Helliwell's First Employer in Tampa

We will recall from a prior post that CIA paymaster Paul Helliwell in his youth was listed as the manager of a liquor distribution company in 1934, the same year Prohibition ended. The treasurer of this enterprise was a Tampa attorney, Cody Fowler, who had arrived from Oklahoma some 12 years earlier.

Cuban Rum, Inc.'s Cody Fowler

Pettingill fired by Pres. T. Roosevelt

Employed by Cuban Rum, Inc. as Secretary and Manager, attorney Cody Fowler, whose mother was a real estate developer who came to Tampa from Jacksonville, was the treasurer for Cuban Rum, Inc. The address for the rum distributor was in the Citizens Bank Building, 706 Franklin in Tampa, coincidentally, where Fowler’s law office (MacFarlane, Pettingill, MacFarlane) was then housed in room 921. The building was torn down in 1978, the same year Cody Fowler died.

One of that firm's senior partners, Noah Brooks Kent Pettingill, came from a family which first moved to Tampa in 1884. He had been appointed Law Judge of the United States Provisional Court for the military district in Puerto Rico during the end of the Spanish-American War. Following that, he became U.S. Attorney in Porto Rico, as it was then called.

He was, however, summarily fired by President Theodore Roosevelt in late 1906 after it was learned he had privately taken a case against other "colleagues" within the insular court system, whose names were not revealed. 

It is possible, however, that what led to his dismissal was a scandal in 1903--a smuggling indictment involving naval officers in a court within Pettingill's jurisdiction--a scandal which saved the careers of the officers by throwing Pettingill under the tracks. We can only wonder what Pettingill learned from this experience.

Macfarlane family

Pettingill eventually retreated to western Florida to practice law in the firm Cody Fowler joined in 1924. 

Pettingill's sister had married Scotsman, Hugh Campbell Macfarlane, who had helped organize the Tampa Board of Trade in 1885 to create a port at Tampa Bay and to lure cigar manufacturers to the area. He purchased 200 acres of marshy land on the west bank of the Hillsborough River, which he developed into West Tampa, a city originally independent of Tampa itself. 

The city included at least 2,000 Cubans as early as 1895. Howard Street in West Tampa was named for Macfarlane's son, Howard Pettingill Macfarlane, a third partner in the law firm. It is, therefore, not surprising that Fowler, or possibly even his partners--Macfarlane and Pettingill--through their investment company, may have been interested in setting up a business to import rum from Cuba to take advantage of the end of Prohibition in December 1933. 

It is not known how long the relationship lasted between Paul Helliwell and the lawyers of the firm, or even whether they may have made use of the strategic position of Paul's father in the Customs house in Tampa, but the question is worth considering. 

 

 

Maud Cody Fowler

Click to enlarge. Maude the only woman.

Cody Fowler’s mother, Madeline Maud Cody had been born in March 1871 in Fayette, Tennessee to Joseph L. and Harriet Adeline Cody. She married Orin Scott Fowler in 1890, and their only child, son Orin Cody Fowler, was born in Arlington, Tennessee in 1892. 

Arlington, a few miles northeast of Memphis, was home base for the first few years of their marriage, while O.S. (as he was commonly known) worked as a traveling salesman. In 1897, we learn from the Salem, Missouri, newspaper that O. S. had been aboard a street railway car in that city with Maud's father, Joseph L. Cody, when it was struck by a loose coal car that had come unhitched from the Illinois Central's main train. Neither man was permanently injured but undoubtedly quite shaken up.

O.S., the son of Napoleon Bonaparte Fowler, grew up  in St. Louis, Missouri, and in El Dorado, Kansas, where his parents moved in 1883. Napoleon died there in 1901, while O.S. was living with his wife, Maud and young son Cody Fowler in the Panhandle Plains of Texas. The grocery store they operated was in a small community 30 miles northwest of Charles Goodnight's home. The only means of transport at that time were horses and trains. One train actually, the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad.

If You  Build It, They Will Come...

It's not known who or what enticed Joseph Cody and O.S. Fowler to this barren land, which only a few years earlier had been the domain of the J.A. Ranch, a partnership between John George Adair (and his wife Cornelia Wadsworth Ritchie Adair) and Charles Goodnight. Adair had been an Irish securities broker who moved to Denver by way of New York, who began purchasing what would eventually become, we've been told,  "1,325,000 acres in parts of Randall, Armstrong, Donley, Hall, Briscoe, and Swisher counties," by the time of Adair's death in 1885. 

It was all left to his wife, who continued the partnership with Goodnight for a few more years. It is not clear whether she still owned the ranch when she died in 1921. However, it most likely became part of the New York and Texas Land Company consisting of millions of acres all over Texas, or the Francklyn Land and Cattle Company (White Deer Lands Trust Company) in the Panhandle.

"From 1882 to1886, N Bar N leased range in Carson and neighboring counties from the Francklyn Land & Cattle Company, a British syndicate backed by Cunard Steamship Line. Afterward this range belonged to White Deer Land Company. The N Bar N outfit left here because White Deer Land Company wanted the range cleared of large herds.

Joseph Cody's family members were settled into Carson County--including two daughters, Ola and Elsie, who were working as school teachers--where he ranched. Not far away, Maud and O.S. operated a grocery store. From advertisements that later appeared in Oklahoma newspapers, we get the sense that it was actually Maud who was mostly in charge of the grocery store operations. 

Newspapers reported in 1903 that O. S. Fowler had a ranch in Stratford, Texas, and that he ran for election for County Judge of  Sherman County (not Carson, where they lived). 

Though we gleaned all our resources, it was totally unverifiable at this time. If he was a candidate in Sherman County, he lost. Neither could we find reports of his candidacy in Carson County.

By 1903, however, they had relocated to Oklahoma, just a few miles west of Oklahoma City. Maud was clearly in charge, and she didn't hesitate to let everyone know it.

