We will be adding details under the Radio Caroline 1964-1967 page (which is found under the DATA button on the menu bar above), that will expose the hoax story regarding 'Jimmy Ross' which has found its way into many books; magazines; newspaper features and broadcasts. Please check on that page from time-to-time for updates.

Our Timeline (located under the DATA button on the menu bar above), is now being extended and some material is in the process of being reposted and added to.

While we are working from the past towards the present, we are also examining events in 1991 and working backwards to the year 1964. This has raised an interesting question.

Of all the many books and publications in our library, the earliest advent that we can find regarding the emergence of the 'Jimmy Ross' story, is in the year 1990 with the thinly disguised novel by Ian Cowper Ross called 'Rocking the Boat'. This was followed a year later by the BBC-TV screening of 'A Pirate's Tale' made by 'Arena'. That television documentary featured Ian Cowper Ross as narrator, and in it, he fleshed out the financial beginnings of 'Radio Caroline' which he first mentioned in his novel. That is where the 'Jimmy' story began. However, the TV documentary did not expound upon the 'Jimmy' story, that had to wait for Ray Clark to interview him sometime later.

So does anyone know more than we do at present about why Ian Cowper Ross began the 'Jimmy' story in 1990? Does anyone have knowledge of any books aside from the Venmore-Rowland and Paul Harris books that deal with events in 1964, concerning the financing of 'Radio Caroline'?

Clearly there is a story here that needs to be investigated a lot more than we already have, and we welcome your input.

Because this is an ongoing investigation, and prior to our own publication in a book format, we welcome all corrections or additional information to anything you may read on this Blog. It has just been brought to our attention that we transposed the year, but not the date of the 'Arena' program as screened on BBC television. The first screening was in 1991, and not as stated by us in 1990.

We will now be making corrections to the copy of our two previous entries which make reference to that program.

Our original plan prior to the pandemic, was to hold a workshop-symposium, and invite all interested parties to an Online event. Unfortunately more than one person took advantage of our plan and used our paid research as part of their own fraudulent vanity publication. This resulted in more misinformation coming into circulation, and therefore we terminated our plans for an Online workshop-symposium.

However, if you do spot an error in our texts, please let us know. Upon verification of such information, we will make an immediate correction. 

[The following is a revision of our original text due to the correction noted in our Blog entry for 3/28/2021.] The fake story about 'Radio Caroline' began as a simple misdirection that employed Ronan O'Rahilly, and that was back in 1964. In fact, back then there were elements of the true story that did find their way into print, but they quickly disappeared under an avalanche of misinformation.

But the real mischief, the fleshing out of the fake story about the creation of 'Radio Caroline' did not begin until decades later in 1990. That was 10 years after the demise of the motor vessel Mi Amigo, which means that it was also ten years after the international criminal theft of money obtained by defrauding Thomas J. Morrison in Pennsyvania, USA.

It was Morrison's money obtained by false pretenses, which was then mixed with money conned out of a drug dealer and murderer, which actually paid for the outfitting of the 'Ross Revenge'. Paul Rusling never told you that, and Paul Rusling also had business and personal dealings with James Ryan, the man at the center of the 'Radio Caroline' criminal case in the USA! (This is not to imply that Paul Rusling was part of that criminal conspiracy, because as far as we presently know, he was not. As far as we know right now, Rusling's involvement with Ryan came later as part of a business arrangement with Ray Anderson.)

This is the 1990-1991 timeline:
 
May 14, 1990: Ian Cowper Ross and the directors of publisher William Heinemann 'launched' a book called 'Rocking the Boat'. Its venue was the drawing room of an upmarket home belonging to Ian Cowper Ross' aristocratic mother-in-law, Jacqueline Lady Killearn. We have a copy of the hardbound edition of this book which does not explicitly say that this book is a novel, or that it is a work of part-fiction, or that the characters and events in the book are not intended to be construed as references to actual human beings or real events. In fact, on the inside back cover under a picture of the author it says:
"Ian Ross was one of the founders of the pirate station Radio Caroline, was briefly manager of the pop group the Animals, then, in the early 1970s, built a rag-trade empire which collapsed. After that he went to California, opened Flippers, a roller-disco, which was a spectacular but short-lived success, following which he was for two years a butler to a with his wife and six children. He is working on his second novel."
November 5, 1990: The last transmission was made from the mv Ross Revenge, anchored off south-eastern England, in the North Sea.
February 1, 1991: The new UK Broadcasting Act 1990 became law.
(https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/42/schedule/1/paragraph/1)
It enabled the UK authorities to seize vessels such as the Ross Revenge, which are used as a base for offshore transmitting stations directed at the United Kingdom.
March 1, 1991: BBC TWO first televised the independent 'Arena' production of 'Caroline 199 - A Pirate's Tale'   (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0080t61​ ). The script use in that documentary, and the sourcing of copyright material; the lining up of locations and receiving access permissions, plus securing dates for people to appear in the program, had to be planned long before its first airing on March 1, 1991. At this time we do not have access to the production timeline.
November 21, 1991: After the now silent Ross Revenge drifted on to the Goodwin Sands and a tug pulled it off, the ship was towed into the Eastern Docks at Dover, England.

Of importance to this recital is the fact that whatever Ian Cowper Ross' book of 1990 was supposed to be, his key appearance in the 1991 television program was made abundantly clear: Ian Cowper Ross was one of the main narrators on camera who provided continuity to its sequencing from scene-to-scene. Ian Cowper Ross also made it abundantly clear that this was not a work of fiction; it was intended to be viewed as fact.

On the BBC web site (listed above), it states that this 1991 television show was about: "....Radio Caroline, founded in 1964 by Ronan O'Rahilly", and that 'Radio Caroline' "gave many DJs their first break, including Tony Blackburn. Arena traces the origins of this broadcasting phenomenon of the 60s which is threatened with extinction by the government's new bill."

This timeline raises many new questions about the involvement by Ian Cowper Ross in the termination of offshore broadcasting to the European nations.

It also raises big questions about his reason for creating a bogus 1964 storyline involving his father, because the 1991 television show fleshes out a series of events into a full-blown story, none of which is true.

Ian Cowper Ross suddenly reappeared in 1990, first with his Heinemann book, while making himself available for many interviews conducted by a number of different authors. These writers then began quoting Ian Cowper Ross concerning the start of 'Radio Caroline' in 1964. Once the BBC aired its 'Arena' produced show in which Ian Cowper Ross had blatantly lied on camera by turning his obscured book narrative into real names; places, and dates of a factual nature, then the floodgates of 'pirate' book publications was opened.

The version of events as told by Ian Cowper Ross was accepted as fact beyond doubt. But everything that Ian Cowper Ross has claimed is false, and we will prove it!

Since the entire 'Radio Caroline' story as told to date is fake, and that includes the fraudulent listing at Companies House for the operative of a British license to broadcast under that name today (2021) as a tiny community radio station, then it is time for everyone who has any interest in this subject to snap out of their daydreams and face the cold, hard facts now appearing in evidence on this Blog, and soon to be in the book 'Dial 999 for Caroline: the girl who never was'.

​We originally offered to host a symposium to be attended by all interested parties, but that only resulted in the theft of our work by Paul Rusling, and the overnight swing from cooperation to backstabbing by Garry Stevens!

That is why we have taken a totally independent approach that owes nothing to anyone, except for the genuine research we have previously conducted with certain individuals who wish to remain unnamed, for now.

Tomorrow: What Ian Cowper Ross has claimed in his verbal and textual explosion of misinformation about the start of 'Radio Caroline'.

[NOTE: A correction has been made to a date within this text that relates to the screening of a BBC-TV program about the start of 'Radio Caroline' in 1964.]

