Lex Fridman Podcast
#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
Wed, 30 Oct 2024
Rick Spence is a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult, and military history. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep451-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/rick-spence-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Rick's Website: https://www.uidaho.edu/class/history/faculty-staff/richard-spence Rick's Courses: https://bit.ly/40dIZbw SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex MasterClass: Online classes from world-class experts. Go to https://masterclass.com/lexpod Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (09:04) - KGB and CIA (23:21) - Okhrana, Cheka, NKVD (38:53) - CIA spies vs KGB spies (45:29) - Assassinations and mind control (52:23) - Jeffrey Epstein (59:15) - Bohemian Grove (1:11:09) - Occultism (1:22:20) - Nazi party and Thule society (2:02:38) - Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2:35:43) - Charles Manson (3:02:30) - Zodiac Killer (3:13:24) - Illuminati (3:20:48) - Secret societies PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips SOCIAL LINKS: - X: https://x.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://instagram.com/lexfridman - TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://facebook.com/lexfridman - Patreon: https://patreon.com/lexfridman - Telegram: https://t.me/lexfridman - Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
The following is a conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult, and military history. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
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you have written and lectured about serial killers, secret societies, cults, and intelligence agencies. So we can basically begin at any of these fascinating topics. But let's begin with intelligence agencies. Which has been the most powerful intelligence agency in history?
The most powerful intelligence agency in history. I mean, it's an interesting question. I'd say probably in terms of historical longevity and consistency of performance that the Russian intelligence services, notice I didn't say the KGB specifically, but the Russian intelligence services going back to the czarist period are consistently pretty good, not infallible. None of them are.
Of course, there's a common Western way of looking at anything Russian. Very often, I think it's still the case, Russians are viewed in one of two ways. Either they are bumbling idiots or they are diabolically clever. No sort of middle ground. And you can find both of those examples in this.
So what I mean by that is that if you're looking at the modern SVR or FSB, which are just two different organizations that used to be part of the one big KGB, or the KGB or its predecessors, the Cheka, you're really going back to the late 19th century and the Imperial Russian Intelligence Security Service movement. generally known as the Okhrana or Okhranka.
It's really the department of police, the special corps of gendarmes. Their primary job was protecting the imperial regime and protecting it against imperial or other interior enemies, revolutionaries for the most part. And they got very, very good at that. by co-opting people within those movements, infiltrating and recruiting informers, agent provocateurs.
In fact, they excelled at the agent provocateur. Person you place inside an organization costs trouble. usually maneuver them into a position of leadership, and they provoke actions that can then allow you to crack down on them. That is to sort of lure or bring the target organization into any legal or open status that it can be more effectively suppressed. They were very good at that.
So good that by the early 20th century, in the years preceding the Russian Revolution in 1917, they had effectively infiltrated every radical party, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, great and small, and placed people in positions of influence and leadership. to the point that arguably, that is, you can debate this, but I think in the whole, they could largely dictate what those parties did.
Nothing was discussed at any central committee meeting of any revolutionary group that the O'Connor wasn't immediately aware of. And they often had people in positions to influence what those decisions were.
Of course, that raises an interesting question, is that if they were that good and they had infiltrated and effectively controlled most of the opposition, then how did the regime get overthrown by revolutionaries? The answer to that is that it wasn't overthrown by revolutionaries. It was overthrown by politicians. That would then take us into a detour into Russian history.
But I'll just leave it with this. If you look at 1917 and you look closely, this is one of the things I would always tell my students is, is that there are two Russian revolutions in 1917. There's the first one in March or February, depending on your calendar, that overthrows Nicholas II. Revolutionaries are really not involved with that. Bolsheviks are nowhere to be seen.
Trotsky and Lenin are nowhere to be seen. They have nothing to do with that. That has to do effectively with a political conspiracy within the Russian parliament, the Duma, to unseat an emperor they thought was bungling the war and was essentially a loser to begin with. And it was a coup d'etat, a parliamentary coup d'etat.
The temporary or provisional government that that revolution put in power was the one overthrown by Lenin eight months later. And that government was essentially one dominated by moderate socialists. It was a government that very quickly sort of turned to the left. The guy we associate with that is Alexander Kerensky. Alexander Kerensky was a Russian socialist, a politician.
He was the quasi-dictator of that regime. He's the person, not the czar, who's overthrown by Lenin. So the revolutionaries, they did not prove to be the fatal threat to the czarist regime. It was the czarist political system itself that did that. What then transpired was that the Okhrana and its method and many of its agents then immediately segued over into the new Soviet security service.
So one of the first things that Lenin did in December of 1917, within a month of seizing power, since the hold on power was tenuous at best, was that, well, you were going to need some kind of organization to Infiltrate and suppress those pesky counter-revolutionaries and foreign imperialists and all of the other enemies that we have.
And so the extraordinary commission to combat counter-revolution and sabotage, the Chaka, was formed. You put a veteran Bolshevik, Felix Dzerzhinsky... At the head of that, someone you could politically rely upon, but Dzerzhinsky built his organization essentially out of the Okhran. I mean, there were all of these informers sitting around with nothing to do, and they were employed.
In the early 20s, the kind of rank and file of the Cheka might have been 80 to 90% former imperial officials. Those were gradually decreased over time. So why would they do that? Well, they were professionals. They also needed to eat, and things were somewhat precarious.
So if your job is to be an agent provocateur, if your job is to infiltrate targeted organizations and lead them astray, you do that for whoever pays you. That's part of the professionalism which goes in. And under the Soviets, the Soviet intelligence services are also very good at that. They are very good at infiltrating people into opposing organizations.
And I guess the one example I would give to demonstrate that are the Cambridge Five, the British traitors, from a Soviet standpoint, heroes, who were recruited, most notably Kim Philby. Guy Burgess, Donald McLean, Anthony Blunt, and there may have been well more than five, but it wasn't bad out of just Cambridge.
And then placing those people in high positions, the ultimate goal, of course, is to get your people into positions of leadership and influence in the opposing intelligence service. And so they did. Of course, it all fell apart and they ended up in, you know, Philby ended up living the last part of his life in exile in Moscow, but they got their money's worth out of him.
