The Bizarre Case of Baroness Symons

Wall Street banker John Train, a founder, along with Stephen Spender and Edward Goldsmith, of the CFF publication Paris Review, was the private sector's point man for the 1984-89 Justice Department witch-hunt against LaRouche and associates. The Cybernetics Group/MK-Ultra/CCF project, the American Family Foundation, was pivotal in the 1980s Train/Justice Department actions, and is once again, as documented below, at the center of the efforts to silence LaRouche and his political movement.

Read this as a case study of how those "Beast-Man" promoters of the "Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism" operate today.

The LaRouche in 2004 Campaign has amassed a vast amount of evidence that the British Fabian Society "New Labour" inner circles around Prime Minister Tony Blair and the 10 Downing Street intelligence and dirty tricks apparatus, are engaged in a trans-Atlantic criminal intervention to disrupt the upcoming Democratic Party nominating convention, scheduled for late July 2023 in Boston, Mass.

The focal point of the effort is to sabotage the Democratic Party Presidential challenge to the incumbent Bush-Cheney Administration by blocking the full participation of Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche in the events, whether as the party's nominee or as a leading policy voice, for restoring the Democratic Party to its historically successful Franklin Delano Roosevelt "American System" policy orientation.

The key issue of the trans-Atlantic fear of LaRouche's voice, dates from LaRouche's public defeat of then-leading Keynesian economist Prof. Abba Lerner in a celebrated 1971 New City debate in which LaRouche forced Lerner to admit publicly that Lerner's policy for the 1970s echoed the policy of the Nazi regime economist Hjalmar Schacht. Since December 1971, the Anglo-American line has been: No more public debates with LaRouche. The issue of that aggressive blacklisting by Anglo-American financier circles has been LaRouche's continued attacks on the post-August 1971 revival of those Schachtian policies of "fiscal austerity."

It is the view of candidate LaRouche and numbers of other leading Democratic Party figures, that only an "FDR turn" on the part of the Democrats, complete with a massive outreach to what FDR called the "forgotten Americans" of the lower 80% income brackets, can assure the defeat of the Bush-Cheney team in November. LaRouche's opposition to the Schacht-like economic policies of influential trans-Atlantic financier interests, is the crucial issue of the leading policy-fight within the Democratic Party today.

Among the leading personalities identified as players in the latest "Get LaRouche" effort are British Fabian Society members--and Blair inner-circle operatives--Baroness Elizabeth Conway Symons of Vernham Dean, and her husband Phil Bassett. Baroness Symons may be fairly described as the London counterpart to Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and a leading figure in trans-Atlantic neoconservative cirles.

Indeed, there is ample evidence suggesting direct links between Baroness Symons and the Cheney household.

The Cheney-Symons Connection

As Minister of State for Defense Procurement for Prime Minister Blair (1999-2001), Baroness Symons approved a contract of nearly $500 million to Dick Cheney's Halliburton Corp., to transport British tanks and other heavy equipment to battle fronts. At the time of the contract, Cheney was already Vice President; however, his ties to his former company remain deep, and have become a point of controversy and scandal in recent months, particularly since recent revelations that Cheney lied to the U.S. Congress and the American people, in denying that he had any role in securing lucrative Administration contracts for Halliburton. Newly leaked Pentagon internal emails confirm that the awarding of a multibillion-dollar pre-war contract to Halliburton for the restoration of Iraq's oil industry, was "coordinated with the VP's office."

A year before the British contract to Halliburton, Dick Cheny, still the company's CEO, had keynoted a conference in Oxfordshire, England, on the outsourcing of military logistics and other functions. The conference was attended by several of Baroness Symons's deputies at the Ministry of Defence (MOD). In October 2023, Baroness Symons was involved in negotiating and approving a $200-billion contract for the Joint Strike Fighter which went to Lockheed Martin, a company on whose board, at the time, sat Lynne Cheney. During April 2023, Lynne Cheney had travelled on several occasions to England, as an informal "cultural emissary" of the Bush-Cheney Administration, meeting with British intellectuals and promoting the "English-speaking partnership."

