I shall now turn to the Posse Comitatus. While the links between the John Birch Society and the Sovereign Order of Saint John are somewhat circumstantial, the same cannot be said of the Posse Comitatus. Prominent members of the SOSJ were directly involved in establishing the Posse and its ideology, as shall be discussed in a moment. First, however, we need to briefly consider the man chiefly responsible for the spread of the Posse Comitatus as well as its vast influence on the modern day conspiratorial right.
Contrary to public reports, the Posse was not founded by former Silver Shirt member Mike Beach, but by a former military intelligence officer who served under Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines during World War II: Colonel William Potter Gale.
"... Gale hoped to lay the groundwork for a violent revolution by creating a paramilitary group known as the Posse Comitatus. Latin for 'power of the county,' the term refers to the medieval British practice of summoning a group of men to aid the sheriff in keeping the peace by pursuing and arresting lawbreakers. While the historic role of the posse comitatus had been to aid civil authorities in suppressing violence and vigilantism, Bill Gale's revision stood this ancient principal on its head --his posse was devoted to promoting armed insurrection. Under Gale's definition, anyone could call out the Posse, not just the sheriff, and if government officials attempted to enforce 'unlawful' legislation the Posse could arrest and put them on trial with a 'citizen's jury.' Although others later claimed the credit, it was Bill Gale who first developed and popularized the strategy. And it was Gale's encouragement that promoted right-wing militias to form local Posse chapters to mobilize against blacks, Jews, and others perceived enemies of the Republic, including government officials they said were subverting the intent of the Constitution. Building on the bigotry of Christian Identity theology and his involvement with the radical right after he left the army in 1950, Bill Gale popularized a set of ideas that have influenced anti-government activists to the present day. After founding the Posse Comitatus in the 1970s, Gale helped launch the Christian Patriot movement in the 1980s. And long before the first so-called 'citizens' militias' appeared in the 1990s, Gale had introduced the concept of private armies and the 'unorganized militia.'
"Of course, there was nothing original in a right-wing group that cloaked itself in patriotism while instructing its followers to take up weapons, enforce white supremacy, root out communist subversion, and resist the evils of central government. But Bill Gale added a new and important twist that made the Posse Comitatus novel and attractive. His message was embellished with elaborate legalistic rhetoric that invoked, among other things, the Constitution, Magna Carta, and medieval principals of British law in order to legitimize his violent call to arms. Gale's Posse also was unique because it successfully bridged the gap between the anticommunist and segregationist movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the paramilitary movements of the 1990s. And during the early 1970s --when other right-wing organizations were collapsing --the Posse thrived by disseminating its ideas and spawning successive waves of violence. Unlike the paramilitary Minutemen of the 1960s, which was disabled after many of its leaders were prosecuted for illegal firearms possession, the Posse was largely unaffected by Bill Gale's death in 1988, seventeen years after its founding. Lie children grown to maturity, the forces he shaped have fueled the radical right to the present day...
"Undergirded by the twin pillars of racism and anti-Semitism, fear of communist subversion and advocacy of states' rights became the rallying cry of the radical right in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the genius of Bill Gale's invention of the Posse Comitatus was the way in which he took these themes and repackaged them in psuedoreligious legalism that emphasized individual and 'natural rights.' For decades, the Ku Klux Klan and its various allies had created social movements and sought political power based upon explicit appeals to racial purity and Christian Nationalism. Bill Gale was no less fanatical in his devotion to 'white survival' or his denunciations of world Jewry. But Gale fashioned an elaborate, American-sounding ideology that married uncompromising anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and white supremacy with the appealing notion of the extreme sovereignty of the people. By emphasizing the idea that white Anglo-Saxon Christians were joined together by natural and 'lawful' rights that trumped those of a (racially) corrupt state, Bill Gale's Posse Comitatus reached a new constituency of conservatives who would be reluctant to embrace an ideology that revolved solely around crude bigotry."
(The Terrorist Next Door, Daniel Levitas, pgs. 2-4)
There is compelling evidence that not only did Gale became involve in paramilitary activities well before 1971, but that he was actively involved in recruiting from other veteran and patriot groups in a bid to establish a network that spanned across a wide spectrum of mainstream and far right organizations. Two early organizations he was involved in that seem to have served as fronts for this network were the Christian Defense League (CDL) and the California Rangers. The CDL was founded by Gerald L.K. Smith, the former Silver Shirt member and proto-Christian Identity minster who had long been bankrolled by Wickliffe Preston Draper (among others). Another member of the CDL and close Gale associate (until the late 1960s) was Wesley Swift, a former Klansman, long time Gerald L.K. Smith associate and one of the earliest Identity minsters.
