‘VIPS’ and the LaRouchians
Rage Against the Woke Machine with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Insanity
Three years after the death of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019), the infamously kooky American “small-time Hitler,” the Russian invasion of Ukraine breathed new life into his political cult, which even tried to spearhead a pro-Russian “anti-war” movement in the United States. Three years later, the LaRouchians have drifted toward irrelevance again, but with Trump back in the White House, Tulsi Gabbard installed as Director of National Intelligence, and Kash Patel running the FBI, they are hoping for another rebound. It could depend on a certain group of “VIPs.”
The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which consists of former US intelligence officers, formed in 2003 to call out the Bush-Cheney administration’s “Cooking Intelligence for War in Iraq.” VIPS wrote its first public memorandum to George W. Bush on February 5, 2003, the day that his Secretary of State Colin Powell made a warmongering presentation to the UN Security Council. One year and ten VIPS memos later, the group was said to have “produced some of the most credible, and critical, analyses of the Bush Administration’s handling of intelligence data in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.”
The main face of VIPS is co-founder Ray McGovern, a charismatic retired CIA officer and famous anti-war activist. He served 27 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, which he joined under John F. Kennedy. Whereas the LaRouchians fed information to various officials in the Reagan administration and its National Security Council, McGovern directly briefed Ronald Reagan and his national security advisors on a daily basis. In 2006, to protest the CIA’s role in the Bush-Cheney torture program, McGovern returned the Intelligence Commendation Medal that the CIA awarded him upon retiring from the Agency in 1990.
By the late 1990s, according to investigative journalist Chip Berlet, the LaRouchians “solicited contacts with a number of critics of U.S. foreign policy and intelligence agency practices, sometimes with surprising success.” McGovern only warmed up to the LaRouchians in recent years, after their tentacles were wrapped around his organization.
The first VIPS member wooed by LaRouche appears to have been Mike Gravel (1930–2021), the former Senator and Democratic presidential candidate. Gravel got the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record in 1971, and apparently joined the VIPS steering group in 2014. Gravel mentioned LaRouche while running for president in 2007. “We dismiss people,” the former Senator from Alaska said in an interview. “What’s his name, Lyndon LaRouche. I dismissed him, never gave him any credibility. Well I went to hear him speak at the urging of some friends. He does shoot himself in the foot but some of his ideas are great.”
In 2015, Gravel declared himself the newest member of LaRouche’s “cadre” at a conference held by the Schiller Institute, which is an important organization in the international LaRouchian network. “And this didn’t come to me naturally or quickly,” Gravel admitted to the audience. “I want to say that this lady up front, Anita Gallagher, has been beating on me for a decade, and calls me.” (Gallagher, a former associate of LaRouche, was sentenced to almost 40 years in prison for securities fraud in the early 1990s.) “And I got to tell you, I have been captured. I am now part of the team, and will work towards the goal.”
When Mike Gravel half-heartedly ran for president again, his teenaged campaign managers downplayed his association with the LaRouchians — luckily for them, Lyndon Larouche just died — but the Executive Intelligence Review renewed the call to “exonerate” its recently departed leader, now with an endorsement from a 2020 presidential candidate.
About a month before Gravel filed with the Federal Elections Commission, Virginia State Senator Richard Black, a relatively new VIPS member, announced that he would not be seeking re-election in 2020. He also mourned the loss of his constituent, Lyndon LaRouche, “one of the greatest minds in American history” and “by far the most adept political economist since Alexander Hamilton.” What’s more, “He got the Gestapo treatment from British Liberals in the [Washington] swamp, compelled to do so by their British masters.”
Colonel Richard Black, a far-right Republican and former career military officer, spoke at a 30th anniversary Schiller Institute conference in 2014, two years after his election to the Senate of Virginia. This might have been the first of many LaRouchian events for Black. His electoral district included the counties of Prince William and Loudoun, where Lyndon LaRouche lived since 1983.
The Washington Post has reported that Black is “known for a conservative grass-roots following and a history of inflammatory remarks about social issues.” That includes “not taking a position for or against marital rape” (2014), arguing that polygamy is “more natural” than homosexuality (2013), and alleging “there is a tendency to encourage homosexual activity” within public schools (2005). Another article said, “He has argued that abortion is a worse evil than slavery. And once, to demonstrate why libraries should block pornography on their computers, Black invited a TV reporter to film him using a library terminal to watch violent rape porn.”
