- Imagine you have a struggling crusade that needs someone
to run it and that the Lord Himself tells you, "Write down the qualities
you want in your next leader and give me the list." Imagine that you
joyfully jot down everything you want andómirabile dictuóGod
gives it to you.
-
- Something akin to this must have been what happened when
Larry McDonald was finally named chairman of the John Birch Society, because
Larry had all the necessary qualities to lead the battle for America. He
was literally movie star handsome; had he flown into Burbank and been willing,
the studios would have fought to sign him to lucrative contracts before
he left the airport.
-
- Some very handsome people have no charm. Larry was (and,
by the way, I'm using the verb form "was" rather than "is,"
because I'm remembering him as he was, not because I think he is gone)
not just drop-dead handsome; he had enough charm to make Cary Grant look
like Buster Keaton.
-
- Larry did one thing that made me nervous. Many times,
he would be standing in a hotel lobby, for instance, after a public meeting,
typically surrounded by admirers, patiently answering their questions,
deflecting their effusive praise. I would jab at my watch and tell him:
"Larry, I donít want to get rid of you, but your plane leaves
in 45 minutes and it takes half an hour to get to the airport."
-
- Immensely patient, Larry would smile the patrician smile
and humor me. "Plenty of time, Alan." Which of course would make
me even more nervous. Forty minutes later, he would be running down the
concourse, and would leap aboard his flight as the door closed.
-
- Larry was a physician, like his father, grandfather and
brother, a specialist in urology. One of his patients was his predecessor
as John Birch Society chairman, Robert Welch, who told dinner audiences
that Larry inspected the Welch plumbing so often, he had installed a zipper
to save time. Of course, Bob Welch didn't show us the zipper, so he may
have been joking.
-
- Often, Larry and I would be seated at the long head table
near each other at formal banquets where everyone was served a slab of
roast beef. I would eat the veggies, but not the meat, which would have
been far too heavy on my stomach. Larry was a dedicated carnivore and knew
this, so after he had finished his own roast beef, he would show up behind
me, reach over my shoulder and fork my roast beef onto his plate.
-
- This was my cue. In mock-complaint, I would tell other
guests at the head table, "Dr. McDonald stole my roast beef. Lifted
it right off my plate before I could get to it." Larry would tell
them, "A Congressman has a license to steal," and they would
nod. Sometimes, I would alter the scenario a bit. Before Larry could come
and steal my roast beef, I would go to him and ceremoniously throw it on
top of his own slab of meat. When whoever was beside him would look up
at me, puzzledóI was wearing a tuxedo but wasn't a waiteróI
would explain that, as a Member of Congress, Dr. McDonald was a specialist
in "taking the food from a manís mouth."
-
- We are looking at Larry McDonald's many qualities; so
far we have seen that he was immensely handsome, inordinately charming,
and had a delightful sense of humor. Many men in Washington have those
qualities. Larry also could make a good speech. So could many others. He
was brilliant and had a prodigious memory. His knowledge of the conspiracy
for world government was truly encyclopedic. His energy and endurance were
titanic. He was prodigiously tenacious and would not be deflected.
-
- Larry also had a talent I envied for organization. His
friends and even his enemies in Congress agreed that he was far and away
the leader of the patriotic members who opposed the conspiracy for world
government. He founded an outfit called Western Goals for the purpose.
Again, he became the chairman of the John Birch Society. He served on the
boards of the Conservative Caucus and the Committee for the Survival of
a Free Congress. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, he
organized an intelligence network to unearth communist infiltration.
-
- Larry and Congressman Ron Paul spent considerable time
together. Ron of course is also a physician; when he isn't serving in Congress,
Ron is a gynecologist in Lake Jackson, Texas. Larry is a Democrat, Ron
a Republican. The big difference between them is that Larry is a student
of the conspiracy; Ron is a libertarian, and libertarians tend to debunk
conspiratology. As you can imagine, it was fascinating to be part of their
conversations.
-
- Ron at first didn't cotton to the possibility that a
conspiracy was behind so many of our problems. I have heard him marvel
many times about the insanity of Washington. "Alan, it's a loony bin.
It's literally crazy." I believe I am correct in thinking that in
his recent writings and speeches, our good friend Ron has more and more
adopted Larry's belief that our trouble isn't mere insanity; it's deliberate,
it's the work of a conspiracy. Ron told the Philadelphia Inquirer that
Larry was "the most principled man" he knew in Congress.
-
- Larry was aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on that
fatal flight because he was on his way to Seoul to participate in the 30th
anniversary celebration of the U.S.-Korea Mutual Defense Pact. He was organizing
a new worldwide alliance of anti-Communist nations, advising them wisely
to avoid the United States, which will alwaysóalwaysóstab
a friend in the back and betray anyone and everyone who opposes the conspiracy
for world government. Were it not for the United States government, Communism
would never have been anything more than a footnote. It is no surprise
that many observers described him as "the most dangerous enemy the
Communists had."
