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.

Those Pesky Republican Operatives

Killer Political Instincts 

©2005 by Linda Minor

A Taste for Blood 

George Walker Bush called Karl Rove his "Brain". Part of the story has been told many times. Paul Begala, Rove's Democrat counterpart said of one book, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, by Wayne Slater and Jim Moore: 

"Love him or hate him, Karl Rove is one of the most brilliant and successful political consultants of all time." 

Brilliant, yes. But what makes him successful as a Republican strategist is that atavistic ability to lunge for the jugular and not let go. It is a trait that has come to epitomize Republican politics--at least the political game played by the strategists who get paid to manage the campaigns of of all levels of candidates running for office today.

RNC Head Picks Winner

It was an auspicious meeting between 23-year-old Karl and George H. W. Bush in 1973 which sealed the younger man's meteoric rise within his chosen career. Rove was vying for the chairmanship of the College Republicans against his more traditional opponent, Robert Edgeworth, who heartily embraced Barry Goldwater in that year when Bush was dubbed as chairman of the Republican National Committee at the height of the politically disastrous Watergate scandal. Given the choice between Rove and Edgeworth, the seemingly mild-mannered Bush picked Rove hands-down, according to a 2003 article by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker. [1] The meeting would become only the first step in a long-term relationship between Rove and Bush, leading, as it turned out, to an even more co-dependent association between Rove and Bush's son, "Dubya".It was all about getting into power, which seemed like an impossible dream in those days after Watergate.


George Bush was, at that moment in time, frustrated because former Goldwater idealists, disgusted by Watergate shenanigans, were abandoning politics in droves.In their place, new power was being handed to a youthful electorate within the College Republican organization, whose value to the Party promised an abundance of gratuitous labor and an almost self-sufficient network of grassroots volunteers. Senator Carl T. Curtis summed it up well when he said:

"I can think of no other political organization which can give conservatives a bigger 'bang per buck.' " [2]

George Bush’s Political Secrets

In 1972 the 48-year-old George Bush had already experienced a varied career in both business and public life. A Navy pilot in World War II, he completed his studies at Yale in 1950 (Skull and Bones) and moved to Texas to engage in the oil business. Financed largely by clients of his father and uncle with connections to the investment banks of Brown Brothers Harriman and  G.H. Walker & Co., he worked first for a subsidiary of Dresser Industries (now part of Halliburton), which was then wholly owned by Brown Brothers Harriman, of which his father (Senator Prescott Bush) was a senior partner with a veritable coven of Skull and Bones bankers--Averell and Roland Harriman, Knight Woolley and Robert A. Lovett.

Prescott Bush in Brown Brothers Harriman office with Bonesmen partners Bunny Harriman, Knight Woolley and Lovett

After more than a decade in Texas, having attached himself to wealthy Texans Bill and Hugh Liedtke, W.S. Farish III, and Robert Mosbacher, Bush thought he had gained sufficient backing to enter the political fray. He managed to win election twice to a Republican Congressional seat from a wealthy precinct in Houston in 1966 and served until 1970 when then President Nixon, anticipating an important vote concerning China’s status to that body, appointed him to be Ambassador to the United Nations.

When hell broke loose over Watergate, Sen. Bob Dole, who had replaced Rogers Morton at the Republic National Committee, quickly resigned, and Bush took over in January 1973. Nixon had placed the real political power of his office in the hands of his former law partner, John Mitchell, who headed the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), the source of the scandal to begin with. By placing Bush at the RNC, the White House was hoping for more loyalty to Nixon than Dole had shown. And, too, Bush was also there to cover his own misdeeds and those of his fellow fundraisers, referred to on the “smoking gun” tape as “the Texans,” disclosure of whose role in the campaign could have revealed “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” according to Nixon. [3]

Though conspiracy theories abound, George Bush’s real role in Republican politics during the Kennedy years remained buried, at least until publication of Russ Baker's ground-breaking book, Family of Secrets. Bush would have even more opportunity to cover up prior dirty tricks when President Gerald Ford appointed him Director of the C.I.A. late in 1975.

There's a Lesson There

Segretti

Keeping the lid on the secrets being uppermost in his mind, when the stressed-out Bush met the arrogant and ebullient Rove in 1973, he was, therefore, inspired by the young man’s optimistic spirit, as well as his ability to engage in the same dirty tricks that were to land Donald Segretti in a prison cell. Segretti, one of many "advance men" that had been hired by CREEP to disrupt Democratic campaigns during the 1972 primary season through acts of political sabotage and espionage, once distributed a letter falsely claiming that former Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson had fathered an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old girl. He pled guilty in 1973 to three counts of distributing illegal campaign literature.

In 1970, it has been often reported, Rove, while working for a Republican candidate and pretending to be a Democrat volunteer for that opponent, removed two reams of stationery from the Democrat's office which he used to advertise the opening of his  headquarters, adding "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing." [4] Stories about such successes were undoubtedly boasted about at College Republicans training weekends. Karl Rove was a fast learner. 