"One of the driving forces in the CDL in its early days was retired Lieutenant Colonel William P. Gale, who had trained guerrilla bands in the Philippines during World War II. In the late 1950s Gale formed the small, paramilitary California Rangers, which the California attorney general's office alleged was 'designed as a secret underground guerrilla force... linked with other non-military organizations by by a common ideology and leadership.' Gale's strategy was to try to recruit members through veteran's organizations, but it backfired in 1963 when the Long-Beach Press-Telegram exposed his efforts to convert the American Legion Post in Signal Hill into a Ranger front, and one of his Rangers was arrested for selling a machine gun and Sten gun to undercover agents. In 1963, when a wealthy Los Angeles benefactor put money into the CDL, Gale tried his hand at improving its fortunes (at the same time professing 'the ministry of William P. Gale' from the pulpits of Swift's churches.
"The CDL's activities stepped up under Gale's leadership. According to an infiltrator who later supplied surreptitiously made tape recordings to radio station KLAC in Los Angeles: 'I was the security agent for the CDL national director. I guarded the security building and the files therein, the files which extended through most every state in the union. Members of the Klan, members of all other extremist groups who joined in to help make the Christian Defense League the central group, the reporting group, for all those organizations. The very sister and co-worker in this, of the CDL on the West Coast, is the National States Rights Party.' On the night of June 10, 1964, he related, Swift and his associates met in Reseda with George Lincoln Rockwell to discus 'a merger for the purpose of exchanging and compiling intelligence information; to make and keep an up-to-date roster of agents, double agents and other informers,' and to devise a command order. California Deputy Attorney General Thomas McDonald has advised that there has been a 'real coalescence' between the Swift complex, the NSRP, and Klan-like groups in Southern California.
"As for the paramilitary aspect, the infiltrator revealed: 'We had occasion to have with us, from time to time, people who sold illegal guns for the rightist groups, without the proper registration procedure. In many cases these weapons were hidden in holes in the ground where they might be dug up later, in what they called defense against communism and against aggression, even by the FBI, the federal forces, or the National Guard.' About this time California law enforcement encountered a rash of arms episodes..."
(Power on the Right, William Turner, pgs. 102-103)
Earlier Turner, a former FBI agent, had also alluded to Gale taking over a portion of Robert DePugh's Minutemen.
"DePugh's future as the titular head of the paramilitary right depends not only on his ability to tread water while in jail, but on the result of current shakeouts and realignments taking place. Some splinter groups calling themselves Minutemen seem to be gathering strength. One, New Orleans-based, is headed by a retired Army colonel. Another, centered around Hollywood and Orange County, calls itself the 'Real Minutemen' and functions within a church structure; one of its members, who served in military intelligence during World War II, privately claims to have a close relationship with the FBI. The main split between these versions of the Minutemen and DePugh is that they view Moscow, not Washington, as the principal enemy, and consequently cooperate with federal authorities."
(ibid, pg. 99)
As Gale was a former military intelligence officer who was living near Hollywood and had recently founded his own Identity church around this time frame, it seems rather certain he is the individual in question. Further collaborating this connection was a letter sent to researcher Kenn Thomas by former Minuteman "Reverend" Bob LeRoy (who was yet another military man who served under Douglas MacArthur) which briefly outlines the history of DePugh's Minutemen:
"The Minutemen [group] was national and split into three regions: East Coast; Central States (my area); and West Coast. Had over 30,000 readers of a newsletter called 'On Target,' went out in the late 70s. 1962-1980... Nearly all of the 'Christian Identity' leaders came to our annual conventions in Kansas City, MO from 1973-1980. I have met them all at one time or another. I was one of the few Baptist ministers who fully supported the Minute Men from 1962 to 1982. Now the new militia movement has taken over most of the old Minute Men. DePugh and I both believed like Gerald L.K. Smith. But we were not as anti-Jewish or anti-Negro as Smith and also the New Identity pastors. The Identity people under Sheldon Emry; Colonel Bill Gale of California; Gordon Kahl of Harvey, ND; Bob Miles of Michigan; Richard Butler of Idaho; James Ellison of Arkansas; Louis Beam of Texas; Mr. J.B. Stoner of Georgia; Larry McMurry of Montana; K.A. Badynski (KKK) of Tacoma, WA; Col Jack Mohr of Mississippi; Rev. Thorn Robb of Arkansas; and Dr. Ed Fields of Georgia; etc. were all leaders and editors of small newsletters like myself. Some are still at it after 40 years.
"Colonel Gale and I both fought the Japs together in Leyte and Luzon (1944-1945). He was about five years older than I. The youngest Captain (and Major Colonel later) in the U.S. Army. I was a mere PFC, LM gunner and parachutist for 3 years with the 511th P. Inf. Reg. There.
