Dr. Richard B. Spence is a History Professor at the University of Idaho with expertise in Russian, military, espionage, and occult history. He's the author of Secret Agent 666, Trust No One, and co-author of Empire of the Wheel. ↓ Monetary Metals is providing a true alternative to saving and earning in dollars by making it possible to save AND EARN in gold and silver.Monetary Metals has been paying interest on gold and silver for over 8 years.Right now, accredited investors can earn 12% annual interest on silver, paid in silver in their latest silver bond offering. For example, if you have 1,000 ounces of silver in the deal, you receive 120 ounces of silver interest paid to your account in the first year.Go to the link in the description or head to https://monetary-metals.com/delingpole/ to learn more about how to participate and start earning a return on honest money again with Monetary Metals.↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future.In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, James tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.Purchase Watermelons (2024) by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/Products/Watermelons-2024.html↓ ↓ ↓Buy James a Coffee at:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpoleThe official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but before we meet him, a quick word from one of our lovely sponsors.
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I'd definitely give the silver a go.
I've got gold but I like silver because silver has the potential to go much, much higher.
If you're of a sort of more adventurous disposition, which I am.
Anyway, you should do both.
Gold and silver.
If you want interest on it, Welcome to the Delling Pod, Dr. Richard B. Spence.
How do I describe you?
You're a sort of an historian of the occult and of spying, is that right?
Well, I'm an historian, okay?
Yeah. So, what's a very quick and dirty version of my academic trajectory?
Basic academic training.
The thing that I started out studying was modern Russian and Eastern European history.
So Russia and the Balkans.
And the Middle East.
So there you go.
So that's the kind of general academic areas.
Now, when you begin to look at modern Russian history, what do you run into?
What's the 500-pound gorilla?
Well, that's the Russian Revolution.
And when you begin to study the Russian Revolution...
that it's all about, you know, all revolutions are about conspiracies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You don't have a revolution without a conspiracy.
If you don't conspire, you'll be dead very quickly.
And when you begin to delve into that realm, you begin to find out that, well, this is where, it was the first place where the role of secret societies, these kind of initiatory oceans,
Oathbound orders began to show up, because I began to find connections between people who seemed to have nothing to do with each other politically, but who nevertheless were cooperating, and that was the basis that they were cooperating on.
And then also, if you look at something like the Russian Revolution, and you look at revolutionary conspiracies, intelligence, or what we call intelligence, espionage is all a part of that as well.
I mean, you've got every, you've got German agents, British, Asians, everybody, Americans, everybody is involved on some sort of clandestine level in Russia in 1917, 18, and the years thereafter.
So you're constantly tripping across spies every place that you turn.
So that was my kind of introduction.
And then, as I usually say when people ask me, how did you get interested in this kind of stuff?
Well, it's one thing leads you to another.
And it's a process.
It may seem odd, but the investigation of espionage eventually leads you into occultism, and that's a whole universe in and of itself.
And so it continually expands in its horizons, and it takes you in new directions or down new rabbit holes, but that's what keeps it interesting.
So that's how I've gotten to where I am now.
Yeah. Oh, hang on.
We're getting some hideous echo there.
When I...
You can't hear it?
No. Well, let's just...
We'll just soldier on and hope...
Whenever I speak too enthusiastically, I can hear dogs barking in the background.
Have you read, you must have done, Anthony Sutton on...
Yes. Not only did I read it, but I took that as an inspiration to write my own book, which is neither meant as an affirmation nor a refutation of Sutton's.
Sutton's was, you know, I encountered that book, and his Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, and the first time I encountered it, it...
I just thought, I don't know.
It didn't make much of an impact on me, because I didn't have that much to connect it to.
About ten years later, I read it again, and now it seemed to make much more sense.
So, in fact, just a few years ago, I wrote, because I couldn't come up with a more original title, Wall Street and the Russian Revolution, because I wanted to broaden it a bit, as opposed to just looking at 1917.
And that's really...
I acknowledge Anthony Sutton as the kind of inspiration for this.
He's the guy who pointed me in that direction.
And I think in my book, I can fill in a lot more material.
I can broaden what it was that he was looking at, because there's simply more stuff available now.
So he wrote his book in the 1970s, where, for instance, access to any kind of Russian records or archives was basically impossible.
So, I think that he, I think he was off base in some areas, but I think on the whole, he had a sense of what was going on.
And there's nothing too mysterious about that.
I mean, the question comes down, why would American, in particular in this case, or other Western capitalists be interested in...
You know, canoodling with the Bolsheviks?
Well, because they thought they could make money off of it.
That's the only reason those guys do anything.
And in some cases they did.
Yeah, well, I mean, clearly he was...
Sorry, I keep hearing this demonic dog barking voice every time I speak.
You're not hearing it.
You're not getting it on your computer.
Okay. That what Sutton was saying was clearly dangerous enough to get him kicked out of the Hoover Institution.
The Hoover Institute, yes.
The Hoover Institute.
He was saying something that the establishment did not want said.
I'm not sure, I mean, look, I'm not the spy historian, but I think I would dispute your suggestion that it's just about money.
I think it's more than that.
I think it's about an elite, for want of a better word, which wants to control the world.
And the people who manipulated Russia into the Bolshevik Revolution are the same people who were probably involved way back in the French Revolution, probably involved in profiting from the, yeah,
okay, profit in the Second World War as well.
These are people who think outside national borders, who have no loyalty to individual sovereign states, but just basically want to run the world like a game of risk in their own interests, and we're just pawns.
We're just collateral damage.
We're cattle.
Well, see, you're more conspiratorial than I am.
I'm not...
I am.
Let me go back and sort of rephrase this.
I don't think that in most cases, or in many cases, you don't need any more than the profit motive to explain.
I'll give you an example of that.
Henry Ford.
Henry Ford, the American automobile tycoon, he was one of the first.
In 1919, Ford Motor Company is making deals with the Soviets through various intermediaries.
And he continues to do that through the 1920s and the 1930s.
So you know all those tractors that Stalin used to implement collectivization?
Those were licensed Ford tractors.
Every one of those was a knock-off of a Fordson tractor produced under license, and Ford Motor Company made a profit off of every single one of those.
Now, Ford also is noted in doing business with the Nazis, which he did, because the Germans would buy things.
Ford is not a particularly political guy.
That is, I don't know whether Ford you could connect to some kind of Illuminati-like group.
He was very suspicious of bankers for good reason.
So Ford, I think, is an example of a Western capitalist who engaged in business with the Soviets and the Nazis and anyone else simply because it seemed to be a profitable business deal.
But it doesn't have to be just that.
And one of the other things that you come across is, to take it to another level, you come across people who are businessmen, they're entrepreneurs, they're capitalists, they're engaged in industry and finance, but they are philosophically sympathetic or attracted to the tenets of socialism.
They see a kind of commonality in that.
And part of that has to do is that one concept is that what we're talking about here is the industrialized order of the world.
That is that the destiny of all nations is in some way to industrialize, to gear everything towards the maximization of production and the control of that production.
And that's one of the things you find both within a capitalist society and within a communist society.
They do exactly the same thing.
The only thing the Soviets were about was industrializing those areas and in harnessing those resources.
It's simply a slight tweak on you're doing the same thing with a kind of different philosophical basis behind it.
Then you get into the third level that you were talking about, the idea that there is a much longer...
long-term, at the very least, a multi-generational plan of some sort by people who view themselves as a ruling
for some reason.
Like the people today who gather at Davos.
Okay, the
Klaus Schwab types.