Her sister, Ola Edna Cody, married in 1906. Son Cody Fowler was sent off to military school. The N. B. Fowlers moved east of Oklahoma City to make a homestead claim, which they accomplished in 1909, the same year N.B. Fowler died. Things began to change after that. The O. S. Fowlers sold their grocery store in El Reno and relocated to Kansas City. Before July 1910 Maud and O.S. had seen advertisements for land for sale in Florida, and, just as so many others had done, they bought a few tracts. 

 Florida Drained Land Company

Unlike most, however, they actually visited Florida that year to talk to people onsite about buying more land in the Everglades. The people they saw apparently signed them up as agents to help sell the land. Maud (always called Mrs. M.C.) Fowler was being written up by commercial newsman Gilbert D. Leach in October 1910 as having been engaged in sales of Florida lands only a few months, revealing she had a unique ability to resell the land almost instantly at a much higher price.

Maud was soon on the payroll of the Florida Drained Land Co. with the job of entertaining passengers being taken by train to visit Florida to hear a sales pitch from the company. Articles were placed in Missouri and Kansas papers that mentioned a certain Mrs. M. C. Fowler, also known as "Mother" Fowler, who made the trip so enjoyable for prospective buyers.

In the meantime, O.S. had found his niche as a hotel manager for the Elsmere Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. The 1911 Kansas City directory listed Maud's name (M. C. Fowler) as vice-president of the Security Underwriters Corporation that year. 

Florida history sites have stated Maud had lived in "Kansas City where she became one of the most successful women of the business world in that city and, as Vice President of the Security Underwriters Corp. of Kansas City, she was one of few strong businesswomen of that day and also headed the Kansas City Women’s Athletic Club." In fact, Maud's name did appear in Kansas City newspapers as "Mrs. M. C. Fowler," president of the Women's Athletic Club, in 1913.

She somehow avoided being tainted by the white-collar scandal that began to hit the news in 1912. Some of the land buyers panicked when they noticed the monthly checks they were sending to Plantation Lands or Florida Farm Land Co.--there were other similarly named companies as well--were being deposited into accounts held in New York by an octopus-like entity known as Security Underwriters Corporation. 

It was reported that this company's stock was controlled by a syndicate of engineering companies which had allegedly contracted with the original owners of the land engaged in selling it off by agent companies to dredge laterals and canals in connection with the work previously done by the State of Florida, as promised by the Governor.

Without using that language, the reports alleged the sales companies were engaged in a ponzi scheme. The buyers' payments were being spent as rapidly as they were received, and none of those funds were being used to drain the land. It was fraud, pure and simple, attorneys for the buyers claimed. 

When their lawsuits rendered them no recovery in the form of damages, by the end of 1912 they filed applications for receivership under state laws akin to federal  involuntary bankruptcy. That seemed to  have put a halt on Maud Fowler's cash cow for the time being.

The Fowlers--Hotel Managers

 

Orin S. and Maud C. Fowler's names cropped up as managers of Artesian Farm Land Sales in the 1913  Jacksonville, Florida, city directory. They were then living at the Hotel Jackson at 206 Main, but in 1915 their names appeared in connection with the Seminole Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida. Son Cody was also in Jacksonville in 1913, but living at the YMCA while practicing law at Miller & Fowler.

Oklahoma City addresses 1918

The Fowler, however, moved back to Oklahoma City, apparently to care for Maud's mother, Harriet Cody, who died in January 1917. The city directory listed their names as proprietors of the Martinique (112 NW 7th) and Hadden Hall (215 N.W. 10th)  hotels in Oklahoma City.  A year later they were managing the Hotel Lawrence at 15 West Grand Avenue.

Cody Fowler married in 1915, two years after graduating from Cumberland University in Tennessee with a law degree. He and his wife, the former Maude Stewart, lived with her parents--Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Stewart, Sr., a wealthy lumber man in Arkansas before relocating to Oklahoma City, where his office was in the Insurance Building, 114 No. Broadway. 

 

In 1917 he began two years of military service during WWI and, after returning, was elected Department Commander of the American Legion of Oklahoma, serving until August 1924. At that point he set out for Tampa, Florida, where he already had a job, working for the Macfarlane, Pettingill law firm.

 

Even after moving to Florida, Cody Fowler continued his involvement with the American Legion and also became active in the chamber of commerce. In 1950 he was named president of the American Bar Association. He was about as conservative politically as one could be at that time, according to a write-up about him in the Tampa Daily Times.

 

His father had long since died, but his mother was then still living in Tampa, Florida, involved in selling real estate.

Artesian Farms had been incorporated in 1910 by a partnership of the Bolles Trust Co. and the son of former Florida governor, William Sherman Jennings. Governor W. S. Jennings moved from Chicago to Florida in 1885, settling in Jacksonville after serving as Florida's governor 1901-05. William Jennings Bryan's mother, Mariah Jennings, was a sister of William Sherman Jennings. She married her brother's law partner, Virginia-born Silas Bryan, in 1852. Silas had moved west to Illinois after his parents died. His own death occurred in Marion, Illinois in 1880. At that time the Bryans' eldest son, named for the future Florida governor, was a young student of 20 with four younger siblings.

In 1881 William Jennings Bryan began law school in Chicago, spending much of his time at the home of former Senator Lyman Trumbull. In 1883 he began practicing law in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he married in 1884, but by 1887 the newlyweds had moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. He was first elected to Congress as a Democrat and from Nebraska and began serving in Washington in January 1891.

His mother's brother, William Sherman Jennings, had since moved to Florida. In 1900, Jennings was elected governor of Florida for the term from 1901 to 1905. While governor, Jennings is credited with coming up with the idea of draining the Everglades by cutting the natural rock dams in the rivers and allowing the water to run out. His successor as governor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, a gunrunner between Jacksonville and Cuba during the Spanish-American War, continued the effort to drain the Everglades until his term ended in 1909. He died the next year.

Early in 1909 an ad campaign began throughout the Midwest, begging for sales agents on behalf of Florida Fruit Lands Co., one of many companies controlled by Richard Bolles.