While the Watergate scandal was at its peak, Rove’s opponents for the College Republican position—Terry Dolan and Robert Edgeworth—leaked to the Washington Post a tape recording of an amused Rove and another College Republican, recounting their antics and campaign espionage during previous political campaigns. The story that appeared in the Post ran under the headline

“GOP PROBES OFFICIAL AS

TEACHER OF TRICKS”

Republican Chairman George Bush was not amused. Edgeworth told the New Yorker, “Bush sent me ... the angriest letter I have ever received in my life. I had leaked to the Washington Post, and now I was out of the Party forever. That letter is a family heirloom." [5] In contrast, Bush rewarded Rove with a full-time job at the Republican National Committee. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

Rove's Rise to Fame

Lee Atwater

The manager for Rove's 1973 CRNC campaign was none other than 22-year-old southerner, Lee Atwater, who would become famous for his killer political instincts seven years later, after George Bush hired him as strategist in his post-Watergate campaign for the presidency.  Rove's own fame came hot on Atwater's heels.

While a high school senior in Salt Lake City he worked in the campaign of Utah Senator Wallace F. Bennett and got his first taste of political strategy. As a freshman political science student at the University of Utah he interned for Ralph Tyler Smith’s 1970 U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois and so overwhelmed his College Republican boss that he was rewarded with the job as executive director of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC), located in Washington, D.C., no less. [6]

The move to the nation’s capital would be a heady experience for  Rove, a nerdy lad who already had an established history of impatience and even brazenness. As a protege of the College Republicans' national chairman, Joe Abate (now a lobbyist), Rove soon met others with his taste for political blood, including his former campaign manager Lee Atwater, as well as Roger Stone and Terry Dolan—each of whom was trained in the College Republican stable to be a political consultant for the conservative cause. A decade later, equally adept, yet unprincipled, trainees—Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist—joined them there. [7] 

Reed and Abramoff in a casino

Baby-faced Ralph Reed was anointed by Pat Robertson to head the IRS-designated not-for-profit 50l(c)(4) organization, the Christian Coalition. Time magazine in 2006, at the time of his fall from grace, quoted Reed, during the peak of his hubris, in a not-so-Christian moment, likening his political role to a jungle killer fighting a war:

Reed with Pat Robertson

"I do guerrilla warfare," Reed once boasted to a reporter, describing how he ambushed his enemies as a political operative. "I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag."

Rove's Background

Under Rove, direct mail—a dirt path blazed by Richard Viguerie—would be paved. The simple mailing list would be broadened to establish ideological coalitions spanning the nation. The Republican political base would be analyzed and broken down into categories with enthusiastic young ideologues appointed to raise money from each segment by preaching to their respective choirs about their candidates.

Because 1972 was the first year that eighteen-year-olds could vote, the CRNC became an official auxiliary to the Republican Party, and its chairman (Rove) was made an ex officio member of the national committee’s executive committee. Quite a step up for a young man of Rove’s age. 

At the same time, emotional upheavals in Rove's family life intensified the experience, as he traveled to his hometown of Sparks, Nevada, to check in on his mother and found himself profiled in the Reno Evening Gazette on January 31, 1972, which described him as:

a political science and history major at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where the College Republican National Committee has its offices. He attended Florence Drake Elementary School and Dilworth Junior High when he lived in Sparks.

The paper also proudly proclaimed his other achievements:

Former Sparks [Nevada] Youth Named To Who's Who

Karl Rove, the 21-year-old son of Mrs. Reba Rove of Sparks, has been appointed to Who's Who of Outstanding Young Men of America.

The upheaval involved Karl's being told by an aunt that Louis Claude Rove, Jr. was his adoptive, rather than his biological, dad. He also discovered that Louis was, in fact, gay. Even though Karl would continue to raise funds from the anti-homosexual Republican base constituents by bashing gays, he came to terms with his father's lifestyle.

Karl's mother, the former Reba Wood, was divorced from Louis on May 25, 1970 in Reno, Nevada, where Reba took her family to live after giving up her gift shop in Salt Lake City. Reba had met and married Louis while he was a student at the Colorado School of Mines in Denver, when Karl and his brother Eric were quite young. The name of their real father, her first husband, is unknown. Louis' graduation and marriage occurring at the beginning days of the 1950's uranium boom, led to one of his first jobs at Climax Molybdenum Co. in Salt Lake City, Utah. By 1966 he was chief geologist at Vitro Minerals Corp., created under supervision of the Atomic Energy Commission during the peak of the boom in 1955. 

Louis Rove's Resume

From Louis Rove's Who's Who listing

(Note: This blog previously explored a contract between LBJ friend, Morris D. Jaffe, and the Climax uranium company, as well as uranium mining companies owned by Dallasite, D. Harold Byrd. Readers can search this blog or scan tags for more on these subjects, by finding these tools in the frame to the right.)

