John Simkin

They can be purchased from here: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/molsite/p....asp?key=POSTER Badges & Jewellery can be found here: http://portrayer.co.uk/site/category.php?c=4+

It is true that some children argue that they rather be placed in “sets” or “bands”. However, this is usually the more able who dislike the disruption that some low ability children cause in class. I accept that the most able are helped by setting (although it usually has the bi-product of making them arrogant). However, research shows that it has a devastated impact on the self-confidence and self-image on those outside the top set. The “labeling” impact creates serious long-term problems. Most teachers are usually former high-achieving students. They are also products of private or grammar schools or a “banded” comprehensive school. They have little experience of being in a low-ability group. As a result, they find it difficult to teach these groups. A problem caused largely by a lack of empathy. I failed my 11+ and had to endure being taught in low-ability classes. Peer group pressure was such in the secondary schools that I attended, that it was virtually impossible to show any interest in the subject. Combined by being taught by teachers who thought you were “thick” because you had failed your 11+, you had no chance. Therefore I had to leave school in order to get a decent education. The first two schools I taught in were both true comprehensive schools. That is, mixed ability teaching group (those with special needs were taught in different classes). This system works as long as you have teachers who believe in the system (grammar school educated teachers were always a problem because of their elitist ideas). However, over the last few years, most comprehensive schools have abandoned the basic ideas behind comprehensive education and they have been turned into grammar and secondary modern schools under the same roof. Blair’s new education act is an attempt to revert back to the grammar/secondary system. That is why the Labour Party is virtually united against it while the Tory Party supports the new measures.

Namebase entry for D. Douglas Dillon http://www.namebase.org/main1/C-Douglas-Dillon.html Adams,S. War of Numbers. 1994 (218) Andrew,J. Power to Destroy. 2002 (78, 90) Bamford,J. Body of Secrets. 2001 (52, 60-1) Barnet,R. Mueller,R. Global Reach. 1974 (251) Bird,K. The Chairman. 1992 (499) Bird,K. The Color of Truth. 1998 (103) Blum,W. The CIA: A Forgotten History. 1986 (183) Blumenthal,S. Yazijian,H. Government by Gunplay. 1976 (246) Bradlee,B. A Good Life. 1995 (143-4, 205) Colby,G. Dennett,C. Thy Will Be Done. 1995 (326-7, 337, 361-2, 478, 585, 735, 789, 833) Colby,G. DuPont Dynasty. 1984 (429-30) Council on Foreign Relations. Annual Report. 1988 (2, 49, 106, 132, 135, 164) Council on Foreign Relations. Annual Report. 2001 (2) Council on Foreign Relations. Membership Roster. 2001 CounterSpy 1975-W (28) Davis,D. Katharine the Great. 1987 (300) Domhoff,G.W. The Higher Circles. 1971 (130, 132, 139, 345) Domhoff,G.W. Who Rules America? 1967 (99) Dye,T. Who's Running America? 1983 (90, 147) EIR. Dope, Inc. 1992 (159) Evanzz,K. The Judas Factor. 1992 (101-3, 263) Fitzgerald,F. Way Out There in the Blue. 2000 (82) Forbes 400 Richest Americans. 1985 Galiullin,R. The CIA in Asia. 1988 (22) Garwood,D. Under Cover. 1985 (57) Gibbs,D. The Political Economy of Third World Intervention. 1991 (92, 100, 117-8) Green,S. Taking Sides. 1984 (138) Guardian (New York) 1975-01-15 (3) Hershman,D.J. Power Beyond Reason. 2002 (148) Hinckle,W. Turner,W. The Fish is Red. 1981 (129) Jeffreys-Jones,R. The CIA and American Democracy. 1989 (199) Kelly,S. America's Tyrant. 1993 (36) Kwitny,J. Endless Enemies. 1984 (57-8) Kwitny,J. The Crimes of Patriots. 1987 (24) Lobster Magazine (Britain) 1986-#12 (23) Lundberg,F. The Rich and the Super-Rich. 1969 (206, 351) Marchetti,V. Marks,J. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. 1974 (357) McCartney,L. Friends in High Places. 1988 (112, 138) Mintz,M. Cohen,J. America, Inc. 1971 (185, 337) Mother Jones 1978-10 (33) Mother Jones 1996-04 (53) NACLA. The University-Military-Police Complex. 