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Jeremiah 'Jerry' Duggan was a British student at La Sorbonne in Paris. He was killed on March 27, 2003 at the age of 22 near Wiesbaden, Germany after running in front of cars on a busy road. The circumstances of his death are controversial. He died after attending a conference and cadre school held by two Lyndon LaRouche organizations: the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche Youth Movement.
Background
Duggan, who was Jewish and resided in Golders Green, London, was in Paris in March 2003 when he first made contact with the LaRouche movement, after buying a newspaper in the street from Benoit Chalifoux, editor of Nouvelle Solidarité, the movement's French-language newspaper. Duggan decided to accompany Chaifoux to Wiesbaden to attend what he believed was an anti-war conference protesting the United States invasion of Iraq, which had just begun. He travelled there on March 21 with Chalifoux and around eight other men in a convoy of cars. Wiesbaden is the European center of the LaRouche network, which many Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, accuse of being anti-Semitic and fascistic.
The two-day conference was organized by the Schiller Institute, a Wiesbaden-based organization run by LaRouche's German-born wife, Helga Zepp LaRouche. The 82-year-old perennial American presidential candidate was himself a speaker, along with other speakers, including Prof. Dr. Vladimir S. Myasnikov (Institute for the Far East, Russian Academy of Sciences), Dr. Bi Jiyao (Academy of Macro-Economic Research, State Development Planning Commission, China), Chandrajit Yadav, (Former Union Minister, India), Ambassador Kim Song-woo (Secretary General, East Asian Common Space Secretariat, Seoul, Korea), Dr. Ahn Byung-min (Director of the Department of Rail Transportation Research of the Korea Transport Institute), Markku Heiskanen (Nordic Instititute of Asian Studies), and Dr. Zbigniew Kwiczak (Former Minister at the Polish Embassy in Moscow)[1] (http://www.schillerinstitute.org/conf-iclc/2003/bd_schw/program.html). After the conference, Duggan decided to attend what a British inquest into his death heard was a "cadre school" held by the LaRouche Youth Movement in a nearby youth hostel, attended by about 50 members. [2] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46883-2004Oct20.html)
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During his stay in Wiesbaden, Duggan said in telephone calls to his parents and his French girlfriend, Maya, that he found the Institute "extreme," but the conference was stimulating. However, Mrs. Duggan says that, after her son's death, she met Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, a scientific adviser to the Schiller Institute, who told her that Duggan had reacted strongly when he heard Schiller Institute members blame Jews for the Iraq war. [3] (http://www.justiceforjeremiah.com/ericaspeech.htm) Jeremiah allegedly stood up during a meeting and exclaimed: "But I'm a Jew!"
Six days after he arrived in Germany, in the early hours of Thursday, March 27, Duggan telephoned his girlfriend in France. In a statement to Scotland Yard, Maya said he sounded incoherent and faint. He told her: "I'm under too much pressure. I don't know what the truth is any more, or what are lies." He said his arms and legs hurt and he had discovered some "very grave things". He told her he would be returning to Paris the next day, though he had previously said he had no money for a train or plane ticket and could not get a lift with the LaRouche Youth Movement members until Sunday, March 30. [4] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46883-2004Oct20.html)
After this phone call, Duggan telephoned his mother just before 4:30 a.m. and said: "Mum, I'm in terrible trouble, deep trouble. I want to be out of this. It's too much for me. I can't do this. I want out ..." His mother said he was speaking quietly, as though afraid of being overheard. The line went dead. He called back seconds later and said, "I am frightened." She told him she loved him. At this, he shouted, "I want to see you now," and began to spell out the name of the town he was in. At that point, the line went dead again. [5] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46883-2004Oct20.html)
Forty-five minutes later, Duggan ran out onto the Berliner Straße, a busy road five kilometers from the youth hostel where he was staying, and was killed. The first car only grazed him, knocking off the vehicle's wing mirror. According to witness statements pieced together by the police, it seems he ran for another kilometer down the road. A second car knocked him down, then a third car ran over him. Drivers have told police he looked as though he was running for his life, not trying to end it. The second driver who hit him said Duggan ran toward the car with his arms outstretched and his mouth open. His mother told the inquest she believes Duggan was trying to flag down someone to help him, and that his mouth was open because he was screaming. [6] (http://www.justiceforjeremiah.com/inquest.html)
After her son had telephoned her, but before news of his death reached her, Erica Duggan managed to obtain a telephone number for the youth hostel Duggan was staying in. A woman she believes to be a manager at the Schiller Institute, Ortrun Cramer, came to the telephone. Ms. Cramer was among a group of international observers at the Michigan Democratic Caucuses on March 11, 2000 who watched the count of votes for Lyndon LaRouche. At the time, she was an authorized representative of the Vienna-based International Progress Organization. Mrs. Duggan told The Times she heard Cramer say: "It's the mother." She and Cramer had a brief conversation during which Cramer said Nouvelle Solidarité was a news agency and did not "take responsibility for an individual's actions." [7] (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3561-884378,00.html) The coroner's inquest heard that, after Duggan's death, Cramer was found to be in possession of his passport, which he would have needed to get home to France. One of the issues the family wants to resolve is whether Cramer took possession of his passport before his death, which would indicate the organization may have tried to restrict his movements.