​​At the top of this Blog there is a banner for 'YesterStudies', and for anyone who is wondering what it means, here is a brief explanation:

YesterStudies is another way of looking at the past. We do not claim to be, nor do we wish to be tagged as 'historians', and neither do we believe in any form of over-arching conspiracy theory to be our starting point. The only sort of hypothesis we use is of the same genre that a detective may use in trying to solve a cold case crime.

Our inspiration for this work came from a very brief skit by Steve Martin, the comedian born in Waco, Texas who attended California State University at Long Beach. That is where he studied philosophy.

In the February 18, 1982 edition of 'Rolling Stone' magazine, Steve Martin referred to that course work when he told Ben Fong-Torres:
"It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non-sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff because all you have to do is twist everything hard— you twist the punch line, you twist the non-sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up."

Steve Martin's exposure to philosophy resulted in a very brief skit that he performed on January 21, 1978, during his appearance on season 3; episode 9, of the NBC-TV network show called 'Saturday Night Live'.  It is called: "You Can Be A Millionaire and Never Pay Taxes":

The key to his routine, and therefore our application, is found in not answering a hypothetical question about his hypothetical statement, as shown by the transcript below:

Look at the banner at the top of this Blog. Look at all those books, none of which can tell you who started 'Radio Caroline' or why they started it. Oh, yes, they provide answers, but they are of the Steve Martin comedy ilk. They make a statement in point number one and then quickly move to points two and three in greater detail - even though their points two and three do not address the issues raised in point number one.

But with a few other exceptions, look at the other offshore stations of the 1960s. Most of them have detailed and verified documented accounts of their origins. Some, like the rambling beginnings of the non-starters such as 'CNBC'; 'GBLN' and 'GBOK' also engage in the same kind of obfuscation that is wrapped around the subject of 'Radio Caroline'.

So using the same approach to logical thinking that caused Steve Martin to create his routine, we looked again at the story of 'Radio Caroline' as told in all those books.

In Steve Martin's routine, the primary question is not about avoiding the taxes due on a million dollars - which you don't have; it is how do you get the million dollars to begin with - which you may be very happy to pay taxes on - if only you could receive the million dollars!

The hack writers of those books shown in the banner at the top of the Blog, all avoid that first basic question, and that question went unamplified from 1964 until the year 1990. That is when Ian Cowper Ross got involved with his eccentric and aristocratic mother-in-law. Together they created a fictional book containing inferences relating to the creation of 'Radio Caroline'.

During the first part of the following year, BBC-TV screened a show in March 1991 which 'stars' Ian Cowper Ross and Ronan O'Rahilly. Produced by an outside company, in that show Ian Cowper Ross claimed that it was the documentary true account about events in 1964 which led to the start of 'Radio Caroline'.

BBC-TV presented its 1991 fictitious tale as the truth, but that show was not a documentary, it was total fiction, which raises the question of: why did they wait so long?

What other event,  or events took place in 1990, which set the stage for this fake tale to be published and broadcast?

The answer to that question is found in a change in UK law: It made offshore broadcasting impossible because it enabled UK authorities to legally board ships in international waters. This new legislation had been proceeded by a problematic raid on August 19, 1989 by a Dutch government authorized boarding of the mv Ross Revenge. For this the Dutch could look back to 1964 when they did the same thing by shutting down transmissions from REM island. in both the 1964 and 1989 instances, legal problems arose in Holland.

Unaddressed by everyone at the time (until now, by this Blog), is the fact that the common thread behind policing of the waters of the North Sea, was the exploration and discovery and retrieval of natural gas and petroleum products. Here we are not talking about "a million dollars", we are talking about billons of dollars. That means we are talking about a huge amount of tax revenue derived from the riches of the licensed North Sea which so called 'pirate' broadcasters were squatting upon and creating havoc with international licensing laws relating to natural gas and petroleum products. But no wanted to explain this to the public, and it is interesting that Tony Benn, who had banged the drum in relation to 'pirate' broadcasts, was swiftly moved to a new job within the Labour government where he also had control over natural gas and petroleum products derived from the British 'sector' of the North Sea!

This work, this Blog, is the first attempt to explain just what was behind the 'menace' of 'Radio Caroline' and the other offshore broadcasting stations. The biggest 'threat' came from stations attached to sea bed. That is why REM island was raided, and the UK stations that suffered the ignominy of being brought within UK territorial waters, and therefore under existing UK laws, by the redrawing of the British coastline, were also a legal threat.

But a threat to whom?

A threat to international treaties involving the changed status of the North Sea and other bodies of water in Europe, that might be concealing vast amounts of natural gas and petroleum products. The squatters on Rough Tower were told successively, in a British 'softly, softly' approach not to do anything that would provoke their eviction. They could claim all they liked, but they could not do as they pleased.

Now you see the emergence of 'Climate Change' being used as a huge battering ram against the conglomerate of offshore exploration and retrieval companies involving rigs; tankers and even underwater pipelines. Their story goes back to the middle of the Nineteenth Century and the promotion of John D. Rockefeller. That is why we are laying the groundwork, once step at a time, to reveal how the natural gas and petroleum products industry evolved, and how its opposition has morphed into a strange battle cry called 'Climate Change', with of all things a young girl named Greta Thunberg as its celebrity spokesperson.

This story of 'Climate Change' is another story surrounded by obfuscation and misdirection, and again, it is all about money: big money - on both sides. Forget ethics; forget 'Saving the Planet', because this is all about the wealth of transitional lives and their self-interests. But there are a lot of dumbed-down minds who can't see the woods for the trees, and they are willing and able to become members of a rent-a-mob to demonstrate for a bit of fun. The real story though is going on at the banks with investments in alternative fuels. However, as inward looking as the West is, it should not be forgotten that this is all a very Western daydream. The rest of the real world is mostly continuing along the same road once paved by the likes of John D. Rockefeller.

So this brings us back to our present timeline and the last broadcasting transmission from the mv Ross Revenge. It was made on November 5, 1990, just before the new UK 1990 Broadcasting Act became law on February 1, 1991, and that new law could have resulted in the legal seizure of the ship by UK authorities. Instead, the silent Ross Revenge drifted on to the Goodwin Sands and a tug then pulled it off and into the Eastern Docks at Dover, England on November 21, 1991.

It is within that window of time from the raid on August 19, 1989, until the passing of the new Broadcasting law on February 2, 1991, and the Ross Revenge being towed into the territorial waters of the United Kingdom on November 21, 1991, that the make-believe fiction scripted by Ian Cowper Ross was launched in both book and television formats.

The date of the book review in 'Tatler' magazine, is May 14, 1990, and it was followed on March 1, 1991 by a one hour and thirty minutes television documentary made by an independent production company called 'Arena'. That show relied upon lines scripted by Ian Cowper Ross, and was transmitted as: 'Caroline 199 - A Pirate's Tale'. It was first televised by BBC Two on March 1, 1990, and later repeated on October 1, 2007 by BBC Four.

Because of scripting and production time, it is probable that the television program was contracted for long before the Heinemann book was launched. This means that Ian Cowper Ross was probably busy writing his part of the script on August 19, 1989, and that is when the Dutch, with British cooperation, launched their raid on the Ross Revenge.

The 'Arena' production blurb claimed that: "....Radio Caroline (was) founded in 1964 by Ronan O'Rahilly", and that it "gave many DJs their first break, including Tony Blackburn. Arena traces the origins of this broadcasting phenomenon of the 60s which is threatened with extinction by the government's new bill."

This double barrage of nonsense set the stage for what would then follow using the name 'Radio Caroline'. It eventually culminated in the creation of a fraudulent listing for a new company registered in the UK at Companies House, which called itself 'Radio Caroline'. That company eventually received a small local license to broadcast as a community radio station.

