Talk:Fusion Energy Foundation/Sources

Fusion Energy Foundation

FEF: Primary

The author cites an announcement in May 1985 by Dr. George Keyworth, science advisor to President Reagan, that beam weapon missile defenses are much nearer than most people think. The system that has achieved the most rapid rate of progress, he notes, is the thermonuclear powered x-ray laser. He cites the recent tests, reported by William Broad in the New York Times May 15 as evidence that x-ray lasers - instead of first-generation deployment in the mid-1980s as had been realized - are now a near-term third-generation prospect because of the perfection of the lenses. He proceeds to cite the work of Lawrence Livermore National Lab. as outlined by Dr. Lowell Wood to Congress several months before the above tests - as well as subsequent and current work. In noting the 20-year effort of the USSR on beam defense research, Stevens says evidence points to a thorough investigation of the x-ray laser possibility by the Soviets. He bases this on a presentation by Dr. Mark J. Eckart of Livermore at the May conference in Baltimore on lasers and electro-optics. In reviewing the Livermore experiments demonstrating a lab-scale x-ray laser, Eckart noted that before 1980 most all scientific papers providing its basis were by scientists in the Soviet Union - but a dearth of papers since 1980. Stevens observes that there can be little doubt that both the US and USSR have within their grasp the capacity to render offensive ballistic nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. The political question, he notes, is whether the Soviets will continue to oppose the Strategic Defenses Initiative while they rush to deploy the x-ray laser first, thereby gaining an overwhelming strategic advantage. 2 references, 4 figures.

— Abstract, "X-ray laser: a revolution in beam defense and the laboratory" Stevens, C.B., Fusion, Volume: 7:4, OSTI ID: 6483755 [1]

Relevant persons from among leading scientists in the "West" have attested to the excellence of Soviet science's work within these fields; more notably, for our purposes here, there are aspects of that Soviet practice to whose quality this writer can attest from the standpoint of his own special expertise.

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A case in point: In 1978, representatives of the Fusion Energy Foundation were invited to participate in a Soviet-sponsored international conference, on the subject of intertial-confinement (e.g., "laser") fusion. The participants met with this writer to learn what his requests might be. In light of the quarrel between the FEF and places such as Lawrence Livermore Laboratories (LLL), this writer suggested that the Soviets might have declassified aspects of their reliance upon B. Riemann's conception of isentropic compression for the development of the Soviet "hydrogen bomb." Papers representing such declassification would be most useful in the writer's and FEF's efforts to challenge the competence of virtual-reality devices, such as LLL's Lasnex. The FEF representatives were successful in filling this request. It was on this basis, that the writer proposed to proceed with EIR's computer-based quarterly economic forecast for the U.S. economy, which, during the 1979-1983 interval it was operational, was the only successful such forecast available in the public domain. This forecasting endeavor was prompted by the desire to demonstrate the Riemannian principle of isentropic compression by a useful application in some domain. This case is exemplary of those past generations of Russia's scientists, and who were, thus, rooted in the Classical scientific method of western Europe, especially the Germany scientific tradition of Gauss, Humboldt, Riemann. These are exceptionally qualified persons, of a quality wich will not be easily replicated today.

— Russia's relation to universal history, LaRouche, EIR November 14, 1996

During mid-1977, [George] Keegan met with associates of mine from the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF). He outlined his study, and identified the difficulties he had had with colleagues and opponents such as Graham. He asked FEF to provide him an assessment of some of the crucial evidence which Graham et al. had ridiculed. An FEF team, headed by one Dr. Steven Bardwell,[FIGURE 101] a plasma physicist, pulled together a study of instances in which known Soviet technology might provide Moscow the scientific capability for deploying an operational ballistic missile defense system of a type based upon "new physical principles," as distinct from so-called "kinetic energy" intercept systems.

[..] FEF's work to that effect had been developed as a by-product of both my general specialization in the matter of Riemannian manifolds for purposes of long-range studies in technological attrition, and my rejection of the mechanistic delusion, that so-called "Coulomb Forces" operate as law within the range of the sub-atomic and nuclear "infinitesimally small." My views in such matters coincided with my own emphasis on a modern view of Platonic "hylozoic monism," a view of Riemannian physics, and of the work of Vernadsky et al., which I had set forth as the science policy of our publishing effort, in memoranda of March-April 1973. It was those memoranda which had pushed the importance of controlled nuclear fusion, and which had been the sparkplug for the founding of the Fusion Energy Foundation.

The Rudakov lectures at Livermore had served us associated with FEF as a point of reference, a demonstration of the point at which both "super-lasers" and "particle-beam" technologies were emerging from confinement to laboratory experiments and related pioneering tests.

— The Washington Post 'Death Beam' hoax by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Executive Intelligence Review October 18, 1999

The following testimony by the Schiller Institute was submitted to the Senate Finance Committee, which held four days of hearings on abuses by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), on April 28 to May 1. The testimony was submitted on May 22. [..]

1983-1984: A series of meetings is convened at the Manhattan apartment of New York investment adviser John Train. According to Michael Hudson, a participant at the meetings, the purpose of the meetings was to "coordinate national magazine stuff about you guys, and work with Federal law enforcement to deny you funding and tax exemption, is the delicate way to put it."

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At the time, the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), a leading proponent of beam weapons ballistic missile defense, was a tax-exempt foundation under the Internal Revenue Code. FEF was considered by LaRouche's political opponents to be a major source of respectability and funding for LaRouche's ideas. According to Hudson, he was put into contact with the Baltimore regional office of the IRS to further the slander and unwarranted prosecution campaign outlined at the Train salon meetings. That office had purview over tax-exempt organizations. In response to FOIPA requests, the IRS disclaims that it has a file concerning these events or any file at all concerning the Fusion Energy Foundation.

[..] September 1986: The IRS falsely tells the Associated Press that the Fusion Energy Foundation's tax-exempt status has been revoked, and releases other information about the FEF to reporter William Welch. As a result, AP, in a national wire, claims that solicitors for the FEF are committing tax fraud by stating that the FEF is tax exempt. After threats of legal action, the IRS claimed that it had made a "mistake" concerning FEF's status when discussing the FEF with reporter Welch and that the FEF was, indeed, tax exempt. As previously noted, in response to FOIA requests, the IRS has disclaimed that it has any file on the Fusion Energy Foundation.

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April 1987: The United States government launches an unprecedented bankruptcy liquidation of Campaigner Publications, Caucus Distributors, and the Fusion Energy Foundation, the principal publishers of LaRouche's ideas. IRS Agent Lucey, who was subsequently described in government documents as the "elder statesman" of the Federal criminal task force and the "resident expert" on LaRouche, plays an active role in assisting the civil bankruptcy action. The bankruptcy action is later dismissed as illegal by Federal Judge Martin Bostetter, who likened it to a "constructive fraud" upon the Court. The bankruptcy ends any ability to repay the loans at issue in the subsequent Federal indictment of LaRouche for loan fraud.

— IRS corruption fuelled operations of `Get LaRouche' task force, Executive Intelligence Review June 5, 1998

Specifically, beginning 1977, I came to play a leading international role in developing and proposing what President Ronald Reagan presented as his “Strategic Defense Initiative,” in his televised address of March 23, 1983. It should be recalled here, that the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), of which I had been the leading co-founder, played a key part in those matters. During the past decade, 21st Century Science & Technology has continued aspects of that work of FEF, as also the weekly Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).3 Then and now, all competent statements on the subject of missile defense, bridge the conventional, misguided separations of physical science from Classical culture.

— SDI Revisited: In Defense of Strategy , Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (Partial text from article in 21st Century Summer 2000)

On Oct. 31, the following interview was conducted by telephone with former U.S. Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, and broadcast live on Carlos Gamero's hour-long "Economic Agenda" program on LU5 Radio in the southern Argentine province of Neuquén. [..]

[Luis Aníbal Rodríguez Luppo, an engineer and professor at Comahue University]: In the 1950s, Argentina was a pioneer in the area of nuclear fusion as a source of cheap energy. It's our understanding, Mr. LaRouche, that you have a Fusion Energy Foundation which is dedicated to the study of these matters. Can you tell us something about this?

LaRouche: The Fusion Energy Foundation in the United States was shut down by the government in a political operation, by the friends of George Bush, Sr. and Henry Kissinger. But the work goes on. The fusion work has been postponed, because of these delays over the years. The capabilities exist and are still being worked on. Worldwide, or at least in many parts of the world, there is a renaissance in nuclear technology. [..]

— LaRouche: With a New Bretton Woods, Argentina's Opportunities Are Great Executive Intelligence Review November 10, 2000

All the original proposal for what came to be known as "SDI" was my own personal undertaking; my chief collaboration in developing the technical side of the proposal was done through the channels of a scientific association which I had led in founding during the mid-1970s, the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF). The original impetus for the founding of that association came in the form of a letter which I wrote to my associates during Spring 1973, in which I defined the leading task of science to be subsuming Vernadsky's conception of the noösphere under my own discoveries, incorporating certain crucial features of the work of Bernhard Riemann, in the science of physical economy.

— SDI UNDER RECONSIDERATION: War as Peace By Other Means Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., EIR March 23, 2001

Later, however, in my writing a 1973 letter which founded the scientific institution subsequently known as the Fusion Energy Foundation, I emphasized that my associates must subsume Vernadsky's concept of the noösphere-biosphere underneath my own original contributions to the development of the science of physical economy. Since that time, the institutions which I represent, have always adhered to that specific view of the crucial place of Vernadsky's work within the framework provided by a science of physical economy.

— ON ACADEMICIAN LVOV'S WARNING: What Is 'Primitive Accumulation'? Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.. EIR August 17, 2001

This speech was given on March 21, 1993, to a conference of the Schiller Institute in Northern Virginia, and was published in an April 1993 EIR White Paper on "The Crucial Role of Lyndon LaRouche in the Current Strategic Situation." Gallagher was the former executive director of the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), which had been shut down by an illegal government-forced bankruptcy in 1987.

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Late February 1983. LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee published another of many such mass circulation pamphlets on relativistic beam weapon defenses. This included a white paper written by a Fusion Energy Foundation scientist on how beam weapons work, also being used by LaRouche in his contacts with U.S. government officials. The political mobilization call on the front page of the pamphlet was prophetic: "Let us make the month of March...." [..]

March 24, 1983. I appeared, representing FEF, on CBS-TV evening news as the first non-government spokesman to defend and explain the SDI. CBS-TV said that they had contacted the Heritage Foundation, considered the premier think-tank for Reagan Administration policies, but Heritage's staff director told CBS they knew nothing about SDI, which was "the Fusion Energy Foundation's thing." FEF Research Director Uwe Parpart was featured the following morning, March 25, on "Good Morning America," for the same reason.

April 8, 1983. LaRouche keynoted a Fusion Energy Foundation conference in Washington, D.C. on the Strategic Defense Initiative, attended by 800 representatives of administration, Congress, business, and the diplomatic community, including 16 East bloc representatives. Representatives from the Soviet embassy and press attended, but then walked out.

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April-June 1985. The Fusion Energy Foundation held conferences in Rome, Paris, and Bonn on the Strategic Defense Initiative, to inform European military leaders and scientists of the work involved and the implications for economic progress worldwide.

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April 1986. FEF held a conference in Tokyo attended by nearly 300 Japanese science, business and military representatives, addressed by scientists from Europe, the United States and Japan, on the urgency of Japan cooperating with the SDI. Soviet embassy representatives protested and walked out during the speech of LaRouche representative Uwe Parpart. Two months later Japan's Foreign Minister Abe announced Japanese scientific labs would join the SDI.

— SDI and the Jailing Of Lyndon LaRouche by Paul Gallagher Executive Intelligence Review. March 12, 2004

In one of those fortunate quirks of scheduling, EIR and the Fusion Energy Foundation had arranged a conference on the strategic defense plan for mid-April in Washington, D.C. at the Vista Hotel. The event had been scheduled prior to the President's March 23 speech. It was a standing-room-only crowd of 500 or 600 people. Mr. Shershnev sat in the front row. Afterwards, in a meeting with EIR's Washington bureau chief, Shershnev conceded that his and Moscow's hard-line attitude towards LaRouche's strategic defense proposals had been a mistake. He added that with the President's March 23 announcement, the situation was now too big for him to handle. He reported that he had recommended a face-to-face meeting between LaRouche and Georgi Arbatov, the head of the U.S.-Canada Institute. This recommendation was at that very moment being reviewed at the highest levels back in Moscow. Two weeks later, the back-channel was abruptly shut down on orders from Moscow. Shershnev was, shortly thereafter, summoned back home.

— The Power of Ideas: SDI Changed the World, Jeffrey Steinberg, EIR June 18, 2004

There have been four leading obstacles to progress in space exploration and related fields since the middle of the 1960s. [..]

Fourth, throughout, has been a frictional resistance to scientific and related progress even within centers of advanced scientific education.

This conflict was a central problem with which I had to deal even within the ranks of that elite body which formed the core of the once-powerful Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF); a problem also encountered at such relevant science centers as Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. That is to say, with the exception of such outstanding figures as the late Professor Robert J. Moon, the typical front-line scientists associated with my work on SDI and related projects, were typically accomplished original discoverers among professionals in experimental physics, who were often intimidated and confused by the mystical incantations of that modern Babylonian priesthood of review committees—a priesthood whose radically reductionist, mystical, "ivory tower" views and matching, inquisitional-like influence on the subject of abstract mathematics, have dominated the work of the peer-review committees. That priesthood represents the same type of incompetence which underlies and permeates that herd of wild-eyed quackademics responsible for the spread of that disease known as present-day ruling opinion in the field of economic doctrine in general, and government policy-shaping in particular.

It was that type of scientist, as associated with FEF, which had made possible the relative successes of that work of mine leading into the design conception of the SDI, and related other projects now spilled over in the space programs. The sheer idiocy shown by the current Bush Administration's effort to cut back on the X-43A program, a real scientific breakthrough in space and related fields, is typical of a government which is not content with shooting itself in the foot, but insists on also shooting itself in the head.

— How I Defined the Scramjet by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. November 11, 2004 November 19, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

A critical case in recent U.S. history, of a vicious attack by what insider-author Perkins calls "economic hit men" against the potential economic and scientific progress of nations, was the 1978-86 war of Wall Street investment banks and their agents against the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF) of Lyndon LaRouche.

Founded by LaRouche with nuclear scientists and engineers in 1974, by the end of the 1970s the FEF was a broadly influential movement for scientific and technological optimism, at the same time stimulating provocative lines of thermonuclear fusion research through its magazine and journal. Inspiring 100,000 subscribers and members by 1980, FEF was at the center of organizing fusion energy research as both a scientific frontier, and a U.S. national technological objective with the McCormack Fusion Energy Act of 1980. It was leading those American scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and teachers determined to revive and spread nuclear fission power technologies despite the organized media-driven fear campaign which followed the March 1979 Three Mile Island accident. And it developed a similar influence in Germany, France, Sweden, Italy, and a number of developing nations.

LaRouche's policy of nuclear power for development and peace in the Third World was the hallmark of the FEF. And the LaRouche objective of a Third World debt moratorium and an International Development Bank to finance such great projects, had been adopted by the Non-Aligned Movement nations at their 1976 Columbo Conference and presented to the UN on their behalf by LaRouche's friend, Guyana's Foreign Minister Dr. Fred Wills.

The scope of the FEF's leading influence from laboratories to legislatures, on university campuses and in the American business community, and among elected officials, can be glimpsed from the major policy conferences it held in each of those years (see box)—along with hundreds of smaller sessions—on nuclear science, technological development, and, from 1977 on, for LaRouche's idea of anti-missile defense based on "new physical principles" which became President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

When the self-described Nuclear Club of Wall Street was formed in meetings of bankers and financiers at the beginning of 1978, its major objective was to destroy the potential for nuclear power-based economic development around the world, which was then being promoted by statesmen in Europe, Japan, and the developing sector. To accomplish this, however, the Wall St. financiers knew they had to destroy LaRouche's FEF; replace it with tame "pro-fission power" and "pro-fusion power" front-groups which in fact would advocate a moratorium on both; and organize control of nuclear-related companies' credit-lines and finances, to choke off investment in nuclear technologies. The "Club's" policy was to stop nuclear power development, deny it to developing countries, and force a shift back to coal and petrochemical fuels at escalating prices. This was the policy of Lazard Frères banker Felix Rohatyn—then the dictator of New York City's finances and controller of Ted Kennedy's embryonic Presidential campaign—of Bechtel Corp. powers George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger; of Henry Kissinger's just-formed Kissinger Associates consulting firm; of Jimmy Carter's first Energy Secretary James R. Schlesinger; and of much less well-known but very influential investment bank operatives. It could not be done without a Wall Street campaign to destroy LaRouche's powerful FEF.

The Nuclear Club of Wall Street was launched when a group of New York investment bankers met in the boardroom of the Dreyfus Corporation, under the direction of, among others, Arthur Ross, Sr., a British Intelligence-connected banker whose son was, at the time, a collaborator of LaRouche's movement. The purpose of the meeting, according to participants and published materials, was to create an ostensibly pro-nuclear covert intelligence operation to gain dominant financial control over the borrowing of the American and other nuclear industries, and prevent nuclear expansion especially to the developing sector. Several "Club" members had direct connections to the Mossad and other Israeli interests, and, as EIR discovered through investigation, the Club was also involved in conduiting U.S. nuclear secrets to Israel. A full exposé of this was published in LaRouche's Fusion magazine in September 1979, after the "Club's" assault against FEF came out into the open.

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Nuclear Club of Wall Street meetings were devoted to the topic of sabotaging LaRouche's growing influence among scientists, engineers, and policymakers, and his promotion of nuclear fission and fusion power, especially on a global scale. A major 1978 FEF conference in Pittsburgh was sabotaged in collaboration with Schlesinger's Department of Energy, and the FBI, forcing speakers to withdraw. In conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League, the "Club" coordinated a series of slander campaigns against the FEF and LaRouche, stating that both were anti-Semitic, or more broadly, that the FEF's campaigns for global nuclear technology development were "too radical," or "Soviet-linked."

In July 1978, the Club launched an explicit "countergang" to the FEF and Fusion magazine (which was to gain the second-largest circulation of any science publication in the United States). This countergang was the Society for the Advancement of Fusion Energy (SAFE), which coordinated a media and newsletter slander campaign against the FEF, and (in the post-Three Mile Island hysteria) "for" fusion and against fission power. SAFE was headed by Hanes' friend Alfred Slaner, a Keyser Roth textile firm executive, and Luella LaMer Slaner, who testified in a full-length mink coat to Congressional hearings for "fusion only."

At the same time, slanders against FEF were circulated through the Atomic Industrial Forum (AIF), an industry group of which the Club gained political control. AIF chairman Roger J. Sherman of EBASCO Services Corp. praised the nuclear-wrecking Energy Secretary James Schlesinger as "very pro-nuclear, brilliant," and campaigned against funds for "an unproven and new concept like fusion"—and against the FEF. Sherman exposed who was controlling him by calling for a nuclear moratorium after Three Mile Island—a moratorium which has now lasted for a quarter-century.

Both SAFE and AIF, and the "Club" through its own banking and business channels, intensively slandered LaRouche and FEF through, in particular, the American entrepreneurial business community, seeking to cut off the active and financial support which engineers, executives, scientists, and teachers gave to FEF. Every effort was made to intimidate speakers at FEF's conferences, while the leaders of SAFE and AIF refused demands for a public debate with FEF Executive Director Dr. Morris Levitt.

The campaign of slanders run under the cover of the AIF was carried out by two public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton, and its corporate parent, Ogylvie Mather, headed by the British oligarch David Ogylvie. Ogylvie is a member of the extended British Royal Family, and an active member of the semi-secret Club of the Isles which created and runs the World Wildlife Fund.

For the Nuclear Club, John W. Hanes, Jr. and others were involved in directing the circulation of slanders to key FEF contacts, and in efforts to "recruit" FEF personnel. Among the misinformation it circulated, which gained widespread credence through media friendly to or controlled by the Club, was that fusion was safe while fission was dangerous and had to be stopped. SAFE board members Dr. Heinrich Hora and Dr. Aaron D. Krumbein, both with connections to the Soreq Nuclear Research Institute in Israel, attempted an academic wrecking operation against the FEF's quarterly theoretical journal, the International Journal of Fusion Energy.

As Fusion showed in its September 1979 exposé, the Nuclear Club of Wall Street also tried to organize an assassination attempt against Lyndon LaRouche himself, bringing into the country for the purpose a Mossad operative named Zwi Aldoubi. `Technological Apartheid'

LaRouche's FEF came through the battle with the Nuclear Club of Wall Street, and was the scientific vehicle through which LaRouche's idea of relativistic beam-weapons anti-missile defense, as the alternative to Mutual and Assured Destruction, became influential until its 1982-83 adoption as President Ronald Reagan's SDI. After March 1983, FEF conferences explained SDI to international audiences of military and scientific professionals, and brought them into cooperation with it. Wall Street "hit men" John Train, Ross, and others organized media and financial networks—including Henry Kissinger—to demand prosecutions of LaRouche and the FEF. They got them, under the direction of U.S. Assistant Attorney General William Weld, the scion of one of their group of investment banking families.

The policy of the Wall Street "hit men" was carried out. The "back-to-coal" energy policy of Felix Rohatyn and James Schlesinger completely supplanted nuclear power from 1980-95, leaving the hills of America's coal basins torn and bare, and the U.S. railroad grid groaning and breaking down under the vast loads of coal.

