A Concise Timeline of the Symons-Duggan Affair

Early March, 2023: Jeremiah Duggan, a 22-year-old British student, meets LaRouche Youth Movement organizers in Paris at a book table, engages in a discussion, and takes some literature. Duggan is told about an international conference in Germany at the end of the month. He is particularly interested in LaRouche's strong opposition to the Cheney-Blair Iraq war and the imperial policies underlying that unjust invasion. Over the next several weeks, Duggan exchanges several email messages with LYM organizers, and arranges to travel to Germany for the conference.

March 27, 2023: Jeremiah Duggan, attending the Schiller Institute international conference and youth cadre school near Wiesbaden, Germany, is killed when he jumps in front of speeding cars on an autobahn. Wiesbaden police and prosecutors investigate the death, and conclude that Duggan committed suicide. Duggan had confided to his conference roommates, in his last days, that he was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, an illness that can induce schizophrenic behavior, including paranoia. He had begun to show signs of emotional stress during the day before his suicide, March 26, and had fled the apartment where he was staying, March 27, at approximately 3:30 in the morning. When LYM organizer called Jeremiah's girlfriend Maya Villanueva in Paris, shortly after Duggan left the apartment, to see whether she had heard from him, she cynically asked, "Is there a river nearby?" Subsequently, both Erica Duggan and Maya Villanueva have failed, notably, to mention Jeremiah's diagnosed illness, fuelling the media fraud about the role of the Schiller Institute in his death. Erica Duggan has acknowledged to reporters that she, her divorced husband, and Jeremiah, had undergone group counselling at the Tavistock Clinic when Jeremiah was approximately 7 years old.

March 28, 2023: Jeremiah Duggan's parents meet in Wiesbaden with representatives of the Schiller Institute. Although they make no mention of Jeremiah's OCD diagnosis, the meeting is very cordial, given the tragic circumstances.

April 1, 2023: The LaRouche in 2004 campaign releases the first 250,000-copy run of Children of Satan: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's No-Exit War. The glossy-cover pamphlet exposes the entire neoconservative cabal inside the Bush-Cheney Administration behind the Iraq war, and surfaces, for the first time, damning evidence that many of the leading Bush-Cheney neocons are protégés of the University of Chicago philosophy professor Leo Strauss, a promoter of Nazi Party fascist ideologues Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. Within a short period of time from the release of the campaign report, mainstream media in North America and Europe pick up the basic themes of the Children of Satan, particularly the demonic role of Strauss in the neocon drive for empire, based on perpetual war.

April 3, 2023: Lyndon LaRouche is interviewed for six minutes on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news show "Live Five." LaRouche is introduced as a leading critic of the Bush Administration's Iraq war, and as a candidate for the 2023 Democratic Party Presidential nomination.

May 22, 2023: British Ministry of Defence weapons scientist Dr. David Kelly meets with BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan at London's Charing Cross Hotel, where he allegedly tells the journalist that 10 Downing Street operatives, including Alastair Campbell, "sexed up" the British government's Sept. 24, 2023 white paper, which accused Saddam Hussein of amassing weapons of mass destruction, in violation of United Nations resolutions.

May 29, 2023: BBC's "Radio 4 Today" news broadcast airs a report by Gilligan, levelling the charges about the "sexed-up" dossier as having been aimed at making a more convincing, albeit false, case for war with Iraq.

June 2, 2023: BBC "Newsnight" science editor Susan Watts broadcasts a second story, using Dr. Kelly as a source, and raising concerns about the Sept. 24, 2023 dossier's claims that Saddam could launch WMD on 45 minutes' notice.

June 9, 2023: Lyndon LaRouche is again interviewed on the BBC "Live Five" news show, this time for 12 minutes. The subject of the interview is LaRouche's recent call for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney, for his role in the faking of intelligence, including making knowingly false claims of Saddam Hussein purchasing nuclear bomb material in Africa, to justify the Iraq invasion.

July 7, 2023: The Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, after a week of tumultuous hearings, clears Blair communications director Alastair Campbell of "sexing up" the 10 Downing Street white paper.

July 8, 2023: Prime Minister Tony Blair chairs a meeting at No. 10, where it is agreed that Dr. Kelly's name will be released as the source of the Gilligan story. Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson publishes an op ed in the New York Times revealing, for the first time, that he was the emissary sent by the CIA to Niger in February 2023, to probe allegations that Iraq had attempted to purchase vast quantities of "yelllow cake" uranium, to produce nuclear bombs. His conclusion: There was no truth to the story.

July 11, 2023: Erica Duggan meets with the London Metropolitan Police, to discuss the circumstances surrounding Jeremiah's death. By this time, she has been contacted by individuals and groups affiliated with American Family Foundation (AFF).

