Editor's Introduction:
Investigate Assassination Attempt on Lyndon LaRouche, Oct. 6, 1986, To Change This Most Dangerous Moment in World History
Oct. 6, 2024—We are republishing in this issue of EIR the article written by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. on March 2, 2004, titled “‘Convict Him or Kill Him!’ The Night They Came To Kill Me,” [see below] which places the two efforts to assassinate LaRouche (the first in 1973, and the second on Oct. 6, 1986, 38 years ago) at the center of the historical effort by British intelligence to destroy any potential that the United States would return to its historic role as a true republic, based on technology and development for all nations to end colonialism, once and for all.
Assassinations are very much in the air and on people’s minds today: Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the scene of the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt against him on Oct. 5, in the wake of attempt number two in Florida. Recently released from prison WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange revealed in his Oct. 1 testimony before PACE (the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) in Strasbourg, France that, in 2017, besides his being confined illegally in England for the crime of being a journalist, CIA then-director Mike Pompeo plotted his assassination while he had sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London—an action taken clearly in league with British intelligence. The ostensible leaders of the U.S. and the UK are proudly and loudly praising Israeli Prime Minister ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu’s numerous bloody assassinations of Palestinian political leaders in Iran and Lebanon, while the mainstream media have become cheerleaders for these assassinations as well as for the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians.
The Schiller Institute and Executive Intelligence Review have argued, repeatedly, that the primary force behind the drive for global war—even nuclear war—is the onrushing collapse of the Western financial system. As the physical economies of Germany, the UK, the U.S., and most of Europe break down, they are propped up only through a magic trick—the unprecedented printing of new debt, both for predatory wars, and for the bailout of the leading banks of Wall Street and the City of London. Reading LaRouche’s 2004 article, it is striking to see that he identified the cause of the attempts on his life as originating from his economic forecast, that President Richard Nixon’s 1971 takedown of the Bretton Woods gold-reserve-based monetary system assured that not only a depression, but a physical-economic breakdown crisis would result, even leading to an ecological holocaust, if that disastrous decision were not reversed. The attempt to eliminate LaRouche from politics and from international diplomacy was intended to silence that voice, and that warning. We are now seeing the consequences of the fact that LaRouche’s warnings were not heeded, regarding either the economic breakdown or the onrushing danger of nuclear war.
It is not too late to change the course of this historical suicide. The proposals put forth by LaRouche are now influencing the emergence of a new world paradigm including the majority of the world’s nations, with leadership from the now-expanding number of nations in the BRICS. The exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, even at this late date, would bring this issue to the fore in the nations of the West, providing the basis for a new cooperation of all nations and the creation of a new Renaissance for Mankind.
‘CONVICT HIM OR KILL HIM!’
The Night They Came To Kill Me
Editor’s Note: EIR first published this article in Vol. 31, No. 10, March 12, 2004, pp. 18-22.
This statement was issued by the LaRouche in 2004 Presidential campaign committee on March 2, 2004.
On October 6, 1986, a virtual army of more than four hundred armed personnel descended upon the town of Leesburg, Virginia, for a raid on the offices of EIR and its associates, and also deployed for another, darker mission. The premises at which I was residing at that time were surrounded by an armed force, while aircraft, armored vehicles, and other personnel waited for the order to move in shooting. Fortunately, the killing did not happen, because someone with higher authority than the Justice Department Criminal Division head William Weld, ordered the attack on me called off. The forces readied to move in on me, my wife, and a number of my associates, were pulled back in the morning.
That was the second fully documented case of a U.S. Justice Department involvement in operations aimed at my personal elimination from politics. The first was documented in an FBI internal document dated late 1973. The first was an internal U.S. operation; the second, of Oct. 6-7, 1986, was international, including the involvement of the Soviet government of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. To understand the higher level of command behind the way in which the Democratic National Committee bureaucrats have used the Party’s nullification of the Voting Rights Act to attempt to exclude me from this election, we must point to the crucial features of the 1973 and 1986 attempts at my personal elimination.
This is not only my cause for complaint. The great majority of Americans are as much the intended victim as I am. They have a right to know what is being done to them in this connection. I explain.
