The John Train 'Salon'
The Evidence of Criminal Fraud
Filed with the Fourth Circuit Court

Included in the six volumes of evidence filed with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va. is an affidavit by Herbert Quinde, a reporter for Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) magazine. The affidavit, dated Jan. 20, 1992, details a nine-year investigation by EIR researchers, private investigators, and attorneys into a criminal conspiracy involving government officials, representatives of major news media organizations, private citizens, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) to slander and frame up Lyndon LaRouche and a number of his political associates.

The 28-page Quinde affidavit, with 34 attached exhibits, constitutes one key piece of evidence of the massive government-private sector effort to "Get LaRouche." The affidavit was submitted before Federal District Court Judge Albert V. Bryan, Jr. as part of a 2255 Motion on Jan. 22, 1992. On May 14, 1992, Judge Bryan denied the motion, and on Nov. 17, 1992, the Quinde affidavit was submitted to the Fourth Circuit as part of the appeal of Judge Bryan's ruling.

The evidence contained in the affidavit and accompanying documents is sufficient to warrant a new evidenciary hearing on governmental fraud upon the court that would lead to the exoneration of LaRouche and all of the other federal and state defendants associated with LaRouche.

The Train Salon Sessions

On April 23, 1983, the first of at least three meetings took place at the Manhattan residence of John Train, a private investment counsellor with the firm of Train Smith Counsel. Train chaired each of the meetings, which were convened to plan out a major media slander campaign against Lyndon LaRouche. The slanders were designed to promote and appear in conjunction with fraudulent government criminal and national security probes of LaRouche and his associates.

Between August 1982 and the convening of the first of the three known Train salon meetings, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger had waged a concerted effort to foist an illegal government crackdown on LaRouche, commencing with a personal letter to FBI Director William Webster. At a Jan. 15, 1983 meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), Kissinger allies Edward Bennett Williams, Leo Cherne, and David Abshire had succeeded in triggering an FBI investigation of LaRouche on the fraudulent grounds of suspected foreign funding. The foreign funding ruse was critical, in that it sanctioned an "active measures" campaign against LaRouche that would have been otherwise prohibited under Executive Order 12333.

According to eyewitness accounts, participants at the three Train salon meetings included Roy Godson, then a consultant to the National Security Council and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; John Rees, a longtime FBI informant; Mira Lansky Boland, head of Fact Finding at the Washington, D.C. offices of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith; at least one representative of Freedom House, a private research organization headed by PFIAB Chairman Leo Cherne; Richard Mellon Scaife, a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, whose tax-exempt foundation would later come under federal criminal investigation for illegally financing the arming of the Nicaraguan Contras; and several dozen journalists from major national media outlets, including NBC-TV, Readers Digest, Business Week, The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal. One participant, Chip Berlet, told EIR investigative journalist Quinde that he was introduced to many other individuals at the Train meetings who were only identified as "gentlemen with a government connection."

As a direct result of the Train salon planning sessions, a number of slanderous stories were planted in major news outlets, including:

• a January 1984 New Republic article by Peter Spiro;
• a January and March 1984 NBC-TV News pieces by Brian Ross and Patricia Lynch which, among other things, accused LaRouche of plotting the assassination of President Jimmy Carter, Kissinger, and others, and called for an Internal Revenue Service investigation of LaRouche;
• a November 1984 New Republic article by Dennis King and Ronald Radosh accusing LaRouche of foreign espionage and violence;
• a March 23, 1986 Wall Street Journal story by Ellen Hume;
• a May 27, 1986 Wall Street Journal story by Lynch and King which was based on information illegally leaked from an ongoing Boston federal grand jury;
• two successive April 1986 NBC-TV News broadcasts produced by Lynch, which accused LaRouche of plotting the assassination of Henry Kissinger, and included leaked Boston grand jury information and unfounded claims that the IRS had launched a nationwide probe of LaRouche;
• March and December 1986 NBC-TV News broadcasts claiming that LaRouche had been responsible for the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on Feb. 28, 1986. The December broadcast included material provided by federal prosecutors in Boston, despite the fact that they had already been told by Swedish authorities that the charges of LaRouche involvement in the Palme murder had been thoroughly probed and proven false;
• an August 1986 Readers Digest article by senior editor Eugene Methvin.

