For Whom Does "the CIA" Really Work?

With this post we continue to explore connections mentioned by JFK assassination researcher Lisa Pease, author of "David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur," who focused on the sulphur company during times it was headed by John Hay "Jock" Whitney. Originally published in Probe, Pease's article discusses Freeport Sulphur's international nature as well as its close ties to happenings in Cuba during the time JFK was President. 

Valuable in the insight Pease's article gives us into the role of the Central Intelligence Agency's use of Freeport Sulphur, nevertheless it does not ask who really owns and operates the CIA itself. Perhaps looking back deeper into the company and its formative years will help in answering that question.

Who Was Jock Whitney?

Jock's father was William Payne Whitney, commonly known simply as Payne. As a youngster, Payne Whitney was caught in a feud between his father and his mother's brother, Oliver Payne, following her death in 1893. Promised a share of Oliver's wealth, he turned against his own father, who had married Edith Randolph, a woman scorned by the Payne family, whom he had been seeing before his wife died. According to the New York Social Diary website:

Jock and Betsy Cushing Whitney

In 1902 [William Collins] Whitney’s son, Payne Whitney, who’d sided with Oliver Payne, married Helen Hay from Cleveland, Ohio. Miss Hay was the daughter of John Hay who had been private secretary to President Lincoln and later Ambassador to the Court of St. James under President McKinley. Mr. Whitney who, like his father, went to Yale, was 26. For a wedding gift, Col. Payne gave the couple a Stanford White house at 972 Fifth Avenue.... After the Second World War, he started an investment fund, run by a friend he’d met in the War, to invest in new ideas of the men coming back from the War. He called it Adventure Capital and later dropped the “ad” to coin the now established term: venture capital. He was known for his ventures in Hollywood (“Gone With the Wind”), his industrious ventures, as well as being the last publisher of The New York Herald-Tribune.... Like his grandfather, he was also the Ambassador to the Court of St. James (under Eisenhower). Married twice, first to a beauty who loved horses more, and finally to Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, daughter of the famous brain surgeon Harvey Cushing, first wife of FDR’s son’s James, to whom he [Jock] remained married to the end of his life.... The Payne fortune, inherited by Payne Whitney, and then his children, grew far larger than the fortune left by William C. Whitney to his children. That was partly due to the fact that Harry Payne Whitney and Gertrude Vanderbilt produced more offspring who produced more offspring. Jock Whitney produced no off-spring, and his investments after the War catapulted him (and partially his sister [Joan Whitney Payson]) into the realm of what are now billions.

972 Fifth Avenue mansion

Payne Whitney had inherited his uncle's huge mansion in New York, and the 1920 census shows Jock and Joan living there with their parents--only four people at 972 Fifth Avenue--being cared for by fifteen servants, none of whom were American-born. Payne's business address, 14 Wall Street, was the Bankers Trust Company, set up by the White and Case law firm in 1903, and was controlled by J.P. Morgan affiliates in the days prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve banking system. Before 1930 Morgan bankers controlled United States government policy on currency. According to economist Murray Rothbard, the first governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank was:

Benjamin Strong, who had spent virtually his entire business and personal life in the circle of top associates of J.P. Morgan. A secretary of several trust companies (banks doing trust business) in New York City, Strong became neighbor and close friend of three top Morgan partners, Henry P. Davison, Dwight Morrow, and Thomas W. Lamont. Davison, in particular, became his mentor, and brought him into Morgan's Bankers Trust company, where he soon succeeded Lamont as vice-president, and then finally became president. When Strong was offered the post of Governor of the New York Fed, it was Davison who persuaded him to take the job....The main collaboration throughout the 1920s, much of it kept secret from the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, was between Strong and the man who soon became Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Collet Norman. Norman and Strong were not only fast friends, but had important investment-banking ties, Norman's uncle having been a partner of the great English banking firm of Baring Brothers, and his grandfather a partner in the international banking house of Brown Shipley and Co., the London branch of the Wall Street banking firm of Brown Brothers. Before coming to the Bank of England, Norman himself had worked at the Wall Street office of Brown Brothers, and then returned to London to become a partner of Brown Shipley.

The Role of Brown Brothers Harriman

Montagu Norman had been called "the currency dictator of Europe" by the Wall Street Journal in 1927. Thus, when the U.S. government witnessed the decline of the Brown Brothers investment bank in 1926, it felt the need to shore it up with an infusion of capital and turned to the two Yale educated sons of robber baron E.H. Harriman to do so. Averell and Roland (Bunny) Harrison were the Skull and Bones friends and eventual partners of Prescott Sheldon Bush, the father and grandfather of two future presidents.

It is no coincidence that America's earliest attempts at setting up intelligence agencies called upon the talents of the sons of Wall Street bankers. Idealistic principles often fall by the wayside when big money is involved, and it is the wealthy elitists who think they have the most to lose in the games played in international market manipulations. The poor have only their lives, and are often treated as cannon fodder by such elitists on every front.

In the years between the two "great" wars the Brown Brothers partner, Montagu Norman, was actively concerned with handling Germany's reparations payments, working with the first head of the Bank for International Settlements, Gates McGarrah, whose grandson, Richard McGarrah Helms, would later head the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Within six months after the above photos appeared in the news, Norman had found the perfect rich kids to entice with the power of helping to run the world. Their father's death in September 1909, when the boys were mere teenagers, had been the top headline in newspapers throughout America. Their mentor became the man most trusted by their father to run his business, Robert Scott Lovett, who would see that the boys were educated at Yale alongside his own son, Robert Abercrombie Lovett. All would rise to power in the government as the second great war approached, with help from their brothers in Skull and Bones.

Prescott Bush, center, with Brown Brothers Harriman partners--Bunny Harriman, Knight Woolley, and R.A. Lovett

By following the money, you often learn how the world really operates, who works for whom, so to speak.

Oliver Stone relates in his book, The Untold History of the United States:

Prominent among the American capitalists with ties to Nazi counterparts was Prescott Bush, the father of one president and grandfather of another. Researchers have been trying for years to determine the precise nature of Bush's ties to Fritz Thyssen, the wealthy German industrialist who played a crucial role in bankrolling Hitler, as revealed in his 1941 memoirs I Paid Hitler. Thyssen ultimately repudiated the Nazi dictator and was himself imprisoned.
While incarcerated, Thyssen's vast wealth was protected overseas, much of it by the investment firm of Brown Brothers Harriman, through the holding company Union Banking Corporation. The account was managed by senior partner Prescott Bush. 

About ten years younger than the Harriman boys, Jock Whitney and his sister sat atop a huge pile of money which they would make available to those in power engaged in manipulation of international currency. Although Jock went to Yale, he was tapped for Scroll and Key, rather than the Bones secret society, and was a mere two years behind Scroll and Key member James Stillman Rockefeller (son of Elsie Stillman and William G. Rockefeller), whose Uncle Percy, married in 1901 to Elsie's sister Isabel Stillman, was a member of the Skull and Bones class of 1900. Only a year after his Yale graduation, James Stillman Rockefeller had united fortunes with the Carnegies by marrying the niece of the steel magnate whose fortune had been liquidated by the Morgan bank. Five years later, Chase Manhattan bank would acquire the Equitable Trust, another Morgan affiliate--thus shifting control of the New York Fed in 1930 from Morgan to Rockefeller-owned banks at the same time Freeport Sulphur's control shifted under the leadership of Langbourne Williams, Jr., a Stillman son-in-law, as will be detailed in the next installment.