MI6 agent Ian Fleming understood the value of strategic materials to governments. That's why you find them in most of his book titles. At first there was gold, then diamonds. Octopussy was a cutesy term he invented to throw all the valued resources in the pot, along with what Epstein later lived to tell us was one of the most valuable of all.
This is not an attempt to revise history. Rather it is a new look at my old research in light of what we have learned in retrospect.
Sensing the End of the Gold Standard
Even
before meeting Eisenhower, Robert B. Anderson had been
selected by President Truman during the closing days of WWII to deal with a national
security matter--how to use gold confiscated from war enemies to shore up U.S. gold reserves underlying the
Bretton Woods Agreement.
Sterling Seagrave wrote in 2008, describing those earlier events:
Stimson’s special assistants on this topic were his deputies John J.
McCloy and Robert [A.] Lovett, and consultant Robert B. Anderson, all clever
men with outstanding careers in public service and banking. McCloy later
became head of the World Bank, Lovett secretary of Defense, Anderson
secretary of the Treasury. Their solution was to set up what is
informally called the Black Eagle Trust. The idea was first discussed with
America’s allies in secret during July 1944, when forty-four nations met
at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the postwar world economy.
(This was confirmed, in documents we obtained, by a number of high-level
sources, including a CIA officer based in Manila, and former CIA Deputy
Director Ray Cline, who knew of Santy’s recoveries in 1945. As recently
as the 1990s, Cline continued to be involved in attempts to control
Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.)
After briefing President Truman and others in Washington, including
McCloy, Lovett, and Stimson, Captain [Edward G.] Lansdale returned to Tokyo in
November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then
accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila, where
they set out for a tour of the vaults Santy already had opened. In them,
we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down "row after row of
gold bars stacked two meters tall." From what they saw, it was evident
that over a period of 50 years (1895-1945) Japan had looted many
billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. A far longer period
than Germany had to loot Europe. Over five decades, Japan had looted
billions of dollars’ worth of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other
treasure, from all over East and Southeast Asia. Much of this had
reached Japan by sea, or overland from China through Korea. What was
seen by Anderson and MacArthur was only some of the gold that had not
reached Japan after 1943, when the US submarine blockade of the Home
Islands became effective. From this it is obvious that what was looted
by Japan on the Asian mainland from 1895-1943 had reached Japan and been
tucked away there in what the US Army statement called "undeclared
caches of these treasures ... known to exist."
Far from being bankrupted by the war, Japan had been greatly
enriched, and -- thanks to Washington’s intervention -- used this
treasure to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, while its victims
struggled on for decades.
The gold recovered in the Philippines was not put in Fort Knox to
benefit American citizens. There has been no audit of Ft. Knox since
1950.
According to Ray Cline and others, between 1945 and 1947 the gold
bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was discreetly moved by ship to
176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. The gold was trucked to
warehouses at the U.S. Navy base in Subic Bay, or the U.S. Air Force
base at Clark Field.
Preference went to the U.S. Navy because of the weight of the
bullion. Secrecy was vital. If the recovery of a huge mass of stolen
gold became known, the market price of gold would plummet, and thousands
of people would come forward to claim it, and Washington would be
bogged down resolving ownership.
The secrecy surrounding these recoveries was total. Robert Anderson
and CIA agent Paul Helliwell traveled all over the planet, setting up
these black gold accounts, providing money for political action funds
throughout the non-communist world. In 1953, to reward him, President
Eisenhower nominated Anderson to a Cabinet post as secretary of the
Navy. The following year he rose to deputy secretary of Defense. During
the second Eisenhower Administration, he became secretary of the
Treasury, serving from 1957 to 1961. After that, Anderson resumed
private life, but remained intimately involved with the CIA’s worldwide
network of "black banks," set up by Paul Helliwell. Eventually, this led
to Anderson being involved in the scandal of BCCI, the Bank of Credit
and Commerce International, a Pakistani bank with CIA ties.
Robert B. Anderson and Greenwich
Anderson
had resigned from Ike's defense department in 1955 to take a job with
Thayer Lindsley of the Canadian gold mining company called
Ventures, Limited.
Based in New York, Anderson commuted from his new home at No. 1, Deer
Park Court in Greenwich, Connecticut--about a mile and a half from
Prescott Bush's residence--as marked on our
Greenwich map made for another post at this blog.