And you can also find this in KGB infiltration of the CIA, the FBI, the Aldrich Ames, Hanson cases. Of course, we were infiltrating by we. I mean, the Americans in the West managed to infiltrate our moles as well. But if it came down, you know, someone could dispute this, but I would think if you were going to come down to a kind of like a who had the most moles Superbowl,
probably the Soviets would come somewhat ahead of that.
So the scale of the infiltration, the number of people, and the skill of it. Is there a case to be made that the Okhrana and the Chaka orchestrated both the components of the Russian Revolution as you described them?
Well, there's an interesting question for me. I mean, there are all kinds of questions about this. I mean, one of the questions is whether or not Lenin was an Okhrana agent. Okay, I've just said heresy. I'll do that quite often because I am a heretic and proud of it. Great. Why would you possibly say that Lenin could have been an Okhrana agent? Well, let's look what he managed to do.
So you had, coming into the 20th century, nominally a single Marxist movement, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. And Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, majorityites and minorityites, are merely factions of that party. And they always agreed that they were all Marxists and We all believe in dialectical materialism and the rise of... We're all socialists, comrade.
The difference was the tactical means by which one would attain this. And what Lenin wanted was a militant, small-scale vanguard party. He wanted a revolution. He wanted to seize power, seize control of the state. And once you have the state, then you induce socialism from above.
Whereas the majority of the people, the so-called Mensheviks, the minorityites, who are, oddly enough, the vast majority of the party, that's one of the first things. How do you lose that argument? How does the minority get to grab the name majorityites? But Lenin did that.
So what Lenin wanted was a conspiratorial party of committed revolutionaries that would plot and scheme and undermine and eventually seize control of the state and induce socialism from above. There were other Russian Marxists who thought that that sounded vaguely totalitarian and not really democratic and not even terribly socialist. And they opposed that, ineffectively, from the beginning.
Outmaneuvered every step of the way. The Mensheviks are a case study in failure of a political organization. That, too, will be heresy to some people. But look, they lost. Now, so what Lenin managed to do, starting around 1903, continuing on to this, is he managed to divide Russia. to take what had been a single Marxist party and split it into angry, contending factions.
Because he and his Bolsheviks were on one side, advocating a much more militant conspiratorial policy. The discombobulated Mensheviks were over on the other, and in between were a lot of people who really didn't know where they stood on this. I mean, sometimes they kind of agree, and he seems to be making sense today. No, no, I don't think he's making sense in that day.
But he managed to completely disunify this organization. Now, who could possibly have seen benefit in that? The Ograna. Now, whether or not they put him up to it, whether or not in some way they...
helped move him into a position of leadership, or encouraged it, or encouraged it through people around him, whether he was a witting or unwitting agent of the Zara secret police, he certainly accomplished exactly what it was that they had wanted. And I find that suspicious. It's one of those things that it's so convenient in a way is that I'm not necessarily sure that was an accident.
There's also this whole question to me as to what was going on within the Okrana itself. And this is one of these questions when I come to you later about how intelligence agencies interact or serve with the governments to which they are theoretically subordinate. They do tend to acquire a great deal of influence and power. After all, their main job is to collect information.
And that information could be about all kinds of things, including people within the government structure itself. And they also know how to leverage that information in a way to get people to do what you want them to do.
So an argument can be made, again, an argument, not a fact, merely an opinion, which is mostly what history is made out of, opinions, is that at some point, between about 1900 and 1917, people in the Ocrana were playing their own game. And that game took them in a direction which meant that continued loyalty to the emperor, specifically to Nicholas II, was no longer part of that.
To me, in a way, it seems almost during the events of 1917 that, one, you had an organization that was very effective when it did that suddenly just becomes ineffective. It doesn't really disappear. These things don't go away because it will reappear as the Ochaka basically fairly quickly.
But it raises the question to me as to what degree there were people within the organization who allowed events to take the course they wished.
I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is within an organization like Akrana or if there's kind of a distributed intelligence that happens.
Well, one of the key elements in any kind of intelligence organization or operation is compartmentalization. Need to know. So rarely do you have an occasion where everybody, everybody in an executive position are all brought into a big corporate meeting and we discuss all of the secret operations that are going on. No, no, you never do that.
Only a very limited number of people should know about that. If you have a person who is a case officer who's controlling agents, he's the only one who should know who those people are, possibly his immediate superiors. But in no way do you want that to be common knowledge. So information within the organization itself is compartmentalized. So you don't need everybody to be in on it.
You don't even need necessarily the people who are nominally at the top. For instance, the Ocrana, the real boss of the Ocrana was the Imperial Ministry of the Interior. The Minister of the Interior, in fact. But the Minister of the Interior had no real effective control over this at all.
I mean, to the point was that at one point early on, they actually organized the assassination of their own boss. They have their agents among the revolutionaries kill the minister of the interior. Because he'll just be replaced by another one. He's an imperial bureaucrat. He's not really part of their organization.
You know, it's like a director of an intelligence agency appointed by the president. Maybe he's part of the organization. Maybe he isn't. Maybe he is not one of us. So you've got... different levels, different compartments within it, and who's actually running the show, if anyone is. I don't know. That's never supposed to be apparent.
Well, that's a fascinating question. I mean, you could see this with NKVD. It's obviously an extremely powerful organization that starts to eat itself, where everybody's pointing fingers internally also, as a way to gain more power. So the question is, in organizations like that that are so compartmentalized, where's the power? Where's the center of power?
Because you would think, given that much power, some individual or a group of individuals will start accumulating that power. But it seems like that's not always a trivial thing. Because if you get too powerful, the snake eats that person.
Well, if we go back again to the founder of Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky dies in 1926. Keels over after giving a... heated speech to a party meeting. Now, the common view, what you usually read, which was key for the time, is that, you know, clearly Stalin had him whacked because anytime someone died, it was almost always it. And I think a lot of times he did.
But in some cases, Stalin's probably getting blamed for things that he didn't actually do. Dzerzhinsky wasn't even opposed to Stalin. So it's not clear why he, but this was the, you know, Stalin died, you know, obviously he was poisoned. Something happened. It was an unnatural death. Somebody goes in for an operation, you know, it gets a little too much anesthesia. Stalin killed them.
Somebody tips over in a canoe in upstate New York. Stalin killed them. There's actually a case about that. So, That itself can be kind of useful where every time someone dies, they think you killed them. That's kind of an interesting method of intimidation in that regard. But the suspicion is nonetheless there. Dzerzhinsky had been, he was the grand inquisitor.