"On December 26, 1908, the trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund [of the State of Florida] signed a contract with Richard Bolles, conveying to the latter 500,000 acres of overflowed state lands for two dollars an acre. As part of the deal, the State agreed to use half the proceeds of the sale for drainage and reclamation purposes. Dicky Bolles became the second million-dollar purchaser of lands from the State of Florida (matching Hamilton Disston's investment in the 1880's)."

"Bolles' land promotions reached a feverish pitch in March, 1911, when his Florida Fruit Lands Company held a giant land auction in Fort Lauderdale. When representatives of the potential bidders realized that no auction was to take place; that they were expected to execute deeds already designated by the Company; and that the purchased lands were still under water, they brought suit against Dicky Bolles and the Florida Fruit Lands Company. The case was settled in November 1913, with the court allowing Bolles to keep the $1,400,000 already paid him, but prohibiting him from collecting any further funds until the State had fulfilled its contract to drain and survey the Everglades lands." 

 

At the same time the civil settlement was reached, however, a federal indictment was issued for fraudulent use of the mails and using the mail to conduct an illegal lottery after the defendants lost in their petition to be able to present witnesses before the grand jury that they had proceeded legally. Even so, those charges were dismissed in April 1914, stating the company and its officers were guiltless.

But it had been a harrowing two-year period for the sales agents, who had no means of making money. In Tampa, for example, the Daily Times reported about one agent who was so desperate for money he had  bought a typewriter on credit and sold it for $20. The buyer was suspicious, investigated, and found out the typewriter was not legally owned by the seller. Police were called and arrested the man in his hotel room. 

 

He died in a Tampa cell that night after drinking a vial of carbolic acid carried in his shoe. Police and reporters were curious about the man's real name and residence. A card found in his pocket bore the name Florida Land Co., with an address at the Chemical Building in St. Louis. On investigation it was learned that Mrs. M. C. Fowler had rented an office in that building for two months the previous summer; her real address, however, was in Kansas City. 

 

When passing through Tampa, she had talked to railroad officials about a man in the Jacksonville office who had committed suicide with a gun a week earlier than the Tampa suicide. Sounds like sales agents were dropping like flies while sales were being held up by the courts.

After leaving the governorship in 1905, Jennings became "very active locally, promoting the sale of real estate for George Merrick, the founder of Coral Gables."

 
The Artesian Farm Land Co. was at that time housed in the Dyal-Upchurch Building, at 4 East Bay in room 310, next door to the Atlantic and East Coast Terminal company--near the corner of Main and East Bay years before the Main Street bridge was constructed.

Church near old Hadden Hall in 1917

Directories for 1917 and 1918 also show the O. Cody Fowler family living in Jacksonville at 721 West 15th Avenue, though simultaneously claiming to be a resident of Oklahoma City, at Hadden Hall, on West (now NW) 10th Street (between N. Robinson and N. Harvey avenues), only a half block from First Christian Church.

A duplicative listing in the 1920 Census, however, showed Cody and his wife living with her parents in Oklahoma City.

National Registry of Historic Places

 

At some point prior to 1920 the elder Fowlers bought a house in Jacksonville, Florida, as the U.S. Census for that year shows Orin S. and Maude C. Fowler living on Edgewood Avenue. Maude's younger sister Elsie Lee Cody, an unmarried school teacher, moved to Florida from the Texas panhandle and later lived at 1860 Oak in Jacksonville, later relocated to Tampa.

The Fowlers listed their occupations that year as a druggist and truck garden farmer.

 
Perhaps the lies had something to do with the massive fraudulent schemes which had already been occurring in Florida as early as 1912. One newspaper, the Miami Metropolis, had traced the fraud to Wall Street and to some land investors operating all over the country at the time, in particular the Security Underwriters Corp. of Kansas City mentioned above.

Click image to enlarge.

 We'll examine these allegations in future posts.

[Originally published 5/16/2013]


Next, see:
When White Russians Invaded Florida

An Off-the-Books Private War

[originally posted in 2013]

Excerpt from:

The Marcos Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave
©1988, Harper and Row, Inc

Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos Family

Reading between the lines of Lieutenant Colonel North's testimony, it is clear that CIA director William Casey was proud of having an "off the shelf" team of private operators funded by unofficial sources. This enabled Casey to avoid the kind of interference from Congress that had been blocking the Reagan administration's initiatives to topple the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. But Casey's gambit was not entirely new. The members of The Enterprise were all larger-than-life characters who had worked together for many years, a first generation of colorful old OSS hands, and a second generation of hard-nosed covert action types who cut their milk teeth at the Bay of Pigs. Some of their names have since become familiar:

• John Singlaub, 
• Richard Secord, 
• Ray Cline, 
• Theodore Shackley, 
• Thomas Clines, and others.

Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise

But no longer around is the man who, in a way, started it all going: the CIA's original overseas paymaster and Mister Black Bag. His name was Paul Helliwell.

Paul Helliwell, a lawyer, had been a colonel in the U.S. Army’s G-2 Intelligence unit in the Middle East, later transferring to O.S.S. as Chief of Intelligence in China, and he had a reputation for buying information with bars of opium. He reputedly met with Ho Chi Minh, leader of North Vietnam, three times in 1945 but was unable to reach an agreement for the U.S. to provide Ho with weapons to use against Japan because Ho would not swear not to use them against the French. When O.S.S. was disbanded, Helliwell stayed in intelligence in the War Department.

He left the military around 1947, when the CIA was created, and joined a Miami law firm — Bouvier, Helliwell and Clark — but still found time to work for the CIA.

[Cite: Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in The Bahamas (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991).]

Chennault with Mme Chiang

Helliwell’s first major assignment after the war was to find a way for the CIA to subsidize the airline, Civil Air Transport, owned by Major General Claire L. Chennault, which had been used to furnish materiel to the anticommunist Chinese in Southeast Asia.

In 1951 Helliwell set up Sea Supply as the CIA’s first proprietary company in order to transport weapons to the Nationalist Chinese troops in Burma and to Thailand police, whose Chief was involved in the opium trade. The planes were not returned empty after the guns were unloaded; they were filled with drugs destined for the United States — usually Florida. The money derived from the sale of the drugs had to be laundered for the CIA, and Helliwell figured out how to do it.

