can be organized.
Mae’s grandfather founded the posh I. Magnin department store chain. Guests at her family home included Hollywood luminaries Jack Warner, Milton Berle, Bob Hope and Louis B. Mayer and even Richard Nixon, who were all friends of her father, Edgar Magnin, who attended both the Nixon and Reagan inaugurals. ↑
University of California at Berkeley English Professor Peter Dale Scott is another important “deep-state” researcher who is often credited with coining the term. Scott is author of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) among many other books. ↑
For a profile of Brussell, see Paul Krassner, “The Mind of Mae Brussell,” Oui magazine, May 1978; and Judith A. Eisner, “Carmel Closeup: Mae Brussell: Fears ‘hidden government’ planned assassinations,” The Carmel Pine Cone, September 29, 1972. ↑
Eisner, “Carmel Closeup.” ↑
Brussell also highlighted the CIA’s adoption of psycho-surgeries. ↑
Mae Brussell, “Why Is the Senate Watergate Committee Functioning As Part of the Cover-Up?” The Realist, July 1973. Counter-culture writer Paul Krassner stated: “Way back then in the ’60s, way back before Watergate even happened, Mae told me that all the crazy and violent things going on in the country were part of a plan to get Ronald Reagan in office.” ↑
Krassner, “The Mind of Mae Brussell.” ↑
Warren Hinckle, “CIA-Mafia conspirators can rest easier,” San Francisco Examiner, October 6, 1988. ↑
Eisner, “Carmel Closeup.” ↑
See Alex Constantine, Editor, with introduction by Paul Krassner, The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America with introduction by Paul Krassner (London: Feral House, 2014). ↑
Gumbel was removed from his academic position by the Nazis. ↑
Krassner, “The Mind of Mae Brussell.” ↑
Constantine, ed., The Essential Mae Brussell. According to Wikipedia, Delgado’s research centered on the use of electrical signals to evoke responses in the brain. His earliest work was with cats, but he then did experiments with monkeys and humans, including psychiatric patients. He was known to plant electrodes in the brains of these patients. Brussell noted Delgado’s work for the CIA and U.S. Navy intelligence and that he was able to surgically implant a computer receiver in a Spanish bull and pioneered shooting mood drugs into the human brain. He learned how to control people through a remote-control computer. Delgado published a book entitled Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). ↑
Brussell pointed out on her radio program that the mainstream media accepted prison authorities’ claims about how Jackson was killed. She believed that the larger “deep-state” strategy was to have Jackson killed in order to provoke riots in the Black community that would legitimize Republican Party calls for law and order in the 1972 election. ↑
The whistleblower was Gaston Means who wrote the book with May Dixon Thacker, The Strange Death of President Harding (New York: Guild Publishing Corporation, 1930). See also Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Is This First Lady Also the First Presidential Assassin,” CovertAction Magazine, August 2, 2023. ↑
Brussell noted that Johnson aide Bobby Baker also established a prostitution house for members of Congress that enabled him and his boss, Lyndon B. Johnson, to blackmail other members of Congress. ↑
Details on the symbiotic relationship between Johnson and Brown would later be detailed in Robert Caro’s epic four-volume biography of Johnson. ↑
Perot used some of his fortune to bring gifts to American POWs in Vietnam. ↑
Noam Chomsky criticized McCarthy for abandoning political activism and commitment to the anti-war movement after Hubert Humphrey secured the 1968 Democratic Party nomination. For more on McCarthy, see Dominic Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy and the Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). ↑
Brussell emphasized that an unusually high number of Carter’s Cabinet consisted of people associated with the IBM Corporation, which benefited from Carter’s support for a secret space station satellite launched by NASA in California. Carter Defense Secretary Harold Brown, one of Robert McNamara’s whiz kids, was on both the board of IBM and the Trilateral Commission. Brussell pointed out that the Trilateral Commission had issued a report, The Crisis of Democracy, that railed against the excesses of democracy bred by the 1960s-era movements and called for the taming of popular passions. ↑
According to Brussell, Sullivan & Cromwell also represented I.G. Farben which manufactured the gasses used to kill Jews and others during the Holocaust. ↑
“Interview with Mae Brussell,” Conspiracy Digest, Winter 1978. Brussell said that Kissinger’s policies enabled the laundering of billions of dollars of drug money. She also said that he had been in the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps 90th Division which was in charge of Klaus “the Butcher of Lyon” Barbie who was recruited by the CIA. She said that Warren Commission member and Chase Manhattan and World Bank President John J. McCloy, Peter Drucker, and Fritz G. A. Kraemer, Plans Officer for the U.S. Army Chief of Staff and a Vietnam War architect, handled Kissinger’s career from Harvard to the Council on Foreign Relations to the State Department. ↑