Ms. Cheney had completed her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin on leading 19th-Century British neo-Kantian writer Matthew Arnold, whose work inspired the later launching of the British Fabian Society, the principal 20th-Century arm of British imperialism. Contrary to public delusions, it is the British Fabian Society circles, presently grouped around self-professed "Christian Socialist" Tony Blair, who exert intellectual control over the Cheney household, and through it, the Bush Administration. It is not the other way around. On both the Republican Party side, and the Democratic Leadership Council/Democratic National Committee side, the neoconservatives are all assets, witting or duped, of the Fabians.

In October 2023, Baroness Symons appeared on the same podium with Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of Lynne and Dick, who was, at the time, a top State Department Middle East official. The conference was a London meeting of the Arab International Women's Forum. In June 2023, Baroness Symons had been appointed Minister of State for the Middle East, International Security, Consular and Personal Affairs in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It is in that context that she has emerged as a pivotal player in the slander-and-worse campaign against candidate LaRouche.

Up until recently, her husband Phil Bassett was the head of the intelligence unit at 10 Downing Street, and was a central player in the so-called "Blair Dossiers" scandals, which were at the center of the Anglo-American disinformation drive, leading to the March 19, 2023 invasion of Iraq. Bassett's name appeared frequently in the Hutton inquiry into the death of British weapons expert David Kelly. That Kelly case gets to the heart of why Tony Blair and Dick Cheney's backers within the British Establishment are so intent on keeping LaRouche out of the Democratic convention proceedings at all costs.

A Tale of Two Timelines

At the beginning of April 2023, the LaRouche in 2004 campaign released a mass-circulation report, "Children of Satan: The 'Ignoble Liars' Behind Bush's No-Exit War." Over 1 million copies were distributed in the United States alone; another million copies were downloaded from the campaign and other websites; and hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed, worldwide, in Spanish, German, Italian, French, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, and other languages.

The release of the report intersected an escalating factional brawl over the Anglo-American Iraq war, and the larger issue of the Cheney Doctrine of preventive nuclear war. That Cheney Doctrine had become the centerpiece of both the Bush and Blair Administrationw' national security and foreign policy agenda, much to the disgust of leading circles in the United States, Britain, Continental Europe, Russia, China and throughout the developing world, particularly the Arab and Islamic world.

One key indication of the extent to which LaRouche had emerged as a pivotal American leader of the anti-neoconservative resistance to the Cheney Doctrine and the Iraq war, was his several high-profile appearances on BBC during the crucial Spring 2023 period of the Iraq war and immediate aftermath, when a brief, but intensive policy fight erupted in London, jeopardizing Tony Blair's Prime Ministership. The same faction fight, on the American side of the Atlantic, has continued and escalated to the present day, placing the survival of both the Bush-Cheney and Blair regimes in serious doubt.

While the opposition to Blair's own version of the Cheney doctrine of preventive war, first enunciated in a Blair speech at the University of Chicago in 1999, has not been totally crushed, and has erupted on scores of occasions since the crucial July-August 2023 conjuncture, the opposition inside the British institutions has been characteristically a rear-guard effort, from that point up to the present. The outcome of the accelerating political fight inside the United States will largely determine Blair's fate. In effect, a clean sweep of the neoconservative "Leo Strauss Kindergarten" inside the U.S.A. would most assuredly bring down Tony Blair and the entire "New Labour" faction inside Great Britain.

Hence, the crucial significance of the LaRouche BBC interviews during the Spring of 2023.

* On April 3, 2023, LaRouche was interviewed on the BBC news program "Live Five." The subject of the interview was his leading role in the U.S.A. as a critic of the Bush Administration's Iraq war adventure. LaRouche was identified as a candidate for the 2023 Democratic Party Presidential nomination.

