Cooper reiterated his no-Jews-in-the-Protocols-of-Zion line many times. In an interview with a CNN reporter in 1993, a relaxed-looking Cooper said, “I get people who still come to me all the time and say, ‘Bill, you’re wrong. It’s the Jews. The Jews are subverting the world.’ And I tell them, ‘Man, it’s not the Jews. It’s not the Jews, it’s not the Catholics, it’s not the blacks.’”
To understand the nature of domination, you had to envision the world as the Secret Government did, “the way they see it,” Cooper said. The strategy of control laid out in the Protocols of Zion had run its course. Blame had its time constraints; there would always be someone new to accuse. The mounting anxieties of the modern world could not be laid at the doorstep of a single ethnicity or nation-state.
The emerging mass-consumer society required a regimen of control that excluded overt war. The process was too costly, the results unpredictable. A more easily managed, self-sustaining system was needed. Such a scheme already existed, Cooper told readers of Behold a Pale Horse.
Supposedly first announced at the initial meeting of the Bilderberg Group in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1954, the rudiments of the plan had recently surfaced in a top secret document bearing the unsettling name “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.” “SWFQW” was nothing less, Cooper declared in Behold a Pale Horse, than “the Illuminati’s declaration of War upon the People of America.”
“This is their plan,” Cooper often wrote on top of the dot matrix printouts of “SWFQW” he handed out on lecture tours. “Study it. Defeat it. God Bless You, William Cooper.”
“This chapter could only come in the beginning,” Cooper wrote in his author’s notes accompanying the forty-four-page section that opened Behold a Pale Horse. “Your preconceived ideas had to be shattered in order for you to understand the rest of this book. In this chapter you can see every step that the elite have taken in their war to control this once great nation. You can see the steps that will be taken in the future. You can no longer pretend innocence.”
Cooper said he had seen documents that “explained” the goals and workings of “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” while he was in Naval Intelligence. But it wasn’t until July 7, 1986, that an actual copy of the document, dated May 1979, was “found in an IBM copier that had been purchased at a surplus sale.”
First reaching the wider public in Cooper’s book, “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” has become a classic of modern “conspiracy” literature, a staple on “truther” websites. It has been name-checked by hundreds of rappers. In 1997, Killarmy, a Wu-Tang Clan “affiliate,” recorded an entire album entitled Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. “I wield the silent weapon for this quiet war that’s in store,” the rapper says. His adrenaline revving like an engine, he’s a ninja in camouflage, “avenging.”
Reputedly an “introductory programming manual” for new employees of Operations Research, a creepily anonymous fearsome-sounding top secret military intelligence group, “SWFQW” opens with a hearty “Welcome Aboard.” The document is said to mark “the 25th anniversary of the Third World War, called the ‘Quiet War,’ being conducted using subjective biological warfare, fought with ‘silent weapons.’”
Written at the level of an undergrad paper in electrical engineering, “SWFQW” defines “a silent weapon” as differing from a conventional weapon in that “it shoots situations, instead of bullets; . . . originating from bits of data, instead of grains of gunpowder.” It attacks “under the orders of a banking magnate, instead of a military general.” Because the silent weapon “causes no obvious physical or mental injuries and does not obviously interfere with anyone’s daily social life,” the public cannot comprehend this weapon and therefore cannot believe that they are being attacked and subdued.
“The public might instinctively feel that something is wrong, but because of the technical nature of the silent weapon, they cannot express their feeling in a rational way. . . . They do not know how to cry for help, and do not know how to associate with others to defend themselves against it.”
According to the document, the silent weapon is deployed like a time-release capsule, at modulated speeds and patterns, so the target audience “adjusts/adapts to its presence and learns to tolerate its encroachment on their lives.” Inevitably, however, “the pressure (psychological via economic) becomes too great and they crack up.”
It is the job of the programmer to control these “self-destructive oscillations.” This is done through the application of data-driven “inputs” (living standards, social contacts, analysis of individual habits, self-indulgence, “methods of coping,” etc.) to create successful “outputs,” such as desirable levels of surveillance, the storage of information, legal functions, and health options, etc. Successfully regulated outputs are considered “controlled situations.”