Yeah, they're just the minions of the people I'm talking about here.
I mean, yeah.
But that there has been this long-term effort to, for lack of a better term, to rule the world.
Now, that becomes much more challenging concept.
And it's difficult.
If not impossible to prove.
You can suspect it all you want.
You can collect all of the circumstantial evidence you have.
These people are not going to operate in such a way in which it's...
You can easily put your finger on it.
So I think that's...
That still, to me, exists within the realm of theory, which means it is...
This is basically the way that I rank things.
People sometimes ask me, what do you believe?
And my answer to that generally is, I don't believe anything.
That is, I don't believe it in the sense that I believe in God, or I believe in this, or I believe in that.
Because once you start believing in things, you start following it.
That becomes something, and that belief will then make you leave others out.
I take into account things that have been said, things that have been done, what I can see, what I suspect, and I sort of arrange them on a scale of probabilities.
All things that could conceivably exist may exist.
Some much more likely, others less likely, but it's simply a range of probability.
So, you know, aliens may exist and have, you know, they certainly exist, I would argue that.
Yeah. I'm not sure I'm with you on the aliens.
Which you may find unexpected.
I was going to ask you about this, because you're in a bit of a bind, aren't you?
You're in...
You're a published author, and yet you're writing about particular areas where, on the one hand, you're bumping into what you termed conspiracy theories.
So you've got the kind of the out there fringe represented by people like me, who might tarnish your credibility as a kind of, as an academic and a publishable author.
And at the other side, you are dealing with institutions which, I suppose, have the power to kill you, or they have the metaphorical power to do the same thing,
which is to cut you off from the information that you need, the insider information, to be able to write the books you do.
So you've kind of got to...
So when I'm talking to you now, it's a bit like an intelligence officer interrogating somebody.
And that somebody I'm interrogating, I don't know whether he's telling me what he actually thinks, what he thinks he's allowed to tell me.
You see what I mean?
It's a kind of, because you're in a hall of mirrors, so am I.
Well... I recently gave an interview on...
On a podcast called The Lex Friedman Show.
I saw it.
Very mainstream.
He's very mainstream.
We talk about all kinds of things, this and the rest of it.
One of the things I did, which I usually don't do, is I sort of went through and read some of the comments.
Which is usually something you don't want to do.
And there are a number of people that go, oh, this guy is somehow connected to academia, therefore he's compromised.
Look, I'll say it here, and you can believe me or not, no one has ever come up...
I wish somebody had come along and offered me money to write something or not write.
Never. Never that.
The main thing...
In academia, academics are largely ignored.
You want to...
Okay, this...
And I'll say this from a career of some sort.
Now, what might put it right now, I'm retired since 2020, so I am no longer employed in academia.
So I'm no longer bound by any things which are there.
And, you know, when you do work within a university system and you have deans and provosts and presidents over you, you know, where they don't want anything, what they're mostly concerned about is whether you do or say something that would embarrass the university.
That and money is what they're concerned with.
But I never got any pressure.
No one ever came along and said you should do this or you should do that.
Because for the most part, some academics, at least in terms of history, is that nobody really cares much what you do.
I've often put it that, you know, a lot of the stuff that I wrote in my academic career, you write for academic journals.
Academic press.
Journals is what you would want to do.
And just for the uninitiated out there, whatever it is that we university types write for academic journals, we don't get paid for.
Okay? Academic journals don't pay.
In fact, sometimes they expect you to pay them to publish your articles.
But next, To digging a hole in the forest and burying your research, the next best thing you can do to make it immaterial to the rest of the world is to publish it in an academic journal.
Because it is virtually guaranteed that no one of any number will see it.
You may have some grad students who will come along and need it to flesh out the bibliography of their thesis.
But that's about it.
A handful of people will ever access your research.
Even though it's publicly available, it's just not there because generally speaking, most people outside of academia don't know that academic journals exist and you would have to go looking for them to find it.
So it really doesn't get much attention.
So no, no one ever came along and said I should talk about one thing or not talk about anything else.
It was my research tended to take me Out of the mainstream, increasingly.
I didn't start out that way, but as it went on, you find yourself more and more out on the...
You could call it the fringe, but I'll call it the frontier, the kind of edge.
And pretty soon, you go far enough where you figure out that there's really nobody else out there.
At least in terms of academia, there's no one there.
You're kind of on your own, which is an interesting position to be in.
You're not competing with other people in that sense.
But it's a, you know, I follow the subjects I've been.
I'm not trying to impute your integrity.
I'm more trying to Okay,
well... And yet, here you are.
You've done a lot of research that I think a lot of people are going to find very interesting in Alistair Crowley, who unfortunately I was talking about on my last podcast.
People are going to start thinking I'm obsessed with Crowley, which I'm really, really not, although I can see he was quite an influential figure.
And I'm quite interested in hearing what you've discovered maybe later on about his...
Work with the intelligence.
I think you've found evidence that he worked for British intelligence both in the First World War and the Second World War.
We'll come to that in a bit.
Can I just ask you, given that it's vaguely topical at the moment, there's been this massive data dump of the Kennedy stuff.
Where are you on Kennedy?
I mean, you know, give me a couple of...
Where am I on JFK?
Well, I haven't gone through any of the new stuff, and I don't know what's going to come out of it.
So, if you look at the JFK assassination, and this is true for other things you look at, you don't get...
Let me back up a little bit.
This may be a little long-winded, but I think it explains more about where I'm coming from.
I generally describe...
If somebody asks me what history is, I go, it's 10% facts and it's 90% opinion.
Because real facts, the things that you know, okay, you don't believe them, you know them, are relatively rare.
So you can go through and, you know, for instance, if you're doing, working on a biography of some kind, you're trying to find something, you can go through and you can find records of their birth, their death, where they went to school, marriages, divorces, you can get the whole sort of public record,
the footprints that they left.
And you can line those all up in order, but that doesn't give you a real picture of this person.
It just tells you where they were and who they were associated with.
Well, it might have belonged to Barack Obama.
That would be quite interesting.
It can point you in different directions, but even that would only be one aspect of the person.
So at some point, you have to take the data points you have The facts that you have, and you build a narrative around them.
That's where the opinion comes in.
So, another example is that you wouldn't get much of a dispute.
You would probably find some people who would dispute this, but let's take it as a fact that the Second World War happened.
There was something called World War II, and it happened.
But that doesn't tell you why it happened.
Exactly when did it start?
It depends on where you are.
Did it start in 37 or 39 or 41?
But the big question about something like the Second World War is why it happened, and that is not a fact.
That comes down to a matter of interpretation and opinion.
And the thing that you can do in almost all cases is that you can take the same set of facts The same set of data points, and you can create different narratives to incorporate them.
You can tell, and a narrative is just, you know, a fancy way of saying you invent a story.
So you've got these facts, and you come up with a story to explain the facts.
And that's what you find in the Kennedy assassination, in all of the conspiracy theories that it has spawned, and it has spawned a lot of them.
The basic fact is that JFK was killed on the 22nd of November in Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
That's it.
That's the basic fact.
Everything else is a matter of the integrity that you want to create around it.
There are those who say that even that is disputable.
There are people who dispute that.
Someone the other day was going that he was never killed.
I don't know if he's living in Bermuda somewhere.
I'm going to...
Generally speaking, yes.
The fact is that he was killed in a particular...
We've got a picture of him apparently being killed there.
That seems to establish that that happened.
Well, if you trust the Zapruder footage, etc.
But look, just cut to the chase.
Who do you think was behind the assassination?