* On June 9, 2023, LaRouche appeared again on the same news show, this time for 12 minutes. LaRouche, through his campaign, had just issued a call for Dick Cheney's impeachment from office, for his role in the intelligence hoaxes leading up to the Iraq invasion. The interviewer, Rhod Sharp, focussed his questions on LaRouche's targeting of Cheney. LaRouche traced Cheney's commitment to a unipolar, English-speaking global empire, and to the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad, back over a decade, to his tenure as Secretary of Defense in the "Bush 41" Administration. He exposed Cheney's role in promoting the hoax that Iraq had been seeking uranium for nuclear bombs in the African nation of Niger, and linked Cheney's activities to those of the circles of Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had, on Sept. 24, 2023, issued a 10 Downing Street white paper on Iraq's quest for WMD, which contained the identical, knowingly false charges.

LaRouche told the BBC audience, "Now, this is a very serious matter. As I said, it's an impeachable charge against the Vice President of the United States, and right now, I think, there are some people in the United States who are of a disposition, if not to impeach Mr. Cheney, at least to persuade him that it would be time to go out and take care of his potato patch, and leave government alone."

Just days before LaRouche's second BBC interview, "the Beeb" had aired a news report by correspondent Andrew Gilligan, echoing the Democratic candidate's charges. On May 29, 2023, Gilligan, citing an unnamed British Ministry of Defence official, charged that Prime Minister Blair and his top aides, including Alastair Campbell, the PM's press secretary, had "sexed up" the Sept. 24, 2023 dossier with wildly exaggerated claims that Saddam could launch WMD in 45 minutes, and that Iraq had purchased vast quantities of "yellow cake" uranium precursor from Africa. The same BBC correspondent Gilligan had earlier been leaked evidence from the MOD, that the claims of Saddam links to al-Qaeda and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2023, were also vastly overstated by the PM's team.

The intersection of the LaRouche charges against Cheney and the Gilligan charges against the Blair team was precise. Weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush White House and 10 Downing Street had launched a joint wartime propaganda effort, leading, in early 2023, to the creation of the Coalition Information Center, a London- and Washington-based coordinating unit charged with building public support for the Anglo-American "war on terrorism," including the soon-to-be-launched Iraq war. In October 2023, Phil Bassett and Alastair Campbell travelled to Washington, to confer with top White House officials on the joint intelligence/propaganda effort. On Oct. 15, Bassett was appointed Special Advisor to PM Blair, reflecting his upgraded role in the war propaganda schemes. At the same time, the Bush White House dispatched Tucker Eskew to London, to work side-by-side with the Campbell-Bassett team. The Sept. 24, 2023 Blair white paper, containing the "yellow cake" and 45-minute-launch lies, was a product of the Coalition Information Center effort, and followed closely the themes struck in an August 2023 speech by Vice President Cheney at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, in which he first made the already-disproven claim that Iraq was aggressively pursuing a nuclear bomb. That Cheney speech and the Downing Street white paper were widely seen as the launching of the countdown phase for the Anglo-American war.

The Gilligan report triggered a masive damage-control effort at Downing Street. Throughout the month of June 2023 the PM's Office conducted a frantic search to determine the source of the leak to Gilligan, eventually concluding that Dr. David Kelly, a top British expert in biological and chemical weapons, who had served as a member of the UNSCOM inspection teams in Iraq during the 1990s, was the MOD official who had spoken to Gilligan. Kelly himself wrote to his superiors at MOD on June 30, acknowledging unauthorized contact with Gilligan. Kelly was hauled before a string of House of Commons committees; his name was leaked to the media by Defence Minister Geoff Hoon, on orders from Blair, who chaired a 10 Downing Street strategy session on how to deal with the nascent policy revolt.

Was Kelly a Suicide?