During this interim period between government work,
Anderson maintained his Texas oil background, accepting a
distinguished-service award in the fall of 1956 from
Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, where the speakers at the meeting talked about the big challenge ahead in
the oil industry of finding enough domestic oil to meet the country's
demand.
Less than a year after that award, President Eisenhower summoned Anderson back to Washington (June 1957) to replace George Humphrey as
Secretary of Treasury, an appointment
Senator Prescott Bush applauded.
After Anderson left the Treasury Department, however, rather than going back to
Texas, or running for President, as Ike had had wanted him to do, he instead returned to his adopted home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Many years later, when his wife, Ollie
Mae, died in May 1987, her address was given as 682 Lake Avenue, still
in Greenwich.
Anderson served on the board of the State National Bank of
Connecticut during the 1960s as a
director alongside G.H. (Herbie) Walker, Jr. and Samuel Pryor. He was also on the 12-man Board of
Dresser Industries,
alongside Texas governor Allan Shivers, Norman Chandler of the
L.A.
Times, Lewis MacNaughton (partner of geologist Everett DeGolyer), and
Neil Mallon. In 1964, however, Anderson supported his old friend
Lyndon Johnson
for re-election instead of Bush's favored Goldwater.
Herbie Walker, an uncle of George H. W. "Poppy" Bush, was the man who raised money from investors for his nephew's first oil company in the West Texas oil field in the early 1950's. Uncle
Herbie, Dorothy Walker Bush's brother, had risen to the head of the
Walker family following the death of Bert Walker in 1953.
G. H. Walker was the first president of
W.A. Harriman & Co.
in New York appointed by the young Harriman boys when it opened in 1920, long
before the investment bank merged with Brown Brothers in 1931.Had the elder Walker chosen his grandson, "Poppy" Bush, to be David K.E. Bruce's
protégé? Aviation Corporation (AVCO), where
Bruce had been president, was also a creation of W. Averell Harriman. When Bruce then left AVCO in 1929 and returned to the foreign service, it was at the behest of Prescott Bush's
partner at Brown Brothers Harriman--W. Averell Harriman. As I have
stated before:
It is Prescott’s
entry into partnership in the newly created investment bank of Brown Brothers
Harriman (BBH), which best explains how his sons and grandsons attained their
access to capital. BBH
began doing
business in 1931, as a result of a merger between the old,
well-established
Brown Brothers & Co. and W.A. Harriman & Co., a deal put
together by Prescott Bush's father-in-law on behalf of the sons of
railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman, who had been Prescott's Skull and Bones
brothers while they were all at Yale during the years just prior to WWI.
Renaissance and Aeneas--1993
The
same year
Renaissance Technologies made an investment in a company that
modified an invention made for the medical industry for use petroleum
exploration it hired
Robert Mercer and others from IBM
who had long been studying speech recognition and machine translation,
"computational linguistics." RenTec partnered with Aeneas Venture Corp.,
which five years earlier had poured money into Harken Energy, in the
purchase in 1993 of Numar, a
Pennsylvania corporation which developed medical technology for use in the oil industry (see inset right).
Four years later, Numar would be acquired by Halliburton, whose chief executive, Dick Cheney, handled the deal for the
Dallas-based corporation
, whose other executives--Anne Armstrong and lawyers at John Connally's
Vinson & Elkins--had implemented the terms. Connally and
Armstrong had been part of the Nixon administration, with Armstrong and
Cheney surviving into Gerald Ford's presidency (1974-76), during the
same time Bush 41 was Director of the CIA.
Numar received Halliburton stock valued at $472 million in exchange for its own stock, making the purchase price
$360 million. According to
Bloomberg:
In September 1997, NUMAR Corporation was acquired by Halliburton
Company, through the merger of a subsidiary of Halliburton with and into
NUMAR. Previously, NUMAR Corporation was engaged in the design,
manufacture, and marketing of a patented, proprietary well logging
device, used in medical diagnostic imaging devices, to evaluate
subsurface rock formations in newly-drilled oil and gas wells.
