Galician Gang: Sgt. Pepper, Shirley Temple, Rolling Stones

In my last post I wrote about The Beatles’ Gurus and their unsavory connection with the British East India Company, Chicago’s “Kentucky Colony”, and Silicon Valley’s Technocracy. In this post I’m going provide the ‘text between the images’ of the Sgt Pepper cover with respect to its Shirley Temple and Rolling Stones imagery. That text is all about the Galician Gang.

I’ve covered Hollywood, organized crime and the Galician Gang extensively on this site, particularly their connections with Monroe, WI’s local movie biz stars: Leon Goetz, William Wesley Young, Edith May Leuenberger and mogul John Freuler. Right now, we are going to talk about another Hollywood phenomenon, Shirley Temple, because she appears on the Sgt. Pepper cover a whopping three times. More than even The Beatles. She is image (58), (71) and finally a cloth doll replica of her is draped over the chair on the far RHS, next to the “Diana Dors” waxwork. Dors (born Diana Mary Fluck) is the Marilyn Monroe look-alike in gold, image (70). No one appears on the cover more than Shirley Temple.

Full Sgt. Pepper album cover shoot.

Wikipedia map of the Sgt. Pepper cover with waxworks included.

Shirley Temple gets a triple-royal treatment from cover designers Jann Haworth and Peter Blake, who were husband and wife when they designed the album cover. The Shirley Temple doll on the RHS is actually an example of Haworth’s signature art, which she prefers to call “soft sculptures”. Haworth claims sexism is the reason she’s not better known for her work… John Stuart Mill also though women didn’t get a fair shake. :(

Jann Haworth and two of her dolls, circa 1965. Connections with Robert Fraser landed Blake and his wife the Beatles gig.

Yet, despite her feminism, Jann Haworth’s fame rests squarely on the commodification of women and her family story is one that has particular resonance with andreanolen.com. Jann’s father, Ted Haworth, was an Academy Award winning art director who got his foot in working with Alfred Hitchcock. (The Academy Awards were founded to whitewash Hollywood’s prostitution roots.) Because of him, Jann says she spent her childhood watching people like Marilyn Monroe perform. Her father’s father, William, was a playwright and Broadway producer, while her great uncle Joseph was a leading Shakespearean actor. (Remember ole David Belasco?) The Haworths all ended up living in Sundance, Utah and Salt Lake City, Mormon Capital of the World, is where Jann’s latest art has been installed.

From the BBC:”Jann Haworth in front of her mural, SLC Pepper, in Salt Lake City, Utah, 2004. An update of the Sgt. Pepper theme, she was careful to ensure gender balance of cultural figures.”

So how did Jann Haworth get the incredible Sgt. Pepper gig featuring her creepy Shirley Temple “soft sculpture”? According to an interview Jann gave to the BBC in 2004:

“We were standing in my studio when that idea came up [for the cover]. I suggested it. (Art dealer) Robert Fraser and Paul [McCartney] came out to the studio and they would have come on the Hammersmith flyover, and right past that was this little instal of succulents that made... I think at the time it was a clock. The idea of doing lettering like that, I just loved, so I suggested that as another form of lettering, besides the drum, that would keep the integrity of the cover.

“So it doesn’t matter whether that’s 20% of the cover or 50%... the authorship was definitely enhanced by Robert Fraser and Paul and their confirmation of the ideas that we put forward, but it wasn’t prefigured by Paul at all, despite his claims.”

Robert Fraser was one of the most blood-curdling men on the planet and I’ll tell you why in a minute. Right now, let’s focus on why Shirley Temple, who was retired from acting by the time Jann’s father was working on his Hitchcock movies, plays an outsized role in the imagination of feminist Haworth. I will remind readers that Galician gangsters controlled Hollywood per Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s mandate and that the sex trade always targets children because they can be pimped longer. These gangsters themselves had a penchant for youth, as evidenced by the Mishawum Manor underage prostitution badger-trap, which gave FDR his hand over them in the first place.

In 1988 Shirley Temple came out with an autobiography, which was the same year that the Franklin Scandal broke. What was the entertainment world like back then? “Uptown Records”, which launched P-Diddy’s operation, had started just two years before; Jeffery Epstein and Steven Hoffenberg had just come into the big “corporate raiding” bucks; and Harvey Weinstein was just starting his starlet-rape career. In this 1988 book, Temple made some very careful observations.

She noted that her first staring role, at the age of three, was that of a prostitute named Charmaine for a Baby Burlesks episode called War Babies.

Baby Burlesks was a short film serial where single episodes played before a main film feature, much like what I describe here in relation to pornographer John Freuler. It featured heavily sexualized toddlers in adult-themed ‘comic’ situations. Temple was recruited by Charles Lamount of “Educational Pictures” movie studio for this exploitative serial. What was working for “Educational Pictures” like? As summarized by cinemasters.net:

…Temple described the Baby Burlesks series as "a cynical exploitation of our childish innocence." She also explained that if any of the preschool age children misbehaved on set, they were locked in a windowless booth called the "punishment box" and be forced to sit on a solid block of ice for extended periods of time. Temple was sent to the "punishment box" several times but claimed it did "no lasting damage" to her psyche. Temple described these production sets having a very strong, present, "time is money" attitude. This led to her being forced to work while injured on multiple occasions, one time working a single day after a serious eardrum operation.

In 1988 Temple also described how at the age of twelve, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer producer Arthur Freed exposed himself to her. Temple giggled nervously at the old man, so he threw her out of his office. Arthur Freed was born in 1894 to a Jewish family in South Carolina and allegedly attended the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire before meeting Minne Marx, mother and manager of the Marx Brothers, and joining her Vaudeville troupe. Minne Marx, who immigrated from Germany, found fame in New York City when David Belasco ruled theater there.

Arthur Freed

Temple tells us that at 17 years old David O. Selznik of Selznik International Pictures tried to rape her but she managed to get away. Selznik ran R.K.O. pictures, a Kennedy family investment. Selznik’s family were Russian Jews who after WWI took over Kinograms, the likely Imperial German film propaganda outfit run by Col. William Selig. They could only do this with the blessing of the Roosevelt machine.

David O. Selznik.

Was Shirley Temple pimped as a child? If she was, she does not explicitly say so in her autobiography. As someone married to a Standford Research Institute executive and a State Department crony in her own right, she knew how to keep her mouth shut. Certainly current events show us pedophile kompromat rings were still a strong force in 1988.

What we can say is that her movies consistently have elements which appeal to pedophiles. Again, I reference cinemasters.com to elucidate the problem:

Despite her extraordinary level of success, you'd be hard pressed to find someone that can recall or actually name one of her movies, and that's for a reason. None of her films have aged well in the slightest. The overt sexualization of Hollywood's youngest starlet began the very moment she first appeared on camera… One particular scene in the feature film, Bright Eyes shows the toddler singing the song: "On The Good Ship Lollipop" in an uncomfortably short babydoll dress, being carried, held, and touched by an ensemble of around a dozen grown men. The 1936 film, Poor Little Rich Girl also has plenty of scenes of Temple being fondled by grown men, that entire film as a whole is a prime example of early-Hollywood pedophilia and how normalized it was in the industry.

With the arrival of Shirley Temple to the film industry, creeps from all across the globe could fulfill their sick, twisted fantasies from the comfort of the movie theater. And when these movies later came out on home media, the problem only became worse and more easily hidden.

(Pedophilia has been part of Hollywood a long time, I encourage readers to look at William Wesley Young’s 1913 movie biz partner, Willis Brown.)

Still from “The Good Ship Lollipop”.

Now I first saw these movies when I was a kid and I didn’t associate them with pedophilia. However, I remember my grandmother commenting that a dress so short wouldn’t be used now. I also remember thinking there was a lot of touching and petting. I was given the explanation “that was a simpler time”. I believe pedophilia was less talked about then. However, in my old age I appreciate that, for instance, an alcoholic might respond to a Bud ad differently than someone without that addiction. A pedophile watching Temple in the 1930s would definitely pick up on things I wouldn’t. Decide for yourself below. Freed saw something he liked.

Bearing the above in mind, remember that Shirley Temple appeared on the Sgt. Pepper cover three times. Placement of her image becomes extremely important. First, she appears over John Lennon’s shoulder. John Lennon is known to have had a problem hitting women. Apparently, he would lay next to his “bohemian” mother on her bed and touch her breasts, wondering if he should go further. Sexual abuse is common among sex trade families and usually the abuse comes from parents first, which may also explain why, out of so many bands, men like Brian Epstein and Allen Klein managed The Beatles.

