'Defense Industry And Nazis Linked To JFK Assassin' San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 1981

I don't want to convince anyone

who doesn't believe me. They do

their thing and I do mine.

-- Mae Brussell

Carmel Valley

Her thing is a tireless search for names and dates -- facts that provide the scaffolding supporting her speculation about how they are all related in some strange but inevitable way -- the deaths of the Kennedys, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Martin Luther King, Jimmy Hoffa, Martha Mitchell, Dag Hammarskjold, Fay Stender, George Moscone -- even singers Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, Mama Cass, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon.

What do these strange cases have to do with the Mafia, the CIA, Alger Hiss, Gary Powers, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, George Wallace, Larry Flynt, Patty Hearst, Jim Jones, Nelson Rockefeller, Dan White, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, David Berkowitz -- Mark David Chapman?

Murder, blackmail, coups d'etat, break-ins, payoffs, cover-ups, media manipulation, mind control, psychic surgery, drugging, hypnosis, gene splicing, eugenics -- activities whose ultimate aim is . . . what?

Brussell has spent 20 years finding connections, meditating on implications, sounding the tocsin.

Her analyses have been heard weekly on radio station KLRB-FM in Carmel for nine years, appear on a spot basis with the big San Francisco AM stations, go out in cassette form with supporting documentation to members of World Watchers International, a nation-wide organization she founded.

Her home in the hills above Carmel Valley is awash in thousands of books and documents. Among them is the 26-volume Warren Commission hearings and her 27,000 pages of textual analysis. "I studied it for eight years. It was like the Rosetta Stone. It unlocked every other conspiracy," Brussell says.

"Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Kennedys -- there is always a pattern where a piece of information is destroyed, in which a witness is killed. It's so predictable, you can go back and look up old cases."

The daughter of Rabbi Edgar Magnin of Los Angeles, Brussell was a Beverly Hills matron and mother of four who was married to a wealthy clothier when JFK was slain in 1963.

"I started saving every newspaper article about it. I wasn't a researcher. I was just curious. How could someone rule the United States for a thousand days and then be lopped off so nonchalantly?"

Years passed, marriage ended, the questioning habit of mind made greater demands. Brussell took odd jobs to support her research.

Her work became a source upon which other conspiracy buffs drew. Brussell came to know so much that increasingly it was impossible to provide brief answers to questions: dense yards of paragraphs about background had first to be understood. Her high speed conversation swiftly sketches connection between crime and politics, mob and government agency. If the listener allows his mind to stray during these monologs, the linkage is lost.

"I began to realize," she says at one point, "that everyone around Lee Harvey Oswald was a Nazi or in the defense industry."

She has a copy of an FBI memorandum dated Sept. 18, 1967, describing her contacts with former New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison. "She pictures America as controlled by conspirators in the government, which view she has stated publicly," the memo says.

She ruminates about the secret power of giant corporations, the possibility of clandestine meetings where powerful men plot the future, the real reason that a ringer is buried in Howard Hughes' grave.

"I'm just one person and I'm doing all I can," she says.