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by Iamwhomiam » Wed Jan 18, 2017 9:11 pm
by American Dream » Fri Jan 20, 2017 11:00 pm
The "Thumbprint" and Other Hallucinated Truths
LSD and the "Grateful Dead Family"
by Derek Pyle
(October 2016)
In the drug lore surrounding LSD, there exists an esoteric "hippie mafia" called the Grateful Dead Family. A group of initiated Deadheads, fans of the band who sell high quality LSD at jamband concerts. This is no ordinary acid, but a super pure version dubbed "family fluff," produced by an unbroken chain of Deadhead chemists dating back to the 1960's.
The story goes something like this. An Illuminati-like sect of elders monitor the country's low-level acid dealers, and only after proving worthiness might a low-level head be invited to join the GDF. But first, new members must pass through a ritual of initiation: the thumbprint.
The thumbprint is a mega-dose of LSD, a thousand times stronger than the average street dose. Passing the thumbprint test is required before one is allowed to buy and sell weight (large quantities of LSD).
Your ability to withstand the thumbprint proves that your karma is clear -- can't have spir-itually impure people climbing the ranks of the GDF. The test also proves that you are not an undercover cop, or so says the myth, because no cop could maintain their cover under such a powerful acid trip.
There are many variations on the story. Perhaps the most popular recounting comes from Shroomery.org, a website primarily dedicated to psilocybin mushroom cultivation. One fo-rum member, chinacat72, described the thumbprint initiation in a series of posts dating back to 2003. These posts have been discussed and linked across all the Internet's seediest sites, from Reddit to the Dark Web.
It appears, however, that the story's most esoteric elements are not true. Thumbprints are an actual way of consuming LSD, but not through a secret initiation administered by watchful elders. This is disappointing news for those of us obsessed with rock and roll's occult nature. But thanks to a new book by Jesse Jarnow, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, we have new Deadhead-LSD stories to replace the old.
Drugs and music often go together, but the connections between the Grateful Dead and LSD are quite unique. In the history of modern music, no other band and no other fanbase has been as immeshed in drug distribution as the Grateful Dead were with LSD.
Owsley Stanley, the world's first illicit LSD chemist, was also the Grateful Dead's sound engineer and financial patron. He used his acid funds to provide rehearsal space and sound equipment for the band in their early days. The Dead were also the house band at the Merry Prankster's multi-media LSD freak outs, as immortalized in Tom Wolfe's novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
After kickstarting the psychedelic half of the 1960's, the Grateful Dead ultimately outlived the hippie movement, creating their own longer lasting subculture -- the world of Deadheads and Dead tour. And wherever the Dead went, LSD followed.
Much has been written about the early days of both LSD and the Grateful Dead. Phil Lesh's book Searching for the Sound describes the band's early heady days. Rhoney Stanley's memoir Owsley and Me: My LSD Family offers an account of the larger LSD world, and Nicholas Schou's book Orange Sunshine chronicles the generation of acid dealers who followed immediately after Oswley, with a focus on another "hippie mafia" called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
Very little has been written about the story of LSD and related the role of the Grateful Dead post-1970's. Enter Jesse Jarnow's new book, Heads, published in the winter of 2016. Relying on a great deal of research and interviews with various acid chemists and high-level dealers, the book is a remarkable contribution to the legends of Deadheads and their LSD.
According to Jarnow, Grateful Dead concerts were the country's primary network for LSD distribution up until the 1990s. The book does not directly address the legend of the Grateful Dead Family and the thumbprint, but Jarnow was gracious enough to correspond and speak with me about the myths. Consider this a solid source -- an end to all rumors.
The LSD network surrounding the Grateful Dead existed as a part of the larger subculture of the band and their fans. For three decades, the band toured relentlessly, playing a different set of songs each night. Each night featured a significant amount of structured as well as non-structured improvisation.
On a really good night the improvisation opened a portal to, well- maybe it was the divine, or maybe it was just really good music. Either way, it was definitely a good soundtrack for tripping -- and when the band peaked, you wanted to be there!
