Kenneth Burnstine's Strange Life and Associates

Who Was John Birch?

Checking this blog's timeline indicates that in October 2013 my research concerned the history of the John Birch Society created in 1958. 

Birch was actually a missionary student from Georgia, who went to a Fort Worth, Texas, Baptist seminary run by Dr. J. Frank Norris, who, according to the website catalog of his papers, corresponded with several U.S. Presidents, as well as many other powerful political and religious figures from the time. What was most intriguing to me on October 20 was how Norris sent Birch to Kunming, Yunnan, China--the same area of China where General Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers were based. 

Peter Dale Scott has written about the Strategic Service Unit--the "cloak and dagger" sections of the defunct OSS--in Kunming shortly after the end of WWII, whose Far East Division chief was Paul Helliwell, a Florida attorney we have written about before.

Sterling Seagrave wrote that Paul Helliwell 

allegedly "became the man who controlled the pipe-line of covert funds for secret operations throughout East Asia after the war." 

 Eventually, Helliwell would be responsible for the incorporation in America of the CIA proprietaries, Sea Supply Inc. and Civil Air Transport (CAT) Inc. (later Air America), which would provide support to both Phao Sriyanon of the Northern Army in Thailand and the KMT drug camps in Burma.

I had let myself be diverted from a promise to reveal how William S. Youngman's marriage into the Perkins and Forbes network of opium trading families from Massachusetts help to explain why America became so entrenched in Southeast Asia during the 20th century. Kruger did not seem to be aware of this historical opium link between FDR's lawyer, Tommy the Cork, and the Forbes/Delano network while he struggled to explain why, decades later, Nixon warred against French heroin traffickers. Yet, as Kruger acknowledged, the war against the French drug connection failed to eliminate the actual source of the opium, the Golden Triangle. 

When the French abandoned their colonial possession in Indochina in 1954, the United States moved in the "Saigon Military Mission" under its its Chief, Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, allegedly to prevent the area's being taken over by Soviet Communists, according to the Pentagon Papers documents. In this endeavor Lansdale had assistance from George McLean Hellyer, of the U.S. Information Agency. The Foreign Service had assigned him Hellyer, who lived in Tokyo, to Vietnam as early as 1953.  

The two former advertising PR men immediately began a program of psychological warfare, just as Lansdale had done in the Philippines at the close of WWII.

Hellyer's Background

The British Hellyer family became tea importers in Japan after William J. Alt, established the business in Nagasaki around 1860. George and his brother David had lived there as children. (See book by David Tirrell Hellyer, At the Forest's Edge: Memoir of a Physician-Naturalist.) 

George was born in Chicago in 1912, and his parents moved that same year to Kobe, Japan where his father, Harold Jesse Hellyer, had been born.  Two brothers, David and Walter, were born in Japan before the family relocated for awhile to  Lausanne, Switzerland. Frederick Hellyer died in 1925, and his widow, Dorothy, married Thomas Emerson Ripley in Santa Barbara, CA.

George M. Hellyer was working in advertising and public relations in Tacoma, Washington, when he enlisted at the outbreak of WWII. According to the 1940 census, in 1935 he had been living at the Hellyer's home in Lausanne.  A family website relates:

George Hellyer had a varied existence including an adventurous war career as an American liaison officer with British troops in Burma, and a stint in the tea business in Formosa (now Taiwan). He became an officer of the US Information Service and held senior positions in Saigon, Washington DC, North Africa and Brussels.

The same website also reveals that George's grandfather, Frederick Hellyer:

took a Japanese wife, apparently not an unusual custom at the time, and had c.2 children. When he married his American wife Georgiana, his Japanese family was provided for and he left them a business in the name of Hellyer which still exists. His daughter is said to have been the wife of Admiral Tojo (famous in the second World War). This aspect of Frederick's history was not generally known in the family, but details have been researched recently by Robert Hellyer (great grandson of Harold Hellyer, son of Georgiana).

Tessa Montgomery and husband

He [Robert] has been in contact with Viscountess [Tessa] Montgomery (daughter-in-law of the Field Marshall) who is a descendant of the Alt family. Alt House in Nagasaki is preserved in Glover Park with other colonial houses of the late 18th Century.

Alt played a huge role in helping to launch the Meiji government, introducing Western technology and boosting commercial activity in Japan--as they moved on to Osaka and then Yokohama. The Alts moved back to England and sent Hellyer nephews to Japan to operate the tea business. One of the nephews, Frederick Hellyer, family gossip reports, married a Japanese woman who bore him a daughter who later became the wife of Admiral Tojo. I have found nothing that documents this however. He did marry a Boston girl named Georgianna Tirrell and established an American-based branch of the tea company in Chicago. It is not known how closely Frederick Hellyer's American/Japanese family associated with relatives in both England and Australia, though it fascinates this blogger to discover that W.J. Alt's daughter Anne in 1894 married Frederick Arthur Montague Browning, "father of the British airborne forces." 

Their son, Frederick Arthur Montague "Boy" Browning, was educated at Eton and then Sandhurst until 1915, in time to fight in "the Great War," and returning in 1924 to Sandhurst as Adjutant. He met Daphne du Maurier in 1931 and they married in 1932. By the end of the second World War he had been placed in command of Headquarters Airborne Troops, later to become known as the 1st British Airborne Corps, consisting of the 1st and 6th Airborne Divisions, and the Special Air Service Brigade. He worked on the image of his unit and chose the maroon beret to "reinforce the feeling of their belonging to a brotherhood." He served from 1944 to 1946 as Chief of Staff to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia (SACSEA), whose nephew married the future Queen Elizabeth II.

French entrepreneurs then set up their own heroin refineries in Marseille and began to launder profits through French banks and presenting the Bank for International Settlements with huge balance of trade surpluses. Because of the Bretton Woods agreement made in 1944, which, for purposes of currency exchange, pegged the value  all foreign currencies on the U.S. dollar. That worked fine until U.S. prices began to skyrocket, making Europeans very unhappy that their own currency values were negatively impacted. French President De Gaulle's decision to cash in his country's trade surpluses in gold at the set price of $35 per ounce quickly drained the gold reserves. By 1971 America had run out of it and unilaterally closed this window through which gold was freely handed out. 

The problem did not come as a surprise. The fact that Richard Nixon chose John Connally to head the Treasury Department was no accident. This "long, tall Texan" had not only been a protege of Lyndon Johnson, but was also the favored successor chosen by Robert B. Anderson, an obscure little lawyer with glasses and a limp, tapped to be Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of the Navy in 1953 and Deputy Secretary of Defense in 1954 until 1955, when Anderson "retired from government" to work for Ventures, Limited. 