Three
years after the Halliburton deal, Cheney was elected vice president
under George W. Bush (43), who had been the primary beneficiary of the
Aeneas Venture Corporation's 1988 Harken transaction.
 |
| George W. Bush was a director of Harken with Alan Quasha, Mikel Faulkner, and Michael Eisenson before 1993. |
Though Renaissance Technologies had not
been involved in the 1988 Bush transaction, there were certain aspects
surrounding an investment Simons' former company, Monemetrics, had made
years earlier that rang a reminiscent bell. Knowing that
Harvard-educated Alan G. Quasha had purchased Harken stock for
Quadrant Capital Corp.
by using entities in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, held in trust by
his mother, Phyllis Grant Quasha, an Australian citizen, I began to
wonder whether
Ivory Limited, set up in the British Virgin Islands, a limited investor in a 1981 partnership between Simons'
Monemetrics Corp. and
Doral Industries
(headed by Norman Melnick). It appeared that Melnick wanted to buy the
Magic Marker trademark, a bankruptcy asset of his former employer, and.
According to Bloomberg's
cache: "He was an early adopter of outsourcing manufacturing to China."
Alan
Quasha is said to have created Quadrant Management in 1988, the same
year he went to work for Compagnie Financière Richemont SA., but he
admitted in an
interview
that he began doing "restructurings" as early as 1979. Was Doral
Industries, Simons' partnership with Norman Melnick, one of those
restructurings which brought in capital from his father's law firm?
Did Melnick and Simons obtain the needed capital, by chance, from a client of Alan Quasha's father,
attorney William Quasha, who was still practicing law in Manila in 1981? Could the capital infusion from the secret Ivory Ltd. account in the British Virgin Islands have been arranged by Quasha Ancheta Pena & Nolasco, whose website proclaims the firm was "originally founded in 1946 ... as William H. Quasha and Associates." Had Simons crossed paths while he was at Harvard with Alan Quasha? Those are questions for other researchers to answer.
The Quasha Family
Nevertheless,
those questions only led us to seek answers to other inquiries,
concerning how Renaissance Technologies may have discovered the
opportunity to join with Aeneas in 1993. Our first step was to learn
more about the Quasha family. The two sons, Alan Grant Quasha and Wayne
Quasha, attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where Wayne
was on the baseball team and was editor of the
Hill News student paper in the mid 1960s. Alan played tennis at the Hill School in 1968, and at Harvard he would be on the
squash team in 1972. He spent most of the
1970s at Harvard, obtaining an
MBA from Harvard Business School while graduating later from Harvard Law School.
In
1976 Alan was working as an associate with the New York law firm of
Davis, Polk & Wardwell when he joined New York's Union Club. He
did not move back to his father's law firm--then known as Quasha,
Asperilla, Zafra, Tavag & Ancheta--with offices in Manila and
Bangkok, Thailand. Instead, in 1977 he married
Diana Vinade Ronan, a debutante daughter of a powerful businessman with close connections to the Rockefeller family.
Dr.
William J. Ronan was chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey and a "senior adviser to the Rockefeller family." He was former
dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration at New York
University, having been affiliated with that school since as early as
1939, the year he
married Ellen Vinade.
He had also been chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for a time.
Alan Quasha completed an advanced degree in taxation in
1980 at the NYU Law School, where his father-in-law was dean. He was
then primed to start his career, while getting one more advanced law
degree from Harvard. That was the year Ted Koppel reminded us every
night how many days Americans seized by students in Teheran had been
held as hostages by Ayatollah Khomeini, while
President Jimmy Carter holed up in the White House, refusing to campaign
while the hostages were not free. Republicans were hopeful about
reclaiming the presidency, and seven of them actively campaigned. After
George H. W. Bush's withdrawal in late May, Ronald Reagan named him as
his running mate. But still Carter, competing in Democratic primaries
against Ted Kennedy and Jerry Brown, did not campaign.
Gasoline
prices skyrocketed, and there were long lines at the pumps. Anger was
rife, and conspiracies were suspected, especially after the attempted
April rescue mission (Operation Eagle Claw) failed. Wayne Madsen in
2015, analyzing declassified documents,
stated the failure of the mission occurred because two Republican
candidates were operating two separate spy operations, using "moles
within the National Security Council," and passing stolen classified
intelligence to Richard H. Allen, William Casey, Ed Meese, or Judge
William Clark. Four days before the mission,
Miles Copeland,
an old Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt CIA hand, leaked news of the mission in
the Washington Times. Madsen called these leaks of highly classified
documents and other acts "high-level treason ... not a mere policy
difference," against the United States.