Another pivotal figure Brussell correctly pointed to was Major General Charles Willoughby, Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief in the post-war U.S. occupation of Japan and fascist who oversaw the release of Japanese war criminals such as Yakuza founder Yoshio Kodama. ↑
Krassner, “The Mind of Mae Brussell.” ↑
Brussell viewed the 1967 Greek coup, which unseated the left-leaning Andreas Papandreou, as a blueprint for a slow-motion coup in the U.S. Agnew was even more to the right of Nixon. Phil Ochs sang that the “ravings of Spiro” against anti-war demonstrators, leftists and the intelligentsia, were “the ravings of a clown” in his counter-cultural song “Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon.” For more on Pappas, Nixon’s co-chair of the financial committee that helped re-elect him who was described in The Boston Globe as a “modern-day robber baron and salesman for the military junta looking for business opportunities in Greece,” and by CovertAction Magazine, as “Nixon’s bagman,” see Michael Steven Smith, “How Nixon Flexed CIA Muscle to Destroy Reporter Who Discovered He was Taking Illegal Campaign Contributions from Fascist Greek Junta,” CovertAction Magazine, January 28, 2022; Elias Dematrocopolous. “A Look at Watergate Then and Now,” The Washington Post, July 15, 1997.For more evidence validating Brussell’s perspective, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Alger Hiss Spy Case Frame-Up Has Markings of an Intelligence Operation,” CovertAction Magazine, July 21, 2025; Jeff Kisseloff, Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2025). ↑
Mae Brussell, “Who Killed Congressman Larry McDonald,” Hustler, February 1984, reprinted in Constantine, Ed., The Essential Mae Brussell, Chapter 16. Brussell noted that a side benefit for the CIA was to create a right-wing martyr out of McDonald, an admirer of Joseph McCarthy and fascist Chilean General Augusto Pinochet. ↑
See Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 55, 289. ↑
Mae’s quote to Playgirl is drawn from Marie Jones, “The Queen of Conspiracy: The Life & Times of Mae Brussell,” New Dawn Magazine, November-December 2022. ↑
Mae Brussell, “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination,” The Rebel, January 1984. ↑
See H. P. Albarelli, Jr., Coup in Dallas: The Decisive Investigation into Who Killed JFK (New York: Skyhorse, 2021). ↑
See Sean Fetter, Under the Cover of Night: The United States Air Force and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, 2 vols. (Virginia: Arlington Press, 2023). ↑
Eisner, “Carmel Closeup.” ↑
Thomas Buchanan, Who Killed Kennedy? (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1964), 108. ↑
For a parallel viewpoint to Brussell’s, see Lincoln Lawrence and Kenn Thomas Mind Control, Oswald & JFK: Were We Controlled? (Kempton, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997), iii. Oswald’s mother Marguerite had said that, after he came out of the army, her son began losing his hair even though he was only in his early twenties, and had become ashen grey and started behaving strangely. ↑
A March 1964 memo by CIA Director John McCone to Secret Service head James Rowley allegedly stated that Oswald had “possibly been chemically or electronically controlled…a sleeper agent subject spent 11 days hospitalized for a minor ailment which should have required no more than three days hospitalization at best.” Jim Keith, Mind Control, World Control (Kempton, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997), 143, 146. ↑
Ferrie was the initial target of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation into the JFK assassination. Eight witnesses had observed Oswald in Ferrie’s company attempting to vote in rural Clinton, Louisiana, in the 1960 election. On the night of November 22, 1963, Ferrie made a strange trip to Texas for the alleged purpose of indoor ice skating. Ferrie said at the time of the assassination that he was still in New Orleans, employed as an investigator for Carlos Marcello. On February 22, 1967, four days after Garrison’s probe was made public, Ferrie was found dead in his apartment. The coroner concluded that he had died at age 49 of a blood clot. ↑
Penn Jones, Forgive My Grief (Midlothian, TX: Midlothian Mirror, 1966); https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKdeaths.htm. Jones considered Lyndon B. Johnson to have been central to the murder of JFK and specified that Johnson had killed many people in the state of Texas during his rise to power. ↑
Brussell went on to note that “the coat sleeve of Kennedy’s was cut off and is missing. The ceiling panels, in the direction of Cesar’s bullets, are gone. Sirhan Sirhan’s weapon was ‘sold’ and is out of the state, probably destroyed.” After RFK’s death, Brussell noted that wiretapping and surveillance increased and new national security measures were passed. A recent detailed study buiding on Brussell’s research is Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2018). ↑
