Who Engineered the Heroin Coup?

Refer back to our October 8 posting of the excerpt from Heroin in Southeast Asia. We inserted a map of the Yunnan province of China, showing Kunming, "the hotbed of military operations," of  

1. Claire Chennault's 14th Air Force and of 

2. the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Detachment 202.

These military operations in this area of China were occurring at the tail end of WWII, and would lead up to the Korean War a few years later.  Kruger's focus in his book was on Captain Lucien Conein, the French Foreign Legionnaire turned OSS agent for the United States. Why? Because he points to our trail of money. Remember, we ALWAYS follow the money.

When President Truman agreed to drop the bombs on Japan, abruptly ending WWII, the old China hands realized their government budget to fight Chinese Communists had just dried up. They had to build an alternative supply to finance the "nationalist" Chinese forces led by the American-educated Soong family satellites, groomed to set up China's central bank by donors to Southern Christian colleges since the time Charlie Soon first arrived in North Carolina.

Background Reading to Get Up to Speed

Readers who have not already done so should familiarize themselves with this author's other blog, which has long followed the trail of opium money through the Forbes family that culminates into today's United States Secretary of State John Kerry, particularly at this point with his ancestor known as Jack Forbes, a contemporary of Secretary of State (later President) John Quincy Adams, who was the actual creator of the Monroe Doctrine during his tenure in the State Department. It was J.Q. Adams who was then handling the career of the first John Murray "Jack" Forbes, not to be confused with his nephew of that name who rose to opium fame several decades later.

At the other website, Where the Gold Is,  I posited that J.Q. Adams had accomplished his purpose of strengthening the nascent U.S. republic by allowing Jack Forbes, the consul he named to an important post in Europe as French hero Napoleon was shipped off to Elba. It should be remembered that at that time the French were our allies, while the victor, the British, were our avowed enemies. Thus, it was of little significance to Adams at that time that the only way that Forbes' consulate post, where he was sent to spy on the British enemy, could be financed was by allowing him to enter into commercial partnerships with family members, also based at the foreign consulate.

Jack's youngest brother, Ralph Bennet Forbes, was one of several partners who took advantage of that opportunity to trade in China following the tanking of his own business using slaves to grow sugar cane in what is now the island of Haiti/Dominican Republic (then known as Santo Domingo). There Ralph had become acquainted with James and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, ship owners involved in the triangular barter trading pattern between the island, New England and, during colonial days, Liverpool. They had seen much of their business interests destroyed, however, when revolutionary Americans boycotted and blockaded trade with the former "mother country."

As so often happens, his working relationship with the Perkins brothers led to marriage to their younger sister, Margaret Perkins. Quoting now from my other blog:

By 1811 Ralph had already been married to Margaret Perkins 12 years, and the brothers had given up trade in the West Indies for the East Indies, with China. In the meantime the young Robbins cousin [James Murray Robbins] went to Europe to replace Ralph Forbes. The editor of The Letters reports that President Monroe, through his secretary of state, Jack's old friend J.Q. Adams, called Forbes home and entrusted him with negotiations following Napoleon's defeat at the hands of the British, while the teenage Robbins was sent to Elsinore [Helsingor], Denmark, not far from Jack's 1813 post in Copenhagen. Was he merely there to keep his eyes and ears open and courier intelligence back? ... Did President Monroe, the last Founding Father to serve as chief executive of the United States, know what was about to hit the fan? Did anyone understand at the time that the cost of such intelligence to the new nation was to allow those consular officials free reign in smuggling drugs?

Kris Millegan's Theory

My early research has been guided and directed since about 1996 by the profound ideas and reading of the publisher of Trine Day books, who was then a mere hippie musician turned philosopher--Kris Millegan, who posted the following statement in 2000 to a research group to which I then was a participant:

Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by US law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins' siblings and children. The Perkins opium business had made a fortune and established power over these families. By the 1830s, the Russells bought out the Perkinses and made Connecticut the primary center of the US opium racket. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under Russell Trust. By 1856, Russell Trust Incorporated their open pirate emblem -- the skull and cross bones.

Millegan's theory related to the importance of Yale secret society, Skull and Bone, which he had found to be steeped in the long history of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency involvement in the Southeast Asian drug trade. Millegan was an avid reader who shared his insights by posting excerpts of books he read on this subject, one of which was Henrik Kruger's book, Heroin in Southeast Asia, cited previously. Much of this history has been made into an excellent online book by William P. Litynski, in downloadable format, called An Illustrated History of the China Trade and the Opium Wars.

Litynski mentions that William Russell, trustee of Yale University from 1745 to 1761, had two great-grandsons from two different sons. One was the China-trading Russell and Co. co-founder, Samuel Wadsworth Russell, and another was Skull and Bones co-founder, William Huntington Russell. This fact alone seems to indicate a connection between Yale and the opium trade in China worth pursuing. There are also many important links between the trade in opium in those days, not only with Yale, but with Harvard and Princeton as well, all of which occur because of the close family connections within the management of those three universities.

