Ram Dass and the Ringstrasse
The past few weeks allowed me to “core dump” information on the post-WWII “Galacian Gang”, particularly their roots in Lincoln’s Civil War politics. The Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper” cover has been a useful conduit for this and I really owe Jann Haworth and Peter Blake thanks for giving me such an opportunity. If you’d like to catch up, please see:
1) Spooks of the Raj: Sgt. Pepper and the New Age Movement
2) Galician Gang: Sgt. Pepper, Shirley Temple and Rolling Stones.
Today I’m going to talk about a guru conspicuously absent from the Sgt. Pepper Cover: “Neem Karoli Baba”, born Lakshman Narayan Sharma to— you guessed it— a Brahmin family. But, not in Calcutta! This one was born in Uttar Pradesh, India near the border with Nepal. What is the same is that Neem Karoli Baba’s career took off after allying himself with the Raj by 1935. Within twenty-five years Neem was being promoted via a CIA-adjacent ex-Harvard professor named Richard Alpert. Alpert took the name “Ram Dass”.
This matters because we are now looking at the Steve Jobs side of the Apple Computer/Apple Corp legal debacle. Readers may remember that in 1976 Steve Jobs stole The Beatles’ holding company’s name, “Apple”. Apple Corp was allied with the Galician Gang via business associates of Robert Maxwell. That didn’t matter. Jobs won every legal case, or I should say Jobs’s financial backers won every legal case, and Maxwell ended up floating in the Atlantic Ocean. Stay useful.
Steve Jobs and his wingman Larry Brilliant stole other things from the Beatles besides the name “Apple”. They ripped off the Fab Four’s “guru” accessory, too. Silicon Valley’s guru was Neem Karoli Baba, a fat reincarnation of the Monkey Lord Hanuman, who was recruited in 1935 by Colonel J. C. McKenna of the “Imperial British Rajput Regiment Centre” in Fatehgarh, a cantonment town in Uttar Pradesh, India.
This guru has the same “crazy wisdom”, disrespectful, counter-culture entitlement that I’ve come to expect from Western proponents of BEIC-style Hinduism, the “turn on, tune in, drop out” crowd. The attitude and the proponents are a pairing which I believe was entirely engineered. So how did the Brits find this one?
The following information comes from Divine Reality, a biography of Neem written by his acolyte Ravi Prakash Pande. Neem was a miracle-worker who had an agreement with the local Brahmin community around the village of Neeb Karori, an agreement which turned sour over money. Neem then hung out around the Ganges River at Kilaghat recruiting soldiers under Col. McKenna’s command. The Col. was strict about cult leaders usually, but one day he came back to his quarters to find Neem sleeping in his bed and immediately McKenna became a convert to Neem’s cult. McKenna was Neem’s first Western convert, so the story goes, and the colonel gave the guru full access to his soldiers. Powerful Indians soon followed, because Neem had universalist appeal:
Without any publicity, urban and rural Indians of all ages, castes, and classes, as well as people from the West became Baba's devotees. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and even atheists were drawn to him. V.V. Giri, former president of India; Gopal Swarup Pathak, former vice president; Justice Vasudev Mukherjee; Jugal Kishore Birla, the famous industrialist; Sumitra Nandan Pant, the poet; former prime minister Jawahar Lal Nehru, and many other well-known and distinguished persons had Baba's darshan and showed great respect for him.
Nehru caught my eye, because he was the first head of state to be featured on the cover of the CIA’s Playboy magazine.
And Ruth Marianna Moskowicz Handler over at Mattel even had a Barbie doll outfit “Guruvy Formal #1431” named after Nehru. So the outfits objectifying White women were out in full force behind this Indian head of state.
“Barbie® doll's handsome and guruvy boyfriend was a perfect escort in this modern tuxedo. Ken® doll's long sleeved shirt featured a high collar with a gold and white lamé striped red cravat (attached). White slacks with zipper, a handsome red brocade floral vest with solid red back, and a faille Nehru jacket completed the outfit. White socks and white loafers accessorized the look.” Thank you, Barbiepedia.com.
What Neem Karoli Baba and Col. McKenna were doing is precisely the same as what Quaker leader George Fox did to establish Quakerism in the 1640s-50s. Fox preached to Parliamentarian soldiers and was charismatic enough to get noticed, he was then approached by the military brass for a formal relationship… which Fox claimed he rejected. Fox’s followers went on to dominate pamphlet-based propaganda in English, as well as the sex trade in London and in the Pennsylvania Colony. The British military has a long history of exploiting cults among its recruits.
What did British intellectuals really think of Neem’s type of spirituality? They had the benefit of over a century of up-close observation. For example, Raphael Hurst was a Theosophist and member of the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain. Although a proponent of Neo-Hindu spiritualism for Western esotericists, in 1934 had this to say about the Indian gurus:
"One heard so much of certain so-called holy men who possessed repute of having acquired deep wisdom and strange powers; so one travelled through scorching days and sleepless nights to find them, only to find well-intentioned fools, scriptural slaves, venerable know-nothings, money-seeking conjurers, jugglers with a few tricks, and pious frauds." A Search In Secret India (1934)
Somerset Maugham, who made a point of studying Indian religious customs, has this to say of one sufi (Islamic) mystic in "The Writer's Notebook," (1946):
"He said the things I had heard from others twenty times before. That is the worst of the Indian thinkers, they say the same things in the same words…"(T)hey repeat it like parrots, there is no denying the fact that it is irksome to listen interminably to the same statements. You wish at least they could think of other metaphors, similes, illustrations than those of the Upanishads. Your heart sinks when you hear again the one about the snake and the rope."