Finally, the second and third images of Temple flank a British Marylin Monroe clone, Diana Dors. Dors’s husband, Dennis Hamilton, promoted her for sex film-comedies and risqué modelling, much like Flo Ziegfield and his ‘wife’ Anna Held fifty years prior. Dors came to show biz attention after modeling for UK Department of Defense magazine Soldier Magazine; and from there was recruited to drama school London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). At LAMDA she met people such as Peter Ustinov, whose father Klop Ustinov was a famously under-remunerated MI5 asset. Hamilton defrauded Dors, they divorced, and she spent the rest of her career on TV playing up the “sex goddess” image. So yeah, a childhood-aged Shirley Temple flanks her both sides.

While film is a powerful way of “animating an image”, a three dimensional working could also represent “bringing to life”, or ensouling with star-rays… whatever floats your boat.

Readers may notice that Haworth’s Temple “soft sculpture” is wearing a sweater. That sweater reads: “"Welcome The Rolling Stones (on chest) Good Guys (down arm-sleeve)". The image of Fraser/McCartney/Blake/Haworth’s ‘mnemosyne working’ makes a specific invocation to The Rolling Stones, a band that shares the Beatles’ spooky connections.

The Rolling Stones and Hermeticism

In the previous post I pointed out how the NSA can spy on whomever they fancy because of their partnership with GCHQ, which is based out of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, U.K. The history of The Rolling Stones also begins in Cheltenham, which has been a retirement community for British spooks, military brass and colonials from the early 1900s until at least the 1990s when I lived there.

In 1942 a boy was born in Cheltenham to a well-off musical family. The boy was named Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones. The Jones’ hailed from Wales but moved to the spa town to further Brian’s father’s career as an aeronautical engineer.

From the age of 16 onward, Brian Jones had a habit of impregnating very young girls and then eschewing all personal responsibility for the resulting babies. (He would have six illegitimate children this way.) Brian Jones’ reputation in Cheltenham was so bad that when the local Arts college heard about it, they withdrew a scholarship which had been awarded to him. My point is that Brian disgraced himself publicly and repeatedly in front of the grandfathers of Britain’s intelligence establishment.

That’s not to say everything about Brian’s rep was bad: people knew his dad moonlighted as a church organist and that Brian was musically gifted. In fact, the heights from which Brian fell probably increased his disgrace. Jones was clearly a young man with an unusual psychological profile, he may even have been described as ‘narcissistic‘.

“Monty, I think we’ve found our boy.”

By 1962 Brian had established himself as both a cad and blues musician in Cheltenham, and it wasn’t long before he was invited to play as a guest with Alexis Korner’s “Blues Incorporated” band in London. Korner was a U.K. transplant by way of Paris, Switzerland, and North Africa; his cosmopolitan parents moved to London in 1940, just in time for the war effort. Alexis Korner has been dubbed ‘a father of British Blues’.

During Jones’ guest appearance with Blues Incorporated, Brian was introduced to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards by Korner, who took special interest in Jagger and Richards even though at that time neither had played music outside their parents’ living rooms. [See 27: Brian Jones, by Chris Salewicz.] As a recap, Korner brought in a troubled guitar player all the way from Cheltenham for a short-term gig where he could meet two teenagers with no professional musical experience. A ‘father of British Blues’ must have a lot of free time!

Alexis Korner by Chris Walter.

This is what rock historian Seth Rogovoy writes about Korner in Forward magazine:

Like many early British rock bands, The Rolling Stones started out playing American blues. Most of the members of the Stones served their apprenticeship in Blues Incorporated, a band led by blues guitarist Alexis Korner, who was born in Paris to an Austrian Jewish father and a Turkish-Greek mother. Stones founding guitarist Brian Jones, drummer Charlie Watts, and keyboardist Ian Stewart all played with Blues Incorporated, and vocalist Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards jammed with the group on a number of occasions, before the five joined forces and formed The Rolling Stones.

In fact, Korner’s influence went well beyond the Stones and as Rolling Stone magazine states, Korner “virtually gave birth to an entire generation of superstars and cult heroes” which included Rod Stewart, John Mayall and Jimmy Page (as in Aleister Crowley). A sort of Frank Zappa for the Brits, Korner helped launch Led Zeppelin and Cream. Not long after introducing all the Stones, Korner embarked on a television career with ITV, the television channel launched by the British government in 1955. The Rolling Stones would take up gigs that Blues Incorporated cancelled due to Korner’s budding broadcasting career– a career which made him a brahmin of the British music scene.

Yet, rock’n’roll sensations are not formed on musical talent alone…

In mid-1963 a promoter named Andrew Loog Oldham read about The Rolling Stones in a newspaper and jockeyed to become their manager– so goes the story. Oldham was the illegitimate son of Celia Oldham and American Andrew Loog, a member of the 332nd Bombardier Squadron who was shot down before he ever saw his son. When Andrew was still a child, Celia, to whom “image was everything“, remarried a man named Alec Morris. Morris had high-level connections with the US mob and intelligence community via James Angleton.

It was probably Morris’s connections that hooked the teenaged Andrew Loog Oldham up with a series of high-profile jobs which culminated in Andrew managing The Rolling Stones in his early twenties. These glamorous jobs included: personal assistant to fashion designer Mary Quant; protegé to Beatles magician Brian Epstein; and protegé to music-biz-murderer Phil Spector.

So who was Alec Morris? To hear Andrew Loog Oldham tell it, Morris was a well-to-do furniture maker from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ who switched to producing munitions boxes during WWII and ended up driving a Rolls Royce and owning an investment company. Morris’s fantastic business success happened at a time when most of Britain was malnourished and struggling to say warm. How’d Alec do it?

Andrew Loog Oldham offers one clue: in 1915 Alec Morris “smuggled himself aboard” a troop transport ship destined for New York City, where for a few years Morris taught dance classes alongside George Raft, the mafia figure. What Andrew Loog Oldham fails to mention is that George Raft wasn’t just any up-and-coming mafioso– Raft was a friend of Bugsy Siegel and Hollywood heavyweight Johnny Rosselli; Raft became a partner in the Mafia-run Las Vegas casino The Sands; and then a front man (perhaps even a bit more) for OSS mobster Meyer Lansky’s gambling operations in Cuba and London. (Lansky was the “Mob’s Accountant”.)

How’d Morris get plugged into Raft and his ilk? Because he had contacts with the Galician Gang. Raft’s hustle according to his TMC.com profile:

Raft worked as a “paid dancer” (a male escort for female patrons) in several clubs, including the Roseland Ballroom, where his dancing shoes were on display at the time of his death in 1980. He was the partner of Elsie Pilcer on the Keith and Orpheum vaudeville circuits, and was on the bill with the famous nightclub hostess Texas Guinan at her club, the El Fey speakeasy, where Fred Astaire [Sgt Pepper image 9] and George Gershwin would come to watch him dance. Astaire recalled going there “several times to see George [Raft] dance. He was a sensation in those days…the main attraction…George did the fastest and most exciting Charleston I ever saw. I thought he was an extraordinary dancer.”

To be a male “paid dancer” meant one was a pimp in the dance-hall bordello scene that was a specialty of the Galician Gang. Such operations get acute attention from author Julius Kemény in his book “Hungara: ungarische mädchen auf dem Markte”(1903) [Hungara: The Market for Hungarian Girls], which documents how the Galician Gang worked in Austria-Hungary. The same business model was simply transplanted to the United States. I remind readers that Austro-Hungarian police identified traveling musical acts as a primary vector for White slaving.

George Raft’s, and by extension Alec Morris’s, connections in post-WWII American organized crime really couldn’t get any better. After Raft had made his contacts dancing in NYC, he found himself well-placed for a Hollywood career: mobsters from New York like Harry Cohn and mobsters from Chicago like Johnny Rosselli had Hollywood under their thumb, as Gus Russo writes in his book The Outfit:

Johnny Rosselli became the movie honchos’ bookmaker and personal adviser… As bookie to the studio heads, Johnny would glean information vital to the Outfit’s [Chicago mob’s] movieland aspirations. By either threatening to expose hidden skeletons or to call their vigorish, Rosselli was able to acquire silent partnerships for the Outfit in many Hollywood careers. It is believed that in this way the hoods “sponsored” actors such as George Raft, Chico Marx, Jimmy Durante, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe [Sgt Pepper image 25].