Harken
The
Harken founders
were account executives for the investment banking firm of White Weld
& Co., a brokerage firm destined to merge with G. H. Walker
& Co. in 1974, thus removing the Walker name from the securities
industry. In April 1978 White, Weld Credit Suisse would be snatched up
by Merrill, Lynch, and its name would also disappear from history. Harry
L. Mulligan and Phil Kendrick, Jr.--whose names when combined spelled
Harken--first
set up this company in California in 1973 before relocating to Texas.
Phil Jr.'s father was an oilman in Abilene, Texas, and Phil Jr.
graduated in 1950 from the University of Texas. After he sold his
father's oil company a decade later, he moved to New York to work for
White, Weld & Co.,
 |
| Reprint of Jack Z. Smith Harken story |
Mulligan, born in 1930, was a graduate of the Jesuit
Xavier High School and Fordham University in New York. Having grown up
in Forest Hills, New York, in 1967 he worked in New Haven, Connecticut,
while residing in Woodbridge.
Kendrick and Mulligan
formed Harken in Pasadena, California in July 1973 while its founders
were still working for White, Weld. At that same time they had set up a
number of limited partnerships designated K&M Exploration. The
partnerships were drafted at 555 South Flower Street in the office of
Latham & Watkins, the law firm which represented the Richfield
Oil Company in Los Angeles, which had its headquarters in the same
building.
White, Weld & Co.,
which handled securities matters for Richfield, was then in the process
of absorbing G.H. Walker & Co., removing the latter's name from
its letterhead in November 1974, when the merger with the investment
bank founded by Bush 41's grandfather was concluded.
 |
| Uncle Herbie |
Nevertheless, G. H. Walker, Jr. (Bush's Uncle Herbie)
became a director following that merger, while his son, Bush's first
cousin,
G.H. Walker III
(called Bert, like his grandfather), was named senior vice president,
director for the new securities firm. That position lasted only until
the end of 1975, when Bert left the merged firm to work for Stifel,
Nicholaus & Co. Bert Walker Sr. had died in 1956, followed by
Herbie Walker in 1977.
At first Kendrick worked from his home in Pasadena, while his partner
Harry Mulligan, Jr.
worked in New Haven. They moved to Abilene a year later, from which
they operated Harken for five years, drilling more than 300 wells,
primarily in Texas and Oklahoma. Kendrick spent those years watching
Australia, he
told David Armstrong, in the hope he could find an opportunity to explore for oil there.
It
was a year of upheaval on many fronts--especially political and
financial. In 1973 George Bush 41 was at the Republican National
Committee, CREEP having completed its mission of reelecting Nixon. Bush
held Richard Nixon's nervous hand, finally telling Nixon when it was
time to resign, and likely arranged for the pardon by President Gerald
Ford in order to ensure that Nixon would keep quiet about the Watergate
burglary and the "plumbers." 1974 was the same year Henrik Kruger wrote
that the "
heroin coup"
was complete. And it was also the year most of the large investment
banks (partnerships with accountability) began to consolidate their
portfolios and go public, thus removing themselves from responsibility
for their bad decisions.
Robert Mercer's Black-box, Computer-Driven Algorithms
1986
the Chicago Tribune published a story which indicated that IBM was a
decade away from technology that would allow one computer to talk to
another.
Robert Mercer,
manager of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Center in Yorktown Heights, New
York's real time speech recognition department, was quoted.
A
West Texan by birth, I myself have driven through Abilene dozens of
times in my life. It is a dusty Texas city lying at the point of
intersection between two lines:
- one line between Lubbock and Waco and
- a second between Midland and Fort Worth.
Between
that hub and the perimeter, formed by connecting the outer cities that
compose the X, lies little but mesquite trees and an occasional
tumbleweed. Mikel Faulkner, while attending the sectarian Church of
Christ college (Abilene Christian College), had met and become engaged in 1970 to a Midland, Texas,
girl named Sandra Potter, daughter of Wayne Potter, as announced in his hometown newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky.
Whether
members of the Potter family had ever crossed paths with the Bush
family in Midland is not known, although we do know that Faulkner would
likely have been working on his MBA at Harvard at about the same time as
George W. Bush, who received his degree in 1975, seven years after his Yale undergraduate degree was awarded.