Anderson traveled to Egypt as President Eisenhower's special emissary in 1956 to attempt to negotiate with Nasser (Nasr) about terms of the Baghdad Pact, and then in July that year after Egypt "nationalized" the Suez Canal, he went to talk to Saudis about what America proposed to do about Nasser. As a result of Anderson's secret talks, according to one historian, William J. Bowers:

President Eisenhower wrote Dulles at the NATO summit affirming his conviction to back Saud despite the temporary set back posed by Nasr’s popularity. At a meeting of the National Security Council a little over a week later the administration decided to support Saud instead of joining the Baghdad Pact. This was due primarily to the administration’s belief that Nasr was a communist threat, one which the pact was not conceived to oppose. So, a regional rival to Nasr needed to be created. In exchange for Saud’s leadership, the Americans were willing to promise the king that the U.S. would not longer pursue joining the pact...Eisenhower’s prime motivation in building up King Saud as a major figure in the Middle East was his concern to guarantee greater access to Middle Eastern oil for Western Europe. The president was convinced that the dissolution of Western Europe due to economic difficulties could be avoided by an infusion of Saudi petroleum.

In Chapter 20 of his book, The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger mentioned Mitchell Werbell's  purchase of the B.R. Fox Company as a front for some weapons transactions negotiated with the Central Intelligence Agency's Lucien Conein. Kruger profiled Conein in chapter 14, which QJ covered previously. 

Kruger, unfortunately, failed to follow up on the Fox Company, after quickly mentioning that it served as a link between WerBell and Lucien Conein in August 1976. 

Not only did Quixotic Joust explore exactly what that link was, but we dug up much more information about who set up the B.R. Fox Company, as well as who it was within the CIA who wanted to understand what was going on with WerBell.

Who was Mitch WerBell, really?

His Security File
The security file for Mitchell WerBell consists of 158 pages and was apparently compiled by Jerry G. Brown, Deputy Chief of the Security Analysis Group (SAG), at the request of Bruce L. Solie, Chief of the Office of Security (OS).*

On August 14, 1959 WerBell requested approval for volunteer status with Central Intelligence Agency, but two months later advised that he was no longer interested. That date in August the CIA was deeply involved with Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.
 
The first document furnished by the RIF check came from the War Dept, showing his service record in Army and application to OSS when he was stationed at Fort Monmouth, N.J. His application was dated on February 10, 1945 and signed in Kunming, China. This application provides a great deal of information about WerBell's background.

(Coincidentally, Bernard B. Spindel's military enlistment in the Signal Corps took place at this same Army base in November 1942.)

As "neighbors," he listed, then struck through, the name Gen. George L. VanDeusen (the General was commanding officer of the Eastern Signal Corps Training Center Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, from 1940 to 1944); Mrs. Geraldine Thompson, resident of Brookdale Farm, Lincroft, N.J. (a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and then president of the Visiting Nurse Association at that location); and  Marshall P. Blankarn of nearby Rumson, from a family of stockbrokers. WerBell stated he attended the Stevens School in Philadelphia, 1924-30, then the Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia, 1932-36, followed by one year at VMI. 

He then returned to Philadelphia and studied advertising at Charles Morris Price until 1941. However, this seems to contradict the information he gave concerning where he lived during the same times. From 1934 until 1938, he lived in Ventnor, N.J.; 1938-42 in Philadelphia; September 1942 until April 1943 in Rutherford, N.J. and December 1943 until August 1944 at Brookdale Farms in Lincroft. In another section he admits to having been a member of a ship's crew for about nine months in 1937-38, spent traveling around Central and South America and parts of Europe.

However, a declassified CIA document clearly indicates that as early as July 1974 the CIA was using the space subleased by the DEA from WerBell's company, a Georgia corporation known as Central Investigative Agency, set up on May 31, 1973. The document is a cable sent to CIA Director William Colby to report that the CIA had been informed from George Kenny of the Atlanta FBI office that a former Atlanta policemen working for Werbell's company in Washington, D.C. had notified the FBI that Conein was using this office under name of a limited partnership called Electronic Surveillance LP out of Suite 1201-A of this building during July 1974, a few weeks before Richard Nixon resigned.

Less than a year after WerBell was acquitted of this conspiracy, along with several others, co-defendant John Nardi died when a shrapnel-filled car bomb, planted on a stolen car parked next to his Oldsmobile, was detonated by remote control. Nardi, was reputed to be vying to fill a Teamster post left vacant. More details of who was involved in this intrigue with WerBell are set out in Ronald L. Ecker's essay, "Our Man in Powder Springs."

We know from Robert Morrow's book, First Hand Knowledge, however, that somewhere in the building attorney, Mickey Wiener (a/k/a Myron Weiner), formerly of Roselle, N.J., had an office during the same time-frame to serve as a lobbyist for criminal associates like LJB's friend, Bobby Baker. Peter Whitmey wrote in his essay, "The Morrow-Kohly-Nixon Connection," published in November 1992 in The Third Decade, that, not only was Weiner's office in the LaSalle Building at 1028 Connecticut, but that Mario Garcia Kohly had an office across the street at 1025 Connecticut. Maybe someone in 1971 was afraid that Spindel was hinting that he knew something about who was working against President Kennedy from this very building.

One location brings all the scheming characters together. Strangely enough, they each had a separate connection to the Bahamas. Keep that island nation in mind as we explore each character who appears in our tale of intrigue. 

Bernard Bates Spindel

Bernard Spindel was born in 1923 to a Russian immigrant who worked as a longshoreman on New York City's docks. After three years of high school, in 1942 Bernie enlisted in the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth Red Bank in New Jersey and was trained as an electrician. We're talking analog electronics in those days, and Bernie was among the greatest, we are told.

Once the war was over in 1945, Bernie expected to be released from his military service, but had to sue the Army to force them to let him out of his commitment. The lawsuit made the news, which may have caught the attention of union officials, who quickly added the new civilian to their list of vendors. The best wiretapper in the business was hired by James R. Hoffa and, in the mid-50's was prosecuted as a co-conspirator with the union boss for wiretapping Teamsters Union's Local 337 offices in Detroit. Just before Christmas in 1957 the first trial ended in a hung jury--11 to 1 for conviction. Their second trial in 1958 resulted in acquittal.

Hoffa would be tried for conspiracy again in Nashville in 1962, and subsequently (after Jack Kennedy's death) for jury tampering. During the tampering trial Spindel testified that Hoffa's defense attorney hired him to counterspy on government agents (taking their orders possibly from Bobby Kennedy who was still Attorney General in LBJ's Cabinet), who had Hoffa's hotel under surveillance, and that he had monitored the agents' radio conversations. Spindel had also been the one to ask Fred Otash on the West Coast to wiretap Marilyn Monroe's bedroom to get evidence for Hoffa to prove the Kennedy brothers were each having sex with the star.