I'll go along with the...
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence, who I think in 1979, after looking through all this stuff, they probably punted, but I'd argue that the closer they would come is they decided that John F. Kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy.
But they weren't sure whose it was.
And I'd even leave out the probably.
I don't have to be any further convinced that there was, and a conspiracy only involves someone in addition to, you only have to have two.
One person can't conspire, but two can.
I have no definite opinion as to whose conspiracy that was.
I can see lots of arguments one way or the other that the CIA was involved, the FBI, different elements in the U.S. government.
I would tend to suspect that was probably the case.
Okay. But do I believe that was the case?
No, I suspect that was probably true.
So the reason I ask this is because people in my circles, it's not just sort of debatable.
It's an absolute given that involved in the assassination of President Kennedy was was the CIA probably working in cahoots with Crime Inc.
And maybe maybe the Israelis as well.
The Israelis seem to be increasingly important judging by these intelligence leaks.
Maybe they maybe the Israelis ordered it because they were upset about his position on nukes for Israel.
I don't know.
But but sure as eggs is eggs, the CIA were in on it.
And the station chief, I think, in Dallas at that time was George H.W. Bush.
I'm talking about where my people are concerned, my audience.
He's a wrong-un.
I mean, he's really, really bad.
And there's a lot of bad blood in that family.
Going back to Vannevar Bush and Prescott Bush and all these people involved in the Second World War.
So, the reason that what I'm trying to establish is you seem to be quite cautious.
Maybe you don't even think what I do, but you do seem to be...
My position would be the CIA is not a friendly caring organisation looking after American interests.
It specialises in assassination, drug running, child trafficking, gun running, disaster capitalism in places like South America.
It is a criminal organisation working for criminals.
Now, there's no point...
Us having a conversation about the intelligence services, if you're going to tell me, if your position is rather more cautious than that, because it ain't going to sit well with my audience or what they know.
However, if you're going to say to me, well, we can talk about earlier stuff before the current CIA, before we get into hot water talking about what it does, then I'm happy to do that.
Do you see what I'm saying to you?
Well, you know, I'll push back a little bit.
Your audience doesn't know that.
They believe that.
They're happy in their belief.
They're more than happy.
They don't want to be challenged, because they don't need to be.
No, they should be challenged.
You should always be challenged on things.
The minute you stop being challenged, the reason you don't want to be challenged...
The reason I would argue that people don't want to be challenged on a belief is that they don't really believe it.
I'm being impertinent in speaking for my audience here, because there's a lot of them.
If you're really that touchy, you tend to find this with, dare I say, religious beliefs.
People never want the religion questioned, because they argue they believe in it implicitly, and I argue, no, you don't.
It's the other way around.
I'm trying to get the best out of you because I'm interested in what you can tell me that I don't know.
That's really what I want.
And that's what you're here for, basically.
That's what people are itching to know, what you know that we don't.
So why don't we start with Crowley in the intelligence?
Because I've discussed him before.
We know he was self-described the wickedest man in the world.
We know he sort of subverted organisations like the Order of the Golden Dawn and created his own kind of Thalema.
cult and ordo templi orientis and they got into drugs and and sex and hung out with famous people and got them sucked into his cults and stuff um why was this guy considered a useful
intelligence asset in the first and second world wars Thank you.
Because he knew people and he had connections.
And it's all about...
You know, from an intelligence standpoint, if you're using someone as an asset, so keep in mind, so Crowley is not an intelligence officer.
He's not an intelligence agent in the sense.
There are people who are employees of the agency themselves.
They're officers within the agency, within the intelligence institution.
And what those people in the field basically do is that they cultivate assets, sources of information and influence.
And that's what Crowley had.
One of the things that the occult sphere, this world of esoteric orders, brotherhoods, the pursuit of occult knowledge, this forms a separate level of connection in society.
Yeah, because I'm thinking, we've been masturbating in a coffin, skull and bones.
Yeah. That kind of creates a bond, doesn't it?
A sort of intimacy that you're never going to kind of lose.
Well, you recognize these things among other people, and it's similar to...
Well, you remember I mentioned earlier that it was in looking at the Russian Revolution that I came across.
To be more specific about that, what I came across, without going into great detail, was a member of the Romanov family, a Grand Duke.
Who wanted to get out of a town.
He felt he was in danger.
This was before the Bolsheviks came along.
And he went to the revolutionary commander of this town.
The commandant of the town.
And he asked him to help him escape.
To help him get out of town.
Because he thought he and his family weren't safe.
Which they weren't.
Now, he and the revolutionary commandant politically have nothing in common.
The Revolutionary Commandant a few years earlier had been a terrorist who had tried to kill people like this guy.
But what the Grand Duke does is that he knows that the Commandant, like he, the Grand Duke, is a Freemason.
That they are members of the same fraternal order which are committed to helping each other in times of need.
And he goes to him and basically says, politically we're enemies, but I appeal to you.
As a brother Freemason to help me and my family get out of this situation.
And the Commandant did.
Now, you know, I ignoramus that I was.
I'd never seen that before, but that was what was the first sort of epiphany that there can be connections between people that aren't about economics or about politics.
They're not even about what we would necessarily think of in terms of religion, but that they appeal to some sort of common Bond in a kind of esoteric or occult identity.
And these organizations, and there's always this kind of kaleidoscope effect.
Occult groups are constantly coming into being and then breaking apart and then reforming.
Names change constantly.
But they often exchange membership.
People tend to float around in these things.
So one of the things that Crowley Through his activities in the occult, was very well connected to, was what I'll call the occultist here.
The various brotherhoods and organizations that transcend borders and which can link people together in ways that are otherwise not visible.
So, around 1910, 1911, discuss it in my book, he is...initiated into a German secret society called the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Eastern Templars,
or Order of the Eastern Temple, the OTO, as it was known then.
So the OTO is originally a German secret society.
It's not British, not American, it's German.
And the fellow who's the head of it at that time, the guy who initiates Crowley into it and makes him the OTO representative for the English-speaking world, basically, is a fellow by the name of Theodore Royce.
And Royce, in his day job, was a journalist.
I think on some occasions he was a singing waiter.
He ran a German news service in Britain.
Remember, this is in the years coming up to the First World War.
That was his day job.
But what was his real job?
He was a German intelligence officer.
So, Reuss, a member of German intelligence, is simultaneously the head of the OTO, and in 1910 and 11, and the years leading up to the First World War, he initiates
Crowley into the OTO.
Now, on the one level, that's because Crowley wants to be part of this organization, but
The other aspect of it is that by recruiting Crowley into the OTO, Royce, I believe, I don't know this, but I believe, also thought that he was recruiting Crowley as an asset of German intelligence.
And the reason why I think that's the case is that it then explains what happens a few years later when Crowley goes to New York in early 1914 and is very quickly Almost without any hesitation,
accepted into the German and German-American propaganda network in New York.
And see, that's one of the things you kind of have to scratch your head with.
I mean, look, this guy's a Brit, so why are the Germans accepting him?
Why would they listen to anything he said?
And that's because someone in Berlin or someone in Germany is telling them, this guy is okay, and that person is Theodor Reuss.
But Corley's doing something else.
He's working for...
He's a counterfeit trader.
That's his mission.
His mission is to appear to be a renegade, infiltrate the...
The reason why this is important is that for most of the First World War, the United States is a neutral country.
The US doesn't enter the war until the middle of 1917.
And there is a great interest, particularly on the part of the British establishment, people within the British government, who want to get the US into the war.
From the beginning, they want to do that.