Dedicated heads would travel across the country, to attend every single show. An eco-system evolved around the concerts. Pre- and post-show tailgating evolved into a carnival ba-zaar of VW buses, drum circles, tie-dye, and the occasional naked dude running around yelling about God. To pay for the journey, many people sold simple foods and beer as well as home-made T-shirts and artwork decorated with Grateful Dead-themed iconography.
The scene was colorful, wild and weird. In addition to countless teenagers and college students making the trip as a coming-of-age adventure, Grateful Dead shows served as a mag-net for the country's fringes. Elvis rebirthers and alien conspiracy theorists, back-to-the-land types, self-proclaimed wandering itinerants and even religious cults -- everybody liked the Grateful Dead. It was in this swirling marketplace and social scene that the LSD dealers flour-ished.
As Jarnow described it, "When the Grateful Dead went to Iowa, LSD would show up in Iowa." The band members were not directly involved in this distribution chain -- Jerry Garcia wasn't selling acid in the parking lot -- but high-level and low-level dealers went on tour, following the band just like thousands of other Deadheads.
At any given Dead show, you could easily buy individual hits as well as sheets of acid (one hundred hits per sheet). Those in the know might even acquire grams of raw crystal -- powdered LSD straight from the lab, with one gram equaling ten thousand doses.
Dead shows also served as a meeting point for all kind of dealers. "In a lot of cases," Jarnow told me, "Dead shows were the social network for distribution that would happen through other channels, like the mail."
Unbeknownst to many fans, in the 1980's and 1990's, Owsley the acid kingpin still attended many Dead shows, manning a Greenpeace booth in the venue's lobby. Owsley supposedly retired from cooking LSD in the 1970s, but he was still willing to share trade secrets with the right person.
One of Owsley's "disciples" was Karen Horning. Prominent on the scene in the 1980's, Heads chronicles how over the years, Horning sold pounds worth of raw crystal. The band and their crew even knew of Horning, but they kept some distance from her whenever she appeared backstage with Owsley.
If anyone was initiated into the Grateful Dead Family, it would be Karen Horning. Beyond her direct connection to the original LSD chemist, there's documented evidence -- a lengthy trial and incarceration -- to prove the depth of her involvement in the acid scene. Horning was even-tually caught in an undercover sting, arrested while selling an ounce of raw crystal to a single buyer. That's a quarter million hits of acid.
Horning is just one example of the many heavy hitters Jarnow interviewed for Heads. Yet none of the people corroborated the GDF story. Rather than discovering an organized and unified group of LSD mafiosio, Jarnow found just the opposite. "There was no one way that it worked," Jarnow told me. "It was this incredibly fluid, always changing system."
"It was just a bunch of people doing this in kind of loose configuration, informally con-nected in this sort of holistic way," Jarnow said. He described the process as cell-like, with fluid cliques of people moving in and around each other, and around Grateful Dead concerts.
Sometimes the dealing process was so decentralized as to be nearly anonymous. Karen Horning, who had numerous fake identities herself, didn't even know the real names of the people she bought crystal from.
"That's part of the anarchistic structure," Jarnow told me. "It's hard to call them rules, but it seems like there were certain practices that people engaged in -- one of which is not knowing the names of the people above you." This degree of anonymity worked to protect the chain of dealers. It's hard to get busted when no one knows your name!
Mega-doses, or what you might call a thumbprint, were in fact another loose practice. For those with surplus supply, dipping a finger -- a thumb even! -- into a bag of raw crystal was not uncommon. Amazingly, a few dealer cliques were not content with merely eating raw crystal, preferring to snort it instead. "But in terms of a formal [thumbprint] initiation," Jarnow told me, "everybody laughed when I asked about that."
Jarnow does describe a few longstanding people -- elders, even -- who carried the torch throughout the decades. Heads offers the first detailed account of a man dubbed Dealer McDope (apparently no one knew the guy's real name). McDope provided LSD precursor, ergotamine tartrate, to chemists.
As Jarnow explained to me, ergotamine tartrate "is not a trivial thing to manufacture or acquire. There was this group of very secretive people who were able to acquire the precursor, mostly in Europe, but by the 1990s there was just this one guy left."
That guy was Dealer McDope. The demise of McDope had a major impact on the pro-duction of LSD. As Jarnow told me, his death contributed greatly to "what's known as the ‘acid drought' of the early 21st century."
