Lyndon LaRouche and the Art of Inducing Suicide

The Virginia-based cult leader ranted at his Baby Boomer followers, the majority of them Jewish, calling them worthless and suggesting they kill themselves. One of them did.

By Dennis King

JULY 30, 2007--Right-wing cult leader and convicted felon Lyndon LaRouche is in big trouble this summer--not with the FBI this time (at least not yet), but with his own followers and many heretofore silent ex-followers. The source of his problem is a now infamous morning briefing that emanated from his Leesburg, Va. headquarters in the early morning hours of April 11, 2007.

This document--signed by LaRouche assistant Tony Papert but clearly reflecting remarks LaRouche had made at a meeting the previous evening--was in some respects just a garden-variety tirade in which the 84-year-old LaRouche called the Baby Boomers in his organization (those who had joined in the late 1960s and early 1970s) a pack of deranged, senile, and morally degenerate slackers because they hadn't been raising enough money to pay for his various political projects. However, the statement also included something much nastier than usual--a suggestion that certain of the Boomers were so burned-out and worthless that the best solution for them might be to simply commit suicide.

Within hours after the briefing was sent by email to members of LaRouche's International Caucus of Labor Committees (ICLC) worldwide, Kenneth Lewis Kronberg, 58, a Jewish member of the organization who had been in it for most of his adult life, drove to a highway overpass in Sterling, Va., exited his car, and jumped to his death.

Kronberg had been the owner and chief executive officer of PMR Printing Co., a firm that printed most of the cult's propaganda as well as servicing many outside clients. LaRouche, who spent five years in federal prison (1989-1994) for conspiring to sell worthless securities to senior citizens, had indirectly controlled PMR for almost 30 years through his psychological and ideological domination of Kronberg and other ICLC members employed by the firm.

LaRouche makes Kronberg his scapegoat

According to former cult members, LaRouche's special hostility to Kronberg had its roots in the early 1990s, when the organization's National Executive Committee (NEC) made a decision, while LaRouche was in prison, to sell his luxurious Ibykus Farm estate near Leesburg in order to pay large debts incurred by PMR. (The NEC believed this sale was the only way to save a company without which the entire LaRouchian propaganda machine would grind to a halt). When LaRouche left prison on parole, he vented his anger over the sale of the estate--and at Kronberg for allowing the LaRouche supporters who worked at PMR and its typesetting subsidiary, World Composition Services, a degree of personal space not allowed to most other members of the LaRouche movement. (LaRouchian employees of PMR and World Comp received regular salaries and adequate health insurance, and had managed to start families and become active in local religious or civic groups.) But LaRouche did not move aggressively against Kronberg at that time--he needed him to churn out the publications devoted to depicting LaRouche as a former "political prisoner" who should be "exonerated" by then-President Bill Clinton.

PMR skirted the edge of insolvency for many years, both before and after its financial crisis of the early 1990s, because of the failure of various LaRouche-dominated political and publishing entities to pay their printing bills. Essentially, LaRouche was milking PMR to support his political aspirations. He was also milking ICLC-linked publishing and printing firms in Europe, and when the Boomer leadership of the ICLC's German branch complained in 2006, LaRouche drove them from the organization. The pattern dates back over a quarter-century, to the days when LaRouche skimmed the profits from a computer software company in Manhattan to pay for his 1980 Presidential campaign (the owners of the firm, faced with bankruptcy, quit the LaRouche movement rather than acquiesce in further skimming).

PMR was able to survive up through the early 2000s because of lucrative outside accounts. But in the economic downswing after 9/11, the picture changed. PMR was able to continue in business only through desperate measures, such as not paying federal payroll withholding taxes for several years, resulting in a huge tax liability. Kronberg pleaded with the NEC to take steps to save PMR, which at that point employed about 40 people, including at least a dozen who had given decades of their lives to the LaRouchian cause.

The denunciations of Kronberg escalate

LaRouche responded to Kronberg's pleas by scapegoating him as the cause of the firm's difficulties, relentlessly denouncing him at NEC meetings, in memos, and in personal exchanges. The verbal abuse continued with no letup for well over two years before the issuance of the "suicide" briefing, several sources say.

The suicide briefing did not mention any individuals by name, but there can be no doubt that the primary target was Kronberg--not only because of LaRouche's prior concentration of his fire on PMR's chief executive, but also because the document cited Kronberg's company (referred to as "the print shop") as the "worst" example of Boomer treachery in the entire movement.

According to former members familiar with the ICLC's internal distribution process, the briefing was written and sent out the previous night, to be available to members starting in the early hours of April 11. Kronberg and other LaRouche followers at PMR and World Composition Services, which shared the same facility, would have read the document as part of their morning routine, and even if for some reason Kronberg himself had not looked at it immediately, others would have promptly alerted him about it.

The singling-out of individuals, or an entity, for harsh criticism within the LaRouche organization, especially when the criticism is circulated to the entire membership, is always a matter of extreme concern for those targeted. They will inevitably fear that the criticism presages a decision to remove them from their positions of organizational influence, put them through the psychological wringer (LaRouche calls it "ego-stripping"), and send them to the LaRouchian version of hell: the telephone boiler rooms.

LaRouche's youth "army"

The "suicide" briefing reflects a long-standing plan by LaRouche to transfer positions of authority in his movement to younger members (especially those recruited on college campuses by the LaRouche Youth Movement, or LYM, over the past decade) and thus guarantee that the movement will survive his death. Like several previous LaRouche pronouncements, the April 11 document urges LYM members to prepare for a battle to wrest control away from the supposedly unreliable and lazy Boomers, who, it is suggested, should either acquiesce in their own demotion, or die:

The leadership is among the 18-35 year olds. The Baby Boomer generation is politically dead, and can only be brought back by artificial insemination. . . .They can follow a trail of shit, but they can't lead anything. . . .

The breakdown in fundraising is a symptom of a moral breakdown in leadership. . . .The disintegration began in the period of the 1990s to 2000, especially, in Leesburg, in 1992-93. When Lyn [LaRouche] came out of jail [in 1994], he presented his solution to the sales force in the very living room in which he spoke last night [the living room in LaRouche's home]. People went screaming out of the room, and refused to change. This Boomer policy failure went on uninterrupted into Y2000...The print shop was the worst. . . .

Don't go telling a Boomer to exert leadership. We're organizing the country: namely the 18-35 year olds. How? Just like an army. . . .

We're reaching the most active part of the younger generation. . . .We go to the Boomers: "We're your boss." "You? Who are you?" "We represent the youth, the leadership." But you have to make it stick!. . . .

The Boomers will be scared into becoming human, because you're in the real world, and they're not. Unless they want to commit suicide.

Several sources say that this diatribe, although signed by Tony Papert, reflects LaRouche's personal speaking style. Papert, they say, is known to merely transcribe LaRouche's remarks in documents of this type--and that the suicide remark was made at the Tuesday evening (April 10) meeting at LaRouche's home referred to in the portion of the document quoted above.

LaRouche on "virtual" suicide

LaRouche issued a similar but briefer statement in his own name later in the morning of April 11. Entitled "Controlling your rage!", it was addressed, in its original form, to leadership bodies of the organization and alluded, like the earlier briefing, to suicide as a possible option for Boomers unwilling to get with the program.

The problem [of betraying the human race] exists even among us, as some among us are enraged not only at the immorality in the Senate and elsewhere, but among those in our own ranks who refuse to give up [their] Baby Boomer corruption. . . .Some among us with [sic] rather commit virtual suicide than admit I have been right on these matters.

Although this LaRouche statement was issued at 10:29 AM--too late to have been seen by Kronberg--it nevertheless provides evidence that the ICLC chairman had not developed second thoughts about the extreme language of the earlier briefing, and that he intended to continue ratcheting up the pressure on his Boomer scapegoat. However, when the second LaRouche statement was made available to the entire ICLC membership the next day (the day after Kronberg's death), the wording had been changed: "virtual suicide" was now "virtual ruin."

A culture of abuse and threats

The toxic language of the two April 11 statements did not come out of the blue. It was the result of a culture of harsh verbal abuse and threats that had built up over decades in the LaRouche organization. Indeed, LaRouchian publications going back to the early 1980s have included a number of sadistically-worded discussions of how to induce suicidal behavior in individuals hated by LaRouche (especially Jews, but also Gentiles regarded as allies of the imaginary international "oligarchy"). This bizarre feature of LaRouchian political warfare is described in the following paragraph from Chapter 17 ("Get Kissinger!") of the present writer's Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism,[FN 1] which cites articles from the early 1980s in LaRouche's weekly newsmagazine Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) and his defunct semiweekly newspaper, New Solidarity.