"The movement got its start under Wesley Swift of California during World War II and grew under R. Butler and Colonel Gale, who studied under his teachings. Rev. Sheldon Emry operated on his own in Arizona. Others in other states did the same. So like the Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Pentecostals and Methodists, etc. they are split-up into dozens of right-wing factions nationally."
(JFK & UFO's, Kenn Thomas, pgs. 107-108n35)
Robert DePughDePugh seems to have been on the outs with Gale during the 1960s (probably due to the fact that DePugh was busted by the FBI while Gale was dropping hints that he was an informant for the Bureau), but they same to have patched things up in later years as the above indicates.
What then are we to make of this seemingly nation spanning network that brought together elements of the Minutemen, the KKK, and the Christian Identity movement? And what of Gale's alleged ties to the FBI and his attempts to recruit from the American Legion? As explained in depth throughout my examination of the American Security Council, industrial security was originally a joint FBI/military intelligence operation that utilized both "Overworld" elements such as the American Legion as well as fringe, "super patriot" groups such as the American Protective League. Is it possible then that Gale was engaged in some type of industrial security operation?
I've already established that the JBS-linked Western Goals Foundation was engaged in such and operation and indeed former FBI agent William Turner alluded to the possibility in his classic Power on the Right that the American Security Council was receiving reports from the Minutemen during the 1960s. Turner also indicated in one of the above quotes that Gale was establishing an intelligence network among far right groups. Did the reports from such a network also end up in the files of the ASC?
Beyond that, was there even a more sinister purpose than intelligence gathering? If so, it likely involved only a small fraction of the 30,000 individuals the Reverend LeRoy claimed were affiliated with the Minutemen. Recluse suspects that Robert DePugh's Minutemen was used as both a front and a recruiting ground for the "Real Minutemen," a group of individuals likely far more serious and disciplined than the buffoons that were generally attracted to DePugh's Minutemen and most paramilitary right wing groups in general. Thus, there was a kind of "Overworld" Minutemen (the DePugh organization) and an underground Minutemen that Colonel Gale, a former military intelligence officer with experience in guerrilla warfare, was deeply involved in.
In fairness, it should be noted that many "serious" researchers (i.e. mainstream liberals that dismiss any and all conspiracies on principal) have strongly disputed Gale's military background, and thus his ability to organize some type of underground force.
"In September 1943, Gale was a young major just two months shy of his twenty-seventh birthday when he shipped out to Australia. A specialist in logistics, he had spent the preceding months in Washington D.C., procuring tanks, trucks, and equipment for the war against the Japanese. Gale's role was to help supply American forces aiming to seize islands in the Central and Southwest Pacific, but he did not stay long enough to accomplish much. After just two weeks of duty he complained of liver trouble and jaundice and was hospitalized. Aside from a case of hookworm, his medical tests came back negative but he still spent nearly three months recuperating in the hospital. Not long after resuming his duties in early 1944, he complained again of jaundice. Though he may have had liver problems, army doctors were more concerned by the growing anxiety they observed in the young officer and they diagnosed Gale's condition not as hepatitis, but as 'psychoneurosis... manifested by abdominal pain, indigestion, weakness, insomnia and fatigue.' Gale was flown back to the United States in April where he remained until a medical board let him return to the Pacific the following month. Despite the diagnosis of army doctors, Gale's superiors still considered him 'a willing officer, anxious to learn and be of value,' and dubbed him 'exceptionally loyal.' In November 1944, Gale was appointed director of supply for the army's Pacific Section Headquarters on the northwestern coast of New Guinea. It was from this vantage point that Gale grandiosely claimed he spent six months planning 'every operation in the Philippines,' outfitting and training Filipino guerrilla units and serving in combat on Leyte and Luzon. These events were described in theatrical and overblown detail in a 1991 biography of Gale by Cheri Seymour, a California journalist who befriended the aging rightist shortly before he died in 1988.
"... Gale also claimed to have rescued thousands of American prisoners of war from behind enemy lines in daring operations at Los Banos and Cabanatuan in the Philippines, but Gale's military records offer scant support for his version of events. In a further effort to embellish his war record, Gale said he had been shot in the shoulder, which simply wasn't the case. In fact, he was never wounded during the war and he received no medals for injuries suffered in battle. Of the seven citations and awards he did receive, all but one were simply for military service during wartime in the Pacific theater, and none were given for having faced enemy fire.
"By August 1945 Gale was back in an army hospital, complaining of jaundice, and the following month he was evacuated to the U.S. Gale later claimed he was so ill that the army shipped him home with his coffin. Meanwhile Josephine had given birth to a second child --a girl, Kathleen --and the couple's third child, Bill Jr., was born in October 1946, the same month Bill left for Tokyo. The family spent the next two years in Japan while Bill worked with the staff of General Douglas MacArthur, helping to supervise the U.S. occupation forces in Japan. It was Gale's most significant military assignment, and his family enjoyed the excitement and prestige of life overseas. Although Gale's superiors classified his performance as 'excellent,' they also commented on his lack of stamina, and in January 1948 Gale restated his habitual complaint of hepatitis. However, as with his previous hospitalization, liver tests showed no evidence of disease, again begging the question of his psychological state. By August he was back in California."
