The Journey 70. Richard Spence – Espionage, Occultism and Secret Societies

Publisher RA “Kris” Millegan talks with Richard Spence about his book, Wall Street and the Russian Revolution: 1905 – 1925, Antony Sutton’s discovery that American interests were providing weapons to “the enemy” in the Vietnam War, and the “back channel” but primary relationships between countries that perform as enemies on the world stage.

Kris: What do you have to say about British Intelligence and the occult?

Richard: It’s not just British Intelligence and the occult. It tends to be a wide ranging connection between what we think of as the agencies – the people who work for them, whose job is to basically safeguard secrets and to steal secrets. The connection is roughly that whole issue of secrecy. The occult is most commonly identified with devil worship. But all occult actually means is hidden.  Something that either needs to be safeguarded or uncovered. If you look at those we call occultists – Aleister Crowley’s a good example of that – their lives revolve around trying to discover these secrets and also then to sort of re-encode them in a particular way.

One of the things that tends to be a general rule of what’s called Occultism – those that go searching after these secrets – is that secrets only belong to the worthy. They’re not for everyone. So Occultists are always about uncovering secrets and then trying to re-bury the secrets and, really, intelligence agencies do exactly the same thing. They’re going to safeguard things that are occulted [hidden], the secrets of the state, and they’re always attempting to uncover what they have on the other side.

You can see it in American intelligence in the 1950s and ‘60s and, God knows, probably today, in things like MK ULTRA, which is all about mind control, trying to essentially understand the architecture of the human mind with the purpose of then being able to understand how it can be re-assembled. There’s always been this willingness of the intelligence community to probe around into what we call the occult [i.e. remote viewing] because here’s the question: what if magic works?

Here’s Crowley’s definition of magic which I think is very important, paraphrasing, it’s “the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” In other words, it’s mind over matter. Through magical intent, you can cause change at least up to the point that anything is capable of change.

Kris: And if you look at initiation in Masonry and other things, a lot of it is a form of mind training, of quote-unquote mind control. To me, the first thing that intelligence does is you take notes. You’re looking first at all the publicly available material. Then, if you can, you look at privately available material and take notes. Then you get into actions that you try to do to influence the outcomes of those actions. That’s basically what I see as intelligence.

Richard: Information from all kinds of places. Signals intelligence. Human intelligence, where you collect information from people. Agents go out and recruit sources; assets, who come over in a number of ways. Ideological reasons. You pay them. Or you compromise them into helping you. You’re reading people’s mail. You’re listening in on their phone calls. You’re intercepting electronic transmissions. Then at some point all of this information is being collated and analyzed. As an analyst, you’re going to look at all this and make some kind of narrative out of it.

Kris: That was my father’s job. He was in research and analysis from COI to OSS to G2 to CIA and he quit them because he didn’t want to be involved in some of their operations.

This was part-one. Part-two, Episode 71, will be posted December 7, 2021.