Black’s controversial trips to Syria and meetings with Bashar al-Assad in 2016 and 2018 could have been arranged by the LaRouchians. Dennis King said they “have a special affinity for regimes that are tottering” — for example, Panama’s General Manuel Noriega, a discarded CIA asset that Lyndon LaRouche “praised … as a leader in the war on drugs.” As Black once told a group of politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, “I’m not some left-wing pacifist.” In 2019, he became a United Nations representative of the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review, pillars of the LaRouche Organization.
In 2020, the LaRouchians accused “Black Lives Matter” of fomenting a “color revolution” and military coup against Donald Trump. During the George Floyd protests, Colonel Black recalled that as the former head of the US Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon, “I played a key role in deploying the 7th Infantry Division to quell the 1992 LA riots.” Despite being a political nut-job with no apparent background in intelligence, Black joined VIPS in 2018.
With signatories listed in alphabetical order, Black’s name subsequently appeared at the top of VIPS memos, second only to NSA whistleblower William Binney, who also endorsed the call to “Exonerate LaRouche” by 2019. That being said, Binney and Black haven’t signed the latest VIPS memos from this and last year.
Jason Ross, a former science advisor to Lyndon LaRouche who dropped out of college to join his cult (and now is secretary-treasurer of the LaRouche Organization), conducted separate interviews with Ray McGovern and William Binney in the spring of 2017. Later that year, Donald Trump urged his CIA director Mike Pompeo to meet with Binney after he spearheaded a VIPS memo to Trump: “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?” Former NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe joined VIPS by 2014, and both of them got involved with the LaRouchians.
A week after LaRouche died in February 2019, the Schiller Institute held its “first U.S.A. national conference in over fifteen years.” Special guests included Binney and a pair of Russian UN officials. A year later, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the United States, the Schiller Institute hosted “A Conversation with NSA Whistleblowers: Rescuing the Republic from the Surveillance State.” Helga Zepp-LaRouche said at the start of this event with Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe, “I am appealing to all of you to join the fight for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, and the implementation of his ideas.”
During the summer of 2020, the Schiller Institute hosted multiple webinars with Bill Binney to make his case that there was no Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee, because as VIPS contended to Trump, “data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to a DNC computer.” In July, after two such events in a week, this former Technical Director of the NSA participated in an online Schiller Institute conference about “Lyndon LaRouche’s Battle for Justice.”
This webinar started with an eight minute video of Lyndon LaRouche from the 1990s in which he mentions Ukrainian Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, someone that LaRouche determined to be an innocent victim. “What we’re going to do today,” explained the moderator of the webinar, “is to give you a chance to hear from some of the people who went through … the persecution and prosecution of LaRouche in the 1980s, so that you might … get a better understanding of what has confronted the current President of the United States in the hoax called Russiagate.”
Some people have questioned why Bill Binney is doing this with the Schiller Institute and members of the Lyndon LaRouche Organization, and so on, and the answer is, because we do the work. Because the rest of you, who should be doing it, aren’t doing it.
Later on, panelists indicated support for Trump threatening military force against Black Lives Matter protesters, “to stop the insurrection by these Jacobin mobs … [that are] part of the effort to bring down the president, part of the coup,” according to convicted LaRouche associate Michael Billington. As his co-panelist Helga Zepp-LaRouche told it, George Soros funded Black Lives Matter, and “if you look at the method of using civil rights kooks, of using NGO kinds of organization, it is the method of the color revolution … to try to destroy the sovereign nation state.”
Before moving to these matters, Binney told the LaRouchians that “I have been feeding information” to the Trump administration’s Department of Justice investigation into the FBI’s probe of “Russian interference” in the 2016 election. Without naming names, Binney said that “hopefully they will put these [anti-Trump] criminals in jail, and I mean a lot more than have been discussed publicly. I mean, this is much deeper, and it goes much, much further into all these agencies, and the politicians involved, so they all need to go to jail, and there’s evidence to do that.” A month later, LaRouchePAC hosted a Q&A with Binney in which he again claimed that “I was feeding stuff in through different channels” to Attorney General Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham about “finding information inside the NSA databases and so on.”