(The Terrorist Next Door, Daniel Levitas, pgs. 18-20)
Gale after his service endedLevitas goes on to note that the circumstances surrounding Gale's retirement from the army in 1950 were every bit as mysterious as the rest of his service.
"After twelve cumulative years of army service, Lieutenant Colonel William Potter Gale was pronounced permanently unfit for military service and classified as disabled due to hepatitis, despite repeated medical tests to the contrary. Gale never disclosed the real reason for his forced retirement, and he lied when he said he'd left the army at the rank of full colonel --a claim he repeated incessantly until his death in 1988.")
(ibid, pg. 21)
Does this mean Gale was a quack then?
Hardly. In point of fact, his contradictory military record --which combines frequent phantom medical claims with almost uniformly complementary praise for his performance --is a strong indication that he was involved in something curious. If Gale was trying to fake his way out of military service by making up illnesses, as Levitas seems to be implying, then why did his superiors constantly give him favorable reports? Why was he brought back to Japan to work with MacArthur's staff? And what of the Reverend Bob LeRoy's claims of having served with Gale at Leyte and Luzon, as noted above?
It's entirely possible that if Gale really was engaged in "unconventional warfare" (as he called it) in the Philippines as he claimed that the military would falsify his records as such operations frequently include activities and deeds that the American public would not be accepting of. The way Gale's record is presented as it stands both disproves his guerrilla warfare claims as well as bringing his credibility into further question by playing up his mental instability. Such a presentation would be especially likely if he was engaged in truly sensitive operations. But so much for Gale's involvement in paramilitary affairs for the time being.
Not only was Gale one of the chief architects of the modern paramilitary movement amongst the far right, but he also seems to have been among the first individuals to spread the concept of Common/Admiralty Law that is the central tenet of the modern day sovereign citizens and freeman-on-the-land movements. While Gale was probably not the individual who spawned these doctrines he clearly had an enormous influence of their spread, particularly be de-emphasizing the racial aspect of this doctrine in favor of vague concept of individual freedom. But be assured, the whole sovereign citizen concept was initially based upon race.
"According to this doctrine, a 'sovereign was not just any individual born and residing in the United States. Instead, sovereigns were those originally mentioned in the Preamble to the Constitution in the phrase 'We the people.' And as any high school student should know, at the time the Constitution was written, 'We the people' meant 'we the white people.' The (white) racial definition of citizenship had then been reaffirmed in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which reads in part: 'A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a 'citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution.' By repeating these arguments, the Posse Comitatus and its Christian patriot look-alikes stood on solid historical, if morally shaky, ground. Before the Civil War the United States has indeed been a 'white Republic.'
"After the Civil War, however, the Fourteenth Amendment had countermanded Dred Scott and guaranteed the rights of citizenship to the newly freed slaves and all others born in the United States. The racial definition of citizenship had been changed. Like many unreconstructed Confederates and a host of other far-right propagandists, Christian patriots believed the Fourteenth Amendment had not been passed in a constitutional fashion. The southern states had been under military occupation at the time, they argued.
"Christian patriot ideologues took their arguments took their argument a step beyond constitutional validity. The Fourteenth Amendment had created a special class of citizens, they charged. This special class received its rights from the government through the individual's contract with the state. Sovereigns, on the other hand, those descended from the original (white) sovereigns, still received their rights (and responsibilities) from God. By this logic, inconsistent as it might be, sovereigns could either join the compact or asseverate themselves from it."
(Blood and Politics, Leonard Zeskind, pgs. 80-81)
one characteristic of sovereign citizens is their insistence on issuing their own licences platesThis isn't to say that there isn't something nefarious about the Fourteenth Amendment. Through clever wording (almost surely inserted by the Eastern banking and industrial interests who bankrolled the Union during the Civil War) it did effectively guarantee the rights of flesh and blood human beings to corporations, a fact that the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling recently reaffirmed. But the Posse Comitatus attempted to take this historical fact and combine it with bizarre Biblical and legal interruptions combined with equally bizarre racial doctrines that created an entirely separate legal frame work for those who knew how to claim their "sovereignty." In the case of William Potter Gale, this ideology even incorporated beings from outer space.
