“Spy Kids” – The Russians, The Finders, and The “Family”

Julian Assange?

Spy novels, movies and wild rumors often suggest that – in some strange cases – children have been groomed to become an agent. That is an agent for a government, organization or cult. But as we shall see, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. For the bulk of this article we will not go into the terrible issues of children in the illegal sex trade, although cult elements of this type are likely involved.
Let’s start with the Russians – From The Wall Street Journal:
“Russian Spy Ring Aimed To Make Children Agents”
(Excerpts)
A Russian spy ring busted in the U.S. two years ago planned to recruit members’ children to become agents, and one had already agreed to his parents’ request, according to current and former U.S. officials.
When the suspects were arrested in 2010 with much fanfare, official accounts suggested they were largely ineffectual. New details about their time in the U.S., however, suggest their work was more sophisticated and sometimes more successful than previously known.
One of them infiltrated a well-connected consulting firm with offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., by working as the company’s in-house computer expert, according to people familiar with the long-running U.S. investigation of the spy ring.
The effort to bring children into the family business suggests the ring was thinking long term: Children born or reared in America were potentially more valuable espionage assets than their parents because when they grew up they would be more likely to pass a U.S. government background check
A spokesman at the Russian embassy in Washington declined to comment. Officials in Moscow have previously acknowledged the spy ring but haven’t commented further. All the captured suspects eventually pleaded guilty to acting as secret agents for the Russian government.
Tim Foley was among the children most extensively groomed for a future spy career, officials say. Though he wasn’t American-born, his parents lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, under the assumed names Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Mr. Foley was 20 when his parents were arrested and had just finished his sophomore year at George Washington University in the nation’s capital.
His parents revealed their double life to him well before their arrest, according to current and former officials, whose knowledge of the discussion was based on surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that included bugging suspects’ homes. The officials said the parents also told their son they wanted him to follow in their footsteps.
He agreed, said the officials. At the end of the discussion with his parents, according to one person familiar with the surveillance, the young man stood up and saluted “Mother Russia.” He also agreed to travel to Russia to begin formal espionage training, officials said.
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It seems quite possible that nearly every country in the world may have some similar operation going on – with the intent of penetrating various government agencies. But things get weirder and weirder. Here’s a piece I wrote on “The Finders” in 2010:

Did The Finders Create a “Bourne Identity”?