This well-documented "acid drought" can also be linked to the Grateful Dead ecosystem, as it coincided with the end of Grateful Dead tour. Heads describes how, as the band broke up and stopped touring in the wake of Jerry Garcia's death, the infrastructure supporting LSD distribution literally disappeared. The 1996 bust of long-time chemist Nick Sand -- caught with 43 grams of raw crystal -- also played a major role in the drought.
The U.S. government has a different explanation. Claiming responsibility for the drought, the DEA boasts that the arrest and prosecution of acid chemist Leonard Pickard stopped 95% of the country's LSD production.
Pickard was, of course, connected to the Grateful Dead scene. Busted for making LSD in the late 1980's, Pickard's acid was laid on Grateful Dead-themed blotter. Heads re-counts how Pickard stopped making acid after the 1980's bust, but sometime in the 1990's, a group of chemists summoned him to begin again.
It's the stuff of legend that may or may not be true, again with a Grateful Dead twist. "In the accounts of that gathering," Jarnow told me, "it happened in Jerry Garcia's old house."
But could the meeting be construed as a group of elders, convening around some kind of initiation? Jarnow doesn't think so. "I imagine that as being more of a business meeting than any type of initiation," he told me.
Or maybe it was more of a "family" meeting -- just without the capital "F". Like a large group of extended kin, with cousins twice removed and the occasional drunk uncle floating in and out of jail. After all, these Deadheads worked together for decades in a clandestine mission to save the world by way of LSD, and what's more familial than that? But it wasn't some tiered mafia with military rankings. According to the high-level people Jarnow interviewed, there was never a proper noun "Family."
Since Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, various members of the Grateful Dead continue to perform around the country. There is invariably LSD available at these shows, but the heady days of yonder are gone. Jamband concerts are now one of many public gatherings where LSD can be found. Burning Man, electronic dance music, and the festival circuit -- not to mention the proliferation of Internet-based drug sales on the Dark Web -- make for even more decentraliza-tion.
In today's scene, there are people who claim to represent the Grateful Dead Family. Just go to any jamband festival and you'll meet half a dozen of them. But if the past is any indicator of the present, those repping the GDF "brand" are not a unified, all-powerful group but just one of the many cliques in an increasingly anarchistic tapestry of dealers. It's a shadowy world but on behalf of the wide-eyed Deadheads everywhere -- those who wonder late at night about their favorite band's strange mixture of mysticism, illicit activity, and rock'n'roll -- Jarnow has written a truly illuminating, watershed book.
by American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 11:22 am
Ukiah Daity Journal, Ukiah, Calif.
Wednesday, February 7, 1979
'Judo Connection' linked to Cal killings
SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) — An international drug smuggling ring involving elite Black Belt judo experts around the world has been linked to a series of murders in California. The "Judo Connection" is believed to be responsible for massive quantities of LSD distributed in the United States and Britain in recent years. The ring, for example, was the supplier for Francis Ragusa, an LSD kingpin who was savagely murdered with his wife and sister in their Oakland home a year ago. The death of Lee Hassler, a little known 35-year-old University of California drop-out with an interest in judo, has also been directly tied to the ring. Hassler's body, trussed and shot in a canvas tarpaulin, was found on a Sierra mountain road in 1976. Hassler, it developed, had an apartment in Hanover, West Germany, which served as a drug smuggling base. Central figure in the case currently is a man namied William Backhus, 42, of Philadelphia. He is on trial in Frankfurt, Germany, on drug Smuggling charges. In the 1960s Backhus lived in Tokyo among the judo experts who gathered there from throughout the world to practice their art. His associates included several high ranking judo athletes, including one who who won a bronze medal at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Backhus turned up in Germany in 1972 after living for several years with judo friends in Holland: European detectives, after breaking up a major drug smuggling ring in Europe through "Operation Julie" in 1976, found that the supplies of illicit drugs continued flowing almost without interruption. They traced the new supplies to the "Judo Connection." A substance called " ET" (ergotamine tartrate) was being purchased in Germany and shipped to the United States. At secret laboratories this substance was converted into LSD and put on the market, some of it going back to Europe. As the 'drug chain continued to unravel, police discovered that many of the couriers, buyers and other traffickers happened to be judo practitioners as well, thus establishing the "Judo Connection." U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigators estimated that the Backhus group smuggled at least 44 pounds of ET — enough to produce 50 million LSD "trips." The Ragusas, a well-to-do family who lived quietly in the Oakland hills, were savagely stabbed to death Jan. 25,1978. Investigators found $275,000 worth of LSD in their house and it was learned that Ragusa, 29, posing as "David Lovelace," a rug merchant, had made eight or nine trips to England in the preceding months. It was also learned he had salted away many millions of dollars in real estate, mines and other investiments throughout the world. Lawrence Reilly, 29, of San Rafael, Calif., was arrested as a suspect in the Ragusa killings. He is still awaiting trial. In one of the bizarre developments in the case, Reilly was virtually kidnapped from the Alameda County Jail by federal agents and taken away for questioning elsewhere last summer. County prosecutors did not know of this until after it was done. Besides the Ragusa and Hassler slayings, investigators have linked the "Judo Connection" with five other drug-related murders in the United States.
