Red Flags and False Flags

Blog readers have lives separate and apart from the blog writer, leading the readers free simply to wonder only occasionally what is taking so long for the blog to get to the point. This blogger does have a present life, which sometimes intrudes into the musings of past events being researched. Even more significant, however, is the fact that researching those past events often diverts the research into areas the blogger never quite expected it to go. Here's a brief recap:

• After working for a couple of months on the study of the family of Ruth Hyde Paine for a presentation at the JFK Assassination Conference in Arlington last year, I started a new project tagged "Wayne January's Tale about a Tail Number." The goal was to determine what I could about whether someone was trying to help Lee H. Oswald and his friend Judyth Vary Baker escape to Cozumel, Mexico on the afternoon of November 22, 1963.
• After publishing Part I of the research, a reader graciously mailed me a package containing the history of the airplane that Wayne January wrote about. It was my analysis of tail Number N-17888's title which led me to look into the history of NAvion Aircraft, a defense plant built at the site of the federal government old North American Aviation field. After WWII ended, the factory came under the ownership of "Texas Engineering and Manufacturing Company, known by its acronym, TEMCO, a company which by 1947 was making B-25 bombers for South American countries."
• The years between WWII and the Korean War were years that saw contests taking place within large airplane-building corporations as well as single-engine airplane manufacturing. TEMCO was converted into a mega-conglomerate by D. Harold Byrd, working with James Ling, who created Ling-Temco-Vought on the original site of North American Aviation. This was the same company which had a subsidiary which employed the notorious Malcolm Everett (Mac) Wallace, alleged to have been the real shooter who fired from the Texas School Book Depository, effectively framing Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin of JFK.
• Thus, I began a new line of research, hoping to find a past link between D. Harold Byrd and Mac Wallace. The next segment, "As the Byrd Flies...," set out the research into D. H. Byrd's ancestry, which coincidentally revealed his mother's family's close ties to Vice President John Nance Garner. The next segment about "Admiral Richard Byrd, Jr." connected the true family links, much more distant than first cousins, as D. H. had often implied.
• The next segment of our research delved into stories about another plane, a "Comanche-type aircraft" boarded by "three men in suits" just over an hour after President Kennedy had been gunned down. From what Merrit Goble, who ran the fixed-wing operation, TexAir, at Red Bird told Louis, Gaudin, the Air Traffic Control Specialist for the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA)--added to other revelations made to investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker-- conclusions have been made that this plane was flown by Barry Seal, who flew one actual assassin from Red Bird field to Love Field that day. 
• I was even more intrigued, however, by the fact that Lyndon Johnson's brother-in-law, Birge D. Alexander, "an engineer-executive" at FAA in Fort Worth, according to Life magazine's profile of the new president in August 1964, was promoted to Area Manager for the Southwest Region of the F.A.A., announced in July 1965 in the Amarillo Globe-Times.

I published these last three segments in April, four months ago, but I have continued to try to make sense of where I suspected the research was leading, and of how to introduce it. Intriguingly, in my mind it appeared that, rather than pointing more fingers at LBJ, the material seemed to be pointing to someone in the shadows, using President Johnson as a shield to hide his own misdeeds.

In future posts I will publish the research that leads to the conclusion that ties D. H. Byrd's uncles to a particular railroad network which was expanding into Texas in the early 1900's.

As I learned more about this railroad, one name would appear from time to time that raised a red flag to me.

This name declared:  
Here is the money; follow it. 

That name, of course, was G. H. Walker, father of Dorothy Walker. On August 6, 1921, in Kennebunkport, Maine, he became the father-in-law of Prescott Sheldon Bush. He died, however, in 1953, passing many of his banking secrets down to his son, George Herbert Walker, Jr. We will explore some of these details later.