He was seemingly firmly in control of the organization. Of course, maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was. My guess would be is that if Dzerzhinsky's death was not natural causes, that he was probably eliminated by someone within his own organization. And then you look at the people who take over.
His immediate successor is Vyacheslav Menzinski, who's really not really a secret policeman, more a kind of intellectual dilettante. But if you look behind him, you'll notice the fellow is Henrik Jagoda. And Yagoda will really sort of manage things from behind the scenes until Mijinsky dies in 1934. And then Yagoda will hold on until he's a victim of the purges, I think, in 1937 or 1938.
Yagoda is ambitious, murderous. And if I was going to point the finger to anybody who possibly had Dzerzhinsky whacked, it would be him. And for the purposes simply of advancement. That's the, you know, the person to look out at any kind of corporate organization is...
your immediate subordinate, the person who could move into your job, because more than likely, that's exactly what they're planning to do.
Yeah, just one step away from the very top, somebody there will probably accumulate the most power. You mentioned that the various Russian intelligence agencies were good at creating agent provocateurs, infiltrating the halls of power. What does it take to do that?
Well, there's an interesting little acronym called MICE. M-I-C-E. And it's generally used. And it's just the way in which you would acquire. How do you get people to work for you? Well, M stands for money. You pay them. People are greedy. They want money. You know, if you look at Aldrich Ames, he had a very, very expensive wife with expensive tastes. So he wanted money. I is for ideology.
So during, particularly in the 1920s and the 1930s, the Soviets were very effective in exploiting communists, you know, people who wanted to serve the great cause. Even though that's initially not really what they wanted to do, because the idea was that if you recruit agents from among, let's say, American communists, you compromise the party.
Because exactly what your enemies are going to say is that all communists are
soviet spies they're all traitors in some way so you would really want to keep those two things separate but ideology was just so convenient and those people would just work for you so well they were you could get them to do anything betray their grandmother they would go ahead and do that for the greater good so ideology can be a motivation uh and that can be you know someone who is a um
who is a devoted Marxist-Leninist. It can also be someone who's a disgruntled communist because there's no anti-communist like an ex-communist. Those who lose the faith can become very, very useful. For instance, if you look in the case of American intelligence, the people who essentially... temporarily destroyed much of the KGB organization in the U.S.
post-World War II, were people like Whitaker Chambers, Louis Boudin, Elizabeth Bentley. All of those people had been Communist Party members. They had all been part of the Red Faithful. They all, for one reason or another, became disillusioned and turned rat or patriot, whichever case you may want to...
put in that regard what does the c and the e stand for the c is for coercion that's where you have to persuade someone to work for you you have to pressure them so usually you blackmail them you know that could be they have a gambling habit uh you know in the old days it's very often because they were gay okay gets them a decision where they can be compromised
And you can get them to do your bidding. Those people usually have a certain amount of control. Here's an interesting example of how the Okrana tended to handle this. I think it's still largely used. You'd round up a bunch of revolutionaries on some charge or another, distributing revolutionary literature, running an illegal printing press.
You bring a guy into the room and you say, okay, you're going to work for us. He, of course, would refuse to do so. And they go, well, if you refuse, we'll keep the rest of your comrades in jail for a while. You know, maybe beat them with a rubber truncheon or so. And then we're just going to let you go. We're just going to put you back out on the street.
And if you don't work for us, we will spread the rumor through our agents already in your organization that you are. And then what will your comrades do? How long are you going to live? So you see, you have no choice. You're ours and you're going to cooperate with us.
And the way that that effectiveness would be ensured is that you have multiple agents within the same organization who don't know who each other are. That's very important. And they'll all be filing reports. So let's say you have three agents inside the central committee.
of the SR party and there's a committee meeting and you're going to look at the reports that fail, they all better agree with each other, right? If one person doesn't report what the other two do, then perhaps they're not entirely doing their job and they can be liquidated at any time. All you do is drop the dime on them. And this was done periodically.
In fact, in some cases you would betray your own agents just to completely discombobulate to the organization. This happened in one particular case around 1908.
The fellow who was the head of the chief revolutionary terrorist organization, which wasn't Bolshevik, but the so-called socialist revolutionaries, actually the biggest revolutionary party, the SRs, who aren't even actually Marxists, more anarchists. But they went all in for the propaganda of the deed. They really like blowing people up and carry out quite a campaign of terrorism.
The fellow who was the head of that terrorist organization was a fellow by the name of Yevno Azev. And Yevno Azev was, guess what? An Okhrana agent. Everything he did, every assassination that he planned, he did in consultation with his control. So he kind of run out his string. There was increasing suspicion of him. He was also asking for a lot more money.
So the Akrona itself arranged to have him ride it out. And what did that do? Well, what do you do in your party when you find out the chief of your terrorist brigade was a secret police agent? It's consternation and mistrust. Nobody in the party would ever trust and you couldn't tell who you were sitting around. I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on, Boris Sevenkov, who was a
Russian revolutionary, and the second in command within the terrorist organization. By the way, the guy that wanted Azev's job so bad he could taste it. Well, on the one level, he expressed absolute horror that his boss was a police agent. And well, he should, because Savinkov was a police agent too. See, they already had the number two waiting in the wings to take over.
But he was legitimately shocked. He didn't really suspect that. So it's a way of manipulating this. And then finally we come to the E. That, I think, is the most important. Ego. Sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical satisfaction that they receive. The sheer kind of Machiavellian joy in deceit. An example of that would be Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five.
Now, Philby was a communist, and he would argue that he always saw himself as serving the communist cause. But he also made this statement, I think it's in the preface to his autobiography, and he says, "...one never looks twice at the offer of service in elite force." And he's talking about his recruitment by the NKVD in the 1930s. And he was absolutely chuffed by that.
The mere fact that they would want him, what he considered to be a first-rate organization would want him, satisfied his ego. And if I was to take a guess as to whether it was... ideological motivation, whether it was the romance of communism or whether it was the appeal of ego that was the most important in his career of treason, I'd go with ego. And I think that figures into a lot.
