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John Train


Guest Tom Scully

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Guest Tom Scully

John Train's background story, IMO, is strange enough to defy description, which is perhaps, the reason it has not been presented in this kind of detail before:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=dev...1&scoring=a

Miss Alexandra Mills Is Bride of TJ Devine

- New York Times - Apr 15, 1973

William B. Macomber Jr., United States. Ambassador to Turkey, was best man. ... Mr. Devine is with Train, Cabotj Inc.; a private New York investment concern ...

Arthur Cheney Train was an assistant district attorney in New York who later devoted himself to writing novels.

In 1896, Ethel Kissam Train's aunt, Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt willed the annual income from the sum of $150,000 to Ethel.

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=dep...n&scoring=a

WCTU CONVENTION; NEARLY FIVE HUNDRED DELEGATES GATHER IN ST. …

New York Times - Nov 14, 1896

Chauncey M. Depew yesterday filed the will of Maria Louisa Vanderbilt, ... OOO be invested by the executors and the income paid to Ethel Kissam during her ...

Maria was the widow of the richest man in the world, William H. Vanderbilt.

In 1897, Arthur Train married Ethel Kissam, daughter of Benjamin Kissam, the brother of Maria Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?pz=1&...nge=1930%2C1949

ARTHUR TRAIN WEDS ETHEL KISSAM.

Pay-Per-View - Chicago Tribune - ProQuest Archiver - Apr 21, 1897

ARTHUR TRAIN REDS ETHEL KISSAM. of Gil. W. H. Vnnderblilt Becomes ... Mass., and the ushers -were Benjamin Curtis, Clifford Payson, Stephen Hfecksher, ...

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/...9679D94679ED7CF

Harvey -- Prindle.

New York Times - Apr 21, 1897

Train -- Kissam. A fashionable wedding was that of Miss Ethel Ktssam, daughter of the late Benjamin P. Kissam, and niece of the late Mrs. William H. ...

In 1923, Ethel Kissam Train died, leaving five surviving children from her marriage to Arthur C. Train and

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=ent...n&scoring=a

- New York Times - May 30, 1923

...The will of Mrs. Ethel Kissam Train, who died on May 15. filed yesterday in the Surrogates' Court, bequeaths her entire estate to her husband, Arthur Train,

Three years later, Arthur Train married the future mother of his youngest son, John Train, only child of Arthur's marriage to Helen Coster;

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=+ar...&lnav=hist3

AC TRAIN MARRIES MRS. COSTER GERARD; Couple Suddenly Go to …

- New York Times - Jan 7, 1926

Although their wedding had been set for next Spring, Arthur C. Train writer and lawyer, and Mrs. Coster Gerard, divorced wife of Sumner Gerard, ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=A+S...n&scoring=a

A Son Born to Mrs. Arthur Train.

- New York Times - May 26, 1928

A son was born to Mr. and ' Mrs. Arthur Train of 113 East Severitythird ... The child is a descendant of John Train, who came--to this country in 1635, ...

According to the 1930 U.S. Census, the Arthur Train household on 73rd St. in Manhattan was a dwelling valued at $150,000 and included besides 2 years old son, John, the names of a live-in governess and seven other servants. Next door neighbor Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, lived in a dwelling valued at $175,000, managing with only six live-in servants. Whitney later served 40 months in Sing Sing prison for the crimes of stealing millions of dollars of his brokerage clients' money.

John Train's aunt Maude Coster married an Austrian Count on May 26, 1916.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/...9639C946796D6CF

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=art...&lnav=hist3

$1,244,573 WILLED BY ARTHUR C. TRAIN; $5,000 to Widow, Residuary to …

- New York Times - Oct 30, 1947

Arthur C. Train, lawyer, novelist and creator of the fictional Yankee attorney "Mr. Ephraim Tutt," who died on Dec. 22, 1945, left a gross estate of ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=art...&lnav=hist5

MANHATTAN TRANSFERS

- New York Times - May 4, 1946

Arthur G. Train to Helen C. Train. 113 E 73d St, et al (S182.50). Maiden Lane, 41-43; Chase National ... Same property: Harry Casper to Eleanora N. Ffndlay. ...

John Train's mother Helen Coster was the daughter of JP Morgan partner Charles Henry Coster, and the grand-daughter of direct relations to Sen. Claiborne Pell

and to the wife of Warren Commissioner Thomas Hale Boggs:

http://leigh.editme.com/files/GenealogyRep...20Claiborne.pdf

Generation No. 6

7. Ferdinand Leigh6 Claiborne (William5, Nathaniel4, Thomas3, Thomas2, William1), born 9 Mar 1772,

died 22 Mar 1815. He married Mary Magdalene Hutchins. Mary Magdalene Hutchins was born 1777.

U. S. General 1813-1815. Mississippi House of Rep.

Children of Ferdinand Leigh Claiborne and Mary Magdalene Hutchins:

10 i. John Francis Hamtramck Claiborne, born 24 Apr 1807.

11 ii. Ferdinand Leigh Claiborne, born 20 Feb 1809, died 11 Dec 1893.

...Generation No. 7

10. John Francis Hamtramck7 Claiborne (Ferdinand Leigh6, William5, Nathaniel4, Thomas3, Thomas2,

William1), born 24 Apr 1807. He married Martha Dunbar.

Children of John Francis Hamtramck Claiborne and Martha Dunbar:

i. Nathaniel Herbert Claiborne, born 5 Jun 1833.

ii. Willis Claiborne, born Oct 1834, died 1864.

13 iii. Wilbur Herbert Claiborne, born 5 Jun 1833, in Natchez, MS, died 1863.

14 iv. Emily Anne Magdaline Claiborne, born 1834.

11. Ferdinand Leigh7 Claiborne (Ferdinand Leigh6, William5, Nathaniel4, Thomas3, Thomas2, William1),

born 20 Feb 1809, died 11 Dec 1893. He married Virginia Ann Courtney Terrell. Virginia Ann Courtney

Terrell was born 1807.

Children of Ferdinand Leigh Claiborne and Virginia Ann Courtney Terrell:

15 i. Louis Bingaman Claiborne, born 6 Aug 1842, died 29 Nov 1934. -Grandfather of Marie Corrine Morrison Claiborne, wife of Thomas Hale Boggs.

....Generation No. 8

14. Emily Anne Magdaline8 Claiborne (John Francis Hamtramck7, Ferdinand Leigh6, William5,

Nathaniel4, Thomas3, Thomas2, William1), born 1834. She married (1) Clarence Pell. Clarence Pell was

born 2 Dec 1820, died 8 Jun 1865. She married (2) Clarence Pell. Clarence Pell was born 2 Dec 1820,

died 8 Jun 1865.

Children of Emily Anne Magdaline Claiborne and Clarence Pell:

19 i. Herbert Claiborne Pell, born Jun 1855. -Grandfather of U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI)

ii. James Kent Pell.

iii. Ferdinand Leigh Pell.

iv. Clara Pell.

v. Emily Dunbar Pell. -Grandmother of John Train

vi. Charlotte Latrobe Pell.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/...96F9C946197D6CF

September 13, 1900

It will probably be a surprise to almost every one who knew the late Charles H. Coster to finde his estate amounts to $2,804,000 in personal and $3.000.000 in real property, with all indebtedness paid. This makes his widow an exeedingly rich woman. Mrs. Coster was Emily Pell, a daughter of the late Clarence Pell, and elder sister of Miss Charlotte Pell. She is at Tuxedo with her children. ....

15. Louis Bingaman8 Claiborne (Ferdinand Leigh7, Ferdinand Leigh6, William5, Nathaniel4, Thomas3,

Thomas2, William1), born 6 Aug 1842, died 29 Nov 1934. He married Marie Rosalie Porciau. Marie

Rosalie Porciau was born about 1851, died about 1935.

Louisiana House of Reps. 1884-1888.

Children of Louis Bingaman Claiborne and Marie Rosalie Porciau:

20 i. Roland Philemon Claiborne, born 11 Aug 1888, died 19 Oct 1918.

...Generation No. 9

19. Herbert Claiborne9 Pell (Emily Anne Magdaline Claiborne8, John Francis Hamtramck7, Ferdinand

Leigh6, William5, Nathaniel4, Thomas3, Thomas2, William1), born Jun 1855. He married Katherine

Lorrilard Kernochan. Katherine Lorrilard Kernochan was born 1858.

Children of Herbert Claiborne Pell and Katherine Lorrilard Kernochan:

22 i. Herbert Claiborne Pell, born 16 Feb 1884, in Illinois, died 17 Jul 1961.

ii. Clarence Cecil Pell.

20. Roland Philemon9 Claiborne (Louis Bingaman8, Ferdinand Leigh7, Ferdinand Leigh6, William5,

Nathaniel4, Thomas3, Thomas2, William1), born 11 Aug 1888, died 19 Oct 1918. He married Martha

Corinne Morrison. She was the daughter of Edward Seghers Morrison and Eustatia Harris.

On his draft registration card on June 5, 1917, his DOB is given as Aug 11, 1985. This would make him

31 years of age. His age is given as 28. I believe the year of the DOB was listed in error and should have

been1 888. The card also says that he had lost the little finger on his lefth and.

Children of Roland Philemon Claiborne and Martha Corinne Morrison:

23 i. Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne

....Generation No. 10

22. Herbert Claiborne10 Pell (Herbert Claiborne9, Emily Anne Magdaline Claiborne8, John Francis

Hamtramck7, Ferdinand Leigh6, William5, Nathaniel4, Thomas3, Thomas2, William1), born 16 Feb 1884,

in Illinois, died 17 Jul 1961. He married (1) Matilda Bigelow. She was the daughter of Nelson Pendleton

Bigelow and Sophia Dallas Borda. He married (2) OliveTilton Bigelow.

Children of Herbert Claiborne Pell and Matilda Bigelow:

25 i. Claiborne deBorda Pell, born 22 Nov 1918, died 1 Jan 2009.

23. Marie Corinne Morrison10 Claiborne (Roland Philemon9, Louis Bingaman8, Ferdinand Leigh7,

Ferdinand Leigh6, William5, Nathaniel4, Thomas3, Thomas2, William1). She married Thomas Hale Boggs.

Thomas Hale Boggs was born 15 Feb 1914, in Long Beach, MS, died 16 Oct 1972, in Alaska.

Gov. Louisiana, 1952. U. S. House 1941-1943, 1947-1972. Lost in smallpl ane crash in Alaska in 1972.

Neither plane nor body ever recovered.

Children of Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne and Thomas Hale Boggs:

i. Barbara Boggs.

ii. Thomas Hale Boggs.

26 iii. "Cokie" Boggs

John Train's first wife, Maria, and current wife, Francis Cheston, and Train's partner of at least 39 years, Francis H. Cabot:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=joh...1&scoring=a

John PC Train Weds Maria Cini di Pianzano

- New York Times - Jun 29, 1961

... Florence, Italy, and the late Count Ippolito CiniJ di Pianzano, to John P. C.I Train. ... Cabot Assodates and an 'editor and co-founder of The Paris Review.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...25448-2,00.html

The Press: Big Little Magazine

Monday, Aug. 11, 1958

...Review's four American founders spun together accidentally in the Paris literary whirl late in 1952. They were Plimpton (Harvard '48), Novelist Harold Humes (M.I.T. '48), Peter Matthiessen (Yale '50) and John P.C. Train (Harvard '50), son of the late lawyer-writer Arthur Train. Over Pernods at the Chaplain bar in Montparnasse, they agreed that the world badly needed a new little magazine, and scraped together $ 1,000 to start it. Their complaint: "Laden with terms like 'architectonic,' 'Zeitgeist' and 'dichotomous,' the literary magazines seem today on the verge of doing away with literature, not with any philistine bludgeon, but by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter." The Review "put criticism where we thought it belonged: in the back of the book," says Plimpton....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/books/13hume.html

The Burgeoning Rebirth of a Bygone Literary Star

By CELIA McGEE

Published: January 13, 2007

...But also intriguing to many is the documentary’s revelation of a C.I.A. connection to the history of The Paris Review. In the film, Mr. Matthiessen, best known as a novelist, environmental activist and advocate of American Indian rights, admits publicly for the first time that he was a young C.I.A. recruit at the time he helped start the magazine, and used it as his cover.

“Immy cajoled me into talking about it,” Mr. Matthiessen said.

Mr. Humes, who tussled with Mr. Matthiessen and Mr. Plimpton about this secret after Mr. Matthiessen confided in him in the mid-’60s, died in 1992 in St. Rose’s Home, the New York City cancer hospice founded by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter. Ms. Humes found correspondence between the three co-founders about Mr. Matthiessen’s clandestine affiliation in a suitcase of papers sent to Mr. Humes’s wife and four daughters in New York after he had to be institutionalized in Britain for several months after a psychotic break.....

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=fra...n&scoring=a

Whitney Tower, 75, Writer And Leader in Horse Racing

New York Times - Feb 12, 1999

Whitney Tower, the longtime racing writer and former president of the National ... Alfred; and, from his first marriage, to Frances Cheston, by two sons, ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=fra...n&scoring=a

Michelle Obama is invited to visit the grave of slave kin in South...

New York Daily News - Oct 14, 2008

Ms. Obama is welcome to visit anytime." Tower's mother, Frances Cheston Train, herself a descendant of the Drexel family, inherited the 3000-acre farm, ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=fra...n&scoring=a

MISS EB ALDRICH LISTS ATTENDANTS; Mary Millard to Be Honor Maid …

- New York Times - Dec 5, 1946

The bridesmaids will be the Misses Sylvia Whitehouse, cousin of the bride; Martha Firestone, Frances Cheston and Moira Redmond, sister of the prospective ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=fra...n&scoring=a

INQUIRY ON POLICE WEIGHED BY STATE; Citizens' Unit Plea Studied -- …

- New York Times - Nov 16, 1960

The office Is occupied by John Train and Francis H. Cabot, financiers. They said they were not members of the committee but had donated the space out of ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=fra...1&scoring=a

The Cabots of Boston; Family's Fortune Derived From Soot The Cabots

- New York Times - Mar 12, 1972

Total Cabot family holdings of the company were worth about $140-million when the stock ... For example, Francis H. Cabot, a New York member of the clan who

...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?um=1&...john&cf=all

WEDDINGS; Nina Train, Christopher Choa

nytimes.com - Jan 24, 1993

Nina Train, a daughter of Maria Teresa Train and John Train, both of New York, ... The bride is a stepdaughter of Frances Cheston Train of New York. .

On July 9, 2004, John Train's son-in-law, Paul,Klebnikov, a reporter for Forbes Magazine, was shot and killed in Moscow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Klebnikov

Post Script:

An "aside" to John Train. Mr. Train, if you're getting any ideas...I've already been warned.

Edited by Tom Scully
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Guest Tom Scully

"Barb's" thjread has 7700 views now. Has anybody learned anything new from reading any of the posts on that thread? Pardon me for venting, but there are still leads

to uncover and pursue, but balance, patience and openmindedness are required.

Ahem! Something for everybody....here. "The father", John Train's and Francis H. Cabot's partner:

(Wasn't it a conflict of interests for John McCloy to "serve" as a Warren Commissioner while representing the Rockefeller family who controlled 50 percent of Bell's parent company, since Bell employed WC target of interest, Michael Paine, and his step-father, Arthur Young?)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,745706,00.html

Business & Finance: Investment Trusts

Monday, Jun. 12, 1933

...Late last year he formed Equity Corp. to take over Yosemite, the tail that wagged his mongrel dog. By this time Wall Street was aware that Wallace Groves was about 40 and a onetime lawyer. Last week when he sold control of Equity Corp. it learned that he had no plans for the future. Wall Street guessed that that might be all it was ever to know of Wallace Groves.

It was different with Equity Corp,. for that had been bought by David Meriwether Milton, a young lawyer who married Abby, daughter of John Davison Rockefeller Jr., shortly after he defended her on a speeding charge. He works for the comfortable old firm of Satterlee & Canfield but like his father-in-law his outside interests are real estate and finance. About the time that the father-in-law was launching Rockefeller Center, David Milton launched a swank East River apartment house for which Mr. Rockefeller loaned him $1,000,000. And about the time Mr. Rockefeller woke up to the fact that he was the biggest stockholder of Chase National Bank, David Milton bought an investment trust. It was a nice little trust with $400,000 in assets. Last January he picked up another. By acquiring Equity last week he became president of a $7,500,000 concern with the simplifying of Wallace Grove's ornate structure as his chief job. ....

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/01/obituari...in-bahamas.html

February 1, 1988

Wallace Groves Is Dead at 86; Developer of Resort in Bahamas

By CRAIG WOLFF

Wallace Groves, whose Wall Street career ended in the 1930's when he was convicted for mail fraud and who then went on to develop the city of Freeport in the Bahamas into a major resort and gambling area, died Saturday at Doctors Hospital in Miami, six days after suffering a stroke. He was 86 years old.

Mr. Groves essentially had two business lives. First, as a young, flashy, and successful investor, he was involved in several businesses and had controlling interests in several others, including the United Cigar Store and the Whelan Drug Store chain. Spent 2 Years in Prison

But he was indicted in 1938 and convicted in 1941 of using the mails to defraud stockholders in the General Investment Corporation, which he controlled. He had been accused of using the mails in a scheme to sell securities to General Investment at an inflated price. Mr. Groves spent two years in Federal prison.

Late in the 1940's, Mr. Groves became interested in Grand Bahama Island, the long, narrow strip at the northwest edge of the island group. He bought 114,000 acres at $2.80 an acre.

In 1955, he was able to negotiate an unusual agreement with the Bahamian Government. He received a wide range of tax concessions as the president of the Grand Bahama Port Authority Ltd. in return for attracting and developing industrial and commercial enterprises. He was also responsible for developing utilities, schools, roads, and hospitals.

Through the authority, of which he was the majority stockholder, he owned the airport, the Freeport Bunkering Company, a huge ship-fueling outfit, and the Bahamas Amusement Ltd., which at one time held the exclusive gambling license for Freeport.

Lived in Grand Style

Mr. Groves's casino holdings were often criticized for attracting a criminal element to the island, and he was sometimes criticized for operating in a monarchial style. He lived in Freeport in a large home, distinctive for its blue-green tiled roof, and spent much time on his private island, Little Whale Clay, south of Grand Bahama. He sold the island in 1985. Residents and employees often complained that the authority which had broad power to expel, ran the island in police-state fashion.

Still, Mr. Groves was also hailed as the developer of the sprawling vacation haven about 80 miles of Florida. He sold interest in the authority in 1968 for $80 million and in 1978 he sold his interest in the Intercontinental Diversified Corporation for $38 million.

Mr. Groves is survived by three sons, Gordon and Graham, both of Coral Gables, Fla., and Gary of Houston; two daughters,....

(Former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman's daddy:)

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.htm...788D85F4C8485F9

BELL AIRCRAFT ELECTS 2; Milton and Todd Represent Equity Corp. on Board

March 18, 1948, Thursday

Section: SPORTS BUSINESS--FINANCIAL, Page 41, 174 words

BUFFALO, N. Y., March 17 (AP) -- The Bell Aircraft Corporation announced today election of two directors representing the Equity Corporation group of investment companies that recently acquired 34.5 per cent of its stock. They are David M. Milton, president of Equity and its subsidiaries, the First York Corporation and the American General Corporation, and Webster B. Todd, chairman of Equity's executive committee.

http://www.meriwethercapital.net/about.htm

GEORGE D. O'NEILL

Mr. O'Neill is the founder of Meriwether and has been active in the firm since its inception in 1976. Prior to the formation of Meriwether, Mr. O'Neill held various positions with several financial institutions including Train, Cabot & Associates, Equity Corporation and Chase Manhattan Bank. Mr. O'Neill has served as a director of many companies including Rockefeller Group, Inc., Bell Aircraft and Wheelabrator. He was formerly a Commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Mr. O'Neill is a graduate of Harvard University.

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=geo...471092846919985

Tropic Trees .