The LaRouchian hysteria about Kissinger resulted in a strong indirect warning to him in July 1982. An EIR news brief quoted a prediction by an unnamed psychic that if any attempt should be made on the life of LaRouche, "a list of 13 well-known political figures, headed by Henry Kissinger, Nancy Kissinger, and Alexander Haig will meet sudden death by either massive heart attacks or strokes."[FN 2] Death fantasies about the Symbolic Jew thereafter became commonplace in LaRouchian publications. When [Seymour] Hersh's The Price of Power was published, New Solidarity reported that Kissinger was on the verge of a "potentially fatal coronary."[FN 3] EIR boasted that, as a result of Operation Nuremberg [a LaRouche harassment operation against the former Secretary of State], Kissinger had become a "cardio-vascular risk" and might "choose [a] coward's way out" (i.e., suicide).[FN 4] When Hungarian-Jewish writer Arthur Koestler (the author of Darkness at Noon) committed suicide along with his wife in 1983, a New Solidarity editorial suggested various ways in which Henry and Nancy Kissinger and Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker (the arch-usurer in LaRouche's eyes) could follow the Koestlers' example.[FN 5] In what could be read as an allusion to the Holocaust, the editorial asked: "Why should the worthwhile vast majority of the human race settle for attempts to solve its antisocial problems on a case-by-case basis? Why not get organized to settle with such characters all at once?"

This stuff is so close to psychotic that it was almost certainly published at LaRouche's direct instigation. It reflects in a roundabout way his fantasy of becoming Der Abscheulicher (the Abominable One)--the successor to the Old Man of the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle's Nest) above Berchtesgaden--who would wipe out his enemies, and especially the Jews, if he ever came to power.

I use the phrase "roundabout way," because LaRouche had (and still has) two problems in turning his fantasies into reality: first, he wasn't/isn't even close to seizing power; second, he knew/knows you can't run around killing people in a non-LaRouche-controlled USA without eventually getting caught and sent to a really, really bad prison (far worse than the Rochester, MN federal country club in which he resided from 1989 to 1994).

LaRouche has chosen to express his fantasies via one of the few methods safely open to him in a society based on the rule of law. He has constructed a scenario for induced suicide by which he apparently believes he can cause the deaths of his perceived enemies without any fear of prosecution--like the villain pursued by Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie's Curtain.

Traffic signs and "controlled aversive environments"

Insofar as the idea of induced suicide is directed at Jews, LaRouche is not the first fascist to recognize the possibilities. David Clay Large reports, in his history of the 1936 Olympics, that on some roads in Nazi Germany "the speed limit markers on dangerous turns included explicit exemption for Jews, thereby encouraging them to kill themselves."[FN 6] However, LaRouche's approach--as evidenced by the above-cited EIR and New Solidarity articles and various other documents of the LaRouche movement--involves something far more elaborate than traffic signs. The basic tactic is to develop psychological profiles of persons such as Kissinger whom LaRouche hates and fears, and then, based on such profiling, to construct a "controlled aversive environment" around the targeted individual and exert insidious and ever-escalating psychological pressures that will hopefully cause the person to commit suicide (or that will increase the person's stress level to the point at which he or she will die from a coronary). One might call it psychological terrorism--or death via mental judo.[FN 7]

In the early 1980s, LaRouche assigned dozens of cadres around the world and spent millions of dollars in an attempt to create a controlled aversive environment around Kissinger. As documented in Chapter 17 of my book, the campaign included stalking and threatening Kissinger, impersonating him, playing malicious pranks on him, distributing massive propaganda about him in several languages (including a flier entitled "Kissinger: The Politics of Faggotry"), disrupting his public appearances worldwide, and in general accusing him of the most vile personal indecencies that LaRouche could concoct out of his own obsessed brain.

It is difficult to conceive of any reason for this campaign other than LaRouche imagining that he could drive a famous Jew to suicide (or at least a mental breakdown) with impunity, thus demonstrating to various international fascist networks that he, LaRouche, was the man to follow.

Of course a proper Hero of the West must go after leftists as well as Jews, and LaRouche focused--simultaneously with the campaign against Kissinger--on the late Petra Kelly, founder of the Green Party in Germany and an outspoken supporter of nuclear disarmament. (See [FN 8] for details.)

Kronberg's terrible bind

One could argue that such harassment campaigns lack the punch, in spite of their nasty language and intent, to really induce suicide. Indeed, the underlying idea appears never to have come even close to succeeding until LaRouche tried it on one of his own followers, Ken Kronberg.

Why did it work on Kronberg? When I read the briefing memo that triggered his suicide, I immediately remembered the LaRouche organization's carefully crafted Get Dennis King campaign in 1980--and what I had felt when they delivered their coup de grace: a phone call from one of the women in the organization's then national headquarters in Manhattan asking, "Dennis, haven't you committed suicide yet?"

The shock I experienced from this phone call and preceding events quickly turned into anger and outrage, but this might not have been the case if I had faced the terrible kind of bind that Kronberg would face 27 years later. The suicide suggestion to him came not from an anonymous member of a group he disdained--as was the case with me--but from a man he had regarded with great reverence for over 30 years and from the organization that had been the center of his life during that entire period. Thus, I suspect, he could not turn his feelings outwards against his tormentors very easily, and his outrage and pain rebounded upon himself.

This is something that many people experience at one time or another, and it often results in a temporary mental breakdown or a period of depression. In Kronberg's case, the shock of the morning briefing, coming as the culmination of years of psychological bullying and denunciations by the leader of the organization to which he had devoted almost all of his adult life, appears to have been more than he could withstand.

What might have been

It is a pity that Kronberg could not recall, before he embarked on his final ride, the 1983 article about inducing suicide in Jews that his own company had typeset for LaRouche ("Koestler Takes His Own Advice; Kissinger to Follow?"; quoted above). If he had remembered this article, or if someone could have shown it to him that morning, he might have begun to realize just how cynical and contemptible LaRouche's suicide rhetoric really was. I'd like to think he would have turned the tables on LaRouche and Papert by suggesting that they be the ones to jump off a bridge. Indeed, I imagine him giving them a little nudge in that direction by immediately driving his car to the nearest FBI office with the account books of PMR--to show how jailbird LaRouche and his thuggish inner ring had conspired to loot the company and defraud the IRS.

However, Kronberg didn't remember that 1983 article, and probably none of the cult members who worked closely with him would have remembered it either. LaRouchian cadres are often worked so hard for such long hours that they don't have time to read the publications (aimed mostly at outsiders) that they produce or raise the money for.

A replay of the Jewish Doctors' Plot?

LaRouche's return to the induced-suicide theme in 2007 should be understood in the context of his planned purge of the Boomers, a large percentage of whom (in contrast to the LYM members) are Jewish. LaRouche is now an embittered old man who knows he only has a small window of time to guarantee the survival of his movement. Like the aging Stalin in the early 1950s, LaRouche sees himself surrounded by unreliable aides who may be plotting against him or, what's worse, plotting to sell out the movement after he dies. And thus his paranoid rage kicks in, and we get the Jewish Boomers' Plot as a weird sort of replay of Stalin's Jewish Doctors' Plot.

My assumption here is that anti-Semitism is at the core of LaRouche's personal world view. True, he has expressed extreme bigotry towards many other ethnic groups--Irish, Italian, Mexican, Puerto Rican and African-American--as well as towards lesbians (and indeed the entire female sex), gays, British aristocrats, Catholics, Protestants (especially Episcopalians), Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox believers and New Agers. But he always returns to conspiracy theories dating back thousands of years and centered on "the Jew"--the only target of his bile that he suggests is a separate evil species outside the human race.[FN 9] LaRouche really, really hates the Jews, following in the footsteps of his father before him, and this hatred gave him a special bond, during the ICLC's heyday, with various neo-Nazi and old Nazi allies such as Willis Carto and Krafft Ehricke. (Most ICLC members were never granted the dubious honor of meeting with these "co-thinkers" of LaRouche.)

The fact that LaRouche has so many Jews in his organization actually bolsters my interpretation. There are few better ways that a Hitler type without state power (and without even a large-scale Brown Shirts' movement) could express his malignant anti-Semitism than by recruiting Jews to a totalitarian cult based on a topsy-turvy form of Jew hatred, and then exploiting them and stifling their personal aspirations for decades on end while their helpless parents and other family members just...suffer.

Trashing Kronberg's memory

LaRouche's sadistic attitude to his Jewish followers is illustrated by his reaction to Kronberg's death. He did not attend the funeral, and he waited a week before sending what was supposed to be a condolence letter to Kronberg's widow, herself a long-time member of the LaRouche organization. Several sources say that top LaRouche aides pressured him to write the letter because they believed it was essential to helping limit the damage to the organization's morale (news of the death of Kronberg had spread like a shock wave among former and current LaRouchians, especially in the Leesburg area, with both groups attending the funeral in large numbers).