This isn't something that comes into their head later on in 1917.
It is an extremely early goal.
It is a secret, a clandestine, you could argue a conspiratorial goal, to bring the United States into the war on the Allied side.
Well, specifically on Britain's side, but you join up with the French as well.
But that's not the key issue.
And so there is a secret war.
Starting in 1914 through the middle of 1917, going on in the United States in order to influence American elite and public opinion and to bring the country into the war.
So one of the things, and the Germans, their propaganda effort is to try to convince the Americans to stay out of the war.
Because they don't think there's any way that they would come in on their side, so they want the Yankees to stay out of it.
And this is where Crowley begins to offer his advice to the propaganda cabinet, as this organization was called in New York, as to how to best accomplish that.
And he gives them fundamentally some bad advice, which nevertheless they seem oddly inclined to take.
This is one of the arguments that Crowley would later use.
So one of the things he ends up doing is he ends up writing anti-British propaganda for a German-American magazine called The Fatherland.
If you're going to come up with a pro-German magazine, I don't think you can have a better title than that.
And he writes stuff which is, you know, it gloats over Zeppelin attacks on London, it says very unpleasant things about the king.
He's, you know, People later on argued that he was writing propaganda for the enemy.
Yes, that's exactly what he was doing.
But his excuse thereafter, or rather his explanation, is that I was doing this really to create a kind of parody of German propaganda, which he argued that the Germans were just too dense to ever pick up on.
It was the type of stuff that worked on them.
But that it was...
His argument was, go back and look at the stuff I'm writing, and it's completely over the top.
It's almost comic, which if you look at it from that standpoint, it is.
And so this was the whole story that Crowley would later tell to those who were interested, that during the war, I was actually working for His Majesty's government.
I was serving the British cause by playing the role of a...
...of a renegade, of a traitor.
Not many people believed him, and not necessarily for bad reason.
It was an odd thing to say.
And how I became interested in it is I was actually working on another spy running around New York during World War I. And I knew that Crowley was there at the same time.
So I thought, hmm, I wonder if there could be some sort of connection between them.
I wrote to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and I knew that one of the rare compendiums of intelligence information that had been completely declassified were the records of what was then called the Military Intelligence Division.
So if you go back to 1917, 1918 in the U.S., there's no CIA, there's barely an FBI, and so the U.S. Army and Army intelligence had the main role of sort of internal security and counterintelligence,
and this became the military intelligence division of the U.S. Army.
And during the war and the period thereafter, they amassed a gigantic archive, as these things quickly do, of dossiers and investigative files and this whole compendium of three-by-five cards with notations about suspects.
Excuse me.
So you could find information on people who were suspects at the time.
So I wrote to the National Archives asking if there was a file in the MID archives about Aleister Crowley.
There was.
It's not a very big file.
In fact, the whole thing is...
That's it.
That's eventually what I got.
And... It's essentially a report from the MID officer in West Point, New York.
Yes, where the military academy is.
But the fellow was sort of the middle part of New York.
And one of the people who had come to his attention was this weird Englishman who'd been camping on an island in the Hudson River and had become a suspicious character.
And he'd looked into him and found out that this guy...
Now, by the way, this is 1918 that he's doing this.
So the U.S. is in the war.
And the MID officer finds out that this Crowley character had been connected with German propaganda before and, you know, is contemplating arresting him, pulling him in and questioning him.
But what he does is he makes an inquiry through the MID to the British consulate in New York.
And here, to me, was the key statement in this whole file.
Let's see.
The subject has formerly been investigated by the Department of Justice on charges of being a German spy.
It was determined that Alistair Crowley was an employee of the British government at present in this country an official business of which the British Consul New York City has full cognizance.
That's got to get away.
Yeah. So, what that meant.
This is one of the things that historians do.
We dig through hundreds or thousands of pages of stuff, most of which is immaterial, and then you come across one thing.
You're looking for that pay dirt.
So, what Crowley later claimed, that he was working for the British government, Council 1918 just said is the case.
Now, it still leaves a lot of questions about exactly what he was doing.
But, in this case, the old devil was telling the truth, and then the rest of the investigation expands from there.
Yeah. He was probably there to do more than write half-arsed propaganda for German magazines, wasn't he?
He was probably providing comprimat.
I mean, he'd have been well-placed to get that.
Knowing that part, you then have to look at what...
Where did he go?
Who did he know?
What does he do?
So, yes, the propaganda part is part of it, but what Crowley claimed at one point is what he was part of, is he's part of this whole operation to bring the Yanks...
Into the war.
That's what he saw his role as.
Now, he may have been exaggerating that in his mind.
He may not have.
But it was a mission that took him...
He takes this whole cross-country trip at one point in 1950 and 1916.
He travels all the way from New York.
To Chicago, to Seattle, down all the way to Los Angeles, where he does some curious things that are unclear, but he's there for a while, all the way down to San Diego, and then back down through the American South to Florida,
and back.
He makes this cross-country trip.
And there are lots of interesting questions there, not the least of which is where he gets the money to do this because that wasn't cheap even then and supposedly he doesn't have any money.
That's one of the things that you find is that people who apparently have no actual source of income, nevertheless, the money would appear for these things to happen.
His complaint was that, you know, British intelligence authorities gave him some money, but they never gave...
He always felt undervalued and underpaid for what services he was doing.
I think there were a lot of things he was doing on that trip.
He was in these various cities.
I think, again, he was checking up on the German networks there.
His activities in San Francisco are particularly suspicious if you look at who else and what else was going on at the time.
Another part of that was also just kind of measuring things in terms of American public opinion.
I don't necessarily mean the man on the street.
But remember, everywhere he went,
his occult connections, through the OTO and other groups, there were people he could know.
gave him...
A nexus in these places that he could gauge in terms of how these people thought.
I mean, these were often people more in the arts and intellectual realm of things.
I think he was doing his basic function was to gather information.
And an asset gathers information.
That information is then passed on, usually to higher quarters, so that information is then analyzed, or it's then gone through.
It's like, Sand in a gold pan that you're eventually going through looking for usable information.
So Crowley wasn't doing this single-handedly, but he was part of a much larger British intelligence operation in the US, in the neutral US, throughout the war.
And that was his goal.
He might also even have been involved, might have been, He saw his nemesis, the guy that he thought was the most dangerous German agent in America, at least through 1916,
was a Harvard psychology professor by the name of Hugo Munsterberg.
He was of German origin, but he was teaching at Harvard at this point.
He was a very prominent figure in the German-American community.
And one of the things to keep in mind is that German-Americans were very numerous.
There were a lot of them.
There were more Germans in the U.S. than there were Irish or Italians or just about anything else.
They were probably the single biggest ethnic component.
So that was one of the things you had to keep in mind.
There were lots of Germans in this country, and Mr. Berg was a respected figure in academia.
He had friends in high places.
One of his friends was former President Theodore Roosevelt.
They didn't see eye to eye and everything, but they were buddies in many respects.
And so Crowley, writing about Munsterberg, argues that he actually at one point, I think, calls him the Professor Moriarty of German intelligence in America.
It's difficult in some ways to see why.
I mean, Munsterberg was, again, he had a good deal of credibility and respect in academic and even in political circles.
He was articulate, fairly well acquainted with American culture and society.
He was probably a little more adept in maneuvering his way around the American collective psyche than others might have been.
And he was a psychologist.
Very interested in mass psychology, particularly the influence of film.
Early on, he was one of these people who saw that film had a role as a kind of apparatus in shaping mass psychology.
