Does Pastor Terry Jones have a big, big secret? (Updated)

In our previous two posts, we focused on Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the creepy Coptic who produced the religiously intolerant film "Muslim Innocence," which led to riots in the Middle East and the death of the American ambassador in Libya. I believe that this film was produced as a deliberate provocation, designed to propel Mitt Romney into the White House.

It is quite telling that Romney smirked as he launched his scripted attacks against Obama. Fortunately, those attacks seem to have backfired. So far.

Nakoula isn't in this alone in this enterprise. One of his partners is Pastor Terry Jones, who gained international notoriety in 2010, when he burned copies of the Koran in a deliberate attempt to incite Muslims to violence.

*  *  *

Update: Jones now claims that, contrary to report, he did not promote Nakoula's poorly-made incitement to riot. In fact, Jones says that his account was hacked. Most people will classify that claim under the heading "A likely story" -- although if there is any truth to what Jones says, we've entered very murky waters. And now, back to our original post...

*  *  *

Until today, I had presumed Jones to be a simple bigot. However, an interesting -- albeit rather questionable -- journalist named Gordon Duff offers quite a different take on Jones.

We've discussed Duff in a previous post. To be frank, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the guy. And I'm quite flabbergasted by this:

Jones, to most, is an uneducated and lower class figure in a backward area of the American south. His congregation is largely made of weak minded people on the fringe of society, easily coerced and influenced. He has few followers.

However, Jones has another following, one not so easy to detect. Jones moved to Germany in 1981 and established a religious cult in Cologne. Thus, his ties while there were with Israeli intelligence and the P2 Masonic lodge, better known as “Operation Gladio,” the group responsible for the murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and terror bombings that went on into the 90s.

Jones real background is that of an intelligence asset. His personal weakness is narcissism. His strength is his ability to hide behind what appears to be backward and ignorant exterior while actively working as an intelligence agent for a combination of rogue CIA elements, extremists in the former Stasi German group now called the DVD who partner with Israel’s Mossad.

Jones is a spy, CIA trained, run by rogue handlers, and heavily promoted by Mossad elements throughout the Middle East and able to garner national news attention in the US when anyone else of his minor following and total lack of credibility would be ignored.

Instead, his every obscene move, his every blasphemy, from his tiny and forgotten church, reaches, not just the front page of every paper but is announced and spread throughout the Islamic world by the hundreds of Israeli agents that infiltrate every Mosque.

The relationship between the Mossad and DVD is now well known. German built submarines armed with Russian built nuclear weapons patrol of Iran as we speak, their Israeli crews ready to start World War III.

Inside the US, rogue elements of Bush era intelligence privatization, initially under Blackwater Corporation and its various successors, still actively run agents, manage narcotics processing and distribution and intimidate world leaders through threats against their families.

Jones is part of this operation, tasked with destabilizing Egypt and Libya, tasked with providing an Islamophobic backdrop for Netanyahu’s upcoming visit to the United Nations and providing support for extremist elements in Europe and the US who see President Obama too “morally flexible” in his dealings with Iran.

Whew! How much of this is true?

Duff's bottom line -- that this incident is ultimately about Iran -- mirrors my own previously-expressed views. But his claims about Jones, although fascinating, should be approached with great caution.

For one thing, Duff writes for a website friendly to the 9/11 "Truthers," whom I despise with a passion more purple than Pilate's toga. I would also note that Duff seems to have phobic attitude toward hyperlinks. He disdains the tradition of citation of sources. He refuses to give us any hint as to how we might verify his very large claims.

Incidentally, the P2 Lodge and Operation Gladio were two very different things. One was a group of people and the other was a plan. So right there we have an example of Duff's sloppiness.

All of this is not very promising. Nevertheless, I decided to check out Duff's allegations, to the extent that they can be checked out.

Many will be surprised to learn that Jones did, in fact, run a surprisingly popular church in Cologne, Germany. His former congregation "fired" him when the pastor began burning Korans. In 2010, Der Spiegel published a disturbing profile of Pastor Terry Jones:

What is less well known is that the pastor led a charismatic evangelical church, the Christian Community of Cologne, in the western German city up until 2009. Last year, however, the members of the congregation kicked founder Jones out, because of his radicalism. One of the church's current leaders, Stephan Baar, also told the German news agency DPA that there had been suspicions of financial irregularities in the church surrounding Jones.