You know, people don't, someone doesn't get the promotions that they wanted. Again, if you look at something like Aldrich Ames' career in particular, you've got these kind of, his career in the CIA was hit or miss. He didn't get the postings or promotions that he wanted as a valuation. He never felt that he got credit for doing that.
And that's the type of thing that tends to stick in someone's craw and can lead for egotistical reasons and added incentive to betray.
Yeah, that there's a boost to the ego when you can deceive, sort of not play by the rules of the world and just play with powerful people like they're your pawns. You're the only one that knows this.
You're the only one that knows that the person who is sitting across from you to which you have sworn your loyalty, you are simultaneously betraying. What a rush that must be for some people.
I wonder how many people are susceptible to this. I would like to believe that people have, a lot of people have the integrity to at least withstand the M.I., The money and the ideology, the pull of that, and the ego.
It can also be a combination of the two. I mean, you can create a recipe of these things.
Certain amount of money, ego, and a little push of coercion.
But if you don't, we'll rat you out. You'll be exposed. What are some differences to you as we look at the history of the 20th century between the Russian intelligence and the American intelligence, the CIA?
If you look at both the Okhrana and the KGB, one of the things that you find consistent is that a single organization handled foreign intelligence, that is, spying upon hostile governments, and also internal security. So that's all part of it. Whereas if you look at the U.S.
models that evolves, you eventually have the FBI, who under Hoover, quite insists that he's going to be the counterintelligence force. If there are commie spies running around America, it's the FBI who's supposed to ferret them out. The CIA is not supposed to be involved in that.
The charter, the basic agreement in 1947, did not give the CIA any... It's often said they were barred from spying on Americans, which isn't quite true. You can always find a way to do that. What they don't have is they don't have any police or judicial powers. They can't run around in the country carrying guns to use on people. They can't arrest you. They can't interrogate you.
They can't jail you. they have no police or judicial powers. Now, that means they have to get that from someone else. That doesn't mean that other agencies can't be brought in or local police officials, corn, or whatever you need, you can eventually acquire. But they can't do that directly.
So you've got this division between foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence, often split between hostile organizations. The relationship between the FBI and the CIA, I think it's fair to say, is not chummy, never has been. There's always been a certain amount of rivalry and contention between the two. And it's not to say that something like that didn't exist between the
domestic counterintelligence and foreign intelligence components of the KGB. But there would be less of that to a degree because there was a single organization. They're all answerable to the same people. So that gives you a certain greater amount, I think, of leeway and power because you're controlling both of those ends.
I remember somebody telling me once that, and he was a retired KGB officer. There you go. Retired. One of the things that he found amusing was that in his role, one of the things that he could be is that he could be anywhere at any time in any dress. which meant that he could be in or out of uniform and any place at any time. He was authorized to do that. So more freedom, more power.
I think one of the things that you would often have the view is that the Russians are simply naturally meaner. There's less respect for human rights. There's a greater tendency to abuse power that one might have. I mean, frankly, they're all pretty good at that.
It is fair to say that there's probably some degree of cultural differences, not necessarily for institutional reasons, but cultural reasons. There could well be things that Americans might balk at doing more than you would find on the Russian or Soviet side of the equations. The other aspect of that is that Russian history is long and contentious and bloody.
One of the things it certainly teaches is you never trust foreigners. Every foreign government, anywhere, any country on your border is a real or potential enemy. They will all, at some point, if given the chance, invade you. Therefore, they must always be treated with great suspicion. That goes back to something that I think the British observed, was that countries don't have friends.
They have interests. And those interests can change over time. Well, the CIA is probably equally suspicious of all other nations. That's your job. You're supposed to be suspicious. Your job is not to be trusting. The basic job of an intelligence agency is to safeguard your secrets and steal the other guys and then hide those away.
Are there laws, either intelligence agencies, that they're not willing to break? Is it basically lawless operation to where you can break any law as long as it accomplishes the task?
Well, I think John Le Carre gave his pen name. He was talking about his early recruitment into British intelligence. And one of the things he remembered being told up front was if you do this, you have to be willing to lie and you have to be willing to kill. Now, those are things that in ordinary human interactions are bad things. Generally, we don't like it when people lie to us.
We expect that people will act honestly towards us, you know, whether that's being a businessman you're involved with, your employers. We're often disappointed in that because people do lie all the time for a variety of reasons, but honesty is generally considered to be it. But But in a realm where deception is a rule, dishonesty is a virtue.
To be good at that, to be able to lie convincingly is good. It's one of the things you need to do. And killing also is generally frowned upon.
You know, put people in prison for that. They're otherwise executed. But in certain circumstances, killing is one of those things that you need to be able to do. So what he felt he was being told in that case is that, you know, once you enter this realm, the same sort of moral rules that apply in general British society do not apply. And if you're squeamish about it, you won't fit in.
You have to be able to do those things.
I wonder how often those intelligence agencies in the 20th century, and of course, the natural question extending it to the 21st century, how often they go to the assassination? How often they go to the kill part of that versus just the espionage?
Let's take an example from American intelligence, from the CIA, 1950s, 1960s, into the 1970s, MKUltra. that is a secret program, which was involved with what is generally categorized as mind control, which really means messing with people's heads. And what was the goal of that?
Well, there seemed to have been lots of goals, but there was an FBI memo that was, I recently acquired, quite legally, by the way, it's declassified, but it's from 1949. So this is only two years after the CIA came into existence. And it's an FBI memo because the FBI, of course, very curious what the CIA is up to.
And the FBI are not part of this meeting, but they have someone in... They're sort of spying on what's going on. So there was a meeting which was held in a private apartment in New York. So it's not held in any kind of... It's essentially never really happened because it's in somebody's house, but... And there are a couple of guys there from the CIA. One of them is Cleve Baxter.
Cleve Baxter is the great godfather of the lie detector. Pretty much everything that we know or think we know about lie detectors today, you owe to Cleve Baxter. He's also the same guy that thought that plants could feel, but which somehow was a derivative of his work on lie detectors. So these guys are there, and they're giving a talk to some military and other personnel.
And there are certain parts of the document which are, of course, redacted, but you can figure out what it is that they're talking about. And they're talking about hypnotic suggestion and all the wonderful things that you can potentially do with hypnotic suggestion.
