The British, Using George H.W. Bush, Destroyed the First Church Committee’s Achievements: a True Crime Story and Lesson for Our Times, continued.

In our previous chapters, we told you about a salon of government officials and journalists who assembled at the Manhattan townhouse of Wall Street and City of London financier John Train, beginning in April of 1983.  Their objective was the political and legal assassination of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., in an operation bearing direct parallels to the 2015 forward full-spectrum information warfare and lawfare operation against Donald J. Trump.

Throughout 1982 and early 1983, the British government, Henry Kissinger, and the CIA networks associated with George H.W. Bush and James Jesus Angleton, had been clamoring for LaRouche’s head, incensed and enraged both about the growth of LaRouche’s political movement, and his classified projects on behalf of the Reagan White House.  The most notable of these concerned back-channel negotiations with the Soviets about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).  Much to everyone’s surprise, Reagan had announced that the SDI would go fully forward one month before the Train salons commenced.

Our last chapter laid out how the legal architecture for the operation against LaRouche involved Executive Orders 12333 and 12334 and NSDD 77.  These orders completely rolled back the intelligence community reforms made in the wake of the Church and Pike committee investigations.  When you hear Joe Biden raving about “defending democracy,” while he imposes a police state here, and we hurtle toward a nuclear war with Russia on behalf of a fascist-infested police state in Ukraine, you are experiencing the legacy of these 1981-1983 “lawfare” actions.

Let’s start our catalogue of the participants in Train’s salons with their impresario, John Pell Coster Train, who finally died last August at the age of 94.  Train was a perfected example of the “American Tory Traitor,” the term FDR used to describe the treason faction of Wall Street.  They are loyal only to the Anglo-American financial oligarchy, hate the American Revolution and the Constitution, and see government as a tool by which to secure power for themselves and their fellow “families.”   The Train family’s elite Eastern Establishment lineage, through Enoch Train and Company, dates back centuries, and includes 19^th century opium dealing and early involvement with the J.P. Morgan Wall Street/London banking cartel.  

At Harvard, Train, dressed in a British Redcoat’s uniform, intervened against a Patriot’s Day commemoration of Paul Revere’s ride, yelling obscenities and insults against the American revolutionary actors.  He was cheered on by a crew of fellow students he had organized for this purpose. He married the Italian Maria Teresa Cini, a devotee of Prince Valerio Borghese (the “Black Prince”), who led neo-fascist coup plots in Italy throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.  At the end of World War II, the fascist Borghese had been saved from certain trial and execution by American OSS officer James J. Angleton.  Call that the beginning of the life-long Angleton connection to the Train family.

Train was a founder of the Paris Review, along with his Harvard roommates Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan.  The Aga Khans have been intimates of the British Royal Family since Queen Victoria.  Prince Sadruddin, who remained close to John Train throughout his life, was also a personal friend and advisor to George H.W. Bush.  The Paris Review, during the Cold War, featured a direct CIA agent, in the form of Peter Matthiessen.  It worked closely with the CIA/MI6 sponsored Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF) spewing avant-garde, existentialist, and fascist literary products across the world. 

This alleged epitome of “artistic freedom,” like all CCF products, was designed to lure artists in Europe, the East Bloc, and the developing sector who composed the “non-Communist left” and Communist dissidents, away from the temptations of communism, via generous financial grants and support.  The generous funding and cultural dominance of CCF-promoted anti-rational “modern art” ultimately subverted and destroyed classical culture, substituting the arbitrary and the ugly for the poetic and the beautiful.  This was the most destructive of all illicit CIA activities.  By destroying the classics and access to them, the general ability of humans to think was assassinated.

Although the CCF was run by Frank Wisner, and then by Tom Braden and Cord Meyer, Angleton kept close watch.  He earned the agency nickname “the poet” for his writing and promotion of fascist poetry.  His other nickname, “Mother” reflected his British intelligence training and roots.

After his return from Paris, Train established Wall Street investment firms which managed the funds of the wealthiest U.S., British, and other elite families.  At the same time, Train’s firm served as a conduit for various CIA projects.  In his book about the Bush family, Family of Secrets, Russ Baker shows, through CIA documents, that Train’s firm was a cover for CIA proprietaries, and that Train’s partner, Thomas Devine, played a role.  Prior to his partnership with John Train, Devine had been formally employed by the CIA, and then became the partner of George H.W. Bush in Zapata Oil and Zapata Offshore.  Thomas Devine remained extremely close to Poppy Bush after Bush entered politics.  Both oil companies, the claimed sources of Poppy Bush’s “independent” Texas oil wealth, had long been rumored to be enmired with the CIA by veteran Texas political sources.

Train’s investment firm, although located in New York, was more centered in Britain and continental Europe than the United States.  In 1984, Train’s firm was restructured.  English Association Trust bought a controlling interest.  EAT, through its parent English Association Group PLC, was itself a wholly-owned subsidiary of PK Banken of Sweden, a state-owned bank.  Other Train associates describe his intelligence pedigree and operations as “an appendage of the London International Institute for Strategic Studies,” the heart of British imperial operations.

Train’s politics?  He was an acolyte of the British economist Cyril Northcote Parkinson.  Parkinson wanted to bust up nation states and restore monarchies.  He schemed with Alfred Heineken, the Dutch beer magnate, for “Eurotopia,” which would bust up the European nation-states into 75 equally-sized small city-states—which would allow for “better governance.” He had similar plans for the United States.

The U.S. was too big to be governed effectively, Parkinson argued.  Additionally, the presidency was too much for one human being.  It should be transformed into a two-person operation, mirroring the relationship between the British Queen and the British prime minister.  Legislation, Parkinson demanded, should be done through secret ballots, since representative government allowed too much participation by average people.  Similar schemes for wrecking the nation-state under the banner of environmentalism had been proposed by Sir James Goldsmith and his brother Teddy, who were also Train intimates from the Paris days forward.  Sir James had joined Train in the Bush/British secret government apparatus which targeted LaRouche. 

At the time of his LaRouche salons, Train was a very busy man.  He had just collaborated with S. Steven Powell in an expose of the Institute for Policy Studies for alleged Soviet ties.  The beef with IPS, however, actually concerned its persistent role in the investigation of the 1976 assassination of the Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington, D.C., and Henry Kissinger’s role in the 1973 deadly coup against the Allende government in Chile which preceded it.

Train was also working with Walter Raymond at the White House, with the CIA, and with the CIA/Leo Cherne quangos Freedom House and the International Rescue Committee on Afghanistan, producing propaganda promoting the mujahideen for Zbigniew Brzezinski’s proxy war against the Soviet Union.  His own quango for this operation, located in his office, was the Afghanistan Relief Committee, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.  Many argue, correctly, that this proxy war fiasco gave rise to Islamist terrorism and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.  Train’s Afghan collaborator was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, at the time an Islamist terrorist and major drug lord controlled by the Pakistani and British intelligence services.

In one memo cited by Joel Whitney in his book Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, Train seems to contemplate causing massive atrocities against civilians, attributing them to the Soviets, and filming them in order to provoke the desired anti-Soviet Afghan response.

Next:  Who Else Was There—Operation Mockingbird’s Rebirth (coming soon)...