1970 (27) National Reporter 1986-SU (45, 47) New American Movement Newspaper 1975-02 (1) New York Times 2003-01-12 (26) Olmsted,K. Challenging the Secret Government. 1996 (49, 83) Perloff,J. The Shadows of Power. 1988 (104, 111, 200, 202) Quigley,C. Tragedy and Hope. 1966 (953) Saloma,J. Ominous Politics. 1984 (125) Sampson,A. The Money Lenders. 1982 (92, 98-9) Sanders,J. Peddlers of Crisis. 1983 (156) Saunders,F. The Cultural Cold War. 2000 (181-2) Scott,P.D... The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond. 1976 (495) Shoup,L. Minter,W. Imperial Brain Trust. 1977 (61, 78, 86, 101, 108-9, 242, 302) Silk,L.& M. The American Establishment. 1980 (144) Simpson,C. The Splendid Blond Beast. 1993 (48) Sklar,H. Trilateralism. 1980 (205) Smith,J. The Idea Brokers. 1993 (125) Smith,R.H. OSS. 1981 (23) State Dept. United States Chiefs of Mission 1778-1973. 1973 (58) Swanberg,W.A. Luce and His Empire. 1972 (370) Tarpley,W.G. Chaitkin,A. George Bush. 1992 (54, 70, 75, 80, 289) Thomas,E. The Very Best Men. 1996 (221) Weissman,S. Trojan Horse. 1975 (26) Wyden,P. Bay of Pigs. 1979 (73) Yakovlev,N. CIA Target -- the USSR. 1984 (69)

During my research for my Assassination, Terrorism and the Arms Trade: The Contracting Out of U.S. Foreign Policy: 1940-1990 paper I have discovered some interesting connections between Tommy Corcoran and C. Douglas Dillon. According to Drew Pearson, Tommy Corcoran played an important role in getting James Forrestal into government. He claims he did this on behalf of C. Douglas Dillon, who wanted to “have a man in the White House”. (1) In August, 1940 President Roosevelt was appointed under secretary of the navy with special responsibility for procurement and production. In April 1944, Forrestal became the new Secretary of the Navy. Forrestal held the post until September 1947 when he became Secretary of Defence. It was in this post that Forrestal became America’s leading Cold War warrior. Pearson became convinced that Forrestal was taking this position in order to make money out of the threat of war. Pearson had discovered that Forrestal, while working for Dillon, Read & Co., in the inter-war years had loaned “hundreds of millions to the German cartels of the Ruhr during the pre-Hitler period, reviving industries which were to form the backbone of Hitler’s war machine.” Pearson believed that “Forrestal was a Trojan Horse of the Right lodged inside the highest counsels of a professedly liberal Democratic Administration.” (2) Pearson revealed in his newspaper column that Forrestal had developed a close relationship with military dictatorships in Latin America. He was especially concerned about the help Forrestal was giving to Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Pearson wrote: “Practically all Latin America is watching the State Department to see what we do about recognizing the new Army dictatorship in Venezuela... the State Department's trigger-recognition of Latin dictators has brought forth a rash of military revolts, the latest being the Nicaraguan-inspired march against the peaceful government of Costa Rica... Secretary of Defense Forrestal still favors his plan of sending more arms to Latin America under a new lend-lease agreement, despite the fact that new arms to Latin American generals are like a toy train to a small boy at Christmastime. They can't wait to use them - usually against their own President. General Somoza, the Nicaraguan who has now inspired the fracas in Costa Rica, was trained by the US Marines, later seized the Presidency of Nicaragua. President Trujillo, worst dictator in all Latin America, was also trained by the US Marines. Unfortunately, under the Forrestal-Marine Corps program, we train men to shoot and give them the weapons to shoot with. But we don't give them any ideas or ideals as to what they should shoot for.” (3) Tommy Corcoran and I. Irving Davidson were lobbyists for these Latin America dictators. In fact, in 1954, Corcoran was to play an important role in the CIA overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala (while working as a lobbyist for United Fruit). (4) Harry S. Truman also became concerned about the activities of Forrestal and on 28th March 1949 he forced him to resign from office. Two months later, James Forrestal committed suicide by throwing himself out of a 16th-floor hospital window. I have written earlier of how Phil Graham successfully persuaded John F. Kennedy to appoint C. Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury. (5) What I did not know was that another of Corcoran’s clients, Steve Bechtel, was also campaigning behind the scenes for JFK to appoint Dillon. The other person he was trying to get into the administration was John A. McCone, who was another one of Corcoran’s clients. (6) McCone of course was appointed as Director of the CIA in 1961. 1. Drew Pearson, Diaries: 1949-1959, 1974 (page 40) 2. Jack Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker, 1979 (page 127) 3. Drew Pearson, Washington Merry-Go-Round (15th December, 1948) 4. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 219) 5. Katharine Graham, Personal History, 1997 (page 292) 6. Laton McCartney, Friends in High Places, 1988 (page 138)

Goldwater was very keen to get the support of racists. His strategy was to get the vote of the racists in the Deep South who were angry with the actions of Lyndon Johnson. In John B. Judis’ book, William F. Buckley: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988) he publishes the letters of Goldwater and Buckley. The two men were in constant contact about the necessary strategy to defeat the Democrats. This included picking up the racist vote in the Deep South. The main issue concerned the John Birch Society. Buckley and Goldwater agreed that they shared the views of the JBS. However, Robert Welch, the JBS leader was a problem as it had been disclosed that he had sent out a letter claiming he had evidence that Dwight Eisenhower was a “communist”. Buckley agreed that Eisenhower should be “eliminated” if this was true. However, he agreed with Goldwater that to be associated with Welch’s claims would hurt them in the polls. It was therefore agreed to attack Welch but not his policies. In this way they would retain the votes of the JBS supporters. On page 133 Judis writing about the National Review’s constant attack on Eisenhower claims that Buckley and the other editors constantly “condemned the administration’s concessions to communism and the welfare state, and they defended the South’s resistance to racial integration.” On page 139 Judis explains why Buckley argued against blacks having the vote. He writes: “Buckley would claim that he was asserting the de facto rather than genetic inferiority of blacks. But the inescapable point was that he was willing to cite an individual’s membership in a “race” – regardless of that person’s educational background or intelligence – to disqualify him from voting.” Judis then goes on to look at why Buckley and Goldwater were so against blacks having the vote. Buckley explained in the National Review many times that if blacks got the vote they would support politicians who wanted to increase welfare spending. As quoted earlier, Buckley equated the welfare state with communism. Buckley and Goldwater believed that Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders were communists (based on information he received from J. Edgar Hoover). As Buckley wrote in National Review on 19th August, 1967, as far as he was concerned, King was comparable to Hitler and Lenin. Therefore, King needed to be repressed: “the non-violent avenger Dr. King, that in the unlikely event that he succeeds in mobilizing his legions, they will be most efficiently, indeed most zestfully, repressed.” Buckley and Goldwater believed the communists controlled the anti-war movement. Like many right-wingers, they watched in horror as in the 1960s as the anti-war, civil rights, trade unions and anti-poverty groups began to merge (pages 308-309). It is of course no coincidence that Martin Luther King was assassinated at a time when he was widening his attacks to the Vietnam War and to the way that the poor were being treated in America. This grand coalition was indeed posing a serious threat to the power structure of the United States.

