Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Leo Wanta Update: Who is Christopher Story?

As I mentioned before, there are 3 people involved in the Leo Wanta story, Wanta himself, Michael C. Cottrell, and Christopher Story, an editor for a journal titled the International Currency Review. While I am pretty convinced this whole thing is a hoax, I am still not sure what the objective is, so I have been trying to figure out who these people are. I even e-mailed Cottrell, asking how I could get a copy of his thesis, but received no response.

Story, much like Cottrell, has been on Greg Szymanski's radio program several times, making the some ridiculous claims and accusing the same international powers of involvement in this conspiracy. One of his biggest themes is that the mainstream media refuses to pick up the story. He is correct in this, I can still find no references to either Story or the Wanta story, by any mainstream souce. The fact that there is no substantiation for this tale, however, appears the mostly likely explanation.

The International Currency Review, oddly enough, doesn't have its own website, but shares one called World Reports with other periodicals run by Story such as Soviet Analyst and Economic Intelligence Review. This publication is presented as a serious financial journal, with a rather steep pricetag of $525 a year, but it has been rather difficult to find out much about it.

I am a graduate business student, so I looked it up at our library, the University of Washington library has one of the largest collections in the world, and was actually able to find the ICR in the stacks. They only carry it from the early 70s to 1995 unfortunately. Looking through the articles, it appeared to start out as a legitimate financial journal, with mundane articles on currency exchange and monetary policy, but starting in the early 90s began focusing on paranoid Cold War/Illuminati/Vatican conspiracy theories, many of which are reflected on Story's website.

Soviet Analyst remains the only reliable intelligence publication in the world that is devoted exclusively to the Soviet Leninist dimension of the continuing dialectical World Revolution (the Thesis) and to the systematic exposure of the continuum of Soviet strategic deception and revolutionary antagonism towards the international community. The Antithesis to this state of affairs is the proactive World Revolution stance of the United States — a revolutionary power by definition — the agenda of which is inscribed upon the Great Seal of the United States, a fact of which almost everyone is ignorant. The year 1776, inscribed upon the bottom of the incomplete geomasonic pyramid on the Great Seal, which is replicated on the familiar $1.0 note, is the date not of the foundation of the United States, but of the publication by the lapsed Catholic priest-promoter of the Illuminati, Professor Weishaupt of Ingolstadt University, of a dark treatise on the ‘New World Order’. Soviet Analyst positions the essentially self-standing Soviet ingredient of today’s World Revolution within the context of this evil revolutionary dialectic. Successive issues of Soviet Analyst have exposed dimensions of continuing covert Soviet strategic deception operations — which the United States is at last having to face, having woken up, for instance, to the fact that the insurgency in Iraq is being directed by Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU). We have exposed the true identity of Mikhail Gorbachëv, too.

This probably explains why the library stopped carrying the journal. Why waste $525 a year of the taxpayer's money?

A check of all the databases, academic, news, and financial comes up with a complete blank. Google Scholar show similar results, a few citations in the early 1970s, dwindling down to nothing.

So who exactly is Christopher Story? Well unfortunately I could not find out more, but he doesn't appear to have any more credibility than the other characters.