Then Paul Rusling delivered his vanity self-publication called 'The Radio Caroline Bible' to the supporters of this new radio venture, and he attempted to take our paid research without approval, and then twist it into a timeline of nonsense created by Ian Cowper Ross.

However, using the same methodology that Steve Martin employed to deliver his skit, it is now possible to show that that Rusling's book and the bogus station that it represents, are not mere entertainment for the moment, but scams fleecing the gullible, and frauds undermining the true account of the seamless intertwining of British and American broadcasting history.

NOTE: On 3/28/2021, some editorial copy corrections were made to dates cited in this text.

See our new 'Radio Caroline' page under the DATA menu button for answers.

Our research has followed questions that arose over the differences in laws enacted to control the regulation of broadcasting in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America. These questions about law then spun-off into other questions relating to geopolitics during the period known as the Cold War.

One theme that became apparent to us, is that there has been, and there continues to be, a constant intermixing of various interpretations of the Christian religion, as applied differently in both the UK and USA, and then its promotion over the airwaves of both countries. In the UK it was by a State dominated broadcasting system known by the initials BBC, and in the USA it was by many seemingly independent broadcasting companies. Some of those American voices were heard on the airwaves in the UK, via Radio Luxembourg; the American Armed Forces Network of stations, and transmissions by the Voice of America.

When offshore broadcasting stations began transmissions to the UK in 1964, there were no hints of geopolitics or religion. But with the arrival of Radio London in the latter part of that year, that changed when 'The World Tomorrow' program eased into a seven days-a-week strip, with emphasis on a coming 'United States of Europe'. Other offshore stations soon joined a 'fleet' of these broadcasters, and all of the main stations carried this same program which was announced by Art Gilmore, followed by a monologue delivered by either Garner Ted Armstrong, or his father, Herbert W. Armstrong.

In continuing our investigation into these broadcasts and stations it became clear that the part played by Herbert W. Armstrong on the world stage, was far more than being a radio evangelist. Something else was going on that drew in geopolitical interests originating in the USA. But this is not to imply that one man or his organization had control of a geopolitical message which then translated into control of the Cold War political stage: it did not!

No such world conspiracy of any type is implied or being followed by this research!

However, this is not to say that a number of different people representing different entities did not have over-arching agendas that saw the world as their stage. They did! But since there were competing individuals and competing agendas, things never seemed to be manifest in successful united outcomes. 'Things' got in the way, and unplanned and unforeseen 'things' caused their many and varied best laid plans to go awry.

Therefore, trying to understand and then relate to others what happened during the Cold War years, is no simple matter! But there are some common threads which can be followed, and there are some individuals such as Herbert W. Armstrong, who appear to have become players according to the scripted presentations of geopolitical planners. How much these individuals knew about the overall plans is another matter, because to some extent the evidence shows that while they were aware of being 'used', they were happy to go along with it.

However, there is good reason to believe that they were not part of any 'Master Plan', or even aware that such plans (for there were many competing plans), even existed. It is as if they were humming along with Elvis Presley singing 'Are you lonesome tonight? when he voiced a borrowed speech about the world being a stage and each of us playing a part.
 
As for a dominant theme throughout the years beginning in the mid-1800s, there is one which has continued and is still continuing through today. It is the one surrounded by a hue and cry over 'Climate Change', and there is one issue that has been constant in its dominating presence and it comes from underground. Without petroleum and its sister of natural gas, today's world could not exist.

We will not be presenting any form of overarching conspiracy on these pages, but we will continue to reveal how the subject of petroleum and natural gas became represented by many loud voices and noisy actions. Those are the individuals and the causes they championed, that lead the population of the world into a serious series of conflicts which began with the Great War at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.

This is the BioFrag Index in alphabetical order. (Only names shown in GREEN are already linked):

AKERS, Wallace A.  – born September 9, 1888 at Walthamstow, England.
ARMSTRONG, Garner Ted – born 1930, February 9, 1930 at - Portland, Oregon.
ARMSTRONG, Herbert W. – born July 31, 1892 at Des Moines, Iowa.
BARTON, Bruce Fairchild – born August 5, 1886 - at Robbins, Tennessee.
BELL, Alexander Graham – born March 3, 1847 at Edinburgh, Scotland.
BROWN, George R. – born May 12, 1898 at Belton, Texas.
BUZZARD (2d), Rear-Admiral Sir Anthony Wass – born April 28, 1902 at Lea Green, Derbyshire.
BUZZARD (3d), Sir Anthony Farquhar (3d) – born June 28, 1935 at Surrey, England.  
DETERDING, Henri W. A. – born April 19, 1866 at Amsterdam, Netherlands.
EDISON, Thomas A. – born February 11, 1847 at Milan, Ohio.
FORD, Henry – born July 30, 1863 at Springwells Township, Michigan.
GILMORE, Arthur (Art) Wells – born March 18, 1912 at Tacoma, Washington.
GRAHAM, William (Billy) Franklin Graham Jr. – born November 7, 1918 at Charlotte, North Carolina.
HEEREMA, Pieter Schelte – born April 27 1908 at Amsterdam, Netherlands.
HOUSE, Edward M. – born July 26, 1858 at Houston, Texas.
HUBBARD, Elbert Green – born June 19, 1856 at Bloomington, Illinois.
JOHNSON, Lyndon B. – born August 27, 1908 at Stonewall, Gillespie County, Texas.
LING, James J. – born December 31, 1922 at Hugo, Oklahoma.
MARCONI, Guglielmo G. M. – born April 25, 1874 at Bologna, Italy.
MCLENDON, Gordon B. – born June 8, 1921 at Paris, Texas.
MORGAN SR., John Pierpont – born 1837 at Hartford, Connecticut.
MOHRENSCHILT, George Sergius de – born April 17, 1911 at Mozyr, Russian Empire (Belarus).
MURCHISON, Jr., Clinton (Clint) W. – born September 27, 1923 at Dallas, Texas.
MURCHISON, Sr., Clinton (Clint) W. – born at Tyler, Texas.
O’REAR, Boliver B. – born 1897 at Jasper, Alabama.
OSWALD, Lee Harvey – born October 18, 1939 at New Orleans, Louisiana.
PARR, George B. – born March 1, 1901 at San Diego, Duval County, Texas.
PLUGGE, Leonard Frank – born September 21, 1889 at ?
PHILLIPS, David Atlee – born October 31, 1922 at Fort Worth, Texas.
PIERSON, Donald Grey – born October 11, 1925 at Abilene, Texas.
RADER, Stanley R. – born August 13, 1930 at White Plains, New York.
REITH, John C. W. – born July 20, 1889 at Stonehaven, Kincardineshire, Scotland.
ROCKEFELLER Sr., John D. – born July 8, 1839 at Richford, New York.
RICHARDSON, Sid W. – born April 25, 1891 at Athens, Texas.
RUBY, Jack Leon – born April 25, 1911 at Chicago, Illinois.
SARNOFF, David – born February 27, 1891 - at Uzlyany near Minsk, (Russia), Belarus.
STANLEY, Charles Orr – born April 15, 1899 at Cappoquin, (near Cork), Ireland
STEFFENS, Lincoln A. – born April 6, 1866 at San Fra6, ncisco, California.
TARBELL, Ida – born November 5, 1857 at Erie County, Pennsylvania.
TESLA, Nikola – born July 10, 1856 at Smiljan, Croatia.
THOMSEN, Alex Brask – born September 17, 1919 at Copenhagen, Denmark.
WESTINGHOUSE, Jr., George – born October 6, 1846 at Central Bridge, New York.
WIRTZ, Alvin – born May 22, 1888 at Columbus, Texas.
YOUNG, Owen D. – born October 27, 1874 at Stark, New York.

This Index will be continuously updated and expanded.