Tommy the Cork

His associates in Sea Supply, and later in the Caribbean area planning the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, were New York attorney Thomas G. Corcoran ["Tommy the Cork"] (one of FDR’s "Brain Trust") and Frank Wisner.

In 1961 Helliwell became "paymaster" for operatives working covert intelligence operations in the Bay of Pigs, although his methods are not clearly apparent. However, in late 1963 he was involved with a bank in the Bahamas called Bank of the Caribbean Limited, which was "picked up" in 1965 by one of his clients, a CIA-connected "insurance conglomerate."

In 1968 the bank’s name was changed to Underwriters Bank Limited, which had been registered by Inge Gordon Mosvold, a Norwegian shipbuilder who may have been a front for an even wealthier man named Daniel K. Ludwig, for whom Mosvold had chartered the Mercantile Bank and Trust in Freeport in January 1962. The corporate shareholders of the Mercantile Bank were Cayship Investment Company, Inc. (Panama); Security (Bahamas) Limited; and Cia. de Navegacion Mandinga S.A. (Panama); as well as two nominees.

Mercantile Bank was parent company for the now-famous Castle Bank and Trust formed by Helliwell, alleged to be "one of the CIA’s finance channels for operations against Cuba," being managed from Andros Island in The Bahamas beginning in 1964. [Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980.]

Thanks to the CIA's part in rescuing the regime of Generalissimo Chiang in 1949, Helliwell had access to its black resources. In 1949 Helliwell and a handful of other CIA agents salvaged Claire Chennault's Civil Air Transport (CAT) and other American and Chinese aircraft from the mainland, and transferred them by ship to Taiwan.

He spent the years immediately following Mao's victory reorganizing the U.S. line of defense around Red China. With war-surplus Victory ships and Liberty ships, and some of Chennault's planes, he set up Sea Supply Corporation and Air America, using the Philippines and Thailand as staging bases for secret operations throughout Southeast Asia. As a means of harassing Red China from the rear, and gathering intelligence, Sea Supply ferried materiel to Thailand to support the KMT opium armies in Burma and the rebellious Champa tribesmen in eastern Tibet. CAT and Air America flew these supplies from Thailand into the Golden Triangle poppy fields and across upper Burma to the Himalayas, and flew supplies from the Philippines for the beleaguered French at Dienbienphu.

It was an expensive business. The KMT and the CIA paid off General Phao, the commander of the Thai police, who obligingly transshipped heroin from the opium armies down to Bangkok for export. They also paid the KMT's General Li Mi what it took to keep his army of ten thousand going, which Li Mi was not about to do with his share of the opium proceeds. All this took a lot of gold bullion, but Helliwell rose to the occasion. He and other Agency financial experts in the field followed basic rules laid down by the original CIA director of covert operations, Frank Wisner. First get the rich people on your side, including the rich gangsters, then set up channels for black money so you can provide funds across borders to the people who need them to get the job done. Kim Philby said Wisner once told him, "It is essential to secure the overt cooperation of people with conspicuous access to wealth in their own right." The cooperation of rich people hid the transfer of black money.

Helliwell's Family and College Days

What Seagrave failed to reveal, however, are a few small details about Helliwell before he joined the Army. Could any of these facts have contributed to placing him where he ended up later--as the center man in the dirty money laundry for the CIA?

Paul Helliwell’s father, Lionel H. Helliwell, was an English cloth buyer from Yorkshire when he settled in New York. He advanced within the trade to become a broker in the textile industry. In North Andover, Massachusetts, in 1910 he married Nola Harless, a dedicated school teacher and administrator at Hampden Sydney School in Knoxville, Tennessee, who had recently been replaced in her position by a man.

North Andover was where Lionel's brother, William Helliwell, a textile designer at Worsted Mills, lived since his immigration  from Leeds in 1902.

 

See map online

When Paul was five, the 1920 Census found his family in rural New Jersey, ten miles north of Morristown, living in a scenic neighborhood in a home they owned. It appears they remained there until at least past the  date the Florida census would have been taken in 1925. The 1930 Census shows he had relocated his family to Seffner, Florida, a small town east of Tampa, Florida. His brother was also a resident of Seffner when he died in 1929. William's wife then returned to her family back East. Eventually, Lionel and Nola Helliwell would move to Miami.

 

In Tampa Lionel worked for the United States Customs House, then located on the third floor of the building facing Florida Avenue, between Twiggs and Zack Streets (see inset map left). The city directories, however, show more than one location for Customs offices. During these years Paul was attending high school at Plant City, where he graduated in 1933 and still living with his parents.

A 1934 listing in the Tampa, Florida, City Directory, shows him living alone, however, while working for Cuban Rum, Inc., the only company listed under liquor importers those months following the repeal of Prohibition. 

 

Intriguingly, immigration records indicate that Helliwell had a plane ticket for a return trip from Cuba in 1934, but didn't make the flight. 1934 was the same year he began as a freshman at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he was soon in position to make even more powerful contacts. However, Cody Fowler, his partner at Cuban Rum in downtown Tampa appears to have helped him financially with college and law school, and stood ready to give him a job upon graduation.

 

 

Click image to enlarge.

Living in the Chi Phi House in Gainesville, Paul was one year behind future Florida governor, George Smathers, a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon House, where his roommate in 1933-34 was Philip Graham. Pulled out of college for a year because he had developed dissolute habits, according to Carol Felsenthal's biography of Graham's future wife, Phil was allowed to return in the fall of 1934, which placed him in the 1936 graduating class with George Smathers, who would continue law school in Gainesville until 1938. Helliwell completed his law studies there a year later. 

 

Phil Graham got into Harvard Law only after his father sought help from Florida Congressman Claude Pepper, but the young genius had proven himself by the end of his second year when he was named head of the Harvard Law Review. 

 

Another Harvard Law scholar, Ed Prichard, Jr., soon introduced him to Felix Frankfurter, the Harvard professor whom FDR named in 1939 to the Supreme Court, and also key recruiter into FDR's brain trust. It was an auspicious year. 

