Bob Dobbs Bio to 1963

My father was a butler for a very wealthy family in Paris and so was his father and his father’s father. The family’s lineage in the servant world went back over 300 hundred years, straddling French and Scottish ancestors.

My father’s great-great grandfather is discussed in a story by Charles Dickens. One can find it in the Miscellaneous Papers Of Charles Dickens, a collection of some of Dickens’ journalism. The tale is dated May 26, 1855 and its title is “The Toady Tree” (pp.49-54).

“When Dobbs talks to me about the House of Commons (and lets off upon me those little revolvers of special official intelligence which he always carries, ready loaded and capped), why does he adopt the Lobby slang: with which he has as much to do as with any dialect in the heart of Africa?”

Charles Dickens, “The Toady Tree”

My father, Rene F. Dobbs, was born on June 4, 1882—four months after James Joyce and five months before Wyndham Lewis. These two avant-garde writers had a profound influence on Rene and, therefore, on me. His employers were of the European oligarchy class that held court since the Renaissance. This “fondi” group and its secret intelligence resources were greatly weakened after World War One. With cutbacks in the allocations for extensive espionage, my father was upgraded to the inner circle of his employers’ network only out of necessity. Rene became an initiated member of the presently legendary and chimerical Priory of Sion in 1922. His father would never have been such a direct witness to the kind of desperate power negotiations that unfolded between the two World Wars. The panic increased in the Thirties when money as a medium, formerly privately owned, was made public property in the new welfare states.

During the last year of World War Two, my father brought me into his level of access to the global intelligence fields that were preparing the structure of the Solar Government to be set up in the Fifties. In retrospect, my later espionage activities were of the “James Bond” sort compared to his “Jeeves.” He rarely left Europe while I became a man of action in the New World. However, his rather sedentary self developed a perspective considerably wiser than my hyper purview, and by the Sixties his advice on the fate of the Secret Council of Ten saved my life. There are samples of his changing understanding of our family’s profession in my diary.

My father was a Forrest Gump of European intrigue and thanks to his vocation, I ended up in Adolph Hitler’s office in 1936 during the Berlin Olympics, and later, in the laboratory of Albert Hofmann in April, 1943, during the week Hofmann enjoyed his first LSD inquiries.

I did manage to return the favor and give Rene an Alice-in-Wonderland experience when I forced him to see a Frank Zappa concert in 1968 in swinging London. He was absolutely dumbfounded but, nevertheless, recognized the syndrome of classical genius that his ancestors were privy to for centuries in their cloistered world.

Rene died on July 5, 1976, the day after I heard Marshall McLuhan declare, during a broadcast atop the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, that the next bicentennial for America would “in a word, apocalypse.”

Working with MI6 in 1953, I was part of a team in Iran that failed to protect Mossadeq from the CIA’s successful move to install the Shah. At that point, British intelligence was becoming weaker than American intelligence and I personally paid the price by being dispatched to the margins: Nova Scotia, Canada. However, in January, 1954, I was assigned to investigate an obscure professor in Toronto who had just started a new publication called Explorations in December, 1953. My employers were intrigued at his discussion of some of the basic principles in our policy of “tetrad-management.” We were puzzled at how he came to intuit this. We didn’t want this understanding to become too widespread.

I was asked to get to know McLuhan in the role of someone interested in his ideas. I eventually found out that he was clued-in by his friend, Wyndham Lewis, whom McLuhan had met in 1943. Lewis was an old acquaintance of my father’s and knew a great deal about the Priory of Sion in the 1920s. He satirized it in his novel, The Apes of God (1930).

In 1954, my team fumbled the Guatemalan socialist intervention and Arbenz was forced to resign. I was in the dog house again. I was ordered to get to know the new North American “vectors” since it looked like I wasn’t going to be based in Europe anymore. This apparently regretful turn in my espionage career turned out to be very fortunate. I spent the rest of the 1950s becoming very interested in American pop culture, which I had largely been sheltered from during my youth in Paris. This is when my love of American rhythm and blues was embedded and led to my early interest in Frank Zappa’s work at Studio Z in Cucamonga, California.

By 1962 I decided to create my own “army” in the American media so I first arranged for influential people in New York to promote McLuhan’s work. Tom Wolfe’s reputation was one particularly unexpected beneficiary of that project. As McLuhan’s image soared internationally, I watched how he handled himself and secretly became a friend. Together we plunged ahead, never looking back.

In 1963 and 1964 I participated in the cover-up of the true facts of the [John Kennedy] assassination and I am proud that I did. If the truth had surfaced shortly after the murder, civil war would have broken out in the United States. Not a larger war with the Soviet Union since they weren’t guilty. No, a civil war. We on the Secret Council of Ten supported the cover-up by the conspirators in spite of the heinous character of the act. The seamless web of the global economy at the time could not afford such a rupture in the national fulcrum of that theatrical structure wherein the Word Makes the Market. ~Bob Dobbs