St. Petersburg Times - Google News Archive - Nov 25, 1972

....George O'neill partner in Train Cabot Inc.

The senior Rockefeller son-in-law, David M. Milton, was chairman of the holding corp., and his son-in-law, George D. O'Neill Sr., was promoted to V.P. of the holding corp. in 1959, announced in the same article as the promotion of Gen. Walter Dornberger:

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.htm...789D85F4D8485F9

MiSS ABBY.MILTON TO BE WED IN JUNE; Me,:llber of Rockefeller Family Engaged to George D. O'Neill, a Senior at Harvard

February 6, 1949, Sunday

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=dav...1&scoring=a

Son to Mrs. George D. O'Neill

- New York Times - Apr 29, 1955

Mrs. O'Neill is the former Miss Abby Milton, daughter of Mrs. Jean Mauze of 1 Beekman Place, New York, and David M. Milton, and a granddaughter of John D.

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22...1&scoring=a

Bell Aircraft Promotes Aide

- New York Times - Jun 16, 1959

Dr. Walter R. Dornberger, rocket and space specialist, was elected a vice president of the Bell Aircraft Corporation today. Bell stockholders also elected Franklin Field, vice president of Placco Puerto Rico, Inc., and George D. O'Neill vice presi-[ dent of the Equity Corporation,] which controls Bell. All are] from New York City. Mr. Dornberger, who has been of engineering for Bell's ....

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=Bel...1&scoring=a

BELL AIRCRAFT CORP.; Meetings of Stockholders Held To Permit Voting …

- New York Times - Jun 11, 1960

Bell Intercontinental Corporation comes into being on July 2. The $22.000,000 represents the book value of the assets being sold - Bell's Niagara Frontier ...

Price of Bell Defense Business Raised 2.5 Million for Textron

- New York Times - Oct 18, 1960

Textron, Inc., will pay the Bell Intercontinental Corporation $2500000 more for ... Bell Intercontinental Corporation, formerly Bell Aircraft Cornoration, ...

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.htm...789D85F428685F9

NEW CHIEF NAMED FOR EQUITY CORP.; Jakob Isbrandtsen Elected to 3 Top Posts at Concern

By DOUGLAS W. CRAY

February 2, 1966, Wednesday

Section: Business & Finance, Page 43, 523 words

The Equity Corporation, a closed-end, non-diversified investment company whose affairs have been under a wide-ranging investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, dropped its chairman last night and set out on a new course under new command....

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=equ...&lnav=hist3

Former Chief of Equity Corp. Accused by SEC; David M. Milton Blamed

- New York Times - Feb 22, 1966

Equity owns 50 per cent of the Bell Intercontinental Corpo- ration, 14.5 per cent of the Financial General Corporation, 11.8 per cent of the Sterling ...

… Plans Talks With Equity; ISBRANDTSEN SETS TALK WITH EQUITY

- New York Times - Jun 15, 1966

Among Equity Corporation's i portfolio holdings are interests in Bell Intercontinental ation, the Singer Company, Sterling Precision Corporation.

"The son"...victim of his upbringing?

http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showCon...331&id2=633

http://web.archive.org/web/19980530034821/.../cnp/index.html

(Excerpted) 1998 CNP membership by name

Tom Ellis

Raleigh, North Carolina

Maupin, Taylor, Ellis & Adams, P.C.

Nelson Bunker Hunt

Dallas, Texas

Hunt Exploration Mining Company, Inc.

George D. O'Neill Jr.

Lake Wales, Florida

Elsa Prince (Mother of Balckwater's Erik Prince...)

Holland, Michigan

EDP Management

John K. Singlaub

Arlington, Virginia

The Representative

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=tom...517796321296427

Reagan Nominee Pulls Out, Blames Racial Allegations .

Spokesman-Review - Google News Archive - Jul 28, 1983

Ellis, a Raleigh, attorney, told Reagan in a letter that racial allegations ... at the hearing about his past membership on the board of the Pioneer Fund, ...

All 17 related -

http://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories.../weekinbiz.html

Friday, May 7, 1999

The Week in Business

Rockefeller trust funds surface in Central Florida

ORLANDO -- Pleadings and hearings on what may turn out to be one of the largest divorce settlements in history are taking place almost weekly in the 17th floor chambers of Orange Circuit Judge Charles N. Prather.

Amy W. O'Neill, the 32-year-old wife of George D. O'Neill Jr., is suing the 49-year-old great-great grandson of John D. Rockefeller Jr. for divorce and custody of their five pre-teen children.

At issue is the value of four trust funds set up by various members of the Rockefeller family from which O'Neill receives undetermined annual income but no principal.

The wife wants to know the value of the funds to ask for lifetime adequate alimony and family support. The husband maintains that the value of the funds never has been publicly disclosed since they were first created in 1934 and should not be open to the public now.

The couple was married in New York City in 1988. Amy O'Neill filed for divorce in 1997. She alleges the husband repeatedly abused her verbally in front of friends and family.

The O'Neills and their children had lived at the 75-year-old Rockefeller retreat at Mountain Lake, near Lakes Wales in Polk County, until the divorce action. Mrs. O'Neill and the five children currently live in Delray Beach in Palm Beach County, a three-hour drive from Mountain Lake. The divorce petition was filed in Orange County rather than Polk or Palm Beach counties to avoid media attention.

The husband is listed in pleadings as an employee of the Cape Well Components Ltd. firm in Cromwell, Conn. The wife is unemployed. (Case No. DR 97-8911-30)

http://www.sptimes.com/News/050500/Worldan...d_breakup.shtml

By KRIS HUNDLEY

published May 5, 2000

... On one side is O'Neill, the 49-year-old great-great grandson of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Standard Oil in the 1870s and created such mind-boggling wealth that heirs are still feeding off proceeds five generations later. One of the four trusts of which George is a beneficiary was set up by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1934 and was valued two years ago at $354-million; George's stake in the family fortune has been estimated to be at $200-million.

On the other side of the divorce is the 32-year-old daughter of Faith Whittlesey, President Ronald Reagan's two-time ambassador to Switzerland and former assistant to the president.

The couple, who were married in 1989, have five children...

This guy lived 97 years and died 11 years ago...anybody ever heard of him? His history overlaps Henry Crown's and William B. Macomber's WWII duty, Torbitt's references

to DISC and Division 5, and the secretive Rockefeller controlled holding Corp.."the Equity Corporation" that owned 50 percent of Bell, and holdings in Sterling Precision and Singer, reminiscent of Robert Sterling Clark's fortune source. Clark was the financier of the 1934 "Business Coup", courting USMC Gen. Smedley Butler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Olmsted

Major General George H. Olmsted (March 18, 1901, Des Moines, Iowa - October 8, 1998)[1] was an American military officer and insurance executive.

...World War II

Recalled to active service in the Army in January 1942, then Major Olmsted commanded the Requirements and Assignments Branch, International Division, Army Service Forces which handled Lend Lease requests from allied governments for Army material and equipment. In this position he had to balance the complex, simultaneous equations of American industrial production schedules and capacity, American military requirements, urgent requests for help from allied governments and the demands

of the current strategic situation. Frantic appeals were coming to the United States from Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and Free French Forces in North Africa. All of these appeals had to be dealt with as rapidly or as diplomatically as possible. In addition, Major Olmsted established programs to ensure delivery of assistance to the correct place at the promised time as well as programs to train the recipients in the use and maintenance of the equipment.

In 1944, then Colonel Olmsted's wife Virginia died. Shortly thereafter he was sent to China to serve on the staff of General Albert Wedemeyer and to establish a new general staff section known as G-5 for the China-Burma-India Theater. Colonel Olmsted was promoted to Brigadier General and took command of the G-5 section which was responsible for civil (Economic and Political) affairs, lend lease operations, training of allied military forces, and clandestine operations.

As World War II came to a close in the Pacific, a new situation faced the allies in China. Thousands of allied prisoners of war (including General Jonathan Wainwright, the hero of Bataan) were being held in eleven Japanese POW camps in China. Working with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), US Navy Intelligence, and allied intelligence services, the locations of all eleven camps were pinpointed and General Olmsted was ordered to plan and direct an operation to notify the Japanese as soon as a surrender had been announced and to ensure that they cooperated in the safe repatriation of the prisoners. His plan called for leaflets to be dropped by aircraft on each camp immediately after the surrender. Shortly after that, a team of seven unarmed men were to parachute into each camp carrying with them letters signed by General Wedemeyer addressed to the Japanese camp commander by name. The letters stated that the war was over, that the allied powers would hold the camp commander personally responsible for the safety of the prisoners and that he should fully cooperate in an immediate repatriation. No one was quite sure how the Japanese would react to this. However, the operation was carried out as planned, there were no hostilities, no one was injured, and the Japanese agreed to cooperate fully.

The last great problem to face General Olmsted in China was what to do with the surplus equipment that had to be left behind in the Theater as American forces departed to come home. Not wishing to see all that stuff abandoned in place, General Olmsted managed to work out a bulk sale to the Chinese government. When he heard about it, President Truman was reported to have said, "this was the best liquidation of surplus US equipment anywhere in the world".

For his services during World War II, General Olmsted received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star Medal. From the French government he received the Legion of Honor, the British government made him an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and the government of China honored him with the Order of the Sacred Tripod and the Special Order of Pao Ting.

Post War

General Olmsted returned to Des Moines in 1946. The management team that he had built in his companies before leaving for military service had performed well during the war years and his return became a matter of picking up where he had left off. After an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination for governor of Iowa in 1947, he continued to expand his business activities and became a partner in the Equity Corporation in New York. In 1948 he met Carol Shearing of Marrila, New York and they were married in 1949. Recalled to active duty with the Army in 1950, General Olmsted assumed command of the Army's military assistance operations. Once again, it was a case of finding the equipment and resources that Allied Governments requested and getting it to them. So successful were his activities that he was promoted to Major General in 1951 and assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense to assume command of all US government military assistance be it Army, Navy, or Air Force. Released from active service in 1953, Olmsted returned to Des Moines to resume his business career. He continued, however, to serve in the Army Reserve and was the Commanding General of the 103rd Infantry Division USAR from 1953 to 1959.

Shortly after his separation from active duty in 1953, General Olmsted bought control of United Services Life Insurance Company which wrote life insurance for officers of the military services. In 1955, he purchased control of International Bank of Washington and in 1959, he purchased Financial General Corporation, the 7th largest bank holding company in the country from his partners at the Equity Corporation. The final form for Olmsted's business ventures had come into being. All of the companies were grouped under International Bank or Financial General Corporation both of which were headquartered in Washington, D.C....

Edited by Tom Scully
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This guy lived 97 years and died 11 years ago...anybody ever heard of him? His history overlaps Henry Crown's and William B. Macomber's WWII duty, Torbitt's references

to DISC and Division 5, and the secretive Rockefeller controlled holding Corp.."the Equity Corporation" that owned 50 percent of Bell, and holdings in Sterling Precision and Singer, reminiscent of Robert Sterling Clark's fortune source. Clark was the financier of the 1934 "Business Coup", courting USMC Gen. Smedley Butler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Olmsted

Major General George H. Olmsted (March 18, 1901, Des Moines, Iowa - October 8, 1998)[1] was an American military officer and insurance executive.

...World War II

Recalled to active service in the Army in January 1942, then Major Olmsted commanded the Requirements and Assignments Branch, International Division, Army Service Forces which handled Lend Lease requests from allied governments for Army material and equipment. In this position he had to balance the complex, simultaneous equations of American industrial production schedules and capacity, American military requirements, urgent requests for help from allied governments and the demands

of the current strategic situation. Frantic appeals were coming to the United States from Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and Free French Forces in North Africa. All of these appeals had to be dealt with as rapidly or as diplomatically as possible. In addition, Major Olmsted established programs to ensure delivery of assistance to the correct place at the promised time as well as programs to train the recipients in the use and maintenance of the equipment.

In 1944, then Colonel Olmsted's wife Virginia died. Shortly thereafter he was sent to China to serve on the staff of General Albert Wedemeyer and to establish a new general staff section known as G-5 for the China-Burma-India Theater. Colonel Olmsted was promoted to Brigadier General and took command of the G-5 section which was responsible for civil (Economic and Political) affairs, lend lease operations, training of allied military forces, and clandestine operations.

As World War II came to a close in the Pacific, a new situation faced the allies in China. Thousands of allied prisoners of war (including General Jonathan Wainwright, the hero of Bataan) were being held in eleven Japanese POW camps in China. Working with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), US Navy Intelligence, and allied intelligence services, the locations of all eleven camps were pinpointed and General Olmsted was ordered to plan and direct an operation to notify the Japanese as soon as a surrender had been announced and to ensure that they cooperated in the safe repatriation of the prisoners. His plan called for leaflets to be dropped by aircraft on each camp immediately after the surrender. Shortly after that, a team of seven unarmed men were to parachute into each camp carrying with them letters signed by General Wedemeyer addressed to the Japanese camp commander by name. The letters stated that the war was over, that the allied powers would hold the camp commander personally responsible for the safety of the prisoners and that he should fully cooperate in an immediate repatriation. No one was quite sure how the Japanese would react to this. However, the operation was carried out as planned, there were no hostilities, no one was injured, and the Japanese agreed to cooperate fully.

The last great problem to face General Olmsted in China was what to do with the surplus equipment that had to be left behind in the Theater as American forces departed to come home. Not wishing to see all that stuff abandoned in place, General Olmsted managed to work out a bulk sale to the Chinese government. When he heard about it, President Truman was reported to have said, "this was the best liquidation of surplus US equipment anywhere in the world".

For his services during World War II, General Olmsted received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star Medal. From the French government he received the Legion of Honor, the British government made him an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and the government of China honored him with the Order of the Sacred Tripod and the Special Order of Pao Ting.

Post War

General Olmsted returned to Des Moines in 1946. The management team that he had built in his companies before leaving for military service had performed well during the war years and his return became a matter of picking up where he had left off. After an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination for governor of Iowa in 1947, he continued to expand his business activities and became a partner in the Equity Corporation in New York. In 1948 he met Carol Shearing of Marrila, New York and they were married in 1949. Recalled to active duty with the Army in 1950, General Olmsted assumed command of the Army's military assistance operations. Once again, it was a case of finding the equipment and resources that Allied Governments requested and getting it to them. So successful were his activities that he was promoted to Major General in 1951 and assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense to assume command of all US government military assistance be it Army, Navy, or Air Force. Released from active service in 1953, Olmsted returned to Des Moines to resume his business career. He continued, however, to serve in the Army Reserve and was the Commanding General of the 103rd Infantry Division USAR from 1953 to 1959.

Shortly after his separation from active duty in 1953, General Olmsted bought control of United Services Life Insurance Company which wrote life insurance for officers of the military services. In 1955, he purchased control of International Bank of Washington and in 1959, he purchased Financial General Corporation, the 7th largest bank holding company in the country from his partners at the Equity Corporation. The final form for Olmsted's business ventures had come into being. All of the companies were grouped under International Bank or Financial General Corporation both of which were headquartered in Washington, D.C....

Good work, Tom, but I doubt anyone who hasn't already followed these threads will not appreciate it because of your lack of writing a summary of what it all means. What it means to me is that all intelligence operations in America are controlled by wealth, which is centered within the banking establishment. Olmsted is a character I discovered several years ago at the end of several trails of research. One trail had to do with Financial General Bancshares, which had constructed its headquarters in Washington, D.C. in the same building which later housed the offices of the Mullen Company, which seemed to be a pivot for hiring recently retired agents (whether FBI or CIA--like James McCord and E. Howard Hunt--for the Watergate caper), if I recall correctly. The research developed from checking into the address of that building, which had originally been built by Olmsted's bank.

Olmsted had been the person many decades earlier who had charge of the insurance fund for veterans. I followed one trail along that line, remembering that David Atlee Phillips had created an organization to lobby for former intelligence agents. I tried to figure out who invests the pension funds of these intelligence agents, who uses those funds to invest as venture capital and then hires former intelligence operators to protect that investment. It all seemed to fit.

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John Train was instrumental in the 1980's rail roading of Lyndon LaRouche. I believe Tom left that fact off John Train's resume.

http://www.larouchepub.com/exon/exon_add2_train.html

Wall Street broker and Anglophile intelligence operator John Train took charge of key aspects of the propaganda and witness tampering in the Get LaRouche drive beginning in April 1983, working in league with the Project Democracy apparatus inside the Reagan-Bush administration. Train operated under the illegally invoked umbrella of Executive Order 12333

Edited by Terry Mauro
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John Train was instrumental in the 1980's rail roading of Lyndon LaRouche. I believe Tom left that fact off John Train's resume.

http://www.larouchepub.com/exon/exon_add2_train.html

Wall Street broker and Anglophile intelligence operator John Train took charge of key aspects of the propaganda and witness tampering in the Get LaRouche drive beginning in April 1983, working in league with the Project Democracy apparatus inside the Reagan-Bush administration. Train operated under the illegally invoked umbrella of Executive Order 12333

Other links to information about John Train:

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3339j_train_intro.html

http://www.larouchepac.com/pages/writings_...41228_ss_09.htm

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"The father", John Train's and Francis H. Cabot's partner:

From that point you seemed to digress without stating to whom you were referring. How does Olmsted and the others examined fit into this topic about Train, Cabot?

I will attempt to answer my own question here.

First, it seems the reference to the Train, Cabot partner must have been to GEORGE D. O'NEILL

Prior to the formation of Meriwether [Capital in 1976], Mr. O'Neill held various positions with several financial institutions including
Train, Cabot & Associates
, Equity Corporation and Chase Manhattan Bank. Mr. O'Neill has served as a director of many companies including Rockefeller Group, Inc.,
Bell Aircraft
and Wheelabrator. He was formerly a Commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Mr. O'Neill is a graduate of Harvard University.

George D. O'Neill, a Harvard graduate, had married Abby Milton, a daughter of John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s daughter, Abby Rockefeller Milton, who, after divorcing him, later became Abby Mauze.

SUNDAY, MARCH 2,1969

BERNARD GAVZER, AP news writer

The dream of any dynasty is continuity. In this, the House of Rockefeller is blessed. Though the reigning third generation full of vigor and in firm command, the fourth generation is already standing on the threshold, groomed and girded for stewardship of one of the world's great fortunes.

-The fourth— the Today Generation numbers 23, in a direct line from great grandfather, John D. Rockefeller the

19th century's principal self-made billionaire. Little known, they are emerging from protective privacy to enter the arena of public affairs. One day their decsions could possibly alter the quality of American life....

All the fourth generation Rockefeller children, at some point in their lives, recognized once they got beyond the confines of the family estate at Pocantico Hills, N.Y., where nearly all spent most, or at least a part, of their childhood, that there was something different about their lives. How many other children were there in the world, let alone among their peers, who had access on a rainy afternoon to a diversion such as the Playhouse, which by modest description can only be likened to a backyard Madison Square Garden....These cousins are bound by name, cemented by money, joined in common goal. There is the familial cousin, and The Cousin, which is a separate sort of entity that metamorphizes at age 21. At that age, a Rockefeller enters the society of cousins which meets formally to discuss mutual interests, such as philanthropies and investments, politics and philosophy, as well as art and theater and sports and child rearing. There are 17 adult cousins, plus 11 spouses.

Recalling one recent cousins' meeting, Hope Spencer sought to find the words that would describe her cousins and said:

"Our generation has all the elements of the new American melting pot; There is diversity and independence. And there is this very strong sense of social equality. We're walking on the sidewalks—not riding in Rolls Royces. We're not going to skip any long roads because we have money."

Shake that Rockefeller Cousin tree, give it a good whack, and there's an impressive harvest. It has to be whacked because some cousins are publicity-shy, still cautious about leaving the cocoons of privacy.