Someone asked, “What does Bill know about QAnon and does he believe it to be real?” Binney didn’t really answer the question, but said “I’m not involved in QAnon.” At some point in the run up to the election, Roger Stone’s social media strategist, Jason Sullivan, put his “very good friend” Bill Binney in touch with Ron Watkins, who was suspected of being “Q” — the mysterious online figure behind the QAnon conspiracy movement. According to the 2021 HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm, “Working together with Bill Binney, Sullivan had developed a tool that gamed Twitter’s algorithms, allowing for anyone of his choosing to massively amplify their message.” The film included a scene of their pre-election call with Ron Watkins, in which Sullivan says,
This is not a sales call. This is just to … get an introduction and see if there is … anything we can do to help the cause of the Great Awakening. If Q is trying to utilize or optimize abilities on Twitter, we can make them better. We’ve got proprietary tools that can help recruit their armies and get everybody on the same sheet of music to where we’re all disseminating together, and our splash in the pond is getting bigger and bigger every time we drop something. Ron’s the chief admin that’s creating 8kun, and that’s [the website] where Q is dropping stuff, so it looks like these two are working together in some way, shape or form … I want to help the President of the United States get his word out.
In September 2020, LaRouchePAC streamed a webinar with VIPS members Binney, Black, and Wiebe titled, “Use the Truth to Stop the Insurrection Against the Presidency.” Later that month, Colonel Black did a LaRouchian-moderated Q&A about the “coup against Trump” with members of TheDonald.win, “an online forum favored by some of the most zealous and militant Trump supporters.” According to the journalist Justin Hendrix, “The Donald [.win] is notable because of the sheer amount of detailed coordination, planning, and logistics it hosted” for January 6.
A couple weeks before the election, Kirk Wiebe told a LaRouchePAC webinar with Bill Binney, “We’re in a civil war. It’s already started. Civil wars don’t typically begin with gunshots. They begin with vehement visceral disagreements about essential things.” In the aftermath of the election, LaRouchePAC hosted a “fireside chat” with Wiebe on “DEFEATING ELECTION PSY-OPS … The New American Revolution with Donald Trump or Fascism with Sleepy Joe.”
Two weeks later, Wiebe and Binney participated in another “fireside chat” (which LaRouche used to hold in his Virginia mansion): “Overturn U.S. Election Fraud to Defeat a Green, Global Bankers’ Dictatorship.” The Schiller Institute maintained in December that “Donald Trump could yet be inaugurated President in January 2021,” if only he gave Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Bill Binney and other whistleblowers the necessary platform “to reveal how the surveillance state has nearly mortally wounded the American electoral process.” They could expose that “British Intelligence, Not Russia Or China, Is The ‘Foreign Actor’.”
After the Capitol riot, nobody from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity seemed eager to associate with the LaRouchians for a while. Helga-Zepp LaRouche even distanced her LaRouche Organization (Schiller Institute and Executive Intelligence Review) from the militantly pro-Trump “LaRouchePAC.” But then in June 2021, Ray McGovern spoke at a Schiller Institute event alongside Richard Black and the director of the Russian International Affairs Council, a think tank established by the Russian government.
Later that summer, McGovern and Binney took part in a LaRouchian conference to mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In the meantime, a 77-year old retired Colonel angrily denounced the Loudoun County School Board at one of its meetings. “It’s absurd and immoral for teachers to call boys ‘girls,’ and girls, ‘boys.’ You’re making teachers lie to students, and even kids know that it’s wrong!”
Richard Black continued until his microphone cut out: “This Board has a dark history of suppressing free speech. They caught you with an enemies’ list to punish opponents of Critical Race Theory. You’re teaching children to hate others because of their skin color, and you’re forcing them to lie about other kids’ gender! I am disgusted by your bigotry and your depravity!” Black’s future Youtube co-host Jon Tigges got arrested that day, for which he later appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to tell his side of the story.
As 2021 came to an end, the Executive Intelligence Review interviewed Graham E. Fuller, who spent 20 years in the CIA, and joined VIPS by 2015. According to the New York Times, Fuller wrote “a ‘think piece’ [that] circulated in the intelligence community in May 1985,” which was “instrumental in persuading some top-ranking Reagan Administration policy makers to begin considering covert contacts with Iranian leaders. It eventually led to the covert sale of United States weapons to Tehran in what became the Iran-Contra affair.” Chip Berlet wrote in 1999,
Many reporters in the mid 1980’s were contacted by LaRouchians who offered assistance and documents to help research the Iran-Contra story. This assistance was accompanied by their relentless peddling of typical LaRouchian distortions regarding vast conspiracies. … Over the past few years the LaRouchites have solicited contacts with a number of critics of U.S. foreign policy and intelligence agency practices, sometimes with surprising success. In many cases, it is the LaRouchian intelligence network that serves as a broker for information flowing between left-wing and right-wing groups. LaRouchians appear to have first penetrated the left in recent years when they began to trade information on covert action and CIA misconduct. The LaRouchians were early critics of the Oliver North network. In the early 1980’s, LaRouche intelligence operatives such as Jeffrey Steinberg maintained close ties to a faction in the National Security Council which opposed Oliver North’s activities. At the same time the LaRouchians quietly began providing information to mainstream and progressive reporters and researchers.
