JANUARY 14 SYMPOSIUM

The ‘Assassination Bureau’
Key to Understanding Post-WWII History

by Daniel Platt

[Print version of this article]

Jan. 14—Sponsored by the Schiller Institute, an online international conference was held January 14, on the U.S. holiday weekend honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., titled “Resurrect the True Mission of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Stop NATO’s World War; Dismantle the ‘International Assassination Bureau’.” Ten speakers, from the U.S., Europe, and Africa, presented different facets of a process which began in the 19th century and reached a crescendo of violence in the period following the end of the Second World War. An international oligarchy, faced by a threat to its power posed by the rise of actual and potential sovereign states, implemented a “strategy of tension” to intimidate political leaders around the world into submission.

The in-depth historical material presented will be published in coming issues of the EIR, in reports expanded by the speakers, all for the purpose of furthering the mobilization to end the subversion which now is at the point of threatening world war, and nuclear annihilation.

The conference opened with a powerful, short video excerpt from a 2004 speech by Lyndon LaRouche, “The Immortal Talent of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” given at a Jan. 19 meeting in Talladega, Alabama, for King’s birthday commemoration. LaRouche spoke of the lesson about him everyone should learn, “which brings him back to life, as if he were standing here alive today….” LaRouche said that “we face the same problem, in principle, that Martin faced, and faced successfully.” How are we going to shape our policies, he posed, to successfully develop relations with societies of widely varying cultures around the globe, recognizing the common humanity that unites us all?

The discussion then proceeded with a concise, powerful summary of the current strategic picture by Harley Schlanger, Vice President of the Schiller Institute U.S.A. and formerly national spokesman for Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Schlanger served as moderator for the four-and-a-half-hour event, and warned in his overview that we are up against an Anglo-American approach of “foreign policy through warfare.” What followed was an incisive look at the mechanisms which have been used to suppress political leaders and movements who offered an alternative to this benighted policy.

Synarchism

This process was analyzed from different perspectives. Dr. Clifford A Kiracofe, President of the Washington Institute for Peace and Development and former senior professional staff member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, described the emergence during the period from the late 19th Century through the 1930s, of the synarchist movement, “synarchism” being defined as the antithesis to anarchism. He characterized it as an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists, an “overworld” that placed itself above sovereign nation states, but collaborated with the “underworld” of organized crime. This tendency favored a “controlled society” as later depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1950), and was central to the intellectual networks which spawned fascism. Following WWII, these networks reorganized themselves, and their heirs will be meeting next week at the annual World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland, which Kiracofe called a “consensus-building mechanism for the global elites.” As Schlanger pointed out during the discussion period, these networks played a key role in shaping the Anglo-American intelligence services after the war.

The disparate elements of these supranational elites, confronted by the twin dangers of Third World anti-colonial movements and national leaders who tried to assert their nations’ sovereignty, collaborated to form an “assassination bureau.” As Schiller Institute founder and leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche observed, what followed has been called a “strategy of tension” intended to inject fear into political leaders so that they would not entertain the idea of a departure from the London-Wall Street-dominated system.

A wave of assassinations took place, beginning in the 1960s with the assassination in 1961 of the Congo’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba’s importance was developed by journalist Norbert Mbu-Mputu from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, author of L’autre Lumumba. Peuple du Congo, histoire, résistances, assassinats et victoire sur le front de la Guerre froide (The Other Lumumba. The People of the Congo, Their History, Resistance Movements, Assassinations, and Victory on the Cold War Front). He referenced other African leaders who became targets, including Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkruma; former Congolese President Laurent Kabila, and former President of Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara. During the discussion period, Harley Schlanger added the name of Muammar Gaddafi, the late leader of Libya, to that list.

The killing of Lumumba was followed in 1962 by the assassination of Italian leader Enrico Mattei, a Member of Parliament and administrator of ENI, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (National Fuel Trust). EIR journalist Claudio Celani reviewed the recent evidence that it was in fact an assassination, contrary to the initial state finding, and described the motives: Mattei had undermined the dominance of the “Seven Sisters” oil cartel, and had offered actual development aid to the oil-producing nations of the Global South, in addition to more favorable terms (a 25%/75% profit-sharing arrangement, as opposed to the 50%/50% deal favored by the Seven Sisters). Celani went on to analyze other episodes of the “strategy of tension” in Italy, such as the killing of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

One year after the assassination of Enrico Mattei came the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy, who had special dealings with Mattei. There followed the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy within weeks of each other in 1968.

LaRouche Organization leader Dennis Speed carefully examined these events (the JFK assassination has been in the news recently, due to Biden’s decision to declassify some of the relevant documents as required by law, but to continue to hold back others). Speed reviewed some of what is known about the various components of the “assassination bureau,” including the role of Permindex (Permanent Industrial Expositions), and the recent addition to this apparatus of the Ukrainian Center for Combating Disinformation (CCD), which prepared the notorious online hit list, on which several of the conference speakers appear as targets.

Speed also developed the importance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He played additional excerpts of Lyndon LaRouche’s 2004 Talladega, Alabama, speech, in which LaRouche described King as a “man of God” who was, furthermore, conscious of that fact.