Throughout the 1960s his name was connected with an office in the LaSalle Building (demolished in 1980 to make way for a building with the address of 1717 K Street NW), just north of Farragut Square, where it was alleged he made and sold bugging and wiretap equipment. The May 20, 1966 issue of Life magazine gave him an amazing spread with full-page photos of him installing surveillance equipment as a salaried employee of his own corporation, B.R. Fox Co. According to Life, "Spindel claims to have vault full of vital tape recordings within easy reach of his beneficiaries, just in case...'Just say I'm well insured,' he says." 

"...claims to have vault full of vital tape recordings within easy reach of his beneficiaries...well insured."

The "insurance" Bernie allegedly carried was the business called the B.R.Fox Co., which reportedly owned a "vault full of vital tape recordings," left to his wife and children. As far as we have been able to ascertain, however, his relationship with Barbara Fox did not exist, if at all, until shortly before his death.

Numerous genealogical studies reveal he was married to Martha Jean Stuart, an Army-trained nurse from Montana, whose mother was a Swedish national and her father was one of the sons of miner Granville Stuart and his Shoshone wife. Shortly before she was born her father was jailed for not supporting her mother and brother.

The 1930 census shows Albertina (Lofgren) Stuart was confined in a mental hospital in Warm Springs, Montana, and the children were then placed in the Montana State Orphans' Home in Twin Bridges. Albertina died in 1941.

Jesse Granville was adopted by the Hain family at the age of nine, and Martha, who went by Jean, was adopted by a different family--Monroe Judson and Myrtle Griswold, farmers in Cohagen, who adopted two other children as well. Jean ran away from her new home when she was 16, went back to Lewistown, Montana, and apparently joined the WACs under her birth name.

Nine years after Bernie Spindel's death, Martha married Franklin Kellogg "Ozzy" Glasier. Glasier had lived for years with his second wife, formerly Olive May Guillotte, in Ankara, Turkey, where, as it was reported in 1958 in a Salt Lake City newspaper, he was a "civilian attaché to the U.S. Military Aid to Turkey program ... as a special adviser to the Turkish army." Mrs. Glasier was quoted by the newspaper, which reported:

The Turkish people didn't seem much concerned about Russia's Sputnik, according to Mrs. Glasier. "They like America and I don't think they give Russia much credit for accomplishing anything." Turkish men, particularly in the rural areas, allow the women to do most of the hard labor such as field work and farming, she stated. However, she pointed out that, in the urbanized areas the upper classes live much like average Americans.

Glasier's first marriage to Gwendolyn Frances Glasier ended in divorce in 1942. They were married before 1935 and had lived in Honolulu, Atlanta, and Santa Cruz, California, before the divorce. 

They lived in Atlanta during the years 1937-39, at about the same time Mitchell WerBell first arrived there. We will return to WerBell shortly.

Three years after the spread appeared in Life, Bernie was convicted of using his bugging equipment to tap the phone of Kenneth Klein, attorney for Diane Brown Hartford, a former model from Philadelphia, who was then in the process of divorcing the millionaire grocery heir, G. Huntington Hartford II.

In May 1972, just a month before the Watergate break-in, whoever was the actual owner of Spindel's company sold it to Michael John Morrissey, who operated it as the B.R. Fox Electronics Company until 1974. At that point, who should appear on the scene but Mitchell WerBell?
 
In 1975, after names of persons involved in Spindel's former company hit the news, the CIA denied any involvement with them or any knowledge of the company known as B.R. Fox. ]
 
Kenneth Gordon Burnstine had been born in Chicago but after his military service and marriage, moved to Florida, living in a $650,000 house in Fort Lauderdale, protected by a 350-pound lioness who mauled a small neighborhood boy, almost killing him in 1974. He was then president of Florida Atlantic Airlines, owned by Leasing Consultants, Inc., and was indicted that same year for a conspiracy with Congressman Bertram L. Podell (Democrat, New York) for activities dating back to 1968. 

Podell had been paid to influence federal agencies in selecting Burnstine's airline for an air taxi route to the Bahamas. Burnstine's earlier airline, Florida International Airways, Inc., made headlines in June 1973 when its Lockheed Lear Star was found abandoned on 47th Street of North Golden Gate subdivision outside Naples, Florida. 

Richard H. Silkey was piloting the plane during a training flight from the Bahamas to Tampa, when he "accidentally feathered the wrong engine when engine trouble developed in the port engine," Burnstine admitted to the Naples Daily News reporter. 

The airline had two prior emergency crash landings, in Jamaica and Bahamas, under its belt, resulting in deaths. Burnstine himself died in a June 1976 crash after introducing the WerBell's co-defendants Cunningham and Nardi to DEA agents posing as smugglers.]

Without Burnstine to testify for prosecution in the August conspiracy trial, the parties stipulated that "WerBell recruited Bell, who recruited Cunningham, who recruited Franklin, who recruited Nardi." What tied WerBell to the perpetrators of the drug deal was his connection to Lucien Conein, whom WerBell had known during their OSS days in Kunming, China. 

The defense strategy led by WerBell's attorney, Edwin Marger, was to have Conein testify that he was a high-level DEA intelligence official and former CIA agent, who engaged WerBell to create assassination devices for the DEA to use against drug smugglers. Then Werbell found the smugglers with Burnstine's help, apparently enticing one of them to find others. Conein's testimony revealed that at the time this so-called plot was hatched, the DEA was using office space in the same building--LaSalle Building at 1028 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.--where a deceased expert in wiretapping and bugging had his office for several years.

This office had once been that of Bernard Bates Spindel before his untimely demise in 1971 and appears to have been used by his successors, despite the attempt by Howard Ray Gibson to disguise that fact. Conein and John Patrick Muldoon were in contact by June 1974 ostensibly, Conein claimed, for DEA to purchase surveillance equipment from the "former" CIA agent, now working for one of WerBell's companies.
-----------

Note from above continued: Five years after the pictures of Spindel appeared in Life, he died at the youthful age of 48, There is an insightful article about Mitchell WerBell written by Ronald L. Ecker entitled "Our Man in Powder Springs," and a fascinating 1981 interview with Robert Eringer from SAGA magazine. 

What other sources have failed to research, however, is WerBell's genealogy. His father, John Michael WerBell, was a bacteriologist who owned a laboratory in Philadelphia at N. 5th and Spring Garden--the WerBell Patho-Bacteriological Lab. 

The census record for 1920 lists John Michael as having been born in New York in about 1888 to a Jewish father from Strasbourg and a mother from Rumania. The infant Mitchell lived with his parents in the home of his grandmother, Sarah Goldich. 

Ten years later Mitchell WerBell's father claimed to be a physician, now with two live-in servants, though he had told census workers he had not been to school. His death, according to the American Jewish Year Book, occurred in Philadelphia on December 1, 1933, and it listed him as a 47-year-old "physician, cancer research worker, Russian Army veteran, cited for valor." 