Other scholars had more interesting critiques, take for instance the Russian philosopher Prince N.S. Trubetskoy, who studied Indian Subcontinent religions far more deeply than his Universalist contemporaries. Trubetskoy penetrated the stark cultural differences behind words loosely translated as “compassion” or “love”:
“The way that Buddha showed to Nirvana was twofold. On the one hand, psychophysical exercises of self-immersion, concentrated meditation, holding the breath—in their techniques, almost identical to the system of yoga. But on the other hand, self-sacrifice and love towards all existence. However, this second way is, so to speak, a part of the first, especially psychophysical exercise. Love, mercy, compassion—all these for the Buddhist are not feelings, for feelings must not remain in his soul, but only results, the consequences of the complete loss of his feeling of individuality and of his personal wishes. In such a mental state, it doesn’t cost a person anything to sacrifice himself for his neighbor, for, not having his own desires, he naturally fulfills the desires of others easily. To suppress one’s will so much that one does the will of another exclusively is recommended precisely in the form of an exercise. Forgiveness of all is looked upon as a means of obliterating the feelings. Apathy or indifference reaches perfection when a person relates to his enemy in the same way as to his friend; when he is indifferent to joy or to pain, to honor or dishonor." (Trubetskoy, Christianity and the Religions of India. Moscow: Sretensky Monastery. 2000. Pp. 38, 39.)
Neem Karoli Baba’s cult is quite typical of guru-personality cults in India, excepting his extraordinary Western sponsorship. This is how Pande describes Neem’s claimed supernatural abilities:
Sri Baba Neeb Karori Maharaj appeared to be an ordinary human, but he was actually divinity incarnate. He inspired people in unseen, intangible ways. No one could predict his behaviour. His actions revealed an all-knowing, all-pervading, and all-powerful being who had nature itself under his command. Our rational minds made it difficult to accept such power in a human being, but Baba's divine love melted away our natural scepticism and submerged us in grace.
Neem could make trains stop and start at his will; take over the minds of cows; foresee the future; and manipulate Silicon Valley executives. Neem was certainly something incarnate.
Neem Karoli Baba is usually photographed wrapped in a tartan blanket that obscures his impressive girth, which would eventually kill him.
I wrote about Larry Brilliant’s charitable enterprise in my post Spooks of the Raj. His flagship outfit, SEVA.org, piggybacked on Neem Karoli Baba’s cult and remains a platform for the ‘enlightened’ of Silicon Valley’s “bros”.
(The same bros who have a weird habit of promoting child pornographers.)
What Col. McKenna/Neem started was a roving preacher act, an act that hit on the same tropes which the British East India company had found so useful (universalism, fuzzy radical equality, fuzzy feminism), but tailored for the areas outside of the Calcutta sphere at a time when industrialists dreamed of a united Indian nation. Ideologically, Neem followed in Ram Mohan Roy’s footsteps during the later part of the Swadeshi Movement that Gandhi and his promoters exploited. Neem loved train travel (first class!) and toured India from 1935-58 while maintaining residence and children at his family’s base in Uttar Pradesh. Something happened in 1965 though, almost twenty years after the end of the Raj and McKenna’s military funding, which put Neem on a very different path to that of hermeticist Sri Yukteswar Giri and Sri Paramahansa Yogananda. The story goes that Neem was found by a painfully young American named Kermit Michael Riggs at the end of the “Hippie Trail” in Kathmandu.
Kermit Michael Riggs, aka “Big Rig”, aka “Bhagavan Das”. Thank you, The Wanderling.
Riggs was a surfer dude who went by the handle “Big Rig”. In 1961 Riggs graduated from Laguna Beach High School. Allegedly, dissatisfaction with the JFK assassination lead him to India. After having spent about 18 months in India (1965), “Big Rig” ordered Dr. Richard Alpert, formerly of Harvard University, to meet with Riggs’s guru Neem. Alpert, under the name “Ram Dass”, would spend the rest of his life promoting Neem, while “Big Rig” took the handle “Bhagavan Das”.
Lol, what was going on? Both men describe their first meeting in their respective autobiographies; both accounts are almost perfectly contradictory. In Alpert’s, he claims he met Riggs in Kathmandu through a “beautiful Indian sculptor” named Harish, who brought the boy Riggs to Alpert’s palatial hotel room (!) where they did drugs for a few days and Riggs convinced Alpert to forgo a trip to Japan and meet Neem instead. (See Be Here Now, Alpert 1971.)
[Alpert writes] "And I met this guy [Riggs] and there was no doubt in my mind. It was just like meeting a rock. It was just solid, all the way through. Everywhere I pressed, there he was!
… But there was also the counter thought, 'How absurd -- who's writing this bizarre script. Here I am -- I've come half-way around the world and I'm going to follow, through India, a 23 year old guy from Laguna Beach, California [Riggs].'
"I said to Harish and to David [Padwa], 'Do you think I'm making a mistake?' And Harish said, 'No, he is a very high guy.' And so I started to follow him [Riggs] -- literally follow him."
