Here is a profile of Mae Brussell by Paul Krassner, founder and publisher of The Realist, which was a very interesting satirical publication. Unfortunately, Krassner gave far too much space to conspiracy theorists.
The profile shows that Mae Brussell was completely delusional.
Money Quote:
Mae has been our nation's number-one, self-appointed conspiracy freak since the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.
Hey, I thought I was the conspiracy freak! Some people don't realize it, but the word freak does not always have a negative connotation.
Brussell saw connections everywhere:
I first met Mae Brussell when she provided me with leads for a story I did on Charles Manson. Then, a few months after the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, Mae rang me up. She recognized names and methods of operation from her assassination research. For example, she knew that Watergate burglar James McCord had crossed paths with Lee Harvey Oswald when both had been working for CIA intelligence ...
Really?
And, of course, Brussell believed that the CIA killed both John and Robert Kennedy.
And then she just gets absurd:
Mae Brussell contends that Nixon's own Watergate plumbers, and the entire intelligence network they represented, were prepared to overthrow Nixon whenever it was deemed necessary by the true powers. Ultimately, she believes, the same men who brought Nixon to power via the Kennedy assassinations were also pulling the strings at Watergate.
That is assassinations in the plural, meaning John and Robert.
Even Krassner is startled by some of Brussell's claims:
Sometimes Mae's theories seem like they've been pulled from the pages of a James Bond -- or perhaps an E. Howard Hunt -- spy thriller. "I found it interesting that the Cuban Watergate burglars -- who were later given a $200,000 payoff by the CIA -- were looking for the air conditioning plans for the hotels in Miami, when later it was discovered that Legionnaire's Disease may have come through the air conditioning ducts. There is the capability to use germs to neutralize people. The CIA has the germs. Legionnaire's Disease has the exact symptoms of a disease they were experimenting with at Fort Detrick, Maryland. When you hear of weapons control, you think of guns, tanks, planes, but don't hear that they're selling germs, or that Nixon ordered Richard Helms to destroy the germs at Fort Detrick and Helms didn't.
Brussell then rails against psychosurgery and makes up a quote from a Dr. Jose Delgado.
"We are witnessing pockets of violence, because they are now able to electronically, surgically and hypnotically kill citizens. The army alone spent $26 million in projects to alter human behavior, and they not only did it with electrode implants but with LSD plus electrodes. They alter minds so that people act without knowing why. They can make someone murder a whole family and then kill himself."
Actually, the MK-Ultra program was a huge failure. Stephen Kinzer wrote in his book Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control:
For ten years, Gottlieb directed systematic, intense, and far-reaching research into mind control. Finally he and his comrades were forced to face their cosmic failure. Their research had shown them that mind control is a myth -- that seizing another person's mind and reprogramming it is impossible.
And the Brussell goes into mysterious deaths:
"Sheffield Edwards was killed and William Harvey was killed -- the CIA contacts with the Mafia people -- and the CIA agent Guy Bannister [sic] was killed. He worked with Robert Maheu and Lee Harvey Oswald and he flew out of a window. The same people who were behind it are alive today, and they're sweeping away the bodies. It's at the highest levels that these conspiracies are planned, not just with a few Cuban exiles."
Of course, Guy Banister did not fly out of window. He died of a heart attack and was found in his bed in his apartment.
Even rock musicians are dying in mysterious circumstances:
Musicians: Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Mama Cass Elliott, Jim Croce, Tim Buckley -- "And almost thirty other fine musicians have died under mysterious circumstances. Rock Musicians had an ability to draw together youth at a time when protest meetings were being broken apart, and the hippie, antiwar youth became too visible with their own, unique art form at Woodstock. The Senate investigation documented that persons seeking 'racial harmony' and 'social protest' were defined as enemies of the state. Only people like Sonny and Cher, the Osmonds, John Denver and the Captain and Tennille made it as role models. They either have to tame you or kill you."
I have to agree -- the Captain and Tennille was too much for me.
And then Brussell brings up Freddie Prinze:
"He was an active Democrat, entertained by the President at the White House, a symbol for the Chicano. He had a deep concern about who killed Kennedy. He had a copy of the Abraham Zapruder film, and he kept playing it over and over. Time magazine says he had an intrigue about death because he kept watching Kennedy die. Well, you could say he was worried about how Kennedy was killed.
I know researchers who've played that film over two hundred times. It's not because they are preoccupied with death, but because it's perfectly obvious that the government is lying, that Kennedy's head is going back. And here's a guy, Freddy Prinze, who every time somebody comes over, he shows the film to them and talks about it. He tells a psychiatrist he's suicidal, who takes his gun, and then when he leaves, he hands it back to him. Then Freddy goes to Vegas and picks up a hundred Quaaludes from another doctor. The removal of Freddy Prinze means one less visual person from that stratum of society. They lose a symbol for the Puerto Rican kids sitting on the steps in New York. There are no positive visual images of Chicanos on the screen. No encouragement for the young ones, because this one's heavily doped and has blown his brains out."
This is so incredibly delusional.
Krassner wonders why they have not killed Brussell. She answers that it's because she only has a small audience.
"That's why the CIA works on a basis of need-t0-know. Because if you know too much, you may not do what you're supposed to do. If you know that the end result is that somebody's going to be blown up twelve miles away -- and all you're supposed to do is deliver an envelope -- you may think about it. One man who called me had killed ten people -- a number of the murders were chemically induced 'apparent heart attacks' -- for the CIA. But when he was ordered to kill a Congresswoman, he refused. Another CIA agent then tried to kill him by cutting his jugular vein, but he had it sewn up and survived. Now he's vowed vengeance against them. He told me that agents listen to my show, Dialogue: Conspiracy, and I asked, "what do they think about it?" He said they think it's right on, that they can understand. That it's also a safety valve for them, something that lets them know just how far things are going."
All of the killing is for the establishment of a fourth Reich:
'When Hitler failed, his officers were brought to the U.S., from inside Rockefeller Center, and to the Bahamas and Southern states to build that dream of the Fourth Reich. It is in this context that the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, labor leaders, judges, entertainers, reporters, authors, students, Black Panthers, Indians, Chicanos and hippies are being slain, and why the masses are being doped into control."
You would think that all this nonsense would have convinced Krassner that Brussell was completely off her rocker. Well, maybe he did realize it. And that's why he let her speak.
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She sends a crazy memo to Rep. Carl Stokes.
Mae Brussell helped convince Dick Russell that Willoughby was behind the JFK assassination.
A Richler article with a large section on Mae Brussell.