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Sunday 5 August 2012

Kris Kristofferson, LAX, 1987

In June of 1987, as I was coming down from a Zen retreat on Mount Baldy, I decided to take a two-week trip to Mexico. I booked a flight on Aero Mexico, and was sitting in the Departures Hall waiting to board when two men carrying shoulder bags, both dressed in khaki-coloured outfits, came and sat down in the empty seats on my right.

The first man, taller, heavier, bore an uncanny resemblance to Kris Kristofferson. His friend could have been anybody, but from the casual way they chatted back and forth, they seemed to know each other well. The man who looked like Kris Kristofferson was sitting right next to me, and seemed to be checking me out. I could hear every word he exchanged with his buddy, as I noted that he also sounded just like the singer we all knew from TV and radio. It flashed through my mind that there were many women who would be thrilled to be sitting this close to the singer-composer of the sixties' hit, Bobby McGee. But somehow, I wasn't. If anything, I felt turned off by his hulking presence and air of arrogance, so I shifted my position away from him, and listened to the flight attendants' announcement that our flight to Guadalajara, via Mazatlan, was delayed due to mechanical problems.

At this news, the man next to me let out a groan, reached into his shoulder bag, pulled out a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine and began thumbing through it casually. Sitting on his left, I had a clear view of the full-page ads for weapons and gear, as well as the classifieds that he was perusing as he chatted on about his itinerary to his friend. First, he was headed to Mazatlan, where he said he had "a girl" -- he'd bought her perfume in the Duty Free. His friend, who presumably was going with him, listened and made approving comments. After that, he would travel to Managua where there was another woman waiting for him.

Just around then, I began to find their conversation disturbing. I no longer believed this creep was Kristofferson, however much he might resemble him. From the way he talked about Nicaragua and the women and his many visits down there, I decided he was an American mercenary, probably a Contra or CIA agent, off to murder for his country and Ronald Reagan. I had been following the war on and off, in the pages of the LA Times, and the little I knew about it was enough to trigger a wave of nausea and disgust so intense that I actually stood up and dragged my carry-on bag to the opposite side of the waiting room.

In my high-minded way, I wanted to send a message to this lowlife criminal that not everyone in Amerika was brain-dead, and he should be more careful what he said in public. His eyes followed me as I crossed the hall and found another seat. I saw him say something to his friend, as he nodded in my direction.

Our flight to Mazatlan-Guadalajara never took off, however. Half an hour later, it was cancelled, and I was put on a direct flight to Guadalajara the next day.

The following year, Kris Kristofferson put out an album called Nicaragua. It was sympathetic to the Sandinistas and got him boo-ed offstage by American rednecks at a couple of concerts. These facts seem to both confirm and contradict my impressions of that day in June, 1987.

Like my former next door neighbour, Leonard Cohen, Kristofferson is a recording artist with a deep cover and connection to the military. According to Dave McGowan, he is the son of an Air Force intelligence officer and grew up on bases around the US and Europe -- as did Jim Morrison and almost every other rock and roll icon whose voice filled our airwaves during the good old days of the hippie movement.

Now I'm sorry I didn't ask him for his autograph.

Kristofferson seems to play both sides of the Left-Right dichotomy. Seen by some as a crusader for human rights in Latin America, he has also been linked to USAF Satanist Michael Aquino, who ran a human trafficking operation between Mexico, Central America and California during the heyday of Ronald Reagan's Contras,which was in full swing at the time I sat next to the Kristofferson lookalike at LAX.  David McGowan's The Pedophocracy discusses the sickening background to all this, as do Ivan Fraser and Mark Beeson in The Brotherhood.

It has crossed my mind that my response to the khaki-clad pair in the LA airport may have been an overreaction. In 2005 I also changed seats in the Athens airport to distance myself from an obviously psychotic US soldier who was returning from Iraq -- maybe war just makes me sqeamish. In the case of the Kristofferson encounter, it was the way he talked about those "girls" who awaited their Gringo boyfriend down in Managua and Mazatlan, that set off wild alarms in my mind, supposedly calmed by my recent Zen retreat in the mountains.

What became of Kristofferson's girlfriends? Did they introduce him to more of their young, beautiful friends? It's even possible they ended up in Aquino's unspeakable cross-border network, as smuggled prostitutes or worse, victims of one of the snuff-film producers preying on women and children.

In the mind-controlled world of entertainment, anything is possible.















Epic Irony

L-R Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon and unidentified man, 1973.








This photo popped up recently in a blog about secret collusion and double-dealing in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. I just happened to notice the man standing just behind Ariel Sharon bears a strong resemblance to Leonard Cohen, so I reposted it to a discussion at the Leonard Cohen Forum, in which former Israel Defence Force soldiers and fans of Leonard Cohen were reminiscing about that long-ago conflict, when Leonard came to Israel to entertain the troops. Other photos posted at the Forum catch him mainly in the act of entertaining, but this one seems to show the singer accompanying the two commanders on a tour of the battlefield. Those pine trees in the background suggest they may be somewhere other than the Sinai desert, where most of the fighting happened, although the IDF was also deployed to the Golan Heights, on the Syrian border. Wherever it was taken, it shows three smiling men in military outfits -- which suggests it was taken when the Israelis were winning the war against the Egyptians and Syrians.

Reportedly, Leonard likes to talk about the days he spent in a trench with Ariel Sharon. A poem in Death of a Ladies Man describes his feelings when the fighting got a little more intense than he had bargained for. In that poem, he jokes about "testing the sphincters of my courage" as the bombs flew overhead.

Biographer Ira Nadel states that Leonard arrived in Israel a few days ahead of the actual war, just as he was in Havana two weeks before the Bay of Pigs. It's possible he had advance warning (on both occasions) that a "surprise attack" was coming.

Israeli writer Israel Shamir has suggested the Yom Kippur War was actually a false flag attack, arranged between Washington, Tel Aviv and Cairo to provide Henry Kissinger and the Americans with a pretext for brokering the Camp David accords, which allowed them subsequently to strengthen their foothold in the Middle East.

It's also interesting to note that Henry Kissinger, Ariel Sharon, Moshe Dayan (and even then-Prime Minister Golda Meir) have all been linked to the cult of Sabbatai Zvi.

Henry Kissinger, of course, is connected to all kinds of things, including MKULTRA mind control and Operation Paperclip. But when I think about my former next-door neighbour Leonard Cohen travelling to Israel to support the troops and build up their morale in a phony war which ended up killing thousands, I'm mainly overwhelmed by a sense of "epic irony."

I can't help thinking, what a waste of human energy, not to mention (of course) human blood. An IDF soldier at the Leonard Cohen Forum speaks of the guilt he feels (and will carry with him to the grave) for having killed so many people during a war which he nevertheless believes had to be fought to save Israel.To him, Israel's victory against "overwhelming odds" in the Yom Kippur War is an invincible argument against those anti-war types, you know, the John Lennons of this world (many of whom are no longer with us).

Epic irony.