"... But Gale, like his mentor Wesley Swift, had a peculiar obsession with creatures from outer space, and his texts included phantasmagorical theories about the role of otherworldly beings in establishing racial hierarchies on earth. According to Gale, Adam and Eve and their descendants were celestial beings of 'pure seed' whose Aryan character was demonstrated by their fair complexion and ability to blush, a trait absent from nonwhite races. The racial prospects of the divine first family were shattered, however, when Eve was seduced by the devil and gave birth to Cain who then murdered his brother, Abel, and became the ancestral father of the Jews."
"Gale's interpretation of the Book of Genesis contained a novel twist on the story of 'original sin.' According to conventional Christian theology, 'the fall' of woman and man occurred when the serpent convinced Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and Adam followed suit. While the cause and meaning of 'the fall' have been debated for centuries, including its obvious sexual connotations, Identity believers like Gale were the first to define 'original sin' as race-mixing.
"In contrast to the pure offspring of Adam and Eve, Cain's children were the product of the sexual union of Eve and the devil, and as such were 'a pollution of the Holy and the Celestial seed.' They also multiplied rapidly, 'had no morals... and were evil.' To prevent further race-mixing, God instructed Adam and Eve to separate themselves from Cain's offspring. Satan, on the other hand, was constantly luring them into the ranks of the 'Enosh' --nonwhite, 'kinky-haired,' fallen angels who had originated on other planets and been brought to Earth by Lucifer after he was cast out of God's Kingdom. According to Gale --who probably got these ideas from Wesley Swift --the arrival of the so-called Enosh predated the Creation of Adam and Eve by hundres of thousands of years, hence their designation as 'pre-Adamic' and essentially nonhuman..
"According to Gale's biblical genealogy, nearly all of Adam's descendants polluted their celestial bloodline by intermarrying with either the nonwhite Enosh or the satanic children of Cain... Gale's scheme of biblical racial classification translates thusly: The white, true Israelites of the Bible who mixed with the pre-Adamic Enosh transformed themselves into 'non-white races,' while the offspring of those who took Canaanite wives sometimes retained the appearance of Adamic people, but nonetheless acquired the satanic character of their Jewish ancestors. The true Israelites called the Canaanites and their descendants 'Edomites' or 'Yehudi,' which translates simply as 'Jews' in Hebrew but which Gale claims means 'the cursed ones...'
"While the non-white Enosh were barbaric primitives and descendants of Luciferian aliens from outer space, and the Jewish Edomites were malevolent agents of the devil, the pure descendants of Adam were a master builder race who, among other things, used 'atom-powered space vehicles' and 'divine knowledge' to build the Great Pyramid of Giza.'
"Viewed through the lens of Christian Identity, Gale saw all of history as a Manichean struggle between white, divine, Anglo-Saxon Christians, and Satanic Jews. It was Europe, Gale wrote, that the devilish Yehudi gained control of the wealth of the nations they invaded and acted as 'destroyers from within.' America, in contrast, was a 'New Jerusalem,' divinely ordained to advance the interest of Aryan, 'Adamic Israelites' through its thirteen colonies that were formed from the 'thirteen tribes[sic]' of ancient Israel. Echoing themes that would later become cornerstones of Posse ideology, Gale wrote that America was founded by English immigrants fleeing religious persecution was 'one of Satan's lies.' Gale even regarded the Boston Tea Party as an anti-Jewish protest, saying that those colonists who opposed the English stamp tax did so because they knew the tax would enrich the 'money lenders' of England and Europe, who were children of Cain. And repeating a long-standing anti-Semitic myth, Gale claimed that George Washington foresaw the invasion of America by 'Cain's children' in a vision. This heavily recycled anti-Semitic canard was only one many promoted by Gale. He also wrote that the Jewish celebration of Yom Kippur --the holiest day on the Hebrew calendar --disqualified Jews as American citizens. For Jews, the holiday emphasizes atonement, forgiveness, and self-improvement, but according to Gale, the observance proved Jews were dishonest and disloyal. That is because the traditional Kol Nidre prayer recited on the eve of the holiday asks that any impulsive and unfulfilled vows made during the previous year be nullified. Although the prayer refers only to pledges made between an individual and God, anti-Semites like Gale contended that it was a ruse to enable Jews to secretly renege on agreements with Gentiles...
"The Faith of Our Fathers championed states' rights by attacking the Fourteenth Amendment and repeating an argument popular among Southern segregationists --that the Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection under the law regardless of race, had never been legally ratified by the states. Gale also asserted that blacks were not citizens and therefore had no right to vote..."
(The Terrorist Next Door, Daniel Levitas, pgs. 79-82)
The interest Gale and Swift both had in extraterrestrials may well have stemmed from Silver Shirt founder William Dudley Pelley, who was one of the first figures to combine Ufology with occult teachings in the post-WWII era. Indeed, Pelley may even have been one of the first individuals to advocate an early concept of ancient aliens. It's interesting to note that Pelley was indicted for treason in 1942 along with suspected Sovereign Order of Saint John member "Count" Cherep-Spiridovich. Nor was this the SOSJ's only brush with UFOs --during the Willoughby era one of its members was a military intelligence officer named Colonel Philip J. Corso.