Kermit Michael Riggs, aka “Big Rig”, aka “Bhagavan Das”.
Riggs, in his autobiography, says Harish introduced him to a bunch of “squares” in a hashish cafe. Riggs said that prior to the introduction he had already heard of Leary and Alpert because they had LSD and everybody wanted to try it. Alpert was giving it to all the kids he could find along the Hippie Trail through India because the doctor wanted to find out more about its effects. ("It's Here Now (Are You?), A Spiritual Memoir", Michael Kermit Riggs, a.k.a “Bhagavan Das”, 1997):
"I [Riggs] sat down next to Richard, who was fiddling with his tape recorder--checking the batteries, popping them in and out, pushing the buttons--and never acknowledging me. He seemed so nervous. I thought, "This is truly one of the most uptight persons I've ever met."
"Harish, who looked like Hanuman, the monkey god, said that he'd heard about me. Folks in that area called me Dharma Sara, my Buddhist name. I mentioned the LSD, and they invited me back to their room for a hit. They were staying at the five-star hotel in Kathmandu called the Soalti, built by one of the king's sons…
"My hosts offered me room service. I could have anything I wanted, so I ordered a peach Melba…"The next day, Richard offered me hits of LSD and STP, another psychedelic drug. I took them both and was launched on a forty-eight-hour trip.”
Richard Alpert/Ram Dass
During this trip, the 32 year old Alpert got heavy with the 23 year old Riggs:
And so we began the "forum": a male power head trip. Talk about male bonding. It was this incredible ongoing philosophical talk that went on all day and night. It was so intense! Harish would roll hash cigarettes to keep things flowing. We discussed what was going on in America, kundalini and sexual energy, God, and the Divine Mother. It seemed as though we talked about everything. Richard and David were two intense Jewish intellectuals. It was an unbelievably diverse dialogue among the four of us about the mysteries of the universe, including Hinduism and Buddhism. We talked about The Tibetan Book of the Dead and about different states of consciousness. Then there was the book Serpent Power, which dealt with kundalini yoga.
Who are these stiff intellectual drug wizards? Below, you can see photographs of David and Richard in 1967 and again in 1988, these come from fansite cuke.com. Richard Alpert is the son of a prominent Boston lawyer, as he states: “He [Alpert’s father] started Brandeis University and he was head of the United Jewish Appeal and he and Einstein met and collaborated in starting Einstein Medical School in New York.” Alpert describes his religious upbringing as “primarily political Judaism”. David Padwa was born in New York City, and in his own words: “i am descended from an illustrious jewish rabbinical family of the 16th century from the italian city of Padova.” David served as a director for Rothschild Biotechnology Investments after finding Neem; in the late 2000s the Rothschilds began to invest heavily in Brazilian farmland alongside George Soros, and Indian vegetable growing for European markets. Controlling key points for the global food supply, from seed to shelf, is a huge prize.
Alpert and Padwa were well connected men and in 1969, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper was already trying to immortalize this dubious encounter between them and young Riggs:
"David [Padwa], the Hindi guide and Alpert sneaked the boy [Riggs] into their hotel room that night. They stayed there for a few days smoking and talking. David and Alpert postponed their flight to Japan. They found out that the boy was 23. He had left high school in Laguna Beach, California, at 17 and thumbed across the world. He was a kid with thin karma. His name was Bhagawan Dass." HARVARD CRIMSON April 23, 1969, thank you The Wanderling.
Who was David Padwa? An agriculture tech millionaire, according to his resume on cuke.com: “1975-1985. Founder and CEO of Agrigenetics Corporation: Agrigenetics was the earliest agricultural biotechnology company, attaining $120 million in revenues and supporting a multi-million dollar research budget in cellular and molecular biology before being acquired by a large chemical company in 1985 [Lubrizol, owned by Berkshire Hathaway]. The company's path-breaking genetic research and patenting strategy transformed the American crop seed industry.” In the USA, farmers have to re-purchase seed batches from a handful of firms every year: by law they cannot save seed and replant from last years’ crop. This is a tremendous financial shackle.
Padwa was an advisor to the National Science Foundation and a director of Rothschild Biotechnology Investments before studying computer networks at the University of Georgia. (You can see the whole CV at the end of the post.)
No really, what was going on? Kermit Michael Riggs had got sucked into an operation around Allen Ginsberg, who was recruiting malleable people on the peripheries of a drug experimentation lead by CIA executive Sidney Gottlieb. Ginsberg began this recruiting around 1961 through “Beat Poet” groomers like Gregory Corso and Ron Zimardi.
Zimardi describes himself this way: “In this half of the world before I was 21 and left for India I had already grown up with Stokely Carmichael, the founder of SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a pro-racial integration action group] and author of 'Black Power' in the Bronx during junior high.” Zimardi goes on to say he picked up Riggs in Athens, Greece while Zimardi was living with Dan Richter, who edited the London-Athens literary journal Residu. Richter would later be an artistic collaborator with Stanley Kubrick.
“Freedom Rider” head Stokey Carmicheal and Ronald Zimardi. Personal anecdote: In the 1960s it was good for your career at the CIA to have participated in these “freedom rides”. Carmichael was also part of the black supremacist group “Black Panthers”.
