Part 2 is about Adam Finnegan and Erich Traub:
lyme2.
Adam Finnegan wrote "my source John Loftus was
the first to expose the Lyme disease connection to biological warfare in
1982, in The Belarus Secret". [https://
Loftus is a former military intelligence officer, Nazi hunter, and
president of the Florida Holocaust Museum. [https://
Loftus claims that he is an Irish Catholic, but for some reason he even wrote a column called "Spyview" for a Haredi Jewish magazine called Ami. So I don't know if he is a crypto-Jew or just a particularly hardcore shabbos goy.
Wikipedia says: "The Office of Special
Investigations historian David Marwell described Loftus' book The
Belarus Secret as 'the worst kind of amateur
history.'[6] Vital Zayka, a fellow of
the Center for Jewish History in New York City, accused Loftus of
falsification.[7] The Israeli historian and
Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff described the book as controversial and
referred to Charles R. Allen Jr.'s review in Jewish Currents, in which
Allen joined the active criticism of Loftus and named him a fraud and a
liar.[8]" [https://
Loftus said that the publisher of his book The Belarus
Secret was a former high-level CIA agent who had a Q clearance, and
who taught him about the history of biowarfare. [https://
Loftus used to organize an annual conference in DC called The
Intelligence Summit, whose advisory council included two former heads of
the CIA, senior officials of the Mossad and IDF, and an Israeli-born
director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism. [https://
Paul Vallely was the senior military analyst for Fox News during the
Iraq War. An article from 2004 said that Loftus was "earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News
and ABC radio". [https://
In the inaugural Intelligence Summit in 2006, the speakers included
the Jewish neocons Michael Ledeen and Richard Perle. [https://
Loftus was also on the advisory board of an NGO called ACT for
America, along with people like James Woolsey, Mike Flynn, Paul Vallely,
and Robert Spencer. [https://
Loftus coauthored two of his three best-known books with this Jew
called Mark Aarons, who Loftus described as his "beloved friend": [https://
Mark Aarons worked at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which
aired two documentaries about Nazis he did with Loftus. Aarons was a
member of the Communist Party of Australia from 1969 to 1978. His father
was the head of the party, and his brother, grandfather, and
great-grandparents were also prominent members of the party. [https://
For some reason the copyright holder of the book The Secret War
Against the Jews is listed as Aarons and not Loftus, even though
Loftus is listed as the first author. The book was supposedly an "oral history" of anti-Jewish operations conducted
by intelligence agencies, which was based on interviews that Loftus and
Aarons conducted with over 500 former intelligence officers. Loftus and
Aarons wrote: "Most of the hundreds of intelligence
officers we interviewed over the last decade were trained to regard
Jews, and hence Israel, as hostile targets." [https://
The primary financial sponsor of The Intelligence Summit was the
Israeli gangster Michael Cherney. [https://
The website of the Jerusalem Summit said: "The
center that would unite the mankind can be only in Jerusalem, the
eternal and indivisible capital of Israel." [https://
One of the features on Michael Cherney Foundation's website used to
be an "anti-fascist library", which reminded
me of how Loftus's buddy Dave Emory has a library of anti-fascist books
on his website: [https://
Cherney has been denied a visa to the United States since 1999
because of his involvement with the Russian Jewish mafia, and in 1999
the Interpol issued an international arrest warrant against Cherney.
[https://
Joel van der Reijden from ISGP wrote: "Other very
obvious neocons - hardcore Zionists, in fact - that have appeared on
Coast to Coast AM are Robert Spencer and John Loftus. Spencer runs the
anti-Islamic outfit Jihad Watch and sits on the advisory board of the
Intelligence Summit. [...] Loftus is tied to
the highest levels of Israeli and Zionist political and intelligence
circles. Former CIA directors James Woolsey and John Deutch sat on the
board of his Intelligence Summit until 2006, when very obvious Russian
mafia ties to the Summit's long-term financier, Russian Zionist oligarch
Michael Cherney, were made public. Woolsey and Deutch should have known
about these ties, because since the late 1990s Cherney has been
repeatedly and convincingly linked to the powerful Russian-Zionist
Solntsevskaya mafia and its allies. These allies also include the
primary Rothschild partner in Russia, Oleg Deripaska, as well as the
Israeli state, which prevented a KGB/FSB-ran assassination against
Cherney in 1995. In 2003 Cherney also founded the Jerusalem Summit,
which sponsored at least two small meetings between Israeli officials
and American neocons. At the first meeting in 2003 Richard Perle and
Coast to Coast's Frank Gaffney were present, along with Ehud Olmert and
Benyamin Netanyahu. That's two visitors of Coast to Coast AM with clear
ties to Michael Cherney: John Loftus and Frank Gaffney. Basically,
inviting either of these two men is the same as giving voice to
propaganda of the CIA, MI6, Mossad, Russian-Zionist oligarchs and the
Russian-Zionist Solntsevskaya mafia all at once." [https://
In the book The Secret War Against the Jews, Loftus and
Aarons included a chapter about Robert Maxwell, where they praised
Maxwell's various exploits and admired his clever "con artistry". They wrote that Maxwell saved
Israel from defeat in 1948 because he supplied Israel with arms from
Czechoslovakia, and that "this one act alone made
Robert Maxwell a great man, one whose memory will be forever revered as
one of Israel's founding heroes." [https://
In 2013 when Loftus did an interview about The Secret War Against
the Jews on YouTube, the host said that the most phenomenal story
in the book was that Robert Maxwell was "The
greatest savior in the history of the state of Israel. He practically
alone saved the state of Israel by being a spy in the British service
but being very well connected with the Czechoslovakians. And if anyone
knows the history of Israel, without Czechoslovakia and the arms that
they got in 48, Israel could not have made it. So he procured those arms
for Israel." [https://
The Mega Group's favorite charity was Birthright Israel, whose
co-chair Charles Bronfman was a co-founder of the Mega Group. At one
point 8 out of 12 board members of Birthright Israel were members of the
Mega Group. [https://
Whitney Webb wrote: [ibid.]
Other, similar associations can also be found in the earliest stages of Steinhardt's career. For decades, Steinhardt was particularly close to Marc Rich, first meeting the Mossad-linked commodities trader in the 1970s and then managing $3 million for Rich, Rich's then-wife Denise, and Rich's father-in-law from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s through his hedge fund. Rich's fortune during this time was "a source of funding for secret financial arrangements" and that "his worldwide offices, according to several reliable sources, frequently served Mossad agents, with his consent."
Rich had more direct ties to the Mossad as well. For instance, his foundation - the Rich Foundation - was run by the former Mossad agent Avner Azulay. Rich was also friendly with prominent Israel politicians, including former Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Ehud Barak, and was a frequent provider of "services" for Israeli intelligence, services he freely volunteered. In addition, as mentioned in Chapter 7, Rich had a relationship with BCCI and the corrupt bank lent him tens of millions of dollars throughout the 1980s.
In the late 1990s, Steinhardt would enlist other Mega Group members, such as Edgar Bronfman, in the effort to settle the criminal charges against Rich, which eventually came to pass with Clinton's controversial pardon before he left office in early 2001. Steinhardt claimed to have come up with the idea of a presidential pardon for Rich in late 2000.
Whitney Webb also wrote that Marc Rich was a cofounder of the company Nordex, and "Nordex was later described by Andrew Cockburn as an 'ex-KGB front company' that intelligence sources believed was 'involved in arms, drugs, the whole nine yards.'[242] It was also involved in the trade of nuclear materials. [...] Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Maxwell child who had sought to be his 'father reincorporated,' Kevin Maxwell, was intimately involved with Nordex as was his brother Ian."
Michael Cherney and his brother were involved in the FIMACO money
laundering scheme, where former KGB and communist party assets were
transferred to the US secret economy through front companies like
Nordex: [https://
For example, Paul Klebnikov explained that Marc Rich was the mentor to the 1990s looters of Russia.[18][19] Before the 1990s to trade between the West and the Soviet Union, Rich established a trading house in Switzerland for each commodity to be traded: oil, aluminum, zinc, chromium, steel, etc.[18][19] Each trading house had a monopoly on the trade for its commodity between the Soviet Union and the West and would purchase the commodity from the Soviet producers for only 5% to 10% of its market value then sell the commodity through its Swiss trading house at market value and pocket the difference.[18][19] Marc Rich's firm Nordex followed this scheme.[18][19]
[...]
Reports by Swiss and German intelligence implicated numerous persons in the Russian mafia through Grigory Luchansky's Vienna, Austria based Nordex and Boris Birshtein's Zurich Switzerland based Seabeco AG, KGB, FSB, and others in the scheme to move billions away from the Soviet Union and into a secret economy.[146][147][148] Some of the funds were sent to the United States through Semyan "Sam" Kislan from Odesa, Michael Cherney and Lev Cherney using the United States firm Newtel Company and Alexander Smolensky's Stolichny Bank.[150][151] Russian prosecutors had previously tried to implicate Birshtein, Veselovsky, Luchansky, and others of illegally money laundering Communist Party funds.[21][142]
In order to defend himself against accusations that he was a
gangster, Michael Cherney made a website called
michaelcherneymikhailchernoymurderrussiamafiafacts.com. The website
included an article by John Loftus, who said that Cherney made his
fortune by buying up aluminum companies after he "obtained international investment": [https://
But Loftus didn't mention that the source of the international
investment was Marc Rich, who was one of the main architects of the
FIMACO money laundering operation, and who in 1983 had already been
indicted on 65 criminal counts, including income tax evasion, wire
fraud, and racketeering. [https://
According to Boris Klebnikov who wrote a book about the looting of
Russia, aluminum was one of the main commodities Marc Rich dealt in:
[https://
"Governmental authority began to crumble. All these local Communist Party bosses got to strike deals on their own," the author tells me.
Based in Switzerland, with its secretive banking laws, Rich was in a prime position to help Russia's plunderers carry out their dirty work. Klebnikov reported that Rich dealt in oil, aluminum, zinc and other raw commodities.
"He'd strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company," explains the author. "He'd say, 'OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at 5 to 10 percent of the world market price.'"
"'And in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.'"
For at least two years, as the Soviet Union was in its death throes, Rich was that nation's largest trader of aluminum and oil on a spot basis.
"He made a complete mint off of Russia," says Klebnikov.
A former foreign-trade minister told the author that Rich instructed the robber-baron elite how to skirt the law by doing secret deals through shell companies and the like.
"Marc Rich ended up being a mentor to all these young kids who came out of the Communist Party establishment, and who made billions off these schemes themselves," Klebnikov charges.
Cherney's aluminum company engaged in the kind of scheme described by
Klebnikov, and in order to eliminate their competition, they either
bought or murdered their rivals. Wikipedia says: [https://
As more of Russia's industry was privatized, Trans World bought stakes in the country's largest smelters, to prevent the rise of competitors which also might be interested in signing tolling deals.[4][6]
When the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Factory, Russia's second-largest, refused to enter an agreement with Trans-World, the director of the plant began to receive threats.[4] Vadim Yafyasov, a deputy director, was killed in front of his Moscow home on 10 April 1995.[4] Felix Lvov, a Trans-World rival, was picked up by men with special services IDs as he was sitting in a plane at Sheremetyevo Airport. His corpse was found in a nearby wood several days later.[7] Trans-World eventually took control of the Krasnoyarsk smelter in cooperation with Anatoly Bykov,[1] described by the New York Times as "one of Russia's most infamous mobsters".[8]
[...]