And two of the things they note is that one of the things we could potentially do is erase memories from people's minds and implant false memories. That would be really keen to do that. Just imagine how that would be done. So here to me is the interesting point. They're talking about this in 1949. MKUltra does not come along until really 1953, although there are all sorts of artichoke and others.
Everything is sort of leading up to that. It's simply an elaboration of programs that were already there. I don't think that it ultimately matters whether you can... Implant memories or erase memories. To me, the important part is they thought they could, and they were going to try to do it.
And that eventually is what you find out in the efforts made during the 1950s and 60s through MKUltra, MKSearch, MKNaomi, and all the others that came out. That's one of the things they're working for. And among the few MKUltra era documents that survived, there's that whole question is that you get someone to put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger and then remember it later. Yeah.
You could, interestingly enough.
So non-direct violence, controlling people's minds, controlling people's minds at scale, and experimenting with different kinds of ways of doing that.
One person put it that the basic argument there, or the basic thing you're after, was to understand the architecture of the human mind, how it worked, how it put together, and then how you could take those pieces apart and assemble them in different ways. So this comes, this is where hypnosis comes in, which is a was then still is, fairly spooky thing.
Nobody's ever explained to me exactly what it is. The idea was that could you, you think of the whole possibilities in this case, could you create an alternate personality and use that alternate personality in an agent role, but then be able to turn it on and off so subsequently the person which that personality inhabited was
captured and interrogated, tortured, you know, had their fingernails torn out, they would have no memory of it. They couldn't give any kind of secret away because it was embedded in some part of their brain where there was a completely different person. I mean, you can just imagine the possibilities that you can dream up.
And again, it's not, I think, the question as to whether that is possible or whether it was done. although I suspect that both of those are true, but that you would try to do it. Then imagine the mischief that comes out of that.
And one of the big complaints from a legal standpoint about MKUltra and the rest is that you were having medical experiments, essentially, being carried out on people without their knowledge and against their will, which is, you know, a no-no.
Yeah, the fact that you're willing to do medical experiments says something about what you're willing to do. And I'm sure that same spirit, innovative spirit, persists to this day. And maybe less so, I hope, less so in the United States, but probably in other intelligence agencies in the world.
Well, one thing that was learned, and the reason why most MKUltra and similar records were destroyed on order in the early 70s, around the time the CIA became under a certain amount of scrutiny. The mid-'70s were not a good time for the agency because you had the church committee breathing down their neck. You had all of these assassins. People were asking lots of questions.
And so you need to dump this stuff because you were committing crimes against American citizens. So let's eradicate it. And the important lesson to be learned is that never do this type of thing again where at least in any way in which the agency's direct fingerprints are placed on it. You can pay people. You can subsidize research. You can set up venture capital firms. You got plenty of money.
And you can funnel that money into the hands of people who will carry out this research privately. So if something goes wrong, you have perfect deniability.
On the topic of mice, on the topic of money, ideology, coercion, and ego, let me ask you about a conspiracy theory. So there is a conspiracy theory that the CIA is behind Jeffrey Epstein. at a high level, if we can just talk about that. Is that something that's at all even possible? That you have, basically this would be for coercion.
You get a bunch of powerful people to be sexually mischievous, and then you collect evidence on them so that you can then have leverage on them.
Well, let's look at what Epstein was doing. He was a He was a businessman who then also developed a very lucrative sideline in being a high-level procurer, basically in supplying young girls.
And he also filmed much of that activity. I think...
His partner in this, Ghislaine, and I hope I'm pronouncing her name correctly. I think it's Ghislaine. Ghislaine? Well, I've heard it both ways. Ghislaine or Ghislaine, whichever it may be. I think her argument at one point was that, well, we did this to protect ourselves. But this type of thing has been done before. There's nothing new about this.
Getting influential people in compromising situations and filming them. I could give you another historical example of that. In late 1920s, actually early 1930s, just pre-Nazi Berlin, there was a very prominent sort of would-be psychic and occultist by the name of Erich Jan Hannesen. He had a private yacht. I think it was called the Seven Sins. And he hosted parties.
He also had a whole club called the Palace of the Occult, which hosted parties where things went on. And there were cameras everywhere. He filmed important people. You know, guys like the brown shirt chief of Berlin in various states of undress and sexual congress. And he did that for the purposes of blackmail. So in Epstein's case, he is a procurer of young girls to wealthy men, largely.
And many of those events were recorded. Now, even if it wasn't his intention to use them for blackmail, think of what someone else could do, because people know about this. So you can raise a question, is this not, you know, Epstein is just kind of a greedy pervert. But through his greedy perversion, he's now collecting information that could be useful. Who could that be useful to?
Who would like dirt on Prince Andrew? Think of all the people who were there. And these, you know, there were important people who You know, went to Lolita Island. So if it isn't Epstein directly, he might have been being, I'm not trying to let him off the hook because I have anything for him. He was either running his own blackmail business or someone was using him as a front for that.
I mean, I think we're kidding ourselves. We tried to pretend that's not what was going on.
So you think even American intelligence agencies would be willing to swoop in and take advantage of a situation like that?
Well... you know, American politicians could ultimately end up in a position to oversee things like intelligence budgets. One of them might even become director. You never know. You can never tell what some crazy president might do. One of the guys who understood the person was J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover spent a long time collecting dossiers and politicians.
How do you think he'd remain director of the FBI as long as he did? Because he systematically collected dirt on people. So, there is a history behind Of this type of thing. And again, you could argue that's partly for his protection, to keep his job, to protect the sanctity and security of the Bureau. You can find a million different ways to justify that. It's really dark.
Well, there is that side to human nature. Let's put it that way.
whether it's the CIA or the Accra, maybe that's what the President of the United States sees when they show up to office, is all the stuff they have on him or her, and say that there's an internal mechanism of power that you don't want to mess with, And so you will listen, whether that internal mechanism of power is the military industrial complex or whatever, the bureaucracy of government.
Kind of actually the deep state. The deep state.
The entrenched bureaucratic. Well, it's been said, and I think it's generally true, that bureaucratic creatures are like any other creatures. It basically exists to perpetuate itself and to grow. I mean, nobody wants to go out of business. And of course, you get all of these things like Pizzagate and- of one form or another. But here's an interesting thing to consider.
Okay, and I want to argue that I'm not saying that Pizzagate in any way was real or QAnon had to say that, but where do they get these ideas from? So let's ask ourselves, do pedophiles exist?