— 'Hit Men' vs. LaRouche's Fusion Energy Foundation by Paul Gallagher Executive Intelligence Review. December 3, 2004

Following the successful demonstration of nuclear power for electricity production and the development of small-scale research reactors in the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s was to be the decade that commercial nuclear power plants would spread throughout the world.

This optimistic program was not to go unchallenged, however. By the time the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), founded on the initiative of Lyndon LaRouche in 1974, came on the scene, the forces of economic destruction were well organized and mobilized to kill nuclear power.

The FEF became the hegemonic political force in the fight for nuclear energy, in a head-to-head battle with the Trilateral Commission and Wall Street's Carter Administration, and malthusian institutions such as the Club of Rome, which were created to kill technological optimism, along with a substantial portion of the world's population.

As a mass-based educational force, presenting the economic development policy initiatives of Lyndon LaRouche, the FEF became the focus of enmity, slander, and dirty tricks, by the financial institutions that had no intention of allowing the economic break-out of the resource-rich "Third World," which access to nuclear power would enable.[1] At the same time, as EIR has been documenting, "economic hit men" were destabilizing pro-growth governments, and even assassinating their leaders.

The result is that today, most of the plans from the 1950s and 1960s by developing nations for the deployment of nuclear technology have been stalled, delayed, or sabotaged. But in the current economic climate, where the political and military threats, and dollar hegemony of the United States are quickly losing credibility, a second chance at a nuclear renaissance is possible, if the world economy is reorganized to allow it.

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The day after his inauguration in 1977, President Carter named RAND Corp. utopian James Schlesinger as energy "czar." With the promulgation of the National Energy Act later that year, Schlesinger declared: "The era of cheap and abundant energy is recognized to be over."

But this insane policy was not going to go unchallenged—Lyndon LaRouche's Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF) was on the scene. The FEF was soon to be in a head-to-head fight with the Trilateral Commission's Carter Administration, and the Council on Foreign Relations' 1980s "controlled economic disintegration" project, which had included contributions from "Arc of Crisis" ideologue Zbigniew Brzezinski, and "Clash of Civilizations" author Samuel P. Huntington.

Just a year after its founding in 1974, the FEF held a conference on thermonuclear fusion energy, at the New York Academy of Sciences. If Schlesinger et al. were against nuclear fission because it held the promise of abundant energy supplies for the world, imagine their horror at the prospect of developing nuclear fusion, which can use isotopes of hydrogen for fuel that are found in universally available seawater!

In 1976, the Fusion Energy Foundation held more than a dozen conferences around the country on energy and economic development, explaining how current and more advanced nuclear fission technologies, and tomorrow's nuclear fusion, would defeat the propaganda of conservation, austerity, and "limits to growth."

By early 1977, as the Trilateral Commission was settling in at the White House and Schlesinger was mapping out his plan to turn the United States into a solar-powered post-industrial scrap heap, the FEF was planning a series of conferences on "solving the energy crisis," with the participation of corporate executives, scientists, and engineers from universities and government laboratories, elected officials, trade union representatives, and diplomats.

The response from the "powers that be" was swift. Days before a conference was to take place in Pittsburgh on April 29, 1977, the FEF learned that 12 of the scheduled speakers had withdrawn, after being subjected to a campaign of blackmail, libel, and coercion from the office of Schlesinger in Washington, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation office in Pittsburgh. Months before, it was learned, the FBI had characterized the FEF as a subversive and dangerous group, due to its affiliation with Lyndon LaRouche. As early as 1976, scientists working with the FEF had reported being threatened that their Federal research funding could be cut off.

Two days before the Pittsburgh conference, the FEF went into court and was granted a temporary restraining order by Judge William Knox, who determined that there was enough evidence against the FBI, Schlesinger, and the U.S. Attorney General, for the court to prevent any further harassment of the FEF.

Two years later, the incident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant on March 29, 1979 brought the FEF into national prominence as the only organization in the country that unconditionally supported the expanded use of nuclear energy. While the nuclear industry hid under their beds, hoping that the bad publicity and growing anti-nuclear movement would go away (and slandered the FEF), organizers for the FEF stood on street corners and in airports with signs stating: "Nuclear Power Is Safer Than Sex."

A cartoon in the FEF's Fusion magazine that year showed Jane Fonda holding a candle, with the caption: "If God had meant us to use nuclear energy, He'd have given us brains!" The cartoon accompanied an editorial titled: "Nuclear Power Versus the New Dark Ages."

The Foundation's independent investigation into the Three Mile Island incident indicated the likelihood that there had been sabotage at the plant, in order to create panic and hysteria, which the media then gladly spread. Jane Fonda had starred in a film, The China Syndrome, portraying a fictional catastrophic nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, which was released a few months before the Three Mile Island incident.

The FEF escalated its fight for nuclear power. In 1979, EIR published a Special Report commissioned by Lyndon LaRouche, titled, "America Must Go Nuclear," written by a task force of the FEF. LaRouche, then a Presidential candidate, stated: "In my first day in office, I shall deliver to the Congress a comprehensive energy policy." That policy, he stated, would repeal the Environmental Protection Act, and complete work on the 120 nuclear plants stalled in various phases of construction. In addition, the policy will "provide for the addition of 1,000 gigawatts (1 million megawatts, or about 1,000 large nuclear plants) of nuclear energy by 2000. . . ."

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President Carter appointed neo-liberal S. David Freeman to head Franklin Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority. Under Freeman's leadership, the TVA, the largest nuclear construction site in the world, cancelled all but 5 of the 18 nuclear plants it had planned to build. Twenty-five years later, the TVA is still paying off the billions of dollars of debt incurred from the cancellations. Freeman was awarded Fusion's "lousewort laurels," for re-introducing 19th-Century wood-burning stoves into the valley.

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The denial of nuclear technology to developing nations has had consequences. In 1982, the Fusion Energy Foundation released a study indicating that at least 115 million people worldwide had died over the preceding 15 years due to the sabotage of nuclear power. Suffering with lower energy and low economic growth rates, poorer or no health care, and lack of infrastructure, millions in the developing nations were denied the very means for survival.

— How Nuclear Energy's Promise Was Nearly Destroyed Marsha Freeman, Executive Intelligence Review, January 14, 2005

Similarly, among the relevant notables within the former Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), there were physical scientists, including physical chemist Professor Robert Moon, who practiced creative scientific discovery with notable excellence, and yet, at the peer-review blackboard, submitted to the still currently conventional, barbarisms practiced under the inquistional eyes of the radically re‹ntductionist Babylon priesthood of contemporary mathematics dogmas.

— Soviet Ideology and Creativity By Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Executive Intelligence Review June 7, 2006

All around me, my generation is dying out rapidly, and with its passing, go most among the best minds of physical science from the earlier experience of my adult lifetime. So, we have lost most representatives of that generation of thinkers whose achievements are typified by my associates of the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF) of the 1970s and 1980s. [..]

To illustrate the nature of this problem in science, consider the following case.

Among the ranks of FEF during those years, the typical representative of the generation of that quality of achievers among the practitioners of science was Professor Robert Moon, Chicago University's celebrated student of that Professor William Draper Harkins, a Harkins who, notably, ranked with, but above Rutherford as a leading physical chemist of the world of his time.

In 1987, the FEF was shut down through a politically motivated operation which a Federal Court later ruled to have been a fraudulent bankrupting of that scientific association by the U.S. Department of Justice then associated with Massachusetts' William Weld. Professor Moon died in late 1989. So, coincidentally, near the close of the 1980s, the later generation, the so-called "Baby Boomer" generation, born during, approximately 1945-1957, began to occupy the positions which had been held by the generation which had dominated the scientific leadership of FEF.

The consequent decade's saddening developments in Europe and the Americas, are typified by the way in which the closing four, post-President Kennedy decades of the Twentieth Century's modern science had been brought, thus, to our hope that the present, virtual collapse of our economy is only temporary.

Those cited developments of 1987-1989, typified the onset of what became today's crisis of both physical science and culture generally. However, as I shall show in the following pages, these developments also typify the most crucial issue of economics, world-wide, today. That matter of economics, as it must be treated from the standpoint of physical science, not the prevalent, but intrinsically incompetent notions of monetary theory, is the preeminently relevant focus of this present report.

The currently onrushing, dismal change for the worse, came, near the beginning of the 1990s, as typified by both the demise of FEF and the entry of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. The coincidence of those developments, has crucial importance, even global strategic importance, for addressing the leading practical problems of physical science, as also Classical artistry today.

— APE OR MAN?: The Great Secret of Economics by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Executive Intelligence Review June 23, 2006

The effect of my own association with Professor Moon crystallized into a more important relationship around the implications of Vernadsky's discoveries in a certain fashion, during my vigorous defense of the work of Kepler against the frauds of Newton, during several general meetings of the leading body of the Fusion Energy Foundation. My argument prompted Professor Moon to return to some uncompleted work of his own in physical chemistry. The lines of work which this prompted were crucial for situating lines of inquiry of continuing relevance for today.

— NEW BRETTON WOODS: Russia's Role in a Recovery , Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. EIR September 5, 2008

So, consequently, on the occasion of a meeting convened at Ibykus Farm back during the mid-1980s, I shocked the assembled scientists of our international Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), by insisting that the problems of physics which were confronting us then, must be addressed by aid of attention to the details of Kepler's discovery of the principle of universal solar gravitation. I situated my argument to that effect, in the domain of my special competence as, as, in effect, already, then, a leading physical economist of the world today. Such was my tested competence in a Riemannian science of physical economy. Most among those assembled at that meeting had been enraged by my introduction of this as a matter of policy, excepting, from a somewhat older generation, Chicago's celebrated Professor Robert Moon.

That rage, from many at that table, expressed, essentially, a knee-jerk reaction to any attack on what had been presumed by them, academically and similarly, to have been the absolutely sacred utterances of the Black Magic specialist, Isaac Newton. For them, Newton was deemed almost sacred among true believers. The believers included many otherwise competent scientists of outstanding accomplishment, but, nonetheless, still victims of youthful classroom indoctrination in what had been built up into the form of a shabby cult-ritual around that dubious English creature.

In retrospect, looking back over the twenty-odd years since that particular FEF meeting, I had been completely correct in every feature of what I delivered, on the point of my argument then. The relevant evidence re-examined, repeatedly, in recent times, has shown my argument, then, to have been thoroughly sound.[3]

Notably, the rage expressed when the same matter came up again during two subsequent meetings of the FEF, although considerably lessened, showed evidence that a large part of the such errors spread among scientists at that time, and still today, are a reflection of the fact that the generation of scientists produced from among returning World War II veterans had studied virtually nothing of Kepler's actual work. Most among them knew almost nothing about the way in which the deepest issues of modern science, which had been posed, uniquely, by those kinds of discoveries typified by Kepler's own, had been fraudulently put aside during the centuries, put aside despite the De Docta Ignorantia of the actual, Fifteenth-Century founder of modern physical science, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.[4]

This same, inherently destructive error by my own critics, within FEF and elsewhere during the 1980s, and, again, now, lies in what they copied from the Newton cult's libels against Kepler. The influence of that same philosophically reductionist cult traced from Wenck, Zorzi (Giorgi), Fludd, and Sarpi's lackey Galileo, is a tradition which persists today, usually in a more vicious form today than that of the past. The folly of that cult is now a tradition which has been formed under the influence of the far greater decadence which has been recently accumulated in the dogmas and expositions among leading academic institutions. Such has been the effect, for science and science education today, which is to be recognized in the tattered condition of higher education today, since the passing away of most among the representatives of three adult generations of matured adults, including the two preceding my own.

— KEPLER'S ACTUAL DISCOVERY: Mathematics Is Not Science Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. EIR November 21, 2008

FEF: Secondary

The 7th District Congressional race has become a 3-way political contest wuh the filing of Samuel A. Ginger, candidate of the U.S. Labor Party. Cinger,26, a hospital admissions officer, filed a petition with 3,600 nominating signatures Tuesday in Harrisburg. A resident of Philadelphia, 3920 Sanson St., Cinger has waived the district residency requirement. [..]

Cinger is supporting the Fusion Energy Foundation attempt to plan science and technology for world development. The foundation wants to channel the efforts of scientists, skilled workers, bankers and engineers in meeting meeting political, economic and scientific requirements of achieving fusion power. This developmentwould provide a virtually limitless source of energy for world economic reconstruction.

— Cinger makes three-way race in 7th District. Delaware County Daily Times. August 30,1976 p.3

An opponent of a bill which would remove criminal penalties in Wisconsin for possession of small amounts of marijuana said Tuesday that recent research linking marijuana to brain damage and decreases in white blood cells has cot been given enough attention. "We need much more research before we say that this drug is okay, that it causes no medical complications." Dr. Ned Rosinsky of New York, a representative of the Fusion Energy Foundation, told the Assembly Health and Social Services Committee . "Marijuana is a medically dangerous drug until proved otherwise." [..]

Rosinsky cited a study done recently at Tulane University, which found changes in the deep braia waves of rhesus monkeys that were given the equivalent of one marijuana cigarette per day for three months. He said that studies of human brain waves have shown no abnormalities, but he criticized those findings because the tests were not done on the deeper brain waves. Rosinsky also cited findings from a study done at Columbia University that showed a 41 per cent decrease in the rate of reproduction of white blood cells in marijuana users. "This is a severe effect on the immunSlogical system." he said. "Any time you have that kind of a decrease in white blood cell production, you may find cancer development decades later." Rosinsky - said decriminaiization of marijuana use would be a mistake. "I think that the perception of people is that because the government does not attach severe penalties to it, it must be okay." he said.

— Researcher opposes easing marijuana law, The Daily Tribune Wednesday. April 6, 1977 Wisconsin Rapids, Wis. Page 17

Relatively safe nuclear fusion reactors could be constructed by 1990 if $50 billion to $100 billion is spent on research, a physicist says. Dr. Morris Levitt, executive director of the New York-based Fusion Energy Foundation, said here Wednesday that nuclear fusion can draw enough energy from the oceans to provide power for the next one million years. Nuclear fusion, which fires the sun and provides the punch in hydrogen bombs, essentially reverses the nuclear processes used in today's fission reactors

— AP. THE ADA EVENING NEWS Ada, Oklahoma, Thursday, April 14, 1977, p. 6a

A group supporting nuclear fusion as a source of energy has accused three top Carter administration officials of harassment because it does not support the president's energy plan. The 'Fusion Energy Foundation and its executive director, Dr. Morris Levitt, filed suit in U.S. District Court here yesterday against FBI Dire'ctor Clarence Kelley, U.S. Atty. Gen. Griffin Bell. Federal Energy A d m i n i s t r a t o r James Schlesinger and FBI agent William Martin. The suit specifically accuses Kelley of ordering FBI agents to disrupt FEF conferences, to prevent the group from having its views published nnd to dissuade other scientists from supporting the group. It also accused Schlesinger of conspiring with Kelley to disrupt the FEF conference planned for this weekend in Pittsburgh. It did not specify any charges against Bell. The suit asks civil damages and an injunction against the, defendants to prevent them from "depriving the plaintiffs of their constitutional rights." FEF, a not-for-profit, New York-based corporation, contends that nuclear fusion, which joins the atoms of abundant light metals, is more efficient as an energy source than nuclear fission. which splits atoms of more precious uranium or plutonium.

— Nuclear Groups says Carterites harassed them. AP Yuma Daily Sun. Thors., Apr. 28,1977. p.2

U.S. District. Court Judge William Knox planned a hearing today on a petition to make permanent a preliminary injunction enjoining the FBI and two federal officials from "threatening, harassing or otherwise interfering with" the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF). Knox issued the preliminary injunction Friday against the FBI, Attorney General Griffin Bell and Energy Chief James Schlesinger.

The FEF, a lobby group for the rapid development of nuclear fusion energy, was one of four spnosrs of a Conference on Energy Development, held Friday at the William Penn Hotel here.

The FEF said it obtained a temporary injunction to prevent the FBI and two officials from interfering with the confeence and future FEF activities.

Morris Levitt, executive director of FEF, accused the FBI of harassment, including eavesdropping on telephone conversations and attempts to dissuade conference participants.

— Injunction against the FBI. UPI, THE DAILY COURIER, CONNELLSVILLE, PA. MONDAY, MAY 2, 1977

ENID, Okla. (AP) — An expert in fusion energy feels that if President Carter's policy against breeder reactors holds firm "there won't be a United Slates in the 21st century." Morris Levitt of New York City, director of the Fusion Energy Foundation, said "if we're lucky we will have a slow economic collapse. It's more. likely that we'll be drawn into a nuclear war 'with the Soviet Union— and lose." Levitt, 37, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia, is one of 106 delegates from 25 states, participating in a producer-consumer energy congress under way on the campus of Phillips University here.

— No energy, no America, AP. Friday, June, 3 1977 Journal-News, Hamilton and Fairfield. Ohio p.3

The executive director of the pro-technological development Fusion Energy foundation yesterday claimed the Carter administration is crippling technological development in an attempt to save an embattled monetary system. Dr. Morris Levitt said the administration is not supporting development of fusion as a source of energy because it has a policy to maintain high energy prices to generate revenue. "They see a no-growth energy policy... as a means to patching together a wobbly world economic situation," Levitt said during a Los Angeles news conference. Levitt said fusion as a main source of energy for the country is the best answer because it "marks the next logical stage on how energy sources have developed historically." He explained the Fusion Energy Foundation, established in 1974, aims to develop a political movement to bring back technological research and development in the United States. Levitt claimed the county's support of scientific development and growth has declined since the late 1960s. He added that he thinks the majority of the people and the Congress are committed to technological progress. Hoawever, forces in the Carter administration are holding back such support, he contended.

— Technology crippled under Carter, fusion director says, July 6,1977 VALLEY NEWS Van Nuya, Calif. p.5

The mayor of Auburn and two representatives of the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF) will discuss proposals for immediate development of energy sources during a public forum at Eisenhower College Nov. 14. Titled "How to Spend $100 Billion on Energy," the forum will begin at 7:00 p.m. at Gould Theatre, and is open to the public free of charge. The forum title refers to the price tag attached to most energy proposals now being considered by the federal government. Dr. Morris Levitt, executive director of the Fusion Energy Foundation, will outline the FEF program for energy development in his speech, "The Scientific Feasibility of Nuclear Energy." FEF favors development of high-technology and highdensity energy as opposed to low-density energy sources such as solar and wind energy. Dr. Levitt has testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, the Washington State Legislature's Energy Committee, and the 1976 Republican Platform Committee, which adopted some of his policies in the 1976 Republican platform. He often serves as a guest lecturer, and currently is engaged in research on the epistomological problems of modern physics. [..]

Michael Gelber, the Central New York regional representative for the Fusion Energy Foundation will cover the history of energy development and past trends in en- ergy resources during his speech, "Energy and Politics."

— Energy experts to host forum Syracuse Herald-Journil, Nov. 5,1977 p.3

An effort similar to the one which led to America's landing'of the first man on the moon is needed to develop a working model of fusion reactor by the year 2000, the head of the Fusion Energy Foundation said Thursday. Dr. Morris Levitt, executive director of the non-profit foundation attempting to promote acceptance of fusion by the public, called for a ten-fold increase in funding of fusion projects — to $5 billion annually. [..]

Noting current funding is about S500 .million a year, Levitt said continuation of that level would mean putting off a working fusion reactor However, he predicted, an increase to $5 billion would probably mean success by the end of the century. "Fusion is technically feasible," he said. "If the' resources are committed, it can be done. It is the longrange solution to the energy problem." • - Levitt said an increase in fusion funding has support in Congress, but the key question is whether the nation's nuclear energy policy "can be geared up for a massive export policy to provide funds."

— Funding Requested: Fusion Reactor Project Viewed, UPI Tyrone Daily Herald, Friday, November 10,1978, p.2

You meet them at a Republican club meeting, or a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, or a scientific conference. They are young (mid- to late twenties), welldressed, well-groomed, well-spoken. they present themselves as being in favor of economic growth. They speak of energy produced by controlled thermonuclear fusion as "an absolute necessity if the human race is to survive the next quarter-century." They say that they represent the Fusion Energy Foundation and need contributions from conservative businessmen who understand the need to oppose Ralph Nader and the "eco-freaks who threaten the growth of U.S. industry." They sound good. You give them a check.

What they do not tell you is that the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), recently and incredibly granted tax-exempt status, is a front for the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) and its electoral arm, the United States labor Party (USLP), a self-styled Marxist organization with intimate ties to groups as disparate as the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, the Palestiniant errorist movement, and Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby.

They also do not tell you that your contribution will fund NCLC/ USLP propaganda, as well as some of the group's other, equally dubious, undertakings. Nor do they tell you that, not long ago, the NCLC undertook a major campaign to penetrate and influence conservative organizations nationwide. [..]

Another major thrust of the "Whig Coalition" is the NCLC's attempt to make conservative contacts through the Fusion Energy Foundation. Founded at the prompting of and under the auspices of the NCLC. the FEF remains firm- ly under NCLC control. Chuck Stevens. Dr. Morris Levitt (both long-time NCLC members), and [Uwe Henke (an NCLC National Executive Committee member, also known by his party name, "Uwe Parpart") direct FEF activities on a day-to-dav basis. l'he FEF's main activity is fundraising. Most of the contributions it takes in go to the NCLC war-chest. Estimates of the NCLC's annual budget range from $l million to $3 million, with the higher figure the more reliable. [..]