A series of investigative reports broadcast by the NTV television network in 1996 accused TransWorld Group of working with the Izmailovsky gang of the Russian mafia, and of having committed a series of high-profile murders: in particular, those of Felix Lvov, Oleg Kantor and Vadim Yafyasov.[7]
[...]
In June 2000, an investigation into Trans-World's business was published in Fortune magazine; the article remarked that the company's history was filled with "more than a few corpses".[3]
Adam Finnegan works as a "marketing media
coordinator" for Trine Day Books, which published his book. Trine
Day was founded by Kris Millegan, whose father was a high-level CIA
agent. Millegan says that he started studying conspiracy topics after
his father told him about the covert operations he had been involved in.
[https://
In 2010 Trine Day publishd an expanded edition of Loftus's book
The Belarus Secret under the title America's Nazi
Secret. Millegan wrote a foreword for the book, but he didn't have
anything critical to say about Loftus's story even though it was
obviously fake. Trine Day is going to publish an autobiography of Loftus
titled My Clients were Spies. [https://
The first two guests on Finnegan's YouTube channel were Bruce de
Torres and Daniel Estulin. [https://
TNT Radio is now defunct, but it seemed like some kind of a
Russian-backed disinformation operation. [yt.
Trine Day has also published 4 books by Peter Levenda, who was the
anonymous author of the satanist book Simon Necronomicon. He later had a
key role in the Blink-182 guy's UFO disinformation operation, along with
the so-called former intelligence officers Jim Semivan, Luis Elizondo,
Chris Mellon, and Hal Puthoff. Levenda is a member of the Association of
Former Intelligence Officers, and he has been allowed to present
conspiracy theories about Nazis on mainstream TV, just like Loftus.
[https://
John Loftus was a frequent guest on the radio show of Dave Emory, who
is a leftist conspiracy theorist who finds Nazis hiding under every
rock. [https://
In one of his radio shows, Dave Emory said that the reason why all
the crooks appear to be Jews is because they're actually Nazis with fake
papers: "But the main reason according to John
Loftus that the German government dragged its feet so dutifully in
releasing documents about the Third Reich - there was a large
documentation center in Berlin controlled by the German government, it
was the single largest repository of information about the Third Reich,
they only released it to journalists and historians a couple of years
ago, more than 60 years after the end World War II - and the main reason
for that according to John Loftus is that - as the Third Reich
operatives were preparing for their post-war underground careers, a
massive forging program was underway within the concentration camps
using forgers - who were basically a captive workforce - to create very
elaborate paper trails documenting many of these post-war Third Reich
operatives as Jews. So that in addition to Bormann Jews per se,
there is also a substantive body of underground Reich slash Bormann
capital network operatives, who are basically nominally Jews, but are in
fact good loyal Nazis who have been given Jewish documentation. Again,
what a perfect cover for an underground operative of any kind, then - to
make oneself out to be the opposite of what one really is. So in
addition to the concept of Bormann Jews per se, bear in mind
that there was according to John Loftus a massive program to create a
Jewish cover for post-war operatives, and then rather like the financial
crisis, it can be blamed on - your negative things can be blamed on,
quote, 'the Jews'." [http://
Emory's bible on post-war Nazis was a book about Martin Bormann by Paul Manning, who worked as a war correspondent for CBS before he became a conspiracy author. But Loftus has also worked as a consultant for CBS, and he has appeared as a regular commentator on Fox News, and his coauthor Mark Aarons is a communist Jew who worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Early books about Project Paperclip were written by Linda Hunt who worked for CNN, and by Tom Bower who is a communist Jew who worked for BBC TV.
Loftus had a page for video clips on his website, where there were
three video clips that were all about Sami Al-Arian, who was one of the
main villains in Emory's alternate universe that was filled with
Islamofascists and Fourth Reich Nazis. [https://
Dave Emory called himself a "Brussell
sprout", because he was a disciple of the leftist conspiracy
theorist Mae Brussell, who Emory called his "very,
very close friend and research colleague". [https://
In 2004 Dave Emory did a radio show about Lab 257 where he
primarily focused on Erich Traub, and he subsequently also discussed
Erich Traub on other episodes of his show. [https://
One of the main topics Dave Emory discussed on his radio show was how
HIV was a bioweapon, and he also promoted the work of Len Horowitz and
Alan Cantwell, who both said that HIV was a bioweapon created by the
Americans. [https://
Nick claims that HIV is a recombinant virus that includes components
of the visna virus. Variations of his visna recombination theory had
earlier been presented by John Seale, Robert Strecker, Jakob Segal, and
Alan Cantwell. Nick has been unable to answer me which parts of the
genome of HIV come from visna, and I have shown him plots which
demonstrate that no part of the genome of HIV is closer to visna than to
SIV. [https://
Len Horowitz was knighted by an American order that claims to be
descended from the Russian branch of the Knights of Malta: [http://
The order was founded in 1956 by Charles Pichel, and it is known as
the "Shickshinny Knights of Malta", because
it was originally based in the town of Shickshinny in Pennsylvania.
[https://
Horowitz claimed that HIV was created by Robert Gallo's group at the
National Cancer Institute, but Horowitz still simultaneously claimed
that HIV was created at Fort Detrick, because he claimed that the NCI
took over Fort Detrick. His theory is reminiscent of the KGB's
disinformation campaign about how HIV was created at Fort Detrick. [hiv.
In 1992, the former Stasi disinformation officer Günter Bohnsack said
that the story that HIV was created at Fort Detrick was an active
measure initiated by Moscow, but the three people he credited for
popularizing the story were Jakob Segal, Stephan Heym, and Johannes
Mario Simmel, who were all Jews. The main star of the campaign was the
communist Jew Jakob Segal, who had previously supplied the Stasi with
intelligence on western nuclear research, and who once suggested his
supervising officer at the Stasi to stage a car accident to kill a
scientist. Segal was a hardcore Lysenkoist who had earlier continued to
support Lysenko's view that genes did not exist even after Lysenko
himself had abandoned it, but later Segal claimed that HIV was a genetic
recombinant of the STLV-I and visna viruses. Segal's books were
published by the publishing house of the Marxist-Leninist Party of
Germany. The director of the publishing house coauthored a book with
Segal, and he went on a speaking tour in Africa promoting Segal's theory
together with the Communist Party of South Africa. Segal was interviewed
in the West German press by the Jewish journalist Stefan Heym, who was a
close friend of Segal. Heym was earlier the editor-in-chief of the
German-language newspaper of Communist Party USA. He served in a
psychological warfare division of the US Army led by the Jew Hans Habe,
who established numerous newspapers in Germany after the war when the
German independent press was dismantled. Heym was an editor of one of
the newspapers, which was largely staffed by Jews who had served in the
psychological warfare division of the US Army. Heym wrote the script for
a propaganda radio play which included the earliest reference of any
kind I have found of Josef Mengele being an evil doctor at Auschwitz.
The Stasi disinformation officer Bohnsack also said that the Stasi
supplied material about HIV to the Jewish fiction writer Johannes Mario
Simmel, who wrote a popular novel about the theory that HIV was created
at Fort Detrick. [hiv.
Jakob Segal's theory that HIV was created at Fort Detrick is
reminiscent of the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was created at Fort Detrick,
whose main proponent was George Webb. Segal said that HIV was a hybrid
of the HTLV-1 and visna viruses, but Webb similarly said that SARS-CoV-2
was a hybrid of three viruses. Segal was registered as a Stasi
informant, but according to Trish the Dish who used to do videos with
Webb, Webb had acquired a level 3 certification at the Department of
Homeland Security (and the name of DHS is
reminiscent of Stasi which is short for "state
security" in German). [yt.
Webb's theory that SARS-CoV-2 was created by Sina Bavari's team at
Fort Detrick was also promoted by Mark Kulacz, who did his alt media
debut on a channel that was launched by the son of a high-level FBI
agent together with George Webb. [https://
George Webb started promoting Finnegan's book soon after the book was
published. [https://
Finnegan is a regular guest on the channel of John O'Loughlin, who is the son of a high-level FBI agent. O'Loughlin recorded an audio narration of Finnegan's book, and he appears to be Finnegan's biggest advocate in alt media. When George Webb lived in the DC area, he did many videos in person with John O'Loughlin, who is a retired lawyer who was a member of the DC Bar Association.
George Webb has said that when he lived in New York in 2002 to 2003,
he shared an apartment with a lady who worked as a caterer at Epstein's
parties and who secretly videotaped the parties. [https://
Several people in alt media who produce disinformation about viruses
are somehow connected to George Webb. Kevin McCairn did many of his
earliest videos together with Webb's mini-me Addy Adds and Webb's
science teacher Paul Cottrell. [clot3.
An old snapshot of Loftus's website indicates that booking for his
lectures was handled by the B'nai B'rith Lecture Bureau: [https://
Loftus was listed on the B'nai B'rith's website as one of 57 speakers
on the roster of the B'nai B'rith Lecture Bureau, and possibly the only
gentile speaker in case he is not a crypto-Jew. [https://
B'nai B'rith is a Jewish Freemasonic order, which originally had a system of six degrees, each of which was associated with an initiation ritual, a secret teaching, a password, and a secret handshake, even though the system of degrees gradually fell out of use during the 20th century. B'nai B'rith also employed the blackball system for admitting new members similar to other Masonic orders.
The main hero of Loftus's book The Belarus Secret was a Jewish barber called Sol Schnadow, and Sol's memoirs were the main source Loftus relied on in the book. Loftus claimed that he discovered the memoirs in secret intelligence archives, because Sol had handed out the memoirs to the FBI three decades earlier, but the memoirs remained buried in the archives until Loftus happened to find them.
In 1986 when John Loftus was the featured speaker at an event
organized by United Jewish Appeal, a Jewish newspaper published a photo
from the event which featured a person named Sol Schnadow according to
the caption of the photo: [https://
In 1991 the same newspaper published an obituary of a
Holocaust-surviving barber called Saul Schnadow, who was a "member of the South Orange Avenue Masonic Lodge":
[https://
His membership in the Masonic lodge was one of the few things
mentioned in his short obituary, so being a Freemason might have been a
significant aspect of his life. Loftus claimed that the headquarters of
the Belarus Nazi network were located in South River, New Jersey, which
is only about 40 km away from the Masonic lodge. [https://
Before Adam Finnegan started his Substack, his articles were
published on a platform called One Great Work Network. The "creator and curator" of One Great Work Network is
Mark Passio, who is a former priest in the Church of Satan. [https://
Finnegan is one of 35 authors who have more than 50 posts on Mark
Passio's platform, along with people like these: [https://
Another author on Passio's platform is Andy Brooksher, whose profile
image features a Masonic compass, and who founded the "Green River Alchemical Society" which he calls the
world's first "decentralized, public Secret
Society". [https://
In an article titled "Introducing... The One Great
Work Network Mystery School: Ending Slavery, One Mind at A Time",
Finnegan wrote that his website Garden of Great Work was "a larger network of initiates and those devoted to the
larger journey of discovering and serving Truth, both within and in the
world of objective reality, to discover what is, from what is not, and
to reshape oneself continuously to be in line with Truth and the
spiritual homeostasis of what the great Occult Initiate Mark Passio of
What On Earth is Happening referred to as 'Natural
Law'". [https://
In 2020 Finnegan wrote on his website that he "started up the Garden of Great Work, my site of education
for the teachings of Truth and Natural Law in the occult traditions and
contribution to modern day Mystery Schools, which I will be working with
soon". [https://
A copyright notice at the bottom of his website said "©2020 by Sol Invictus". Sol Invictus is equated
with Mithras, and with the dark sun Saturn that Finnegan identifies
with. Sol Invictus is also the name of one of the five holidays
celebrated by The Satanic Temple, which is owned and managed by a Jew
called Cevin Soling. [https://
Finnegan wrote that the "Fixation of Fire"
is "the attachment of oneself to their Drive or
sense of purpose, symbolized by fire, as something comparable to a
passion", which becomes "a service in the
Great Work". [https://
I found an obituary of an Anthony Passio Jr. from Philadelphia, who
"served in the United States Army as a Green Beret,
Special Forces". He died of cancer on May 11th 2024, and he was
the husband of Patricia Tartaglia-Passio and the "father of Ronald Tartaglia, Lori Ribecchi (Daniel), Dina Valentino (Dino), Mark Passio, and Eric Tartaglia (Shawnna)". [https://
It's not exactly surprising that the leader of a satanist cult would
be the son of a Green Beret. Just like Passio, Michael Aquino was also a
priest in LaVey's church before he founded his own satanic movement.
