Mae Brussell Noteworthy is the complete absence in the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File of any mention of Freemasonry. The, as yet unpublished, Gemstone File papers are purported to contain several references to Freemasonry and the masonic affiliation of the author’s brother and father. Neither have yet to be confirmed to have been freemasons. ANTI-MASONRY REFUTED ANTI-MASONRY FAQ GEMSTONE FILE . .

The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File The "Gemstone File" refers to either a collection of some thousand pages1 of handwritten letters and notes penned between 1968 and 1976 by Bruce Porter Roberts (1919/10/27-1976/07/30)2 or a set of perhaps 360 photocopied pages from a selection dated from August 1970 to August 1972, given by Roberts to Mrs. Mae Brussell née Magnin (1922/05/29-1988/10/03) in August or September 1972. The distinction is moot but when reading about the papers, the reader should be aware of the author’s intent. Brussell became interested in conspiracy research in 1963 and is mainly remembered as compiler of a comprehensive index to the Warren Report. Roberts claimed an intimate knowledge of a conspiracy dating to 1932 involving Kennedy’s assassination, the Mafia, the CIA and an organization "called MMORDIS - Mouldering Mass Of Rotten Dribbling Infectious Shit" which runs the entire world, controlling the American defense department, the intelligence agencies, and the Vatican. According to Martin Cannon,3 Brussell created the Gemstone File—literally—when she placed Roberts' photocopied papers into a manila folder and wrote the word "Gemstone" on the tab. The author of the Skeleton Key, Stephanie Caruana,4 claims that Roberts, in September 1974, told her in an handwritten note that the name derives from his purported early distribution of the papers from 1968 onward, accompanied by artificial gemstones. James L. Moore’s explanation, or a G. Gordon Liddy source, are unsubstantiated.5 There seems to be little question that Roberts wrote the papers that the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File is based on, although Martin Cannon points out a similarity in writing styles between the Skeleton Key and an article, "Why Was Patty Hearst Kidnapped?", published by Brussell in February 1974 in The Realist. Authorship of the Skeleton Key There is equally little question as to who wrote the Skeleton Key, or at least the original of the anonymously distributed 24 or 23-page typed photocopies that began to appear in 1975. During two KLRB-FM radio broadcasts in 1977 and 19786 Mae Brussell reported that she had met Stephanie Caruana in early 1974 and that Caruana had met Roberts and subsequently wrote the Skeleton Key. Caruana reports that she met Roberts in September 1974: "The Skeleton Key was based on notes I made on the Norwegian letters [letters to the Norwegian consul] of December 1974-March 1975, plus what Roberts told me personally and what I remembered of the file I had read at Mae’s." Caruana published Gemstone-based material in a December 1974 Playgirl magazine article entitled "Is Howard Hughes Dead and Buried off a Greek Island."7 The article makes no mention of Bruce Roberts or of the Gemstone Files, and is based largely on "Proof that Pres. Kennedy Survived Assassination: Chance Photos Show JFK Alive on Skorpios," an article by Greg Watson that appeared in the Canadian tabloid Midnight on October 18, 1971. Caruana claims to have known Roberts in 1974 and 1975, and to presently have about 400 photocopied pages of Roberts' correspondence and notes. Reports—cited by James L. Moore—that she had also claimed to have met him in 1972, or earlier, appear to be unfounded. She further claims : "Various versions of the Key have appeared and circulated since the first one I wrote and released, which was dated April 1, 1975. I wrote three or four "editions", dated in April, May, and June, of 1975, and either gave them away, or sold them for $3.00, the cost of making copies."8 James L. Moore (b. 02/09/1945) claimed in the mid-eighties to have met Roberts in San Francisco in 1967, a claim that Caruana strongly contests, although she accepts that he may have received copies of Roberts' letters. He also claims to be the author of the Skeleton Key, having finished compiling it on 1 May 1975, but that his Gemstone notes were stolen from his home. His claims appear to be unsupported. Moore claims: "The first documented publication of what could be Gemstone material occurred in early May 1975 in Modern People magazine and entitled "Modern People Exclusive: Who REALLY Killed JFK?" by James L. Moore. While it does not mention Bruce Roberts or the Gemstone Files by name, it does mention the link between Aristotle Onassis to the [Kennedy] assassination." Moore further writes: "The earliest