There is Rodman, soon to be 37, Nelson's eldest son, an economist, Phi Beta Kappa. Hope Spencer can converse in Swahili and her brother, Jay, speaks Japanese. He can also talk with some expertise about the abilities of a Joe Namath. David Rockefeller knows his Bach and is fine enough a sailor to have crewed on

the Intrepid, winner of the America Cup. There is Abby Milton O'Neill, daughter of Abby Mauze, John D. Jr.'s only daughter, whose passion for restoration of colonial Williamsburg has made her far more than a mere buff on that period of Americana. Her sister, Marilyn, is married to Prof. William Simpson of Yale, an Egyptologist....

Two of David Rockefeller's daughters are busy in the Boston area. One is Abby, a gifted musician and an activist

in the anti-draft movement, and the other is Neva Kaiser, magna cum laude a Radliffe and currently writing a preface to a book of poetry by Conrad Aiken.

Much of this individualism stems from the fourth generation's interpretation of the credo of John D. Jr. Said he:

"I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind. The cousins have tended to take this as a literal edict that laziness or squandering of time and energy, let alone money is certain to bring on the infliction of all the plagues catalogued in the Old Testament. The thrust of Rockefeller philanthropy is that it must include personal involvement and commitment; no absentee altruism....

What to do occupies a considerable amount of energy and time on the part of the cousins and a corps of outsiders who are part of the army of experts—investment counsellors, accountants, public relations staffs, etc.—available to these Rockefellers. The Rockefellers thus extend their own substantial intelligence and expertise by having access to intelligent people who can produce relevant information....

"The profit, motive is a tool we want to use to accomplish social ends," Rodman said. . .

Steven had some reservations and then said: "I think that if business does not learn how to channel its resources; into an effective redistribution of the wealth then the free enterprise system will not last 50

years."

George Dorr O'Neill--son of Grover O'Neill--and Abby Milton were married in 1949.

In 1932 Wallace Groves formed Equity Corp. to take over Yosemite. A year later, according to Time Magazine (Jun. 12, 1933), he sold it to "David Meriwether Milton, a young lawyer who married Abby, daughter of John Davison Rockefeller Jr., shortly after he defended her on a speeding charge. He works for the comfortable old firm of Satterlee & Canfield but like his father-in-law his outside interests are real estate and finance. About the time that the father-in-law was launching Rockefeller Center, David Milton launched a swank East River apartment house for which Mr. Rockefeller loaned him $1,000,000. And about the time Mr. Rockefeller woke up to the fact that he was the biggest stockholder of Chase National Bank, David Milton bought an investment trust. It was a nice little trust with $400,000 in assets. Last January he picked up another. By acquiring Equity last week he became president of a $7,500,000 concern with the simplifying of Wallace Grove's ornate structure as his chief job."

Time, Dec. 28, 1936:

Mr. Milton last week went to Washington to explain to the Securities & Exchange Commission about the complicated maze of Equity Corp. Before going into the story of each of 44 companies which have been involved in the investment trust's activities, SEC Counsel David Schenker drew from Mr. Rockefeller's son-in-law the story of how he got into Equity Corp. For $41,000 cash and 19,000 shares of an inactive insurance stock, Mr. Milton and Ellery Huntington Jr. eventually acquired control of Equity, which managed companies with assets of $218,000,000. Mr. Milton's cash stake was $13,000.

First he and his associate bought control of Consolidated Funds Corp., an investment trust which controlled Oceanic Insurance Co., which owned a quarter of Equity Corp. Then Underwriters Equities, a trust controlled by Mr. Milton, sold $900,000 worth of insurance stocks to a company managed by Equity, and the proceeds were used to buy control of Equity. Thus, a $13,000 cash buy into Consolidated Funds plus Equity's own money put Mr. Milton into Equity. Said Lawyer Schenker: ''[it's] a Van Sweringen operation in the investment trust field." After detailing various operations of Equity Corp., Mr. Schenker drew from Mr. Milton testimony about the formation of Merton Shares, a Canadian corporation, asked him why he had gone to Canada to insure success in a U. S. transaction. Apologized Mr. Milton: "I don't know, it could perhaps have been done some other way. It was a continual headache."

----------

(By Associated Press)

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17, 1936.—David M. Milton, president of the Equity Corporation and son-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., told the Securities Commission today he obtained control of companies having resources of $218,000,000, with $13,000 in cash and 6,300 shares of an inactive insurance company. Milton testified the cash and the stock—shares of the American Colony Insurance Company—were used to acquire control of Consolidated Funds of New York, an investment trust holding Insurance stocks. Consolidated Funds, in turn

controlled the Oceanic Insurance Company which had a one-quarter interest in Equity Corporation which controlled a majority of the 43 companies which now make up the Equity group structure. Milton testified at the commission's general hearing on investment trusts.

---------

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Wallace Groves took over Pepsi Cola in the 1930's from Loft candies. Wallace Groves collaborated with Meyer Lansky on his gambling empire in the Bahamas.

Groves is generally credited with creating Freeport in the Bahamas.

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Guest Tom Scully

Terry,

RE: Your comments in post #4, in a somewhat tongue in cheek reference, directed at John Train at the bottom of post #1 on this thread, I did link to a page with the material you mentioned, and said I had overlooked. The problem in researching this subject is that the research about John Train spread across so many web addresses by the EIR and it's affiliates is so prolific it dominates. I'm trying to avoid using it because it is not credible. An example is the of repeated snippet that at Harvard, Aga Khan was "John Train's roommate". It is not likely that this is true. Train was born in 1928, and Aga Khan's 2003 obit gives his DOB as 1933, and graduation year from Harvard as 1954. Much of the rest of what comes from EIN on the subject of Mr. Train is not accompanied with sources easily verified.

I am covering in this post, the children of Arthur C. Train and Ethel Kissam and their spouses and children. In this group, John Train had one half brother, Arthur K. Train, and three sisters, Helen, Margaret, and Lucy. All are deceased, since the youngest was born 25 years before John was.

I've already posted about the marriages of Train's mother's sister in the Josefa Johnson thread, Train's aunt and first cousin entertained Charlene Wrightsman in their Tuxedo Park, NY home from July 4 to 5, 1953. We know this because police apprehended the daughter of a former Standard Oil of NU chairman, Ethel Jones Taylor, daughter of Warner L. Jones, for the crime of stealing Wrightsman's expensive jewelry.

Since John Train was connected to the CIA in his role as a founder of the Paris Review, and in his role as longtime business Train, Cabot investment firm partner, employing Thomas J. Devine at least since 1973, it would almost be expected that Train would have family ties associated with white Russians and or ties to possible CIA proprietary business activity. Train's family, in these areas, does not disappoint.

Below is displayed support for the observations that Train's sister Margaret was married to a Russian Colonel assigned to the Tsar's palace security detail, and for sister Helen's marriage to a man, Charles D. Hilles Jr., who was the son of a former RNC chairman who was an investor along with the Guggenheim Brothers, in Anglo-Chilean Nitrate Corp. in 1925 and was a director. Hilles Jr. himselg was a corporate counsel and executive V.P. at IT&T, taking a leave of absence from IT&T in 1954 to serve as advisor to John McCloy's immediate replacement as High Commissioner of Germany.

IT&T was linked to the principal CIA front company, according to Phillip Agee, Southern Capital. Since Train, Cabot was known to handle the financial investments of CIA proprietary companies, I am attempting to find investment activity possibly related to WUBRINY/LPDICTUM and WUSALINE.

I have no idea if John Train had close ties to these much older half siblings on his father's side. Unlike John they were all second cousins of William H. Vanderbilt's and his wife,'s Children. The Train children's grandfather, Benjamin Kissam, was the brother of Mrs. Vanderbilt. Upon his inheritance , circa 1870, William Vanderbilt was the wealthiest man in the world. Boris Samsonoff and Charles Hilles make for interesting brothers-in-law of John Train:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?um=1&...erge&cf=all

MRS. TRAIN EMBREE WEDS COL. SAMSONOFF; Daughter of Arthur Train of …

- New York Times - Aug 10, 1930

... in a civil ceremony to Colonel Boris Samsonoff.formerly of the Russian ImperialGuard. ... and his wife and Captain Serge De Witt of the Twelfth Lancers.

New York Times - Aug 11, 1930

Arthur Train of New York announced today the marriage of his daughter, Mrs. Margaret TrainEmbree, to Colonel Boris Samsonoff of the former Imperial Russian ...

MRS. TRAIN EMBREE WEDS COL. SAMSONOFF; Daughter...

http://thepeerage.com/p8985.htm

He died on 21 July 1990 at age 98 at Cendrieux, France. Serge de Witt gained the rank of Captain in the service of the Russian Imperial Cavalry. ...

Notes of Social Activities in New York and Elsewhere

- New York Times - Nov 28, 1932

Sands Point in honor of Count Boris Samsonoff. Mr. and Mrs. Clarence H. Mackay of Harbor Hill, Roslyn, are at their place on Gardiner's Island for a stay of ...

Horse Show Season Opens In Little More Than Month

- Hartford Courant - ProQuest Archiver - Mar 23, 1941

Boris Samsonoff, "White" Russian, a former colonel in the Imperial Guard, now operates the Washington Riding Club at Washington, Conn., where neighbors keep ..

$1,244,573 WILLED BY ARTHUR C. TRAIN; $5,000 to Widow, Residuary to …

- New York Times - Oct 30, 1947

He directed that Ms estate be shared equally by his three daughters and two sons, who are: Mrs. Boris Samsonoff, Washington, Conn.; Mrs. Dean.

http://genforum.genealogy.com/russia/messages/1616.html

My grandfather was Boris Samsonoff, of Saratov. He emigrated to the US after being on the losing side of the Russian Civil War. He earlier served in the Russian army during WWI, according to his diary (which I have), he served in East Prussia, and later with the Czars bodyguards (I believe), up until 1917. He ended up settling in Connecticut, where he operated a riding stables. He died in the early 1960's. Our family is now widely scattered all over the US and Great Britain. He was the last full blooded Russian in our family, but we still carry the name. Hope this helps. Incidently, I have never personally met any other Samsonoff's or Samsonov's other than my own family members.

Bridge Champions At UofC Are Named

- Hartford Courant - ProQuest Archiver - Apr 6, 1954

Wethersield and Boris A. T. Samsonoff, A'ashington, Conn. The learn of Cohen and Rosen- org playing the norm and south wards placed second in the New

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Slow-Motion-Da...s/dp/B000GG4FHM

Death in Slow Motion : A Memoir of a Daughter, Her Mother, and the Beast Called Alzheimer's

by Eleanor Cooney

http://www.deathinslowmotion.com/Reviews/Courant/text.htm

The Hartford Courant,

Sunday, February 23, 2003 — Mother's Decline, Honestly Told

Reviewed by Richard Zimler

By CAROLE GOLDBERG

Courant Books Editor

Mary Durant was an extraordinary woman: an author, an actress, an adventurer, a beauty, a thrice-married mother, the lover of many interesting men, a wit with a taste for the macabre.

She was, her daughter Eleanor Cooney writes in a tribute Mary would surely savor, "hip, cool, brilliant, funny, sane."

Mary is still alive, but that woman is gone now, having been, as Eleanor makes clear, "insidiously replaced by an imposter."

Mary has Alzheimer's disease, and Eleanor tells her story in "Death in Slow Motion." But just as Mary herself was far from ordinary, this book is no typical account of a family forced to cope with a devastating chronic illness.

It contains no inspirational platitudes, no sentimental musings, no selfless children only too glad to shoulder an immense burden. In fact, at times it fairly seethes with bitterness and anger. Eleanor is stun- ningly frank about the frus- trations and heart- break family members feel when a beloved parent loses her grip on reality.

When Eleanor and her brother Tom were growing up, the family lived in Washington, Conn., where they moved in a circle that included Arthur Miller, Alexander Calder, the artist Alexis Chernov and many other talented people."There were trysts and tangles that would have made John Cheever blush," Eleanor writes.....

http://www.deathinslowmotion.com/Excerpts/chap8/text.htm

...In our town, we had not just one but two expatriate Russians with manic-depressive American wives. Alexis' eyes were so black that iris and pupil were indistinguishable; Colonel Boris Samsonoff (Link) had eyes as pale as a winter sky in Siberia. The Colonel had been an officer under Tzar Nicholas. When the revolution came, he'd been a supporter of the progressive leader Kerenski; when Lenin and the Bolsheviks took over and Kerenski fled, so did the Colonel-first to the Ukraine and then to Turkey. Eventually, he made his way to Paris.

He was in his seventies by the time I knew him. My mother had first glimpsed him when she was a teenager. God, she said; he was the handsomest man I ever saw in my life. You could still see it when he was old. Tall, broad shoulders, a full head of wavy white hair, and those eyes. He'd been a master Cossack rider in his prime. My mother told us that she remembered him in his younger days riding his horse into town, wearing his old Cossack coat.

He had a few horses. He gave riding lessons to children, and I was one of them. Again, my mother, such a fine rider herself, was simply trying to add something fun to my life. I never learned to jump. It was a little like my recalcitrance with Miss Wood. The Colonel, though, wasn't always as sweet-natured as Miss Wood about my failings. I remember him red-faced and raging once when I refused to gallop toward the raised bar. I was about eight, but somehow I knew it wasn't really me he was so angry at. his wife, Margaret, was a painter whom he'd met and married in Paris. I really liked her-she was fun and friendly, to kids especially. She wasn't quite as wild as Katrina

in the "up" part of her manic cycle, but she did occasionally drive to the post office in her nightgown. The Samsonoffs were not the intimates that the Chernovs were, so I don't know the details of what went on at home, but I don't think it was always fun for the Colonel. I suspect great quantities of alcohol were involved. Young though I was, it often seemed to me that there was a cloud of sadness around him.

He had real Russian soul, though. One day when my mother had dropped me off for a lesson he said solemnly that he had something to show me. We went into the barn, and he held the head of one of the horses tenderly between his two huge hands so that its eye was framed. "Look," he said. "See how beautiful it is." And we stood there and gazed into the depths of the horse's big purply-brown limpid eye with the long black lashes. And he was right. It was beautiful. Like my years on the bench beside Miss Wood, this was not wasted time. And of course, like everything else, I had my mother to thank for it.

The Colonel and Margaret had two sons. The one I knew best was named Ivan, and by the time he was a young man he was at least as handsome as his father had once been. Black hair, blue eyes. A true heart-throb. My mother definitely checked him out. I may have been just a little kid, but I certainly noticed him, too. He was an athlete, a runner, decades before jogging was invented. My mother and I, riding in the car, often caught glimpses of him sprinting along leafy roads around town. My mother would draw her breath in sharply with appreciation, and I'd see her glancing in the rearview mirror for another look after we passed him. And he was a really nice guy with a sunny disposition. Women were mad for him. The Colonel adored him.

Ivan got some kind of rare bone cancer in his leg. They cut it off, all the way up to his pelvis. He wore an elaborate prosthesis for a while-elaborate because they'd cut off so much that there was no stump at all-and then he died. On the day of Ivan's funeral, the Colonel took his old Cossack rifle and blew his head off. I remember my mother answering the phone and bursting into tears. So much for my riding lessons. And I really, really missed him…...

http://media.gunnery.org/media/Articles/20...cAwards0708.pdf

THE SAMSONOFF WRESTLING AWARD:

THIS AWARD WAS ESTABLISHED IN MEMORY OF IVAN SAMSONOFF WHO GRADUATED FROM ... TITLE OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY WITH A GOLD MEDAL. HE DIED OF CANCER. IN 1961. ...

Margaret Train Samsonoff, Painter, Daughter of Author

- New York Times - Jun 2, 1963

... another son, Boris Sam= Jr.; two sisters, Mrs. Dean K. Worcester and Mrs. Charles Hilles of New York, and a brother, Arthur Train Jr. of New York and Paris.

New York Times - Jun 2, 1963

Beloved mother of Mrs. William Brunet, Washington, Conn., John Embree, Hartford, Conn. and T/Sgt. Boris Samsonoff Jr., U.S.A.F. sister of Mrs. Dean K. ..

Sarasota Herald-Tribune - NewsBank - Sep 26, 1997

Boris A.T. Samsonoff, 65, Venice, died Sept. 23, 1997. He was born April 20, 1932, in New York and came to Venice eight years ago from San Jose, Calif., ...

Lucy Hartwell Train:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html...FB266838B639EDE

MISS TRAIN TO WED DEAN K. WORCESTER; Flance of Daughter of Mr. and …

New York Times - Apr 3, 1920

ldr. and Ilirs. Arthur C. Train of 113 Eaet Seventy-third Street announce the of their daughter. Visa Lucy FFa: Train, to Dean Kirkham Worcester, ..

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=Dea...1&scoring=a

Lucy Chauncey Dies at 45; Former Teacher and Editor

New York Times - Nov 11, 1975

mrs. , a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Dean K. Worcester of New York, prepared at the Brearley School for Smith College, where she was president of the student ...

Deaths

New York Times - Feb 2, 1976

Sister of Mrs. Frances", Widrum of Trappd, Md. Also survived by three ... Ethel K. train, beloved wife of Dean K. Worcester, at Dean K. Vlorchestrr, Jr.. ...

Lucy Chauncey Dies at 45; Former Teacher and Editor

November 11, 1975, Tuesday

Lucy Lawrence Chauncey, a former editor of University, a Princeton quarterly, and the wife of Dr. Henry Chauncey, retired president of the Educational Testing Service, died

Sunday in Princeton (N.J.) Medical Center. She was 45 years old and lived in East Amwell Township, N.J.

Dean K. Worcester, 79, Lawyer And Former Stock Exchange Aide

- New York Times - Oct 4, 1977

Dean K. Worcester, a member of the law firm of Carter, Ledyard Milburn from 1938 to 1969 and later a counsel to the firm, died Saturday in his home, ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=hil...1&scoring=a

CHILEMAY SEEK LOAN OF $45,000,000 HERE; Finance Minister Is Said to …

- New York Times - Oct 16, 1925

E. A. Capoelen Smith of Guggenheim 13ro.q. will be the President and Augustin ... Howland, Charles D. Hilles, Carrel A. , Paul M. Mayer, C/ I.elor Burdick.

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.htm...783D85F4D8485F9

C. D. HILLES DIES; LED REPUBLIC.S; Former National Chairman, 82, Committeeman 18 Years, Was Aide to President Taft

August 29, 1949, Monday

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=dir...1&scoring=a

CD HILLES DIES; LED REPUBLIC.S; Former National Chairman, 82, …

- New York Times - Aug 29, 1949

Charles D. Hilles of ' Park Avenue, New York, former national chairman of the Republican party, who was national committeeman from New York from 1920 through 1937, died here yesterday at his country home, Seatuck Lodge. His friends, led by George K. Morris, state chairman, kept control of the delegation, so far as election of national committee members and members of convention committees was concerned...Mr. Hilles was resident manager of the American Employers Liability insurance Company and a director of the Otis Elevator Company, American Smelting and ... Central Realty Company, Anglo-Chilean Nitrate Company, General Cable ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=Cha...n&scoring=a

GIVE DINNER.; Entertain for Helen Train and CD Hilles Jr., Who Are...

- New York Times - Mar 16, 1929

Entertain for Helen Train and C. D. Hilles Jr., Who Are to Wed Today. Mr. and D3rs. Charles D. Hilles have a dinner last in the Seablade of the St. Regis ...

MRS, C,D. HILLES JR.

- New York Times - Feb 21, 1971

Mrs. Helen Train Hilles, an author of and magazine stor. ies for children, ... N, Y. Mrs. Hilles was the wife of Charles D. Hilles Jr., a 2: lawyer and ...

CHARLES D. HILLES, EX-ITT OFFICER; Lawyer, Adviser to Conant in …

- New York Times - Apr 30, 1974

Charles Dewey Hilles Jr., a former executive vice president arid director of the ... Mr. Hilles's first wife, the former Helen Train, died in 1971. ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22...1&scoring=a

CHARLES D. HILLES, EX-ITT OFFICER; Lawyer, Adviser to Conant in …

- New York Times - Apr 30, 1974

In 1954 Mr. Hilles took a leave of absence from I.T.T. to serve as special legal adviser to Dr. James Conant, the United States. High Commissioner in ...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=hil...1&scoring=a

TAKE NEW HIGH POSTS WITH IT & T.

