All are welcome... all are welcome....
One of the several chapters of Cryptoscatology under discussion during this interview is Chapter Five: "Science Fiction as Manipulation: SF's Intersection with the Intelligence Community." To whet your appetite, here's a brief excerpt from that chapter:
Undoubtedly, [H.G.] Wells was the first writer
to use science fiction as a vehicle for intelligence propaganda, but not the
last. One of the most interesting
examples is the case of Paul Linebarger, who wrote science fiction under the
name Cordwainer Smith. He was a leading
expert in psychological warfare during the 1950s and ‘60s, and was an advisor
to President Kennedy. He wrote the book
on psychological warfare—literally. Its
title is Psychological Warfare and
was published by Combat Forces Press in Washington,
D.C. just after World War
II. In this book Linebarger writes: "Almost
all the best propagandists of almost all modern powers have been, to a greater
or less degree, literary
personalities. The artistic and cultural
aspect of writing is readily converted
to propaganda usage…. Though literary
men have converted their writing to propaganda
purposes, few of them have gone on to define the characteristics of a specific conversionary literature or to compile
canons of literary style applicable to the propaganda
field. The contributions may lie in the
future" (290).
That was in 1948. In 1950 he published his first short story
“Scanners Live in Vain” in Fantasy Book,
which was followed by at least twenty-five more stories plus two full-length
novels. Linebarger admitted to his
editor Frederick Pohl that there were numerous codes hidden in his stories
(Smith, The Instrumentality of Mankind
xvi). These are known in the advertising
world as “phonetic embeds”—strange double-entendres, anagrams, and deliberate
typos intended to plant suggestions in the reader’s mind. It would probably take a computer to decipher
all the codes in Linebarger’s stories, but some of them can indeed be uncovered
if one is diligent enough.
I mentioned earlier that
Linebarger was an advisor to President Kennedy.
In light of that fact it’s interesting to note the following codes. Only a few months after Kennedy’s death,
Linebarger published a novel called Quest
of the Three Worlds that was chock-filled with phonetic embeds. On pages 69 and 74 you’ll find that the first
letter of each sentence spells out “Kennedy shot,” and “Oswald shot too.” Perhaps this would be unremarkable in itself,
but the kicker is this: The paragraph
spelling out Oswald’s name is entirely about hypnotism. The main character is taught to shoot a gun
by hypnotism, and is then hypnotized into learning about psychological warfare
with the aid of a “neuro-electric learning helmet,” a phrase that sounds
somewhat like “neuro-linguistic programming.”
Near the end of the book Linebarger writes about a secret council of
“perfect ones” who “know everything” and live in a well-guarded Egyptian setting. Linebarger calls this group The Instrumentality. They sound very similar to The Round Table
Group, or the High Cabal discussed by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty in his book JFK.[1] Prouty, by the way, was also an advisor to
Kennedy.
This is pretty strange stuff for
a Presidential advisor to be writing only a few weeks after an
assassination. Three years later, in
1966, Linebarger died of a heart attack at the relatively young age of
fifty-three. In that same year a dozen
people tied in with the Kennedy assassination died mysteriously:
--Earlene
Roberts, Oswald’s landlady, died of a heart attack.
--Hank
Suydam, who was in charge of all the JFK stories at Life magazine, died of a heart attack.
--Albert
Bogard, a car salesman who claimed Oswald had taken him on a wild car ride only
two weeks before the assassination, committed suicide.
--Karen
Carlin, who worked at Jack Ruby’s nightclub and was the last to talk to Ruby
before the murder of Oswald, died of a fatal gunshot wound.
--Marilyn
Walle, a woman who worked as a dancer at Ruby’s nightclub, died of a fatal
gunshot wound.
--Lee
Bowers, Jr., the man who saw the real shooters behind the picket fence on the
Grassy Knoll, died in a car accident.
--Capt. Frank Martin, a Dallas police captain who watched Oswald get shot, died of cancer.
--Jimmy Levens, a nightclub owner who hired Ruby employees, died of natural causes.
--Clarence Oliver, a D.A. investigator who worked on Ruby’s case, died of “unknown” causes (Marrs 560).
In light of this litany of death,
is it too farfetched to think that Linebarger was bumped off for revealing a
little too much about the assassination in his fiction? In a world engineered by professional science
fiction writers like H.G. Wells and Linebarger himself, one wonders if anything
is too farfetched.
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