possible mention of any published source that links Caruana to The Key is an August 1975 article in a now-defunct publication called The City of San Francisco." Another party to the controversy is Peter Renzo (b. 1946), who claims to have received a copy of the Gemstone File from an unidentified, dying friend. He also claims to be a CIA agent, but makes no claim going back before 1976 when he authored a book based on a heavily-altered version of the Skeleton Key later published in February 1979 by Hustler magazine. On 12 August 1980 the tabloid Globe began serializing Renzo’s Gemstone Files, calling them "fantasy". The controversy over Caruana’s authorship rests on a misconception that Caruana claimed that the Skeleton Key was a précis of the Gemstone File. As noted above, it was actually based on her memories of a small part of the file, copies of other letters given her by Roberts and her conversations with Roberts. While researcher Gary Buell was once skeptical of Caruana’s claimed authorship, today both he, Martin Cannon and James H. Daugherty9 agree that there is no grounds to doubt that she wrote the 1975 Skeleton Keys. Gerald A. Carroll gives Caruana credit as "author and distributor" of the Skeleton Key, noting: "The entire chapter on Caruana in [Jim Keith’s] The Gemstone File is written in a somewhat suspect style."10 Inconsistencies in Caruana’s claims have raised suspicions but can easily be explained by the fact that she is recalling thirty-year old events. James L. Moore continues to claim to have written the Skeleton Key but has not proven his case. Roberts' letters If Roberts wrote some thousand pages, the question also remains, where are the papers? It should be noted that only 351 photocopied pages are claimed extant as well as a small handful of other photocopied correspondence. While many of the pages were photocopies of correspondence to heads of state, politicians and others, to date—with one exception located by Stephanie Caruana11—no original document received by a purported recipient has surfaced. There have been two main researchers investigating the Gemstone File and the file’s history. Martin Cannon, who appears to have accepted Mae Brussell’s publicly expressed antipathy for the Skeleton Key, believes that Roberts was "an alcoholic with a brain tumor and hallucinations of importance". He contends—and appears to have demonstrated—that claims made in the 351 pages of the Gemstone Files that he has seen are easily deconstructed and disproven. He quotes Daugherty, who wrote on 26 December 1994: "I don't think it’s true. It is even hard to find parts of it that are true." "The key insight is that there is no integration of it’s narrative into known geopolitical history." Earlier, in Lobster Issue 19 (1990) in 'Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Research', Robin Ramsay notes that he had rebutted Gemstone’s central claims in International Times (Vol 4 No 11, 1978). The other researcher is Gary Buell who—tongue-in-cheek— claims to be the world’s leading authority on the Gemstone File. Like Cannon, Buell accepts Caruana’s authorship—and her claim that the full file was some thousand pages—and believes that Moore may have submitted the Skeleton Key to Hustler before they published it, but that they already had it from other sources. Unlike Cannon, although Buell agrees that Roberts was mentally unstable, he is open to the idea that Roberts may have had inside information on John F. Kennedy’s assassination. [gemstone-file.blogspot.com 28/09/2005] Both Buell and Cannon claim to be in possession of photocopies of the 351 pages. According to Buell, Caruana obtained her copies of the letters from bookdealer Tom Davis (d. 01/2002) in 2000, a claim substantiated by Caruana. Moore and Renzo have also claimed to possess copies. Unfortunately, the only available transcriptions of Roberts' correspondence are those "edited" by Caruana. These are available as either a CD or a trade paperback, The Gemstone File - A Memoir (see Bibliography). To date, no original manuscripts—Roberts is claimed by Caruana to have written in ballpoint pen on lined yellow legal pads—have surfaced, although Buell claims to possess two original pages, written in pencil on unlined paper. Buell also claims that his copies of the pages prove that Caruana has edited and bowdlerized Roberts' original text. On Tuesday, January 31, 2006 he posted the text of sixty-one pages at realgemstonefile.blogspot.com/. History of the Gemstone File Cannon reports that Brussell’s materials passed into the hands of her long-time friend, mail-order bookseller Tom Davis, of Aptos, California. According to Cannon, in 1994 the collection moved to Santa Barbara, California, where Davis tried to establish a Brussell Library. During 1994 and 1995 Cannon claims