However, LaRouche, who reportedly was reluctant to write the letter at all, ended up producing a singularly nasty missive. He suggested that Kronberg's sole significance as a human being had resided in his service to LaRouche's cause. He asserted flatly that Kronberg had been "struck down by a sickness," as if LaRouche himself were in no way responsible. He crassly advised Kronberg's widow that "[w]e either cling to that dedication of our living, or we were no more than virtually beasts." By using the past tense "were," LaRouche managed to artfully suggest that Kronberg, by abandoning the struggle, had proven himself to be just another subhuman. By using the word "virtually" he defiantly reasserted his April 11 statement about "virtual suicide." LaRouche then stated: "The ugly, horror-stricken moment must pass," thus suggesting that Kronberg's death was of only momentary significance to him, and that he really didn't care that this tragedy would affect Kronberg's widow, son, and relatives not for a "moment" but for the rest of their lives.

LaRouche and his followers have expressed a similar crudeness and insensitivity towards other grieving families as well; see [FN 10].

The "fantasy Hitler"

In 1984, ADL fact-finding director Irwin Suall described LaRouche on NBC's First Camera as a "small-time Hitler." LaRouche sued, but a jury found the phrase to be not libelous. Suall's remark aptly described LaRouche's role as the leader of a small ultra-right movement that devotes much of its energy to anti-Semitic propaganda; however, I think the term "fantasy Hitler" might better express LaRouche's personal psychology. The ICLC chairman reminds me of the Hitler in an alternate universe in Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream who emigrates to America as a young man, becomes a science-fiction writer for the pulps, and pens a really awful repressed-homosexuality-drenched novel about fictional bully boys in gleaming jackboots who attempt to take over Germany in yet another universe.

Spinrad's Hitler did not have the opportunity to be anything more than a pulp writer with political fantasies, because he was living in the wrong country in the wrong 1920s-1930s timeline. LaRouche has never had the opportunity to be much more than a cult leader with political fantasies, because the post-war period in our universe has not been characterized by the social instability necessary to bring a fascist within striking distance of seizing power.[FN 11] (LaRouche did have an opportunity to expand his base significantly in the 1980s, but characteristically he bungled it.) The movement LaRouche actually runs is only a pale and distorted imitation of the real thing--like the shadows on the wall of the cave in Plato's Republic.

Third Reich vs. Fantasy Reich

Indeed, let's examine, point by point, how LaRouche's shadow-Reich stacks up against its original:

Hitler physically stripped the Jews at the entrance to the gas chambers; our fantasy Hitler merely ego-stripped them.

Hitler herded them into concentration camps; our fantasy Hitler recruited them into a cult that for the past 35 years has been their concentration camp of the mind.

Prior to launching the gas-chamber mass exterminations, Hitler starved many Jews and other targets of his wrath to death in the camps or let them die of disease. Our fantasy Hitler pays his followers such paltry stipends that they must subsist on the cheapest and most unhealthy foods, and when they get sick it's not his problem. (The fundraisers and others at the national headquarters do have medical insurance nowadays--but with huge deductibles that render it of very limited value for persons already living on the edge.)

Hitler put some of the Jews to work in slave labor facilities (like the underground Mittelwerk V-2 factory run by Arthur Rudolph, hero of LaRouche's now-defunct Fusion Energy Foundation). LaRouche puts "his" Jews to work in telephone boiler rooms 16 hours a day soliciting fraudulent loans from little old ladies.

Hitler would, if a Jew survived a slave labor camp, eventually send him to be gassed. When one of the ICLC Jews becomes burned out and no longer useful (or is perceived as some kind of threat), our fantasy Hitler screams at him and suggests that he commit suicide.

That the fantasy Hitler's message to Kronberg (in essence: Go kill yourself, you worthless subhuman) is not an aberration is made clear by certain remarks the fantasy Hitler addressed to the cult's Jewish members back in 1978. The remarks are included in LaRouche's notorious article that year on the alleged cult origins of Zionism in which he claimed that only 1.5 million Jews had been killed by the Nazis, none of them in gas chambers.[FN 12]

"Narrow bestial ethnic loyalties"?

In this extraordinary screed, the LaRouche Jews were told:

Forget your narrow bestial ethnic loyalties! Instead ask yourself: "What is a Jew good for? What can a Jew contribute to humanity generally which obliges humanity to value the Jew?"

And the fantasy Hitler warned them of the consequences of not giving their all to his movement:

You have no right to hide behind the whimpering, morally degraded profession of [excuses]. . . .Either you take responsibility for the ultimate consequences of your conduct or you have no moral right to complain against whatever evil the world's developments bestow upon you.

As of April 2007, the "world's developments" had not given LaRouche the power to bestow the "whatever" form of evil on his Jewish followers--even though he sensed they were beginning to go soft (i.e., to hide once again behind "whimpering, morally degraded" excuses) and were even rediscovering Judaism. So he simply suggested that they bestow the evil on themselves.

Although it worked with Ken Kronberg, it is unlikely to work again. The appalling suicide message in the April 11 morning briefing has been seen by most members of the organization and has circulated widely in the outside world. The fact that LaRouche sadistically hounded Kronberg for years prior to the latter's death is known by most ex-members and many current members of the LaRouche organization. The ex-members are outraged, the boomers still inside the organization are upset, and the "yutes" (LaRouche Youth Movement members) are confused.

Former members with ties to persons still trapped on the inside say that the Kronberg tragedy couldn't have occurred at a worse time for LaRouche, since the ICLC's financial problems have forced many of the Leesburg Boomers (including some who harbor explosive secrets about the cult's history) to obtain jobs in the world outside their accustomed "bubble." This ongoing exposure to the real world, coupled with the shock over Kronberg's suicide and the cruel words that triggered it, is causing some profound soul-searching by current members, the ex-members say.

Leakage from the bubble world

On July 23, a former member writing under the user name "Eaglebeak" posted the following observations on a Fact Net message board where present and ex-members of the LaRouche organization debate with one another:

Things have changed in Leesburg. From what I am picking up, members are challenging, complaining, muttering.

The place leaks like a sieve, because members and non-members fraternize like crazy now--something that never happened in the past to this degree.

The insulation and isolation that was preserved so effectively in the past is eroding beyond repair because so many [LaRouche followers] in Leesburg, including NEC members, now work. . . ."Outside" contact--whether ex-member friends, non-member friends, outside jobs--is popping the bubble.

That means that there is potential for constant leaks, uncontrollable, and also for unrest in the ranks.

When LaRouche issued the fateful briefing on April 11, he appears to have inadvertently opened a Pandora's Box. According to Eaglebeak and other ex-members, this plague of troubles is spreading inexorably by way of the numerous unauthorized conversations between LaRouchian Boomers and people in the outside world. The Washington Monthly will soon publish a major article on LaRouche, PMR and Kronberg--the product of months of digging by investigative journalist Avi Klein--that may accelerate the exodus of Boomers from the cult, encourage former top members who know about offshore bank accounts and past links to Latin American death squads to come forward, and trigger a new federal probe of LaRouche's criminal activities.

This may be the end game, folks.

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[1] King, Dennis. Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, New York: Doubleday, 1989. Quote is from the revised Internet version (2007).

[2] "Briefly," Executive Intelligence Review, July 6, 1982.

[3] "Mental Health Report: Is Henry Going Off the Deep End?" New Solidarity, June 10, 1983.

[4] "Dr. K's Career Takes a Turn for the Worse," Executive Intelligence Review, January 4, 1983. The author of this article, LaRouche follower Mark Burdman, later committed suicide.

[5] "Koestler Takes His Own Advice; Kissinger to Follow?" New Solidarity, March 14, 1983.

[6] David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936, New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.

[7] If, as New Solidarity stated, suicide is a "coward's way" of escaping LaRouchian harassment, then LaRouche's suicide-induction fantasy--if he had ever succeeded in carrying it out on Henry Kissinger--would have been a "coward's way" of committing a homicide.

[8] Another target was Petra Kelly, the late Green Party leader in Germany. Sensing that Kelly was psychologically fragile, the LaRouchians made a serious attempt to invade her personal space and create the desired aversive environment. Among other things, this included the distribution, at public meetings she attended, of smear articles calling her a Communist, a fascist, a terrorist, a witch and a "whore," and describing her alleged love affairs in lurid language. LaRouche's followers even published in 1982, in the German language edition of New Solidarity, a journalistic version of their Petra Kelly psychological profile. The article speculated that her alleged relationships with older men were the psychological result of her abandonment in childhood by a supposedly "shiftless" father. Mirroring the LaRouchian articles on Kissinger, the profile of the Green Party leader claimed that she suffered from a "heart condition," with the implication that the harassment campaign would hopefully worsen this health problem.