It is not clear why he would have fought for the Russian Army since he had claimed to have been born in New York to French and Rumanian parents.

Less than three miles away from the Goldich residence, where this so-called lab was based, another mysterious family named Cummings lived in their row house at 2917 N. Hancock. The father aged 60 in 1910, had arrived in the United States from Ireland following the U.S. civil war and had raised three sons--Sam Jr., Thomas and Robert--with help from his second wife, Martha.

Mitchell's mother, Rebecca Goldich WerBell was born to a Jewish family of immigrants from Russia--Louis and Sarah Goldich--who operated a grocery store near the Delaware River waterfront in Philadelphia, the city where Mitchell would be born 19 years later. Louis died in 1907, survived by a large family of merchants. 

Rebecca (Reba or Beckie) married Philadelphian John Michael WerBell in 1916. By 1940 Max Goldich, Reba's brother was the superintendent of the Biarritz Apartments (owned by Herbert V. Apartments Corporation) in Atlantic City, New Jersey, one block from today's Tropicana Casino. Max's name was listed for about 12 years as a member of the Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia, and he moved from that city (4618 N. 13th St.) before 1930 and turned up selling real estate for attorney Joseph Varbalow, whose Russian family had lived close to the Goldiches in Philadelphia. 

An honors graduate in law from the the University of Pennsylvania's class of 1917, Varbalow moved to Camden, N.J. and practiced at 227 Federal Street, almost directly across the river from where WerBell grew up--less than four miles away via the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. 

Camden is 60 miles west of the Atlantic seashore, where the Herbert V. Realty Company was primarily operated by Joseph's eldest brother Harry and his son Herbert, Mitch WerBell's maternal uncle and cousin. By 1926 Joseph was a prosecutor, and by 1934 a judge for Camden's city district court. 

China Burma India vets welcomed home. 




As for Mitch WerBell himself, according to immigration records, by 1936 he was a junior officer aboard the Standard Fruit Company ship Gatun, operating to the ports of New Orleans and New York. In an oral interview, he revealed that he joined the OSS in 1942. By 1945 we find his name listed as a second lieutenant on the Army transport ship, General A.W. Greely, which ferried Chennault's veterans of the China-Burma-India campaigns from Calcutta to New York. In 1951, a listing appeared in the city directory of Atlanta for an advertising agency called WerBell and Magruder, the latter being Peyton M. Magruder, an aeronautical engineer, who designed the Glenn L. Martin Company's B-26 Marauder.