However,
at the time Dubya purchased his Texas Rangers baseball team stock in
the fall of 1989, he was not only acting as an energy consultant for Harken, but
he was its largest shareholder. The baseball syndicate buyers also
included Richard E. Rainwater of Fort Worth and William O. DeWitt Jr. of Cincinnati. Rainwater, named as a partner with Bass Enterprises and Sid Bass in television station KFDA as early as 1976, had handled Bass brothers' stock portfolio while he was at Goldman Sachs, and was still advising the Basses until 1986. The Bass brothers' mother was the late Sid Richardson's sister and only legal heir.
It was therefore likely that Bush brought in Alan Quasha to buy into Harken in 1981-82. Mikel Dean Faulkner had been a 1971 magna cum laude graduate of Abilene Christian College in Harken-founder Kendrick's hometown, had
studied mathematics there before serving in the Navy's nuclear power
program which trained officers to operate nuclear submarines. Either
Kendrick or someone else recruited him in 1981 to become Harken's president to run the company which was then in the process of being sold to some individuals Kendrick had met while drilling for oil in Australia.
After creating Tesoro, West had grown rapidly and by November 1973 was negotiating with an "unnamed Arab potentate"
to drill on Arab soil. In those eleven years he had already moved his
drilling equipment into Alaska, Trinidad and Indonesia. By the next
year, he was giving speeches against U.S. government policy under President Gerald Ford.
Under Faulkner's helm a few years later Harken bought a corporation founded by another accountant from Abilene, G. Randy Nicholson, a trustee of Faulkner's alma mater Abilene Christian College since 1981. Nicholson had created E-Z Serve gas stations
and convenience stores based upon a technology he invented for gas
pumps installed with credit card readers which transmitted information
to a computer database, thus avoiding the need for human interaction.
Harken soon increased its revenue by 9600%! In 1990 Donald M. Smith exclaimed [in the
National Petroleum News (Jan 1990 v82 n1), p42] that Harken's:
financial growth has been nothing short of spectacular--from a
few million dollars in annual sales in 1986 to gross revenues expected
to be in the $1-billion range this year.
One sign of Harken's
growing eminence occurred on August 30 when the company's stock began
trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol HEC.... Overall,
the company's financial performance has been startling. In 1986, Harken
Oil & Gas, Inc. (the name was changed to Harken Energy Corp. on
Jan. 1, 1989 to reflect its broader industry profile) had total
revenues of only $4.4-million. In 1987, following the acquisition of E-Z
Serve in December 1986, the company's revenues jumped an astonishing
9,600% to $421-million....
As
described in the company's own financial pronouncements, Harken
"acquires, restructures and manages energy assets for itself, other
energy companies and financial institutions." As such, the company's
growth strategy differs somewhat from many other oil companies in that
the principal building blocks of its growth, so far at least, have been
through acquisitions and not based on internal expansion.
Also
rather unique among the larger Sunbelt-based independents is the fact
that Harken's top two officers, Mikel D. Faulkner, president and CEO,
and Alan G. Quasha, chairman, have financial and legal rather than
operational oil company backgrounds. Faulkner, 40, is a certified public
accountant with a master's degree in business administration [Though
his undergrad degree was in mathematics and physics]. Quasha,
also 40, is a New York attorney and specialist in corporate
reorganizations....
Faulkner, a Church of Christ deacon known for both his
straightforward honesty and shrewdness, joined Harken from Fort
Worth-based American Quasar Petroleum (now Wolverine Exploration Co.)
where he was controller. Prior to that he was with the Arthur Anderson
& Co. accounting firm in Dallas for several years.
Quasha,
a partner in the law firm of Quasha, Wessely & Schneider, New
York, is also chairman of Frontier Holding Inc. and played a big role in
restructuring Denver-based Frontier Oil and Refining Co. several years
back [NPN--Jan. '88, p15].
Faulkner signed on at Harken in 1981
and became chief executive in 1982 following a management shakeup. With
the company facing bankruptcy, he laid off 90 of its 100 employees, sold
25% of the company's oil field assets for $5-million and then used that
sum to negotiate new terms with creditors. In 1982, Harken had a debt
load of $20-million; in 1983, it was debt-free....
In all,
Harken has scooped up about a dozen companies since 1983, acquiring
both petroleum marketing firms and oil and gas properties and boosting
its $20-million 1983 asset base fourteen-fold by midyear 1989....