- New York Times - Feb 15, 1952

T. Directors of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation elected yesterday Charles D. Hilles Jr. vice president and general attorney and Paul

New Director Chosen By New York Trust Co.

- New York Times - May 23, 1957

Mr. Hilles is executive vice president and a director of International Telephone , Corporation. He also is a member of the executive committee and a

MISS LEE HILLES WILL BE MARRIED; Publishing Aide Is Betrothed to …

- New York Times - Jun 16, 1956

Mr. and Mrs. Charles D. Hilles Jr. of 333 East Siaty-eighth Street and Millbrook ... Her father, executive vice president of the International Telephone and

http://www.smokershistory.com/Hilles.html

Charles Dewey Hilles Jr., Skull & Bones 1924

- Aug 10

Charles D. Hilles Jr. was associated with the law firm of Root Clark Buckner and ... Hilles was the special legal advisor to the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, ... Conant, who succeeded John J. McCloy, was a founding member of the ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124424893825190729.html

By STEPHEN MILLER

* JUNE 6, 2009

Edward J. Gerrity Jr. (1924 – 2009)

P.R. Chief Put Happy Face On ITT's Acquisition Spree

Edward J. Gerrity Jr. ran the public-relations department of International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. from an office spanning the entire 33rd floor of the global conglomerate's New York City headquarters.

The Park Avenue office in Manhattan was a hive of activity, receiving reports in pre-Internet days via WATS line and newswire teletype from ITT's units around the world. The sprawling public-relations operation befitted Mr. Gerrity, once the right-hand man of CEO Harold S. Geneen, who assembled ITT from more than 250 companies in one of the great acquisition sprees in American business history.

In 1959, when Mr. Geneen took the helm, ITT was a midsize company that manufactured telephone equipment and electronics, with interests in Latin American phone companies...

...Mr. Anderson published more reports that tied ITT and Mr. Gerrity to attempts to block the election of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 by proposing payments to Allende's opponents through the CIA. "Allende had said he was going to expropriate our phone company. So who were we going to support?" Mr. Gerrity told the Journal in 1997. The Allende government nationalized ITT's Chile Telephone Co., and ITT took a $70 million write-down in 1972.

Mr. Gerrity was charged with perjury and obstruction of government proceedings in 1978 as a result of his 1973 testimony before a Senate committee investigating the Chile matter. The charges were dropped after the Justice Department concluded it would have to reveal national-security information to prosecute the case.

The two affairs tarred ITT in the public eye. On the left, ITT became a byword for corporate greed and corruption. In the fall of 1973, just weeks after the Chilean government was unseated and Allende died, ITT offices in New York and Rome were bombed. Mr. Gerrity traveled with a security detail thereafter.

"We were running uphill. No matter what you explained, nobody wanted to accept it," Mr. Gerrity told the Journal in 1982, while overseeing an image-enhancing ad campaign to differentiate the company from AT&T....

http://books.google.com/books?um=1&ned...sa=N&tab=np

Dirty work: the CIA in Western Europe‎

by Philip Agee, Louis Wolf - Political Science - 1978 - 734 pages

Page 129

"Mr. Evans" is Marvin L. Evans, who ran Southern Capital for the CIA until his

retirement in 1973. Evans extends the proprietary trail to Africa,

http://books.google.com/books?um=1&q=%...nG=Search+Books

Dirty work: the CIA in Western Europe‎

by Philip Agee, Louis Wolf - Political Science - 1978 - 734 pages

Page 129

...After the MUTUAL committee took over, Southern Capital branched out from its

normal blue-chip purchases to more speculative fields, including short-term including short-term

buys of Swiss francs and several hundred thousand dollars in Mexican pesos. Another source reports that during the early 1970s,

when the CIA was working secretly with ITT to keep Salvador Allende from power in Chile, Southern Capital owned some ITT stock.

MUTUAL Chairman Houston told the Senate committee: "Well, a couple of times our investment advisor recommended a stock which I

knew we had big contracts with, and I told the board no, this involves a conflict of interest. We won't

touch it." The net profit on Southern Capital's portfolio in 1974 was more than $1.5

million, according to the Senate report. Most of that money never found its way onto Southern's balance sheets,

however, because it legally belonged to proprietary insurance and financial companies in overseas tax havens.

Southern Capital, as a Delaware corporation doing in the District of

Columbia, did submit US tax returns but was under no obligation to list the money it made for its sister proprietaries.

The company kept three or four lawyers busy full time, a former Southern employee recalls.

"Mr. Evans was a stickler on legality," he says. "Mr. Evans" is Marvin L. Evans,

who ran Southern Capital for the CIA until his retirement in 1973.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&sa...sa=N&tab=wp

Dirty work: the CIA in Western Europe‎

by Philip Agee, Louis Wolf - Political Science - 1978 - 734 pages

Page 128

So far as is known, Southern Capital is the CIA's largest remaining proprietary.

http://ajweberman.com/nodule14.pdf

NODULE 14

OSWALD NEW ORLEANS: PART TWO

OSWALD'S LETTER TO SOVIET EMBASSY JULY 1963

ORLANDO PIEDRA

Orlando Piedra, whose address was in OSWALD'S address book, was associated with

Enrique Fernandez Parajon, the former Chief of Batista's Secret Police, and he was a friend of

BRINGUIER. Ronnie Caire stated he had been introduced to "the man who had been head of

Batista's Secret Police" by Sergio Arcacha Smith. FBI SAC James J. O'Conner questioned

Piedra about his connection to OSWALD on December 20, 1963...

ANALYSIS

....On June 25, 1962, the

Department of the Army reported: "Ex-Dictator of Cuba Batista is sponsoring and financing the

military training of Cubans in exile in the U.S...Recruiters for this pro-Batista armed force are

offering a bounty of $200 upon enlistment. The trainees are fed, housed and provided with a

khaki uniform. Recruiters are: Orlando Piedra, New Orleans. Eladio Del Valle recruiter in

Miami." [Army Report ID 2205713]

In 1967, Arnesto N. Rodriguez Sr. suggested that the District Attorneys office in New Orleans

contact Orlando Piedra about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, since Orlando

Piedra possessed files on exiles suspected of being double-agents. [Dubois Castro Bobbs

Merrill 1959 p130; WCD 1203a; Memo: Sciambra /Garrison 2.14.67; Interview with R 1.23.67

ARA files]

On May 8, 1973, the name of Orlando Piedra appeared on a document titled "Memo from DDO

from James Flannery, Subject; Media Inquiry to Cuban Exile Journalist in Miami regarding:

Cuban Involvement in Watergate Case and Attitudes in Miami Area w/bio summaries." This

CIA Index Card read "Rene Viera Gonzalez, S. Gottlieb, Renaldo Pico, Orlando Piedra,

Rolando Masferrer, ITT, Joaquin Pedromo Sanjenis, Juan A. Paula, Edgardo Buttari, Charles

'Bebe' Reboso, Anthony Felix Corzo Genova, Ernesto Betencourt, Mr. Kercher, Avany, John

Dean, James Flannery, Marvin L. Evans." [iG File 15, Tab 26]

http://books.google.com/books?um=1&q=M...nG=Search+Books

Dirty work: the CIA in Western Europe‎

by Philip Agee, Louis Wolf - Political Science - 1978 - 734 pages

Page 130

One of Evans' private law clients, a Miami man named Thomas R. Green, runs a

string of air companies in Florida, ... Marvin Evans now owns 15% of Green's

http://books.google.com/books?um=1&q=%...nG=Search+Books

Dirty work: the CIA in Western Europe‎

by Philip Agee, Louis Wolf - Political Science - 1978 - 734 pages

Page 130

Marvin Evans now owns 15% of Green's Africair; Green served on the board of

directors of Southern Capital.....

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=afr...1&scoring=a

Bribe Data Destroyed After Miller Was Questioned, Textron Reports; …

- New York Times - May 9, 1978

A part owner and vice president t of Africair is Marvin L. ):vans, who managed a C.LA, investment company until he retired from the agency in 1973. ...

http://books.google.com/books?um=1&spe...nG=Search+Books

The Secret History of the CIA‎ - Page 197

by Joseph J. Trento - Political Science - 2005 - 560 pages

In the fall of 1960, Sherwood heard from a colleague, Marvin Evans, a CIA lawyer

based in Frankfurt who was visiting Berlin, that Lumumba was going to die

(I know....I know...."Joe Trento"....but I included it because I found it to be an interesting link to my recent post about CIA's Charles Whitehouse....)

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.htm...4DA405B888BF1D3

TEXTRON SUBSIDIARY NAMED IN PAYMENT IN SALE OF AIRCRAFT; AUDITOR RECORDS SUBPOENAED Bell Helicopter Said to Have Paid $300,000 to Africair, Linked to Business Deals With C.I.A. Confirmation Delayed Twice Textron Unit Is Named in Payment

February 25, 1978, Saturday

Section: Business & Finance, Page 27, 828 words

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24--Bell Helicopter, a subsidiary of Textron Inc., made a $300,000 payment in connection with an aircraft sale to Africair Inc., a company that has had extensive business dealings with the Central Intelligence Agency, Government sources said today.

Edited by Tom Scully
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Terry,

RE: Your comments in post #4, in a somewhat tongue and chief reference, directed at John Train at the bottom of post #1 on this thread, I did link to a page with the material you mentioned, and said I had overlooked. The problem in researching this subject is that the research about John Train spread across so many web addresses by the EIN and it's affiliates is so prolific it dominates. I'm trying to avoid using it because it is not credible. An example is the of repeated snippet that at Harvard, Aga Khan was "John Train's roommate". It is not likely that this is true. Train was born in 1928, and Aga Khan's 2003 obit gives his DOB as 1933, and graduation year from Harvard as 1954. Much of the rest of what comes from EIN on the subject of Mr. Train is not accompanied with sources easily verified.

I am covering in this post, the children of Arthur C. Train and Ethel Kissam and their spouses and children. In this group, John Train had one half brother, Arthur K. Train, and three sisters, Helen, Margaret, and Lucy. All are deceased, since the youngest was born 25 years before John was.

I've already posted about the marriages of Train's mother's sister in the Josefa Johnson thread, Train's aunt and first cousin entertained Charlene Wrightsman in their Tuxedo Park, NY home from July 4 to 5, 1953. We know this because police apprehended the daughter of a former Standard Oil of NU chairman, Ethel Jones Taylor, daughter of Warner L. Jones, for the crime of stealing Wrightsman's expensive jewelry.

Since John Train was connected to the CIA in his role as a founder of the Paris Review, and in his role as longtime business Train, Cabot investment firm partner, employing Thomas J. Devine at least since 1973, it would almost be expected that Train would have family ties associated with white Russians and or ties to possible CIA proprietary business activity. Train's family, in these areas, does not disappoint.

Below is displayed support for the observations that Train's sister Margaret was married to a Russian Colonel assigned to the Tsar's palace security detail, and for sister Helen's marriage to a man, Charles D. Hilles Jr., who was the son of a former RNC chairman who was an investor along with the Guggenheim Brothers, in Anglo-Chilean Nitrate Corp. in 1925 and was a director. Hilles Jr. himselg was a corporate counsel and executive V.P. at IT&T, taking a leave of absence from IT&T in 1954 to serve as advisor to John McCloy's immediate replacement as High Commissioner of Germany.

IT&T was linked to the principal CIA front company, according to Phillip Agee, Southern Capital. Since Train, Cabot was known to handle the financial investments of CIA proprietary companies, I am attempting to find investment activity possibly related to WUBRINY/LPDICTUM and WUSALINE.

I have no idea if John Train had close ties to these much older half siblings on his father's side. Unlike John they were all second cousins of William H. Vanderbilt and his wife,'s Children. The Train children's grandfather, Benjamin Kissam, was the borther of Mrs. Vanderbilt. Upon his inheritance , circa 1870, William Vanderbilt was the wealthiest man in the world. Boris Samsonoff and Charles Hilles make for interesting brothers-in-law of John Train.

Tom,

I think you have summarized the research quite well here. Terry is correct in stating that EIR, the LaRouche organization, has zeroed in on John Train as the operator of a "salon" which targeted Lyndon LaRouche after he sponsored the publication of the first Dope, Inc edition. Jeff Steinberg, Anton Chaitkin and others have been working for decades in an attempt to destroy the drug-running network that funds these so-called aristocrats who kept the cold war so wound up in order to use the power of the US government to protect their narcotics and gambling incomes. That was where the real money was; the oil infrastructure was the facade behind which they hid their real cash cow--vice, which seems to lure so many scions of wealth into the vise of their power.

The Bush family was lured into this vise first, as far as I can tell, by the wiles of the second wife of the Rev. James Smith Bush when he was in mourning for his first wife. But that's another story....

The second publication of Dope, Inc. expanded the research and came much closer to exposing the British and Canadian connection to show how the drug money was laundered through Caribbean banks--almost all being run by British bankers through Canadian auspices.

What we are seeing now in your research, Tom, is how these bankers, operating out of London, manipulated and maneuvered their pawns, including the Kentuckian oilman Warner L. Jones, descendant of the founder of the Kentucky Derby, and friend and horse-breeding partner of Humble Oil/Exxon scion Will Farish III, whose family was completely tied up in the Anglo-American investment bank of Brown Brothers Harriman, as was Prescott Bush and his sons. The term "investment banking" is a polite euphemism for using governmental power to advance the wealth of the non-working jet-set classes by corrupt intelligence operations.

The focus should not be on the "Central Intelligence Agency" per se, because this agency is merely a tool of the international banking establishment which has always made its biggest profits from vice. That is history, as propounded by the LaRouche organization, which has taken its research all the way back to the Roman Empire, to Venice; from there to the Bank of Amsterdam and the Bank of England.

In order to really understand what has been happening all along, we have to understand the mentality of the banking class that existed in 1776 in England which had been making money from the slave trade and moved into financing transportation of convicts to Australia and to forcing the Chinese government to allow them to bring opium from India to China. It was that trade in China which taken over by the British government for a time after it removed the monopoly granted to the BEIC in order to pay for the two Opium Wars which occurred at about the same time the British bankers lost their investment in what was then Mexico (now Texas).

The bankers had made huge loans to the government that had thrown out Spanish conquerors in 1821. (For an overview of the aftermath of this period, see When Mexico Had the Blues: A Transatlantic Tale of Bonds, Bankers, and Nationalists, 1862–1910 written so well by STEVEN C. TOPIK: "When Maximilian von Habsburg's gilded coach first entered Mexico City in May of 1864 to an enthusiastic greeting, the future appeared as glittering as his livery. French troops would help the Austrian prince resurrect Mexico's past brilliance. But Maximilian needed more than just soldiers to build his New World empire. The emperor needed gold. He turned to the Paris stock market, where the French regime of Napoleon III put its prestige behind bond issues of 1864 and 1865 worth some 534 million francs, in a stroke tripling Mexico's foreign debt...Today's globalism is not new. During the "hundred years' peace" before World War I, international capital flowed freely over most of the globe....Cooperation between financiers of different nationalities was just as common as competition. Indeed, family allegiance among members of international financial diasporas was just as strong as their patriotism. The international banking houses were precursors of today's multinational corporations... Mexico's little blue bonds lived a most cosmopolitan life. They provide a wide-angle lens to study the mechanics of international history. To write the biography of the "petits bleus," we must follow the sage advice Deep Throat gave Woodward and Bernstein in the movie—"Follow the money."")

More on this later.

Edited by Linda Minor
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Tom,

You're funny. Usually when someone "omits" Lyndon LaRouche it's because they are afraid of what their friends and neighbors might think. I am glad to see this is not the case with you.

George Plimton was born in 1927 and damn if he doesnt claim Aga Kahn as his Harvard roomate! That leaves Train a whole year younger than George Plimton. That shoots down your speculation based on birth dates. Unless of course this Prince is a differrent Aga Kahn than the person you reference.

Quote:

George always knew that of all the choices in his life, the "most sensible one," he once told me, "would be to drop The Paris Review ." But he didn't, and from the moment he tapped Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, his Harvard roommate, to be the Paris Review 's first publisher while they were running the bulls in Pamplona, to the somewhat less glamorous but no less loyal publishers of the 1970s (Ron Dante, the music producer and creator of the Archies; Bernard F. Connors, the Canadian soft-drink king), to the creation in the 1990s of a sensibly endowed Paris Review Foundation, fundraising was foremost on his mind.

The Last Gentlemen New York Observer

http://www.observer.com/node/48129

You must also try and keep in mind that LaRouche and his organization probably have a better understanding of John Train and what he represents than the typical researcher trying to connect the dots. They were in a full blown political battle for their very life against John Train.

http://berletwatch.freehostia.com/qa.htm

Richard Cumming

http://www.literaryrevolution.com/mr-cummings-52305.html

QUOTE:

But founding a magazine was not

within Matthiessen’s ken, so he befriended expatriate Harold Humes, who had

attended MIT and who was starting a new literary publication that would feature

interviews with writers, fiction and reviews of restaurants and clubs. Matthiessen

provided funding from Sadruddin Aga Khan, the son of the Aga Khan, who had been

John Train’s roommate at Harvard, and who agreed to serve as the magazine’s

publisher. Train became managing editor. Then Matthiessen got rid of Humes and

brought in his old friend from New York, George Plimpton, who had been studying

English literature at King’s College, Cambridge, to replace him. Plimpton, who had

gone to Groton and Harvard, was the son of Francis Plimpton, founder of the white

shoe law firm of Debevoise, Plimpton (His partner was Eli Whitney Debevoise) who

also served as counsel to the Democratic Party.

Sorry Tom but I'll take the intelligence briefs of the LaRouche organization any day over any other private source. But don't despair I have seen your complaint before, many time before in fact.

Edited by Terry Mauro
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http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/site...3203_train.html

Appropriately, Train's family fortune came, in large measure, from the 19th-century profits of Enoch Train and Company, a clipper-ship firm that served as a junior partner of the British East India Company in the Far East opium trade. Train's grandfather on his mother's side was a founding partner of JP Morgan.

Born in 1928, John Train was educated at Groton, Harvard, and The Sorbonne. In 1951, Train founded the Paris Review, a project of the Anglo-American intelligence community's postwar cultural-warfare front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The publisher of Paris Review was Train's Harvard roommate, Sadruddin Aga Khan. The magazine promoted such dregs of Fabian cultural perversion as the poet and British intelligence operative W.H. Auden; British literati spook Stephen Spender; British counterculturalist Aldous Huxley; propagandist-for-Weimar Christopher Isherwood; and Archibald MacLeish.

...By 1956, Train returned to the United States, working for two years for Wall Street speculator Imre de Vegh, before launching Smith Train Counsel, his private investment fund....in 1984, Smith Train Counsel was partly bought up by the London-based English Associate Trust, which was, in turn, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Swedish banking giant, PK Banken, a joint venture of the Swedish government and the notorious Erik Penser.

----------

From The American Conservative magazine February 16, 2004

In this environment, the American jeunesse dorée of Peter Mathiessen; his

stunning wife, the writer Patsy Southgate; George Plimpton; and Paris

Review managing editor, John Train, Sadruddin Aga Kahn’s roommate at Har-

vard, flourished.

------------

It appears that George Ames Plimpton was also part of the same New England Brahman class.

http://www.smith.edu/library/libs/ssc/newsames.html

http://www.twenga.co.uk/book/mad-ducks-and...s_50215065.html

George Ames Plimpton was born March 18, 1927. He was educated first at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and then spent four years at Harvard majoring in English and editing the Harvard Lampoon, followed by two at King's College, Cambridge. ...Plimpton also served as a volunteer for Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential run and was walking in front of him as the candidate was assassinated in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel.

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If we trace John Train's ancestry back a few generations, therefore, we find him associated in society and business with the men in and around Boston and its environs who traveled extensively to the Far East. Those jocular seamen engaged in their pernicious global trading over a century ago set the model for the cold war spies who used Train Cabot as a front, as they still use a plethora of proprietaries today.