Carl M. Loeb, Jr.

According to Climax's company history, it merged in 1957 with the non-ferrous metals mining company, American Metal Company (Limited)--the majority of whose stock in 1918 had been placed in a voting trust for its British alien owners, though the company president was an American, Carl M. Loeb (father of John L. Loeb). After the war it became American Metal Climax, Inc., still controlled by the Loebs, evidenced by the fact that Carl M. Loeb Jr.,

"a metallurgical engineer, ... was an executive with the Climax Molybdenum Company, which later became AMAX Inc. [in 1974]. He was also a limited partner in Loeb, Rhoades and Company, a brokerage and investment banking firm that his father, Carl Sr., and his brother John had helped found, and that was later merged into Shearson and then American Express."

The family moved to Sparks, Nevada as early as 1961:

Rove’s father and mother, Louis and Reba Rove, were listed in a local [Sparks] city directory beginning in 1961. Louis Rove was a geologist with the Utah Mining Company (one of the six corporations that built Hoover Dam). At the time, the Roves were living at 2195 Nelson Way, a block east of Pyramid Way and just north of the then relatively new Greenbrae Shopping Center.

By 1962, Louis Rove’s title had changed to regional manager and the corporation’s name had changed to Utah Construction and Mining Company [UCM]. In 1963, the Roves moved to 149 East Gault in Sparks. Karl was the second of five children in the family. His brothers and sisters were Olaf, Reba, Eric and Alma.

UCM was a high-security-clearance company which built a facility for the Atomic Energy Commission after first entering the nuclear industry in 1957. In 1964, according to Jason Wanlass's website at Weber State University, Communications Department, UCM was hired to construct an underground control center for Minuteman missile launching facilities. The company, which began by laying railroads and building dams, "under the guidance of Marriner Eccles, ... expanded into mining dredging, and land development."

Reba Wood Rove

Reba had been born in New Mexico in 1929 to Robert G. and Elsie Wood of Pueblo, Colorado (her father died there in 1973). Prior to her divorce and employment, she had been active in a women's group, Beta Sigma Phi, in Reno since moving there and served as president of the Reno-Sparks city council prior to 1966. 

After her 1970 divorce from Louis, her name sometimes appeared in the news as the coordinator for the Senior Citizen Resource Center, which handled the "meals on wheels" and similar programs for seniors in Reno's Washoe County, but it also announced her resignation from that post in May 1972. Karl's sister, Reba, who was only ten when her parents divorced, became a high school cheerleader. She and her sister Alma were also active in the local chapter of Rainbow Girls, a Masonic-connected society. In 1973 Alma married John Robert Monroe, but divorced him four years later.

It is quite likely that Reba had met her last husband, Lowell Henry Brinson, while she worked at the senior center in Reno. The son of a California railroad porter, he was regional coordinator in Stockton, California in 1968 for the Foster Grandparents Program, before moving to Reno to become Nevada's state director for ACTION, a new federal volunteer agency. Lowell and his wife Shirley had divorced soon after filing bankruptcy in Reno in late 1969--at the exact same point in time Louis Rove abandoned his family to take up a full-time gay lifestyle. They married in Los Angeles, California, on May 17, 1981, the same year she purportedly committed suicide. Although her suicide was mentioned in Time magazine, while reviewing The Architect, the marriage to Brinson was omitted:

In 1981 a third devastating blow struck what remained of the Rove family. Karl's mother committed suicide in Reno, Nev. She had surmounted much in her life, Rove says, starting with poverty. Her father had worked on a road crew in the San Juan Mountains and sold knives from the back of his truck to grocery stores in little out-of-the-way towns. "They lived in a house in southern Colorado where, when they finished reading the evening newspaper, they'd take flour paste and slap it on the wall for insulation," he says.

After persevering through all that, the disintegration of a marriage and the challenge of raising five children by two fathers, why had Reba Wood Rove reached a point where she couldn't go any further? "Again, it's hard to figure out," Rove says. "You can speculate on what demons she just wasn't able to overcome, but she couldn't. And it's very sad for my sisters, who were very close to her."

Louis Rove--Louie, as he was commonly known in the piercing party circuit--died on Jul 14, 2004 in Palm Springs, California. 

The Mullen Company, Utah and the CIA

As we mentioned earlier, Rove received his political baptism in the last campaign of Senator Wallace Bennett, who had entered the U.S. Senate only one year prior to Prescott Bush.  Bennett’s wife of 71 years was a daughter of the Mormon Church's former President, Heber J. Grant. 

Sen. Bob Bennett, defeated by Tea Party

Utah Senator Robert F. Bennett, who had headed his father’s campaign the year Rove worked for it, would be elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. He had preceded Rove at the University of Utah by some fifteen years, graduating in 1957, and then running the family’s manufacturing business, from which he took a leave of absence to run his father’s 1962 campaign. He then moved to Washington permanently to work as press secretary for a Republican Congressman. After a stint as a lobbyist, he ran his father’s last Senatorial campaign in 1968, the year Richard Nixon was elected to his first term. President Nixon rewarded him with a job as Congressional liaison for the Department of Transportation.

