Named for White House aide Tom Charles Huston, the Huston Plan was an attempt by President
RICHARD NIXON to coordinate and consolidate
domestic surveillance of his perceived political ene- mies throughout the United States and abroad. The move began on June 5, 1970, when Nixon met with the four chiefs of U.S. intelligence: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION(FBI) Director J. EDGAR HOOVER;
Director Richard Helms of the CENTRAL INTELLI- GENCE AGENCY; Vice Admiral Noel Gaylor of the NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY; and Donald Bennett,
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Pro- claiming that the nation was beset by an “epidemic of unprecedented domestic TERRORISM,” Nixon
appointed the four chiefs to an ad hoc committee for development of “a plan which will enable us to cur- tail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.” Hoover was placed in charge of the committee, with Huston serving as White House liaison.
Huston’s relationship with Hoover broke down three days later when he met with the chiefs and rejected Hoover’s bid to prepare “a historical sum- mary of unrest in the country up to the present.” Contradicting Hoover before his peers, Huston dis- missed any review of “the dead past,” instead demanding a list of techniques for use against left- wing radicals in “the living present.” While Bennett, Helms, and Gaylor cautiously agreed, Hoover balked at revealing the FBI’s illicit methods. In a memo to Assistant Director WILLIAM SULLIVAN dated June 6,
1970, Hoover declared: HUSTON Plan
HUSTON Plan
For years and years I have approved opening mail and other similar operations, but no. It is becoming more and more dangerous and we are apt to get caught. I am not opposed to doing this. I am not opposed to continuing the burglaries and the opening of mail and other similar activities, providing someone higher than myself approves of it. . . . I no longer want to accept the sole responsibility. [If] the attorney general or some other high ranking person in the White House [approves] then I will carry out their decision. But I am not going to accept the responsibility myself anymore, even though I’ve done it for many years.
Historian Theodore White praised Hoover’s stand as a lone hero’s resistance to Nixon’s criminal activi- ties, but in fact it was nothing of the kind. Hoover simply refused to place himself at risk for a corrupt administration that might use him as a scapegoat. Coordination of domestic spying through the White House was thus derailed by Hoover’s instinct for self-preservation, while the nation’s chief practitioner of such techniques became an icon to civil libertari- ans. It was Hoover’s last coup before his death in May 1972. Tom Huston was replaced in Nixon’s favors by John Dean, and the Nixon regime moved on to the fatal morass of the WATERGATEscandal.
IBM
The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) was created in 1924 when leaders of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company opted for a less cumbersome title. Four years later, IBM joined in the pseudoscientific eugenics movement, funded by the ROCKEFELLER Foundation and other
wealthy benefactors, which aimed at launching a full-scale domestic campaign of ethnic cleansing across the United States. IBM’s contribution to the racist movement was the preparation of early com- puter punch cards that would classify Americans according to such categories as “race descent,” “nativity and citizenship,” and “kin in institutions.” The Carnegie Institution’s notorious Jamaica Race Crossing Project introduced the punch-card system in 1928 as a tentative means to purging the Earth of nonwhites. Connecticut authorities subsequently failed in their attempt to index (and forcibly sterilize) 11,900 residents who were classified as “socially inadequate,” but the IBM punch-card system was soon adopted by ADOLF HITLERand his SSas a means
of eliminating “undesirables” from Europe. Inves- tigative journalist Edwin Black broke the sordid story seven decades later at the dawn of a new mil- lennium in his book IBM and the Holocaust. IBM chairman and CEO Lou Gerstner fielded inquiries from various concerned investigators when the corporation’s history went public, announcing that his firm had “deposited the relevant archives” with
New York University and Hohenheim University in Stuttgart, Germany. In February 2001 five Holocaust survivors living in New York sued IBM on charges
I
Herman Hollerith invented one of the first adding machines and then became a founder of the IBM corporation.
that the company “knowingly supplied technology used to catalog death-camp victims and aided in the persecution, suffering and genocide” of Nazi victims during World War II. Attorney Michael Hausfield, speaking for the plaintiffs, said that “Hitler could not have so quickly and efficiently identified and rounded up Jews and other minorities, used them as slave laborers and ultimately exterminated them, without IBM’s assistance.” The plaintiffs dropped their lawsuit a month later after German authorities established a $5 billion reparations fund for Holo- caust survivors and their families.
See also HOLOCAUST AND HOLOCAUST DENIAL.
ILLUMINATI
The original Illuminati (“Enlightened Ones”) was founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a disillusioned
JESUIT and professor of canon law at the University
of Ingolstadt, Germany. Borrowing heavily from the rituals of Freemasonry, the group was an elitist revo- lutionary group with strong occult overtones, min- gling magic and politics in a scheme to abolish all monarchies and form an “ideal” one-world govern- ment—led, of course, by the Enlightened Ones. Debate continues regarding possible links between the Illuminati and the American Revolution (which also began in 1776) with proponents of the theory noting that several founding fathers were also high- ranking Masons. At least one proposed link, sug- gested by J. Gordon Melton in his Encyclopedia of Religions, may now be laid to rest. Melton claims that the Illuminati “was present in England as the Hell-Fire Club headed by Sir Francis Dashwood,” himself a personal friend of Benjamin Franklin, but elementary research proves that Dashwood’s blas- phemous society dissolved in 1762, well before Weishaupt’s group was born.
A quarrel between Weishaupt and disciple Baron Von Knigge led to exposure of the Illuminati’s revo- lutionary goals in 1885. Weishaupt fled Germany, and his organization was banned by law in Bavaria (along with the Freemasons). Historians still debate what happened to the group from that point onward, arguing the merits of a Jesuit priest’s allega- tion (published in 1797) that blamed the Illuminati for the French Revolution’s “reign of terror.” The same publication linked Weishaupt’s occultism to the dishonored KNIGHTS TEMPLARand beyond that
to the Islamic ASSASSINS CULT. More recently, author
David Icke found a “remarkable resemblance” between Illuminati documents and the PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION(forged by Russian SECRET POLICEin the late 19th century).
No date is available for the Illuminati’s dissolu- tion, if indeed it ever disbanded. Melton confirmed the group’s existence in 1978 with public offices in San Francisco and Nantes, FRANCE, but neither
responded to queries seeking information about the organization’s activities. Conspiracists, meanwhile, suggest that the Illuminati is active behind the scenes of most (if not all) major world events and institu- tions. Anti-Semites equate it with the so-called Jewish World Conspiracy, while others speak of
SATANISMor a guiding hand behind the NEW WORLD ORDER. A typical Internet broadside, devoid of sup-
porting evidence, insists that:
The Illuminati are elite men, those on the top, who con- trol the International Bankers to control, for evil pur- poses, the entire world. Their agent[s] are bred, educated, and trained to be placed behind the scenes at all levels of government. As experts and advisers, they mould government policy so as to further the secret plans of their masters. They lure people away from God by offering them money, the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Those who direct the Illuminati are against Christ and for Satan. They always remain in the dark, uniden- tified, and generally unsuspected. They use all peoples to serve their diabolical purposes. They divide to con- quer, supplying arms and money to both sides, instigat- ing people to fight and kill each other, in order to be able to achieve their objectives. they foster the terrorism of atomic warfare and deliberately cause world famine. Their primary goal is to form a one world government to have complete control of the entire world, destroying all religions and governments in the process.
In short, a one-size-fits-all conspiracy encompass- ing the Earth and all upon it. What conspiracist could ask for more?