NOTE! This article was switched from an earlier date to this date, and another article with today's date was switched to the earlier date in order to keep continuity within the content of two articles. Here is the three page magazine feature article that Elbert Hubbard wrote about John D. Rockefeller as a person. Read what Hubbard wrote about Standard Oil in our earlier Blog entry. Excerpts from both articles will be reproduced in a readable form in succeeding editions of this Blog, along with comments by Herbert W. Armstrong about Elbert Hubbard. 

Elbert Hubbard was very impressed with John D. Rockefeller, and very unimpressed by Ida Tarbell's 'muckraking' coverage of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust; while Herbert W. Armstrong was very impressed by Elbert Hubbard and his skills as an advertising copy writer.

The majority of people alive today, have not, in all probability, ever heard of Elbert Green Hubbard, and that also explains why most people do not know what made Herbert W. Armstrong and his more famous son Garner Ted, think they way they did.

Elbert Green Hubbard was born at on June 19, 1856, and both he and his wife drowned off Ireland on board the Lusitania. It had  which had just been torpedoed by a German submarine on May 7, 1915.

Elbert Hubbard; John D. Rockefeller; Ida Tarbell and Herbert W. Armstrong all knew each other. They became contemporaries, but they did not necessarily share the same views about life.

While John D. Rockefeller began the age in which you now live, that is the age of North Sea natural gas and oil, he also begat a gigantic monopoly.  He achieved this in some ways that are similar to the methodology used by the Italian Mafia. Ida Tarbell decided that his business practices needed to be exposed, but not everyone agreed and she was dubbed as being a 'muckraker'.

But there was a problem.

John D. Rockefeller was a loyal member of the Baptist Church, which is the same denomination that Billy Graham later represented with those 'crusades' of his that began in London, England just after World War II. But back in the USA decades earlier there arose something very 'American' about a combination of the Protestant faith and capitalism. Both got wrapped in the Stars and Stripes; the Holy Bible, and small town America, which embraced capitalism as Godliness, and perceived communism to be Satanism.

Wading into that polemical mixture was Elbert Hubbard. He was an anarchist, according to some, while others, today, might see him as a 'Green' - of sorts. But Hubbard became a friend of Rockefeller just as the automobile age was about to dawn. It was the time of Thomas Edison and the invention of the electric light bulb, and America was about to be sucked into World War I, and Edison's company was being absorbed into another monster in the making called the General Electric Company.

Hubbard did not see what happened next because a German submarine took his life. But prior to that event, Ida Tarbell, the 'muckraker', had begun exposing Rockefeller's monopoly. It was her revelations that caused the U.S. Government to target Rockefeller's monopoly and try to break it up. Hubbard did not like that at all, even though Rockefeller only became wealthier in the process, and so Hubbard wrote an article which Rockefeller then turned into a booklet and distributed.

As a young man, Herbert W. Armstrong got to know Hubbard and became very impressed by him, because Hubbard was considered to be an 'advertising man' who taught Armstrong how to write copy that sells. Now add to Armstrong's life another writer with an interest in turning Jesus into a pragmatic salesman who believed in capitalism, and all of these influences began to create in Herbert W. Armstrong a man who not only believed in his own abilities, but a man who also believed that the end justifies the means.

We will lift the lid off all this tomorrow, and began to examine the details.

The 'Swinging Sixties' never happened, but a bunch of kids were hired to play records from unlicensed transmitters from off the coast of the United Kingdom, and the news media had a field day misreporting about how repressive life had been without those sounds. But this was of course a lie. The Beatles were already famous before the pop pirates first appeared on the airwaves.

The man who brought pop music to the British airwaves took off for the USA where he did it again. His name is Jack Good and the medium is television, not radio. But Jack Good has become the forgotten man in a sea of lies promoting an Irish kid named Ronan O'Rahilly.

Over the years the lies have escalated via the number of books published about the fake side of this subject - the story that never happened and the impact it never had. Behind this misinformation was a geopolitical propaganda machine which had used the U.S. based branch of the Lutheran Church and then Billy Graham to fight the Cold War, but in the Sixties, in Britain, it became the turn of Herbert W. Armstrong and his son Garner Ted.

These two were sex-crazy; money-hungry and power-seeking liars. Obviously Garner Ted got it from his Dad, but where did Herbert learn to use and abuse? That is what we will be revealing tomorrow.

​Garner Ted's second choice of career after leaving the Navy, was attempting to become a pop star. It was only after failing to succeed in that endeavor that that he threw in the towel and then joined his father's enterprise. He was a chip off his father's cynical block with his approaches to both religion and sex. Garner Ted was a playboy dressed up as an evangelist.

Over the years several well-known people have also become entangled in this mess, and they include the likes of world chess champion Bobby Fischer. But when the antics of the Armstrong family are compared to the documented record of thuggery; debauchery and murder in the name of the Papacy ruling the Roman Catholic Church, they pale into insignificance. But this is stated not to attack that denomination, but to show that sex, money and the recriminations of man-made religions, all seem to walk hand-in-glove.

However, the outward impact of Armstrong's coming utopia of a thousand years was being manifest, according to Herbert W. Armstrong on the campus of Ambassador College. It was that outward model of seeming perfection on earth which became enough to snare the son of the former head of UK Naval Intelligence, Sir Anthony Buzzard. The eponymous younger Buzzard attended Ambassador College and then joined its faculty. After his father died, he also inherited his title.

Country singer Merle Haggard became so impressed that he co-wrote 'Okie from Muskogee' with the Ambassador College campus in mind. Haggard also wrote another of his songs after his friend and mentor Garner Ted Armstrong died, because, claimed Haggard, Garner Ted had become both his personal friend and a 'professor' who made sense of  world events.

The reason for including this sub-story is because it is part of a huge amount of evidence which reveals that Herbert W. Armstrong was not who he claimed to be.

In the 1920s he did become an advertising salesman who learned how to write text that could sell other peoples' products. Then, as the Great Depression took hold in the 1930s, he switched to writing copy about his own ethereal product - after he got a Church to ordain him.

​Below left is a full-page newspaper ad written by Herbert W. Armstrong in a style using CAPITAL letters that he continued to use for the rest of his life. Next to it is his Ministerial License Certificate which he was given - before getting kicked-out of that denomination and starting his own offshoot. The cause of that theological disagreement was his belief in British-Israelism.

​This move into religion would paint Herbert as a very cynical manipulator of minds, and an extremely successful confidence trickster. But did others who were equally manipulative and cynical know this? Was Herbert W. Armstrong a willing puppet on their financial string?

The hard evidence says "yes" to all of the above.

By the time Herbert W. Armstrong got to Pasadena, California, the adjoining part of Los Angeles called Hollywood, was waiting for him. So were the doyens of black and grey broadcasting propaganda. Who they were; what they were up to, and how Herbert W. Armstrong fit into their master plan for U.S. propaganda during the Cold War of the Nineteen Fifties, will be explained as this Blog continues each day.

Many of the events that came to pass in the Nineteen Sixties began with individuals who were born towards the close of the Nineteenth Century. Herbert W. Armstrong first drew breath in the year 1892, and according to press reports, the beginning of life for Boliver B. O'Rear occurred five years later. He died aged 61 in 1958, and this would place the year of his birth in 1897.

While we found many similar local newspaper reports about Boliver, his wife and children, it is his obituary that is most interesting because it states that his funeral took place in Jasper, Alabama at a local Baptist Church, which according to Armstrong's definition was a denomination teaching a false religious message. But more than this, there is the reference to his employer which before Armstrong was the United States Internal Revenue Service; a Federal Agency collecting taxes for the U.S. Treasury in Washington, D.C. It is also worth noting that no mention is made of anything to do with his work for Herbert W. Armstrong!