to have had access to the collection through Davis, although whether this was before or after the rest of the Brussell materials had left Davis' possession is unclear. Virginia McCullough acquired the collection in 1993 and reports that there were no Gemstone papers given to her. Cannon reports that the Gemstone folder was empty when he saw it and claims that Davis allowed him to copy the pages that he had moved into a separate collection, but Caruana claims that Davis told her that he never allowed copies to be made. Moore notes further intermediary steps, perhaps as many as five, but can only identify John Judge who allegedly turned the collection over to McCullough. Virginia McCullough, Curator of the Mae Brussell Collection, claims to "have been unable to locate even one letter allegedly written by Bruce Roberts...." Caruana accepts this but also believes that the collection is currently nothing more than an inaccessable stack of cardboard boxes piled in a damp basement. Textual authority If any can claim to be authorities on the Gemstone File it would be those who have actually had the opportunity to read the extant papers, and have taken the time to carefully compare the information in them to the historical record. Brussell held a set of the papers from 1972 until her death but, according to Caruana, never looked at them closely. Caruana, having spent some time in conversation with Roberts has the greatest claim to understanding his mindset. She has had a set of the papers since 2000 and appears to uncritically—and somewhat defensively—accept the claims made in them. Davis held a set of the papers from 1988 until his death in 2002 but there is no record of his opinion of them. If it is true, as Caruana believes, that Brussell made three copies of the papers for distribution to three of her friends, their location is unknown, although Caruana assumes that one went to John Judge, who has not been heard from, and that another one went to Davis. The third is unaccounted for. Buell claims to have received a set from Davis, Cannon has not identified his source, and neither Moore nor Renzo have demonstrated that they actually possess sets. Unfortunately for disinterested historians, there is no definitive text. There has been no attempt made to correlate the various sets of papers or objectively evaluate them and their provenance. Caruana is intent on not allowing anyone to see the pages in her possession, and has limited access to her edited text versions. Buell claims to have a textfile of his set of pages which he has been promising to post online since 2002.12 Cannon has absented himself from the debate. Conclusions There is no question that Bruce Porter Roberts existed. His San Francisco obituary reports that he was survived by a daughter and brother, and there are at least two photographs of him, one with entertainer Carmen Miranda. Bruce Robert may have been nothing more than a paranoid schizophrenic, as demonstrated by excerpts seen in Martin Cannon’s Exposed at last: The Real Gemstone File (2001), but the Skeleton Key has become an archetype for unified global conspiracy theories. Richard Alan’s The Gemstone File, Sixty Years of Corruption and Manipulation. (1992) and Gerald Carroll’s Project Seek: Onassis, Kennedy and the Gemstone Thesis (1994) both purport to provide documentation of the truth of Roberts' accusations. An anonymous New Zealand writer (identified as Anthony Pollock in wikipedia) produced a lengthy continuation called The Kiwi Gemstone, or The Opal File, in 1988, and there have been at least one spy novel and five non-fiction books on the topic. Noteworthy, for the purposes of this website, is the complete absence in the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File of any mention of Freemasonry. The, as yet unpublished, Gemstone File papers are purported to contain several references to Freemasonry and the masonic affiliation of the author’s brother and father, although neither have been confirmed to have been freemasons. Bibliography Richard Alan (pseud.), The Gemstone File, Sixty Years of Corruption and Manipulation. Columbus, Ohio : Crown Pub. Co., November 1992. xlvi, 403 p. : ill. ; 28 cm. ISBN : 0963170457 Gerald A. Carroll (1954- ), Project Seek : Onassis, Kennedy, and the Gemstone thesis. Carson City : Bridger House, 1994. ISBN : 0964010402. The Skeleton Key made no mention of Freemasonry, and Carroll also wrote: "A popular theory that conspiracy advocates have pushed for years involves the so called 'Illuminati'...." "The only trouble with this thesis is that it’s too easy an explanation for the current world situation. Granted, some Freemasons are in positions of power. But some people, like Onassis, were members of no such group." pp. 326-27. But then he includes a baffling flowchart which implicates both the so-called Illuminati and the Freemasons at the highest levels of an alleged "Conspiracy Network". Stephanie Caruana, Bruce Roberts' Gemstone File http://gemstone-file.com (offline as of 2004/12/28). THE GEMSTONE FILE. Onassis, Howard Hughes, JFK, Jackie, Bobby, Nixon, Nader, and the CIA/Mafia/Big money take over of the U.S. in 1963. US history from the 1920s to 1975, by Bruce Roberts. Includes Skeleton Key edited with additions by Stephanie Caruana. 