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Originally Posted by LoneCollector1987
Would something else be possible?
What if Hughes would have the clandestine support of another state?
According to data the FBI had its USSR infiltrators (Robert Hanssen for instance), CIA (Aldrich Ames), so what if they had helped Hughes?
Throw in that KGB / GRU agents would watch Hughes and his people, find out FBI / Police agents and either turn them or let them disappear or they suffer "accidents".
Could this be possible and how effective would it be?
And why didnt the FBI try to build a left-wing version?
You know, covering all angles: left wing, right wing.
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During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was building the left-wing version inside the US, primarily targeting university students and minorities, and US domestic intelligence was focused mainly on discrediting and rolling those groups up, especially as they became more involved in anti-war and explicitly criminal/terrorist activities (i.e., the Weatherman bombing campaigns). In the 60s and 70s, the FBI was a different organization that it is today, and the FBI and the US as a whole were much more worried about communism than today (Hoover was positively obsessed), which is to say...I think the idea of Pied Pipering the left by creating an American Lenin may have run into some resistance. Not to say it couldn't or wouldn't happen, certainly some of the plots that have become public about the CIA and FBI have made me scratch my head more than a few times (the CIA saving al-Sadr, the FBI instigating the Curtis Culwell attack in Garland, TX for example), so plots within plots is reasonable, I just can't get my brain to connect the dots on the first pass.
On the subject of foreign support and sponsorship, maybe Pinochet and Apartheid South Africa could be candidates, as well as some of the right wing narco-aligned figures in Colombia (who have been fighting a dirty war against FARC for 50 years now). New America is basically a fascist or proto-fascist org. Communist revolution was a persistent threat in the developing world in the 60s and 70s, and the aforementioned countries/regimes saw themselves as being embroiled in existential battles against the communists (South Africa even went so far as to secretly design and build 6 atomic bombs). Maybe you have some shadowy figures in those countries make common cause with some anti-communist people in the US like Hughes, mix the ingredients and let them stew for a decade or so and you get New America. I kind of like it.
The fiction/true crime writer James Ellroy writes pretty extensively about the intersection of the FBI/CIA/organized crime and drug trafficking from the 60s to the mid-70s. Some fertile ground there to mine as well.