Mae Brussell: Secret Service Files on the Queen of Conspiracy Theorists

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by X. Sharks DeSpot

“We are identical to Germany in 1932…Nothing is natural today. Billions are going into creating divisions，terror, to make headlines, to spread confusion and fear, “(1)

If ever there was a time Mae Magnin Brussell summed up her view of the world, that was it. The country, indeed the whole world, was being trans-formed into a police state, a gigantic conspiracy which was responsible for almost every disturbing event. As her obituary stated:

“Ms. Brussell contended that the Kennedy assassinations, Martin Luther King’s assassination, the (Charles) Manson family murders, the Chappaquiddick affair and the Patricia Hearst kidnapping were all set into motion by the far right, the CIA, the FBI and the Mafia under a massive conspiracy to discredit the left and establish a fascist state.”(2)
This, along with her speaking style, condemned Mae Brussell to minority status. She may not have been, as an FBI agent said, a ‘‘crank”, but she was on the political fringe throughout her twenty five year long career. Most people, regardless of political affiliation and ideology, simply do not see die country as being on the verge of fascism.

She did have several advantages. First and fore-most is that she was a true believer. Most of the 120 pages which make up her Secret Service file were generated because she called the Secret Service. More than half the file’s bulk would not exist if she had simply refrained from sending letters to presidents, calling up various police agencies, or visiting Maureen Reagan, daughter of the then-president Ronald Reagan. Someone who was only interested in the publicity would probably have lost interest in what she did as she became old news. If she had been trying to make money, she simply would not have invited trouble by annoying the Secret Service as often as she did.

This, I think, was because she was topical. She spent a large amount of time simply clipping magazine articles and cross-referencing diem with her ever growing collection of newspaper clippings and books. As a result, she was usually very up-to-date, focusing on Watergate and Howard Hughes during the 1970s, and then changing her emphasis to Contragate during the 1980s. She provided a fresh conspiratorial topic with each of her weekly radio shows: cattle mutilations; the House Select Committee on Assassinations; Interpol; the Jonestown Guyana massacre; and on and on. There was hardly a conspiratorial topic which she did not cover. Her confidence in conspiracy theories never ended because conspiracy theories kept coming up.

Her United States Secret Service file begins some time after May 20’ 1973. The first thing in the file is a letter from Mae Brussell to President Richard M. Nixon, asking that he stop by and discuss with her the problems of the nation. The letter gives one the feeling of having walked into the middle of a play but having missed the beginning. This is because of a fact in a memo on the same file, apparently typed on a piece of paper to which Brussell’s mailing envelope was stapled:

“File on subject has been destroyed. Suggest we find out if subject’s father known to administration. I believe this woman should be interviewed•”

Why was her file destroyed? And what was in it? The two most important facts are that Mae Brussell wrote the first real article about Watergate, in The Realist underground news magazine in 1972. The second is that her father was Rabbi Edgar Magnin, who had prayed for Nixon’s presidency at his 1972 inauguration. It seems obvious that the Secret Service had spied on her because of The Realist article, or because the Secret Service agents in question felt it would be expedient to protect Nixon’s friends.

In November of 1973, Brussell was scheduled to attend a rally at the Archives Building in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Committee to Open the Archives. ‘‘PURPOSE OF THE RALLY IS TO DEMAND ACCESS TO JFK ASSASSINATION MATE- RIAL” intones the teletype message. The San Francisco, California office of the Secret Service went out and bought a copy of The Realist and the Mae Brussell Conspiracy Newsletter. After that, there is no indication of any attempt to actually watch her. It was also one of the few times that the Secret Service seemed to be taking her seriously. She was the daughter of Nixon’s good friend, and that was her importance to the Secret Service.

Aside from a few minor incidents, her file is uninteresting until she wrote a letter to Carter National Campaign Headquarters August 18,1976. The sub-sequent interview by the Secret Service on December 4,1976 said:

Brussell stated that she was quite concerned with President-elect Carter’s leaving the country to vacation in the Virgin Islands, in that she felt that he, Carter, would be killed.
Brussell also stated that another assassination group that she is aware of is one that is located in the Los Angeles area. She further advised that this group has a member, a secret service agent, whom she did not name, and members of the California Highway Patrol, Los Angeles Police Department, have trained with the CIA in the Mohave Desert. The subject did not identify her source of information, however, it is known that she is a subscriber to at least eight daily newspapers representing various parts of this country.

The assassins seeking to kill President-elect Carter included “President Ford, Richard Helms, ambassador to Iran, John Connolly, (sic) Paul Laxalt, acting as Ronald Reagan’s representatives from Summa Corporation (Howard Hughes Corporation).”