His wife, Hildegard, also was born in Pennsylvania, in Berks County, where her father, Hugo Hemmerich, German-born general manager of a company that manufactured hosiery in Reading and Wyomissing. Throughout the mid-thirties the mill dealt with union disputes and threats of strikes. Hildegard WerBell's brother, Rolf Hemmerich, was a chemical engineer at Shell Oil Co. and retired from there in Houston around 1990. 

~~~~~~~~~~
*SAG was a branch of the Central Intelligence Agency's Domestic Contacts section, i.e. OS/SAG. Solie in 1978 succinctly described the OS function in a deposition:

His description is so succinct that it is of no help whatsoever in drawing a distinction between it and the other two security agencies in the Agency. It appears to mean that OS reviewed all relevant material in government archives to determine whether certain information should be "classified" to protect the identity of agents and assets or could be declassified, though Solie claimed to have counterintelligence duties also. His boss was the Director of Security, Howard J. Osborn.

SAG, however, was not part of the Counter Intelligence Division, which had its own Research and Analysis branch within the Domestic Contacts section, i.e. DC/CI/RA,  which was headed by Ray Rocca. The CI office assigned 201 file numbers to the subjects of their research; for example, when CI opened its "personality file" on Lee Henry [sic] Oswald on 9 December 1960 (more than a year after his defection to the USSR), his number became 201-289248, and the first document in that file was addressed to Headquarters, RI (short for Record Identification) to determine whether the subject could be identified in any government agency; all such files were collected, and each document in the 201 file also had an RIF number.

In Bill Simpich's excellent essay entitled, "State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald," he talks about yet another security division under the Domestic Contacts section -- Personnel Security Division (PSD) which dealt with outside activities of agents, each of which had to be cleared by a different section headed by W. A. Osborne. Thus, there were at least three distinct groups within the Agency creating different types of security files on persons of interest. A very fine line ran between them, which was not always well delineated, even to those who worked within each division, and the line is made even more difficult to discern because the information remains classified, e.g. see this 1965 annual report. Simpich has published a series of articles about security matters (republished in QJ here) and at OpEdNews, which offer great insight into the subject of security matters within the CIA.

WerBell's security files were set up by OS/SAG, we will explore what meaning that fact has by looking at its own personnel.

What can we learn about Solie and his interest concerning WerBell and Resorts International? All that is publicly available comes from information learned about his wife:

Mary Elizabeth Matthews Solie
Birth:     Mar. 21, 1918, Peru, Nemaha County, Nebraska, USA
Death:     Mar. 7, 2009

Parents: Homer L. Matthews, Jr. and Clara Hosterman Matthews.
She graduated from Peru State Teachers College in 1939 with a Bachelors Degree in Education. She then taught school in Taylor, NE. She also attended Iowa State Univ. for one year. She was married Feb. 22, 1944 in Marion, AR to Lt. Bruce L. Solie. They lived in Memphis, TN and Homestead, FL. Her husband was then sent overseas. When he got back to the states they moved to Badger Village, WI, where he went to school. In 1951 they relocated to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. (where he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency) until he retired in 1979. Preceded in death by her husband, Bruce Leonard Solie (1917-1992), parents, and infant sister. Mary is survived by son John Solie and daughter in law Susan Solie Wachtler and son in law Frederick, daughter Nancy Solie and son in law Paul Logue; 5 grandchildren, and 3 great grandsons; a sister Louise Shires. Mary was almost 91 when she passed away.

Sensing the End of the Gold Standard

Connecting these seemingly disparate events is another Texan -- President Eisenhower's favorite--Secretary of Treasury Robert Bernard Anderson--who had long been John Connally's business and financial mentor. Anderson taught Connally that oil and money, unlike oil and water, do in fact mix quite well.

Even before meeting Eisenhower, however, Anderson had been selected by President Truman during the closing days of WWII to deal with a national security matter--how to use gold confiscated from war enemies to shore up U.S. gold reserves underlying the Bretton Woods Agreement. Sterling Seagrave wrote in 2008, describing those earlier events:

Stimson’s special assistants on this topic were his deputies John J. McCloy and Robert [A.] Lovett, and consultant Robert B. Anderson, all clever men with outstanding careers in public service and banking. McCloy later became head of the World Bank, Lovett secretary of Defense, Anderson secretary of the Treasury. Their solution was to set up what is informally called the Black Eagle Trust. The idea was first discussed with America’s allies in secret during July 1944, when forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the postwar world economy. (This was confirmed, in documents we obtained, by a number of high-level sources, including a CIA officer based in Manila, and former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who knew of Santy’s recoveries in 1945. As recently as the 1990s, Cline continued to be involved in attempts to control Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.)

After briefing President Truman and others in Washington, including McCloy, Lovett, and Stimson, Captain [Edward G.] Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila, where they set out for a tour of the vaults Santy already had opened. In them, we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down "row after row of gold bars stacked two meters tall." From what they saw, it was evident that over a period of 50 years (1895-1945) Japan had looted many billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. A far longer period than Germany had to loot Europe. Over five decades, Japan had looted billions of dollars’ worth of gold, platinum, diamonds, and other treasure, from all over East and Southeast Asia. Much of this had reached Japan by sea, or overland from China through Korea. What was seen by Anderson and MacArthur was only some of the gold that had not reached Japan after 1943, when the US submarine blockade of the Home Islands became effective. From this it is obvious that what was looted by Japan on the Asian mainland from 1895-1943 had reached Japan and been tucked away there in what the US Army statement called "undeclared caches of these treasures ... known to exist."

Far from being bankrupted by the war, Japan had been greatly enriched, and -- thanks to Washington’s intervention -- used this treasure to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, while its victims struggled on for decades.

The gold recovered in the Philippines was not put in Fort Knox to benefit American citizens. There has been no audit of Ft. Knox since 1950.

According to Ray Cline and others, between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was discreetly moved by ship to 176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. The gold was trucked to warehouses at the U.S. Navy base in Subic Bay, or the U.S. Air Force base at Clark Field.

Preference went to the U.S. Navy because of the weight of the bullion. Secrecy was vital. If the recovery of a huge mass of stolen gold became known, the market price of gold would plummet, and thousands of people would come forward to claim it, and Washington would be bogged down resolving ownership.

The secrecy surrounding these recoveries was total. Robert Anderson and CIA agent Paul Helliwell traveled all over the planet, setting up these black gold accounts, providing money for political action funds throughout the noncommunist world. In 1953, to reward him, President Eisenhower nominated Anderson to a Cabinet post as secretary of the Navy. The following year he rose to deputy secretary of Defense. During the second Eisenhower Administration, he became secretary of the Treasury, serving from 1957 to 1961. After that, Anderson resumed private life, but remained intimately involved with the CIA’s worldwide network of "black banks," set up by Paul Helliwell. Eventually, this led to Anderson being involved in the scandal of BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a Pakistani bank with CIA ties.

Robert B. Anderson and Greenwich

Anderson had resigned from Ike's defense department in 1955 to take a job with Thayer Lindsley of the  Canadian gold mining company called Ventures, Limited. Based in New York, Anderson commuted from his new home at No. 1, Deer Park Court in Greenwich, Connecticut--about a mile and a half from Prescott Bush's residence--as marked on our Greenwich map made for another post at this blog.

Greenwich, CT--Rockefeller family, owners of Citibank stock, controllers of NY Fed                          

