SECRETS OF LOSING A REPUBLIC

From Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump

 

The Jeffrey Epstein files have been the topic at the top of the news cycle for months now, if not years. Sex attracts the public's interest, it seems, long after those following the flow of drugs for weapons have fallen by the wayside. Having following the theme of CIA Drugs for the last nearly 30 years, I've concluded sexual blackmail is simply another component of a conglomerate of power-seeking that also includes controlling weapons, using addictive drugs as the commodity by which to acquire the craved power.

 

Part of the control mechanism within a democratic nation requires that those craving power keep the public distracted, which they do by corporatizing the ownership of professional sports teams, combining that with advertising media and concessions, sponsorships and the like--rolling them all into one category, "entertainment," just another word in today's world for distraction from reality.

 

Although it has been a gradual progression, the loss of independence has been a threat since even before Benjamin Franklin declared the oft-repeated mantra: "A republic, if you can keep it." Ben Franklin, before he was a Founding Father, was a newsman. He was a friend of Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. Even without "social media," they knew how to inform the public about the importance of liberty and independence. They began their fight, not solely against their colonial rulers, but against the biggest corporation of that time--the British East India Company--then known as a joint-stock company, which had a government-granted monopoly on trade.

 

America lost its way when we lost our ability to free and open debate about the issues. Debate that is financed by special interests and paid propagandists with unlimited funds and deep pockets is not independent journalism. It was lost when we began equating national security with secret intelligence agencies during and after World War II. When the CIA budget and spending practices were shielded from the public, and leaking of such secrets became a crime. When Dollar-a-Year men were put into positions of trust within the government and allowed to set up the infrastructure for the Central Intelligence Agency and all the three-letter agencies like the CIA, which are today being protected by those whose names are redacted in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

 

Perhaps it began with the sons of the tycoons in the railroad industry used their inherited funds to invest in the new airline industry at the time of WWI, and then escalated when bankers who managed inherited wealth got into the game in the years between the two wars. It expanded globally when Wall Street's bankers and attorneys accumulated political power and learned how to keep certain financial transactions away from public scrutiny. Democrats like FDR and Harry Truman, excited by the promise of power perhaps, started the ball rolling. One of the first front companies they created is the subject of what follows. 

 

 George A. Doole, Architect of Air America

We found George Doole captaining a Panam World Airways flight in March 1945, listed on a Flight Manifest from Brazil to New York. Doole was a civilian pilot, who later operated deep within the bowels of the civilian aviation intelligence conglomerate known as Air America. 

Click image to enlarge.

Evan Thomas wrote Doole's obituary for Time Magazine, which revealed more about Doole's life than had ever been disclosed while he was alive: 

...At the Chevy Chase Club, a Wasp bastion in a well-to-do Maryland suburb, Doole sometimes liked to while away afternoons playing bridge and back-gammon... Doole lived in one of the most elegant apartment buildings in Washington, the Westchester, but he never invited any guests there, and he refused to give the management a key. ...

Winning a commission in the Army in 1931, Doole learned how to fly airplanes. He later became a pilot for Pan Am, at first flying old Ford Tri-motors on the Guatemala-to-Panama run. Along about 1953–no one seems quite sure when – Doole made an unusual career move. He went to work for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Officially, the CIA says it has no record that Doole ever worked there, but among old agency hands, he is a legend. Operating out of a small, nondescript office on Connecticut Avenue, he founded and ran a far-flung network of airlines that the agency used to carry out its covert operations all over the world. Owned by a holding company, the Pacific Corp., that was itself a CIA front, Doole’s empire included Air America, Civil Air Transport, Southern Air Transport, Air Asia and dozens of small puddle-jumper lines. Together, at their peak in the mid ’60s, these CIA “proprietaries” added up to an airline that was almost the size of TWA, employing nearly 20,000 people (as many as the CIA itself) and operating some 200 planes. Even the CIA was not sure just how many. Asked by then Deputy Director Helms to account for all the planes in Doole’s regime, a staffer spent three months on the project before confessing that he could never be more than 90% certain. The problem, explained the exasperated staffer, was that Doole was forever leasing planes between his shell corporations and changing their markings and tail numbers. 

Traveling around the world, orchestrating his vast air armada, Doole kept his airplanes busy. Under the cover of legitimate freight and charter services, Doole’s airlines supplied a 30,000-man secret army in the mountains of Laos for a ten-year war against the Pathet Lao, dropped scores of agents into Red China, and helped stage an unsuccessful revolt in Indonesia. Not surprisingly, all this flying about aroused curiosity. In 1970 a New York Times reporter asked Doole if Air America had any connection with the CIA. “If ‘someone out there’ is behind all this,” Doole airily replied, “we don’t know about it.” 

 Doole’s pilots, who flew in and out of tiny jungle fields in abysmal weather and sometimes under enemy fire, were a raffish lot. They referred to the CIA as “the customer,” the ammunition they dropped as “hard rice” and being under heavy fire as “sporty.” Brushes with death were described as “fascinating.” To be “absolutely fascinated” meant scared witless.