2001. Compact Disk available at http://www.lasthurrahbookshop.com/assframe.html Stephanie Caruana, The Gemstone File: A Memoir. http://gemstone-file-memoir.com (2005/09/07 - ). Victoria, Canada : Trafford Publishing, 2006/10/16. [Self-published]. 478 pp. pb. b&w images. 8"x10". ISBN 1-4120-6137-7 David [Hatcher] Childress, Kenn Thomas, Inside the Gemstone File. Steamshovel Press. 1999. [Adventures Unlimited Press, July 1999] ISBN : 0932813666 Jim Keith, The Gemstone file. 1st IllumiNet Press ed. Atlanta : IllumiNet Press, 1992. viii, 214 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN : 0962653454 Peter Renzo, Beyond the Gemstone File. 1976 Fighting Tigers, 1980 [Vantage Press, NY : June 1990. ISBN : 0533090970] Web sources Martin Cannon, Exposed at last: The Real Gemstone File. newsmakingnews.com/mcgemstoneexposedatlast.htm James Daugherty alt.conspiracy,alt.illuminati,alt.discordia : "gemstone file" 26 Dec 1994 06:26:40 -0500 Virginia McCullough, "Requests, Research and Retrieval". newsmakingnews.com/vm10,30,01MBresearch.htm. 2001. Jim Moore, "Who is Bruce Roberts?" geocities.com/omegareport/Authors/06-Roberts-Bruce.htm. 2002. MaeBrussell.com P.O. Box 24553 San Jose, CA 95154-4553 USA maebrussell.com Notes 1. "My estimates of '1000 pages or more' given during various interviews were attempts to straighten out the confusion caused by Mae’s statements here and perhaps elsewhere that she had the 'only complete set,' consisting of 360 pages. Also, I referred to number of pages, not number of letters. Some of these letters were very long. The series of six or seven letters to Ralph Nader, which comprised the first part of Mae’s series, and which I have included in this book, take up more than 150 pages." Stephanie Caruana, 2001. Cf.: "They were a series of letters that he wrote to his mother, or a diary that he kept for himself." Mae Brussell. KLRB-FM interview, 1978. 2. "ROBERTS, Bruce Porter — July 30, 1976. Bruce Porter Roberts, father of Beverly Siganoff; beloved son of Eva R. Roberts; brother of D. L. Roberts; nephew of C.J. Kimball; a native of New York; a veteran of WWII. Services Mon. 2:30 p.m. DAPHNE’s 1 CHURCH ST." S.F. Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, August 1, 1976. Section B, page 7. Also see: "Bruce Porter Roberts was born Oct. 27, 1919, in the state of New York, and died July 30, 1976, in San Francisco...." p. 3 ; "body cremated Aug. 4" p. 182. Gerald A. Carroll, Project Seek, Onassis, Kennedy and the Gemstone Thesis, Obituary cited but not quoted on p. 163. 3. Perhaps more of a dilettante than a dedicated researcher, after a decade of UFO research, Martin J. Cannon wrote The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abduction in 1997, a paper which he recanted on 21 March 1997. His 'Mind Control and the American Government,' was published in Lobster 23 in 1992 lobster-magazine.co.uk. See ufomind.com and mindcontrolforums.com. His interest in the Gemstone File lead to his writing Exposed at last: The Real Gemstone File in 2001. Since then he would appear to have had no contact with the loosely-defined conspiracy community. 4. Stephanie J. Caruana has been a freelance magazine writer since at least the mid-1970s. Her work appeared in early issues of Playgirl magazine. Between Fall 1987 and August 1991 she published and edited five issues of Spear Shaker Review. She wrote a play, Spear Shaker which was read on November 5, 1995 in Cambridge, MA, and was a contributor to the Summer 1996 Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter. Since 2000 she has been promoting her edited transcripts of Roberts' papers. If internet sources are to be relied on, she is a 71 year-old resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has lived in a number of Massachusetts communities. She was a one-time member of Boston Mensa and the Blue Boar Society, and visited Papillote Wilderness Retreat in Roseau, West Indies in 1999. See find.intelius.com. She denies Moore’s claim that she graduated from Bishop Kearny High School in 1968. Although Moore claims to have email correspondence in which Caruana contradicts herself in her claims of meeting Roberts, this is not conclusive. 