Interesting article about Jeff Skoll in the Guardian. Maybe he can be persuaded to make a movie on the assassination of JFK? http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featur...1681362,00.html The scene is the back room of a shop in Tehran. A middle-aged American is making a delivery - but there is a hitch: one half of his lethal cargo disappears, at gunpoint, behind a curtain, in the hands of a man whose language he does not understand. As the American escapes the scene down a dusty road, he glances up towards a rooftop. A car explodes behind him. This is Syriana, the most political film to have come out of Hollywood since there was a war in Vietnam. Both subtle and contorted, it has launched a thousand cover stories and been hailed as the crowning product of a newly politicised Hollywood; liberals have welcomed it as a throwback to the days of Warren Beatty and Robert Redford. Conservatives have gone so far as to suggest that it condones terrorism. Written and directed by Steven Gaghan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, Syriana plots the ways in which American interests in Middle Eastern oil lead to the very acts of violence that America most fears. George Clooney, who plays the nervous American spy - bearded, overweight and fluent in Farsi - executive-produced the movie. His own political allegory, Good Night, and Good Luck, was released in the US a month earlier, and with these films he has become a kind of hero for our time: more powerful than any producer, a vocal source of dissent, giving performances modest to the point of invisibility. He is behind the scenes, you might say, even when he is in them. The New York Times film critic AO Scott wrote that Syriana made the darkest of Seventies paranoid thrillers look as sweet as Capra. David Denby in the New Yorker described it as offering 'not so much a story as a malaise'. This is a large part of its novel provocation: it's a film about an ideology, not a government, a single conspiracy or any given war, which is more subtle and more insidious, in a way, than many of the films of the 1970s to which it is being compared. 'Corruption is our protection,' says an oil executive played in the film by Tim Blake Nelson, 'Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why we win.' In left-leaning America's new favourite blog, the Huffington Post, the holistic guru Deepak Chopra gave Syriana the following review: 'We are quickly learning that when the right hand is cut, the left hand bleeds ... Something like global co-operation must emerge if this new reality is ever to make sense. The first step, as Syriana suggests, is to realise that we are all part of its cast, one way or another.' That last line could serve as a motto for Participant Productions, the company behind Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck. Set up in 2004 by Jeff Skoll, billionaire co-founder of eBay, Participant's express purpose is to make movies that will help to change the world. In the words of Meredith Blake, the firm's executive vice-president: 'Our product is social change, and the movies are a vehicle for that social change.' But if a film is too preachy, as Participant knows, no one will listen, so the films must also be commercially viable. So far, they have been a spectacular success: in its opening weekend, Syriana got the second-highest box-office rating of the year. Participant's second film, Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney's drama about the downfall of Joseph McCarthy, has grossed more than double its budget and triggered widespread discussion about the freedom of the press. North Country, a film starring Charlize Theron as a miner involved in a sexual harassment case, has been disappointing at the box office but effective in its social impact. This is what Skoll refers to as a 'double bottom-line' - he has different criteria for measuring success. Other recent Hollywood films have had a basis in politics - Jarhead, Munich, The Constant Gardener - and many movies are now independently financed by people with non-Hollywood backgrounds: there are internet entrepreneurs such as David Sacks and Mark Cuban; the Christian Republican communications mogul Philip Anschutz is behind Ray and The Chronicles of Narnia; real-estate entrepreneur Bob Yari helped finance Crash and Thumbsucker. Jim Stern, part owner of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, funded Hotel Rwanda But no one is doing what Skoll is doing. Inspired by such films as All the President's Men, Erin Brockovich, Hotel Rwanda and Gandhi - which he has paid to have dubbed into Arabic by Palestinian actors to spread peace in the Middle East - Skoll saw that the films he loved didn't have much 'follow-up in the real world' and decided to provide an infrastructure that would allow movies to make a difference far beyond the cinema. Participant Productions creates partnerships with activist groups, organises an action campaign around each movie, and has set up a community website (participate.net) where people can become involved in group blogs with high-profile experts - and even, in the case of Good Night, and Good Luck, with real people on whom the film's protagonists are based. So who is this social messiah? Business Week has repeatedly voted him the most innovative philanthropist.The Financial Times has