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?

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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.

Knights and Their Secret Orders

Conditional Allegiance to Power?

In another blog article, I borrowed a quote from famed economic historian Robert L. Heilbroner who was quoted by James Presley in his book, A Saga of Wealth as follows:

Vassal swearing allegiance to lord

“Throughout most of history,” wrote Robert L. Heilbroner, “wealth and power have gone hand in hand.” The alliance, an obvious one, has grown with but occasional public outcries. Working together, possessors of wealth and power may achieve a stability of their own. Over most of history, wealth has been a vassal to power, for as Heilbroner explained, “it was easier for the ruler to become a rich man than the rich man a ruler.” [Presley, page 303]

Elliott Roosevelt was ushered into the radio business initially by Fort Worth men associated in business with  the father of his second wife, Ruth Googins. They enticed him to move to  Texas -- undoubtedly promising him the moon in the hope of attracting his father's power for their own interests. Newly elected Franklin Roosevelt had a power to which these businessmen gravitated, but that expanding federal power could also make them shudder. Americans, since the days of the Federalist blockade against England, have fought tooth and nail against the Constitutional principle of majority rule, which effectively damns the business interests of the defeated minority. They swear their fealty and allegiance to the man in power only when he gives them what they want. Full stop.

In 1930 Texas had quite a number of men, like Elliott's radio investors Sid Richardson and Charles Roeser, who had recently become rich in the oil fields of Corsicana and East Texas. Over the preceding decades these wealthy men had witnessed what they viewed as the usurpation of state law by the federal government. The federal government had obtained the power to tax their incomes in 1913 and to prohibit the sale of liquor within the state in 1920. Both laws could now be enforced through the expanding powers of the Bureau of Investigation, linked to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Prohibition, as opposed to Texas' own police force, the Texas Rangers.

With this feeling of a need to reach out and grab control of federal authority--much as Colonel Edward M. House of Texas had done when he went in search of a candidate for the Presidency in 1912--the newly wealthy oilmen in Texas thought that, by buying Elliott a place within Fort Worth society, they would thus gain the power of the executive office for themselves. Like the du Pont family of Delaware who would attempt to buy Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. in 1937, the Texans soon discovered things did not quite go as planned under the new President.

FDR was happy to accept his minions' pledge of fealty but, as the rich Texans soon learned, he rarely protected their interests if it was inconsistent with his concept of the overall good for America. Two of these wealthy "vassals," as we have seen, Sid Richardson and Charles Roeser, saw their investment in Elliott's radio network tank. At the same time, their primary interest--oil--was also in dire straits. Where was the protection they expected?

Hot Oil in East Texas

FDR was elected in 1932 by a plethora of groups disenchanted with Republican Herbert Hoover's nonaction in overcoming the effects of the stock market crash in 1929 and the depression that seemed to be unending. The Democrats' pledge to repeal the Volstead Act brought several otherwise divergent groups of voters into the Party, including Franklin Jr.'s in-laws, the du Ponts of the famous chemical conglomerate.

Over-drilling in East Texas

A wealthy group of Texas Democrats consisted of oil men made wealthy in the East Texas Oil Fields, who saw their profits being drained by fly-by-night opportunists tapping wells into the massive pools of oil underneath their own oil wells. They believed they had the right to regulate production through the Texas Railroad Commission, originated in the days when Colonel Edward M. House was building his own railroad and electing governors in Texas to appoint men to the Commission judicially recognized as the agency in charge of regulating oil and gas.

The Texas Oil and Gas Conservation Act of 1919 prohibited production of crude oil “in such manner and under such conditions as to constitute waste” and the Texas Railroad Commission was charged with doing “all things necessary for the conservation of oil” and with establishment of “such rules and regulations as will be necessary to conserve the oil and gas resources in the state.”

Believing the 1919 Act gave Texas complete power to regulate oil well production within Texas, the commissioners attempted to quell the flow from cheap "teakettle" refineries set up by independent oilmen who came to the Texas boom field from all parts of the nation, threatening to drain the pools underneath the wells of the "big oil" interests like Humble Oil. In the summer of 1931, more than a year before FDR's election, a federal appeals court had struck down the power of the Railroad Commission to do more than to "conserve" oil, disallowing a quota system, and thus upholding the rule of capture announced many years earlier in Pennsylvania.

