The United States of Paranoia (19 page)

Burnham is an engaging stylist and a talented storyteller, and it is no surprise that her book was a commercial success, eventually selling more than a million copies. What might be more surprising is the interfaith approach she adopted, the ease with which a volume studded with Bible quotes could also declare casually that Zoroastrianism “transformed the old Babylonian and Assyrian gods into archangels, whence they crept irrevocably into Judaism and Christianity.”
44
Burnham was following in the footsteps of an earlier book: Peter Lamborn Wilson, who is in no sense a Christian, had argued in
Angels
that the angelic archetype appears in almost every religion.
45
She was also drawing on her own hopscotch spiritual path, which included a spell as a Buddhist and a long-standing interest in the faiths of the world. “I have spent a lifetime looking into various religions,” she says today, “and realizing that they’re all saying the same thing in slightly different words.”

Burnham’s book also declared forthrightly that its author doesn’t believe in Hell: a tolerant, positive outlook for the age of
Oprah
and the self-help shelf. Indeed, the author eventually appeared on
Oprah
, and some stores filed her book in the self-help section. But her books were sometimes filed as Christian literature too, and Burnham doesn’t seem displeased about that. When she heard that a priest had told his congregation that everyone should keep two tomes by the bed, the Bible and
A Book of Angels
, she reported the news proudly in a later edition of the text.

As Burnham climbed the best-seller list, vendors took note. A flood of angel tchotchkes cascaded onto the market: angel dolls, angel figurines, angel watches, even angel perfume. And, of course, more angel books. Because they prominently feature the word
angels
, those books attracted a lot of Christian buyers. Some of them were written by conventional Christians, while others strayed even further from orthodoxy than Burnham did. One volume might thank “the helpful research departments at the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Assemblies of God General Council Headquarters, and
Guideposts
magazine.”
46
Another might announce that the ranks of angels include “incarnated elementals,” which turns out to mean “leprechauns, fairies, brownies, and elves.”
47
And both books might sit on the same shelf at Barnes & Noble.

Not surprisingly, the fad annoyed many Christians, some of whom saw Satan’s hand at work: the Enemy Outside in an angelic disguise. “As a young man out of college,” the religious writer Bill Myers claimed he encountered a medium who said he could transmit messages from angels. The alleged angels

told me things about myself they couldn’t have known except through supernatural means. They knew, for instance, that I was an aspiring writer. In fact, one of the voices assured me that I was going to be a successful author, and that I was going to accomplish great things for God through my writing. Of course, this is what I
wanted
to hear! The “angels” went out of their way to feed my pride and tantalize me with visions of glory. They constantly flattered me and made me feel I was somebody special.

They also seemed to help me achieve this fame by offering to help me write a book proclaiming to be the “deeper mysteries of God’s love.”

I grew uneasy. I didn’t know much about angels then, but I began to suspect that these beings didn’t really have my best interest in mind. They were a bit too slick. And instead of encouraging me to grow in humility and love, I sensed them stirring up my pride and desire for success.

Finally, I decided to ask one of these beings a crucial question: “Is Jesus Christ your Lord?”

“Absolutely!” he said. But before I could even breathe a sigh of relief, he added, “In fact, not only is He my Lord. He’s also my brother.”

I could feel the hair on the back of my neck rise.

Why? Because I knew Satan and his demons have always been driven by a desire to be considered God’s equals.
48

You thought you were watching
Touched by an Angel
, but that was just a mask: It was
The Exorcist
all along.

Myers’s take won’t be very persuasive to people who don’t share his religious views. But setting theology aside, there is at least one sense in which devils were present at the beginning of the angel boom. Before Peter Lamborn Wilson wrote
Angels
, helping lay the groundwork for the fad, his publisher had invited him to do a book about devils. But Wilson figured devils were boring. It would be more fun, he decided, to write about angels and “make them sexy.”
49

As angel books invaded bookstores, tomes about aliens and Ascended Masters kept coming out alongside them. Other versions of the Benevolent Conspiracy circulated as well. A whole subculture devoted itself to the idea that certain digital time displays, particularly 11:11, might be messages from another plane. I quote a representative article:

All over the world, people report waking up at night, looking at the alarm clock, and noticing that it is 11:11pm. This happens again the next night, and the next. Soon they begin to see 11:11 everywhere; from computer screens to digital watches to addresses, labels, menus, billboards and advertisements. Is this repetition simply coincidental? At first, it may merely be forgotten as a lone anomaly—an annoyance. But perhaps, these mysterious time prompts are really wake-up calls urging the observer to sit up and pay attention.