Kelly sued the LaRouchians in U.S. federal court. Her attorney, Ramsey Clark, said they had engaged in a "vicious campaign that made it difficult for her to appear in public. The campaign became physical at times. They cornered her on a train, they shoved her grandmother around. . . .They abused her most fundamental rights of privacy, dignity, physical integrity, and reputation."

At Kelly's deposition, the LaRouchians took delight in asking all about her sex life, then published an article based on her responses, boasting that she had been "reduced to a frightened infant" and "seized by prolonged fits of paranoia."

Although the LaRouchians did not, in the articles I have examined, suggest that Kelly take her own life, they were clearly out to psychologically destroy her--and if they had succeeded, the outcome might well have been more serious than a brief stay in a mental hospital. In 1992, several years after the LaRouche campaign against Kelly had ended, she and her longtime partner Gert Bastian were found dead in their home of gunshot wounds: the German police concluded it had been a double suicide.

The LaRouchians quickly tossed their hostility to Kelly into an Orwellian memory hole (just as Ramsey Clark had vaporized his own past support of Kelly and become a LaRouche defender). The line now was that Kelly and Bastian had been murdered by nefarious forces and that the German authorities should be pressured to conduct a more thorough investigation. This would not be the last example of LaRouchian dodging and weaving on the issue of life and death in contemporary Germany: When Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish university student from the U.K., died while attending a LaRouche cadre school in Wiesbaden in 2003, the LaRouchians claimed it was just a suicide and strongly opposed the Duggan family's efforts to trigger a criminal investigation.

[9] Examples of LaRouche's equal-opportunity bigotry, and of his obsessive idea that the Jews are a separate "species," can be found in Chapter 30 ("The War Between the Species") of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism.

[10] For LaRouche's crudeness towards the family of Michael Gelber, a long-time follower who died in 1994, see http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/gelber1.htm. For the ICLC chairman's attacks on the family of Jeremiah Duggan (see [FN 8]), as well as more details on LaRouche's insulting attitude towards the Kronberg family, see http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/insult.htm.

The LaRouchian sadism towards families that have suffered a tragic loss comes out most clearly, however, when the person who died was someone the cult regarded as a clear-cut enemy--an agent of the international "oligarchy."

In 1986, when the LaRouche organization was supporting Panama's cocaine dictator Manuel Noriega, whom LaRouche depicted as a progressive and humanistic leader, the country's leading spokesperson for human rights, Hugo Spadafora, was seized at the Costa Rican border, tortured for hours in an unspeakable manner by Noriega's thugs, and beheaded. (For the details, see Guillermo Sanchez Borbon, "Hugo Spadafora's Last Day: A murder in Panama undoes a regime," Harper's Magazine, June 1988; also see R.M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez, In the Time of Tyrants, New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.)

This created a huge scandal in Panama, and Noriega had to sack his own puppet President, Nicolas Barletta, after the latter suggested setting up a commission to investigate Spadafora's murder. The LaRouchians instantly jumped to the defense of their favorite dictator, claiming that Spadafora was just another "dead terrorist" who had worked for left-wing drug traffickers while Noriega was waging a heroic fight against drugs.

After Spadafora's brother and sister engaged in a peaceful protest in Panama City to urge a full investigation, LaRouche's EIR (March 7, 1986) published a cover photo of their action with mocking commentary on the editorial page: "Our photographer . . . caught the brother and sister of Panamanian terrorist Hugo Spadafora . . . in their cultish protest . . . over Spadafora's unsolved murder." The editorial suggested that the two siblings were in league with the "Gnostic fraternity of Panama," which supposedly had "put out newspaper ads announcing they would form a 'mental chain' until 'justice' was done in the Spadafora case--meaning the overthrow of the Panamanian Defense Forces by the drug-terror mob Spadafora worked for." EIR went on to fulminate about "an underworld run by the Gnostics, with their hatred of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and their bizarre sexual rituals" and even roped into the conspiracy the "Israeli cultist and hooligan Ariel Sharon."

The LaRouchian trashing of Spadafora's memory by calling him a terrorist and drug trafficker was based on a cover story concocted by Noriega's G-2 military intelligence unit, according to 1988 U.S. Senate testimony by Jose Blandon, Noriega's former consul general in New York, who also stated under oath that "Mr. LaRouche works for Mr. Noriega."

In fact, the cover story spread by the LaRouche organization was a complete pack of lies. Far from being a narco-terrorist, Spadafora was a valued ally of U.S. policy in the region who only days before being slain had met with a DEA official to provide information about Noriega's cocaine trafficking.

After the downfall of his regime, Noriega was taken to the United States, tried on drug and racketeering charges in 1992, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. In 1995, a Panamanian court found the former dictator guilty in absentia of conspiracy to murder Spadafora, and sentenced him to 20 additional years.

Lyndon LaRouche was never prosecuted for serving as an unregistered agent of a foreign power in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

[11] LaRouche's consolation prize is that the science fiction TV series "Sliders" depicted him as dictator of the United States in a parallel universe (a curious inversion of Spinrad's theme). But LaRouche cannot savor this honor since he's locked into the theory that science fiction is an evil invention of the unspeakable Fabian oligarchist H.G. Wells.

[12] LaRouche, "New Pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism," New Solidarity, December 8, 1978.

In Search of John Doe No. 2: The Story the Feds Never Told About the Oklahoma City Bombing

by James Ridgeway
MOTHER JONES

Federal officials insist that the Oklahoma City bombing case was solved a decade ago. But a Salt Lake City lawyer in search of his brother's killers has dug up some remarkable clues—on cross-dressing bank robbers, the FBI, and the mysterious third man.

KENNEY TRENTADUE was driving a 1986 Chevy pickup when he was pulled over at the Mexican border on his way home to San Diego on June 10, 1995. He was dark-haired, 5 feet 8 inches, and well muscled, a former athlete who had picked up construction work after he quit robbing banks. His left forearm bore a dragon tattoo. Highway patrol officers ran his license and found that it had been suspended, and that he was wanted for parole violations. After two months in jail in San Diego, Trentadue was shipped, on August 18, to a prison in Oklahoma City for a hearing on the parole violations. The move placed Kenney in close proximity to the most famous federal prisoner in America. In one way or another, it also sealed his fate.

Four months earlier, another car had been stopped by a state trooper, some 80 miles north of Oklahoma City. It was 10:20 a.m. on April 19, 1995, and much of the country was still waking up to the enormity of what had happened earlier that morning, when an explosives-laden Ryder truck gutted the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. The driver of the 1977 Mercury Marquis was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon and driving without tags. He gave his name as Timothy McVeigh. Two days later McVeigh was identified as the John Doe No. 1 wanted in the bombing, and fellow antigovernment extremist Terry Nichols turned himself in to police. They were indicted on August 10, and federal authorities said they had their men. But there were many who didn't buy the tidy closure.

A sprawling Great Plains town known for its tornadoes, Oklahoma City was already the center of a swirl of theories about the crime, all of them insisting that the two men could not have acted alone. Some refused to give up on the idea of Middle Eastern terrorists, speculating about a plot headed by Saddam Hussein; others suspected an inside job by the feds. Some simply stuck to the far more plausible conviction that there were coconspirators not yet apprehended. After all, immediately following the bombing, law enforcement had been searching furiously for a man whom numerous sources said they saw with McVeigh, and who by some accounts was seen walking away from the Ryder truck—the character whose police composite sketch became known around the world as John Doe No. 2. According to the police description, this man was about 5 feet 9, muscular, and dark-haired. By some accounts, he drove an older model pickup truck and had a dragon tattooed on his left forearm.

Kenney's brother, Jesse Trentadue, knew nothing about the resemblance between his brother and the nation's most wanted man. But he now believes it sparked the events that would launch him on a 12-year investigation of a prison mystery and a massive government stonewalling effort. In the process, he would discover documents showing that even as the Justice Department was working to convict what it insisted were only two conspirators, its agents were actively investigating a wider plot—a plot whose possible ramifications they concealed from defense lawyers and from a public that, at a delicate moment in an election year, they were anxious to reassure. The government's refusal to disclose what it knew—and what it did not know—may also have forestalled the nation's best opportunity to address the problems in federal law enforcement and intelligence that would become tragically apparent on September 11, 2001.

Jesse Carl Trentadue is no liberal crusader, nor is he an antigovernment conspiracy theorist. He grew up poor in an Appalachian coal camp, called Number 7, halfway between Cucumber, West Virginia, and Horsepen, Virginia. Earlier generations of Trentadue men had all gone into the mines: One grandfather had first descended at age six, another at age 12, and both had died of black lung, as would Jesse's father. But coal prices fell during the Korean War, and in 1961 the Trentadues followed a neighboring family to Orange County, California. They traveled, Jesse says, "like the Okies," heading west on Route 66, sleeping beside the car at night.