Big Oil vs. Independents

Sterling Mansion portico

The governor of Texas at this time, Ross Sterling, was one of the founders of Humble Oil (now Exxon), who had resigned from the Humble board in 1925 when his sale of stock to Standard Oil of New Jersey made him a wealthy man and gave Jersey Standard half of Humble's stock. Sterling had seen his fortune diminish with the 1929 stock crash, which came on the heels of his sinking a hefty $1.4 million of his new-found wealth into the construction of a 21,000-square- foot mansion in La Porte, Texas.

Governor Sterling

As the Depression deepened without help in sight from President Herbert Hoover, Sterling took action on the state level, calling a special session of the Texas Legislature in August 1931 to address the oil crisis. Federal courts were being requested to grant injunctions in favor of small independent oil men who had contracted to sell more oil than the Railroad Commission permitted them to drill under new proration orders, issued in the hope of stopping the price of oil from plummeting further.

Since June, "the price of oil throughout the Mid-Continent Field had fallen from one dollar and seven cents for high gravity oil, similar to that produced in East Texas, to an average of twenty-two cents a barrel." [Master's thesis of Lucile Silvey Beard, citing L. G. Bignell, “East Texas Must Not Pass 160,000 Barrels of Oil,” Oil and Gas Journal, August 20, 1931, p. 23.]

While appealing one such injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sterling then declared a state of war in East Texas and put the Texas National Guard's Brig. Gen. Jacob F. Wolters in charge of enforcing the new Texas law. Wolters, a graduate of the Fort Worth college that later became Texas Christian University (TCU), was not only a partner in a Houston law firm which acted as general counsel for the Texas Company (later Texaco), but, since 1918, as a general in the Texas National Guard had been the "troubleshooter for many Texas governors. They called on him to establish martial law in areas where even the Texas Rangers could not reassert civil law and order." [1]

In December 1932, a month after FDR was elected but not yet inaugurated, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal district court's contempt order against Governor Sterling "on the ground that a governor can declare martial law only in case of actual insurrection or menacing threats of insurrection."

In Sterling v. Constantin, 287 U.S. 378 (1932), Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who wrote the stinging opinion, addressed the governor's "attempt to regulate by executive order the lawful use of complainants' properties in the production of oil" by interjecting himself in the place of civil judicial process, delegating the authority to the

Humble Oil

Not only did Governor Sterling lose this case, so did former-governor Dan Moody, who had preceded Sterling as governor. Moody, given the credit for ending the reign of the Ku Klux Klan prominent once again during Prohibition, by fighting against the localized corruption of Pa and Ma Ferguson, had made it possible for the federal government to increase its power in areas formerly left to state control.

According to Nicholas G. Malavis in Bless the Pure and Humble: Texas Lawyers and Oil Regulation, 1919-1936, Moody--who had returned to private practice when succeeded by Sterling (elected apparently in an effort to protect Standard Oil's stock value)--was hired as attorney for a plethora of independent East Texas oil operators (filling 13 Pullman train cars) when Dan represented their interest before proration hearings at the Railroad Commission in March 1931. The orders came and went but, without any inherent enforcement mechanism, Governor Sterling was impotent without the national guard.

Rise of the "Federal Authority"

What is important for these purposes, however, is how this battle in the oil fields affected what was later to occur in Texas politics during the 1960's. Having been slapped down for using state action to regulate what they thought should have been within the state's power, certain influential Texans sought to buy their way into federal power. And if that wouldn't work, ... well, it would work. Texans knew how to handle such matters. They had being doing it since 1836.

Pre-1931 photo of Gov. Moody showing Oveta Culp as parliamentarian; she was later wife of Gov. Hobby

Remember San Jacinto!