-
- As impressive as all this is, however, it would be little
more than routine without Larry's most outstanding, most obvious quality,
the quality that bound all the others together. Many good men go to Congress
to do what needs to be done. At the airport, on their way to Washington,
they tell us they will turn the country around, restore our Christian system
and Constitution, kick the Communists out, etc.
-
- A year or so later, they disappear; we don't hear from
them. Eventually, they resurface, but they are different men. They have
"seen reason." They have decided to "cooperate," because,
after all, politics is "the art of compromise." Some of them
even still talk a good game, but their hearts are not in it. They have
succumbed to the blandishments of higher office, more and bigger payoffs,
network coverage and international prestige, interviews with Republican
media frauds O'Reilly and Hannity, flashier women on fancier yachts. Maybe
they have succumbed to blackmail or threats.
-
- Not Larry. His last day in office, he was the same as
the first. One can only imagine what it must have been like to stand alone
on the floor of the House, surrounded by world government troglodytes festooned
with human gore. I do not know what Larry faced and feared; I do know he
never wavered, always voted for the Constitution and the country, against
the conspiracy and totalitarianism. I do know his incomparable courage
never failed, that he was always true to the Christian civilization whose
champion he was.
-
- What would the Soviets do to take out such a man? What
would they do to take out the "most dangerous man" they faced?
Would they shoot down a commercial airliner for the purpose? Did they?
I donít know. Some theorists speculate they did exactly that, and,
because I donít know, I donít dispute them.
-
- I do know that if they didn't shoot the plane down for
the purpose, when the Soviets found out who was aboard, when they found
out whom they had, they decided in a Moscow minute to keep himóand
because they kept Larry, they had to keep everyone else. They couldn't
very well announce that they were releasing the others but had decided
to keep Congressman McDonald because he was such a Free Enterprising pain
in the tush.
-
- What happened? What do we know? More and more has oozed
out over the years. It will be twenty years ago when you read this, the
night of August 31/September 1, 1983. Like some of you, I remember exactly
where I was and what I was doing when I heard that Jack Kennedy had been
dusted and that the World Trade Center had been destroyed. On that fateful
night in 1983, I was working alone in my office at home, when my wife called
with the news.
-
- For hours, I followed the story. Finally, assured by
the media that KAL 007 had "landed on Sakhalin," that the passengers
were "safe," that Congressman McDonald was "all right,"
and that Korean Air Lines had sent another aircraft to the island to take
them off, I went happily to bed, already relishing Larry's hair-raising
rendition of the event, confident he would be back to steal still more
of my roast beef.
-
- When I awoke, of course, everything had changed. Now,
KAL 007 had been "blown to bits," bits small enough to pass through
a cheesecloth. All the passengers and crew were dead, especially Dr. McDonald.
There weren't enough body parts to bury in a thimble. There were enough
shoes to have shod three-quarters of the passengers, but no feet to put
in them. There couldn't be any luggage because there wasn't any plane.
-
- One rule to remember in journalism is that the first
reports of something are generally the most accurate, for the obvious reason
that the first reporters don't yet know the party line. They don't yet
know what they are supposed to say, so they tell the truth; they report
what really happened. For instance, in Oklahoma City, many television reports
from the crippled Murrah federal building initially mentioned the four
bombs they had found. But four bombs would mean a conspiracy, wouldn't
it? The one man who was executed for the crime could not have done four
bombs alone.
-
- Never fear. Within hours, the humanoids with the electronics
in their ears arrived from Washington, D.C. The zombies from the Communist
News Network, from the Communist Broadcasting System, from the Bazonga
Broadcasting Commune in London and so on, showed up, took over and told
the local media "what really happened." Now we learned that there
were not four bombs. There were no bombs. There was just the usual mixed
up kid with a truck and a bag of fertilizer.
-
- Soon after the Soviets shot down Flight 007, a man named
Orville Brockman, FAA Duty Officer in Washington, D.C., called Tommy Toles,
Larry McDonald's media representative in the Seventh District of Georgia.
Duty Officer Brockman told Tommy that he had just heard from a Mr. Tanaka,
his counterpart in Japanese aviation, who told him that Japanese military
radar had tracked KAL 007 to "a landing on Sakhalinska." The
brief conversation was recorded and I have a copy of the tape. Indeed,
it's no secret; many people have heard it.
-
- There was also a report in the New York Times on September
1, 1983. Of course we now know that the New York Times doesnít deserve
to wrap fish, but, for what it's worth, the first piece on the shootdown
by the Times said that 007 was forced down, that it landed on Sakhalin
and that all aboard were safe. The first UPI wire story from Seoul on the
same date, said much the same thing. According to these reports, the information
originated at CIA. The President of KAL started out for Sakhalin to greet
the passengers and crew, and got as far as Tokyo, where he was told they
would not be coming.
-
- We also know from the transcripts of what was said that,
long after 007 was "blown to bits," the Soviet pilot who attacked
it reported it had not been shot down, and the general in charge told him
to go ahead and destroy it. We know from the transcripts that long after
007 was attacked, the flight deck was still talking to Air Traffic Control
in Tokyo, which is hard to do if you have been blown to bits. Flight Seven
Captain Chun told Tokyo he was descending to a new altitude. Even the black
boxes the Soviets had all along and were eventually forced to turn over
prove that almost two minutes after the attack, when the tape mysteriously
stopped (because of Soviet tampering?), the crew was still in control and
Flight Seven was flying.
