Links Between Assassins, Green Berets and French Connection?

In one segment of the Great Heroin Coup we viewed the plan to create a "war on drugs" as a plan to change the location point from which illegal drugs would be transported into the United States. We called it "changing the middleman." When did this plan originate? Who was coordinating it?

Gearing up for war on French narcotics, propaganda.

There was a drug bust in New York City in 1961 that nobody heard of until a book came out in 1969, which was developed into "The French Connection," the movie which swept the Academy Awards in April 1972. Brahman-bred author Robin Moore dug this story out of the archives just in time for Nixon to begin his war against French heroin refiners. Was that just a fluke, or could Moore, with contacts in Special Forces since the days it was still part of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), have known that this story was about to become big news?

Who Was Robin Moore?

Robin Moore, author

 
Robert Lowell "Robin" Moore, Jr., born in Boston in 1925, but grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the heart of transcendentalism. His mother, Eleanor Turner Moore, was a devoted volunteer at the Thoreau Society, while raising four children--Robin, his sister Marcia, and brothers William and  John. Robert L. Moore Sr.'s mother was Mrs. James Lowell Moore, a member of the Newell family. Her father, Rev. Dr. William Newell, had been pastor of the First Parish in Cambridge 1830-68, and her historical tale delivered in 1939 about her family connections to Harvard's literary Lowell family is intriguing, to say the least.

Their neighbors in Concord included local physician, Edward Waldo Emerson, son of Thoreau's best friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dr. Emerson's sister, Mrs. William Hathaway Forbes, had named one son, Edward Waldo Forbes, for her brother. Another son, Ralph Emerson Forbes married Elise Cabot, and their daughter Ruth Forbes grew up to be the mother of Michael Paine. 

 

It was Michael's wife, Ruth Hyde Paine, who befriended Marina Oswald in Dallas, possibly at the request of Michael's employer, Bell Helicopter, which manufactured and sold the invention patented by Michael's stepfather, Arthur M. Young. 

Another son, William Cameron Forbes, "worked as a partner in his grandfather's firm, J.M. Forbes and Co., after 1899 and was appointed by President Roosevelt in 1904 to the Philippine Commission, where he held several administrative posts and then served as governor-general of the islands, 1909-1913. He also served as the ambassador to Japan in 1931-1932 and led an economic mission to East Asia in 1935." In 1927 his name was tossed around briefly as a potential  Republican candidate for President, most likely by those at Harvard who would have liked to have one of their own in a position of power.

Robin Moore enlisted in 1944 and served in the Army Air Corps as a nose-gunner on a B-17 bomber during WWII. After the war he went to Harvard, graduating in 1949. Only eight years out of college, in 1957, he was able to purchase a 2,000-acre estate at the eastern end of Jamaica, a large chunk of which he donated to the government for a public beach. Near Port Antonio, his Blue Lagoon estate was almost 100 kilometers east of where British spy Ian Fleming was writing his tales of James Bond.

Jack Youngblood

Moore's first book (The Devil To Pay - The True Story of an American Soldier of Fortune in Castro's Revolution), was co-authored with mercenary Walter A. "Jack" Youngblood, and came out in 1961, at least four years after Moore bought his tropical island retreat. Thus the money did not come from book sales, nor from inheritance from his parents who were both still living at the time. 

 

Dick Russell wrote in the Village Voice in 1976 that the same  Youngblood whose story Moore told in 1959 was believed by James Earl Ray's attorney, Robert I. Livingston, to have been a contract assassin who worked with a man James Earl Ray claimed had set him up -- "a Latino gunrunner he'd known only as 'Raoul'," who looked very much like a man called "Frenchy," one of the tramps arrested in Dealy Plaza in 1963. Frenchy is believed by many researchers to have been a Texan named Charles Rogers from Houston, who was a first cousin of Charles Harrelson. (See The Man on the Grassy Knoll by John R. Craig and Philip A. Rogers for more on their family backgrounds and possible relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald.)