Three plausible explanations can be given for the web of contacts the NCLC has maintained with the radical Right and sought to build with the responsible Right: 1. The NCLC has a pecuniary interest in cultivating funding sources on the Right. Contributions to the CFE and FEF, for example, help considerably to reduce the NCLC's operating deficit [..]

The NCLC's ability to move in conservative circles rests not merely on the failure of conservatives to perceive the true character of such fronts as the Committee for Fair Elections and the Fusion Energy Foundation, but. more, on a fundamental misunderstanding of the parent organization. The NCLC's posture of political independence. Its advocacy of positions on issues that are tangential to its own primary political program but important to conservative activists (e.g , opposition to the decriminalization of marijuana), and the forcefulness of its criticisms of prominent Left and liberal leaders have led many on the Right to buy its pitch-and pay for it.

— Rose, Gregory, The Life and Swarmy Times of the NCLC, March 30, 1979, National Review

The group calls itself the Independent Commission of Inquiry, but the name may be misleading. According to its chief spokesman, its members will not be as involved in trying to find out what happened at Three Mile Island as they will in trying 10 counter the anti-nuclear power publicity that was stimulated by the power plant accident near here two months ago. Jon Gilbertson. the director of nuclear engineering for the Fusion Energy Foundation in New York City and a member of the commission, said the group of industry and labor leaders will conduct a SiO.OOO advertising campaign in the near future, running ads in several newspapers. Later. Gilbertson said, the commission wants 150.000 people to march in Washington. D.C.. in support of nuclear energy. Despite the emphasis on public relations, commission members did meet last week with Rep. James L_ Wright Jr.. R-142. of Levittown. chairman of the House Select Committee on Three Mile Island. Wright said the commission "offered its expertise to the committee, with a built-in bias." [..]

Toe Independent Commission of Inquiry, however. wants the commitee to consider the effects on the national economy of a. shutdown of all nuclear power plants and to investigate impossibility of saootage at Three Mile Island. The commission suggests that believers in the philosophy of zerogrowth may be having excessive influence on the course of nuclear power in this country. In its position paper, the commission asked. "Was the incident at TMI perhaps initiated, perpetuated and falsely exploited by people who are pushing such a philosophy in the U.S.?" Such questions are among those that the commission is expected to pose in its advertising campaign. Gilbertson said the commission will also try to correct the technical misstatements that have been made about nuclear power and to point out the possible economic impacts of doing away with nuclear power plants. "We want to bring the state of Pennsylvania oack in support of nuclear power." Gilbertson said. Ads are to be run in Harrishurg newspapers. "Nuclear News." "Journal of Commerce" and probably a Chicago metropolitan paper.

— Page 17 C DAILY INTELLIGENCER Doylestown Pa. . May 31. 1979 State group created to boost atomic energy, counter critics By HARRY STOFFER Intelligencer Harrisburg Bureau

A member of a pro-nuclear group, which formed a commission to independently investigate the Three Mile Island, says the accident at the nuclear power plant may have resulted from sabotage. "Our theory centers on the assumption that there was official sabotage," said Dr. Morris Levitt, a spokesman for the pane!, called the Independent Commission of Inquiry. He charged the accident was part of a high-level conspiracy to stop nuclear power. "This is no tea party. There is a political brawl going on regarding nuclear power and people play dirty in that. It is a life and death issue," he said. Levitt, also Executive Director of the Fusion Energy Foundation of New York and a member of the socialist American Labor Party, posed the question of why the cooling system valves were closed in the reactor which overheated. "If it was a combination of mechanical and human error, the odds of that happening are a billion to one," he said. "At this point the most likely possibility is sabotage. "If there was sabotage you would have to look at private institutions and foundations in this country. From that milieu you can create a nuclear saboteur." The NRC and the FBI currently are investigating possible sabotage at the nuclear power plant in Surrey, Va., where caustic soda was found on unused nuclear fuel assemblies. When asked about sabotage at Three Mile Island, Levitt replied, "We have the case in Virginia. So what's the big deal?"

— Sabotage At TMI? UPI Tyrone Daily Herald Saturday, June 2, 1979

By Saturday, July 14th, more than 10,000 Legionnaires, American Legion Auxiliary members and their families are expected to be here attending the 61st Annual American Legion State Convention at the Pittsburgh Hilton, July 11- 14. [..]

Jon C. Gilbertson, a nuclear engineer, director of nuclear engineering for the Fusion Energy Foundation, and a founding member of the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the Three Mile Island incident, will also speak on Thursday.

— American Legion Slates 61st State Convention, PAGE EIGHT —THKTITI'SVILLE HERALD, Titusville, Pa., Tuesday, July 10, 1979

Among the avid proponents of fusion energy is the ultra-rightwing U.S. Labor Party (USLP) or National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) headed by Lyn Marcus, (also known as Lyndon LaRouche). In 1974 the USLP/NCLC founded the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), its think-tank on fusion energy. FEF publishes two journals: The International Journal of Fusion Energy, a professional looking technical journal on fusion, and Fusion Magazine, a monthly. Fusion has carried such enlightening articles as, "There is no Cancer Epidemic" by Dr. Richard Pollak, which purports to demonstrate that the "...scare stories about carcinogens from the environmentalists have more to do with their prejudices against industrial society than with scientific facts."

(In the spring of 1977, the USLP was involved in gathering information for the New Hampshire State Police to target the Clamshell Alliance as a "cover for terrorist activity.")

— No nukes: everyone's guide to nuclear power By Anna Gyorgy. p. 272 South End Press, 1980 ISBN 0896080064, 9780896080065

Members of a U. S.-based pro-nuclear organization are raising money in Canada for a right-wing political party that among other things preaches anti-Semitism and considers Metro Toronto a key target for recruiting. The Fusion Energy Foundation, which advocates unlimited expansion of nuclear power generation, was set up five years ago by members of the U. S. Labor Party, a radical and cult-like group that has campaigned for world industrialization. Although FEF members deny that the foundation is linked financially to the USLP - known in Canada as the North American Labor Party - the two organizations share office space in New York City. In many cases their memberships overlap. And despite a U. S. law that prohibits candidates from receiving donations from outside the country, an FEF spokesman said the group is gathering funds in Toronto for the party's leader, a 1980 U. S. presidential candidate. [..]

Richard Sanders, a 37-year-old unemployed taxi driver, orchestrates the activities of both the NALP and the FEF in Metro Toronto. Mr. Sanders has run for mayor of Toronto in the past three elections; in 1978 he received 40 votes, and accused his opponents of rigging the balloting. Mr. Sanders was reluctant to talk about party financing in a recent interview, but he did say that money raised in Canada for the FEF (incorporated in New York State) is kept separate from USLP funds.

After that, I send the money down to New York. I don't know what happens to it once it gets down there, but I don't worry about those things. . . . It would be hard to prove that anything that was taking place was wrong.

[..]

At the same time, money earned through the sale of LaRouche literature is sent to the leader's U. S. campaign committee, Mr. Sanders said. U. S. law says candidates for political office must not solicit, accept or receive a contribution from citizens of another country. [..]

Members of the four groups - the USLP, the NCLC, New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications Inc. - received 78 per cent of the group's spending, Mr. Eiland said. The investigators also failed to locate 49 of 70 citizens listed as having donated money; several others denied making donations.

— Nuclear Group Raises Funds For Right-Wing Party In U.S. Ross Laver. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Jan 2, 1980. pg. P.5

A pro-nuclear organization says it has new evidence that sabotage was the cause of last spring's reactor accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. A spokesman for the Fusion Energy Foundation said foundation officials would release the evidence today. "There was an environment in that plant that was at least conducive to tampering," said Paul Gallagher, business manager of the New York based organization. "New evidence is accumulating that sabotage very likely occurred," he said in a telephone interview. The foundation has frequently suggested sabotage in past months. Plant operators and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have discounted sabotage as a cause of the accident, the worst in the history of commercial nuclear power.

The foundation pins its claims on the still unexplained closing of two key valves in the plant's emergency feedwater system prior to the accident. The NRC and the plant experts say the improperly closed valves did in fact lead to the accident, but could not have done so without a series of other mechanical problems and human errors., They say the mechanical problems and the errors are now well understood, and were definitely not deliberate. "We haven't had any indications that would lead to sabotage at all," said plant technical spokesman Ralph Neidig. In January, the NRC's special Rogovin report on the accident said it investigated the possibility of sabotage. "We remained alert for any evidence that the accident might have been caused or complicated by an intentional, malicious action ... We developed no such evidence," said the report. The Rogovin report and other official studies say the closed feedwater valves resulted in the original overheating problems at the plant, but the biggest problem was a pressure valve that opened and then failed to close. [..]

Gallagher disagreed. "The more information that becomes available about TMI, the clearer it becomes that... it would not have been a significant incident at all if the backup feedwater valves- had not been shut off," he said. The foundation wants fission nuclear power plants like Three Mile Island to continue operating until technology can be developed to harness fusion energy.

— Pro-Nuclear Group Claims Sabotage Caused TMI Accident, Indiana Evening Gazette, April 8,. 1980, p. 8

Another item on the U.S.L.P.’s rightist agenda is its support of nuclear power. In line with its doctrinal commitment to economic advance and high technology, in 1975 it launched the Fusion Energy Foundation. Environmental opponents of nuclear power are consequently described as the vanguard of the forces of “deindustriaIization” poised on the cusp of terrorism, if not already immersed in it. The party’s,attack on the antinuclear movement deploys a wide range of weapons-infiltration, disruption, threats, defamation (an antinuclear rally js branded a “drug and terrorist festival”). Wild charges are dispatched to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, state and local police; the Federal authorities are petitioned to treat ,speakers at antinthear rallies as violators of the Federal statute that prohibits thc crossing of state lines in order to incite a riot. These familiar shenanigans aside, the Fusion Enera Foundation has gained a solid foothold in the pronnclezr scientific community. The foundation calls for a $5 billion crash program to create an American fusion-energy capability by the year 2000. Although the operating leadership of the foundation consists entirely of U.S. Labor Party members, it has lured dozens of corporate executives, physicists, government planners and plasma biologists to serve-largely as figureheads-on its scientific advisory board, and it has also salted its board of directors with nonparty members. Most of these people are unaware of the foundation’s connection with the Labor Party; ,those who do know of it are usually unaware of ‘what the party stands for.

The fcnundafion has become deeply involved in fusion energy research, and most fusion researchers in the country have at one time or another had direct contact with foundation represkntatives; event he head of fusion research for the Federal Government has cooperated with the group. The ties between the foundation and the pcientific community are so strong that, according to one energy researcher, “they get information on new fusion energy developments and pass them ondo us literally months before the government does. And they’re always accurate.’’

The attempt to politicize the nuclear energy issue, to propagandize the readership of the foundation’s two journals with the U.S.L.P. line-through editorials as well as the writings of Chairman LaRouche-has created problems. To begin with, the foundation’s tax exemption bprs it from such activities, and the scientists involved have found the propaganda repellent.

— Donner and Rothenberg, The Strange Odyssey of Lyndon LaRouche, The Nation, August 16-23, 1980

WASHINGTON - A new book published Thursday tells people how to build their own hydrogen bomb, if they can get the ingredients. The Fusion Energy Foundation's book, The Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices, contains detailed explanation of the science behind the H-bomb. It follows unsuccessful efforts by the government t.> block a similar magazine article last year. The paperback book, published by a private foundation that promotes the use of nuclear energy, sells for $995 Parts and supplies are extra and cannot be found in any store.

— New book tells how to build H-bomb, 8—Section 1 Friday, November 6, 1981 THE DAILY HERALD (Arlington Heights?)

A new book explaining how to build a hydrogen bomb, but the author says he doesn't expect it to foster an arms race among basement tinkerers. "Only a country could build a bomb, and a country rich enough to build one would have no trouble doing it," Freidwardt Winterberg, a research professor at the University of Nevada, said. He spoke at a press conference coinciding with the publication of his booky "The Physical Principles of Theemonuclear Explosive Devices," by the Fusion Energy Foundation, a private organization promoting use of nuclear energy. The 144-page paperback is packed with diagrams, formulae and equations that Winterberg says it can be easily understock , by any bright undergraduate student with the fundamental grasp of, physics and calculus. Its detailed explanation of the science behind the Hbomb is'common knowledge among scientists, but many of its facts are still considered security secrets by nations with nuclear capabilities, according to Winter-i berg.

— You, Too, Can Build The Bomb AP Indiana Evening Gazette, November 9, 1981

They are not told of the Beacon's ties to LaRouche or the Labor Party. In fact, the U.S. Labor Party no longer technically exists. It has dissolved itself, like the National Caucus of Laboir Committees before it, into the National Democratic Policy Committee, the Fusion Energy Foundation and, now, Beacon itself. But no matter what LaRouche calls it, the party line remans essentially the same, and the Beacon is rife with it.

— Teamster Madness, Douglas Foster, Mother Jones Magazine Jan 1982

A pro-nuclear energy group founded with the help of politician Lyndon LaRouche said yesterday it will try to make "a laughingstock" out of Henry Kissinger by pushing an assault complaint against his wife. Dennis Speed, regional coordinator of Fusion Energy Foundation, said it was at his suggestion that a group member filed charges after being involved in an altercation with the Kissingers.

— KISSINGER TARGET OF COMPLAINT (AP). Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Boston, Mass.] 5 Mar. 1982,1.

Nancy Kissinger made one mistake in etiquette when she allegedly tried to choke that woman in Newark airport: Mrs. Kissinger did not stornp on the woman's face. The details of the case have been widely reported in the press. Mrs, Kissinger and her husband, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were waiting Feb. 7 at the airport for a flight to Boston, where Kissinger was to undergo a triplebypass heart operation. Also at the airport were Ellen L. Kaplan and a companion, Thomas Simpson, who are members of a pro-nuclear group called the Fusion Energy Foundation.' The Kissingers reportedly walked by teh table where Mrs. Kaplan and Simpson were sitting. Mrs. Kaplan "decided to ask the Kissingers some questions." So, as the Kissingers walked by, Mrs. Kaplan asked Kissing why he had "prolonged the war in Vietnam." Upon hearing the question, Kissinger reportedly said, "Jesus Christ." Mrs. Kaplan then followed the couple and admits saying to Kissinger: "Mr. Kissinger, do you sleep with young boys at the Carlyle Hotel?" Mrs. Kaplan charges that at this point Nancy Kissinger grabbed her by the throat and tried to choke her. Mrs. Kissinger then allegedly pushed her face close to Mrs. Kaplan's and said, "Do you want to get slugged?" Mrs. Kaplan recalls: "I just froze and pulled away and told her, 'You better not try.'" An attorney for Mrs. Kissinger has said his client is not guilty of the allegations, and a trial date has beensetfor,May26. But rather than face assault charges, Mrs. Kissinger should be given some sort of medal for valor. The only mistake she made was not finishing what she started. [..]

Unfortunately, a number of fringe religious and political groups have cashed in on the proposition that anyone can say anything anywhere. Knowing that airports are laces where generally well-to-do men and women are literally trapped, these groups have made a practice of setting up shop in the airport concourses — and either trying to sell "literature" to the passengers, or attempting to engage them in conversation designed to sway the passengers to the proselytizers' point of view. [..]

Traditionally, the worst of th airport leeches were the Hare Krishna men and women. A couple of years ago there was a brief and wonderful spell when passengers fought back by purchasing metal clickers, and clicking them in the Krishnas' faces as soon as they saw them. For a period of months the Krishnas were driven off like so many unwanted crows by passengers with clickers. But that soon died off, and in many airports the Krishnas are back. Dr. and Mrs. Kissinger were not stopped by Krishnas, though; they, were stopped by people from Fusion. Fusion is perhaps the most obnoxious of the groups now infesting the airports. They are easy to identify; I cannot be precise about this, because — due to my feeling abou flying — I am invariably heavily drugged when I am passing through an airport. But if you see men and women carrying signs that mention Jane Fonda, whales, and Ted Kennedy's car, you can assume they are from Fusion. Picture this scene if you will: Dr. and Mrs. Kissinger are on their way to a hospital, where Kissinger will be undergion surgery that is lifethreatening. First this Mrs. Kaplan wants to discuss foreign policy with Kissinger. Then she accuses him of homosexual relationships with young boys. If Mrs. Keplan's allegation that Mrs. Kissinger tried to choke her is true — do you blame Mrs. Kissinger? If your spouse were on his or her way to the hospital for a serious f operation, would your instincts be any different? Mrs. Kaplan explained her actions by saying she was a "longstanding opponent" of Kissinger, and that she "wanted to confront the man with how low he is."

— Nancy Kissinger's only mistake ByBOB GREENE 4-A (Galveston Daily March 15, 1982

One outspoken advocate of the president's plan is Uwe Parpart Henke a physicist with the non-profit Fusion Energy Foundation of New York The organization was founded in 1974 by several people including Lyndon Larouche, a longtime nuclear energy proponent, the founder of the U,S, Labor Party and an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. [..]

Spokeswoman Christina Hutch said Larouche remains on the foundation's advisory board but the organization has no financial link to his political campaigns. Henke said in a telephone interview that a "foolproof" system using spacebased laser weapons could be constructed in 10 to 12 years. Other researchers, however, were considerably less optimistic Sidney Drell, a professor of physics at Stanford University and former defense consultant to the White House and the National Security Council, said that assessment assumes "that the offense doesn't react to your deployment." Henke said his group became interested in laser and particle beam weapons — such as beams of high energy electrons or protons — as an offshoot of its work in fusion energy research. Charles Baker, director of the fusion power program at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, said Monday that the Fusion Energy Foundation has "overstated" the promise of fusion energy. "They will tell people that with sufficient support fusion can be accomplished in only a few years," Baker said. "The judgment of the vast majority of the people actually working in fusion believe it will take substantially longer." Henke's projection is considerably more optimistic than President Reagan's. Last week, Reagan expressed hope for such a defense by the end of the century.

— Fred S. Hoffman, Defense Plan Is Debated, AP, TITUSVILLE. PA.. TUESDAY MORNING, MARCH 29,1983 Titusville Herald. P. 1

Most people only see them at air terminals — those cleancut, intense young people carrying signs exhorting you to support nuclear power. Show the slightest interest, and they'll gladly give you a lengthy discourse on their dream for the future: mankind freed from material wants thanks to the limitless energy fusion power would provide. Listen long enough and you might even be talked into buying a copy of the slick publications which are the mainstay of their group — The Fusion Energy Foundation — like Fusion magazine, or Executive Intelligence Review. On the surface it all seems quite harmless, if a bit single-minded. Things, however, are not always what they seem.

not always what they seem. What most people don't realize is that these fresh-looking young people are really members of the U.S. Labor Party (USLP), a virulently anti-Semitic outgrowth of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). And the Fusion Energy Foundation is really a front the USLP uses to win the confidence of unsuspecting businessmen. Over the year, the USLP has developed a variety of fronts for its activities, including the National Caucus of Labor Committees, the National Democratic Policy Committee, the National Anti-Drug Coalition and the Fusion Energy Foundation. Recently, they established something called the National Labor Committee to Defend Harrison Williams, which the AFL-CIO News described as being used to "...draw trade union officials into the orbit of the National Democratic Policy Committee." [..]

During the last several years, the Fusion Energy Foundation has succeeded in gaining the confidence, albeit for short periods of time, of a variety of respected scientists. By sponsoring conferences on nuclear energy, they are able to dupe some of these individuals into lending their organization a patina of undeserved credibility. Worse, there is the danger of potentially damaging the reputations of those involved since LaRouche and his followers have never hesitated to drop names at every opportunity.

— Radicals Ride on Legitimate Issues, By MiLT COPULOS PAGE FOUR—THE TITUSVILLE HERALD, Titutville, Pa., April 14, 1983

Harley Schlanger, a little known Democratic candidate for retiring U.S. Sen. John Tower's seat, is on the offensive when it comes to defense. The Houston resident is campaigning on a platform in favor of the MX missle, the B-l bomber and laser beam weapons which he believes form the only credible defense against nuclear weapons. "We need a crash program in defense laser beam technology, which the press has called 'Star Wars,'" said Schlanger, southern regional coordinator for the Fusion Energy Foundation, a pronuclear group. Schlanger, 34, a founder of the National Democratic Policy Committee, also favors a ".wholesale monetary reorganization starting with taking the Federal Reserve out of the control of the big international banks."

— Schlanger candidate for Senate, 6A The Paris News April 22. 1984

The basis of LaRouche's effort is his cadre organization, the National Caucus of Labor Committees (N.C.L.C.), which controls assorted front groups and enjoys close ties to the Ku Klux Klan. The most visible arms are the Fusion Energy Foundation (F.E.F.), which promotes nuclear power and beam weapons, and the National Democratic Policy Committee (N.D.P.C.), an electoral machine on the fringes of the Democratic Party. [..]

Perhaps the most significant of LaRouche's N.5.c. contacts was Dr. Ray Pollock-one of the chief architects of Reagan's star wars policy. Pollock, WIlO resigned from the Administration early this year, told us of two meetings he had in his N.S.C. office with LaRouche, and he also described his long history of contacts with aides of LaRouche: first as a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, then as a Department of Energy adviser, and finally at the N.s.C. nOLLOCK STATED that "LaRouche is a frightening .1.-kind of fellow." But he too was intrigued by LaRouche's talented followers. Pollock's initial contact was Chuck Stevens, an engineer who works for the Fusion Energy Foundation and who began calling Pollock when Pollock was at Los Alamos. Pollock said that Stevens and other F.E.F. members "had interesting rumors about the fusion community," which he said "speaks well for their intelligence network." [..]