Suppose you have a thirty-year cult, run by a southern eccentric with ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Suppose that cult raised children in austere surroundings combined with advanced education, perhaps to be used by said intelligence agency?
Suppose that cult was investigated for child abuse/neglect but the investigation was shut down for “National Security” reasons?
Sound like something out of a movie? Young “Jason Bournes” being created, nurtured and trained for future use? Well, something like that seems to have happened in “The Finders” cult.
The unraveling of “The Finders” case brought to the forefront many long-rumored stories about possible child trafficking as well as those about children being trained for use as spies and assassins.
In February 1987, a tip to the police led to the arrest of two “well dressed men” in a park in Tallahassee Florida. The men appeared to be “supervising” a group of six disheveled and hungry children. The men, who were based out of Washington D.C., were charged with child abuse. The D.C. police raided a house and warehouse, where they found many items that implicated “The Finders” cult in international intrigue and what appears to be ritual sacrifice of animals. The children were temporarily moved to an undisclosed location under armed guard due to threats to authorities.
This all sounds like typical internet rumor-mongering, except the story was carried by The New York Times and U.S. News And World Report.
The smoking gun was a report by U.S. Customs agent Ramon Martinez. Customs was called in to investigate a possible link to child pornography or child trafficking, and the Martinez document is shocking. There were indeed photos of many children, some naked. This in itself is not surprising due to the commune-type upbringing of The Finders. There were also photos of members in white robes, with the children, in what appears to be ritual sacrifice of goats. The Finders claim it was merely typical harvesting of animals on a farm, but the children actively participated in the disembowelment.
At the time of the arrest, despite the “well dressed” appearance of the adult men, the children seemed to have no knowledge of such things as electricity and hot running water. In a strange twist, they seemed highly educated. Details of what was found in the warehouse and the customs report can be read in this report by Dave McGowan.
Other items seized from the finders included Telex messages about obtaining children from Hong Kong, international money transfers, and this, from the Martinez report:
“Further inspection of the premises disclosed numerous files relating to activities of the organization in different parts of the world. Locations I observed are as follows: London, Germany, the Bahamas, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Africa, Costa Rica, and ‘Europe.’ There was also a file identified as ‘Palestinian.’ Other files were identified by member name or ‘project’ name. The projects appearing to be operated for commercial purposes under front names for the Finders. There was one file entitled ‘Pentagon Break-In,’ and others referring to members operating in foreign countries”.
Everything in this case points to a possible prosecution for child abuse, but the investigation was shut down for National Security reasons.
Marion Pettie was the leader of “The Finders” cult. Described as a tall, well-built southern gentleman, Pettie maintained a large property in Culpepper Virginia and the locations that were raided in Washington D.C.
He has admitted that his wife had worked for the CIA and that his son flew for the CIA airline “Air America”, long known for it’s drug-trafficking exploits in Southeast Asia.
In an excellent interview in the Washington “City Paper”, Pettie described his role as “Game Caller”. He instructed his followers to live by the day, hour, minute. He would send them on “projects”, often to foreign countries. All the Finders men dressed like FBI agents, in conservative dark suits. Not exactly your typical hippie-cult attire.
At the dawn of the computer era, Pettie recruited a talented computer engineer who trained members of The Finders in computer technology. They went on to run a project for – you guessed it, The CIA.
Pettie openly admits that he ran a safe house for members of intelligence agencies, from The Office of Navel Intelligence, to the OSS, to any spook that needed a place to hang out. He claims he would “study them”.
The children that were found in the park with the “well-dressed men” were returned to their mothers and the cult. The investigation was dropped.
The most recent information I could research on The Finders was a blog post by a guy named Michael Phillips. Phillips claims to have met The Finders in San Francisco in the 1970’s. Phillips respects the group, and thinks they had innovative ideas. Several Finders-type comments followed his blog post, one saying that Pettie and other founding members were now dead, and thanked him for the kind words. Phillips had just proof-read a 550-page manuscript of a book on the finders by member Robert “Tobe” Terrell.
Another questionable report on a New Zealand Indymedia blog said that The Finders had relocated to Taiwan. I don’t know about that.
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We will never know the true story of “The Finders”, what they were training the children for, or the source of their wealth. The Washington “City Paper” article says that some former members were suing Pettie and the remaining estate of the cult.
The articles I researched are split into at least three categories. The right-wing writers focus on Satanic ritual abuse. The left side suspects the children may have been programed to be spies or assassins. People like the blogger Phillips suggest they were just elaborate role-playing adventurers.
It is well known that intelligence agencies run programs resembling The Finders, such as the Kool-Aid massacres in Jonestown. It’s easy to pull a Sirhan-Sirhan or Lee Harvey Oswald out of these groups when they need one.
But let’s close with this chilling conclusion to the report of U.S. Customs officer Martinez:

“On April 2, 1987, I arrived at MPD at approximately 9:00 a.m. Detective Bradley was not available. I spoke to a third party who was willing to discuss the case with me on a strictly ‘off the record’ basis.
“I was advised that all the passport data had been turned over to the State Department for their investigation. The State Department in turn, advised the MPD that all travel and use of the passports by the holders of the passports was within the law and no action would be taken. This included travel to Moscow, North Korea, and North Vietnam from the late 1950s to mid 1970s.
“The individual further advised me of circumstances which indicated that the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed MPD not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired.

“No further information will be available. No further action will be taken.”
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And now we come to Wikileak’s founder Julian Assange. Despite appearances and reputation, Assange is no “Liberal”. He identifies himself as Libertarian, which is actually on the far end of the political “right”.
Assange also has a strange history, one that touches on a far-out Australian cult called “The San­ti­nike­tan Park Asso­ci­a­tion”, or simply “The Family”.
The Family was a new-age communal group that has in some articles been labeled “white Supremasist”. The children were brought up with austere disipline:
From “The Age” (Australia):

“But in an extraordinary slip recently, on SBS’s Dateline program, whose reporter, Mark Davis tracked him down in Norway earlier this year (the program screened last Sunday), Assange said that this man ”seemed to be the son of Anne Hamilton-Byrne of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult in Australia, and we kept getting tracked down”.

Byrne was the leader of a cult, The Family, discovered in the Dandenong Ranges in the early 1980s. There were 14 children in the cult, who were treated abominably, and taught that they were all Byrne’s children. All of them had their hair dyed blonde (the police finally caught up with the cult in 1987).

Assange won’t discuss the link with Byrne. He says only: ”My mother was never in a cult. I was never in a cult.”