These events occurred a relatively short time before Texas started to plan for the Centennial to commemorate its 100 years of independence from Mexico, declared on March 2, 1836, but not officially won until winning the battle at San Jacinto on April 21 that year. Ironically, Texans were only able to build a suitable monument to their glory days of independence by tapping into funds obtained from the federal government. And it just so happened they had powerful men in place who did the tapping for them--Vice President John Nance Garner and RFC chairman Jesse H. Jones.  The total monies for the memorial was set out in a special article in the San Antonio Light May 9, 1937:

The government, appropriated $3,000,000 for Centennial markers and buildings and other government agencies contributed enormous amounts of money toward various Centennial projects. The expenditure for San Jacinto is approximately this:

Vice President Garner's Centennial commission..................$ 385,000
WPA for landscaping...............................................................325,000
WPA Funds for terracing........................................................ 500,000
Extra fund approved by president........................................... 200,000

Total federal funds.............................................................. $1,320,000
State appropriation .............................................................$   250,000

Houstonians and Texas officials were embarrassed when Jesse Jones who, as chairman of RFC was instrumental in obtaining the WPA and PWA grants and originally inspired the San Jacinto monument, came to Houston to level the cornerstone which was to have borne his name. Additional embarrassment is in store for those who accompany President Roosevelt on his scheduled visit to San Jacinto at the end of his gulf fishing trip.

The reason the original fund set up in Texas was not used was that the constitutional amendment authorizing a centennial celebration and instructing the legislature to make adequate financial provision for resulted in competition among Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio to host the central exposition. Although it possessed the least historical background, the commission chose Dallas because it offered the largest cash commitment ($7,791,000), the existing State Fair of Texas facility with provisions for expansion, and unified urban leadership headed by bankers Robert L. Thornton, Fred F. Florence, and Nathan Adams. The Texas legislature and the United States Congress each appropriated $3,000,000 for the special 1936 centennial; however, it was determined these funds could not be used in this monument.

It was thus up to Houstonian Jesse Jones to ensure that those "Sons of the Republic of Texas" who fought at San Jacinto were properly memorialized. An editorial in the Kerrville Daily Times humorously recounted events surrounding San Jacinto Day celebrations of 1937:

It has been suggested that an enemy of Jesse Jones is responsible for the protest of the patriotic organization. This may or may not be true, but the whole fuss looks like a tempest in a teapot to us. Far too many squabbles have developed during the Texas Centennial period over the location bill u provision which would have of Centennial memorials, etc. Such foolishness should stop....Jesse Jones foremost citizen of Houston, and a National leader, was largely responsible for the Federal appropriation for the monument. We see no good reason why his name and the names of the President and Vice President might not have been cut into an inconspicuous cornerstone. The whole fuss is being humorously referred to as the "Second Battle of San Jacinto." A similar uproar about the Alamo which occurred several years ago, was designated as the "Second Battle of the Alamo," and just now a third battle seems to be possible over the location of the Alamo Museum.

Jesse H. Jones and Sam Houston's only surviving son, Andrew Jackson Houston - 1936

In a show of gratitude that the long-dreamt-of monument was finally a reality, the Sons of the Republic of Texas (Gen. Jacob F. Wolters had been a president of the fraternity before 1934) made Jesse an honorary member. He could not be a regular member, because of its bylaws:

The society of Sons of the Republic of Texas is composed of white male persons of good moral character who are more than 16 years old and who are descended from an ancestor who was a loyal resident citizen of Texas prior to its annexation to the United States of America in February of 1846.

Base of San Jacinto Monument

Then they took him into their small secret order, the Knights of San Jacinto, created by Texian President Sam Houston in 1843, and revived by the Sons of the Republic of Texas at the culmination of Centennial celebrations on San Jacinto Day 1939. San Jacinto Museum of History Association headed by George A. Hill, Jr., the man "primarily responsible for creating the San Jacinto Museum."

The secret order's major role in later history will be explored in other posts at this blog.

 __________________

Endnotes:

[1] Wolters, a partner in an eminent Houston firm--Lane, Wolters and Storey--with Judge James L. Storey and Jonathan Lane. When Storey died in 1925, his obituary stated he had recently withdrawn from the firm -- making it Wolters, Blanchard, Woodul and Wolters -- which then included former lieutenant governor Walter F. Woodul, with offices on the  eighth floor of Jesse Jones' Houston Chronicle Building.