A "climate of fear and control" had previously prevailed in the congregation, says one former member of the church who does not want to be named. Instead of free expression, "blind obedience" was demanded, he says.

Various witnesses gave SPIEGEL ONLINE consistent accounts of the Jones' behavior. The pastor and his wife apparently regarded themselves as having been appointed by God, meaning opposition was a crime against the Lord. Terry and Sylvia Jones allegedly used these methods to ask for money in an increasingly insistent manner, as well as making members of the congregation carry out work.

Terry Jones is starting to look an awful lot like Jim Jones, who was pretty damned spooky in his own right. Let's continue with the Spiegel piece:

Former church members are still undergoing therapy as a result of "spiritual abuse," Schäfer said. According to Schäfer, Jones urged church members to beat their children with a rod and also taught "a distinctive demonology" and conducted brainwashing.

"Terry Jones appears to have a delusional personality," speculates Schäfer. When he came to Germany in the 1980s, Jones apparently considered Cologne "a city of Hell that was founded by Nero's mother," while he thought Germany was "a key country for the supposed Christian revival of Europe," Schäfer says.

As I said earlier: Disturbing. But so far, I have found no hint of a relationship between Jones and the P2 Lodge, an Italian pseudo-Masonic secret society which came to an end in 1981. (Some say it continues in another form, but that's a discussion for another day.) Neither do I see any proof that Jones has ever worked with spies in the service of Israel, Germany, America or any other government.

Many will find it hard to believe that any intelligence agency would recruit someone as bizarre as Jones. Of course, his eccentricities may be part of an act -- and in truth, there is a long, weird history of spooks who have recruited mondo-wacko religious figures into various schemes. (If you want some interesting reading, look up the hidden history of something called the Old Catholic Church. One might also mention a fella named Moon who died recently...)

I attempted to verify Duff's claim that Pastor Jones has allied himself with former members of the Stasi, the notorious East German intelligence service. Duff claims that the Stasi lives on, and that it is now called the DVD. According to other sites, those initials stand for Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst (German Defense Service).

Question: Does this organization actually exist? Or is it an intelligence myth -- a fictitious "bad guy" group modeled after Ian Fleming's SPECTRE?

Gale's authoritative Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security mentions nothing about a German group called DVD. Nevertheless, Duff's website, Veteran's Today, offers an alleged history of the formation of this group; the piece is written by one Michael Shrimpton, who claims to be an intelligence analyst. In this rather difficult-to-follow article, we learn that the DVD began life in the 1940s as an arm of Nazi intelligence. If you scroll down that page, you'll see some sarcastic comments from spook-watchers who think that Shrimpton is full of it.

Various anti-Semitic conspiracy sites make reference to the DVD.  Example.

This article from 2007 gets very weird very quickly:

Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst (DVD), Dachau, like the criminal Central Intelligence Agency, is self-financed. It is not funded by the German Government and taxpayer. It operates entirely separately from the Government and the rest of the German intelligence community (although there is some interpenetration, of course), and merely reports what it sees fit to the Chancellor. It does not take instructions from the German Chancellor, as its agenda does not always coincide with that of the overt German Government.

This is because, as the Nazi Pan-German global hegemony strategic continuum, DVD is in charge of Nazi long-range deception strategy and counterintelligence – the purpose of which is to monitor and promote the pan-German ideology of regional and ultimately global Nazi control. 

Well. That's over-the-top even by my lenient standards.

Yet it's downright sedate when compared to the stuff you see on other sites that talk about the Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst. See, for example, here and here and here. The last link goes to a page which claims that the DVD is involved with Satanism and child abduction.

(If this group is real, why hasn't Dave Emory talked about it? This kind of thing is right up his alley.)

So far, I'm not convinced that the DVD exists. I've certainly seen no proof that Pastor Terry Jones is a member of it.

Since the Stasi was very anti-Israel, it's a little hard to believe that former Stasi agents have teamed up with Mossad. Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

Is Duff wrong about Terry Jones and his alleged intelligence connections? I can't say that he is and I can't say that he isn't. At this time, we have no choice but to put a big question mark over everything Duff has to say.

Yet nobody can deny that Pastor Terry Jones is an interesting fellow.

I wonder: What drew him to Germany? Why did he fixate on Cologne? (I've heard that it's not a very religious city, even by modern German standards.) Why did the German government look the other way when Jones mistreated his employees and followers? His former German congregation appears to have been larger than his current American following: How did that happen? When did this good ol' boy learn the language? And where did he get the money for an international experiment of that sort?