Aquino was a Green Beret, and he served in the 7th Psychological
Operations Group at Fort Bragg, where he coauthored the essay "From PSYOP To Mind War" with his supervising
officer Paul Vallely, who was a member of the advisory council of
Finnegan's mentor's intelligence conference. [https://
The central tenet of Passio's cult seems to be to follow what he
calls "Natural Law", but in one of his
presentations he equated Natural Law with the teachings of the Kabbalah,
because he said: "Kabbalah: powerful, powerful
tradition, about the reception of Natural Law. And that's what it means,
reception. It is about the reception of the divine light." [https://
Mark Passio looks like a rabbi, but I think he's just an Italian:
Mark Passio was appointed as a priest in the Church of Satan by
Blanche Barton, who was Anton LaVey's girlfriend and who became the high
priestess of the church after LaVey died. [https://
Anton LaVey's daughter said that LaVey's biography credited to
Blanche Barton was "apparently ghostwritten by LaVey
himself". [https://
The biography said that LaVey recalled that around 1949 when he studied criminology in San Francisco, "There were two main rendezvous spots in San Francisco, a Jewish Community Center and a Workers' Collective downtown, where fellows would come in off the boat and went right down to meet contacts in the library of one of these places. I would be hired to play for a fashion show or variety show, then I'd get through and go right down to the docks where crates of guns were being loaded onto ships to Israel. Many of the guns were ones that had been 'liberated' during the war by American soldiers and were slated as DEWAT [deactivated war trophies]. But before they had a chance to be officially deactivated they were cosmolined up and sent to Israel. They'd wind up in a crate marked 'menorahs' or something - mostly German MP 40's and P-38's, but even Japanese Nambus, anything could get their hands on. Afterwards, I'd get letters of praise from the fashion show organizers saying how much I'd added to their presentation; little did they know what I'd been doing after their show." Then LaVey recalled: "I felt a culmination of that whole episode in my life many years later, shortly after The Satanic Bible came out. I met with Assaf Dayan, actor son of Israel's legendary Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and he was glowing about the book, agreed with every in it [sic]. He said it was exactly the philosophy they practiced, were forced to practice, in modern Israel. He extended an invitation for me to stay at his family home in Tel Aviv whenever I wished."
In the book The Secret War Against the Jews, there's a long footnote where Loftus and Aarons present Rachel Verdon's theory that Lyme disease was brought to America by a Soviet fur ship:
Rachel Verdon has been collecting declassified records of Soviet research on Nazi toxins. She has compiled a frightening and formidable amount of documentation. Although the evidence is still incomplete, there is reason to believe that the Soviet military discovered that ticks, fleas, and lice could be systematically infected and then secretly dispersed throughout an enemy population. There are some indications that the Soviets used the "insect vector" on their own dissident Moslem populations.
According to our sources, they tried it on an American population as well. Vernon [sic] has found some intriguing circumstantial evidence to support this claim. In the late 1940s, the Soviet ship Elberus [sic] delivered a load of furs and skins to the port of New York. Shortly afterward an epidemic of an unknown disease similar to rickettsial pox broke out in New York City. It was traced to a form of insect rarely seen in the United States but common in the Soviet Union.
According to our sources, the U.S. government threw a top-secret classification over the entire episode and immediately began to study the Soviet insect vectors on Plum Island off the coast of Connecticut. That, the old spies say, is how Lyme disease began to spread. The government quietly commissioned a study of the New England population, using the unwitting Muscular Sclerosis Society as a cover. When no indications of epidemic infections in humans or animals were found, the whole study was quietly scrapped.
What the government did not know was that Lyme disease can be dormant for several years and later may have reacted with common vaccines in a most unfortunate manner. While the Lyme disease story cannot be corroborated, Vernon [sic] has confirmed that a top-secret U.S. study labeled "Clandestine Attacks on Crops and Animals" once existed, but all copies have been destroyed. One of the participants in the study, Leo Alexander, has been identified as a U.S. intelligence expert on Nazi medical experiments on human beings. To this day, the Department of Agriculture Research Station on Plum Island is closed to human visitors. Still, it may all be a coincidence.
It's convenient how the sources cited are "old spies say" or "according to our sources" or a study that "once existed, but all copies have been destroyed".
Loftus and Aarons also wrote "Several other scholars and researchers have shared their information and documents with us, among them Peggy Robohm and Rachel Verdon." Several FOI documents obtained by Rachel Verdon were cited as sources in the book.
In 2006 Rachel Verdon self-published a book titled Lyme disease
and the SS Elbrus: Collaboration Between the Nazis and Communists in
Chemical and Biological Warfare. [https://
Rachel Verdon did not mention Erich Traub in her book, but she claimed that a German chemist called Henry Tolkmith was actually Josef Mengele, and that he was somehow a key witness to the Nazi-Soviet collaboration to create Lyme disease, and that he monitored the spread of Lyme disease in the United States. Grok said:
Verdon claims Tolkmith was an I.G. Farben chemist brought to America via Operation Paperclip and hired by Dow Chemical to work on pesticides, poison gas, and organophosphorus compounds. She asserts his real identity was Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz "Angel of Death," whose expertise in tick-borne nervous system diseases (including Lyme and multiple sclerosis) made him valuable to both East and West during the Cold War.
Tolkmith/Mengele is portrayed as a protected "Dragon Returnee" who may have served U.S. agencies (Defense or Health Department) in tracking Lyme disease and related conditions, as part of postwar coverups that ignored Nazi-Soviet collaborations.
Verdon sought Tolkmith as a "historical witness" to the long-term Nazi-Soviet pact to spread tick-borne plagues via Soviet fur shipments (e.g., on the SS Elbrus), which she says infested U.S. ports and undermined democracies through chronic illness.
Suspicions stemmed from inconsistencies in his Paperclip files (conflicting descriptions, double U.S./USSR sightings). During Verdon's interview at his Florida home, he denied dossier photos were of him interpreted as proof of identity theft (possibly involving his brother Karl). She notes he died soon after. Later editions cite new photos (e.g., Karl Hoecker Album) as confirming the images depict Mengele, solidifying his U.S. role in Lyme "tracking."
In 2012 Rachel Verdon self-published a book where she said 9/11 was
financed by underground Nazis in the ODESSA network. [https://
In 2022 Rachel Verdon was interviewed on YouTube by Tino Struckmann.
[https://
At time 18:07 she said about Lyme disease that "It wasn't really man-made. It's been here for thousands of years. There's even records of Lyme, uh, 200 years ago, up in the Great Lakes, that my doctor Paul Lavoie uncovered. But it wasn't rampant, because the rats weren't rampant, okay. I mean, an occasional deer would get it, an occasional fur trapper would get it, but - you know, and they could live through it and get over it too. So that's uh, Lyme has been here, I think, easily since the first shipping came in from Russia, okay." I don't understand why at first she said Lyme disease has been in America for thousands of years, but then she said it's been in America since the first shipping came in from Russia.
At time 23:21 she said that the German army had a unit called "Waffenprüf 9" that had been stationed in Russia in
1926-1933 until it was called back to Germany, even though Stalin killed
off "everybody that's witness to this". She
said that between the wars when Germans were forbidden to work on
chemical and biological warfare because of the Versailles treaty,
Germans went to Russia to train on chemical and biological warfare,
where they had a program to parachute contaminated rats all over the
steppe and tundra. But then in order to cover up their tracks, in 1940
Hitler sent Waffenprüf 9 back to Russia on a "decontamination mission" where "Joseph Mengele was brought with them to be put into the
gas and smoke unit". Waffenprüfamt 9 was the gas protection
branch of the ordnance office of the German army, and its personnel do
seem to have taken part in chemical weapons tests on the Tomka site in
Russia, and the Soviet co-director of the test site was later sent to
the gulag but not killed. [https://
At time 42:32 in order to explain why Mengele lived with Tolkmith's wife after Mengele had adopted Tolkmith's identity, she said: "Maybe the real Tolkmith died at Dyhernfurth, and he gave his wife Valentine to Mengele, who was also a poison gas expert and a biological warfare expert. And, uh, and said, 'Get my wife out of here. Get, you know, beat it back to, you know, West Germany, get rat lined out.' That's what I think happened. But I can't prove it."
At time 1:01:16 she speculated that the Tuskeegee syphilis study involved covertly tracking Lyme disease and not only syphilis, and that Mengele might have been supervising the study. She said that Thomas Parran who conducted the study "was tracking syphilis which is a spirochete - but easily tracking Lyme disease with it, okay - and he started a secret guinea pig experiment on a group of black share croppers in Tuskeegee, Alabama. And that experiment wasn't exposed until 1969, when the first exposure of Lyme disease was recognized. It's just too coincidental. Now was Mengele advising the Tuskegee syphilis experiments with Lyme disease? Who knows." At time 1:05:08 she said: "There was a very good possibility that Mengele was working with the health department with these Tuskeegee Lyme disease, you know, experiments that were eventually exposed in 1969. Which would have meant that Mengele was still here as somewhere doing something."
Someone called Jerry Leonard also wrote an 83-page PDF about how
"the Lyme Epidemic is the result of Phase II of the
CDC's infamous Tuskegee Experiment". [https://
In The Sleeper Agent, Finnegan wrote: "Therefore, the presence of the Lyme disease agent just after 1945 or before Traub's return to American shores would still be in line with this story, that British Intelligence took strains from him early on when WWII just ended and Traub continued developing and spreading it when he returned to American shores for full-time work. Other researchers have also suggested tick-infested hides that were sent to American ports just after WWII, and since they took his strains to Russia when they captured Insel Riems, this would also still be in line with this story.[108]" Footnote 108 referred to the book by Rachel Verdon, even though I don't see how her theory is compatible with Finnegan's theory. But to Finnegan's credit, I didn't find him relying on Verdon as a source in any other part of his book.
Verdon's book had an appendix where she wrote about various sets of documents that she had requested through FOIA, but she was told the documents could not be located or they had been destroyed. They included documents titled "Clandestine Attack on Crops and Animals Overall Survey" (SD 27403), "Clandestine Attack on Crops and Animals, 15 May" (SD 32636), and "Clandestine Attack on Crops and Animals" (SD 22772):
I don't know if Verdon was just intrigued by the documents because
she saw their titles on some index of documents. The documents likely
have nothing to do with Traub or Lyme disease. She wrote about another
document she did a FOIA request for that "this title
was located at the National Library of Medicine, unclassified, through
the Library of Congress NUC Pre-1956 Index". The National
Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints is a 754-book series that lists
printed works published before 1956 held by American libraries. [https://
I didn't find her explaining anywhere how Leo Alexander is supposed to have participated in the "Clandestine Attack" study, even though she mentioned Leo Alexander several times throughout the book. She presented him as a villain-like figure because he was an advocate of eugenics and electroshock therapy, and she speculated that he might have been a communist agent.