It’s easy to imagine that courting VIPS has long been a goal of 21st century LaRouchians. The Schiller Institute interviewed Ray McGovern again in early 2022. The day before Russia attacked Ukraine, Graham Fuller signed a LaRouchian petition to “Convoke an International Conference to Establish a New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.”
Roughly 48 hours later, during a Youtube livestream on “The British vs. the American System: To Prevent War, Exonerate LaRouche,” former NSA whistleblower Kirk Wiebe discussed “a couple realities we have to deal with to achieve the vision that Lyndon LaRouche has put forth … a world with land bridges and sea lanes.” This VIPS member said, “That goal is noble, and it’s absolutely the right thing to do … We need to redefine the relationships along economic lines and fair trade as Lyndon LaRouche has put forth … That is the path, if done with integrity.”
That summer, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) published a list of “Speakers who promote narratives consonant with Russian propaganda.” A large number of them were LaRouchians, VIPS, or had participated in Schiller Institute events. The first five names on the list included Graham Fuller, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Richard Black, and Ray McGovern. The CCD also tried to blacklist US politicians (Rand Paul and Tulsi Gabbard), and one of the world’s most famous economists (Jeffrey Sachs), journalists (Glenn Greenwald), and political scientists (John Mearsheimer).
The LaRouchians were among the first to conflate the CCD list with Myrotvorets, the Ukrainian government-linked database of “enemies of Ukraine.” This is a criminal “blacklist website,” explains political scientist Ivan Katchanovski, but not Ukraine’s official “hit list,” as many have described Mytrotovrets and later the CCD. Thanks to an outfit of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, the LaRouche Organization made some new friends in 2022.
“Shut Down the Ukrainian Hit List Targeting Americans and International Voices of Opposition,” declared a LaRouche Organization livestream in September 2022. Special guests from the CCD “Hit List” included Dragana Trifkovic, the director of the Serbian Center for Geostrategic Studies, and two former US military analysts, David Pyne and Scott Ritter.
Pyne wrote some controversial articles about the war in Ukraine for the realist-conservative publication, The National Interest, and later he advised the far-right 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Pyne participated in a few more LaRouchian livestreams that year, and said he was “grateful to EIR [Executive Intelligence Review] for coming up with a number of peace proposals.”
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter joined VIPS in the 2000s. He became a prominent alternative media commentator on the war in Ukraine. Ritter’s theatrics and pro-Russian rhetoric escalated as the war dragged on. By early 2023 he flaunted meetings with Russian officials, and declared that “Ukraine is a rabid dog.” In early 2024 he visited Chechnya and addressed thousands of Ramzan Kadyrov’s fighters in broken Russian. Ritter appears to have only warmed up to the LaRouchians after they both appeared on the CCD “hit list.” Since then he’s done numerous interviews, webinars, and events with them.
Over two years ago, I wrote something about the hypocrisy of LaRouchians trying to lead an anti-war movement against US involvement in Ukraine. That was before their efforts largely culminated in a bizarre “Rage Against the War Machine” (RATWM) rally that took place in Washington around the one year anniversary of Vladimir Putin declaring his “special military operation.”
One of the main speakers at that event, which promoted an alliance of the Left and Right, turned out to be the next Director of National Intelligence. The organizers later tried and failed to have another rally against the “Deep State,” but now the LaRouchians are counting on Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel to drain the swamp.
Jose Vega, a 2024 LaRouchian Congressional candidate in New York City, was one of the speakers at the 2023 RATWM rally. In 2020, he moderated TheDonald.win Q&A with Richard Black about the “coup against Trump.” Two years later, when Vega and a friend heckled Alexander Ocasio-Cortez as a “war hawk” who supports Nazis in Ukraine, he said “Tulsi Gabbard has shown guts where you’ve shown cowardice.”