During this interim period between government work, Anderson maintained his Texas oil background, accepting a distinguished-service award in the fall of 1956 from Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, where the speakers at the meeting talked about the big challenge ahead in the oil industry of finding enough domestic oil to meet the country's demand.

Less than a year after that award, President Eisenhower summoned Anderson  back to Washington (June 1957) to replace George Humphrey as Secretary of Treasury, an appointment Senator Prescott Bush applauded. After Anderson left the Treasury Department, however, rather than going back to Texas, or running for President, as Ike had had wanted him to do, he instead returned to his adopted home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Many years later, when his wife, Ollie Mae, died in May 1987, her address was given as 682 Lake Avenue, still in Greenwich.

In 1962 Anderson was serving on the board of the State National Bank of Connecticut, as a director alongside G.H. (Herbie) Walker, Jr. and Samuel Pryor. He was also on the 12-man Board of Dresser Industries, alongside Texas governor Allan Shivers, Norman Chandler of the L.A. Times, Lewis MacNaughton (partner of geologist Everett DeGolyer), and Neil Mallon. In 1964, however, Anderson supported his old friend Lyndon Johnson for re-election instead of Bush's favored Goldwater.

Herbie Walker, an uncle of George H. W. "Poppy" Bush, was the man who raised money from investors for his nephew's first oil company in the West Texas oil field in the early 1950's. Uncle Herbie, Dorothy Walker Bush's brother, had risen to the head of the Walker family following the death of Bert Walker in 1953. [Search this blog for "George Herbert Walker" for other articles.]

G. H. Walker was the first president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in New York appointed by the young Harriman boys when it opened in 1920, long before the investment bank merged with Brown Brothers in 1931.Had the elder Walker chosen his grandson, "Poppy" Bush, to be David K.E. Bruce's protégé? Aviation Corporation (AVCO), where Bruce had been president, was also a creation of W. Averell Harriman. When Bruce then left AVCO in 1929 and returned to the foreign service, it was at the behest of Prescott Bush's partner at Brown Brothers Harriman--W. Averell Harriman. As I have stated before:

It is Prescott’s entry into partnership in the newly created investment bank of Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), which best explains how his sons and grandsons attained their access to capital. BBH began doing business in 1931, as a result of a merger between the old, well-established Brown Brothers & Co. and W.A. Harriman & Co., a deal put together by Prescott Bush's father-in-law on behalf of the sons of railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman, who had been Prescott's Skull and Bones brothers while they were all at Yale during the years just prior to WWI.

Renaissance and Aeneas--1993

The same year Renaissance Technologies made an investment in a company that modified an invention made for the medical industry for use petroleum exploration it hired Robert Mercer and others from IBM who had long been studying speech recognition and machine translation, "computational linguistics." RenTec partnered with Aeneas Venture Corp., which five years earlier had poured money into Harken Energy, in the purchase in 1993 of Numar, a Pennsylvania corporation which developed medical technology for use in the oil industry (see inset right).

Four years later, Numar would be acquired by Halliburton, whose chief executive, Dick Cheney, handled the deal for the Dallas-based corporation , whose other executives--Anne Armstrong and lawyers at John Connally's Vinson & Elkins--had implemented the terms. Connally and Armstrong had been part of the Nixon administration, with Armstrong and Cheney surviving into Gerald Ford's presidency (1974-76), during the same time Bush 41 was Director of the CIA.

Numar received Halliburton stock valued at $472 million in exchange for its own stock, making the purchase price $360 million. According to Bloomberg:

In September 1997, NUMAR Corporation was acquired by Halliburton Company, through the merger of a subsidiary of Halliburton with and into NUMAR. Previously, NUMAR Corporation was engaged in the design, manufacture, and marketing of a patented, proprietary well logging device, used in medical diagnostic imaging devices, to evaluate subsurface rock formations in newly-drilled oil and gas wells.

Three years after the Halliburton deal, Cheney was elected vice president under George W. Bush (43), who had been the primary beneficiary of the Aeneas Venture Corporation's 1988 Harken transaction.

George W. Bush was a director of Harken with Alan Quasha, Mikel Faulkner, and Michael Eisenson before 1993.

Though Renaissance Technologies had not been involved in the 1988 Bush transaction, there were certain aspects surrounding an investment Simons' former company, Monemetrics, had made years earlier that rang a reminiscent bell. Knowing that Harvard-educated Alan G. Quasha had purchased Harken stock for Quadrant Capital Corp. by using entities in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, held in trust by his mother, Phyllis Grant Quasha, an Australian citizen, I began to wonder whether Ivory Limited, set up in the British Virgin Islands, a limited investor in a 1981 partnership between Simons' Monemetrics Corp. and Doral Industries (headed by Norman Melnick). It appeared that Melnick wanted to buy the Magic Marker trademark, a bankruptcy asset of his former employer, and. According to Bloomberg's cache: "He was an early adopter of outsourcing manufacturing to China."

Alan Quasha is said to have created Quadrant Management in 1988, the same year he went to work for Compagnie Financière Richemont SA., but he admitted in an interview that he began doing "restructurings" as early as 1979. Was Doral Industries, Simons' partnership with Norman Melnick, one of those restructurings which brought in capital from his father's law firm?

Did Melnick and Simons obtain the needed capital, by chance, from a client of Alan Quasha's father, attorney William Quasha, who was still practicing law in Manila in 1981? Could the capital infusion from the secret Ivory Ltd. account in the British Virgin Islands have been arranged by Quasha Ancheta Pena & Nolasco, whose website proclaims the firm was "originally founded in 1946 ... as William H. Quasha and Associates." Had Simons crossed paths while he was at Harvard with Alan Quasha? Those are questions for other researchers to answer.

The Quasha Family

Nevertheless, those questions only led us to seek answers to other inquiries, concerning how Renaissance Technologies may have discovered the opportunity to join with Aeneas in 1993. Our first step was to learn more about the Quasha family. The two sons, Alan Grant Quasha and Wayne Quasha, attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where Wayne was on the baseball team and was editor of the Hill News student paper in the mid 1960s. Alan played tennis at the Hill School in 1968, and at Harvard he would be on the squash team in 1972. He spent most of the 1970s at Harvard, obtaining an MBA from Harvard Business School while graduating later from Harvard Law School.

In 1976 Alan was working as an associate with the New York law firm of Davis, Polk & Wardwell when he joined New York's Union Club. He did not move back to his father's law firm--then known as Quasha, Asperilla, Zafra, Tavag & Ancheta--with offices in Manila and Bangkok, Thailand. Instead, in 1977 he married Diana Vinade Ronan, a debutante daughter of a powerful businessman with close connections to the Rockefeller family.

Dr. William J. Ronan was chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and a "senior adviser to the Rockefeller family." He was former dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration at New York University, having been affiliated with that school since as early as 1939, the year he married Ellen Vinade. He had also been chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for a time.

Alan Quasha completed an advanced degree in taxation in 1980 at the NYU Law School, where his father-in-law was dean. He was then primed to start his career, while getting one more advanced law degree from Harvard. That was the year Ted Koppel reminded us every night how many days Americans seized by students in Teheran had been held as hostages by Ayatollah Khomeini, while President Jimmy Carter holed up in the White House, refusing to campaign while the hostages were not free. Republicans were hopeful about reclaiming the presidency, and seven of them actively campaigned. After George H. W. Bush's withdrawal in late May, Ronald Reagan named him as his running mate. But still Carter, competing in Democratic primaries against Ted Kennedy and Jerry Brown, did not campaign.

Gasoline prices skyrocketed, and there were long lines at the pumps. Anger was rife, and conspiracies were suspected, especially after the attempted April rescue mission (Operation Eagle Claw) failed.  Wayne Madsen in 2015, analyzing declassified documents, stated the failure of the mission occurred because two Republican candidates were operating two separate spy operations, using "moles within the National Security Council," and passing stolen classified intelligence to Richard H. Allen, William Casey, Ed Meese, or Judge William Clark. Four days before the mission, Miles Copeland, an old Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt CIA hand, leaked news of the mission in the Washington Times. Madsen called these leaks of highly classified documents and other acts "high-level treason ... not a mere policy difference," against the United States.