[That Zimardi was operating in Greece is interesting, because the New Age Movement was surprisingly active there, particularly in Thessaloniki, the ancient White Slaving port of Sigmund Freud’s in-laws. A superfluity of Indian and American gurus inspired a strong cultural backlash from Athonite writers, for example, The Gurus, the Young Man, and Elder Paisios by Dionysios Farasiotis and From Tibet to Mount Athos to Elder Paisios by Yanni Kotzampasis.]
Gergory Corso’s upbring was far less sheltered than Zimardi’s: from an abusive immigrant Italian family in NYC’s Greenwich Village, as a young teen Corso became involved in the Mafia and sex industry. Corso recruited a troubled American heiress for Ginsberg named Hope Savage. Savage, another useful idiot like Riggs, was milked for sex and cash by Corso before she ran away from both Ginsberg and him in India. She appears to have spent what reminded of her life in hiding.
Gregory Corso
As an historian of the Galician Gang and their pimping techniques, the parallels between Gingberg/Corso/Zimardi operation and the 19th century ethnic gangs of pimps and their alfonso groomers is striking. Instead of simple prostitutes, Ginsberg was manufacturing poster-children for a cultural propaganda “active measures” campaign dear to the old OSS [Office of Strategic Services] crew in Canada.
Allen Ginsberg had extraordinary access to CIA drugs and CIA leadership like director Richard Helms. Ginsberg was expelled from both Cuba and Yugoslavia after trying to court anti-government forces there. How do you say “managed opposition” in Serbo-Croatian?
Ginsberg acted as cheerleader for Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in their quest to legitimize recreational psychedelic use. In Ginsberg’s own words, his goal was “influencing the Intellectual tone of the West”. The way to achieve this goal was through social dislocation via drug abuse. Social dislocation would lead to political conditions amenable to dismantling democracy and undermining Christian traditions in favor of dictatorial, Universalist socialism. Leary and Alpert were not the originators of this influence operation, however.
The money and political power for this “culture shift” came out of Canada and the old OSS network. (Remember William Stephenson and the BBC promoting Aleister Crowley’s drug-den “Thelema Abbey” with Ken Anger?) The point man for the Canadian OSS’ers was a uranium merchant named Al Hubbard. Psychiatrists in Canadian Universities, including McGill, worked with Hubbard to give poorly-understood psychedelics to their patients under circumstances that are best described as torture. Hubbard got power through these Canadian connections, but he had plenty of helpers around FDR too.
Alfred Matthew Hubbard was born in Kentucky to poor parents and began his career as a conman in Seattle, WA where he found plenty of wealthy bankers ready to give him money for perpetual energy machine development. The real money came from bootlegging and developing Seattle’s radio industry. Hubbard eventually turned on his bootlegging pals and worked with law enforcement. FDR used Hubbard to smuggle war ships up to Canada in violation of US neutrality and this lead Hubbard to the Canadian OSS contacts. President Truman pardoned Hubbard for these seditious crimes.
Hubbard had the “oh so social” connections among the US power elite and CIA executives to proselytize on behalf of LSD and personally groomed Adolus Huxley’s use of the drug, as well as the Brit’s subsequent championship of psychedelics for ‘mind expansion’:
Hubbard introduced LSD to prominent psychiatrists in Hollywood who, in turn, would introduce it to many of their celebrity patients, including Cary Grant (1904-1986), Jack Nicholson (b. 1937), and Stanley Kubrick (1925-1999). Hubbard was known to travel with a leather satchel full of pharmaceutically pure LSD and, by all estimates, introduced more than 6,000 people to the drug, earning him the nickname "the Johnny Appleseed of LSD."
That Hubbard “tuned in” Huxley was quite a feat, as in 1931 the Brit had just published a novel titled Brave New World about a dystopian future society where “World Controllers” use drugs to coerce the population into loving their servitude. Huxley was from a family of propagandists on behalf of “unorthodox investors” in London, so Hubbard’s millions were persuasive.
Nobody seems to really understand Hubbard’s motivation, but we do know that he worked for the mob in Las Vegas (Lansky!) as well as the CIA on a contractor-type basis. Sandoz, the manufacturer of LSD, kept the agency informed of all LSD purchases so Hubbard’s proselytizing had to have been done with the agency’s blessing. But LSD wasn’t the only drug being tested.
These other drugs entered the USA from California. Alpert recruited Riggs from the periphery of band of international drug smugglers, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, who kept Dr. Timothy Leary supplied with non-Sandoz psychoactive drugs. (This gang was in operation by 1966 and were busted in 1972.) The Brotherhood pulled members from the surfer-dude scene around Laguna Beach. Leary would call the Brotherhood from his mansion in Millbrook, NY and the gang would supply him with peyote, pot from Sinaloa MX, Afghan heroin or LSD-type drugs like “Orange Sunshine” which was designed for the gang by Alexander “Sascha” Shulgin, whose parents had fled Tsarist persecution. (Riggs has never been outed as a gangmember— but his geography, timing and connections strongly suggest that he was a teenage drug-mule before Zimardi/Ginsberg/Alpert found him.) Immediately after the Brotherhood was wound up by US law enforcement in the early 1970s, the Nepalese royal family began sponsoring massive shipments of heroin to the United States— allegedly under protection from the CIA. (Same royals who built Alpert’s palatial hotel room!) Riggs wouldn’t return to the United States until 1972, when the Brotherhood was behind bars.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love were a working-class White gang who brought drugs up from Mexico before the cartels were a twinkle in Mexico City’s eye. Much like their “Burned-Over District” New York forebears, this organized crime gang used faith-based deceptions to profit from their victims. A typical Anglo-American undertaking drawing on over a century of tradition.