State Street Trust Company, Boston (1919) published this reminiscence of those burly merchants of yore, which gives us a glimpse of how John Train and his ilk saw their ancestors:

Some Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston

ENOCH TRAIN

Enoch Train was so popular with his employees that when he failed during one of the panics prior to the Civil War, one of his

Portuguese stevedores, taking his own bank book, placed it on his employer's desk, saying, "Take it; I have made the money out of your ships." This anecdote well illustrates the fine relations that existed between himself and his employees, to whom he was always kind and considerate. He was likewise the soul of honor and integrity, and was generous and public-spirited in every worthy cause. Aaron Sargent in his " Recollections of Boston Merchants " best describes his popularity: "To receive a bow or a 'Good-morning' salute from Enoch Train, as, tall and erect and with manly step, he walked down State Street and along Commercial Street to his counting-room, was something not to be despised by any one, whether a merchant or one

holding some other position in commercial Boston." He was also foremost among the merchant ship-owners of his day, and at one

time owned the largest number of ships of any firm in Boston, thirty or more of his vessels plying between this port and Liverpool. Having been brought up in the hide and leather store of his uncle, Samuel Train, his earliest ventures after he went into shipping on his own account were in the Russian and South American trades, importing principally hides. A few years later, in 1844, he established the well-known Train line of packets to Liverpool, the first ship built being the " Joshua Bates," named after the American partner of Baring Brothers at that time. This vessel was built for him at Newburyport by the celebrated ship-builder, Donald McKay. Mr. Train was so much pleased with this first vessel and with the skill of the builder that on the day she was launched he said to McKay, "You must come to Boston; we need you, and if you want any financial assistance in establishing a shipyard let me know the amount and you shall have it." The rest is too well known to repeat. In

rapid succession were launched the "Anglo Saxon," "Anglo American," " Washington Irving," "' Ocean Monarch," " Parliament," " Star of the Empire," "Chariot of Fame," " Staffordshire," " Cathedral," and " John Eliot Thayer." The " Staffordshire " was lost at sea not far from this coast and many passengers were lost. It is stated that there were so few boats and panic-stricken people slung so desperately to the gunwales of the rowboats that one of the officers was obliged to chop off their fingers with a hatchet in order to save even a few of the passengers. Another ship, the " Ocean Monarch," was burned at sea with a loss of four hundred lives, and George Francis Train, a representative of the firm, in an account of his life, describes the pathetic scene he witnessed when the news was first announced in Boston. It was customary for the captain of each inward-bound

vessel as she approached her dock to shout from the rail the latest news. On this occasion the " Persia " under Captain Judkins was about to dock, and hundreds of people were waiting to hear tidings of some friend or vessel. The captain shouted the sad fate of the " Ocean Monarch " and within a few minutes the announcement was made in the Merchants Exchange. The Train firm on another occasion believed the " Gov. Davis," which ran on their Boston, New Orleans, Liverpool triangular route, had also been burned at sea, as word was received that " The ' Gov. Davis ' is burned up."

While those in the counting-house were grieving over their losses of friends and cargo, another message was handed to them, changing the message to " The ' Gov. Davis ' is bound up." The vessel was safe in Boston Harbour and there was great rejoicing in the Train office.

Another ship belonging to the firm, called " Break of Day," came into Boston Harbour on a winter's day without a spar standing. " The Chariot of Fame " was Train's favorite vessel, her master being Captain Knowles. She had a reading-room on her quarter-deck for cabin passengers, a great luxury in those days. Donald McKay also built for Mr. Train the " Flying Cloud,"

" Empress of the Seas," " Plymouth Rock," which was half-owned by George B. Upton, and the " Lightning." Some of Train's captains were Caldwell, Thayer, Murdock, Brown, Richardson, Howard, and Knowles.

In 1855 the Boston & European Steamship Company was incorporated, with Enoch Train, George B. Upton, Donald McKay, Andrew T. Hall, and James M. Beebe as sponsors, " for the purpose of navigating the ocean by steam." The plan was to build a splendid

line of steamers, rivalling in every respect the well-known Collins line of New York, [financed by Brown Brothers] the English port to be Milford Haven in Wales. The remarks made by Enoch Train at that time are especially interesting to look back upon, as they show his ideas in regard to the steamship which was then just beginning to replace the sailing-ship. It had been expected that Train would oppose the suggested company, as being antagonistic to his own, but instead he was so broad-minded that he lent it the strength of his right arm, as he expressed it.

***

RUSSELL STURGIS

RUSSELL STURGIS'S grandfather, who bore the same name, visited the Daniel Bacons on Cape Cod, and while there he met and married Elizabeth, the daughter of Mrs. James Perkins. Mrs. Perkins was the daughter of Thomas Handasyd Peck, who left some

interesting letters concerning the lives of the Bostonians of the early days. Of her it is related that during the Revolutionary War there was much sickness among the English troops in Boston and the English general was advised to get assistance from

Mrs. Perkins, who was known to be very capable. She replied, as was quite natural at that time, that she would aid them " as sick men but by no means as soldiers." After the war Mrs. Perkins and her son-in-law returned from the Cape to Boston.

Russell Sturgis, the grandson and well-known Boston and Canton merchant, was born in Boston in 1805, went to Harvard at the age of twelve, and in 1828 made his first voyage abroad in the " Boston," with only two fellow-passengers. He had settled down in this city as a young lawyer and would probably have continued in this profession had he not overheard John P. Cushing speak of the unwillingness of a certain person to go to China. "I wish I had that chance offered me," remarked Sturgis. In a few days the opportunity was given to him by Mr. Cushing and he sailed for Canton in 1833.

Eventually Sturgis entered the firm of Russell & Sturgis of Manila and Russell, Sturgis & Co. of Canton, and in 1840 the latter house consolidated with Russell & Co., Mr. Warren Delano being taken in as a member of the firm. Two years later Russell Sturgis became a partner. The East had a great fascination for him, and in fact for all the men who went out there from Boston. The life there was new and interesting to them, and they assumed great responsibilities; they lived a life of great freedom, although they were not allowed to go outside the " Factory " reservation. Besides being called " foreign devils " they were also described as " a ghostly tribe of barbarians," as " uncouth beings with fiery hair," as " a strange people who came to the Flowery Kingdom from regions of mist and storm where the sun never shines," even as " wild, untamed men whose words are rough, and whose language is confused." During the opium war, Russell Sturgis's son, Julian Sturgis, who wrote a short memoir of his father, describes how each member of Russell & Co. had to do some of the housework. Lots were drawn and the duty of cook fell to Capt. R. B. Forbes, who was soon deposed from his position by Warren Delano for presenting to his fellow-captives a dish of ham and eggs which was mistaken for some sort of leather.

John C. Green, who was the head of Russell & Co., tried his hand at boiled rice, which resembled a mass of glue, so the story goes. A. A. Low, father of Seth Low, was ordered to set the table after having produced some boiled eggs that resembled grape-shot. To kill time they played whist, and hunted rats with a terrier, which latter fact led the Chinese to believe that the "Fan-Kwae" were holding a continuous feast. Julian Sturgis also mentions the Canton Regatta Club, which was founded in 1837, thereby causing a protest to be Issued by three of the Co-Hongs, who believed that great danger would arise from its formation. The protest reads as follows: —

"On the river boats are mysteriously abundant; everywhere they congregate in vast numbers; like a stream they advance and retire unceasingly. Thus the chances of contact are many; so are accidents even to the breaking of one another's boats, to the injury of men's bodies, while more serious consequences might ensue!

HOUQUA, MOUQUA, PwANKEIQUA."

" More better no go," warned Houqua, In his pigeon English.

In 1844 Russell Sturgis retired from business and came home to Boston to join his children, who had been sent there to school, their mother having died in Manila in 1837. Sturgis then married again, his wife being Julia A. Bolt, a sister of Robert A. Bolt's mother. He found the scale of living in that day more expensive than he had expected and therefore decided to return with his family to the East. He was to sail on the " Canada " from Boston to London, where he was to connect with a ship that was to take him eastward. The expressman who brought In the family luggage from Jamaica Plain was delayed by an open drawbridge and failed to get to the wharf until after the vessel had sailed. Sturgis and his family decided not to sail without the luggage and had to wait over for the next boat. It is said that when he found the delay occurred through no fault of the expressman, he treated the expressman so kindly that the man was so surprised and overcome that he Immediately burst into tears. The steamer on which they finally crossed did not arrive in London in time to catch the boat sailing eastward, therefore Sturgis and his family had to remain a number of weeks in London before making connections. During this time he was asked by Mr. Bates, the senior member of Baring Bros. & Co., to become a partner in the firm, which position he accepted, finally becoming head of the house. It was jokingly said in the family that if it had not been for the dilatory expressman Mr. Sturgis would never have become head of the firm of Baring Bros. & Co. He never returned to this country, dying in England in 1887.

Mr. Sturgis's genial, hearty, and kindly personality is well remembered by many Bostonians whom he warmly welcomed and sumptuously entertained at his town house in Carlton House Terrace and at his country place, first at Walton-on-Thames and later at Leatherhead. His American guests were often astonished at his up-to-date information, and accurate memory of births, marriages, and deaths among his acquaintances in Boston, as he always showed a genuine and constant interest in all his friends in this country. He was one of the generous contributors to the Boston Art Museum when its new building was built in Copley Square by his son John H. Sturgis.

COLONEL THOMAS HANDASYD PERKINS

Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Jr., son of Colonel Perkins, described in last year's pamphlet, was invariably known as " Short-

arm Tom " because his right arm was a trifle shorter than his left, a defect, however, which didn't prevent his " landing " it in the right place when occasion demanded. While he was in London there was no one skilful enough to box with him and so his friends

recommended that he go to a curious old African sparrer, named Richmond, who had such long arms that he could button his

breeches at the knee without stooping at all. During the first lesson Colonel Perkins was at first hit very hard, but later retaliated by fighting the African backwards until he was knocked into the window and would have gone completely through had not his antagonist and his friends pulled him back by the ankles. After he had extricated a few pieces of glass from his arms, he said with great respect for his amateur sparring partner: "Golly, Massa Major, how you do hit wid dat right of yours ! Why, I radder be kicked by old Massa's black mule dan hab you hit me again like dat. No, by golly, I don't want any mo' of dat hitten here." It is interesting to record that Richmond was born at Richmond on Staten Island. He became a body-servant to General Earl Percy when the English took possession of Long Island during the Revolution, and later accompanied his master to England, where he served him for a number of years. He then took up prize-fighting and soon became a champion.

Another example of the Colonel's strength and agility was shown when he and the well-known actor James Wallack were leaving the Federal Street Theatre in Boston. A man very much under the influence of liquor rushed at them with a knife, whereupon Colonel Perkins parried the blow and felled the assailant to the ground, but himself received a bad wound. It was later discovered that the attacker was none other than Junius Brutus Booth, the actor, who doubtless was jealous over the success of Wallack, and who had intended his blow for his rival instead of for Colonel Perkins.

When Colonel Perkins first went to China he was very young, and very homesick, and was much disappointed not to be received more cordially by John Perkins Cushing, the head of the firm of J. & T. H. Perkins, who happened to be very much occupied when he arrived. Young Perkins presented a letter of introduction from Mrs. Forbes, a sister of his father, which was met with a curt " There's your desk." Nothing was said for a long time, young Perkins in the mean time spending his time making lamp-lighters, when suddenly Mr. Cushing looked over at him and said, " Is your Aunt as fat as she used to be?" "Ten times fatter" was the reply, and the conversation again ended. This may have been the same aunt who asked one of the younger members of the family to put a pillow in the small of her back. The reply came, " You haven't any small to your back, Aunty." A friendship between Mr. Cushing and his young apprentice quickly began, and the two became lifelong friends.

Not many days after their first meeting Mr. Cushing asked the new arrival if he would take an armed boat and go up to Houqua's

and get from him a hundred thousand dollars. Perkins got ready for the expedition and then waited around for further instructions,

thinking he would need a letter of introduction to the comprador. Mr. Cushing said that this was very unnecessary, as all the business with Houqua was by word of mouth. The Chinaman promptly appeared when he knew an American had arrived to see him, and invited him ashore, saying in his pigeon English, " Hi ya, my welly glad sabe that son my olo flen, Mr. Perkins, my welly much chin chin you, askee come ashore, come ashore; as for dollar, can hab, yes, can hab leckly." While the money was being counted out, Houqua invited young Perkins to lunch with him and to attend an old Chinese play which Houqua said had been going on for several weeks. Finally the play was over, Houqua amusingly remarking that "the tide would not wait even for Confucius " and therefore the play must come to an end for the day. The dollars were taken back safely to Canton.

Colonel Perkins spent a good many years of his life in London, where he made many warm friends. He also acquired the reputation

of being one of the best-dressed men of his day and of having the handsomest leg in London. Wliile there he served on the staff of General Devereux for over two years. On one occasion the question of wearing knee-breeches or trousers was discussed, and those present decided to ask Major Perkins what his decision would be. His answer was that all men who had bad legs might come in trousers, and, as General Devereux expressed it, " trousers were very scarce that season at Almack's."

On another occasion a marquis had driven six horses through the streets of London and had been fined, as this was against the municipal regulations. Major Perkins declared that the offender hadn't known how to do it, and he promptly made bets with all the people in the room that he could drive his six-in-hand about the Park without being fined. The next morning the same party of men scrambled into their seats in the drag and the six-in-hand started on its way about London. In a short time a " bobby " ordered them to stop, remarking that it was contrary to the law to drive six horses about the streets of London. " I am aware of that," answered Colonel Perkins. " Then I must summon you," replied the officer. " I am Colonel Thomas H. Perkins of Park Lane," was the reply, " and I am not breaking that regulation. If you will take the trouble to inspect my off-wheeler you will perceive that he is a mule and I know of no regulation which prevents a gentleman from driving five horses and a mule to his drag if he pleases." None on the drag had noticed the mule, and when they did see it there was a shout of laughter from every one, with the exclamation, " You have won, Tom," and the " bobby " remarked, " Damned Yankee trick that," as Colonel Perkins touched up his horses and started for home.

General Devereux praised Colonel Perkins very highly while he was his staff officer. One day a number of men were having a

discussion and the Marquis of Hertford said he knew a certain thing was so. Some one else asked him how he knew this, and he replied, " Because Tom Perkins told me so." Again the questioner rather carelessly asked who Tom Perkins was and why he should always be quoted. The questioner again was admonished by the Marquis, who replied that Tom Perkins was a young man whom he admired and respected; that he admired any man who could knock Richmond through a window, and respected a young man who when he came to hunt with them not only brought nags enough to horse himself but had spare mounts for some of his own impecunious relatives. He further stated that he had seen the questioner riding some of Tom's horses himself. There was a shout from all those in the room, and the questioner declared that he was sorry he had spoken.

When Colonel Perkins returned to America he purchased a house at Nahant which was owned at one time by General Charles J. Paine, the famous yachtsman. Perkins was always fond of the water and was an excellent hand in steering a small boat. Captain Dumaresq came back from Baltimore and described a very beautiful schooner which Perkins bought, and made a match with her against the " Sylph," which was to be sailed by John Perkins Cushing and Capt. R. B. Forbes. The race was to a buoy off the outer light in Boston Harbour, it being agreed that the first boat around should drive a boat-hook into the buoy and the next boat should take it out. The Perkins-Dumaresq yacht, which was called the " Dream," rounded the buoy first, and the Colonel drove his boat-hook into it and succeeded in first reaching home. The boat-hook never was brought back, and for years afterwards, when Colonel Perkins met Captain Forbes on Temple Place or on the Common he used to yell:

"Ben, ahoy! Where is my boat-hook?"

Colonel Perkins was born in his father's house on Pearl Street and later attended school at Exeter Academy, where the master

declared he was a very rare fellow because he had "a watch, a fowling piece and a Lexicon," a rare combination at that time.

He married Miss Jane Francis Dumaresq and they lived in Boston, first on Chauncy Street and then at 1 Winthrop Place. He became a partner in the firm of J. & T. H. Perkins, and was so successful that in 1834 he built a house of his own at 1 Joy Street, where he passed many years. To their house came many of the important people of this time, — Harrison Gray Otis, Judge Story, Samuel Appleton, Thomas L. Winthrop, Daniel Webster, Nathaniel Amory, Major Joseph Russell, Mr. and Mrs. Everett, Augustus Thorndike. Francis Codman, Charles Hammond, J. P. Cushing, Thomas and Lothrop Motley, Louis Stackpole, Henry Cabot, Col. T. G. Carey, W. H. Gardiner, and others. His father's house in Temple Place was the rendezvous of all the important people of the day. Mention is often made of the wonderful Thanksgiving dinners there, which were attended by four generations, those present often numbering over sixty, and occupying two rooms for the dinner-table. Upon these occasions it was always customary after dinner for the youngest child to walk down the entire length of the table, and it is recorded that the last one to achieve this feat was a great-grand-daughter, now Mrs. F. C. Shattuck, who was then about five years old.

When Colonel Perkins realized that he was about to die he said to a friend of his: " I am about as good as Gus Thorndike, Jim Otis, or Charlie Hammond, and almost as good as Frank Codman. I shall go where they go, and that is where I wish to go." In a few weeks this fine gentleman died, in the year 1850.

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Guest Tom Scully

Linda and Terry,

I spent some time looking more thoroughly into LaRouche and his intel apparatus and I was going to post on what I've found and how it's influenced my thinking, and I wanted to get into the fact that John Train's grandfather, CHarles Russell Train, was 117 years older than John, and that John's father, Arthur was also an only child, a product of a second marriage, late in his father's life, but I have to shelve all that, for now. I also wanted to post about John Train's other half siblings, his mother's children, but I am postponing that subject for now, too. I've found a good new source on John Train and his college friends, written by an author I've recenlty quoted, but that post will be delayed, too....because:

(I am not going to post a summary now, but I'll be happy to answer questions....the crux is that Thomas E. Gouttierre plays a mighty big role and John Train may just be a principle in an intelligence operations that has resulted in enormouse repercussions for the US and the world. IMO the "one right wing" political party, encompassing both democrats and republicans and the media, all owned by the same corporatists, is the root cause of this dysfunction....)

(Read the lower footnote on page 62)

http://books.google.com/books?id=kZ7E6S02G...t&resnum=3#

Afghanistan-Washington's Secret War By Phillip Bonosky

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/article...elief_Committee

Updated: 1/91

Categories:Political, Service

Background: The Afghanistan Relief Committee (ARC) is a private, 501 ©(3) tax-exempt organization established by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Robert Neumann and Mary Ann Dubs in 1980 to help Afghan refugees from the war between the mujahedeen and the Soviet-backed government. (1,3) Initially the group worked within the United States, using the media and organizing activities to publicize the situation of the refugees. ARC then began to work directly with Afghan refugees living in camps inside the Pakistan border, and more recently has been providing humanitarian aid in Afghanistan. (1) ARC is housed at the law offices of attorney John Train, president of ARC. (3)...

....Private Connections: ARC maintains an office at a firm in which board president John Train has an interest. It paid the firm $13,250 in 1985 and $4,500 in 1985 to cover the cost of rent and accounting services. During 1986 ARC paid approximately $34,000 to an advertising agency of which a member of the ARC board of directors is president. (2)

Rosanne Klass was a founding member of the Afghanistan Council of the Asia Society and is on the board of the anticommunist,"democracy-building" Freedom House. Through ARC and these groups she coordinated efforts to disseminate promujahedeen information to the western world. Klass has been described, even by other Afghan rebel supporters as "obsessed" and a "fanatic."(3) Her connection with Freedom House gave Klass access to government officials and advisers such as Freedom House Trustees Zbigniew Brzezinski and Eugene Wigner. Freedom House Chairman Leo Cherne was a close associate of then-CIA head William Casey. (3) When visitors come to ARC seeking information on the country, they are referred to works of Klass and told to contact her at Freedom House. (3)....