Harken


The Harken founders were account executives for the investment banking firm of White Weld & Co., a brokerage firm destined to merge with G. H. Walker & Co. in 1974, thus removing the Walker name from the securities industry. In April 1978 White, Weld Credit Suisse would be snatched up by Merrill, Lynch, and its name would also disappear from history. Harry L. Mulligan and Phil Kendrick, Jr.--whose names when combined spelled Harken--first set up this company in California in 1973 before relocating to Texas. Phil Jr.'s father was an oilman in Abilene, Texas, and Phil Jr. graduated in 1950 from the University of Texas. After he sold his father's oil company a decade later, he moved to New York to work for White, Weld & Co.,

Reprint of Jack Z. Smith Harken story

Mulligan, born in 1930, was a graduate of the Jesuit Xavier High School and Fordham University in New York. Having grown up in Forest Hills, New York, in 1967 he worked in New Haven, Connecticut, while residing in Woodbridge.

Kendrick and Mulligan formed Harken in Pasadena, California in July 1973 while its founders were still working for White, Weld. At that same time they had set up a number of limited partnerships designated K&M Exploration. The partnerships were drafted at 555 South Flower Street in the office of Latham & Watkins, the law firm which represented the Richfield Oil Company in Los Angeles, which had its headquarters in the same building.

White, Weld & Co., which handled securities matters for Richfield, was then in the process of absorbing G.H. Walker & Co., removing the latter's name from its letterhead in November 1974, when the merger with the investment bank founded by Bush 41's grandfather was concluded.

Uncle Herbie

Nevertheless, G. H. Walker, Jr. (Bush's Uncle Herbie) became a director following that merger, while his son, Bush's first cousin, G.H. Walker III (called Bert, like his grandfather), was named senior vice president, director for the new securities firm. That position lasted only until the end of 1975, when Bert left the merged firm to work for Stifel, Nicholaus & Co. Bert Walker Sr. had died in 1956, followed by Herbie Walker in 1977.

At first Kendrick worked from his home in Pasadena, while his partner Harry Mulligan, Jr. worked in New Haven. They moved to Abilene a year later, from which they operated Harken for five years, drilling more than 300 wells, primarily in Texas and Oklahoma. Kendrick spent those years watching Australia, he told David Armstrong, in the hope he could find an opportunity to explore for oil there.

It was a year of upheaval on many fronts--especially political and financial. In 1973 George Bush 41 was at the Republican National Committee, CREEP having completed its mission of reelecting Nixon. Bush held Richard Nixon's nervous hand, finally telling Nixon when it was time to resign, and likely arranged for the pardon by President Gerald Ford in order to ensure that Nixon would keep quiet about the Watergate burglary and the "plumbers." 1974 was the same year Henrik Kruger wrote that the "heroin coup" was complete. And it was also the year most of the large investment banks (partnerships with accountability) began to consolidate their portfolios and go public, thus removing themselves from responsibility for their bad decisions.

Robert Mercer's Black-box, Computer-Driven Algorithms

1986 the Chicago Tribune published a story which indicated that IBM was a decade away from technology that would allow one computer to talk to another. Robert Mercer, manager of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Center in Yorktown Heights, New York's real time speech recognition department, was quoted.

A West Texan by birth, I myself have driven through Abilene dozens of times in my life. It is a dusty Texas city lying at the point of intersection between two lines:

1.  one line between Lubbock and Waco and 
2.  a second between Midland and Fort Worth.

Between that hub and the perimeter, formed by connecting the outer cities that compose the X, lies little but mesquite trees and an occasional tumbleweed. Mikel Faulkner, while attending the sectarian Church of Christ college (Abilene Christian College), had met and become engaged in 1970 to a Midland, Texas, girl named Sandra Potter, daughter of Wayne Potter, as announced in his hometown newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Whether members of the Potter family had ever crossed paths with the Bush family in Midland is not known, although we do know that Faulkner would likely have been working on his MBA at Harvard at about the same time as George W. Bush, who received his degree in 1975, seven years after his Yale undergraduate degree was awarded. 

However, at the time Dubya purchased his Texas Rangers baseball team stock in the fall of 1989, he was not only acting as an energy consultant for Harken, but he was its largest shareholder. The baseball syndicate buyers also included Richard E. Rainwater of Fort Worth and William O. DeWitt Jr. of Cincinnati. Rainwater, named as a partner with Bass Enterprises and Sid Bass in television station KFDA as early as 1976, had handled Bass brothers' stock portfolio while he was at Goldman Sachs, and was still advising the Basses until 1986. The Bass brothers' mother was the late Sid Richardson's sister and only legal heir. 

It was therefore likely that Bush brought in Alan Quasha to buy into Harken in 1981-82. Mikel Dean Faulkner had been a 1971 magna cum laude graduate of Abilene Christian College in Harken-founder Kendrick's hometown, had studied mathematics there before serving in the Navy's nuclear power program which trained officers to operate nuclear submarines. Either Kendrick or someone else recruited him in 1981 to become Harken's president to run the company which was then in the process of being sold to some individuals Kendrick had met while drilling for oil in Australia.

Mikel Faulkner decided to leave his job as accountant for American Quasar Petroleum Co. to work for Harken. American Quasar Petroleum was originally incorporated in Florida and was leasing land from the Miccosukee Tribe for exploration in 1981 with San Antonio, Texas, based Tesoro Petroleum. Tesoro was founded by Robert Van Osdell West, Jr., who had a Ph.D. from the University of Texas when first employed as a petroleum engineer in Midland in 1949 by Tom Slick of San Antonio. West worked for Slick's companies until his death in October 1962, at which time he bought TexStar Corporation, renaming it Tesoro, from which he retired in 1992. He died in 2006.

After creating Tesoro, West had grown rapidly and by November 1973 was negotiating with an "unnamed Arab potentate" to drill on Arab soil. In those eleven years he had already moved his drilling equipment into Alaska, Trinidad and Indonesia. By the next year, he was giving speeches against U.S. government policy under President Gerald Ford.

Under Faulkner's helm a few years later Harken bought a corporation founded by another accountant from Abilene, G. Randy Nicholson, a trustee of Faulkner's alma mater Abilene Christian College since 1981. Nicholson had created E-Z Serve gas stations and convenience stores based upon a technology he invented for gas pumps installed with credit card readers which transmitted information to a computer database, thus avoiding the need for human interaction. Harken soon increased its revenue by 9600%! In 1990 Donald M. Smith exclaimed [in the National Petroleum News (Jan 1990 v82 n1), p42] that Harken's:

financial growth has been nothing short of spectacular--from a few million dollars in annual sales in 1986 to gross revenues expected to be in the $1-billion range this year.

One sign of Harken's growing eminence occurred on August 30 when the company's stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol HEC.... Overall, the company's financial performance has been startling. In 1986, Harken Oil & Gas, Inc. (the name was changed to Harken Energy Corp. on Jan. 1, 1989 to reflect its broader industry profile) had total revenues of only $4.4-million. In 1987, following the acquisition of E-Z Serve in December 1986, the company's revenues jumped an astonishing 9,600% to $421-million....

As described in the company's own financial pronouncements, Harken "acquires, restructures and manages energy assets for itself, other energy companies and financial institutions." As such, the company's growth strategy differs somewhat from many other oil companies in that the principal building blocks of its growth, so far at least, have been through acquisitions and not based on internal expansion.

Also rather unique among the larger Sunbelt-based independents is the fact that Harken's top two officers, Mikel D. Faulkner, president and CEO, and Alan G. Quasha, chairman, have financial and legal rather than operational oil company backgrounds. Faulkner, 40, is a certified public accountant with a master's degree in business administration [Though his undergrad degree was in mathematics and physics]. Quasha, also 40, is a New York attorney and specialist in corporate reorganizations....