“Handsome Johnny” Rosselli: Chicago organized crime figures like Rosselli were heir to the “machine” set up by Lincoln’s Counterfeiters.

Johnny Rosselli as well as Raft’s patron Bugsy Siegel were both CIA collaborators, as Russo writes:

It seems that some senior CIA officers who had met Johnny Rosselli at a Maheu clambake the previous spring and were so taken with the Outfit’s emissary that, when word come to the Agency that Castro was to be removed, the officers immediately thought of “Uncle Johnny.” It is not known if Rosselli had spoken to the CIA boys at the clambake as he had to actor George Raft a year earlier in a Los Angeles bar. When Raft had mentioned that he had just returned from Cuba, where Castro was threatening to take over, Rosselli had bragged, “You give me a couple of guys with machine guns, we could go down there and take over the whole island.”

These mafia-intelligence ties were years in the making. Russo describes how Raft was close to Bugsy Siegel, who in turn reported to Meyer Lansky and Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Lansky and Luciano worked for the OSS during WWII:

 [Mario] Brod had been a liaison between the Central Intelligence Agency and the New York crime bosses since World War II, when the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), had kicked off the U.S. government’s long, mutually beneficial relationship with the underworld. The partnership had its known origins in 1942, when the OSS enlisted Meyer Lansky and the imprisoned Charles “Lucky” Luciano in its effort to deter wartime sabotage in the New York harbor. The government also utilized Luciano’s Italian contacts to gain intelligence in anticipation of the invasion of Sicily. For his efforts, detailed in Rodney Campbell’s book The Luciano Project, Lucky Luciano was allowed to leave prison in exchange for permanent exile in Italy. At the time, Brod was an OSS captain in Italy under future CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. [Emphasis added]

James Angleton used Luciano’s mob connections to help OSS’ers wrest control of Italy. To better explain this OSS/Mafia partnership, we need to look at what James Angleton was doing for FDR/Churchill’s spying outfit in Italy.

LHS to RHS: An unidentified man, James Jesus Angleton and a license plate, courtesy of The Israeli Intelligence and Heritage Commemoration Center.

The British trained Angleton for his OSS counterintelligence work in Italy and he was transferred to Rome 1944. While in Rome, Angleton was tasked with political purges and placing propaganda in the compliant Italian press. [See: Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer; Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior]. At the same time, Angleton made connections with people who would eventually form Israel’s Mossad. In Richard Bennett’s 2013 book Espionage: Spies and Secrets, he writes this about Angleton:

Angleton began his career in espionage in the wartime OSS. During his time in Italy both before and after the end of the war, Angleton developed a deep relationship with the leaders of the Jewish underground, who later became senior officers in Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. Because of these ties, he entered the CIA with the clear understanding that he would head the Israeli desk.

Angleton’s Italian/Israeli connections were set up under the watchful eyes of the British. This makes Alec Morris all the more interesting, because Andrew Loog Oldham tells us that Morris made at least one business trip to Italy in 1948– the year Angleton was officially hired by the CIA as the top aide to the director of the Office of Special Operations. On this Italian business trip Morris avoided death by grabbing a woman and jumping from a plane, there were no other survivors. [from Stoned, by Andrew Loog Oldham]

James Angleton had a long history in Italy because his father managed National Cash Register’s business there. (NCR became IBM and was the source of the Angleton family wealth.) As a teen in Italy Angleton befriended a Wisconsinite named Ezra Pound. As the grizzled head of CIA counterintelligence, he would take fly-fishing vacations in the north of our state. Thank you, thehuntfortomclancy.

Angleton must have made good “Jewish underground” connections because in 1951, the year Celia Oldham introduced her boyfriend Morris to her son Andrew, Angleton was given control of the Israeli Desk, the CIA’s formal information-sharing arrangement with the new Middle Eastern state. This is how Tom Mangold describes Angleton’s prize:

Angleton’s ties with the Israelis gave him considerable prestige within the CIA and later added significantly to his expanding counterintelligence empire.

My understanding is that to control both the counterintelligence function and a regional desk is not normal for the CIA (or any intelligence outfit) so Angleton’s position was unique. While Angleton’s strategy of partnering with organized crime was (and is) unethical, it was hardly unique for intelligence outfits. Both the Romanovs and the Hapsburgs partnered with the Galician Gang for Pinkerton-like political police work. Criminal Allen Pinkerton and his “railway detective” crew were crucial for protecting Lincoln’s counterfeiters in Chicago, later they became Lincoln’s wartime intelligence operatives. [Read all about it in my book!] Angleton’s “Jewish underground”/Mossad connections were common spycraft by 1947.

The Israeli connection between The Beatles and their investors makes sense in light of British espionage overtures to the “Jewish underground” in Italy. In 1966 Oldham surrendered The Stone’s accounting to Allen Klein, who would shortly be handling the Beatles money for Robert Maxwell’s business partners too. From Rogovoy in Forward, 2014, “The Secret Jewish history of The Rolling Stones”:

In 1966, Oldham turned over management of the Rolling Stones to a Jewish accountant from New York named Allen Klein. Klein scored the group a monumentally profitable record deal when their contract with Decca Records came due for renegotiation. The deal was much more lucrative than the one Brian Epstein had negotiated for the Beatles, and after Epstein died in 1967, the Beatles turned to Klein in the hopes that he could do for them what he had done for the Stones.

L-R: Allen Klein, George, Ravi. (Photo: Leonard Detrick/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

AnalogPlanet: “How to describe the notorious music industry figure Allen Klein, the one-time manager of both the Beatles and Rolling Stones? One lawyer working with Klein called him “the devil incarnate.” Paul McCartney called him a “trained New York crook,” and that acutely cool figure, Mick Jagger, once had to be restrained from attacking Klein at a business meeting.”

At this point I’d like to draw a parallel between the careers of George Raft and Andrew Loog Oldham. In 1959, Castro pulled Lansky’s (and Raft’s!) Cuban gambling ticket, prompting the mobster to look for somewhere else to set up casinos. Lansky chose London– Raft’s old friend Alec Morris’s haunt– and set up shop there in the early 1960s with The Colony Sports Club. Andrew Loog Oldham began his string of fantastic, high-profile jobs in the early 1960s too– the most fabulous of which was managing the Stones, which started in 1963.

Dino Cellini outside George Raft and Meyer Lansky’s London gambling den, The Colony Sports Club. The Colony’s rise and fall had a strange synchronicity with Andrew Loog Oldham’s career.

Those good times ended sometime before March 2nd 1967 when the lucrative London gambling scene fell apart for Lansky and Raft. In a deft move by British authorities, Raft was denied reentry into the U.K. due to his unsavory business connections. Consequently, the Colony Sports Club shut down. (See Colin Fry’s The Krays.)

February 1967 was also the end of Andrew Loog Oldham’s career in Britain. In early February a strange American with multiple passports visited the Rolling Stones at their rural Redlands mansion; dropped off some new drugs from California; and disappeared just before police raided the Stones and made them media martyrs. (Rolling with the Stones, Bill Wyman.)

Robert Fraser was in the police car that hauled The Stones away. Subsequent press in The News of the World (owned by the Carr family) and The Times (owned by the intelligence-heavy Astor family) made the Rolling Stones into a riot-inducing force in Britain, then globally. Welcome The Rolling Stones Good Guys!

The iconic photograph of Fraser handcuffed to Jagger prior to their trial for drug possession, which Sanchez says catapulted the Stones to “martyrs” and “heroes”.

According to The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Andrew Loog Oldham fled Britain, just like the mysterious American, in order to avoid police charges in relation to the drugs. Oldham found temporary work with in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon music scene: “Oldham decamped to California, where he helped Lou Adler (of “Rocky Horror Picture Show” fame) and John Phillips (Mamas & the Papas) with Monterey Pop, suggesting they book Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who.” Despite this, Oldham’s brilliant career was over.

Although Oldham was discarded, his tenure at the Stones had laid the foundation for their image and cultural message. This is how Seth Rogovoy describes Andrew Loog Oldham’s contribution to the Stones:

Building on the lessons he learned as a protégé of Brian Epstein — the Jewish owner of a record store in Liverpool, who turned that city’s most popular bar band into the international sensation known as The Beatles — Andrew Loog Oldham, also Jewish, soon took over management of The Rolling Stones, reshaped their image, and steered them toward a broader musical palette.