The clipping also says that at night Boliver B. O'Rear studied law to get his degree from the National University of Law in Washington, D.C., which is where he was first admitted to to the bar as an attorney. In 1923, this item [right] says that he had not been back to Jasper, Alabama in over two years.

In 1953, this article [left] appeared in the local Jasper newspaper. It reflects a somewhat detached view by Bolivar O'Rear to his home in Los Angeles, and a somewhat strange transfer from the nation's capital by something other than a direct relocation.

Other articles in the local press about the O'Rear children, report that they have academic aspirations that do not include anything to do with Herbert W. Armstrong, who is never mentioned in these stories. (At least not the ones we have come across so far.)

​This brings us back to the article in the 'American Lawyer' magazine. It says that Rader first met Armstrong in 1956, which is two years before O'Rear died. Since Rader was at that time working for media man Milton Scott, he was obviously bringing contact work to Armstrong, and that legal paperwork would have to be approved by O'Rear. So there is a very good possibility that Rader also knew O'Rear. This article [right] also mentions that Bolivar O'Rear is living and working in Los Angeles, California, but in none of these articles is Herbert W. Armstrong ever mentioned.

Tomorrow, how 'The Work' of Herbert W. Armstrong began to acquire curious links to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assets in various parts of the world, during the tenure of Bolivar B. O'Rear.

The story of British offshore radio has its roots in the year 1959, because that is when various people began making moves to set events in motion that would eventually culminate in 1964 with the creation of 'Radio Caroline'. But the trail was not created by the people named in the stack of books claiming to reveal the "true story", or the "real story" about 'Radio Caroline', because the truth is not in those books. In fact, key names don't even appear in those publications!

But as I [Caroline Brooks] explained yesterday, we are following the lives of various individuals to document how their lives crisscrossed the lives of other individuals in order to weave together the fabric of this hitherto untold story. Other writers spinning fake stories have ignored those names (like Jimmy Deterding), and some of those names have been published in glaring format for all the world to see. But those hints have sailed over the heads of the offshore hack writers. Instead, they have followed the old fake trail led by the young man full of blarney and lies whose name is Ronan O'Rahilly.

However, the actual story is a lot more interesting than the fake story!

​We now know the name of the person who died and when he died, and it was not in the year 1956, as claimed by 'The American Lawyer' magazine. In fact a picture of Stanley Robert Rader, C.P.A, first showed up in the 1959 Ambassador College yearbook with this caption: "Auditor and Financial Advisor for the Church and College. A new-comer to the Campus, Mr. Rader's advice is frequently sought on questions relating to business and financial matters."

​So who did Stanley Robert Rader, a nominal member of the Jewish faith, replace to advise this Christian denomination on matters relating to business and finance? The answer is ​Boliver O'Rear [right] who was a both a practicing, attorney and a member of the Baptist denomination.

Armstrong's operation began life in the Nineteen Thirties as a tiny local congregation based in Eugene, Oregon. It had broken away from a small denomination that previously ordained Herbert W. Armstrong.

In the Nineteen Forties Armstrong relocated to Pasadena, California, and attracted the professional services of Boliver O'Rear who was not a member of Armstrong's  Church, and neither was he a subscriber to Armstrong's theology! But that is not the only oddity that draws our attention to the life and times of Boliver O'Rear.

Armstrong's literature states that when he died, Boliver O'Rear had been "both legal advisor and auditor of Ambassador College since its beginning ten years ago." Ambassador College began in the year 1947.

The slow process of turning a Sunday morning religious service of the Church of God in Eugene, Oregon into a Hollywood formatted monologue was gradual. Inspiration for a name change came from the promotional title of the 1939 World's Fair, when Armstrong picked-up its futuristic theme and reinterpreted it to refer to a Biblical verse about a millennial age of peace on Earth.

That is when newspaper program listings for the 'Radio Church of God' broadcast service on Sundays, were changed to a listing for the 'World Tomorrow' program. It was still presented under the eponymous name of the radio program, which was then registered as a California corporation. Ambassador College, which began as an activity of the Radio Church of God, Inc., was then registered separately as another non-profit California corporation. Handling both the legal and financial contract work for Herbert w. Armstrong, was Los Angeles attorney Boliver O'Rear.

Even after the name change, the Hollywood influenced program still retained elements of a church service, and its morphing into a monologue introduced by Art Gilmore, the announcer of the Broderick Crawford television show called 'Highway Patrol', and then concluding with an instrumental jingle, would be gradual.

More about Boliver O'Rear tomorrow.

Since this is being written by one person [Caroline Brooks], albeit with the resources and guidance of a team of three other people, I write in the first person to state that I am well-aware that many readers of my Blog have little patience with my slow progress. That is because they have grown-up expecting instant answers to everything. Well, I am sorry to disappoint you (if this describes your approach to the subject matter of this Blog), because this storyline has no 'instant' explanation.

First of all, as the banner above makes plain, a lot of books have been written over many years to provide readers with a totally fictitious explanation about the origins of offshore radio in Europe. Consequently many readers have previously imbibed this nonsense and now as they read this Blog they are trying to reconcile what they are reading, with what they have previously read elsewhere. My suggestion is that you forget what you think that you know, and that you begin again by reading this Blog without confusing yourself unnecessarily.

I have been explaining how the misinformation has been spread and even why it was spread, but the quick and simple explanation involves a totally fictitious storyline in which many names appearing in this Blog, do not appear in the fictitious version. So, keep in mind a lot of the information and people we have already referenced such as Herman and George Brown, because they will come back into the real story, right here on this Blog.

In order to deal with these many biographical snapshots, I have to deal with them one at a time, or within the context of other people that they immediately relate to. This brings us to the present focus which is upon the relationship between Stanley R. Rader and Herbert W. Armstrong.

With that in mind, and also recalling my words in yesterday's Blog in which I compared Herbert W. Armstrong to a lobster who was slowly cooked to a mental death by Stanley R. Rader, I will also cite the article that appeared in 'The American Lawyer' and titled: 'The Devil and Stanley Rader - How a Jewish lawyer from White Plains found Jesus, big bucks, and lots of trouble doing "the Work" in California'. It was written in 1979 by Henry Goldman, and it appeared in the August edition of that publication.

This is how Henry Goldman describes that initial meeting of the Cook with his lobster. (I am aware that most Jewish people practicing the Jewish faith, which Rader may, or may not have been doing, would shy away from the idea of shellfish as a food, but this is analogy!)

"Stanley Rader .... became an accountant after his 1951 graduation from UCLA .... His initial contact with [Herbert W. Armstrong] came in 1956 when he was working as an accountant for Hollywood advertising mogul Milton Scott, who bought radio and television time for [Armstrong]. When Armstrong's accountant died in 1956, Scott sent Rader to straighten out [Armstrong's] books. .... Scott .... says Rader violated their confidential relationship by wrestling [Armstrong's] advertising business away from [Scott]."

As I revealed in yesterday's Blog, Stanley Rader was first acknowledged in a formal manner by his inclusion within the 1959 edition of the Ambassador College yearbook; which means that his presence became known on the Pasadena campus the year before. But Rader was intruding into the family-based organization created by Herbert W. Armstrong, and as their relationship developed, it grew into a crisis which resulted in Herbert dumping his biological son Garner Ted, and embracing Stanley as his de facto son. But all of that in 1959, was in the future, and it would not emerge as an overnight crisis, but one that would boil to the point of spillage; adjustment and correction, and then result in a total breaking away of Garner Ted amidst a sea of legal turmoil to the benefit of Stanley, who eventually walked away as the victor.

But if Milton Scott sensed that Stanley Rader had an agenda other than that of the Milton Scott advertising agency; the evidence points to Stanley Rader having a Master of his own, and his Master is the one with an address in Langley, Virginia and known by the letters CIA. However, this is not a Blog making accusations derived from circumstantial guilt, we require links to show a common purpose of association, and that is what we will continue to reveal tomorrow.

