The Truth and the Truth
From the Encyclopedia of Heresies
A characteristic common to all intelligence officers, East and West, is that they have a special open mindedness. For them nothing is impossible just because it is improbable.
—Robert Anton Wilson
They were founded by a man who bucked the odds, who did things his own way, and who succeeded when by all rights he should have failed. He was a cowboy. He assembled under his wing others like himself—bent men, men who did not think the way others did—and set them loose in a world at war to learn a craft that the other nations had honed over centuries. They were not spies in the traditional sense of the word up to that point, although they would become so. They were interested in truth drugs, in occultism, in foiling the Nazis any way they could. They were the OSS, and they were founded by Wild Bill Donovan. He was a man who loved action, who pushed the boundaries of the possible, and who loved truth so much he was forced out of the Nuremberg trials due to his insistence that he should be the one to prosecute the Nazi war criminals. A suspicious mind might argue that what he really wanted was the chance to depose them, both legally… and otherwise. Like General Reinhard Gehlen, one of his German opposites, he was at least as interested in the Soviets (his putative allies) as he was in the Germans… although there is little evidence that he had anything to do with Gehlen’s arrangement with the US Government by which the Nazi Superspy became the head of an anti-Soviet spyring working for it.
Wild Bill loved truth, helped forge the ideals of the prosecutors at Nuremberg, and was a guiding light to men like Bill Casey and George Bush, men who would become leaders… men who would shape the CIA. And it is the CIA that I believe is the last magical brotherhood of the 20th century. (I know we’re in the 21st... but I’m talking about the years between 1947 and 2000, so I’m in bounds. Unlike them.) The CIA was founded in 1947, the same year that Aleister Crowley died. Now, we know Crowley was an operative for British Intelligence at times (or at least we think we do) and while I don’t think Crowley was directly connected to the CIA, I’m willing to allow for some indirect inspiration. If you look at the CIA’s website, you will find a great many interesting things.
If you are a recent or frequent user of illegal drugs, including marijuana, you need to know that CIA is a drug-free workplace. Drug abuse is one of the common reasons a security clearance is denied to applicants.
The CIA is expressly forbidden to spy on US citizens or operate in the United States… yet it does. The CIA claims that it is antithetical to the organization to allow agents to use drugs or to import them into the United States… but it employed countless psychologists to determine the effect of various drugs (including LSD, THC and sodium pentathol) and other persuasive agents on the human mind. It even went so far as to dose Frank Olson with LSD and possibly either allow him to jump to his death… or perhaps help him along. It hired prostitutes to slip LSD into their clients’ drinks and then watched from behind one-way glass in Operation Midnight Climax. (Scroll down… there’s a lot of ax grinding in the article.)