According to Fusion magazine, two F.E.F. staff members did travel to Moscow in December 1978 to attend a conference on "laser interaction." In addition, N.C.L.C. defectors recall a slide show given by a LaRouche science aide after returning from a tour of a Soviet science complex near Novosibirsk in central Siberia. [..]

Although Keegan soon terminated all contact with the LaRouchians because of his uneasiness over their politics, they continued their work without him through articles in Fusion, careful monitoring of relevant Soviet literature in plasma physics, and polemics against scientists skeptical of particle beam technologies. But the heart of their work in this area during the Carter Administration was the cultivation of scientists in fusion research-the springboard of the star wars technology. Important in this effort was a pragmatic relationship formed with several scientists in the Carter Administration's Department of Energy, who found the F.E.F. useful in promoting the cause of fusion research and were willing to speak at its conferences and otherwise lend their prestige to its organizing efforts. For instance, Dr. John Clarke, then the deputy director of the Office of Fusion Energy, and today its director, praised the F.E.F. in a 1978 speech for its "courage" in championing high technology and acknowledged the fusion community's "debt of gratitude." (The F.E.F. promptly used the statement in a drive to sign up new members; and Dr. Clarke reaffirmed the statement in answer to queries, according to Freedom of Information documents released by the Department of Energy.) Dr. Stephen Dean, director of Magnetic Confinement Systems in the Office of Fusion Energy, also spoke at F.E.F. events, including a conference staged to promote the Palestinian and Arab cause, with Dr. Clovis Maksoud of the Arab League as the keynote speaker. Dean continued to cooperate with the F.E.F. after he left the government, and even accompanied a LaRouche science aide on an F.E.F.-arranged trip to India, where the two had an audience with fusion enthusiast Indira Gandhi. In a recent phone interview, Dean indicated that he and other leading fusion scientists continue to have sympathy for the F.E.F.'s work. "I don't think they've done the country any harm," he said. "It makes life exciting to have them around." None of the past or present Department of Energy scientists who helped the F.E.F. ever had much sympathy for the group's conspiracy theories. However, the LaRouchians did manage to develop a more ideological relationship with two maverick university-based fusion scientists, Dr. Winston Bostick and Dr. Friedwardt Winterberg. Bostick, who became involved in beam weapons-related [..]

research at the Kirtland Air Force Base weapons laboratory from 1979 to 1983, confirmed in a recent telephone interview that he supports many of LaRouche's political positions, including LaRouche's attempts to promote "German military, scientific, cultural, and economic traditions" among Americans. Winterberg, who volunteered ideas on beam weapons to the Air Force in the late 1970s and continues to speculate on the subject, has collaborated with the LaRouchians in a variety of ways, including foreign speaking tours for the F.E.F. In 1981 he provided them with diagrams of such esoterica as a "Nuclear X-Ray Laser Weapon Using Thermonuclear Explosives," which they promptly published in Fusion. He then wrote them a manual on how to make an H-bomb. By the end of the Carter Administration, the F.E.F. was claiming thousands of members in the science and engineering community (on paper, at least) and over 80,000 Fusion subscribers. In 1980 one F.E.F. physicist wangled an invitation to give a lecture on the military applications of fusion power at West Point, and another spoke to a sizable audience of weapons scientists at Lawrence livermore. With the enhanced credibility came many donations; and, in fiscal year 1980-81, the F.E.F. reported an income of close to $2 million. In April 1981 LaRouche's New Solidarity reported that President Reagan "is known to favor a space-based ABM system." This information was apparently one reason that the F.E.F. began in 1981 to shift its main focus from fusion research to particle and laser beam weapons. In May 1981 the F.E.F. held a Washington conference to publicize new studies of "anti-missile beam potentials." The following February, LaRouche himself proposed at an EIR forum in \Vashington that a public drive for "defensive" beam weapons be stimulated to counter the nuclear freeze movement. LaRouche then issued a report which advocated beam weapons in greater detail-to bring about a "modern" u.s. military policy. In May 1982 the F.E.F. circulated to scientists and the Pentagon a "white paper" on beam weapons written by Dr. Bardwell. In August the F.E.F. distributed a special report on the X-ray laser concept to members of Congress, and this was followed up by several "briefings" for Capitol Hill aides. [..]

After Reagan's speech, the media turned to the F.E.F. as a legitimate source for explaining what the President had in mind. F.E.F. spokesmen were quoted in wire service reports, syndicated columns, The Washington Post, and many local newspapers across the country. In their own publications, the LaRouchians were quick to claim a major share of the credit for the star wars policy, even describing LaRouche as its "intellectual author." According to Ray Pollock, they "flooded Capitol Hill" with such claims. He recalls that some people in the Administration and on the Hill became "concerned," but that "no action was taken to straighten out the record." The LaRouchians promoted the President's new policy on various fronts. Their spokesmen testified at Congressional hearings and lobbied for beam weapon resolutions in several state legislatures. Beam weapons became a major theme of their electoral campaigns and of speaking tours by F.E.F. scientists. In the summer of 1983 the EIR published two "forecast reviews" on classified beam technology studies being prepared by the National Security Council. In October 1983 the F.E.F. held a seminar on beam weapons in the Dirksen Office Building. Dr. Pollock, who attended this meeting, recalls that "the room was full" and that many "government people" were there. [..]

Today, DeLauer says that the statement about fIR's expertise was an expression of his "exasperation" with the interviewer. As for LaRouche, he said, "1 have no use for that guy and his opinions." Yet DeLauer (who has recentlybeen attacked in LaRouchian publications for his alleged "go slow" attitude on the 5.0.1.) made an exception for the F.E.F., praising it for being "the only active group that opposes Jane Fonda" and for its championing of nuclear power. "In their support of nucledr power-in that sense-I support them," DeLauer said, and revealed that he had given them a financial donation. Asked about an obscene anti-Jane Fonda bumper sticker sold by the F.E.F., DeLauer said, chuckling, "I got another one [F.E.F. slogan} for you: 'more people have been killed in the back seat of Ted Kennedy's car than in a nuclear reactor' " Nevertheless, DeLauer stuck to his main theme: the LaRouchians have "no standing whatsoever" with the Defense Department.

— THE LARoUCHE CONNECTION By DENNIS KING AND RONALD RADOSH THE NEW REPUBLIC NOVEMBER 19, 1984. p. 15

While the National Democratic Policy Committee works to promote LaRouche's political ideas - these include a return to the gold standard, low interest rates, and rapid development of nuclear power and "Star Wars" technology - such groups as the Fusion Energy Foundation help to recruit new members attracted by its pro-nuclear stance and, in some cases, ignorant of other aspects of LaRouche's operation. Among the various groups here and abroad that draw new ntembers are: the International Caucus of Labor Committees; the Schiller Institute, ostensibly set up to promote German-American unity; the Lafayette Foundation for the Arts and Sciences: and the Club of Life. an international political organization that started up as an anti-environmentalist and anti-population-control group. Where does all the money come from? At trial, LaRouche claimed to know nothing about his organizations' financial activities. Some of the money comes from donations, some from the sale of intelligence reports to foreign countries. And some of the money comes from the sale of publications. Among them are E.rec'utit,e Intelligence Reviey,, a weekly that costs $399 a year; Investigative Leads, a newsletter sent to police chiefs and members of law enforcement agencies; Neu' Solidctin', the LaRouche newspaper, which comes out twice a week; and The Cantpaigner, a monthly theoretical journal. The Fusion Energy Foundation also publishes a glossy monthly, Fusion.

— Far left, far right - far out, Pat Lynch, COLUIVBIA JOURNALIS, \/ REVIEW MARCH/APRIL 1985. p.44

For years, his well-dressed young followers have collared passers-by at airports with catchy signs such as "Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales," signing up backers for their pro-nuclear, pro-"Star Wars," anti-drugs, anti-AIDS and other campaigns. Without mentioning their LaRouche affiliation, they ask people to subscribe to officialsounding publications like the "Executive Intelligence Review," and "Fusion" magazine, or to join groups. Federal officials say hundreds of purchasers have been overcharged on their credit cards and others unwittingly have ended up as political contributors to Mr. LaRouche. U.S. Attorney William Weld, in a recent Massachusetts court filing, says a continuing federal investigation "indicates an extensive nationwide pattern of the unauthorized use of credit card numbers by LaRouche-related entities and individuals."

— LaRouche Group, Long on the Political Fringe Gets Mainstream Scrutiny After Illinois Primary. By Ellen Hume. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Mar 28, 1986. pg. 1

Millions of Americans who travel frequently through United States airports have seen at least one phase of the LaRouche operation. LaRouche supporters, under the aegis of the "Fusion Energy Foundation," solicit support for laserbeam weapons for national defense. The LaRouche cause is also trumpeted in his publications — the weekly Executive Intelligence Review, the twice-a-week newspaper New Solidarity, and pamphlets and books such as one entitled "LaRouche: Will this man become President?"

— LaRouche forces suddenly front and center in 1986 elections The Christian Science Monitor A-8 THE FREDERICK POST, FREDERICK, MD., WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 1986

Four organizations associated with Lyndon LaRouche yesterday appealed contempt findings and assessment of civil fines for their failure to comply with grand jury subpoenas for their records. The subpoenas were issued more than a year ago by a federal grand jury in Boston which is probing credit card fraud by various entities and individuals associated with LaRouche. According to a brief filed by Assistant US Attorney Daniel I. Small, the "initial investigation indicated an extensive use of credit card numbers by LaRouche-related entities and individuals resulting in hundreds of unauthorized charges apparently totally hundreds of thousands of dollars." After hearing arguments yesterday by attorneys Matthew H. Feinberg and Kenneth J. Aronson for the LaRouche organizations and by Small, the three- judge panel took the case under advisement. On March 29, 1985, US District Judge A. David Mazzone ordered each of four organizations, Campaigner Publications Inc., Caucus Distributors Inc., National Democratic Policy Committee and the Fusion Energy Foundation, fined $10,000 for contempt.

— FOUR LAROUCHE ORGANIZATIONS APPEAL CONTEMPT FINDINGS, FINES William F. Doherty, Globe Staff. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Apr 9, 1986. pg. 30

A Michigan man, Robert Seeber, wrote to the FEC that $1,000 was charged to his Visa account by LaRouche supporters and that he then received promissory notes in the mail. Seeber said he believed they got his card number from a subscription he took to Fusion Magazine, a LaRouche publication. "I feel there was a hard sell conspiracy to get loan dollars for LaRouche so they could get matching election funds," wrote Seeber.

— Court Papers Detail LaRouche Operation; [ALL EDITIONS] By Rita Ciolli. Newsday Washington Bureau. Newsday. (Combined editions). Long Island, N.Y.: Apr 15, 1986. pg. 15

One Church Hill woman, who didn't want to be named, said she received a telephone solicitation just before the 1984 presidential election by a group representing "Democrats for Reagan." The woman said she donated, by credit card, less than $100 but "not a paltry sum." Other calls came after that. During about the third or fourth call, the woman recalled, she heard a reference to LaRouche. She told the caller she was no longer interested. However, sporadic calls continued. The last, on April 12, came from someone selling subscriptions to "Fusion," a LaRouche-backed publication, she said.

— EX-LAROUCHE 'SUCKER' FEELS VINDICATED Rex Springston. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Apr 23, 1986. pg. 1

[Charles R.] Zimmerman, a retired Bethlehem Steel executive and investor, said he was persuaded to invest $200,000 in a partnership with other LaRouche associates for the purchase of a small AM radio station, WTRI of Brunswick, Md. He has lost track of how many other loans and gifts he gave, but one estimate puts the total at more than $1 million. [..]

Edward Spannaus, treasurer of the LaRouche campaign, declined to comment when asked about allegations by individuals that they were talked into making loans they now regret and for which they have not been repaid. Spannaus said, "I'm not going to comment on matters that are in litigation right now." Asked if LaRouche-related organizations encourage supporters or members to turn over personal savings, Spannaus attributed the allegation to "the drug lobby." In a series of interviews over several days this week and last week, Zimmerman recalled the campaign for his contributions, most of which were made to the LaRouche-linked Fusion Energy Foundation. Receipts show that Zimmerman sent at least 24 overnight letters by Federal Express between last Christmas and late February, some on successive days. Zimmerman said he was sending them checks. Each was addressed to Fusion Energy or to Caucus Distributors Inc., another LaRouche-reiated group, in Baltimore. He signed two form letters late last year agreeing to convert $20,000 in loans to gifts. Asked why, Zimmerman said, "They asked me to."

— LaRouche Network Taps Old Millionaire By WILLIAM M. WELCH Associated Press Writer, p.12 - Casa Grande, Ariz. DISPATCH Saturday, April 26,1986

Charles R. Zimmerman is an elderly, forgetful and bewildered millionaire who says I'm mad at myself now for turning over hundreds of thousands of dollars to the network of organizations around the political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche. Mr. Zimmerman, a retired executive of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, is one of a number of elderly or infirm people who, according to public records and their own accounts, have been the target of money-raising efforts by Mr. LaRouche's Presidential campaigns or by organizations linked to him. [..]

In an interview Friday night on the ABC News program Nightline, Mr. LaRouche contended that people who have said they regret turning over money to his representatives were under extreme pressure from the outside. He described Mr. Zimmerman as a person who's been associated with us as a supporter for a long time and said Mr. Zimmerman had come under massive pressure amounting to extortion to try to interfere with his relationship with us. [..]

Mr. Zimmerman, a thin man whose red hair has turned white, lives alone in a small, comfortable apartment in a high-rise retirement development here. Above his desk is a plaque from the Fusion Energy Foundation bestowing its Benjamin Franklin Award Honoring Special Contributions to the Future of Science.

— LAROUCHE TACTICS PROVOKE DISPUTE, AP, New York Times, Apr 27, 1986

Like thousands of others, David Nick Anderson's first brush with the politics of extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche was at an airport where LaRouche followers were selling magazines. Anderson liked what he heard, charged a copy of LaRouche's Fusion magazine to his credit card, and stayed in touch. Several years later, the 36-year-old third-generation Oklahoma oilman is a major financial supporter of LaRouche's presidential campaign and network of organizations. He is, in fact, Lyndon LaRouche's landlord.

— CONSERVATIVE OILMAN PAYS RENT FOR LAROUCHE ESTATE The Associated Press. Sun Sentinel. Fort Lauderdale: May 3, 1986. pg. 6.A

His organization is based in Leesburg, Va., and includes what Federal records describe as a labyrinth of related groups that shuffle money and employees among one another. The four involved in the subpoenas here are the National Democratic Policy Committee; Campaigner Publications Inc., a multimillion dollar company, according to court records; Caucus Distributors Inc., which pays bills and salaries for various LaRouche activities, according to court records; and Fusion Energy Foundation Inc., which promotes reseach in nuclear energy.

— LAROUCHIES' FINE FOR CONTEMPT SWELLS TOTAL OVER $17 MILLION, GROWING Joel Brinkley, Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: May 21, 1986. pg. 4

The business network, defectors say, is essentially an elaborate shell game, with cash always in motion from shell to shell to avoid taxes and court judgments and to disguise various questionable transactions. The taxexempt, nonprofit Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), and political action and election campaign committees are frequently used. An interview transcript quoting an NCLC defector, introduced as an exhibit in the case of "LaRouche vs. NBC," reads as follows: "Money from the . . . profit-making organizations went into political campaigns and was not correctly reported. Money from the tax-exempt {FEF} was given to the political campaign, unbeknownst to the people who made the contributions. . . . Someone would contribute to the {FEF} because they believed in nuclear power and their contribution would turn up as a contribution for . . . {LaRouche's} presidential campaign." The structure of the network makes government investigation difficult. Mr. LaRouche and his followers compound the problem by claiming that any probe is politically motivated, and by launching civil-rights suits against the investigators. [..]

Charles Zimmerman, an 80-year-old former Bethlehem Steel executive living in Sarasota, Fla., was induced to donate or loan a total of more than $2 million to the FEF and other groups over a recent six-month period, according to Jay Silverman, a lawyer for Mr. Zimmerman's bank. Mr. Silverman said a civil complaint is being prepared against the LaRouchians. In another recent incident, Elizabeth Rose, an 83-year-old Pennsylvania resident, was persuaded to donate more than $1 million to at least three LaRouchian entities, according to William Eastburn, a lawyer representing Mrs. Rose's children. "It's like they {the LaRouchians} are her surrogate children," said Nancy Day, a daughter of Mrs. Rose, who confirmed the gifts had been made. "They're going to suck out her eyeballs," she said. Both Mr. Eastburn and Ms. Day said the LaRouchians were attempting to alienate Mrs. Rose from her family.

— The Empire of Lyndon LaRouche By Dennis King and Patricia Lynch. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: May 27, 1986. pg. 1

Maryland is one of four states in which state securities administrators have issued cease-and-desist orders against Caucus Distributors or another LaRouche-related organization, Fusion Energy Foundation. The other states are California, Alaska and Indiana.

— LAROUCHE GROUP BLAMES PRESS, FEDERAL PROBE FOR ITS CASH WOES :[THIRD Edition]." Seattle Times, June 9, 1986,

Maryland and Indiana have also issued similar orders against Caucus Distributors, and securities officials in California have issued an order against another LaRouche group, the Fusion Energy Foundation. The Illinois Attorney General's office has been asked to file suit against Caucus Distributors for alleged securities violations.

— LAROUCHE MONEY IS UNDER SCRUTINY, AP, New York Times, Jun 15, 1986

Two organizations tied to political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, already cited for securities violations in seven states and the object of a federal probe, are facing a New York state investigation into fund-raising tactics, a spokesman for the state attorney general said Monday. New York state officials have issued subpoenas for financial and tax records for the organizations, Caucus Distributors Inc. and Fusion Energy Foundation Inc.

The investigation involves allegations of fraud and the sale of unregistered securities. in the course of fund-raising by both organizations, as well as the alleged failure by Fusion Energy Foundation' to file required annual financial disclosure reports for five years, said Timothy Gilles, press secretary to New York Attorney General Robert Abrams. [..]

Both organizations have been involved in a federal grand jury investigation in Boston into allegations of credit card fraud, along with the LaRouche presidential campaign organization and other LaRouche-linked groups and individuals. Gilles said the state investigation began several weeks ago because of complaints and because of the actions taken by authorities in other states.

He said the New York attorney general's office had "received complaints of fundraising misrepresentations, of heavyhanded fundraising. We have received complaints of alleged credit card fraud/' In one case, Gilles said, a contributor "understood his contribution would be used in support of President Reagan.... He later finds out it's to a LaRouche organization."

Caucus Distributors is incorporated in New York state as a not-for-profit organization. Fusion Energy is registered with the New York attorney general as a notfor- profit organization making public solicitations, Gilles said. Both groups have been involved in extensive fund-raising, solicitation of loans and sale of unsecured promissory notes to individuals across the nation. Many people have loaned or contributed amounts in the tens of thousands of dollars. [..]

One or both of the organizations has been the object of cease-and-desist orders to stop selling unregistered securities, in the form of promissory notes, in these states: Indiana, Washington, Alaska, Maryland, California and Minnesota.

— Attorney General Investigates LaRouche Fund-Raisers, PAGE B-4/THE POST-STANDARD, Tuesday, July 1,1986 (Albany, NY?)

A federal appeals court in Boston yesterday upheld contempt citations and massive civil fines totaling more than $17 million against four organizations associated with extremist politican Lyndon LaRouche. The four groups were cited for their failure to cooperate with a federal grand jury investigation of possible credit card fraud by them and other LaRouche-related groups. The groups are suspected of obtaining hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest-free loans from banks by fraudulently altering small credit card purchases or donations from persons interested in LaRouche. The monies were ultimately returned, without interest, after the owners of the credit cards informed the banks that the charges were not authorized. Prosecutors have said that the LaRouche groups allegedly made unauthorized charges of $500, $1,000 or more to the credit card numbers of people they solicited to buy magazines, often at airports. The fines were imposed by US District Judge A. David Mazzone after the groups failed to comply with grand jury subpoenas for documents. Cited were: Campaigner Publications Inc., Fusion Energy Foundation, National Democratic Policy Committee and Caucus Distributors Inc.

— FINES FOR LAROUCHE GROUPS UPHELD William F. Doherty, Globe Staff " Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext), July 4, 1986

State and federal authorities across the country are investigating the financial empire of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche and charging that his followers have duped people, especially the elderly, into lending nearly $1 million to LaRouche-related organizations. In the last seven months, authorities in at least nine states have started investigations of LaRouche's fundraising. Last month, the Illinois attorney general's office asked Cook County Circuit Judge Joseph Wosik to issue a preliminary injunction prohibiting further sales of promissory notes to Illinois residents by three LaRouche related firms. [..]

In addition, the New York attorney general's office said last week it has begun an investigation into the fundraising practices of two LaRouche-related organizations. The New York investigation stems from the failure of two groups to file state-required reports. One is Fusion Energy Foundation, a La Rouche-related charity that in 1981 reported $3.5 million a year in revenues. The other is Caucus Distributors Inc., a nonprofit corporation that distributes LaRouche propaganda and was named as one of the defendants in the Illinois lawsuit.

