Showing posts with label Citigroup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Citigroup. Show all posts

Thursday, April 18, 2013

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.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

War Is Big Business

Deep Politics of Freeport Sulphur

In the Vol. 3, No. 3, March-April, 1996 edition of Probe, noted JFK assassination researcher Lisa Pease wrote in her article entitled "David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur":
Freeport Sulphur was born in Texas in 1912. The company later moved the headquarters office to New York. Originally, the principal business was mining sulphur. By 1962, Freeport Sulphur was the nation's oldest and largest producer of sulphur. In 1962, the fertilizer industry used 40% of the sulphur produced in the world. Other business segments that use sulphur in the production process are chemical, papermaking, pigment, pharmaceutical, mining, oil-refining and fiber manufacturing industries. For most of this period, Freeport was headed by John Hay Whitney.

Jock makes the Time cover
In 1927, Payne Whitney, one of America's richest multimillionaires, died, leaving his only son and future Freeport president an estate valued at over $179 million. At the young age of 22, John Hay Whitney became one of the country's richest men. Nonetheless, "Jock," as the press later called him, took a job at Lee Higginson and Co. on a salary of $65 a month. There, he made a fateful friendship with another onetime Lee Higginson employee named Langbourne Williams. Langbourne's father had originally founded Freeport Texas, then lost control of the business. Langbourne enlisted Jock's boss at Lee Higginson--J. T. Claiborne--to help in a proxy fight for control of Freeport. Claiborne urged the young Jock to join their efforts. Jock did--to the tune of a half a million dollars. By 1930, the Claiborne-Williams-Whitney team had won control of Freeport.



Freeport, Texas, was actually a town--not a business. It became a deep-water port when a Swedish Texan named Swenson, coincidentally the widowed brother-in-law of fertilizer magnates from Maryland named Tilghman, decided to use the expiring Herman Frasch patent to develop a sulphur resource. Located within a salt dome located on a part of the historic Austin's Colony granted to Stephen F. Austin, the land was owned by the heirs of Austin's sister, Mrs. James F. Perry, whose Peach Point Plantation in Brazoria County--variously called Bryanmound (Bryan Mound) or Bryan Heights Salt Dome -- was first suspected to contain sulphur by stock speculator Bernard Baruch a few years prior to its actual development in 1912.

When Baruch was unable to obtain financing from J.P. Morgan for sulphur production at the Bryan/Perry property, he instead moved to adjacent Wharton County's Boling salt dome, which he (along with the Morgan bank and W. Boyce Thompson) purchased in 1914 from  the Gulf Sulphur Company. In 1918 the name changed to Texas Gulf Sulphur. Austin's original land grant included land all the way to Bastrop, but it is not known whether the mineral estate of Boling Dome was still by that time owned by the Perrys and Bryans.

Freeport Sulphur, early days





Sulphur, however, was in great demand during World War I, and Bernard Baruch of the War Industries Board in Woodrow Wilson's administration was sniffing it out. It should not be overlooked that Woodrow Wilson was a wholly owned subsidiary throughout his administration by the little man from Texas named "Colonel" Edward M. House, originally from Houston. 

House's father, Thomas W. House, had run the blockade during the war years and had been in Matamoros and Monterey with Charles Stillman, William Marsh Rice and other merchants from Texas. They knew how to profit from trading in war materiel. 

The New Regime at National City Bank

By 1915 sulphur output would double:


By this time, Erice Swenson was 65 years old, no doubt ready to retire. But, as an officer in the National City Bank in new York, and as head of Freeport Sulphur in the middle of the great war, that was not about to happen. James Jewett Stillman, who died in 1918, was for four years replaced by his son, James Alexander Stillman. 

An 1896 Harvard graduate, young James in 1901 married Anne Urquhart, the daughter of actress Cora Urquhart and James Brown Potter. As founder of high society's Tuxedo Set, Potter was the son of banker Howard Potter, who married Mary Louisa Brown, whose father, James Brown, was the senior partner of  Brown Brothers & Co, an investment bank founded by sons of Alexander Brown of Baltimore.

When Mrs. Stillman followed her mother onto the stage as "Fifi" Stillman in 1921, a long battle played out in news headlines across the nation, and when James' embarrassing personal life hit the front pages of all the newspapers, it was the elderly Eric Swenson who rose to the chairmanship of the National City Bank.