5. Liddy notes first using the term "Gemstone" on 27 January 1972, at a meeting with Attorney General John Mitchell, John Dean and Jeb Magruder, as a code name for plans to gather political intelligence and counter oppositional demonstrations in U.S.A. president Richard Nixon’s upcoming reelection campaign. Transcripts of meetings on 16 and 17 April 1973 when "Gemstone" and another operation—an operative posing as a chauffeur loyal to Muskie—code named "sedan chair" were mentioned, were released on 5 August 1974 with later transcripts released in September 1974, but the terms were already common knowledge and the subject of parody in "G. Gordon Liddy, Agent of C.R.E.E.P.", By Marc Rubin and Chris Miller; Illustrated by Francis Hollidge, National Lampoon, October 1973, Vol. 1, No. 43 "Banana" where Howard Hunt is depicted composing erotica in his head: "'...come and get me', she breathed, draped across the sedan chair, her breasts were like gemstones." See Will, The autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy, G. Gordon Liddy [George Gordon Battle Liddy], St. Martin’s Press, 1980. p. 196. 6. "They were put together by Stephanie Caruana. She came to my house to do an interview with me, for Playgirl magazine." Dialogue Conspiracy Mae Brussell. 25 December 1977. 7. Playgirl, vol ii, no, 7, December 1974. Douglas Lambert, publisher. Editor-in-Chief, Marin Scott Milam. Playgirl Inc., Los Angeles, California. "Is Howard Hughes Dead and Buried off a Greek Island, A noted theorist on conspiracies, a contributing editor, and an informer named Tiger Eye bring us an unlikely tale. Or is it?" by Mae Brussell and Stephanie Caruana. pp. 28-30, 41, 123, 125, 138. "Mae Brussell is a researcher who has spent ten years studying political assassinations and conspiracies in the United States. She teaches a course called Assassinations and Conspiracies at Monterey Peninsula College, and does a weekly radio news analysis over Station KLRB-FM, in Carmel, California. Stephanie Caruana is a regular contributor to Playgirl, currently working with Mae Brussell." 8. See gemstone-file.com [2001/02/21 - 2004/12/28]. Also see "A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File", The Spectrum, Feb/March 2002, Vol 3, No. 9. Tehachapi, California. thespectrumnews.com. 9. 'A-albionic Research describes itself as "A private network of researchers dedicated to identifying the nature of the ruling class/Conspiracy(ies)." A-albionic and the New Paradigms Project web page, a-albionic.com, are run by James H. Daugherty, a mail-order distributor of printed matter who purports to believe that the Vatican and British Empire are locked in a mortal battle for world control.' David McHugh "Conspiracy Theories Grow," Detroit Free Press, April 29, 1995, p. 1A. A-albionic Research can be contacted at PO Box 20273, Ferndale, Michigan, 48220-0273 USA. Also see The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present, David Brion Davis, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971, ISBN: 0801491134. 10. Gerald A. Carroll (1954 - ), Project Seek, Onassis, Kennedy and the Gemstone Thesis. Carson City, NV : Bridger House Publishers, Inc., 1994. ISBN : 0-9640104-0-2. pb 388 p. with index. p. 185. Cf.: "Another suspicious facet of Caruana’s and Brussell’s "knowledge of Roberts is a lack of a physical description." p. 189. "... Caruana’s general conspiracy knowledge as reported by Keith appears flawed on several fronts, making her blanket claim as sole author of the Key somewhat suspect." p. 192. citing Keith p. 46. "Gemstone 6:9 is a crucial passage because it hints at when Bruce Roberts first started circulating his Gemstone papers. This would go against reputed Skeleton Key author Stephanie Caruana’s assertions in Jim Keith’s The Gemstone File that Roberts ever intended to circulate his research; that he was compiling these writings as a personal diary." p. 262. 11. "Roberts showed me a pile of rubies and diamonds that he had created. He gave me a hand-written note listing several foreign embassies in San Francisco where I might be able to read some of the Gemstone letters. (These were serious, private, secret letters about world affairs.) At one of these embassies, I was given a file to read that contained letters written to the leader of this particular country. I was able to ask for the file by name, and that’s how I received it: in a file folder labeled "Gemstone File." Stephanie Caruana, email correspondence. 2001. 12. World Domination Update, "In Ricotta Velveeta" vol. VI, iss. iv branchfloridians.org. 2002. See realgemstonefile.blogspot.com ; gemstone-file.blogspot.com [2006/03/01]. These notes have been compiled by Trevor W. McKeown from personal research, online resources, and correspondence with Stephanie Caruana and Gary Buell. No claims are made or implied as to the veracity of the content of either the Skeleton Key or the Gemstone File.

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