Justice for Jeremiah

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Molly Kronberg's statement

My name is Molly Kronberg, and I am writing from Leesburg, Virginia, the town which is the international headquarters of the Lyndon LaRouche organization.

I was a member of the LaRouche organization for 35 years, and as a National Committee member, a leader in the U.S. organization for 25 years.

The vast majority of that time I spent in the National Center of the LaRouche organization; as a result, I know Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche personally and have known them for many years.

I have also known many members of the German organization for many years.

Reopen the Investigation

I write today to support the efforts of Erica and Hugo Duggan, and the Justice for Jeremiah campaign, to reopen the investigation into Jeremiah’s death in March 2003.

It is obvious that the LaRouche organization, in Germany, Britain, and the U.S., is desperately anxious to prevent the reopening of the investigation. They have gone to great lengths to do so—witness Lyndon LaRouche’s vicious personal attacks, in private and in public, against Erica and Hugo Duggan—up to and including blaming Erica Duggan for the death of her son, accusing her of “driving him to suicide” by something she said in their last telephone conversation.

LaRouche has done this in public, in the pages of his Executive Intelligence Review magazine, and in private, as can be proven by reference to remarks of his transcribed in various editions of the organization’s daily “Morning Briefing,” which circulates to all members in the United States, Canada, Latin America—and Europe.

My Personal Experience

This is a standard LaRouche mode of operation: blaming the victim. I know this personally: Almost two years ago, on April 11, 2007, my husband of 36 years, Kenneth Kronberg, committed suicide, driven to it by constant harassment and persecution from LaRouche, including a suggestion in the “Morning Briefing” for that day that he commit suicide.

When I accused LaRouche of responsibility in bringing about Ken’s death, LaRouche began a campaign—first in private and then in publicly circulated materials—to blame me, not only for Ken’s death, but for the imprisonment of LaRouche members (himself included) in the 1980s, and, in effect, for all the ills that have befallen the organization—a point he made again at length in the “Morning Briefing” for March 15, 2009.

LaRouche is like a squid, releasing clouds of ink to cloak his real motives and real actions.

I knew, shortly after Ken died, that if I spoke out against LaRouche in any way, he would blame me for Ken’s death. How did I know? Because that was what he had already done to Erica Duggan.

Something to Hide

In the Duggan case, the fact that LaRouche has publicly and repeatedly blamed Erica Duggan for the death of her son, and the fact that the LaRouche organization internationally has mobilized to try to prevent any reopening of the investigation into Jeremiah’s death, point to the most ominous of conclusions.

If the LaRouche organization had nothing to do with Jeremiah Duggan’s death, why does it oppose further investigation?

What possible harm can come to the LaRouche organization through further investigation, unless it has something to hide?

And there is the crux of the matter: The LaRouche organization has something to hide.

It is the task of a new investigation to find out what that something is.

The LaRouche Organization, Point by Point

There are several points about LaRouche and his small, but very dangerous, organization that I may be uniquely qualified to make.

Point 1: The LaRouche organization in the United States and Germany is one and the same organization, run as one by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche.

Point 2: The LaRouche organization is fairly characterized as anti-Semitic, as can be seen from its literature over decades, and from its relentless attacks on prominent Jews—Henry Kissinger, George Soros, Felix Rohatyn, Alan Greenspan, Edward Levi, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Milton Friedman—on and on.

Point 3: The LaRouche organization is a cult, whose social cohesion is based on a kind of mind control of its members which is realized through constant personal attacks on individuals; more general, but also constant, attacks on the membership as a whole; and the creation of a state of infantilism and extreme paranoia regarding the outside world and anyone who may disagree with LaRouche’s dicta

Point 4: The LaRouche organization has a criminal history, leading, in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, to the conviction of between 20 and 30 members of its inner circle—and the imprisonment of 15 of them—on fraud charges (securities fraud, mail fraud, tax fraud) stemming from their schemes to defraud supporters, including many elderly supporters, out of large sums of money, estimated by the prosecution to total roughly $34 million overall.

The nid-1980s prosecutions of LaRouche organization leaders and fundraisers were kicked off in earnest in October 1986 with a 400-person raid by the FBI and the Virginia State Police on LaRouche’s headquarters in Leesburg, Virginia.

Lyndon LaRouche himse lf was convicted in Federal court in 1988 of mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service, and was sentenced to 15 years in Federal prison, of which he served five (1989–1994). He was not, as he claims, sent to prison because he “invented” President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, nor because he had a plan for peace in the Mideast, nor because the Russians wanted him in jail, nor (his most recent claim) because I framed him. He was sent to prison because he directed, oversaw, and profited from a criminal enterprise.

Point 5: The LaRouche organization has a history of violence that dates all the way back to the early 1970s, when it launched what LaRouche called “Operation Mop-Up,” which consisted in physical attacks, often with karate weapons like nunchuks (illegal in many states in the U.S.), on members of the Communist Party USA and other leftwing groups.

In conclusion: I write today as someone who is intimately familiar with the LaRouches and their organization, as someone who has lost a beloved family member to the psychological brutality of Lyndon LaRouche and his organization, and finally, as someone who can see plainly that LaRouche’s terror at the possibility of a new investigation into Jeremiah Duggan’s death, and the lengths to which LaRouche has gone to prevent that investigation, are the strongest possible proof that there is something to be investigated, and something to be discovered, as to why and how Jeremiah died here in Wiesbaden six years ago.

I urge the law enforcement authorities of Wiesbaden, Hesse, and Germany in the strongest possible terms to reopen the case of Jeremiah Duggan. I will be happy to help them in this endeavor—to do all that I can to shed light on the history and inner workings of the LaRouche organization.