A Note on MRA, CIA and L. Ron. Hubbard
In response to my snippet in issue 38 (p.22) on Moral Rearmament and the CIA, Daniel Brandt (1) sent me the following from Miles Copeland’s, The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA’s Original Political Operative (London: Aurum Press, 1989, pp. 176-177). This is a nice demonstration of the rereading problem in these fields. I read/skimmed the Copeland book when I first got it, found it an amusing read but didn’t notice – or forgot – the fascinating section Dan has sent. I ought to have reread it. But then I ought to reread all these damned books; and who has the time? Of course, Dan would say that all my rereading problems would vanish if I used his wonderful data base (www.pir.org/) more. He’s read all the books – and indexed the major items. Hence his retrieval of this Copeland section. He’s right; and when Internet access in this country is as cheap as it is in the US…. Notice in the section below not only the reference to the CIA and MRA but also the CIA and Scientology! Is the Hubbard Org listening?
‘……..PhD named Bob Mandlestam, that he should get something started, anything that smacked at all of political action, so that Frank Wisner wouldn’t spot the unit’s inactivity and steal its office space and budget. Bob eagerly put his imagination to work on some ideas he had been nursing since his university days.
His first was what he called ‘occultism in high places’, or ‘OHP’, a theory of political activism based on an impressively detailed study of ways in which leaders of the world based their judgements on one form or another of divine guidance. For example, our station chief in Kabul had reliably reported that Afghani politicians habitually settled deadlocks in their parliament with cockfights. Each side of the dispute would throw a chicken into a clearing on the parliament floor, the chickens would fly at each other, and when the fight ended with one chicken dead the chairman would hold what was left of the winner aloft and pronounce the dispute settled. Bob had actually sought the advice of a Mexican chicken-trainer when Kim halted the project explaining that, alas, our superiors would have to be introduced slowly into the more exotic kinds of projects we would eventually be generating, and that, besides, catering to the superstitions of African and Asian peoples would offend the remaining liberals among us as being ‘racist’.
But when Bob came up with the ideas of planting astrologists on certain world leaders he was not to be stopped. To start with, he immediately got Kim’s enthusiastic support, and the two of them softened Frank Wisner’s resistance by reminding him of the influence certain Georgetown mystics were having on the social life of Washington. Not only were our leading hostesses, Pearl Mesta and Gwyn Cafritz, in the habit of checking guest lists with their astrologers, certain members of Congress whom I’ll refrain from naming were known to rely on the advice of a colourful Georgetown figure known as Grandpa Moses who, in turn, relied on voodoo magic, the rites of which were prescribed by our own CIA.
Then there was something called Moral Rearmament, known as MRA, an interdenominational politico-religious movement started by a nut named Frank Buchman. It purported to deepen the spiritual life of its members, thereby inducing them to behave responsibly and altruistically in their public lives. What caught Bob’s eye was the social level at which the movement operated. It was aimed almost exclusively at leaders, and its literature was so designed. It was, in other words, appalling.
The astrology training scheme dragged along slowly, and didn’t show results until some years later when a seer we planted on President Nkrumah of Ghana persuaded him to accept an invitation to visit Communist China so that he would be out of the country when our boy, General ‘Uncle Arthur’ Ankrah, staged his coup d’etat, and some months later when a computer we programmed to make astrological computations induced President Sukarno of Indonesia to make various moves which suited our purposes. But the arrangement we made with Moral Rearmament gave us useful secret channels right into the minds of leaders not only in Africa and Asia but also in Europe. When Bob made similar arrangements with Scientology, the brainchild of another nut, this one a science-fiction writer named Ron Hubbard, we were on our way to having a political action capability which would make the highly expensive, largely ineffective and largely overt ‘covert action’ of Bill Casey’s CIA seem trivial by comparison. ‘MRA will hit ’em high, and the Church of Scientology will hit em low!’ Bob liked to boast, and he was right (emphases added).’
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Mori Yoshiro and Obuchi Keizo
Mori Yoshiro replaced Obuchi Keizo as prime minister of Japan recently. However the rest of Cabinet members are not changed. It means two members of the U.S.-Japan 21st Century Committee are at the positions: Minister of Finance, and Director General of Economic Planning Agency.
There were two another interesting members in the committee: Fukukawa Shinji, Chairman and CEO of Dentsu Institute for Human Studies, and Kobayashi Yotaro, Chairman and CEO of Fuji Xerox, and Chairman of ‘Keizai-doyukai (Japan Association of Corporate Executives)’. They are members of the Trilateral Commission. Kobayashi is Japanese Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Sakurai Haruhiko