While we have chosen to adopt the well-documented life and times of Herbert W. Armstrong as one of the 'pebbles' that began a serious of ripples in this recital of past events, it is now necessary to introduce the person who became his Puppet Master. That person is Stanley Robert Rader.

Stan Rader died in 2002, thus terminating a life of 70 years. But in the year 1959 he was just beginning to emerge from the shadows, and into the public life of Herbert W. Armstrong.

Rader was born on August 13, 1930 in White Plains, New York. He was the junior of Herbert W. Armstrong who was born on July 31, 1892 in Des Moines, Iowa.

Armstrong's parents subscribed to the Quaker faith. Rader was born to parents of the Jewish faith.

​The year before Herbert W. Armstrong first arrived at Copenhagen, Denmark to see the manager of 'Radio Mercur', Stanley Robert Rader was being introduced in the 1959 Yearbook of Armstrong's Ambassador College at Pasadena, California, by the picture shown above. The Yearbook represented events during the preceding twelve months, and in 1958, as a Chartered Public Accountant, he was identified as the financial auditor and advisor serving the institutions of Armstrong's Church and College.

However, Rader's public emergence did not reflect his initial media beginnings concerning the relationship that would gradually turn the tables on Armstrong like a lobster being slowly boiled to death. Events would gradually put Rader in charge of both Armstrong's Church and his College.

Rader then attempted, without a lot of success, to quieten down both institutions as to what he was really setting out to do, which was to morph the assets of the Church and the College into a spectacular secular foundation. It would be that new institution which engaged with world leaders while at the same time, bedazzling the world of cultural entertainment.

For a time, he actually 'pulled it off'!

Rader had taken advice given to Armstrong since the Forties to become a political and cultural radio commentator, of which there had been many in the past, and many in his future. But Armstrong resisted until Rader showed Armstrong that it was not a question of one or the other, he could do both!

As he approached the zenith of his ambitions, Stanley R. Rader made a lot of enemies who tried to destroy him. This led to a very public legal war which Rader turned into a debate about the meaning of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as it applied to State laws. For a short time thereafter, Rader emerged as the victor and he even got the University of Southern California Gould School of Law to create a Chair for the 'Herbert W. Armstrong Professor of Constitutional Law, Emeritus'!

In other words, the life and times of Herbert W. Armstrong came to influence the ordinary lives of millions of people on this Planet. But most people had no idea that Armstrong was the servant of a Puppet Master named Stanley Robert Rader. In fact, it took many years for Armstrong to realize that Rader had become his real life but secular "Guiding Hand", and by then, it was too late.

Rader's life had already come to an end, and Armstrong's was swiftly fading out of existence.

Tomorrow, how the paths of Rader and Armstrong collided, and how the Rader-Armstrong story developed from there.

Garry, we have asked you to remove Rusling's false advertising banner which appears to be in the fixed position at the top of your Forum. We received feedback asking us what made us think that you were even aware of the issues involved. Well, we now know the answer to that question, because the other day you responded to a thread on your own Forum which appears to relate to this same issue.

Garry, we still have all of your emails asking us to continue with our investigation, before Paul Alexander Rusling stole our research and then used it in his own vanity, print-on-demand book in support of a fraudulent claim that links Malcolm Smith's new and irrelevant community eponymous radio station, to the launching of 'Radio Caroline' back in 1964.

The Rusling-Smith plan has been used by them to successfully obtain thousands of Pounds in free advertising, both in print and on radio and television news coverage for that pip-squeak venture.

We have also been asked why we don't take legal action, and our answer is that the people swindled out of money to buy this Rusling work of fiction - sold in the name of true non-fiction - are the persons harmed by this Rusling-Smith conspiracy to defraud the public. We are not victims of that part of their swindle. We are victims of theft by Rusling.

For our part we are methodically revealing the true story here on this Blog, and we will eventually publish it in book format as 'Dial 999 for Caroline - the girl who never was'. Therefore it would seem that at some point in time you will be forced to remove the fraudulent promotion on your Forum that advertises Rusling's book for sale - or be confronted with the stark contrast between fact and fiction; honesty versus dishonesty, and you will be on the wrong side of that confrontation.

So again, Garry, please remove that fraudulent advertising. That is all we ask of you, and in so doing you will have closed an unpleasant chapter which does not seem to have been of your making, but which is now breaking out into all sorts of hate posts by other people and about other people on your own Forum - which is supposed to be a Forum for anyone interested in radio and related subjects. That is how we got involved with you in the first instance, and back then you repeatedly told us by email to continue to unmask the fraud being spread to promote a new and tiny community station calling itself 'Radio Caroline'.

You still have not explained to us in public or in private, why you suddenly flipped 100% into backing the fraud and let the fraudsters attack our research - while stealing it, and then twisting it to promote their fraud - which your Forum is still advertising.

Garry, it is time for you to face the facts and address this issue.

UPDATE!

Today, March 12, 2021, on the corresponding Forum that emerged from your Forum, the person of Malcolm Smith posted a very hypocritical comment that merely draws attention to the same issues addressed here. For your part Garry, you have responded by deleting the thread that prompted our response and the subsequent reaction by Malcolm Smith (who continues to use the fictitious name 'Peter Moore'.)

Garry, the old saying that "you can run but you can't hide" applies to this situation, which will not be resolved until you resolve it. All you have to do is remove the false Rusling-Smith advertising that is still on the top of your own web site. Today you proved that you are capable of deleting threads, so now it is time for you to remove the false advertising thread that we are complaining about.

In this recital of events that involves a number of different people whose individual lives eventually collide with each other in time and space, I could have focused upon any number of them, but I chose Herbert W. Armstrong for several reasons.

First thing to remember is that this is not a story about Herbert W. Armstrong. It is about the many individuals that his life impacted, and by this I do not mean in the world of theology, but in the real world of geopolitics; commerce, and life in general as lived by the majority of people in the world today. That opens up a vast spectrum of different views of life, and that is exactly the context in which I want to present the life and times of Herbert W. Armstrong.

In fact, if you go back through previous editions of this Blog - which will become part of the text for the book 'Dial 999 for Caroline - the girl who never was', you will discover that I have already delved into the biographical accounts of many people from various backgrounds. Eventually it is my intention to show how all of these people, and still more to come, all collide in time and space with each other, and most of them for different reasons.

The one contributing factor that caused me to use Herbert W. Armstrong as the centerpiece for my recital is that his life is now within bookends: he lived and he died. But within that same time period he was constantly writing letters and articles, as well as speaking on radio, television and in public forums. However, those letters of his are time-stamped and they were widely distributed. Therefore they have a certain amount of authenticity to them with regards to their contemporary content.

Then there is the content as well as context of his letters. Armstrong came from a print advertising background and then got into radio and television broadcasting. Because these broadcasts involved sponsored time, it means that he, or the organizations that he represented, had to buy the time periods from the stations for his programs to be aired.

A lot of his correspondence is centered upon media matters - both print and broadcasting. As such, by removing the theological overtones from his texts, we are left with a superb chronological documentation of media matters from the 1930s through the 1980s. This is what we will be delving into, and I don't think that anyone else has ever used the letters of Herbert W. Armstrong in such a secular context before now.

Remember too, that the life and times of Herbert W. Armstrong compose only one part of a gigantic story involving a host of very different people whose lives come together to reveal an amazing and hitherto untold story. That is the story behind the story yet to appear in context as 'Dial 999 for Caroline - the girl who never was'.

Therefore, keeping to my promise of bringing the life of Herbert W. Armstrong into the world of Radio Mercur, and my previous quotations from Armstrong about the manager of that offshore radio station, it is time to reveal just who this American was that Armstrong wanted to meet. Now a lot of material has been written about Radio Mercur as a Danish commercial station, and additional material has also been written about the Swedish language station that bought 'down time' from the Danish station for Skånes Radio Mercur.