 

Phil Graham and George Smathers both married in 1939. Paul Helliwell graduated from law school and married Majorie Mae Muller, whose father had relocated his family to Florida and sold insurance. Her mother managed the Astoria Apartments at 1367 S.W. 5th Street (at 14th Avenue), where Marjorie grew up.

By 1945 Paul and Marjorie Helliwell were living in Miami, along with his parents. Paul had joined the military during the war and was already a Lieutenant Colonel. His father still worked as a Customs inspector.


Peter Dale Scott sums up who was directing Helliwell in this one sentence:

In effect, Corcoran was running an off-the-books private war in which a private company, China Defense Supplies, was diverting some of the war materiel destined for China to a private army, the American Volunteer Group. 

 

We'll pick up there later.

 

 

Next: See

Helliwell's First Employer in Tampa

 

 

 

Who Was Jay Harrison?

The article below appeared on JFKCountercoup2, a blog written by Bill Kelly, JFK assassination researcher. It is not clear from the posting where or when the article appeared. What it fails to mention is who provided the information for the obituary, or even who wrote it for the newspaper. Very likely it was furnished by Walt Brown, the history teacher and COPA member trusted by Harrison at the time of his death to receive his files and papers. 

Jay's father's parents were John Calvery/Calverley Harrison (born in Lancashire, England, in 1868, died in Leominster, MA in 1921) and Eva Maude Proctor (1876 – 1950). Jay's mother was born in California to John Archibald Fraser, Jr. and Charlotte Theresa Mcclintock.

Obituary: HARRISON, JOHN FRASER [J and Jay]

Jay was born in Portland Maine on 8 Nov 1933. He was the only child of John Alexander and Leonore Mary (Fraser) Harrison. His father was then the Portland Branch Manager for the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.

His paternal ancestry went back to 5 pilgrim passengers onboard the Mayflower that landed in Plymouth, MA on 16 December 1620. His maternal ancestry went back to the Fraser Clan in Kintail Parish of Ross and Cromarty County Scotland thence to Brockville Ontario, Canada, along with a direct linkage to Simon Fraser (his Great-Grand Uncle) of Canadian historical fame.

Jay used to joke that one day, when he was about 13 and living on the family farm back in Ogunquit Maine, he looked into a mirror and said "Where in the world did he come from?" and he searched for the answer to that question for the rest of his life. He was an active genealogist from that day forward.

Jay graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring MD and went on to the Industrial Engineering School at The University of Maryland. His college education was interrupted by the Korean Police Action in early 1953.

Jay was drafted into the US Army and was trained in communications and intelligence and among other assignments was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Communication Center in The Pentagon. Following his "active" service he was assigned to a Reserve SIRA Team (Strategic Intelligence Research and Analysis) for 6 more years.

Jay held, during his military service, every Security Clearance ever issued and was sworn to secrecy on many subjects for the rest of his life. He abided by that commitment and refrained from addressing subjects that are today common topics on the internet.

Jay also attended George Washington University and the University of Maryland while he was stationed in Washington, DC, and then in later years Graduate School at the University of Texas in Austin.

As a veteran, and while attending UofM, Jay worked evenings repairing Multilith printing presses in Government agencies for Addressograph-Multigraph in Washington, DC. Jay then joined the sales component of A-M and became a Junior Salesman in Rochester, NY servicing Eastman Kodak Co. It was in Rochester that he met and married Marian Ernest, another A-M employee. Upon promotion to Senior Salesman Jay was transferred to the newly created branch office in Montgomery, Ala. Jay and Marian arrived in Montgomery in the first week of December in 1955 and that was the same week that Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white person on the bus and the famous "bus boycott"  began.

Over the next few years Jay was promoted and reassigned by AM to Cleveland, OH, Erie, PA and eventually Dallas, TX in late 1959.

On 13 Jun 1961 he became a Reserve Officer on the Dallas Police Department. His military background and genealogical research experience was used by the DPD's Criminal Intelligence Section.

At the time of the Kennedy Assassination at 12:30PM on 22 Nov 1963 he was on assignment observing the Black Muslim Church, as intelligence information was that members of that church would be creating a scene somewhere along the motorcade route. When the shooting event happened, he went to the School Book Depository Building and arrived there 4 minutes following the shooting. Later that day he was on the guard team for Governor Connally at the ICU in Parkland Hospital.

He was the first Reserve Officer of the DPD to be awarded the The Meritorious Conduct Award, the highest award to an officer of the DPD. This award was made on May 14, 1965 for his research efforts  into the Kennedy Assassination and associated events before, during and after the action.

In 1964 he left A-M Corp and joined one of his clients (Texas Instruments) as its Corporate Printing Coordinator.

In July 1966 he was was hired by Frank McBee, the VP of a small but rapidly growing, electronics firm in Austin to be their Publications Manager. That company's name was TRACOR. Jay's first day there was  Monday, 1 Aug 1966, and he and a personnel officer ate an early lunch at the Night Hawk Restaurant at 19th and Guadalupe. They came outside about 12:05 and at that time Charles Whitman was shooting from the Tower.

In 1968 Jay became VP of Market Development of Norman Harwell & Associates (NHA, Inc) the 2nd largest technical publication firm in the world. In 1971, after the elimination of MIL-Spec requirements of the federal government, NHA went from over 1700 employees to less than 100. Unfortunately Jay was one of the ones that was looking for a new job.

In 1974 he returned to Austin and went to work for Nash Phillips-Copus Co (NP-C) as a salesman in their Multi-family Division. He was NP-C's Salesman of the Year in 1975 and 1976. He was awarded the Outstanding Salesman of the year award by the Austin Association of Sales Executives;  He was one of the top 10 Salesman in the nation in the years 1976, 77 and 78 by the National Association of Homebuilders. Jay was promoted to Sales Manager of NP-C in 1977. NP-C was the 2nd largest builder in Texas and 7th largest builder in the nation. CenTex Construction (a Clint Murchison, Sr Company) was the largest builder in both TX and the nation.