Swenson must have known where lots of bodies were buried over the years, even having been one of the chief witnesses in the case prosecuted by the grandfather of James A. Baker III against the alleged murderer of William M. Rice, whose death opened up the huge endowment for Rice University.

By now most of the men who participated in setting up the sulphur facility at the new city of Freeport, Texas and the port that allowed for its distribution, were beginning to recede from the active management. These investors were named as the original underwriters of the stock at page 105 of a book by Gerald Kutney, Sulfur: History, Technology, Applications & Industry, as well as in a magazine article in The Chemical Engineer.

Original underwriters of $700,000 worth of stock in the company included the following:
  • Frank A. Vanderlip, James Stillman, Samuel McRoberts--all officers of National City Bank, along with Eric P. Swenson, whose family bank, S. M. Swenson & Sons, also subscribed, as did Maud Tilghman Swenson's brothers, Frederick B. & Sidell Tilghman. Maud died in 1892, only three years after her marriage to Eric Swenson.
  • John Langbourne Williams & Sons and Franklin Quimby Brown of Redmond bank (also involved in Knickerbocker Trust), who also subscribed as underwriters, were members of a fertilizer syndicate called Interstate Chemical Corporation with the Tilghmans. Their syndicate of investors in railroad securities often included C. Sidney Shepard (Yale, 1878) of New Haven, CT.
  • Smaller investors: Edwin Hawley (tycoon in Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad), Williams & Peters (coal merchants), E. K. Knapp, E. M. Carter, Benjamin Andrews (a mining engineer who held several patents in connection with Union Sulphur Co.), James M. Edwards, Orne Wilson, W. B. Chisolm (part of a fertilizer syndicate), W. O. Wetherbee (a bank clerk who testified with Swenson in the Rice murder trial), John N. Steel, John Hays Hammond (associate of William Boyce Thompson), A. Chester Beatty, A. C. Swenson, F. A. Fearing, George C. Reiter, and S. M. Betts.
Many of those named above were also directors of the Interstate Chemical Corporation.
It was because of the initial investment by the J.L. Williams & Sons banking enterprise that Langbourne Meade Williams, Jr. ascended to a management position in 1930. His father (L.M. Sr.), died in 1931, and the Freeport Sulphur stock the family held gave him an opportunity to make a financial play, but it was another connection which gave him the power to do it. That came from the Rockefellers.




To be continued in a future post.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Citigroup's Texas Roots

From Wethersfield, CT - Puritan Stronghold

Charles Stillman, whose Texas-made fortune was used to set up the First National City Bank in New York City, was born in Wethersfield, Connecticut in 1810. His father, Francis Stillman, was a great-great-grandson of the man referred to by Stillman family genealogists as the "Settler" in America, George Stillman.

Wethersfield, CT
Francis Stillman stemmed from three Nathaniel Stillmans in a genealogical line that began in Hadley, MA in 1691. The first Nathaniel, who married a daughter of David and Honour Treat Deming in 1743, died in Wethersfield in 1770, six years before the Declaration of Independence. Francis' father was the third Nathaniel Stillman, born in 1752, who fought in the Revolutionary War, then died in Wethersfield in 1838, the same year his son Francis died--only two years after Texas had declared its independence against Mexico.

Francis was a ship-owning merchant who took his teenage son Charles to Durango, Mexico, as early as 1823, leaving him there to fend for himself within a trading network already established. "Don Carlos," as Charles was known in those parts, commandeered a profitable mercantile trade, which he would substantially increase during the Mexican War, which began when the new Republic of Texas was annexed as part of the United States in 1845. Upon his death many years later, Charles Stillman's family donated his papers from those years in Mexico and Texas to Harvard, an event which would give rise to research projects designed to establish a link between the New England money interests and Stillman's somewhat hidden Texas roots.