Jesse's ticket to a different life was a track and field scholarship to the University of Southern California where, like his teammate O.J. Simpson, he made all-American. After a stint in the Marines and law school at the University of Idaho, he landed in Salt Lake City, where he built a reputation as a tough, tenacious lawyer working everything from sports law to contract disputes. He met me on a warm Saturday, on a bench in front of the Judge Building, the handsome, century-old structure where he practices law. Stocky, with a graying mustache and a neat beard, a cigar between his lips, he looked like the 21st-century version of an Old West sheriff—weather-beaten, self-contained, and shrewd. His office upstairs was dominated by an enormous portrait of his brother. It depicted Kenney in a dark shirt, looking calm and earnest, bathed in a glow that evoked the portraits of saints.

As youngsters in West Virginia, Jesse says, the brothers "shared a bed and an outhouse." Three years his junior, Kenney was a track star in high school, but dropped out after an injury and joined the Army, where he developed a heroin habit. Then he tried carpentry and factory work before discovering that he had a knack for robbing banks. "This isn't just robbing a teller," Jesse notes with a flush of pride. "It's taking the whole bank down." On Kenney's jobs, he adds, "the weapons were empty or the firing pins had been removed. He said, 'Robbery is one thing. Murdering is something else, and it's not worth that.'" When Kenney got caught, "he didn't contest it. He just went in, pled guilty, and served his time."

Released on parole in 1988, Kenney cleaned up, started working in construction again, and got married. His first child, a boy named Vito, was born nine days after Kenney was arrested at the border.

On August 19, 1995, Kenney called Jesse's house to report that he had just arrived at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center. Jesse's wife, Rita, an attorney and law professor, was surprised he'd been shipped from San Diego all the way to Oklahoma for a probation hearing. Kenney told her—in a conversation that was, like all inmates' calls,"It's that jet age stuff."

Kenney called again that night, sounding chipper, and the brothers strategized about the parole hearing; Kenney promised to call again the next day. But no call came until early the morning of August 21, when the phone rang at Kenney and Jesse's mother's house. It was the prison warden. Kenney, she said, had committed suicide that night. She offered to have the body cremated at government expense—a move without precedent in federal prison policies—but Wilma Trentadue turned her down.

Five days later, Kenney's body arrived at a mortuary in California. There were bruises all over it, clumsily disguised with heavy makeup; slashes on his throat; ligature marks; and ruptures on his scalp. Photos of the injuries were included in a letter that Jesse drew up on August 30 and hand-delivered to the Bureau of Prisons (bop), which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice (doj)
.

"I have enclosed as Exhibit 'A' a photograph of Kenneth's body at the funeral," it read. "This is how you returned my brother to us.... My brother had been so badly beaten that I personally saw several mourners leave the viewing to vomit in the parking lot! Anyone seeing my brother's battered body with his bruised and lacerated forehead, throat cut, and blue-black knuckles would not have concluded that his death was either easy or a 'suicide'! " After describing Kenney's injuries in detail, and speculating how they might have come about (bruises to his arms from being gripped, others to his legs from being knocked to the ground with batons, slashes to his throat from someone "possibly left-handed," which Kenney was not), Jesse concluded: "Had my brother been less of a man, you[r] guards would have been able to kill him without inflicting so much injury to his body. Had that occurred, Kenney's family would forever have been guilt-ridden... with the pain of thinking that Kenneth took his own life and that we had somehow failed him. By making the fight he did for his life, Ken has saved us that pain and God bless him for having done so!"

Two days later, on September 1, the Bureau of Prisons issued a press release stating that Kenney's death had been "ruled a suicide by asphyxiation" and that the injuries on the body "would indicate persistent attempts...to cause himself serious injury or death." (Officials would later put forth an elaborate scenario in which Kenney tried to hang himself but fell, bruising his head and body, and then tried to slit his throat with a toothpaste tube before succeeding in his second hanging attempt.)

In fact, as the bop would have known, no official ruling as to the manner of death had been made; rather, every communication from the state medical examiner's office indicated it was being treated as a suspicious death. On August 22, the day after the body was delivered to the ME's office, Chief Investigator Kevin Rowland called the local fbi office to file a complaint. On a form documenting the call, the fbi agent wrote "murder" and noted that Rowland "believes that foul play is suspect[ed] in this matter." The state's chief medical examiner, Fred Jordan, refused to classify the case a suicide, listing the manner of death as "unknown" pending investigation.

As was customary with suspicious deaths, within days the Bureau of Prisons formed a board of inquiry. In an unusual move, the staff attorney heading the probe was told to treat his team's findings as "attorney work product," which would protect it from discovery in any future lawsuit as well as from Freedom of Information Act requests. In October the bop's general counsel issued a memo noting that "there is a great likelihood of a lawsuit by the family of the inmate." To this day, the bop, fbi, and Department of Justice refuse to discuss the case; spokespeople for each agency referred questions for this story to an fbi official in Oklahoma City, who declined to comment citing ongoing litigation.

Not long after Kenney died, Jesse got an anonymous phone call. "Look," the caller said, "your brother was murdered by the fbi. There was an interrogation that went wrong.... He fit a profile." The caller mentioned bank robbers but didn't give many details. Jesse didn't know what to make of the tip; he put the call out of his mind.

Exactly what happened the night Kenney died is impossible to reconstruct, in large part because a great deal of evidence went missing or was destroyed by prison officials. According to bop documents, a guard discovered Kenney hanging from a bedsheet noose in his cell at 3:02 on the morning of August 21, 1995. Stuart A. Lee, the official in charge at the prison that night, refused to unlock the cell while he waited for a video camera to film the body. According to a bop memo, he would later tell investigators that he knew Kenney was dead and he thus "was not concerned with taking any immediate emergency action." The prison medic on several occasions said he performed cpr on Kenney, but later admitted he made no effort at resuscitation. The video of the body was never made, or it was erased, depending on whose account you believe.

Prison officials did take photos of Kenney's body, though when the family asked for copies, they said they couldn't find them; the photos reappeared in the fbi's files years later. Kenney's clothes vanished between the time he was found hanging in his cell and the time his body was turned over to the medical examiner. Other evidence, including his bedsheets, boxers, and fingernail clippings, disappeared for several weeks; investigator Rowland would later suggest they had been in the trunk of an agent's car. Kenney's cell was cleaned by 2 p.m. the day of his death, before legally required examinations of the site had been made. And even though the medical examiner's office had given orders to preserve the cell, the walls—including a pencil scrawl that prison officials called Kenney's "suicide note"—were painted over, leaving only photos whose "lack of detail," according to the fbi crime lab, rendered it "doubtful if this hand printing will ever be identified with hand printing of a known individual."

Other key evidence was simply omitted from or buried in the official reports: fbi and state Bureau of Investigations officials later testified, in a lawsuit brought by the Trentadue family, that a second person's blood had been found in Kenney's cell, and that there were no cut marks on the noose from which he was, according to prison officials, "cut down." According to an internal fbi memo, a prison guard told his neighbor that Kenney had been killed, and then hung in his cell as a cover-up; an inmate who reported hearing similar statements from a second guard said he was warned to keep silent and then sent to isolation. Another inmate, Alden Gillis Baker, would later give Jesse's lawyer a note describing an incident during which, he said, Kenney got into an altercation with a guard. Eventually, he wrote, additional officers entered the cell, there was "a lot of physical violence going on," he heard "faint moaning," and later the sound of bedsheets being torn. (He would repeat this account in a deposition in connection with a lawsuit brought by Jesse, but a judge ruled that Baker, a convicted robber and sex offender, was not a reliable witness. In 2000, Baker was found hanging in his cell in a California federal prison.)

Government accounts of the incident relied heavily on reports from a different set of inmates. One claimed that during his two days at the prison, Kenney had seemed angry and agitated. Another claimed he was acting "upset, paranoid, and weird in general," and thought everyone was talking about him having aids. (The Bureau of Prisons transcript of Kenney's conversation with Jesse's wife reads, "It's that aids stuff," not, as Rita insists he said, "that jet age stuff." According to medical records, Kenney was hiv negative.) And then there were the words scrawled in pencil on the wall—"My Minds No Longer It's Friend" and "Love Ya Familia!" Oddly, the bop investigator who took the pictures shortly after Kenney's death wrote in a caption that the scrawl read, "Love Paul."

The fbi agent who investigated the case immediately following Kenney's death did not even look at the cell. He did visit the prison, but spoke only with officials, interviewing no inmates and collecting no evidence except for the photos of the cell. The case languished for months, until complaints from the medical examiner's office reached the Department of Justice in Washington. In early 1996, the department's Civil Rights Division took over supervising the investigation and decided that the case should be presented to a federal grand jury, which would determine whether to issue an indictment.