Colonel Philip J. Corso
Yes, the same Colonel Philip J. Corso, who became involved with the Nazi "ratlines" in Italy after the war; the same Colonel Philip J. Corso who hinted at helping organize an Operation Gladio-style network in Germany during the 1950s; the same Colonel Philip J. Corso who was working for the staff of segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond in the 1960s; and the same Colonel Philip J. Corso who wrote The Day After Roswell and spent years promoting any number of the classics of UFO lore.
In fairness, it should also be noted that Gale also had a long time association with Freemasonry. Indeed, his "church" held it services for 13 years at a Masonic Temple in Glendale. Gale claimed that one of his earliest followers, Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, was a Master Mason when Gale introduced him to Identity theology. What's more, Gale alluded to one of his financial patrons as being a powerful Hollywood figure and Freemason.
"Gale collected himself and slumped forward, his elbows on his knees. 'Anyways, I had just been introduced to that element, you might say, living in Hollywood and meeting with people I didn't even know were connected with them. Like one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood...
"'My offices were in his building when I was with Waddell and Reed. He owned the Outpost Estate development; I bought my home through his real estate agency. He owned the Masonic Temple on Hollywood Boulevard --he built it. He owned the First Federal Savings and Loan building on Hollywood Island.'
"'What was his name?' Seymour asked.
"It was a long German name. I sent him some material, from my office to his executive suite, and he said, "Oh, are you a friend of Gerald Smith" I said, "Yeah." And he said "So am I, but don't let anyone know it." He liked me and he liked Douglas MacArthur. Gerald Smith had all those millionaire people supporting him.'"
(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pg. 85)
The individual Gale is alluding to can be no other than Charles E. "Mr. Holltwood" Toberman, who developed many of Hollywood's major landmarks including the Hollywood Bowl, Grauman's Chinese Theater, Grauman's Egyptian Theater, El Capitan Theatre, the Roosevelt Hotel and of course the Hollywood Masonic Temple. Gale alleged that Toberman supported him until the time of his death in 1981.
Charles E. Toberman (top) and his Hollywood Masonic Temple (bottom)I find Gale's claim in this case to be highly probable. Gale was a successful businessman in the 1950s who initially worked for Hughes Aircraft Company after leaving the army before he went to Waddell and Reed. He did indeed own a house in Outpost Estate and reportedly his children played with the offspring of celebrities such as John Wayne. What's more, Gale continued to have ample funds even after his extremist views drove him out of the corporate world and despite the fact his "ministry" never attracted more than a handful of followers. Naturally, "serious" researchers such as Daniel Levitas have chalked up Gale's financial prosperity to his ability to sale life insurance to widows.
Further, while Gale was certainly prone to embellishments from time to time, there is not seemingly a logical reason for him to claim that one of his chief patrons was a wealthy and influential Freemason. Masonry is almost universally despised by the conspiratorial right, the chief audience for Gale's ideology. Such a revelation could have easily thrown his credibility into question amongst such circles, which is probably why he only acknowledged it at the tail end of his life.
Even stranger is that Gale himself was also partly Jewish, a fact researcher Daniel Levitas exhaustively documented in The Terrorist Next Door. Gale went to great lengths to keep this little detail hidden throughout his life, as one would imagine. Colonel Gale is hardly the only ideologue of the racist far right to have a trace of Jewish ancestry, however. For instance, author Kevin Coogan, while researching his ground breaking Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, also came to suspect that Yockey had Jewish relations as well.
Saint Francis the Jew?Gale's Jewish ancestry is especially curious when considering his arrest and trial in the mid-1980s. Gale, after nearly three decades in far right causes with an explicatively paramilitary bent, was finally arrested for conspiracy (among numerous other things) in 1986. Gale's arrest was part of a broader legal action targeting an organization he had founded in the early 1980s known as the Committee of the States.
While this endeavor seemed superficially less militant than that of the Posse its impossible to tell what Gale's true objective for it was as his health began to rapidly deteriorate shortly after it's founding in 1982. By the time he was arrested in 1986 he only had two years to live and his pending death was rather evident by the time his trial began to unfold in 1987.
Gale around the time of his trial
His followers, including his wife Roxanne, believed a conspiracy was at hand due to several key dates during Gale's downfall: His arrest in 1986 and the onset of his trail in 1987 occurred during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. What's more, the trail verdict read just hours after Yom Kippur began in 1987.
Gale was sentenced to three years in prison, but he never lived to serve any of it as he shed his mortal coil on April 28, 1988, two days shy of the forty-third anniversary of Adolf Hitler's death. Had the Jewish conspiracy finally caught with the partly Jewish Gale? Or was his arrest and trail a ready made martyrdom for a man who may have already realized he was dying some time beforehand?