What all of these accounts seem to have in common is in emphasizing that these two stations were primarily Danish and Swedish, and thus downplaying any American connections. Now in a sense, if we only concentrate on their broadcast output, then most of it was in Danish and Swedish, but if we look behind the scenes at management, we find something completely different.

So referring back to a previous edition of this Blog where we recited this interesting comment by Herbert W. Armstrong:

".... I boarded an SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) polar-flight DC-7 plane at Los Angeles International Airport, ​in early June, 1959 .... We arrived in Copenhagen about 3 o’clock in the morning. .... We took this flight, stopping first at Copenhagen, because we wanted to contact the first radio station that we had heard of operating offshore from a ship. The offices of this station were in Copenhagen. .... I was not able to contact the manager of the station, who was out of town. However, I did contact him later by telephone."

So who did Herbert W. Armstrong, an American who was not versed in either the Danish or Swedish languages, hope to meet and converse with in June 1959? More to the point, who called him from Copenhagen by telephone while Armstrong was in Rome, and offered to have his English language programs translated into Danish and or Swedish? Remember, Armstrong already had several foreign language editions of his program hosted by other speakers, including a Russian edition hosted by a speaker in New York.

That was in June 1959.

Now let us move ahead in time to this strange letter written on February 3, 1960 by Gordon McLendon to General Somoza in Nicaragua:

In May 1960 a feature about 'Radio Mercur' appeared in a U.S. electronics magazine:

This man's name is Phil Irwin and in May 1960 he was identified both in text and in picture as the station manager of 'Radio Mercur'. So what is known about this man? We know that he is a U.S. citizen and that he worked for a radio station in the State of New York before he went to Denmark. His career then shifted to the Voice of America, and by the 1980s he was presenting his own shows on that U.S. government network which was broadcasting to Europe.

Clearly there is a distinct timeline here. Herbert W. Armstrong flew into Copenhagen on a SAS plane in June of 1959 to see the Station Manager of 'Radio Mercur', but the Station Manager was not in town. However, after Armstrong had moved on to Rome he got a telephone call from 'Radio Mercur' in which the 'World Tomorrow' program was discussed with a view to airing it in Danish, Swedish, or both languages. On February 3, 1960, Gordon McLendon told General Somoza that his group had just bought half of 'Radio Mercur'. In May 1960, Phil Irwin was shown as part of a U.S. magazine article about 'Radio Mercur', and he was identified as both Station Manager and program presenter of an English language show on 'Radio Mercur', which he taped in the station's land-based studio in Copenhagen. On the desk in front of him is a model of the radio ship mv Cheeta.

This thread will continue in tomorrow's edition of the Blog.

In the year 1959, many individual pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle began being joined to other pieces, and they would come to form a panoramic picture of events that would take place over the coming decade. There was just one problem facing onlookers, they could only see parts of the puzzle.

From those observable parts, various interpretations of what this puzzle portrayed began to be published. But because only fractions of the puzzle could be observed during the time of its formation, the interpretations varied to a wild extent.

It is only now, by looking backwards in time that it is becoming possible to see an overview of what the completed puzzle was revealing about the Nineteen Sixties. Now, because enough pieces have been identified and put into place, it is possible to go on searching for the pieces that are still missing.

But whereas it was not possible before now to know what was missing, with an idea of what the panoramic picture represented, it is now possible to look for those shapes that are figuratively upside down and therefore still obfuscated, but which match the missing shapes in the picture now emerging. Once they are put into place with the picture side exposed, more and more of the total picture becomes visible and understandable for the first time.

It is in this context that we now come to the part played in this story by Herbert W. Armstrong. He is now deceased, and so his own life-story has a beginning and an ending. Much of his earlier life had nothing to do with the events of the Nineteen Sixties, except that he was treading a path and following the lead of many other people who looked at world events and tried to interpret them through the prism of one branch of the Christian religion.

The study of Christian theology is reflected in four basic research areas of discipline, and Armstrong engaged in all of them. In the end, it was his own exhortation to study the Bible which led to the self-destruction of the Church that he had built!

Biblical study was his foundation, but because it involved a critical examination of texts translated centuries ago from other languages into what is now archaic English, it resulted in his own family members turning on each other. Everyone of them had their own opinion as to what the Bible was saying to them, personally. But that rancor took time to develop.

Armstrong's interpretation of church history, which is another of the four types of Christian theology, also put him at odds with other Christian denominations. But the third branch involving systematic theology was equally explosive, because it tried to reconcile Biblical teachings with the harsh reality of living life itself, and that is reflected in practical theology. In essence, these are four good reasons to stay clear of the entire subject! 

Herbert W. Armstrong was a product of the latter part of that era in which people like John D. Rockefeller built commercial empires, and Ida Tarbell flourished as one of the first investigative journalists, but her targets branded her as a 'muckraker'. It was during these years that Armstrong, who was trying to establish himself as an advertising salesman, became sidetracked because he was fascinated by the origins of the people living in the British Isles.

At the same time his wife who had a mystical interest in life, led him to start thinking about life, death and the final judgement of God. So Armstrong became ordained by a very small organization and soon he was preaching to a tiny congregation in Oregon.

Now Armstrong's version of eschatology also began to assimilate versions of what others taught about the last days of Planet Earth and its inhabitants. Many years later In 1970, a best selling book called 'The Late Great Planet Earth' popped-up in the book shops and it was then quickly followed by a movie of the same name narrated by Orson Welles. Its theme was that various Biblical passages predicted that the European Economic Community would eventually emerge into a revived Roman Empire, probably known as the United States of Europe. It would be ruled by a person known as the Antichrist. But that book and movie were many years in Armstrong's future. In the 1930s he took the words of Benito Mussolini seriously when Il Duce invaded Abyssinia and claimed to be rebuilding the Roman Empire.

Both Armstrong, and the later book/movie of the 1970s called 'The Late Great Planet Earth', shared an overview of this morphing process into the United States of Europe, but Armstrong did not share their version of events leading up to it, nor with events resulting from it. Indeed, Armstrong championed both dystopia and utopia, with one leading to the other in a 'Wonderful World Tomorrow'. It was that idea which gave rise to his eponymous radio and television program titles.

Herbert W. Armstrong defined his version of the world tomorrow as being a thousand years of peace on earth. Human beings would be ruled from Jerusalem under a one world government dominated by the returned supernatural figure of Jesus Christ. In other words Armstrong was not preaching 'The End of the World', only the end of human rule over other human beings.

Also putting him at odds with most Christian churches was his definition of the word 'gospel'. His interpretation of that word was that the majority of churches taught a 'gospel' about the person of Jesus Christ. His own definition and therefore his own interpretation was defined in the Book of Matthew; chapter 24 and verse 14: "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come."

In other words, not only was his mission to buy double-truck advertising pages in 'Reader's Digest' and a host of other major mass circulation publications in which to spread this warning message, but he was also to buy time on radio and television stations in order that the human race would have no excuse for behaving the way it did. Herbert W. Armstrong did not vote, and he discouraged his converts from engaging in military combat. His parents were of Quaker stock and they did not take up arms to fight other human beings.

After leaving the original Church of God organization that had ordained him, Armstrong began his crusade in the 1930s with a congregation of his own that he also called Church of God. It was located in Eugene, Oregon, USA. He then began buying time on a local station and called his program the 'Radio Church of God'. Years later he incorporated in the USA under that name, but when he began to build a college in the United Kingdom, in 1960 he registered his operation with British authorities under the name of 'Ambassador College UK Ltd.' This secular sounding name was the secret to understanding what began to revolve and evolve around the person of Herbert W. Armstrong.

