John Birch Society Tries to Bring Back Cold War Culture
Though alleging to expose “deep-state” machinations against Donald Trump, their publication accuses James Comey and John Brennan of being communist agents and venerates Cold War-Era KGB defectors who
[Source: ena.our-dogs.info]
Originally published at CovertAction Magazine
While browsing through the magazine section at Barnes and Noble recently, for fun, I picked up the September issue of the John Birch Society’s publication The New American.
Named after an OSS veteran who was killed by the communists during the Chinese Civil War, the John Birch Society has a history going back to the 1950s of warning about alleged communist infiltration of the U.S. government and society and railing against the UN.[1]
True to form, the editor’s note from the September New American issue, written by Alex Newman, warned about a treasonous conspiracy against President Donald Trump mounted by communist “deep-state” operatives whose broader ambition is to create a “one-world political, economic, and even religious regime based not on American or Christian ideals, but on principles of slavery.”
These comments turn on its head the conventional understanding of the “deep state” as a confluence of intelligence agencies and wealthy corporate interests that support secret government policies beneficial to the military-industrial-Wall Street complex.[2]
Emphasizing the Rockefeller family’s scheming against American interests in his editor’s note, Newman quoted John F. Kennedy warning in a 1961 speech about a “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” driven by the Soviet Union that “relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence—on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.”
Today, Newman said, the conspiracy is even more virulent with former FBI Director James Comey, a key ringleader in Russia Gate, allegedly admitting that he was a communist, and former CIA boss John Brennan, another key figure in Russia Gate, admitting that he supported Communist Party USA presidential candidate Gus Hall in 1976.[3]
The ridiculous charges that Comey and Brennan are communist agents mimic the Cold War-era John Birch Society’s efforts to brand hawkish figures in the U.S. national security establishment, like Walt W. Rostow, Dwight Eisenhower and Henry Kissinger, as communist agents.
In Brennan’s case, he said he voted for Hall as a youth because of his then displeasure with the two-party system. However, in 1980, after being recruited as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, he began his CIA career and became known for championing drone strikes and other aggressive measures in the Global War on Terror and an aggressive anti-Russia foreign policy.
The September 2025 issue of The New American, characteristically, featured an article by General Michael Flynn warning of a “deep-state” coup in Trump’s second term and another that referred to prospective New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a “Marxist worm.”
An additional article in the September 2025 issue, by William F. Jasper, the current president of the John Birch Society, was entitled “Putin’s Russia: The Return of the Iron Fist.”
This article was first published in 2007. In the recent re-published version, the editors stated that the article offered a prescient warning about the severity of the Russian threat reminiscent of the Cold War.
They wrote that, “[w]hile the Russiagate scandal was a hoax, it does not follow that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s generational dictator has been unjustly maligned. Despite what many leading voices on the so-called alt-Right and their gullible followers want to believe, Putin is no friend of traditional civilization or of Christianity. He is, and has been for as long as his nefarious career can be documented, an unreconstructed Marxist tyrant, extremely Stalinesque, instead of the latter-day Peter the Great that so many of his admirers want him to be.”[4]
The editors’ note captures the flavor of Jasper’s article, which suggests that the media and political establishment have frequently underplayed Putin’s revitalization of merciless KGB practices.
Jasper wrote that, “while the media-anointed Russia experts have proven time and again to be spectacularly, dangerously wrong,” The New American has chosen to develop its analysis based on the “incomparable insights of Anatoliy Golitsyn, arguably the most important Soviet defector ever to come to the West.”[5]
A one-time major in the KGB’s strategic planning department, Golitsyn had worked closely with James J. Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, and Count Alexandre de Marenches, head of French intelligence, who considered him an “indispensable asset in the effort to understand the Soviets’ geopolitical chess-game,” according to Jasper.[6]
Having access to the KGB’s inner sanctum, Golitsyn said that U.S. leaders were naïve about Soviet-Russian intentions and fell for the deception that the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991.
According to Golitsyn, the Soviets were like the ancient Greeks who feigned defeat during the Trojan War but later came back to vanquish the Trojans—a fate he suggests would befall Americans if they did not wake up.
Golitsyn claimed that, in 1960, the Communist Party Central Committee of the Soviet Union, with implementing help from the KGB, secretly set in motion a long-range plan designed to manipulate Western politicians.
The first phase of the deception was supposedly to feign the Sino-Soviet and other splits between communist parties in Yugoslavia and Eastern and Western Europe, which were really under the full control of secret police networks permeating societies under communist rule.[7]
The next phase of the deception was perestroika—the liberalization of the USSR’s political and economic system in the 1980s—which Golitsyn considered a short-lived effort under Mikhail Gorbachev to rebrand the Soviet Union’s image in the world community.
The next phase of the deception, according to Golitsyn, was the KGB-created Russian mafia, which was blamed for the corruption, violence, chaos and mayhem plaguing Russia since the country went capitalist.
In truth, Golitsyn said that all of the leading Russian crime bosses and oligarchs were veterans of the KGB and Communist youth, and were set up in business by the KGB following a refined version of Lenin’s New Economic Program.