The resulting “atrophy of cognitive powers” is coupled with “unrelenting emotional affronts and attacks (mental and emotional rape) by way of a constant barrage of sex, violence, wars in the media.” These are the building blocks of an American population that is “undisciplined,” “confused,” “disorganized,” and “distracted.”
Silent Weapon technology is designed as a self-perpetuating, self-modifying system but reserves the option to introduce “a shock test” to alter an unproductive pattern or simply to create a vehicle of chaos. “Shock tests” can be big or small, but a well-planned, efficiently run society need not require excessive police presence or employ more visible means of totalitarian control. Corrective change can be accomplished “by carefully selecting a staple commodity such as beef, coffee, gasoline, or sugar, and then causing a sudden change or shock in its price or availability.”
The process can be said to be working effectively when “there is a measurable quantitative relationship between the price of gasoline and the probability that a person would experience a headache, feel a need to watch a violent movie, smoke a cigarette, or go to a tavern for a mug of beer.”
Long before anyone was talking about the red and blue pills of The Matrix, Bill Cooper was warning of mass social engineering on the part of the New World Order. “In a study of mind control and psychological warfare, ladies and gentlemen,” Cooper said, “it is not enough to simply review the latest technology of coercion, the most recent gadgetry of techno-junk littering the depths of government supply depots and so-called cults. Far more dangerous than these appliances is the praxis behind them. An ages-old underground current informs the modern project in this modern era; life in our modern era is little more than life in an open-air mind-control laboratory.”
Who is “the modern man,” Cooper asked. “He is the smartest, most advanced individual to ever strut the planet, the most relatively liberated being in history. He scoffs with great derision at the idea of the existence and operation of a technology of mass mind control emanating from the mass media and government. Modern man believes he is much too smart to believe in anything as superstitious as that. But the truth is, modern man is the ideal hypnotic subject.”
For a long time, many assumed Cooper was the author of “SWFQW.” After all, many of Cooper’s signature lines, such as the uninformed public being nothing but “beasts of burden and steaks on the table by choice and consent,” are quotes from the document.
In 2003, two years after his death, however, Cooper’s authorship came into question. By then it was apparent that there was at least one more version of “SWFQW” out there. The text was similar to what appeared in Behold a Pale Horse, but the “new” copies included a number of electrical circuitry diagrams. With most digitized Internet users unfamiliar with such analogue material, the hand-drawn diagrams struck many as oddly occult symbols, filled with archaic meaning and dread.
This raised the eyebrows of “Joan d’Arc,” then editor of Paranoia magazine. Acknowledging the august place of “SWFQW” in the literature, calling it “a dubious elite blueprint for control of the planet second only to The Protocols of Zion,” Joan d’Arc thought the presence of “these sophisticated diagrams,” absent from the Behold a Pale Horse version, cast doubt on the document’s provenance.
“As far as I know, Bill Cooper was not a highly trained economist,” Joan d’Arc wrote, suggesting the document might be the work of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, or “the late anarcho-libertarian Murray Rothbard.”
On December 17, 2003, Paranoia received a letter from Hartford Van Dyke, then a prisoner at the Federal Correctional Institution in Waseca, Minnesota. Van Dyke, sixty-three, had just begun serving an eight-year sentence after his conviction on conspiracy and counterfeiting charges.
“Dear Paranoia,” Van Dyke wrote from his jail cell, claiming that he, not Bill Cooper, was responsible for the authorship of the legendary “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.” He also took issue with Joan d’Arc’s characterization of the document as “a paranoid manifesto.”
“SWFQW” was not a work of paranoia but rather of “sociopathy,” Van Dyke said. “It begins as a logical sociopathic work that ends as an emotional sociopathic work. Being as it is about war, the subject matter had to be sociopathic.”