The Brotherhood ran a store/public outreach office called “Mystic Arts World” and the leadership of the gang were devotees of a Japanese Buddhist guru named Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who, through an unnamed sponsor, took up residence in California in 1962. Guru Joshu became plugged into the psychedelic drug scene and became guru to the Brotherhood by 1967. (It may be worth remembering that Alpert axed a 1965 trip to Japan in order to meet his life’s work, Neem Karoli Baba, via “Big Rig”.)
The Brotherhood had powerful friends: Readers may remember that the Rolling Stones drug bust happened at the height of the Brotherhood’s operations, 1967, and that it was a Californian with multiple passports who showed up at Redlands and disappeared just before the cops came. Andrew Loog Oldham then ran to California too. This drug bust was overseen by the slippery Robert Fraser and made the Stones a cause célèbre. (So the Brotherhood were helping a Rothschild boy in Fraser, and another one in Padwa.)
This is a pretty good graphic describing the Hippie Trail and the heroin trade out of Afghanistan in the 1960s and 70s, which also happens to be the time Prof. Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin” alleges the CIA got into the heroin trade in SE Asia. Allegedly the Nepalese royal drug-runners allowed the CIA to set up a base at Lo Mustang from where military action against southern China could be launched.
The early 1970s opiate trade is the immediate cause of Ginsberg/Riggs/Alpert’s meeting and Silicon Valley’s introduction to Neem. But why was social revolution ‘needed’ in the first place? Answer: The anxieties of financial barons like the NYC Seligman family in the face of political upheavals in Austria-Hungary circa 1870-90.
In 1890s Vienna, a powerful group of people who built their mansions along Emperor Franz Josef’s “Ringstrasse” decided that their experiment assimilating into mainstream German culture had failed and that the new homeland for Austria-Hungary’s wealthy Jewish elite would be the Anglo sphere: a sort of NYC-London axis. To that end, men like Sigmund Freud’s in-law Edward Bernays immigrated to NYC. This crisis had been precipitated by the “Ringstrasse” crowd losing control of the Austro-Hungarian parliament in the 1870s, when a coalition of Christian and nationalist parties were voted in and took power legitimately. Destructive financial maneuvering, expansion of the voting franchise, and imperial patronage brought the “Ringstrasse” back in control by the 1890s, but social trust and resources had been irreparably eroded.
While stateside, Bernays preached the dangers of democracy to NYC financial elites. His seminal work Propaganda (1928) projects the very situation his parents sweated under in Austria onto the United States:
They ["our invisible governors"] govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one choses to take towards this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons-- a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million-- who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases... But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion.
Could US elites feel the same pangs of fear as the Ringstrasse? Women like Emma Goldman had encouraged the assassination of one president. Certainly William Wesley Young’s patrons in New York (Kahn, Warburg, Seligman) looked at the fate of their Viennese relatives with apprehension.
Bernays befriended the public relations executive of J. P. Morgan & Co., a man named Robert Gordon Wasson. Wasson got his position at J.P. Morgan in 1934 having written a book exonerating Morgan Sr. for embezzlement during the Civil War, a scandal called the “Hall Carbide Affair”. Wasson biographer Jann Irvin believes that his friendship with Bernays must have informed Wasson’s public relations career.
Wasson’s silver tongue was in high demand during the Great Depression. Robber Barons like the Morgans were apprehensive under dual threats from “muck racking journalism” and the resurgent socialist movement. They had a long-standing fear of the ‘dirt farmers’ and urban working class. To that end, financial families went into business with “political bosses” like Chicago’s Kentucky Colony and hired men like Monroe’s William Wesley Young to steer working-class political movements. (Note the Kentucky Colony were British-aligned and Young was a British intelligence agent.) Drugs could also be useful to this end.
Since the 1870s in German Europe companies like Merck Pharmaceuticals were researching cheap ways to feed their working classes. Cocaine was the byproduct of this research and Merck paid Sigmund Freud in Vienna to promote cocaine as a type of panacea. European militaries were also interested in drugs that could make soldiers fight longer. But if drugs could turn the volume up, they could also turn it down.
Observers in the British Raj noted the stupefying effects of marijuana on the lower castes and consequently they made cannabis sales a government monopoly. During Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement (1905-47), his supporters identified cannabis use with social dysfunction among the lower castes:
Moreover, IHDC [Indian Hemp Drug Commission] revealed reports of cannabis being used as a weapon of caste discrimination. The Hindu caste system has four custer viz. Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra. However, at the village and local level, these four castes are further divided into smaller sub-castes known as jati (Khatoon 1995). The consumption of cannabis was linked with the lower castes (Sudras and outcastes), and the upper castes (Brahmin) claimed to vehemently despise cannabis use:
“There can be no other agency in bringing to light the history of a lunatic than the police, because ganja-smokers are generally men of low-caste and of bad character, with whom the high officers cannot be in touch. The habit of ganja smoking is looked down, and therefore those who use ganja smoke it secretly, trying their best to conceal the fact from their elders and their society.” (Report of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission 1893-94 1894, 413).
Cannabis, like access to clean water, was an ancient tool that the Brahmin class could use to keep “delta” castes docile and their numbers down. Viennese and Canadian eyes were watching!