In The Sleeper Agent, Finnegan quoted Loftus as writing: "In the late 1980's I asked Rachel Verdon, one of my wonderful Lyme Disease volunteers, to request declassification of government records concerning Plum Island. Rachel discovered that nearly all the records were still classified or had been destroyed, including the bioweapons master file named 'clandestine attacks on crops and animals' which had been illegally shredded." In her book Verdon wrote that Loftus "has instructed others, including this author, on how to write Freedom of Information requests for the release of these documents". But still it's not clear if she knew if the clandestine attack documents had anything to do with Lyme disease, and she seems to have also done FOIA requests for documents that were not related to Lyme disease.
Rachel Verdon wrote that she was "directed to the
attention of Ipatieff by members of the United Jewish Appeal in
Washington, DC, citing a January 26, 1996 edition of 'Novoye Russkoye Slovo' featuring a January 1927
reprint of front page headlines on Vladimir Ipatieff 'Chemical Warfare Chief of the Soviet Union'
collaborating with the Germans in 'strangulating
gases'". [https://
But regardless her connection to UJA in DC is interesting, because
Loftus used to work in DC before he moved to Florida, and he spoke at
several events organized by UJA between at least 1985 and 2003, one of
which also featured a person named Sol Schnadow according to a Jewish
newspaper. [https://
Leslie Wexner was the protege of Max Fisher, who was the general
chairman of the United Jewish Appeal. Wexner was one of the largest
contributors to UJA and he became a vice-chairman of UJA. Wexner
Heritage Foundation was co-founded by Rabbi Herbert Friedman, who was
the chief executive of UJA. Whitney Webb wrote: [https://
Epstein had become installed at Bear Stearns, and likely risen in its ranks so quickly, due to the patronage of Alan Greenberg, who was intimately involved in several of the same organizations as the Bronfmans, like the United Jewish Appeal and the Jerusalem Foundation (the latter was notably created by Teddy Kollek, see chapter 3). Like Greenberg, the Bronfmans also donated heavily to those same groups in addition to being closely involved in their affairs.
[...]
From 1954 to 1971, Friedman was the chief executive of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) and, in that role "raised more than $3 billion to support the fledgling state of Israel"[22] During this period, UJA was intimately involved in the relaunching of the Jewish Agency by Wexner's mentor Max Fisher in 1970. As noted in the previous chapter, Fisher was also intimately involved with the UJA as well as the related United Israel Appeal. Throughout the 1980s, Wexner was "one of the largest individual contributors to the United Jewish Appeal in America" and, after creating the Wener Heritage Foundation with Friedman, Wexner became UTA's vice chairman.[23]
[...]
In the 1980s, Charles Bronfman served on the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel; served as honorary President of United Israel Appeal's Canada branch and built a coalition with the United Jewish Appeal via the Charles and Andrea Bronfman Foundation to create Israel Experience Inc., an initiative to send Jewish teens to Israel founded in 1993.
She also wrote that apart from Epstein, other guests at Ron Perelman's fundraiser in 1995 included "Bob Kanuth, an investment banker who previously served in both the US military and the CIA, and Sylvia Hassenfeld of the Hasbro family.[229] Aside from being extremely wealthy due to her family connections, Hassenfeld was intimately involved in Zionist philanthropic organizations, serving as the national chairwoman of the United Jewish Appeal's women division and holding top leadership posts at related organizations like United Israel Appeal and the Jewish Agency for Israel.[230]" Ron Perelman bought an 8% stake in a subprime loan company where Mike Carroll worked as a senior counsel. Ron Perelman has a close connection to Mario and Andrew Cuomo, but Mike Carroll was the senior vice president of a company whose board included Mario Cuomo, and the back cover of Carroll's book included a blurb from Mario Cuomo praising the book.
Loftus and Aarons wrote that Rachel Verdon "has
confirmed that a top-secret U.S. study labeled 'Clandestine Attacks on Crops and Animals' once
existed, but all copies have been destroyed. One of the participants in
the study, Leo Alexander, has been identified as a U.S. intelligence
expert on Nazi medical experiments on human beings." [https://
There were 6 results on Google Books that matched the phrase "Clandestine Attacks on Crops and Animals", which
consisted of 2 books by John Loftus, and 1 book each by Rachel Verdon,
Adam Finnegan, Karl Grossman, and Tara Hulko. [https://
I didn't find information on how Leo Alexander is supposed to have participated in the study. Grok said that "Alexander's participation is alleged solely in Loftus and Aarons' book based on a secondhand confirmation from 'Rachel Verdon'". And Grok brought up these points:
"Loftus and Aarons' book is controversial and has been criticized for relying on anonymous sources, unverified intelligence contacts, and speculative connections (e.g., alleging widespread Western betrayal of Jewish interests via espionage deals with ex-Nazis)."
"'Rachel Verdon' (or Vernon) appears primarily in fringe/radio contexts (e.g., a 2003 Coast to Coast AM guest discussing Lyme disease origins, possibly biowarfare-related theories), but no credible academic or archival source identifies her as an authority on classified U.S. studies or Alexander's involvement."
"The alleged study title 'Clandestine Attacks on Crops and Animals' surfaces almost exclusively in echoes of this book (e.g., in recent online discussions tying it to modern conspiracy topics like bioweapons or vaccine theories), with no declassified documents, FOIA releases, or official histories confirming its existence or Alexander's role."
"Alexander's postwar career included consulting for the U.S. Air Force and Army on medical/psychiatric matters, but nothing in public records ties him to crop/animal sabotage research."
Leo Alexander was a Jewish psychologist who served as the chief
medical advisor to the US prosecution team in the Nuremberg trials.
[https://
A New York Times article from 1945 said: "According to Maj. Leo Alexander, formerly of Duke
University but now in Germany as an investigator, Marshal Hermann
Goering ordered scientists at Dachau to freeze prisoners in every
conceivable way and then to revive them. The victims were immersed in
ice-cold water. They were then given hot baths and made to nestle
against four naked gypsy girls, two to one man, the three covered with
blankets. Though he is horrified, as any humanitarian can be at the
perversion of the experimental method, Dr. Alexander has to admit that
the Germans discovered procedures which have merit. The naked girls did
little good, but immersion in hot water was often effective."
[https://
The experiments seem scientifically absurd, but they are typical of
Holocaust stories born out of a Jewish imagination. For example a
Mengele survivor claimed that he saw a hunchbacked dwarf die of
exhaustion, because SS men forced the dwarf to have sex repeatedly with
a syphilitic gypsy woman to see if the dwarf would catch syphilis (so that eventually the dwarf was "no
longer able" so a male nurse had to be "forcing him down" on the woman). [https://
The freezing experiments were supposedly conducted by Sigismund
Rascher, but in April 1945 he was shot in prison under mysterious
circumstances, so he was unable to attest to the validity of Leo
Alexander's report. A British intelligence agent also testified that
while he was imprisoned with Rascher at Dachau, Rascher confessed that
he had designed the gas chamber at Dachau and that thousands of people
had been gassed at Dachau, even though in reality Rascher was never
imprisoned at Dachau, and no people were gassed at Dachau according to
mainstream history. [https://
Joel van der Reijden wrote: "People visiting the
website of the Intelligence Summit these days won't believe their eyes.
The front page is littered with headings as 'Jihad
dog killing,' 'Muslim cannibalism,'
'Islamic Gangs,' 'Killing
Christians,' and 'Ukraine Nazi coup.'
This is mixed in with conspiracy categories as 'Illuminati,' 'FED
bank,' 'CFR,' 'Club of Rome,' 'Committee of
300,' 'Pope Roman Empire,' 'Knights of Malta,' 'Jesuit
spy,' and 'Jesuit pope.'" [https://
The website now gets redirected to realnewswars.info, where text at
the top lists the domain names "REALNEWSWARS.INFO", "TRUMPFORJUSTICE.COM", "VOTERSCOALITION.COM", "DOMINIONETAL.COM", "ACTOFWARMACHINE.COM", "INTELLIGENCESUMMIT.ORG", "SPYCRUISE.ORG", "WORLDGANG.COM", "SPYTHEATRE.COM", and "BRENTBELESKEY.COM". [http://
The website appears to be run by Brent Beleskey, whose bio says:
"Brent has done production and investigative
research work for 'The Intelligence Summit'
for 8 years, a non-partisan non-profit Education Forum, that provide an
opportunity for the international intelligence community to listen to
and learn from each other, and to share ideas in the common war against
terrorism. Worked under John Joseph Loftus, an American author, former
high level U.S. government prosecutor, former US Army intelligence
officer and Radio talk show host". [https://
Brent Beleskey's bio also says that he was the producer of the SpyCruise Event, where "About 100 spooks are expected to board a Holland America cruise ship for SpyCruise, which sets sail Nov. 13 for the Caribbean for a week of talks on terrorism and national security issues. The speakers list is a who's who of spooks, including: Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA; Porter Gross, a former congressman with ties to the intelligence committee and another former director of the CIA;; Peter Brookes, who served with the CIA and the State Department and is now a fellow at the Heritage Foundation; General Paul Vallely and Andre Le Gallo, a former CIA chief in Mali, Romania, Israel and Belgium with specialties in managing counterintelligence and special operations."
The SpyCruise event was "Presented by the Centre
for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI
CENTRE) and Henley-Putnam University" and sponsored by the
Counter Terrorist magazine. [https://
The CI CENTRE is an American organization despite the British
spelling. Their president and founder David Major falsely describes them
as "the nation's leading counterintelligence
training, education and knowledge company". [https://
David Major and James Woolsey are honorary board members of the DC
Spy Museum. [https://
The Henley-Putnam University was previously known as the California
University of Protection and Intelligence Management, and before it as
the International Institute of Professional Executive Protection. It was
founded by Nirmalya Bhowmick, who is a "former
secret agent", Thai kickboxer, and bodyguard from India. [https://
In 2013 the Executive Council of the Intelligence Summit consisted of
Norman Bailey, Thomas McInerney, Richard Marcinko, and Paul Vallely.
[https://
Norman Bailey is an adjunct professor at an intelligence training
school in DC called Insititute of World Politics, which has also
employed Mary Holland's coauthor Ethan Burger. [https://
Paul Vallely and Thomas McInerney cofounded an organization called
Stand Up America, which in 2016 published a document titled "A Counterjihad Security Architecture for America".