For one, he turned them into the anti-Beatles, giving them a more “dangerous” and rebellious image — longer and unkempt hair, and an overt sense of sexuality and violence. Oldham enlisted the services of photographer Gered Mankowitz — the son of English Jewish screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz — who was responsible for the band’s early album covers and publicity shots. Mankowitz was as responsible as Oldham was for creating the Stones’s bad-boy image, and he was the official tour photographer on the band’s first United States tour in 1965.

Yes, Andrew Loog Oldham’s phenomenal success dried up at the same time as the money stream from George Raft’s gambling business. However, The Rolling Stones were formed in 1962– the same year that the MI6/CIA ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ was ‘outed’ by Soviet-backed press. By 1967 it was clear that the Stones were shaping up to be a valuable mouthpiece in the ‘cultural Cold War’– they were useful promoting non-Communist left politics. It was time to ditch low-rent mafia baggage anyhow. Welcome The Rolling Stones Good Guys!

With greasy young Oldham out of the way; the necessary Galician Gang accounting connections cemented; and the ‘ideas map’ for The Stones established, we witness the hand of Robert Fraser. Fraser is the blood-curdling man I warned readers of at the beginning of this post. He’s also the guy Jann Haworth credits with developing ‘her idea’ for the Sgt. Pepper album cover.

Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser is the Mephistopheles behind both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He is the ideas man. The man who introduces everybody. It was Fraser who introduced Kenneth Anger, Marianne Faithful and (probably) Anita Pallenberg to the Stones; just as Fraser introduced Paul McCartney to the Beatles; and Japanese banking heiress Yoko Ono to John Lennon. (Fraser introduced Brian Jones and Keith Richards to cocaine, too.) Fraser’s mafia dogsbody “Spanish Tony” Sanchez got everyone their drugs and made police problems go away. Fraser was at the heart of the epic Beatles/Rolling Stones marketing battle in the late Sixties and was instrumental in making the political furor around the Stones happen. Who was Robert Fraser?

Robert Fraser was a former military officer and “art dealer” gatekeeper to London’s music/trust-fund crowd. Fraser had served in the King’s African Rifles during its suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. Britain’s success in quashing the revolt is largely credited to ‘pioneering’ use of psychological warfare: using complete control of information services to spread disinformation and surreptitiously break insurgents’ resolve.

Robert Fraser during his glory days in the Swinging Sixties… right after the Mau Mau operation.

The KAR used control of the media to influence the Kenyan public against the Mau Mau rebels, giving Fraser a set of skills that would have been useful shepherding The Times’ and The News of the World’s coverage of the Rolling Stones’ drug-bust in 1967.

I couldn’t find exact dates for Fraser’s KAR adventures; the Mau Mau rebellion spanned 1952-60. In his autobiography Life, Keith Richard says this about Fraser:

Captain Fraser, who’d had a commission in the Kings’ African Rifles, the strong arm of colonial authority in East Africa, was posted in Uganda, where Idi Amin was his sergeant.

Idi Amin, the notorious Ugandan dictator, served with the KAF in Uganda and Kenya, where he fought the Mau Mau for the British.

Fraser’s art world street cred comes from 1) his father, Lionel, a wealthy investment banker who was a Tate Gallery director, and 2) working with M. Knoedler & Co., an ancient NYC art dealership and hub of an international network that fenced stolen art to Robber Barons and their subsequent imitators (sometimes on behalf of the Soviet Government).

Evening Standard (London), January 24, 1962.

Robert's father, Lionel Fraser, was the son of Kentucky Colony lieutenant Harry Gordon Selfridge’s butler. Lionel worked in Naval Intelligence during WWI and shortly thereafter joined Helbert, Wagg & Co., of which he eventually became chairman. What was Herbert, Wagg? An unorthodox investor stock brokerage:

Helbert, Wagg & Co. was formed in 1848 by two London stockbrokers, John Helbert (1785-1861) and his nephew John Wagg (1793-1878). The two men, from families originating in Germany, were members of London's Jewish community, and John Helbert's wife, Adeline Cohen, was the sister of Hannah, wife of Nathan Rothschild. Helbert, Wagg & Co.'s principal client was the firm of N.M. Rothschild & Sons…

In the 1920s the firm began offering investment management services, launching four investment trusts during the interwar years. It also engaged in foreign exchange dealing – run by Lionel Fraser and George Bolton - and international securities arbitrage. In addition, the firm made large bond issues for European governments and public authorities, and provided corporate finance services for British manufacturing companies and financial trusts.

In 1946 Lionel Fraser became deputy chair, replacing Alfred Wagg as chair in 1954. In the post-war years the firm took on pension fund management, and also developed expertise in mergers and acquisitions. The new executive team included Gordon Gunson, James O'Brien, Alan Russell, Michael Verey and Charles Villiers.

In 1960 the firm merged with Schroders Limited, the two firms becoming fully integrated in the operating company J. Henry Schroder Wagg & Co. Ltd in 1962.

I write a lot about these WWI financial machinations with respect to Otto Kahn, the Warburgs and the Rothschilds. You can read about the political machinations of their American partners in Lincoln’s Counterfeiters, out October 2025.

By WWII Lionel Fraser was a currency advisor to the U.K. Treasury. He became director of important London transport conglomerates Thomas Tilling (buses), Tube Investments (as in ‘the Tube’); as well as of military aerospace giant Babcock. So that’s “Groovy Bob’s” dad. What about his American art employer M. Knoedler & Co.?

Fraser worked within M. Knoedler & Co,’s art-dealing network as a London node. In 1971 the flagship M. Knoedler & Co. was sold to Armand Hammer. In this network-node capacity Fraser promoted the work of of Jean Dubuffet, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Brian Clarke, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. The Hammers controlled the Knoedler gallery until its disgraced closure in 2011, when president Ann Freedman took the fall for selling Chinese fakes purporting to be from prominent Abstract Expressionist artists like Rothko and Pollock (artists who knew a thing or two about the CIA themselves….)

Fraser met Marianne Faithfull through her then-husband’s (John Dunbar) “Indica” art gallery, where Fraser would host parties. John Dunbar was the son of Robert Dunbar, British film wunderkind and another Alfred Hitchcock employee, but one who joined the Ministry for Information and from late 1944 served four years as cultural attaché in Moscow. John Dunbar married Marianne Faithfull having met her in spy-soaked Cambridge University.

Alchetron.com: Indica Gallery was a counterculture art gallery in Mason's Yard (off Duke Street), St. James's, London, England during the late 1960s, in the basement of the Indica Bookshop co-owned by John Dunbar, Peter Asher and Barry Miles. It was supported by Paul McCartney and hosted a show of Yoko Ono's work in November 1966 at which Ono first met John Lennon.

Marianne Faithfull is a gal with intelligence connections. Her dad was a spook for the British who collaborated with Marianne’s mother’s family, a mixed Jewish/Austrian family, who lived (freely) in Berlin during WWII and helped socialist partisans during the war. Marianne’s mother was a dancer during the Weimar period for the Ringstrasse-adored Max Reinhardt Company— one of those firms that moved theater acts across international borders.

Marianne's father, Robert, was born in Suffolk in 1912. Robert, whilst stationed in Vienna with the British Army, married Eva Von Sacher-Masoch in 1946 and they had their only child, Marianne in early 1947. Robert's role involved espionage which had brought him into contact with the Von Sacher-Masoch family. The couple lived together at Braziers Park, Oxfordshire before separating in 1952. TheGeneologist.co.uk

Marianne Faithfull’s mom should make Freud-aficionados’ jaws drop, because she’s the grand-niece of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs— the dude we get the term “sado-masochist” from. Small world, no?

Marianne and her mom. Her dads family were journalists and missionaries.

Fraser was a man on the inside, so to speak. This is how ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez, who talks about the Rolling Stones in his autobiography, describes his boss:

He [Fraser] was a charming man, and he began to build a large circle of friends among the rock stars who were fast becoming a kind of aristocracy. They trusted his advice when he talked about fine art investments for their new wealth, and they found his combination of culture and hip vitality enormously stimulating.