Dredging up the Past 

Chauncey D. Stillman
In 1939 one of these descendants, a cocky young Harvard graduate named Chauncey Devereaux Stillman, recruited some historians to pore through the papers, while he also tossed some family money around in Texas, most of it in the form of grants to memorialize his ancestor's eminent stature in the wilds of Texas. He even brought an entourage with him to Texas for ceremonial purposes, but according to one local resident named G.E. Dodd, more money was sought from the locals to memorialize their unsaintly ancestor than was passed down to them.
Charles Chauncey and sons, 1922

Charles Devereaux Stillman was the acknowledged author of a genealogy which began with the life of Don Carlos, who is said to have made his way on his father's schooner Albion from Mexico's interior near Durango in 1828 to Brazos de Santiago--the "salt water harbor for the town of Matamoros." There he came in contact with Francis Stillman's partner, Daniel Willard Smith, according to this book, Charles Stillman 1810-1875, published in a private printing for the author in 1956. 

Smith, who also hailed from Wethersfield, had been appointed American Consul to Mexico by President James Monroe. The consul's job was to resolve disputes that American citizens, then trading with Mexico (which at that time included what is now known as Texas), had with the government or other citizens of Mexico during an extremely tense time. Evidence of that tension was revealed in this article published in early 1837 recounting numerous reports recently received in the U.S. capital regarding incidents that had occurred in Mexico:
Zalmon Hull, father of Hezekiah Hull, Lydia Wells' father

Zalmon Hull's father was a resident of Fairfield, CT., 60 miles or so down the road from Wethersfield, passing by Middletown and New Haven. But Zalmon married a Redding girl named Betts and relocated further inland, even though he shipped out to engage in the Mexican trade. He was mentioned in the January 1914 edition of National Magazine, an article entitled "The Tragedy of Mexico," page 847 of which reads:

This "American consul" was Daniel W. Smith, who was already married by that time to the widow of Zalmon Hull's son, formerly Mrs. Hezekiah Belden Hull. That marriage made him the stepfather of her daughter Lydia Ann Hull, the mother of James B. Wells, Jr., for whom Jim Wells County in Texas was named. Lydia's husband, James Babbage Wells,
"was a privateer or mercenary during the Texas Revolution and commanded the Texas Navy yards at Galveston. In Aransas village, Wells was a cattle rancher who owned a schooner."
It was that fact which caused his name to be listed in an extremely rare book called The Sons of the Republic of Texas., which glorifies the lives of those who settled Texas when it still a part of Mexico prior to 1836, and before statehood in 1845.

When Charles Stillman arrived in Matamoros (often spelled Matamoras) in 1828, he naturally gravitated to fellow natives of Connecticut there, in addition to two of his brothers with whom he was involved in business partnerships until 1847, when the last of them, Frank D. Stillman, returned to Connecticut. Charles was then on his own but soon established a partnership with John J. Young on Rosales Street in Matamoros. Young died in 1859, but his descendants remained, and we will hear more about them later.

During this time, Charles realized the U.S. government would want to sell off part of the land on which Fort Brown was located and had almost 5,000 acres surveyed out of it. This was to become the city of Brownsville. We can only wonder if Frank had helped to make that happen once he returned to the northeast. A land boom quickly occurred, making Charles quite wealthy, but the population diminished from cholera epidemics. In 1849 Charles, at the ripe old age of 38, returned to Wethersfield for a wife.

Chauncey Devereux Stillman

Keep in mind that Charles Stillman's descendant, fresh from Harvard in 1929, had taken it upon himself to research and write the history of his family in Texas. In 1955 he traveled down to Brownsville to dedicate a house to the City of Brownsville, claiming it to have been the home that Charles Stillman bought for his bride Elizabeth Pamela Goodrich Stillman a century earlier.

Beginning in 1945, articles began to appear in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly on this subject, such as this one by Harbert Davenport, whose father was a law associate of Judge James B. Wells, Jr. Newspaper articles, like the one below, appeared under the byline of his wife:


Not everyone believed the story told by Jim Wells' law partner, Harbert Davenport, or by Mrs. Davenport in the above article. One witty, courageous long-time Brownsville resident, however, named George Emmet Dodd (son of Beeville, Texas attorney William W. Dodd), responded to the Mayor Stokeley's trumped up decision to grovel before the Stillman and Rockefeller families who came to Brownsville in 1955 to memorialize Charles Stillman with a little help from the city taxpayers. Dodd himself had a long and illustrious heritage in Texas, married to a granddaughter of Colonel James Eskridge Graham

It's unfortunate there aren't more people like G.E. Dodd in the world, who can tell fake historians and paid public relations "experts" to take a flying leap.