Sir Stewart Menzies and Gladio

Belgian Enquiry into Gladio 



The Belgian parliamentary commission has ended its investigation into the "Stay Behind," or Gladio, network. 

Sir Stewart Menzies--"C"

Its conclusions show that the Belgian network was jointly organised by the STC/MOB (a branch of the civilian security service) and the SDRA 8 (of the military security service). In addition to functioning as a resistance network in the event of a Soviet attack on western Europe, the organisation also had contingency plans for evacuation of VIPs, the removal of security service secret documents and maintaining contact with government ministers.

The first "Stay Behind" network, codenamed "Sussex II," was set up in December 1944 with the approval of Premier Spaak, when Sir Stewart Menzies (Chief of MI6) visited Brussels. 

In 1948 the Brussels Pact [consisting of five nations] created the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU) which by 1951 had become the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), based in Paris. A letter, written by Belgian Premier Van Houtte in March 1953, discusses coordination and technical arrangements between the CPC and SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), clearly linking the CPC with NATO.

During 1957 the CPC created two sub-committees, one of which went on to become the Allied Coordination Committee (ACC) and was responsible for coordinating the "Stay Behind" networks in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, United Kingdom and the United States. Its peacetime duties included elaborating the directives for the network, developing its clandestine capability and organising bases in Britain and the United States. In wartime it was to plan stay behind operations in conjunction with SHAPE; organisers were to activate clandestine bases and organise operations from there. Organisers would receive diplomatic immunity for their actions.

Between 1980 and 1986 the ACC arranged three-yearly international exercises to test its radio communications network and the collation of information. These exercises were codenamed 'Oregon.' In addition there were annual exercises to test the professionalism and performance of the network:

• 1985 WODAN (Belgium/Holland); 
• 1985 THUNDERBOLT (Belgium/US); 
• 1987 SEABIRD I (Belgium/US); 
• 1988 SEABIRD II (Belgium/Holland); 
• 1989 SEABIRD III (Belgium/Italy); 
• 1990 MARGARITA (Belgium/Britain).

 The last ACC meeting took place on the 23-24 October 1990, and members discussed the re-orientation of the ACC. The Belgian security service suggested a policy that would allow the network to operate more broadly in "crisis" situations. Apparently the "stay behind" network had been activated during the Zaire crisis in 1980, but failed to intervene because of operational problems.

Contact between the ACC and SHAPE (NATO) was carried out by the Clandestine Planning Committee. When, in 1968, the Chair of the CPC moved to Brussels it became a part of the Belgian military security service (SGR) known as section SDRA II and served as the international secretariat of the CPC.

Daniele Ganser

During the Belgian parliamentary commission enquiry the head of the SGR, General [Raymond] Van Calster gave evidence that was misleading. When questioned about the structure of the SGR he omitted to mention SDRA 11. Colonel Detrembleur, head of SDRA 11, refused to answer the commissions enquiries on his department, asserting that he was bound by NATO confidentiality. He claimed that the commission would need to obtain SHAPE authority for him to answer any questions, and he doubted if this would be forthcoming as it had been refused to other countries in the past. The commission dropped their investigations into the NATO connection.

Although the security service witnesses confirmed the existence of a functioning NATO security system against subversion, a NATO Security Committee and its National Security Authorities, much of this information had been published by Stef Janssens and Jan Willems in their book Gladio. According to their investigations NATO members must install a National Security Authority. 

Statewatch bulletin, vol 2 no 1 

© Statewatch ISSN 1756-851X. 

Personal usage as private individuals/"fair dealing" is allowed.

Jesus H. Jones Behind the Scenes

"The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue."  --Edward R. Murrow

Musings about Media and Politics

During some of the scandals which erupted a few years ago I spent some time musing about how little has changed since the days of Plato's Republic in Greece when the Sophists helped to destroy their democratic government. I compared the Greek Sophists to the likes of Scooter Libby and explored the rise of political strategists such as Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff, tracing the roots back to the development of propaganda techniques during World War II by members of the newspaper, magazine, radio and television media and their adjunct advertising staffs.