In 1966 Marianne Faithful left Dunbar to service Mick Jagger, who was living with Fraser at times. Another girl Fraser (probably) introduced to Jagger and his crew was Anita Pallenberg. Pallenberg serviced Brian Jones and then Keith Richard. What do we know about Anita Pallenberg?

During her life, Pallenberg was very quiet about her ancestry. Now it appears she was the daughter of Arnold "Arnaldo" Pallenberg, a German-Italian sales agent, amateur singer, and hobbyist painter, and Paula Wiederhold, a German embassy secretary, but this information is shaky. Her only known employer prior to shacking up with Jones was “The Living Theater” satellite in Rome. The Living Theater was founded in NYC in 1947. (Sanchez, Up and Down with the Rolling Stones).

Hold two contradictory ideas at once: Pallenberg encouraged Brian Jones to present contradictory images of himself and exploit symbols, a form of magick that fascinated Aleister Crowley. This photograph, which was sent to the press, is one example. (Also, note more dolls a.k.a. the exploited.) Buying an expensive car formerly owned by a Nazi official was another one of her publicity stunts. mouthfullofpennies

The Living Theater received funding from a CIA front, a ‘philanthropic foundation’ called the Farfield Foundation. It seems that the only thing we know about Anita’s working past is that it was paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency. In Frances Stonor Saunders’ words:

It was now reasoned that if the Farfield Foundation were to disburse funds to American– as well as international– projects, then the CIA’s interest, thus sandwiched, would become less conspicuous. ‘The Farfield was engaged in other activities because it needed to cover for the foundation, in case anyone enquired what it was doing,’ explained Diana Josselson. The Farfield report for the period 1 January 1960 to 31 December 1963 lists some of the hundreds of grants made for that period. Recipients included the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Modern Language Association, the Dancers’ Workshop, the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, Italy (contributions towards general expenses and the participation of American students, and for the expenses of the poet Ted Hughes), the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theater Arts, the Living Theater of New York, the New York Pro Musica, the Association of Literary Magazines of America, Partisan Review (‘a grant for expenses’), and the International Institute in Madrid (a grant to preserve the personal libraries of Lorca Ortega and Fernando Almalgro). (Saunders, The Cultural Cold War)

In fact, Anita probably met Groovy Bob through The Living Theater. From Keith Richards’ Life, page 221:

“Anita [Pallenberg] and I went to Rome that spring and summer [1967], between the bust and the trials, where Anita played in Barbarella, with Jane Fonda, directed by Jane’s husband Roger Vadim. Anita’s Roman world centered around the Living Theatre, the famous anarchist-pacifist troupe run by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, which had been around for years but was coming into its own in this period of activism and street demos. The Living Theatre was particularly insane, hard-core, its players often getting arrested on indecency charges—they had a play [“Paradise Now”] in which they recited lists of social taboos at the audience, for which they usually got a night in the slammer. Their main actor, a handsome black man named Rufus Collins, was a friend of Robert Fraser, and they were a part of the Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga connection. And so it all went round in a little avant-garde elite, as often as not drawn together by a taste for drugs, of which the LT was a center. And drugs were not copious in those days. The Living Theatre was intense, but it had glamour. There were all those beautiful people attached, like Donyale Luna, who was the first famous black model in America, and Nico and all those girls who were hovering around. Donyale Luna was with one of the guys from the theater. Talk about a tiger, a leopard, one of the most sinuous chicks I’ve ever seen. Not that I tried or anything. She obviously had her own agenda. And all backlit by the beauty of Rome, which gave it an added intensity…”

“Anita Pallenberg as The Black Queen/The Great Tyrant in Roger Vadim’s cult-classic sci-fi film of 1968, Barbarella.” mouthfullofpennies

Barbarella was representative of The Living Theater offerings too, which stressed interracial sex in particular. Performers were often arrested for indecency.

The Living Theater was not Pallenberg’s only CIA connection. She also appeared in Playboy magazine, as one of their 1962 “Girls of Rome”, one of only two fully clothed.

Pallenberg’s February 1962 Playboy photograph, as part of “Girls of Rome” photospread. She was 18 years old.

The cover of Anita Pallenberg’s Playboy.

In Alfred McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin (1991), he mentions how Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s name came up during an IRS investigation into a CIA front bank:

In 1973 agents of the Internal Revenue Service were able to photograph the Castle Bank’s customer list while a bank executive dined in a posh Key Biscayne restaurant with a woman described as an IRS “informant”. Reviewing the purloined documents, IRS investigators found that the 308 Castle Bank customers on the list had moved $250 million to foreign numbered accounts. Depositors included Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, Penthouse magazine publisher Robert Guccione, and some major organized crime figures– Morris Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, and Samuel A. Tucker. Elated by the find, investigators formed Project Haven to make “the single biggest tax-evasion strike in IRS history.” Suddenly, the IRS announced that it was dropping the investigation because of “legal problems.” According to a later investigation by the Wall Street Journal, “pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency… caused the Justice Department to drop what could have been the biggest tax evasion case of all time.” The CIA invoked “national security” since it was using the Castle Bank “for the funding of clandestine operations against Cuba and for other covert intelligence operations directed at countries in Latin American and the Far East.”

The troika of mobsters listed above were originally from the East Coast but got in on Las Vegas’s gambling scene early. Morris ‘Moe’ Dalitz went into business with Meyer Lanksy to build the iconic Las Vegas Stardust casino; both Lansky and Dalitz had interests in Cuban casinos. These are James Angleton’s connections; Pallenberg had CIA written all over her.

The “stimulation” provided by Fraser hit Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show level in 1968. With Allen Klein ensconced as their investment manager and surrounded by spooky girlfriends, Fraser introduced The Stones to Kenneth Anger. Anger was an American devotee of Aleister Crowley, image (2) on the Sgt. Pepper album cover, right next to kindred spirit Sri Yukteswar Giri.

Aleister Crowley is the man with intense eyes next to fellow Hermeticist Sri Yukteswar Giri,

Anger was a homosexual cult leader who used psychological control techniques that his idol, Crowley, developed in the 1890s— the same time that the Beatles’ BEIC-derived Vivekananda and Yukteswar “gurus” were being promoted by the Kentucky Colony.

Crowley studied psychological control techniques described in Hermetic works and he repackaged as “Thelema”. If you’d like to know more about this ugly subject, particularly exploitation of homosexuality and child abuse, see this examination of Plato’s Symposium.

Crowley was drawn to the “system of control” devised by Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt. (Weishaupt would, for example, get sexual confessions then use them as blackmail.) With Thelema, Crowley paired Weishaupt’s system with Edward Kelley’s tactics for exploiting the power of belief. Here’s a quote from Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control by E. Michael Jones, on Weishaupt’s Illuminati system:

The significance of the Illuminati lay not in its political effectiveness (it existed a little more than eight years), but rather in its method of internal organization. In borrowing freely from both the Jesuits and the Freemasons, [Adam] Weishaupt created an extremely subtle system of control based on manipulation of the passions. Borrowing the idea of examination of conscience from the Jesuits and sacramental confession from the Catholic Church to which the Jesuits belonged, Weishaupt created a system of “Seelenspionage” that would allow him to control his adepts without their knowing that they were being controlled…

Weishaupt had not just issued a manifesto calling for revolution, he had created a system of control that would create disciplined cells which would do the bidding of their revolutionary masters often, it seemed, without the slightest inkling that they were being ordered to do so…

Edward Kelley is famous for manipulating Dr. John Dee (1527-1609). Kelley claimed to be able to talk to spirits. Dee was part of Queen Elizabeth I’s espionage network and is credited with smuggling crucial navigation instruments out of Belgium which helped Her Majesty’s Navy remedy their ‘technology gap’. As Dee got older, he became more interested in Kabbalah and ‘controlling spirits’ through magical means, thereby falling in to Kelley’s trap. Dee gave his library, his wife, and his fortune to Kelley in exchange for Kelley’s cooperation in ‘talking with angels’ and uncovering magical secrets (and power). The product of this slow fleecing was a book titled Monas Hieroglyphica which is interpreted as a guide to “Enochian Magic”– the process of invoking and controlling spirits. A straightforward rebranding of old-school hermeticism.