On July 6, 1996, more than 10 months after Kenney's death, the grand jury was convened. Justice officials from Washington went to the trouble of commuting to Oklahoma City to oversee the proceedings. It was an election year, and President Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno—still under a cloud for her handling of the Waco siege three years earlier—was preparing to try McVeigh and Nichols. The last thing the doj needed was a trial, in Oklahoma City, accusing its employees of murder and obstruction of justice.

But to put the case to rest, federal officials would have to find a way around Fred Jordan, the Oklahoma chief medical examiner who had refused to classify the death a suicide. Within a few months, the local fbi office was calling Jordan—a man with a long and distinguished career, who had achieved near-heroic status in Oklahoma City for his effective and sensitive handling of the bombing victims' remains—a "loose cannon."

In December 1995, Jordan told an fbi official that the bureau had urged him to hold off on releasing an autopsy report until the fbi could complete its investigation. He also told the U.S. attorney's office in Oklahoma City, according to correspondence from that office, that Kenney had been "abused and tortured"; later he would tell them, according to a bop lawyer, that "the federal Grand Jury is part of a cover-up." In a memo to his own files, Jordan wrote that it was "very likely this man was killed."

In search of a second opinion, doj officials asked Bill Gormley, a forensic pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, to review the case. In May 1997, Gormley called Kevin Rowland, the chief investigator in the Oklahoma medical examiner's office, who wrote a memo to his files noting that Gormley "was troubled that [the doj] only seemed interested in him saying it might be possible these injuries were self inflicted." In fact, Rowland wrote, Gormley had grown convinced that "this man was murdered."

As late as July 1997, Fred Jordan told a local TV station, "I think it's very likely [Kenney] was murdered. I'm not able to prove it....You see a body covered with blood, removed from the room as Mr. Trentadue was, soaked in blood, covered with bruises, and you try to gain access to the scene, and the government of the United States says no, you can't.... At that point we have no crime scene, so there are still questions about the death of Kenneth Trentadue that will never be answered because of the actions of the U.S. government. Whether those actions were intentional—whether they were incompetence, I don't know.... It was botched. Or, worse, it was planned."

After more than a year of proceedings, in August 1997, the grand jury (which, like all such panels, had heard only evidence selected by the government) concluded its investigation without issuing any criminal indictments. The doj held back the news for two months while staff in Washington met to devise a roll-out plan that a doj aide compared to "coordinating the invasion of Normandy." The plan targeted the media as well as Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), who, thanks to Jesse Trentadue's efforts, had taken an interest in the case. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing a few months earlier, Hatch had quizzed then-Attorney General Janet Reno about Kenney and told her that "it looks like someone in the Bureau of Prisons, or having relations with the Bureau of Prisons, murdered the man."

But Hatch never followed through on his stated intent to hold hearings on the case. Neither did Oklahoma Republican Senator Don Nickles, then the majority whip. In December 1997, Nickles held a press conference lambasting the feds' handling of the case; he said prison officials in Oklahoma had told him they'd been ordered not to talk about it. The next day Nickles got a visit from Thomas Kuker, head of the fbi's Oklahoma City office. According to an internal fbi memo, Kuker assured the senator that he, too, had once been concerned about the case, but had become convinced that there was no foul play. After a second meeting with the fbi two months later, Nickles backed off.

The doj also continued to pressure Medical Examiner Fred Jordan, to the point where Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General Patrick Crawley wrote to a Justice Department attorney that the bop and fbi had "prevented the medical examiner from conducting a thorough and complete investigation into the death, destroyed evidence, and otherwise harassed and harangued Dr. Jordan and his staff. The absurdity of this situation is that your clients outwardly represent law enforcement or at least some arm of licit government.... It appears that your clients, and perhaps others within the Department of Justice, have been abusing the powers of their respective offices. If this is true, all Americans should be very frightened of your clients and the doj."

Four months later, in July 1998, Jordan suddenly changed his conclusion on Kenney's manner of death from "unknown" to "suicide," saying he had been convinced in large part by the identification of the supposed suicide note by a handwriting expert—even though the expert had not been able to see the actual note, and had received what the doj itself considered inadequate samples of Kenney's handwriting. Although he never fully retreated from this determination, Jordan would later say, in a deposition, that he still believed Kenney was beaten, and that he himself had been "harassed by the Department of Justice from the very beginning" of the case.

The last government investigation into the death of Kenney Trentadue, conducted by the doj's Office of the Inspector General (oig), was concluded in November 1999. The report was sealed, and only a brief summary made public. The full report, a copy of which was obtained by Mother Jones, ran to 372 pages and included names and many other crucial details. It also contained material taken from the secret grand jury proceeding, according to its cover page.

The oig report supported the government's position that Kenney's injuries had been self-inflicted. But it did find fault with the prison's response and with the fbi's investigations, concluding that bop and fbi employees had lied about their actions to supervisors, investigators, and the oig itself. (In 2003, Jesse filed a complaint about what he considered shoddy investigative work in the report with the President's Council on Efficiency and Integrity, a White House agency; the council dismissed the complaint, and when Jesse asked why, it sent him 55 pages of evidence the oig had submitted. All but 350 words had been blacked out.)

In late 2000, the civil lawsuit brought by the Trentadue family commenced in federal district court in Oklahoma City. The jury found that Stuart A. Lee, the prison official in charge the night Kenney died, had violated Kenney's civil rights by being "deliberately indifferent to his medical needs." Four months later, the court awarded the family $1.1 million for emotional distress (based not on Kenney's death itself, but on the bop's conduct afterward). The court denounced prison employees for trying to cover up their own misconduct, declaring that, "From the time of Trentadue's death up to and including the trial, these witnesses seemed unable to comprehend the importance of a truthful answer." The government appealed, and the matter remains bogged down in the courts to this day.

For Jesse, the ruling was bittersweet. For more than four years, he had been investigating the case—interviewing witnesses, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, lobbying lawmakers. But he was no closer to understanding why Kenney might have been, as the medical examiner had put it, "tortured," or why the prison and the doj would have gone to such lengths to cover up whatever occurred.

By the spring of 2003, Jesse Trentadue had all but given up on solving the mystery. Then he got a call from a small-town newspaper reporter in Oklahoma. His name was J.D. Cash, and he wanted to talk about Kenney, whose story and photo had been widely circulated on the Internet. What kind of vehicle had he been driving when he was stopped at the border? Did he have tattoos? Then Cash explained what had gotten him interested. Kenney's particulars fit the police description of John Doe No. 2, and some photos of Kenney bore a clear resemblance to the police sketch of the alleged bomber. And both Kenney and John Doe No. 2 looked quite a bit like another man, a bank robber named Richard Lee Guthrie.

Guthrie's name meant nothing to Jesse Trentadue, but in the far-right radical scene, he had some notoriety. In 1994 and 1995, Guthrie and his gang, the Aryan Republican Army, carried out an impressive series of 22 bank robberies across the Midwest, netting some $250,000 that they used to support the white-supremacist movement.

The ara had a flair for the dramatic. They rented getaway cars in the names of major fbi officials. At some robberies they wore Clinton and Nixon masks; at others, they tried to look like Arabs. At a December 1994 robbery they wore Santa and elf suits; the following April, they left behind an Easter basket holding a bronzed pipe bomb. In a home movie, Guthrie's partner Peter Langan donned a black balaclava and talked about the coming white revolution. The ara's philosophy was old-fashioned nativism, but their style was a takeoff on the ira, with Latin American revolution and rock and roll thrown in. (Members of the Philadelphia skinhead music scene were part of the group.) Langan liked to call himself "Commander Pedro"; outside the gang, he cross-dressed and later, when sentenced to prison for the robberies, requested that a judge authorize a sex-change operation.

Cash told Jesse that some people—including some in federal law enforcement—thought the ara might have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, and that Guthrie could have been John Doe No. 2. (Guthrie, along with other key ara members, was finally arrested in January 1996 and was reported to be cooperating with federal prosecutors tracking the far right. That July, shortly before he was due to testify in court against Langan, Guthrie was found hanging in his cell.)

J.D. Cash, who died in May, at age 55, was an unsettling figure—a genuine crusader for truth as well as an instinctive self-promoter. A lanky man with a warm face that could turn hard in a hurry, he'd been a lawyer, mortgage banker, and entrepreneur before taking a job as the hunting and fishing reporter for the McCurtain Daily Gazette in eastern Oklahoma. Having lost friends and family in the attack, he had grown consumed with the bombing and become a central figure in the Oklahoma City "truth movement," a loose collection of individuals and groups dedicated to identifying holes in the official story, advancing alternate theories, and gathering evidence to support them.