That was the same year Bob Bennett met Charles Colson—once a lobbyist, an aide to former Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall, and then corporation lawyer—who was tapped to be Nixon’s special counsel. By the summer of 1970, Bennett was receiving phone calls from Colson, as well as from fellow Mormon Bill Gay, who had come to dominate the Hughes Tool Corporation. Both men informed him that Robert R. Mullen was selling his public relations company, Mullen and Company, which already had the Washington account as lobbyist for the Mormon Church. [8] When Hughes Tool fired Democrat Lawrence O’Brien as its lobbyist, late in 1970, Bennett was hired to replace him. [9] Thus armed with this important client, Bennett left his job at Transportation to become president of Mullen and Company, the final purchase of the firm closing in September 1971.

E. Howard Hunt

Between 1968 and 1970, Chuck Colson and E. Howard Hunt, both alumni of Brown University (Hunt in the class of 1940 and Colson a 1953 grad) were seeing each other on a regular basis.[10]  Hunt, a naval officer and an agent of the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 until its demise, obtained a Guggenheim fellowship which paid him to travel in Mexico while he wrote his first novel (later a best-seller). After that he worked on the staff of Ambassador Averell Harriman, a partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman, as well as adviser on-call to every Democratic President since FDR.

In 1948 Hunt left Harriman’s employ, having been recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency by Frank Wisner. In the meantime, he had married one of Harriman’s secretaries, Dorothy, who had spent the war years in Bern, Switzerland in the Treasury Department’s Hidden Assets Division, looking for hidden Nazi assets. Coincidentally, or not, it was in Bern where Allen Dulles, Hunt's ultimate boss in the CIA, spent the war years. Those contacts gave Hunt thus powerful references on his resume!

By the end of April 1970 all details fell in place for Hunt’s “retirement” from the C.I.A., and his employment one day later by Mullen and Company. According to Hunt's autobiography, Undercover: Memoirs of an American secret agent, he got the job through the “CIA’s placement service,” and was told by the placement officer that “the Mullen firm had ‘cooperated’ with CIA in the past." [11]

Subsequent to Hunt's settling into his new office, Mullen sold the firm to Rove's friend from Utah, Robert F. Bennett. Though miffed by the change in management, Hunt was stroked by Colson, who only a few months later telephoned him with the opportunity of a lifetime, to work at the White House. Thus, in July 1971 Hunt was hired to work on Colson’s staff as a consultant on a part-time basis until the end of the 1972 election, while still maintaining his position with Mullen and Company.

