Supplementing our core business of offering publishing services, OBS also from time to time publishes books under the imprint of Protean Press. This October we bring out the posthumous publication of selected writings by Carl Oglesby, an author OBS worked with in many capacities over the years. Clandestine America is a collection of three of his works.
As conspiracy theories reach a heady roil in today’s globally networked environment, Carl Oglesby’s political work offers context and sheds new light upon what may prove to be the mother of all conspiracy theories: “The Secret Ending of World War II,” the ramifications of which have echoed throughout modern American history, from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate and potentially through to the bitter bipartisanship of 2020 America.
Combining selections of Oglesby’s work on his political awakening, deep state conspiracies of the Kennedy assassination and Watergate, and a previously unpublished work proposing a shocking secret ending to World War II, Clandestine America invites and motivates readers, scholars, and political thinkers to identify a through line—and to question authority, dig deeper, and either refute or validate Oglesby’s horrifying findings.
It will be printed on the Espresso Book Machine and distributed exclusively through two indie bookstores, the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the American Book Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Email info@obs.com if you would like to attend the virtual book launch and order an advance copy.
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“Oglesby is one of the few contemporaries I read for the pleasure of clarifying my own thinking. [… The Yankee and Cowboy War is] the most readable book on conspiracies and assassinations I have read and also the most stimulating. I think Oglesby is one of our first-rate political writers, skilled, always interesting, and with a rare gift for making political theory as lucid and exciting as a good narrative.”
Norman Mailer
“Written with grace and fervor.”
Howard Zinn about Oglesby’s autobiography, “Ravens on the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement”
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Also by Carl Oglesby
Containment and Change: Two Views of American Society and Foreign Policy in the New Revolutionary Age (Macmillan, 1967)
The New Left Reader (Grove Press, 1969)
The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond (Sheed, Andrews & McMeel, 1976, Berkley Medallion, 1977)
The JFK Assassination: The Facts and the Theories (Signet, 1992)
Who Killed JFK? (Odonian Press, 1992)
Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement (Scribners, 2008)
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Foreword: Why Oglesby, Why Now?
I first met Carl Oglesby, a radical intellectual of both libertarian and leftist leanings, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1976. We were both working as freelance writers, and would go on to collaborate on several book projects until the 1990s. Over those years I developed high regard for his insights, scholarly drive, and intellectual integrity. He never published an allegation or assumption for which he couldn’t provide a citation. Carl was an uncompromising truth seeker. In 1976, he was running the Assassination Information Bureau, which he founded, encouraging the U.S. Government to reopen the Warren Commission Report and investigate who murdered John F. Kennedy. It is a quest he pursued his life long. And it is still an open question.
Carl came from a blue collar family, the first in his generation to graduate from college. He started out his career as a technical writer and editor for defense contractors in the Midwest; he got married, had three children, bought a house, and was living a comfortable middle-class life, leavened by poetry, music, and playwrighting, amid the excitement and promise of a new generation of leadership in Washington. Until November 23, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated and Carl discovered a new reality leading him to political activism. Part One of this book, excerpted from his autobiography “Ravens in the Storm,” tells that story of political awakening.
Carl ultimately left the tech writing job and joined the anti-Vietnam war movement, writing and travelling extensively, giving speeches, and rising up in the ranks of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to ultimately become its president. These moves threw his family into financial and emotional insecurity, and disappointed his proud parents. Ultimately he left SDS when it got infiltrated by violent Weathermen, who preferred bombs rather than rigorous argument as the path to political change. Carl loved his country and was driven to seek the truth about what powers of corruption were secretly at work and threatening its core tenets of freedom, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
When I met him, Carl had just published “The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond,” which essentially frames the political situation of today’s America, where individualism (or selfishness) and nationalism (the “Cowboy” of the west, or the current occupant of the White House) are squaring off against the imperialist liberal (the “Yankee,” or the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020). Prescient and clear thinking, Oglesby proves eerily predictive, offering us new ways of thinking about today’s political dynamic. This was Carl’s most successful book; it is republished here in its entirety in Part Two.