Cash became an acknowledged clearinghouse for information on the bombing and its endless complications, uncovering a store of vital information while putting forth some highly questionable theories. He despised the fbi and loved writing stories about the bureau's stupidity and perfidy. His belief in a cover-up—and even government foreknowledge of the bombing—had made him a favorite among some militia types. Yet he also insisted that the bombing was part of a conspiracy by the organized far right, and wanted to see all the perpetrators brought to justice. From Cash, Jesse Trentadue would get a crash course on the questions that still lingered, years later, around the bombing.

For the federal government, a great deal was riding on public perceptions of the attack. Bill Clinton's speech at a memorial service for the victims, and his emotional meetings with their families, drove up his popularity ratings, which had bottomed out after the 1994 midterm elections; the spotlight on violent antigovernment extremists was also credited with eroding sympathy for the antigovernment rhetoric in Newt Gingrich's Contract With America.

But the destruction of the Murrah Building—just like, years later, the fall of the Twin Towers—also pointed to a series of deep shortcomings in federal law enforcement and intelligence. Agencies such as the fbi had plenty of agents doing first-rate crime-solving work, but their record in "domestic intelligence" was another matter. Not unlike the patriot groups obsessed with black helicopters, the fbi was consumed by conspiracy theories that reflected the fears and fantasies of its leadership. The same agency that harassed pinko screenwriters in the 1950s, bugged civil rights leaders in the 1960s, and today monitors peace activists and librarians sought to infiltrate the far right through similar means—with dubious informants and questionable surveillance. And when it did move against far-right groups, it often ended up boosting the movement it sought to thwart; the 1992 raid at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the botched 1993 attack on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco fueled a growing fury on the far right. (The Oklahoma City bombing came on the second anniversary of the Waco disaster.)

Increasingly, that anger was targeted at the federal government and its symbols. The Murrah Building itself had been the target of a white-supremacist plot as far back as 1983. Among those involved in that failed endeavor was Richard Wayne Snell, who was later convicted of murdering a black Arkansas state trooper and a pawn-shop owner who he thought was Jewish. Snell was executed on April 19, 1995—the very day of the Murrah bombing. The final resting place of Snell's body would be a remote religious compound called Elohim City. For those seeking evidence of a wider conspiracy in the bombing—and the federal government's missed opportunities to crack it—all roads led to Elohim City.

the place was not much to look at—a clutch of small buildings in the Ozark Mountains in eastern Oklahoma. Elohim City's inhabitants were followers of the late Robert Millar, who taught a doctrine known as Christian Identity, which holds that black and brown people and other "non-whites" (including Jews) are "mud people." The community was patriarchal and polygamous, with all residents, including children, trained in the use of weapons by a visitor they called "Andy the German"—Andreas Strassmeir, a former German military officer.

For many years, Elohim City served as a sort of extremist sanctuary. Members of the Aryan Nations came through, skinhead bands made visits, young recruits showed up at the gates. Dennis Mahon, a former Klansman who had become a leader of the White Aryan Resistance, had a trailer there and participated in Andy the German's guerrilla warfare training. In the early 1990s, the burgeoning militia movement, which helped inspire McVeigh and Nichols, became part of the mix.

Also drifting in and out of Elohim City were various informants. Internal fbi memos suggest that the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the far right, had a source there whose tips were passed to law enforcement. (Mark Potok, the director of splc's intelligence project, told me that his organization had not placed an informant inside the compound, but received only second- or thirdhand reports from the compound.) Millar himself shared some information with the fbi, according to his former attorney, Kirk Lyons, in hopes of avoiding a Waco-style raid. And the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was getting information from inside Elohim City for nearly a year before the Murrah bombing, via an ex-debutante named Carol Howe. The daughter of a wealthy Oklahoma businessman, Howe with her fiancé had formed a two-person neo-Nazi group that urged "white warriors" to take up arms against the government. In 1994 she called a racist hot line and got involved with the White Aryan Resistance and Mahon. Soon thereafter the batf, possibly wielding the threat of a weapons charge, convinced Howe to inform on Mahon, and for most of the next two years it employed her as an informant. In that capacity she made numerous trips to Elohim City.

Howe's reports provided the batf—which, records show, shared some of the information with the fbi—with details about the weapons being stockpiled at Elohim City, Strassmeir's combat training, and Millar's sermons against the mud people and the U.S. government. Howe reported that Strassmeir had talked about blowing up federal buildings, and that he and Mahon had made several trips to Oklahoma City. In February 1995, Howe joined a group of Elohim City residents on such a trip; she told her batf handler that she'd stayed at the home of a former military person who demonstrated an explosive device.

Two years after the bombing, in 1997, Howe and her fiancé were indicted on charges related to their two-person "National Socialist Alliance" that included making bomb threats and possession of an illegal explosive device. She would be acquitted on all charges. There was a pretrial hearing in the case, which involved testimony from Howe's batf handler, on the same day that Timothy McVeigh's trial opened in Denver. At one point, the judge had the following conversation with Howe's attorney, Clark Brewster:

The Court: Well, let me ask you this, Mr. Brewster. A lot of this makes for good conversation, like the trip to Oklahoma City, you know, before the bombing and so forth and it makes for sensationalism, and I don't know that it really has anything to do with the Oklahoma City bombing, but I saw where you were coming from. With that McVeigh trial going on, I don't want anything getting out of here that would compromise that trial in any way.

Brewster: What do you mean by compromise? Do you mean shared with the McVeigh lawyers?

The Court: Yes, or something that would come up—you know, we have got evidence that the [batf] took a trip with somebody that said buildings were going to be blown up in Oklahoma City before it was blown up or something of that nature, and try to connect it to McVeigh in some way or something.

Brewster did not return calls for this story; McVeigh's lawyer, Stephen Jones, says the prosecution never gave him any information about Howe or Elohim City, but that Brewster filled him in and he attempted to have Howe testify at trial. The judge rebuffed him on this and every other attempt to show that McVeigh and Nichols hadn't acted alone.

one day in 2004, Jesse had a kind of breakthrough—one that would put him at the center of the Oklahoma City truth movement, though it would ultimately get him no closer to proving who was to blame for Kenney's death. A source at the fbi, who had at one point taken an interest in Kenney's case, passed him two heavily redacted memos indicating that, more than a year after Oklahoma City, the bureau had been investigating a link between the bombers and bank robber Richard Guthrie's ara—a connection that ran through Elohim City.

Jesse filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and then a lawsuit, for documents containing information on these connections, and the bureau—after first claiming it had none—finally produced 25 documents comprising 150 pages, many of them heavily redacted.

The documents connect two investigations under way at the bureau in 1995 and 1996, both of them linked to Elohim City via informants: OKBOMB, run out of Oklahoma City, and BOMBROB, an investigation of the bank-robbing Aryan Republican Army. One of the memos, dated August 23, 1996—some 16 months after the bombing—was sent from fbi headquarters in Washington to the BOMBROB investigation. It read, "Information has been developed that [names redacted] were at the home of [redacted] Elohim City, Oklahoma on 4/5/95 when OKBOMB subject, Timothy McVeigh, placed a telephone call to [redacted] residence. On 4/15/95, a telephone call was placed from [redacted] residence to [redacted] residence in Philadelphia division. BOMBROB subjects [redacted] left [redacted] residence on 4/16/95 en route to Pittsburgh [sic], Kansas where they joined [redacted] and Guthrie." At that time, some ara suspects lived around Philadelphia, and Pittsburg, Kansas, was the site of an ara safe house. The document makes clear that the bureau was interested in communication between McVeigh and the ara immediately before the bombing, and that Guthrie himself was in Pittsburg—some 200 miles from Oklahoma City—three days before the attack.

In addition, the memos indicate that the fbi received reports of McVeigh calling and possibly visiting Elohim City before the bombing, at one point seeking "to recruit a second conspirator." The documents also have one source reporting that McVeigh had a "lengthy relationship" with someone at Elohim City, and that he called that person just two days before the bombing. (These documents were never shown to McVeigh's lawyer.) The Justice Department and the fbi would not comment on the documents; an fbi spokesman in Oklahoma City told me that the bureau is confident it has caught and convicted those responsible for the bombing.

Jesse believes that McVeigh's contact was Strassmeir, a fixture in many Oklahoma City theories. There has been much speculation, aired most recently on the bbc show Conspiracy Files this year, that Strassmeir had ties to U.S. and German intelligence and might (along with his government contacts) have had advance knowledge of the plot. In February 2007, Jesse filed a declaration in court signed by Nichols stating, "McVeigh said that Strassmeir would provide a 'safe house' if necessary. McVeigh...said that Strassmeir was 'head of security at some backwoods place in Oklahoma.'" Strassmeir left the country in early 1996; he was later questioned on the phone by the fbi.