named him one of eight most eligible 'billionaire bachelors'. Others refer to him simply as 'the filmanthropist'. Skoll, who turns 41 next week, grew up in Montreal and Toronto, the son of an industrial chemicals salesman. When he left to study for a BA in electrical engineering, he was the first person in his family to go to university. He ran a computer-rental company in Toronto for a while, then went to Stanford University to do an MBA. It was there that he met Pierre Omidyar, with whom he founded what was to become eBay. (On being told of his raising venture funding, Skoll's parents said: 'Hey, that's great, and your cousin Leonard just opened a dry cleaners.' No one in his family suspected what eBay would become, until one day it went public and his parents saw it on CNN.) EBay went public in 1998, and the following year Skoll, the company's president and first full-time employee, became Canada's youngest billionaire. He immediately sought philanthropic outlets, one of his schemes being a sort of developing world eBay in which craftspeople could sell their wares over the internet directly to the West and make a living instead of making pennies by selling to distributors. He left eBay in 2000, retiring at the age of 35 with an estimated $2bn in his pocket. Skoll, universally said to be earnest, boyish, shy, thoughtful and down-to-earth, has, by his own reckoning, wanted to change the world since he was 14. He firmly believed in 'the power of storytelling to do good' and planned to make enough money to be able to write stories himself. You might say he got a little waylaid. But in a sense, Participant has brought him back to that purpose. 'When I first started talking to people about investing in movies,' he has said, 'I heard over and over that the streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like me.' He remained undeterred, because, as he told Time magazine last month: 'Traditionally, people come to Hollywood for financial reasons or they think it's glamorous. I'm doing this because I believe that movies and documentaries can be a wonderful pathway to change the world.' Still, there are perks. A few years ago, he was a geek in Silicon Valley. Now he's going to parties where Paris Hilton is tapping him on the shoulder and giving him her number. Skoll describes Participant as a venture that straddles business and philanthropy. He's not trying to buck the system, he's trying to help it, in the form of what he calls a 'virtuous cycle: the movie helps the non-profits, the non-profits help the movie.' Redford, who collaborated with Skoll on a TV series called The New Heroes, has said he has 'not come across anyone who was so genuinely altruistic about their purpose. I've usually come across people who want to do good, but they are looking for a return.' Redford is one of the Seventies 'heroes' to whom people constantly refer when they speak about Participant's current crop of films. Yet one of the surprising things about Skoll is that he does not fit into the liberal tradition of Hollywood. In a move that cleverly removes him from the knee-jerk backlash against Hollywood lefties, he has said that, although he is Canadian and therefore doesn't vote in America, had he been a US citizen he would have voted for Reagan, and for Bush Sr as well as for Bill Clinton. He calls himself a 'centrist' and has asserted that he would be equally open to making films that speak to conservative moviegoers. Production meetings at Participant stray wildly from the usual Hollywood fare. Where other companies might discuss the astronomical fees demanded by actors or complicated shooting schedules, Participant's executives are more likely to dwell on windmill facilities or the use of cow manure as a source of alternative energy. Meredith Blake explains how they decide to make a film: 'We have a pretty unusual three-step review process,' she says from their office in Beverly Hills. 'First the creative team looks at it, then finance, and then I do a social sector review.' Blake, a lawyer who founded Break the Cycle, an organisation devoted to putting a stop to domestic violence, greenlights films on the basis of the issues they raise. A project will only move forward if she finds it has a valid social or political message. She also selects the non-profit, corporate and media partners that will help audiences to get involved. I ask if Participant has contributed money to causes touched on by films they decided not to make. 'No,' she says, 'but there have been movies proposed that have been creatively fantastic but been found to be socially falling short.' These, she says, are turned down without question. One of the difficulties with 'the second, social part of the bottom line', she explains, is working out how to track it. 'Social return is harder to measure.' But they know what their non-profit partners are experiencing, metrics are being tracked behind the website, and they get anecdotal reports - from teachers, from college campuses, from women who have found lawyers to represent them in sexual harassment cases. 