John Birch Society Warning to JFK in 1958

Forewarning to JFK assassination? 

"... you will usually find him in church on Sunday morning, maybe even a Catholic church. But as a member of the United States Senate, running for the presidency, and smart enough to know the strong Communist support behind-the-scenes which he will have to get in order to have any chance of being nominated in 1960, such an amoral man can do a tremendous amount of ball-carrying on behalf of the Communist aims here in the United States... 

--Robert H.W. Welch, founder of John Birch Society (1958)

It was Rev. J. Frank Norris, who, using his seminary set up in the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, was instrumental in teaching the Chinese language to John M. Birch in the short span of a year's time. The son of missionaries to northern India, John and his brother, Walter Ellis Birch, traveled aboard the S.S. Trafford Hall with their parents, George Snider and Ethel Birch, from Calcutta to Boston in 1920.

From Mission Fields to Fields of Poppies

Charlie Soong

The Birches were part of the "Jumna Mission" in Allahabad, first established by the Presbyterians in 1840. That area near the junction of the Jumna and Ganges rivers historically dates back to battles between the East India Company and the Moghul Empire before 1767. By 1773 the Honourable British Company had the monopoly on the Patna opium controlled by the Nawab of Bengal in this region, which was ultimately trafficked through Macao. This era in history was summarized by Sterling  Seagrave in his book about the Christian-educated Charlie Soong and his family, The Soong Dynasty:

Proper Englishmen like Dr.William Jardine, one of the greatest opium merchants, purchased raw opium from Indian growers for niggardly sums, and resold it to the Chinese through Hong Kong for ten times the amount. For a while, the British were successful in financing their imports of tea by smuggling opium to China, but as tea consumption rose, opium traffic had to be increased accordingly. Since the Manchu regime had banned opium trading, British ships carried their loads to the Portuguese colony of Macao, at the mouth of the Pearl River, unloaded the drug there, then sailed innocently into Canton harbor with legal cargoes. Later, when enough Manchu officials had become partners in the illicit trade, the opium was shipped directly into Canton, where it was stored brazenly in warehouses along the riverside.

Since the Manchus had banned opium, it became important for British and American merchants who traded in the drug to ensure that the Manchu dynasty was overthrown and replaced with a group they could control, possibly through a mutual religious frame of mind. Thus it was through the Protestant family of a young boy dubbed Charlie Soon that these Western merchants would ultimately control China.

It is not a coincidence that the Bengal area of India was an early location for Presbyterian missions since East India Company successor was created by Presbyterian Scots from Dumfriesshire. Dr. William Jardine (born in 1784) had been a surgeon aboard an East India Company ship and subsequently worked for and became a partner of Magniac and company, another opium trader in Canton. James Matheson and his nephew, Alexander Matheson, joined the firm Magniac and Co. in 1827, and joined the partnership in 1832 as Jardine, Matheson and company.

Matheson's interest in the firm ended up in the hands of his nephew:

Mr. Donald Matheson, of the Lews, worthily maintains the high reputation of his race. He was educated at the High School of Edinburgh, and being devoted to a business career proceeded to China as an assistant in the firm of Messrs. Jardine, Matheson and Co. Being of a deeply religious disposition his experience of the opium traffic was such that he became an intensely earnest anti-opiumist.

Donald Matheson

On his return to Scotland, he married, in 1849, Jane Ellen, daughter of Lieutenant Horace Petley, R.N., who is still a sympathetic partner of his domestic joys, and a helper in his public life. During the subsequent years Mr. Matheson has devoted himself mainly to mission work in Edinburgh and London. As an ardent Presbyterian he has rendered valuable service in the London Presbytery, and for a lengthened period acted as Hon. Secretary of their Presbyterian Mission in India. Mr. Matheson is also a Vice-President and Treasurer of the Evangelical Alliance; and he has done good service as a worker in the Foreign Evangelization Society. He gave evidence before the British Opium Commission at Westminster, and strongly denounced the sale of that drug in India under Government patronage. (emphasis added) {See note 1 below.}

Sir Robert Jardine had inherited a large portion of Jardine's interest in the the opium smuggling firm before 1865, when he entered Parliament and was created a baronet in 1885. Another portion was owned by William Johnston(e) "Tony" Keswick, a grandson of William Jardine's sister, who came into the firm in 1855 and became its head in London in 1886. Tony, was in charge of the Shanghai office until 1941. Tony and his brother John Keswick, served as senior intelligence operatives with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during WWII.

Du Yue-sheng

We learn from Douglas Valentine's excellently researched book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs, that William J. "Tony" Keswick (1903-1990), a director of Jardine Matheson Shipping Company, and who would be named to the board of the Bank of England and British Petroleum, also sat on the Shanghai Municipal Board (British International Settlement) with Du Yue-sheng. Du was given credit for facilitating Chiang Kai-shek's "bloody ascent to power in 1927," through a crime syndicate he controlled.

Chiang and his brother-in-law, T.V. Soong, were Du's "political protectors." According to Valentine, there was a connection between the Keswick brothers and America's Office of Strategic Services involving "drug-related espionage intrigues." (See also, Diplomacy and Enterprise: British China Policy, 1933-1937 by Stephen Lyon Endicott, which discusses W.J. Keswick's role in influencing British monetary policy in China during the appeasement phase.)

Mme Chiang (Meiling Soong)

American narcotics agent Garland Williams took command of the Army's reorganized Counterintelligence Corps six months prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. A year later he joined the OSS and was sent to London to confer with Tony Keswick, then chief of the British Special Operations Executive (BOE), whose brother, John Keswick, was then working with Chiang's spy chief, Gen. Tai Li, in Chungking, Du's new headquarters since 1941. With information manuals received from Keswick, Garland Williams returned to the U.S. to set up OSS training schools, and, by 1944, he was back in China with a top secret position at the Flying Tiger base in Kunming. All the details about how this relationship affected America's drug policy are provided in The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs.

Security training was provided by none other than "privateer," William D. Pawley, who would reappear again in the 1960's, helping to finance the fight against Fidel Castro. (See also Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War, relating to Gen. Tai Li and Keswick's secret China Commando Group; and The Dragon's War: Allied Operations and the Fate of China, 1937-1947, which states that John Keswick was "an intimate friend to T. V. Soong and Madame Chiang," formerly known as Meiling Soong. With reference to China and the Soong family, all the books by Peggy and Sterling Seagrave are highly recommended and now available to borrow free through Amazon Prime or purchase on Kindle.)

Pawley's 1918 passport (Ancestry.com). Click to enlarge.

Dulles Family of Presbyterian Missionaries

What serious students of government drug policy have learned over the years is that the government officials who make the policy are, for the most part, members of families with ties to either India, China, Persia, or other parts of the world where opium is grown, refined or sold lucratively. As mentioned above, the Keswick family were not only made wealthy through their inherited company, Jardine, Matheson, but were instrumental in directing British policy to their own benefit in China. In addition, they operated at a high level within the BOE in New York (also known as British Security Coordination), with headquarters at 630 Fifth Avenue, Room 3603—the same address for Allen Dulles when appointed to run the New York office in 1940.

In the words of Peggy and Sterling Seagrave in the New Epilogue to  Gold Warriors:

Once OSS was set up, Donovan became heavily involved in opium and heroin, mingling narcotics with espionage during the war. [footnote: Seagrave interviews with General Ray Peers. Detachment 101 used opium to pay agents. Ray Peers: “If opium could be useful in achieving victory, the pattern was clear. We would use opium.” Valentine, at page 47, quoting from The Burma Road.]

He learned a lot from the Brits. In China, he worked with SOE’s William and John Keswick of Jardine-Matheson, Britain’s biggest opium cartel in Asia, with a controlling interest in Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and ties to the Oppenheimer family through the giant mining firm Rio Tinto Zinc.

(HSBC was one of the main repositories of Santy’s gold, and has blocked all efforts by his heirs to access it.) Together, Donovan and the Keswicks arranged deals with KMT spy-boss General Tai Li and his underworld business partner, druglord Du Yueh-sheng. So did Commander “Mary” Miles of SACO, the Sino American Cooperative Organization set up by Donovan’s old friend Navy
Secretary Frank Knox, as cover in China for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Their currency in covert operations was drugs, gold, and diamonds.

Our own research into the background of John Birch (below) unearthed the fact that the missionary's parents had worked out of the Ewing Christian College on behalf of the American Board of Foreign Missions based in New York. Their passport application in 1918 included an affidavit signed by Mr. and Mrs. D.W. Griffin, Presbyterian missionaries in India, who reported on the application to the State Department of having known Birch and his wife for four months. Don W. Griffin had also been associated with Allen Dulles at that same location, according to annual report for January 1, 1917 of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Foreign Missions.

Excerpt from James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Regnery Publishing Co. 1999):

The first of the [Dulles] line to arrive in America was a Joseph Dulles, who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, during the Revolutionary War. ...The son, also Joseph Dulles, went to Yale and became a minister....

John Welsh Dulles, Joseph's son, also a Presbyterian minister, answered the call of missionary work that had so gripped the American Protestant churches of that time. The Reverend John Dulles and his wife went to India to preach at a mission in Madras [southeastern tip of India] and stayed there for years before health problems drove them home to Philadelphia. His wife, Harriet Lathrop Winslow, had income of her own, which helped this Reverend Dulles ascend into the hierarchy of the Presbyterian Missions Board. He became something of a celebrity for his memoirs of his work in India and his tours of the Holy Land. ... Since the Presbyterian church was such an important part of the family's identity, it was only natural that later generations of Dulles sons were educated at Princeton College, which was founded by Presbyterians. When it was his turn, Allen Macy Dulles [father of John Foster and Allen Welsh Dulles] graduated with honors from both the undergraduate college and the seminary....

Edith Foster Dulles [their mother] was a ... daughter of a diplomat....He [John Watson Foster] was the valedictorian of his class of 1855 at Indiana University, and his stint at Harvard Law School was followed by a year of reading law with Algernon Sullivan, an established attorney in Cincinnati.... In the 1872 presidential campaign, President Grant's tolerance of the corruption of his inner circle nearly cost him reelection. Yet despite the thousand faults and worries that beset Grant, General Foster, who was chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, stuck loyally to his wartime commander....In 1873 Grant rewarded his old friend by naming him minister to Mexico....

The seven-year tour of duty in Mexico was the first of nearly thirty years of assignments that took [their maternal grandfather] Foster and his family far away from Indiana forever. The next stop was an appointment by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, as minister to the court of Russian Czar Alexander II.

John Welsh Dulles, Jr. was a brother of John Foster and Allen Dulles' father (Allen Macy Dulles), and his son, whose name is often given as William Dulles, Jr., was an attorney before serving as treasurer of the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board for eight years. John Welsh, Jr. and two other siblings of Allen Macy were born in southern India, before their parents returned from the mission field to live in Philadelphia.

Their brother, Perrit, married into an influential family: Mallet-Prevost. Julia A. Mallet-Prevost had been born in Brownsville, Texas in 1854, while her father Dr. Grayson Mallet-Prevost of Philadelphia was serving as a diplomat in Mexico. Although born in Philadelphia in 1823, Grayson was a great grandson of the Frenchman, Henri Mallet, and his Swiss wife, Jeanne Gabrielle Prevost, whose last names were combined when they married in 1753. Jeanne's brother, Jacques Marc Prevost married Theodosia Bartow, shortly before the revolutionary war began in America; they became the parents of John Bartow Prevost and Augustine James Frederick Prevost. Shortly after their father died, fighting on the British side in the revolutionary war, Theodosia married Aaron Burr, tried but not convicted of treason.

John Birch Society--Another False Flag?

The future head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles arrived at his first paying job as an English teacher at Ewing Christian School, the same school where George Birch taught agriculture for three years, 1917-20 at the school which evolved into the Sam Higginbottom Institute {See Note 2 below}. Ethel May Ellis Birch had been the one to apply for the passport for herself in the summer of 1917 with George's passport being something of an afterthought. Two of their children would be born while they lived in Allahabad.

John Birch, a toddler, returned with his parents and infant brother from India in August 1920. Then between 1922 and 1930, five more siblings would be born in Vineland, New Jersey, where Ethel had been born and reared. Her parents were Walter Haskell and Liberty "Bertie" Cosman Ellis. When her father died before 1930, Ethel's mother went to live with a maiden sister, and the Birch family moved back to Georgia, where John's father's family had lived for generations. George Birch had obtained a teaching job at the Martha Berry College near Rome, Georgia, but in 1935 his name appeared in the Macon, Georgia city directory at the County Agricultural office where he supervised the screw worm program there.

By 1946 George Birch's employer was shown as the State Typhus Fever Control Service, and his supervisor would most likely have been Frank S. Hemmings, Jr., who had an office on the 7th floor of the federal building at 544 Mulberry in Macon. Georgia had a strong interest in public health. The Communicable Diseases Center in Atlanta was founded July 1, 1946 as the successor to the World War II Malaria Control in War Areas program of the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities. Preceding its founding, organizations with global influence in malaria control were the Malaria Commission of the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation greatly supported malaria control, sought to have the governments take over some of its efforts, and collaborated with the agency.

Ironically, the "Communists" whom the John Birch Society was organized to warn against were the very people for whom George Birch worked, i.e., the organized public health organization supported by the Rockefeller Foundations. The second irony is that, though Welch repeatedly called John Birch a "fundamentalist Baptist" (page 41) in his Indianapolis speech (see The Blue Book), his parents reported to the same Presbyterian missionary network in Allahabad, India, for which Allen W. Dulles (who then headed the CIA) worked for a year. It is as though Robert Welch was a propaganda tool operating on behalf of the very elite clique he seemed to be attacking. Using the word "fundamentalist" ten times in his speech, Welch rang an alarm about the diminishing numbers of evangelicals attempting to convert the heathen:

Some have merely watered down the faith of our fathers, and of theirs, into an innocuous philosophy instead of an evangelistic religion. Some have converted Christianity into a so-called "social gospel," that bypasses all questions of dogma with an indifference which is comfortable to both themselves and their parishioners; and which "social gospel" becomes in fact indistinguishable from advocacy of the welfare state by socialist politicians.

But Welch also inserted a very ominous paragraph into his 1958 speech, which we have to look back on, after what happened in November 1963, with amazement:

But on our own side of the fence, among the millions who either are, or pretend to be, non-Communists, the amoral man, who has no slightest inner concern with right or wrong, is one of the greatest causes of our constant retreat, and one of the greatest dangers to our survival. And he doesn't wear any label. He usually lives up to the appearance of excellent morals, because it is expedient for his purposes, and you will usually find him in church on Sunday morning, maybe even a Catholic church. But as a member of the United States Senate, running for the presidency, and smart enough to know the strong Communist support behind-the-scenes which he will have to get in order to have any chance of being nominated in 1960, such an amoral man can do a tremendous amount of ball- carrying on behalf of the Communist aims here in the United States; and he can do an almost equal amount of damage to anti-Communist morale in other parts of the world, by his well-publicized speeches against Chiang Kai-shek or in favor of the Algerian rebels. Or an amoral man, as the head of a great so-called Republic, may have no slightest scruples or concern about its fate or the fate of other nations, in the face of Communist conquest and of the cruel tyranny of their rule. And any similarity of characters in this story to any living persons is not coincidental. [emphasis added]

Welch also quoted the poet Alfred Noyes, a former Princeton professor, calling him a "good friend." Noyes had worked during World War I in the British propaganda office of Ambassador Spring-Rice who worked closely in Washington with the Dulles brothers' uncle Robert Lansing. 

Noyes had a role in falsely convicting a man named Roger Casement (later hanged), who was discredited by use of a forged diary for acts of homosexuality. Noyes in 1957 had himself been castigated by the poet Yeats into admitting his part in the offensive British policy:

In 1957 Alfred Noyes made full amends for his previous harsh judgement when he published The Accusing Ghost; or, Justice for Casement in which he argued that Casement had indeed been the victim of a British Intelligence plot. His conversion, and Yeats' protest in verse, cemented the idea that the diaries were forgeries.

We have to wonder. Were Welch and Noyes working together in propaganda and intelligence operations during WWI? Was the John Birch Society a continuation of the British-American propaganda effort on behalf of the Nationalist Chinese?


Bombs Over Tokyo

Many years after George and Ethel Birch returned from their three years in the mission field in India, their eldest son John, having graduated from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, had decided to attend a Bible Baptist institute in Fort Worth, Texas to learn to be a missionary to the Chinese people. According to a brief bio of Birch, he was already at his mission four months after Pearl Harbor Day when he took on a more active role in history:

Chuchow location near Formosa

In April 1942, he aided the Doolittle Raiders after they crash-landed in Japanese-controlled areas of China [30 miles north of Chuchow China] by helping them get to friendly territory. Jimmy Doolittle recommended John to Gen. Claire Chennault for service with the Army Air Forces and Chennault awarded Birch a commission on July 4, 1942.

I Could Never Be So Lucky Again: An Autobiography

Chennault used Birch as an intelligence officer and he served with the Military Intelligence Service with Headquarters 14th Air Force when it was activated on March 10, 1943. Capt Birch also worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, but managed to continue his missionary work to the Chinese people at the same time. On August 25, 1945, Capt. Birch was murdered by Chinese Communists while traveling to reach Allied personnel in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. He was buried in a cemetery near Hsuchow, China. The John Birch Society was named in his honor on December 9, 1958, and he is considered to be the first casualty of the Cold War.

What Can Be Documented

At the time of the 1940 census, John Birch, age 21, lived as a boarder in a rented house at 915 West First Street in Fort Worth with a fellow student of his same approximate age, Oscar Wells, nephew of Martha Thomson, the widow of J.B. Thomson. Birch reported his birthplace as British India. By the time the 1942 directory was issued, the house was vacant.

Birch address in Fort Worth, 1940 census

Birch's roommate, Oscar Wells came to Fort Worth from an isolated area of the Texas Panhandle, east of Amarillo, near the Oklahoma border and would also serve as a missionary to China. Shortly after leaving Fort Worth, Wells married Myrtle Huizenga under a certificate signed by F. Russell Engdahl of the American Consular Service in Shanghai, China in June 1942. {See Note 3}

The Wellses had a daughter born in Shanghai, later-astronaut Shannon Wells Lucid:

Shannon Lucid was born in Shanghai, China on January 14, 1943. Shortly after her birth Lucid with her parents were interned in a Japanese concentration camp in northern China during the Second World War. The camp was referred to as the Shantung Compound, and the internees were not freed until 1945. A book has been written about the trying conditions in the compound by a University of Chicago theologian Langdon Gilkey [son of Hyde Park Baptist Church pastor and the first dean of the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel]. The title of the book is “Shantung Compound.” Lucid’s parents were Baptist missionaries Oscar and Myrtle Wells.

Fighting in Chuchow, 1927

Norris {See Note 4} had long been a great supporter of the mission work of his friends, Rev. and Mrs. Fred Sheldon Donnelson, who set up the Shanghai Baptist Tabernacle, after the Japanese began attacking the Chinese in this area, the same area which had been the subject of Sun Yat-sen's Boxer Rebellion years earlier.

In 1937, Japan and China were at war. Hangchow [45 miles northeast of Chuchow] was continually under Japanese air attack. When the Japanese infantry landed troops nearby, the Donnelsons fled to Shanghai. They reluctantly left for a trip home and a furlough, but not before becoming burdened for the city of Shanghai. They vowed to return as soon as possible.

When the Donnelsons returned to the United States, they found the independent Baptist landscape had changed. The protest-based Baptist Bible Union had given way to the missionary vision-based World Fundamental Baptist Missionary Fellowship. Churches and preachers were attracted to a system of missionary support that showed signs of organization yet lacking the features of denominational control and bureaucratic inefficiency. ... The pages of J. Frank Norris’s Fundamentalist constantly encouraged readers to send support for the new work to be built when the Donnelsons returned to Shanghai.

They did return in the fall of 1938. In the next three and a half years, they established Shanghai Baptist Tabernacle and a Bible school with dormitories for housing resident students.

Other Fundamentalist World Mission Work

Jerry Falwell

One-time Director of World Missions for the Baptist Bible Fellowship, Rev. Fred Sheldon Donnelson would in 1972 be offered a position by Rev. Jerry Falwell (founder of the "Moral Majority") at Lynchburg Baptist College in Virginia. Falwell knew Donnelson through his son, Paul Frederick Donnelson, pastor of the Park Avenue Baptist Church in Lynchburg, whose preaching "brought him [Falwell] to the altar" in 1952.

This miracle of salvation occurred only three short years after the Donnelson family, after being interned by Japanese soldiers in China, had to leave China for the second and final time in 1949. In 1952 J. Frank Norris, died, and the Baptist institute in Fort Worth which John Birch had attended for a brief time was relocated to Arlington, Texas at the site of a former gambling casino. But that's another story in itself.

[Side note: Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker has documented more than one strange connection between Donnelson's "convert," Falwell, and a flight school at Venice, Florida, airport owned by Wallace Hilliard, a school that "trained" alleged Saudi student pilots connected to the 9/11 attack at the World Trade Center.]

From the John Birch Society (JBS) document, The Blue Book, we learn the names of the founding Council of the JBS in 1958. These directors did not include General Jimmy Doolittle, but the list did include Lt. Gen. Charles Bertody Stone III, who came from a military family from Georgia. Stone had earlier been stationed at Wright Field as chief of the supply branch, Air Service Command, and in June 1945 (two months before John Birch was "assassinated" by Red Chinese) was assigned the task of organizing a new headquarters for the Flying Tigers, which was absorbed into the 14th Air Force. He assumed command two months later.

The Saturday Evening Post in 1955 contained this statement:

After the Japanese surrender, Captain Birch headed a mission which proceeded north from Anhwei Province toward Tsingtao, apparently to straighten out some difficulty which Chinese-communist troops had created in the surrender of Japanese units. Because the file on Captain Birch's mission has been classified as secret, there is no way of knowing just what the purpose of the mission was. According to Robert H. W. Welch, Jr., in The Life of John Birch (Regnery), the captain himself felt that "it is of utmost importance that my country learn now whether these people are friend or foe."

When U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson ridiculed the idea that the U.S. was losing face in Asia in 1949 as the result of State Department policy toward China, he was taking a slap at Chinese Nationalist lobby in the U.S. One of the lobby's sparkplugs is a New York [textile] importer named Alfred Kohlberg. Operating through the American China Policy Association, Kohlberg is a fount of propaganda for the Nationalist cause, sending masses of material to a list of 2,000 editors. Though Kohlberg is not registered as a Congressional lobbyist, Capitol Hill is flooded with his pro-Nationalist material. In at least one instance the Chinese embassy itself has lobbied against a Presidential appointment. In July 1949 a high embassy official met secretly with a group of ten U.S. Senators to urge the defeat of W. Walton Butterworth as Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East. Nation. 12/24/1949, Vol. 169 Issue 26, p619-620. 2p

The article focuses on China lobbyist Alfred Kohlberg. Kohlberg would indeed be either the very last person or the very first person one would expect to discover trafficking in Communist Chinese merchandise. The U.S. customs authorities apparently saw it the latter way when, in December, 1954, they impounded 30,800 embroidered linen handkerchiefs, worth $90,000, which Kohlberg had imported from Hong Kong. Kohlberg protests they were not made in Communist China but in Hong Kong. Kohlberg will be remembered as the voluble New York propagandist who seven years ago led the China Lobby's attack on the State Department's now-exiled China hands. New Republic. 6/25/56, Vol. 134 Issue 26, p6-6. 1/2p. [emphasis added]

Gen. Claire Chennault with Madame and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek

Birch's death, occurring just days after WWII ended, would be waved like a bloody shirt by the John Birch Society, created  in 1958, as the first American killed in WWIII. But, we are told, the JBS was not affiliated with Norris, who had died in 1952.

~~~~

NOTES:

{Note 1}
 Donald Matheson's son Duncan was a Major in the Inniskilling Dragoons, which we cannot help but notice was the regiment connected to the Hargreaves branch of the Alexander Brown banking family. Sir William Brown's daughter Grace Brown Hargreaves was mother of Thomas Hargreaves, and his daughter Annie in 1877 married Frederick Eustace Arbuthnott Wollaston, whose father was a Major in the Irish Jacobite 6th Inniskilling Dragoons. An uncle, William Wollaston, was in the 47th Bengal Native Infantry, the army assigned to the East India Company in northern India, an area that has once been more Muslim than Hindu. Another relative was Arthur Naylor Wollaston, author of several books about Islam, who was in the India Office's Revenue Department.

{Note 2} 
Obituary, THE NEW YORK TIMES, June 12, 1958:  Dr. Higginbottom came to the United States in his youth. He attended Amherst College and received an M.A. at Princeton University. He began service in Allahabad in 1903 as an economics teacher at the Christian College and soon began his campaign to improve the living standard of the Indian country folk, or, as he put it, "to save men's souls by saving their bodies first".

In 1909 Dr. Higginbottom returned to this country to study scientific farming at Ohio State University. He received a B.Sc. degree in agriculture there in 1911 and raised $30,000 from church groups to develop his farm school plans.

Indian princes and British Indian officials repeatedly visited the Higginbottom establishment to study his methods and invite him to lecture before representative bodies. Princeton University, in 1923, awarded a Doctorate of Philanthropy to him, and in 1952 he won the national award of the American Agricultural Editors' Association.

His "The Gospel and the Plow", published by Macmillan's, became an outstanding book in its field. He also wrote "What Does Jesus Expect of His Church?" and "Sam Higginbottom, Farmer".

{Note 3}
Engdahl had married Elizabeth Lockhart in a Catholic ceremony soon after being posted in Shanghai in 1937. A 1941 article identified her as the daughter of Dr. Oliver Cary Lockhart, who had been serving for the past twelve years as "financial advisor to the Chinese government." Dr. Lockhart began a teaching career at Ohio State University in Columbus in 1908 (living in upper Arlington near the more ostentatious Marble Cliff community where Prescott Bush's family lived), where he taught, among other classes, "banking and foreign exchange." By the time WWI rolled around, in addition to teaching, Lockhart also held a position in Manhattan with the Morgan-affiliated National Bank of Commerce as an auditor and eventually moved his family to an apartment across the street from Columbia University.

Dr. Lockhart authored an article that appear in the Feb. 1924 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics entitled "The Denominations of the Currency in Relation to the Gold Problem," which begins with the following paragraph:

The monetary gold stock of the United States has more than doubled since July 1, 1914. It is now well above four billion dollars, and is increasing at the rate of twenty-five or thirty millions per month. The greater part of this accumulation is directly or indirectly the outgrowth of the World War. The principal currency problem before the country to-day relates to the influence of this accumulation on total monetary circulation and on the volume of bank credit.

Things would change, however, after the stock market crashed in 1929, and Lockhart would be sent to China as an adviser until 1941. Upon his return he was employed by the Office of Price Administration in Washington, D.C., while his wife, the former Joanna Kenyon Mix, remained at their home in Greens Farms, Connecticut. Their daughter, wife of Consul Russ Engdahl, would be interned in the Japanese camp, where her husband died allegedly from an accidental fall, but Elizabeth, a graduate of Cornell, lived until 1995, working in various consular posts:

'33—Elizabeth Lockhart Engdahl of Mill Valley, CA, formerly of Washington, DC, Dec. 16, 1994; retired head of field operations division of visa office, US State Department; former Foreign Service officer who served in Shanghai, Teheran, Paris, and Vienna; active in professional affairs.

While in Shanghai, Engdahl's boss, also named Lockhart, came from Texas. Consul General Frank Pruit Lockhart was U.S. Consul General in Hankow, 1925-31; Tientsin, 1931-35; Shanghai, 1940-42 . Also interned in the same camp with the Engdahls, he was returned to the U.S. aboard the S.S. Gripsholm in 1942. Intriguingly, we note that the consular post he held would be filled by John Moors Cabot.

{Note 4}
Norris had been waging a battle against Russian communism — since 1935, long before Senator Joe McCarthy joined the bandwagon (see sermon which begins at page 201 of the file; also Turley, p. 292). Here is an excerpt from that sermon, quoting from a 1935 resolution of the Northern Baptist Convention held in Colorado Springs:

Now, I am going to make a charge that the Social Action Commission [of the Northern Baptist Convention] and Russian Communism, especially two principal American branches are identical. Let me quote from the report:

We are convinced that the economic system as it has been operated has also created serious obstacles to Christian living. There are multitudes of Christians in high and low positions in our economic and industrial life who desire to express their Christianity in these relations but who find it impossible within the system.

The church has a responsibility to them. It is futile to bring up generations of youth in Christian ideals which they are compelled to discard when they go out to make a living. Christians owe it to themselves and to their fellows to work for an economic order in which Christian motives have freer chance for expression and in which Christian ideals have larger hope of realization.

The possibility of change for the better must be accepted as a fact by the Christian. The economic system has been man-made and it can be changed by men. Changes must begin with the individual and an improved operation of any system rests with the individuals. 'No gain can be achieved by society that is not supported by human wills.'

"In view of these conditions, what may be done by our denomination to effect the changes which are necessary to provide more opportunity and encouragement for men and women to live as Christians in their economic and industrial relations and to secure fundamental justice for all?

"It is clear that the denomination corporately cannot prosecute particular measures for social change. It should, however, have a constant program of education on these matters for its constituency which will enable them to act in accordance with Christian standards in these relations.

"We therefore recommend that such a program be conducted by the denomination through the local churches with the following definite objectives:

"I.  To create social attitudes based on these fundamental considerations.

"II.  A second definite objective of such a program of education should be to keep before our constituency certain basic issues, among them being:

" (l)  Economic security for all. This would involve general education on the need of unemployment, sickness and accident insurance and old age pensions; assembling and distributing the facts relative to specific measures for economic security; making available lists of information sources and agencies; and co-operation with other denominations and agencies for the furtherance of economic security.

" (2) Collective bargaining in industry. This would involve a program of education for a better understanding of the relative positions and problems of employers and employees in bargaining over wages, hours and conditions of work; and further the provision for a social action committee in every church, or in cooperation with other churches, to ascertain and publish the facts in the event of conflict and to encourage the exercise of moral judgment; and finally the support of whichever party in a dispute is in the right by purchasing the products of the industry or by contributions to the needs of the workers of funds, moral encouragement and places of meeting where needed.

" (3) More adequate representation of consumer interest in the determination of economic policies. This would involve the study of how the government may safeguard the consumer and promote his welfare and how consumers themselves may be informed so as to buy for their real needs and best interests instead of being at the mercy of the producer's and seller's advertising.

" (4) Keep open the channels of discussion of controversial economic and industrial issues. This would involve the dissemination of information about anti-sedition legislation designed to prevent the discussion end advocacy of legitimate economic changes and the organization of sentiment and effort for the defeat or repeal of any such laws as infringe upon the constitutional liberties. It would also involve giving moral and financial support to those who have been the victims of discrimination.

"III.  A third definite objective of such an educational program for the denomination should be to inculcate in individuals worthy economic motives and incentives that through them the basis of the economic system may be shifted from that of acquisitiveness to that of service.

 "IV.  A fourth definite objective should be to impress upon our individual members the importance of effecting changes in the economic order by the exercise  of their three-fold citizenship — political, civic and economic.

" (l) By political citizenship support should be given to whatever political party or candidate represents, on the whole, the most favorable disposition and opportunity to effect the desired changes. Since, however, the major political parties have not come to be in any considerable measure parties of clearly avowed and continuously held social principles, political effectiveness through them in the direction of the desired economic changes must involve support of smaller interest and pressure groups whose intelligent and persistent advocacy may lead to the espousing of social principles and programs from time to time by these major parties. Such pressure groups are numerous and range in point of view in our country from the American Liberty League to the League for industrial Democracy".

Now we have the whole thing out. Two of the principal Russian Communistic organizations in this country are "The American Liberty League" and "The League for Industrial Democracy".

Where Texans Conspired with British Spies

Jamaica Resorts--Round Hill and The Tryall Club

Sir Wm. Stephenson ("Intrepid")

In our last entry at this blog, we posted a news article about Paul Raigorodsky's co-investors in the development of the Tryall golf club in 1957, a 2,300 acre resort development 12 miles west of Montego Bay, Jamaica, often incorrectly said to have included within its acreage the former residence of Britain's North American chief of Intelligence, Sir William Stephenson. The top British spy's Hillowton home had instead been, it appears, a few miles to the east of Tryall and Round Hill--in Reading, St. James Parish, all as shown on the map below.

In 1940 the Intrepid BSC head was placed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in an office in New York -- Room 3603 of Rockefeller Center -- and by war's end his position at BSC (British Security Coordination) had become an umbrella spy society covering MI5, MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Special Operations Executive (SOE), and the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), in all of North and South America as well as the Caribbean. 

Spying against American Presidents and their officials (as revealed in books by authors Jennet Conant, Thomas E. Mahl and Donald Sturrock) did not end after the war. The propaganda machine had been placed in high gear and continued at a seemingly relaxed pace in the British islands south of the United States, where the British spies partied with Americans, both their witting and unwitting tools. 

Stephenson's death occurred on January 31, 1989, in Bermuda, where Stephenson moved after allegedly selling his Jamaican home, Hillowton in 1951.

Pat "Bubbles" Harmsworth

By 1989 spymaster Ian Fleming had already been dead 25 years, his death occurring only a year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, ironically a fan of the James Bond novels. Six years before that infamous murder, members of the Dallas community where Kennedy's brains were splattered over Dealy Plaza were making plans to construct the Tryall Club adjacent to Round Hill, in Montego Bay. Popular with British aristocrats and their American counterparts, Round Hill has been called "the first great post-war hotel, a meeting place for New York socialites and European royalty, a private retreat for Hollywood on holiday."

Ten years after plans to build Tryall were announced, the following article widely appeared in the press, quoting Patricia Evelyn Beverly Matthews "Bubbles" Harmsworth, more officially known as the:

vivacious Pat  Harmsworth of London, wife of the heir to the title Viscount Rothermere  [her husband's father was Esmond Cecil Harmsworth]. "After lunch, there's swimming, water skiing, snorkeling, but mostly tanning. "You have to get a tan. People don't know where you've been otherwise." Pat and her husband live in a cliffside home at Round Hill that Pat bought by accident. "I bid on it just for fun, and suddenly, I had a winter cottage."

Spies in Swimsuits

Fleming with first James Bond

Pat's husband, Vere Harold Esmond Harmsworth, was a stepson to Ian Fleming's longtime mistress (later wife), Anne Charteris Harmsworth, who had vacationed in Jamaica with Fleming for years while married to the 2nd Viscount Rothermere. 

Anne's first husband, the 3rd Baron O'Neill died in 1944, and though having had affairs with both Harmsworth and Fleming while married to O'Neill, she chose to marry the wealthy Viscount Rothermere in 1945; they divorced in 1952 after she became pregnant with Fleming's son, Caspar Robert Fleming. 

Lt.-Col. Raymond Arthur Clanaboy O'Neill, a son from her marriage to Baron O'Neill, would be widely rumored to be the man who would marry Princess Alexandra of Kent, though the Princess would actually choose Angus Ogilvy in 1963.

Ian Fleming's stepson, Ray O'Neill

Anne Fleming's stepdaughter, Esmé Gabrielle Harmsworth, already an adult in 1945, when Ann married the Viscount, had married into the Barings banking family in 1942, making her the Countess of Cromer. In 1961 her husband, G. Rowland Stanley Baring, was Governor of the Bank of England. 

During the same year a photo of Esmé's newest stepmother (Mrs. Mary Ohrstrom, niece of Clint Murchison, Sr.) appeared to support the Murchison sons' takeover of Baltimore's Alleghany Corporation. Based in Baltimore, childhood home of the Duchess of Windsor, Alleghany Corp. was originally financed by Alex. Brown and Sons and invested in by Wallis Simpson's uncle on her behalf. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were introduced by investment adviser Robert R. Young to Clint Murchison and taken to his secluded ranch in Mexico in 1950.  (See also Bryan Burrough, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes.)

Texan Conspirators against Liberal Presidents?

Click to enlarge.

During the proxy battle, Drew Pearson had written in his column:

The Murchisons [John D. and Clint, Jr.?] owe several millions to Mrs. Robert Young, widow of the late New York Central executive, and, according to SEC records, have borrowed $3,000,000 from Arnold S. Kirkeby, who owns the Kirkeby hotel chain and who once borrowed indirectly from "Longy" Zwillman, the New Jersey gangster, to acquire the Sherry-Netherland in New York. It's a frantic battle between the new Texas oil millionaires and the old Scotch Wall Street millionaire. Whoever wins out on May 1 will control two major railroads and the biggest mutual funds empire in the world. The battle will be worth watching.

When Bubbles' father-in-law married a third time, his new wife was former Texan, Mary Murchison Ohrstrom, one of the three women pictured above. She was a daughter of Kenneth Murchison, whose older brother was Clinton Williams Murchison, Sr. of Dallas, the father of the proxy battlers against Allan P. Kirby for control of Alleghany. 

Clint Sr. and Kenneth were sons of a small-town banker, and grew up in a family with ten children. Kenneth graduated from the University of Texas and went to work for a prominent Wall Street Bank at 60 Wall Street. At age 23, Kenneth applied for a passport, to go to the Philippines and Hong Kong on business.

Daughter Mary married Ian Fleming's wife's stepson.

Kenneth married Helen Claire Delaney, daughter of oil producer Michael Joseph Delaney of Bowling Green, Ohio in 1929, and they set up housekeeping in Highland Park, north of Dallas, where he worked for his brother Clint. Years later they lived at 3525 Turtle Creek Blvd., and Kenneth ran the Insurers Corporation in Dallas. 

Growing up in an assortment of states, Helen Delaney Murchison had moved from Ohio to South Boulder Avenue West in Tulsa, Oklahoma by 1910, and had lived a couple doors away from  oilman, Charles John Wrightsman, whose son, Charles B. Wrightsman, was four years older than Helen. 

We will return later to Charles Bierer Wrightsman and the other "conspirators." In the meantime, do your own research, and feel free to comment below.

White Russians and British Spies

The following post has been sitting in my draft file for ages now. As I did my research, I kept running into work previously done at Greg Parker's website, Reopen Kennedy Case, but it seems no one else has been fascinated by the potentially earth-shaking connections Max E. Clark of Fort Worth had to the White Russian community in Dallas. As revealed by the Warren Commission, Max Clark was married to Gali Scherbatoff, a Russian who was born in France. He explained in his testimony how their meeting with the Oswalds came about:

Mr. CLARK. My wife was born in France; her father is Russian and her mother is English and Russian. I know her father was born in Russia but I am not certain whether her mother was born in Russia or England because they alternated back and forth so I really don’t know....

Mr. LIEBELER. This first attempt of Oswald’s to contact your wife did he tell
you what motivated him; was it purely a social matter?

Mr. CLARK. Purely social; his wife could not speak English and she would
like to talk to some girl that spoke Russian so we made the offer. We were not
about to go out to his house where he was living. If he wanted to see us he
could come over there. We felt we had done enough. Shortly after that my
wife’s mother was having an operation in France so it had been planned that
she would go over there during this operation, so my wife left in July, I believe,
or first of August. I have forgotten, of 1962 and was gone 7 weeks or something
like that. When she returned to Fort Worth in September or the latter part
of September, the Russian group which she keeps rather close contact with -- there is not such a large number between Dallas and Fort Worth that they communicate quite freely back and forth -- stated that they had met this Marina
Oswald and that she was having an extremely hard time and so several of
them came over from Fort Worth, I mean from Dallas to Fort Worth and asked
my wife to meet them at Oswald’s house.

Bill Simpich has also studied Max Clark and described his role as a security officer in Fort Worth as well as within the community of White Russians in Dallas. Bill Kelly posted Simpich's research at his blog, JFKCountercoup:

The Dallas-Fort Worth community of Soviet and Eastern European emigres -- referred to as "White Russians" -- took Oswald and his family under their wing upon their arrival from the USSR in May 1962....

Max Clark, an attorney and former industrial security supervisor at General Dynamics, was a mentor for de Mohrenschildt and this community. Clark was part of a network of security personnel that put the squeeze on the Kennedy Administration that year to get General Dynamics' TFX project in Fort Worth approved over their Boeing competitors At the time, this deal to churn out the F-111 fighters was one of the largest military contracts in history.

The White Russian community harbored an underground anti-Soviet movement known as the NTS. The Dallas White Russian community was tightly aligned with an anti-Soviet movement known by its Russian initials of "NTS" (National Alliance of Russian Solidarists).

Documents show Max and Gali had married at some point before 1947, when as a couple, they returned from France aboard the S.S. De Grasse.

Click to enlarge.

Gali Scherbatoff's family's address was listed on the opposite page to the one above, shown as follows:

Click to enlarge.

The address shown for Max and Gali Clark at that time in 1947 was 608 Eighth Avenue in Fort Worth, Texas--a four-unit apartment house quite close to the historic Thistle Hill mansion built for Electra Waggoner Wharton. This apartment was only two streets over from the Sixth Avenue office building--where Max Clark's father's oil business had been housed for many years. The building was named for the late Dan Waggoner and his widow and built by rancher/oilman, W. T. Waggoner. By 1947 most of the Waggoners were either dead or had moved from Fort Worth, but their name still commanded a great deal of power among the old-timers in the city, like Sid W. Richardson, who resided in a hotel called the Fort Worth Club and had his offices on the 24th floor of the Fort Worth National Bank Building at 714 Main.

Adelaide Scherbatow in 1918

The Warren Commission testimony of  Paul Raigorodsky disclosed that Gali Scherbatoff Clark (Max Clark's wife) was a cousin of Kyril Scherbatow, who lived in New York and Jamaica. Thus, it seems the Clarks had invested with Raigorodsky in the Tryall Resort he had helped to build in Jamaica beginning in 1957.

Intriguingly, the British novelist Ian Fleming also had a residence in Jamaica, as did the head of British Security Coordination (BSC), William Stephenson. Only in recent years has it been disclosed the extent to which BSC was using its agents to spy on the internal politics and policy of its American allies. The first research came to this blogger's knowledge from a fascinating book called The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, written by Jennet Conant.  A second, even more comprehensive report of the propaganda techniques used by the BSC appeared in Thomas E. Mahl's book, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44.

Considering also the fact that several other Texans had vacation homes in Jamaica where they could have been in contact with British spies--intent during WWII and its aftermath with directing the course of American policy in a direction favorable to that of the United Kingdom--it leads us to consider an alternative to the common belief that it was the CIA behind the assassination of JFK. At the Tryall website we read:

By the 1950s, a group of entrepreneurs--including John Connally, later governor of Texas, and Lloyd Bentsen, who would become a U.S. Senator--had purchased the land. In 1957, they founded the Tryall Club as a private villa resort.

John Connally was the Texas governor at the time President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, an act which benefited Connally's mentor, Lyndon Johnson, as well as those businessmen who supported him. Many assassination researchers have wondered about the meaning of his exclamation on November 22, 1963:

My God, they are going to kill us all!

We will come back to John Connally later, after exploring more about the other investors who helped the White Russian Paul Raigorodsky create his resort somewhere between Ian Fleming's "Goldeneye" and Sir William Stephenson's "Hillowton". H. Montgomery Hyde described Hillowton in his book, Room 3603:

Stephenson had gone to live in Jamaica, where he had bought a property at Hillowton, overlooking Montego Bay - "the finest house in the island," he called it. (Incidentally, it was his wife's choice). His example was followed by several of his friends, including Lord Beaverbrook, Sir William Wiseman, Noel Coward and Ian Fleming, all of whom acquired estates on Jamaica's beautiful north shore at this time. For a year or so he showed little interest in the outside world and was content to enjoy life on this island in the sun. Only gradually did he recover his interest in commerce and industry.

With some of his war-time associates, such as financiers Sir Rex Benson and Sir Charles Hambro in London, General Donovan in Washington,and a number of Canadian and American industrialists like Edward Stettinius, former chairman of the U.S. Steel Corporation, he formed the British-American-Canadian Corporation, which developed into the World Commerce Corporation, originally designed to fill the void left by the break-up of the big German cartels which Stephenson himself had done much to destroy. Thus he and his colleagues on the board raised an initial $1,000,000 to help 'bridge over the breakdown in foreign exchange and provide the tools, machinery and "know how" to develop untapped resources in different parts of the world.

The Hillowton tract was apparently owned in 1939 by Mrs. John King Reckford, who lived in New York City. Reckford published a notice in the Kingston Gleaner to have her 22 acre property registered after it was surveyed. Reckford was the former Virginia Aileen Thelfall of Crafton, Pennsylvania, who married Naval Lieutenant Reckford, scion of the American Lead Pencil Co., in 1936 in the church in Elberon, N.J. named for eminent banker Moses Taylor. After John's death in 1941, the property was sold to Sir William Stephenson, head of British Intelligence in the United States. Room 3603 states that Hillowton was owned by the BSC chief no later than 1943, when he invited Noel Coward to visit there.

An aside to this story is intriguing as well. The seller of the Jamaican estate, Mrs. Reckford in 1945 married Fernand Jean Prosper Delzaert, a Belgian economist stationed in Washington, D.C., whom she divorced in 1949 (see news clip).

In February 1948, The Gleaner published a photo of Roald Dahl with his first name typically misspelled:

MR. ROULD [sic] DAHL, writer, and friend of Sir William Stephenson, who arrived here yesterday afternoon by British South American Airways plane from London to spend a four week vacation.

Mr. Dahl told the Gleaner yesterday that his first book "Flying Fast," was recently published, and the second, "The Satier," will be published in the United States next month. He will leave Kingston some time today for Hillowton Reading, where he will be a guest at Sir William Stephenson's winter home in St. James.

In July that year another notice mentioning Dahl and Hillowton appeared in the Gleaner:

NOTICE

ALL WRITERS MAY FORWARD their SCRIPTS to MISS LENA LEVY, STENOTYPIST. who has her office OPPOSITE the MONTEGO BAY POST OFFICE. PHONE 654. Some months ago Miss Levy got through 85.000 words for those well-known writers, the Max Murrays, and 40,000 words for that brilliant young writer, Ronald [sic] Dahl, who spent a few weeks with Sir William and Lady Stephenson at Hillowton.

Donald Sturrock wrote in his book, Storyteller, a biography of Roald Dahl:

Dahl himself escaped for a month to Jamaica in early 1948, flying via Senegal and Brazil, and staying for two weeks with Hemingway at Sir William Stephenson’s house in Hillowton outside Montego Bay—a “dream place” where he went swimming every day on Max Beaverbrook’s private beach. He then travelled east along the north coast of the island to spend a few days with Charles Marsh near Ocho Rios. But he ended up staying as the house guest of Pamela Berry, the Marchioness of Huntly, and making his Jamaican “headquarters” with her.

It has been said that Stephenson sold Hillowton in 1951. If so, there appears to be a gap to research between that date and six years later--May 6, 1957--when the following headline appeared at the top fold of the Kingston Gleaner in Jamaica:

Tryall sold to multi-million dollar group.
Jamaican named Chairman.

We will pick up at this point, hopefully, in our next entry.