The editor of the document was Clare Lopez, who was also the vice
president of the Intelligence Summit. [https://
In 2022 Paul Vallely and Thomas McInerney were speakers in Todd
Callender's Military Medical Martial Law symposium, along with people
like the former DIA head Mike Flynn, the DMED whistleblowers Pete
Chambers and Theresa Long, Reiner Füllmich, Jane Ruby, Bryan Ardis,
Sasha Latypova, the fake Indian chief John Cipolla from the Alliance of
Indigenous Nations, and the Qtards Ann Vandersteel, Mel K, And We Know,
and SGT Report. [https://
There's a single paragraph about Lyme disease in the preface to
America's Nazi Secret, and there's a long footnote about Lyme
disease in The Secret War Against the Jews. I didn't find Erich
Traub mentioned in either book. The preface to America's Nazi
Secret speaks of unnamed "Nazi germ warfare
scientists" but doesn't explicitly name Erich Traub. The original
2004 edition of Lab 257 was not included at Google Books, so at
Google Books the earliest book that matched the query
"erich traub" lyme was from 2007, and it referred to
Lab 257. [https://
In the preface to America's Nazi Secret, the paragraph about Lyme disease comes right after a paragraph where Loftus suggested that Israel's Arab neighbors were manufacturing Nazi nerve gas, and that Mengele tested poison gas on Auschwitz inmates and "traded the test records to British intelligence in return for his freedom":
It is an irony that one of Israel's Arab neighbors is reported to be manufacturing Nazi nerve gas. Sarin is cheaper than atomic bombs and almost as deadly. Wonder where the Arabs got the Nazi nerve gas formula? A British document mentions a post-war interview with a man named "Mengele" as a Nazi adjutant in charge of research on poison gas weapons. It is almost certain that Dr. Joseph Mengele experimented with Sarin on Auschwitz inmates and then traded the test records to British intelligence in return for his freedom. The actual inventor of Nazi nerve gas emigrated to the United States and died recently in Florida.
Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to America. They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I received some information suggesting that the US tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s. I explored the old spies' hypothesis that the poison ticks were the source of the Lyme disease spirochete, and that migrating waterfowl were the vectors that carried the ticks from Plum Island all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret US document confirming that "clandestine attacks on crops and animals" took place at this time. The Lyme disease outbreak in America was monitored secretly under the cover of a New England health study.
I didn't find any other reference to Lyme disease in the book. The
single paragraph above is also quoted in the book Lab 257.
[https://
A New York Times article from 2004 said: "John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor,
describes Mr. Traub's activities and work with ticks in the book 'The Belarus Secret,' which details the careers of
former Nazi scientists. Mr. Carroll cites the Loftus book in his
work." [https://
The most famous book by John Loftus is The Belarus Secret,
which was published in 1982. An expanded edition of the book was
published in 2010 by Trine Day under the title America's Nazi
Secret. The 1982 hardcover edition and 1989 paperback reissue of
The Belarus Secret are both 196 pages long according to Amazon,
but the 2010 Trine Day paperback is 336 pages long. [https://
In America's Nazi Secret, Loftus wrote that after he was hired by the Office of Special Investigations, which was the Nazi hunting division of the DOJ, his "security clearances were upgraded above Top Secret (Q, SI, COSMIC)", and he wrote that at the OSI, "security clearances were raised - my own was three access levels above Top Secret - to permit inspection of the secret records of the various intelligence services". Loftus wrote:
When I joined OSI, my new boss discovered that I had some slight background in military intelligence as a former Army officer. Despite the fact that military intelligence is often regarded as a contradiction in terms, I was the first person in forty years to review the classified archives of U.S. intelligence. My job was to look in the old files for leads on any Nazis hiding in America.
I found more than I bargained for when I went to the archives in Suitland, a little town just outside Washington, D.C. That's where the Government's secrets are buried, literally. There are twenty vaults underground; each vault is one acre in size, crammed floor to ceiling with classified files. Do you remember the last scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark? That's what the vaults in Suitland are like, only not as organized. No one has the faintest idea what's down there. America had twenty-two different intelligence organizations after World War II, and the people who put the files away have long since retired.
I spent the better part of two years studying top-secret files in Suitland, and other archives like it.
Then Loftus wrote that he discovered the key document his book was based on, which were the memoirs of a Jew called Solomon Schiadow:
I spent weeks in underground vaults, learning the intricacies of long-forgotten intelligence operations, and then systematically retrieving the records from their dusty containers. It took years to reassemble all the documents, many of which had never even been translated. But there was one document that I could not forget: the memoir of Solomon Schiadow, who had survived the Byelorussian holocaust. Whenever I felt frustrated by a dead end or an uncooperative agency, I would remember what he had written, and feel renewed determination to keep on, sifting through the files for traces of the men who had committed the atrocities he recorded.
Sol's story was described in more detail in the book The Secret
War Against the Jews, where his last name was written as "Schnadow" and not "Schiadow". In the book, Loftus and Aarons wrote
that even though Sol's exploits were not recorded by history books, he
was the only survivor of a Polish horseback invasion into Nazi Germany,
and he was probably the first Jewish soldier to invade Nazi Germany.
During his invasion, Sol supposedly went partially bald because his hair
stuck to dried blood in his helmet (which does not
seem physically plausible): [https://
Three days after Germany attacked Poland with tanks and airplanes, Shnadow's unit counterattacked on horseback. The unit actually fought its way across the frontier and penetrated the Third Reich. Shnadow was probably the first Jewish soldier to invade Nazi Germany. The incident did not make it into the history books, however, because he was the only survivor. The German army caught the little band of Polish cavalrymen in an artillery ambush, followed by a machine gun attack. Shnadow's horse was blown to the ground, pinning him beneath it. In seconds the battle was over. The brave Polish cavalry surrendered. Then the German infantry moved in to take its revenge.
First, the Germans shot the prisoners of war and then the Polish wounded. Shnadow could hear the footsteps as the executioners approached. He could only lie there helplessly and close his eyes as the shots came closer. A German soldier looked down at him, covered from head to toe with the blood of his horse. "This one's dead," the soldier muttered, and moved on. For seven hours Shnadow lay still amid the corpses, waiting for the Germans to finish their killing and leave. When darkness came, he struggled from beneath the horse and threw off his helmet. To his amazement, all the hair on the top of his head was stuck to the dried blood in the helmet. He was alive, but partially bald.
Shnadow changed his uniform for some clothes he had stolen and snuck back across the border into Poland, the only survivor of the first raid on the Third Reich.
Apparently Sol's hair never grew back, because a few pages later when the authors described events that took place several years later in 1945, the authors wrote that Sol managed to avoid capture by the Soviets because of his baldness: "The soldiers ran right past. The Soviets were looking for a young soldier with hair, not a balding refugee. Making him lose his hair was the only favor the Nazis had done for him."
According to Loftus and Aarons, the main person responsible for the Belarusian Holocaust was Stanislaw Stankievich, who invented a novel "sardine method" which economically enabled killing a double layer of Jews with one bullet:
The SS had asked whether Stankievich could massacre every one of the eight thousand Jews in Borisov in a single day, without any German help. Stankievich thought it over and said that it could be done. He threw a wild party for his police force, to get them properly drunk for the work that was to come.
The raid began at 3:00 A.M. on October 20. It was all very systematic. The Jews were shuttled out one hundred at a time to a road near the airport where long ditches had been dug. There they were forced to undress and made to lie on top of each other, head to toe. Stankievich's idea was to shoot through a double row of bodies to save ammunition. It was his own unique contribution to the horrors of the Holocaust. Of course, if the Jew on top was shot through the heart, the one on the bottom was only wounded. The police were told to cover the wounded with a thin layer of dirt and then suffocate them beneath another double layer of bodies. It went on all day: a layer of dirt, a double layer of bodies, another layer of dirt, and so on. Stankievich was very proud of his system. He called it the "sardine method."
After the war the worst part of the atrocities was discovered: The bodies of the smallest children had no wounds. Apparently, to save the price of a bullet, Stankievich buried the babies alive.
The Holocaust literature is full of stories of crafty Jews who managed to escape from a gas chamber, so in similar fashion, Loftus told that some of the Belarusian Jews managed to cleverly dig themselves out of mass graves: "The mass graves were overfilled, and some of the victims, who had only been wounded, dug themselves out." However the clumsiness of the "sardine method" appears to have inspired the invention of gas chambers: "The massacres nauseated the Germans because the methods were considered clumsy. There were complaints back to Berlin about wounded Jews crawling out of graves alive. [...] Eichmann's diary noted that he was revolted by the brutal method of killing in the Belarus region and ordered experiments with poison gas as a more 'humane' alternative." Loftus didn't cite any source for Eichmann's diary, because no such diary entry exists. Loftus and Aarons also wrote: "Because the gas vans and the liquidation squad simply could not keep up with the huge numbers of Jews to be killed, Eichmann conceived of poison gas as an alternative. Partly in revulsion against the cruel methods of Stankievich and his colleagues, and partly as an efficiency measure, he brought the gas chamber into use."
Out of about 4,000 Jews in his town, Sol is supposed to have been the only survivor, who was spared because he falsely said he was a bricklayer, and the Nazis needed bricklayers to work at a concentration camp. When Sol was at the concentration camp, "the young White Russian trainees tried to outdo each other in cruelty", so that "A baby was thrown in the air and caught with a pitchfork. A young man was tied to a horse, drenched with kerosene, and then he and the animal were burned alive. One guard took a butcher knife and carved out human organs while the victim was still alive."
According to Loftus and Aarons, Sol then led the escape of 125 Jews from the concentration camp:
Shnadow and four others decided to plan a breakout. It was madness, but there was no other choice. Shnadow said that if even one of them lived to be a witness, to tell what the Nazis had done, it would be worth it. The last 125 Jews were marked for death anyway. Under the noses of the SS, they dug a tunnel out of the stable leading to the fence. The blacksmith's shop made a pair of wire cutters. Time was running out. Soon the fence would be electrified.
That night Shnadow led the breakout. His job was to kill the closest guard and cut the wires. But the guard already was dead drunk, and the heavy snowfall muffled their escape. In one of the worst blizzards of the season, the last Jews in the camp made their escape into the night. It was dawn before the guards realized what had happened. The Germans thought it a poor reflection on White Russian efficiency that Jews could escape from a school for camp guards. Stankievich ordered a massive manhunt and captured one of the inmates. Before he was tortured to death, he revealed who had planned the breakout. Stankievich put a price of 10,000 marks on Shnadow's head.
In America's Nazi Secret, Loftus wrote that Sol himself dug the tunnel: "This little Jewish barber dug a tunnel under a Nazi concentration camp and led the last hundred Jews in a breakout. The Nazis put out a reward of 10,000 marks on Sol's head."
Loftus and Aarons wrote that afterwards when Sol had moved to the United States, he happened to give a copy of his memoirs to the FBI, but the memoirs remained buried in the FBI's archives until Loftus discovered the memoirs in 1979:
Years passed, and then one day the FBI visited Shadow and showed him a photograph of an alleged White Russian war criminal. Shadow gave the FBI agents a copy of his memoirs, but told them he was quite sure that the man in the photo had never been in Koldychevo. It was all rather puzzling. Shnadow went back to work at his barbershop and thought no more about the visit.
Shnadow's story was hidden for many years, until one of the authors found a copy of his memoirs in a classified FBI file. In 1979, John Loftus was one the first attorneys assigned to the Justice Department's Nazi hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations. By luck of the draw, he had been assigned to review the White Russian cases, the crimes of men from Belarus.
Both The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the
Jews said that Sol's name was Solomon, but his name is written as
Saul on his gravestone and in his obituary. [https://
I also found a photo of the Bielski Brigade where one person was
identified as "Sholem Sniadowicz (Saul Schnadow)". [https://
When I googled for "Sholem Shnadovitch",
there were only a couple of results, but one of them was an entry at
openlibrary.org for a 39-page booklet published in 1960 titled "Reminiscences of my experiences in World War II".
[https://
But anyway, I don't remember Loftus saying anywhere that Sol's memoirs had been published before Loftus supposedly discovered them in the underground vaults. Loftus wrote that in 1979 he "stumbled across Sol's papers" three decades after Sol had handed out the memoirs to the FBI, so presumably Sol would've already written the memoirs around 1949. Of course it's possible that Sol would've given an unpublished manuscript to the FBI and later published the memoirs, or that the copy he gave to the FBI was part of an early self-published set of copies, and he later printed more copies in the 1960s.