Yeah.
Do organized pedophile organizations exist? Yeah, they share information, pictures, they're out there on the dark web. They cooperate. So does child trafficking exist? Yeah, it does. So in other words, Whether or not specific conspiracy theories about this or that group of organized pedophile cultists is real, all the ingredients for that to be real are there. Pedophiles exist.
Organized pedophilia exists. Child and human trafficking exists. At some point, at some time, someone will put all of those together. In fact, certainly they already have.
We'll jump around a little bit, but because your work is so fascinating and it covers so many topics. So let's, if we jump into the present with the Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg Group. Bilderbergers. So the elites, as I think you've referred to them. So this gathering of the elites, can you just talk about them? What is this gathering?
Well, first thing I have to point out is that Bohemian Grove is a place, not an organization. It's where the Bohemian Club meets. It's that 2,700-acre old-growth redwood near north of San Francisco. The Bohemian Club began back in the 1870s. Its initial members were mostly journalists.
In fact, supposedly the name itself comes from, it was a term for an itinerant journalist who moved from paper to paper was called the Bohemian.
And although I think there may be other reasons why that particular term was chosen as well, but I think the original five members, there were like three journalists, there was a merchant and there was a vintner guy who owned a vineyards, California, how surprising. None of them terribly wealthy, but they formed an exclusive men's club. Was and still is.
Nothing terribly unusual about that at the time. But it became fashionable. And as it became fashionable, more wealthy people wanted to become part of it. And the thing about getting rich guys to join your club is what do rich guys have? Money. And of course, it's one of those rich guys that bought Bohemian Grove, where now you build your... your old boy's summer camp, which is what it is.
They got cabins with goofy names. They go there. They perform skits. They dress up in costumes. True, some of those skits look like pagan human sacrifices, but it's just a skit. What's really going on there? On the one hand, you can argue, look, it's a rich guy's club. They like to get out there. The whole motto of the place is weaving spiders come not here.
So we're never going to talk about business. We just want to get out into the woods, put on some robes, burn a couple of effigies in front of the owl, have a good time. Probably get drunk a lot.
What's with the robes? Why do they do weird, creepy shit? Why do they put on a mask and the robe and do the plays and the owl with the... And then sacrificing, I don't know. Why do you have a giant owl? I mean, why do you do that? But what is that in human nature? Because I don't think rich people are different than not rich people. What is it about wealth and power that brings that out of people?
Well, part of it is the ritual aspect of it. And that clearly is a ritual. Rituals are pretty simple. Rituals are just a series of actions performed in a precise sequence to produce an effect. That describes a lot of things. It describes plays, symphonies, every movie you've ever seen. A movie is a ritual. It is a series of actions carried out
in a precise sequence to produce an effect, with an added soundtrack to cue you to what emotions you're supposed to be feeling.
It's a great idea. So the rich people should just go to a movie, or maybe just go to a Taylor Swift concert. Like, why do you have to put... Well... Why the elf?
Part of it is to create this kind of sense, I suppose, of group solidarity. You know, you're all going to appear, and also a way of sort of transcending yourself, in a way. You know, when you put on the robe... It's like putting on a uniform. You are in some way a different or more important person. It's a ritual. The key ritual at Bohemian Grove is a thing called the cremation of care.
And that's what it's supposed to be. We're rich, important people. We have to make all of these critical decisions. Life is so hard. So we're going to go out here in the woods and we're going to kick back. And we're all going to gather around the lake and then we're going to carry, you know, it's wicker. It's not a real person. And how would you know?
And then we're going to, and we're going to, and this is the cremation of our care, but it's a ritual which is meant to produce a sense of solidarity and relief among those people who are there. The question comes down with the rituals is how seriously do you take them? How important is this to the people who carry them out?
And the interesting answer to that is that for some people, it's just boring. I mean, there are probably people standing around the owl who think this is ridiculous and can't wait for it to get over with. There are other people who are kind of excited about it and get caught up into it. But other people can take it very seriously.
It's all a matter of the intention that you have about what the ritual means. And I don't mean to suggest by that that there's anything necessarily sinister about what's going on. But it is clearly a ritual carried out for some kind of group reinforcing purpose. And you're absolutely right. You don't have to do it that way.
I've gone to summer camps and we never carried out mock sacrifices in front of an owl. We did all those other things. We didn't even have any robes either. So it goes beyond merely a rich guy's summer camp, although that's an aspect of it. But it also, I think, often obscures it. Focusing on Bohemian Grove at the getaway of the club ignores that the club is around all the time.
That's what's at the center of this. It is the club and its members. So despite all the talk about no weaving spiders coming around here, one of the other features of the summer meeting are things called lakeside talks. And this often people are invited to go there. And one of the people who was invited, I think around 1968 was Richard Nixon, who was making his political comeback.
And he was invited to give a talk where very important people are listening. And Nixon in his memoirs realized what was going on. He was being auditioned as to whether or not he was going to be right. He recognized that that was really the beginning of his second presidential campaign. He was being vetted.
So one of the main theories, call it a conspiracy theory or not, about the bohemian club and the gatherings is that people of wealth and influence gather together and And whether or not it's part of the agenda or not, inevitably, you're going to talk about things of interest.
But to me, the mere fact that you invite people in, political leaders, to give lakeside talks means that there are weaving spiders which are going on. And it is a perfect private venue to vet people for political office.
I mean, yeah. Where else are you going to do it? If you're interested in vetting, if you're interested in powerful people selecting...
Well, see, here's the question. Are these guys actually picking who's going to be president? Is that the decision which is being made or are they just deciding what horses they're going to back? Right. I think the latter is the simpler version of it, but it doesn't mean it's the other way around. But these are the kinds of, you know, I mean, Nixon was, you know, there was the whole 1960 thing.
So he's the new Nixon. And this is where the new Nixon apparently made a good impression on the right people, because he did indeed get the Republican nomination, and he did indeed become president.
Well, there could also be a much more innocent explanation of really it's powerful people getting together and having conversations and through that conversation influencing each other's view of the world. And just having a legitimate discussion of...
policies why wouldn't they i mean why would you assume that people are not going to do that it's the owl thing with the with the robes like what why the owl and why the robes um which is why it becomes really compelling when guys like alex jones uh forgive me but i've not watched his documentary i probably should at some point about the bohemian grove
where he claims that there is Satanist human sacrifice of, I think, children. And I think that's quite a popular conspiracy theory. Or it has lost popularity. It kind of transformed itself into the QAnon set of conspiracy theories. But, I mean, can you speak to that conspiracy?