The rest, as they say, is history. Or it would be history...except for the fact that it's still going on!

~~~~~~~~

NOTES:

[1]  For details of the battle for the chairmanship, see Nicolas Lemann, “The Controller,” The New Yorker (May 12, 2003).  Both Rove and opponent Robert Edgeworth claimed to have been elected and appealed to the Republican National Committee, of which George H.W. Bush had recently become chairman.

[2]  Scott Stewart, “The College Republicans – A Brief History” (July 24, 2002).

[3]  See the transcript from Nixon archives.

[4] Jake Tapper,“Spy vs. spy” in Salon, September 26, 2000.  See also the website supporting Public Broadcasting System’s “Frontline” episode on Karl Rove, "The Architect."

[5]  James Moore, Wayne Slater, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), p. 135.

[6]  The Salt Lake Tribune, 18 September 2004.

[7]  For Norquist’s views on Rove’s agenda, see Michael Scherer’s article at Mother Jones, January 2004.

[8]  The Associated Press Political Service, 15 June 1992.

[9]  O’Brien had been placed on retainer in 1968 after Robert Kennedy’s assassination upon orders from Howard Hughes, who felt he hit paydirt when O’Brien also landed the job as head of the Democratic National Committee in 1969.

[10] Colson was president of Brown University’s alumni association and Hunt was vice president.  Brown University had been named for its first major donor and treasurer, Moses Brown, a member of a wealthy Rhode Island shipping family long engaged in the slave trade, who used public relations to create a reputation for themselves as abolitionists. In “Money and Gunpowder” it is revealed that Providence, Rhode Island was the home of John D. Rockefeller’s father-in-law, Senator Nelson Aldrich who was most instrumental in setting up legislation creating the Federal Reserve banking system. When Samuel and Flora Bush sent their eldest son, Prescott Bush, to St. George's prep school at nearby Newport, Rhode Island, Samuel Bush was placed on the board there, where he served for many years. The family vacationed on Narragansett  Bay every summer, and Flora Bush died there, having been struck accidentally by a car. See Part Two also.

[11]  Hunt specifically mentions in Undercover (Putnam 1974) that the PR firm had “established and managed a Free Cuba Committee for CIA.” [p. 141]  Hunt, at that point in his book, brings up a name—R. Spencer Oliver—whose real importance is never fully explained by Hunt. It is only through books published after that date that one learns what some say was the real reason for the burglary of the Democratic headquarters. What Hunt does not reveal is that, at the time of the Watergate break-in, Oliver was working for the Democratic National Committee, where, as Executive Director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen, he had an office in the complex. Not only that, but the key to his secretary’s desk was found in burglar Bernard Barker’s pocket. This secretary, Ida Maxwell "Maxie" Wells, filed a lawsuit against G. Gordon Liddy, which she lost and subsequently appealed.  The opinion in Wells v. Liddy, reversed on appeal, contains some most interesting information about a call girl ring operating out of Oliver’s office in the DNC.  Hunt’s purported reason for mentioning this name is to give evidence of why Hunt felt uneasy at Mullen after Bennett’s taking over the firm. He describes Oliver as the “son of a lobbyist occasionally employed by our firm.  A Democrat, Oliver had been engaged for some time in an international student exchange which I suspected to be financed by CIA.”  [Undercover, p. 142]  Hunt may have been referring to the National Student Association, headed by Cord Meyer, Jr., exposed in 1967 as a C.I.A. front by Ramparts. magazine in 1967.

The Arithmetic Doesn't Add Up to Democracy

The Existing Order

© Oct. 16, 2009 by  LINDA MINOR

(all rights reserved)

“That an Anglo-American alliance is well calculated to support the existing order throughout the world, even at the expense of democracy against Fascism, should … give pause to anyone who calculates that Montagu Norman + J. P. Morgan = democracy.” (1)

Plot and counterplot

In 1934 General Smedley Darlington Butler, a career Marine, became whistleblower to one of the strangest plots in American history when he testified before the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities about a series of meetings with mysterious American businessmen and bond brokers who selected him to  serve in a capacity they termed “assistant President”--an honorary position for a  military straw man to represent the views of America's World War I disgruntled veterans who, many bankers feared, were in danger of organizing a revolution against capitalism.

Butler described numerous cat-and-mouse assignations with a broker named Gerald C. MacGuire. Once he determined to his own satisfaction that something was amiss, he blew the whistle on their charade and went public, revealing the all-consuming fear of the erstwhile conspirators that one of two options was about to occur, neither of which was desirable:

• That the wealthy class would either be forced to pay higher taxes to support Roosevelt’s welfare programs; or

• That Roosevelt would change the government’s economic system completely from capitalism to socialism.

MacGuire's henchman, Robert Sterling Clark, denied, when queried by Butler, any evil motives against FDR on the part of his clique, declaring:

"This is to sustain him when others assault him…. You know, the President is weak. He will come right along with us. He was born in this class. He was raised in this class, and he will come back. He will run true to form. In the end he will come around. But we have got to be prepared to sustain him when he does."(2)

Further questioning by General Butler, who played along with the game, elicited from MacGuire the following dialogue:

“We might have an assistant President, somebody to take the blame; and if things do not work out, he can drop him…. That is what he was building up Hugh Johnson (FDR's National Recovery Administration czar) for. Hugh Johnson talked too damn much and got him into a hole, and he is going to fire him in the next three or four weeks.”

[Butler] said, “How do you know all this?”

“Oh,” he said, “we are in with him all the time. We know what is going to happen.” (3)

Butler realized very quickly that the schemers were privy to highly confidential inside information from the centers of power. Everything they predicted shortly came to pass. However, if General Johnson was a disappointment to those who selected him, their choice of General Butler was about to become a disaster.