Doole would appear from time to time at CIA bases from Vientiane to Panama City, but he stayed aloof from the pilots, many of whom regarded him as a bit of a snob. “I never saw the man without a tie on,” scoffs one. Doole played bridge, flew airplanes and did business deals the same way: slowly and deliberately. “The Chinese liked to negotiate with him,” recalls a former CIA official. “He was polite; he never showed any excitement. But he was tough.”

When the extent of the CIA’s covert operations was revealed by newspaper exposes and congressional hearings in the early ’70s, the agency was forced to dismantle Doole’s huge aerial empire and sell off the various planes and airfields. It was done at a profit; the agency turned over $20 million to the U.S. Treasury. Doole also did well by himself. Though he earned a government salary as a CIA employee, he augmented his income by investing, shrewdly, in the stock market. His estate when he died was worth “several million dollars,” according to a sister.

 In 1971 Doole retired from the CIA. Formally, that is. He kept his hand in the aviation business as a director of Evergreen International Aviation, a company that refits and charters airplanes. Though Evergreen bought Intermountain Aviation, one of Doole’s CIA “proprietaries,” in 1975, the company insists that it has had nothing further to do with the agency. Perhaps. But when the dying Shah of Iran wanted to fly from Panama to Egypt in 1980, he flew on a chartered Evergreen DC-8. Doole arranged the charter.

The airfield in the Arizona desert where Evergreen opened its huge hangar last year, the George A. Doole Aviation Center, was once owned by the CIA. Today Evergreen workmen repair and refit commercial airliners from Pan Am, American and Emery Air Freight. It all seems perfectly ordinary and unexceptional, rather like the George Doole who enjoyed playing bridge at the Chevy Chase Club and dancing with wealthy widows. There is probably nothing remarkable about those two unmarked black Chinook helicopters that took off from a far corner of the airfield not long ago and headed south.

Managing Drug-Importing Airlines

George Doole's death left his proprietary empire in disarray, crumbling in the hands of Oliver North and his minions--men far less capable than George Doole had been. Their mismanagement of the secret airlines resulted in its exposure three decades after Doole had helped to create it. 

Evan Thomas wrote an obituary for Doole in 1985, but--although it was written after Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12356 [April 1982], as implemented in HR 10-24(c)4, which required a reporter seeking access to classified files to sign a secrecy agreement and allow the CIA to review and redact what the reporter wrote before it was published--Thomas did not have full access to CIA files at the time he wrote Doole's obit. Even if he had such access, he would never have been cleared to expose the documents he found. Years later in 1996, Thomas described the process he went through in "A Singular Opportunity: Gaining Access to CIA's Records," an article that appeared in Studies in Intelligence.

Doole's path from Pan Am to the Central Intelligence Agency in 1953 was likely similar to that many other military and aviation intelligence operatives followed as the U.S. began its cold war strategy against The Soviet Union, our former ally. Jack Crichton, for example, had been stationed at Coolidge AFB in Antigua in 1944, according to the flight manifest we discovered when doing Jack Crichton's genealogy, still an ongoing research project.

From Doole to Wexner 

It took me years to notice something quite fascinating, though it may be merely coincidental. The year George Doole died--1985--is the same year Leslie Wexner was introduced to Jeffrey Epstein, and it was that same year, Bob Fitrakis tells us, that Les Wexner and Epstein combined forces with others in Wexner's hometown of Columbus, Ohio, to move the allegedly "privatized" formerly CIA-owned airline, Southern Air Transport, from Miami to Columbus. Fitrakis aptly labeled the airline "Spook Air," in his article that appeared in the Columbus Free Press in 2018, originally published at Columbus Alive 4-22-1999.

Shortly after meeting Epstein, Wexner began the development of a new city, New Albany, northeast of Columbus, where the small town of that name then existed. At the same time he signed up to establish the old Southern Air Transport CIA airline at Rickenbacker (cargo-focused) International Airport south of Columbus. Assistance came from the McCoy family of Banc One. 

John G. McCoy, followed by his son John B. McCoy, helped 

"Banc One ... [to become] one of the country’s largest banks after acquiring First Chicago Bank for $21 billion. After the merger, the bank moved its headquarters to Chicago. John B. McCoy resigned in 1999 after the bank had earnings shortfalls. Jamie Dimon was hired as chief executive in 2000.

JPMorgan Chase – by then led by Dimon – bought Banc One in 2004. Chase later changed the name of its two-million-square-foot corporate offices in Columbus to the McCoy Center." 

 

 

Although it has been claimed that Jeffrey Epstein first became a JPMorgan client in 1998, a retired FBI agent named Shaun O'Neill stated in a report read by Russ and Pam Martens that "William Langford, an anti-money-laundering (AML) executive at JPMorgan Chase" stated under oath in a deposition in connection with SDNY Case No. 1:22-cv-10904-JSR that Epstein's relationship with the bank actually began in 1985. The report at footnote 14 cited Langford's Deposition as Exhibit 3, adding that "Epstein became a JPMC client in 1985, yet some 25 plus years later JPMC AML [Anti-Money Laundering (AML)] Group was unable to identify Epstein’s source of wealth or his clients, effectively rendering useless their KYC [know your customer] compliance component as it regards Epstein. On January 14, 2011, the primary JPMC AML Investigator looking into Epstein emailed senior management, 'Here is why I would like to know who his clients are' in response to an article about whether Epstein was running a Ponzi scheme." [Langford Dep. Ex. PM11 (JPM-SDNYLIT-00152808)]. 