Let's put it this way. The general public, rich people are inherently suspicious. Yeah. Let's put it that way. First of all, they've got all that money and exactly how did one obtain it? And I do not, of necessity, adhere to the view that behind every great fortune there is a great crime, but there often are. There are ways in which it's acquired. But I think it's...
One of the things I think that can happen is, particularly when people acquire a huge amount of money, and I won't name any names, but let's say there are people who perhaps in the tech sphere, who coming from no particular background of wealth, suddenly find themselves with $600 billion. Well, this is the question you would have to ask yourself, why me?
because you're one of the rare, tiny group of human beings who will ever have that kind of wealth in your hands. Even if you are a convinced atheist, I think at some point you have to begin to suspect that the cosmic muffin, Providence, whatever it is, put this money in your hands to do what? Achieve great things. Just think of all the stuff.
So you're going to start a foundation and you're going to start backing all the things that you like. I think there's an element of ego that comes in with it as well. And Again, it may not be so much what the rich person with a huge amount of money at their disposal and a lot of fuzzy ideas about what to do with it can be influenced by others.
It's always that question as to who's actually manipulating these events. What's going on in that regard? In some way, they can be a very useful sucker. Find somebody with a lot of money and get them to finance the things that you want them to do. The Bohemian Club is...
I don't think in and of itself inherently evil or sinister, but it means that there are lots of different people in it who have different agendas. It goes back to what I said about how somebody feels about the cremation of care ritual.
This is either just a waste of time, it's just some sort of silly thing that we're doing, or it is something of great importance, perhaps even mystical or religious importance, because that's ostensibly, what it's pretending to be. It's always this question as to what degree you begin to play, and the play becomes serious. That tends to happen a lot.
You've studied a lot of cults and occultism. What do you think is the power of that mystical experience?
Well, what is broadly referred to, well, we're getting to, what's occultism? What's the occult? The occult is the hidden.
That's all it really means, specifically hidden from sight.
And the basis of it is the idea that what is hidden? Well, what is hidden from us is most of the world, most of reality. So the basic concept within occultism, the basic concept within most religions, which are approved forms of occultism, is that the world, the physical world that we are aware of, is only a very small part of a much larger reality.
And that what the methods and practices of occultism arguably do is to allow someone to either enter into this larger reality or to access that larger reality for purposes to be exploited here. The most interesting statement about, and a key element of this becomes the thing called magic. Now we all know magic, you know, it's a guy standing on stage performing a trick.
But the interesting thing about a stage magician is that a stage magician is, we know when we're watching this that it's a trick. Yet we can't really figure out, if he does it well, how that trick is being accomplished because it seems to defy physical laws. And that's what's fascinating about it.
So even though you know it's a trick, if you can't figure it out, it has this kind of power of fascination. But it's mimicking something. Stage magic is mimicking real magic. So it's real magic. Well, let's go back to Alistair Crowley. Cause you know, he, he always has to go. We knew he's, I knew he was going to come up at some point in this earlier because he always does.
All roads lead to Alistair Crowley. All roads lead to Alistair Crowley. Um, Alistair Crowley. And I've said this enough that I should be able to get it right, but I'm paraphrasing here. He goes magic, which of course he spelled with a K to, you know, or CK. Um, is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will.
So in a way, that's sort of mind over matter, but it's the idea that one can, through will, through intention, bend reality to make something happen. Somebody once put it this way, it's tipping the luck plane. So, you know, you got some kind of a level plane. What you're trying to do is just tip it just a little bit so the marble rolls over one side or another.
Now, that presupposes a lot of things that, is there a luck plane? I don't know. But, you know, it's a good sort of idea to have. And here again, don't become overly bothered trying to figure out whether you actually can bend reality. become bothered by the fact that there are people who believe that they can and will go to great efforts to do so and will often believe they have succeeded.
So it's this effort to believe Make things occur in a particular way. Maybe just to sort of nudge reality in one little way or another. And that's where things like rituals come in. Rituals are a way of focusing will and attention. We're all there. We're all thinking about the same thing. And you have to imagine just how.
The pervasiveness of what could be called that kind of magical thinking every day is everywhere. So let me give you an example. Have you ever attended a high school football pep rally? Think of what's going on there. Okay, your team is going to battle the other team. You've now assembled everyone in the gymnasium. You've got people who are dancing around in animal totem costumes.
And what are you chanting? Everyone is supposed to chant that the other team dies, that you will be horribly defeated and that our team will be victorious. That is a magic ritual. The idea is, if it comes into this idea, it's very popularly about visualizing things. Visualizing, manifesting, I love this term. You need to manifest your success. Well, that's just magic. That is magic.
trying to cause change in conformity with will. So these things can happen without you being even consciously aware of what's going on. And you don't need to be, because if you're all a part of the mob, which is there in the gymnasium, and you get into this and you get worked up, and a cultist would argue what you're doing is you're creating a huge amount of energy.
All of these people are putting energy into something, and that energy goes somewhere. And maybe you can. Maybe, just maybe, you actually can slightly increase the chances of your team's victory. Of course, your opponents are having their own ritual at the same time, so whoever has the bigger mojo will apparently win on the team.
So that's a, I would say, trivial example of that. but a clear one. I do believe that there's incredible power in groups of humans getting together and morphing reality. I think that's probably one of the things that made human civilization what it is. Groups of people being able to believe a thing and bring that belief into reality. Yes, you're exactly right.
Bring to conceive of something and then through intention, will. to manifest that into this realm.
And of course, that power of the collective mind can be leveraged by charismatic leaders to do all kinds of stuff, where you get cults that do, you know, horrible things or anything. There might be a cult that does good things.
I don't know. It depends. We usually don't call those cults.
100%.
Without endorsing this entirely, an interesting, you know, one of the questions, what's the difference between a cult and a religion?
And it has been said that
that in the case of a cult, there's always someone at the top who knows what's going on. Generally, who knows it's a scam. In a religion, that person is dead. So, see, I've just managed to insult every single religion. But it's an interesting way of thinking about it, because I think there is some degree of of accuracy in that statement.