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, whistle-blower, and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), added additional insights regarding King and other Civil Rights Movement leaders, and quoted Fanny Lou Hamer saying, “Sometimes it seems like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom.”

Assassinations in Germany

Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented an intensive analysis of the “strategy of tension,” employing the examples in Germany of the assassinations of Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen and Treuhand administrator Detlev Rohwedder, in 1989 and 1991, respectively. Both were in positions of responsibility for economic policy during the German reunification. She said that these killings created a climate of fear in Germany, and that this explains why German leaders today embrace a war policy that runs so directly counter to the interests of their nation. She reported that former Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy, Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, had told representatives of the LaRouche organization that Herrhausen was killed because he would present an alternate pathway to the one desired by the Anglo-American elites for the post-COMECON world, and that his killing was as important as the assassination of JFK. She said that Herrhausen’s growing support for Third World debt relief was “the cardinal sin which would cost him his life,” and his death sent a message to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl: “Don’t dare go for a sovereign program.”

Radio talk show host and political analyst Garland Nixon added his insights: Following the Second World War, the U.S.S.R. asserted its dominion over the nations of Eastern Europe through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). NATO did the same thing in Western Europe, but needed the illusion of national independence, sovereignty, and democracy. The Ukraine war has dispelled this illusion, “lifted the veil.” The trans-Atlantic elites take a view of the citizenry that is no different from the way Prince Harry viewed his Afghan victims, through the sights of his helicopter gunship: they are not regarded as human. These elites feel now that they must stifle dissent in the media and social media, but this is a basis for optimism, because it demonstrates that they are afraid. “The U.S. empire is at war with modernity,” Nixon said. “It’s like whack-a-mole” against any power perceived as threatening it. “The U.S. is also at war with itself.”

The Principle of Nation-States

Jacques Cheminade, Schiller Institute leader and founder and former French presidential candidate for the Solidarité et Progrès party, conducted a sweeping review of the oligarchy’s attempts to manage the post-war world. He examined the theory that the 1960 summit conference in Paris between the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France was intentionally sabotaged by the intelligence agencies, who may have leaked information to the U.S.S.R. that enabled them to detect and shoot down the U.S.’s U-2 high-altitude spy plane, a major incident. He said that these intelligence services functioned as an integral component of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), about which President Dwight Eisenhower had warned. (Panelist Ray McGovern has recently expanded this concept into MICIMATT, the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think Tank complex.)

Summarizing the significance of the many postwar political assassinations, Cheminade said that the trail of murders was “obviously not a coincidence,” but an action against the “principle of nation-states.” He described the abortive attempt on the life of French President Charles de Gaulle by the French OAS (Secret Army Organization), another tentacle of the assassination bureau. Cheminade concluded by saying that “de Gaulle and Kennedy, despite their flaws, were giants,” compared to our present-day heads of state.

Well-known political consultant, campaign advisor, and Donald Trump confidante Roger Stone offered his own observations on a wide spectrum of topics, including the recent revelation in Politico of a taped conversation between President Richard Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms, in which Nixon attempted to gain leverage during the Watergate scandal by threatening to reveal who had actually killed John Kennedy. According to Stone, several of the Watergate burglars were still on the CIA payroll, and some had been present at Dealey Plaza at the time of the JFK assassination.

During the discussion session, the significance of the assassination bureau was summarized in a variety of ways. Claudio Celani said that there is a red line that runs through the cases of Mattei, Moro, King, JFK, and others: these figures all had a policy in conflict with the oligarchy. Helga Zepp-LaRouche said that the assassinations were intended to create an “aura of terror.... If you assassinate a few people, then maybe the others will be afraid and behave.” Clifford Kiracofe added that the objective of the globalists is to prevent the U.S. from having good relations with Russia and China.

At the close of the conference, Helga Zepp-LaRouche elevated the proceedings by referring to the ideas of the Institute’s namesake, Friedrich Schiller. Our opponents, the oligarchs and racists, she said, are like the crippled plants in Schiller’s metaphor, because they are emotionally undeveloped. True happiness comes not from having billions of dollars, caviar, and Porsches, but from creativity, from love, from contributing something to humanity. “What you hate, you lose; what you love, you gain.”

Symposium Participants

In order of their presentations, the speakers at the symposium were the following. The transcript of the video excerpts by Lyndon LaRouche are included elsewhere in this issue. A video of the full conference is available.

Harley Schlanger (Germany/U.S.), Schiller Institute, moderator

Dennis Speed (U.S.), Schiller Institute

Ray McGovern (U.S.), former CIA Analyst; founding member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), founder and leader of the Schiller Institute

Dr. Cliff Kiracofe (U.S.), former Senior Staff Member, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; President, Washington Institute for Peace and Development

Claudio Celani (Germany/Italy), Editor, EIR Strategic Alert Service

Garland Nixon (U.S.), investigative journalist, veteran radio and TV analyst

Norbert Mbu-Mputu (France/DRC), researcher, author in anthropology and sociology

Jacques Cheminade (France), President, Solidarité et Progrès; former French Presidential candidate

Roger Stone (U.S.), political strategist