Van Dyke was far from unknown in the patriot/libertarian scene at the time. According to the Associated Press, Van Dyke and his codefendant, John S. Nolan, had attempted to pass more than $3 million of fake money, bills of their own design, many of which featured a picture of the queen of England rather than Andrew Jackson or Benjamin Franklin. In trouble for refusing to pay taxes, Van Dyke sent $600,000 of the phony notes to the IRS, saying he was sending “fake money to satisfy fake debts.”
As for the authorship of “SWFQW,” Van Dyke said he put the manuscript together, but “I am the author only in the sense that I compiled and linked the gems of other writers.”
Foremost of these influences, Van Dyke wrote, was Harvard professor Wassily W. Leontief, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. Born into a bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg in 1906, and having spent his early life on the run from the Russian and German secret police, Leontief invented the economic models of “in-puts” and “out-puts” supposedly adopted by the planners in “SWFQW.”
“Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars,” Van Dyke wrote to the Paranoia editor, was “a form of modern technological alchemy that produced gold for the few, dross for everyone else.”
Van Dyke’s letter also provided clues about the secret document’s quirky path to its appearance in Behold a Pale Horse. He said he finished the “SWFQW” text in December of 1979, and printed “about 65 copies,” intending to mail them out to “friends and organizations.” Van Dyke said he had no idea what happened to these mailings but could “fairly well account” for what happened to one copy of the soon-to-be classic document.
Van Dyke tells of how he was driving on Interstate 5 sometime in 1980 when he picked up a hitchhiking soldier. “He was late for duty (or was going to be late), at McChord AFB in the state of Washington,” Van Dyke wrote. “Even though I was traveling in my own locality, I drove him to McChord (a two-hour trip each way). On the way, I told him about “SWFQW,” and when he stepped out of the car to go onto the base I handed him a copy.”
Since McChord was not far from the auction site where the copy of “SWFQW” allegedly turned up on the IBM copier on July 7, 1986, Van Dyke surmised that it was the same document he’d handed to the soldier a few years before. Van Dyke said that very same copy later turned up in Phoenix, Arizona, where it came to the attention of Sheldon Emry, pastor of the Lord’s Covenant Church. Emry, a former Army cryptographer and early adopter of the Christian Identity belief that the Anglo-Saxon peoples, not the Jews, were the true Chosen People of the Bible, published “SWFQW” in the November 1986 edition of his church newsletter, America’s Promise. The document almost immediately resurfaced in the American Sunbeam, a four-page weekly paper published just outside the Ozark Mountain town of Seligman, Missouri.
Founded in 1881, the Sunbeam was once called the Seligman Sunbeam, in honor of Joseph Seligman. Eldest of ten children of a Jewish wool merchant from Baiersdorf, Germany, Seligman arrived in America at age eighteen during the 1830s. By 1861, the enterprising Seligman had prospered to the point where he was able to float a multimillion-dollar loan to support the Union cause in the Civil War. He also brought the railroad to the Ozarks, which is why locals named their town and newspaper after him.
The Sunbeam! The phrase itself connotes a newspaper that could be delivered by young boys with oversize baskets on their bicycles, be left open on lunch counters for the next customer to read, a chronicle of wedding announcements, grange meetings. Indeed the paper characterizes itself as “A Bold Fearless, Energetic Newspaper” pledged to the defense of “The Union, The Constitution and the Enforcement of the Law.”
After the railroad moved away, however, the town and paper went into deep decline. Then, in 1973, the Sunbeam was purchased by Edward Aloysius Roberts, aka the human manifestation of Delamer Duverus, the Sea of Truth, the City, the Mind of God.
The erstwhile Roberts (1910–1986), who grew up in the “gutters of New York City among the human animals,” described his earliest encounter with “Silent Weapons” technology in his spiritual biography, The Golden Reed, published in 1973.
“It was the summer of 1947, immediately following World War Two. We were living in a rented stone cottage on the outskirts of a small town in the Hudson River Valley of New York State,” wrote Roberts, then a struggling sculptor.