A newsletter of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research from 2003 says
they had received a donation of the "wartime memoirs
of Sholem Shnadovitch of Ostrolenko, Poland". [https://
In 2021 Loftus wrote: [https://
In early 1981, my literary agent approached Ashbell Green, a former CIA/OPC [Office of Policy Coordination] agent who was a senior editor at Alfred Knopf Publishing. My agent gave Ashbell a one-page book proposal from me, in which I proposed writing a book on the history of OPC's classified employment of Nazi war criminals, which manuscript would have to be submitted to the US government for pre-publication review.
Ash gave me a book contract and a $20,000 advance. I worked on the book throughout the summer and fall of 1981 and completed the manuscript on or about December 7, 1981. I then submitted it to the CIA Pre-Publication Review Board. When CIA censorship was completed, I called Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes to say that I had a story for him.
In the introduction to America's Nazi Secret, Loftus wrote:
[https://
Many years ago, when I first submitted the manuscript of this book for censorship, one of my CIA reviewers grumbled that I had more of an institutional memory than they did. It is really not surprising, since I had studied the classified archives of the twenty-two other US intelligence agencies who had spied on the early CIA.
Then again, I had help. My editor at Knopf Publishers, the legendary and recently retired Ashbell Green, had himself been one the old OPC hands. If memory serves, his Master's thesis was on the Hungarian Nazi movement. He was not one of the Nazi recruiters, but had heard enough to know that the story about the Nazi connection had to be told.
One evening Ashbell was at a dinner party with a number of old friends from OPC who were complaining about "that terrible book, The Belarus Secret." A bit chagrined, Ashbell announced that he was the editor of that terrible book. The stunned silence was finally broken by the hostess who looked sternly at Ashbell and said: "You know the worst thing about that terrible book? It's all true."
The OPC was the CIA's covert operation wing. Wikipedia says that the
OPC's first action was "to influence the Italian
election of 1948, a policy success which demonstrated that
psychological/political warfare could be the key to winning the Cold
War". [https://
However I didn't find evidence that Ashbel Green worked in
intelligence apart from what Loftus said, and Grok said that "the 'former CIA/OPC agent'
detail stems from John Loftus's personal recollection and has not been
independently substantiated in biographical, historical, or archival
sources". OPC only existed from 1948 to 1952. Wikipedia says that
Ashbel Green graduated from high school in 1945, served in the Navy
Reserve from 1946 to 1948, he was the president of the radio station of
Columbia University, and he earned a master's dergee in Eastern European
history from Columbia University in 1952. [https://
In the preface to the 1982 edition of The Belarus Secret,
Loftus wrote: "I was especially pleased to have the
assistance of Nathan Miller, who edited the final draft of the
manuscript for publication, and that of Mike Hamilburg and Ashbel Green,
whose patient criticisms were invaluable." The cover of the book
features text that prominently says the book was edited by Nathan
Miller. In the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication (CIP) data block, there's also an entry for Nathan
Miller, but Grok said: "This is unusual/not standard
for a typical editor credit - most books from major publishers in the
1980s (even with named editors) do not list
the editor in the CIP's Roman numeral tracings. It's far more common to
see only authors, joint authors, or very prominent contributors
there." And there's even a bio of Miller at the end of the book.
[https://
Nathan Miller was a historian whose best-known books include a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, a history of the US Navy, and a book called Spying for America: The Hidden History of U.S. Intelligence.
Nathan Miller was not mentioned anywhere in America's Nazi Secret, and he was not even mentioned in the new longer preface to the book.
In 1984 The Journal of Belarusian Studies published a review
of Loftus's book by the Belarusianist scholar Jim Dingley, who wrote:
[https://
The conclusions of the book 'are based primarily upon available public records', but it should be stressed right at the outset that Loftus attaches considerable importance to two documents that are beyond the reach of the ordinary reader, or even academic researcher, because they remain classified. The first is the manuscript memoirs of a concentration camp inmate, - Solomon Schiadow, and the second the memoirs of Friedrich Buchardt, who had served in Vorkommando Moskau of Einsatzkommando B under Standartenführer Prof. Franz Six. The book under review provides no illustration of either of these secret documents.
[...]
Linguistic ignorance or fundamental illiteracy leads to a confusion of the terms 'translation' and 'transliteration' on p.91. Loftus asserts that Byelorussians deliberately altered the spelling of their surnames to escape detection as war criminals, in blissful ignorance that these people in the course of their life had had to spell their names in at least four different ways, two in Cyrillic (Russian and Byelorussian) and two in Latin script (Byelorussian and Polish), e.g Островский, Астроїскі, Astroǔski, Ostrowski.
[...]
Loftus seeks to demonstrate that 'over half of the persons' named by Engelhardt, eight in all, on p.215 of this book as 'leading representatives of the Byelorussian Union of University Students before World War II' became Nazi collaborators during the war. 'Over half' of eight is at least five. Of the persons listed, two (Cerepuk and Varonka) had been in the United States since the 1920s; one, Fr. Cikota, served in Rome as superior-general of the Marian Fathers during the period 1933-39. At the expiry of his term of office in 1939 he could not return to Byelorussia because of the Soviet occupation. He went on missionary work to Manchuria and in 1948 was arrested by the communists. He died in a Soviet concentration camp in 1954. V. Zacharka, already a sick man when war broke out, died in Prague in March 1943 having consistently refused to have anything to do with the Nazi occupiers. Of the remaining four, only two, Abramčyk and Kasmovič are 'identified' by Loftus elsewhere in the book as 'collaborators'. Loftus 'identifies' Kasmovič with Zarečny. He is incorrect; Zarečny was the pseudonym of Ludvik Hałubovič, apparently a one-time officer in the NKVD. Loftus even repeats Engelhardt's mistake in giving Čerepuk's name as Cherepukan.
[...]
The charge against Stanisłaǔ Stankievieč of complicity in the massacre of the Barysaǔ ghetto in 1941 is not new and is not backed by any serious new evidence. If the Soviet authorities had evidence to back the charge, they have had ample opportunity to present it.
[...]
The only significant new information is contained on p.165 of this edition [1983 UK edition], where we learn that the Francis Ckrvyna (sic) Library in London is a private research group and had once housed Abramčyk's staff. Strange, since Abramčyk died in 1970, and the Francis Skaryna Library (assuming that this is what Loftus means) was founded in 1971. Abramčyk's portrait is also supposed to hang 'prominently in the lobby of the library'. As a regular user of the Library I can assure Loftus that it does not. Loftus describes the Library as possessing a complete set of Nazi propaganda papers published during the war; it unfortunately does not.
In 2009 the US Department of Justice published a history of OSI
written by Judy Feigin, who worked as a legal historian at the OSI. She
wrote: [https://
Loftus left the government in August 1981 before any Byelorussian cases were filed.[7] As others in OSI took over Loftus' investigations, they began to question his thesis. Although some individual investigations seemed plausible, no one could find evidence of a conspiracy to transplant en masse Byelorussian Nazis to the United States.[8]
[...]
According to then OSI historian David Marwell:
The allegations lodged against Belorussians living in the United States are, almost without exception, limited to mere membership in one or more of the following organizations. ... My initial investigation, although not complete, revealed no evidence to suggest that mere membership in any of these organizations would be sufficient grounds even to suspect persecution, let alone to initiate legal action.[11]
Nothing Marwell found in subsequent research altered his opinion.
Meanwhile, Loftus began a public campaign to promote his ideas. On May 16, 1982 he appeared on 60 Minutes, then the most popular television show in the country. He reiterated and expanded upon the allegations he had made to Congressman Frank: he now asserted that files had been withheld not only from Congress, but also from the courts, from the CIA, and from local agents of the Immigration Service. Loftus described finding the missing files in the Army's vaults. Moreover, he estimated that with the knowledge of the FBI, CIC, the Army and
[...]
60 Minutes rebroadcast the Loftus segment in September 1982. Ryan wrote a letter to be used in the rebroadcast, in which he challenged Loftus' assertion that over 300 Byelorussian Nazis were in the United States.
This irresponsible statement has understandably been taken by many people to mean that there are 300 Byelorussian war criminals living in the United States: "people who kill babies," in Mr. Loftus' words.
That is not true. Mr. Loftus persistently made such claims while he was employed by this Office, but he was unable to document them satisfactorily and eventually he left the Office. The investigation has continued quite thoroughly without him.[17]
[...]
Reviewing the book for the office, Marwell found it to be:
the worst kind of amateur history. It is bad history because it is poorly written, poorly researched, and poorly documented. It is fraudulent history because it mangles facts, distorts events, and misrepresents major themes.[21]
Checking various citations in the book, Marwell discovered that they often did not support Loftus' claims; in many instances they flatly contradicted them. This included matters of major import to Loftus' thesis. Thus, his claim that the Byelorussian Nazis "ran everything for the Germans"[22] referenced (with an improper number) a microfilm which in fact established that the Germans bemoaned Byelorussian inertia.
[...]
In March 1983, the Public Integrity Section completed its investigation of the alleged obstruction of Congress. They found "[njo evidence... which demonstrates an intentional effort by anyone to obstruct the GAO investigation." It was indeed the case that files of two Byelorussians had been requested but had not been turned over to the GAO. However, one of the Byelorussian names was on a document that was only partly legible. In an effort to supply the requested material, DOD had searched under several variations of the purported name and birth date. Unfortunately - but innocently - it had not come up with the proper combination. (This was in the very early computer era, and programs automatically providing variations were unavailable.) Once given the proper spelling by OSI, the Army had located the file.
The explanation for the missing files on the second name was no more damning. They had been found - by the Army - in a cross-reference from another OSI requested file.[26] Thus, in both cases, DOD - rather than Loftus - had located the missing files. Since DOD turned over the relevant files to OSI in 1979, Public Integrity found no reason to impute a nefarious motive to the 1978 incidents. Public Integrity concluded that human error was a more likely explanation than malfeasance. This was especially so since DOD had handled hundreds of requests (most from OSI, but dozens also from GAO), yet:
there has been no suggestion that the responses were less than candid and complete except with regard to these two individuals. There is no apparent reason why these two individuals would be singled out for concealment of files when the files on everyone elseincluding other war criminals - were being produced.[27]
As for Loftus' claim that one file ultimately turned over had been "sanitized," Public Integrity compared an early microfilmed version of the file with one that had been turned over. They were identical.
In 1985, the GAO issued a new report. It found no evidence of a concerted effort by the intelligence agencies to bring Byelorussian Nazis and Axis collaborators to the United States. Most of the collaborators who had assisted the U.S. remained in Europe. The government had chosen whom to help on a case-by-case basis; they were not part of an overall aid program. The report referenced five individuals who had emigrated with U.S. assistance.[28] All were investigated by OSI.
In the end, OSI prosecuted two Byelorussians, Basil Arteshenko and John Avdzej. (Some who might have been prosecuted had died in the interim.) Avdzej had in fact been identified by John Loftus as a potential defendant. Indeed, he was one of the five men listed as priorities in the memorandum sent to the Attorney General in October 1980. The case ultimately filed, however, bore little relationship to the one set forth in Loftus' writings.