Another
acquisition, that of Spectrum 7 Energy Corp. in 1986, brought George W.
Bush Jr., the president's son, on board as a director....
Donald Smith's analysis in 1990 ignored the fact that a total of 30% of Harken Energy stock, valued at $28 million, as Harvard had only recently learned from SEC filings, according to the May 1991 Harvard Crimson, was held by the Harvard endowment.That fact, however, would
quickly become a matter of concern since there was an apparent conflict of
interest because two managers of Harvard-affiliated entity
Aeneas also had personal investments in Harken--10,000 shares each held
by Michael R. Eisenson and Donald D. Beane. The Crimson repeatedly reported its concern, while Harvard itself denied that the investment was improper.
SEC
documents which revealed the conflict of interest were not filed until
eight months after George W. Bush (later President Bush 43) sold 66% of
his Harken stock for $848,560. That was the source of the money with
which he repaid loans created when he bought his share of the Texas
Rangers baseball team. He had sold just in the nick of time, only "two
months before the corporation announced a $23 million loss," as the
Crimson reported in 2002.
Harvard had come under a great deal of scrutiny before that 2002 report
because of research that Catherine Austin Fitts was doing following the
collapse of Enron in 2001, which occurred only one month after the 9/11
debacle. Working with Fitts, I had written up research that appeared in
2002 called "Follow the Yellow Brick Road: From Harvard to Enron" to assist her in determining who had caused her own company, Hamilton Securities Group, to tank in 1996.
Although most of our research turned on Pug Winokur's career, Mike Eisenson
was also of interest because he was one of two men who told Fitts in
1990 that 20% of the equity in Hamilton, a company initially founded to
give contract advice to Pug Winokur's company, NHP, Inc.
(formerly National Housing Partnership), in which Harvard also had a
large investment, would be owned by NHP. Fitts, feeling extortion was at
play, refused to agree to the kickback scheme and was consequently
advised by Eisenson that the verbal contract she had made with Winokur
would be abrogated. Fitts, however, believing Hamilton could still offer
a valuable service without NHP's consulting contract, proceeded to set
up her company without Harvard's participation.
Two
years prior to this discussion, Winokur had been at DynCorp, but in 1995
joined the board of Harvard Management Corporation, the board which oversaw Harvard's overall endowment. In the late summer of 1995 NHP
completed its IPO, repaying loans to venture capital entities affiliated
with Harvard, such as Demeter and Capricorn.
My main
contribution to Fitts' project was in offering an historical perspective concerning what I
knew about Harvard's original founding and the investments made by
earlier capitalists whose fortunes had been made in "the China trade,"
or what I felt was a euphemism for the drug trade of the 1840's. That
article was posted to the internet by a friend of an acquaintance, and
its now-dead links were cited and referred to as a "far more
controversial take," by a Harvard Watch group.
But the work we did attempting to understand how the money worked did
wake people up and gain attention about how incestuous tax-exempt
entities really are.
In 1987 American Quasar partnered with Wolverine Exploration in an exchange of warrants, shortly before Wolverine became Harken. Then, in 1988 members of a syndicate investing in Harken Oil and Gas did not mention Quasha by name, nor did it report that a Harvard investment vehicle, Aeneas
Venture Corp., owned 22% of Harken. Possibly attempting to throw the public offtrack, Malcolm
Berko reported in 1989 that "George Sporos
(no relation to 'Sporos' Agnew), a renowned, astute and shrewd money
manager," also owned 22% of the stock in Harken. Another large owner was
then the Union Bank of Switzerland, whose stock put the aggregate
ownership of Aeneas and UBS and Bush at more than 50%. George Soros, also a shrewd and savvy money manager, was accurately identified in a Jack Z. Smith piece in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, not Sporos. So much for Berko's expertise!
In October 1991, the last year of George H.W. Bush's presidential term, Horn & Hardart (which owned the now dormant Automat) was taken over by North American Resources (NAR Group Limited), which
included members of the Quasha family and a Swiss financial firm, changing the name to Hanover Direct, a catalog retailing business with
headquarters in New Jersey. The Swiss firm was Richemont
Finance S.A. ("Richemont"), a Luxembourg company, owning about 49% of
Hanover's common stock. Richemont
was a wholly owned subsidiary of Compagnie Financiere Richemont, A.G., a
Swiss public company engaged in luxury goods, tobacco and other
business on behalf of its owner South African citizen Anton Rupert,
who died in 2006. His son Johann Peter Rupert also worked in the same
companies. The offshore havens were used to hide their South African
ownership because of global embargoes against the apartheid government.