Robert Gordon Wasson had his own interest in psychedelic drugs: the silva divinorum mushroom that politically disengaged Mexican peons would consume to “commune with god”. He and his wife conducted research in Mexico which was funded by the CIA as part of their MK Ultra program— one of just a series of domestic control operations, the main thrust of which focused on more mundane, yet effective, advertising-business adjacent tactics. The type of tactics Philip Zimbardo wrote openly about in the 1980s. Wasson used the CIA’s Time-Life magazine operation to promote their “mind expanding” research to gullible members of the post-WWII American public.
At the same time Indian nationalists were trying to stamp out the plague of drug-induced dysfunction, “World Controllers” like Wasson and Hubbard were grooming the American public to accept such poison— and avoid the democracy problems that burned their Ringstrasse friends.
But not all was well with the “alphas” at the CIA…
The psychedelic movement would have stayed an ‘in joke’ among the “invisible governors” had not their very human foibles disrupted Wasson’s plans.
The end of the 1950s saw a culture/ethnic war split the CIA. The combatants’ preferred method of fighting was exposing their competitors’ unethical programs to Congress, or the American public more generally, in hopes the political fallout would destroy their enemies. This is how we got the “Family Jewels” revelations; as well as books like The Politics of Heroin, written by Alfred McCoy and Allen Ginsberg or The Search for the Manchurian Candidate by John Marks. Bill Colby was good at doing this through David Obst, Mark’s agent. Much of the infighting centered over how the agency would manipulate the US public, or in other words achieve that “influencing the Intellectual tone of the West”, as Ginsberg put it.
You could describe the two factions as “those who valued European high culture vs. those who wanted to burn it”; or perhaps “the WASP mob/ Jewish mob+/- Irish Catholic mob” divide; or the “James Angleton/ Bill Colby” divide; or the “capitalist/ cocktail socialist” divide. None of these perfectly describes the factions but, to the limits of my understanding, collectively they give a pretty good idea. But please don’t take my word for it, here is novelist Richard Elman’s (from a Yiddish-speaking family in Brooklyn) take on the enemy camp:
It’s worth considering what these people had in common. They were all Christians, in a non-sectarian, T. S. Eliot kind of way. They believed in a higher authority, a higher truth which sanctioned their anti-Communist, anti-atheist crusade. T. S. Eliot, [Ezra] Pound, and other modernists appealed to their elitist sensibilities. The CIA even commissioned a translation of Eliot’s Four Quartets and then had copies air-dropped into Russia. These were men, as much as Shaw and Wells, for whom the socialist “century of the common man” was unwelcome— they wanted the Uncommon Man and High Culture. So, they weren’t just putting money into culture willy-nilly. (Taken from CIA and Cultural Cold War, Saunders p 248.)
As I’ve shown in my previous posts, men like Angleton were very happy to exploit low culture too— but they weren’t ready to burn the past. Here’s Allen Ginsberg’s more nuanced take on his adversaries:
“T. S. Eliot Entered my Dreams”, 1978:
On the fantail of a boat to Europe, Eliot was reclining with several passengers in deck seats, blue cloudy sky behind, iron floor below us. “And yourself,” I [Ginsberg] said, “What did you think of the domination of poetics by the CIA. After all, wasn’t Angleton your friend? Didn’t he tell you his plan to revitalize the intellectual structure of the West against the so-to-speak Stalinists?” Eliot listened attentively— I was surprised he wasn’t distracted. “Well, there are all sorts of chaps competing for dominance, political and literary… your Gurus for instance, and the Theosophists, and the Ideologues. I suppose I was one such, in my middle years. But they were petty— well meant but of no importance to Literature.” “I thought they were of some importance,” I said, “since it secretly nourished the careers of too many square intellectuals, provided sustenance to thinkers in the Academy who influenced the intellectual tone of the West… After all, Intellectual tone should be revolutionary, or at least Radical, seeking roots of dis-ease and Mechanization and dominance by unnatural monopoly… And the Government through foundations was supporting a whole field of ‘Scholars of War’… The subsidization of magazines like Encounter which held Eliotic style as a touchstone of sophistication and competence… failed to create an alternative free vital decentralized individualistic culture. Instead, we had the worst of Capitalist Imperialism.
Big Rig, “Ram Dass” and Neem were just soldiers in this internecine CIA war; they were duplicates to undermine Angleton messaging from the Beatles. That’s why they are not on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper cover. Anglophile intelligencers who had survived WWII were now paying the price of partnering with FDR’s gang-world Galician and Irish vote-harvesters, some of whom weren’t interested in being second-tier partners in the global information market.
The internecine war was especially intense around LSD promotion. The flash point was surreptitious drug testing by the CIA’s “Office of Technical Services” department which at that time (1951-73) was lead by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s department specialized in the weaponization of synthetically-produced drugs which interfered with the human nervous system. The street-distribution of similar drugs had been a Galician Gang specialty since about WWI— read about Chicago/Rockford/Monroe’s Goldman Family here. The Goldmans got their synthesized drugs from Germany. (Prior to Galician dominance, Lincoln-aligned Black American gangsters were prominent in illegal drug distribution in Yankee cities.) Some of these Galician Gang drug dealers had federal protection by the 1930s, as evidenced by the sad disgrace of Leon Goetz.