Crowley implemented his system at his Italian “Thelema Abbey” in Cefalù. There, Crowley would use social pressure techniques: perverted sex (fear, shame); isolation (from family, information control); and drug abuse to destabilize followers and keep them under his control. In this way Crowley’s Abbey anticipated the more sensational MK ULTRA research, as well as sophisticated “social influence” techniques. In the 1980s Washington D.C. ‘mind control’ psychologist Philip Zimbardo studied these “social influence” techniques for the Office of Naval Research. A summary of this study was published as “On Resisting Social Influence” in Cultic Studies Journal, 1984, Volume 1, Number 2.

One of the “nightmare” paintings in the Crowley’s Thelema Abbey, where acolytes were meant to be desensitized to degrading and traumatizing sex acts.

While Crowley had a shockingly sophisticated understanding of mind-control techniques, he hadn’t quite figured out who were the best targets for recruitment. Crowley had a lot of disillusioned followers and by the time of his death only Jack Parson’s Los Angeles Thelema chapter was still on good terms with “The Beast”. Personality profiling— particularly John Gittinger’s work identifying narcissistic traits (often a trauma response)— became a cornerstone of CIA psychological research in the 1950-70s.

Crowley’s intelligence community connections were not well hidden, for an introduction see Richard Spence’s Secret Agent 666. Kenneth Anger, who had intel connections of his own, was particularly interested in the system Crowley developed at Cefalù.

Matthew Stone’s 2010 portrait of Kenneth Anger, an homage to Anger’s role in 1960s London. Thank you, matthewstone.co.uk.

Girlfriends Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithful quickly latched on to Anger’s magical workings and became acolytes along the lines of Marjorie Cameron. Anger achieved intellectual isolation, or what mind control psychology pundit Philip Zimbardo terms ‘saturation and detachment’ by enlisting Pallenberg and Faithfull to influence Jagger and Richards:

[Keith] Richards was saddled with his paranoiac drug addict girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg. Anger played on her uncertain place in the Stones contingent and her coke-induced phobias. Pallenberg could be pretty dominant but could also be on the next plane out ant any minute, just a bad memory of excess herself. She needed Anger and his help. [Landis, Anger]

With Faithfull and Pallenberg firmly in his camp, Anger built up his image as Crowley’s ‘magickal’ heir by performing miracles, e.g. attending a party at Indica Gallery via the astral plane (the punch was spiked) and weird witchy rituals on the lawn outside Jagger’s estate. If somebody did something Anger didn’t like, he would put a magickal ‘curse’ on them and consequently believers ran scared of offending Kenneth. The legend of these ‘magickal’ workings and curses was then embellished by Anger’s buddies in the press. This cemented Anger’s influence on the band and gave him a platform for wider proselytizing.

Kenneth Anger outside Aleister Crowley’s Thelema Abbey in Cefalù in 1955. Anger is promoting Crowley’s famous magick philosophy “Do What Thou Wilt.”

Who was Ken Anger and why did Robert Fraser bring him into The Stones’ loop in 1968?

The uncomfortable fact is that during the period 1947-1968, Kenneth Anger was everywhere the CIA was. In the early fifties, Anger courted the CIA-funded Jean Cocteau in Paris while Cocteau frontlined for the CIA’s ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’. In the mid Fifties, Anger investigated/promoted Crowley’s Cefalù sex cult with Alfred Kinsey, just as the CIA was reviving Crowley’s ‘system of control’ research through MK ULTRA. In the mid-to-late 1960s, Anger pushed LSD use and exploited San Fransisco’s demimonde just like MK ULTRA’s George White had for his spy research.

Gay Pornography and Ken Anger

Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer) first ‘got noticed’ as an underground film creator with his homoerotic short ‘Fireworks’ (1947), in which an Anger-like character turns tricks, then finally gets beat up/raped by a bunch of burly sailors. ‘Fireworks’ is widely recognized as the film which opened up gay pornography to a more main-stream audience.

What interests me about Anger’s film was that it caught the eye of Amos Vogel (born Vogelbaum), a NYC transplant whose family left Austria after the Anschluss. In October 1947, one month after the CIA was founded, Vogel started “Cinema 16”, an ‘underground’ film distribution network. Vogel contacted Anger about ‘Fireworks’, according to Anger’s biographer Landis, and ‘Fireworks’ was among the first films promoted by Cinema 16.

‘Catching the eye of Cinema 16′ appears to have launched Anger’s career: it sent him to Europe; got him a Ford Foundation grant; and gave him street cred in San Fransisco during the later 1960s. Cinema 16 also gave him important contacts– in 1962, while living in NYC, Anger was housed by an old friend from Cinema 16, Marie Menken, who was then working for CIA-front TIME magazine “in the cable room taking communications from overseas”, says Landis. More on her later.

Cinema 16 played ‘Fireworks’ publicly for the first time in 1948 at the Los Angeles Coronet Theater; the film got favorable reviews from Lewis Jacobs in Hollywood Quarterly. Cinema 16 and Hollywood Quarterly seem to have had a symbiotic relationship: HQ ran a gushing introductory piece on Cinema 16 written by Cinema 16’s founder Amos Vogel.

Amos Vogel, Anger’s ticket to intelligence work.

Hollywood Quarterly (1945-1957) was financed by UCLA and featured the writing Theodor Adorno, a member of the Frankfurt School which, like Vogel’s family, left Europe when the political winds turned against them. Academics from the Frankfurt School would go on to work at the OSS and later receive CIA largess. (See Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture By Chris Robé.) Hollywood Quarterly was amenable to reinventing itself to fit the CIA’s anti-Stalin leftist politics and purged itself of communist-smelling contributors in 1951. (See Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal by Saverio Giovacchini.)

What was Hollywood Quaretly’s mission? The University of California Press says this about its publication:

Writing Just After the end of World War II, the editors of the Hollywood Quarterly posed the following question: “What part will the motion picture and the radio play in the consolidation of the victory, in the creation of new patterns of world culture and understanding?”

None of the information I’ve presented above proves that Hollywood Quarterly or Cinema 16 were CIA fronts, it only proves that they acted like CIA fronts. Unfortunately for the legacy of Kenneth Anger, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’ was a CIA operation beyond question, and Cinema 16 propelled Anger onto Congress-frontman Jean Cocteau’s lap.

In 1948 Cocteau hosted the Festival of Damned Film in Biarritz, France. Fresh from his Cinema 16 success, Anger sent Cocteau a copy of ‘Fireworks’, which Cocteau adored and gave his ‘Poetic Film Prize’ at the festival. Cocteau’s enthusiasm eventually lead Anger to move to Paris in 1950.

Jean Cocteau was a practical man. When Paris was under German occupation, he cooperated with the Germans. When Paris was under American occupation, he cooperated with the Americans. In her book on the Congress of Cultural Freedom (The Cultural Cold War, 2000), Francis Stonor Saunders details Jean Cocteau’s work for the CIA promoting the anti-Stalinist left across Europe.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom really started in NYC in 1949 with a meeting of anti-Stalinist leftists at– of course– the luscious Waldorf Astoria hotel. The CIA’s operatives were setting up the Congress during 1950 when Anger moved to Paris and by early 1951, the Congress announced that Jean Cocteau would be among its keynote speakers at its first festival in April 1952. Music from Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was also on the CIA’s playbill.

Kenneth Anger’s antics with Cocteau spanned the period 1950 through Fall 1953. Anger hung out with Cocteau while Cocteau was negotiating with CIA representatives. During this time, Cocteau and Anger would scandalize Parisian audiences with a production of Igor Stravinsky’s/Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of Oedipus Rex– the production was scandalous because Cocteau dared show his face so soon after collaborating with the Nazis.

The ever-entertaining Jean Cocteau.

Anger spent two periods in Paris, 1950-mid 53 and late 1955-58, but his artistry failed to impress the more established French cultural scene both times. By 1958 biographer Landis says Anger’s reputation in France was on “tenuous ground” because he was “a gauche American with a reputation for pop iconography”. Many Americans who worked with the CIA’s heavy-handed Congress eventually drew ire from the French, as Saunders documents in the chapter titled ‘Cette Fête Américaine’:

Diane Josselson [wife of a prominent Congress organizer Michael] remembered the Paris of this time as brimful with anti-Americanism, a “Yanqui Go Home” mentality everywhere: “The people one met weren’t really like that, but they did have an idea that the typical American was gross.” Many Americans were irked by this ungenerous response to their largess. “I could get quite distressed at Europeans if I allowed myself to,” confessed C.D. Jackson.