 

From this the Martenses concluded: 

"If Langford is correct, that would mean that JPMorgan Chase has financial transaction files on Epstein dating back 40 years–which would certainly open a window into who provided Epstein’s early seed money and who his largest financial funders were over the decades." (italics added)

As we stated at the beginning of this blog post, 1985 was the critical year--the year that George Doole died just before Iran Contra exploded in the news; the year Leslie Wexner met Jeffrey Epstein, and the two men began working together to move Southern Air Transport to Columbus, Ohio. It was also in 1985 that Barry Seal was arrested in Florida and began, as we said in Gangster Planet to "work off his beef," only months before he was murdered. Before his death, Rodney Stich wrote:

Reed described how Oliver North and William Barr authorized him to start a CIA proprietary in Mexico posing as a high technology trading and consulting firm. Reed moved his family to Mexico, thinking the operation was legitimate and of long duration. Reed worked closely with Oliver North, Felix Rodriguez, and Barry Seal­. Before long, Reed discovered that the CIA front company he operated was being used by the CIA for gun-running and drug smuggling and this was confirmed in July 1987. He advised his CIA handler that he wanted out of the operation, and under cover of darkness, Reed moved his family back to Arkansas where he went into hiding. He then became targeted for retaliation by one of Arkansas’s state police officers who was on Governor Bill Clinton­‘s staff.  

There's Something Hinky about Columbus

Bob Fitrakis zeroed in on the men Wexner and Epstein gathered around them to build a civilian airport south of Columbus where an Air Force base once operated, stating:

As the logistics man for Wexner, Epstein arranged the arrival of Southern Air Transport (SAT) to Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Columbus, Ohio. The airline, formerly Air America, was infamous as an illegal gun- and drug-running operation. SAT filed for bankruptcy in Columbus on October 1, 1998, the same day the Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General issued a report linking the cargo hauler to allegations of drug-running in connection with U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Once lauded as a coup for central Ohio development, landing Southern Air Transport’s business at Rickenbacker eventually turned into a nightmare, as the enterprise became mired in massive debt and was closed under a cloud of suspicion about its true activities. 

Whitney Webb and Ed Berger clearly realized what was going on. It was money laundering and blackmail, and she revealed in 2023 at her website that:

the same powerful players who brought Epstein to prominence were largely responsible for the rise of JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon.  

Evidencing the power JP Morgan Chase wielded worldwide is the fact that the US Attorney Denise George, who brought the bank into a RICO lawsuit along with Epstein and others, was almost immediately fired, even though by November 2022 she had settled a case against Epstein's Estate, bringing more than $105 million into the coffers of the Virgin Islands, while "all 150 victims’ claims against Epstein were satisfied in separate private settlements with the Epstein Estate." 

It was only when she found substantial evidence against "Epstein’s primary bank, JP Morgan Chase, alleging that the bank facilitated and profited from Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking enterprise," that she filed the civil lawsuit, and four days later "George was abruptly dismissed from office on December 31, 2022, by Governor Albert Bryan, Jr. who appointed her and later expressed his dismay over the J.P. Morgan lawsuit," according to her website. Despite her being fired, the lawsuit was allowed to continue under a different attorney.

Wexner's Bankers 

Whitney Webb dug much deeper, examining "top executives and directors of Bank One, which boasts incredibly close ties to The Limited’s Leslie Wexner and his right-hand man for many decades, Columbus-area real estate developer John W. Kessler."

 

Also called Banc One, its directors were called out in 1986 for being involved in a pay-to-play fund-raiser Leslie Wexner hosted for Democratic governor Richard Celeste's re-election campaign. It was only a coincidence that all those men on the host committee just happened to be doing business with the State of Ohio, in addition to being Republicans, according to his opponent in the primary, whom UPI reported as saying, "We all know that Celeste expects people doing business with the state to kick into his campaign and to front for him."

 

 

 From Bush's Russo to Reagan's Earl Brian

 

Perhaps it was that very expose that prompted Vice President George Bush to spur his Houston friend and landlord, Joe Russo, to partner with a Mexican media magnate, Mario Vasquez Rana, in buying UPI out of Chapter 11, which it had been forced into in April 1985. Russo's and Vasquez' competitor in the bidding was none other than Earl W. Brian's Financial News Network. 

 

All the sale managed to do was delay Earl Brian's acquisition, forcing him to buy from Vasquez and Russo in 1989. During that time, as we know, Brian also got all knotted up in Iran Contra and the Promis software scandal, forcing them back to bankruptcy court. What remained of UPI's corpse was scavenged by the Saudi-owned group (ARA International) in 1992. 

 

By 1998, almost nobody remembered that UPI had once been "a major presence in the global news business, a training ground for a generation of journalists that included Walter Cronkite," according to Forbes. 

 

Back in Columbus, Ohio 

Alan D. Fiers Jr., according to Fitrakis, who had been a member of the "1961 Ohio State University football team and a Buckeye assistant coach in 1962, who later became the chief of the CIA Central American Task Force." Fiers was also connected to the move of the airline, as was "retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, head of air logistics for the CIA-owned Air America’s covert action in Laos between 1966 and 1968, and air logistics coordinator in the illegal Contra resupply network for Oliver North in the ’80s."