And from “The New Yorker”:

“. . . . When Assange was eight, Claire left her hus­band and began see­ing a musi­cian, with whom she had another child, a boy. The rela­tion­ship was tem­pes­tu­ous; the musi­cian became abu­sive, she says, and they sep­a­rated. A fight ensued over the cus­tody of Assange’s half brother, and Claire felt threat­ened, fear­ing that the musi­cian would take away her son. Assange recalled her say­ing, “Now we need to dis­ap­pear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to six­teen. When I asked him about the expe­ri­ence, he told me that there was evi­dence that the man belonged to a pow­er­ful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some mem­bers were doc­tors who per­suaded moth­ers to give up their new­born chil­dren to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in gov­ern­ment, Assange sus­pected, who pro­vided the musi­cian with leads on Claire’s where­abouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or hid in places where she had lived before. . . .
“No Secrets” by Jeff Khatch­a­tourian; The New Yorker; 6/7/2010.

Sarah Hamilton-Byrne wrote a book about her experiances in the cult titled “Unseen, Unheard, Unknown”:
(Excerpts)

“My mother was Anne Hamilton-Byrne, the leader of a small sect in the Dandenongs called the Family or the Great White Brotherhood. I was a small part of her plan to collect children in what she herself once called a “scientific experiment”. Later I discovered it was her intention that we children would continue her sect after the earth was consumed by a holocaust. She saw us as the “inheritors of the earth”. I didn’t know that then. In those days I was just a child. A child of a guru, but a child no less.
Twenty-two to twenty-eight children in all lived at Uptop in its heyday, although the fosters had varying lengths of stay
She used to say that she couldn’t remember all the dates very well because she had so many children. Maybe, in retrospect, we should have realised that was weird but then we never thought it was anything out of the ordinary. She decided upon sets of twins and triplets and gave us ages and birth-dates to fit in with that idea. Birthday changes were just something you accepted. It was as if Anne knew so much more about everything than us and she just might be revealing another piece of our life plan if she changed our birthdays.
We were the children of The Family, the children of Anne Hamilton-Byrne. We were dressed alike. Most of the girls’ hair was dyed blond, cut into fringes and worn long with identical hairstyles and identically-coloured ribbons. All the boys had bowl haircuts.”
*
“Why did she raise us in almost total social isolation, miles from anywhere, with minimal contact with other humans apart from the sect members who looked after us? Why did she subject us to the bizarre and cruel regimen in which we grew up? Was it to demonstrate that she had the power to create a generation that would be reared with her beliefs and believing in her? I suspect perhaps that there were more sinister motives than these alone. Some of us had multiple birth certificates and passports, and citizenship of more than one country. Only she knows why thus was and why we were also all dressed alike, why most of us even had our hair dyed identically blond. I can only conjecture because I will never know for sure. However I suspect that she went to such great lengths in order to enable her to move children around, in and out of the country. Perhaps even to be sold overseas. I’m sure there is a market somewhere in the world for small blond children with no traceable identities. If she did it, it was a perfect scam. Many ex-sect members have said that they were aware that Anne was creating children by a “breeding program” in the late 1960s. These were ‘invisible’ kids, because they had no papers and there is no proof that they ever existed. Yet we Hamilton-Byrne children had multiple identities. These identities could perhaps have been loaned to other children and the similarity of our appearance used to cover up their absence. One little blond kid looks very like another in a passport photo. I don’t suppose we will ever know the truth because only Anne Hamilton-Byrne knows the truth about the whole affair and the truth is something she will never tell.”
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In comparing these three stories, we can see that the Russian spy ring was involved in conventional espionage.
But “The Finders” and “The Family” were involved in mind control, and perhaps secrets much darker.
Note that government officials and intelligence fronts seem to be deeply involved in the cults, at times letting them “off the hook” or providing cover.

With stories like this in mind, it cautions us to take a good look at Julian Assange, who he really is, and if some entity is running him as an agent. Could he have deeper ties to “The Family” than he admits?

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UPDATE:

The spy aged EIGHT: How American forces recruited a young boy to plant a chip on his stepfather – an Al Qaeda target in Yemen – so they could kill him in a drone strikeNew allegations claim that an 8-year-old Yemeni boy who was abandoned by his biological family was then roped back into their clutches
The boy’s biological father works for the Yemeni Republican Guard, which helps U.S. forces, and they asked have an al Qaeda operative located

That operative had been added to the U.S. ‘kill list’

The Republican Guard knew that one of their officer’s children had been taken in by that target, Adnan al-Qadhi, so they called the biological father and asked him to have his son place the chip on the surrogate father
The boy complied and days later, Qadhi was killed in a drone strike

By Daily Mail Reporter
PUBLISHED: 18:21 EST, 15 August 2013 | UPDATED: 09:10 EST, 16 August 2013

Link to full article

Tags: Australian cults, CIA, FBI, Julian Assange, Marion Pettie, mind control cults, Russian Spy Ring, The Family, The Finders, Wikileaks

This entry was posted on August 16, 2013 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Hidden History, Tell the truth and run !. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.