 
According to the Hal Boyle column (see clipping to left, above), Robin Moore told him he "ran a bar call 'The Teahouse of the Blue Lagoon'." If true, judging from an old postcard by that title showing a photo of an isolated bar, Moore would not have made much money at it unless.... Perhaps the "teahouse" was a code word for something else? Possibly a warehouse for weapons sales, approachable by boat.

The CIA once checked into using the bar and other parts of Moore's property as a staging area, based on a report from Jack Reed, who went to Jamaica in 1964 and spoke at length with Moore. Whether or not they worked out a deal is unknown, but their meeting occurred at approximately the same time Paul Davis tells us Robin "went back to school,"  according to his article in Military History:

At age 37 Moore graduated from the U.S. Army’s airborne school and the Special Warfare Center – the first and only writer to do so. He arrived in Vietnam on January 6, 1964 and spent six months with the Green Berets.

At the end of that Special Forces training mission, Moore returned to Blue Lagoon and wrote The Green Berets: The Amazing Story of the U. S. Army's Elite Special Forces Unit. It even had a catchy, nauseating tune to go along with it--Balad of the Green Beret.

Bahamian Tax Evaders
In 1973 Robin Moore, with two failed marriages already under his belt, married Mary Olga Troshkin, whom he met at a party given by his friend, G. Huntington Hartford II--the grocery heir who developed Paradise Island and its casino in the Bahamas. Hartford acquired the island in 1960 from the notorious Swedish Nazi, Axel Wenner- Gren, in 1962 entertained a defeated Richard Nixon there, and sold it to Resorts International in 1966. The following year Nixon attended the casino's gala opening in December. 

Wealthy Americans were being encouraged to set up secret bank accounts in these islands then being developed as tourist meccas, where money dropped in the casinos could be siphoned off by organized criminals, all in the guise of jet-setters' fun in the sun. Mitchell WerBell III, for example, was helping promote a group calling itself "Friends of Abaco," with help from John Patrick Muldoon, Michael "Moses Olitsky" Oliver, and Walter Josef "Walt" Mackem. Abaco was a Bahamian island that wanted to stay under the wing of the British monarchy. 

These tax evaders and gamblers not surprisingly had numerous connections to Mafia gunrunners, such as Jack Ruby, and all were in some way linked to ongoing intelligence operations previously mentioned with reference to Mitchell WerBell and the B.R. Fox company, allegedly created by Jimmy Hoffa's favorite wiretapper, Bernard Spindel. We will return to this scene in the future.

Sheraton Hotels and ITT
While Robin was whiling his time away with assassins and tax evaders, his father had been working with his partner Ernest Flagg Henderson II in negotiating a sale of their Sheraton Hotel Corporation to ITT, finally consummated in 1968. The elder Moore and Henderson had been roommates at Harvard before graduation in 1918. Moore then trained as a pilot in the Army Air Corps, while Henderson joined up as a pilot in the Navy. Upon release in 1920, both returned to study at MIT before entering business together. When Robin's father died in 1986, the following tribute was paid to him by the Associated Press:

Moore, who served as an ambulance driver and aviator in World War I, turned down a commission in the Army Air Force for World War II, telling the government he could be of more help working with William [Powell] Lear in development of the wire audio recorder - a predecessor to the tape recorder - and Radio Direction Finder, a navigational device. The RDF conceived and manufactured by Moore and Lear soon became standard equipment on all U.S. military aircraft. 

In 1944, having resumed his relationship with Henderson [through Atlantic Securities and Standard Investing Corporation], the two bought Boston's Copley Plaza hotel, made it their flagship, and continued building the Sheraton chain. In 1948, they merged with U.S. Realty and Improvement Corp., and the companies became Sheraton Corp. of America. In 1967, Moore and Henderson began negotiations with International Telephone and Telegraph Corp., which bought Sheraton in 1968. Henderson died during the negotiation period.

But ITT rose again to create another scandal during the Republican convention in San Diego in 1972. Jack Anderson printed a memo allegedly written by ITT's lobbyist Dita Beard.