But I suspect...
Those are the things that you know about Munsterberg.
I know that Crowley thought that he was the most dangerous German agent.
I know that Munsterberg is a psychologist.
He had a particular interest in mass psychology.
He had friends in high places.
He was potentially influential.
But behind the scenes, I can find these, to me, Hence, that Minsterberg is also, not too surprisingly, interested in, let's say, esoteric things.
That's one of the things that people, particularly in academia, wouldn't always advertise publicly.
When we came to elements like theosophy, spiritualism, Minsterberg had a curiosity about these things.
Which, to me, opens up the possibility That what really concerned Crowley about Munsterberg wasn't the fact that he was a psychologist, but that he was, in his spare time, so to speak,
an occultist.
That he was versed in the same kind of ideas, beliefs, and procedures that Crowley...
That was something that Crowley could recognize, or others could not.
And I would give him the pot, you know, that Crowley can see, you know, if I look at Munsterberg, there are kind of hints of this, but to Crowley, it could have been quite obvious.
And it comes down to, so what would Crowley think was going on?
Crowley's whole idea was that the applied version of what we'll call occultism, The way that you actually use this for some particular purpose was to cause change to occur in conformity with will.
That was his definition of magic, with a K. That is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will.
In modern times, people talk about manifesting things.
You've heard this, we're going to manifest my success.
That's the word.
That's the new ageification of our culture.
That's by design.
It's a sort of continuation of the theosophy that you mentioned.
Manifesting. Manifesting.
It's trying to cause change.
It's trying to manifest a reality that you want.
Literally, to bend reality to your will.
But it works, right?
To change things.
Well, that's what probably at one point told people.
He goes, you know, don't try to think about this stuff too much.
I don't know.
Don't try to figure out whether magic is an external force or whether it's something that's just coming out of your mind.
He goes, the only thing you pay attention to is whether or not it works.
As he put it, what he had learned is that if you do certain things in certain ways, you'll get These results.
And in that sense, he was a very practical occultist.
He wasn't going to agonize over the exact theological implications of this.
He was simply going to argue that if you do this, you get those kind of results.
And remember, you're locked into this battle for trying to influence reality, right?
You want a reality where the Americans will enter the war.
The Germans want a reality where the Americans will stay out of the war.
And so, from Crowley's standpoint, who could tell what might happen from a powerful occult adept, if Munsterberg was one, using his methods to try to bend reality to his purpose?
That he was dangerous, not again, not because he was an academic, not because he was a psychologist, not because he was a politician, but because he was a magician.
Now, again, I don't know that that's true.
I suspect that it may have been.
And then that comes to the, you know, if we bring things to their conclusion, what happens to Hugo Munsterberg?
He's giving a lecture in December 1916 and he drops dead.
Ah. So he would have put the death curse on him.
Well, Crowley seems to be kind of self-congratulatory about this.
Now, he's not...
Around Boston when this happens, I think he's off in New Orleans, it happens remotely, but Crowley learns about it, and he's quite satisfied by that result.
And I would think from his satisfaction, would believe that something he did or willed perhaps influenced that.
So, we'll never know for sure, but it's a strange world we live in.
What do you...
You've suggested that, rightly I think, that theosophical circles embraced some of the most influential figures of the day, being artists and politicians and celebrities of various kinds and movers and shakers,
which is why I suppose somebody like Crowley would have been useful.
Why do you think it is that these people are drawn...
Because this is sort of the nexus between your intelligence services and your occult thing.
This is where they sort of merge, isn't it?
There does seem to be a strong predilection for high-powered people.
To want to join these kind of occult societies.
What's that about?
Why would they want to do that?
Well, if you think you're an important person to begin with, you generally want to be even more important.
The ego is insatiable.
You know, what every occult Brotherhood or sisterhood worth its salt offers is what?
It offers knowledge not available to the ordinary mortal.
Yeah. They all promise that in some way.
Freemasonry promises it.
If you join this...
Cults promise this.
If you join this particular group, you are going to be enlightened to a reality that other people do not have.
And in enlightenment, there is power.
Makes you feel important.
It can give you...
If you understand how reality actually works and other people don't, then you're in a position to manipulate it.
I mean, let's go back to the idea that you posited earlier, that there is this centuries-long, you know, for lack of a better term, there's a kind of Illuminati.
There is a super elite which controls and manipulates the world, treats us like animals to be herded around for their purposes.
And then you come back to this.
Now, how do they manage to accomplish this type of thing?
Well, let me bring you back to the Crowleyan idea that...
Magic is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will.
Let's say, in my case, for the sake of argument, for the sake of theorizing, let's say that there was at some point a group who learned the knowledge to do exactly that, to manipulate reality,
to bend reality to their collective will, and that that's what they're doing, and that that is the secret of their control.
It's even why, in some cases, most of us can kind of dimly sense it, but we
can't see it because they're changing the very reality around us.
Yeah. And if that, you know, what Crowe is positing is that the power to do that exists in every person, he believed, but also collectively,
And if that's the case, it follows that there are people other than individuals who are utilizing it.
I mean, the most chaotic thing to me is it isn't just one group that's bending reality.
You have numerous competing groups that are all fighting with each other trying to bend reality.
And it's constantly changing.
And it's in this constant flux as one group gains ascendancy over the other one.
That's spooky.
Well, it's more than spooky.
So, okay, so what I don't understand, and this is not a criticism, I'm genuinely curious, because we sort of, we research, if you like, in similar fields.
I came to the conclusion ages ago that this is not theoretical, it's not let us suppose that these powers exist.
writtering away their time sort of buggering one another and taking drugs well they might do it for the fun of it right but but but there's a reason why you know you get your throat cut and your tongue pulled out for revealing the secrets and and the reason that
there is this kind of sort of apostolic sort of satanic apostolic succession of mages going back into time going back to, I don't know, the guy who was, what's he called, Al Rashid,
the guy in charge of the assassins and going.
Hassan al-Sabah Well,
Or is it because you, on some level, you don't believe in the supernatural?
that's a big question.
In the course of time, my experience, I have bumped into certain things enough that I don't dismiss that idea as foolishness.
Right. As some people might.
That's big of you.
I haven't had a huge number of recurrences, but yes, every now and then, it will just come up and whack you on the head.
You're not necessarily expecting it's there.
No, I don't think that that idea is...
I don't think anything concerning the occult is beyond the realm of...
But I can only speak from my own experience to sort of compile that with others.
I haven't had enough to tell me exactly what's going on, but yes, this is the simplest way to put it.
What Crowley's talking about, and others are talking about, to put it in the simplest terms, is not utter bullshit.
They're not just bullshitting.
They're not just making stuff up.
Well, to some degree they are.
But that it has a basis in reality.
And how far that then goes and people do use this and they apply it.
That's... How far it goes from there, I don't know.
But you see the logical conclusion of your semi-admission is, okay, so we've got people like Crowley, working for British Intelligence Services, using the social networks that you get when you're in occult circles.
You've talked elsewhere about Skull and Bones, about Bohemian Grove.
We know that you're elites in America.
They've all been in things like Skull and Bones.
They've all been in the coffin.
They've done that kind of stuff.
They go to Bohemian Grove.
The owl, by the way, is an occult symbol.
It's not just some random bird they chose.
It's the bird of enlightenment and of darkness and seeing and all sorts of occultic stuff.
What you're sort of halfway to acknowledging, but not quite, is that basically the people who run the world and even the lower tier figures like US presidents who are after all only vassals of the people who run the world, they're basically, they get their power from occult forces,
from dark forces.