“We had survived the terrors and madness of war, and could not find the answer for the insanity of the event. Why, we asked. Why should humanity bathe in the blood of their species without any reason.” It was then, Roberts wrote, that he was “suddenly, and unexpectantly, jolted loose by a power that filled our consciousness. It was as if a switch had been closed to send waves of pure energy through us. It was so great a power that coursed through us, it was unbearable.” At first, Roberts thought he would be driven crazy by the electronic pulse, “but the intensity soon decreased to a tolerable flow.”
It was during this event, Roberts wrote, that he gained insight into what he called “the first layer” of the deeper knowledge he suddenly felt compelled to explore. As he pored over each “impress of history,” what he found was “contradictory to everything we’d ever been led to believe.”
During the 1950s and 1960s, Roberts turned up among the southwestern UFO cults with a small band of followers. They lived communally in small towns throughout the southern states, moving often. During this time, Roberts, now calling himself Delamer Duverus, “an Atonga who speaks that which is given him to tell his people,” came to the dying town of Seligman to revive the Sunbeam.
His work often appeared in the paper. In one essay, called “The Next Voice You Hear,” Duverus wrote that while today’s society had become a cacophony of useless noise, listening to the only sound that mattered was banned by the authorities. In the modern world, hearing voices in one’s head was supposed to be a form of “mental disturbance,” a trick by the Devil to delegitimize the voice of God’s prophets, Duverus wrote.
But what really brought the American Sunbeam back to relevance was Duverus’s political activism. In his FEMA concentration camp pamphlet, Dr. William Pabst thanks the Sunbeam for providing several locations for prospective detention centers. Along with some of the most scabrous racial and anti-Semitic material imaginable, Duverus also published a version of “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.”
In Behold a Pale Horse, Cooper says he received his copy of “SWFQW” from “Mr. Tom Young, a fellow Warrior in the cause of Freedom,” but he clearly had dealings with Duverus, who said the manuscript was delivered to the Sunbeam office by an “unknown person.” In his introduction to the Sunbeam version of “SWFQW,” the one that now circulates on the Internet with the oddly rendered circuit diagrams, Duverus thanks an anonymous gentleman “stationed in Hawaii,” where he “held the highest security clearance in the Naval Intelligence.”
Cooper reciprocated the gesture in the opening of Behold a Pale Horse, where he uses a full page to quote Delamer Duverus. Arranged on the page in the shape of a diamond (or a teardrop) the quote reads: “One basic truth can be used as a foundation for a mountain of lies, and if we dig down deep enough in the mountain of lies and bring out that truth, the entire mountain of lies will crumble under the weight of that one truth.”
In 1991, Cooper appeared on the Staten Island, New York, public access TV show Dimensions in Parapsychology. Introduced by cohost Bryce Bond, a former soft jazz deejay, as “the Ralph Nader/Rambo of Revealing Secrets,” Cooper was going to talk about “UFOs and the secret government,” Bond said.
Cooper cheerfully complied, going through the motions of his 1966 sighting on the USS Tiru. But he soon started talking about the then-incipient American invasion of Kuwait.
What was about to happen in the Persian Gulf had nothing to do with evil aliens, the villainy of this year’s boogeyman, Saddam Hussein, or even the price of oil, Cooper said. You had to look at history through the long lens, not the toilet tissue of lies issued by the mass media. The roots of Operation Desert Storm dated back at least six thousand years, possibly to Creation itself.
The first factor was the setting of the conflict. That’s because Saddam’s fiefdom wasn’t really Iraq, some phony nation-state with borders sketched out on a blackboard by the victors of the First World War. It was Mesopotamia, the alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, the fertile crescent of biblical lore. It was Babylon, land of Sumer and Ur. It was here, amid the present-day targets of Basra and Baghdad, that the Brotherhood of the Snake, the first of the secret societies that continue to rule the world, came into existence.
Cooper first wrote about the Brotherhood of the Snake in his essay “Secret Societies and the New World Order”: “History is replete with whispers of Secret Societies,” Cooper began. “Accounts of elders or priests who guarded the forbidden knowledge of ancient peoples. Prominent men, meeting in secret, who directed the course of civilization are recorded in the writings of all people.”