....Thomas E. Gouttierre worked in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan. He was the director of the Center for Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska. Gouttierre was denounced by the Afghan government radio for working with the CIA. He attended a pro-mujahedeen conference in 1981 with Karen McKay of Committee for a Free Afghanistan. (3) Dupree serves on the board of AFA. (9)

Senator Gordon Humphrey sat or sits on the boards of The Mercy Fund and the Council for International Development. Both groups work in support of the Afghan mujahedeen. (4,5)....

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...elief_Committee

...."ARC was founded shortly after the onset of the Ronald Reagan administration, a time when many anticommunist, freedom fighter non-governmental organizations (NGOs) undertook the cause of the Afghan mujahedeen resistance. Among the many support groups founded at that time were the Committee for a Free Afghanistan (CFA), American Friends of Afghanistan (AFA), and the Afghanistan Information Center (AIC)--all of which received funding, directly or indirectly, from the government funded National Endowment for Democracy."[2]

"It has been suggested that ARC was founded to organize support for Zia Khan Nassery to head a puppet government which would be under the guidance of the CIA through its cover group, The Asia Foundation. However, other observers argue that ARC was formed in response to the U.S. government policy of working through NGOs to carry out foreign policy goals that could not be conducted through normal channels. In this case it was support for the mujahedeen opposition to the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. It was believed that working through 'private' organizations would maintain the credibility of the Afghan resistance as an 'indigenous freedom struggle.'"[3] ....

Castro seemed much smarter than the American people, in fall, 2001:

http://vdedaj.club.fr/cuba/npa_fidel_20011102.html

TELEVISED PRESENTATION BY PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO RUZ ON THE PRESENT INTERNATIONAL SITUATION, THE ECONOMIC AND WORLD CRISIS AND ITS IMPACT ON CUBA. HAVANA, NOVEMBER 2, 2001

My fellow countrymen:

.I do not share the view that the United States' main pursuit in Afghanistan was oil. I rather see it as part of a geo-strategic concept. No one would make such a mistake simply to go after oil, least of all a country with access to any oil in the world, including all the Russian oil and gas it wishes. It would be sufficient for the U.S. to invest, to buy and to pay. Based on its privileges, the United States can even purchase it by minting reserve bonds on a 30 years maturity span.</b> That is how, throughout more than 80 years, it has bought products and services accounting for over 6.6 trillion dollars.

Military actions in Afghanistan are fraught with dangers. That is an extremely troubled area where two large countries have fought several wars. There are profound national and religious antagonisms between them. The population of the disputed territory is mostly Islamic. As the tempers grow frail, a war might break out; and both countries have nuclear capability. That risk is as serious as the destabilization of the Pakistani government by the war. That government is being placed in a highly complicated position. The Taliban emerged there, and they share the same Pashtun ethnia with an undetermined number of Pakistanis, in fact, no less than 10 million; and I have chosen the most conservative figure among those that have been mentioned. They also share with fanatic passion the same religious beliefs. The U.S. military are usually well versed in their trade. I have met some when, after retirement, they have visited Cuba as scholars. They write books, tell stories and make political analyses. I was then not surprised by the information released by The New Yorker magazine of October 29 in the sense that there was a contingency plan to seize the Pakistani nuclear warheads, in case a radical group took over the government of that country.

It was absolutely impossible for the American strategists to overlook that substantial risk. Every bomb dropped on Afghanistan, every picture of dead children or people dying or suffering from terrible wounds, tend to compound that risk. What is hard to imagine is the reaction of those responsible for protecting those weapons, to a plan that is by now of public domain as much as Chronicle of a death foretold by Gabriel García Marquez.

I am not aware of something the U.S. Special Services should know only too well, that is, where and how those nuclear warheads are kept and the way in which they are protected. I try to imagine -and it is not easy-- how such an action could be conducted by elite troops. Perhaps, one day someone might tell how it could be done. But, still, I find it hard to imagine the political scenario in the aftermath of such an action when the fight would be against over 100 million additional Muslims. The U.S. government has denied the existence of such contingency plan. It was to be expected. It could not do otherwise.

The most logical question that crosses my mind is whether the heads of governments and statesmen who are friends of the United States and have a longstanding political and practical experience did not see these potential dangers, and why they did not warn the United States and tried to persuade it. Obviously, America's friends fear it but do not appreciate it.

It is always difficult to try to guess when it comes to these issues. But, there is something of which I am absolutely certain: it would be sufficient if 20 or 30 thousand men used clever methods of irregular warfare, the same that the United States wants to use there, and that struggle could last 20 years. <b>It is completely impossible to subdue the Afghan adversary in an irregular warfare on that country's ground with bombs and missiles, whatever the caliber and the power of these weapons.</b>

They have already been through the hardest psychological moments. They have lost everything: family, housing, and properties. They have absolutely nothing else they can lose. Nothing seems to indicate that they will surrender their weapons, even if their most notable leaders were killed. The use of tactical weapons, which some have suggested, would have the effect of multiplying by one hundred that mistake and with it unbearable criticism and universal isolation. Therefore, I have never believed that the leaders of that country have seriously considered such tactics, not even when they were most enraged....

Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert Afghan War; $2 Billion Program Reversed Tide for Rebels Series: CIA IN AFGHANISTAN Series Number: 1/2; [FINAL Edition]

Steve Coll. The Washington Post Washington, D.C.: Jul 19, 1992. pg. a.01

.... During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory - into the Soviet Union itself. Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials.

"We can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union," Casey said, according to Mohammed Yousaf, a Pakistani general who attended the meeting.

Casey's visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan administration decision in March 1985, reflected in National Security Decision Directive 166, to sharply escalate U.S. covert action in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. Abandoning a policy of simple harassment of Soviet occupiers, the Reagan team decided secretly to let loose on the Afghan battlefield an array of U.S. high technology and military expertise in an effort to hit and demoralize Soviet commanders and soldiers. Casey saw it as a prime opportunity to strike at an overextended, potentially vulnerable Soviet empire.

Eight years after Casey's visit to Pakistan, the Soviet Union is no more. Afghanistan has fallen to the heavily armed, fraticidal mujaheddin rebels. The Afghans themselves did the fighting and dying - and ultimately won their war against the Soviets - and not all of them laud the CIA's role in their victory. But even some sharp critics of the CIA agree that in military terms, its secret 1985 escalation of covert support to the mujaheddin made a major difference in Afghanistan, the last battlefield of the long Cold War.

How the Reagan administration decided to go for victory in the Afghan war between 1984 and 1988 has been shrouded in secrecy and clouded by the sharply divergent political agendas of those involved. But with the triumph of the mujaheddin rebels over Afghanistan's leftist government in April and the demise of the Soviet Union, some intelligence officials involved have decided to reveal how the covert escalation was carried out.

The most prominent of these former intelligence officers is Yousaf, the Pakistani general who supervised the covert war between 1983 and 1987 and who last month published in Europe and Pakistan a detailed account of his role and that of the CIA, titled "The Bear Trap."....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer

rom U.S., the ABC's of Jihad

Violent Soviet-Era Textbooks Complicate Afghan Education Efforts

By Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, March 23, 2002; Page A01

In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code......

Many of the 4 million texts being trucked into Afghanistan, and millions more on the way, still feature Koranic verses and teach Muslim tenets.

The White House defends the religious content, saying that Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture and that the books "are fully in compliance with U.S. law and policy." Legal experts, however, question whether the books violate a constitutional ban on using tax dollars to promote religion.

Organizations accepting funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development must certify that tax dollars will not be used to advance religion. The certification states that AID "will finance only programs that have a secular purpose. . . . AID-financed activities cannot result in religious indoctrination of the ultimate beneficiaries."

The issue of textbook content reflects growing concern among U.S. policymakers about school teachings in some Muslim countries in which Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism are on the rise. A number of government agencies are discussing what can be done to counter these trends.

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush have repeatedly spotlighted the Afghan textbooks in recent weeks. Last Saturday, Bush announced during his weekly radio address that the 10 million U.S.-supplied books being trucked to Afghan schools would teach "respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry."

The first lady stood alongside Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai on Jan. 29 to announce that AID would give the University of Nebraska at Omaha $6.5 million to provide textbooks and teacher training kits.

AID officials said in interviews that they left the Islamic materials intact because they feared Afghan educators would reject books lacking a strong dose of Muslim thought. The agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.....

.... Some legal experts disagreed. A 1991 federal appeals court ruling against AID's former director established that taxpayers' funds may not pay for religious instruction overseas, said Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law expert at American University, who litigated the case for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ayesha Khan, legal director of the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the White House has "not a legal leg to stand on" in distributing the books.

"Taxpayer dollars cannot be used to supply materials that are religious," she said.

Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994. .....

.... AID dropped funding of Afghan programs in 1994. But the textbooks continued to circulate in various versions, even after the Taliban seized power in 1996.

Officials said private humanitarian groups paid for continued reprintings during the Taliban years. Today, the books remain widely available in schools and shops, to the chagrin of international aid workers. ....

.....Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujaheddin, who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says.

"We were quite shocked," said Doug Pritchard, who reviewed the primers in December while visiting Pakistan on behalf of a Canada-based Christian nonprofit group. "The constant image of Afghans being natural warriors is wrong. Warriors are created. If you want a different kind of society, you have to create it."

....In early January, UNICEF began printing new texts for many subjects but arranged to supply copies of the old, unrevised U.S. books for other subjects, including Islamic instruction.

Within days, the Afghan interim government announced that it would use the old AID-produced texts for its core school curriculum. UNICEF's new texts could be used only as supplements.

Earlier this year, the United States tapped into its $296 million aid package for rebuilding Afghanistan to reprint the old books, but decided to purge the violent references.

About 18 of the 200 titles the United States is republishing are primarily Islamic instructional books, which agency officials refer to as "civics" courses. Some books teach how to live according to the Koran, Brown said, and "how to be a good Muslim."

UNICEF is left with 500,000 copies of the old "militarized" books, a $200,000 investment that it has decided to destroy, according to U.N. officials.

On Feb. 4, Brown arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistani border town in which the textbooks were to be printed, to oversee hasty revisions to the printing plates. Ten Afghan educators labored night and day, scrambling to replace rough drawings of weapons with sketches of pomegranates and oranges, Brown said.

"We turned it from a wartime curriculum to a peacetime curriculum," he said.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/afghanistan/schools.html

Getting children back to school is a number one priority in Afghanistan's post war government. But the big question is: what will they learn?

Back to school in Afghanistan

CBC News Online | January 27, 2004

The National | Airdate: May 6, 2002

Reporter: Carol Off | Producer: Heather Abbott | Editor: Catherine McIsaac

....A student learns to add and subtract bullets

Math teachers use bullets as props to teach lessons in subtraction. This isn't their idea. During decades of war, the classroom has been the best place to indoctrinate young people with their duty to fight. Government-sponsored textbooks in Afghanistan are filled with violence. For years, war was the only lesson that counted.

The Mujahideen, Afghanistan's freedom fighters, used the classroom to prepare children to fight the Soviet empire. The Russians are long gone but the textbooks are not. The Mujahideen had wanted to prepare the next generation of Afghans to fight the enemy, so pupils learned the proper clips for a Kalashnikov rifle, the weight of bombs needed to flatten a house, and how to calculate the speed of bullets. Even the girls learn it.

"We were providing education behind the enemy lines."

But the Mujahideen had a lot of help to create this warrior culture in the school system from the United States, which paid for the Mujahideen propaganda in the textbooks. It was all part of American Cold War policy in the 1980s, helping the Mujahideen defeat the Soviet army on Afghan soil.

University of Nebraska

The University of Nebraska was front and center in that effort. The university did the publishing and had an Afghan study center and a director who was ready to help defeat the "Red Menace."

"I think Ronald Reagan himself felt that this was a violation of the rights of the Afghans," says Tom Goutier, who was behind the Mujahideen textbook project. "I think a lot of those working for him thought this was an opportunity for us to do the Soviet Union some damage."

Goutier's personal involvement in Afghanistan began in 1964 as a young U.S. peace corps volunteer. Over the years, he rubbed shoulders with Mujahideen leaders and he learned Afghan languages. During the 1980s, his love of America and his love of Afghanistan merged.

"We were living in an era in which the Afghans were trying to learn to survive," he says. "They were fighting for their survival in which a million of them were killed, a million and a half wounded. So, at that time, there was a lot of militaristic thinking."

The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in 1979. Its fighting forces were well armed and ruthless. The Mujahideen fought the Soviets throughout the 1980s with a lot of covert aid from the U.S.

In 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. put a rush order on its proxy war in Afghanistan. The CIA gave Mujahideen an overwhelming arsenal of guns and missiles. But a lesser-known fact is that the U.S. also gave the Mujahideen hundreds of millions of dollars in non-lethal aid; $43 million just for the school textbooks. The U.S. Agency for International Development, AID, coordinated its work with the CIA, which ran the weapons program.

"We were providing education behind the enemy lines," says Goutier. "We were providing military support against the enemy lines. So this was a kind of coordinated effort indeed.

"I eventually was involved in some of the discussions, negotiations for removing the Soviets from Afghanistan. I was an American specialist in these discussions and many people in those discussions said just as important as (the) introduction of stinger missiles was the introduction of the humanitarian assistance because the Soviets never believed the U.S. would go to that extent."

"The U.S. government told the AID to let the Afghan war chiefs decide the school curriculum and the content of the textbooks," says CBC'S Carol Off. "What discussions did you have with the Mujahideen leaders? Was it any effort to say maybe this isn't the best for an eight-year-old's mind?"

"No, because we were told that that was not for negotiations and that the content was to be that which they decided," says Goutier.

There were those who opposed the text book project, such as Sima Samar who ran a school in those days, but opposition did little good.

Sima Samar

"I was opposing but we had no choice," says Samar, who served as minister of women's affairs for the interim government that ran Afghanistan after the Taliban were driven out. "It was already done and… nobody had the freedom to speak against all those things."

"I was interested in being of any type of assistance that I could to help the Afghans get out of their mess and to be frank also anything that would help the United States in order to advance its interests," says Goutier.

American interests were well served. But after the defeat of the Soviet empire, the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan. The country descended into civil war. The U.S. gave almost no money to help rebuild after the war against the Soviets and no money to rewrite the school textbooks.

.....The latest war in Afghanistan is now over but there's a constant threat of a new one. In the markets, tailors make uniforms for the stream of young men who want to be mercenaries. Only hunting guns are sold now since the heavy weapons are banned. But they still exist, woven into the very fabric of the country.

The Afghan children who returned to school in 2002 got new textbooks with new ideas but from the same old publisher. The University of Nebraska secured the contract again for $6.5 million from the United States government.

However this time there was a promise that they will not contain war propaganda.

http://web.archive.org/web/20011126021357/...examined+.shtml

CIA, scholar links to Asia, Mideast reexamined

By Chris Mooney, Globe Correspondent, 11/25/2001

Andrew Hess, who teaches a course on Afghanistan at Tufts University, is one of the nation's top specialists on a suddenly crucial part of the world. Since the United States started its Afghan campaign - and began getting criticism for its lack of expertise in Central Asia - Hess has waited for the government to tap his knowledge.

He's still waiting.

This fall Hess has taken calls from newspaper reporters and television stations - but hasn't received one call from US intelligence. He says he's baffled.

''I'm the only person with a program at the graduate level in the United States that deals with southwest Asia,'' he said.

Since Sept. 11, the CIA has made clear that it is eager for recruits familiar with the Middle East and Central Asia, especially those who can speak Arabic, Dari, or Pashto. And applications have shot through the stratosphere, many from recent college graduates.

But the deeper knowledge of the area and language lies not with students but with professors like Hess. And when it comes to academics, many intelligence watchers say that contact with the CIA largely remains limited to those scholars who have well-established credentials as insiders.

....The Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha has longstanding ties with Washington policymakers and collaborates regularly with intelligence. ''We're at war,'' said center director Thomas Gouttierre. ''I'm an American, and the American government is leading this war. If we have some knowledge or analysis that could be of advantage, we should be forthcoming.''....

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/ti...amp;match=exact

In Nebraska, an Oasis of Insight Into Afghanistan's Heart; [biography]

Jodi Wilgoren. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Oct 6, 2001. pg. A.8

WHEN Thomas E. Gouttierre, a baker's son from Maumee, Ohio, applied for the Peace Corps in 1964, he had never even flown on an airplane, never mind traveled beyond the United States. He wanted to go somewhere that ''wasn't hot'' and ''wasn't in the Western Hemisphere,'' so he listed Iran, Turkey and ''anyplace but Latin America'' as his three choices.

Soon Mr. Gouttierre was teaching English and coaching basketball in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Instead of the Peace Corps' standard two years, he stayed nearly 10. Then he came here to the University of Nebraska's Omaha campus, home to the nation's only Center for Afghanistan Studies and its largest library of works on Afghanistan. As dean of international studies, he visited 70-some nations before losing count, and has studied the Taliban and Osama bin Laden for the United Nations....

...THE Center for Afghanistan Studies was started in 1973 as the Omaha campus's attempt to break into international academics by focusing on an area few others considered. From 1986 to 1994, the university spent more than $50 million in grants training teachers and funneling textbooks to more than 130,000 students in Afghanistan and Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. The library has 8,000 manuscripts and documents on the region, from an 1860 handwritten volume of poetry known as the Haft Aurang to the Afghan Communist Party's first newspaper a century later.

Mr. Gouttierre, who graduated from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, never finished his Ph.D., though he has three honorary doctorates....

http://web.archive.org/web/20040224015345/...4/0402teamb.php

A History of Threat Escalation

Remembering Team B

By Tom Barry | February 12, 2004

The most notorious attempt by militarists and right-wing ideologues to challenge the CIA was the Team B affair in the mid-1970s. The 1975-76 “Team B” operation was a classic case of threat escalation by hawks determined to increase military budgets and step up the U.S. offensive in the cold war. Concocted by right-wing ideologues and militarists, Team B aimed to bury the politics of détente and the SALT arms negotiations, which were supported by the leadership of both political parties. 1..

http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990215/hiro/2

article | posted January 28, 1999 (February 15, 1999 issue)

The Cost of an Afghan 'Victory'

Dilip Hiro

page 2 of 4 | PREV 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 NEXT

As for Saudi Arabia, the remaining member of the troika, it had long been a bulwark of anti-Communism, its rulers lavish in their funding of antileftist forces around the globe--be it in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal or Italy. The fact that the population of Afghanistan was 99 percent Muslim was an additional incentive to Riyadh.

The US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance's financing, training and arming of the mujahedeen--recruited from among the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan--was coordinated and supervised by the CIA. The day-to-day management rested with Pakistan's ISI. All donations in weapons and cash to the campaign by various sources--chiefly Washington and Riyadh--were handled by the CIA. These amounted to about $40 billion, with the bulk coming from the United States and Saudi Arabia, which contributed equally.

The volunteers underwent military training and political education. Both were imparted by the ISI. In the political classes the mujahedeen were given a strong dose of nationalism and Islam. The fact that the Soviets were foreign and atheistic made them doubly despicable. The intention was to fire up militant Muslims to fight Soviet imperialism. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles in the later stages of the jihad, the mujahedeen made a hash of Soviet helicopter gunships, a critical tool of the USSR's counterinsurgency campaign.

Article date is a mistype, context and archive shows http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.tr....Zalmay.Oil.htm it must be "January 13, 2001" :

http://web.archive.org/web/20070807060700/....Zalmay.Oil.htm

Zalmay Khalilzad and the Bush Agenda

by Jennifer Van Bergen

t r u t h o u t | January 13, 2001 - The appointment by the Bush Administration of Zalmay Khalilzad as special envoy to Afghanistan which was announced on December 31, 2001, only nine days after the U.S.-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul, seems timely and logical. Khalilzad, a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan with extensive knowledge of the region and experience, appears to be the right person for the job.