The Yankee/Cowboy dialectic also offers an informative context for exploring the thesis of Part Three of this book, ”The Secret Ending of World War II: How Nazism Survived to Fight Another Day,” Carl’s book proposal which posits that the Nazi intelligence service, led by spymaster Reinhard Gehlen, conditionally “surrendered” to and made a deal with the U.S. government in the summer of 1945, which allowed the intact Gehlen Organization to come under the wing of the U.S. intelligence services and in fact inform the agency that would become today’s CIA. This book proposal is published here for the first time.
Oglesby submitted this book proposal to me, then his literary agent, in 1990. We did not place it with a book publisher back then. Though I had worked with Carl on a number of writing projects, this one probably seemed to me too far-fetched to gain a trade audience, and besides, my company was at that time moving away from literary agenting as a business and towards internet-based publishing solutions. Carl and I lost touch with one another as the ‘90s progressed; Carl grew ill, stopped writing, and died in 2011.
I rediscovered “The Secret Ending” quite by accident in August 2018, a forgotten manuscript in a box in my office. Reading his manuscript brought Carl back to life; it felt as if he was reaching out to me from those old Cambridge days, grabbing my lapel, imploring me to read this book, to reconsider its thesis and information in light of the rapid move our country has made towards authoritarianism. Indeed, the shocking information in Part Three appears to be immediately relevant to the current political situation. The then-radical idea that the Nazis might have actually “won” the second world war in this manner appears now perhaps to be an open question, though the Nazification of the U.S. intelligence services remains to be definitely proven. A deeper dive into this time of Cold War prologue is warranted. Such research is more possible today than it was in 1990 thanks to multiple Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuits that Carl filed—some of which are still open and being litigated today—that have yielded thousands of pages of documents yet to be fully catalogued, examined and analyzed. That is why we are publishing this book—not to present “The Secret Ending of World War II” as a proven truth, but rather as a large and growing question mark concerning the actual final outcome of World War II. Who won the war? And what other dark acts and conspiracies may have sprung from the survival and even prospering of a Nazi diaspora, its elite and its corporate entities? Carl’s pencil sketch of what he thought that diaspora looked like, with the Gehlen Org right in the middle, appearing almost as an organic neuron integrating the “Free” and “Nazi” worlds, appears in Part Three and on the cover of this book.
Readers may find Oglesby’s theme relevant today because of the recent rise of authoritarianism, and even neo-Nazis, in the U.S. and elsewhere. How is that Gehlen “surrender” playing out on today’s stage, especially as the U.S. heads into elections, which will either further cement the rapid turn our nation is making to the right, or begin to restore our country to its foundational democracy.
A brief survey of current literature shows that the information contained in “The Secret Ending” has received some, but widely varying public exposure. David Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” (Harper, 2016) seems to validate Oglesby’s basic contentions regarding Gehlen’s close ties to Allen Dulles and the U.S. intelligence community, and his “surrender” (though the book does not mention Oglesby by name). Conversely, Pulitzer Prize winning Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA”(Anchor, 2008) relegates Gehlen and his organization to just one page out of 722, noting that [one CIA man] “…recorded his revulsion at working with a network of ‘SS personnel with known Nazi records.’” Scott Anderson’s “The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts” (Doubleday, 2020) mentions Gehlen’s “surrender” in passing, but doesn’t go so far as to describe his escorted arrival in Washington D.C. in August 1944, wearing a US Army General’s uniform. So, where does the truth lie?
In the process of preparing this manuscript for publication, we have interviewed and conversed with subject matter experts and scholars; thousands of FOIA files have been released in this area since the 1990s. Analysis of these papers is a difficult and massive task; sometimes indeed it feels like sand is being thrown in the eyes of researchers. Many documents are blurry, unreadable, heavily redacted, partial repeats, and blind alleys. So we have decided that, rather than hiring an Oglesby avatar to either debunk Carl’s thesis, or validate it and complete the research and writing of “The Secret Ending of World War II,” we would publish the proposal itself, as Carl wrote it, together with his own story of radicalization (Part One), and the “Yankee and Cowboy War” (Part Two), to put forward the conceptual framework, the questions and suppositions, that might encourage scholars to pick up the trail Carl Oglesby blazed, at a time when his suppositions potentially point to a most ominous reality. This is the content imperative that drives Protean Press to publish “Clandestine America.” We invite readers to delve deeper, question authority, seek out the truth, and make it known across the land.
Laura Fillmore
October 2020
Rockport, Massachusetts