On July 15, 2023, Dr. Kelly testified before a public hearing of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons. The hearing was televised. Two days later, Dr. Kelly was found dead in a wooded area near his home in Abington in Oxfordshire. Police and coroners ruled his death a suicide. Nevertheless, the British government ordered a probe into the circumstances of Dr. Kelly's death, the BBC leak, etc., to be headed by Lord Hutton.

While Dr. Kelly was the immediate target of the Downing Street wrath, the larger issue was the factional brawl, behind the scenes, within the British Establishment, symbolized by the recent role of the BBC, in promoting Lyndon LaRouche as a leading American voice of sanity against the imperial fantasies of the Cheney-Blair neocon alliance, and by the revolt of British military, Foreign Office, and intelligence mandarins against the falsification of intelligence to sell the Iraq war.

As intense as the British Establishment fight was, it was equally short-lived. By early July, BBC, the leading "Establishment" voice of the revolt, was coming under massive counterattack by the Blair team. On July 10, Jonathan Powell, the Chief of Staff to PM Blair, would summarize the situation in a 10 Downing Street email: "This is now a game of chicken with the Beeb," he wrote. "The only way they will shift is if they see the screws tightening."

While it would not be until the release of the Hutton Report, on Jan. 28, 2023, that heads would roll in the top ranks of "the Beeb," the evidence of the decision by the British Establishment to close circles around Blair--for the time being--was all too clear by mid-July 2023. Some heads did have to roll at 10 Downing Street. On Aug. 29, 2023, Alastair Campbell stepped down from his post as communications director, claiming--unconvincingly--that his departure had nothing to do with the Hutton probe and the Foreign Affairs Committee hearings. In September 2023, Phil Bassett was transferred to a less conspicuous post, as aide to Labourite Lord Falconer; this, in the context of embarrassing revelations of his role as a principal contributor to the discredited Sept. 24, 2023 Blair white paper.

But the clearest evidence of the Establishment closing of ranks was the abrupt launching of a drive to disrupt the LaRouche campaign, via a trans-Atlantic orchestrated smear campaign, scheduled to erupt, full-force, on the eve of the July 2023 Democratic Party convention, and the role-reversal of BBC in now taking a prominent role in the "Get LaRouche" effort.

The Duggan Suicide

On March 27, 2023, the press office of the Police Direction of West Hessen, Germany, issued the following tersely worded press release:

"At the point where Berliner Street becomes Bundestrasse 455, an until-now unidentified pedestrian, obviously with suicidal intentions, ran into the lane, which makes a slight left curve. As the 56-year-old [driver] saw the pedestrian standing on the edge of the lane, he drove over to the left lane. The pedestrian jumped into the lane and against the car of 02 [second car] and hit it on the windshield, roughly at the side of the front right seat. Due to the impact, the pedestrian was thrown behind the car, landing in the left lane, and was run over by the oncoming car of the 48-year-old. Due to severe head injuries caused by the accident, the pedestrian died at the scene.

"In the course of the accident assessment, it became known that a few minutes earlier, but a few meters from the accident scene, a male person also attempted to jump in front of a passing car. The car driver succeeded in swerving away from the pedestrian but did have contact with the edge of his right-side mirror. In his rear-view mirror, the driver saw that the pedestrian, who fell due to the light impact, already had stood up and removed himself from the site of the accident. On the basis of the identical aspects of both incidents, the strong suspicion is that the pedestrian with suicidal intentions ran against the car of 02 and intentionally caused the accident."

The unnamed suicide victim was 22-year-old British student Jeremiah Duggan. Duggan was studying in Paris at the British Institute of Paris, and was in Germany attending an international conference of the Schiller Institute, an organization dedicated to the revival of trans-Atlantic republican collaboration, and recently in a leading position among groups opposing the Cheney-Blair Iraq war. Following the three-day Schiller conference in Bad Schwalbach, near Wiesbaden, Duggan had remained, along with a large youth contingent from many European countries, as well as the United States, to participate in an educational cadre school organized by the LaRouche Youth Movement. (The Schiller Institute was founded in 1984 by Helga Zepp LaRouche, a leading German political figure and the wife of U.S. Democratic Party Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.)