The German authorities initially pronounced Duggan's death a suicide, but the British inquest at Hornsey, in Haringey, North London concluded there was nothing in the German police report or in Duggan's background that suggested suicide. He had no history of mental illness, the court heard. The coroner, Dr William Dolman, said that Duggan was in a "state of terror" when he died:
- What was it we ask ourselves that turned a stable and a apparently happy, young man with a stable relationship? What was it that turned that young man into a terrified young man? We know that the weekend before he'd had friendly conversations with his girlfriend on the phone, that was five days before his death. What was it that impelled him to make a phone call in the early hours at 4.20 a.m in the morning on the day of his death? Then phone his mother an hour later. There is no doubt that there had been a huge change. What was he frightened of? What was he scared of indeed terrified of? Was he scared of what might happen to him? Sadly we might never know what it was but something had happened that made him run away from the house into the road.
Dr Dolman then said that he would deliver a narrative verdict. This is unusual in British courts, where coroner's verdicts are normally terse and formal:
- Jeremiah Joseph Duggan received fatal head injuries when he ran into the road in Weisbaden and was hit by two private motor cars. What other fact do we know that I must add? I really must add that he had earlier been in a state of terror. It is a world not commonly used in a coroner's court but no other word would reflect his state of mind at the time.
The LaRouche organization strongly denies any involvement in Duggan's death. Lyndon LaRouche himself has issued a statement saying the Duggan affair is a "hoax" constructed by supporters of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the U.S. Vice-President, Dick Cheney. It is "such an obvious fabrication that no further comment is necessary," said LaRouche. [8] (http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/site_packages/3125symons.html)
On October 31, 2004, the Sunday before the conclusion of the inquest, the British Sunday newspaper, The Observer, reported that "German prosecutors have told government officials they plan to re-open the investigation. They have been told about new evidence compiled by Erica and her lawyers that raises grave questions over their initial verdict that he took his own life."
Mrs. Duggan's allegations
The coroner, Dr. William Dolman, reached his conclusion after studying evidence presented by Duggan's mother, a retired school teacher living in Golders Green, London, who has conducted an 18-month investigation into her son's death, and has spent her life savings and sold her home to raise funds to pursue the case. [9] (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1340301,00.html)
In court, Mrs. Duggan described the Schiller Institute as a "dangerous and political cult with strong anti-Semitic tendencies, known to have a history of intimidation and terror tactics," and said that, when British police broke the news of her son's death to her, they told her: "Go nowhere near these people. They are dangerous." The court also heard that a Scotland Yard report describes the LaRouche organization as "a political cult with sinister and dangerous connections." Lyndon LaRouche himself was released from jail in 1994 after serving five years of a 15-year sentence for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations (see United States v. LaRouche). The LaRouche organization believes that the British royal family has been involved in the international drug trade; that the Secret Intelligence Service and the Duke of Edinburgh killed Diana, Princess of Wales; that rogue elements within the U.S. military were involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; and that the Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division (Tavistock) specifications, and promoted in Britain by agencies . . . controlled by British intelligence." [10] (http://www.rickross.com/reference/larouche/larouche34.html)
Mrs. Duggan believes her son was a victim of mind-control techniques used by cults to snare people into joining them. [11] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/larouche/main.htm) [12] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46883-2004Oct20.html) She is being supported by the British Foreign Office in her quest for a new German investigation. The Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean, head of Consular Services at the Foreign Office has helped Mrs. Duggan launch the Justice for Jeremiah website. [13] (http://www.justiceforjeremiah.com) Nikolas Becker, a Berlin-based lawyer who represented former East German Communist leader Erich Honecker during the Berlin Wall shootings trial, is representing the Duggan family in their efforts to have the German suicide verdict overturned. Becker told a British newspaper: "There is enough evidence [Duggan] was probably in a hopeless psychotic situation [when he died] and there is no evidence that there was any mental illness in his family. It is known these kind of organizations produce this kind of psychotic breakdown."