Ukiah Daily Journal, Ukiah, Calif.
Thursday, February 15, 1979
Obscure murder leads to 'Judo Connection' drug ring
By RICHARD M. HARNKTT SAN FRANCISCO (UPl) -
When the body of Lee Frickstad Hassler was found wrapped in a tarpaulin with two bullets in his head by a couple of hikers in El Dorado County on Oct. 6, 1976, few paid much attention. The name of this 35-year-old UC dropout and judo fan did not ring a very loud bell anywhere. But soon Lee Hassler's name was ringing bells for international drug agents throughout Europe and Asia as well as in the United States. Hassler was a key link in a web of international drug smuggling that involved a worldwide group of Black Belt judo experts. He was a supplier for Francis^ Ragusa, a drug dealer who was brutally slain with his wife and sister a year ago in Oakland. Two men in the "Judo Connection" are currently on trial in Germany, William Backhus, of Philadelphia, and Clarence Watson, of Portsmouth, Va. The prosecution of a suspect in the Ragusa killings is on the back burner while federal agents pursue the many remaining strands in the web. Besides the murders of Hassler and Ragusa, a half dozen other deaths have been linked to the case. None has been solved. Hassler's body had been stripped of identification and his boots (where he kept thousands of dollars hidden) were gone. Police identified him from fingerprints and found he lived with his elderly parents in Berkeley, was unmarried and secretive. In autos Hassler owned, and in his room, they found guns, drugs and a list of names and telephone numbers — apparently including some thai convinced agents Hassler was "the link" between the drug ring and the mystet-ious 29-year-oid Ragusa, who lived quietly in a plush, heavily guarded, Oakland hills home. Investigators learned that Hassler had been behind the scenes in several other drug cases in California, Uiat he, mel Ragusa and agreed to supply him with three kilos of "ET," a substance from which LSD is made, and that he maintained an af>artment in Hanover, Germany. Meanwhile detectives in Germany 'ooking into the ",Judo Connection" which had been buying illegal drugs had come up with the name "Lee." At that point in the investigation there occurred one of those dramatic sequences as bizarre as the wildest fiction. Backhus, also a judo Black Belt, acquired the uniform of a U.S. Army Military Police major. He went to Hassler's apartment in Hanover, with another confederate posing as an interpreter. He told the landlady he was there to collect Hassler's effects. Backhus found money and papers but did not find the key to Hassler's safety deposit. Police later found the keys in a pair of sox in the apartment. Cash and drugs were in the bank vault. Backhus then made a quick trip to the United Stated, to let his buyers know that he "had nothing to do with Hassler's killing." The only lead police'developed to Hassler's death was a man named Jim Teegarden, said to be a former Alaska state trooper a nd bush pilot. His name had been found on Hassler's list. He was questioned about the killing but gave detectives no information and promptly disappeared. One arrest was made in the Ragusa slayings. Lawrence Reilly, 30, is in the Alameda County Jail awaiting trial. Police say he will not talk because "he says ho is dead if he talks" and is safer in jail than out. Reilly, like Ragusa, is from New York, and both are said to have Mafia links. One judo expert, Garry Friedrichs, of Reno, has been, tried and sentenced for receiving drugs through the "connection."
