Leonard Doyle, Guardian 24th February 1984.
Sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for illegal surveillance of private citizens, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) settled out of court. LAPD’s Public Disorder and Intelligence Division were accused of ‘organising a massive spying operation providing right-wing organisations with a sophisticated computer and handing on extensive files on suspects.’
Here is the tip of an enormous iceberg. The best (brief) account we know of is February’s issue of The Hustler, the US porno mag. owned by Larry Flynt. Much of what follows is lifted from that.
LAPD had set up the Public Disorder and Intelligence Division and the Criminal Conspiracy Section (PDID and CCS) in the 1960s. In 1971 one of the CCS agent provocateurs, Louis Tackwood (a black), began exposing their activities. Tackwood later wrote a book, a fairly extraordinary book called The Glasshouse Tapes (Avon NY 1973) describing his activities and those of LAPD’S CCS. Among his more startling claims is one that CCS planned ‘left wing’ riots and the assassination of Nixon for the Republican Convention of 1972, apparently in the hope of installing Vice President Agnew as some kind of dictator. Although this story is quite widely accepted among the US conspiracy buffs, the exact status it has remains unclear to me.
Tackwood linked two of the Watergate ‘plumbers’, McCord and Hunt, to the LAPD. (The various official Watergate enquiries managed to miss all this.)
In 1975 the Los Angeles Police Commission (a civilian body somewhat akin to our Police Committees) ordered 2 million police intelligence files accumulated since the 1950s, to be destroyed. Nothing was done.
In 1983, ACLU, representing 183 clients, mostly left/radical groups, filed suit against LAPD for various breaches of civil liberties. It then emerged that an LAPD PDID officer was transferring the aforementioned intelligence files into a computer for a right-wing intelligence agency called Western Goals. (A private intelligence agency, something like our Economic League). Western Goals was headed by Larry McDonald, the Chairman of the John Birch Society. McDonald subsequently died in KAL 007.
Larry Flynt suggests in his Hustler piece that KAL 007 was sent into Soviet airspace precisely in the hope that it would get shot down and rid the Reagan administration of an embarrassing individual – Larry McDonald. (The source of the embarrassment is detailed below.) Flynt’s hypothesis seems implausible (there are easier ways to kill people) but, as Flynt points out, Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, was killed in a plane crash during the Watergate mess in very peculiar circumstances. (On this see ch 7 of Carl Oglesby’s The Yankee and Cowboy War (Kansas City 1976)
The Western Goals links are interesting in two directions. One leads to Reagan himself: the law firm defending the LAPD officers has, as a partner, Reagan’s Attorney General, William French Smith. (The same firm also represents Reagan’s personal interests.) The second leads back to Joseph McCarthy. The No 2 man at Western Goals is John Rees, whose wife, Louise, used to work for McCarthy and Roy Cohn in the 1950s. (Cohn is also connected to Western Goals, on the Advisory Board.)
These connections explain why sections of the US conspiracy buff world are getting excited about this affair. They also make one wonder why the Democrats have made so little of it.
Larry Flynt, the owner/publisher of The Hustler and other porno mags in the US, is an interesting man. He’s a conspiracy buff, and in the late 1970s he bought a failing underground paper (the LA Free Press, I think) and turned it over to a group of Kennedy assassination buffs. They produced a one-off issue devoted to the assassination, included in which was the offer of $1,000, 000 from Flynt for information leading to a conviction in the Kennedy case. A short time after this Flynt was shot and paralysed from the waist downwards. His assailant was never found. Flynt believes the shooting was connected to the offer of money and has said, once on British television, that he was shot by the FBI. To my knowledge he has yet to produce any evidence for this belief.
Flynt is now producing a new magazine in the States, The Rebel, which, we hear, contains a deal of conspiracy/parapolitical material. If anyone reading this has a copy we’d very much like to see it. He is also currently paying Mae Brussel to send her taped radio programmes to the members of Congress.
Flynt is currently in jail for contempt of court. He refused to tell a court where he had obtained the FBI video tapes of one John De Lorean buying drugs.
With an estimated $50,000,000 fortune to spend, Flynt may yet turn out to be a serious threat to various ruling elites in America. If he survives that long.
RR