Gottlieb was the son of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants to the Bronx. As a man, Gottlieb was remarkably like NSA-mother Elizebeth Smith’s husband, William Friedman. Like Friedman, Gottlieb studied agriculture in the Midwest at a time when this was very important to Zionists in Chicago. Like Friedman, Gottlieb had a soft spot for socialism and joined the Young Peoples’ Socialist League at the University of Wisconsin, Madison at the same time Smith was setting up the NSA with help from Chicago power-broker Col. Fabyan, a pre-1916 Imperial German spy.
“Poisoner in Chief” Dr. Sidney Gottleib with his lawyer in 1977. Unlike other malefactors, Gottlieb was allowed to testify to the Senate behind closed doors.
Gottlieb got into CIA work through the National Research Council (Padwa!) and the University of Wisconsin System. In 1951 Gottlieb, while at NRC, was brought to Allen Dulles’ attention through University of Wisconsin bacteriology professor Ira Baldwin, who was also the Assistant Dean of the College of Agriculture. Baldwin was from a practicing Quaker family just like the NSA’s Elizebeth Smith! Since the US Civil War at least, UW administrators had a deep interest in Quaker educational networks, as evidenced by their relationship with Bonelatta-Gang-Era Monroe’s education tsar, Prof. Twining.
University of Wisconsin doyen Prof. Ira Baldwin.
Baldwin in turn owes his career to the fact that big pharma heir George W. Merck was an advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, benefactor of the Galican Gang’s Hollywood business. Merck led the War Research Service, a WWII-era outfit which initiated the U.S. biological weapons program, he brought Baldwin on board along with a guy called Frank Olson, who was a bacteriology student under Baldwin at UW. Frank would end up jumping out a window… but I get ahead of myself.
Is the devil a German? George W. Merck, scion of the ancient pharmaceutical AND INTELLIGENCE family. Never patriots, the Mercks were always “enlightened globalists”. Relative Johann Heinrich Merck ran Hesse’s intelligence operations in support of the French Revolution and the writing careers of men like Goethe. George’s dad cooperated with the USA and UK against Germany during WWI, while the German branch of the (family) company partnered with Austria Hungary and Imperial Germany. The company were leaders producing psychoactive drugs like cocaine, and had ethics no better than the Galician Gang, see my post Ferdinand von Springmuhl. They brought you a covid jab too, btw.
We know something of what Gottlieb was up to for the CIA because he was forced to testify about his work to the US Senate “Church Committee” in 1975. Gottlieb’s department had been wantonly pursuing extremely unethical research, including surreptitious tests of mind-altering drugs on both CIA and army personnel; “demimonde” drug users and prostitutes; and incarcerated people. Frank Olson was one of these victims and a bad trip from Gottlieb’s goons resulted in Olson’s death. (I wrote about this systematic lack of ethics with reference to the Rolling Stones and George White/pimp Ira Levin here.) Interestingly, Elizebeth Smith and her husband were purged from the NSA at around the same time.
Gottlieb’s gang began testing drugs like LSD, marijuana concentrates and mescaline on institutionalized people, either in mental hospitals or prison-affiliated psych wards. Then they began giving them to their colleagues at the CIA and US Army Chemical Corps. According to the author of Acid Dreams, Gottlieb also used new CIA recruits through their intake facility at Williamsburg as unwitting guinea pigs. It’s handing this poison to the ‘new kids’ where Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg come in.
In the early 1960s, Harvard professors Richard Alpert and Tim Leary; as well as “beat poet” Ginsburg had regular and large-scale access to Gottleib’s drugs, which were by no means easy to find at the time. As I stated before, Alpert was from a Jewish family in Boston while Leary was Irish Catholic from nearby Springfield. A marriage made in Mishawum heaven.
Both Leary and Alpert were fired from Harvard in 1962 when they used divinity students who were attending a Christian church service, held on Good Friday at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, as unwitting test subjects for LSD research. (A set up much like what Gottlieb approved at the CIA. Gottlieb also employed the infamous “Lord’s Prayer” ice-pick lobotomist Walter J. Freedman II for CIA work.)
Harvard University threw Leary and Alpert under the bus when they pair got caught. The disgraced professors became professional LSD promoters after that: the money allegedly came from the Mellon banking family (who actually got their money from matriarch Sarah Negley’s Civil-War-General/rail magnate father) but the CIA liked to cover their funding under philanthropic foundations or wealthy American families at this time. Ginsberg was their cheerleader and while most of the the drugs probably came from the CIA, we know Leary used the surfer-smugglers around “Big Rig”’s hometown Laguna Beach, California too.
So I hope I have given readers a deeper understanding of why Neem Karoli Baba is not on the Sgt. Pepper album cover, and perhaps some insight into the Apple Computer/Apple Corps feud as well. The truth is stranger than fiction.
As a parting salvo, readers may like study this October 2020 photo of Bhagavan Das and his latest squeeze. I mean, they look possessed to me.
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David Padwa CV:
https://www.cuke.com/people/padwa.htm
David Padwa Curriculum Vitae (posted 12-15-14)
“For in my nature, I quested after beauty, but God, God, hath sent me to sea for pearls.” - Christopher
Born, New York City, 1932. Attended Bronx High School of Science.
B.A. University of Chicago 1950.
1951-1953. Dishwasher, ghostwriter, hospital orderly, novelist, poet, merchant-seaman. Decided to return to academic life.