Loftus had partly confused Jan Avdzej with his brother, who in fact was denied a visa because of his wartime activities.[29] Moreover, the memo to the Attorney General had misrepresented some significant aspects of World War II history and Jan Avdzej's personal story.[30] For example, Loftus reported that Avdzej was "wanted for his war crimes by several nations" when in fact no nation had ever sought his apprehension. The memo claimed that he, along with other Byelorussians, had exterminated "virtually the entire Jewish population" of their area "with little, if any, German assistance." However, as discussed earlier,[31] the Germans directed the massacres and were in fact disappointed at the level of assistance they received from the Byelorussians. The memo also claimed that Avdzej was "the subject of massive publicity in both the Polish and Soviet press, so that we can anticipate historical corroboration of his quisling status." In fact, OSI could find no such publicity. The Soviets and Poles informed the office that they had no corroborating evidence. In June 1991, OSI closed its investigation of a "Byelorussian Collaborationist Movement", though individual cases remained open for review.
A footnote pointed out that "Loftus traces his
involvement in Jewish causes back to 1973 when he claims to have 'helped train Israelis on a covert operation that turned
the tide of battle in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.'" An
interview of Loftus from 2002 said: [https://
His training duties forced him into the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he said. In the days before the war, the U.S. government knew about Arab plans to attack the Jewish state but failed to inform the Israelis, Loftus said. For political reasons, he said, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wanted to withhold supplies from Israel.
But Loftus said then-Chief of Staff Alexander Haig worked behind the scenes to make sure the Israelis were prepared. On Haig's orders, Loftus said, he gave 40 Israeli officers a crash course in how to use the newly introduced TOW missile system. Just a few days later, the Israelis used the system to devastate an Egyptian tank advance.
"That was the day Alexander Haig and I helped them win the war," Loftus said with a laugh.
In 2009 a Belarusian newspaper published an article about The
Belarus Secret by Vitaly Zayka, who at the time was a fellow at the
New York Center for Jewish History and the chairman of the New York
branch of the Belarusian-American Association. He wrote the following in
Belarusian: [https://
The first is Loftus's own credentials. It turns out, according to his boss at the OSI, Alan Ryan,
Loftus was not a "federal prosecutor" at all, but a support worker who prepared documents for the OSI lawyers.
The second is the book's conclusions ("searches"). If Cold War enthusiasts "blinded by anti-communism" were creating an anti-communist army out of "Nazis," why bring it to America, thousands of miles from the planned theater of operations in Eastern Europe? Loftus doesn't even ask himself that question.
Third, the time of the beginning of Loftus's "intelligence" activities coincides with the rise of interest in the Holocaust and war crimes, when articles, books, and films on this topic began to appear everywhere, when people began to make a career out of it, to do a "business."
All of the above points to economic, rather than altruistic, motives for Loftus's desire to "bring information about a criminal conspiracy against America to the world."
When we turn to the book "The Secret of Belarus", the first thing that catches our eye is the carelessness in the use of names and place names:
"Radislau" Ostrovsky (instead of Radoslau), "Baronavichy" (instead of Baranavichy), Cherepukan (instead of Cherepuk), the author even managed to misspell the names of both of his supervisors in the USSR (a full list of errors was provided by the English Slavist Jim Dingley). It is clear that the book was written in a hurry, when so many elementary errors were made.
But the errors in the writing are nothing compared to the flaws and outright falsification that Loftus uses throughout the book and repeats later in interviews and newspaper articles.
Everywhere he makes no distinction between work in any local administration structures during the German occupation and war crimes. Everywhere he does not burden himself with evidence when he speaks of Belarusian figures as criminals.
The main victim of the falsified accusations was Stanislav Stankevich, a literary critic and editor who was once the mayor of Barysau during the war.
In his book, Loftus claims that Stankevich was the person who ordered and directed the extermination of the Jews of Borisov in October 1941. The basis for this, according to Loftus, is the Söneken report, which was used as one of the documents at the Nuremberg Trials. Referring to this document, Loftus writes: "Stankevich gave the order (to the chief of the security police, Egaff) to kill about 7 thousand men, women and children" (p. 27). The document itself does not say anywhere that Stankevich gave such an order. Moreover, as is known, the burgomasters had no authority over the security police, which was directly subordinate to the German head of the SS and the police with headquarters in Mogilev. Loftus resorted to outright falsification and slander to fit the facts into his sensationalism about the US authorities' "covering up of Nazi criminals."
Loftus's entire book is filled with similar insinuations about Radosław Ostrowski, František Kushal, Vytautas Tumaš, and other Belarusian figures. It seems that having found several documents about negotiations between former Belarusian collaborators and American intelligence agencies, Loftus came up with an exciting detective story with the possibility of further financial exploitation of the topic. Then he hired someone to fill the plot with a general texture (Loftus does not know the languages of the primary sources he refers to), without bothering too much about the truthfulness and authenticity of his findings. The result of this "business plan" was the book "The Secret of Belarus", which was soon published in Britain as well (with the addition of gems like "Ckryvana Library" about the Skaryna Library in London), was published in French in translation ("The Terrible Secret", 1985), and was republished in English in paperback in 1989.
Having created a strong press storm, the topic forced the General Accounting Office (GAO) - the legal department of the US Congress - to conduct several investigations in addition to those already conducted before Lotus's "findings" in 1978. Loftus was called to testify in this case.
As a result, it was stated that the conclusions presented in the book were not confirmed by the investigation. The storm subsided after some time.
The book was widely and tastefully quoted in the Soviet Union, but it did not arouse the interest of scholars in the Free World. Interestingly, it is completely ignored or mentioned as erroneous by almost all serious researchers who deal with the history of American intelligence services. Unfortunately, historians who deal with the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes sometimes uncritically quote and retell Loftus's statements with all their factual and spelling errors.
Insinuations about the so-called "butcher Borisov" Stankevich and Kushal and his accomplices are again playing on the pages of supposedly reputable publications, who "poured vodka into the eyes, raped girls before shooting them and smashed the heads of some babies, while others were thrown alive into graves so that they would suffocate under the corpses of their parents. Kushal's 20,000 peasant terrorists fled to the West from Soviet battle tanks and fought in various parts of the SS in the last year of the war" (for more on this, see Hersh, Burton. The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992, pp. 275-276). Unfortunately, unproven accusations against Belarusian national figures have spread far and wide, and in certain anti-Belarusian circles, Stankevich's participation in the murder of the Jews of Borisov or the blood of 42 thousand Minsk Jews on the hands of Tumash are perceived as an axiom.
Now these falsifications from printed publications are moving to the Internet. Loftus bears a considerable share of responsibility for the spread of lies. The references provided by Loftus in his book require special attention and a separate article. Having called the Holocaust in Belarus "unique, because in no other nation under German occupation did the inhabitants persecute their neighbors (Jews) so cruelly and with such enthusiasm," Loftus, without blinking an eye, builds a lie against an entire people, ignoring documents, hundreds and thousands of testimonies of the Jews themselves to the contrary. Interestingly, after following Loftus's references, we read in the primary sources he mentioned - German documents - the exact opposite of his vile slander! The Germans complain that it was impossible to mobilize the Belarusian population for pogroms against the Jews.
[...]
Loftus also worked for the Fox News channel, but was fired in 2005 for providing false information about an Arab businessman, calling him a terrorist and giving his exact address. The man has since moved out, and the family who moved into the house he sold began receiving threats and broken windows.
Mark Alexander who was a student at the University of Vermont wrote a
PhD thesis titled "Nazi Collaborators and Cold
Warriors: America's Belarusian Quislings". [https://
He also wrote: "Some of the relevant historiography refutes Loftus. Ryan, the director of OSI in the early 1980s, explains that he only became aware of 'a handful of cases' in which 'one could conclude that U.S. officials assisted or sponsored the entry of Nazi war criminals into the United States.'[910] Even in these cases, Ryan argues, 'questions remain whether the officials knew the incriminating background of the individuals involved.'[911] He explains that while there is no evidence of a widespread conspiracy to bring Nazis or Nazi collaborators to the US, 'the record is clear that preventing the entry of Nazi criminals to the United States was not a high priority, and was not taken seriously.'[912] Schiessl's work on the subject agrees with Ryan's conclusions, asserting that 'sensationalist books' are responsible for the exaggerated impression 'that former Nazis and their eastern European helpers were lurking everywhere, and that a conspiracy of shadowy figures connected to the U.S. government helped them deliberately escape justice and live in peace in the United States and South America.'[913]" He cited Christoph Schiessl's book Alleged Nazi Collaborators in the United States after World War II.
He also wrote that soon after Loftus appeared on 60 Minutes, "A long response appeared almost immediately in the Belarusian-American newspaper Bielarus, which Stankievich had edited for seventeen years until his death just eighteen months earlier.[922] The article defended Stankievich from Loftus' charge that he had been complicit in the destruction of the Jewish ghetto he had overseen as the German-appointed mayor of Barysau, dismissing the accusations as the most recent in a 'constant barrage of Soviet propaganda' aimed at Stankievich for a life filled with anticommunist Belarusian nationalist work.[923] The editorial continued to assert that broadcasting such libelous Soviet propaganda on an American network was 'a frightening case of irresponsible TV journalism.'[924]" The article was titled "CBS: Trial by Insinuations ('The Nazi Connections')", but I didn't find it published online.
Most of the Lab 257 book consists of a general history of Plum Island that doesn't even deal with Lyme disease, and Mike Carroll spent a large part of the book writing about breaches of biosafety that had occurred on Plum Island. But he presented little evidence that Erich Traub had any kind of a close involvement with Plum Island, or that Erich Traub had done research on Borrelia bacteria, or that people on Plum Island had done research on Borrelia bacteria. He also didn't present evidence that Borrelia burgdorferi had been weaponized, or that it had been weaponized at Plum Island, and in fact I'm not even sure if Carroll's position is that Borrelia burgdorferi had been weaponized or not.
Pages 6 to 16 of the paperback edition discuss Project Paperclip, Erich Traub, and information presented by John Loftus. Carroll's hypothesis that Nazis were somehow involved in Lyme disease largely relied on two key pieces of evidence, which were the single paragraph about Lyme disease he quoted from The Belarus Secret, and comments by an anonymous eyewitness that I believe had not been presented elsewhere before Carroll's book.
Carroll presented the first key piece of evidence on page 13, where he wrote:
In the preface of The Belarus Secret, Loftus laid out a striking piece of information gleaned from his spy network:
Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to America. They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s. ... Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that "clandestine attacks on crops and animals" took place at this time.
Carroll presented the second key piece of evidece on pages 15-16, where he wrote: "Traub might have monitored the tests. A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950s recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. 'They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951 - they were inoculating these ticks,' and a picture he once saw 'shows the animal handler pointing to the area on Plum where they released the ticks.'" But Carroll didn't cite any source, and anecdotes from anonymous sources are easy to fabricate.
Apart from the two key pieces of evidence, on pages 8-9 Carroll wrote:
Just months into his PAPERCLIP contract, the germ warriors of Fort Detrick, the Army's biological warfare headquarters in Frederick, Maryland, and CIA operatives invited Traub in for a talk, later reported in a declassified top-secret summary:
Dr. Traub is a noted authority on viruses and diseases in Germany and Europe. This interrogation revealed much information of value to the animal disease program from a Biological Warfare point of view. Dr. Traub discussed work done at a German animal disease station during World War II and subsequent to the war when the station was under Russian control.[3]
Where footnote 3 said: "According to the document, a transcript of the meeting was prepared by the CIA. When I requested the transcript under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA informed me that no such report ever existed, and if it did, it would be withheld for reasons of national security." Carroll's book includes only a few numbered footnotes within the main text, but at the end of the book there's a list of sources employed in each chapter, so it's difficult to tell which statements are backed up by which sources. The document he referred to here may have been this source he listed under chapter 1: "Memorandum 'German Specialist, Dr. Erich Traub: Request for services of,' from Chief of Naval Operations to Director, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, 2 February 1949." But I didn't find the document posted anywhere online. When I tried googling for the quoted text in double quotes, all results appear to have referred to Lab 257. I didn't even find the quotation mentioned in The Sleeper Agent.