Further musings along this line have taken me back into political management of the Democrats s as well, decades earlier. When businessmen and bankers are put in control of our government, they tend to see the national interest from their own slanted perspective--believing "what's good for General Motors is good for America," et cetera. As James Carville used to remind Bill Clinton ad nauseum, "It's the economy, stupid," and those in charge tend to have the most impact on the economy when working through the corporations over which they, or those who are backing them, have the most control.

In the late 20's and early 30's, not only was radio one of the biggest investment opportunities of that day, but its technology promised an ability to influence a wide-ranging audience of voters, as well as buyers of consumer goods. Retailers of goods and services were beginning to understand that radio could have a broader impact than newspapers and magazines. Politicians, and those who financed them, were eager to get aboard this new technology. Demographics, like democracy, is all about numbers.

President Roosevelt, a savvy politician, make great use of the new phenomenon in his "Fireside Chats."

Elliott's network would have made a third one, competing with CBS and NBC.

Lyndon Johnson's opportunity to rise in radio came simultaneously with Elliott Roosevelt's decline in that field, which may or may not be a mere coincidence, each resulting from the influence of Jesse Jones' network of Texans. In Jones' book, Fifty Billion Dollars, published by Macmillan in 1951, he disingenuously described the maneuvers of the Texas state Democratic convention of 1944:

the Regulars captured the convention from the pro-Roosevelt delegates, who then bolted to hold their own convention. Soon after these meetings certain troublemakers in Washington tried to make it appear to the President and others close to him that I had encouraged the action taken by the Regulars. This was due to the fact that George A. Butler, the husband of one of my several nieces, took a prominent part in the Regulars movement. In discussing this with the President, I told him that I had a good many in-laws, including several men who had married my nieces, and that I did not control them in their politics any more than he controlled his own family. I reminded him that his son Elliott, over my protest, had persisted in his purpose to second my nomination for the Vice Presidency at the 1940 Chicago Convention, after the President had chosen Henry Wallace, and of Elliott telling me that his father did not know what he was doing in wanting Wallace. Subsequent developments proved that Elliott was right about Wallace.

Being a member of the President's Cabinet, I was, of course, embarrassed by Mr. Butler's activities in the Regulars movement, but there was nothing I could do about it. [page 274]

Background of the "Texas Regulars" Movement

Spearheading the publicity for the "Regulars" was the eminent E.E. Townes, who had been closely connected to Jesse's financial network since at least 1917, if not much earlier, through Houston oil men made wealthy after the Spindletop boom in 1901.

Click to enlarge

Included among these businessmen were the founders of Humble Oil, which had been chartered in 1917 by none other than Houston attorney Edgar E. Townes on behalf of William S. Farish, Ross and Frank Sterling, Harry C. Wiess, Robert L. Blaffer, and W.W. Fondren. Jesse Jones, who was never an oil man, was strangely included in the original list of incorporators (possibly as a mere trustee who represented the financial interest of others who wished to remain unnamed, most likely Col. E. M. House, who had previously introduced Jones to President Woodrow Wilson).[1]

A few months after Humble Oil's corporate papers were filed, President Wilson appointed Jesse to head the American Red Cross, then active in World War I as a sort of "unofficial intelligence agency," before any official civilian intelligence service existed. Jones sold his stake in Humble Oil in 1918, after first introducing W.S. Farish to his "personal friend," Harvey Gibson, president of Liberty National Bank in New York City, which loaned Humble a much needed $250,000.[2]

Jones revealing model of San Jacinto Monument

E.E. Townes took Jones' place in 1918 on the board of directors of Humble Oil and thereafter devoted full time to the corporation's business.[4] Townes' brother, John C. Townes, Jr., was general counsel for the company for a ten-year period before going into partnership with E.E. Townes and his son.[5] For a number of years their law firm was located in the same building--Houston's San Jacinto Building--as Herman and George Brown's "Brown Foundation," not surprisingly since, according to Jesse Jones' own newspaper [Ralph Bivins, Houston Chronicle, Section Business, Page 6, 08/17/2003], principals of Brown and Root bought the building in 1940 from principals of Humble Oil:

In 1940, an investment group led by George Brown of Brown and Root bought the property for $1.35 million. The seller was a holding company led by R.L. Blaffer, former chairman of the old Humble Oil and Refining Co. In 1950, a redevelopment of the hotel became major news in Houston. The interior and exterior of the hotel were stripped away, architect Kenneth Franzheim [a New York and Houston architect who was awarded contracts from Jesse Jones' RFC subsidiary Defense Homes Corporation] redesigned it, and the hotel was transformed into an office building.

