CIA Killings of American and British Rock Musicians,1968-1998
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WHO'S NEXT?: CIA Killings of American and British RockMusicians,1968-1998 by Alex Constantine Research assistance: The late Mae Brussell's "Operation CHAOS," an unpub lished essay, and film-maker Lew Lee. Reports of appalling excesses committed by domestic intelligence operatives during the Vietnam era have surfaced repeatedly in the public print since the evacuation of Saigon: the FBI's COINTELPRO outrages, the probable involvement of military intelligence officers in the murder of Martin Luther King, et.al,, assaults on 1960s activism by the CIA's CHAOS division, the distribution of LSD to subvert the anti-war movement, a litany of Watergate "horrors" and various ill-conceived, federally-sanctioned undercoveroperations. Some of this closet activity has only come to light decades later, including the existence of a CIA-led "Sovereign Committee," an assemblage of prominent reactionaries bent on turning back the civil rights movement in the South of the 1960s by decimating the lives of its leading spokesmen. Still eclipsed by federal classification are the tactics of the U.S. intelligence sector in the destabilization of the lives of musicians and coun ter-cultural activists, as revealed in a Senate Intelligence Committee report released on April 26, 1976: "Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate personal conflicts oranimosities between them. Send articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank accounts. Ob tain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into rivalries that MAY RESULT IN DEATH." Killing was, without question, deemed a sound option by an intelligence sector embroiled in suppressing the popular backlash to military-industrial authority. One covert operation proposed by the President Nixon's Plumbers unit,, a CIA c adré, involved the bombing of100,000 demonstrators at a rock concert in Mission Bay, San Diego during the 1972 Republican convention (an event subsequently moved to Miami, where the same White House special operations unit planned to provoke a riot to be blamed on the Left, perHarper's magazine for December 1972, until the whistle was blown by FBI informant and Green Beret vet William Lemmer before a Florida grand jury). The music industry of the Vietnam period was the binding force of a cu ltural revolution. Music and the politics of the Left were one. "War," Mick Jagger reflected, "stems from power mad politicians and patriots. Some new master plan would end all these mindless men from seats of power." Mick Jagger's aud ience sang his revulsion, but their enmity
