In the final chapter of Prof. Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin, he gives a brief description of the Nugan Hand Bank Scandal. Nugan Hand was an Cayman Islands bank that was intimately involved in the heroin trade during the 1970s; Nugan Hand appears to have taken over as ‘the CIA’s banker’ after Castle Bank & Trust of Nassau was compromised in 1973 by an IRS investigation. (The CIA quashed the investigation for ‘national security’ reasons!! But, the damage had been done…)
Castle Bank’s successor, Nugan Hand, was headed by ex-military types, including a smattering of men from the CIA, like retired director William Colby, who served as the bank’s legal counsel for a time and whose “calling card” was found with the body of Frank Nugan in 1980.
I’m talking about Castle Bank and Nugan Hand today because during the 1973 IRS investigation, an ‘informant’ was able to photograph Castle Bank’s client list. Along with the usual suspects, like mafia figures Morris Dalitz, Morris Kleinman and Samuel Tucker, were two notable pornographers: Hugh Hefner of Playboy, and Robert Guccione of Penthouse.
The CIA’s Soft Porn King.
The CIA’s Hard Porn King.
Why were these two famous pornographers piggy-backing on banking interests vital to US ‘national security’? Why were they pooling their money with cash used by the CIA for “clandestine operations against Cuba and for other covert intelligence operations”?
What are the national security implications of porn?
Before readers laugh at this question, I will remind them that in most parts of the world pornography is outlawed– or at least frowned upon– as being a social evil. Beijing banned pornography in 1949. The Soviet Union banned it also; people born in the USSR will tell you what a shock it was to see smut pour in along with the American dollars. Sharia law prohibits porn; Christian teaching does the same. So what’s up? Are all these governments/ religious leaders just anti-free-speech? Is everybody else stupid?
To answer that, I’m going to give you a quote from the Marquis de Sade, who was not just a pornographer and psychopath, but a leading political thinker of the French Revolution who was given a judgeship after 1789.
De Sade liked to throw political philosophy in with his porn. In Philosophy in the Bedroom, de Sade explains how pornography is useful in a republic:
The transgressions we are considering in this second class of man’s duties toward his fellows include actions for whose undertaking libertinage may be the cause; among those which are pointed to as particularly incompatible with approved behavior are prostitution, incest, rape and sodomy. We surely must not for one moment doubt that all those known as moral crimes, that is to say, all acts of the sort to which those we have just cited belong, are of total inconsequence under a government whose sole duty consists in preserving, by whatever may be the means, the form essential to its continuance: there you have a republican government’s unique morality. Well, the republic being permanently menaced from the outside by the despots surrounding it, the means to its preservation cannot be imagined as moral means, for the republic will preserve itself only by war, and nothing is less moral than war. I ask how one will be able to demonstrate that in a state rendered immoral by its obligations, it is essential that the individual be moral? I will go further: it is a very good thing he is not. The Greek lawgivers perfectly appreciated the capital necessity of corrupting the member citizens in order that, their moral dissolution coming into conflict with the establishment and its values, there would result the insurrection that is always indispensable to a political system of perfect happiness which, like republican government, must necessarily excite the hatred and envy of all its foreign neighbors.
Porn is indispensable to our ‘freedoms’, which despots ‘hate’. Sound familiar? De Sade explains further:
Lycurgus and Solon, fully convinced that immodesty’s results are to keep the citizen in the immoral state indispensable to the mechanics of republican government, obliged girls to exhibit themselves naked at the theater. [Footnote: It has been said the intention of these legislators was, by dulling the passion men experienced for a naked girl, to render more active the one men sometimes experience for their own sex. These sages caused to be shown that for which they wanted there to be disgust, and to be hidden what they thought inclined to inspire sweeter desires; in either case, did they not strive after the objective we have just mentioned? One sees that they sensed the need of immorality in republican matters.] Rome imitated the example: at the games of Flora they danced naked; the greater par of pagan mysteries were celebrated thus; among some peoples, nudity even passed for a virtue.
De Sade was a bit confused with his sources, the lawgiving he’s talking about comes from Philemon, who is quoted in Athenaeus, Deipnosophists XIII: Concerning Women, 25, which you can read here. Philemon does not say the same thing de Sade says; Philemon does say that women displayed naked and prostituted help the state by burning off young men’s excess energy. In other words, omnipresent sex keeps men passive.
Perhaps the CIA does feel pornography is a matter of national security: after all, we don’t want all those under- and unemployed young men thinking about government corruption…
The CIA’s Soft Porn King today.
The CIA’s Hard Porn King today. He’s dead. Freak liposuction accident?
Bearing in mind the centuries-old understanding of the political effects of pornography, let’s turn our attention to Castle Bank’s porn kings:
Hugh Hefner, whose magazine published stories by British spy Roald Dahl*, is an Army veteran; homosexual rights advocate; and a self-professed champion of free speech. Hefner could be credited with bringing porn ‘mainstream’ in the Anglo-American world.
Hefner’s image has recently been tarnished by allegations that he is a drug-pushing control freak; that the fabled Playboy mansion is like a grubby, ‘no-tell’ motel; and that, according to former playmates Jill Ann Spaulding and Victoria Zdrok, Hefner needs to watch gay male porn to maintain his chemically-assisted erection. In fact, the Playboy Mansion sounds a lot like Bryan Singer’s Hollywood (gay) pedophile ring.
Does the CIA feel Hefner’s enterprise is money well spent? Clearly, what Hugh sells isn’t very close to his heart; perhaps de Sade was on to something.
Robert Guccione set up Penthouse in direct ‘competition’ with Playboy; Penthouse took a more explicit ‘hard-core’ angle, going as far as to feature fetish stuff like urination and ‘facials’. The magazine has a knack for getting nude photos of women ‘before they’re famous’, such as Madonna and Vanessa Williams, and has even exploited underage girls, like Traci Lords.
Penthouse was first published in England, not America, and gave CIA asset Seymour Hersh a platform to ‘leak’ a handful of government scandals. (Presumably clearing them with William Colby first!) Guccione has been lauded by such venerable institutions as Brandeis University for his reporting through Penthouse.
Guccione also gave American Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, her start in publishing– because of her innate ability? Probably not: Anna’s father was the editor of London’s Evening Standard, so Guccione’s help was likely a business favor to her old man. Never the less, Anna has given unflinching support to America’s current Commander-In-Chief. Also money well spent?
In conclusion, before anyone gets too teary-eyed about freedom of speech champions like Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione, let’s stop and think about where the money comes from.
“And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
*For readers interested in weird espionage ‘coincidences’, Hugh Hefner published Roald Dahl’s twisted story, The Last Act, which is about a vicious, misogynist womanizer who gets his high school flame to commit suicide after her husband’s untimely death. The disturbing thing about The Last Act is how much Dahl– an ‘illegal’ spy and womanizer himself– identifies with the psychopath.
One of MI5’s successes against the Soviets was the apprehension of ‘illegal’ agent Gordon Arnold Lonsdale, whose real name was Konon Trofimovich Molody. Molody had a wife and children in Russia, but he was a profligate womanizer who cultivated the image of a wealthy bon vivant. The MI5 codename for Molody was ‘Last Act’. Aren’t these guys cool?!