In January 2012 I traced the various ancestries, first by starting with John Kerry's relationship back through the Forbes family, and then by the Russell family's long connections to Yale and to the founding of Skull and Bones--a project I had been working on for several years. See 2004 article, "Primer on Controlling People, Using Their Own Money." As one can see, the same themes run over and over throughout this history.

In a more recent project, I showed how those same families who were involved in subsidizing the Skull and Bones (Russell Trust) network through the Morgan banking empire were, according to Antony Sutton's research, overthrown after the 1929 crash from a technology based on electric powered streetcars (Morgan) to one envisioning individually owned petroleum-fueled vehicles (Rockefeller). Both group of investors have been heavily entrenched within the Order of Skull and Bones. Whoever controls Skull and Bones thus seems to control the direction of American investment.

Now, Back to Heroin and French Indochina

Thomas Gardiner Corcoran, a/k/a Tommy the Cork, a contemporary of Jesse Jones in Herbert Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation, had cemented his Texas connection in 1937 by lobbying for Sam Rayburn to become Speaker of the House of Representatives. Corcoran took a great deal of political flak for the maneuvers (such as the "Court packing plan) he handled for FDR; because of his loyalty, according to author David McKean, in October 1940 he was assigned to perform an undercover task in China:

The importance of being a Delano

Roosevelt conveyed to him, again through Lauchlin Currie, that he wanted to establish a private corporation to provide assistance to the Chinese. Corcoran thought the president's idea was ingenious, and later wrote that "if we'd tried to set up a government corporation per se, or do the work out of a Federal office, there would have been devil to pay on the Hill." Instead, Corcoran set up a civilian corporation, which he chartered in Delaware and, at the suggestion of the president, named China Defense Supplies. It would be, as Corcoran later recalled, "the entire lend lease operation" for Asia.
 
In order to provide the company with the stamp of respectability, Roosevelt arranged for his elderly uncle, Frederick Delano, who'd spent a lifetime in the China trade, to be co-chairman. The other chairman was T.V. Soong, Chiang's personal representative who frequently visited Washington to lobby for aid to his government. Soong, a Harvard graduate, was also Chiang's finance minister, as well as his banker and his brother-in-law. And he was a close friend of David Corcoran, whom he had met when the younger Corcoran was working in the Far East.

It just so happens that David was one of Tommy the Cork's brothers. Drew Pearson wrote about the Corcoran family's involvement in the quasi-government corporation in his August 1, 1942 column, which is so incredible it must be printed here in full, with emphasis added in italics:

WASHINGTON — For a long time official Washington never knew that the celebrated Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran ever had anyone else in his family. The public spotlight which beat down on him as the most intimate adviser of the president was so intent that it put everyone else in the shadow.

Recently, however, Washington has discovered two of his brothers. In fact, it has become very much aware of them. One is Howard Corcoran, assistant United States district attorney in New York, the man primarily responsible for the wholesale arrests in the German-American bund. For more than a year, Howard Corcoran waged an up-hill battle to round up the bund. Other federal officials argued that the bund could not be touched, most of the members being American citizens. Some of the leaders might be arrested, but that was all, they said.

Bund's Nemesis

Howard Corcoran, however, maintained that the proper strategy was not to arrest the leaders and scare the others underground, but to watch the entire organization, then make wholesale arrests. This quiet surveillance was carried on for more than a year, and resulted in the largest arrest in our history. David Corcoran, the other brain trust brother, is fighting the nazis in a unique manner. He has become the chief American spearhead in routing the nazi drug trust from South America.

To appreciate the importance of this, it is necessary to know that the drug industry for years has been the chief undercover organization for nazi propaganda in Latin-America. Nazi traveling salesmen, penetrating the byways, were able to report on everything a foreign military power wanted to know, in addition to arranging political contacts, and using radio and newspaper advertisements to spread nazi "kultur" among Latin-American good neighbors.

So important is this drug propaganda network that until a short time ago the nazis flew essential drugs into South America, smuggled aspirin from the United States through pro-nazi Latin-American armies and, thanks to the large stocks accumulated before war broke, have continued to carry on. For a long time the state department and the Rockefeller committee have been trying to get the United States firms to carry similar radio and newspaper propaganda, and now give credit to David Corcoran for doing the most outstanding job along this line.