— LAROUCHE FUNDING UNDER LEGAL SIEGE Ray Gibson. Chicago Tribune (pre-1997 Fulltext). Chicago, Ill.: Jul 7, 1986. pg. 1

Lawyers for an elderly California woman, armed with a $135,000 judgment, are asking Virginia courts to seize assets of an organization tied to political extremist Lyndon LaRouche in order to recover money she lent the LaRouche group. The organization, Fusion Energy Foundation, acknowledged owing the money to Grace M. Lindros, 71, of Los Angeles in settling a lawsuit in California in January. Mrs. Lindros had charged representatives of Fusion, LaRouche's presidential campaign and another related group used "oppressive and fraudulent tactics" to persuade her to make three loans totaling more than $125,000 and then failed to repay them. "They virtually cleaned her out," said C. Brian O'Gorman, her attorney in Goleta, Calif. "They overcame her will and convinced her to sign over very large amounts of money to entities about which she knew nothing." Fusion Energy Foundation Inc. is one of several groups under investigation by a federal grand jury in Boston into allegations of credit card fraud. It faces multimillion-dollar contempt-of-court judgments stemming from that case. LaRouche, a frequent fringe candidate for president, is listed as a director of the foundation. Fusion Energy agreed to a repayment schedule to settle the woman's suit, but one check for $7,500 bounced and, after several months of payments, no more were received, O'Gorman said. Her lawyers filed a motion for judgment in Loudoun County where LaRouche makes his headquarters, seeking to force the organization to make payments or to have the court attach assets to obtain repayment. No hearing has been set. "We'll attach anything we can find, and we'll go to any other state if we can find assets," said James R. Treese, an Alexandria lawyer also representing Mrs. Lindros. Fusion Energy missed a June 22 deadline to file a response in Circuit Court here. Treese said Fusion, through its lawyer, initially agreed to repay a large portion but recently said the group did not have money to make payments. The Fusion lawyer, Herbert R. Rubenstein, said in an interview he was still trying to negotiate a new schedule to repay the debt. "Obviously we understand we owe some money, and we are trying to negotiate some terms," Rubenstein said. LaRouche's spokesman, Christina Huth, and the executive director of Fusion Energy Foundation, Paul Gallagher, did not return a reporter's telephone calls seeking comment. [..]

According to her suit, Mrs. Lindros said she was first persuaded to lend LaRouche's presidential campaign $950 in April 1984 and 11 days later agreed to lend $25,000 to another LaRouche-related group, Campaigner Publications Inc. Four days later, she was persuaded to lend another $100,000 to Fusion Energy Foundation. According to the suit, the LaRouche group's fund raisers refused to accept a check and took Mrs. Lindros to her bank where they "insisted that she immediately transmit the funds by wire transfer to defendants' account in New York," a method that prevented a stop payment order. O'Gorman said Fusion Energy offered its settlement the day before the case was to be tried in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The claim in Virginia includes the $100,000 loan to Fusion plus interest, attorney's fees and other costs totaling $135,783.32. No settlement has been reached on the smaller loans to Campaigner and The LaRouche Campaign, he said.

— William M. Welch LAROUCHE GROUP FACES JUDGMENT. Richmond Times - Dispatch [serial online]. July 14, 1986:7

A foundation that is part of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche's network of organizations has lost federal tax-exempt status. The Internal Revenue Service has removed Fusion Energy Foundation Inc. from the public list of organizations with tax-exempt status under Section 501 (c) (3) of the IRS code, said Steve Pyrek, IRS spokesman. LaRouche is one of the directors of the New York-based Fusion Energy Foundation, which raises millions of dollars a year through contributions, loans and sales of magazines. "Fusion Energy currently does not enjoy tax-exempt status, and any contribution to it would not be deductible on federal income tax returns as charitable contributions," said Bob Kobel, public affairs officer for the IRS at its Brooklyn, N.Y., office, which maintains records of tax-exempt organizations. Christina Huth, spokeswoman for LaRouche at his Leesburg, Va., headquarters, declined to comment. The foundation is among several LaRouche-related organizations named in court documents as being under investigation for what federal prosecutors in Boston claim is a nationwide pattern of credit-card fraud. Kobel said the IRS could not discuss the circumstances nor the exact date of the revocation of tax-exempt status because federal law prohibits disclosure of certain taxpayer information. [..]

In the July-August issue of Fusion magazine, published by the foundation, an advertisement for the group says, "Donations to the Fusion Energy Foundation are tax-deductible." Fusion Energy is being investigated by the New York attorney general's office for alleged violations of state laws on charitable solicitations, including Fusion Energy's claim that donations to it are tax-deductible. LaRouche disciples are commonly seen in airports selling Fusion magazine. The publication advocates use of fusion energy and other nuclear-energy technologies. The magazine solicits contributions in the name of the foundation.

— Fusion Energy Foundation / LaRouche Firm Loses Tax-Exempt Status San Francisco Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). San Francisco, Calif.: Sep 12, 1986. pg. 14

Guardians for a retired industrialist filed suit yesterday accusing political extremist Lyndon LaRouche of fraud, theft and racketeering in persuading him to turn over $2.6 million to the LaRouche organization. Charles R. Zimmerman, 80, a retired executive with Bethlehem Steel Corp. described as infirm and susceptible, was the object of an intense, high-pressure campaign by LaRouche fund-raisers who persuaded him to make loans and contributions, to forgive most of his loans, and to turn over valuable stock to the LaRouche cause, the suit charged. Zimmerman also was persuaded to turn over $200,000 as principal investor in a small AM radio station in Brunswick, Md., purchased by LaRouche associates with approval of the Federal Communications Commission this year. "Alone, weak and suggestible, Zimmerman was ill-equipped to resist the persistent and overwhelming campaign of the defendants," the suit said. The suit, filed in the Florida circuit court here, named LaRouche, a fringe candidate for president, and two corporations linked to him, Fusion Energy Foundation Inc. and Caucus Distributors Inc. Also named were Paul Gallagher, executive director of Fusion, and Rochelle Ascher, who contacted Zimmerman as a fund-raiser, according to the suit. LaRouche has been listed in federal tax records as a director of Fusion Energy Foundation. Caucus Distributors distributes LaRouche publications.

— LAROUCHE ACCUSED OF FRAUD :[FINAL Edition]. The Patriot - News [serial online]. September 18, 1986:A15.

Much of the work of the grand jury has been made public, because individuals and organizations associated with LaRouche refused to respond to subpoenas. Two of those organizations, the Fusion Energy Foundation and Caucus Distributors Inc., have been found to be in contempt of court and slapped with fines totaling millions of dollars. Many people told authorities that LaRouche followers staffing tables at airports encouraged people to pay for magazine subscriptions with credit cards, according to documents filed as part of the grand jury investigation. When those people received their credit card bills, they reflected charges of hundreds or thousands of dollars rather than the $25 or less that they had authorized, the documents alleged. [..]

The allegations of securities violations apparently stem from complaints similar to that of a California woman. Grace M. Lindros, 71, of Los Angeles contended that representatives of LaRouche-related organizations persuaded her to make three loans totaling more than $125,000 and then failed to repay them. One of the organizations, Fusion Energy Foundation, agreed to pay back a $100,000 loan plus interest, and lawyers for the woman have attempted to attach assets of the organization in Loudoun County to recover the settlement.

— AUTHORITIES RAID LAROUCHE FIRMS' LEESBURG OFFICES Alan Cooper. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Oct 6, 1986. pg. 1

To make a white-collar criminal case against groups tied to political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., Virginia authorities borrowed a page from the vice squad books. The authorities turned to an undercover agent with the Virginia State Police to bait the hook by posing as a potentially sympathetic contributor to LaRouche organizations. State Police Special Agent L.W. Burchett first made contact with a LaRouche supporter when he bought subscriptions to several magazines -- "Fusion Magazine" and "Executive Intelligence Review" -- from a salesman at Washington National Airport in August, according to court documents. Numerous telephone calls to Burchett, soliciting cash donations and loans, followed at a special telephone set up for the investigation. After requests were made repeatedly, he agreed Sept. 18 to lend $5,000 at 6 percent interest. In exchange, he got a letter acknowledging the loan and promising a tour of what one LaRouche supporter termed "headquarters" for the LaRouche organization, a building at 20 S. King St. here, according to an affidavit filed in Loudoun County Circuit Court.

— POLICE SET BAIT TO MAKE CRIMINAL CASE AGAINST LAROUCHE GROUPS Peter Hardin. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Oct 7, 1986. pg. 1

A 75-page affidavit that triggered a police sweep on Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. headquarters here last Monday provides fascinating insights into the money-raising tactics of the bizarre, extremist political movement. [..]

The affidavit, by a special agent of the Virginia state police's bureau of criminal investigation, depicts a nationwide con game controlled by a small group of LaRouche adherents trained in separating the unwary from their money. One of the glaring lessons of the affidavit is that a chance airport encounter can be extremely expensive in the long run, and that signing petitions for causes that sound worthy can lead to incessant dunning for large loans and donations. [..]

Whether initial contact with unsuspecting people came at one of the familiar Fusion Energy Foundation tables that LaRouchies set up in airport concourses or on the phone from a crowded "boiler room" in Leesburg, the first transaction was usually only the start. A remarkable common aspect of the nine case histories cited in the affidavit was the ease with which solicitors got people - utter strangers - to discuss their financial situations over the telephone, give out their credit card numbers with seeming abandon, and mail or air-ship large personal checks to organizations with strange names and strange addresses. Special agent L. W. Burchett of the Virginia state police hung himself out for the picking at Washington National Airport last August and soon made contact with a LaRouche follower. In the next two weeks, Burchett got the full treatment, including a tour of organization headquarters. He then gave away enough money to establish probable cause of a crime. From Burchett's experience and those of the nine pigeons who paid more dearly for their brush with the LaRouche empire, Special Agent-Accountant C. D. Bryant synthesized the paranoid pitch that is made to trap the unwary: "The agents and employees who solicit people . . . make a variety of representations, including the following: "Banks are unsafe. "The International Monetary Fund and others are conspiring to collapse the United States banking system and take it over. "Banks are all involved in laundering drug money. "Purchasing these notes is a good investment with competitive interest being paid. "These investments will go for worthwhile projects such as translating books or raising money to keep Lyndon LaRouche out of jail, where he will be killed." Whatever the objectives of LaRouche fund-raising efforts, the means were flatly illegal, Special Agent Bryant's affidavit said.

— LaRouche probers detail 9 `bilkings' Affidavits leading to raid on Va. HQ charge illegal fund methods William Hines. Chicago Sun - Times. Chicago, Ill.: Oct 12, 1986. pg. 24

Prosecutors say an alleged credit-card scam that was at the core of the Boston indictment was masterminded in Leesburg but claimed victims all over the country. The grand jury said, after a two-year investigation, that unauthorized charges were made to the credit cards of about 1,000 people who bought New Solidarity and other LaRouche publications, such as Executive Intelligence Review and Fusion magazine. In addition, the indictment says intimidation and lies were used to pressure people to lend large sums. LaRouche operatives promised to repay the loans with generous interest, but prosecutors allege that the policy was to not repay. Court records show that a Virgina state police agent received 22 "abusive and demanding" phone calls from LaRouche associates in the week after he posed as a potential donor at National Airport near Washington. Callers said $5,000 and more was needed to keep LaRouche out of jail and stop AIDS, the agent said. Authorities in 10 states are investigating the pressure tactics, including charges that elderly people with sizable bank accounts have been victimized, and an increasing number of civil lawsuits against the practices are pending.

— Authorities See Pattern of Threats, Plots Dark Side of LaRouche Empire Surfaces; KEVIN RODERICK. Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext). Los Angeles, Calif.: Oct 14, 1986. pg. 1

Bank accounts of two Lyndon H. LaRouche-affiliated groups backing Proposition 64, the AIDS initiative, were ordered frozen by a federal judge after a lawsuit charged LaRouche and his extremist followers with a scheme to defraud elderly people of more than $2 million, it was disclosed Saturday. U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson issued a sealed order in San Francisco on Oct. 10 after an 83-year-old widow claimed that elderly people in 10 states had become victims of "high-pressure tactics and manipulative devices to extract loans the defendants have no intention to repay." The suit was unsealed late Friday. Attorney Dan Bookin, who filed the suit on behalf of Margaret M. P. Beynen of Berkeley, announced the action Saturday. [..]

Beynen's lawsuit was brought under the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It cites a "pattern of racketeering activity" that has repeatedly targeted the elderly, using mail fraud and wire fraud. LaRouche and three groups under indictment in Boston were named in the San Francisco suit, which seeks a $64,000 repayment to Beynen and $5 million in punitive damages. The groups-Caucus Distributors Inc., Campaigner Publications Inc. and the Fusion Energy Foundation-have been named in other recent suits alleging that contributors were defrauded, including some who are elderly. The San Francisco suit also names the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee (PANIC), the campaign committee established by veteran LaRouche aides in California to qualify the AIDS initiative for the Nov. 4 ballot and promote its passage. Two officers of PANIC, Khushro Ghandhi and Theodore J. Andromidas, were named in the suit. J. Philip Rubinstein, the president of Caucus Distributors, and Michael Billington, a LaRouche organizer in Virginia who was indicted by the Boston grand jury, were also included in the lawsuit. [..]

The cases of 19 individuals in 11 states are detailed, including that of Grace M. Lindros, 71, of Los Angeles, who lost more than $135,000 or "substantially all her life savings." In an unrelated lawsuit, Lindros sued LaRouche's Fusion Energy Foundation and won a judgment earlier this year, but she still has not received her money. Loaned $30,950 Other elderly Californians cited as examples in Beynen's lawsuit include a widow, Ordel Bradley, 76, who lives on Social Security in a Modesto trailer park. Initially, Bradley loaned $950 to a LaRouche affiliate in May of 1984. During the next two weeks, the lawsuit claims, she was continually solicited for loans, receiving two to three phone calls a day and finally loaning an additional $30,000, none of which has been repaid. Unrelated to this suit, a bank in Florida filed a lawsuit earlier this year on behalf of 80-year-old Charles H. Zimmerman, a retired steel executive who gave or loaned $2.6 million to the Fusion Energy Foundation and other LaRouche organizations. The suit alleges that Zimmerman was pressured into turning over the money. Also this year, First Fidelity Bank of New Jersey sued several LaRouche organizations under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That suit stemmed from allegations of credit card fraud against LaRouche groups that had carried some accounts with the bank. Brian Lantz, vice president of PANIC, said Saturday the newly filed suit was a "political dirty trick" orchestrated by Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. William Weld in Washington and California Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp.

— LaRouche Groups' Bank Assets Frozen in Fraud Scheme; KEVIN RODERICK, CLAIRE SPIEGEL. Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext). Los Angeles, Calif.: Oct 19, 1986. pg. 3

A federal court lawsuit against political extremist Lyndon LaRouche describes more than $2 million in allegedly fraudulent and unrecovered loans taken -by his followers from unsuspecting and often elderly people. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Oct. 10 and kept under sea!, along with a judge's order attaching the assets of two LaRouche-related groups, until late Friday. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson ordered the seizing of money, up to the $63,958 lost by Margaret M.P. Beynen, in bank accounts of Caucus Distributors Inc. and the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee, or PANIC. [..]

The California suit seeks more than $5 million in damages. Besides LaRouche, Caucus and PANIC, the suit also names Fusion Energy Foundation and Campaigner Publications, publisher of Execulive Intelligence Review. It names. Billington; J. Philip Rubinstein,; president of Caucus; Khushro Chaddi. president of PANIC and a highranking member of LaRouche's organizations since at least 1974; and Theodore J. Andromidas, treasurer of PANIC.

— Suit alleges LaRouche cheated elderly, The Indiana Gazette. October 20, 1986 — Poge 11

The LaRouchites' fund raising technique, the indictment said, consisted of approaching people in airports, shopping centers and post offices in seven cities to solicit contributions and sell subscriptions to such LaRouche publications as Fusion, New Solidarity and Executive Intelligence Review magazines. Donors were encouraged to pay with Visa, MasterCard and American Express credit cards. The card numbers were then recorded on what LaRouche followers called contact cards, which listed a cardholder's name, address, telephone number and special in- terests. Later fund raisers used the cards to make further pitches by telephone. Some victims were called 30 times or more, often in the middle of the night. The fund raisers used what the in- dictment calls increasingly insistent tones to ask for loans or donations to the LaR ouche campaign organiza tions. If the solicitations were refused, the indictment alleges, the LaRouchites went ahead anyway and charged unauthorized donations to the victims' credit cards. More than 2,000 unauthorized charges were made, the indictment said; one victim was taken for $8,200.

— Card tricks; uncovering a LaRouche scam. (Lyndon LaRouche). Amy Wilentz. Time v128.(Oct 20, 1986): pp42(1).

Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Robert Abrams filed a lawsuit yesterday seeking to dissolve the Fusion Energy Foundation, a firm allied with LaRouche, and to prohibit its officials from fund raising in New York state. Abrams said the foundation had advertised that contributions to it were tax-deductible after the Internal Revenue Service had lifted its exemption in September 1985. The foundation also has failed to file various required reports with the New York secretary of state and the state attorney general, Abrams said in papers filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. At LaRouche headquarters in Leesburg, Va., spokeswoman Dana Scanlon said, "I don't have any reaction to that" when told about the New York attorney general's court action. Paul Gallagher, director of the Fusion Energy Foundation, said Abrams' lawsuit "is part of an escalating witch hunt against FEF board member Lyndon LaRouche."

— LAROUCHE LAWYERS TRY TO SETTLE WITH N.J. BANK IN FRAUD LAWSUIT William M. Welch. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Oct 29, 1986. pg. 12

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and four officials of a pro-nuclear energy group affiliated with the political extremist were named yesterday in a suit that seeks to permanently bar the group from raising funds in New York State. State Attorney General Robert Abrams said the suit he filed against the group, the Fusion Energy Foundation, of 18 East 41st Street, would dissolve the corporation and permanently bar its directors from fund-raising in New York State. The suit, filed in State Supreme Court, asserts the company and its directors participated in persistently fraudulent and illegal practices in soliciting public funds. Mr. Abrams said the company falsely stated that donations made to it were tax deductible after the Internal Revenue Service revoked its tax exempt status in September 1985.

— ABRAMS FILES LAROUCHE LAWSUIT, New York Times, Oct 29, 1986

Six groups associated with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. filed suit yesterday against the Virginia State Police and Attorney General Mary Sue Terry, saying the state's Oct. 6 raid on the political extremist's headquarters in Leesburg was unconstitutional. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Richmond, alleges that, although they had search warrants, police were not authorized by the permits to seize or remove any property. It seeks a return of all of the property, a listing of everyone who was given information from the property, and a ban on further dissemination of information. [..]

The suit claims that the raids came "in wanton disregard of the rights" of the six groups whose property was seized. The allegations were signed by Edward Spannaus, treasurer of the LaRouche Campaign. [..]

The suit seeks $200,000 for Fusion Energy Foundation Inc., plus $40,000 each for Schiller Institute Inc., the National Democratic Policy Committee, Independent Democrats for LaRouche, the LaRouche Campaign and the Leesburg Security Fund.

— SIX GROUPS LINKED TO LAROUCHE FILE SUIT Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Nov 14, 1986. pg. B-8

The Internal Revenue Service said yesterday it has restored the tax-exempt status of Fusion Energy Foundation Inc., part of Lyndon LaRouche's network of organizations. The IRS said it erred in terminating the foundation's tax-exempt status in September 1985. Ellen Murphy, IRS director of public affairs, declined to describe the reasons for the agency's mistake. News stories, quoting named IRS officials, reported September 11 that the foundation had lost its tax-exempt status. LaRouche, a conspiracy theorist and frequent fringe candidate for president, is a director of the foundation. In a letter reporting its error, the IRS said, "Based on further research, we have found that although the organization has acknowledged not filing returns for the periods ending Aug. 31, 1984, and Aug. 31, 1985, the tax-exempt status should not have been terminated." The letter from Joan M. Sweeney, chief of the exempt-organizations division of the IRS in New York, was sent to the New York state attorney general's office, which has filed suit against Fusion Energy Foundation for allegedly fraudulent fund-raising practices.

— LaRouche Group Gets Back Its Tax Status San Francisco Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext). San Francisco, Calif.: Dec 12, 1986. pg. 20

The Strategic Defense Initiative also drew strong support from the Fusion Energy Foundation and from the publication Executive Intelligence Review, both of which are associated with the Presidential candidacy of Lyndon LaRouche. These organizations, which had begun campaigning for a space-based missile defense system in May 1982 (possibly in response to the High Frontier report), emphasized the economic as well as the military benefits of the beamed-energy research that would be conducted. One of their slogans was "Beam the Bomb."

— Reaching for the High Frontier: The American Pro-Space Movement 1972-84. by Michael A. G. Michaud Copyright 1986 by Praeger Publishers and reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT. ISBN 0275921514, Ch., 11

The court refused to review a case brought by Caucus Distributors Inc., Campaigner Publications Inc., the National Democratic Policy Committee, and the Fusion Energy Foundation seeking review of ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The groups were seeking to lift contempt rulings against them for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury in Boston and refusing to turn over documents.

— LaRouche case rejected for review. Providence Journal [serial online]. January 27, 1987:A-09.

A Clifton Forge physician who says he lent more than $80,000 to organizations tied to political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. says he feels "betrayed" by the LaRouche organizations, which he says have paid back little of what he lent them. Dr. Edward Allen is one of about 3,000 people -- 67 in Virginia -- that state Attorney General Mary Sue Terry says had given $30 million to LaRouche organizations since 1979. Most of the money was received in exchange for promissory notes, which are securities under Virginia law, Ms. Terry said. Five companies and 16 followers of LaRouche were indicted Tuesday in Loudoun County Circuit Court in connection with the payments. The counts include fraud, sale of unregistered securities and the sale of securities by an unregistered dealer. [..]