According to eyewitnesses, at the April 1983 salon meeting, NBC-TV producer Patricia Lynch was introduced for the first time to ADL-linked writer Dennis King, who had already published a 13-part series of slanderous articles against the LaRouche movement in an East Side Manhattan weekly handout, Our Town, beginning in August 1979. The introduction was made by Train. At the meeting, arrangements were also made to have King's planned book on LaRouche financed by the League for Industrial Democracy and by the Smith Richardson Foundation. That book, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, was published in 1989 by Doubleday.

Systematic Perjury

On May 26 and June 2, 1983, Michael Hudson, a participant in the first Train meeting of April 23, told EIR reporter Robert Greenberg about the meeting. Hudson described Train as the man who was coordinating the media slander campaign, and as the person who had introduced him to officials of the FBI and the IRS with the aim of instigating criminal prosecutions of LaRouche. In the two conversations, which were taped (and the transcripts included as exhibits attached to the Quinde affidavit), Hudson described a large wall-chart prepared by Train, which was used as part of the briefing given by a representative of Freedom House on the LaRouche movement. All of the participants were provided with copies of the chart, which was to form the basis for the slanders. According to Hudson, John Train emphasized that the LaRouche organization should be characterized as "KGB-linked" and that LaRouche's known links to U.S. intelligence and government institutions should be downplayed, for the purpose of causing the maximum damage to LaRouche's reputation with the American public.

On March 7, 1984-three days after the airing of the NBC-TV slander of LaRouche on its video magazine show "First Camera," produced by Lynch-Sol Sanders, a former editor of Business Week, told Quinde that he had participated in a meeting "about eight months ago" at which the NBC broadcast had been planned out. Sanders told Quinde that he had opted out of the secret slander effort because "you can't have security with that many people."

In 1984, Lyndon LaRouche filed a civil suit against NBC, the ADL, Pat Lynch, Brian Ross and others in federal court in Alexandria, Va. charging them with libel. During the course of the pre-trial discovery and a lengthy trial that began Oct. 22, 1984, all of the defendants perjured themselves to cover up their involvement in the Train salon.

On Aug. 6, 1984, attorneys for LaRouche depositioned Dennis King. When asked about the circumstances under which he was introduced to Pat Lynch, King was silent. His attorney, Scott McLaughlin, interrupted the deposition, and took King out into the hallway for 20 minutes; when they returned, King claimed he could not recall how he had first met Lynch.

On Aug. 8-9, 1984, LaRouche attorneys deposed Pat Lynch. When asked the same question about the initial introduction to King, she, too, "could not recall." At that point, LaRouche attorney Michael Dennis asked Lynch about Plaintiff's Exhibit 41, a copy of the chart circulated by John Train at or following the second salon meeting in fall of 1983, which had been produced by NBC's attorneys as part of the discovery in the case. [An earlier version of the same Train-produced chart, presented at the original April 23, 1983 session, would be released to LaRouche defendants in a New York State prosecution as material provided to the New York State Attorney General by Hudson.] Lynch's attorney intervened at that point to demand that the entire deposition transcript be classified "confidential."

Lynch then lied that she had first seen a copy of the flow chart when it was provided to one of her researchers by Peter Spiro, a New Republic writer who had written the January 1984 slander against LaRouche.

Mira Lansky Boland, the ADL representative at the Train salon sessions, and later a key participant in the federal prosecution team in Alexandria, would first be interrogated under oath on her role in the Train sessions on May 24, 1990 in Commonwealth Court in Roanoke, Va. She admitted that she participated in a third meeting of the Train-led group within days of the airing of the "First Camera" slander. The session, among other things, discussed the pending libel suit, and may have been instrumental in the systematic coverup of the role of government agents, the ADL, and journalists in the smear campaign and frameup plan.

On the opening day of the NBC-ADL trial, Federal Judge James Cacheris ruled that NBC producer Pat Lynch would not be required to reveal the names of her "sources" for the "First Camera" broadcast before the jury. As the result of that ruling and the earlier perjury, the Train salon evidence was never produced.

That would lay the foundation for all future criminal prosecutions against LaRouche and his colleagues. In the autumn of 1988, following LaRouche's indictment along with six others by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., LaRouche attorneys submitted extensive pre-trial discovery motions, which specifically demanded evidence of U.S. government participation and collaboration with the ADL, John Train and NBC-TV, to plant defamatory news stories and conduct financial warfare against LaRouche and his political supporters. The government denied that any such evidence existed, and further claimed that it was irrelevant.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Train salon black propaganda effort against LaRouche was pivotal to the government's railroad prosecutions of LaRouche and associates, and the coverup of those meetings through perjured sworn testimony and false government claims that no such evidence existed, constituted a serious instance of fraud upon the court.