But pay attention to what? And why?
50

The proposed answers vary, but several 11:11ers believe that the readouts are signals from a friendly celestial conspiracy. “These 11:11 Wake-Up Calls on your digital clocks, mobile phones, VCR’s and microwaves are the ‘trademark’ prompts of a group of just 1,111 fun-loving Spirit Guardians, or Angels,” one website explains; “the 11:11 prompt is their way of using our innate ability for pattern recognition to let us know that they are here.”
51
One book declares that an “11:11 Emergency Platoon” is “on loan to our mortal races for the advancement, or upstepping, of spirituality on this Earth.”
52

If
you
start spotting the 11:11s—or, apparently, any memorable time of day, from 2:22 to 12:12—feel free to take the opportunity to talk with the celestial platoon. All you have to do, according to the aforementioned website, is wait for the prompt and then “Acknowledge it out loud. Say—OK guys I hear you, tell me what you want.”
53

There was a time when communion with the Hidden Masters entitled the contactee to a church of his own: If I’m the one in touch with Higher Intelligence, then I get to tell my followers what the Higher Intelligence had to say. And many sects still stick to this model. But these days the typical angel book, like that 11:11 site, is a do-it-yourself manual. The guru, having cavorted with spirits, wants to tell you how
you
can engage the invisible world too. Every Man a Prophet.

Another version of the Benevolent Conspiracy story takes that theme of empowerment a step further. As Jack Sarfatti, one of Nick Herbert’s psychedelic physicist friends, described the idea: “Higher intelligence is us in the future. * We will soon master time-travel to the past and will go back in time to the primordial soup and plant our DNA there! * We interfere with our evolution at critical times. * We create ourselves by transcending time.”
54
We have met the ancient astronaut, and he is us.

Poke through the lore of the Benevolent Conspiracy and you’ll uncover pieces of genuine history amid the pseudohistory and the speculation. The late Frances Yates, an influential historian of the Renaissance and early modern Europe, has made a plausible case that the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did see a Rosicrucian “type of thinker,” even if the secret society that supposedly produced the pamphlets wasn’t real. Yates’s Rosicrucians still believed in older occultist traditions but were also making the first steps toward the scientific revolution; by her account, the prototypical Rosicrucian was John Dee, and “traces of the Rosicrucian outlook could be detected in Francis Bacon and even in Isaac Newton.”
55
Put another way, there really was an Invisible College, but it wasn’t a secret society guiding humanity behind the scenes. It consisted of innovators operating in the open, influenced by ideas that would eventually be associated with a fictional secret society.

It is also true that several founding fathers—George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Paul Revere—were Freemasons, though that hardly constitutes a conspiracy in itself. As history,
The Secret Destiny of America
left a lot to be desired. But as myth, it was powerful stuff, capable of inspiring people far removed from Rosicrucianism and Theosophy.

In 1957, a movie star and GE spokesman named Ronald Reagan returned to Illinois to deliver a commencement address at Eureka College, his alma mater. “I have never been able to believe that America is just a reward for those of extra courage and resourcefulness,” he told the crowd. “This is a land of destiny, and our forefathers found their way here by some Divine system of selective service gathered here to fulfill a mission to advance man a further step in his climb from the swamps.” Then he related Manly Hall’s story about the stranger whose speech had inspired the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Reagan misattributed the tale, as Hall did, to Thomas Jefferson.

The story itself can be traced back to 1847, and several versions surfaced between then and Hall’s rendition. But the variant that Reagan told features a detail that doesn’t seem to have been present before the Theosophists got their hands on the story: that after the Declaration was signed, “When they turned to thank the speaker for his timely words he couldn’t be found, and to this day no one knows who he was or how he entered or left the guarded room.”
56
Reagan repeated the story in a 1981 article for
Parade
, that time calling it a legend and that time, as the occult historian Mitch Horowitz has noted, using language “very close to Hall’s own.”
57
It’s enough to make you suspect that the president had gotten the yarn, directly or indirectly, from
The Secret Destiny of America
. But even if the similarities are simply a coincidence, Reagan and Hall shared the deeper idea that the country is on a divine mission.