Faulkner, a Church of Christ deacon known for both his straightforward honesty and shrewdness, joined Harken from Fort Worth-based American Quasar Petroleum (now Wolverine Exploration Co.) where he was controller. Prior to that he was with the Arthur Anderson & Co. accounting firm in Dallas for several years.

Quasha, a partner in the law firm of Quasha, Wessely & Schneider, New York, is also chairman of Frontier Holding Inc. and played a big role in restructuring Denver-based Frontier Oil and Refining Co. several years back [NPN--Jan. '88, p15].

Faulkner signed on at Harken in 1981 and became chief executive in 1982 following a management shakeup. With the company facing bankruptcy, he laid off 90 of its 100 employees, sold 25% of the company's oil field assets for $5-million and then used that sum to negotiate new terms with creditors. In 1982, Harken had a debt load of $20-million; in 1983, it was debt-free....

In all, Harken has scooped up about a dozen companies since 1983, acquiring both petroleum marketing firms and oil and gas properties and boosting its $20-million 1983 asset base fourteen-fold by midyear 1989....

Another acquisition, that of Spectrum 7 Energy Corp. in 1986, brought George W. Bush Jr., the president's son, on board as a director....

Donald Smith's analysis in 1990 ignored the fact that a total of 30% of Harken Energy stock, valued at $28 million, as Harvard had only recently learned from SEC filings, according to the May 1991 Harvard Crimson, was held by the Harvard endowment. That fact, however, would quickly become a matter of concern because of the apparent conflict of interest that existed because two managers of Harvard-affiliated entity Aeneas also had personal investments in Harken--10,000 shares each held by Michael R. Eisenson and Donald D. Beane. The Crimson repeatedly reported its concern, while Harvard itself denied that the investment was improper.

SEC documents which revealed the conflict of interest were not filed until eight months after George W. Bush (later President Bush 43) sold 66% of his Harken stock for $848,560. That was the source of the money with which he repaid loans created when he bought his share of the Texas Rangers baseball team. He had sold just in the nick of time, only "two months before the corporation announced a $23 million loss," as the Crimson reported in 2002. Harvard had come under a great deal of scrutiny before that 2002 report because of research that Catherine Austin Fitts was doing following the collapse of Enron in 2001, which occurred only one month after the 9/11 debacle. Working with Fitts, I had written up research that appeared in 2002 called "Follow the Yellow Brick Road: From Harvard to Enron" to assist her in determining who had caused her own company, Hamilton Securities Group, to tank in 1996.

Although most of our research turned on Pug Winokur's career, Mike Eisenson was also of interest because he was one of two men who told Fitts in 1990 that 20% of the equity in Hamilton, a company initially founded to give contract advice to Pug Winokur's company, NHP, Inc. (formerly National Housing Partnership), in which Harvard also had a large investment, would be owned by NHP. Fitts, feeling extortion was at play, refused to agree to the kickback scheme and was consequently advised by Eisenson that the verbal contract she had made with Winokur would be abrogated. Fitts, however, believing Hamilton could still offer a valuable service without NHP's consulting contract, proceeded to set up her company without Harvard's participation.

Two years prior to this discussion, Winokur had been at DynCorp, but in 1995 joined the board of Harvard Management Corporation, the board with oversees Harvard's overall endowment. In the late summer of 1995 NHP completed its IPO, repaying loans to venture capital entities affiliated with Harvard, such as Demeter and Capricorn.

My main contribution was in offering an historical perspective concerning what I knew about Harvard's original founding and the investments made by earlier capitalists whose fortunes had been made in "the China trade," or what I felt was a euphemism for the drug trade of the 1840's. That article was posted to the internet by a friend of an acquaintance, and its now-dead links were cited and referred to as a "far more controversial take," by a Harvard Watch group. But the work we did attempting to understand how the money worked did wake people up and gain attention about how incestuous tax-exempt entities really are.

In 1988 members of the syndicate investing in Harken did not include Quasha by name. Aeneas Venture Corp. owned 22% of Harken as early as 1989, the year Malcolm Berko reported that "George Sporos (no relation to 'Sporos' Agnew), a renowned, astute and shrewd money manager," also owned 22% of the stock in Harken. Another large owner was then the Union Bank of Switzerland, whose stock made the aggregate ownership of these four, including Bush, at more than 50%. George Soros, also a shrewd and savvy money manager, was accurately identified in a 1988 article, written by Jack Z. Smith of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, cited in Donald Smith's article, as the real owner. So much for Berko's expertise!

In October 1991, Horn & Hardart was taken over by North American Resources (NAR Group Limited), which included members of the Quasha family and a Swiss financial firm. The name was changed to Hanover Direct, a catalog retailing business with headquarters in Weehawken, New Jersey. The Swiss firm was Richemont Finance S.A. ("Richemont"), a Luxembourg company, owning about 49% of Hanover's common stock. Richemont was a wholly owned subsidiary of Compagnie Financiere Richemont, A.G., a Swiss public company engaged in luxury goods, tobacco and other business on behalf of its owner South African citizen Anton Rupert, who died in 2006. His son Johann Peter Rupert also worked in the same companies. The offshore havens were used to hide their South African ownership because of global embargoes against the apartheid government.

NAR was also affiliated with Intercontinental Mining & Resources Incorporated, to which it had executed a subordinated $10 million promissory note in 1996. Since Hanover owned both NAR and IMR, the note was surrendered to and cancelled by Hanover.

Harken's 1994 shareholders were reported to include the following:

• Renaissance Technologies.
• Aeneas Venture Partners, an entity affiliated with capital managed by a Harvard University endowment fund. According to a 1994 SEC filing Aeneas was holding 25,000 shares of Common Stock subject to stock options transferred to it by Michael R. Eisenson, a Director of Harken, effective March 1, 1991.
• Aeneas Venture Partners also held as trustee or nominee another 468,367 shares of Common Stock owned beneficially by the Harvard Master Trust [the pension plan for Harvard University]. Aeneas has no investment or voting power over these shares.
• Aeneas Venture Partners held another 234,204 shares of Common Stock owned beneficially by the Harvard Yenching Institute. Aeneas has no investment or voting power over these shares.
• Aeneas Venture Partners 321,679 shares of Common Stock owned beneficially by Phemus Corporation, all of which parties are affiliates of Aeneas.

MRI technology (Numar) developed for oil industry.

Another 1994 investor was Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a one-time member of the board of Investcorp and director of the Zakat (Tax) Department at the Saudi Ministry of Finance, and whose chief banker was Khalid bin Mahfouz of BCCI. As stated at the last link by Lucy Komisar:

"BCCI was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a dirty offshore bank that then-president Ronald Reagan’s Central Intelligence Agency used to run guns to Hussein, finance Osama bin Laden, move money in the illegal Iran-Contra operation and carry out other “agency” black ops. The Bushes also benefited privately; one of the bank’s largest Saudi investors helped bail out George W. Bush’s troubled oil investments."

Russ Baker in his book, Family of Secrets, also explored the provenance of the funds that made their way into Harken. George Walker Bush joined the Harken board in September 1986, the same time Harken purchased Spectrum 7 Energy, a William DeWitt, Jr. and Mercer Reynolds company which merged with Bush's Arbusto Energy two years earlier. Bush had founded Arbusto in 1978.

A letter submitted by Alan G. Quasha to editors of The Nation in 2007 appears to agree with Baker's evaluation that he understood very little. Quasha stated in part about various allegations made in Family of Secrets and and article that appeared in The Nation, called “Hillary’s Mystery Money Men”:

"The insinuations against Harken Energy are false. When I was nonexecutive chairman, Harken’s major shareholders were George Soros, Harvard University and a joint venture I headed; none had ties with “BCCI,” “Saudi frontmen,” “a foreign dictator” or “figures with intelligence ties.” 

Baker and Adam Federman, who authored the Hillary article, vigorously rebutted Quasha's attack on their credibility.

~~~~~~~~~~~

"Saudi Arabia: Creation of the Petrodollar" has been in draft form for several years, being added to and edited as time permitted. Please refer to other articles in my  Quixotic Joust blog which are linked above, including the following:

Being the House Player at the Casino.
Who is Robert Mercer Really?
Remembering the Harken Money.