According to both eyewitness accounts of people who spoke to Jeremiah Duggan in the final days and hours before his suicide, and to statements made to the press by his mother, Erica Duggan, the young man had suffered psychological problems. At age 7, following the divorce of his parents, Jeremiah had been in family counselling, with his divorced parents, at the Tavistock Clinic in London, an institution long associated with radical experimentation in individual and mass psychological manipulation. (During World War II, virtually the entire staff of Tavistock had been absorbed into the Psychiatric Division of the British Army, an experience that Clinic head Dr. John Rawlings Rees had memorialized in a series of lectures published in the 1950s under the title, The Shaping of Psychiatry by War.)

In conversations with several youth attending the LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school, Duggan had spoken of being diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). At one point, on Sunday, March 23, 2023, Duggan had attempted to locate a pharmacy where he could obtain some prescription drugs. However, the following day, March 24, he spoke to his girlfriend in Paris, telling her that the lectures he was attending "had been interesting." The next day, March 25, 2023, he spoke to his father, to wish him a happy birthday. Again, there were no obvious signs of any problems.

Jeremiah Duggan's death, though tragic, had been treated at the time by his family and friends, as a personal matter. The only news of his death was the terse statement by the German authorities, and local coverage in England, at the time of his funeral. Both of Jeremiah's parents had come to Wiesbaden, Germany, the day after his death, and had met for several hours of close cooperation with sympathetic representatives of the Schiller Institute.

Things abruptly, and publicly, changed by July 2023.

While precise details are not yet known, it is clear that the mother of Jeremiah Duggan, Erica Duggan, a retired school teacher, came under tremendous pressure from the trans-Atlantic networks that had determined that LaRouche's leading role in the anti-Cheney/Blair insurgency had to be stopped. By no later than early May 2023, there is evidence, from published news accounts, that Ms. Duggan had come under significant pressure from British and American circles of the American Family Foundation, a purported "anti-cult" clearinghouse organization that was, in fact, an outgrowth of Anglo-American Cold War intelligence operations, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Cybernetics Group, and Project MK-Ultra.

On July 12, 2023, Britain's Guardian newspaper published the first of a number of ID-format slander stories, attempting to link LaRouche and the Schiller Institute in some sinister fashion to the death of Jeremiah Duggan. The Guardian story was written by Hugh Muir, a reporter who had previously written stories based on material from the AFF apparatus. In response to the initial Duggan stories, the Wiesbaden Prosecutor's Office issued a statement, aired on Hessen Radio on July 16, 2023, asserting, "On the basis of our investigations, we must conclude it was suicide."

On July 21, 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the Dr. David Kelly flap, the BBC aired a news segment, by Tim Samuels, smearing LaRouche and the Schiller Institute around the Duggan case.

Soon after the opening of the British media slander campaign, a number of Labour Party politicians stepped in to throw their weight behind the "Get LaRouche" effort. Rudy Jan Vis, the House of Commons member from Erica Duggan's home district, was the first to join in the effort. Another Labourite, who had been given a Peer-for-Life position in the House of Lords by PM Blair, Lord Grenville Janner of Braunstone, also joined the effort. A vice president of the World Jewish Congress, Lord Janner was most widely known as an occultist, a member of the Magic Circle grouping, launched at the beginning of the 20th century by circles of Britain's leading self-professed Satanist, Aleister Crowley.