On page 10 Carroll wrote: "Everybody seemed
willing to forget about Erich Traub's dirty past - that he had played a
crucial role in the Nazis' 'Cancer Research
Program,' the cover name for their biological warfare program,
and that he worked directly under SS Reichsführer Heinrich
Himmler." I didn't find sources that said the Nazi biological
warfare progam was called "Cancer Research
Program" or "Krebsforschung Program",
apart from conspiracy sources that appear to have all referred to
Carroll's book, like the websites of Mark Kulacz, Dave Emory, and Jeff
Rense. The phrases "cancer research program"
or "Krebsforschung" do not appear in The
Sleeper Agent either. However Carroll probably meant Kurt Blome's
Central Cancer Institute at the University of Posen, which allegedly
served as a front for biological weapons research. [https://
On page 10 Carroll wrote: "In fact, the USDA liked him so much, it glossed over his dubious past and offered him the top scientist job at the new Plum Island laboratory - not once, but twice." But it's difficult to tell which of the sources listed in Carroll's bibliography supported his statement. Finnegan wrote in his book: "Back in America the same year, Dr. Jacob Traum retired as lead scientist for the USDA's Plum Island Animal Disease Center and the USDA once again offered Erich Traub the top position to lead Plum Island.[42]" But the source he cited was Lab 257.
On page 14 Carroll wrote: "Erich Traub had been
working for the American biological warfare program from his 1949 Soviet
escape until 1953. We know he consulted with Fort Detrick scientists and
CIA operatives; that he worked for the USDA for a brief stint; and that
he spoke regularly with Plum Island director Doc Shahan in 1952. Traub
can be physically placed on Plum Island at least three times - on
dedication day in 1956 and two visits, once in 1957 and again in the
spring of 1958. Shahan, who enforced an ultrastrict policy against
outside visitors, each time received special clearance from the State
Department to allow Traub on Plum Island soil." It's difficult to
tell which of the sources listed in Carroll's bibliography refer to
Traub's visits to Plum Island, apart from this source: "Memorandum 'Proposed Visit to Plum
Island by Dr. Erich Traub,' from R. A. Carlson, Administrative
Officer, ARS, to M. S. Shahan, Director, Plum Island Animal Disease
Laboratory, undated." But I didn't find the memorandum posted
anywhere online. Traub had already moved back to Germany in 1953, so
even if he later traveled back to the United States three times to visit
Plum Island, it might have been difficult for him to coordinate research
on bacteria conducted at Plum Island. Actually I'm not sure if Carroll
is even saying that the research on Borrelia occurred primarily
at Plum Island, or if he is saying that Traub did his research related
to Lyme disease before or during or after he lived in the US in
1949-1953. Finnegan wrote that "Lyme disease was not
invented at the Plum Island lab in 1975, it was weaponized long before,
in Germany, but Traub conducted tests there with his weaponized
strains". [https://
On page 15 Carroll wrote: "Two hog-cholera bombs were exploded at an altitude of 1,500 feet over pigpens set up at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. And turkey feathers laced with Newcastle disease virus were dropped on animals grazing on a University of Wisconsin farm." Which was followed by a footnote that said: "Traub likely developed the standardized Newcastle disease virus placed on the biological cluster bomb by concentrating the germ in chicken blood while he was working at the Naval Medical Research Institute for Project PAPERCLIP." But it's difficult to tell which of the sources listed in the bibliography indicate that Traub was likely to have developed the standardized virus.
After page 16 in the paperback edition, there are only a few references to Erich Traub. On page 43 Carroll wrote: "After the war, Hagan became a driving force behind Plum Island's creation (Nazi germ warfare scientist Erich Traub would be the other)." He didn't present evidence that Traub would've been the second driving force, even though in The Sleeper Agent, Finnegan wrote: "Traub was the godfather of Plum Island, as it had been structured after his descriptions of the setup at Insel Riems, equipped with production facilities and chicken farms nearby, as back in Germany." And he cited this source: "Memorandum 'Conversation Between Doctors H. W. Schoening, M. S. Shahan and Erich Traub,' M. S. Shahan, 10 December 1952." The same memorandum was listed at the end of Lab 257 as one of the sources employed in the book, but I didn't find the memorandum posted anywhere online.
On page 50 Carroll wrote: "On July 21, 1954,
three weeks after the Army transferred the island to the USDA, an angry
cow coughed a glob of mucus into the unprotected face of a lab worker,
known as 'FW.'[3]
The previous day, FW had injected the cow's tongue with the New Jersey
strain of highly contagious vesicular stomatitis virus, a germ probably
enhanced by Erich Traub during his days working with the USDA."
But he didn't cite any source or explain why he thought that the virus
had been "probably enhanced by Erich Traub".
Vesicular stomatitis virus was not a focus of Traub, even though Traub
was the senior author of a paper published in 1958 titled "Serological studies with the virus of vesicular
stomatitis. I. Typingo f vesicular stomatitis viruses by complement
fixation" (but the paper was about a mundane
serological typing study, and not about creating any kind of an enhanced
version of the virus). [https://
The author of the Lab 257 book was on Fox News discussing
"PLANS OF PLUM ISLAND FOUND ON ACCUSED AL QAEDA
TERRORIST": [https://
It probably refers to this story he told in the preface of Lab 257:
After Pakistan arrested Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and U.S. forces secured the Kabul perimeter as part of the Afghanistan phase of America's war on terrorism, CIA and U.S. Army commandos stormed Mahmood's Kabul residence and the offices of Tameer-e-Ummah. Inside, they found copies of books he authored, with disturbing titles such as Mechanics of the Doomsday and Life After Death, and Cosmology and Human Destiny, which contained the following prediction: "During the autumn of 2000-2001, due to the high energy solar cycle and its impact on people, certain crazy actions are likely to happen." Then they uncovered some very incriminating raw material. One item was a diagram of a helium balloon designed to release large quantities of anthrax spores into the atmosphere. Another was a large document titled "Bacteria: What You Need to Know." And a hefty file folder contained a bundle of papers from an Internet search on anthrax vaccines.
Then there was a dossier. It contained information on a place in New York called the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. There was even a New York Times article in the dossier about this island.
Why would an associate of Osama bin Laden be so interested in some obscure New York island?
An article by The Economist from November 2001 said that
Mahmood's house also contained "a small bag of white
powder" and "two boxes of gas masks and
filters", and the article said: "On a desk
was a cassette box labelled 'Jihad', with the
name of Osama bin Laden hand-written along the spine. Most chilling of
all, however, were the mass of calculations and drawings in felt pen
that filled up a white board of the sort used in classrooms. There were
several designs for a long thin balloon, something like a weather
balloon, with lines and arrows indicating a suggested height of 10km
(33,000 feet). There was also a sketch of a
jet fighter flying towards the balloon alongside the words: 'Your days are limited! Bang.' This, like the
documents, was written in English." [https://
In another part of the Lab 257 book, Carroll wrote:
The worst part of this scenario is that it pales in comparison to what the al Qaeda terrorist network or a well-trained scientist-cum-terrorist already has in mind, waiting for the right moment to unleash upon an unsuspecting-and strikingly vulnerable America.
In August 2002, CNN broadcast excerpts from al Qaeda videotapes showing three tests of a white oozing liquid being unleashed on Labradors, romping around in a closed test room. On film, the trapped dogs quickly turn dour. They begin to yelp and writhe in pain and go on to suffer agonizing deaths from these mysterious chemical or biological agents. Made available to a CNN reporter outside of Kabul, Afghanistan (home of Bashiruddin Mahmood's "charity"), the disturbing tapes show "meticulous planning and attention to the tradecraft of terror," in the words of terrorist expert Magnus Ranstorp. Recently, an Algerian terrorist cooperating with U.S. authorities testified he was taught by al Qaeda how to smear biological toxins on doorknobs. The techniques are similar to those used by German terrorists who smeared glanders bacteria on the gums of horses in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York during World War I.
If you don't think agro- or bioterrorism could be coming soon to an American town near you, you need to think again.
The story of cruel experiments performed on pet animals is typical of
atrocity propaganda. The attacks on the twin towers were not blamed on
Iraq, and none of the supposed hijackers came from Iraq, but Iraq was
initially blamed for the anthrax attacks that began a week after
September 11th. A month before the start of the Iraq War, Colin Powell
famously gave a speech where he held a mock vial of anthrax while he
claimed Iraq was producing anthrax. [https://
In America's Nazi Secret, Loftus wrote: "A group of retired spies helped me form an educational organization called the Intelligence Summit. We sponsored conferences where, inter alia, State Department's protection of the murderous Muslim Brotherhood was exposed. Worse, we revealed Saddam Hussein's abandoned intelligence archives proving that he had every intention of reviving his weapons of mass production, and temporarily hidden his WMD equipment across the border in Deir as Zour, Syria. Both the press and Bush administration had the WMD story wrong. The Israelis got it right. They bombed Saddam's Syrian stockpile along with the nearby nuclear facility."
Mike Carroll received a bachelor's degree in political science from
the School of Public Affairs of the American University in Washington
DC, which offers many intelligence-related courses. Carroll is included
on a list of notable alumni of his department along with two high-level
DHS guys. [https://
The Wikipedia article about Mike Carroll says: "From 2003 to 2005, he was general counsel and senior vice
president of Medallion Financial Corporation.[8] He subsequently served as senior counsel at
Aames Investment Corporation before establishing his own corporate legal
practice, CorpGen Counsel, in 2007.[9]" [https://
Medallion Financial Corporation is the company of Andrew Murstein,
whose Wikipedia page says: "In 2008, Murstein along
with former baseball player Hank Aaron, former New York Governor Mario
Cuomo, both Medallion Financial board members, and former football star
and Congressman Jack Kemp, formed a special-purpose acquisition company
(SPAC) which raised $230 million to buy a
professional sports team." [https://
The back cover of Lab 257 includes blurbs from three people
praising the book, but one of them is Mario Cuomo. [https://
Jack Kemp was a member of the CNP, and CNP's founder Tim LaHaye was a
co-chairman of Kemp's presidental campaign. [https://
Aames Investment was one of the biggest subprime loan companies, but
their owners had the foresight to sell the company in 2006 to another
subprime company, which ended up collapsing a year later during the
subprime crisis. [https://
In 1999 Ron Perelman bought an 8% stake in Aames Financial
Corporation for about 30 million USD. [https://
Perelman was one of Andrew Cuomo's top donors. Mario and Andrew
Cuomo's advisor Steve Cohen served as the general counsel and chief
administrative officer of Perelman's holding company MacAndrews &
Forbes. Cuomo's former chief-of-staff Josh Vlasto later also worked for
Perelman. In 2019 Andrew Cuomo held a fundraiser that featured a
reception by Ron Perelman and Steve Cohen. [https://
Carroll was the vice president and general counsel of Medallion
Financial. Apart from the SPAC for acquiring a sports team, Medallion's
founder Andrew Murstein also "organized and filed
publicly a SPAC focused on the security industry and assembled a board
of directors that included former FBI Director Louis Freeh and former
Pennsylvania Governor and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge".
[https://