The Townes brothers also were assisted by attorney Frank Andrews, senior partner of Andrews, Kurth, the Houston firm which represented Standard Oil of New Jersey, which had a hidden 50% interest in "the Humble." Andrews, incidentally, was another very close friend of Edward M. House (the "Colonel," as he was called).[6] In fact, Andrews and House were partners in an unsuccessful venture in Spindletop with investors from Boston.[7]

The year FDR was first elected, 1932, Elliott was sales manager of the Southwest Broadcasting company, based within the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, which handled the exclusive advertising rights of some of Texas' biggest corporations--Humble Oil and Duncan Coffee in Houston and Magnolia Petroleum of Dallas.

Those corporations' executives all had strong ties to the government's biggest banker of that day, Jesse Holman Jones, sometimes called "Mr. Houston." Jones not only headed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, but he also owned the Lamar Hotel where the "Suite 8-F Crowd" would meet in Herman Brown's 8th floor suite. Originally appointed to the RFC by Herbert Hoover, Jones would remain in his important post throughout FDR's terms of office until frustration with the New Deal forced him out. Jones' arrogance jokingly earned him the nickname, Jesus H. Jones, among some of his detractors.

In January 1938, Elliott became president of Hearst Radio, Inc. after Southwest Broadcasting sold three of the companies it owned to Hearst. One of those stations--Station KUT (1300 kilocycles)--had been created in Austin, Texas in 1922 by the University of Texas which sold it in 1927 to Jesse Jones, under the corporate umbrella through which he owned Houston Station KTRH. Sold to the Hearst empire in 1932, the call letters were changed to KNOW while the station employed then-student Walter Cronkite. Intriguingly, KNOW would later broadcast from the Norwood Building, now owned by an LBJ subsidiary controlled by Lyndon's daughter, Luci JohnsonTurpin.

Elliott Fades Out

The national network Elliott formed possibly with an eye toward helping FDR with the upcoming 1944 election had been financed by a group of men from Harry Truman's stronghold in Missouri, including Lester E. Cox, who established KGBX radio in Springfield, Mo. in 1931. Like the Fort Worth clique which favored the vice presidency of John Nance Garner, these Missouri Democrats likely hoped to influence Elliott's father's choice of a running mate by investing in the son's career. As Jesse Jones revealed also in his book, however, FDR welcomed the financial assistance but felt no obligation to those who showered Elliott with money. Cox sold KGBX to a newspaper company in 1944, just before FDR finally dumped Vice President Henry E. Wallace, replacing what the Regulars called the "Communist" candidate with Missouri U.S. Senator Harry Truman.

By 1944, however, Elliott Roosevelt, in addition to losing interest in the radio network bought in the name of his second wife, Ruth Googins, but he had also dumped Ruth, having left curmudgeonly Jesse Jones to clean up the radio mess abandoned by him shortly after Pearl Harbor. In a section of Jones' book, entitled "Bailing out Elliott Roosevelt," Jesse relates in great detail how he fixed the situation after receiving a call from FDR while Sid Richardson and Charlie Roeser were in his office railing about their tanked investment in Elliott's radio network:

They told me that Elliott's radio company had lost its entire capital of $500,000, and that to buy his stock in the company Elliott had personally borrowed $200,000 from John A. Hartford, president of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, $50,000 from David G. Baird, an insurance official of New York, and $25,000 from Judge Charles Harwood of New York, who subsequently, in the early part of 1941, had been appointed Governor of the Virgin Islands by the President. As collateral to these loans, Mr. Hartford had received $200,000 par value of Elliott's radio stock and Mr. Baird, I think, $50,000 of the same....The [financial] statement showed the company to be insolvent. Operating losses had exhausted all of its capital stock.... These debts did not include what Elliott personally owed for the money he had borrowed to put into the stock of the company. Messrs Roeser and Richardson advised me in writing that they regarded their stock in the company as then of no value....