Identifying the true racketeers

General Butler was loved and admired by the soldiers he led. He identified with them, and he freely placed the blame for the wars in which he had served throughout his career on the class he felt was responsible for those wars—the bankers and businessmen whose fat he, as a career soldier, had often pulled from the fire.

Who were these plotters? Jules Archer in his 1973 book called The Plot to Seize the White House (5) did not speculate about the men who pulled the strings behind the scenes, though he accurately described the scenario that played out on the public stage.  

We know the names of at least two of those puppeteers working behind the scenes -- Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, a "Manhattan private-banker," and Robert Sterling Clark, a scion of the Singer Sewing Machine Co. fortune--though their names are virtually unknown today. Research into their family history and business relationships clearly reveals a money trail and path of intrigue later used by the CIA in its covert political work.

Making the World Safe for Investment

Click to enlarge.

To the plotters it appeared that President Roosevelt had betrayed his class when he exerted his energies to benefit unemployed and impoverished citizens (even labor unions!) at the expense of the business and banking clientele who had garnered the funds to finance his election. John W. Davis, the personal attorney of J.P. “Jack” Morgan, Jr., was instrumental in setting up the legal framework to finance a propaganda-intelligence network, attempting, if not to gain control of the executive branch of government, at the very least to convince the President to pay attention to the financial elite.

Davis' boss, Jack Morgan, Jr.

In August of 1934, shortly after General Butler was clued that such an organization would appear, Davis incorporated the American Liberty Lobby. MacGuire's boss, Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, a Guaranty Trust vice-president,  served as the Lobby's treasurer, and other members included the elite of the General Motors-DuPont structure. The same men had been involved in the Association against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), used by Democratic Party chairman John J. Raskob to repeal Prohibition. (6) In 1928, Murphy's name was listed as a member of AAPA.(7)

MacGuire, who was on the payroll of Murphy's brokerage office, G. M-P Murphy & Co., had not only offered eighteen $1,000 bills to Butler (which were rejected), but had also promised to present the General as keynote speaker at an upcoming American Legion convention in Chicago, where a speech written by John W. Davis about the need to return to the gold standard would be made available for him to read. MacGuire boasted that his boss, Murphy, had donated $125,000 to found the veterans’ group, ostensibly designed along a similar pattern observed in Europe (notably in Mussolini's Italy), which, he bragged, was completely within their control.

Grayson M.-P. Murphy and the

Bankers’ intelligence network

Murphy, who graduated from West Point in 1903 with General Hugh S. Johnson of the NRA, had first attended the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia and the Quakers' Haverford College. During his Army stint he was in the Military Intelligence Division--an elite intelligence group set up during the Spanish-American War. He had also been one of two men selected by Secretary of State John Hay, under instructions from President Theodore Roosevelt, for a secret mission to “gather information in South American countries which might play a role should the United States involve itself in conflict within the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean.” (8)  Acting both as a military attaché and as a consulate aide, Murphy traveled incognito to Venezuela and returned to brief the President personally. (9)

What we can glean from the remainder of his career—including his role in the 1934 plot—reveals much about America’s incipient intelligence organization before either the Office of Strategic Services or Central Intelligence Agency were formed.

G.M-P Murphy & Co., formed in 1907, specialized in the preserving assets of bankrupt companies for the benefit of creditors, working on commissions paid to him by  creditors desiring to get possession of assets held as security for defaulted loans. Gerald MacGuire, at the time he approached Gen. Butler, sold bonds for the Murphy company, and it is clear from testimony given before the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities that MacGuire was

“continuously on the payroll of G.M.P. Murphy & Co., regardless as to whether he was making tours of inspection at the expense of Clark or whatever he was doing.” (10)

Ostensibly, MacGuire’s numerous travel expenses were paid by an organization called the Committee for a Sound Dollar and Sound Currency, Inc. (whose members, MacGuire claimed, included both Grayson Murphy and Robert Sterling Clark. Clark undoubtedly had access to a huge pool of cash set aside to promote the the American Legion's Chicago convention, for which he tried unsuccessfully to recruit General Butler as a speaker. (11) The American Legion’s purposes apparently coincided with those of MacGuire’s employer, Grayson Murphy, whose company’s $125,000 donation had financed the Legion’s incorporation.

Unless Murphy’s company was a mere cover for intelligence work, it is difficult to understand what MacGuire contributed to the company which paid him to travel throughout Europe, studying the role military groups had played in setting up Fascist governments in Spain, Italy and Vischy France. Murphy’s background, besides heading "protective committees" to foreclose on creditors’ interests in collateral on existing loans, was military intelligence and planning of secret military operations--forerunner to the role of today's CIA. He was part of a super-secret intelligence organization within the military, funded by the American Red Cross and coordinated by Major General Ralph H. Van Deman—General Pershing's senior intelligence officer and Chief of Allied Counterintelligence.

Beginning in 1917 Murphy, as an appointee of President Wilson, worked for the Red Cross in France and as an officer in the Army:

“Douglas MacArthur took over the brigade and received his first general's star. … The 42nd also got a new G3, Major Grayson M.P. Murphy, a West Point graduate who had left the army to pursue a very successful career in finance and banking. Murphy had come to France as head of the American Red Cross, and in June 1917, went with Pershing to Chaumont as a part of the permanent staff of AEF Headquarters. While on Pershing's staff, Murphy coordinated Red Cross activities with the army's medical service in the field. His West Point background and good service in the infantry in the Philippines impressed Pershing enough to send him to the 42nd Division in the critical position of G3 [operations and planning].” (12)

“Your Servant—The Red Cross”

According to an article styled “Your Servant—The Red Cross” by Geddes Smith, published in The Independent in 1917, the work performed by the Red Cross War Council in World War I closely resembled contemporary services provided under contracts awarded to Halliburton, a profit-making corporation, for the soldiers in Iraq. Geddes describes those services as follows:

“The Red Cross is servicing France. [We only hope no pun was intended!] The War Council, thru its commissioners, asked France what immediate service was most wanted. ‘Give us canteens,’ was the answer…. The word canteen … means, first, a field kitchen close behind the first line of trenches from which hot coffee and tea … and cold lemonade and such drinks are served out to fighting men…. It means, also, an outpost of civilization—a place where a poilu leaving the front can … shave and wash his mud-stained body and disinfect his germ-laden clothing…” (13)

Red Cross services also included the provision of food supplies, linens and clothing for persons left homeless by the war, infirmaries and rest-stations for soldiers, all of which were paid for out of donations collected by the Red Cross from the general public—estimated at $100,000,000. Today Halliburton is paid by a combination of corporate profits and American tax dollars to provide the same types of services for America’s armed forces.

Rambling with Wild Bill Donovan

Within a year after the war’s end, Murphy returned again to Europe with a man who was to become the first American head of a civilian intelligence organization in America, William J. Donovan. According to Donovan’s biographer, the job Donovan and Murphy performed was to gather information concerning a proposed Morgan bank bond issue for a consortium of capitalists who wanted statistics from Europe before these bankers, lawyers and investors underwrote, bought or sold bonds for European reconstruction; the names of the capitalists, however, were not disclosed. (14)  Donovan and Murphy “toured Europe together to make their own intelligence estimates and establish a private intelligence network to keep them and like-minded members of America’s ‘peacetime’ intelligence subculture advised of changes in Europe.” (15)

Morgan Syndicate

Raskob with his boss, Du Pont

FDR had been elected in 1932 with financial and political assistance from corporations such as General Motors, then in control of major shareholders John J. Raskob and Pierre and Lammot Du Pont, whose desire was to use war-generated profits to diversify and consolidate their corporate holdings. That ambition was consistent with the Morgan banking network's goals, with which General Motors had long been affiliated.

Professor Carroll Quigley, of the opinion that there were different factions within the Morgan bank establishment, stated in his book Tragedy and Hope:

“To Morgan all political parties were simply organizations to be used, and the firm always was careful to keep a foot in all camps. Morgan himself, Dwight Morrow, and other partners were allied with Republicans; Russell C. Leffingwell was allied with the Democrats; Grayson Murphy was allied with the extreme Right; and Thomas W. Lamont was allied with the Left.”  (16)

Thomas Lamont’s rise in influence within the bank followed the chairmanship of World War I head of the American Red Cross, Henry Pomeroy Davison, (17) whose banking career had begun in the Astor Bank, and who reared his sons (F. Trubee Davison and H.P., Jr.) at Locust Valley, Long Island, New York, near the estate of Robert S. Lovett. Lamont's "left-leaning tendencies" caused concern among members of the more conservative faction, who detested the role Leffingwell and Lamont had played in advising FDR to take the dollar off the gold standard. In response to removal of the gold backing on the dollar, Roosevelt’s own budget director, Lewis W. Douglas (who was brother-in-law of Rockefellers' attorney John J. McCloy), predicted the end of Western Civilization, while Montagu Norman of the Bank of England (also a Brown Brothers partner) feared the entire world would plunge into bankruptcy. (18)

These apocalyptic opinions reflect also the sentiments of the Anglo-American political philosophy supported by the same bankers who desired to rid the world of anti-capitalism—any tendencies leading to labor unrest and anarchy—which they equated with Communism. The British Foreign Secretary in 1925, Austen Chamberlain, for example, had commented:

“If I ever had to choose in my own country between anarchy and dictatorship, I expect I should be on the side of the dictator.” (19)

Butler never met with Grayson Murphy, though, upon his insistence that he be introduced to one of MacGuire’s principals in the plot, he was paid a visit from Robert Sterling Clark, a multimillionaire, deprecatingly dubbed “the millionaire lieutenant” during the war. A grandson of Edward Clark, attorney for and partner of Isaac Singer, inventor of the sewing machine, Robert S. Clark was also one of three sons of Alfred Corning Clark, who had served as Singer’s president until his death in 1896. The Clark family involvement in the scheme adds another layer of depth and texture to a tapestry woven by an assortment of banking families who were working behind the scenes in 1934 to wrest control of America’s central bank out of "liberal" hands and place it within those of an Anglo-American military- fascist elite.

Six years after Alfred Corning Clark died, his widow married the Right Rev. Henry Codman Potter, Episcopal Bishop of New York, who serves as a link between Clark and an offshoot of the family of Alexander Brown of Baltimore, the oldest merchant banking family in America. 

Brown Brothers of New York is the bank with which President George H.W. Bush’s father was a partner after its merger with the investment banks of the sons of robber baron E.H. Harriman in 1926.

 NOTES:

1. Quincy Howe, England Expects Every American To Do His Duty (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1937), 198.

2. The quotes from MacGuire were obtained from Wikisource website.