Krassner, “The Mind of Mae Brussell.” Kopechne’s body was found with blood on her blouse and a wound on the back of her head, indicating she had been struck before the car went off the pier. The cause of her death was not drowning but asphyxiation. She was found at the back of the car, which is where she had to have been placed as there was no way she could have gone from front to back amidst onrushing water. For this and other evidence, see John Koerner, Exploding the Truth: The JFK, Jr. Assassination (Chronos Books, 2018), 58; R. B. Cutler, “Chappaquiddick: Water Under the Bridge?” in Al Hidell and Joan d’Arc, editors, The Conspiracy Reader: From the Deaths of JFK and John Lennon to Government-Sponsored Alien Cover-ups (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 40-50. ↑
William F. Pepper, The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016); William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995); William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (New York: Verso, 2018). For a summary of key evidence, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Did J. Edgar Hoover Order the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,” CovertAction Magazine, January 17, 2022. Ray’s brother also believed he may have been hypnotized. John Larry Ray and Lyndon Barsten, Truth at Last: The Untold Story Behind James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Guilford, CT: The Lyon Press, 2008).
Nick Bryant, The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2023). See also Robert Merritt, Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up, as told to Douglas Caddy, original attorney for the Watergate Seven (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009). The Senate Watergate Committee’s senior Republican, Howard Baker, suspected that Woodward—who had a background in naval intelligence working for Admiral Thomas Moorer, a key figure in the Watergate operation who hated Nixon’s détente policies toward Russia and China—was working for the CIA. He directed one of the Watergate Committee’s lawyers to inquire about the association, though the inquiry was rebuffed by the CIA. Hunt was a sinister figure Brussell identified as being part of numerous CIA assassinations and black ops, including the creation of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a right-wing group that tried to draw youth away from the Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and the 1960s counter-cultural movement. ↑
St. John Hunt, Dorothy: The Murder of E. Howard Hunt’s Wife—Watergate’s Darkest Secret (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2015). New evidence has also come out to indicate that Boggs’s plane was sabotaged and that he was murdered. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “American Political History Might Have Turned Out Differently if a Louisiana Congressman’s Plane Hadn’t Mysteriously Vanished Out of Thin Air 51 Years Ago,” CovertAction Magazine, October 16, 2023.Tom O’Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties (Boston: Little, Brown, 2019). A side goal of the murders was to stir up racial conflict. Brussell pointed out that the Spahn Ranch, where the Manson girls lived, was never a hippie commune. CIA-linked aerospace tycoon Howard Hughes knew the owner George Spahn and bought the adjacent property which became a German Bavarian beer garden. Brussell believed that the violence surrounding the 1969 Altamont concert, billed as “Woodstock West,” which gave the whole counter-cultural scene very negative press attention, was triggered by Hell’s Angels provocateurs who had close relations with Oakland area law enforcement. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, whom Ruby said had prohibited him from telling the full story on why he killed Lee Harvey Oswald, was a suspicious character who coordinated some of the legal arrangements of the Altamont event. Brussell believed that it was not by coincidence that the Mafia took over the music industry from the counter-culture and commercialized and ruined it. ↑
Brussell recommended to her listeners Stephen Rousseas’ book, The Death of a Democracy: Greece and the American Conscience (New York: Grove Press, 1967), which she believed provided a playbook for the destruction of democracy in the U.S. ↑
Brussell emphasized that Jonestown fit a pattern of medical experimentation on Blacks. Residents complained of diarrhea and high fevers—a symptom of AIDS. It is alleged that doctors there may have been experimenting with bioweapons. The Soviets accused the U.S. of developing AIDS as a bioweapon. The first doctor in the U.S. to diagnose AIDS, Larry Schacht, not coincidentally perhaps, worked at Jonestown. The doctor who supplied a lot of the drugs to Jonestown lived in Westchester, New York. See Michael Meiers’s detailed study, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? A Review of the Evidence (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989). ↑
The CovertAction Magazine article drew heavily on previous investigations, including Meiers’s detailed study, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? ↑