In 1979 Jay founded Texas Real Estate Marketing & Consulting Corp (TREMAC). It grew to be in the top 3 of Commercial real estate firms in the Austin Market. Its annual sales exceeded 35 million dollars. It went dormant in the real estate crash of 1988.

Jay has been a licensed real estate broker for over 25 years. He wanted to return to commercial real estate sales when the market recovered in 1998/99 but he has been recovering from major surgical and physical disabilities since 1998.

He has been Amateur Radio Licensed since 1952. His current call sign is N5BHU.  Jay received the original "Mayday" from the Medical college on Grenada Island and ALL the communications with that facility were through his home in Rollingwood for over a week in October 1983. The US Department of State and The Defense Department had open telephone lines to his residence for that whole week. His station was manned for 24 hours a day and he still has audio tapes of all the communications. (Ref: Dick Stanley AAS Staff).
  

Jay has done genealogical research for over 55 years and is a highly respected researcher of Colonial New England, The Republic of Texas, and early Texas History. He has been a contributing patron of the Texas State Library and through the years has donated many thousands of dollars in books, equipment and computer CD's to their genealogical collection. He was one of the original founders and authors of "Automated Archives" the ORIGINAL producer of genealogical CD ROMS in the early 1990's.

Jay is the Certified Genealogist for The Texas Supreme Court Historical Society. His current effort is doing hard genealogical research on all 150+ Justices of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Texas and the State of Texas.

Jay was a licensed pilot and in his spare time liked to cruse off into the wild blue yonder.

He can now do it permanently.

Cold War intrigue still surfaces in Virginia

August 11th, 2010

By Peter Vieth

A barn in a remote part of Culpeper County has given up up secrets about a  World War II and Cold War era clandestine espionage agency viewed as one of the predecessors of the CIA.

The operation, bearing the enigmatic name “the Pond,” was responsible for the 1947 rescue of an anti-communist leader in Hungary along with other intelligence successes.

We’re just hearing about the Pond because its leader, fervent anti-communist John V. Grombach, retired to an estate in rural Boston, Va., bringing with him tens of thousands of documents he intended to keep secret. Grombach died in 1982 and the cache of papers emerged by accident in 2001.

The nation’s current spy agencies have finally finished going through the papers and the Associated Press got a look at many of them in April.

The editors of the Culpeper Star-Exponent take understandable pleasure in helping bring out the story of the mysterious Longlea property where Grombach held forth in his later years. They should not overlook another piece of Cold War history in their own backyard – the Mount Pony facility where, for 19 years, the Federal Reserve Board hid a substantial wad of cash in case of nuclear Armageddon.

Excerpt from Jennifer Lake's Blog:

Files belonging to The Pond, when picked up in 2001, were in the possession of the Freedom Studies Center of the American Security Council Foundation (ASCF, est.1958), a private non-profit lobby group for the private American Security Council founded by John Morris Fisher in 1955. Mr. Fisher, then a resident of the town of Culpeper, was the Director for National Security of  Sears Roebuck and Co., the Rosenwalds' vast holding, and just up the road from the town of Culpeper lay Brandy Rock Farm, Strauss’s 1600-acre estate bought in 1933. 

Congressional Record, V. 144, Pt. 14, September 9, 1998 to September 21 1998

Alice Glass was born on October 11, 1911, in Lott, Falls County, Texas, to George William and Judith (Ligon) Glass. She graduated from high school in Marlin and attended Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and Columbia University in New York. After a short second enrollment at Texas Christian University, she moved to Austin and worked as secretary to state senator William Robert Poage.

Charles E. Marsh

A New Deal supporter from Waco, Poage favored rural electrification and rural telephone service while campaigning in 1936 for his first term in the U.S. Congress. Poage kept a home in Waco, less than three miles from Ephraim S. Fentress' residence. Fentress and Charles Edward Marsh had first met in Iowa while each worked for the Des Moines Daily News, and together they gained control of the Waco Morning News in 1917, soon buying Waco's other newspaper, the Tribune, merging them. They then bought newspapers in numerous other mid-size Texas towns. Marsh moved from Waco to Austin after buying the newspaper there in late 1921.

In 1932 his Newspaper Publishing Co. had offices on the seventh floor of the Littlefield Building (104 East 6th Street). Three years later the Austin directory shows part of those offices were occupied by the newly created Texas Racing Commission, whose head was Robert Bernerd Anderson; the Texas State Tax Board, of which the racing commission was a part, was a couple of doors down the hall. Lyndon Johnson also had his Texas branch of the National Youth Administration office in Room 601 of the Littlefield Building in August 1935, one floor down from the Racing Commission's office at 715. Another part of Marsh's old office would be leased to the Texas Relief Commission, which by 1935 was taking up offices on every floor of the Littlefield Building. 

By that time, however, Marsh had moved his office to the Norwood Building at 114 West 7th Street. Years later the Norwood Tower would be acquired by one Lyndon Johnson's daughters, with the penthouse serving as their downtown residence. For 35 years previously, the penthouse was occupied by Thomas J. Butler, the building's former owner, whose wife was a niece of Eugene Bremond, an early banker in Austin with close ties to Col. E.M. House. His State National Bank would become the Capital National Bank in 1934, the year the bank moved its headquarters into the Norwood Building. Marsh moved into the new building as did former governor Dan Moody and other men who would prove to be powerful several years later:  

Norwood Building tenants

State Sen. Poage (D-Waco) maintained an office in the Texas Capitol from 1930 until his election to Congress, and Marsh allegedly met 20-year-old Alice Glass there in 1931. Charles, who married his first wife the same year Alice was born, lived with his family in a large but relatively modest home a few blocks west of the old House mansion near 15th (Enfield) Street.

The purchase by Marsh and Fentress of the Laredo newspaper near the Mexican border, however, resulted in a lawsuit in 1932 to regain title by its former owner, W.P. Allen. During the time Marsh spent in Webb County, he went into an partnership in an oil well being drilled by Herman Brown, a man from central Texas who would eventually become one of Lyndon Johnson's biggest financial supporters.

