FBI spied on Simon Moon's university

I've been reading Gene Healy's book, The Cult of the Presidency. Much of the government abuses he describes in the book are familiar to me, including extensive government spying on dissidents and the rush to get involved in various unnecessary wars. But this paragraph describing the FBI's COINTELPRO (for "Counterintelligence Program"), a 1970s domestic spying operation, surprised me:

The program had begun in 1956 with a focus on the U.S. Communist Party, but soon broadened to include white and black nationalist groups, and eventually ‘‘New Left’’ organizations. The bureau had 

an expansive definition of ‘‘subversive.’’ Among its targets were liberal Antioch College and Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which the FBI termed a Black Nationalist 

‘‘hate group.’’  (Page 107.)

Antioch College is of course the school that is Simon Moon's alma mater in ILLUMINATUS! Robert Anton Wilson lived for awhile in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Antioch is located. Antioch went through financial hard times and shut down in 2008 but reopened in fall 2011.

Some of the incidents described in Healy's book sound like satire from ILLUMINATUS! Here is the paragraph that follows the one quoted above:

Some of the FBI’s actions during this period had the flavor of high-school pranks, albeit potentially murderous ones. In ‘‘Operation Hoodwink,’’ carried out between the fall of 1966 and the summer of 1968, agents purporting to be Communist Party members sent insulting letters to mob figures Carlo Gambino and Santo Trafficante, among others, hoping to ‘‘provoke a dispute between La Cosa Nostra and the Communist Party, USA.’’ Other schemes were less amusing. On one occasion, FBI agents kidnapped an antiwar activist to intimidate him into silence. On another, agents bugged Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms and sent him a tape containing evidence of his extramarital affairs. With the tape was a letter saying ‘‘King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is’’ —that is, commit 

suicide. King was only the most famous of the FBI targets on whom this sort of gutter tactic was employed.

Healy's description of some of the crazy things the U.S. did (or considered doing) to Cuba also is eye-opening (Page 94):

After the Bay of Pigs debacle, top military officials developed a plan to foment a war with Cuba by blaming Cuba for attacks on Americans that the military itself would stage. On March 13, 1962, 

Army General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented Robert McNamara, President Kennedy’s defense secretary, with a memo detailing ‘‘Operation Northwoods’’: a plan to covertly engineer various ‘‘pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.’’ Those pretexts would include ‘‘a ‘Remember the Maine’ incident’’ —staging the explosion and sinking of a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay. Though no U.S. personnel were to be killed in the incident, phony casualty lists would be supplied, which ‘‘in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.’’ The memo also contemplated faking a Cuban attack on ‘‘a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela ...,’’ 

The book then describes plans to stage a phony Communist Cuban terror campaign in Florida and Washington, D.C. and then explains, "The plan, signed off on by all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was apparently vetoed by Defense Secretary McNamara." 

Rob Pugh had a post about this recently at his excellent blog.

Healy's book is available "for a limited time" as a free ebook download here.

Simon Moon's alma mater to reopen?

As I wrote earlier, one of the main characters in ILLUMINATUS!, Simon Moon, studied at a very real Ohio school, Antioch College. (Moon of course also is a character in Schroedinger's Cat, and also pops up in other writings.)

The school ran out of money and shut down in 2008, but progress apparently is being made to get it open again. The Yellow Springs News — a periodical which I'm guessing Robert Anton Wilson read when he lived in the area — reported that the superintendent of the Pittsburgh is visiting the campus next week as one of two finalists for the president's position.

Robert Anton Wilson, Buckeye

Robert Anton Wilson lived in a number of places during his life, including Chicago, Ireland, New York City and California. But as this humble blog is being written in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, I want to note that he also was an Ohioan.

During the early 1960s, Wilson lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It's a small town, but also was something of a countercultural enclave, owing to the presence of Antioch College.

Wilson's sojourn there found its way into ILLUMINATUS!, where it is revealed that Simon Moon went to school in Antioch, as in this passage on page 62: "The next stop was Antioch in dear old Yellow Springs where I majored in mathematics for reasons you will soon guess. The pot there grows wild in acres and acres of beautiful nature preserve kept up by the college. You can go out there at night, pick your own grass for the week from the female of the hemp species and sleep under the stars with a female of your own species, then wake up in the morning with birds and rabbits and the whole lost Thomas Wolfe America scene, a stone, a leaf an unfound door and all of it, then make it to class feeling really good and reading for an education."

Antioch College has closed for money reasons, and as of this writing, it's not clear that supporters will succeed in reopening it.