Lisa’s father Hugo Philip, was a wealthy German banker and stockbroker who represented companies such as Siemens, Halske and I.G. Farben, which developed the cyanide used to gas Jews and whose research labs developed deadly nerve gases. As World War II approached in 1938, Hitler sent the Philip family to serve under deep cover in the U.S., providing them fake papers as Jews. After raising their four kids, Lisa took a job at the University of California at Berkeley library, which possessed the most comprehensive collection of left-wing literature in the U.S. Lisa’s job was to pass information to the CIA about borrowing patterns. See Meiers, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? ↑
See also Meiers, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment; John Judge, “The Black Hole of Guyana: The Untold Story of the Jonestown Massacre,” (1985). ↑
Larry had been a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War and medical technician at Mendocino State Hospital. He was released in 2002 after serving 18 years in prison. He was the only person ever prosecuted for the monstrosities that occurred at Jonestown. Strong evidence suggests Layton’s innocence. Eyewitnesses said he could not have been the one to shoot Ryan. Before departing for Guyana, family members said Layton’s strange behavior included his having shown up at the family’s East Bay home one afternoon dressed in a full surgical gown and promptly dived into the backyard swimming pool. ↑
Tom Davis, “Interview with Mae Brussell On the Assassination of John Ono Lennon,” Candor, July 1, 1981. ↑
David Whelan, Mind Games: The Assassination of John Lennon (Ipswich: Orwell Books, 2023). See also Fenton Bresler, Who Killed John Lennon? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). ↑
Mae Brussell, “Operation Chaos: From Monterey Pop to Altamont—The CIA’s War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture,” November 1976. ↑
John L. Potash provides added evidence that would also lead to suspicion of the phenomenon Brussell is describing. See Potash, Drugs As a Weapon Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2015) and also Dave McGowan, Weird Stories Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops, and the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream (Headpress, 2014), Brussell thought that San Francisco’s liberal mayor George Moscone (1976-1978) and its first openly gay councilman, Harvey Milk, were assassinated in a “deep-state” plot that fueled the political rise of conservative Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who succeeded Moscone as mayor and then became a U.S. senator. Moscone, who was known as “the people’s mayor,” and Milk were killed by supposedly disgruntled employee Dan White, who displayed signs of having been subjected to hypnosis and programmed to kill. White was convicted, but given a ridiculously light sentence after arguing the so-called “Twinkie” defense—that he had been depressed, as was reflected by his binge-eating Twinkies. For further details on this, see Meiers, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment. ↑
Brussell, “Operation Chaos: From Monterey Pop to Altamont—The CIA’s War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture.” Some of Brussell’s ideas were confirmed in Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain’s book, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985). Brussell saw the March 1982 death of comedian John Belushi from an alleged drug overdose as another suspicious one. Mae Brussell, “The Murder of John Belushi,” in Constantine, ed., The Essential Mae Brussell. Brussell said that Belushi’s comedy became more and more political and anti-establishment before his death, which made him a threat to the Nazi-like U.S. power structure. Before he died, Belushi was about to make a satirical film about the War on Drugs and how corrupt it was. ↑
Davis, “Interview with Mae Brussell on the Assassination of John Ono Lennon”; Brussell, “Operation Chaos: From Monterey Pop to Altamont—The CIA’s War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture.” ↑
Brussell, “Operation Chaos: From Monterey Pop to Altamont—The War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture.” ↑
Davis, “Interview with Mae Brussell on the Assassination of John Ono Lennon;” Brussell, “The Murder of John Belushi,” in Constantine, ed., The Essential Mae Brussell. ↑
Halliburton is listed in the report too. Brussell would not have missed that connection when Dick Cheney left Halliburton to become vice president in 2000, or when the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 came down in a controlled demolition on September 11, 2001. ↑