by liminalOyster » Mon Jan 23, 2017 11:59 am
Obscure murder leads to 'Judo Connection' drug ring
by American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 12:12 pm
by liminalOyster » Mon Jan 23, 2017 12:43 pm
by American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 1:02 pm
liminalOyster » Mon Jan 23, 2017 11:43 am wrote:Interesting, thank you. Alongside the Zen Kamikaze pilots and certain maybe-proto-fascist aspects of Western Vajrayana, another unexpected infiltration of western militarism by "Eastern philosophy." Do you remember those Ninja movies (US Hollywood ones, not Japanese) during the peak 80s cold war? Come to think of it, when I was in elementary school in the mid-80s, there was a whole undercurrent of ninjas, samurais, nunchaku, throwing stars, etc.
by American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 1:51 pm
After a three-year trial, West Germany has convicted William Backhus, an American based in Europe, of conspiracy and fraud for supplying large quantities of raw material used in manufacturing LSD, to Oakland dealer Frank Ragusa, who was murdered in 1978. (Oakland Tribune, 7-12-81) Participants in this ring were largely Japan-trained black belt judo experts. Ragusa was "very definitely connected to East Coast Mafia figures and often bailed them out." He was also involved in several drug related murders in Miami. (Palo Alto Times, 10 ~ 78; San F-ancisco Examiner, 3-22-78)
by American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 2:08 pm
by American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 5:58 pm
Trailer #2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7BM4WTJ_og
Trailer #2 for Red Army Faction Blues, Peter Green’s journey to Munich…
by PufPuf93 » Mon Jan 23, 2017 7:44 pm
by American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 8:14 pm
by American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 9:59 pm
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Stark had world-wide business interests in pharmaceuticals. Behind his various 'legit' fronts, by 1969 he had become one of the world's leading suppliers of LSD, produced at his illicit labs in Europe. Stark also plugged himself into the counter-culture. In America he hooked up with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), a Californian motorcycle gang who had transformed themselves, under the influence of LSD and the inspiration of Timothy Leary, into a registered 'church'. By 1969, the BEL had a sizeable share of the market for a less godly, but hugely lucrative business, LSD and marijuana.(2)
The BEL were short of materials and the capital investment needed to continue LSD production, when, in August 1969, Ron Stark visited their commune with a large bottle of pure liquid LSD, enough for up to ten million trips, and explained that he needed a secure outlet in the US for the LSD he was producing in Europe. He also declared his intention of facilitating the overthrow of both Western capitalism and Eastern Communism by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people and claimed that he had a contact with the Dalai Lama's Tibetan freedom fighters and could get the Japanese mafia to smuggle LSD to dose the Chinese occupiers.(3)
The authors of Acid Dreams, Martin and Lee and Bruce Shlain, note that Ron Stark's 'fateful appearance at the Idylwild ranch', coincided with certain 'unpleasant changes'. Some of the old guard had to 'retire' after skirmishes with the law, notably Stanley Owsley, the maker of 'Orange Sunshine', his protg, Tim Scully (who had originally wanted to give acid away free), and superbrat, Bill Mellon-Hitchcock, the BEL's money-launderer. Not long after Stark turned up, BEL founder, 'Farmer John' Griggs died of poisoning in circumstances his friends regarded as suspicious.(4)
Stark in Britain
Before clinching the deal with the BEL, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute. One of these was David Solomon, an American researcher and writer on LSD and cannabis. Solomon had been working with Richard Kemp, a drop-out science student, and his partner, Dr. Christine Bott, to synthesize some powerful liquid cannabis. Solomon had also obtained a supply of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, for a shot at LSD production, and Kemp managed to make some at a makeshift lab in Liverpool.
