Brief Notes on the Political Importance of Secret Societies (Part 2)

See also Part 1 in Lobster 5

United States

Anna Anderson was not the only Anastasia claimant; her chief rival in the United States was Mrs Eugenia Smith. Smith’s claims, although considered shaky by the best scholars, were powerfully supported by the testimony of one Michael M. Goleniewski, who hailed from Poland yet claimed to have known Anastasia as a child.

In his Polish identity, Goleniewski was, verifiably, perhaps the most important official from East Bloc intelligence ever to defect into the arms of the CIA. Goleniewski joined the Soviet intelligence apparatus in Poland at the end of WW2, and by 1955 had reached the rank of colonel and deputy chief of Glowny Zarzad Informacji, the Polish intelligence agency. His responsibilities included counterintelligence and foreign technical espionage. In April 1958 he contacted the Americans and began passing top secret information to the West. At Christmas, 1960, fearing that his cover was blown, he defected to the United States. In all, he transmitted or brought with him more than five thousand pages of documents on Soviet, East German and Polish intelligence.

His most important contribution was in the field of counterintelligence, the murky world of plugging leaks and catching ‘moles’ who work secretly for foreign services. According to his admirers, Goleniewski’s leads and information led to the capture of a small army of Soviet ‘moles’ in Britain, Sweden, West Germany, Israel, Denmark and France. His most important catch was the high ranking MI6 official George Blake, whose unmasking led in turn to the exposure of Kim Philby, the most famous ‘mole’ of all time.

Most disturbing of all, however, for the CIA, was Goleniewski’s claim that the East Bloc intelligence services were receiving timely information from a source or sources within the CIA itself. According to one CIA counterintelligence officer, Goleniewski was ‘the first and primary source’ on a ‘mole’ in the Agency. In short, if Goleniewski is to be believed, the CIA was as penetrated by Russian agents as the British services had been. His accusations led to a controversy that has raged for more than twenty years over the reliability of US intelligence. The CIA’s counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, was convinced that Goleniewski was a KGB plant or provocation agent, and distanced the Agency from the Polish defector. Nonetheless, Angleton came to accept the claim of a later defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, who confirmed that the CIA had indeed been penetrated. (18)

Among the Americans identified by Goleniewski as Soviet agents was none other than Henry Kissinger, whom Goleniewski claimed to have recruited shortly after WW2 while working in the Army’s counterintelligence corps in Germany. This claim – supported by former Army intelligence agent Frank A. Capell – naturally undermined Goleniewski’s credibility in some circles. More damaging, however, was Goleniewski’s claim not to be Polish at all, but rather the true heir to the Russian throne, the Czarevitch, son of Nicholas 2. According to Goleniewski, he escaped with his father and the entire Imperial Family; the execution was merely a politically-contrived cover story.

Goleniewski’s announcement immediately made his position at the CIA all the more untenable, yet he was not without influential supporters. His most highly placed admirer was Herman E Kimsey, a former Army intelligence officer who served as CIA’s Chief of Research and Analysis from 1954 to 1962. As Allen Dulles’ right-hand man, Kimsey was also said to have been in charge of recruiting assassins for the Agency. Forced out of the CIA with Allan Dulles following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kimsey later asserted publicly that Goleniewski had been tested by CIA experts for fingerprints, blood diseases, dental work, and other characteristics, and had been confirmed as the Czarevitch.

Others who supported Goleniewski’s lineage included the John Birch Society (through its journal American Opinion), the Philadelphia-based lay Catholic Order of the Carmelites (an anti-communist organisation), the conservative journalist Guy Richards, the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, and the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta.

In 1981 the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, the religious arm of the White Russian Community, canonised the Imperial family as martyrs to the Bolsheviks. In short, they do not now recognise Goleniewski’s claim that the family survived. In 1964, however, the Synod married him in an Orthodox ceremony under the name of Alexei Nicholaevich Romanov. (19) The Synod’s late change of heart may reflect the fact that a major source of its funding, the Tolstoy Foundation, was a leading conduit of funds from the CIA, which had lost faith in, and was trying to discredit Goleniewski.