For more on white collar crime committed by Trump and his political connections, see Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall (New York: Harpercollins, 1992). Incidentally, Brussell did not believe that William Casey died in May 1987 during the period from Iran-Contra hearings from a brain tumor, as was alleged. She remarked on how healthy Mr. Casey looked on television and in the courtroom just days before he suddenly was stricken. “This does not look like a man who is going to die of a brain tumor.” Yet he did die in less than a week, reportedly from brain cancer. In regard to Casey’s death Mae also said, “The CIA brags about the hundreds of ways they have to kill people. Frank Terpil said he could go down an airplane aisle and brush something on someone’s coat and within 3 days it seeps through … and there’s no trace of anything. Why have an old man bring down the institution – should he possibly break under final cross-examination. If you saw Casey walking down the hall and grinning, and talking, and giving interviews – and the next day he was going to testify. And he’s in his own building when he had those seizures – then he’s put into an ambulance and never seen again! The fact that he was never seen again, and the circumstances of his robustness of the day before his testimony … The man was not thinking or walking like a person with a brain tumor.” William Michael Iverson, “With Eyes Wide Open: Mae Brussell,” C Magazine, November 4, 1988. ↑
For more on Mitchell, see Winzola McLendon, Martha: The Life of Martha Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1979). ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “60 Years After JFK’s Death It Is More and More Apparent that Kennedy Was a Victim of a Palace Coup—Spearheaded by Vice-President Johnson,” CovertAction Magazine, November 22, 2023; Barr McClellan, Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K. (New York: Skyhorse, 2011). ↑
To her credit, on one radio program, Brussell admitted that Kennedy was not a saint. She went into his torrid sex life, and cited a book by Army intelligence officer Frank A. Capell that implicated Robert Kennedy in the murder of Marilyn Monroe, with whom he was having an affair. See an article I did on this topic here and Frank A. Capell, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe (Zarephath, New Jersey: Herald of Freedom, 1964). Brussell believed, probably correctly, that Robert and other Kennedys were blackmailed, which is why they did not pursue re-investigation into the JFK assassination. ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Liberal Savior as Conservative: John F. Kennedy’s Foreign Policy,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, 12, 2 (2024). Brussell touted Kennedy’s signing of a nuclear test ban treaty (officially the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963) with the Soviets; however, she ignored that it excluded underground explosions from the ban and that, afterwards, the U.S. launched an expanded underground testing program. Herbert Parmet and Seymour Hersh argued that Kennedy helped engineer the Cuban Missile Crisis on behalf of “deep-state” interests at a time of U.S. nuclear-weapon superiority over the Soviets so that the U.S. could sustain that superiority. The climate of fear about nuclear war engendered by the crisis presented an opportunity to pursue arms control treaties that favored U.S. interests because it then had a huge lead in the arms race. See Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: Doubleday, 1983); Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997). As for the issue of Kennedy and withdrawal, see Marc J. Selverstone, The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022). ↑
See John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2019). ↑
Kuzmarov, “The Liberal Savior as Conservative.” An admirer of James Bond, Kennedy staffed his administration with counter-insurgency enthusiasts. His Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, had previously headed the Rockefeller Foundation. Kennedy was also closely tied with diamond magnate Maurice Tempelsman—Jackie Kennedy’s future “companion”—who was intent on replacing European with American control over the mineral wealth of Africa and other regions of the world. Kennedy’s foreign policy helped advance this latter agenda under the guise of supporting decolonization. All this is not to suggest that Kennedy did not advance some progressive policies (i.e., attempt to end the oil depletion allowance) or that there were not far-right elements who saw Kennedy as too liberal and sought his removal. It underscores that the assassination was part of an inter-elite rivalry and that Kennedy was not as progressive or heroic as some of his admirers claim. ↑
Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer. ↑
Krassner, “The Mind of Mae Brussell.” ↑
Brussell was among those who believed that the CIA had given the cancer-inducing drug to Jack Ruby who died of cancer on January 3, 1967, at age 55. ↑
Iverson, “With Eyes Wide Open: Mae Brussell.” ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden(Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Alexis Baden-Mayer is a lawyer and activist who has worked in Washington, D.C., as the political director of a non-profit advocacy group since 2005.
Her Substack is Scamerican Century. Alexis can be reached at alexis@organicconsumers.org.
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