I mean, that's how they do it.
You know, this is the connection between the occult and the intelligence services, George H.W. Bush.
He was a wrong one.
He's a really, really...
Is he still alive, by the way?
Is he croaked now?
Has he been dragged to hell?
I think he's still alive, yes.
Is he really?
Blimey. I'm going to get a demon coming my way.
I don't know.
I don't keep track of the bushes in that way.
There's so many of them.
Best not to lie awake thinking about the bushes.
I can't...
He may be.
But... I mean, I'm always...
I'm very interested.
I don't believe in giving my guests...
It's impolite, apart from everything else, to have people on your podcast and be rude to them.
And it's not my intention at all.
Oh, no, I don't think you're being rude, no.
I'm just very curious about why people think what they think and where they are on the journey of kind of awareness about how the world works.
Because, I mean, look, I see you've got on your bookshelf above you.
This sign that says Illuminati.
Illuminati. Okay.
You know what that comes from?
It comes from a wine company.
The Illuminati Wine Company.
Does it?
And, yes, apparently there's, you know, Italian California Illuminati wine.
Yeah. A student cut that out and gave it to me, so I have that up there.
It does not mean that I am, even though it is directly above my head.
So what does that mean?
What does that mean?
Yeah, yeah.
But, I mean, it seems to me that in my journey on the last four or five years, my journey of discovery, is that Essentially,
the people who run the world are members of these secret societies.
And they are essentially, they commune with dark forces in order to gain their earthly power.
That it just gives them a helping hand.
And that's why they're so drawn to these It's not just the gentleman's club with added drinking out of a skull.
More costumes.
With more costumes.
It's actually more than that.
It's about the bonding through compromise, but it's also about calling up these entities and acting as their servants in order to get what you want.
It's a sort of symbiotic relationship between these disbodied demonic things, which have no bodies of their own, therefore they need humans.
But the humans need them because of what they can provide.
Well, what you're describing is the Faustian bargain.
Yeah. If you want to get ahead in the world, then sell your soul to the devil.
Or to the devils, or whatever term you want to put it.
The reason we talk about a Faustian bargain is that people have been writing about that for a very long time.
It's a long-standing trope in literature and culture, and there are people who do that.
Goethe, who wrote one version of Faust, was...
A high-level Freemason.
So he obviously knew whereof he spoke.
I think he was putting things in.
Write what you know.
There you go.
So it's...
And again, it comes back to...
I mean, people would probably do that regardless.
Again, one of the things that strikes me in what we call elite, people who...
Here's one other thing.
There are relatively few people In all of humanity.
Who become the equivalent of, let's say, an Elon Musk.
Okay? Who become the richest man in the world.
Who attain great power and influence.
I take your point.
He's rich.
He's richer than you and I. He's got enough.
Yes, he's got more money than he knows what to do with.
And in those kind of cases, There's a question that almost inevitably arises, which is, why me?
Because one of the things you become...
Another example would be Bill Gates.
It comes from no.
And now, suddenly, you've got $600 billion.
And you can throw this money around and do all these things with it.
And the question that has to occur is, why did this happen?
Is it just luck?
Did I just get lucky?
Did I just come in with the right invention at the right time and that's why I have all this money?
Or have I been chosen for something?
Do I have this the wealth and the potential influence that this wealth gives me because I have been chosen by Providence?
Now which, in a very simple sense, better suits the ego?
The latter, that I've been chosen by, not that I just, I got, I'm just a schmuck who got lucky, as opposed to, I am the chosen of God.
The thing is, just a brief point, if I may intervene at that point, both Elon Musk and Bill Gates come from lineages which have, Musk's family were heavily involved in transhumanism,
and the occult.
So Bill Gates'family have got records that, got a track record.
I don't think these were just kind of random records
ordinary joes who they were selected that the and there seems to be this connection between between their sort of family occult worship and well again it's faust
Well, then, from their view, they've been chosen.
The other thing Musk's family was into, interestingly enough, is theocracy, not technocracy.
Yeah. Which was an interesting side note in this.
So it's...
But even though they're not unique in that, or other people were involved in it, not all of them became as wealthy as they did, but nevertheless, they have this wealth.
And this influence, but it never seems to be, it's never sated in a sense.
There's always this desire for more.
And the fact that you have money and you have influence, then it's the idea of how I'm going to use this influence.
And this is where you find Gates and to some degree Musk and others begin throwing their money around.
Gates was very big into funding.
One of the things was in different initiatives in education, one of them had to do with history.
He was interested in what was called big history.
He was perfectly willing to put money into something so long as it was something that sort of suited his particular interests.
What's big history?
That's a good question.
I'm not sure.
The idea of looking at history as this kind of see how much jargon I can throw into this.
As a kind of, you know, looking at it as a big picture, as a kind of macro, not necessarily the history of the British Empire or the American Empire or this period or that period,
but how the whole thing works.
How the whole mechanism of history functions, which assumes that there's some sort of mechanism to history, which I don't think there is.
Yeah. The idea is that if you study something long, you can figure out what the patterns are, and the patterns will tell you how the machine, you'll understand how the mechanism works.
And then, what's the point of that?
What's the point of learning how the mechanism works, so that you can then manipulate the mechanism?
Sure. It's like people studying stock markets to see whether there are any trends that they can, long-term trends that they can exploit that nobody else has spotted.
Well, the word here is what they're trying to rig.
How can you, what's the system?
Figure out what the system is, and then you can figure out how to rig the system.
So, in a sense, the super elites that you're talking about, that's what they apparently figured out at some point.
What the system is, and then how to rig the system.
I think they're onto something because they've clearly because often you get the same families in power over not just centuries but possibly even millennia that these ruling elites seem to have a remarkable ability unlike kind of us where we have sort of rags to riches in three generations we constantly families are constantly losing their money The serious players never seem to lose this
intergenerational wealth and power.
I was just wondering, when you were researching, I don't expect you to have done so, because I don't think anyone's done it.
When you were researching the kind of secret societies and the occult, did you ever manage to draw a line between, say, the occult societies of the 1930s?
Did you trace their roots back to any particular era?
I mean, could you go back as far as Babylon or Harun al-Rashid or whatever?
Where did it...
How far back did you go?
Well, if you looked at groups, let's say, in the interwar, in the 20s and 30s, let's just take that as a period.
And you then have a proliferation of groups.
One of the places where this is...
More apparent than elsewhere, I think, is in France.
The French don't have one version of socialism, they've got six.
They don't have one version of fascism.
So it's the same sort of thing in the various occult groups there.
But you've got people who...
Look at certain terms that come up.
So there were people who would describe themselves, and there still are, as Rosicrucians.
Oh yeah.
Now, that term first shows up back in the early 17th century.
That's when the Rosicrucian manifestos, that's where some sort of physical evidence of Rosicrucianism appears.
Even at that time, however, the Rosicrucians claimed that the origins of their order went back about 200 years earlier to the adventures of Christian Rosenkreutz, which they took their name from,
who traveled off to the East and was initiated into a secret society of magicians, and that's where he learned the secrets, and then for 200 years that were then kept secret until now we're going to reveal them.
So one of the things that I've always found is that occult groups always tend to claim, they may have, but nevertheless they will claim some kind of ancestry.
They're always sort of trying to trace themselves back to something older.
So you've now got groups in France, elsewhere in the U.S., wherever you may be in the early 20th century who are calling themselves Rosicrucians and who claim descent.