It's especially interesting to note that Gale's trail unfolded at the same time as the Federal government's sedition trail against Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, Texas Klansman Louis Beam (who brought the "leaderless resistance" strategy to the Patriot movement), and eleven other Patriot leaders who were by and large more vital than Gale at that point as well as far more militant (several of the individuals indicted had been linked to Robert Matthews' "Order"). They were all acquitted on April 7, 1988, shortly before Gale returned to his celestial Aryan beings, in what many have described as a shocking defeat for Federal prosecutors.
Louis BeamThus, a dying Gale achieved martyrdom almost simultaneously as several of the guiding lights of the next generation of Patriots were acquitted of sedition and were allowed to carry on Gale's vision. Such is the way the Jewish conspiracy rolls, I suppose.
But let us get back to Gale's ideology and the million dollar question: Where exactly did Gale pick up this curious beliefs? According to Gale himself, it was from the United States Army.
"'We published a little Identity publication at that time; it was a bunch of military officers who asked me to put it out... Colonel Ben (Von) Stahl and Admiral Crommelin and General P.A. Del Valle of the Marine Corps. We had a meeting and they said, "You know, the people should know a little about this law, Posse Comitatus." The military police school in the army had been teaching it for years.'"
(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pg. 86)
General Pedro del ValleYes dear reader, the above mentioned General P.A. Del Valle is the same General Pedro Del Valle of the Defenders of the American Constitution and the Sovereign Order of Saint John. According to Grand Master Charles Pichel himself in his History of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta Colonel Ben von Stahl was also a member of the Order (see page 192 of that work for a full list of military men affiliated with the Order circa 1970).
But before getting to this mysterious group of military officers Gale mentions above, let us first consider the possibility that the US military was responsible for indoctrinating officers with this ideology. As outlandish as it may sound, it is not beyond the realm of possibility. It is beyond a doubt now that the army deliberately indoctrinated officers in deeply racist and anti-Semitic ideology prior to World War II.
"The professional officers corps... was even more exercised that the 'real Americans' were losing control of their own country; as one officer wrote in 1920, 'the "Master Race" is... gradually ceasing to be master in its own house, it is being swamped by... Mongrels, greasers, whelps, and hounds.' Such opinions were part of an official, institutional culture in the military at the time, pervasive among officers... The Army War College, which prepared selected officers for positions of command, invited scientists such as Davenport and McDougall to lecture on race, and Earnest Sevier Cox's White America was assigned to part of the coursework. Another regular visitor, even well into the 1930s, was Madison Grant protege, Harvard-educated T. Lothrop Stoddard, whose books were recommend reading. In The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, for example, prospective command officers could learn of the need to maintain 'white political domination' in the face of the colored threat --not so much from blacks, who were dismissed as inferior savages, but from 'Asiatics,' the yellow race, who according to Stoddard, constituted the main danger in an impending struggle for control of Africa and 'mongrel-ruled' South America. Up until the outbreak of war, Stoddard continued to lecture on 'World Affairs' at the college, praising the racial policies of the Third Reich and encouraged similar, legally mandated measures for segregation and antimiscegenation in the United States, based on 'increasing knowledge of the true nature of race by modern science.'
"The inner circles of the officers corps were particularly concerned over the threat to Nordic culture posed by the influx of Jews. As Joseph Bendersky has recently demonstrated in The "Jewish Threat," during the teens and twenties racial anti-Semitism among military leaders was 'not only prevalent and open but considere morally,politically, and even scientifically warranted.' The military culture adhered strongly to every anti-Semitic stereotype: Jews were physically weak, cowardly, and incapable of loyalty to anyone but themselves --'a disgrace to the flag,' according to one Colonel in 1918, and the only people in the 'world without moral honor or character.' In addition, they were the controlling force behind every movement for world domination, from Bolshevism to international finance. Predicting 'such massacres of the Jews... as have never been thought possible' by the Russians after World War I, one officer observed that 'nothing they can do [to the Jews] is bad enough to fit the case.' These views became common at the highest levels through the next three decades, as midlevel officers in the World War I era assumed upper-echelon positions. In 1940, recently retired deputy chief of staff General George Von Horn Moseley offered to join the America First Committee only if it first agreed 'to eliminate... all Jews and Jewish influence' from the organization and to 'come out before the nation with a definite statement against the Jew and all he stands for'; after the war, he called for a policy to 'give the Jews a limited time in which to close their affairs and leave our shores.' In 1945, General George S. Patton did not consider 'the displaced person... a human being,' especially 'the Jews who are lower than animals...'"