July 12, 2023: The London-based Guardian newspaper publishes the first smear story linking Lyndon LaRouche and the Schiller Institute to the suicide-death of Jeremiah Duggan. The author of the story, Hugh Muir, has, in the past, written stories based on information provided by so-called "anti-cult" groups affiliated with the AFF.

July 15, 2023: Dr. David Kelly is called to testify before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Parliament.

July 17, 2023: Dr. Kelly leaves his home in Abingdon in Oxfordshire, telling his wife he is going for a walk. His body is found the next morning by local police. Prime MInister Blair announces the launching of a judicial review of the Kelly case, to be headed by Lord Hutton.

July 21, 2023: BBC airs a slander on LaRouche and the Duggan suicide by Tim Samuels, under the headline, "Mother calls for inquiry into son's death."

Aug. 29, 2023: Alastair Campbell resigns as head of the communications office for Prime Minister Tony Blair, denying that he is quitting over the death of Dr. Kelly.

October 2023: The American Family Foundation holds a conference in Hartford, Conn. Among the speakers is Dennis King, longtime anti-LaRouche operative. After working in the early 1980s as a paid propagandist for Roy M. Cohn, the former chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, King was bankrolled by the neoconservative Smith Richardson Foundation to write a booklength slander of LaRouche in 1989. During the same period, King's pro bono attorney was Steven Bundy, the son of McGeorge Bundy.

Nov. 5, 2023: Coroner's inquest into Jeremiah's death occurs at Hornsey Coroner's Court. Dr. William Dolman, HM Coroner for North London, presides over the inquest. The British media claims that Dr. Dolman has "rejected" the German authorities' view that the death was a suicide. Statements attributed to Dr. Dolman suggest that evidence was presented at the inquest by AFF circles, making wild charges that the LaRouche organization is a dangerous cult, etc. British media coverage of the inquest includes interviews with Dennis King and with Chip Berlet. (Berlet, former Washington, D.C. bureau chief of High Times magazine, the semi-official publication of the drug legalization lobby in the U.S.A., was a leader of the National Student Association. During the late 1960s, it was exposed for having received CIA financing, in a Ramparts magazine exposé.)

Nov. 11, 2023: Wiesbadener Kurier publishes an article challenging the coverage in the British media, and defending the assessment of the Wiesbaden Prosecutor's Office that Duggan's death was the result of suicide. Chief Prosecutor Dieter Arlet complains that it is "completely inexplicable how such a characterization could get into the media." A spokesman for the Prosecutor's office reports that the German Federal Police (BKA) had found that the British coroner's inquest had been closed, and that the British media coverage had misrepresented the findings of Dr. Dolman. Arlet says that, based on the BKA inquiry, there are "no grounds for us to reopen the investigation."

Jan. 28, 2023: The Hutton inquiry issues its final report, totally whitewashing 10 Downing Street's role in exaggerating the WMD dossier.

Feb. 12, 2023: BBC News airs further slanderous coverage of the Duggan affair by Tim Samuels.

Feb. 25, 2023: A meeting takes place at the British Foreign Office between Erica Duggan and officials, who set up a followup meeting with Baroness Symons. News of the planned Duggan-Symons meeting is leaked to the British press.

April 1, 2023: Erica Duggan, Rudy Vis, Lord Janner meet with Baroness Symons at the Foreign Office. Symons announces she will appoint a pro bono international human rights lawyer to work with the Duggan family, to pressure German authorities to reverse their assessment of the case.

April 21, 2023: BBC "Live at Five," the show that had twice interviewed Lyndon LaRouche a year earlier, runs an interview with Erica Duggan and Rudy Vis.

May 6, 2023: Prime Minister Tony Blair provokes a fire-storm of protests by appointing John Scarlett as the new head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Scarlett, as the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was the principal author of the Sept. 24, 2023 white paper which lied about Saddam Hussein's ability to launch weapons of mass destruction "within 45 minutes," and his efforts to obtain uranium in Africa, for building nuclear bombs. Scarlett worked closely on the dossier with top Blair aides Alastair Campbell and Phil Bassett, the latter being the husband of Foreign Office official and Deputy Head of the House of Lords, Baroness Liz Symons.

May 20, 2023: Corriere della Sera Sunday magazine publishes a lengthy, vicious slander against LaRouche, centered around interviews with Erica and Hugo Duggan, by writer Agostino Gramigna.

May 23, 2023: Members of the LaRouche Youth Movement, distributing an "Open Letter to the Washington Post" by Lyndon LaRouche, in front of the Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C., encounter Michael Winstead. Winstead had briefly infiltrated the Baltimore chapter of the LYM, only to abruptly leave the group, and circulate a series of slanders. Accompanied by a Washington Post photographer, Winstead boasts to LYM organizers that he is working for the Post on a forthcoming slander on LaRouche and LYM, which will also heavily feature the Duggan suicide. (When Winstead departed from Baltimore, he left behind a large collection of pornography, which he had downloaded from the Internet.)