Guns Turned Around

It is paradoxical that the commercial instrument through which Corcoran works is a firm that for a time had patent connections with the German drug trust. Corcoran's firm, the Sydney Ross Co., is a subsidiary of Sterling Products, the biggest drug business in the U.S.A. [Sterling purchased the U.S. assets of the German Bayer AG, including its patent to aspirin.] Its enormous resources, once partially derived from its relationship with the German drug trust, now have been completely  reversed and, through Sydney Ross, thrown into an economic war to the death in Latin America. As one Washington official expressed it: "We have boarded the Bismarck and turned her guns around."

[According to International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 1. St. James Press, 1988 relative to Sterling Drug, Inc."

 In the 1920's cartels with German companies were condoned as a means of helping Germany's beleaguered post-war economy. Yet, as argued in 1942 Fortune magazine article, it was at this early stage that the German government laid the foundation for a policy of economic fascism. At the roots of the struggle over "a simple glassine envelope containing two aspirin-compound tablets" was "Germany's attempt to reduce a continent to the economic and political status of a colony."

Whatever real or imagined designs Germany had in regard to its Latin American market, however, it soon became apparent that it was neither economically nor politically viable for Sterling to continue conducting business with Farben. Coming within a hairsbreadth of suffering U.S. government action, two Sterling subsidiaries in Latin America, Winthrop Products, Inc. and the Sydney Ross Co., suddenly became the advanced guard for a U.S. trade-war policy against Germany. In other words, an all out economic war to gain hegemony over the Latin American market was waged against Farben; as far as Sterling was concerned the cartel ceased to exist.

This sudden turnaround seemed inconsistent in light of the previous intimate business dealings between the two companies. The initial agreement of 1923 called for Sterling to supply aspirin to the Latin American market only if Farben were at any time unable to do so. Yet as late as 1941, during the British blockade of Nazi occupied Europe, Farben asked Sterling to violate the agreement between the two companies and send Winthrop ethical drugs to Latin America. After two and a half days of debate William Erhard Weiss (at that time chairman of the board) ordered the shipment sent.]

Dave Corcoran, the driving force behind the Latin-American Sydney Ross venture, got to it in a roundabout way, in fact via Asia. Originally he was preparing for a medical career, but a girl diverted him into Asiatic trade. When he was graduated from Princeton, he was entered at Oxford for medical studies, but he fell in love and wanted to get married. His father insisted he have a professional education first. A medical course would take several years, so Dave fished through college catalogues to find the professional education requiring the least time. He took a two-year course at the Harvard business school.

Romance Changes Career 

At the end of the course, he married his girl and went to work for an Asiatic trading company. In the far east, he became Tokyo manager of General Motors, saw the movement through Japan of the first military trucks for the conquest of Manchukuo, left General Motors to sell American pharmaceuticals for Sterling Products in China, the Philippines, Malaya and India. Later, Corcoran was lent to Washington as president of China Defense Supplies, Inc., of the lend-lease corporation, and was the first of the crusaders to get supplies up the Burma road, to make up for the trucks he had sent into Manchuria ten years ago.

About this time Sterling Products promised the justice department to compensate for its previous partnership with the Germans by trying to drive the German drug business off the commercial map of Latin America. It seemed an impossible job. But Sterling fished Dave Corcoran out of its pocket and put him in charge of an economic drive against the key item in the German line — aspirin, which had been trademarked and advertised in Latin America for nearly 20 years and had a practical monopoly.

Corcoran had to begin from scratch with a new name. The Germans had stocks carefully accumulated against the possibility of war. Corcoran had to export from the U.S.A., often by the air, as submarines handicapped shipping routes. The Germans had a solid, 65-year-old organization; Corcoran had only a handful of young Americans.

Dave Goes Into Action

The way the Sydney Ross Co. swung into action still has Latin America gasping. Corcoran called in his old team from all over the world and scoured the lists for every good export man he had ever known. In six months, the Latin American organization had tripled. The new trade name "mejoral" became the subject of the biggest American promotion job in Latin American history.

Overnight, Sidney Ross became the biggest radio and newspaper advertiser and the biggest sound and movie truck operator in Latin America. For the first time the American government has a Latin-American "sales" organization comparable to anything the Germans ever had in their commercial conquests. This organization covers not only the city areas, but follows the trail of famous German peddler and his mule throughout the interior.

The success of the drive has been phenomenal. Wherever Sydney Ross can get supplies it is already consistently outselling the Germans and has developed such a fierce competitive technique that anti-monopoly cranks in Washington already are more concerned that Sydney Ross will dominate the market than lambasting the Germans. All of which causes Dave Corcoran to remark:

"Monopoly! About the same kind of monopoly the marines had at Wake island!"

(Copyright, 1942, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)

Once you have time to digest all this, we'll be back with more about Tommy the Cork's law partner, William Sterling Youngman, Jr. who is the central man in this story. In 1934 Youngman was licensed to practice law, and in April 1937 was married to Elsie Hooper Perkins. We pick up there next time. Be ready!