Those events of Oct. 6-7, 1986 began in Sweden, when someone killed that nation’s Prime Minister, Olof Palme, and immediately, fraudulently, assigned blame for the killing action to me. That libel was promptly adopted by my long-standing, usually lying enemies at the Washington Post, and copied by other well-known news-media cesspools. This killing occurred in the context of a massive outpouring of preparatory hate-propaganda against me, world-wide, from the government of Armand Hammer-associate Gorbachev. The issue behind the Soviet participation in the attack, was Soviet inside knowledge of my role in introducing what President Ronald Reagan had named publicly the “Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).” Gorbachev, like his former sponsor, Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, hated me on account of my international, as well as U.S. role in the development of the SDI proposal.
It became clear in the course of that year, that the killing of expendable target Palme was used, and therefore probably intended, to set into motion an environment for what would later pass as a “justified, retaliatory” killing of me; no other plausible motive for the killing of Palme has been presented to the public, up to the present day. Tracing all the relevant developments, over both the interval from that shooting, to the Leesburg events of Oct. 6-7, later that same year, all of the relevant events in the pattern of action, including the preparatory steps taken by Boston’s William Weld, represent a systemically functional connection between the killing of Palme and the referenced events of Oct. 6-7.
When those two Justice Department “elimination” operations against me are considered, the obvious question is: “Are the two actions, those of 1973 and 1986, related?” They are, in fact, closely related, and are key to understanding why the financial powers behind Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe’s actions against me, have been so hysterically determined to exclude the one Democratic Presidential candidate who now represents, presently, officially, the broadest popular base of financial support of all current Democratic contenders. Why do the forces behind these actions fear me so much that they would take such extraordinarily high political risks in running these kinds of efforts to bring about my personal and political elimination?
In the second case, Oct. 6-7, 1986, the obvious motive for the projected official killing of me, my wife, and others on that occasion, was my role in the development of the SDI. Ironically, but not accidentally, this operation was unleashed at the time President Reagan was meeting Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, where the President, once again, firmly restated his commitment to SDI.
However, there is a direct connection to the earlier 1973 FBI operation. The 1973 campaign for my “elimination,” the near-slaughter of Oct. 6-7, 1986, and the stubborn effort to exclude me from the debates now, are each and all products of the same issue of my fight against the effort of certain liberal economists, and others, to put the world as a whole under the thumb of the policies of former Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht.
The ultimate origin of these and related actions is not the U.S. Department of Justice, but a much higher authority than the U.S. government, the same assortment of Venetian-style international financier-oligarchical interests, and their associated law firms, which unleashed the wave of fascist dictatorships in continental Europe over the interval 1922-1945. The common feature of those international financier interests, then, back during 1922-1945, and today, is their present commitment to imposing Schachtian economics upon both the U.S.A. itself, and also on the world at large, as the presently ongoing looting of Argentina typifies such fascist practices in action.
The intention of those financiers behind the demand for my exclusion from the Democratic Party proceedings, is to attempt to ensure that the next President of the U.S.A. is nothing but a pro-fascist banker’s office boy in matters of national economic and social policy. A notable number of these pro-Schachtian financier interests are the proverbial “big bucks” behind the Democratic Party.
Three Linked Issues
Behind all of the operations against me, from 1973 through the present day, is a reflection of the common characteristic of three tightly linked issues. The first, my pro-FDR opposition to Schachtian economics. The second, my opposition to the so-called “utopian” military doctrines currently associated with “beast-man” Dick Cheney. Third, my intention to reverse the folly of the past forty years’ downward drift of the U.S.A., from the world’s leading producer nation, to today’s predatory mess of Roman Empire-style “post-industrial” bread and circuses.
Go back to the late Summer and Fall of 1971. When the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system was ordered by President Richard Nixon, on August 15-16, 1971, I responded, denouncing the incompetence of those leading economists who had insisted that such an event could never happen under the so-called “built-in stabilizers.” Since the mid-1960s, I had warned repeatedly, publicly, against such a highly probable trend, of a series of international monetary crises leading toward the consequent breakdown of the present world monetary system. It had happened. Once again, I had been proven right as a long-range economic forecaster; virtually every university economics textbook, virtually every professor or similar type had been proven totally wrong on this issue.