There were dozens of these groups, Cooper wrote in his essay. In a single paragraph, he named “the Order of the Quest, the Roshaniya, the Qabbalah, the Knights Templar, the Knights of Malta, the Knights of Columbus, the Jesuits, the Masons, the Ancient and Mystical Order of Rosae Crucis, the Illuminati, the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, the Executive Members of the Council on Foreign Relations, The Group, the Brotherhood of the Dragon, the Rosicrucians, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Open Friendly Secret Society (the Vatican), the Russell Trust, the Skull & Bones, the Scroll & Key.”
Some of these societies catered to the blue bloods of Wall Street, others were made up of men in funny hats lined up for the early-bird special, but whether they knew it or not, they all could trace their origin to the Brotherhood of the Snake.
This was the real reason why Americans were about to enter harm’s way in Iraq, Cooper told the increasingly slack-jawed hosts of Dimensions in Parapsychology.
“A half million of the most dedicated, most devout American patriots, people who have sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, are over there in the Middle East,” Cooper said. They were in “a hostile environment where they can be killed very easily with chemical warfare.” As he knew from his eleven-year stint in the military, Cooper said, “our troops have no protection in a desert situation against chemical weapons.
“Those men are dead,” Cooper said, gauging the historical moment. After forty-four years, the Cold War that began in 1947 was at an end. The Berlin Wall, symbol of the divide between East and West, had toppled. Boris Yeltsin would soon be standing atop a T-72 tank to declare the end of the Soviet Union.
The joke of it all, Cooper told Bond, “was that the United States and the Soviet Union have been secretly allies for many, many years. We were never really enemies.” All those sleepless nights, the enslavement of Eastern Europe, the proxy confrontations in Africa and Vietnam that killed millions, had been part of the plot.
Cooper had done his research on Cold War deception. He’d read None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen, the John Birch Society spokesman and onetime George Wallace speechwriter. He’d gone through the work of Antony C. Sutton, books like the three-volume Western Technology and Soviet Economical Development, which makes the case that since US-financed Soviet manufacturing was the main source of supply for the North Vietnamese armies, American taxpayers were essentially footing the bill for both sides of the war.
The alleged “mutually assured destruction,” eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between the US and USSR was the ultimate “phony war.” It wasn’t a war at all but one more use of “the Hegelian conflict situation that was being artificially created to bring about the New World Order. It is called the Hegelian dialectic.”
The reference came, of course, from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), a titan of the Enlightenment who described the quest for truth as “an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise.” The process was a dialectic, Hegel said, hence the Hegelian dialectic.
First came the status quo, the accepted reality, the thesis. Then arose the antithesis, an opposing point of view, one that offered legitimate challenge to the veracity and utility of the current state of affairs. The thesis and the antithesis then engaged in dialectic combat that resulted in a new standard of truth, which was called the synthesis.
This was the way of the world, except the controllers of the New World Order had turned Hegel’s dialectic on its head, Cooper said. “They determine the synthesis first, what they want, and then create the two forces to oppose each other, so they know what they have to do to bring about that synthesis, while everyone thinks it all happened by accident.”
Manifested in bogus divide-and-conquer dichotomies like Democrats and Republicans, manipulation of the Hegelian dialectic was the main tool of the Secret Government, Cooper said. They’d used it to make the Cold War hum, and now that the US-USSR charade had run its course, another manufactured synthesis was getting ready to be born. Like a snake shedding its skin, the New World Order established in 1947 would soon be replaced by another.
The campaign had already been announced, Cooper told Bryce Bond, in a speech made by George H. W. Bush, the forty-first President of the United States, a few months before, on September 11, 1990.
Attired in his official custom-tailored blue suit and blood-red tie, Bush said, “Once again, Americans have stepped forward to share a tearful goodbye with their families before leaving for a strange and distant shore. At this very moment, they serve together with Arabs, Europeans, Asians, and Africans in defense of principle and the dream of a new world order.”
“He said it. Everyone heard him say it,” Cooper told his Dimensions in Parapsychology hosts. “He said it three times in his speech on September 11. Three times. On September 11.”