Gabbard had just announced her departure from the Democratic party. She soon responded to this viral clip, and “the fact that she [AOC] was so dismissive of them,” in a Fox News interview. “One of the main reasons why I left this Democratic party of today is because they have become the party of war hawks,” Tulsi Gabbard explained. “You hear these young men saying ‘nothing else matters if we are all destroyed’ in a nuclear war…” Gabbard also appeared on that year’s Ukrainian CCD list (as well as Myrotvorets), probably for speaking about US “biolabs” in Ukraine, a “corrupt autocracy” in Kyiv, and “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.”
Nick Brana, the chairman of the practically non-existent “People’s Party,” started to associate with the Schiller Institute in late 2022, around the time that he began to organize the RATWM coalition with Libertarians, LaRouchians, and others. He continued to join LaRouchian webinars after the February 2023 rally.
Brana introduced Jose Vega at the RATWM event and announced that Vega would be training rally-goers how to stage their own “interventions,” which is what the LaRouchians have called their tactic of heckling politicians and other famous people to make viral video content. Brana, the former National Political Outreach Coordinator for the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, did an “intervention” on his old boss just before the 2022 midterm elections: “You were supposed to start a political revolution, instead you’re sending money to Nazis in Ukraine. You’re starting a Third World War, Bernie!”
People’s Party champion Jimmy Dore, a comedian and online political commentator, was another speaker at the RATWM event. Since then, Dore and others from the “Jimmy Dore Show” have embraced the LaRouchians, and Jose Vega in particular. Just recently, a year after Vega announced his 2024 Congressional run on their Youtube show, Dore’s sidekick (Kurt Metzger) recommended reading a book by Lyndon LaRouche: “It turns out that guy knew a lot of stuff. … Remember when we had a LaRoucher on and … I thought it was some crazy guy? They call him a cultist — no it isn’t! That guy knows a lot of history.” At that point Jimmy Dore chimed in, all of the “LaRouchies” that he knows are great.
Jackson Hinkle, another divisive RATWM speaker and provocative online political figure, started to flirt with the LaRouche cult in 2022. They appear to have gone their separate ways since his circle of “MAGA Communists” got more serious about establishing their own cult under the guise of the “American Community Party.” Hinkle, it just so happens, joined a surf session with then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. The following year, Gabbard was assigned to the US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command.
More serious speakers at the RATWM rally were ultimately self-sabotaged by LaRouchian banners and their fellow travelers waving Russian flags behind them. The latter came from another cult-like group that sponsored the event. Caleb Maupin, the sex scandal-plagued leader of the so-called “Center for Political Innovation (CPI),” might just see himself as Lyndon LaRouche’s spiritual successor. Sex scandal-plagued VIPS member Scott Ritter, who pulled out of the RATWM rally organized by the sex scandal-plagued Nick Brana, subsequently spoke at CPI conferences in DC, and Ritter has repeatedly participated in LaRouchian events since then.
Ray McGovern didn’t speak at the RATWM rally, but Jose Vega borrowed a line from McGovern that he had just used at a Schiller Institute webinar: “Know Where You Stand, and Stand There.” About 48 hours later, McGovern addressed an informal meeting of the UN Security Council that the Russians organized to highlight Seymour Hersh’s bombshell reporting about the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. The next day, McGovern joined the Schiller Institute to talk more about this. Later that spring, the LaRouche Organization conducted an interview with McGovern on “The Art of Intervention,” although the VIPS founder credited Jose Vega with coining this term. Ray McGovern, a “dear friend” according to Vega, ended up supporting his 2024 Congressional campaign.
Over a year later, Jose Vega’s Congressional bid culminated in an event that he described as the world’s first “hybrid classical concert/political rally.” Between various musical performances, speeches were made by Scott Ritter, Jimmy Dore, and longtime associates of Lyndon LaRouche. Angela McArdle, a Libertarian Party leader from the far-right Mises Caucus, who co-organized the RATWM rally with Nick Brana and also kept in touch with the LaRouchians, remotely addressed the audience. The event’s slogan was “Build a Peace Chorus Against the Ghouls of War.”
Back in 2022, Helga Zepp-LaRouche referred to Tulsi Gabbard as one of the leaders of a new anti-war movement in the United States. Last month, the LaRouche Organization held a small rally in Washington to demand, “Confirm Gabbard and Patel to Stop Wars and Lies.” For New Year’s Eve, the LaRouchians livestreamed a conversation between Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Ray McGovern, titled “2025: Nuclear Doom or New Paradigm.” More recently, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity published a memo to the new Director of National Intelligence, inviting her “to consider its advice” — but if certain VIPS get in bed with the second Trump administration, the LaRouchians might not be far behind.
NEXT UP: Another VIPS member, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and more…