Dr. Allen, 57, said today during a telephone interview that he lent the LaRouche organization about $80,000 three years ago. He said he was contacted by LaRouche followers and encouraged to lend money after he took out subscriptions to two LaRouche publications, Fusion and EIR (Executive Intelligence Review). After he subscribed to the magazines, LaRouche followers called him several times and pestered him until he decided to lend money, he said. He said the LaRouche organization signed a promissory note to repay the money. "It was a promissory note with the principal to be paid on a certain date and interest to be paid quarterly," he said. Dr. Allen, who has practiced in Clifton Forge since 1969, said he received about $10,000 in interest payments but received none of the principal, he said. He has filed a civil suit to recover the money in Loudoun County Circuit Court, he said. "I filed the suit for $80,000 plus interest -- the principal on a note that was due in July 1986, plus interest on another note," he said. Records seized during an October raid of LaRouche headquarters in Leesburg showed that Dr. Allen lent the organization $597,000. [..]

Also indicted on 17 misdemeanor securities charges were five LaRouche- affiliated corporations: his flagship magazine, Executive Intelligence Review; fund-raising groups, Fusion Energy Foundation and Caucus Distributors Inc.; Campaigner Publications, which publishes a magazine; and General Management, which investigators said ultimately handled much of the money raised for various LaRouche causes.

— LAROUCHE BACKER FEELS 'BETRAYED' OVER LOAN HANDLING From staff and wire reports. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Feb 19, 1987. pg. 14

A group associated with political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche must turn over records about potential contributors to the Federal Election Commission under an order by a Richmond-based federal appeals court. In an opinion made public yesterday, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Caucus Distributors Inc. must obey a subpoena issued by the FEC in 1983. The FEC is investigating a complaint filed by Rep. Barbara A. Mikulski, D.-Md., after her 1982 election. She alleged that Citizens for Freeman received contributions actually solicited by the LaRouche-affiliated Fusion Energy Foundation and two magazines, "Fusion Energy and Space Program Magazine" and "Executive Intelligence Review." The FEC found "reason to believe" that her opponent, Debra Freeman, received improper campaign contributions. Specifically, it found reason to believe that the foundation had made in- kind contributions in the form of solicitation costs and that Citizens for Freeman had reported as contributors people who had not intended to be contributors. Fusion Energy Foundation said the solicitation work was done under contract by Caucus Distributors. The FEC thus sought books, records and data, including lists of potential subscribers or possible contributors from Caucus Distributors, which distributes political literature and solicits money for magazine subscriptions. Three years after the FEC issued the subpoena, U.S. District Judge Albert V. Bryan Jr. of Alexandria said last summer that Caucus Distributors had to turn over the information. He levied a $250-per-day fine against the company. In its appeal, Caucus Distributors claimed the subpoena was overbroad and violated the First Amendment rights of magazine publishers for which it solicited. But 4th Circuit Judges Harrison L. Winter, Donald Stuart Russell and Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. agreed with Bryan that "it is not overbroad."

— LAROUCHE GROUP TOLD TO YIELD DATA Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Feb 26, 1987. pg. B-14

A Federal district judge has ruled that the Government can begin collecting more than $21 million in fines against four organizations controlled by the conspiracy theorist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. The decision means the Government can start seizing assets of the organizations, two of which are under Federal indictment in a purported credit card scheme, said Robert S. ... [..]

A spokeswoman for the organizations said she expected that the groups would to try to obtain a stay of the ruling by the judge, A. David Mazzone. The groups are Caucus Distributors Inc., the Fusion Energy Foundation, the National Democratic Policy Committee and Campaigner Publications Inc. They were first cited for contempt of court in March 1985 for refusing to comply with Federal subpoenas requesting documents related to the alleged credit card scheme. [..]

Caucus Distributors and Campaigner Publications are among five of Mr. LaRouche's organizations and 13 of his associates accused of participating in credit card fraud. Fusion Energy and the National Democratic Policy Committee have not been charged.

— U.S. TO COLLECT FINES FROM LAROUCHE GROUPS AP. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Feb 28, 1987. pg. 1.32

The State Corporation Commission decided yesterday that six publishing and fund-raising organizations linked to Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. are violating both registration and fraud provisions of state securities laws. The decision temporarily enjoins the organizations from continuing operations in violation of state laws and is designed to shut down current fund-raising activities that the state has alleged generated more than $30 million in loans and gifts to LaRouche organizations since 1979. [..]

The injunction issued yesterday affects Fusion Energy Foundation Inc., Caucus Distributions Inc., Publication and General Management Inc., Campaigner Publications Inc., EIR News Service Inc. and Publication Equities Inc.

— SCC ENJOINS LAROUCHE GROUPS Bill McKelway. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Mar 5, 1987. pg. A-1

Federal agents today seized control of the headquarters of political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. to collect on part of more than $21 million in fines owed by LaRouche-related groups. Officers of the U.S. Marshal's Service occupied LaRouche organization offices at three places in Leesburg shortly before 7 a.m. EDT. They were acting under an order signed by a federal bankruptcy judge, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Schiller said. Schiller said the order directed marshals to seize the assets and property of three LaRouche organizations that owe fines of more than $5 million each. The fines were levied by a federal judge in Boston for contempt of court for failing to turn over financial records sought by a grand jury. He said the involuntary bankruptcy order provides for a trustee to be appointed to take control of the three organizations. He said the order was signed yesterday by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Bostetter after government attorneys filed papers under seal seeking the order. Armed marshals, assisted by local police, entered the three offices and posted signs saying they were under federal control and sealing them off from outsiders. At at least one of the sites, a locksmith helped marshals enter the building. They apparently met no resistance. The government is seeking $21.4 million in fines from four LaRouche- related organizations: Campaigner Publications Inc., Fusion Energy Foundation, National Democratic Policy Committee and Caucus Distributors Inc. Schiller said the court order named Caucus, Campaigner and Fusion but did not name the fourth group, the National Democratic Policy Committee. Prosecutors contend those organizations funnel money to other LaRouche- linked corporations and committees. The financial records were sought by a grand jury investigating an alleged credit card scam used to fund LaRouche's 1984 presidential campaign.

— LAROUCHE-GROUP OFFICES SEIZED William M. Welch. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Apr 21, 1987. pg. 1

The debtor companies that are the subject of the bankruptcy proceedings initiated by the government are Caucus Distributors Inc., Campaigner Publications Inc., and Fusion Energy Foundation Inc., all of which have headquarters in Leesburg and are the subject of criminal charges in either Massachusetts or Virginia. [..]

Papers filed by U.S. Attorney Henry E. Hudson in the bankruptcy proceedings allege the three corporations were "ultimately controlled by one man," LaRouche, and that they "are operated as the private preserve of LaRouche's cronies with their assets used as they please." "Millions of dollars have passed through the books of CDI, CPI and FEFI with no corporate purpose, on the whim of Lyndon LaRouche," the papers allege. Some payments went to purchases of land in Virginia and some for thousands of dollars worth of improvements to LaRouche's heavily guarded mansion near Leesburg. "Assets continue to be siphoned off for the personal use of Lyndon LaRouche and his cronies," the government said in its bankruptcy petition. "The assets are used not only to pay ordinary living expenses of members of the LaRouche organization, and to satisfy the extraordinary security fetish of Lyndon LaRouche, but also to provide Lyndon LaRouche with a mansion and estate," the papers said.

— DATA SUGGEST LAROUCHE TARGET OF PROCEEDINGS Bill McKelway. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Apr 23, 1987. pg. B-1

A group affiliated with political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. defrauded an elderly Laguna Hills widow suffering from Alzheimer's disease out of a $100,000 stock portfolio, according to a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court. The woman's attorney, Harry E. Westover, said Monday that representatives of the Fusion Energy Foundation, using a "boiler-room" telephone-solicitation technique, had defrauded Flora Whitton of "all she had." According to her court-appointed conservator, Alden E. Andrew, the 79-year-old woman suffers from Alzheimer's degenerative disorder. The Fusion Energy Foundation advocates the use of nuclear power through its publications and through displays at airports, where adherents carry signs bearing such slogans as "Nuclear Plants Are Built Better Than Jane Fonda!" The foundation was one of several LaRouche-affiliated groups whose assets were seized in 1987 by federal agents seeking to collect more than $21 million in court penalties assessed against the LaRouche organization. The penalties were imposed when LaRouche officials refused to turn over financial records sought in a federal criminal investigation. A representative of the foundation could not be reached for comment Monday. The lawsuit, filed Friday, alleges that Whitton was the subject of a telephone fund-raising solicitation and that members of LaRouche's group then flew to Orange County from Washington to escort Whitton to her bank, where they helped her remove the stock certificates from her safe deposit box and sign them over to their foundation. The stocks-valued at $104,452.11-were the widow's entire savings, Westover said. Andrew, Whitton's accountant, said he discovered that the widow had given away her stock when he examined her portfolio in October, 1987. Instead of the stock certificates, Andrew said, he found receipts and thank-you notes from the foundation. He said he sought appointment as Whitton's conservator to try to recover the stock. In a sworn statement attached to the lawsuit, Whitton's physician, Dr. Humberto Buccardo, wrote that his patient "is unable to properly provide for her personal needs for physical health, food, clothing (and) shelter . . . (and) is substantially unable to manage her own financial resources." At the time of the donation, Whitton "did not have the mental ability to understand" what she was doing, Buccardo said in the statement. The lawsuit says that Whitton had no contact with the LaRouche group before her donation and that "she is not interested nor ever has been interested in the battle between nuclear (and) conventional energy." Andrew said Whitton's medical condition has resulted in conduct not in keeping with her character. "We've had to cancel more than 25 magazine subscriptions that this woman subscribed to," Andrew said. "Computer magazines, photography magazines-this woman wouldn't even know what a computer is. "Anytime anyone would call to sell her anything, she would buy. She was a pushover." Her sister, Elizabeth Provan, said she and Whitton were Scottish immigrants and that Whitton came to the United States in 1930. Provan said Whitton had moved to Orange County from Indianapolis in 1964, after her husband's retirement. Her husband died in 1979. Provan said her sister's condition makes her difficult to deal with. "She's just not 100% oriented anymore, you know," she said. [..]

Opponents of LaRouche have charged that he preys on elderly people who do not understand his aims. In 1986, LaRouche and his organizations, including the Fusion Energy Foundation, were sued by an 86-year-old Berkeley woman who alleged that she had been defrauded of $60,000. In the suit, which eventually was settled, "we alleged there was a nationwide scheme to defraud elderly people . . . (and that) there were numerous LaRouche organizations that acted as corporate shells to conceal and disperse the money," the woman's attorney, Daniel H. Bookin, said Monday. "We alleged that they call elderly people who are lonely and isolated and keep calling and calling and calling until they finally give them their money," Bookin added. Bookin said the LaRouche organization did not admit guilt in the settlement. He said that, under the settlement, his client had recovered the money she lost.

— Victim of Alzheimer's Disease LaRouche Unit Bilked Woman, 79, Suit Says; JESS BRAVIN. Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext). Los Angeles, Calif.: Feb 9, 1988. pg. 1

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. on Wednesday called a state lawsuit filed against his affiliate group frivolous and suggested that it was the result of corruption in the California attorney general's office. The Orange County Superior Court suit filed here Friday alleged that members of LaRouche's Fusion Energy Foundation defrauded a Laguna Hills widow with Alzheimer's disease, the degenerative mental ailment, of her $104,000 stock portfolio. Asked about the suit while campaigning for president in Oklahoma City, LaRouche called the allegations "totally frivolous" Wednesday and accused the state attorney general's office of corruption. He didn't elaborate. Duane Peterson, spokesman for Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, said from San Francisco on Wednesday that there would be no comment to the LaRouche allegation. The lawsuit said Fusion Energy Foundation members solicited a donation from Flora Whitton, 79, by telephone. Representatives of the foundation then flew from their headquarters outside Washington to accompany the widow while she took stock certificates from a safe deposit box and signed them over to the foundation in 1986, the suit alleged. The bankrupt group supporting nuclear energy is one of several organizations affiliated with LaRouche, who has espoused conspiracy theories involving the British royal family, among others, and who is running as a third-party presidential candidate. The suit seeks return of the money and $100,000 in damages, said Whitton's attorney, Harry E. Westover. Whitton's court-appointed guardian, Alden Andrew, said Monday that the widow was often the target of telephone sales pitches. "We've had to cancel more than 25 magazine subscriptions that this woman subscribed to," Andrew said. "Anytime anyone would call to sell her anything, she would buy. She was a pushover." Andrew, who is also Whitton's accountant, said he had sought court approval to oversee her finances after finding stock certificates that he valued at $104,452 missing from her safety deposit box in October, 1987. In place of the certificates, the box held receipts for the stock dated Aug. 13 and Aug. 14, 1986, and signed by Paul Gallagher, executive director of the Fusion Energy Foundation, the suit said. Westover said the money represented her life savings.

— LaRouche Accuses State of Corruption in Santa Ana Stock Suit Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext). Los Angeles, Calif.: Feb 11, 1988. pg. 3

Government lawyers will try this week to force key publishing and fund- raising organizations linked to political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. into involuntary bankruptcy. The proceeding in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, comes more than a year after federal agents seized three LaRouche- linked corporations based in Leesburg, declaring that they owed about $16 million in fines. While slow-paced compared with the ongoing criminal prosecution of LaRouche and 16 other defendants in Boston, the Virginia-based effort has unearthed in detail the workings of the LaRouche empire and the power of its fund-raising efforts. The Boston case, for instance, hinges in part on $1 million in allegedly fraudulent credit card disbursements used for LaRouche's 1984 presidential campaign, but documents filed last month in the bankruptcy case show that amount represents only a fraction of LaRouche's fund-raising ability. Between 1983 and late 1985, documents show, LaRouche organizations amassed about $30 million in loans. Virtually all of that money has been spent at the direction of LaRouche, U.S. Attorney Henry E. Hudson has charged. The allegedly bankrupt corporations were used "as the private preserve of LaRouche's cronies," he said last year. Assets, Hudson said, were used to pay ordinary living expenses, to satisfy LaRouche's "extraordinary security fetish" and to provide LaRouche with his sprawling estate outside Leesburg. The three corporations involved in the bankruptcy proceedings are Caucus Distributors Inc., Campaigner Publications Inc. and Fusion Energy Foundation Inc. CDI and CPI also are defendant corporations in the Boston criminal case. Hundreds of pages of documents supporting the government's effort in the bankruptcy case also suggest that LaRouche's financial empire was collapsing under its own weight when scores of federal and state agents swooped into Leesburg and carted off 16 truckloads of financial and organizational documents in October 1986. In late 1985, for instance, LaRouche workers described fund-raising and loan payout efforts as "out of control." Irate creditors were becoming more agitated over the failure of the organizations to repay millions of dollars in loans. Many threatened legal action and state securities agencies across the country were beginning to enjoin LaRouche agents from soliciting money. Thousands of the loans were generated by LaRouche workers who promised repayments at high interest rates, but LaRouche documents show that the organizations intended at most to make small interest payments to appease creditors and only in the most severe cases envisioned repaying substantial amounts of the loans. Monthly incomes jumped wildly. To fight cash flow problems, internal memos recommended that organization members fail to pay personal income taxes, that living expenses be cut back for field workers and that the "jettison principle" take effect. The jettison principle meant that debts of service companies that supplied such things as copying machines, telephones, credit cards and office equipment would be allowed to build up and then the companies would be jettisoned.

— PAPERS SHOW LAROUCHE EMPIRE BUILT ON FRAGILE BASE OF LOANS Bill McKelway. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: May 1, 1988. pg. A-1

The bankruptcy proceeding, meanwhile, begun 13 months ago, will take years to generate any proceeds, assuming Bostetter grants the government's involuntary petitions. Documents have shown that the three LaRouche corporations targeted for bankruptcy -- Campaigner Publications Inc., Fusion Energy Foundation Inc. and Caucus Distributors Inc. -- generated $30 million in loans, most of which are unpaid, but now have assets of only a few hundred thousand dollars. In addition, the companies still owe $16 million in federal contempt fines from their refusal to answer subpoenas in the federal case in Boston. If the companies are declared bankrupt, trustees would have the right to search out corporate funds that were transferred into other corporate entities.

— WELD SAYS LAROUCHE PROBES PURPOSEFULLY APART Bill McKelway. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: May 10, 1988. pg. B-3

For no easily discernible reason, LaRouche calls his main organization the National Caucus of Labor Committees. Its headquarters is in a heavily guarded country estate of considerable acreage near Leesburg, in suburban Virginia an hour's drive from Washington. Printing presses there churn out a variety of publications -- including the "Executive Intelligence Review," a little known newsletter whose accredited White House correspondent helped make news last week. Other LaRouche fronts are the Fusion Energy Foundation, whose small army of airport operatives promotes nuclear energy and space- based weapons systems, and the Schiller Foundation, pushing LaRouche's view that classical German culture is superior to all others. La Rouche followers are encouraged to take instruction in karate and street fighting. [..]

More recently, the Fusion Energy Foundation has been charged with credit-card fraud in its nationwide fundraising efforts. The FBI was called in when numerous givers complained that the organization was billing them for amounts far greater than telephone solicitors had mentioned. Magazine subscriptions supposedly billed at $15 were quietly converted to charges of $500 and $1,000.

— LaRouche gang thrives on Big Lie LIONEL VAN DEERLIN The Tribune 9 August 1988 B-7.

Bardwell, of Hastings on Hudson, N.Y,, who resigned from the LaRouche organuation in February 1984 because of a dispute over defense policy and money questions, said he complained frequently to LaRouche about diversion of money raised from subscriptions to Bardwell's magazine, a publication of the LaRouche-sponsored Fusion Energy Foundation. He said LaRouche responded that Bardwell's sense of obligation to his subscribers was "misplaced" and that "whether or not they knew it, they had contributed money to support Lyndon LaRouche and his ideas." LaRouche also said his personal security took precedence over all other demands on his organization's revenues.

— Ex-aide says LaRouche berated fund-raisers, AP, December 7, 1988 THE STARS AND STRIPES Page7

Marjorie Mazel Hecht, managing editor of a LaRouche magazine, Fusion, another business venture, testified that the publication lost 75,000 to 80,000 subscribers when it was closed down as part of the federal government's move forcing three LaRouche firms into involuntary bankruptcy.

— Business Efforts Fell Short, LaRouche Aides Testify Caryle Murphy. The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext). Washington, D.C.: Dec 9, 1988. pg. b.04

This was, of course, relatively late in the collaboration. Earlier, LaRouche had used his Fusion Energy Foundation (those insistent people selling magazines at airports) to promote fusion research and subsequently Star Wars to a receptive administration and ingratiate the movement with scientists, industrialists and military figures who did not care to discriminate where their support came from. Many publicly came to LaRouche's defense when the government's investigation of fraud in fund-raising finally threatened to shut down the FEF. All this, too, was a parallel with the rise of Hitler, who was tolerated and used by people who thought they could control him. When Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative - a surprise even to many in his own administration - ``the media,`` writes King, ``turned to the FEF to explain Reagan's proposal. The wire services, syndicated columnists and the Washington Post all quoted FEF spokesmen . . . The FEF was undeniably one of the best sources for up-to-date information on SDI in its early stages.`

— An American Hitler // A frightening look at Lyndon LaRouche and America's

receptiveness to right-wing extremism

Series: Books :[CITY Edition]. MARTIN DYCKMAN St. Petersburg Times [serial online]. June 4, 1989:6D.

A federal bankruptcy judge in Alexandria has dismissed involuntary bankruptcy petitions brought by the government against three organizations affiliated with political maverick Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. In a ruling that some say could have an impact on the appeal in LaRouche's criminal case, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Martin V.B. Bostetter Jr. found that two of the three groups were nonprofit fund-raisers and therefore not subject to involuntary bankruptcy actions. [..]

Bostetter also ruled that the government filed the bankruptcy petitions improperly, knowing that there were hundreds of creditors and yet noting the government as the sole creditor in the initial filing. "The government's decision to file the petitions despite that knowledge constituted an improper use of the involuntary bankruptcy statute," Bostetter wrote. The government said it first filed as the sole creditor to limit public exposure of the proceedings and thereby protect assets that might be sold by debtors who learned about the petitions. Federal authorities sought to liquidate the assets of Caucus Distributors Inc., Campaigner Publications Inc. and Fusion Energy Foundation Inc. as partial payment for a $21 million fine imposed by a federal judge in Boston two years ago. U.S. District Judge A. David Mazzone imposed the fine, saying that four LaRouche groups failed for two years to provide documents subpoenaed by a grand jury there. "Essentially the court holds that we did not abuse the bankruptcy filing, just that we should have filed differently," said U.S. Attorney Henry E. Hudson. He said that a minimal amount of money was recovered from the three businesses. LaRouche organizers said Bostetter's ruling vindicates the three organizations and could help LaRouche overturn last December's convictions.

— Ruling May Help Appeal, LaRouche Backers Say Robert F. Howe. The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext). Washington, D.C.: Oct 28, 1989. pg. a.08

The State Corporation Commission will be asked tomorrow afternoon to bar corporations connected to political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. from selling securities in the state. Virginia Attorney General Mary Sue Terry announced that action today at a press conference in which she explained the indictment yesterday in Loudoun County Circuit Court of five companies and 16 followers of LaRouche. [..]

Also among those charged were Paul Gallagher and his wife, Anita. Gallagher is executive director of Fusion Energy Foundation Inc., of which LaRouche has served as a director and which has been active in soliciting loans and contributions from people around the country, often in airports and other public places.