Goleniewski’s most constant defender was the Knights of Malta (SOJ) based in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, which asserted a rightful lineage back to the original Knights of St. John of Jerusalem who rivalled the Templars as leaders of armed Christendom in the early Middle Ages. The order claimed its legitimacy in 1878 from protection granted it by Czar Peter I of Russia following Napoleon’s seizure of Malta, then the home base of the Knights. Peter I was also the alleged founder of the Secret Circle, a group of Church and Army leaders who pledged to protect God and Country. This clandestine patriotic organisation, to which Goleniewski said he belonged, supposedly infiltrated its modern followers into almost every intelligence agency in Europe in order to battle the Bolshevik menace. (20)

The SOJ rests upon an ecclesiastical alliance of Roman Catholics, traditionalist Old Roman Catholics, and Russian Orthodox believers. Its members refer to the New Mass as an “unspeakable abomination” and take violent exception to the “infidel marauders” who have corrupted the Vatican in recent years. The order’s former grand master, Col. Thourot Pichel, said the foundations of Christianity were “about ready to face destruction” from the “world menace of Marxism and Moscow” unless the Catholic Traditionalist Movement and the SOJ could turn the tide. (21) Another spokesman refers to the SOJ as “the army of the Catholic Church”, and boasts that as an army the SOJ devised a tunnel finder device for use by American troops in Vietnam. (22)

The SOJ’s membership reads like a who’s who of military and intelligence veterans. Its ‘two associate chiefs of international intelligence’ in 1970 were Herman Kimsey and former Army intelligence officer, Kyril de Shismarev. Shismarev, whose father had commanded a regiment in Russia’s pre-war Imperial Guard, had known Alexei Romanov as a youth and vouched for Goleniewski. (23) On the order’s ‘military affairs committee’ sat, among others, Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, Douglas MacArthur’s chief of G-2 in the Pacific theatre, and a renowned right-winger; Lt. General P.A. del Valle, a member of the neo-Nazi Liberty Lobby and the National States Rights Party (24); Admiral Charles M. Cooke, former commander of the Far Eastern Fleet and an unofficial adviser in 1950 to the armed forces of the Republic of China; and Lt. Col. Philip Corso, a 20-year veteran of Army intelligence (25) who went to work for Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) and once sued liberal columnist Drew Pearson for defamation.(26) Finally, the Honorary Grand Admiral of the SOJ is Admiral Sir Barry Domville, a former British intelligence chief who was interned during WW2 as a fascist sympathiser.(27) .

Goleniewski’s leading defenders in the SOJ have a curious but important relationship with the unfinished investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For example, the Army intelligence officer, Philip Corso identified Lee Harvey Oswald as a CIA ‘asset’ and named the alleged CIA officials whom Oswald allegedly contacted in Moscow during his ‘defection’ to the Soviet Union. The CIA’s Herman Kimsey, right-hand man to Allen Dulles who later served on the Warren Commission, allegedly had first hand information implicating the KGB in Kennedy’s assassination. In this scenario Oswald thought he was working for US intelligence when the KGB duped him into joining the plot.

Kimsey, now dead, has a spokesman in Hugh McDonald, former Chief of Detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who says he also served as an Army intelligence officer and CIA contract agent. In the Fall of 1964, Kimsey, having retired from the CIA with Dulles, was working with McDonald, then Chief of Security for Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Kimsey allegedly told McDonald at that time details of the plot to kill Kennedy. The actual assassin, Kimsey maintained, was a contract killer sometimes employed by Kimsey on behalf of the CIA. In his book Appointment in Dallas (1975), McDonald says he tracked this killer down in London and learned from him that the paymaster for the hit, codenamed ‘Troit’, set Oswald up as a patsy.

Who was ‘Troit’? McDonald ‘reveals’ in his later book LBJ And The JFK Conspiracy, that the KGB planned the assassination between 1961 and 1963. (Interestingly enough, McDonald’s co-author, Robin Moore, produced the film MacArthur with funds from the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, whose New York newspaper, News World, has accepted Goleniewski as the Czarevitch.) The John Birch Society organ American Opinion, which also backs Goleniewski, buys the McDonald thesis and suggests that ‘Troit’ was none other than George De Morenschildt, a White Russian geologist with strong connections to French and American intelligence who became Oswald’s patron in Texas in 1962 and ’63. American Opinion acknowledges as the source of this hypothesis the veteran Army intelligence officer Frank Capell, who succeeded Col. Pichel as head of the Shickshinny order of the SOJ and who, as we have seen, defended Goleniewski’s assertion that Kissinger was a Soviet agent. (28)

