The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture

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Thornley's Pope certificate". Groucho Gandhi. Archived from the original (Blank form) on November 2, 2006 . Retrieved October 8, 2006. BF Skinner is the behavioural psychologist who, in the 1970s – as the age of individualism rises up – predicts that the whole idea of individual freedom will just be a passing moment in history. Soon, he says, science will find a way of gathering enough data on all human beings so those in charge can predict their behaviour – and alter it with rewards. At that point, what people feel inside them will become irrelevant: only their observed behaviour matters. And he uses pigeons to show how this could be done. It is hard to take seriously any non-conspiratorial explanation of these events. Thornley decided to write a novel based on a not-especially-interesting marine who defected to the Soviet Union. While this hapless Marxist was in Russia, some CIA assets were impersonating this wayward young marine while conducting FDC/agency business. Then Thornley whimsically decided to show up in New Orleans, where he happens to meet Guy Banister—one of the figures involved in creating the FDC. So, he shows Banister the novel he has written about Oswald, the same guy that Bannister’s FDC associates are impersonating. And apparently Adam Curtis doesn’t bat an eyelash.

If one rigidly follows the above architectural design one achieves the desired result: Thornley is somehow an ignored cultural and artistic lion; Garrison is a demented, hateful, vacuous fraud; and who really cares who killed JFK, what does it matter? The problem is this rigid formula renders the book so eccentric as to be solipsistic. Having dealt with the works of writers like Peter Janney, Lamar Waldron, and Tom Hartmann, I use that word gingerly. But this book is clearly in their league. The myth of celebrities in the illuminati was probably born in Playboy magazine. During the counter-cultural haze of the 1960s, editors Robert Anton Wilson and Kerry Thornley started sending fake letters into the magazine. They wanted to shake things up in their tongue-in-cheek way. So they wrote in describing a secret cult – the illuminati – that they said controlled the world. After that, they wrote even more fake letters, disagreeing with the letters they had already published. The whole thing was one big hoax orchestrated by the writers.

Though Thornley at this point admitted knowing Ferrie and Bannister, and even E. Howard Hunt, he claimed that these were not the real conspirators. Absurdly, Thornley was then asserting that the actual plotters were characters known as Slim, Clint, Brother-in-law, and Gary Kirstein. [26] Kerry said he later figured out that two of these men were Hunt and Minuteman Jerry Milton Brooks under pseudonyms. This is but one example of how the HSCA, like the Garrison investigation, was beset by disinformation agents. Besides Thornley, figures like Marita Lorenz and Claire Booth Luce led HSCA investigators on many pointless diversions. [27] John Newman has recently argued that Antonio Veciana was doing something similar to HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi by exaggerating the importance of David Atlee Phillips and by distracting from the relationship between army intelligence and Veciana’s Alpha 66 unit. [28] In this author’s opinion, Harold Weisberg deserved to be heard. If one does not let the accused reply, then one is involved in a slime job. He uses this to connect to, in this same section, the discredited Tim Leary story that he supplied Mary Meyer with LSD and she gave it to President Kennedy. As I have pointed out, this is completely undermined by the fact that Leary never came close to mentioning doing such a thing for nearly 20 years, even though he had written about 20 books in the meantime. Some of them almost daily diaries. But we are to think he forgot to mention that time he met the former wife of a CIA officer, the striking looking Mary Meyer? Please. There are two related reasons. David Lifton decided that his friendship with Thornley was more important than Jim Garrison’s investigation. Therefore, he decided to battle Garrison on both Thornley and other fronts, doing what he could to damage his reputation and credibility. He worked with Edward Epstein, and as the MSM buried Garrison—CBS, NBC, Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek—so did the leading lights of the critical community.

Noting the fact that Freemasons and Roman Catholics are not “historical bedfellows,” Moss called the idea of Masons using this particular Bible “extraordinary.”

Primary Sources

Because of this move, Jim Garrison did not have an easy time finding Thornley. (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 71) In fact, according to the DA, it took quite a long time to locate Thornley. In the nineties, I interviewed former Garrison investigator Jim Rose, who had his logs and journals on hand. A former CIA agent, he explained how he had used his Agency resources to locate Thornley. (DiEugenio, p. 191) Strausbaugh, John (1991). "Oswald's Other". Impropaganda. Review. NY Press. Archived from the original (Image) on June 2, 2006 . Retrieved July 29, 2006. Lance DeHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), p. 20.