At the time Mr. Hartford loaned the money his company was being sued by the Federal Trade Commission under the antimonopoly laws. This was of course known to the President but not to me. [pp. 294-295]

After FDR was elected to his third term, someone spilled the beans on the mess Elliott had made and an investigation ensued. Columnist Westbrook Pegler described part of that public airing as follows:

Hartford was asked why, when he went to see Jesse Jones, then secretary of commerce and chairman of the Reconstruction Finance corporation, at Jones' suggestion, he expected that he was going to get back his $200,000, with interest.

"I thought the President would pay his son's debts, just as any father would," Hartford answered.

At the time of the settlement, Sid Richardson and Charles Roeser, Ft. Worth oil men and friends of Elliott, who had been dined several times at the White House, wrote their opinion that the stock of Elliott's Texas state network, which Hartford had taken as collateral, was worthless. Richardson and Roeser were large stockholders and friends of Elliott and his wife at that time, a Ft. Worth girl. Jones was appearing in the deal as agent for clients, the President and Elliott. All concerned in the representations by which Hartford was led to believe that his collateral was worthless and that he was well rid of it at two cents on the dollar, had an interest in the company or, in the President's case, a paternal interest in his son's fortunes.

There were reasons at that very time, however, had Hartford taken the pains to inform himself thoroughly, instead of relying on his faith in the President and Jones, which might have persuaded him to hold his stock for a rise. The company's affairs were improving. 

"Jones," he said, "assured me that Elliott was broke and insolvent and the stock was worthless and, being a member of the cabinet and head of the largest bank in the world (the RFC), that was all the assurance I wanted."

He added that Jones told him Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt, too, was broke. The stock is now worth more than $100 a share. Hartford's 2,000 shares, bought back for $4,000 of Jones' money, by President Roosevelt's suggestion, now are worth more than $200,000 at that rate.

Apparently Jesse, whose own Station KTRH was part of Elliott's network, had no idea what the network was worth.


Elliott's marriage to rising movie starlet, Faye Emerson in December gave evidence of his new focus on creating a transcontinental airline company, if one can rely on the fact that witnesses at the wedding were Jack Frye, president of Transcontinental and Western Air, Inc. (TWA), and Johnny Meyer, a close friend of TWA's Howard Hughes from Texas (nephew and one-time son-in-law of two of W.S. Farish's in-laws). Meyer had allegedly introduced Elliott and Faye only a few months earlier. News stories of their wedding revealed that "Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet, was her [Faye Emerson's] great-uncle," which, if true, made her a relative of Ruth Forbes Paine Young--daughter of William Hathaway and Edith Emerson Forbes--mother-in-law of future Oswald "friend" Ruth Hyde Paine.

Newlyweds Elliott and Faye (center) with M/M Jack Frye, Janet Thomas, Johnny Meyer, and Mrs. Joseph B Livengood, Faye's friend. Press Photo 1944

British Intelligence Planned Dump Wallace Campaign?

Instrumental in the campaign to dump Wallace was British Intelligence, which then had a very active role in spying on Vice President Henry Wallace--according to Jennet Conant, author of a most fascinating book The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington--with unwitting help from Lyndon Johnson's financial angel, Charles Marsh, a friend of Roald Dahl, the undercover spy:

It was a dirty convention and made for a lot of hard feelings all around. Roosevelt tried to be conciliatory and asked Wallace to remain part of his administration, telling him he could have his pick of jobs with the exception of secretary of state. That job was reserved for his dear friend Cordell Hull, his secretary of state for the past ten years, who was in his last stint of public service. Roosevelt hastened to assure Wallace that he wanted him to take an active role in postwar planning and to sit on "some international conferences." Wallace felt that as one of the strongest leaders in the Democratic Party, he should by rights have the State Department, the most important cabinet post. Out of deference to the president's wishes, however, he settled for secretary of commerce, the seat currently occupied by his bitter adversary Jesse Jones. The president had already indicated that after the election one of the first people he wanted to boot from his administration was the arrogant "Jesus H. Jones." The ambitious commerce secretary had been a thorn in Roosevelt's side as well, and it suited him to allow Wallace to replace him, thereby exacting a measure of revenge on both their behalfs. [pp. 267-268]