Shortly after meeting Stark in Cambridge in Summer 1969, Solomon invited Kemp to come meet 'a man with a million dollar inheritance'. Stark convened a meeting at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on London's Pall Mall with Kemp, Simon Walton, Stark's Scots assistant, plus Solomon and his friend Paul Arnaboldi (then famous as 'Captain Bounty' in the TV chocolate ad). The Great British LSD Plot was thus hatched within weeks of Stark's first meeting with the Brotherhood in California. Stark also introduced Kemp to the Brotherhood's chemists, Nick Sand and Lester Freidman. Kemp was soon working wonders at Stark's lab in Paris and in the first run turned out a kilo of LSD.(5)
In May 1970 Kemp and Stark, with the BEL's chemists, held talks lasting four days on the future of the 'Atlantic Brotherhood'. Kemp was unhappy. He had been assigned to work on a new project to synthesize THC to make a new brand of liquid cannabis as strong as LSD and as cheap to produce. But money promised was not forthcoming, Stark discouraged visits by Kemp's partner Christine Bott, and Kemp felt 'sexually harassed' by the bi-sexual Stark. Worse, Kemp had been pulled up by British Customs during a trip with Walton from France in Stark's Ferrari to buy equipment. During a search of the car, the Customs had found documentation of a massive purchase of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, but failed to see its significance.(6)
When Stark moved his laboratory from Paris to Orleans, he claimed he had been warned about an impending raid on the lab when, 'by chance', he ran into an old pal who worked with the CIA station in London. By this time Kemp had had enough and decided to quit working with Stark. He returned to England in late 1970 and teamed up with Henry Todd, an accountant recruited by David Solomon. In mid-1971, as production began in Britain and the distribution network was being set up, Stark crossed the Channel in one last attempt to dissuade Kemp from branching out independently.(7)
When differences between the 'idealist' Kemp and the 'bread-head' Todd became unresolvable - Todd wanted to dilute the elixir to boost profts - it was decided to split into two independent networks. Todd centred his operation on the Thames Valley, while Kemp and Christine Bott moved out of London to North Wales and set up a lab with Paul Arnaboldi at Plas Llysin near Carno.(8) Amazingly, for the first half of the seventies, the British Acid Underground - thanks to to Stark's role as catalyst - happily churned out hundreds of millions of tabs to satisfied customers, without anyone in authority realising how big the business had become.
The BEL scatters
Following a series of raids on the BEL in America, by early 1973 the authorities estimated that some 20 members were in hiding or in exile - including Stark. Timothy Leary ended up in Afghanistan, after fleeing the US, but the US Embassy evidently knew he was coming and got the Afghan authorities to deport him back to the USA. Ron Stark visited Afghanistan at least once with a plan to set up BEL facilities for making hallucinogenic THC derivative from Afghan hash oil. Thanks to Kemp's efforts, Stark had worked out the first eight of the fourteen stages of the THC synthesis. Stark had a minister of the Afghan regime in his pocket to set up a penicillin factory as a front, and a 'contact' with the US embassy: the BEL's chief hash supplier in Kabul, Aman Tokhi, worked there as a 'maintenance supervisor'.(9)
Stark had taken over Bill Mellon-Hitchock's role in the BEL of money-launderer and procurer of LSD production materials. In 1972 Stark's lawyer in Paris, Sam Goekjian, who had drawn up the charters for Stark's front companies, was investigated by IRS agents and asked about Stark's BEL connections. The DEA, who had just rolled-up much of the BEL network in the US, organised a follow-up raid on Stark's Belgian laboratory on the campus of Louvain le Neuve, near Brussels, but Stark escaped, spiriting away the BEL's investments for his own purposes.(10)
Cue the spooks
That the security services regarded LSD as an issue of 'national security' was confirmed when Lee began to follow leads on Ron Stark and discovered that the security services had been on the trail before him. When Lee went to see the security services about the loan of some high-tech surveillance equipment, he briefed them on 'the suspected international level of LSD trafficking and, more particularly, the probable involvement of terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhof and the Angry Brigade'. Lee had noticed that the network he was investigating had 'a cell-like structure similar to that used by terrorist groups'. Lee was referring to the system of pre-arranged meetings places and dead letter-box drops in tins buried under trees to deliver the LSD to the distributors and collect payment.(16)