 

Fitrakis subtly added: "According to the recent CIA report on Southern Air Transport [Volume II of the Hitz Report], Fiers informed U.S. Senate investigators that the CIA told the DEA early on about Contra leaders being involved in drug smuggling. Secord, who is a 1954 graduate of Columbus’ South High School, pleaded guilty in 1989 to a felony charge in connection with the cover-up of the Iran-Contra affair." [Note: Volume I of the report dealt with the drug operations taking place in South Central Los Angeles, California under the guise of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), commonly known as the Contras.] 

 

When Fitrakis cited the October 1998 CIA report on Southern Air Transport, he was referring to Hitz's Volume II, which contained the paragraphs excerpted below, which referenced Southern Air Transport:

 Southern Air Transport

Robert Gates, left

905.  Background. Southern Air Transport (SAT) carried a variety of equipment, supplies and humanitarian aid for the FDN during the 1980s.
906.  Allegations of Drug Trafficking. A January 21, 1987 memorandum from ADCI Robert Gates to Morton Abramowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, stated that the U.S. Customs Service had advised CIA that the Customs office in New Orleans was investigating an allegation of drug trafficking by SAT crew members. The Gates memorandum noted that the source of the allegation was a senior FDN official. The memorandum indicated that the FDN official was concerned that "scandal emanating from Southern Air Transport could redound badly on FDN interests, including humanitarian aid from the United States."

Morton Abramowitz, diplomat

907.  A February 23, 1991 DEA cable to CIA linked SAT to drug trafficking. The cable reported that SAT was "of record" in DEA's database from January 1985-September 1990 for alleged involvement in cocaine trafficking. An August 1990 entry in DEA's database reportedly alleged that $2 million was delivered to the firm's business sites, and several of the firm's pilots and executives were suspected of smuggling "narcotics currency."
908.  Information Sharing with Other U.S. Government Entities. As previously noted, a January 21, 1987 memorandum from ADCI Robert Gates to Morton Abramowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, reported that U.S. Customs had informed CIA that the Customs office in New Orleans was investigating an allegation of drug trafficking by SAT crew members. ***

1081.  CIA only disseminated three finished intelligence products during the 1980s that related at all to potential Contra involvement in narcotics trafficking. These were: (i) a 1985 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concerning the international narcotics trade; (ii) an April 1986 Memorandum for Vice President George Bush; and (iii) the January 1987 Memorandum from Acting DCI Robert Gates to Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Morton Abramowitz.  ***

1084.   1986 Memorandum for Vice President Bush. On April 6, 1986, a Memorandum entitled "Contra Involvement in Drug Trafficking" was prepared by CIA at the request of Vice President Bush. The Memorandum provided a summary of information that had been received in late 1984 regarding the alleged agreement between Southern Front Contra leader Eden Pastora's associates and Miami-based drug trafficker Jorge Morales. Morales reportedly had offered financial and aircraft support for the Contras in exchange for FRS pilots to "transship" Colombian cocaine to the United States. CIA disseminated this memorandum only to the Vice President.
1085.  DI/OGI analyst who drafted the Memorandum says that there was no follow-up. Furthermore, the analyst recalls no further DI discussion of the Contras' alleged involvement in drug trafficking until the Memorandum that was written for Assistant Secretary of State Abramowitz in 1987.
1086.  1987 Memorandum for Abramowitz. The most comprehensive discussion of alleged Contra narcotics trafficking was included in a January 21, 1987 Memorandum from Acting DCI Robert Gates to DoS Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research Morton Abramowitz. The genesis of this Memorandum, entitled "Assessment of Alleged Connections Between Drug Traffickers and Anti-Sandinista ('Contra') Groups," was a January 9, 1987 memorandum from Abramowitz to then-Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Gates indicating that Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams had expressed concern about the possible involvement of Contras in narcotics trafficking and had requested an Intelligence Community study "on an urgent basis." The memorandum from Abramowitz indicated that Abrams wanted the study "to pull together all foreign and domestically-generated information that is available, rumors and all, and provide an assessment of the credibility of the charges." Further, the memorandum to Gates indicated:

The Assistant Secretary believes that it is essential that we know before the rest of the world if any of those whom we have funded are engaged in this business so that they can be expelled from the ranks of the resistance."

1087.  The Memorandum to Abramowitz was written under the auspices of the NIO/Narcotics and was drafted jointly by officers from the DO and the DI's Office of African and Latin American Analysis. In addition to DO reporting, the assessment relied heavily on DEA information. Six topics were addressed, including:

•  Allegations discussed in three disseminated DO reports of October, November and December, 1984 concerning Pastora, Adolfo Chamorro, Gerardo Duran, David Mayorga, and Jorge Morales; 

• Statements to FBI and DEA undercover agents by Orlando Bolanos, who claimed to be in command of an anti-communist movement in Nicaragua called the "Internal Front," that he planned to smuggle cocaine into the United States;

• The Frogman Case, which involved Nicaraguan drug traffickers who had been apprehended in early 1983 while swimming ashore near San Francisco, including information indicating that an unnamed suspected drug trafficker had placed 51 calls to a telephone in the FDN office in San Francisco that was later learned to have been listed to one of the defendants in the case. The defendant's name was not given;
  
  
  

• "Suspicious activities" at Ilopango air base in El Salvador;

• An allegation that Roger Herman, political director for the Contra group, KISAN, was involved in cocaine smuggling into the United States; and

• Allegations that the ranches of "two [unnamed] U.S. nationals" in Costa Rica, were used to smuggle weapons to the Contras and cocaine into the United States.

1088.  The Memorandum prepared for Abramowitz concluded that there was "no indication that anti-Sandinista groups that have received or now are receiving support from the U.S. Government have engaged in drug trafficking to fund their operations." Moreover, according to the Memorandum, DEA and FBI officials, along with Intelligence Community leaders, said that "no credible information exists to support" allegations of Contra involvement in drug trafficking that "have surfaced over the past four years, particularly when renewed funding for the Nicaraguan insurgency was under consideration in the U.S. Congress."  

1089.  The Memorandum also concluded that, if Contra organizations had unwittingly received donations from sympathizers who derived the funds from drug trafficking:  

". . our best judgment is that the donations probably reflected personal decisions on the part of the donor rather than an organizational effort on the part of an anti-Sandinista group."

Further, the Memorandum stated that "we have no information suggesting Pastora's personal involvement" in the alleged agreement between his associates and Miami drug trafficker Morales, but "he may have been aware of them given his apparently close association with these individuals."

1090.  A January 21, 1987 transmittal letter that ADCI Gates attached to the Memorandum when it was sent to Abramowitz indicated that the Memorandum was being released with two qualifications:

•  DEA Headquarters planned to follow up on the matter of the adequacy of a DEA investigation of alleged drug trafficking at Ilopango.

• 
  The U.S. Customs Service was investigating allegations by Mario Calero that crew members working for Southern Air Transport might have been involved in drug trafficking.

The transmittal letter concluded with the observation that: ". . . as future drug trafficking cases surface it is likely that we will see more assertions of Contra connections. Such assertions may take the form of self-serving stories by traffickers for use in their legal defenses as well as allegations by the Sandinistas to discredit the insurgents. "

Adolfo Calero had been dealt with earlier in the report at Paragraph 891:  

"Background. According to the December 1988 Kerry Report, one of the pilots who flew Contra resupply missions for SETCO was Frank Moss. The Kerry Report also noted that Moss had been under investigation since 1979 for drug trafficking but reportedly was never indicted. In 1985, Moss formed his own company, Hondu Carib, which flew supplies to the FDN. The Kerry Report indicated that the FDN's arrangement with Moss and Hondu Carib was based on a commercial agreement between Moss and Mario Calero, the FDN's chief supply officer. Under that agreement, Calero was to receive an ownership interest in Moss' company. "

The airline, Hondu Carib, owned one of the many airplanes that shipped drugs to Port Charlotte, Florida, just a few miles from Venice, where Daniel Hopsicker lived when he began researching drug planes there, shortly after he finished Barry and 'the boys'.  Port Charlotte drug smuggling had been prolific in the area, as we indicated in Gangster Planet.

"I've done nothing illegal. All I ever wanted to do was fly," Frank Moss said.

Frank Moss, a SETCO pilot, was mentioned in Peter Dale Scott's book, Cocaine Politics, which on page 58 stated that the DC-4 plane Moss used "was listed to Hondu Carib in a 1983 Customs report that linked the aircraft to several individuals said to be 'involved in large-scale narcotics smuggling.' The plane was also being watched because an informant said it dropped narcotics on the isolated Louisiana farm of Adler 'Barry' Seal, an American who managed the Colombian cartels' shipping operations into the United States."

The KISAN group referred to above was described in a CIA document released in 2009, which stated: 

"... FDN has been particularly active in central Nicaragua, astride the Rama-Managua road that serves as a crucial artery in the transfer of weaponry from the Soviet Bloc to the Sandinista regime. On the Atlantic coast, the Indian resistance -- which dates from the regime's repression and forced relocation of the Miskito Indian population in 1981-82 -- continues harassment actions against the Sandinistas.  The Indian umbrella organization KISAN, with about 1,000 combatants, relies heavily on donations of supplies from the FDN. Eden Pastora's forces have dwindled to some 600 men and have largely been sidelined since the Sandinistas drove them from their base camps in southern Nicaragua during the summer. Sandinista Response Managua has responded to the increased pressures by seeking additional economic and military assistance from the Soviet Bloc, cracking down on domestic opponents, and stepping up its counterinsurgency efforts. Only a massive increase in financial support from the Soviet Bloc is keeping the economy afloat."

Approved For Release 2009/09/16: CIA-RDP87M00539RO01802780006-7  Approved For Release 2009/09/16: CIA-RDP87M00539RO01802780006-7 TOP SECRET

It All Leads Back to Columbus, OH in 1985. We will pick up there in a subsequent post.

 

 

Military Intelligence in Dallas in 1963

Umbrella Man

Photo, as enlarged, of "umbrella man"

A few years ago JFK researcher Russ Baker wrote a piece on his website called "JFK Umbrella Man--More Doubts," as a follow-up to a previous article he entitled "NY Times' Umbrella Man Exposed." Baker is a well educated journalist, whose book, Family of Secrets (Bloomsbury Press 2008), attempted to reveal the secret background of the life of George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush (Presidents 41 and 43).

Baker does not take anything published in the mainstream media at face value. He questions all facts presented, researching for himself the sources behind a reporter's story. He is often critical of the conclusions the reporter arrives at given the "facts" laid out. 

You Tube video

Such was the case when he viewed the Errol Morris' "umbrella man" video that showed up in the opinion section of the New York Times website on November 21, 2011, the day prior to the 48th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

Baker delved into who Louis Steven Witt, the man who testified before the HSCA hearing on September 22, 1978, was:

Here are some things you should know about the man who came forward to identify himself as Umbrella Man and tell this ludicrous Neville Chamberlain story:

• His account of his activities that day don’t track with what Umbrella Man actually did, raising questions as to whether this man who volunteered to testify to the assassination inquiry is even the real umbrella-bearer, or someone whose purpose was to end inquiries into the matter.

• The man who came forward, Louie Steven Witt, was a young man at the time of Kennedy’s death. How many young men in Dallas in 1963 even knew what Neville Chamberlain had done a quarter-century before?

• In 1963, Witt was an insurance salesman for the Rio Grande National Life Insurance company, which anchored the eponymous Rio Grande Building in downtown Dallas. It’s an interesting building. Among the other outfits housed in the building was the Office of Immigration and Naturalization—a place Lee Harvey Oswald visited repeatedly upon his return from Russia, ostensibly to deal with matters concerning the immigration status of his Russian-born wife, Marina.  Another occupant of the Rio Grande Building was the US Secret Service, so notably lax in its protection of Kennedy that day, breaking every rule of security on every level.

• A major client of Rio Grande was the US military, to which it provided insurance.

Compare this photo with those shown at WhoWhatWhy of umbrella man.

 

Witt had actually been born in October 1924, making him 18 years old in 1942, the year he joined the military in Omaha, Texas, a farm town located a mere 15 miles from where D. Harold Byrd in 1936 formed a business with three other partners.


In Baker's original story about Witt, Baker wrote:

In 1963, Witt was an insurance salesman for the Rio Grande National Life Insurance company, which anchored the eponymous Rio Grande Building in downtown Dallas. It’s an interesting building. Among the other outfits housed in the building was the Office of Immigration and Naturalization—a place Lee Harvey Oswald visited repeatedly upon his return from Russia, ostensibly to deal with matters concerning the immigration status of his Russian-born wife, Marina. Another occupant of the Rio Grande Building was the US Secret Service, so notably lax in its protection of Kennedy that day, breaking every rule of security on every level.

A major client of Rio Grande was the US military, to which it provided insurance.

It’s worth considering the roles of military-connected figures on the day of the assassination. These include Dallas Military Intelligence unit chief Jack Crichton operating secretly from an underground communications bunker; Crichton’s providing a translator who twisted Marina Oswald’s statement to police in a way that implicated her husband; and members of military intelligence forcing their way into the pilot car [see below] of Kennedy’s motorcade, which inexplicably ground to a halt in front of the Texas School Book Depository (where Lee Harvey Oswald’s employer, a high official with the local military-connected American Legion, managed to find a “job” for Oswald at a time when his company was otherwise seasonally laying off staff.) Oh, and it’s worth contemplating JFK’s titanic, if under-reported, struggle with top Pentagon officials over how the US should interact with Russia, Cuba, and the rest of the world.

 Rio Grande National Life Insurance Company

The Rio Grande insurance building on N. Field at Elm was 18 stories high, and the insurance company was housed in the top three floors. The entire 9th floor was leased to the U.S. government agencies Baker mentioned. Rio Grande's chairman, president and three vice presidents (father and four brothers) had the last name Baxter. All other vice presidents appear to have been their assistants.

Robert Wylie Baxter, of Harlingen, had been one of three incorporators of the company in 1928. By 1930 he had moved to Dallas but retained the name that connected the business to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. In 1939, he traded the original building in Harlingen for one in Dallas. Then in 1948 the company purchased the lot on Field and Elm to build a new building. By then the sons were out of college and the military, with families of their own. The three eldest were employed by Rio Grande, while Murphy soon moved to Midland to pursue a career as an oilman. Bill, the youngest, became a rancher in Tioga.

In Dallas the senior Baxter was also associated with other businessmen as a sponsor of presidential candidates. In August of 1960 an AP wire story alleged that Baxter had been named in 1958--along with Harry W. Bass Jr. and Toddie Lee Wynne, Jr., son of one of the powerful Wynne brothers--as sponsors of an appreciation dinner for Senator Lyndon Johnson, which later turned into a committee supporting LBJ for President during the primary, before he lost the convention vote to John Kennedy. After JFK was nominated, the Dallas men then threw their support to the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, joining others who were already active in Republican politics. They rejected Kennedy, the article said, because he planned to lower the oil-depletion allowance.

Dallas directory, 1963

Less than two weeks following the assassination, Baxter was shown as treasurer of the Wadley foundation, set up by J.K. and Susan L. Wadley to raise funds for research into leukemia. Members of the foundation's board included some of the city's most powerful bankers--Robert H. Stewart III,  J. Rawles Fulgham, and R. L. Thornton. The wife of Robert G. Storey, Jr. headed the women's division.

Thornton, who headed the Mercantile National Bank, had also been a Dallas mayor. Both Stewart and Fulgham were officers of the Dallas Bank which in 1973 became First International Bancshares, Inc. This bank would later place George H. W. Bush in charge of its London subsidiary when newly elected President Jimmy Carter refused to keep Bush on as Director of the CIA. 

 

By 1982, Fulgham was a member of the board of directors of the Bush-connected corporation, Dresser Industries, as well as being executive director of Merrill Lynch Capital, Inc., when he criticized the sanctions imposed by the Reagan administration against a subsidiary, Dresser France, the company furnishing parts for a pipeline being built from Siberia to furnish natural gas to Europe. 

We know the 4th U.S. Army Intelligence Corps was located in Room 912 and that Immigration & Naturalization Service occupied most of the 14th floor of the Rio Grande Building.

Murphy Baxter was engaged as early as 1953 in the oil industry in Midland, Texas, and his office that year was in the V & J Tower at  114 N. Big Spring. That building (now a parking lot) was directly across the street from where the Bush-Overbey oil company was located within the Midland National Bank, which fronted on W. Texas Avenue at the corner of N. Big Spring (see inset). Undoubtedly the two oilmen would have bumped into each other during the years they were both in Midland. A few years later both Baxter and Bush would relocate to Houston.

In October 1967 Murphy H. Baxter filed a lawsuit in Dallas County's 116th District Court against his father and oldest brother, as Rio Grande's two highest executives, alleging they had begun a campaign to market life insurance to military personnel, ignoring commonsense business practices, and resulting in the loss of millions of dollars to him as an 11% shareholder of the company. A month after the lawsuit was filed, Rio Grande agreed to merge into Kentucky Central insurance of Lexington, Kentucky. The merger became effective on January 1, 1968, absorbing all that was left of the Texas insurance company and abandoning the name. The same month as Witt's testimony Kentucky Central was fighting a takeover engineered by American General insurance company in Houston, originally organized by Gus Wortham, a member of what has been called the "Suite 8-F Crowd," one member of which was George R. Brown, who had financially supported Lyndon's Johnson's presidential bid in 1960, when he came in second to John F. Kennedy. American General in 1978 was headed by Andrew Delaney, who had worked with the company's top executives since 1953.

By the time Louie Steven Witt testified in September 1978, one might assume there was nobody left to pressure him to make up an absurd story such as he told to Josiah "Tink" Thompson--that he was protesting Neville Chamberlain's 1938 appeasement policy. 

 

In 1975 his directory listing showed him to be records supervisor at the the Oak Cliff Savings & Loan, when he stepped forward to take credit for standing in front of the TSBD, holding a black umbrella, as the shots were fired that killed Kennedy. Oak Hill Savings in 1972 had been absorbed, through mergers and acquisitions, into First Texas Financial Corporation, and one year after Witt's testimony, it no longer employed him.

Jack Crichton and Dallas Military Intelligence

 

If the intent of Witt's testimony was to mislead the HSCA investigation, one possible clue to that motive might have been the fact that in 1950, while still single, Louie Witt had been employed as a "parts layout man" for an aircraft manufacturer, renting a room southwest of downtown Dallas, less than 8 miles from North American Aviation's aircraft factory. As the linked article states: "Chance-Vought, one of the four divisions of United Aircraft, Incorporated, took over the North American plant in May 1949 to produce and experiment with jet aircraft. The Texas Engineering and Manufacturing Company was organized to utilize the facilities of what by then had become one of the world's largest centers of aircraft production.... After the North American facility (later Ling-Temco-Vought), the Fort Worth General Dynamics or 'Convair' plant was completed in 1941. This firm, noted for bomber production and its controversial TFX contract, ranked first in the nation in the export of defense weapons in 1965."

 

Daniel Hopsicker and I had a chapter in Gangster Planet devoted to the same area that, according to TSHA "had become one of the world's largest centers of aircraft production." If memory serves, we called the chapter "Busting Out All Over."

 

Jack Crichton

After discussion of the umbrella man, Russ Baker jumped to the subject of Jack Crichton, who in 1963 was chief of the 488th Army Reserve intelligence unit in Dallas, relying to some extent on the previous work of Peter Dale Scott. Scott himself, who revised some of his own views of the role of military intelligence after reading Baker's book, had years earlier sat in an interview of sorts held by the man in charge of the HSCA investigation (Robert Blakey) in September 1977 as part of a group of acknowledged JFK assassination experts--known as the "Critics Conference." Scott had by that time already written much about Jack Alston Crichton, chief of the 488th reserve unit of military intelligence, which answered to the 4th Army commander based at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. As we stated earlier, however, the 4th Army Intelligence Corps also had an office in the Rio Grande office building in Dallas, the same building where Louie Steven Witt worked.

Scott knew that half of the 100 members of the intelligence unit had careers within the Dallas Police Department (DPD). In a paper presented in 2010 at COPA he spelled out numerous false flag scenarios that had taken place in Dallas, which he had testified about at the Critics' Conference. He mentioned as an example an army cable sent by Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow of the Intelligence Section of DPD, whose superior officer was Captain W.P. Gannaway, a member of Army Intelligence Reserve.  A warrant officer of the 112th Intelligence Group, Ed Coyle, testified to the Assassinations Records Review Board in 1996 that all the officers in the DPD’s Intelligence Section were in army intelligence.

 

Scott had concluded that "they were almost certainly in the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas: Jack Crichton, the head of the 488th, revealed in an oral history that there were “about a hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department,” citing his previous books, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 276 and Deep Politics II: Essays on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba, 78.

History of U.S. Military Intelligence 

Historically, all military intelligence groups of today can track their origin to 1940. Mother Jones published an article by Adam Hochchild in its first 2018 issue about Major General Ralph H. Van Deman, tracing all military intelligence groups to an organizing meeting held a year and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, at which all intelligence gathering was divided up by Van Deman and his protege, J. Edgar Hoover:

On May 31, 1940, Hoover gathered in his office high officials from the Army, Navy, and State Department to divide up intelligence-gathering territory. “This was like the pope dividing the unexplored world [between Spain and Portugal] in 1493,” says McCoy. “The FBI got counterintelligence at home—and operations in Latin America. Military intelligence, out of which the OSS and then the CIA evolved, got the rest of the world.” 

Peter Dale Scott's COPA paper disclosed that Crichton commanded the 488th and that Deputy Police Chief George L. Lumpkin was also a deputy commander of the 488th under Crichton. He drew a picture of Jack Crichton as "the kind of figure Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point described as a “connector….people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” He then listed a number of contacts among whom Crichton acted as a hub, such as:

• His superior in the Army Reserves, Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, who rode in the pilot car of the Kennedy motorcade in front of President Kennedy. 
• DPD Deputy Chief George Lumpkin was also in the pilot car, which made an unexplained stop in front of the building leased by the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD).
• The Lessor/owner of the TSBD building was D.Harold “Dry Hole” Byrd, who was a director since 1961 of Dorchester Gas Producing, headed by Crichton.
• Lt. Col. Frank Brandstetter, a fellow 488th member, with whom Crichton seemingly conducted “a study of Soviet oil fields,” in the late 1950s. Hungarian by birth, Brandstetter worked in hotel management for eleven years in New York (in 1940 managing a small hotel, ironically, only three doors down from Jeffrey's Epstein's later home on E. 65th Street). He went from being a hotelier to serving in Army Intelligence, and was sent to England to the U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps Headquarters, where he asked to train with the 506th Airborne Infantry Regiment "Band of Brothers," and dropped with that unit into Normandy on D-Day. He founded the Las Brisas Resort in Acapulco while still on active duty for the Pentagon, but he most likely teamed up with Crichton in oil exploration in countries where he could help as a translator. (See Adorable Times blog and obituary).
• Ilya Mamantov, a Russian emigre who arrived with his parents from Latvia, and spent his career with Sun Oil Co., (owned by the Pew family of Pennsylvania), which got its start at Spindletop, where it also was engaged in building a distribution pipeline through Louisiana, when Crichton was growing up there before 1934. Crichton knew Mamatov well enough in 1963 to recommend him to translate for Marina Oswald. 

Before joining the military, Crichton had graduated in 1937 from Texas A&M at College Station, Texas, with a B.S. in petroleum engineering. His name was also listed in the Boston Globe in 1938 as a recipient of an M.S. in petroleum engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Still single in 1938, he returned to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he found Norris McGowen, founder of United Gas Corp. was very active. In fact, Jack was hired to work for United's subsidiary Union Producing Co. at that time, not long before Union acquired the old Youree mansion on Fairfield Avenue in Shreveport to start construction of a seven-story headquarters for Crichton's employer. A few years later the 1525 Fairfield Avenue home office became the Louisiana State Office Building in Shreveport. 

 

Jack's aunt, Jo Crichton Mercer, lived at 1022 Fairfield with her husband, William D. Mercer, less than a mile north of the new headquarters, and he lived with them in 1940 while working for United Gas. Jo and her son, John F. Mercer, were tax collectors for Caddo Parish. 

Cold War Plans

President Truman transferred the activities of the Research and Analysis Branch and the Presentation Branch of the Office of Strategic Services to the State Department, effective as of October 1945. That transfer, according to Truman, represented "the beginning of the development of a coordinated system of foreign intelligence within the permanent framework of the Government. Consistent with the foregoing, the Executive order provides for the transfer of the remaining activities of the Office of Strategic Services to the War Department; for the abolition of the Office of Strategic Services; and for the continued orderly liquidation of some of the activities of the Office without interrupting other services of a military nature the need for which will continue for some time."

Therefore, from October 1, 1945 until the Central Intelligence Agency's creation by Truman's administration, former OSS operatives not released from service transferred over either to the State Department as civilians, or to the Department of War (renamed Defense), possibly as military officers. Since it has been asserted that Crichton was in OSS, he most likely went back into military intelligence until his discharge in 1946.

From there he went to work for Degolyer & MacNaughten's office in Dallas.