Besides providing the fictitious appearance of a genuine free market to attract Western capital and technology, the KGB-mafia provided, according to Golitsyn, an efficient means for dealing with “political undesirables.”[8]
A side-bar to Jasper’s piece, which featured a photo of James Angleton, discusses Golitsyn’s 1984 book New Lies for Old. Jasper said that it presciently warned of a spectacular soon-to-come disinformation offensive by the communists aimed at “convincing the West that communism had disappeared in order that the West might accept gradual convergence with the former communist states.”[9]
Despite the illusion of Soviet collapse, Golitsyn warned in his 1995 book The Perestroika Deception—which was dedicated to Angleton—that the Russian leaders would continue to control independent republics and Eastern European countries covertly and that the KGB had remained ever powerful.[10]
U.S. leaders, according to Jasper, foolishly empowered Lenin and Stalin’s heirs by extending billions of dollars in foreign aid since 1991.
Jasper wrote that, “with Putin’s FSB Chekists now coming brazenly into the open, it is long past time to repudiate Russia’s deception that Golitsyn warned about and reverse course—before the trap door is shut behind us.”[11]
Back to the Future
Jasper’s article fits with a new genre of articles that seeks to restore the reputation of KGB defectors who served as CIA psychological warfare assets.
A right-wing website reviewed in a previous CovertAction Magazine article celebrated a KGB defector turned CIA asset named Yuri Bezmenov, who claimed the Soviets had unleashed psychological-warfare operations in the U.S. in the 1960s that led youth to turn against the military and law enforcement and resulted in ex-hippies gaining power.
Bezmenov’s writings were disseminated through the John Birch Society, and were also quoted in testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, Energy, and the Environment) by Michael Carpenter, then the Senior Director of the Penn Biden Center, who had held high-ranking positions in the State Department, White House, and Defense Department under Democratic administrations.
Cold War historians usually consider KGB defectors such as Bezmenov and Golitsyn to have been opportunists who advanced alarmist and paranoid views about the Soviet Union.[12]
Bezmenov tried to depict the television series M*A*S*H as being part of a Soviet psychological-warfare offensive because it poked fun at military officers, while Golitsyn accused left-leaning British Prime Minister Harold Wilson of being a KGB informant without foundation.[13]
Though grass-roots in appearance, the John Birch Society has long been financed by wealthy businessmen who support a political agenda serving their own class interest.
These businessmen have included John Birch Society founder Robert Welch and Donald Trump’s father Fred, who was close with Welch.[14]
Not coincidentally, the John Birch Society has experienced a revival during Trump’s presidency despite National Review founder William F. Buckley’s effort to relegate it to the fringes of the conservative movement.
The John Birch Society’s hallmark intellectual inconsistency is evident in its attempt to simultaneously expose the “deep state” while lionizing KGB defectors and James J. Angleton—a man who stood at the center of so many nefarious secret government operations.
The John Birch Society should ultimately be recognized as a “deep-state” front operation or limited hang-out.
Like with Alex Jones’s InfoWars and the QAnon cult, its primary purpose is to channel popular political disaffection into support for outlandish theories and reactionary political positions—such as the hard-line, anti-Russia policy advocated by Jasper, which is a boon for the military-industrial complex.
See D. J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014). The John Birch Society is now headquartered, symbolically, in Appleton, Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy’s home town. ↑
See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). ↑
Alex Newman, “The ‘Treasonous Conspiracy’ Emerges,” The New American, September 2025, 5. ↑
Editors’ note to William F. Jasper, “Putin’s Russia: The Return of the Iron Fist,” The New American, September 2025, 17. ↑
Jasper, “Putin’s Russia,” 19. ↑
Angleton allegedly assisted in Golitsyn’s defection in 1961 when he flew with a CIA escort from Finland to Sweden and then to the U.S. President John F. Kennedy allegedly put Golitsyn in contact with Angleton. ↑
Jasper, “Putin’s Russia,” 20. ↑
Idem. ↑
Jasper, “Putin’s Russia,” 21; Anatoliy Golitsyn, New Lies for Old (New York: Dodd Mead, 1984). ↑
Anatoliy Golitsyn, The Perestroika Deception: Memoranda to the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Edward Harle Ltd., 1998). This pamphlet warned that the Soviets were intent, ultimately, on establishing a one-world government with a subordinate West. Golitsyn asserted in his dedication that Angleton was “a man of vision ad courage, a warrior and comrade-in-arms who recognized the dangers of the Soviets’ new strategic challenge.” ↑
Jasper, “Putin’s Russia,” 20. ↑
See Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston: South End Press, 1999). In their own country, defectors were viewed as national traitors who sold out their country for money and the lure of a comfortable life in the U.S. ↑
Golitsyn claimed that Hugh Gaitskell had been murdered in January 1963 to allow KGB agent Wilson to become leader of the British Labour Party. Angleton believed Golitsyn but few senior members of the CIA agreed with him. They pointed out that Gaitskell had died after Golitsyn had left the Soviet Union and would have had to know in advance what was about to take place. ↑
Alex Newman, “Deep State ‘Plan C’ Is to Kill Trump, Advisor Roger Stone Warns,” The New American, January 2, 2018. ↑
Fascinating background and links. Thank you! My understanding is that the KGB identified the Cheeto as a “mark” and began grooming him for their purposes in the 1980’s. Is that your understanding as well?