NAR Group was also affiliated with Intercontinental Mining & Resources
Incorporated, to which it had executed a subordinated $10 million
promissory note in 1996. Since Hanover owned both NAR and IMR, the note
was surrendered to and cancelled by Hanover. Could that takeover have been their way of paying off Bush's campaign debt and getting a tax deduction at the same time?
By the time of the midterm elections during Bill Clinton's first term (1994) Harken's shareholders were reported to include the following:
- Renaissance Technologies.
- Aeneas Venture Partners, an entity affiliated with capital managed by a Harvard University endowment fund. According to a 1994 SEC filing Aeneas was holding 25,000 shares of Common Stock subject to stock options transferred to it by Michael R. Eisenson, a Director of Harken, effective March 1, 1991.
- Aeneas Venture Partners also held as trustee or nominee another 468,367 shares of Common Stock owned beneficially by the Harvard Master Trust [the pension plan for Harvard University]. Aeneas has no investment or voting power over these shares.
- Aeneas Venture Partners held another 234,204 shares of Common Stock owned beneficially by the Harvard Yenching Institute. Aeneas has no investment or voting power over these shares.
- Aeneas Venture Partners 321,679 shares of Common Stock owned beneficially by Phemus Corporation, all of which parties are affiliates of Aeneas.
 |
| MRI technology (Numar) developed for oil industry. |
Another 1994 investor was
Abdullah Taha Bakhsh,
a one-time member of the board of Investcorp and director of the Zakat
(Tax) Department at the Saudi Ministry of Finance, and whose chief
banker was
Khalid bin Mahfouz of BCCI. As stated at the last link by Lucy Komisar:
"BCCI was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a dirty offshore
bank that then-president Ronald Reagan’s Central Intelligence Agency
used to run guns to Hussein, finance Osama bin Laden, move money in the
illegal Iran-Contra operation and carry out other “agency” black ops.
The Bushes also benefited privately; one of the bank’s largest Saudi
investors helped bail out George W. Bush’s troubled oil investments."
This was the money that financed the Tea Party's wins with Newt Gingrich heading the list in 1994. They were just gearing up to oppose Clinton in his bid for a second term, but would still be around to go against Al Gore in 2000 by financing Dubya Bush, or Shrub, as Molly Ivins referred to him.
Role of George W. Bush
Russ Baker in his book, Family of Secrets,
also explored the provenance of the funds that made their way into
Harken. George Walker Bush joined the Harken board in September 1986,
the same time Harken purchased Spectrum 7 Energy, a William DeWitt, Jr.
and Mercer Reynolds company which merged with Bush's Arbusto Energy two
years earlier. Bush had founded Arbusto in 1978.
A letter submitted by Alan G. Quasha to editors of The Nation in 2007
appears to agree with Baker's evaluation that he understood very
little. Quasha stated in part about various allegations made in Family of Secrets and and article that appeared in The Nation, called “Hillary’s Mystery Money Men”:
"The
insinuations against Harken Energy are false. When I was nonexecutive
chairman, Harken’s major shareholders were George Soros, Harvard
University and a joint venture I headed; none had ties with “BCCI,”
“Saudi frontmen,” “a foreign dictator” or “figures with intelligence
ties.”
Baker and Adam Federman, who authored the Hillary article, vigorously rebutted Quasha's attack on their credibility.
Sometimes it just helps to zoom out a little to see the bigger picture.
"Saudi Arabia: Creation of the Petrodollar" has been in draft form
for several years, being added to and edited as time permitted. Please
refer to other articles in my Quixotic Joust blog which are linked
above, including the following:
Being the House Player at the Casino.
Who is Robert Mercer Really?
Remembering the Harken Money.
Balance
in the Middle East could no longer be achieved on a binary scale. With
King Faisal, purportedly speaking not only for Saudi Arabia, but for all
six OPEC countries bound by the terms of the 1971 Persian Gulf Agreement,
the scale was almost impossible to manipulate, especially with Israel
re-entering the fray--threatening to boycott U.S. oil companies if the
U.S. government conceded to Faisal's additional demand that Israel
"return Arab land it had been occupying since 1967."