According to Bryan Burrough in his book, The big rich: the rise and fall of the greatest Texas oil fortunes, Marsh also began financing Sid Richardson's oil ventures in the early 1930's. Citing Marsh's papers stored in the LBJ Library, Burrough says that it was with profits from his partnership with Richardson in the Keystone Field, while in the throes of divorce from his wife, Leona, that he purchased Longlea for Alice in 1938, but that he was forced to sell his interest to Richardson in late 1941 because, in addition to paying Leona in the divorce settlement, he owed taxes to the IRS. 

Roald Dahl

After selling off his newspapers, in 1947, he founded the Public Welfare Foundation . He died in 1964. Before his death, Charlie Marsh even brought in a friend who had actually spied on him for British intelligence to work for the foundation--Roald Dahl--according to one of Dahl's biographers, Donald Storrock, in Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl.

Alice had divorced Marsh not long after they finally married, and she went on to marry numerous times, the last time to Col. Richard J. Kirkpatrick in 1959, to whom she remained married until his death in 1974. In the last few months of her life she moved from Virginia to Marlin, Texas, where she died of cancer in late 1976.

Marsh's daughter, from his marriage to Leona, Antoinette Haskell, operated the Public Welfare Foundation after Charles' death, according to her obituary:

Antoinette Wade Marsh Haskell, 95, of Martinsville, Va., an officer of the Martinsville Bulletin, died Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2009, at Stanleytown Health and Rehab Center. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1914 to Leona Marsh and Charles Edward Marsh, a Texas oil and newspaper man. She was reared in Austin, Texas, where her father was editor and publisher of the Austin American Statesman and other newspapers. She attended the University of Texas for her freshman year and then transferred to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where she graduated in 1936. She then lived in Orlando and Miami in Florida. During World War II she lived in Manhattan in New York City, where she worked as assistant purchasing agent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her husband, Robert H. Haskell, served with the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, and in 1947 the couple moved to Martinsville where he was publisher of the Martinsville Bulletin. He died in 1971.

In addition to serving as an officer of the Bulletin, Antoinette Haskell served as a director of the Public Welfare Foundation until 2008. The foundation was begun in 1947 by her father. She had two sons, Robert H. Haskell of Martinsville and the late Charles T. Haskell; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. The funeral and burial will be private.

Daniel Hopsicker wants to know

Kris Millegan

Kris Millegan is a musician, who became fascinated with spies after his own father disclosed to him one day that he had been one. But that was not all Kris learned about his father, who had personally worked with a "quiet American" named Colonel Edward G. Lansdale. He learned that the Central Intelligence Agency was into pushing drugs on innocent, well-meaning peaceniks much like Kris himself. You see, that's where the market was. Even before Lansdale was a spy, he had been a marketer, like so many free-enterprise Americans who want enterprise to be not free, but lucrative. What they want to be free is the card they receive that gets them out of jail when they violate the law.

Daniel Hopsicker knows all about those "get out of jail free" cards. He's been writing about them for years since first joining Kris Millegan's research list known as CIA-Drugs.  In May 2000 Daniel was headed for Oregon to attend Millegan's first and only CIA-DRUGS SYMPOSIUM, to be held in Eugene. The event featured:

• Rodney Stich, author of Unfriendly Skies, Drugging America, and Defrauding America; 
• Peter Dale Scott, an authority on the drug trade, as well as on the deep political corruption behind the JFK assassination; 
• Catherine Austin Fitts, who at that time was just starting to discover who was behind the destruction of her own experience with free enterprise; 
• Cele Castillo, 12-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration; and 
• Michael C. Ruppert, former cop turned writer, who was intent on disclosing connection between "the C.I.A." and narcotics trafficking.
  

Kris Millegan would go on to author and edit a treatise called Fleshing out Skull and Bones, dealing with power, money, and the American way. The American way of corrupting the Constitution upon which the country was founded by the descendants of that same elite bunch who founded it, not least of which is Yale's Skull and Bones society itself.

 Daniel would go on to write Barry and 'the Boys': The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History and to produce a video entitled "Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida." Daniel would also create a website called The Madcow Morning News, which, some might say, was obsessed with putting away a man called Rudi Dekkers. 

But Daniel had never heard of Rudi Dekkers in May 2000, when he arrived in Oregon for Kris' symposium. Back then his obsession was still about America's "secret history" and about Barry Seal, a "drug smuggler and aircraft pilot who flew covert flights for the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency and the Medellín Cartel." 

It was the last year that Bill Clinton was in office, and the "crimes of Mena, Arkansas" were soon to give way to conspiracy researchers delving into the real reasons behind the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center buildings in 2001. 

Some members of Kris' CIA-Drugs group were even researching whether former CIA agent Edwin Wilson was still in "the C.I.A." when he sold C-4 explosive in 1977 to Libya, as a consequence of Houston Judge Lynn N. Hughes' appointing a lawyer for the former agent  to consider new evidence in Wilson's case. Hughes' ruling, which took four years, eventually set Wilson free: “Because the government knowingly used false evidence against him and suppressed favorable evidence, his conviction will be vacated.” 

Between the time of the presentation of Wilson's motions and the ruling, Michael Ruppert had written in March 2000 in his emailed [since archived] newsletter, From the Wilderness:

...In the meantime Ed Wilson has just asked for contempt charges against 14 of

Ed Wilson

the biggest legal names in and out of government. And his attorney is moving for summary judgement because Judge Lynn Hughes, in Houston, is sitting on Wilson's explosive motion to dismiss the conviction and not rendering a decision. One Federal Judge, Stanley Sporkin, has already retired and two more, one on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, are on the verge of having their rights read to them and of being accused of perjury and of withholding exculpatory evidence. The CIA risks being exposed as having deliberately armed Moammar Qadaffy at the instigation of George Bush. Retired CIA Associate Deputy Director of Operations (ADDO) Ted Shackley stands on the verge of being exposed for perjury and worse. And the Department of Justice is close to being exposed, in open court, of having hidden crimes by high-ranking members for more than 17 years. Now that's the kind of  edifice-crumbling upheaval that may eventually lead to letting a lot of innocent people out of prison - not just one. But only If it is pursued and capitalized upon.