An intriguing detail about Henry Wallace's replacement on the Democratic ticket in 1944 harks back to the radio men from Missouri who financed Elliott's first move into national broadcasting. Lester E. Cox would move up the regional political ladder within Truman's political sphere. As the news article to the right attests, Cox was close to Sen. Prescott Bush's younger brother, James S. Bush, Prescott's best man at his 1921 wedding to Dorothy Walker of St. Louis.[8]

Both Cox and Bush were Democrats who were appointed in 1951 by Missouri's Democrat governor to the governing board of the University of Missouri as well as to its executive committee, which controlled the university's School of Mines and Metallurgy and its radio station. Bush would leave the governing board in 1957. In the meantime his nephew, George Herbert Walker Bush, Prescott's son, would have moved first to the West Texas oil fields and then to Houston, where he began hobnobbing with the same social set which had made up the Texas Regulars in 1944, and he would help them build the Republican Party in Texas, while always having nice things to say about his uncle's friend Harry Truman.

James Bush's Skull and Bones class, 1922

Like Prescott, Poppy and Dubya Bush, James, whom Kitty Kelley in The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty called "the black sheep of the Bush family," was a member of the Yale secret society, Skull and Bones. Kelley also stated he was an alcoholic who, when drunk, beat his wife Janet. That fact never made it into the headlines, however.

---

[1] Bascom N. Timmons, Jesse H. Jones, The Man and the Statesman (New York:  Henry Holt, 1956), p. 96.

[2] Henrietta M. Larson and Kenneth W. Porter, History of Humble Oil (New York:  Harper and Brothers, 1959), p. 72.

[4] Ibid., pp. 28, 55, 58.

[5] Committee on History and Tradition of the State Bar of Texas, Centennial History of the Texas Bar:  1882-1982, p. 94.  According to this account, Townes was a member of the Masonic Blue Lodge, Arabia Temple Shrine, and, after the death of his first wife, was married to Mrs. Browne Rice, Jr.

[6] Rupert Noval Richardson, Colonel Edward M. House: The Texas Years, 1858-1912 (Hardin-Simmons University Press, 1964), p. 201. 

[7] Ibid., p. 201.

[8] In 1948 James Bush made it into Walter Winchell's column with a one-sentence question: "Could James S. Bush (of St. Louis) be 'Mr. Next' for the lovely widder of Wm. Rhinelander Stewart?" The answer turned out to be yes. Bush married the beautiful Janet Newbold Ryan Stewart, whose son, Allan Ryan, Jr., was later in the same 1953 Yale/Skull and Bones class with Poppy Bush's brother, Jonathan J. Bush. James Bush had been a Lt. Colonel, U.S. Army Air Force in WWI. After working as an investment banker at Hayden, Miller in Dayton, Ohio, Bush moved to St. Louis to work for G.H. Walker and Co. (the investment bank set up by Prescott's father-in-law decades earlier), where his 503 Locust office was next to the Boatmen's Bank building. They lived at 36 Westmoreland Place in the city in 1939. Walker relative James H. Wear, Jr., also a banker, lived at 40 Westmoreland. Wear (Yale's class of 1934) was the son of Yale Alumni's one-time president of the St. Louis chapter, whose sister Loulie married George Herbert Walker. The Wears and Walkers all lived within walking distance of each other in the Central West End near Forest Park. By 1910 G.H. "Bert" Walker had bought a three-story Italian Renaissance home at 12 Hortense Place where the couple reared two daughters and four sons, with assistance from six live-in servants. George’s father, David Walker, lived nearby at 53 Vandeventer Place, and an elder brother, David Walker Jr. (a clerk in the Eli-Walker dry goods business), also lived at that address.