3. Retired General Johnson (West Point Class of 1903) was then administrator of the National Recovery Administration. Time magazine (October 31, 1934) reported: “Each and every reporter at Hyde Park was aware that General Hugh Samuel Johnson had at last cooked his goose with the President. In his speech on the textile strike week before, NRA’s Johnson had denounced the strikers in such violent terms that Labor swore it would have the General’s scalp. In the same address General Johnson sealed his official doom, as far as the President was concerned, when he said: ‘During the whole intense [NRA] experience I have been in constant touch with that old counselor, Judge Louis Brandeis. As you know, he thinks that anything that is too big is bound to be wrong. He thinks NRA is too big, and I agree with him.’ Vastly displeased was the President with General Johnson’s public claim to intellectual kinship with Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, before whom the National Recovery Act must sooner or later come for adjudication.”

     Time had first reported on Johnson’s background as follows: “He set up the General Staff's Purchase. Storage and Traffic Division to eliminate competitive government buying, sat on the War Industries Board with Bernard Mannes Baruch. Resigning from the army in 1919 as a Brigadier General, he joined the Moline (Ill.) Plow Co. of which George Nelson Peek, new administrator of the Farm Relief Act, was president. In 1927 he went to Mr. Baruch at No. 120 Broadway as economic expert and factfinder. Mr. Baruch lent him to President Roosevelt to help draft the Industrial Recovery Act.” Time (May 29, 1933).

4. “America's Armed Forces: Part 2—In Time of Peace: The Army,” Common Sense (October 1935), page 8.

5. Jules Archer, The Plot To Seize The White House (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973).

6. The correlation between the two committees is shown in an article by David Kyvig at the website maintained by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT).

7. The entire list of the membership was published by the Washington Post in 1928 under a front-page headline “New Wet Board’s Purpose Mystery to Party Leaders.” Washington Post (April 23, 1928), 1.

The names listed were determined by the Post to be disproportionately Republicans, who would later abandon Herbert Hoover in order to elect Franklin Roosevelt. Besides Murphy, the name of George H. Walker (grandfather of the first President Bush) was also listed. At that time he was employed by W.A. Harriman & Co., which in 1931 was to merge with the established private banking firm of Brown Brothers & Co., of which Bank of England chairman Montagu Norman was a partner.

8. William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: The Dial Press/James Wade, 1967), 597.

9. This trip to Venezuela occurred at the same time that an international lawyer who was a leader in the Pan-American Society, Dr. Severo Mallet-Prevost of Philadelphia (son of Dr. Grayson Mallet-Prevost), sailed to Venezuela in order to promote a loan to be made by Speyer & Co. It appears that Dr. Mallet-Prevost was Murphy’s uncle.

10. The transcript of the hearings of the Committee, often referred to as HUAC or the “MacCormack-Dickstein Committee,” can be found online in three segments, together with Smedley Butler’s brochure, War Is a Racket and other materials about the plot.

11. The Congressional Committee Report, however, upon examining the membership list, did not find those names. See Report of Congressional House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, 73rd Congress, 2d Session (New York: November 24, 1934). Also see the chapter entitled “Wall Street Buys the New Deal,” in Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and FDR (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1975). Had Butler agreed to speak at the convention, he would have received no less than $18,000 in cash for reading a speech written by John W. Davis, demanding a return to the gold standard.

12. James J. Cooke, The Rainbow Division in the Great War, 1917-1919 (Praeger Publishers, 1994), 133, citing as source: John J. Pershing, My Experiences in the World War (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1931), Vol. 1, 71, 108, 280. The author also cites fascinating excerpts from General Patton’s diary relating run-ins he encountered with Murphy: “Maj [sic] Murphy told me he could not put smoke in plan as stencil was already cut. The biggest fool remark I ever heard showing just what an S.O.B. the late chief of Red Cross is.” Cooke, 148, quoting from Martin Bluenson (ed.), The Patton Papers, 1885- 1940, Vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1972), 628.

13. Geddes Smith, “Your Servant—The Red Cross,” The Independent; 91, 3590 (September 22, 1917), 462.

14. Richard Dunlop, Donovan: America’s Master Spy (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1982), 137. We can reconstruct the names of those investors were by examining the bond issues underwritten immediately after their summer tour in 1920.

15. William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance, op. cit., 598.

16. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), 945.

17. “Davison …conceived the plan which resulted in the formation of the Bankers' Trust Company, intended to serve as a depository for the funds of national banks and insurance companies. In 1902 George F. Baker and Francis L. Hine of the First National Bank invited him to become vice-president and director. There he soon won recognition from J. Pierpont Morgan, Sr., who frequently consulted him, especially in the monetary crisis of 1907, when Davison had an important part in determining the action of New York banks. During the next year he joined the Monetary Commission headed by Senator Aldrich and in the capacity of banking expert with that commission he visited France, Germany, and England. He then acquainted himself with the prevailing European idea of a flexible national currency. In association with Senator Aldrich, Paul M. Warburg, Frank A. Vanderlip, and A. Piatt Andrew, he took part in drawing up the ‘Jekyl Island’ report that led to the crystallization of sentiment resulting in the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Having become a partner in J. P. Morgan & Company, he served with distinction in 1910 as chairman of the Six-Power Chinese Loan Conference at Paris.”  Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.

18. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 358-359.

19. Quoted in Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (UK: Merlin Press Ltd., 1997), 39.

20. Published by World Peace Foundation (1927), 718.