1953-1954. Columbia University. Department of Government & Public Law.
1954-1957. Columbia University, School of Law. Received LL.B and Juris Doctor degrees. Admitted to the New York Bar.
1958-1960. Continued graduate studies towards Ph.D. at Columbia University. Served as legal aide to Hon. Philip C. Jessup, Fish Professor of International Law (Judge of the International Court of Justice, former Ambassador-at-Large, Assistant Secretary of State.)
Authored legal articles in The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, The American Journal of International Law, The Journal of International Organization; Diplomate of the Hague Academy of International Law and Member of the Research Center at the International Court of Justice. Served as Counsel to various law firms on international law questions. Employed at The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Department of Political and Security Council Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat. Introduced to the Alps.
1960-1965. Founder and CEO of Basic Systems Inc. Principal offices in Cambridge, New York, Chicago, Pasadena, and Washington, DC. Firm specialized in educational and curricular technologies as well as the provision of systems integration services in education and training markets. In 1964 Xerox Corporation acquired Basic Systems; continued as division executive at Xerox and Director of Planning for educational markets.
1965-1966. Lecturer, Harvard University. Joint appointment at School of Public Administration (since renamed the Kennedy School) and Graduate School of Education.
1967-1968. Travel & Adventure. Alpine mountaineering; crewed on trans-ocean sail; drove land-rover across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. Lived in Japan.
1969-1974. Moved to Santa Fe, NM. Supported regional environmental organizations in the Southwest. Organized the parallel non-governmental gathering at the United Nations Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972. Founder of the Santa Fe Canyon Association; appointed by Mayor Pick to the City's Community Development Commission and there prevented paving of upper Cerro Gordo Road and preserved Cerro Gordo Park as open space. Built the Buddhist meditation center next to Cerro Gordo Park.
1975-1985. Founder and CEO of Agrigenetics Corporation. Moved to Boulder, CO; (bought first 300 baud modem 1983). Agrigenetics was the earliest agricultural biotechnology company, attaining $120 million in revenues and supporting a multi-million dollar research budget in cellular and molecular biology before being acquired by a large chemical company in 1985. The company's path-breaking genetic research and patenting strategy transformed the American crop seed industry. Consultant to the National Research Council, The Business Higher Education Council, The US Congress Office of Technology Assessment. Gave expert testimony before Congressional committees. Also served on the Board of the Industrial Biotechnology Association, and as a Director of Rothschild Biotechnology Investments, a fund listed on the London Stock Exchange.
1985-1986. Bicentennial University Professor at The University of Georgia. Studied implications of large scale computer networked collaborations in the scientific research community.
1986-1987. Professor Adjoint, University of Colorado School of Business. Appointed by Governors Lamm and Romer as Commissioner of The Colorado High Technology Commission, which developed a successful strategy for the State to benefit from its technology resources. Designed and supervised the creation of novel institutional forms to enhance technology transfer from the academic research community into the private sector, and served as consultant to several universities and the Government of Victoria, Australia on issues relating to the commercialization of university based intellectual properties.
1988-1991. Policy Research Fellow and National Science Foundation contractor at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, a consortium of 62 research universities. Helped craft UCAR's approach to capitalizing the consortium's intellectual assets, and for developing hybrid public-private organizations in technology areas.
1987-1993. Outside board member of Bandgap Corporation, a company active in contract opto-electronic research, laser photonics, and the epitaxial fabrication of advanced semiconductor materials. The company was acquired by a Fortune 100 company in 1993. Participated in two Himalayan mountaineering expeditions and created the 1988 expedition's unprecedented internet satellite link on the Tibetan side of Mt. Everest which was used to acquire and exchange up-to-the-minute ground-level meteorological information with a group of American universities.
1991-1995. Returned to Santa Fe from Boulder. Retired again. Presented colloquium at the Santa Fe Institute on the National Science Foundation “Collaboratory” concept and another on the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Climbing in New Zealand, China.
1995 --- Spring and Fall in Nepal.
1995-1997. Chairman of NetSage Corporation, a technology company developing software systems enabling the personalization of interactivity on networks. Granted a United States Patent for the invention of an "Agent Based Instruction System & Method". Chairman of The National Homework Computer Coalition, a non-profit organization chartered in the District of Columbia to investigate requirements to provide students in K-12 with a network access device to be used at home for the special purpose of doing school assigned curricular work on a daily basis.
1998 – Gold medalist, men's over 60 relay team - Mt. Taylor Quadrathlon, and repeated in 2005
2001 – Climbed Grand Teton. Met Bettina Sulzer Milliken, marrying in 2005 and began mountain touring with her in the Khumbu of Nepal, Garwhal Ranges India, Tien Shan Range China, Chimbulak Shan Kazakhstan, Svalbard Archipelago Norway, Torres del Paine Patagonia Chile, Mt. Aspiring New Zealand, Cradle Mountain Tasmania. Commenced working on a novel Incident at Lukla.
2012 -- Now an octogenarian! The years have gone by so swiftly, with many friends gone, and so many books still unread, so many mountains unclimbed, but so happy and in good health with beloved Bettina. Absolutely amazing.
2013 - Incident at Lukla published!
Children: Sabrina Isabella Padwa, Gideon Ash Padwa, Mariner Ezra Padwa
American Alpine Club, Harvard Club of New York.