Edwin Wilson writes to me:

Dear Sir:
I have received your January 28 issue and thank you for a favorable article. My problem is this place [Federal Penitentiary, Allenwood, Pa.] makes it almost impossible to communicate. So I ask you to stay in touch with [Attorney David] Adler who has better, up to date, information than I. Also, I want to cooperate with you. By the way, the article you sent me is missing pages 6&7. Some machine also hates me!

                            Many thanks,
                            Ed Wilson
                            08237-054

The story had first hit the news in the fall of 1999:

Ex-CIA Officer Appeals Conviction

By C. BRYSON HULL

 The Associated Press

HOUSTON (AP) - Former CIA officer Edwin P. Wilson, jailed since 1983 for illegal arms smuggling to Libya, has filed an appeal accusing federal prosecutors of knowingly using a false affidavit to convict him.

Wilson's claims are accompanied by hundreds of secret government memos that his lawyers obtained.

Wilson's main job for the CIA before he retired in 1971 was setting up front companies abroad while posing as a rich American businessman. He lived his cover to the hilt and made himself a multimillionaire in the process. He was arrested in 1982 after being lured out of Libya by a government informant and was sentenced to 52 years in prison.

The appeal is of a 1983 conviction for shipping 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives from Houston's Intercontinental Airport [now intriguingly named George Bush Intercontinental Airport] to Libya. Even if his appeal were successful, Wilson would still face prison time on two other convictions. But his defense attorney, David Adler, believes similar evidence exists that could throw out a Virginia conviction of Wilson for illegally exporting guns to Egypt.

Adler said the secret government memos detail lengthy efforts to hide the use of the false [Briggs] affidavit and prosecutors' failure to release information that would have aided Wilson's defense during his 1983 Houston trial on charges of selling tons of explosives to Libya.

Wilson claims that his dealings with Libya, for which he was convicted, were the result of a CIA request that he ingratiate himself with the Libyans after he officially retired from the agency.

The affidavit by then-CIA Executive Director Charles Briggs, the agency's No. 3 official, said the agency had not asked Wilson either directly or indirectly to provide any service to the agency after he retired.

A four-volume appeal filed Sept. 8 includes more than 800 pages of exhibits that allegedly show government lawyers knew the crucial affidavit was false the night before it was presented in court.

The documents show that Wilson in fact had some 80 contacts with the CIA from his retirement through 1978 and provided a variety of services, including arranging gun sales to a Saudi Arabian security agency and the shipment of two desalinization units to Egypt.

Documents also show prosecutors then spent nearly eight months discussing whether to disclose that fact to the court and Wilson's lawyers.

The evidence was enough to prompt an unusual courtroom admission earlier in March from Justice Department attorney Arlene Reidy.
 

"We have a lot of documents already that I think show that there was a clear problem with the affidavit's accuracy and that the individuals involved were well aware of that problem," Ms. Reidy told U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, according to a transcript.

The former CIA general counsel, Stanley Sporkin, now a federal judge in Washington, D.C., said Tuesday there was no intention to cover up. Rather, he said, officials had a difference in philosophies about how to handle the information about Wilson's activities.

"It would be wrong to think this was in bad faith,'' Sporkin said.

The Justice Department has until mid-January to respond to the appeal. If Wilson's conviction was overturned, he could be retried.

The secret documents were obtained by Wilson's defense under the Freedom of Information Act and through court discovery. They were resealed by Hughes on Sept. 23, but The Associated Press had obtained copies before the order was signed.

Speaking from federal prison in Allenwood, Pa., Wilson said the alleged conspiracy against him was motivated by ambition.

"A few greedy people in the government saw an opportunity to make a name for themselves,'' Wilson said. "The longer I was in prison, the more they had to cover it up and it keeps going higher.''

Another intriguing coincidence? Sporkin would end up being appointed the judge in Catherine Austin Fitts' own civil trial against the man whom she sued for his role in bringing down her business. Business as usual.

It is now 2013, thirteen years later, and another defendant awaits trial in Judge Hughes' courtroom--none other than Daniel Hopsicker's current obsession, Rudi Dekkers. Can there possibly be a connection with that new evidence presented by Edwin Wilson in 1999 relating to his arrest in 1982. The evidence concerned the memorandum signed by Charles A. Briggs, who was then executive director of the C.I.A., as revealed in Hughes' opinion in the Wilson case:

To rebut Wilson’s evidence, on February 4, 1983, the government introduced an affidavit from Charles A. Briggs. Briggs served as the CIA’s inspector general until mid-1982 when he became its executive director—the third highest ranking official of the CIA. In the affidavit, he swore that—with one exception—the CIA did not ask Wilson to work for it after he officially stopped working there. Briggs declared:

“The search [of CIA records] revealed that Mr. Edwin P. Wilson terminated his employment with the CIA on 28 February 1971, and was not re-employed thereafter in any capacity.

According to Central Intelligence Agency Records, with one exception while he was employed by Naval Intelligence in 1972, Mr. Edwin P. Wilson was not asked or requested, directly or indirectly, to perform or provide any service, directly or indirectly, for [the] CIA.”

What will happen? Will Rudi make it to trial? Will he get out of jail free?

Is there somehow a link between George (Poppy) Bush's CIA, for which Edwin Wilson worked and the CIA of his son, Dubya Bush, which was lurking behind the scenes of 9/11?

Daniel Hopsicker wants to know:

CIA=Drugs

Rudi Dekkers is scheduled to go on trial in Houston next month for cocaine and heroin trafficking, unless, that is, something happens between now and then. Courthouse observers suggest the trial will never take place.  They note that Dekkers’ defense lawyers continue to attempt to hammer out a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office before he goes on trial.

Will Dekkers—facing as long as 20 years in Federal prison—get a sweetheart deal? And if he does, will it be in exchange for his testimony…or his silence?
Hanging in the balance is the answer to one of 9/11’s biggest mystery: Where did Rudi Dekkers get his "juice?"