But Capell was not the first to finger de Morenschildt. In 1967, according to an FBI memo, McDonald himself and his friend Leonard Davidov, a fellow CIA contract agent, friend of Kimsey, and Goldwater security staffer, sought information about de Morenschildt’s involvement in the assassination from I. Irving Davidson, a CIA-connected Washington lobbyist for Haiti, a country where de Morenschildt was actively pursuing business deals and intelligence missions. (29)

In short, the McDonald/Kimsey/Capell network appears to have been a disinformation clique centred around the SOJ, and aiming to smear the Soviets (and Goldwater opponent Lyndon Johnson) with responsibility for one of the great political crimes in American history. But there is a special relevance here for the Goleniewski case. Following the JFK assassination a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko, claimed that he had access to the Oswald file in the Soviet Union, and to know that Oswald was never recruited or even questioned by the KGB during his stay in that country. Nosenko’s story fell down on numerous points, and the CIA’s counterintelligence branch concluded that he was a provocation agent, a KGB agent meant, among other things, to mislead the United States about Oswald’s relationship with Soviet intelligence.

This interpretation of Nosenko’s defection has been adopted by the journalist Edward Epstein, who concludes in his book Legend that Oswald did shoot the president and that both he and de Morenschildt had worked for the KGB. Epstein is now an avid defender of Goleniewski, whom he refers to as Romanov. (30) The fact that Nosenko was ultimately rehabilitated within the CIA, and the counterintelligence bureau decimated in a purge that culminated in late 1974 with the firing of James Angleton, suggests to Epstein that Goleniewski was right: the CIA had been penetrated at the top by one or more Soviet ‘moles’ who protected Nosenko at the expense of loyal agency officials. Thus the Epstein/Mcdonald/Kimsey scenario for the JFK assassination is intimately supported by their position on the Goleniewski/mole question.

The stakes are high in this controversy: nothing short of blaming the KGB for the assassination and exposing leading CIA officials as traitors. But the matter goes farther than that. In a recent issue of Commentary magazine, Epstein argues that the United States should shun arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union because the CIA’s ability to verify such an agreement has been neutralised through ‘disinformation’ and double agents within the agency. Although Epstein does not cite the Goleniewski case directly, his argument is a direct outgrowth of his conclusions reached through conversations with that defector and with veterans of CIA counterintelligence. Thus the twenty-year dispute over Goleniewski’s bona fides continues to impinge on the highest levels of national policy.(31)

A Note on SMOM

The SOJ is not recognised by most historians as the legitimate successor to the crusading Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. The ‘true’ organisation is, instead, generally accepted to be the papal order, Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The 10,000 members of this order, scattered throughout the globe, are pledged to defend the Church and to carry on the hospitaller tradition of the original knights. According to Steven Birmingham, “The Knights of Malta comprise what is perhaps the most exclusive club on earth. They are more than the Catholic aristocracy; they are the nobility, royalty. While the Knights of Columbus are associated with lodge meetings and bingo, the Knights of Malta can pick up a telephone and chat with the Pope.” A total of forty countries recognise SMOM’s sovereignty and accredit its ambassadors. (The Vatican recently upgraded its relationship with SMOM to ambassadorial level. AP 11 January 1983)

SMOM’s membership suggests an occult political significance rivalling that of Italy’s P2 lodge. Indeed, there was considerable overlap between the two, even though staunch Catholics like those in SMOM have long been warned away from freemasonry. One of Licio Gelli’s closest collaborators was the SMOM ambassador to Montevideo, Umberto Ortolani, who gave Gelli refuge after his flight from Italy. Ortolani was also the Uruguayan representative of the recently failed Banco Ambrosiano in Italy. Other joint members of SMOM and P2 included Admiral Giovanni Torrisi, chief of staff for defence; General Giulio Grassini, head of the internal intelligence agency SISDE; General Giusseppe Santovito, head of military espionage and counterintelligence; General Giovanni Allavena, an officer in the old intelligence agency SIFAR; and Giovanni Guidi, president of the Banco di Roma. Altogether at least three presidents of the Republic, three prime ministers, and five chiefs of staff were members of SMOM.