-
- Since then, many investigators have put the pieces together.
Airline Captain Joe Ferguson and journalist Bob Lee did a study that applied
Joe's long experience to the facts and found that when the aircraft was
hit, it first descended rapidly to a lower altitude where the depressurized
passengers could breathe, and then descended slower than it would have
in a normal landing, while the captain circled, looked for a place to land.
The 747 was aloft for twelve minutes after it was "blown to bits."
-
- Enter Avraham Shifrin, a Russian who was a Red Army major.
As prosecutor for the Krasnodar Region, northeast of the Crimea, he sent
many victims to the gulag. Then another prosecutor sent Shifrin there.
He spent ten years in various facilities in the gulag, where he lost a
leg. Later, he emigrated to Israel, where he established the Research Centre
for Soviet Prisons, Psych-prisons and Forced-Labor Concentration Camps.
- Avraham became the world's foremost authority on the
subject outside the system itself and wrote a book about it, which he sarcastically
called a "travel guide" for use by tourists in the Soviet Union.
He had a network of spies there who kept him informed. They helped him
investigate the fate of Flight Seven. Avraham and his wife Elena, an English
teacher, were guests on my nightly radio talk show in Los Angeles. They
were the only guests I kept coming back for most of a week.
-
- Avraham is gone now, but a man named Bert Schlossberg
has taken up the cudgels. His site is www.rescue007.org. Please go there
and take a look. His book is Rescue 007: The Untold Story of KAL 007 and
Its Survivors. According to people who apparently were there, the crippled
aircraft landed successfully in the water off Sakhalin, near a tiny island
called Moneron. The Soviets took the surviving passengers off, towed the
aircraft to a shallow site near Moneron and sank it.
-
- Bert Schlossberg reports that the Soviets separated Larry
McDonald from the rest of the passengers and flew him to Moscow about a
week after the shootdown with a special KGB guard unit brought from Khabarovsk
for the purpose. According to Bert Schlossberg: "The KGB had a fleet
of special aircraft, the 910xx series, that was used exclusively for transporting
high profile prisoners, VIPs, and others requiring the strictest security.
These were used for even very short trips rather than using overland transportation."
-
- What happened to Larry in Moscow? Bert Schlossberg reports
that the KGB stashed him in the infamous Lefortovo prison and interrogated
him for months. The temperature in the Lefortovo cells is deliberately
kept near freezing. The cells are a shade under five feet long, the trouble
with which is that Larry McDonald is more than six feet tall. It gets worse.
Bert Schlossberg writes: "The dirt floors were submerged in water
so that the prisoners either stood or lay down in mud. There might be a
slanted bench against which the prisoner could lean with his feet against
the opposite wall."
-
- In middle of 1987, the Soviets moved Larry to a small
prison near a town called Temir-Tau, in Kazakhstan. Bert Schlossberg says
guards at the prison identified him from a photograph that had been computer-aged
to show what he would have looked like at the time. The photograph also
showed a scar running from his left nostril to the left end of his lip.
In the summer of 1990, he was taken to the transportation prison in Karaganda,
where he was known to remain as late as 1995. He may still be in Karaganda;
he may have been moved again.
-
- Notice that 1995 is long after the Soviet Union was alleged
to "collapse." Had it really collapsed, the gulag would have
been thrown open and destroyed, like the concentration camp system first
used by the British in the Boer War and perfected by the Nazis. The criminals
running that system would have been tried and hung. Larry would have been
liberated along with all the others. None of that has happened, of course,
which is still another proof that the "collapse of Communism"
is an utter fraud.
-
- Along these lines, new Soviet disinformation was recently
extruding from a source in Ukraine and circulating the Internet, to the
effect that Flight 007 was indeed "blown to bits" and so were
the passengers. Why would the Soviets be saying this now? My speculation
is that they anticipate many pieces to commemorate the 20th anniversary
of the event, like the brief memoir you are reading now, and that they
are trying to neutralize the possible effect of such coverage.
-
- Is our dear friend Larry alive? Could Larry McDonald
have survived all this? I am confident that I could not. But if any man
could, that man would be U.S. Navy Commander Lawrence Patton McDonald,
a relative of General George S. Patton, Jr. Larry today would be 68. Other
Prisoners of War older than he is have survived. So the answer to my question
is that, based on the evidence, I believe he is.
-
- I believe he is waiting for us to bring him home, but
that will not happen while communist world government traitor George W.
Bush is commander-in-chief. It would be immensely satisfying to have to
tell you how wrong I was, but I now believe Larry will come home only when
Shifrin's spies find out where he is, and a deep cover team of honorably
discharged SEALS mean as razorbacks goes in and gets him. When "President"
Putrid complains he may do likewise with spetsnaz, Bush can tell him to
"bring them on."
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- Copyright © 2003 by Alan Stang
- All Rights Reserved
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