Do you think, actually, the interesting psychological question is, in cults, do you think the person at the top always knows that it's a scam? Do you think there's something about the human mind where you gradually begin to believe... Begin to believe your own bullshit? Yeah.
Yes, that's... That seems to be... That, again, is part of magic, I think, is believing your own bullshit. It doesn't necessarily mean that the head of the cult realized, but there's someone... Maybe the second, you know, I always sort of look in the lieutenant. Someone probably has an idea about what's going on.
The other thing that seems to be a kind of dead giveaway for what we would call a cult is what's called excessive reverence for the leader. People just believe everything these people say. give you an example of the first time I ever encountered anything like that was in Santa Barbara, California in the 1970s when I was going to grad school.
And there was a particular cult locally, which I think was Brotherhood of the Sun. And it was the same, so there was some guy who was, you know... Among the other things, followers were convinced to hand over all their money and personal belongings to I believe he used part of that money to buy a yacht with. Anyway, a lot of it went to him.
And then, of course, working for free upon different cult-owned business enterprises, of which there were several. And there was a person I knew who became a devoted follower of this, and all I could think of at one point was ask them, what the hell is the matter with you? I mean, have you lost your mind?
What is it that this person can possibly be providing that you essentially are going to become a slave to them, which is what they were doing? And I actually give that credit in a way of sort of sparking my whole interest in things like secret societies.
And here again, as a disclaimer, I am not now nor have I ever been the member of any fraternal organization, secret society, or cult that I know of. And that's what interests me about them because I'm just always trying to figure out why people do these things. Like I said, why the robes and the owl? Why? Yeah. Why do you do that? And it's trying to figure it out.
I mean, I couldn't even hack the Boy Scouts, okay? That was too much of that. Because to me, you join an organization and the first thing that comes along is there are rules and someone is telling you what to do. I don't like people telling me what to do. Spent much of my life trying to avoid that as much as possible. And join a cult, there's going to be someone telling you what to do.
Join the Bohemian Club and there's going to be someone telling you what to do. Obviously, a lot of people I really get something out of that. In some ways, it's sort of necessary for them to function. But I do not understand it, and my study of it is a personal error to try to understand why people do that.
And there are so many reasons, primary of which I would say is the desire in the human heart to belong. Yes, sir. And the dark forms that it takes throughout human history, recent human history, is something I'd love to talk to you a bit about.
If we can go back to the beginning of the 20th century, on the German side, you've described how secret societies like the Thule Society lay the foundation for Nazi ideology. Can you, through that lens, from that perspective, describe the rise of the Nazi Party?
Well, I guess we could start with what on earth is the Thule Society? So the Thule Society was a small German occult society. That is, they studied metaphysics, another fancy word for occultism, that appeared in Munich around 1917, 1918. The key figure behind it was a German esotericist by the name of Rudolf von Zabotendorf. Okay, not his real name. His real name was Adam Rudolf Glauer.
He was adopted by a German nobleman and got the name von Zabotendorf. And I like to say that name. So I have this real thing about vague, mysterious characters who show up and do things. And trying to figure out who these people are. So we're working up in the years sort of prior to the First World War. So the decade or so prior to World War I, he spends a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey. There was none in the Ottoman Empire. Which was a fairly tumultuous place. Because in 1908 and 1909, there was the Young Turk Revolution. And you had a kind of military coup, which effectively overthrew the Ottoman Sultan and installed a military junta, which would go on during the First World War to make its greatest achievement in the Armenian genocide.
Eventually, he created a genocidal military regime, which would lead the country into disastrous First World War, which would destroy the Ottoman Empire. out of which modern Turkey emerges. Yada, yada, yada.
And by the way, we should take a tiny tangent here, which is that you refer to the intelligence agencies as being exceptionally successful. And here in the case of the Young Turks being also very successful in doing the genocide, meaning they've achieved the greatest impact, even though the impact on the scale of good to evil tends towards evil.
It's one of those things that often comes out of revolutionary situations. Revolutions always, always, always seek to make things better, don't they? We're going to take a bad old regime, you know, the sultan does, you know. And the sultan was bad, I think it's fair to say. Abdulhamid II was... It wasn't called the Red Sultan because of his favorite color type of thing.
And the idea is that they were going to improve. They were now going to... The Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire. They were going to try to equalize and... bringing in the different groups, and none of that happened. It became worse.
In the same way that you could argue that the goal of Russian revolutionaries was to get rid of the bad, old, incompetent, medieval czarist regime and to bring in a new, great, shining future. And it became even more authoritarian.
And the crimes of the imperial Russian regime pale the significance of what would follow in the same way that the crimes of Abdulhamid pale to when you get to the Young Turks. But that wasn't necessarily the intention. But von Sabotendorf is a German businessman who's working in this period. And the whole point here is that the Ottoman Empire in this period is a hotbed of political intrigue.
All kinds of interesting things about it. The Young Turk Revolution is essentially a military coup, but it is plotted in Masonic lodges. I know, technically, Masonic lodges are never supposed to be involved in politics, but they are. Or, you know, the lodge meeting breaks up and then you plot the revolution. So same group of people, but it's not technically.
But yes, and there's the Macedonia Resorsa Lodge in Thessaloniki was ground zero for plotting this military coup that was supposed to improve the empire. So, Zabotendorf is in one way or another mixed up in all of this, or at least he's an observer. Plus, he's initiated into the Masonic lodges.
And interestingly enough, the fellow who initiates him into one of these Eastern lodges is a Jewish merchant by the name of Termudi, who's also a Kabbalist. So, Svotendorf is very, very interested in the occult. He's initiated into Eastern Masonic lodges in a period when those same lodges are being used as a center for political intrigue.
He also apparently is involved in gun running, which in revolutionary periods, there's a lot of money to be made off of that. So, he's connected to various... dark businesses in a tumultuous time with connections to politicized Freemasonry and the occult. Now, in the course of the First World War, he returns to Germany. He just shows up.
And it would be my operative suspicion or theory that Sibotendorf was working for someone. I don't think he just pops up in Munich on his own accord. Why does he leave the Ottoman Empire and return to that place?
Who's behind him? Well, maybe no one. But why?