[..] The five corporations named in the indictments are Caucus Distributors Inc., Campaigner Publications Inc., Fusion Energy Fund Inc., Publication and General Management Inc. and Executive Intelligence Review.

— STATE SEEKS LAROUCHE GROUP CURB From staff and wire reports. Richmond Times - Dispatch. Richmond, Va.: Feb 18, 1987. pg. 1

And he did go far. Championing the development of fusion energy and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) long before they became matters of public debate, LaRouche was able to recruit scientists and government bureaucrats into such front groups as the Fusion Energy Foundation. While some supporters of SDI (like Generals Keegan and Graham) refused to have any dealings with him, others were not so fastidious. As King notes, La- Rouche appealed to scientists and engineers by defending their interests, attacking environmentalists, providing useful technical information and gossip, and cultivating personal contacts. "LaRouche built up a pool of influential people, whom he had compromised, and who thus had a vested interest in downplaying his extremism to avoid embarrassment to themselves."

— Klehr, Harvey, The Extremist, Commentary, August 1989

The Vietnam War, the crisis in race relations, and the cracks in the economic structure of the 1970s persuaded us that we had to do something and that indifference was morally inexcusable.

And that is where LaRouche had us. His intellectual method resembled the old tale about stone soup: Having announced that he had the inside track on the hidden knowledge that underlay Western civilization (one of his essay was titled “The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites”), he attracted a small parade of intellectual orphans, whom he then put to elaborating the details. By the late 1970s he had collected some highly credentialed acolytes, including a group of physicists and mathematicians at his front organization, the Fusion Energy Foundation. [..]

In 1978, I did a study for LaRouche of the economics of the narcotics traffic. The numbers I crunched showed that narcotics was a hundred-billion-dollar-a-year business—not a controversial conclusion today, but at the time it seemed startling. LaRouche took my quantitative study and combined it with the paranoid musings of other researchers into a book, Dope, Inc., that had unmistakable anti-Semitic overtones. I knew about this, too, and again I looked the other way.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, LaRouche was doing well, with a pocket publishing empire, a more-or-less accepted scientific front in the Fusion Energy Foundation, and a remarkable capacity to raise money (a good deal of which, it later turned out, was obtained by fraud). Nonetheless, within a few years nearly all his key people had quit. Once they began to engage the real world at a serious level, they broke free of LaRouche’s spell.

— Confessions of a Coward May 7, 2009 David P. Goldman, First Things

During the AIDS crisis, Larouche said he supported the “accelerated death” of people with AIDS in order to “cleanse” the country of the disease. He also praised European skinhead gangs that randomly murdered LGBT people. (New Solidarity, Feb. 9, 1987)

Larouche put himself on the same side as the nuclear energy industry by organizing the Fusion Energy Foundation, a group that attacked those who opposed nuclear power and that was used by the power corporations to promote their products around the world. Larouche also publicized and championed Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars.”

Larouche and his tactics of bigoted fear-mongering and senseless violence are the opposite of what communists, socialists and leftists stand for.

— Larouche is no ‘socialist’, By Caleb T. Maupin , Aug 30, 2009 Workers World

The goal of Forum sessions is to present both sides of an issue in a no-holds-barred debate. This is not always possible since there are occasionally heretical views that don't make sense and confuse the debate. For instance, at the spring 1986 APS meeting in Washington, DC, the Forum held a session on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and invited the representatives from the Reagan administration and from the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and some university professors. It never occurred to us to invite Lyndon LaRouche's Fusion Energy Foundation. However, since this group felt they should have been invited, they attempted to shut down the session. As Forum Chair at the time, it was my task to go head-to-head and threaten them with police action if they wouldn't be quiet and allow the session to continue. They did quiet down, and the details of lasers in space were quantified and debated. It is difficult to define when a position should be categorized as "unscientific;" luckily this issue doesn't come up very often.

— Forum on Physics & Society: Forum History. David Hafemeister, Physics Department, California Polytechnic State University © 2009 American Physical Society [2]

• http://digitalnewspapers.libraries.psu.edu/Default/Skins/BasicArch/Client.asp?Skin=BasicArch&&AppName=2&enter=true&BaseHref=DCG/1983/03/29&EntityId=Ar00402
• http://digitalnewspapers.libraries.psu.edu/Default/Skins/BasicArch/Client.asp?Skin=BasicArch&&AppName=2&enter=true&BaseHref=DCG/1981/02/20&EntityId=Ar01301

FEF: King

Introduction

The public directly encountered only the entities, not the shadowy NCLC. The National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC) was the chief vehicle for LaRouchian electoral activity. The Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF) was its scientific think tank and an important lobbying tool. [..]

Ch. 8:

The Fusion Energy Foundation, established in 1974 as a cover for the NCLC intelligence staff's science and technology division, became the chief LaRouchian propaganda vehicle for beam weapons. In the late 1970s it gained a measure of credibility in the scientific community and the aerospace and nuclear power industries by publishing the monthly Fusion, which championed high technology. It also sponsored seminars and conferences on scientific and political topics. Its officers included Dr. Morris Levitt and Dr. Steven Bardwell, both physicists, and John Gilbertson, a nuclear engineer.

The FEF tried to cultivate Major General George Keegan, Jr. (ret.), a former Air Force intelligence chief who believed the Soviets were gaining a dangerous edge in beam technologies. When Keegan called for stepped-up research in this field, FEF members offered their support. They published a pamphlet, Sputnik of the Seventies (1977), praising Keegan and calling particle-beam weapons "crucial to this nation's survival." But Keegan was suspicious of their intentions and soon cut them off.

The FEF continued to publicize the issue on their own, with frequent articles about the latest American and Soviet advances in relevant fields of theoretical and applied physics. They recognized that fusion energy research had potential applications in the beam weapons field, and that many of the scientists for any large-scale Pentagon effort would have to come from civilian fusion research. By discussing the two technologies together, Sputnik of the Seventies was right on target: Many fusion scientists whom the FEF cultivated in the late 1970s ended up in SDI research in the 1980s.

There is no mystery about how the FEF won the respect of fusion scientists. It launched a campaign to get them more government funding. FEF staff members testified before Congress, lobbied, held press conferences, and crisscrossed the nation on speaking tours. Meanwhile, LaRouche followers at airports displayed pro-fusion posters and literature. Hundreds of thousands of Americans first learned about fusion from their encounters with these seven-days-a-week salesmen.

The FEF undeniably met a real need, and not just for a handful of scientists. OPEC oil price hikes had made cheaper energy sources a national priority, and fusion energy was the most promising long-range solution. But fusion researchers had been inept at presenting their case to the public. Thus the Carter administration poured billions of dollars into synfuel, only a few million into fusion. To frustrated scientists the FEF was a heaven-sent ally.

Support for the FEF's work was especially strong among government fusion scientists. According to Department of Energy documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the contacts began during the Ford administration. At first the FEF spokesmen made a comical impression. One DOE scientist circulated a memo describing how they had tried to convince him of the need for a new world monetary system based on the Soviet ruble. But during the Carter years the FEF proved its effectiveness in building a fusion constituency. Researchers and administrators in the DOE's Office of Fusion Energy (OFE) began to take the LaRouche foundation seriously, speaking at its conferences and praising its work. They were willing to overlook its sinister politics, including its scurrilous attacks on Energy Secretary James Schlesinger. The FEF might be nasty, but it was useful.

The relationship between the OFE and the LaRouchians had a peek-a-boo quality. This was reflected in a September 1978 letter from OFE director Edward Kintner to Stephen Dean, head of the Magnetic Confinement Systems Division, who had previously spoken at FEF events. Kintner, apparently under pressure from superiors, ordered Dean "not to appear" at an FEF meeting later that month because it was a fund-raising event and because the FEF had expressed "policy disagreement" with top DOE officials. (The FEF had accused these officials of being part of a treasonous plot.) Yet Dr. Kintner's memo also displayed a remarkable solicitude for the LaRouchians: "This [directive] by no means precludes . . . staff participation in FEF events in general. . . . Please assist FEF in arranging for a substitute speaker if possible so as to minimize problems for the FEF."

The substitute who showed up was Kintner's deputy. Dr. John Clarke. He didn't just talk on fusion technology—he gave a strong endorsement of the FEF. "You are one of the few organized groups I know of," he said, "that has the courage to stand up and advocate high technology as a solution to some of the problems of the world, and for that I think that we owe you a debt of gratitude." This statement was used in Fusion advertisements to solicit subscribers and new FEF members. When Clarke received inquiries about it, he acknowledged on DOE stationery that the quote was accurate. In a letter to a Georgia Tech professor he said that although he didn't agree with the FEF's politics, he thought they performed a "valuable function in our society."

Shortly after Clarke's speech, a senior scientist from the DOE's Office of Energy Research addressed an FEF conference in Pittsburgh. Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Princeton University's Tokamak fusion reactor project also participated. Fusion crowed that the event was attended by representatives of major corporations and that it "marked a quantum jump in FEF's stature as the political leadership of the scientific and engineering communities." While this was an exaggeration, it suggested the hidden agenda behind the FEF's touting of high technology.

In 1979 Stephen Dean left the government to set up Fusion Power Associates, a nonprofit firm backed by energy and defense corporations. This was a setback for the LaRouchians inasmuch as it co-opted their "leadership" role on fusion. But Dean and the LaRouchians continued to have a warm relationship. In August 1979 he appeared on the podium with LaRouche at a U.S. Labor Party rally in Lansing, Michigan. He also accompanied the FEF's Uwe Henke von Parpart on a FEF-arranged trip to India, where they met with fusion energy buff Indira Gandhi and other notables.

When Dean was questioned about the FEF at a 1980 U.S. Senate energy hearing, he testified that "fusion community people attempt to treat the variety of different people that come to us equally and respectfully, independently of whether we agree with their political views. . . . Some of the comments and positions taken by the FEF are in fact positions we support on the merits." He added in a 1984 phone interview; "I don't think they've done the country any harm. It makes life exciting to have them around."

OFE scientists were not the only ones impressed by the FEF. By 1980 it claimed thousands of dues-paying members and over 80,000 Fusion subscribers. FEF director Levitt spoke at West Point on the military applications of fusion power, and Uwe Parpart gave a presentation at Lawrence Livermore. Almost $2 million in donations poured in during fiscal 1980-81.

John Bosma, editor of Military Space magazine, explained the enthusiasm for the FEF as being partly due to the "top drawer" technical expertise of Fusion magazine. He had worked for Boeing Aerospace in Seattle in the late 1970s, and recalled senior managers and engineers "waving [Fusion] around and saying, 'This is great stuff.' "

Another key to the FEF's success was its championing of nuclear power at a time when antinuclear sentiment was sweeping the nation. The 1979 Three Mile Island near-disaster alarmed millions of Americans. Environmentalists staged large demonstrations at nuclear power construction sites such as Seabrook in New Hampshire. Hollywood's The China Syndrome, starring LaRouche hate figure Jane Fonda, portrayed nuclear engineers as liars and murderers.

The nuclear power industry was dismayed and angered. The FEF played on this by charging a giant plot to undermine American world leadership in science and technology. Fusion blamed the Three Mile Island incident on saboteurs. It offered slogans and bumper stickers for an industry counterattack: "More Nukes, Less Kooks" and "Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales." It also suggested that the United States should emulate the Soviet Union's hard line against “zero-growthniks." The February 1980 issue hailed a Soviet government scientist, A.P. Aleksandrov, who had attacked scientists opposed to building nuclear plants near cities. Said Aleksandrov, as quoted by Fusion: "Nuclear plants are very safe."

The FEF provided an opening wedge for other activities. LaRouche's intelligence staff prepared reports for power companies on antinuclear activists. His 1980 presidential campaign committee solicited donations from executives of nuclear power and aerospace corporations. Dozens of scientists and engineers (including a top man from Three Mile Island) signed a full-page Fusion advertisement backing LaRouche for President.

Although some FEF supporters were turned off by its strident attacks on Darwinism, rock music, and Isaac Newton, it continued to grow. One reason was its support for a 1980 congressional bill to establish fusion power as a major national energy goal. The bill's sponsor, Representative Mike McCormack (D.- Wash.), envisioned a development push modeled on the Apollo Project. He estimated it would cost about $20 billion. In a speech before the House he predicted that the development of fusion energy would be "the second most important energy-related event in human history—second only to the controlled use of fire."

McCormack didn't need the LaRouchians to tell him this. Many distinguished scientists had urged increased fusion funding. Nevertheless, the sweeping nature of the McCormack bill was not dissimilar to that of a 1976 fusion research and development draft bill prepared by the FEF. During the late 1970s, FEF staffers sent a steady stream of proposals to McCormack's office. They attempted to mobilize support for his 1980 bill through speaking tours and press interviews, encouraging a barrage of postcards and telegrams to Congress. Simultaneously they attacked the Senate version, accusing its sponsor, Senator Paul Tsongas (D.-Mass.), of attempting to sabotage fusion development.

The campaign for the McCormack bill proved to be a dry run for the LaRouchians' beam weapons campaign. FEF director Levitt warned that the United States was falling dangerously behind the Soviet Union in industry, education, and defense. The McCormack bill could create a "strategic focal point" to mobilize the nation for a historic comeback. "Fusion is strategic militarily," Levitt said.

In November 1980, President Carter signed the Magnetic Fusion Engineering Act, which set the goal of a successful magnetic fusion demonstration plant by the year 2000. Although the bill provided only token funding, the FEF hailed it as a historic step. After Ronald Reagan assumed office, the massive fusion funding McCormack had envisioned went into SDI instead, and many fusion scientists shifted into SDI research. The FEF and LaRouche uttered nary a word of protest. They recognized that SDI offered a far better opportunity to push their ideological agenda.

Ch. 9

In the spring of 1981, two years before President Reagan's Star Wars speech, New Solidarity reported that the President was "known to favor a space-based ABM system." The FEF promptly held a seminar in Washington on "anti-missile beam potentials" and other national-security implications of fusion energy. But the LaRouche campaign for beam weapons did not get into full swing until the following winter, when LaRouche supposedly received a message from a mysterious personage known only as "Mister Ed." LaRouche had received dozens of messages of advice from Mister Ed since the mid-1970s, often in the form of "E to L" (Ed to LaRouche) memoranda. This time the message suggested that he launch a major push for beam weapons. LaRouche, believing that Mister Ed spoke for a faction of the Central Intelligence Agency, "accepted the assignment," according to a report LaRouche's attorneys filed in Boston federal court five years later. In February 1982, LaRouche held a forum in Washington to propose a campaign for beam weapons. It would be a good counter to the nuclear freeze movement, he said. The next month he issued a research and development proposal followed in May by an FEF "white paper." In August the FEF circulated a report on Capitol Hill regarding a scheme for X-ray laser weapons favored by Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb. The FEF held briefings for congressional aides to promote Teller's idea. LaRouche's publications reported on the various high-level lobbying efforts for space weaponry—including the September 1982 White House meeting between Teller and President Reagan. New Solidarity printed the text of Teller's speech the following month at the National Press Club, and dubbed his proposal the "LaRouche-Teller initiative." The FEF's Dr. Bardwell embarked on a tour of college campuses to convince audiences to join "the higher peace movement." [..]

The media turned to the FEF to explain Reagan's proposal. The wire services, syndicated columnists, and The Washington Post all quoted FEF spokesmen. Meanwhile LaRouche began to assert that he was really SDI's "intellectual author." According to Dr. Ray Pollock, the National Security Council's director of defense programs at that time, LaRouche's followers "flooded Capitol Hill" with literature claiming this. Pollock said that although some White House officials were annoyed, no steps were taken to set the record straight. The FEF was undeniably one of the best sources for up-to-date information on SDI in its early stages. An October 1983 FEF seminar in the U.S. Senate's Dirksen Office Building was packed with government officials and foreign diplomats to hear FEF scientists explain the latest developments. John Pike, associate director for space policy at the Federation of American Scientists, recalled that he first learned about Teller's Excalibur project from the LaRouchians. Pike said it was apparent that they had talked to "people with access to classified information." Beam Defense, a 1983 book by the FEF's staff, contained, Pike said, "one of the most comprehensive and detailed studies" publicly available on particle beams and X-ray lasers. It won a 1984 award from the Aviation/Space Writers Association. [..]

One of their first targets was Teller. As late as 1976 they had described him as a Rockefeller agent and a plotter of genocide. But when Teller delivered a speech attacking the ecology movement and its zero-growth theories, the LaRouchians began praising him. LaRouche set his sights on a private meeting with Teller to explore the possibilities of an alliance. FEF staffers hoped that Dr. Stefan Possony, a Teller colleague at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, would arrange it. LaRouche dedicated his magnum opus, The Case of Walter Lippmann, to Possony and Teller as "the writer's former opponents who exhibited the integrity to modify their views on important questions." (They were not his only dedicatees; the list also included Fidel Castro, Helmut Schmidt, and the ghost of Benjamin Franklin.) But Possony, whose taste in rightist politics ran more along World Anti-Communist League lines, never delivered the goods, although he did address two FEF conferences before dropping away. In a 1984 phone interview Teller called LaRouche "a poorly informed man with fantastic conceptions." Teller said he had chatted with FEF members on the phone from time to time, but had rejected all invitations to meet with LaRouche. He acknowledged he had made a mistake in not objecting when they began publishing articles suggesting he was working with them. "I was reluctant to criticize someone for agreeing with my ideas," he explained. [..]

The LaRouchians continued to go to great lengths to entice Star Wars scientists. Roy Woodruff, former head of arms development at Livermore, recalls at least twenty phone calls from Chuck Stevens, a Fusion reporter and former nuclear engineering student. Again and again, Woodruff refused to speak with him, but Stevens persisted. "He sat at the West Gate and waited for me," Woodruff said. "I went out another gate to avoid him." New Solidarity articles often praised Dr. Lowell Wood, chief of Livermore's "O Group," a top SDI research team. Wood said in 1984 that FEF representatives called him from time to time and that he also ran into them at scientific conferences. Asked if they had influenced the development of SDI, he was hesitant to deny it. He said they had boasted to him about meetings with top presidential aides and Pentagon officials. Although he never attempted to confirm these claims, he said that many administration officials had mentioned to him the "quality, speed, and accuracy" of LaRouche's intelligence operation. [..]

For Dr. Winston Bostick and Dr. Friedwardt Winterberg, physicists on the outer fringes of Star Wars, this common interest involved more than SDI. Bostick, former chairman of the Stevens Institute of Technology physics department, participated in beam weapons-related research at the Kirtland Air Force Base weapons laboratory from 1979 to 1983. He was also a leading figure in the FEF, speaking at its conferences, writing for Fusion, and serving on the editorial board of another FEF publication, the International Journal of Fusion Energy. In a 1984 telephone interview he said he supported LaRouche's attempts to promote "German military, scientific, cultural, and economic traditions."

Winterberg was a fusion specialist with the University of Nevada's Desert Research Institute. He volunteered ideas on beam weapons to the Air Force in the late 1970s, and later speculated on the subject for LaRouchian publications. In 1980 he described LaRouche as having the "most scientifically founded" program of any candidate for the U.S. presidency. The FEF published his Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices (1981) and also sent him on overseas speaking tours. [..]

In mid-1984, after being attacked by the LaRouchians for alleged foot dragging on SDI, DeLauer claimed that his statement about EIR's expertise had been mere sarcasm, an expression of his "exasperation" with the interviewer. "I have no use for that guy [LaRouche] and his opinions." he said. But he praised the FEF for its pronuclear stance: "In their support of nuclear power—in that sense— I support them." He had even donated money to the FEF as "the only active group that opposes Jane Fonda." Asked about a sexually demeaning anti-Fonda bumper sticker sold by the FEF, he chuckled and said: "I got another one [FEF slogan] for you: 'More people have been killed in the back seat of Ted Kennedy's car than in a nuclear accident.' "

A far more useful contact was the NSC's Dr. Pollock, one of the key policymakers behind Reagan's Star Wars speech. Pollock said the LaRouchians first contacted him while he was working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the late 1970s. He began to chat on the phone with Fusion reporter Stevens to find out the latest gossip about the fusion research community. [..]

The LaRouchians also kept up a vigorous propaganda effort throughout the United States: signs at airports, FEF speaking tours, lobbying for pro-SDI resolutions in state legislatures, beam-weapons election campaign slates. [..]

In 1986 the Fusion Energy Foundation became the target of multiple criminal investigations. According to prosecutors, evidence showed that FEF fundraisers, along with those of other LaRouche front groups, were defrauding elderly persons in every region of the country by soliciting unsecured loans with no intention of repaying them. FEF officials were indicted for loan fraud in New York and Virginia, and for credit-card fraud in Massachusetts. (The LaRouchians denied the charges.) Federal authorities raided the offices and seized the assets of the FEF and other LaRouche front groups to collect fines levied by a federal judge after they failed to cooperate with grand jury subpoenas.

Despite these troubles, the FEF was not abandoned by its friends in the fusion and SDI communities. The July 1987 issue of Spectrum, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, carried a full-page ad signed by many scientists and engineers from Star Wars-linked corporations and laboratories protesting the government's shutdown of the FEF. The ad's signatories included twenty-two employees of Lawrence Livermore. Dr. Stephen Dean of Fusion Power Associates, which is supported by major Star Wars contractors, sent out a letter defending the FEF and calling the government's charges "quite far-fetched." Urging FPA members to take action, he suggested they contact LaRouche aide Carol White.