Therefore, my associates and I launched a campaign against “Quackademic” economics professors. The turmoil this campaign produced on the campuses, and elsewhere, impelled the pained economists and their owners to select a champion of their cause, to defeat me in open debate. What soon proved to be the luckless Professor Abba Lerner, reputedly the leading resident Keynesian economist in the U.S.A., was selected for the contest.
We faced off on the premises of New York’s Queens College campus. Professors and comparable notables chiefly gathered in the front rows, and students and others chiefly behind them. My challenge to Lerner was that his current proposals for Brazil were an echo of the doctrines of Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht. I warned that his policy toward Brazil was typical of the kinds of fascist-like austerity policies which would be pushed under the new conditions created by Nixon’s action. For the alloted time, and more, Lerner squirmed and wriggled, seeking to change the subject from the concrete issue I had posed as the test question of the time: Brazil policy. Then, the debate closed when Lerner whimpered, “But if Germany had accepted Schacht’s policies, Hitler would not have been necessary.” The assembled body reacted to this whimpered utterance as if stunned. Lerner was, figuratively, carried, hors de combat, from that day’s field of battle.
Since that occasion, no leading economist in any part of the world has found the courage to challenge me in a debate on these crucial issues of Schachtian economic policy being pushed by the U.S. since that time. As Lerner’s friend Professor Sidney Hook stated the point: “LaRouche won the debate, but”—he will lose much more as a result of that. It was his way of saying that the “establishment” would unite against me; it did.
There was no coincidence in any of this. The shift of the U.S. and British economies away from the U.S.’s leading role as the world’s greatest producer nation, toward a pro-Schachtian, “post-industrial” utopianism, was the hallmark of the 1966-1968 Nixon campaign for the Presidency. The follies of this “post-industrial” shift into wild-eyed monetarism, led the U.S. government to the point, that it must abandon its foolish post-Kennedy economic and cultural policies, or make exactly the choice I had warned that I feared they would make. Nixon’s decision of August 15, 1971 made the march in the direction of ruin and fascist-like dictatorship inevitable. Nixon’s mid-August decision thus made the issue of the 1971 LaRouche-Lerner debate the inevitable continuing, leading issue of U.S. economic policy, from that date to the present neo-Schachtian days of Lazard Frères-associated Felix Rohatyn.
Nixon’s decision put the leading institutions and voters of the U.S. into a virtual ideological-economic fishbowl. That is to say: The poor fish might think he can rule the universe by choosing that part of the interior of the fishbowl to which he might wish to swim, but the bowl itself was being moved without his consciousness of the direction into which the bowl was being carried. Such are the sometimes tragic, utopian delusions of Cartesian and other true believers in what they define as “self-evident” definitions, axioms, and postulates. The universe in which they believe, is only a fishbowl filled with those fools who believe that their own free choice, according to such beliefs, controls their destiny.
Most ordinary people today have little appreciation of the fierceness with which pro-Schachtian liberal financiers hate the memory of President Franklin Roosevelt. Most corporate and kindred Baby Boomers, such as my rivals for the Presidency, do not even know what a Schachtian tactic is. Nonetheless, the defeat, chiefly by Roosevelt’s U.S.A., of those pro-Synarchist, pro-Schachtian financiers’ effort to create a fascist internationalism during the post-Versailles decades, has prompted the financiers of today to seek every possible means to uproot and destroy the kind of agro-industrial constitutional republic which Roosevelt’s victory over Hitler et al. represented. So, in August 1944, as soon as the U.S.-led breakthrough in Normandy had sealed the early doom of Hitler, those financier circles which had temporarily supported Roosevelt’s war-effort, launched the right turn represented by Bertrand Russell’s leading role in putting forward a utopian strategic doctrine of imperial world government through preventive nuclear war.