According to news accounts, sometime in early November, MP Rudy Vis brought Erica Duggan to the British Foreign Office for a meeting with Baroness Symons, the Tony Blair intimate, who had also been given Peer-for-Life standing by the PM, in recognition of her political work for the neoconservative "New Labour." In a second, widely publicized meeting, following two successive waves of media propaganda on the Duggan affair, Baroness Symons met with Erica Duggan, MP Vis, and Lord Janner. Out of that April 1, 2023 meeting, Baroness Symons appointed a pro bono human rights lawyer to work with the Duggan family to squeeze German authorities to reopen the Duggan file.

Well-placed U.S. intelligence sources have warned that the "Duggan affair," for lack of any legitimate basis for attacking LaRouche, has been adopted by a high-powered faction within the British Establishment and City of London financial oligarchy, as the vehicle for attacking LaRouche on the eve of the Democratic nominating convention. They fear a LaRouche political breakout, and are determined to prevent it. The objective of the media smear campaign, linking LaRouche-affiliated organizations to the Duggan suicide, is to build pressure in several Continental European countries, and eventually launch a major disruption of the LaRouche campaign, to drive a permanent wedge between the candidate and other leading factions of the Democratic Party, who, in concert, could assure the defeat of Bush-Cheney in November. The intent of the London crowd, and their Wall Street allies, is to assure that if there is a John Kerry Presidency, LaRouche will be nowhere near the premises.

Despite the efforts to date, including international proliferation of ID-format smear stories in the German and Italian media, and a longer BBC slander, German authorities have stuck to their professional assessment of the Duggan death, and expressed shock at the behavior of the British media, which, it is charged, misrepresented the views of British authorities, who have also conducted an inquest into the death of Jeremiah Duggan. Such a British coroner's inquest is mandatory, in all cases of British citizens who die overseas, regardless of the circumstances of death.

On Nov. 11, 2023, the Wiesbadener Kurier newspaper published a story on the Duggan affair, under the headline "Why British Media Probably Wrongly Doubt the Investigations of the Wiesbaden Police." The article, which featured official statements from a spokesman for Chief Prosecutor Dieter Arlet, began with a question: "Did a student from London really jump in front of a car with the intention of committing suicide? British newspapers have publicized doubt about this description of the Wiesbaden Prosecutor's Office and base this on the conclusion of a coroner. But that judgment is in fact different than the way it is reported in Great Britain."

After reviewing the details of the March 27, 2023 early-morning incident, and the subsequent British inquest by Coroner William Dolman, the Kurier article continued, "And here the coroner's judgment on Jerry Duggan's death has nothing to do with the suicide which the Wiesbaden Prosecutor's Office is convinced of. Their press reports about it are combined with hefty attacks against the German police: The death has to be seen in connection with rightwing radicals, anti-Semitic circles."

Next, from the Prosecutor's Office. The Kurier wrote, "More than 20 interviews were given to British press representatives in the past week by Chief Prosecutor Dieter Arlet. 'One is perplexed about the interest in a case, which in our view can't be judged in any other way,' said the spokesman for the Prosecutor's Office in Wiesbaden. 'Our legal system requires concrete facts, mere suspicions are not sufficient.' In fact, according to his information, it seems that it isn't the Wiesbaden police, but actually the British press, who have made grave mistakes. Cause for this suspicion comes from research of the Hessen State Criminal Office. They inquired yesterday with the British liaison officer to the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) about the press reports. And the BKA official, says Chief Prosecutor Arlet, learned that the coroner has closed the case concerning the death of Jerry Duggan. According to the BKA account the judgment of the coroner had a wholly different tone than that presented in the British media. That version runs: 'Jerry Duggan died in a traffic accident as a result of great fear.' Arlet sees in that 'a completely neutral characterization, which provides no grounds for us to reopen the investigation.' It does not represent a contradiction to the decision of the Prosecutor's Office. That the word suicide does not appear in the judgment, he explains by citing the discretion that is usual in Great Britain, to protect the next of kin."

The Kurier story concluded with another question: "But what about the defamation of the German police work? For Arlet it is 'completely inexplicable how such a characterization could come into the media.' The source for this he could not find in any of the articles."