(The Funding of Scientific Racism, William H. Tucker, pgs. 27-29)
Needless to say, if the military was indoctrinating future high ranking officers with such doctrines as the need to maintain "white political domination," some form the Posse Comitatus ideology would not be out of place. Further collaboration of this possibility is provided by the esteemed historian Alfred W. McCoy, who recently noted a mysterious policy the Army War College embraced circa 1919.
"... In October 1919 an Army War College conference on domestic security described the United States as an 'Anglo-Saxon nation' facing the specter of revolt by ethnic radicals, making it imperative to implement 'War Plan White,' a color-coded strategic scenario that the War Plans Division have prepared in the event of a Russian-style revolution by an estimated 1.5 million American radicals. Making the racial prism explicit, another War Department report stated that the greatest threat were pan-Latinism, pan-orientalism, and bolshevism, which had 'an intimate connection of the Jews and Jewry.'
(Policing America's Empire, Alfred W. McCoy, pg. 314)
Is it possible that the race-based paramilitary forces former military men attempted to create after World War II were some how related to this mysterious "War Plan White'? This was a policy after all that military intelligence, especially that relating to industrial security, was deeply involved in. Vigilante, racist groups spread like the plague in the United States in the wake of the First World War, with a few such as the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies having been founded by former military intelligence officers such as John Trevor Sr. While there was a crackdown on such groups during World War II they seemingly made a vigorous comeback as the Cold War set in, the Posse arguably being the most successful of such groups.
And indeed, prominent Posse members have long claimed that military officers were the chief force behind the movement from the very beginning.
"A noteworthy and generally unpublicized aspect of the radical right's history is the military involvement since the movement's inception, James Wickstrom, head of Posse Comitatus, wrote in a 1989 Intelligence Update circulated from Pennsylvania that 'ZOG thought the "Posse Comitatus" was just a tax rebellion movement. But to their surprise some years later, ZOG found that the movement was loaded with former military officers, being used in an advisory manner.'
"'In Wisconsin alone,' wrote Wickstrom, 'Posse Comitatus officers from 36 states were trained in all types of leadership positions and guerrilla warfare...'
"Indeed, Seymour discovered that in addition to Colonel Gale's paramilitary training and lecturing excursions across the country, other retired World War II and Korean war officers such as Colonel Benjamin [Von] Stahl from Nebraska and Colonel Jack Mohr from Mississippi conducted nationwide training exercises."
(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pgs. 218-219)
James WickstromIt would seem that SOSJ member Colonel Benjamin von Stahl was still involved with the Posse in the 1980s. But then again, former military officers seem to have actively been organizing an underground paramilitary network as early as the early 1960s, possibly sooner (remember, Sovereign Order of Saint John members Pedro Del Valle and Bonner Fellers was already attempting such things with the 1950s-era Defenders of the American Constitution). Journalist Dick Russell would allude to the possibility that both Pedro Del Valle and Charles Willoughby were behind Gale's early 1960s efforts to organize a paramilitary underground.
"Willoughby's publisher and friend Billy James Hargis was a short, portly, double-chinned fellow in his midthirties who gained much of his financial support from H.L. Hunt and other wealthy oilmen. Along with Willoughby, who was his Washington eyes and ears, another Hargis' advisory committee members was retired lieutenant general Pedro del Valle, U.S. Marine commander in the Pacific during World War II. After the Korean War, del Valle had become vice president of ITT's Latin American operations.
"In September 1961, Hargis announced that a secret fraternity to coordinate right-wing activities would soon be formed. Then, on March 21, 1962, a carefully selected group was called together in Washington. No press representatives were allowed at the founding session of the Anti-Communist Liaison, which brought together about on hundred delegates representing some seventy-five right-wing groups at the Washington hotel. Named as its chairman and operating head was Edward Hunter, a National Advisory Board member of Young Americans for Freedom.
"The new group's insider was U.S. representative John Rousselot, a John Birch Society spokesman and Christian Crusade board member from Los Angeles. It also had a Southern Californian 'outsider,' Colonel William Potter Gale, yet another ex-MacArthur man. In 1962, as California state chairman of the Constitution Party, Colonel Gale announced his candidacy for the governorship on a platform calling for the abolition of all income taxes. He also organized, soon after the pivotal springtime meeting in Washington, a paramilitary outfit.
"Willoughby, del Valle, and a number of other military officers put together Gale's tactical guide, or manual of arms of the future. It suggested that 'patriotic underground armies should be created, named the "Rangers" who should train to assassinate, sabotage, and overthrow the "People's Democracy."'"
"A Long Beach Press-Telegram expose called Gale's Rangers 'a secret guerrilla group composed of persons devoted to extremist racial and religious beliefs.' Not long after their spring 1962 formation, the Rangers would begin to attract a wide range of wanderers along an L.A.-to-Miami route..."
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 111-112)