During his two terms in office, military traditionalist President Dwight Eisenhower defended our constitutional order from the rampaging utopians he labelled a “military-industrial complex.” President John F. Kennedy’s assassination broke the back of the resistance to those utopians; the U.S. official plunge into the quicksands of asymmetric warfare in Indo-China, and the parallel, mid-1960s “post-industrial” shift, were the concomitant of that victory of the utopians. The murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, were crucial elements of the march toward ruin of our economic culture, and worse, beyond.
The mid-1960s’ cultural-paradigm down-shift, merely typified by the dionysiac rock-drug-sex counterculture, was the destruction of the mind and gut of what had been the world’s greatest economy, the U.S. economy. The purpose of that induced cultural-paradigm shift was to uproot everything about the U.S. which was reflected in FDR’s achievements as President.
My proposal for what President Reagan was later to name his “Strategic Defense Initiative” was prompted by a recognition of the growing actual risk of general thermonuclear war, in the doctrines of James R. Schlesinger’s cabal, around the theme of the “present danger.” I reacted out of my conviction that the nuclear madness of Trilateral Brzezinski’s cronies, Schlesinger et al., showed that the U.S. must find ways to engage the Soviet Union in a long-term alternative to the thermonuclear war implicit in a continuation of the Russell-like, so-called “détente” policies of the 1970s. Thus, when the Reagan National Security Council entertained my back-channel discussions with the Soviet government, to explore what I proposed as the relevant alternative, I became a grave danger to the policies of the utopians inside and outside our defense establishment. At the close of the President’s televised address of March 23, 1983, they decided I was too capable a political force of opposition to their schemes to be allowed to live. It is the same issue I represent against Cheney and his pack of neo-conservative lunatics today. That was the principal motive behind the indicated events of 1986.
In this way, the issue of my opposition to Schachtian economics, to utopian military madness, and to the past four decades’ cultural-paradigm down-shift of the economy, mind, and morals of our nation, are three aspects of the same issue. For that, they wished me “eliminated” in 1973, sought to eliminate me by shameless open actions in 1986, and wish to eliminate all traces of my international influence today.
‘Prison, Anyone?’
The abortion of the shooting assault intended for Oct. 6-7, 1986, led to a subsequent, high-level, intense debate in relevant circles. “Shall we kill him, or imprison him?” was the tenor of that debate. The threat from the utopian faction was, “If you allow him to beat the legal frame-up we are conducting, you will not stop us from killing him this time!”
That decision was in debate from no later than the evening of President Reagan’s televised address of March 23, 1983. After a few days, the utopians had regrouped their forces around circles including the right-wing utopian, and fervent SDI (and LaRouche and Edward Teller opponents) Daniel P. Graham and the utopians of the Heritage Foundation. So, the name of SDI was continued, but, under the influence of circles backing Graham, the content was changed radically to emphasize obsolete, chiefly “off-the-shelf” technologies of no use for the indicated type of mission-assignment.
On Oct. 12, 1988, I delivered a memorable address in Berlin, which was taped there for later broadcast, that same month, on a nationwide TV campaign feature. I forecast the imminent collapse of the Soviet alliance, beginning probably soon in Poland, and spreading into other parts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet economy itself. I proposed a course of U.S. action to deal, through affirmative economic action, with the opportunity to uproot the embedded institutions of major military conflict throughout the world.
I was soon hustled off to the hoosegow by the fastest, if perhaps the most crooked railroad in the U.S.A., the Alexandria Federal Courthouse in the Eastern District of Virginia. So, in effect, the newly sworn President George Bush put me into prison, and, a little more than five years later, Bill Clinton pulled me out. Now, the world makes a new turn around the circle of crisis. This time, those bankers who wish to put a Democrat who would be a virtual office boy for their Schachtian policies into the White House, are at it again. They are terrified at the thought that I, no office boy in these matters, would come even close to the White House.
Some leaders of nations are elected, others are either killed, or sent to prison to be defamed. So, powerful financier cabals have often ordered the fate of nations and the people, if the people let that happen. Thus, in today’s world, the ultimate feat of importance for a republic, is to get competent leaders elected, and keep them from being killed at a sign from the hand of a pro-Synarchist financier mafioso.