After moving from Oregon to California in the late 1940s, he wrapped his electronic programming around the voice of Art Gilmore, who, among other things, became famous as the introductory announcer for 'Highway Patrol' and other well known television shows. On top of this, various media representatives got him to drop the 'Radio Church of God' approach and go for a monologue news analysis format rebranded as the 'World Tomorrow'. (A World's Fair had opened in 1939 under that same name.) A secular Hollywood instrumental jingle then closed the program with Art Gilmore giving out the mailing address. On the air and in print to the public, Armstrong never asked anyone for money. Instead he gave away a library of literature, free of charge.

Other major media influencers went further and wanted Armstrong to take a commercial sponsor, but he never did, and they also wanted him to drop all references to 'God'. He didn't begin to do that until much later, and then only in public. One of the groups wanting to offer him an expansion of his two English language shows was 'Radio Luxembourg'. The London office offered him to switch him from twice a week late at night, to a prime time evening strip, seven nights a week, but here was the catch: He had to go 100% secular and never mention God. But this he could not agree to. Instead, he settled for Art Gilmore announcing: "The World Tomorrow. Ambassador College presents Herbert W. Armstrong bringing you the plain truth about today's world news, with the prophecies of the world tomorrow."

But entering the life of Herbert W. Armstrong was a very talented and nominally practicing Jew named Stanley R. Rader. He first met Armstrong in his capacity as an employee of a media time buyer by which time he was already a Certified Public Accountant. Stanley Rader then got to oversee Armstrong's Church/College financial business and after attending the University of Southern California  Law School and graduating top of his class, he became an attorney who eventually only represented the legal interests of Herbert W. Armstrong.

From then onwards, Rader became the puppet master and Herbert W. Armstrong became his puppet. It was under Rader's influence that the word 'God' disappeared to be replaced by a euphemism. Here's how Armstrong later explained his new approach:

"Now it was not too long ago, there was an editorial in one of our largest news magazines, 'The United States News and World Report.' It said that it would seem that the only hope of survival of humanity now, is the sudden appearance of a strong unseen hand from someplace — to intervene in world affairs and save us from ourselves."

Buried within this 'Strong Unseen Hand From Someplace' are shades of the Scottish economist Adam Smith who wrote:

"Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." (The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part IV, Chapter I, pp.184-5, para. 10.)

With this morphing that was going on beneath the surface, Rader turned Armstrong into an 'Ambassador without portfolio for world peace', and under that banner, he came to see kings, presidents and various other well-known figures on the world stage. Now Herbert W. Armstrong was not representing a small church, because he was Founder of the 'Ambassador International Cultural Foundation' (AICF).

The jewel in the crown of AICF was on the West Coast of the USA in California. It was known as the 'Carnegie Hall of the West' - the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. For a time just about anyone who was someone in the world of performing arts (except for rock stars), appeared there. Among its guest speakers was William Colby, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

[Shown below from top left to right: Ambassador Auditorium; Armstrong in Tokyo with Prince Mikasa, brother of the Emperor of Japan; with two members of the World Court at The Hague and Stanley R. Rader (right); with Maestro Arthur Rubinstein at Ambassador Auditorium. See also this brochure.]

If you are following this Blog with any degree of regularity, then you know that it is actually part of an ongoing major investigation spurred on in a new direction as the result of the self-publication of a vanity, print-on-demand book. It was advertised for sale towards the close of 2019 by Paul Alexander Rusling, and he promoted it as 'The Radio Caroline bible'.

Rusling disputes that his self-published book qualifies as a 'print-on-demand' book, however, he is the one placing repeat orders to print his book. It is only a question of whether single copies, or multiple copies, qualify for that description. He was aided by others to produce it, and one of them compared Rusling's book to the Christian 'Holy Bible'.

In promotion it was married to a fraudulent scheme that tries to link a tiny and insignificant new and licensed local radio station calling itself 'Radio Caroline', to the original twin 1964-1967 'Radio Caroline' stations. The purpose of their confidence trick was, and has been, to obtain thousands of Pounds worth of free publicity from mass media for this tiny new radio station by claiming that fraudulent connection. So far their scheme to defraud by misrepresentation has worked to the advantage of both Rusling and the tiny new radio station.

At first Rusling tried to involve us in his confidence trick by stealing our research and then twisting it to form the basis of his own fictitious narrative. We objected and forced him to remove our name from his promotional material. However, his fraud continues to this day, and he is still assisted by Garry Stevens on a so-called 'Free Radio' forum site. Therefore, from time-to-time we have to keep reminding our readers of these facts, and we will continue to do so until their fraud is discontinued - if that ever happens - which we doubt.

We see no point in wasting more time and money on this issue because the question will then arise about the true version of events. If Rusling's version is incorrect, then what is the true version? It is to answer that question that this Blog now exists, and it will eventually lead to the publication of a new book called 'Dial 999 for Caroline: the girl who never was'.

Because of the necessity of publishing this explanation, our planned editorial '1959: Where interests began to collide', which is a continuation of the link between Herbert W. Armstrong and 'Radio Mercur', will be delayed until tomorrow's Blog.

This is a companion to our feature about Radio Nord.

The Skagerrak seaway connects to the Kattegat and serves as the gateway from to the North Sea into the Baltic Sea. Its shoreline touches southeast Norway; the west coast of Sweden and the Jutland peninsula of Demark. The Polaris nuclear missiles had a limited range, and this is one reason why a US Navy nuclear submarine from its maintenance base at Holy Loch in Scotland, was placed on station in this area. It could effectively prevent the USSR fleet from exiting the Baltic Sea into the North Sea.

Note the U.S. military presence in the area with Polaris nuclear missiles on board nuclear submarines and nuclear tipped Nike-Hercules missiles, all standing guard around 'neutral' Sweden which was surrounded by U.S. interests on board the Danish and Swedish Radio Mercur operations close to Malmo, Sweden, and Radio Nord off Stockholm, Sweden. Nils-Eric Svensson who bought time on Radio Mercur to start a Swedish version, took off for Pasadena, California in this same time period. Now notice this old autobiographical entry by Herbert W. Armstrong from Pasadena, California:

"Now we come to the year 1959. .... Garner Ted and I boarded an SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) polar-flight DC-7 plane at Los Angeles International Airport, in early June, 1959 .... We arrived in Copenhagen about 3 o’clock in the morning. .... First Ship Radio Station .... This was our first visit to one of the Scandinavian countries. We took this flight, stopping first at Copenhagen, because we wanted to contact the first radio station that we had heard of operating offshore from a ship. The offices of this station were in Copenhagen. .... I was not able to contact the manager of the station, who was out of town. However, I did contact him later by telephone. Nothing definite came of it at the time, but it did open to our investigation the idea of broadcasting from offshore ship stations, to countries where no radio time can be purchased or used by The World Tomorrow. .... We carried with us a portable Ampex tape recorder. In fact it was the first of the Ampex 600 models -- I believe ours was the first set from the factory. This was the first portable tape recorder that was of professional broadcast quality, so that programs recorded on it would be acceptable for broadcast by the largest, most discriminating radio stations."

At that time Nils-Eric Svensson [left] was a very young person and he seems to have been the 'front' for others in much the same way that Ronan O'Rahilly was later used in a similar role during the 1964 launch of 'Radio Caroline'. Because when peering behind the curtain of 'Radio Nord', we don't just find some Americans assisting a Swedish guy and his staff, we find a completely American dominated operation. Again, the O'Rahilly 'smoke-screen factor' is brought into play to conceal what is really going on, because the manager of 'Radio Mercur' was also a U.S. citizen with a broadcasting background, and a future with the 'Voice of America'. Tomorrow, we will introduce you to the American manager of 'Radio Mercur' that Herbert W. Armstrong came to meet!