Khalilzad's presence, however, is the fruit of an older agenda, one that reaches back at least to the Reagan era, and Khalilzad has more connections to that agenda than meets the eye.

Simply put, Khalilzad's appointment means oil. Oil for the United States. Oil for Unocal, a U.S. company long criticized for doing business in countries with repressive governments and rumored to have close ties to the Department of State and the intelligence community.

Zalmay Khalilzad was an advisor for Unocal. In the mid 1990s, while working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal at the time it had signed letters of approval from the Taliban. The analyses were for a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. In December 1997, Khalilzad joined Unocal officials at a reception for an invited Taliban delegation to Texas.

UNOCAL LONG CRITICIZED FOR BUSINESS PRACTICES

Unocal, the world's ninth largest oil company according to the National Center for Policy Research, but according to the Los Angeles Times, smaller than America's "most powerful energy companies," has long been criticized for doing business with repressive foreign governments. Legal action was brought against Unocal in 1997 by Burmese refugees for human rights abuses which the refugees claimed were committed by the Burmese military hired by Unocal to protect their operations.

Unocal has also been criticized for its business dealings in this country. A 1998 petition signed by Environmental, Human Rights and Women's Groups, asked California Attorney General to revoke Unocal's Charter, citing Unocal's record as a "repeat offender" of environmental, labor and deceptive practices laws. The petition claimed that Unocal was principally responsible for the notorious 1969 oil blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel and has since then polluted multiple sites from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Petitioners claimed that Unocal committed hundreds of violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, treated U.S. workers unethically and unfairly, engaged in a pattern of illegal deceptions of the courts, stockholders and the public, and "usurped political power," undermining U.S. foreign policy.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Exxon filed a report in August 2001 with antitrust regulators which states that Unocal "subverted the standard-setting process" of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "to obtain unlawful monopoly profits." The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating a questionable patent Unocal obtained behind the backs of CARB and oil competitors after Unocal sat in on official meetings to establish cleaner-burning gasoline. FTC investigators say that the patent may have contributed to last summer's Midwest gasoline crisis.

Other reports cite Unocal's open support of "the most brutal dictatorship" in Asia, General Suharto of Indonesia, where Unocal is one of the largest oil companies, a $5.5 million legal settlement of a citizens suit filed by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund against Unocal for pouring poisonous wastewater into the San Francisco Bay, and Unocal's attempts to intimidate two native tribes in Montana into renewing its pipeline lease without basic environmental protections.

There have been some claims that Unocal was getting briefings from the Department of State. Unocal denied any connection beyond that which a company doing business overseas would obtain from the DOS. However, a look at some of Unocal's CEOs and board members shows strong government ties. Charles Larson, former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Command sits on the board. So does Donald Rice, a former colleague of Khalilzad's at RAND Corp., who was Secretary of the Air force under Bush I. And Robert Oakley, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan during the time the CIA was funneling money and weapons through the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) to Afghan muhajeeden in the 1980s, later the U.S. special envoy to Somalia, worked subsequently for Unocal.

CENTGAS - THE AFGHAN OIL CONNECTION

Unocal was the "Development Manager" of the Centgas consortium. The purpose of Centgas was to build an 890-mile-long pipeline from Turkmenistan through Aghanistan to Pakistan.

Centgas, or the Central Asia Gas and Pipeline Consortium, was a group formed in the mid-1990s which was made up of the government of Turkmenistan and six international companies: Delta Oil Company (Saudi Arabia), Indonesia Petroleum, ITOCHU Oil Exploration Co. (Japan), Hyandai Engineering & Construction Co. (South Korea), Crescent Group (Pakistan) and Gazprom (Russia). Unocal owned nearly half of the shares of Centgas.

As Centgas' Development Manager, Unocal opened talks with the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. To show its good will, Unocal donated money to CARE projects in Afghanistan and provided support for earthquake relief efforts. (According to the CIA World Factbook, damaging earthquakes are known to occur in the Hindu Kush mountains, which run across the center of the country.)

According to L.A. Weekly, Unocal also gave nearly a million dollars to the University of Nebraska's Center for Afghan Studies, which Unocal stated was not used to "provide pipeline constructions skills training." Unocal said the money was used to provide "basic job skills training and education" for Afghans and elementary schooling for their children. However, according to the Asia Times, the Center for Afghan Studies also at one time produced a study of oil and gas reserves in Central Asia, placing their total worth at around US$3 trillion. Thus, the Center was not only interested in helping Afghans obtain basic education and job skills.

Thomas E. Gouttierre, the director of the Center for Aghan Studies, is an old friend of Zalmay Khalilzad. In fact, Gouttierre coached Khalilzad on a high school basketball team when "Zal" first visited America as an exchange student.

The Clinton administration offered backing for Unocal's Centgas project, but after the U.S. bombed Aghanistan in 1998 in retaliation for the Embassy bombings, Unocal withdrew from the consortium, citing "sharply deteriorating political conditions."

Unocal stated that it would only participate in a Centgas pipeline project "when and if" Aghanistan achieved the "peace and stability necessary to obtain financing from international agencies and a government that is recognized by the United States and the United Nations." In February 1999, Unocal denied reports published in Pakistan that it was considering rejoining Centgas, and Unocal continues to state on its Homepage that it has no plans to return to the consortium. Unocal spokesman, Mike Thatcher, stated last October that "We're not going to do it, but sooner or later, someone will."

However, it is clear that the December 5, 2001 "Bonn Agreement," which establishes an interim Aghani government overseen by the United Nations, will fulfill Unocal's prerequisite of an "internationally recognized government." One representative of the Turkmenistan embassy told L.A. Weekly, "So we are hoping that once peace is restored in Afghanistan, building these pipeliness will again become a priority."

ENTER KHALILZAD

Khalilzad's appointment as special envoy to Afghanistan raises suspicions about the priorities of the Bush administration. Long-standing political and business ties connect Khalilzad to an oil agenda. The United States has been bombing Afghanistan in retaliation for terrorist attacks on this country. But Khalilzad's appointment makes it clear that oil is now -- and perhaps has been since before 9/11 -- behind U.S. Afghan policy.

Zalmay Khalilzad was born about 50 years ago in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, 70 miles south of the Soviet border. While he was still young, his family moved to Kabul, where his Pashtun father worked in the government, which was then a monarchy, and Zalmay attended English-language schools.

According to Thomas E. Gouttierre, the director for the Unocal-funded Center for Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the Khalilzad family "certainly would have been people among the intellectual elite of the time."

Gouttierre met Zalmay when the young Afghani first visited the United States as an exchange student through the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker charitable organization. Gouttierre coached him in basketball.

He returned to Afghanistan to complete his high school, but earned his undergraduate degree from the American University in Beirut. At that time, Beirut was still the "Paris of the Middle East."

Khalilzad obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1979 (the same year the Soviets invaded his homeland), where, according to the New York Times News Service, "he became the protege of a famous hard-line strategic thinker." There he also met an Austrain woman, Cheryl Benard, whom he married. Benard writes novels and co-wrote a book about revolutionary Iran with Zalmay

In the early 1980s, Zalmay taught political science at Columbia University in New York, where he worked with Zbigniew Brzezinski. He was also executive director of the Friends of Afghanistan, a support group for the mujaheddins fighting the Soviets -- the same mujuaheddins later known to have spawned bin Laden.

In 1984, Khalilzad became an American citizen and joined the State Department on a one-year fellowship. Khalilzad's background and language skills earned him a permanent position on the State Department's Policy Planning Council during the Reagen era. There he worked under Paul Wolfowitz, then Reagan's director of policy planning, now the No. 2 man at the Pentagon. In 1998, the two, having retained close ties, joined others in signing an open letter to Clinton that argued for the overthrow of Saddam.

From 1985 to 1989, Zalmay served as special adviser to the undersecretary of state. He belonged to a small group of policymakers who advocated providing arms to the "resistance" fighters in Afghanistan.

Khalilzad then consulted for the Rand Corp., a conservative think tank, on defense issues and returned to Washington when Bush I took office, taking up the post of assistant deputy under-secretary of defense for policy planning. Again he worked closely with Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's No. 3 official.

He also got to know Dick Cheney at the Defense Department during the Gulf War.

During the Clinton years, Khalilzad returned to Rand and spent his time writing books and articles. After Bush II was elected, Cheney selected himm to head the transition team for defense. In May 2001, Bush appointed him the National Security Council official in charge of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. His direct superior was Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser, who herself had served as an oil consultant for Chevron.

ZALMAY, THE SOOTHSAYER

Khalilzad's critics point out that Zalmay, who gave a speech upon his arrival in Kabul condemning the Taliban, had at one time, as a paid adviser to oil multinational Unocal, courted and defended them. Indeed, Khalilzad has changed his tune so often that one analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Anatol Lieven, said, "If he was in private business rather than government, he would have been sacked long ago."

But Khalilzad has long and consistently argued that America ignored Afghanistan at its peril. In an article that appeared in the winter 2000 issue of the Washington Quarterly, co-authored by Rand colleague Daniel Byman, Khalilzad and Byman issued a stern warning about Afghanistan being "a haven for some of the world's most lethal anti-U.S. terrorists" who "pose a threat to U.S. soliders and civilians at home and abroad, to the Middle East peace process, and to the stability of our allies in the region." The two recommended taking measures to weaken the Taliban and support the Northern Alliance.

As Jacob Weisberg pointed out in a recent article on Slate News, "What's remarkable about Khalilzad's recommendations ...... isn't just how tragically prophetic they look in the light of Sept. 11. It's how closely they track the Bush administration's emerging Afghan policy."

Another writer points out how "little has been said in the media about the promiment role being played in Afghan policy by officials who advised the oil industry on Central Asia."

According to an article on an Islamic website, the December 5th "Bonn Agreement," which formed the U.N.-supervised interim government in Afghanistan, "consolidates American control over Afghanistan and lays the basis for uprooting Islam from it." The author claims that "America was not content with achieving the five aims announced by Bush to the masses before Congress shortly before the declaration of war against Afghanistan. Instead she went much further than this. The American government has begun to impose its actual mandate over Afghanistan under the cover of the United Nations and works to create a new Afghanistan, infuse it with western culture, [and] strengthen its chains to the hated wheel of American colonialism."

"America has disregarded the leaders of the tribes, the people of influence, position and standing in Afghanistan and replaced them with a handful of traitorous agents, the majority of which are westerners infatuated by the western culture," the Islamic writer states.

If the purpose of the bombing of Afghanistan, the purpose of the Bonn Agreement, the purpose of Khalilzad's appointment, is oil, should Americans be advised of our government's intentions? If this is the writing in the sand, and if our troops risk their lives for this, and thousands if not millions of Afghanis suffer and die, and millions of Muslims become even more alienated and angry, all for oil, where is the ballot box for us to place our vote in, where is Congress?

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2005/...nment_financed/

How the U.S. Government financed millions of Islamist textbooks in cooperation with the Taliban.

By John Stuart Blackton

....Let me start with a direct quotation from The Devil's Game:

"During the U.S.-Taliban era of cooperation from 1994 to 1998 - which ended with the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa...a key UNOCAL consultant [on cutting a deal for an oil pipeline through Taliban territory] was a University of Nebraska academic named Tom Goutierre...... funding for Goutierre's work was funded through the State Department's Agency for International Development, the CIA was is sponsor. It turned out that Goutierre's education program consisted of blatant Islamist propaganda including the creation of children's textbooks in which young Afghanis were taught to count by enumerating dead Russian soldiers and adding up Kalishnikov rifles"...........

..........Bob's [author Dreyfuss] evidence is unfairly called into question by some of the readers at TPM because he doesn't read Arabic. Jane's insights into Iraq are questioned because some readers (ignorantly) believe they were honed inside the Green Zone in Baghdad.

As someone who knows many of the events in Bob's book firsthand, speaks Arabic and (like Jane) regularly ventures well beyond the Green Zone, I find the bulk of the book's empirical evidence to be accurate and helpful in considering the questions that the author poses.....

...........I will wind up my engagement in the book club this week with a complimentary bow to Bob Dreyfuss' recounting of a little-known but telling bit of misguided interventionist policy in the world of the Islamists - a story in which I was directly involved.

Let me start with a direct quotation from The Devil's Game:

"During the U.S.-Taliban era of cooperation from 1994 to 1998 - which ended with the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa...a key UNOCAL consultant [on cutting a deal for an oil pipeline through Taliban territory] was a University of Nebraska academic named Tom Goutierre...... funding for Goutierre's work was funded through the State Department's Agency for International Development, the CIA was is sponsor. It turned out that Goutierre's education program consisted of blatant Islamist propaganda including the creation of children's textbooks in which young Afghanis were taught to count by enumerating dead Russian soldiers and adding up Kalishnikov rifles".

Bob doesn't go on to say that some 6 million of these American printed and American financed Islamist text books were vetted with our knowledge by a council of Sunni and Shia clerics who were the chosen religious representatives key warlords with whom we were allied in the fight against the Russians.

Goutierre actively sought to have his Afghan team and their textbooks recycled for another generation after U.S. forces toppled the Taliban regime. Sometimes, however, we do learn from our mistakes.

This time around, the US government listened to Afghan intellectual leaders who cautioned that Nebraska was known throughout the Afghan Diaspora as "Taliban U".

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-d...F8&n=283155

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review.

One of the CIA's first great moments of institutional reflection occurred in 1953, after American covert operatives helped overthrow Iran's left-leaning government and restored the Shah to power. The agency, then only six years old, had funded ayatollahs, mobilized the religious right and engineered a sophisticated propaganda campaign to successfully further its aims, and it wanted to know how it could reapply such tradecraft elsewhere, so it commissioned an internal report. Half a century later, the most prescient line from that report is one of caution, not optimism. "Possibilities of blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers," the document warned. Since this first known use of the term "blowback," countless journalists and scholars have chronicled the greatest blowback of all: how the staggering quantities of aid that America provided to anti-Marxist Islamic extremists during the Cold War inadvertently positioned those very same extremists to become America's next great enemy. (Indeed, Iran's religious leaders were among the first to turn against the United States.) Dreyfuss's volume reaches farther and deeper into the subject than most. He convincingly situates America's attempt to build an Islamic bulwark against Soviet expansion into Britain's history of imperialism in the region. And where other authors restrict their focus to the Afghan mujahideen, <b>Dreyfuss details a history of American support—sometimes conducted with startling blindness, sometimes, tacitly through proxies—for Islamic radicals in Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Syria.</b> At times, the assistance occurred openly through the American private sector, as Dreyfuss describes in a fascinating digression on Islamic banking. But ultimately, too few government officials were paying attention to the growth and dangers of political Islam. A CIA officer summarizes Dreyfuss's case when he says, "We saw it all in a short-term perspective"—the long-term consequences are what we're facing now. (Nov.)

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/tpmca...005/11/13-week/

by Bob Dreyfuss

........Yet throughout the book you will find, here and there, citations of prescient warnings from people involved in the game that by consorting with this or that force on the Islamic right we were "playing with fire." Perhaps that is the job of a policymaker--to play with fire. If so, that ought to have known a lot more about the flames they were fueling. And they did not.

To me, at least, the stories recounted in Devil's Game are as tragic as they are shocking. And it is my firm belief that we are making many of the same mistakes, again..........

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jun/14/world/fg-loya14

Los Angeles Times

June 14, 2002 Friday Home Edition

Section: Part A Main News; Part 1; Page 1; Foreign Desk

Headline: The World; Karzai Chosen As Leader, Vows To Rebuild Nation;

"Although challenged by two other candidates, his victory was preordained by the controversial influence of U.S. and other foreign advisors, which could taint the credibility of his tenure. Mohammad Zaher Shah, the nation's former king, withdrew from the political stage on the advice of President Bush's envoy [Zalmay Khalilzad].Former President Burhanuddin Rabbani's departure from the race is believed to have been arranged in return for a prestigious title to be bestowed later. Still, Karzai's selection--he received 1,295 of the 1,575 votes cast--clearly reflected majority sentiment among those gathered for the weeklong convocation. Even his rivals joined in the spirit of celebration over what they see as the beginning of a new age in their homeland."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/14/world/tr...-president.html

Traditional Council Elects Karzai as Afghan President

June 14, 2002, Friday

By CARLOTTA GALL (NYT); Foreign Desk

Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 14, Column 1, 1201 words

....The United States, which helped put him in power as part of its war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, openly backed his candidacy. The American envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was on stage offering his congratulations this evening as the results were read inside the vast tent where the loya jirga has been meeting for several days.

''He became a consensus candidate,'' said Mr. Khalilzad in an interview after the election. ''It looked like he was going to win, and it happens often in Afghan loya jirgas when a victory looks inevitable, then they move towards a consensus.''

Mr. Karzai had won over the strongest challengers to his side earlier in the week, securing important endorsements from the former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, who ruled out any post for himself, as well as a former president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and the strong Tajik faction in his own cabinet, including Defense Minister Muhammad Qasim Fahim. Mr. Karzai is an ethnic Pashtun.

A final challenge came when royalists put forward their own candidate for chairman of the loya jirga on Wednesday. But when the chairmanship was won this morning by Ismail Qasimyar, a supporter of Mr. Karzai, it became clear that there was broad support for him.......

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east...r_khalizad.html

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad

In September 2001, Zalmay Khalilzad, now the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and a key player in the country's democratic process, was working as an obscure staffer in the National Security Council.

But as the Bush administration's war on terror unfolded after 9/11, Khalilzad, an Afghan-born Muslim with a background in Middle East policy, rose to a prominent role as an adviser, Zalmay Khalilzad intermediary and policymaker. He was appointed as a special presidential envoy to Afghanistan following the U.S.-led invasion to oust the Taliban, and in 2003, Khalilzad became U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

He helped acting Afghan President Hamid Karzai set up a transitional government in the country of his birth and oversaw its first democratic elections in late 2004.

President Bush appointed Khalilzad to replace John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador to Iraq in June 2005 where his first task was negotiating a compromise between the Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis and secular groups over the constitution. He paid special attention to bringing Sunnis into the political process, especially after a coalition of Shiite parties won the most in parliamentary elections held in December 2005.

"The fundamental problem of Iraq is that the various communities are polarized along ethic and sectarian lines," Khalilzad told the NewsHour in February 2006. "And to deal with this problem, they need to form a national unity government, and that's what we are encouraging."

Khalilzad earned a reputation as a strategic thinker and one who can balance the complexity of politics in the Middle East with U.S. policy.

"He brings a lot more to bear than his predecessors, who knew nothing about Iraq. I wonder how many of our top decision-makers knew, a few years ago, the difference between Sunni and Shia," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter, in an interview with The New Yorker. "He is a broad-minded pragmatist and an insightful strategist. He has a unique advantage in a part of the world in which the United States has become massively engaged and does not have many people at the top equipped to deal with it."

In Iraq, Khalilzad lives in the Baghdad's Green Zone and travels in a security convoy often backed up with armed helicopters for air support. He works from his office in Saddam Hussein's former marble presidential palace supervising a staff of 5,000, the largest U.S. Embassy in the world.

Khalilzad was born in 1951 in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. His father worked in the local office of the ministry of finance. His mother, though illiterate, kept informed by having her children read the newspapers out loud to her.

His family moved to Kabul when he was in eighth grade. In high school he spent a year as an exchange student in California that he credits with giving him a different approach to his home country.

Khalilzad went on to attend Kabul University but transferred to the American University of Beirut after winning a scholarship. He studied political science and history of the Middle East in Beirut from 1970 to 1974. During this time, he met his wife Cheryl Bernard who was researching a dissertation on Arab nationalism. The couple has two sons.

In 1975, Khalilzad came to American to pursue his doctorate at the University of Chicago under the guidance of Albert Wohlstetter, an expert in military strategy who helped him make contacts in Washington. <h3>Wohlstetter exposed Khalilzad to the so-called neoconservative approach to foreign policy that places an emphasis on using America's military power.</h3>

Khalilzad accepted a teaching position in the political science department at Columbia in 1979 and wrote articles about the Soviet Union's invasion into Afghanistan that received considerable attention from experts. In 1984 he became an American citizen and accepted a fellowship with the Council on Foreign Relations.