...from, well, the 17th century Rosicrucians who claimed descent from the original Christian Rosenkreuz, which in turn claims descent from whoever the Eastern masters of wisdom that he learned from.
So it keeps receding back into time.
There's no particular beginning to it.
On the other hand, if you look closely at this, what you can see is that Rosicrucianism kind of, there were always these groups that would claim the name.
And that's what it is.
It's a name.
It's not a specific doctrine.
Right. They seem to, and in the late 19th century, you get the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, the British Rosicrucians and others.
And they appear to be a group of esoteric Freemasons.
People who've decided they want to become magical Freemasons.
And they've gone as far as they can with that.
And then they adopt the term Rosicrucian because it has this kind of cachet which is attached to it.
It tends to extend their pedigree.
It's like tracing your noble ancestors.
That's what I would compare it to.
Occult groups always want to have some kind of...historic lineage.
So, for instance, today you've got a movement like Wicca, which likes to imagine itself as having this long, endless lineage back to the witches of, you know, who knows, the Stone Age.
But it goes back and back and back, and they claim relations to everyone.
Whereas... As an organization, as the name itself, it's kind of invented after World War II.
It's pretty much Gerald Gardner coming up with his stuff.
Cobbling together stuff he got from Crowley and others.
It's always this kind of...
Occultism is always mutating and reinventing itself.
I see that.
To get to your point...
Is there a continuous line of Rosicrucian adepts?
I'm just using that as an example.
Is there this whole unbroken chain of Rosicrucian adepts that goes back to Christian Rosenkreutz, assuming he was a real person, and then goes back even further from whoever he learned that from?
Or is this just a term that different occult groups at different times adopt in order to give themselves Give themselves a fancy name and apparently a kind of historical background that they actually don't have because they just came into being yesterday.
I think it depends on the group, but again, I think both those things exist.
There are a lot of people in this who are just...
I said before, I don't think that it's all bullshit, but I think a lot of it is bullshit.
I think it's a lot of people just inventing things and coming up with fancy titles for themselves and pretending to have all kinds of esoteric knowledge that they don't have.
It's play-acting on one level.
On another level, it's very serious.
Yeah. I sort of imagine that in these circles, the really astute people are Very aware of which organisation at any given time has the best secrets.
So, I mean, you've got the Freemasons and you've got their different rights, haven't you?
You've got the Scottish Rite and whatever the other rights are.
And you've got different sort of subgroups of the Freemasons, the one who dress up like Knights Templar and stuff.
And I'll bet some of those groups are like, yeah, we look at...
We look down on the common or garden Freemason brethren because they really aren't in the game.
And other people are going, yeah, if you're not in OTO, you're not in the game.
I'm sure that at any given time in the world, there are particular organisations which are closer to owning the darkest, truest secrets of the rulers of the world than others.
And they can probably trace...
I mean, you mentioned the Rosicrucians.
Okay, so you're saying that early 17th century, so that's about the time of Francis Bacon.
And if you're saying that they can trace their history back to...
This possibly fictional character, Christian Rosenkreutz, sort of, what, 150 years earlier, you're saying?
About 1400 there.
We're talking about the time of Marco Polo, aren't we?
So we're talking about the first expeditions to the East.
But then you see, you've got the Crusaders.
So they were from the 11th century, they first started going to the Middle East.
And acquainting themselves with these hitherto unknown religions and sort of mysteries of the East.
But then, so were these mysteries preserved from the time of, from biblical times and from the Pharaoh times?
And they must have been, mustn't they?
Well, you know, why stop there?
Why don't you go back to the pre-Ice Age, you know, the antediluvian civilizations that some people believe exist.
Well, I don't believe in those.
Atlantis. I don't believe, I mean, I'm inclined to think that sort of the Assyrians and, well, the Sumerians, I suppose, the Assyrians and the Babylonians would have been, I think that's why people talk about the Babylonians.
Well, again, that's the earliest that we know.
Okay, we know that the Babylonians were there.
We know the Sumerians were there.
And then before that, well, there was something there.
I mean, I'm not a big...
You're not going to kill my overall...
I'm not advocating the idea of Atlantis or Lemuria or, you know...
It sounds like you are.
I'm just saying that some people would do that.
They go, oh, it goes back to, you know, because there just had to be this...
You know, they believed that there was a lost civilization because it just seems obvious to them that this must have been.
It doesn't seem that obvious to me, but I don't know.
See, this is the thing that you find that's intriguing to me as an historian, is that the further back you go, the vaguer things begin, and once you get, you know, the Sumerians are kind of the first group that we can actually attach a name to,
but Okay, for now, in terms of modern archaeology, there are the discoveries at places like Gebekli Tepe.
Yeah. Where they found this megalithic...
I don't know what it is.
It's not a city.
So, there were people, apparently a fair number of people, who were building megalithic structures, who were doing some fairly complicated stuff before...
The Sumerians.
And not in the area where the Sumerians were.
And we don't even have a name for them.
We don't even know who these people were.
They probably did it with the help of the giants.
Yes. But that was nevertheless being done.
So exactly how far back...
Everything just fades out.
Doesn't mean it's not there.
But it fades into a situation where we no longer know the names of anyone, we can no longer discern what their particular purposes were, we don't know what culture this was a part of, and it must have come from something else.
So there's a huge amount of our past history.
I mean, look, the main thing from my standpoint with human beings is we don't know who we are, we don't know where we came from.
That, I think, is our fundamental...
Problemism. We don't know who we are, and we don't know where we came from.
Have you ever been given...
Before we go, have you ever been any...
Your books, have you ever been given any kind of heat from spooks or people like that?
No. I mean, has anybody ever threatened me?
No. Has anybody ever told...
I've occasionally felt...
Well, I know in some cases I've been used by them.
But then I was trying to use them.
It's weird, isn't it?
I was once taken out for lunch.
It was really bizarre.
I was taken out for lunch by two spooks from MI5.
A guy I hadn't seen since sort of Just out of university or maybe even university era.
So I knew he was working for intelligence services.
And they took me out for lunch.
And I still have not a clue why they took me out for lunch or what they were trying to achieve.
They were talking about Turkey.
But whether they were trying to enlist my support for some kind of pro-Turkish, pro-Edogan thing, I'm none the wiser.
I find them very weird.
Tell me your spook story.
Well, there have been a couple of...
There was a...
Alright, so some years back, one of the books I wrote was on a guy who's called a British spy, even though...
Sidney Riley.
You know we had a TV series about him.
Yes, and that's how I first became...
Everybody knows him.
Okay, the TV series, it's a great TV series, it's very entertaining, but it bears no resemblance to the reality of the man.
This is a whole...
This is a completely different guy.
And so eventually, I was graced by the SIS.
MI5. With being granted the ability to see his file.
His MI6 file.
And so I came over to London.
But the whole thing is that no one would ever mention MI6 or SA.
It was always the pretense that I was dealing with someone else.
And it was even the sort of idea that officially I never, I was given what was called a briefing on the file.
So from their standpoint, the way they would sort of present it, that I was brought into a room somewhere and somebody would tell me what was going on.
No, I'll say it right here, they gave me physical access to the damn thing.
Or, they gave me physical access to the file that they wanted to give me physical access to.
Because one of the things that was obvious to me Was that this was not the whole file.
So, I was given access to the information they wanted me to see, and while I was sitting in a room going through this page by page, there was some sort of, I think a guy on the edge of retirement who was sitting across the table from me.
He wasn't even watching me.
He was drinking tea.
And eating biscuits, as you would call them.
Cookies. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He was just kind of sitting there and we would have like casual, you know, he was bored stiff because he had nothing to do.