I ask readers to remember the name C.D. Jackson.

During Anger’s second Paris stay in 1958 he entered his Hollywood-shot film starring Thelema-promoter Marjorie Cameron, ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’, into the film competition hosted by the World’s Fair in Brussels– a venue where Soviet and American artistic offerings went head-to-head. Anger’s ‘Pleasure Dome’ lost because, Landis says, the Soviets had stacked the judges. Anger’s friend from Cinema 16 and the CIA-funded TIME magazine, Marie Menken, also attended the ‘stacked’ film competition in Brussels.

Why was the lady who handled TIME magazine’s international cables at a film festival? Because her superior at TIME, C.D. Jackson, was also a Congress for Cultural Freedom organizer. Anger’s performance at the Worlds’ Fair had important culture-war implications. Here’s what Saunders has to say about C.D. Jackson at TIME:

In the early 1950s, one man alone did more than any other to set the agenda for American cultural warfare. As president of the National Committee for a Free Europe, and later, special adviser to Eisenhower on psychological warfare, C.D. Jackson was one of the most influential covert strategists in America… Graduating from Princeton in 1924, ‘C.D.’ joined the family firm and traveled extensively in Europe, cultivating contacts which would provide a valuable resource during later years. In 1931 he joined Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire as an advertising executive. During the war, he was one of America’s leading psychological warfare specialists, serving as deputy chief for the Office of War Information Overseas, North Africa and Middle East, and then deputy chief of the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD)  of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which was under Eisenhower’s command.)

After the war, C.D. returned to Time-Life Inc. where he became vice-president of Time. He was an early activist in Allen Dulles’s New York crowd, one of the Park Avenue Cowboys. Then, in 1951, he was invited to take part in a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services. This led to a job as an ‘outside’ director of the CIA covert operations via The Truth Campaign and the National Committee for a Free Europe…

When C.D. Jackson wasn’t doing all that, he found time to be on the board of the United Negro College Fund and the Carnegie Corporation of New York!

Psychological warfare expert Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson.

My point is, readers, that Ken Anger had some surprisingly well-placed friends and a knack for knowing what the CIA is interested in, then inserting himself in the middle of it. It’s almost as though Ken Anger was an Agency asset himself…

I’ve covered a period in Anger’s life stretching between 1947-1958, next we need to return to 1947 when Dr. Alfred Kinsey contacted Anger wanting to buy a copy of ‘Fireworks’ for his ‘sexual history’ collection. Kinsey would become a father-figure to Anger.

Philosopher E. Michael Jones uses Alfred Kinsey’s work to describe Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt’s ‘system of control’ for his organization:

As part of the systematization of this semiotics, Weishaupt, not unlike Alfred Kinsey 150 years later, developed a chart and a code to document the psychic histories of the various members of the Illuminist cells. In his book on the Illuminati, van Duelman reprints the case history of Franz Xaver Zwack of Regensburg. In it we see a combination of the Kinsey sexual history, the Stasi file and credit rating all rolled up into one document whose purpose is control.

Alfred Kinsey was a spiritual father to Anger; they shared an interest in Aleister Crowley, but Kinsey thought Crowley was a fraud– according to Landis, Kinsey was only interested in getting his hands on Crowley’s sex diaries for his ‘sex history’ collection, which provided the impetus for Anger’s and Kinsey’s pilgrimage to Cefalù in 1955. After Kinsey’s death in 1956, Anger would describe himself as an archivist, “a volunteer working for the Kinsey Institute”. Anger’s affiliation with the Institute would certainly help him in 1965, when San Fransisco police picked him up on suspicion that he had made a snuff film, according to Landis: “The Kinsey Institute shielded him, classifying him as a freelance gatherer of sex films.”

Kinsey’s methods for growing his ‘sex history’ collection were strikingly similar to MK ULTRA agent George White’s methods for growing his sex and drug knowledge: both men worked with local police to exploit the demimonde.

George White was an old OSS man who worked in the New York Police Department Narcotics division; he’d wanted to join the CIA prior to 1952 but powerful enemies, including J Edgar Hoover, had stymied his career. When Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s ‘Technical Services Staff’ (TSS) division, approached White in 1952 White agreed to help the CIA test drugs on unwitting, marginalized people who White knew from his drug beat. This is how an anonymous TSS source describes White’s test subjects to John Marks: “He knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs.” (Search for the Manchurian Candidate.)

George White. Thank you, sfweekly.com.

In May 1953, around the time Anger left Paris and returned to Hollywood to make ‘Pleasure Dome’, White set up the first Greenwich Village (NYC) drug-test den for the CIA. Prostitutes would lure men to the dens, drug them with substances including LSD and then CIA guys would observe through one-way mirrors and recording devices.

The unwitting drug-tests were so fruitful that in early 1955 Gottlieb transferred White to San Fransisco where he set up a new ‘safehouse’ for the same purpose. According to Marks, White decorated the den with tastes oddly reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s: “he went out and bought items that gave the place the air of the brothel it was to become: Toulouse-Lautrec posters, a picture of a French can-can dancer and photos of manacled women in black stockings.” Sacher-Masoch!

The purpose of the San Fransisco safehouse was not limited to unwitting drug-testing. Marks says: “TSS officials wanted to find out everything they could about how to apply sex to spying, and the prostitute project became a general learning and then training ground for CIA carnal operations… At first, nobody really knew how to use them [prostitutes]. How do you train them? How do you work them? How do you take a woman who is willing to use her body to get money out of a guy to get things which are much more important, like state secrets?”

This is where CIA personality profiler John Gittinger comes in. According to Marks:

The San Fransisco safehouse specialized in prostitutes. “But this was before The Hite Report and before any hooker had written a book,” recalls a TSS man, “so first we had to go out and learn about their world. In the beginning, we didn’t know what a john was or what a pimp did.” Sid Gottlieb decided to send his top staff psychologist, John Gittinger, to San Fransisco to probe the demimonde.

George White supplied the prostitutes for the study, although White, in turn, delegated much of the pimping function to one of his assistants, Ira ‘Ike’ Feldman.

While Gittinger was doing his personality assessments from behind a one-way mirror, CIA agents were learning other things, according to another one of Marks’ anonymous MK ULTRA sources:

We didn’t know in those days about hidden sadism [Faithfull’s Vienna relatives] and all that sort of stuff. We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom. We began to understand that when people wanted sex, it wasn’t just what we had thought of– you know, the missionary position…

In 1955 while White was ‘learning about sex’ in San Fransisco, Anger was touring Europe’s pick-up hot-spots with Kinsey looking for ‘sex histories’ for the old man’s collection.

Whoever Marks’ anonymous sources are, they were being disingenuous in the excerpt above, because as early as 1947 Alfred Kinsey’s sex ‘studies’ had brought deviant sexual behavior to the attention of the reading public, mainly via press coverage in CIA-backed TIME magazine. Prior to that, Viennese criminologists, Viennese sexologists and the von Sacher-Masoch family had made such stories accessible to English-speaking audiences. Marks’ MK ULTRA men seem suspiciously innocent; probably because Marks wanted to avoid using the name ‘Kinsey’.

Gittinger wasn’t the only scientist to use the CIA’s den for ‘scientific’ purposes: Dr. James Hamilton of Stanford Medical School (another old OSS man) used the den for “studies connected to unwitting drug experiments and deviant sexual practices,” according to Marks. Eventually more CIA drug-testing dens were set up: one near San Fransisco in Marin County, and in 1961 a third was set up in New York (the first den there was closed when White moved to California). The ‘new’ NYC den was managed by another OSS veteran, Charles Siragusa.

What I’d like readers to take home is that over the period 1953-1963, we know that the CIA was abusing vulnerable people of the ‘demimonde’ to collect sex histories, sex statistics and do LSD testing. What was Alfred Kinsey doing during this period? Pretty much the same thing as George White.

Starting in that magic year 1947, Kinsey set up his Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at the University of Indiana, from where Kinsey would base his operation until his death in 1956. Kinsey used the gravitas of the university and local police to gather stories, as Anger’s biographer, Bill Landis writes:

Kinsey’s powers of persuasion were enormous, rivaling any cult leader. Beginning in the 1940s, despite rampant sexual repression and the suppression of pornography in American society, he could persuade straight, middle-class people to speak about their sexual practices and perversions…

Armed with financing from both Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey’s work with sexual outlaws was thorough… The Times Square hustlers’ grapevine would spread the line that a guy in a hotel just wanted to listen, ask a few questions, then you could leave. The street people knew Kinsey wasn’t a cop after he had built up a reputation in the area…

The three ordinary Midwesterners calling themselves scientists worked in seedy hotel rooms in Times Square (and many other red-light districts in the United States) measuring the exact dimensions of a male hustler’s genitals, even if it meant paying him a little extra. This would happen after the loosening-up period, in which the interviewee described in detail his sex life.