From 1985-89, Khalilzad served as an adviser on Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war at the State Department where he wrote a policy paper that called for the U.S. to shift its focus from Iraq to Iran. He left the government for the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization where he founded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

During the first Persian Gulf war, Khalilzad worked for the Defense Department as the assistant deputy undersecretary for policy where he received the Department of Defense medal for outstanding public service.

Convinced that the United States had left unfinished business after driving Iraq from Kuwait, Khalilzad encouraged then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to remove Saddam Hussein from power and continued to push for regime change in Iraq.

After the war, he was assigned to analyze America's strategic position in the post-Cold War world and helped draft the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992 that outlined a strategy for maintaining America's global hegemony using the threat of military force.

When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Pentagon and was a counselor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In 2001, he moved to the National Security Council to become the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Southwest Asia, Near East and North African Affairs.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?p...2-12-2003_pg3_2

Op-ed: Renewed violence in Afghanistan —Ahmad Faruqui

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

...Bush pointed out that besides security and reconstruction, the two countries had mutual interests in a number of other areas, including counter-narcotics, regional stability, humanitarian assistance, and human rights. The job of carrying out this ambitious agenda now falls on the shoulders of the Zalmay Khalilzad, who has just been appointed Washington’s ambassador to Kabul.

Born in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1951, Khalilzad hails from the old ruling elite of Afghanistan. His father was an aide to King Zahir Shah, who ruled the country until 1973. Khalilzad obtained a doctorate in 1979 from the University of Chicago, an intellectual centre for the American right wing. Subsequently he taught political science at Columbia University, where he worked with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor. He was also executive director of the Friends of Afghanistan, a support group for the mujahideen whose members now allegedly comprise the vanguard of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

He became an American citizen in 1984 and later worked in the US State Department’s Policy Planning staff. His boss was Paul Wolfowitz, now the No. 2 man at the Pentagon. Later he worked for the RAND Corporation and returned to Washington when the administration of George H W Bush took office. In 1998, he joined Wolfowitz and others in signing an open letter to then President Clinton, arguing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Khalilzad is closely connected to the US oil industry, like many senior officials of the Bush administration. In the mid-nineties, he conducted a risk analysis for Unocal for building an 890-mile, $2-billion gas pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.

Khalilzad also lobbied publicly for a more sympathetic US government policy towards the Taliban. A few years ago, in an op-ed article in the Washington Post, he defended the Taliban regime against accusations that it was a sponsor of terrorism. He wrote, “We should... be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction. It is time for the United States to reengage” the Afghan regime. This “reengagement” would, of course, have been enormously profitable to Unocal, which was otherwise unable to bring gas and oil to market from landlocked Turkmenistan...

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?um=1&...tan.&cf=all

Akron Beacon Journal : US TO SPOTLIGHT SOVIET-AFGHAN WAR

$2.95 - Beacon Journal - NewsBank - Sep 16, 1985

such as Lawrence Eagleburger, a former undersecretary of state, and Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad, a Columbia University political science professor and sometime ...

Guerrillas in Afghanistan are about to get money from the United States government for a public relations campaign intended to bring their struggle against Soviet troops to the world's attention.

The money will train Afghan rebel journalists to use television, radio and newspapers to advance their cause. Reporters will be given mini-cameras to photograph the war inside Afghanistan.

"It is the goal of this project to facilitate the collection, development and distribution of credible, objective and timely professional-quality news stories, photographs and television images about developments in Afghanistan," said a notice in the Federal Register. The program will be overseen by Uncle Sam's own propaganda arm, the U.S. Information Agency. Congress appropriated $500 000 to hire experts and may provide more later.

In making the money available, Congress all but instructed USIA to consider an organization like Friends of Afghanistan, a new group whose board includes former Carter administration national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, known for hard-line anti-Soviet views.

USIA has solicited proposals, due Sept. 25.

Friends of Afghanistan includes other American foreign policy luminaries such as Lawrence Eagleburger, a former undersecretary of state, and Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad, a Columbia University political science professor and some-time paid adviser to the State Department on Afghanistan.

The American effort will enable the rebels to disseminate "the message to the world of what is going on there," said Sen. Gordon Humphrey, R-N.H., who proposed the idea to Congress. "The Soviets, unfortunately, have largely succeeded in their efforts of hiding that war from the people of the world and from world opinion," he said.

Humphrey, who thinks the Reagan administration has failed to provide enough assistance to the anti-Soviet fighters, told the Senate in June that the project was cleared with the National Security Council. Congress' understanding is that the administration may ask for another $500 000.

Afghan rebels, called the Mujahadeen, have been battling 100,000 Soviet troops who have occupied the rugged, mountainous country since December 1979. The rebels' headquarters is in Peshawar, Pakistan, on the Afghanistan border.

The Federal Register said the project is aimed at helping media representatives "overcome substantial obstacles" in bringing the story to world attention and to train Afghans "to develop an independent, self-funded media organization."

As a first step, USIA hired John O. Koehler, a former Associated Press administrator, to travel to Pakistan, Paris and other capitals to assess the needs both of problems guerrillas face in telling their story and of Western journalists trying to do the same thing.

Most Western reporters assigned to cover the Afghan conflict are based in Pakistan and manage to slip over the border occassionally for a first-hand look at the war.

"It's a story that hasn't been told," Koehler said.

Koehler was paid $9,000 plus $4,600 in expenses for his month-long feasibility study. He said he will also look for "people who are trainable."

Rosanne Klass, director of the New York-based Afghanistan Information Center, said the project could be helpful in promoting the story and persuading the Western press "to start using this stuff."

Congress' suggestion that it wanted the USIA to turn to the Friends of Afghanistan to run the program has angered other groups with similar ideas.

"If that is not a conflict of interest, I don't know what is," said Karen McKay, executive director of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan. The group, based in Washington has held seminars on the issue and sought to promote the Afghan cause.

The House-Senate conferees who drafted the legislation under which the money was appropriated said in a written report: "The conferees are further agreed that the United States Information Agency should consider such organizations as Friends of Afghanistan in awarding a grant for carrying out this project."

Generally, such suggestions are taken as marching orders by agencies in the executive branch.

Besides the media project, Congress has authorized the Board of International Broadcasting, a government agency, to begin a new service, Radio Free Afghanistan, to transmit news in Dari and Pashto, the Afghans' native languages.

The new service, scheduled to begin as a token operation this fall, will be similar to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, government-financed news services distributed to Communist countries.

http://books.google.com/books?id=eeYiVXWBG...eur&f=false

The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America

By Peter Dale Scott -Page 71

....Islam in Central Asia as a major threat to the Soviet State.38 (Robert Dreyfuss

... in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, said that he explained to ...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

According to this 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA's intervention in Afghanistan preceded the 1979 Soviet invasion. This decision of the Carter Administration in 1979 to intervene and destabilise Afghanistan is the root cause of Afghanistan's destruction as a nation.

M.C.

The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan

Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,

President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998

Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Translated from the French by Bill Blum

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Tom Scully Post #14

I wanted to get into the fact that John Train's grandfather, Charles Russell Train, was 117 years older than John, and that John's father, Arthur was also an only child, a product of a second marriage, late in his father's life, but I have to shelve all that, for now. I also wanted to post about John Train's other half siblings, his mother's children, but I am postponing that subject for now, too. I've found a good new source on John Train and his college friends, written by an author I've recently quoted, but that post will be delayed, too....because:

Tom,

Gay Talese has captured well the implicit question in your post--how does one generation of men affect the behavior of the generation that follows? The published fictional ideal, the memoirs (probably only half accurate and 200% romanticized) serve as a model for each successive generation. They seek to discover how it would feel to live in a seedier existence, always protected by an invisible net of wealth and prestige that only money--old money, with all the "class" and unearned status it provides--can offer a new generation which craves such excitement, the feel of being alive without the originality to create life on its own.

Plimpton and his crony John P. C. Train went to Paris in search of the romanticized ideal that Hemingway had left them from his memoirs of intelligence ops a decade earlier during the war in Spain. What they left is an imprint of how rich kids out on the town can mess up the world.

Looking for Hemingway by Gay Talese

Excerpted by me from the full version at:

http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/paris/l...-hemingway.html

Looking For Hemingway

by Gay Talese

[Originally published in Esquire in 1960, and reprinted in The Overreachers (1965)]

I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon. He was an extraordinarily good-looking young man, twenty-three years old. It was not long after that that everybody was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six. During the next two or three years all the young men were twenty-six years old. It was the right age apparently for that time and place.

--Gertrude Stein

Early in the fifties another young generation of American expatriates in Paris became twenty-six years old, but they were not Sad Young Men, nor were they Lost; they were the witty, irreverent sons of a conquering nation and, though they came mostly from wealthy parents and had been graduated from Harvard or Yale, they seemed endlessly delighted in posing as paupers and dodging the bill collectors, possibly because it seemed challenging and distinguished them from American tourists, whom they despised, and also because it was another way of having fun with the French, who despised them. Nevertheless, they lived in happy squalor on the Left Bank for two or three years amid the whores, jazz musicians, and pederast poets, and became involved with people both tragic and mad, including a passionate Spanish painter who one day cut open a vein in his leg and finished his final portrait with his own blood.

In July they drove down to Pamplona to run from the bulls, and when they returned they played tennis with Irwin Shaw at Saint-Cloud on a magnificent court overlooking Paris-and, when they tossed up the ball to serve, there, sprawled before them, was the whole city: the Eiffel Tower, Sacre-Coeur, the Opera, the spires of Notre Dame in the distance. Irwin Shaw was amused by them. He called them “The Tall Young Men.”

The tallest of them, at six feet four inches, was George Ames Plimpton, a quick, graceful tennis player with long, skinny limbs, a small head, bright blue eyes and a delicate, fine-tipped nose. He had come to Paris in 1952, at the age of twenty-six, because several other tall young Americans — and some short wild ones — were publishing a literary quarterly to be called The Paris Review, over the mild protest of one of their staff members, a poet, who wanted it to be called Druids’ Home Companion and its cover to be birch bark. George Plimpton was made editor-in-chief, and soon he could be seen strolling through the streets of Paris with a long woolen scarf flung around his neck, cutting a figure reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous lithograph of Aristide Bruant, that dashing litterateur of the nineteenth century.

Though much of the editing of The Paris Review was done at sidewalk cafés by editors awaiting their turns on the pin-ball machine, the magazine nonetheless became very successful because the editors had talent, money, and taste, and they avoided using such typical little-magazine words as “Zeitgeist” and “dichotomous,” and published no crusty critiques about Melville or Kafka, but instead printed the poetry and fiction of gifted young writers not yet popular. They also started a superb series of interviews with famous authors, who took them to lunch and introduced them to actresses, playwrights, and producers; and everybody invited every-body else to parties, and the parties have not stopped even though a decade has passed, Paris is no longer the scene, and the Tall Young Men have become thirty-six years old.

They now live in New York. And most of the parties are held at George Plimpton’s large bachelor apartment on Seventy-second Street overlooking the East River, an apartment that is also the headquarters for what Elaine Tynan calls “The Quality Lit Set,” or what Candida Donadio, the agent, calls “The East Side Gang,” or what everybody else just calls “The Paris Review Crowd.”

The parties are usually long and lively, and there are lots of pretty girls and writers and critics, and on the walls there are many photographs of George Plimpton: one shows him fighting small bulls in Spain with Hemingway, another catches him drinking beer with other Tall Young Men at a Paris café, others show him as a lieutenant marching a platoon of troops through Rome, as a tennis player for King’s College, as an amateur prizefighter sparring with Archie Moore in Stillman’s Gymnasium, an occasion during which the rancid smell of the gymnasium was temporarily replaced by the musk of EI Morocco and the cheers of George Plimpton’s friends when he scored with a solid jab. But those quickly changed to “Ohhhhhhhhs” when Archie Moore retaliated with a punch that broke part of the cartilage in Plimpton’s nose, causing it to bleed and causing Miles Davis to ask afterward, “Archie, is that black blood or white blood on your gloves?,” to which one of Plimpton’s friends replied,

“Sir, that is blue blood.”

…They are obsessed, many of them, by the wish to know how the other half lives. And so they befriend the more interesting of the odd, avoid the downtown dullards on Wall Street, and dip into the world of the junkie, the pederast, the prizefighter, and the adventurer in pursuit of kicks and literature, being influenced perhaps by that glorious generation of ambulance drivers that preceded them to Paris at the age of twenty-six.

In Paris in the early fifties, Irwin Shaw was a sort of pater familias to them because, in the words of Thomas Guinzburg, a Yale man then managing editor of The Paris Review, “Shaw was a tough, tennis-playing, hard-drinking writer with a good-looking wife — the closest thing we had to Hemingway.” Of course editor-in-chief George Plimpton, then as now, kept the magazine going, kept the group together, and set a style of romanticism that was — and is — infectious.

Arriving in Paris in the spring of 1952 with a wardrobe that included the tails his grandfather had worn in the twenties, and which Plimpton himself had worn in 1951 while attending a ball in London as an escort to the future Queen of England, he moved immediately into a tool shed behind a house owned by Gertrude Stein’s nephew. …One lonely night, before returning home, Plimpton took a walk through Montparnasse down the same streets and past the same cafés that Jake Barnes took after leaving Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises. He wanted to see what Hemingway had seen, to feel what Hemingway had felt. Then, the walk over, he went into the nearest bar and ordered a drink.

In 1952 The Paris Review’s headquarters was a one-room office at 8 Rue Garancière. It was furnished with a desk, four chairs, a bottle of brandy, and several lively, long-legged Smith and Radcliffe girls who were anxious to get onto the masthead so that they might convince their parents back home of their innocence abroad. But so many young women came and went that Plimpton’s business manager, a small, sharp-tongued Harvard wit named John P. C. Train, decided it was ridiculous to try to remember all their names, whereupon he declared that they should henceforth all be called by one name — “Apthecker.” …

Since The Paris Review’s one-room office obviously was too small to fulfill the staff’s need for mixing business with pleasure, and since there was also a limit to the number of hours they could spend at cafés, everybody would usually gather at 5 P.M. at the apartment of Peter and Patsy Matthiessen on 14 Rue Perceval, where by that time a party was sure to be in progress.

Peter Matthiessen, then fiction editor of The Paris Review, was a tall, thin Yale graduate who as a youngster had attended St. Bernard’s School in New York with George Plimpton, and who now was working on his first novel, Race Rock. Patsy was a small lovely, vivacious blonde with pale blue eyes and a marvelous figure, and all the boys of twenty-six were in love with her. She was the daughter of the late Richard Southgate, one-time Chief of Protocol for the State Department, and Patsy had gone to the right lawn parties, had chauffeurs and governesses and, in her junior year at Smith, in 1948, had come to Paris and met Peter. Three years later, married, they returned to Paris and acquired for $21 a month this apartment in Montparnasse that had been left vacant when Peter’s old girl friend had gone off to Venezuela…

This apartment, in the fifties, was as much a meeting place for the young American literati as was Gertrude Stein’s apartment in the twenties, and it also caught the atmosphere that would, in the sixties, prevail at George Plimpton’s apartment in New York….

The Paris Review did very well, publishing fine stories by such younger writers as Philip Roth, Mac Hyman, Pati Hill, Evan Connell, Jr., and Hughes Rudd, and, of course, distinguishing itself most of all by its “Art of Fiction” interviews with famous authors, particularly the one with William Faulkner by Jean Stein vanden Heuvel and the one with Ernest Hemingway by Plimpton, …

But, as much as anything else, The Paris Review survived because it had money. And its staff members had fun because they knew that, should they ever land in jail, their friends or families would always bail them out. They would never have to share with James Baldwin the experience of spending eight days and nights in a dirty French cell on the erroneous charge of having stolen a bed sheet from a hotel-keeper, …

The comparative opulence of The Paris Review, of course, made it the envy of the other little magazines, particularly the staff members of a quarterly called Merlin, some of whose editors charged the Review people with dilettantism, resented their pranks, resented that the Review would continue to be published while Merlin, which had also discovered and printed new talent, would soon fold.

In those days Merlin’s editor was Alexander Trocchi, born in Glasgow of a Scotch mother and Italian father, a very exciting, tall and conspicuous literary figure with a craggy, satanic face, faun’s ears, a talent for writing, and a powerful presence that enabled him to walk into any room and take charge. He would soon become a friend of George Plimpton, John Phillips Marquand, and the other Review people, and years later he would come to New York to live on a barge, and still later in the back room of The Paris Review’s Manhattan office, but eventually he would be arrested on narcotics charges, would jump bail, and would leave the United States carrying two Brooks Brothers suits which he had borrowed from George Plimpton. But he would also leave behind a good novel about drug addiction, Cain’s Book, with its memorable line:

“Heroin is habit-forming. . . habit-forming . . . rabbit-forming. . . Babbitt-forming.”

…Paris was, as Gertrude Stein suggested, the right place for twenty-six, but now most of them were thirty years old. And so they returned to New York — but not in the melancholy mood of Malcolm Cowley’s exiles of the twenties, who were forced home during the early currents of the crash, but rather with the attitude that the party would now shift to the other side of the Atlantic. Soon New York was aware of their presence…

And at the same time, on East Seventy-second Street, the Plimpton parties continue — often being planned only a few hours before they begin. George Plimpton will pick up the phone and call a few people. They, in turn, will call others. Soon there is the thunder of feet ascending the Plimpton staircase. The inspiration for the party may have been that Plimpton won a court-tennis match earlier that day at the Racquet and Tennis Club, or that one member of The Paris Review crowd has a book coming out (in which case the publisher is invited to share the expenses), or that a member has just returned to Manhattan from a trip — a trip that might have carried John P. C. Train, a financial speculator, to Africa, or Peter Matthiessen to New Guinea to live with Stone Age tribesmen, or Harold Humes to the Bronx to fight in court over a parking ticket.

And, in giving so many parties, in giving out keys to his apartment, in keeping the names of old friends on The Paris Review masthead long after they have ceased to work for it, George Ames Plimpton has managed to keep the crowd together all these years, and has also created around himself a rather romantic world, a free, frolicsome world within which he, and they, may briefly escape the inevitability of being thirty-six.

It exudes charm, talent, beauty, adventure. It is the envy of the uninvited, particularly of some child-bearing Aptheckers in the suburbs who often ask, “When is that group going to settle down?” Some in the group, like George Plimpton, have remained bachelors. Others have married women who like parties — or have been divorced. Still others have an understanding that, if the wife is too tired for a party, the husband goes alone. It is largely a man’s world, all of them bound by their memories of Paris and the Great Adventure they shared, and it has very few exiles, although it has had someone being the beautiful blonde who was very much on everyone’s mind in Paris ten years ago, Patsy Matthiessen.

Patsy and Peter are divorced. She is now married to Michael Goldberg, an abstract painter, lives on West Eleventh Street, and moves in the little world of downtown intellectuals and painters. Recently she spent several days in a hospital after being bitten by the dog of the widow of Jackson Pollock. In her apartment she has a cardboard box full of snapshots of The Paris Review crowd of the fifties. But she remembers those days with some bitterness.

“The whole life seemed after a while to be utterly meaningless,” she said. “And there was something very manqué about them — this going to West Africa, and getting thrown in jail, and getting in the ring with Archie Moore. . . . And I was a Stepin Fetchit in that crowd, getting them tea at four, and sandwiches at ten. . . .”

A few blocks away, in a small, dark apartment, another exile, James Baldwin, said, “It didn’t take long before I really was no longer a part of them. They were more interested in kicks and hashish cigarettes than I was. I had already done that in the Village when I was eighteen or seventeen. It was a little boring by then.”

“They also used to go to Montparnasse, where all the painters and writers went, and where I hardly went. And they used to go there and hang around at the cafés for hours and hours looking for Hemingway. They didn’t seem to realize,” he said, “that Hemingway was long gone.

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