That idea is a lot older than either Reagan or Hall. It is, in fact, one of the oldest American stories. When the Puritans arrived in New England, they believed they were on an errand to build a New Jerusalem. Sometimes they saw America as a way station, a place to hunker down for a spell before returning to England and erecting their utopia there. But at other times the new Israel was to be planted here in the New World, a commonwealth created far from the corruption and idolatry of Europe. That’s not so far from the goal Hall ascribed to the Order of the Quest, even if the ideas animating the missions were deeply different.

In 1630, speaking on a boat off the Massachusetts shore, John Winthrop said that the settlers’ colony would be a city upon a hill with the eyes of the world upon it. In 1979, announcing his candidacy for the presidency, Reagan quoted Winthrop’s words and continued, “A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny.”
58
An earlier president, Franklin Roosevelt, had declared that his generation had a rendezvous with destiny. Reagan extended the idea to the United States as a whole, and he linked it to the vision laid out at the beginning of the Puritan experiment.

A belief in a benevolent guiding hand can be an antidote to paranoia. “We live now in a culture of extreme fear,” Burnham has said. “Look at the absurdity of the security that’s been put in since 9/11, where you can’t go into any office without having to go through a magnetic screening machine. And someone is going to bomb the Leesburg, Virginia, courthouse? Not likely. The library? Are you out of your mind?” She’d rather think of her angels—of “a spiritual dimension that is on our side, that wants more and better for us than we can imagine.”

But beliefs in benevolent and malevolent conspiracies can also go hand in hand. When you think you’re pursuing a divine destiny, it’s not hard to find yourself watching for all the
other
invisible forces out there: darker, more dangerous powers who don’t want your holy mission to succeed. The Puritans saw their city upon a hill besieged by the Devil in the wilderness. And at Eureka in 1957, after Reagan invoked the mystery man who had urged the founders to sign the Declaration, his speech turned to the Red threat. “Some of us came toe to toe with this enemy, this evil force, in our own community in Hollywood,” he told the graduates, “and make no mistake about it, this is an evil force. Don’t be deceived because you are not hearing the sound of gunfire, because even so you are fighting for your lives.”

7

THE WATER’S GATE

America’s faith is drowning beneath that cesspool—Watergate.

—Gil Scott-Heron
1

T
he special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Diego office had a plan. An antidraft activist in the area was convinced that the Bureau was watching him—he kept telling people that his phone was tapped, his home bugged, his every move observed. With “a small push in the right direction,” the agent believed, the activist would start exhibiting “obvious paranoid tendencies,” and that would “completely neutralize him in his several leadership capacities.”

So let’s make a big show of spying on the man, the investigator suggested. Maybe we could build a spooky-looking mechanism from a bicycle part and an old transistor radio, then drop it off near his front steps one night. “In the event he displayed the contraption to anyone,” the officer argued, “its crude construction would ultimately neutralize any allegation that it originated or is being utilized by the FBI.” And if the target tried to tell people it was a bugging device, they’d ridicule him.
2

Headquarters wasn’t convinced. The problem wasn’t that the plan was unethical, unconstitutional, or absurd. It was that the activist might not be important enough to be “a suitable target for counterintelligence action.” The agent was told to investigate the fellow further, then “resubmit your request if his importance to the New Left movement warrants such attention.”
3
In other words, the Bureau should spend more time spying on the man before it tried to convince the man he was being spied on.

It was November 1968, and that was just one of hundreds of operations against domestic dissidents that FBI agents were proposing, and frequently carrying out, as a part of COINTELPRO, a program to disrupt and neutralize political movements that the Bureau deemed subversive. When it was launched in 1956, COINTELPRO had been aimed at the remnants of the Communist Party and at the groups the party had allegedly infiltrated. Gradually the program’s targets had expanded. COINTELPRO–Communist Party USA was joined by COINTELPRO–Socialist Workers Party, then COINTELPRO–White Hate Groups, then COINTELPRO–Black Nationalist/Hate Groups, then COINTELPRO–New Left.