Lee had begun to suspect terrorist connections when, during surveillance of the Let-It-Be Commune in Wiltshire, a car used by a dealer suspected of working for the LSD network turned out to have been 'linked' in some (unspecified) way to the West German Red Army faction. A check on an associate of the distribution network in Wales showed him to be 'an associate of the Angry Brigade'. Although none of those arrested in Operation Julie were charged with political offences, the supposed 'terrorist connection' did emerge in the pre-trial press coverage. The Daily Mirror ran a piece on how Kemp and his colleagues were 'allegedly' preparing to put LSD into the water supply.(17) Documents from police files on the defendants' alleged political views were also circulated to the media. Richard Kemp, for example, was described as a 'left-wing revolutionary ... his motive for suspected acid activity: a catalyst of British revolution by youth brought on by the use of LSD'. Kemp told the police that he had supported festivals such as Windsor and Glastonbury and had given money to Release, the drugs legal help-line, and had supported 'Head politics' (but refused to name which groups).(18)
In fact the only drug dealers of an significance during this period with terrorist 'connections' of whom we know were Howard Marks - through the maverick Irish 'republican' Jim McCann - and Ron Stark. According to Tendler and May's book on the BEL, FBI reports passed on to the DEA in California and to the British police 'only showed what Stark was not, not what he actually was'. Inspector Lee's informant, 'Nancy', 'strongly suspected that Stark was involved with the CIA and had friends in the American Embassy'.(19)
In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already doing business with McCann, or that he knew Marks' name and address had turned up in the address book of arrested IRA volunteer, Dutch Doherty. (The address had been passed onto Doherty by McCann). MI6 did not appear to realise that the IRA had rejected McCann's efforts to involve them in drugs and that he was using his contacts with republican activists to boost his credibility as a smuggler.(20) Macmillan's scheme went awry when Marks decided to let McCann in on the secret of his 'deal' with MI6. (MI6's admitted involvement later sank the prosecutions of both men.)
When the police learned of Marks' operation after his disappearance in 1974, they suspected that until 1973 he had been dealing with the BEL, and from then on with its remnants.
Ron Stark was not far from Marks' and McCann's scene. In 1971 McCann had taken two American journalists from the London-based 'head' magazine, Frendz, to Belfast, and, while showing them round, tried to fire-bomb Queens University and got them all arrested and charged. It was one of the Americans, Alan Marcuson, who subsequently put McCann in touch with Marks through another old Oxford friend, Graham Plinston.(21) In London, Stark, who was sniffing around radical circles, contacted the solicitor representing the American pair. He expressed some interest in McCann and promised financial support, which never came to anything.(22) Stark was thus poking his nose into the Marks-McCann operation nearly two years before MI6's Macmillan recruited Howard Marks.
The questions asked but not answered
Stark was in prison in Italy in 1977 when Macmillan was posted to the British Embassy in Rome. Macmillan would have been in an ideal position at the MI6 station there to help Lee obtain the documents seized by the Italian police when they arrested Stark in 1975.(23) But the papers didn't arrive until a year after Lee made the request, by which time his investigation was being wound up. Stark's papers included formulas for the synthesis of LSD and THC, some of which were identical to Kemp's; documents on the BEL's tartrate dealings in England; letters to Stark at his laboratory in Belgium from Charles Adams, an 'economic counsellor' at the American embassy in London; and draft letters from Stark to Wendy Hansen, American vice-counsel in Florence which discussed the possibility of a coup in Italy (for which, he said, conditions, were not yet ripe).(24)
This raises this question: if Stark, the catalyst of the British LSD explosion, was an American asset, would his agency have allowed him to break the law and endanger the national security of America's most senior partner in NATO? The answer might be 'yes' if the agency had a joint covert operation with their British counterparts - say in the area of 'counter-terrorism' - which was important enough to justify the risks. Stark was in prison in Italy from 1975-79 following his involvement with a gang of drug-dealing fascist terrorists. But he rubbed shoulders in prison with leading members of the Red Brigades, while maintaining contact with secret intelligence agencies on the outside. He is suspected by some of involvement in the Moro kidnapping.
In 1979 Stark appealed against his 14 year sentence. According to the judge who granted him bail and thus allowed him to flee Italy, 'an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs' suggested 'that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services' and had 'entered the Middle East drug world in order to infiltrate armed organisations operating in that area and gain contacts and information about European terrorist groups' - a statement which raises as many questions as it answers.(25)
by PufPuf93 » Mon Jan 23, 2017 11:07 pm
by American Dream » Mon Jan 23, 2017 11:44 pm
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