If there was ever trouble with the police, the ‘University of Indiana’ acted for Kinsey much like the CIA worked for White’s henchman, but police departments were generally supportive:

Anger was overwhelmed by Prok’s [Alfred Kinsey’s] collection of more than five thousand stag films. “Through the years Kinsey built up contacts,” Anger explains. “Let’s say a police department in Memphis confiscates a blue film. Instead of throwing out the films, they’d ship them to Prok. He had some that were from 1910.” (Kinsey was documenting the sins of early Hollywood.)

Anger says that Kinsey cast a seriously wide net with law enforcement– a net at least as wide as White’s. In my opinion, it would be hard for Kinsey to establish such extensive contacts without the help of organized friends. Could Alfred Kinsey’s research have had any use to the CIA? Landis says this:

Prok’s [Alfred Kinsey’s] data provided him with a certain power. Pomeroy stated that Kinsey “liked secrets, that their possession gave him a sense of power…. [His subjects] included political, social, and business leaders of the first rank, and with his intimate knowledge of their lives [he] could have figuratively blown up the U.S. Socially and politically.”

Sounds a little like Jeffery Epstein or P-Diddy, doesn’t it?! My point is that Kinsey’s work would have been enormously interesting to the CIA– and lo and behold, when Anger failed to tread water in Paris, the homoerotic filmmaker next turned up at the side of a well-know sexologist who was busy ‘challenging’ the sexual mores of the nation. Kinsey and Anger just happened to share an interest in Aleister Crowley and decided to travel to Cefalù together… so that they could shoot a documentary for the BBC!

Yes, you read that correctly. The BBC had Kinsey and Anger make a documentary about Aleister Crowley’s ‘Thelema Abbey’ in 1955, which was mysteriously lost after its initial broadcast. Here’s what Landis says:

An extraordinary photograph of Kinsey with Anger at Thelema Abbey ran in Picture Post magazine, the British equivalent to Life. [Of TIME-Life fame]. The often-seen photo of a bald, scowling Crowley hangs on a wall, and Prok’s arms are outstretched, Christ-like, as he eyes the photo… Anger hovers submissively before his two fathers, Kinsey and Crowley, impishly holding a lantern…

Thelema Abbey, a half-hour sound film, was made of this event and shown on British TV, sponsored by Picture Post. Anger takes credit for this work in his filmography, though he claims that when he went to Picture Post to pick up his print, the magazine had closed and the films was lost forever.

The BBC was birthed from the same mother as the CIA, namely the fortune and contacts of William Stephenson. How odd that the BBC wanted to make a documentary featuring a man whose ‘sexual histories’ would have been of interest to the CIA, MI6… and again, Anger is in the middle of it all!

Kinsey died in 1956, but Anger was just getting started. Even though Paris and the Brussels World’s Fair didn’t work out, Anger still found helpers back home. In 1961 Anger bunked with Marjorie Cameron (as in the lady who facilitated Mossad’s recruitment of Crowley devotee and rocket genius Jack Parsons, See Carter, Sex and Rockets) in Los Angeles, then in 1962 he moved back to NYC to stay with Marie Menken. In 1963 Cinema 16 closed down, pinching off Anger’s funds. Miraculously, the Ford Foundation decided to give him a $10,000 grant just in time, which Anger used to move to San Fransisco in 1963– from then it seems Anger’s money troubles were over.

Allegedly the MK ULTRA program was wound up in 1963, but the LSD plague it helped unleash was just beginning. This is how Bill Landis describes Anger’s work during the San Fransisco period, 1963-68, “He had been a spectacular scenemaker on several levels– prominent occultist, LSD proselytizer, sexual libertine, vanguard filmmaker.”

During this time Anger made some of his most infamous friends: occultist Anton LaVey (born Howard Stanton Levey) and Manson family associate/murderer Bobby Beausoleil. Landis writes:

Both Anger and LaVey existed in a fringe sexploitation area. Anger’s films had become adult house fare. LaVey was familiar with fifties-style Betty Page dominance /submission mentality, and he appeared in nudie spreads for second-string men’s mags…

Devil worship at this point in the sixties was an excuse for exhibitionist behavior and kinky sex.

In San Fransisco, Anger came into his own as a promoter of isolating sex and Aleister Crowley’s system of control. In 1967 Anger’s antics and films were plugged by Newsweek, The New York Times and Playboy magazine. But by 1968 Landis says things were coming “unglued” for Anger in San Fransisco. Whatever Anger’s reasons for leaving were, in 1968 he left for London, where he was immediately plugged into U.K. music industry royalty by Robert Fraser.

Landis was cynical about Anger’s post 1968-work in London. He described it this way:

He [Anger] made a pilgrimage to England, Crowley’s homeland. It was as much a business trip as a spiritual adventure. Like his idol, Anger was about to take up the obscure occupation of fixing heads.

The mod London of 1968 held a plethora of potential investors for Anger who were in desperate need of having their heads fixed. Wealthy, troubled, addicted rock stars and jaded billionaire socialites with their heads into hard drugs and mysticism wielded a huge influence over their peers, but their personal problems, fueled by intense lives consumed by work, left them vulnerable to a higher power.

…Anger loved the attention. It was clear to him that these people wanted to believe he was capable of magick. [Landis, Anger]

Landis adds:

Anger was an expert in the effects of certain drugs on different personalities…

Whatever the particulars were of his intake, Anger possessed a tremendous understanding of the myriad ways heroin, speed, cocaine and hallucinogens, and the various combinations thereof, can connect with various individuals. London was a head’s paradise, fertile ground for an alchemist.

My goal for this post has to provide some of the “missing text” between the images of the Sgt. Pepper “mnemosyne working”. I believe that for the Shirley Temple imagery, the Stones imagery and for a few of the Hollywood faces I’ve dug deeply into the ‘magic’ which fascinated Aby Warburg and Crowley. The effects of this mass-hijacking of collective will are, I believe, working themselves out… and perhaps visiting the sorcerers threefold?

Because in Brooklyn, they protect kids.

UPDATE: When I originally posted this I forgot to tie The Stones into the Leon Goetz story! As regular readers may remember from my post Leon Goetz’s Mann Act Indictment, the Stones had a working relationship with the Chess family of Chicago, who ended up in the gaming business with CIA head William Colby. These remarkable relationships are largely explained by the content above.

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I will point out here that WWI was very good for the Stateside Jewish Mafia, (a.k.a. “Supermob”) which was largely comprised of recent immigrants or sons of recent immigrants from formerly Hapsburg/Romanov borderlands. These mobsters were remarkably effective partnering with corrupt members of the US military. (Just like they were under the Hapsburgs!)

One such band of Chicago bar-operators/pimps/military re-salers surnamed “Chess” (actually “Chez” or “Czyż”) immigrated from Motol on the Poland/Russian border at around the time of Leon’s indictment. The Chess clan preyed on working-class Black communities and founded “Chess Records” a.k.a. Muddy Waters’ record label in the 1940s. They then went on to represent The Rolling Stones in the USA, while their capo Jim Levy managed Activision, CIA director William Colby’s favorite computer game company. The seed-money (and seed-connections) for the Chess empire came from reselling military surplus (used cardboard and bottles….) via their Chicagoland junkyard in the post-WWI era, just like the Goldmans.

Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones and Marshall Chess, grandson to Josef Chez of Motol, hash out some counter-culture product.

Chess Records would eventually become a subsidiary (retaining executive talent) of Activision, the gaming company, which worked with William Colby of the CIA to build a recruiting tool called “Spycraft: The Great Game”. This computer game, which was developed when mafioso like Larry Summers and the Harvard Institute for International Development were colonizing Russia, is now a political liability for the agency and a documentary CIA-splain'n it will be released in 2023.

This is the poster for the new documentary, check out the press.

My point is, readers, that junkyard army-surplus dealers around Chicago had powerful friends.