The White Hate Groups effort was a watershed. The previous COINTELPROs had been designed with the Enemy Outside in mind: The Bureau’s target might have nothing to do with Soviet subversion, but the idea that it
might
be linked to Soviet subversion was always in play. But even J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s famously anti-Communist director, found it difficult to argue that the Reds controlled the Klan. Once the White Hate Groups program began in 1964, the sociologist David Cunningham has noted, many more groups could “be thought of as ‘subversive’ and therefore suitable targets for counterintelligence programs. No longer did a subversive group have to be controlled by or intimately tied to a hostile foreign power.”
4
Because the Bureau was aiming its fire at the radical Right, powerful liberals were happy to sign off on the program, setting a precedent that made it easier later for the Bureau to target the antiwar movement and the Black Panthers.

Under COINTELPRO, FBI agents infiltrated political groups and spread rumors that loyal members were the real infiltrators. They tried to get targets fired from their jobs, and they tried to break up the targets’ marriages. They published deliberately inflammatory literature in the names of the organizations they wanted to discredit, and they drove wedges between groups that might otherwise be allied. In Baltimore, the FBI’s operatives in the Black Panther Party were instructed to denounce Students for a Democratic Society as “a cowardly, honky group” who wanted to exploit the Panthers by giving them all the violent, dangerous “dirty work.”
5
The operation was apparently successful: In August 1969, just five months after the initial instructions went out, the Baltimore FBI reported that the local Panther branch had ordered its members not to associate with SDS members or attend any SDS events.
6

Sometimes the Bureau’s efforts were simply strange. Late in 1968, the FBI’s Philadelphia office pondered how it might react to the counterculture’s rising interest in the occult. “Some leaders of the New Left, its followers, the Hippies and the Yippies, wear beads and amulets,” an agent observed. “New Left youth involved in anti-Vietnam activity have adopted the Greek letter ‘Omega’ as their symbol. Self-proclaimed yogis have established a following in the New Left movement.” Under those “conditions,” he argued, it might be effective if “a few select top-echelon leaders of the New Left be subjected to harassment by a series of anonymous messages with a mystical connotation.”

As examples of such messages, the agent enclosed two sketches: a beetle, with the caption “Beware! The Siberian Beetle”; and a toad, with the caption “Beware! The Asiatic Toad.” The recipient, he explained, would be

left to make his own interpretation as to the significance of the symbol and the message and as to the identity of the sender.

The symbol utilized does not have to have any real significance but must be subject to interpretation as having a mystical, sinister meaning.
7

fbi.gov

If all of COINTELPRO had resembled the Siberian beetle plan, it would be a minor part of history: unconstitutional but clueless and ultimately harmless, the product of the same blundering Bureau that felt the need to file a report on the Monkees. (The Los Angeles field office claimed that a concert by the band had included left-wing “subliminal messages.”)
8
But the FBI’s activities were often darker and more dangerous. When the Senate investigated COINTELPRO, the chief of the Bureau’s Racial Intelligence Section claimed that “no one was killed” after the FBI falsely tagged him or her as a snitch. Someone asked if this had been a matter of planning or just sheer luck. “Oh, it just happened that way, I’m sure,” the officer replied.
9

This is where the study of conspiracy theories becomes a hall of mirrors. The feds didn’t just infiltrate and disrupt dissident groups; they made sure the groups knew that they were being infiltrated and disrupted, so activists would suspect one another of being police agents. In effect, COINTELPRO functioned as a conspiracy to defeat subversive conspiracies by convincing the alleged subversives that they were being conspired against.

While all that was going on, the CIA was engaged in its own program of domestic political surveillance. With the flair of a villain in a campy James Bond rip-off, the agency called it Operation CHAOS. And in the Nixon White House, an aide named Tom Charles Huston was drawing up plans for yet another countersubversive operation, one that would roll back restrictions Hoover had imposed in 1966 and also expand the powers of the CIA and military intelligence to spy at home. Huston wanted to revive the use of “black bag jobs”—in plain English, the use of break-ins. He wanted to make it easier for the feds to tap phones and read people’s mail. He wanted to send more FBI informants to college campuses and devote more CIA resources to watching students abroad. And he wanted the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and military intelligence to answer to an Interagency Group on Internal Security staffed by the White House.

The Huston Plan was stopped, but not because of anyone’s civil libertarian scruples. It was blocked by J. Edgar Hoover, who had no interest in submitting to an interdepartmental committee.