Lyndon LaRouche wrote extensively during the 1970s on how psychoanalytic techniques might be used to address "neurotic blocks to creativity." Under the pen name Lyn Marcus, he wrote in 1973 that: "the short-term focal objective of the Labor Committees' work in applied psychology is the willful development of powers of creative mentation in . . . the organization's cadres . . . The direct conscious perception of the fundamental emotion (love = creative mentation) . . . has been classically identified by the subject as an overwhelming (“oceanic”) and absolutely terrifying “non-erotic” feeling of “love-death” . . . Ordinarily, outside the Labor Committees, there are dangers in exposing a person to such an overwhelming emotion . . . Under some unfortunate circumstances, this experience, absolutely the most terrifying the human mind can know, can prompt suicides, or provide the impetus for psychotic collapse." [14] (http://www.ex-iwp.org/docs/1973/sexual_impotency.htm)
The LaRouche organization's rebuttal
In a June 2004 article [15] (http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/site_packages/3125symons.html) in the organization's weekly magazine, Executive Intelligence Review, [16] (http://www.larouchepub.com) Larouche's director of counter-intelligence, Jeffrey Steinberg, writes that Duggan had told his room-mates at the conference that he had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), an illness that Steinberg alleges can induce schizophrenic behavior, including paranoia.
Steinberg writes that Duggan had begun to show signs of emotional stress the day before his suicide and had fled from the youth hostel where he was staying at 3:30 in the morning. On the Sunday prior to his death, according to Steinberg, Duggan had tried to find a pharmacy where he could obtain some prescription drugs. When, after he went missing, a LaRouche Youth Movement organizer telephoned Duggan's girlfriend, Maya, in Paris to ask whether she had heard from him, she allegedly asked, in what Steinberg calls a cynical tone: "Is there a river nearby?", implying that Duggan was already known to have suicidal tendencies. [17] (http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/site_packages/3125symons.html) Maya has told reporters she asked this only because she was trying to find Wiesbaden on a map.
In the same article, Steinberg also writes that Duggan, along with his mother and father, attended group counseling sessions at the Tavistock Clinic in London when Duggan was seven years old, and his parents were divorcing. Erica Duggan does not deny this. One of the claims of the Lyndon LaRouche organization is that the Tavistock Institute is itself involved in mind control. [18] (http://www.wlym.com/PDF-68-76/CAM7404.pdf) Mrs. Duggan is worried that Jeremiah may have questioned the group's views on the Tavistock.
Steinberg also writes that, just after her son's death, Mrs. Duggan met with representatives of the Schiller Institute — one of whom Erica Duggan says was Ortrun Cramer — for several hours in what Steinberg describes as a "sympathetic" meeting. He alleges that Mrs. Duggan's attitude toward the Schiller Institute changed only after British minister Elizabeth Symons, the Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean intervened in the affair. According to Steinberg, Baroness Symons is a member of the "trans-Atlantic network" that seeks to damage LaRouche because of his opposition to what LaRouche calls the Blair-Cheney war in Iraq.
References
- The Schiller Institute (http://www.schillerinstitute.org)
- The LaRouche Youth Movement (http://www.wlym.com)
- Full proceedings of the Schiller Institute Conference which Jeremiah attended (http://www.schillerinstitute.org/conf-iclc/2003/bd_schw/program.html)
- Guardian article on Jeremiah Duggan's inquest (http://www.guardian.co.uk/antiwar/story/0,12809,1077921,00.html)
- A summary by Jeremiah's family of the coroner's summing up (http://www.justiceforjeremiah.com/inquest.html)
- 1985 Washington Post article with testimony from former LaRouche members (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/larouche/main.htm)
- Washington Post article "brainwashing" claims (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46883-2004Oct20.html)
- Article detailing LaRouche claim about the Beatles (http://www.rickross.com/reference/larouche/larouche34.html)
- The Bizarre Case of Baroness Symons. The LaRouche response to the Duggan case (http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/site_packages/3125symons.html)
- Observer article on Erica Duggan's investigation (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1340301,00.html)
- Erica Duggan's version of her conversation with Dr. Tennenbaum of the Institute (http://www.justiceforjeremiah.com/ericaspeech.htm)
- London Times article on Jeremiah Duggan (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3561-884378,00.html)
- The Tavistock Grin from LaRouche's Campaigner magazine, 1968 (http://www.wlym.com/PDF-68-76/CAM7404.pdf)
- The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party by Lyn Marcus (Lyndon LaRouche), 1973 (http://www.ex-iwp.org/docs/1973/sexual_impotency.htm)
- Executive Intelligence Review (http://www.larouchepub.com/)
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