But he was kind of, you know, passing his time until I guess the pension kicked in.
And this was the job that they had given to him.
and it was but that was one of the things that I and of course one of the things that I had to agree to to see this and this was I think the key point for them this was the whole reason in my view that I got access to the file any
that I wrote as a result
of seeing the file that included information from the file, they got to have a pre-publication review, and they could ask me to censor anything in that that they didn't like.
Yeah. Yeah.
But what it was that they were after is they simply wanted to know what it was that I knew.
And the way that they wanted...
They gave me access to the file so that they could see what I wrote before it was published.
They did ask that a couple of things be rude, but they were completely inconsequential.
This is the whole thing, and this may be why these guys took you out to lunch.
They want to know...
What you know.
And one of the things that still puzzles me today about the whole Riley thing is that why...
Why is that such a big deal?
Because there's all kinds of stuff that's been...
The whole identity, and this is a topic all on its own, but the whole image of Sidney Riley as it's been presented in things like the television series and beginning with Robin Lockhart's book
that that was based on, Ace of Spies, is just
fantasy. It's been completely manipulated for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual character.
and I
And there's something.
That Riley's story connects with something I think quite compromising in early 20th century British intelligence.
And that's what they're very sensitive about.
Well, you think about this.
Early 20th century intelligence, British intelligence, would include The early-ish career of people like Winston Churchill.
Yes. And Winston Churchill is, as you know, sacrosanct in this country.
There's a whole national myth about how this guy saved the world.
You very rarely hear about the truth of Churchill's early I would agree with that.
I'm not suggesting that that was the information.
But the reason I mention this, I used to wonder when I was more naive.
I was just thinking, why is there a 100-year rule?
Why not just a sort of 20-year rule or whatever?
What possible information from 100 years ago could in any way be so shocking that it might alter the course of events now?
But now I understand better how the world works.
What you realise is that documents from over 100 years ago could reveal just how the world really works and how much more cynical it is, how anti-democratic it is.
Maybe that was what.
Do you have any suspicions about what the documents might have revealed?
Well, let me say here, I think you're absolutely right in that general suspicion.
I think, actually, that there's some Churchill connection to this, because Riley is...
Well, let's come back to this.
What's one of the things, and I don't even...
This was a conclusion I hadn't even come to when I'd written the book.
I think I strongly suspected it, but I never can really straight out and say it.
Roly is working for the Bolsheviks.
He's working for the Soviets.
That's what he is.
He is a Soviet agent.
Thank you.
He's related to him.
And... Riley, in some sense, is the first Soviet infiltrator, or a fellow he never quite makes his way in, but it has something to do with a very early infiltration of Soviet intelligence of British intelligence.
Riley opens the door to that, and it has to do with various backdoor deals, and Churchill is involved in it.
I can't tell you exactly how, but he is involved in these efforts to carry out a kind of...
They think what they're doing is carrying out a sort of regime change in Soviet Russia.
And that's one of the things that Riley is assisting, because he does want a regime change.
He wants a regime change that will put Trotsky into control.
And there are elements of the West who are quite keen on that because they think that he will be more amenable to their interests because he's always been more amenable to their interests.
It's one of those things that if you go back into 1918 when Trotsky becomes essentially the Bolshevik Minister of War, the commissar for
It's a long and complicated story that at some point I might write another book about.
But it basically comes down to this.
Leon Trotsky For about three months in early 1917, after being expelled from Spain, he comes to New York.
I've written a couple of articles about this that people can find if they're interested.
And under very interesting circumstances, somebody gives him money to come to New York.
Someone gives him money when he's in New York.
And there, I believe, remember, I don't know, but I believe that a deal was made.
Between Leon Trotsky and American and perhaps other interests, and then with the help of British intelligence, I kid you not, with the help, he then goes back to Russia.
Because he has to make that deal.
Because in order to get out of New York and get to Scandinavia to get to Russia, He needed to have the British consulate essentially approve his passage.
And if they actually thought that he was a German agent, they could have kept him in New York.
They control transit across the Atlantic.
And yes, he gets taken off the ship in Halifax for a month and held, but that just makes the story look good.
Because later then he can argue, see what the awful British did to me?
They inconvenienced me for a month.
But what happens in the end?
He gets back into Russia.
And once he's back there, he infiltrates.
He's not a Bolshevik, but he manages to get into their circles, become a prominent figure, much to the annoyance of other people around Lenin.
And then do everything he can to sort of facilitate American and British interests, find one that he didn't like in that character.
And that, to me, is one of the...
See, that's one of those things that is heresy, not only in terms of Western history, it's heresy in terms of Soviet history.
So, but I'm pretty firmly convinced that that's what was going on.
Yeah. Spies, eh?
Shifty bunch of bastards.
You can't trust any of them.
I'm sure you're right.
They were all planning all kinds of shenanigans.
I'm jolly glad that my college don at university, the one who was in charge of MI5 recruitment, did not Talent spot me, because I think I'd be very unhappy right now if I were doing that job.
Tell us where we can find your books and where we can read your stuff.
Okay, well, my books, Trust No One, The Secret World of Sidney Riley, Wall Street and the Russian Revolution, and then, of course, Secret Agent 666, Alistair Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, those are all available.
Wherever you can find, you know, Amazon would be the place to look, Barnes and Nobles, anybody else who sells books, I think they're around.
I also wrote a book on an obscure Russian revolution.
The book got me started.
Boris Savinkov, who, by the way, was the commandant, the Freemason commandant who let the Grand Duke go.
That was my book.
That is...
Long out of print.
I think you can find them.
I wish that I had a box full of them because they sell for something like $400 and I never made a penny off that book.
But those works are out there.
I have many, many articles scattered around in various journals that you can find on a diverse number of topics.
I have other set of articles that are more popular-oriented for New Dawn and other publications.
And then, in terms of current works, if you are familiar, if anyone's familiar with The Great Courses, which is a company which produces video series on all kinds of things,
generally by academics or former academics like myself, I have three series currently available at The Great Courses.
One is The Real History of Secret Societies, which I guess is different than The Fake History.
And then Secrets of the Occult and Crimes of the Century, which is about all kinds of grisly murders throughout history.
And I am working on another one, which I'll leave for now, that will be out probably late this year.
So The Great Courses has my series available.
And then the other thing I would want to pitch is that a friend and I have, what have we done?
We have started a podcast.
Because it is the destiny.
It's a crowded market, Richard.
You're telling me.
Anyway, I have very modest expectations, but for those who might be interested in what we have to say about a variety of things, including Crowley and Jack Parsons and James Shelby Downard and weaponization of magic, which is another one we talk about,
it is called Strange As It Seems.
It can be found on YouTube and other platforms.
I think to find it, given the algorithm, you have to say, strange as it seems, podcast, or strange as it seems, Spence.
But if you go there, hopefully you'll find things you would be interested in.
There you go.
Thank you very much.
Good luck with your podcast, and good luck with your selling books.
Thanks. Thank you very much.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please do consider supporting me on Substack or Locals.
Or if you just want to buy me a coffee, you can do that, but then you don't get the early access.
And support my sponsors and tell all your friends about how much you've enjoyed the stuff.
Thank you.
And thank you again, Dr Richard Spence.
Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you
you Thank you you *music*
Global warming is a massive con.
There is no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition to my 2012 classic book, Watermelons.
Which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in, well, 2011 actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when The people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed, in a scandal that I helped christen Climategate.
So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us, we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, Who's doing this?
And why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
