I found a book yesterday at the Book Exchange in Missoula and it’s blowing my mind. Published in 2021 by Ken Robinson, Montana Cold War contains some very interesting historical context relevant to my research into Missoula being a CIA town where narratives are highly controlled. Here are some highlights that leapt from the book like a Minutemen missile, starting with the “Lend-Lease” program that provided the Soviet Union with a pipeline for war machinery AND secrets related to nuclear weapons.
That last part about the reputation of Russian officers not paying bar tabs is interesting to me in light of what I wrote about C.E. “Abe” Abramson in this post. Why? Because, in the biographical information at the Tell Us Something page, Abe makes a big joke about not paying HIS bar tab for years. Did Abe pick up this trait from the Russians, or do ALL fly boys resist paying their bar tabs?
Using drugged-out counter-cultures like Burning Man and the Rainbow Family to subvert American culture can be seen as one part of a long-term plan to demoralize Americans. This concept of long-term cultural subversion was clearly articulated in a 1984 interview with a former KGB agent by the name of Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov. Here’s an excerpt from an article about that interview:
Across the world, the KGB did whatever it could to thwart pro-Western and anti-Soviet political movements and figures. The group would assassinate political leaders with cyanide and other weapons. It would fund and arm leftist groups, especially those in developing nations. And the KGB successfully established moles in U.S. intelligence agencies, though the exact number still isn’t — and may never be — known for sure.
Also unclear were the group’s long-term plans involving the U.S. One glimpse, however, comes from a former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, who defected to Canada in 1970. He claimed to know details of a Soviet plan to undermine the U.S., not on the battlefield but in the psyche of the American public.
In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin from which much can be learned today. His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization.” It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.
I mention the Rainbow Gathering because one of the elders, Barry “Plunker” Adams, has lived in Missoula for many years after he helped co-found this “Rainbow” branch of the inaccurately mythologized “Woodstock” origins of the hippie movement.
The Rainbow Family was created out of the Vortex I gathering at Milo McIver State Park in Estacada, Oregon (30 miles south of Portland, Oregon), from August 28 to September 3, 1970. Inspired in large part by the first Woodstock Festival, two attendees at Vortex, Barry “Plunker” Adams and Garrick Beck, are both considered among the founders of the Rainbow Family.[citation needed] Adams emerged from the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco and is the author of Where Have All the Flower Children Gone? Beck is the son of Julian Beck, founder of The Living Theatre, known for their production Paradise Now!
The first official Rainbow Family Gathering was held at the Strawberry Lake, Colorado, on the Continental Divide, in 1972. A week before the festival was to begin, local authorities banned the event and state police blocked the road to the lake. A film of the 1972 Gathering states that Paul Geisendorfer, a local landowner, offered his land as a temporary site as over 10,000 attendees gathered behind police barriers. While there were hundreds of arrests, the huge number of attendees caused authorities to stand down and let them pass through the barriers.
When I moved to Missoula in 2000 I was in my early 20’s and a total dupe for American counter-culture. I read Beatnik poets, had dropped acid, and generally agreed with assessments that mainstream culture deployed authoritarian crackdowns because they feared the peaceful, loving utopias that organically sprung up to show that another way was possible. For a good example of this line of thinking, this interview is indicative of the vibe I’m talking about:
Montana was the location of the Rainbow Gathering in 2000 and again in 2013, where the same location in Montana’s Beaverhead National Forrest was used. By 2013, though, my outlook had changed from 5 long years working at the western Montana’s largest homeless shelter, the Poverello Center. What I saw on the streets of Missoula that summer (and heard from attendees of the gathering) turned out to be a trend of hard drug abuse and violence that made subsequent gatherings much more problematic, which even the Wikipedia page acknowledges:
There were three non-fatal stabbings at a gathering in Colorado in 2014. The same year, a woman was found dead at a Rainbow Gathering in Utah. In early 2015, there was a fatal shooting at a gathering in Florida.
In 2015, a group of Native American academics and writers issued a statement against the Rainbow Family members who are “appropriating and practicing faux Native ceremonies and beliefs. These actions, although Rainbows may not realize, dehumanize us as an indigenous Nation because they imply our culture and humanity, like our land, is anyone’s for the taking.” The signatories specifically named this misappropriation as “cultural exploitation.”
Burning Man has followed a similar trajectory, culminating in a Russian national getting his throat slit last summer. Are these isolated incidents of violence or examples of America losing the Psychological War we were warned about over 40 years ago?
If the connection between WWII ratlines to deliver military equipment to Russia, and the modern day scourge of drug trafficking seemingly destroying America from within, isn’t obvious yet, let me return to Cold War Montana for a fascinating story of America, the CIA, and Canada collaborating last century as the Cold War was heating up:
A Missoula-born Air Force Captain dropping propaganda in North Korea for the CIA? How curious. And of course I couldn’t help noticing the name of the Air Force Base they returned to in California.
Later this week, in part II, I’ll share some new insights into Missoula’s role in the Manhattan Project, along with a surprising mention of two names I really didn’t expect to run across in this 2021 publication written by Ken Robison, so stay tuned!
And, as always, thanks for reading.