At this point you might be expecting to read the phrase “Or that’s the story, anyway.” Sorry. Every word I’ve just written is true. COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and the Huston Plan all existed, and they don’t even begin to exhaust the official crimes that were revealed in the 1970s.

The seventies were a golden age of Enemy Above stories. Ordinarily, such narratives may be the most disreputable sort of conspiracy theory, but as press reports and official investigations exposed a long history of misbehavior in the executive branch, it became clear that many Enemy Above tales were true. And as descriptions of those proven plots appeared in the media, it became easier to imagine that still larger and more malevolent conspiracies were lurking.

In other words, the mainstream was absorbing a mind-set that had long been common currency in the counterculture and the New Left. There was nothing like the direct experience of COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and the local equivalents run by Red squads to instill a deep distrust of the government. It was easier to imagine the president ordering a break-in at the Democratic National Committee if you knew that the FBI had repeatedly broken into the offices of organizations devoted to political protest. For that matter, it was easier to think that the government might have murdered Martin Luther King or Malcolm X if you knew that the Chicago cops and FBI had assaulted and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Black Panther Party.
10
Documented misbehavior inevitably fueled speculations about undocumented misbehavior.

As the Vietnam War wore on and domestic politics grew more bitter and violent, there was more critical coverage of the federal government in the mainstream media. The first COINTELPRO revelations, for example, came out after the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the Bureau’s office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, making off with more than a thousand documents detailing the agency’s attempts to infiltrate and undermine the Left. The anonymous investigators mailed the memos to the media, and
The New York Times
,
The Washington
Post
, and other papers then reported their contents. The FBI soon shuttered the program, though it didn’t end all the activities that had been carried out in the program’s name.

But the fears that were second nature to protesters didn’t start to flood into the mainstream until five burglars were arrested at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. Over the next two years, a chain of evidence emerged that linked their illegal activity to President Richard Nixon, who resigned from office under the weight of the scandal on August 9, 1974. By then there had been a wide range of revelations about the antics of the president’s dirty-tricks team, and the exposés continued to come after Nixon left
office
.

Nixon’s men, it was learned, had sabotaged the campaigns of the candidates believed to have the best chance of unseating their boss in 1972. After the authorities started looking into the Watergate burglary, they had done their best to sabotage that investigation too. When the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War that revealed the government’s deceptions about the conflict, Nixon’s operatives had burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, looking for information that could be used against him. Nixon staffers had assembled a list of the president’s political foes, ranging from the labor leader Leonard Woodcock to the actor Paul Newman. The list’s purpose, White House counsel John Dean explained in a confidential memo, was to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
11
Within the Internal Revenue Service, a group called the Special Service Staff had been regularly used to harass people for political purposes. When a new IRS chief shut the staff down in 1973, the president had immediately attempted to have him fired.

On top of all that, some of the Watergate conspirators had seriously considered a plan to assassinate the newspaper columnist Jack Anderson.

Suddenly the New Left’s warnings seemed much more plausible. (An underground paper in Atlanta greeted the Nixon scandals with the headline
WATERGATE: EXCUSE US FOR BRAGGING BUT WE TOLD YOU SO!
)
12
One COINTELPRO memo had declared the need to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles.”
13
Now “the paranoia” had spread far beyond “these circles.” In just a decade, the historian Kathryn Olmsted has pointed out,

the percentage of people who distrusted the government had risen from 22 to 62 percent. Forty-five percent of Americans polled believed that there were “quite a few” crooks in government, up from 29 percent in 1964. The proportion of those who agreed that the country’s leaders had “consistently lied to the American people” rose from 38 percent in 1972 to 68 percent in 1975. . . .

The proportion of Americans who had a “highly favorable” impression of the FBI had fallen from 84 percent in 1965 to 52 percent in 1973. In 1975, that figure dropped again to 37 percent. Although the Gallup organization did not ask Americans about the relatively anonymous CIA before 1973, the agency at that time was held in lower esteem than the FBI: only 23 percent of Americans gave the CIA a highly favorable rating. In 1975, the figure fell to 14 percent. Among college students, the CIA was highly regarded by only
7 percent.
14

In the 1770s, many Americans had believed that “a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” As the bicentennial neared, that same suspicion grew again.