Chapter Two
WHEN IT ALL BEGAN ANEW
This phase of the human story, as it pertains to both Britain and America, began in the year 1959, although it was going to take a few more years before someone gave it a name. Well, to be more precise, it was not an event that gained a name but the key players who appeared on the world stage.
On January 17, 1961, millions of Americans turned on their television sets to watch their President Dwight D. Eisenhower deliver his final address to the nation as its Chief Executive. It became known as the speech in which their President warned citizens about a 'Military Industrial Complex' that was taking over administration of the country because it offered extremely well-paying jobs, all funded by tax money. There was just one problem.
To employ citizens to work in this 'Military Industrial Complex', the companies which formed its cartel had to keep manufacturing products, but when the quota was reached and the shelves were full, the 'Military Industrial Complex' had to get rid of the old stock to make room for the new stock, and the only way to do that on a big scale was to get someone to destroy the old stock. The easiest way to do that was to start a new series of continuing wars. Enemies destroyed these American products and Americans replaced the old shelf stock with upgraded new stock.
It was a win-win situation for all Americans employed by the Military Industrial Complex. It translated into full employment at top wages, so the more foreign wars that America engaged in, the more that the American economy would continue to grow. For a while, these better paid employees were able to spend their wages locally by buying consumer products.
But then came the day when the growth of Internet shopping resulted in a lot of those wages being spent Online to pay for goods that were not even made in the USA. When the Consumer Industrial Complex shifted its own manufacturing plants to countries such as China, those wages derived from the Military Industrial Complex which originated from U.S. taxation had now resulted in a stalemate. Many of the belligerents that America was fighting abroad were being supplied arms made in China, and China was receiving income from purchases of products made for the Consumer Industrial Complex by high paid employees of the Military Industrial Complex.
HOW THIS ABSURDITY ORIGINATED
The economic reality of the American economy, and thus the sub-economies of the Western nations such the United Kingdom has been couched in deceit since the modern consumer age began at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. By the time of World War Two, the doyen of misinformation and misdirection was Winston Churchill. He created his own fighting forces which today would classify as terrorists. It was out of his shadowy world of psychological warfare that 'James Bond' emerged as a symbol of entertainment, but the man who invested 007 had worked in the dark shadows of top secret activities all focused upon deceiving the German Axis into military defeat.
The psychological warfare employed in Churchill's secret side of World War Two was not restricted to code breaking and sabotage. It was also engaged in delivering fake sermons broadcast by a genuine Catholic priest, and entertainment programs hosted by DJs whose patter was intended to seem as though it was of patriotic German origin for German troops fighting the British. In reality, it was coming from Britain and directed at Germans using pornography and cruel misinformation about loved ones left behind in their own homeland.
By the 1950s, this learned behavior of military warfare by deception, was cloaked in the religious name of 'Crusade for Freedom' and President Eisenhower endorsed its operations. A pretence was launched to convince the American public the 'Crusade' was a citizen inspired and funded charity, to conceal its true owner and controller, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Foreign governments were undermined with U.S. fake news, fake employee unions, fake newspapers and fake broadcasting stations as part of the 'Crusade' which employed employee unions, publications, balloon drops and one of the largest U.S. overseas propaganda operations that was given the umbrella name of 'Radio Free Europe' (RFE). Its primary studio transmissions were received in Portugal where they were then rebroadcast on shortwave from a gigantic farm of antennas.
THE HOLE IN THE FABRIC OF U.S. PROPAGANDA
Initially, RFE programming was transmitted as five different stations in the languages off Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria. This deceptive programming map had a huge gap in it, because the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were part of the USSR, but because they were not considered primary targets for CIA propaganda by RFE, and yet their strategic importance could not be ignored.
The Baltic is almost a closed inland sea, but it has a feeder from the Atlantic Ocean into the North Sea which enters a chokepoint between the Narrows of Denmark and Sweden. On one shore of the Baltic Sea its waves crash against the shoreline of Sweden, but the other shore is controlled by Denmark, Germany, Poland, the enclave of Kaliningrad which is also a part of Russia which adjoins Lithuania, Estonia and St Petersburg, Russia. On its northern shore is Helsinki, Finland.
This strategic void in the radio propaganda map coincided both geographically and in time with the actions of Gordon McLendon, Clint Murchison Jr. and Robert F. Thompson, all three from Dallas, Texas, and all of them wealthy in their own right. McLendon, who was the shadow behind the creation of Radio London, built a career in radio broadcasting based upon a foundation laid down by his father Bart who built a chain of movie theatres.
Murchison sat on top of a family cartel of companies, and Thompson was tied to another wealthy individual whose income was derived from government contracts in the construction business. It was therefore an unlikely trio from Dallas, Texas, who suddenly found their attention being attracted to an area of the Baltic Sea close to that nation's capital in Stockholm.
It was even more peculiar that the three of them should show any interest in creating from scratch a 'pirate' broadcasting ship called Radio Nord (North) transmitting pop music and news in the Swedish language. With regards to the south of Sweden, Gordon McLendon wrote a letter on October 3, 1960, to his friend General Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, who he seems to have gone into business with to buy half of the two-ship Radio Mercur operation. He sent a copy of his letter to his father Bart, and to his colleague Robert F. Thompson who was taking charge of the legal and financial arrangements to operate Radio Nord via a Liechtenstein Anstalt. (This is a financial operating system unique to Liechtenstein because it is not a business corporation according to either the British or American definition of that word.)
However, it should come as no surprise that Gordon McLendon was not only best pals with David Atlee Phillips who dabbled in clandestine broadcasting when the CIA needed help in overthrowing hostile governments, but that Gordon McLendon was also a member of a board of broadcasting advisors to Radio Free Europe. It was not as if McLendon was unaware of what the CIA was attempting to accomplish as part of its 'Crusade' in Europe.
Therefore, it should not appear as an oddity in 'coincidental' timing regarding the sudden interest paid by McLendon, Murchison and Thompson regarding broadcasting from the Baltic Sea. Although Sweden was nominally neutral with regards to the West-East divide in Europe, militarily it was firmly rooted on the side of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. However, Sweden also had its own share of problems in dealing with spies from within its own territorial borders. Radio ships operating just off the shorelines of Sweden could be secretly managed by CIA personnel who kept their covert distance and location hidden from the overt facilities of the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm.