Tommy the Cork Links to Forbes Family Network

Excerpt from Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup – Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism (1980 out of print, pages 129-139):
 

Chapter Fourteen
HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

The place was Kunming in the South China province of Yunnan. The time was the end of World War II. Amid the chaos of war, opium and gold became the primary media of exchange [or, a specie substitute], and cult‑like bonds were forged among a small staff of Americans and high‑ranking Chinese. Yunnan was a center of Chinese opium cultivation and Kunming [see inset map] was the hotbed of military operations, among them Claire Chennault's 14th Air Force and Detachment 202 of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Among Detachment 202's notorious collection of special agents, one in particular – E. Howard Hunt – has needed no introduction since the Watergate break‑in. In Kunming, the spy novelist who later became a comrade of Cuban exiles and China Lobbyists befriended an equally intriguing character, the French Foreign Legionnaire turned OSS agent, Captain Lucien Conein.[1] Although not part of Detachment 202 proper, Conein frequented Kunming while awaiting parachuting over Indochina.[2]

Ambassador Lodge

Indochina remained Conein's base of operation after World War II, when, like Hunt, he slid over from the OSS to its successor, the CIA. He then operated throughout South and North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma, and became the top U.S. expert on the area-‑as well as on the opium‑smuggling Corsican Mafia. He was Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge's middle-man in the 1963 plot to overthrow South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem (who was assassinated along with his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the Corsicans' partner in the drug traffic).

A decade later, Conein and Hunt, working for the Nixon White House Plumbers, would attempt to make it appear that the plot had been ordered by JFK. Both Conein and William Colby, mastermind of the CIA's Phoenix assassination program, were recalled to the U.S. at the start of the seventies.

C.V. Starr

After Mao Tse‑tung's rise to power in China, OSS veterans formed a number of firms that would be linked both to the CIA and to its reactionary client regimes in the Far East. With financial assistance from his friends in Asia, OSS China hand C.V. Starr gained control of several U.S. insurance companies. As brought to light during the McClellan hearings, Jimmy Hoffa awarded one of them, U.S. Life, and a smaller company, Union Casualty‑whose agents Paul and Allen Dorfman were among Hoffa's links to the underworld[3]—a Teamsters Union contract despite a lower bid from a larger, more reputable insurance firm.[4]

Starr's attorney was the powerful Washington‑based Tommy "The Cork" Corcoran. Corcoran's law partner [1941-49], William Youngman [Jr.], was a director of U.S. Life [Insurance]. Corcoran's other clients included

• the United Fruit Company, 
• Chiang Kai‑shek's influential brother‑in‑law T.V. Soong, and 
• the mysterious airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT), of which 60 percent was owned by the Taiwan regime and 40 percent by the CIA.[5] 

What Kruger Did NOT Say

What Henrik Kruger did not say here, which is, in fact, crucial, is that the wife of Tommy the Cork's partner--attorney and former Republican politician in Massachusetts, William S. Youngman--was Elsie Hooper Perkins, a member of the Perkins/Forbes/Higginson opium trading network. We have traced this opium network back to the shipping firm set up by Thomas and James Handasyd Perkins (two sons of James Perkins and Elizabeth Peck). The author of Quixotic Joust has written about that network repeatedly at Where the Gold Is, each of which has taglines and a search engine to help locate additional articles.

Brief Sketch of Mrs. William Sterling (Elsie Hooper Perkins) Youngman's family: 

Elsie Perkins (center) with mother and brother in 1923

Elsie and her brother, Robert Jr.,were born to Robert Forbes Perkins and his second wife. Her father had married Annie Rodman Bowditch in 1891, with whom he had four children, before divorcing her in 1910. By then the children were mostly grown, but the youngest remained with their father. The following year Perkins married Elsie's mother, Evelyn Morancy Gray of Louisiana, who was 25 years his junior, and at about the same time, ex-wife Annie married Bronson Case Rumsey, heir to a leather fortune. Rumsey's granddaughter, Ruth Rumsey, married William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan around the same time as well.

Elsie and Robert, Jr.'s older half siblings grew up in the same historic pink mansion, Owl's Nest, in Framingham, Massachusetts, where Elsie grew up, and shared the same paternal grandparents, Charles Elliott Perkins and Edith Forbes, both of whom were descended from the family this blogger wrote about in "Following the Forbes Money Trail," a family tree incidentally shared with our current Secretary of State, John Forbes Kerry.

Tracing John Kerry's ancestry back to James and Elizabeth (Peck) Perkins has been a long process duplicated by other researchers, such as the author of smokershistory, from whose research we learn even more about this financial network. It all just goes to show how America's original drug-running families have over the last two centuries commingled profits from opium with other investments into "legitimate business," while at the same time they have been placed in charge of America's intelligence agencies. 

Noted historian Eustace Mullins, in his book, The World Order, has also written that Bronson Case Rumsey, the stepfather of Elsie Youngman's older siblings, was also grandfather to Charles Cary Rumsey, who was killed in a car accident in 1922. In 1910 Charles Cary married Mary Harriman, elder sister of Averell and Bunny Harriman. All these marriages help to explain why the Harriman brothers merged their family banking enterprise with the old Brown Brothers investment bank of New York a few years later into Brown Brothers, Harriman.

Back to What Kruger Did Say

On behalf of United Fruit, Corcoran triggered a CIA plot — in which E. Howard Hunt was the agency's chief political action officer — to overthrow Guatemala's President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.[6]

Bird ran Thai Commerce

OSS China hand Willis Bird settled in Bangkok, Thailand to head an office of Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA proprietary headquartered in Miami, which furnished weapons to opium‑smuggling Nationalist Chinese (KMT) troops in Burma. One William Bird, representing CAT in Bangkok, coordinated CAT airdrops to KMT troops and ran an engineering firm that constructed short airstrips used for the collection of Laotian opium.[7]

Sea Supply also provided arms and aid to Phao Sriyanonda, the head of Thailand's 45,000‑man paramilitary police force and reputedly one of the most corrupt men in the history of that corruption‑ridden nation. For years his troops protected KMT opium smugglers and directed the drug trade from Thailand.[8]

When President John F. Kennedy in 1962 attempted a crackdown on the most hawkish CIA elements in Indochina, he sought the prosecution of Willis Bird, who had been charged with the bribery of an aid official in Vientiane. But Bird never returned to the U.S. to stand trial.

Upon returning to Miami, the OSS Chief of Special Intelligence and head of Detachment 202 in Kunming, Colonel Paul Helliwell, was a busy man. In Miami offices of the American Bankers Insurance Co. he functioned simultaneously as the Thai consul, and the counsel for Sea Supply as well as for insurance companies run by his former subordinate C.V. Starr.[9]

American Bankers Insurance was itself a most unusual firm; one of its directors, James L. King, was also a director of the Miami National Bank through which the Lansky syndicate reportedly passed millions en route to Geneva's Swiss Exchange and Investment Bank. One of the Swiss bank's directors, Lou Poller, also sat on the board of King's Miami National Bank.[10]

Moreover, in the fifties and sixties, Thai and Nationalist Chinese capital was invested in Florida's explosive development, much of it by way of the General Development Corporation controlled by associates of Meyer Lansky.[11] It's important to note the dubious alliance of Southeast Asian power groups with those concerned with Florida and Cuba. This early mutuality of business interests is the key to all that follows, and Miami is the nerve center to which we will continually return.

The alliance was comprised of the China Lobby, OSS China hands, Cuban exiles, the Lansky syndicate, and CIA hawks pushing for all‑out involvement in Indochina and against Castro's Cuba. It coalesced between 1961 and 1963, and its members had three things in common:

1. a right wing political outlook, 
2. an interest in Asian opium, and 
3. a thirst for political might. 

The last factor led to another common denominator in which the alliance invested heavily: Richard M. Nixon.

Anna Chennault

Some people effectively overlap the entire spectrum of the alliance. Among them are Howard Hunt and Tommy Corcoran, the man behind United Fruit's dirty work. United Fruit was a client of the Miami‑based Double‑Chek Corp., a CIA front that supplied planes for the Bay of Pigs invasion.[12] Corcoran was the Washington escort of General Chennault's widow Anna Chen Chennault, erstwhile head of the China Lobby, the key to Southeast Asian opium.[13]

Pawley in Haiti during WWI

Another key figure in the China Lobby was weapons dealer/financier William Pawley, the American cofounder of Chennault's Flying Tigers.[14]

Pawley's name was the password to intrigue:

• OSS China, 
• Tommy Corcoran,[15] 
• CIA cover firms,[16] and 
• arms shipments to KMT Chinese on Taiwan in defiance of a State Department refusal of authorization.

All were either directly or indirectly connected to Pawley. He also rubbed elbows with the U.S. heroin Mafia when, in 1963, he, Santo Trafficante, Jr. and Cuban exiles took part in one of the countless boat raids on Cuba.[18]
The China Lobby's Southeast Asian connection naturally went via the Taiwan regime, which controlled the opium‑growing Chinese in the Golden Triangle and, with the CIA, owned the opium‑running CAT airlines. As Ross Y. Koen wrote in 1964:

"There is considerable evidence that a number of Nationalist Chinese officials are engaged in the illegal smuggling of narcotics into the United States with the full knowledge and connivance of the Nationalist Chinese government. The evidence indicates that several prominent Americans have participated in and profited from these transactions. It indicates further that the narcotics business has been an important factor in the activities and permutations of the China Lobby." [19]

British writer Frank Robertson went one step further in 1977:

"Taiwan is a major link in the Far East narcotics route, and a heroin producer. Much of the acetic anhydride-‑the chemical necessary for the transformation of morphine into heroin-‑smuggled into Hong Kong and Thailand, comes from this island, a dictatorship under the iron rule of the late Chiang Kai‑shek's son, Chiang Ching-kuo."[20]

When the Communists routed Chiang Kai‑shek's forces in 1949, some 10,000 KMT troops fled to Southeast Asia and settled in a remote part of Burma. Heavily armed, they soon assumed control of the area and intermarried with the local population. Under General Li Mi they continued to infiltrate China proper, but each time they were repulsed. While awaiting Chiang's signal for a final, two‑front onslaught, Burma's KMT army needed a source of income. Many had grown opium in Yunnan and so the poppies, which flourished on the hillsides, became the force's cash crop.

Around 1950 the CIA became interested in the KMT troops. With General Douglas MacArthur pushing to arm them for an attack on Red China, the agency secretly flew them weapons in CAT airplanes. But when the KMT instead used the weapons against the Burmese army, Burma protested before the UN, where it was decided that 2000 KMT troops would be flown by CAT to Taiwan by 1954. Those who eventually made the trip, however, were only farmers and mountain people in KMT uniforms, and the weapons they took out were obsolete.[21] Nonetheless, with help from the Red Chinese army, Burma drove most of the KMT forces into Thailand and Laos, though many later returned. The Kuomintang and their kin now number over 50,000. Though only a fraction are soldiers, the KMT still controls hundreds of thousands of Chinese occupying the region, especially in Thailand.

"It's opium."

The junction of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, the Golden Triangle, is the site of the bulk of the world's opium production and thereby the source of enormous fortunes for the French and later the Americans. The French held effective control over the Southeast Asian opium traffic until 1965. Between 1946 and 1955 the Mixed Airborne Commando Group (MACG) and the French Air Force managed the shipment of opium from Burma to Laos. A guerilla corps comprised mostly of Laotian Meo tribesmen and led by Colonel Roger Trinquier, MACG remained unusually independent despite its direct connections to the SDECE and Deuxieme (Second) Bureau. To finance their secret Indochina operations, these organizations turned to the smuggling of gold and opium, with MACG in charge of the latter. Large quantities of opium were shipped to French Saigon headquarters and passed on to the Corsican Mafia, who in turn smuggled the drug to Marseilles.

When the French withdrew from Indochina in 1955 after their defeat by the Vietminh, and after the CIA pushed aside the SDECE, MACG leaders communicating through CIA agent Lucien Conein offered the Americans their entire guerilla force. Against Conein's advice they refused.[22] History would cast doubt on the wisdom of that decision.

In 1955 CIA agent General Edward Lansdale began a [fake] war to liquidate the Corsican supply network. While Lansdale was cracking down on the French infrastructure, his employer the CIA was running proprietaries, like Sea Supply and CAT, that worked hand‑in‑hand with the opium‑smuggling Nationalist Chinese of the Golden Triangle, and with the corrupt Thai border police.[23]

Conein

The Lansdale/ Corsican vendetta lasted several years, during which many attempts were made on Lansdale's life. Oddly enough, his principal informant on Corsican drug routes and connections was the former French Foreign Legionnaire, Lucien Conein, then of the CIA. Conein knew just about every opium field, smuggler, trail, airstrip, and Corsican in Southeast Asia. He spent his free time with the Corsicans, who considered him one of their own. Apparently they never realized it was he who was turning them in.[24]

When Lansdale returned from Vietnam in the late fifties, the Corsicans recouped some of their losses, chartering aging aircraft to establish Air Opium, which functioned until around 1965. That year, the Corsicans' nemesis Lansdale returned to Vietnam as an advisor to Amabassador[sic] Lodge. There was also an upheaval in the narcotics traffic, and perhaps the two were connected. CIA‑backed South Vietnamese and Laotian generals began taking over the opium traffic — and as they did so, increasing amounts of morphine and low‑quality heroin began showing up on the Saigon market.

The first heroin refineries sprang up in Laos under the control of General Ouane Rattikone. President Ky in Saigon was initially in charge of smuggling from the Laotian refineries to the South Vietnamese; and Lansdale's office, it is to be remembered, was working closely with Ky. Lansdale himself was one of Ky's heartiest supporters, and Conein went along with whatever Lansdale said.[25]

One result of the smuggling takeover by the generals was the end of the Corsicans' Air Opium. The KMT Chinese and Meo tribesmen who cultivated raw opium either transported it themselves to the refineries or had it flown there by the CIA via CAT and its successor, Air America, another agency proprietary. Though the Corsicans still sent drugs to Marseilles, the price was becoming prohibitive, since they were forced to buy opium and morphine in Saigon and Vientiane rather than pick up the opium for peanuts in the mountains.

Air America, Inc.

In 1967 a three‑sided opium war broke out in Laos between a Burmese Shan State warlord, KMT Chinese and General Rattikone's Laotian army. Rattikone emerged victorious, capturing the opium shipment with the help of U.S.‑supplied aircraft. The KMT, for its part, managed to reassert its dominance over the warlord. The smuggling picture was becoming simplified, with Southeast Asian opium divided among fewer hands, and most of the Corsicans out of the way.

General Lansdale returned to the U.S. in 1967, leaving Conein in Vietnam. The next year Conein greeted a new boss, William Colby. Since 1962 Colby had run the agency's special division for covert operations in Southeast Asia, where his responsibilities included the " secret" CIA war in Laos with its 30,000‑man Meo army. He shared that responsibility with the U.S. ambassador [sic] in Laos, William H. Sullivan, who would later preside over the Tehran embassy during the fall of the Shah.

Many of the agents who ran the CIA's war in Laos had earlier trained Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and afterward had taken part in the agency's continued secret operations against Cuba.[26] Since exiles were furnished by the Trafficante mob,[27] intelligence agents had intermingled with representatives of America's number one narcotics organization. The same agents would now become involved with the extensive opium smuggling from Meo tribesmen camps to Vientiane.[28]

In 1967 Colby devised a plan of terror for the "pacification" of Vietnam. Operation Phoenix organized the torture and murder of any Vietnamese suspected of the slightest association with Vietcong. Just as Lansdale was travelling home, Colby was sent to South Vietnam to put his brainchild to work. According to Colby's own testimony before a Senate committee, 20,857 Vietcong were murdered in Phoenix's first two years. The figure of the South Vietnamese government for the same period was over 40, 000.[29]

It was during Colby's tour in Vietnam that the heroin turned out by General Ouane Rattikone's labs appeared in quantity, and with unusually high quality. The great heroin wave brought on a GI addiction epidemic in 1970; Congressional reports indicated that some 22 percent of all U.S. soldiers sampled the drugs and 15 percent became hooked.[30]

Former Air Marshal, then Vice President, Nguyen Cao Ky (now alive and well in the United States) and his underlings still controlled most of the traffic. President Nguyen Van Thieu and his faction, comprised mostly of army and navy officers, were also in it up to their necks. According to NBC's Saigon correspondent, Thieu's closest advisor, General Dang Van Quang, was the man most responsible for the monkey on the U.S. Army's back. But the U.S. Saigon embassy, where Colby was second in command, found no substance to the accusations, Ky's record notwithstanding: Ky had been removed from U.S. Operation Haylift, which flew commando units into Laos, for loading his aircraft with opium on the return trips.

In the face of skyrocketing GI heroin abuse, the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) looked into General Ngo Dzu's complicity in the heroin traffic and filed a lengthy report at the U.S. embassy.[31] The embassy ignored the report and chose not to forward it to Washington.[32] The BNDD also investigated the roots of the heroin epidemic, but was impeded in its work by the CIA and U.S. embassy. In 1971, however, a string of heroin labs were uncovered in Thailand, and a number were closed down.

In 1971, furthermore, Colby and Conein were recalled to the United States. Colby became the Deputy Director of Operations, the man in charge of the CIA's covert operations. More remarkable, though, was Conein's homecoming after twenty‑four years of periodic service to the CIA in Indochina, raising the question of why the U.S.'s foremost expert on Indochina had been brought back to Washington just as the crucial phase of Vietnamization was about to begin.[33] Ironically, Corsican friends still around for Conein's departure presented him with a farewell gold medallion bearing the seal of the Corsican Union.

At the war's cataclysmic end, the CIA admitted that "certain elements in the organization" had been involved in opium smuggling and that the illegal activities of U.S. allies had been overlooked to retain their loyalties. In reality, the agency had been forced to confess because of its inability to refute the tales of returning GIs, among them that of Green Beret Paul Withers, a recipient of nine Purple Hearts, the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver and Bronze Stars:

"After completing basic training at Fort Dix in the fall of 1965 [Withers] was sent to Nha Trang, South Vietnam. Although he was ostensibly stationed there, he was placed on 'loan' to the CIA in January 1966 and sent to Pak Seng, Laos. Before going there he and his companions were stripped of their uniforms and all American credentials. They were issued Czechoslovakian guns and Korean uniforms. Paul even signed blank sheets of paper at the bottom and the CIA later typed out letters and sent them to his parents and wife. All this was done to hide the fact that there were American troops operating in Laos.

"The mission in Laos was to make friends with the Meo people and organize and train them to fight the Pathet Lao. One of the main tasks was to buy up the entire local crop of opium. About twice a week an Air America plane would arrive with supplies and kilo bags of opium which were loaded on the plane. Each bag was marked with the symbol of the tribe."[34]

The CIA, reportedly, did not support any form of smuggling after 1968. Del Rosario, a former CIA operative, had something to say about that:

"In 1971 I was an operations assistant for Continental Air Service, which flew for the CIA in Laos. The company's transport planes shipped large quantities of rice. However, when the freight invoice was marked 'Diverse,' I knew it was opium. As a rule an office telephone with a special number would ring and a voice would say 'The customer here'‑-that was the code designation for the CIA agents who had hired us. 'Keep an eye on the planes from Ban Houai Sai. We're sending some goods and someone's going to take care of it. Nobody's allowed to touch anything, and nothing can be unloaded,' was a typical message. These shipments were always top priority. Sometimes the opium was unloaded in Vientiane and stored in Air America depots. At other times it went on to Bangkok or Saigon.[35]

Even while the CIA trafficked in opium, President Nixon ranted on TV against drug abuse and lauded the crackdown against French smuggling networks.

Notes

1. E.H. Hunt: Undercover (Berkeley‑Putnam, 1974).

2. Another of Conein's OSS sidekicks, Mitchell WerBell III, was years later indicted in a major drug conspiracy case (T. Dunkin: "The Great Pot Plot," Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1977), and now runs an antiterrorist training school in Georgia (T. Dunkin: "WerBell's Cobray School," Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1980).

3. D. Moldea: The Hoffa Wars (Charter Books, 1978).

4. U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, Hearings, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess. (cited in P.D. Scott: The War Conspiracy, Bobbs‑Merrill, 1972).

5. CAT, which became Air America, was also identical with the "CATCL" that emerged from Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers.

6. D. Wise and T.B. Ross: The Invisible Government (Random House, 1964); Hunt, op. cit.

7. Scott, op. cit.

8. F. Robertson: Triangle of Death (Routledge and Keagen Paul, 1977); A. McCoy: The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper & Row, 1972).

9. Scott, op. cit.

10. New York Times, 1 December 1969; H. Messick: Lansky (Berkeley, 1971). 11. Carl 0. Hoffmann, the former OSS agent and general counsel of the Thai king in New York in 1945‑50, later became the chairman of Lansky associates' First Florida Resource Corp.

12. L. Gonzalez‑Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976).

13. R.Y.Koen: The China Lobby in American Politics (Harper& Row, 1974). 14. Pawley, the ultraconservative former Pan Am executive and Assistant Secretary of both State and Defense, set up the Flying Tigers under a secret order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt exempting him from U.S. neutrality provisions; see A. Chan Chennault: Chennault's Flying Tigers (Eriksson, 1963).

15. Corcoran assisted in the establishment of the Flying Tigers and later Civil Air Transport; see Scott, op. cit.

16. Lindsey Hopkins, Jr., whose sizable investments included Miami Beach hotels, was an officer of the CIA proprietary, Zenith Technical Enterprises of Bay of Pigs note. He was also an officer of the Sperry Corp., through whose subsidiary, the Intercontinental Corp., Pawley helped found the Flying Tigers in 1941. Pawley was Intercontinental's president. See Scott, op. cit.

17. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Judiciary, Communist Threat to the United States through the Caribbean, Hearings, 86th Cong., 2nd Sess. (cited in Scott, op. cit.).

18. See chapter fifteen; it has also been revealed that a prominent Chinese American, Dr. Margaret Chung of San Francisco, who was a major supporter of the Flying Tigers, trafficked in narcotics together with the Syndicate; see P.D. Scott: "Opium and Empire," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, September 1973.

19. Koen, op. cit. 20. Robertson, op. cit.. After a one‑year suspension, the U.S. State Department recently approved the sale of $280 million in military weaponry to the repressive Taiwan regime (New York Times, 20 January 1980), the same regime whose disdain for human rights was most recently expressed by the preparation of cases of sedition against sixty‑five opposition demonstrators (New York Times, 24 January 1980). The CIA's Taiwan station chief in the late fifties and early sixties, when the unholy alliances were forged, was Ray S. Cline. Closely associated with the China Lobby, Cline became famous for his drunken binges with Chiang Ching‑kuo, currently the president of Taiwan (see V. Marchetti and J.D. Marks: CIA and Cult of Intelligence, Jonathan Cape, 1974). A CIA hawk, Cline also helped a gigantic Bay of Pigs‑style invasion of the Chinese mainland which was rejected by President Kennedy. Cline is currently the "director of world power studies" at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which, according to writer Fred Landis ("Georgetown's Ivory Tower for Spooks," Inquiry, 30 September 1979), "is rapidly becoming the New Right's most sophisticated propaganda mill." In testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Cline defended CIA manipulation of the press, saying "You know that first amendment is only an amendment."

20. [William] Pawley eventually built five large airplane factories around the world. It is also likely that he was involved in the CIA's Double Chek Corp. in Miami, as he had similarly been in the Flying Tigers. The CIA's air proprietaries are said to stick together. When in 1958, CIA pilot Allen Pope was shot down and taken prisoner in Indonesia, he was flying for CAT. When he was released in 1962 he began flying for Southern Air Transport, another agency proprietary, which operated as late as 1973 out of offices in Miami and Taiwan. Southern's attorney in 1962 was Alex E. Carlson, who a year before had represented Double Chek when it furnished pilots for the Bay of Pigs invasion; see V. Marchetti and J.D. Marks: CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (Jonathan Cape, 1974). On 23 March 1980, just as Iran's revolutionary government was about to request that Panama extradite Shah Reza Palevi, the ex‑dictator who had been installed on his throne in 1953 by a CIA coup, he was flown off to Cairo on an Evergreen International Airlines charter. As reported by Ben Bradlee of the Boston Globe, (20 April 1980), in 1975 Evergreen had assumed control over Intermountain Aviation, Inc., a CIA proprietary. George Deele, Jr., [sic; Doole] a paid consultant for Evergreen, controlled the CIA's worldwide network of secret airlines for nearly two decades.

21. McCoy, op. cit.

22. D. Warner: The Last Confucian (Angus & Robertson, 1964). 23. McCoy, op. cit.

24. Conein told writer McCoy: "The Corsicans are smarter, tougher and better organized than the Sicilians. They are absolutely ruthless and are the equal of anything we know about the Sicilians, but they hide their internal fighting better." (McCoy, op. cit.).

25. McCoy, op. cit.

26. T. Branch and G. Crile III: "The Kennedy Vendetta," Harper's, August 1975.

27. U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. Senate Report No. 94‑463, 1975.

28. C. Lamour and M.R. Lamberti: Les Grandes Maneuvres de l'0pium (Editions du Seuil, 1972); McCoy, op. cit.; Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars: The Opium Rail (New England Free Press, 1971).

29. Marchetti and Marks, op. cit.

30. Congressman M.F. Murphy and R.H. Steele: The World Heroin Problem (U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1971).

31. Like Nguyen Cao Ky, Ngo Dzu came to the U.S. as a refugee after the final debacle in South Vietnam. Though accused by Rep. Steele of responsibility for the addiction of thousands of GIs to heroin, Dzu went about as a free man until his 13 February 1977 death in Sacramento of apparent heart failure.

32. McCoy, op. cit.

33. Conein's summons home coincided with Howard Hunt's recruitment by the White House and the creation of the special narcotics and Plumbers groups. 34. Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, op. cit. 35. Lamour and Lamberti, op. cit. (quote retranslated from the French).

The Battle of the Baptists

"The Christian church must be a 'propagandist society'."

— Dr. Louis Entzminger

Air Lines and Air Waves in Fort Worth

Working for Brown Brothers Harriman?

When we look behind the corporate curtain to find the money and personnel involved in Elliott Roosevelt's radio station, we uncover much more than meets the eye. The radio station the President's son acquired in 1938 had been owned since 1926 by A.P. Barrett and C.R. Smith of Texas Air Transport, who had used KTAT radio in connection with their own business interests. In 1929 Barrett expanded by incorporating Southern Air Transport (SAT), which absorbed Texas Air Transport, and retained Smith as vice president and treasurer. Later that year, SAT became part of the Aviation Corporation (AVCO), whose chairman was Bonesman W. Averell Harriman, who had recently combined his investment banks with that of the old established Brown Brothers bank of New York.

As mentioned earlier, the attorney for the radio station and the airline which owned it was Raymond E. Buck.

Attorney Buck's father, Judge R.H. Buck, in 1909 was head of the First Baptist Church committee responsible for bringing preacher, John Franklyn Norris, to Fort Worth. Norris described the church in this way:

Millionaires hung in bunches. It was known as "The Home of the Cattle Kings".... I had a literal contempt for the whole machinery. (page 85-86 of file)

Jesse T. Pemberton, who would become Norris' great friend and supporter, was president of the local Farmers and Mechanics National Bank and was quoted (page 84 of file), quite prophetically, as saying:

"I am not opposed to J. Frank Norris; I am for him, but this church is not in condition for his type of ministry. If he comes there will be the all-firedest explosion ever witnessed in any church. We are at peace with the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with one another. And this fellow carries a broad axe and not a pearl handle pen knife. I just want to warn you. But now since you have called him, I am going to stay by him."

As Norris tells his story, he raised no shackles among the congregation for two years. That, however, would change. He says, in his self-deprecating manner, that it began by his telling his wife in 1911 (page 87):

Rev. J. Frank Norris

"I am going to quit the ministry."
She said, "When did you ever begin?"
Such unkindness!...
I didn't care what happened. Mark you there was perfect peace in the church — just as there is in a grave yard. The only difference between that church and the grave yard was the people in the grave yard were buried and everybody knew it, but in the church they were dead and unburied and didn't know it. 

Reading the Entzminger book — much of which is a reprint of Norris' book, Inside the Cup, one has difficulty understanding the chronology of events, as they shift between 1912, 1926 and 1945 as though mere days had elapsed. The author often referred to his antagonists in Tarrant County only with labels (like the district attorney) rather than names. At one point, however, the book does state that Norris' attorneys were Lattimore and Doyle, and it is easy to identify them as Offa Shivers Lattimore (Judge Buck's brother-in-law) and D.M. Doyle, who were engaged in Southern Co-operative Life Insurance together in 1915 (pages 143-144 of file).

The year Norris became active against gambling, liquor and prostitution in Fort Worth, Texas was clearly the year 1911— the same year the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Standard Oil opinion requiring Rockefeller and his big oil cronies to split up their oil trust. Fundamentalists like Rev. William Bell Riley, a close friend of Norris, speaking at the Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, charged that the Rockefellers were trying to "standardize" religion, much as they had the oil industry.

Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett write in Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon; Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil:

Fundamentalist distrust of the Rockefellers evolved into a near-pathological conviction that the Rockefellers were not religious at all, but promoters of a vast communist conspiracy to seize control of their churches and impose atheism on their schools.

The Liberal Baptists — a/k/a Rockefeller Funds

"Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, 

but to cause it. " — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Rev. Fosdick

The Rockefellers and their liberal ministers would wage years of battles against the likes of Milton and Lyman Stewart of Union Oil of California, who used Rev. Riley to attack the Rockefellers from his Chicago pulpit. The fundamentalist Stewarts made their donations to the Northern Baptist Convention conditional upon its adherence to the Fundamentalist Creed. When advised of this approach made by his competitors, Rockefeller, Sr. took steps to modify the terms of his own gifts, threatening to revoke them if used to the benefit of Fundamentalist ideas.

Colby and Dennett state that in Thy Will Be Done that "the Fundamentalist Controversy" then ensued with Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick taking the position for the Modernists, along with Rockefeller-sponsored Beardsley Ruml.

After Fosdick preached a sermon in 1924 called "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" he was ejected from his Presbyterian Church pulpit but would rapidly be hired by the Park Avenue Baptist Church, whose membership included Rockefeller, Jr. Under Fosdick's leadership it would become the interdenominational Riverside Church, moving into an architecturally magnificent new building overlooking the Hudson River in 1930.

Junior had five sons who, utilizing the money from charitable and educational foundations already set up by their grandfather (Senior) and by Junior, further increased the institutional power of their social network. David Rockefeller joined the Rockefeller and Aldrich family banking empire at Chase National Bank in 1946. John D. III coordinated the Rockefeller philanthropic interests, sitting on the boards of dozens of educational, cultural and social foundations into which Rockefeller money was poured. Laurance had a seat on the NYSE and focused on venture capital, setting up Rockefeller Brothers Fund for that purpose in 1940. He was fascinated by aviation, helping to organize Eastern Airlines and McDonnell Aircraft.

John D. Rockefeller, Sr., born and reared in New York, was a Baptist from the American Baptist Society. He believed in molding the minds of his own family, as well as the world, and he set up the General Education Board for that purpose, under Frederick T. Gates:

From the start, the GEB had a mission. A letter from John D. Rockefeller Sr. specified that his gifts were to be used "to promote a comprehensive system." You might well ask what interests the system was designed to promote, but you would be asking the wrong question. Frederick Gates, the Baptist minister hired to disburse Rockefeller largesse, gave a terse explanation when he said, "The key word is system." American life was too unsystematic to suit corporate genius. Rockefeller’s foundation was about systematizing us.
 
In 1913, the Sixty-Second Congress created a commission to investigate the role of these new foundations of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and of other corporate families. After a year of testimony it concluded:

The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social services of the nation.

Foundation grants directly enhance the interests of the corporations sponsoring them, it found. The conclusion of this congressional commission:

The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its funds, free of any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially increased by building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.

Foundations automatically make friends among banks which hold their large deposits, in investment houses which multiply their monies, in law firms which act as their counsels, and with the many firms, institutions, and individuals with which they deal and whom they benefit. By careful selection of trustees from the ranks of high editorial personnel and other media executives and proprietors, they can assure themselves press support, and by engaging public relations counselors can further create good publicity. [emphasis added]

Planning Society's Future

Senior and Junior

Junior, not one to question his father's strong beliefs, had his children educated along lines his father laid out. In 1919, Senior had commissioned John Dewey, a Columbia Teachers College professor, to found the Progressive Education Association, and it was in this experimental program that Nelson Rockefeller obtained his primary school education. The Lincoln Experimental School at Columbia Teachers College was:

testing ground for Harold Rugg’s series of textbooks, which moved 5 million copies by 1940 and millions more after that. In these books Rugg advanced this theory: "Education must be used to condition the people to accept social change....The chief function of schools is to plan the future of society." Like many of his activities over three vital decades on the school front, the notions Rugg put forth in The Great Technology (1933), were eventually translated into practice in urban centers. Rugg advocated that the major task of schools be seen as "indoctrinating" youth, using social "science" as the "core of the school curriculum" to bring about the desired climate of public opinion.  [emphasis added]

John D. Rockefeller, Sr. died in 1937. In March of the following year Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas expropriated the assets of nearly all of the foreign oil companies operating in Mexico, and this same Nelson Rockefeller, educated to believe in using education to condition the minds of people to acceptance of social change, was introduced to Harry Hopkins in the Roosevelt administration by his advance man, Beardsley Ruml, as being willing to negotiate terms of compensation for the seizure of American oil assets by Mexico. Nelson was then only 30 years old. Listening to Cardenas tell him his own version of Mexico's history of being subverted by the United States government and its leaders was an education in itself, but a teaching experience showing him the need to work covertly within these South American countries which contained a huge reservoir of oil his family would like to capture and control.

Cardenas did not relent to young Nelson's weak plea that foreigners be allowed to retain control over assets they had acquired in Mexico, and the U.S. embargo against buying Mexico oil continued. When Mexico began selling oil to Germany, which was then at war against the British, measures to be taken became more pressing.

The next time Nelson spoke to FDR's adviser Harry Hopkins he spoke about the need to open Mexico up to American corporate investment and augment the consular service with programs in culture, education and science to stimulate production, his requests would magically materialize. The advisory committee that he requested be set up with a person to coordinate the programs who had direct access to the White House would soon be incorporated into a Presidential Executive Order.

Who Slew John in Dallas?

The author of this blog — Linda Minor — has been conducting research for the last two decades from every direction around a core hub, that hub being the role of Texans who came together in 1963 to kill John F. Kennedy. That role did not emerge overnight; it had been building up for more than a hundred years, as detailed throughout this blog. Understanding that historical context is necessary before one can really answer the question: "Who slew John in Dallas?"

Thomas E.Mahl, author of Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, has contributed much more on this subject than he has been given any credit for, especially by his recognition of how British intelligence has recruited spies within the American government and set up its own intelligence system within the inner workings of the United States. He writes:

British intelligence had certainly infiltrated Benjamin Franklin’s American embassy in France. Franklin’s chief assistant, Dr. Edward Bancroft, was a British intelligence agent who passed all the information he could gather on to England. In the period 1778–83 the problem was how to get out of a war with the Americans, but in 1916–17 it was how to get the United States into a war. Intrepid’s World War I counterpart had been Sir William Wiseman (1885–1962). His family background, sense of taste, good manners, and discretion highly recommended him to Edward M. House, President Woodrow Wilson’s closest adviser. 

“Colonel” House liked to associate with the famous and titled, and Wiseman could trace his lineage back to the time of Henry VIII and his baronetage to 1628. As Wilson had favored the British in World War I, Franklin Roosevelt was quite willing to work with British intelligence in World War II. One of the unnoticed consequences of Roosevelt’s cooperation was that British intelligence promoted the creation of two American intelligence organizations. Most well known of these organizations was the Coordinator of Information, which became the Office of Strategic Services. The other intelligence organization was so well camouflaged that it was not until 1976 that the first hint appeared that the “Rockefeller Office,” or more properly the Office of the Coordinator of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics, later the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, had been an intelligence operation. The book A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson (no relation to Intrepid) was, for all its flaws, the first to reveal that the Rockefeller Office was an intelligence operation—one that brought the soothing balm of Rockefeller dollars to Intrepid’s ambitious but money-short Latin American operations. [Note—Paul Kramer, “Nelson Rockefeller and British Security Coordination,” JCH 16 (January 1981): 76.]

Another writer has dealt with the role of the British in using secret agents to subvert American opinion and seduce our nation into war. An anonymous author of "The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and The New World Order," known only as W.E.B., published at Terry Melanson's Illuminati Conspiracy website, wrote with a great degree of insight that provides links between the British and Texans as far back as WWI:

Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1913, beating incumbent William Howard Taft, who had vowed to veto legislation establishing a central bank. To divide the Republican vote and elect the relatively unknown Wilson, J.P. Morgan and Co. poured money into the candidacy of Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressive Party. 

According to an eyewitness, Wilson was brought to Democratic Party headquarters in 1912 by Bernard Baruch, a wealthy banker. He received an "indoctrination course" from those he met, and in return agreed, if elected: to support the projected Federal Reserve and the income tax, and "listen" to advice in case of war in Europe and on the composition of his cabinet. 

The Texas 'colonel'

Wilson's top advisor during his two terms was a man named Colonel Edward M. House. House's biographer, Charles Seymour, called him the "unseen guardian angel" of the Federal Reserve Act, helping to guide it through Congress. Another biographer wrote that House believed: "...the Constitution, product of eighteenth-century minds...was thoroughly outdated; that the country would be better off if the Constitution could be scrapped and rewritten..." House wrote a book entitled Philip Dru: Administrator, published anonymously in 1912. The hero, Philip Dru, rules America and introduces radical changes, such as a graduated income tax, a central bank, and a "league of nations." 

World War I produced both a large national debt, and huge profits for those who had backed Wilson. Baruch was appointed head of the War Industries Board, where he exercised dictatorial power over the national economy. He and the Rockefellers were reported to have earned over $200 million during the war. Wilson backer Cleveland Dodge sold munitions to the allies, while J.P. Morgan loaned them hundreds of millions, with the protection of U.S. entry into the war. 

While profit was certainly a motive, the war was also useful to justify the notion of world government. William Hoar reveals in Architects of Conspiracy that during the 1950s, government investigators examining the records of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a long- time promoter of globalism, found that several years before the outbreak of World War I, the Carnegie trustees were planning to involve the U.S. in a general war, to set the stage for world government. 

The main obstacle was that Americans did not want any involvement in European wars. Some kind of incident, such as the explosion of the battleship Main, which provoked the Spanish - American war, would have to be provided as provocation. This occurred when the Lusitania, carrying 128 Americans on board, was sunk by a German submarine, and anti-German sentiment was aroused. When war was declared, U.S. propaganda portrayed all Germans as Huns and fanged serpents, and all Americans opposing the war as traitors.
What was not revealed at the time, however, was that the Lusitania was transporting war munitions to England, making it a legitimate target for the Germans. Even so, they had taken out large ads in the New York papers, asking that Americans not take passage on the ship.

The evidence seems to point to a deliberate plan to have the ship sunk by the Germans. Colin Simpson, author of The Lusitania, wrote that Winston Churchill, head of the British Admiralty during the war, had ordered a report to predict the political impact if a passenger ship carrying Americans was sunk. German naval codes had been broken by the British, who knew approximately where all U-boats near the British Isles were located. 

According to Simpson, Commander Joseph Kenworthy, of British Naval Intelligence, stated: "The Lusitania was deliberately sent at considerably reduced speed into an area where a U-boat was known to be waiting...escorts withdrawn." Thus, even though Wilson had been reelected in 1916 with the slogan "He kept us out of war," America soon found itself fighting a European war. Actually, Colonel House had already negotiated a secret agreement with England, committing the U.S. to the conflict. It seems the American public had little say in the matter. 

With the end of the war and the Versailles Treaty, which required severe war reparations from Germany, the way was paved for a leader in Germany such as Hitler. Wilson brought to the Paris Peace Conference his famous "fourteen points," with point fourteen being a proposal for a "general association of nations," which was to be the first step towards the goal of One World Government — the League of Nations. 

Wilson's official biographer, Ray Stannard Baker, revealed that the League was not Wilson's idea. "...not a single idea in the Covenant of the League was original with the President." Colonel House was the author of the Covenant, and Wilson had merely rewritten it to conform to his own phraseology. 

The League of Nations was established, but it, and the plan for world government eventually failed because the U.S. Senate would not ratify the Versailles Treaty. Pat Robertson, in "The New World Order," states that Colonel House, along with other internationalists, realized that America would not join any scheme for world government without a change in public opinion.[emphasis added]

The CIAA — Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs

On July 30, 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8840, whose purpose was:

to provide for the development of commercial and cultural relations between the American Republics and thereby increasing the solidarity of this hemisphere and furthering the spirit of cooperation between the Americas in the interest of hemisphere defense, it is hereby ordered as follows:

1. There is established within the Office for Emergency Management of the Executive Office of the President the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs [CIAA], at the head of which there shall be a Coordinator appointed by the President.

Nelson, the Coordinator

The Coordinator FDR appointed to his newest bureau was none other than Nelson Rockefeller himself, then only 33 years old. One year after this appointment, the Mexicans agreed to pay roughly $29 million in compensation to several American oil firms, including Jersey Standard and Socal, whose properties had been seized by Mexico. In the meantime, Nelson Rockefeller's dreams of dominance over South and Central America proceeded unabated.

Fort Worth would become a major recruiting ground for the CIAA's network, as we will see in the next episode. The conservative Baptists under Norris, though ostensibly fighting Rockefeller's liberal programs, were used by the CIAA as spies and covert operatives to fight further expropriation of capitalists' assets within the American hemisphere, as well as in other parts of the world.

The Texas State Network--in More Ways Than One

Elliott Roosevelt and TSN Radio

In the beginning of the summer of 2012 I was working on research involving Elliott Roosevelt's radio station in Fort Worth, leading up to revealing how the men who had initially supported his father, FDR, rallied around him in the hope of sucking power from the Presidency to themselves. This is the next segment of the research at that link.

Elliott's first introduction to radio, it is said, came through his work in advertising—handling radio accounts for Albert Frank company, Paul Cornell, Inc., and Kelly, Nason and Roosevelt, Inc. in New York. As sales manager for three stations owned by Alva Pearl Barrett through his Southwest Broadcasting company, Elliott became director of the Southwest division of Hearst Radio, Inc. bought the stations in 1936, then made him its president until January, 1938 when he began forming his own network. At Texas State Network, which began operation on September 15, 1938, Elliott also had a two-day-a-week show called "Texas in the World News" over KFJZ, which was quickly added to TSN.

A Texas Strategy Flouted

It had begun in 1932 with the political strategist, Colonel E.M. House of Texas , who had worked from behind a curtain in 1912 to select, elect and reelect in 1916 the last Democrat to national office, Woodrow Wilson.

Col. House also chose Franklin Roosevelt and encouraged him early on  to run for office. House knew Sara Delano Roosevelt from visits to his summer home in Essex County, Massachusetts, about three miles away from his friend, T. Jefferson Coolidge, of Manchester, whose father had worked for Russell and Company with Warren Delano, FDR's grandfather.

The Delano and Coolidge families had both been steeped in the opium trade in the previous century. But Colonel House died in 1937, and neither Roosevelt nor Garner saw the need to continue the misformed relationship merely to keep a dead man happy.

After two terms as vice president, Garner was fed up with both the President and with being his subordinate. So too were the money men who had accumulated the capital at the instigation of House in 1932, alas, a story reserved for another day! Garner, through his supporters, was prepared to pour the bucket of warm piss which was the vice presidency on FDR's son, if not on the President himself.

When Radio Was New

FDR assigned Elliott "the task of putting in place an infrastructure from which to launch FDR's final run for the Presidency in 1940," although, of course, the younger man's first love was really air transportation.

The Associated Press reported in August 1938 as follows:

The state of Texas today granted a charter to the Texas State Network, Inc., Fort Worth Broadcasting company incorporated by Elliott Roosevelt, Harry A. Hutchinson and Raymond E. Buck. The firm, which has 1,000 shares of no par value capital stock ($50,000 paid in), proposes to operate 23 Texas stations tied in with 108 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting company.

...The president's son bid last spring for managership of the Dallas station but the commission renewed its contract with Mgr. John Thorwald instead. Roosevelt then advanced the counter proposition. Thorwald said in Dallas the network's key stations would be WRR in Dallas and KFJZ or KTAT of Fort Worth.

A.P. Barrett

The KTAT call letters came from Texas Air Transport (TAT), an airline company whose stock was purchased in 1928 by Alva Pearl Barrett, a former state senator, who years earlier had sold the San Antonio land which became Fort Sam Houston to the U.S. Army. Barrett then moved to Fort Worth and became a pioneer in commercial aviation in that city.

The competition to capture contracts to carry federal airmail was fierce as early as 1925, and it was Mayor H.C. Meacham and his ally, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, who fought for it the hardest. Their vision of owning an international mail route was achieved when TAT became the third U.S. transport company to deliver mail to a foreign country by establishing a route via Laredo, Texas, to Mexico. Don Pyeatt has written an excellent history of the development of this airline, in which he states:

In February 1929, Alva Barrett incorporated Southern Air Transport (SAT) in Fort Worth as a holding company for the purpose of acquiring numerous independent transportation related companies. SAT bought Gulf Air Lines (GAL), TAT Flying Service, Airports Engineering and Construction Company and Dixie Motor Coach Bus Lines and merged them into the new company. SAT's headquarters was in Barrett's Aviation Building in downtown Fort Worth and operated from terminals at Meacham Field at Fort Worth and Love Field at Dallas. C.R. Smith of Fort Worth was named vice-president and treasurer of SAT and Tom Hardin became a vice-president and general manager of both TAT and SAT. Silliman Evans, a former political writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and a personal friend of Amon G. Carter, was named Public Relations Director.

Texas Air Transport and KTAT

In 1930 Raymond E. Buck moved into Fort Worth's brand-new Aviation Building at the corner of Main and 7th Streets, built by his client, Texas Air Transport, which also owned its own radio station, KTAT.

Glasscock memorial

Buck's civil law practice began in Fort Worth soon after WWI ended. The son of an eminent appellate judge whose paternal roots were planted in Forth Worth in the 1860s, Raymond was also related to another group of Fort Worth attorneys named Lattimore, one of whom was married to Judge Buck's sister Emma Buck Lattimore.

In 1921 Raymond E. Buck married Katherine Camp of Fort Worth, a granddaughter of Catherine Glasscock, whose birth in Texas in 1837 made her an eligible candidate for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT); thus their sons could easily have joined the Sons of the Republic of Texas (SRT).  Katherine Buck's grandmother was a niece of George Washington Glasscock, who arrived with his brother, Joseph Milligan Glasscock, in Texas (then part of Mexico) in 1835. Both men fought in the Siege of Bexar, which began the year prior to the battle at the Alamo, and Joseph died a hero in 1839. We have written many times here about the SRT, a secrecy-loving fraternity that linked Texian descendants all over the state.

In 1938 KTAT became KFJZ Radio when newspapers reported it had been purchased by the wife of Elliott Roosevelt. She acquired 313 shares, Elliott one with one share going to Harry A. Hutchinson, a resident of Benbrook, who was listed in the city directory for Fort Worth as the general manager of the Elliott Roosevelt Properties. 
 
Legal paperwork may have been handled by R.E. Buck, whose father, Judge Raymond Halbert Buck, had long been close politically to Vice President John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner. Years later Buck himself told Jeb Byrne, an advance man for the 1963 Presidential visit of JFK, that he himself had been friends of Vice President Lyndon Johnson for many years.

Buck had acquired an interest in the radio station in his own name (possibly as a front for Barrett). Barrett's office was located in the Aviation Building, which was later called the Trinity Life Insurance Building.

In addition to his law practice, he owned interests in other businesses in insurance, banking and corporate matters. He was, for example, vice chairman of Fred Korth's Continental National Bank in Fort Worth. A brief summary of his major clients was furnished by long-time secretary, Mary Marett, given in 1975:

• General counsel and director for Southern Air Transport (SAT);
• Associate counsel for American Airlines (of which Amon G. Carter was the largest shareholder, and Cyrus Rowlett Smith was chairman);
• Associate counsel for General Dynamics; and 
• President of Midway Airport Corp., a corporation set up in 1942, before it evolved into today's D-FW International Airport.

JFK's stetson from Ray Buck

In 1963 Raymond Buck, a longtime friend of Lyndon Johnson, was president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored a "non-partisan" breakfast as the central event of JFK's presidential visit to Fort Worth. It was Buck who presented President Kennedy with cowboy boots and a stetson hat shortly before he traveled to Dallas, where he was assassinated.

Elliot's radio network was operated from KTAT as the flagship, with its offices in the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, while the Roosevelts made their home west of town at a ranch in Benbrook. He had divorced his first wife in 1933 to marry Ruth Googins, the daughter of a Swift meat-packing magnate who helped to create Cowtown. The Hotel Texas, where President Kennedy spent the last night of his life, was a couple of blocks west of the packing plants. The plants remained there until the 1970s, when the area became the popular Stockyards District.