Ch. 10

While speculating on total war in the late 1970s, LaRouche had to concede that an American-Soviet nuclear showdown was too dangerous. Between 120 and 180 million Americans would die in the initial exchange alone. This threatened his entire dream of world conquest. His solution was a multitrillion-dollar crash mobilization to build a space-based particle-beam missile shield. Naturally he said it would be a defensive system. The FEF's airport literature tables displayed "Beam the Bomb" posters. Dr. Steven Bardwell urged audiences to join the " 'higher' peace movement.” But Bardwell quit the LaRouche organization in early 1984 and stated bluntly, in a letter to his former comrades, what many of them had known but ignored: LaRouche's goal was not a defensive system such as President Reagan's SDI, but a "first strike" system predicated on a denial of "the right of the Soviet Union to exist" in its present form. Indeed, Bardwell claimed, the LaRouchians had privately discussed "Doomsday weapons," such as "cobalt bombs with fans.”

In the early and middle 1980s LaRouche utilized SDI and beam weapons to draw together the scattered forces of European and American neo-fascism to defend Nazi war criminals and promote revanchism. This effort was symbolized by a photograph of a four-pronged object, glowing with light, that appeared from time to time in Fusion and New Solidarity. Its shape was reminiscent of the swastika. A caption in a 1978 issue of Fusion said it was a plasmoid created at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the 1950s, when a scientist supposedly collided four plasma beams to "form a rotating plasma structure whose dynamics are governed by a 'balancing' of forces." In a 1985 Fusion article by LaRouche urging total mobilization for SDI, the ghostly object was described as a laboratory "'galaxy'...created by colliding electron beams," and it was paired with a telescope photo of a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Eridanus. According to the photo caption, the two objects represent "harmonic patterns," while LaRouche described SDI itself as the precursor of a "hyperbolic flaring" based on "triply self-reflexive" spirals. Readers were also informed that the "spiral geometry of many galaxies coheres with the spiral shape found in living biological processes." [..]

LaRouche told them the slate never needed any wiping in the first place. In a 1981 EIR article praising Nazi Germany's work on jet aircraft, he distinguished between bad Nazi politicians and good Nazi scientists. "Although the Nazis commanded the German state," he said, "it was the German nation which deployed its non-Nazi resources to fight the war," The Peenemünde scientists were part of this healthy German nationalism. The crimes of the Nazi regime thus were "irrelevant" to any judgment of their wartime role. Fusion and New Solidarity published adulatory articles about how Peenemünde had paved the way for fusion energy and SDI. It was said to represent the "classical German tradition," the path to true progress as opposed to the degenerate science of the "British." In November 1981 the FEF held a special dinner and awards ceremony for the University of Colorado's Adolf Busemann, who had worked at Peenemünde. In an interview with Fusion he criticized Hitler for not giving Germany's rocket scientists enough resources to do their job properly. When he died in 1986, New Solidarity urged its readers to "reflect on his life with joy" and bemoaned the fact that so few old-timers were left to "carry on the great traditions of the German scientific school."

The LaRouchians also developed close ties with Krafft A. Ehricke, a member of the von Braun team widely known for his visionary ideas on space travel. He had served in World War II as a tank platoon leader on the Eastern Front before being assigned to Peenemünde. Brought to the United States in 1947, he helped develop the Atlas rocket, America's first intercontinental ballistic missile. Retired and living in La Jolla, California, in the early 1980s, Ehricke dreamed of colonies on the moon. He wrote articles for Fusion, served on its editorial advisory board, and spoke at FEF and Schiller Institute events. In a 1984 phone interview shortly before his death, he praised LaRouche's followers as "open, clean-cut, and positive," in contrast to Jane Fonda and the environmentalists with their "African grass hut technology." He said he had spent many an evening with his friends Lyndon and Helga LaRouche discussing Star Wars and the Soviet Union's plan to become the neo-Byzantine "Third Rome." Ehricke said he agreed with LaRouche's assessment of the Soviet menace because of his own observation of their murderous qualities during World War II. [..]

The FEF, the Schiller Institute, and the Huntsville crowd campaigned to restore Rudolph's citizenship. The old-timers were increasingly nervous because two more from their ranks, Dieter Grau and Günther Haukohl, had come under OSI investigation for their role at Mittelwerk. The FEF warned that "hundreds" of Operation Paperclip scientists were under investigation, but this was denied by the OSI. [..]

Rudolph's most outspoken supporter was Friedwardt Winterberg of the FEF. A student of former Nazi physicist Erich Bagge after the war, Winterberg felt strongly that Rudolph was a victim rather than a victimizer. He launched his own investigation and sent letters of protest to Ed Meese and other administration officials on Desert Research Institute stationery. He also gave an interview to The Spotlight repeating the LaRouche line that an attack on Rudolph was an attack on NATO. Winterberg also sent handwritten notes (he called them "brainteasers") to OSI prosecutor Rosenbaum focusing on such themes as: Israel is guilty of Nazi-style crimes; Simon Wiesenthal was a Nazi collaborator; Zionism is a form of Nazism that has "infected" world Jewry. [..]

In 1985 the old-timers held their fortieth reunion at the Alabama Space and Rocket Museum beneath a giant picture of von Braun. Linda Hunt, a former Cable Network News reporter, recalled a darkened auditorium full of aging Nazis eagerly watching a slide show of the latest laser-beam weapons. She said that when the lights went on, the FEF's Marsha Freeman went to the front and delivered a tirade against the OSI to hearty applause.

This event was mild compared with the Krafft Ehricke Memorial Conference held that year in Reston, Virginia. Sponsored by the FEF and the Schiller Institute, it united support for SDI, defense of Nazi war criminals, glorification of Peenemünde, and a messianic vision of the conquest of outer space. Fusion boasted that participants included "military, scientific, and diplomatic representatives from four continents." Former top Nazi scientist Hermann Oberth sent greetings from West Germany hailing Ehricke's "vision of 'Homo Sapiens Extraterrestris,' " the New Man who would leave behind the "flaming harbors of the Earth." Speakers included Admiral Zenker and Peenemünde rocketeer Konrad Dannenberg. LaRouche gave the keynote address, entitled "Krafft Ehricke's Enduring Contribution to the Future Generations of Global and Interplanetary Civilization." Resolutions were passed calling on President Reagan to adopt LaRouche's crash program for SDI and halt the Justice Department's investigation of the old-timers. Since the only old-timers being probed were those who allegedly served at Mittelwerk, the FEF/Schiller Institute's hoopla about underground factories on the moon and the spirit of Peenemünde in space technology was suggestive, at the least.

Ch. 18

By 1976 the NCLC had established a smoothly functioning intelligence headquarters in New York, with branches in several European and Latin American cities. Three interlocking units emerged: the intelligence division proper, which mostly did telephone research and monitored the foreign press; the science unit, which operated out of separate offices through the Fusion Energy Foundation; and the security staff, which worked on sensitive matters such as the harassment of LaRouche's opponents. [..]

But LaRouche's followers in the early 1980s went far beyond anything in The Intercom Conspiracy when they started publishing hot tips on how to make Hbombs and death rays in league with Dr. Friedwardt Winterberg, a character as odd as anyone in an Ambler novel. Besides his political activities as a nemesis of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, Winterberg is also a brilliant research physicist. According to Edward Teller, he has "perhaps not received the attention he deserves" for his work on fusion. For the LaRouchians, he is a unique commodity--his value resides in what he lacks. What Winterberg lacks is a Q clearance. He therefore cannot be accused of leaking classified information. As a physicist, he can always say he rediscovered the information on his own in his Nevada desert laboratory. In fact, he does indeed figure out the principles of secret weapons on his own. It is his hobby, just as other people breed hamsters. Winterberg sincerely believes that it is ridiculous to classify such matters, for the essence of science is the free flow of information. In 1981 LaRouche's Fusion magazine published Winterberg's diagrams of various devices, such as a "Nuclear X-Ray Laser Weapon Using Thermonuclear Explosives." Later that year, the FEF published his Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices, a how-to manual on H-bombs, with the neutron bomb thrown in as a bonus.

Of course, the LaRouchians had been hinting at such knowledge ever since they set up the FEF in 1974. Predictably, they strove to develop ties with governments desirous of becoming the next nuclear power: India, Iraq, South Africa, Argentina, Taiwan, and Libya. Government nuclear experts in at least two of these countries (India and Argentina) have met with FEF representatives, and the foundation and EIR have arranged speaking tours for Dr. Winterberg. In the wake of the how-to manual, EIR seminars in Washington and European capitals were well attended by appropriately obscure diplomatic clerks from various Third World embassies, with Mossad agents discreetly blending into the background. [..]

The NCLC's most public pro-South Africa effort was the Conference on Industrial Development of Southern Africa, held in Washington in 1978 under Fusion Energy Foundation sponsorship. The conference was an attempt to head off disinvestment campaigns by offering an alternative strategy of massive investment in regional development, The FEF argued that this would create socioeconomic conditions for the "eventual" abolition of apartheid. (A former leading FEF member recalled that his associates, although willing to "court the Boers," had been too embarrassed to "endorse apartheid openly.") The conference speakers included Dr. William van Rensberg, former technical director of the South African Minerals Bureau and author of South Africa's Strategic Minerals: Pieces on a Continental Chessboard, published and distributed in the United States and Europe with money from Mulder's secret fund, A sprinkling of diplomats and corporate representatives showed up to hear van Rensberg describe the migrant labor system in South African mines. "While one may argue about the morality," he said, "it is not always appreciated [that] the mines provide these workers with certain basic skills and offer them, in some instances, their first contact with Western civilization." [..]

Another supposed member of the network was tycoon Anton Rupert, a major figure in the Broederbond, the Afrikaaner secret society that controlled the ruling National Party. Professing to detect traces of a LaRouche-style philosophy in Rupert's business pep talks, Cherry praised him for allegedly maintaining the ethnic purity (no blacks, Jews, or British) of his corporate board. Cherry also expressed admiration for a scheme of Rupert and certain West German bankers to channel massive new investment into South Africa. (The 1978 FEF conference was partly an attempt to popularize this scheme.) [..]

The Soviet connection began in 1974, when LaRouche aides met a Soviet UN mission official, Nikolai Logiunov, who passed them on to Gennady Nicolayevich Serebreyakov, a KGB officer attached to the mission. The latter met regularly with Gus Kalimtgis during 1974-75. LaRouche met twice with Serebreyakov, once at the Soviet mission and once at NCLC headquarters.

The same year the LaRouchians met Serebreyakov, they founded the Fusion Energy Foundation to work among scientists, including those engaged in classified work. The FEF zeroed in on researchers in plasma physics and fusion energy, areas with major military applications. Most of the scientists they called to pump for information were unaware that the FEF was a cover for the "science section" of the NCLC intelligence division, A January 1975 internal document sets forth LaRouche's plan for this elusive unit, which he has almost never referred to in any subsequent document. It would report directly to the NCLC's intelligence director, Criton Zoakos. Its duties would include forming collaborative relationships with specialists at the Atomic Energy Commission's "CTR division, laboratories, universities, and so forth," using the FEF as a "vehicle" when appropriate. LaRouche suggested organizing "ad hoc meetings of working discussion groups" in order to "accelerate the useful exchange of knowledge," but urged the science section to be very careful in its handling of these "sensitive relationships."

In 1975 a top FEF officer traveled to Moscow, supposedly to attend a scientific conference. He was welcomed even though the official line of the Communist Party USA and the Soviet press was that the CIA controlled the LaRouche organization. Meanwhile, LaRouche developed an elaborate espionage philosophy to provide an alibi for dealing privately with the Soviets. The NCLC was the "open channel" through which the KGB could pass "policy-relevant" information to the CIA, and vice versa. The NCLC didn't have to tell the CIA about these meetings; all it had to do was transmit the information over its telex lines. The National Security Agency monitored the lines and would automatically pick it up. As to anything secret the NCLC might learn from American scientists, not to worry--the NCLC was totally surrounded by government agents. Anything secret it learned would be something planted by the CIA because it wanted the KGB to get it through the open channel. Such information would be either disinformation or "policy-relevant." [..]

An equally suspicious incident was described in a 1981 NCLC internal memorandum signed by LaRouche security aide Paul Goldstein. After referring to a "certain [Soviet] UN contact" and the need for "clear channels into the Soviets," the memo mentioned trips by FEF scientists to Moscow for scientific collaboration." During one such trip an FEF representative, whom the memo identified only as "the man without shoes," prepared a ninety-page report for the Soviets "on the U.S. scientific community." The Soviets "found the information given to them quite useful." Although the memo expressed concern over a possible "national security problem," it contained a boast that "our open policy commitment to public cooperation with the Soviets on scientific and related questions makes our defense nearly airtight." In fact, there had been several FEF trips to Moscow following the 1975 opener. In December 1978, Chuck Stevens, well known among American fusion scientists for his wide-ranging gossip on research contracts, promotions, and job changes in the fusion (and later the Star Wars) community, attended a laser physics conference in Moscow along with another FEF representative. On another visit an FEF physicist was given a tour of the Soviet science complex near Novosibirsk in Siberia--and later gave a slide show on it at NCLC headquarters. [..]

Ch. 26

In 1979 a New York Times editorial had urged a probe of his nonprofit Fusion Energy Foundation. But the State Attorney General's office, which is in charge of monitoring nonprofit organizations, took no action. It was one of the few times this publicity-conscious office ever ignored The New York Times.

Ch. 31

Under these conditions the NCLC intelligence staff, editorial department, printing and typesetting businesses, telephone boiler rooms, and field operations became a smoothly functioning profit machine. The national office "sectors" worked together to produce a wide range of books, magazines, and intelligence reports, LaRouche field workers sold them at major airports to affluent Americans waiting for a flight. Their tables were festooned with signs like "Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales"—a magnet for conservatives, but a filter device to keep away all liberals except for those spoiling for an argument. The books and magazines, such as Fusion and Executive Intelligence Review, had colorful, well-designed covers.

The field organizers accepted Visa and MasterCard, and hundreds of names were collected each day. Telephone solicitors at national headquarters and the regional offices followed up with calls urging the purchase of an EIR subscription ($396 a year) or a special EIR report ($250 and up). Purchasers also were asked to donate to LaRouche's campaigns or the Fusion Energy Foundation. In addition, the telephone fundraisers called people cold from lists purchased from conservative organizations.

By 1977 airport sales and telephone fundraising were bringing in over $40,000 a week. Defectors who left during that period recall having raised $300 a day on the phone. By 1980, according to a former top LaRouche aide, fundraising was producing $190,000 a week (about $10 million for the year). In mid-1981 LaRouche announced in a memo that he was upping the quota to "$225,000 weekly in organizing-income of gross sales." Anything less, he warned, would be a "disaster."

The airport tables were sponsored by the FEF, conveniently making the purchases tax-deductible for the customer and tax-free for the LaRouchians. Actually, the LaRouchians sent all the money to NCLC headquarters, not the FEF, and the NCLC finance officers stashed it in the accounts of any front group they pleased. Some businessmen bought EIR or Fusion subscriptions to humor the solicitor or as a gesture of support for nuclear power, writing off the purchase as a corporate expense. These purchasers included officers of major corporations such as ITT and TRW. By 1984 EIR claimed 11,500 paid subscribers—if true, this would have yielded $4.5 million. EIR also offered customized reports and "retainer-contract" intelligence services. [..]

In 1980 LaRouche managed to obtain over $500,000 in matching funds. This was partly because he had moved to the right and thus could attract a greater number of legitimate donations than was possible in 1976. It was also because of false reporting of literature sales and FEF donations. According to Anne-Marie Vidal, who worked in the national office during the 1980 campaign: "A contributor would give money to the FEF to promote nuclear power. Unbeknownst to the contributor, the money would be listed as a contribution to LaRouche." The Federal Election Commission audited LaRouche's campaign finances and ruled that he must pay back $112,000. LaRouche claimed political persecution by the commission, and again filed suit in federal court. He eventually paid a reduced assessment of $56,000, plus a $15,000 penalty, and the FEC refrained from recommending criminal prosecution. In 1984 and 1988, the FEC again awarded LaRouche matching funds, making a total of over $1.7 million for all three elections.

Ch. 32

How did LaRouche get away with so flagrantly defying his creditors and violating federal campaign financing laws? How did he and his followers evade scrutiny by the IRS? To answer these questions, one must understand the financial structure that LaRouche has built to protect himself: an interlocking network of over thirty entities, seemingly independent of one another but actually controlled centrally through informal mechanisms. This business-political "empire" is an elaborate shell game. Cash is always in motion from one shell to another, disguising questionable transactions and avoiding court judgments. The entities include corporations, partnerships, individual NCLC members operating under business names, political action committees (PACs), electoral campaign committees, and the tax-exempt (until 1987) Fusion Energy Foundation. At any given moment the money in the bank accounts of these various entities has little to do with their actual operating receipts and expenditures. Funds are shifted around to meet the needs of the LaRouche organization as a whole. Considerable amounts sometimes will be in the personal bank accounts of trusted but appropriately obscure NCLC members. Large reserves are reportedly held in offshore banks where U.S. claimants and authorities cannot gain access. In the mid-1980s, there were well over one hundred bank accounts involved in these transactions in the United States alone, while LaRouche's European Labor Party had its own interlocking shells and cash was moved between the United States and Europe by courier. [..]

To insulate LaRouche and prevent the entities from being liable for each other's debts, the NCLC denies any controlling role. Its leaders today describe it as merely a "philosophical association" which meets occasionally to discuss Plato's Timaeus and similar refined topics. But in 1974, LaRouche described it as a "vanguard political organization." And in 1976, the NCLC director of organization, Warren Hamerman, declared in a financial report that the "budget and deployment of funds" proceed from a unified strategy. His report used charts and figures to illustrate the flow of money to and from the various entities, including the nonprofit FEF. The NCLC's total resources, he said, are "centrally deployed internationally to achieve maximum concentrated political firepower." [..]

The personnel of the entities were as interchangeable as the equipment. Fundraisers would claim to be from the FEF one day and from Campaigner Publications or Caucus Distributors the next. The money that poured in rarely stayed in the account of the entity to which the check was made out. Indeed, weekly financial reports going back to the mid-1970s show the cash from all LaRouche's entities going into one kitty. Using CIA jargon, LaRouche referred to the NCLC's "proprietary" relationship to the entities. In a 1979 speech he called them the "predicates, the shadows, the footprints" of the NCLC. In a 1981 pamphlet he said the NCLC "participates as a 'mother’ or significantly as a 'partner’ component." The incorporation papers of Caucus Distributors, Inc.—the most successful of LaRouche’s telephone fund-raising entities—affirm outright that its purpose is to promote the "political ideas and beliefs" of the National Caucus of Labor Committees. [..]

Businesses run by NCLC members are expected to put the NCLC's needs first. Former LaRouchian Eric Lerner found this out when he and several comrades formed a company to promote a water desalinization invention. After leaving the NCLC, he stated in a 1979 lawsuit that NCLC leaders had pressured him to funnel the firm's profits to the U.S. Labor Party, the electoral arm of the NCLC, in violation of election laws. Lerner charged that this was standard policy with other NCLC-controlled businesses.

The practice extended to the nonprofit FEF with its multimillion-dollar annual revenues. Bank records show that in the early 1980s the FEF transferred large amounts to several profit-making LaRouche entities. Many large checks were simply made out to "cash." [..]

Whenever airport travelers purchased literature or made a donation to the FEF or LaRouche's presidential campaign via credit card, they allegedly were at risk of additional, unauthorized charges. There was an art behind this, according to records in a suit filed by a bank against the LaRouchians. A fundraiser in the LaRouche boiler room would phone the National Data Corporation to verify how much could be charged. When told the requested charges exceeded the cardholder's credit limit, the fundraiser would call back requesting a lower charge, and repeat this process until the cardholder's credit limit was determined. The fundraiser would then decide how much to rip off, perhaps a small amount that might go unnoticed by the cardholder, or sometimes an amount that would clean out the account. [..]

Additional loans were solicited in the name of Caucus Distributors, Campaigner Publications, and the FEF. Fund-raising quotas were set at $400,000 a week in 1984, and then were upped to $500,000 and $600,000 in 1985 and 1986. Fundraisers increasingly targeted the most vulnerable people they could find— elderly widows living alone, stroke victims, and terminal cancer patients.

Ch. 33

Occasionally a LaRouchian fund-raiser hits the jackpot with a genuinely wealthy senior citizen. In 1986 the NCNB National Bank of Florida, trustee for eightyyear- old retired steel executive Charles Zimmerman, sued the LaRouchians to recover $2.6 million. Zimmerman had been induced to loan cash to the Fusion Energy Foundation and Caucus Distributors, transfer stock to the FEF, and purchase a limited partnership in a Maryland radio station controlled by the LaRouchians. [..]

The adaptability of the LaRouchians was also seen when the Justice Department brought involuntary bankruptcy proceedings against three entities that had refused to pay contempt-of-court fines of over $16 million. (The fines had been accruing daily for over a year, ever since the entities defied a Boston grand jury subpoena of their financial records.) A federal judge in Alexandria placed them under the control of interim trustees, but when U.S. marshals seized the firms' sixty-five known bank accounts, all but $20,000 was gone. And when the marshals seized the firms' offices and publications, the latter just reopened under new names: New Solidarity as The New Federalist, and Fusion as Twenty-First Century Science and Technology In addition, the firms moved their telephone boiler rooms to private apartments also to operate under new names. In late 1987, federal authorities estimated the LaRouche money machine was still raising $2.5 million a month.

— King, 1989