In the United States the list is no less impressive. Leading businessmen, politicians, and professionals have eagerly joined its ranks; Frank Sinatra even turned to his mafia contacts in an unsuccessful bid to become a member. But a significant number of intelligence veterans are also members. These include William Casey, currently director of the CIA; John McCone, former director of the CIA; and Clare Booth Luce, a member of President Reagan’s foreign intelligence advisory board. Two of the highest honours bestowed by the Italian branch of SMOM were awarded in 1946 and 1948 respectively, to James Angleton, then a young veteran of OSS (who would soon take charge of the Vatican desk at the CIA), and Reinhard Gehlen, the Nazi spy who oversaw the post-war reconstruction of German intelligence under CIA auspices. (32)

The Angleton connection to SMOM is suggestive in view of his opposition to the SOJ-backed Michael Goleniewski.(33) The existence of so many intelligence veterans in both Knights of Malta organisations, and their polarisation around the Goleniewski issue, may point to the existence of powerful cliques within the American intelligence community. We have other evidence of just such a phenomenon. Former CIA officer David Atlee Phillips writes of “that small circle of well-bred, highly educated adventurers who were known to some in the CIA as the ‘Knights Templars’ – Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Kermit Roosevelt, Tracey Barnes, Dick Bissell, and kindred spirits. (34) Other CIA veterans have confirmed the existence of similar associations within the agency, with names like the “Century group” and the “Gold Key group”. Further research is obviously needed to uncover the membership and significance of these secret societies within the intelligence communities themselves.

These examples of the role of secret societies in Western society are hardly exhaustive. One could mention the fascist-inspired Ordre de Jaques Cartier which ruled the province of Quebec for 30 years and still exercises enormous influence; the Round Table groups in Britain and the Commonwealth countries; or, leaving the West, the Triads and other societies that organise the social and political fabric of overseas Chinese communities.

Even with these few examples, however, it should be clear that secret societies continue to proliferate in the “modern” world and, in some specialised spheres at least, can influence or even decide important policy debates. Their methods, needless to say, are non- or anti-democratic, which explains the authoritarian character of so many of them. Essentially, secret societies like those described here are instruments designed to covertly seize state power. Because they rely so heavily on secrecy as a modus operandi, it would seem that, as in Italy, exposure is the best means to dismantle them. This article is a call for further work in exactly that direction.

Notes

18. David Martin Wilderness of Mirrors (New York 1981) p103
19. Peter Koltypin, letter to author 10 October 1981; Guy Richards Imperial Agent (New York 1966) p 247
20. Richards pp91-93
21. Col. Thourot Pichel History of the Hereditary Government of the Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta (Shickshinny, Pa. 1970)
22. James Wathen Is the Order of St. John Masonic? (Rockford, Ill. Tan Books 1973)
23. Shismarev helped Goleniewski track down the remnants of the Czar’s fortune. One of Shismarev’s contacts was his “old friend and retired banker” Rudolph Iselin of Basle, whose (son?) Felix was an IG Farben agent before and during WW2.
24. Del Valle has charged – in the spirit of Goleniewski and Frank Capell – that “the conspiracy headed by Dr. Kissinger is clothed in pseudo legality through our surrender … of our armed forces.” (Washington Observer 1 May 1971)
25. Guy Richards calls Corso “one of the most remarkable men in Washington.” Corso, he writes, “has made personal friends in the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, NSA, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps whose loyalty to him transcends bureaucratic boundaries whenever they believe the interests of the country are at stake.” (Imperial Agent p24)
26. Pearson also happened to be one of Goleniewski’s detractors, thanks to CIA leaks. Corso was a leading Goleniewski defender. (Imperial Agent p267)
27. Col. Pichel History op.cit.
28. American Opinion March and February 1976 on Goleniewski and the JFK assassination
29. House Select Committee on Assassinations, appendix pp57-59
30. Houston Post May 30 1981
31. Commentary July 1982
32. Kevin Coogan The Men Behind Counter-reformation in Parapolitics /USA 6; L’Expresso 28 June 1981
33. Angleton did, however, have an obscure connection to SOJ through his early literary mentor, Ezra Pound. Pound refers in his later cantos to P.A. del Valle, a member of the SOJ military affairs committee. And Mary Pound de Rachewiltz met her husband Boris at a picnic with the Princess Troubetzkoi, whose husband is one of the leaders of the Pichel order.
34. D.A. Phillips Night Watch (New York 1977) p 123

Jonathan Marshall is a journalist living and working in America. He has written extensively on parapolitics and related areas and was the editor/publisher of the journal Parapolitics. He now lives and works in California.

This essay originally appeared in Parapolitics and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.