Kirk Lyons, Strassmeir's U.S. attorney, who has defended a number of far-right figures over the years, says the reality is far simpler; Strassmeir came to the United States to take part in Civil War reenactments, liked it here, and, hoping to find a bride, ended up at Elohim City. Lyons insists that Strassmeir was never a spy, except in the minds of conspiracy theorists. ("These silly right-wingers think I am Mossad," he says. "I've given up arguing with these nutsy cuckoos.")

Reached at his home in Berlin, Strassmeir told me that he met McVeigh once, at a gun show in 1993, but that they never spoke again. He said he had no intelligence affiliations and had no clues to the Oklahoma City attack before it happened; but there were definitely informants at Elohim City, he added, and sometimes surveillance planes flew overhead—probably, he thought, to check out the marijuana fields that "some of the rednecks" had planted. He confirmed that two ara members were part-time residents of Elohim City, but said that "nobody knew much about them."

the oklahoma City bombing prefigured 9/11 in many ways. There were the missed clues; the federal informant who actually had contact with the conspirators; the turf-conscious agencies failing to share and act on vital information; and in general, a domestic-intelligence program incapable of translating surveillance into action. Just as they would misunderstand the nature of Al Qaeda, the fbi and other agencies never viewed the far right as a political movement with the strategic and tactical ability to deliver a major attack. Intelligence on these groups suffered from the broader inadequacies of domestic intelligence, especially in the use of untested freelance informants recruited under threat of prosecution. But with federal police forces and the Justice Department responsible for policing themselves, and the details of their work often shrouded in secrecy, the system remained unaccountable. The bombing "grew out of a definable social movement the authorities didn't understand," says Leonard Zeskind, a researcher who has tracked the far right for more than 30 years. "It went unsolved because of the character and gross mismanagement of the investigation. It was an outrageous crime, and the size of the crime magnifies the level of incompetence."

In fact, after the bombing law enforcement's failures were not corrected but rewarded. Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which severely restricted federal courts' ability to grant habeas corpus relief, paving the way for speedier executions (like that of Timothy McVeigh), and ultimately for Guantanamo. It also restricted the rights of immigrants, extended surveillance capabilities, and provided $1 billion in authorization for antiterrorism work, half of it for the fbi. The act raised only muted protest, perhaps in part because it was signed into law by a Democratic president. Yet there can be no doubt that the roots of the Patriot Act were planted not in the chasm of Ground Zero but in the dusty soil of Oklahoma.

For Jesse Trentadue, the ara-Oklahoma City connection has suggested what he believes is the missing motive in his brother's killing: Just as J.D. Cash posited in his first phone call, he now believes that whoever interrogated Kenney took him to be John Doe No. 2—and that Kenney died during an interrogation gone bad. He has no proof for that theory, though he continues to pursue all leads—interviewing McVeigh's death-row neighbor, David Paul Hammer; preparing to formally depose Terry Nichols; seeking to obtain a surveillance video he believes exists of the Murrah Building area shortly before the blast. But by now, Jesse is after more than his brother's killers. He has become an American archetype, the citizen-investigator—still propelled by the sense of justice that first drew him into the law, but no longer convinced of the government's ability to see that justice is done.

Jennifer Wedekind, Caroline Dobuzinskis, and Jessica Savage contributed research to this article. For more Oklahoma City (and John Doe No. 2) mysteries, see motherjones.com/oklahomacity.

Fascist Overtones From Blithely Oblivious Rock Fans

by Nicholas Wood
NEW YORK TIMES

ZAGREB, Croatia, June 30 — On a hot Sunday evening in June, thousands of fans in a packed stadium here in the Croatian capital gave a Nazi salute as the rock star Marko Perkovic shouted a well-known slogan from World War II.

Some of the fans were wearing the black caps of Croatia’s infamous Nazi puppet Ustashe government, which was responsible for sending tens of thousands of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.

The exchange with the audience is a routine part of Mr. Perkovic’s act, and the gesture seemed to lack any conscious political overtones. The audience — most of whom appeared to be in their teens and early 20s — just seemed to be having a good time. But Mr. Perkovic’s recent success among a new generation — many of them apparently oblivious to the history of the Holocaust — has prompted concern and condemnation from Jewish groups abroad and minority groups in Croatia.

[Despite those objections, the concert — his biggest ever, with an estimated 40,000 fans in the soccer stadium — was shown in prime time on Sunday night on state-owned television, prompting further protests from Jewish and Serbian groups.]

“We don’t want to pay for something that strikes fear into my children, or distances them from their friends or neighbors,” said Milorad Pupovac, leader of the largest Serbian political party in Croatia, referring to the plan for the broadcast.

What has shocked those groups more, though, is that in the ensuing debate, many senior politicians and journalists have said that they see no problem with the imagery or salutes.

“They just don’t seem to get it,” said Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who has urged President Stipe Mesic to ban future concerts and help outlaw the use of extremist symbols and slogans.

The Croatian government has been trying to improve its image so it can join the European Union, and it did issue a statement after the concert criticizing the open display of Ustashe memorabilia and slogans. But much of Croatia’s political establishment cannot understand what all the fuss is about.

“You can’t see any anti-Semitism here,” Dragan Primorac, Croatia’s education minister, said in an interview. He said he had planned to attend the concert, before rain caused it to be postponed by a day. Others who did get there, though, included a former foreign minister and two Croatian basketball stars.

“At most, you could blame four to five people,” Dr. Primorac said, for wearing Ustashe regalia, or giving the Nazi salute during the concert. He emphasized, too, that Croatia was a good friend of Israel and pointed to a photograph on his mantelpiece of himself with the Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres as evidence.

Over the last three years the conservative prime minister, Ivo Sanader, has to some extent managed to shed the country’s image as a nationalist state that once harbored war criminals. The effort has been successful enough that Croatia is a favorite to join the European Union. What was seen for much of 1990s as a war-torn nation is now widely perceived as a prime tourist destination, with 10 million tourists a year and visitors flocking to its Adriatic coast.

Photographs and memorabilia from the Ustashe period are no longer sold openly in Zagreb’s city center. Restaurants no longer display photographs of Ustashe units on their wall. But souvenir shops do still sell key rings and baseball caps with the Ustashe U, as well as the slogan used in Mr. Perkovic’s concerts, “Za Dom: Spremni!” or, “For the Homeland: Ready!”

And many Croats still display an insensitivity to Holocaust issues. Mr. Perkovic’s public affairs manager, Albino Ursic, has a large poster that he designed in 1994 on the wall of his office with the words “final solution.” The poster shows a package of cigarettes marked with a large Swastika and labeled “Adolf Filters,” poking out of a black leather jacket. “It’s an antismoking picture,” he said.

“It won an award in Lisbon,” he added, emphasizing that he viewed himself as left of center. As for Mr. Perkovic’s performance, Mr. Ursic said, the fascist salute is made by soccer hooligans across Europe who have little understanding of it. “It is just teenage rebellion,” he said.

Mr. Perkovic’s patriotic — and sometimes violently nationalistic — songs first became popular here during the Balkan wars, when he fought in the Croatian Army. Most Croats know him better by his stage name, Thompson, given to him during the war, when he carried the submachine gun of the same name. He, too, has recently sought to distance himself from the Ustashe association. In an interview, the soft-spoken singer said he had never raised his own arm to make a fascist salute. Nor, he said, did he encourage people to wear Ustashe uniforms. As for the Ustashe slogan he uses, he claims it is a traditional Croatian salute that predates World War II.

Others are unapologetic. Vedran Rudan, a columnist with the Croatian center-right daily Nacional, accused Mr. Zuroff of “extreme arrogance” for writing a letter to the president of Croatia asking the government to bar future Thompson concerts.

She also accused him of branding Croatian youths fascists while ignoring the activities of a well-known ultranationalist member of Parliament, who has close ties with Israel.

“Why do Jews forgive him everything, and the beardless youth and Thompson do not have right to mercy?” Ms. Rudan wrote.

But rights groups here say there is a fundamental problem. While Croatia is now seeking to move away from the nationalist period of the 1990s, the current generation of young people has largely been schooled to believe that the Ustashe government’s actions were no worse than those of Communist leaders in Yugoslavia during the same period.

“They want to put them on an equal footing,” said Danijel Ivin, the president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. “The education about the recent history of Croatia is not adequate.”

Dr. Primorac said that was slowly beginning to change and pointed out that since 2004, Croatian schools had dedicated a day each year to studying the Holocaust.

Others do not think it is changing quickly enough. “It is an issue,” said Tomislav Jakic, an adviser to President Mesic. “It is far from Ustashe nostalgia that was 15 years ago, when the ghost was first let out of the bottle. But the ghost is still here and it will be for years to come.”