To people who had read her writings before, it was familiar. Evelle Younger had presided over the investigation in the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, and she had asserted in the letter to the Carter Campaign that “Ronald Reagan was selected by American Intelligence and all the Pentagon and Intelligence powers to be their man. Nothing, not Jimmy Carter, can stand in their way.” As she said in 1977, “I believe that the pecking order for front man Presidents always was Nixon, Agnew, then Reagan. Carter is an interim after Watergate.’’⑶
Since she was right, it should be pointed out that Ronald Reagan and the conservative wing of the Re-publican party attempted to take over the 1976 Republican Convention. They completed their task in 1980, and got Reagan elected.

But Presidential would-be assassin John Hinckley tried to undo Reagan with a .22 revolver. The “Duty Desk Incident Report” of “04-09-81” says:
“NARRATIVE: On 04-09-81 Mae Brussell called the San Francisco FO to report that she believes that John Hinckley may have been near her home in Carmel, California on 01-13-81.”
Written in felt pen was the message:

“Note: this division is attempting to account for Hinckley’s movements (all of them). Brussell thinks she sited (sic) Hinckley on 1-13-81,a day USSS (Author’s note: United States Secret Service, prob-ably) cannot account for re: Hinckley.”

This was Brussell’s finest hour in the Secret Service file. “San Francisco said that the subject, Brussell, appears legitimate.” Of all the statements she made to agents of the Secret Service between 1975 to 1987, this was the only one treated with any seriousness at all. Brussell had provided them with a license plate number of a 1960 Alfa Romero BTM and the description of the couple driving it, including a man who seemed to be Hinckley. On “6-24-81,” two months after being interviewed by the Service, a message was sent to “USSS Headquarters (ID-ACB REGION IV)”： ‘‘Santa Barbara has determined the probability that the subject observed by Mae Brussell was not John Hinckley.”
But Brussell didn’t believe it, if she was told at all.

At 3:30 in the afternoon, January 30,1982, she stepped up to the daughter of the President of the United States of America and stated “I have some in-formation for you regarding the Hinckley family but the secret service won’t let me talk to you. If you would just call me.”

The next day she was interviewed by the Service: “Brussell made several remarks regarding her belief that vice president Bush was behind a plot to remove President Reagan from office.””
One of the obvious things about Brussell’s Secret Service file is the lack of malice and ill will. In contrast to the FBI attitude towards, say Dr. Martin Luther King, Brussell and the Secret Service agents she met with seemed unable to create any hostility to-wards each other. On May 14,1982 the Secret Service received a letter addressed to an agent with Brussell asking for a picture of an old girl friend of John Hinckley’s she had read about in the May 9, 1982 issue of the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, Why should she trust the Service to do that? Apparently, she had trouble believing that the agent she wrote to could be evil.

In an interview with Brussell on 7/23/87, the re-port said:

“Subject stated that she no longer planned to publish handbills exposing the pope’s criminal history be-cause she realized it would therefore be a waste of money…stated that she planned to be out of town on the day of the Pope’s visit.”

Why did Brussell change her mind about publishing handbills? Most likely because the agent in question asked her not to.

The last entry in her file was her obituary from the San Jose Mercury News, October 5,1988. The file itself has obviously been censored, but it is difficult to say what was left out of the pages released. Certainly, the Service would have talked to the local police department, and descriptions of two of her children were censored out of the December 29,1976 interview. Brussell freely described over her radio show details of her own life that the Secret Service would have felt obligated to censor out, such as her children’s names.
The bulk of the file consists of Brussell’s talk of conspiracy theories, yet the agents in question obviously felt that personal information, not political world view, was most important. She frequently mentioned alleged “interlocking connections between Nazi activities and the takeover of the U.S. government” but not one word was said by the agents about this plot. The fact of the matter is, as Linda Hunt has shown in her book, Secret Agenda, the United States government had very little problem with recruiting Nazis after World War II for its crusade against Communism, and by the mid-1970s proof of this was available to anyone who walked into a public library.

The only thing certain is that it was the Queen, not her kingdom, which interested the United States Secret Service.

1. Conspiracy Digest Interview, Winter 1977-1978 issue.
2. San Jose Mercury News, B 1,“Conspiracy Theorist Mae Brussell Dies,” by Ann W. O’Neill.
3. Conspiracy Digest Interview, Winter 1977-1978 issue.
4. World Watchers International Tape #360, 10/27/78.

Mae Brussell created a large amount of material, tapes and magazine articles, in life. Large amounts of it are now out of print. Audio tapes of her radio show are available from AI Kunzer, 348 English Avenue, Monterey, CA 93940. The Conspiracy Digest inter-view can be purchased from A-Albionic Research, POB 20273, Feradale, Michigan 48220. A collection of Mae Brussell’s essays, The Mae Brussell Reader, can be purchased from Prevailing Winds Research, POB 23511, Santa Barbara, CA 93121.

X. Sharks Despot has contributed to Steamshovel Press, Dharma Combat and the IllumiNet edition of The Gemstone File.

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