'Oil Change', their Syriana campaign on participate.net, is very active, she says. One of the phrases used by Ricky Strauss, Participant's president, is 'passive activism'. He has suggested that there are small things people can do without giving up their entire lives, things that might be equivalent to wearing a Lance Armstrong bracelet. An example of passive activism in relation to Syriana, Blake suggests, would be buying a TerraPass, 'which takes up three minutes of someone's time' and funds clean energy projects so that they reduce a proportionate equivalent of the carbon dioxide emissions from their car. It's difficult to know how smooth the leap from discussion to action will be, but a good deal of discussion, at least, is already under way. JD Lasica, author of Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, is participating in the group blog about Good Night, and Good Luck, and thinks Participant's project is 'a fascinating idea and a worthy experiment. It's still too early to tell whether it's going to pan out. As we're moving into the digital age, people in Hollywood are starting to grasp the idea that they have to do more than just put pictures on the big screen. They have to take into account where the audience is today, and more and more people are involved in the internet. It's more than just a gimmicky, viral marketing approach - they're looking for a serious conversation about the issues that are raised in the film.' One of the other people participating in that blog is Milo Radulovich, the Second World War veteran who was accused of being a Communist by McCarthy, and with whose persecution George Clooney's film begins. On the blog, Radulovich says he has been inspired to see how many people who never lived through the McCarthy era have been to see the film and have understood Clooney's intended allegory about today's political climate. 'Truth is truth,' Radulovich writes, 'unconditional and flaming.' One easily forgotten aspect of the politically charged cinema of the 1970s was the ease and swiftness with which the counterculture became the mainstream. As Ben Dickenson, whose book Hollywood's New Radicalism is due out this month, puts it: 'People like Warren Beatty, who had been on the fringes, were suddenly a part of the mainstream because they had something to say that the mainstream wanted to sell.' Could the same not be said of the new politicisation of Hollywood? If, since Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, politics have become de rigueur, a cynic might suggest that organisations like Participant were just cashing in. Lasica laughs at this idea. 'I think Jeff Skoll has enough money not to have to cash in,' he says. Clooney, for his part, has countered that he grew up during the civil rights era, during Vietnam, with the protest films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is what shaped him, he has said - his tastes are long-standing not opportunistic. John Boorman, veteran director of political films, thinks Participant's work is less like the movies of the Seventies than those of the Thirties and Forties, when studios produced 'problem pictures' intended to combat alcoholism or racism. Which leads one to ask how comfortably Participant will continue to lie as bedfellows within the studio system. The studios, after all, own all the distribution channels. 'You wonder what would happen if the chips were really down over a particular film,' muses Dickenson, 'whether Skoll with his financial clout and Clooney with his star power would have the ability to get a film produced that really challenged the big media industries. Maybe they all feel they're on borrowed time, or maybe they think they've sussed the game enough to keep it going indefinitely.' Next up is Richard Linklater's feature version of Fast Food Nation, and dozens of Hollywood stars have been lining up outside Participant's door. 'Who haven't we seen?' Skoll joked not long ago. Meg Ryan, Salma Hayek, Michael Douglas and all, it seems, have pet political projects. 'It's been a wild time,' says Blake. In the end, though, whether Hollywood is newly politicised or not, each film will have to speak for itself. Boorman speaks from experience when he says 'you have to be very wary about looking for trends. What we're looking at now is an experiment, perhaps, and both Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck are very welcome. But I think the key is not to draw any conclusions about Hollywood attitudes from these films. When you talk about politics in Hollywood, the politics of money is the only politics.'

I suspect the corruption in the Bush administration will have a similar impact that it had during the Nixon administration. As long as they don't make a mistake in selecting the candidate, the Democrats will win in 2008.

I suppose this is meant as some kind of humour. The point I am trying to make is that we need to be constantly vigilant in order to protect our freedoms. Bush and Blair both provide a threat to the freedoms that the people enjoy in the UK. Bush because he is head of a superpower. As a result, decisions he makes, for example, spying on American citizens, has an impact of my freedoms (the possibility that his intelligence service is reading my emails or listening to my telephone conversations). Blair is trying to restrict my freedom by keeping people in prison without being charged of an offence and by putting people on trial without a jury (freedoms we have enjoyed since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215). The Blair government has also passed legislation that restricts our rights of freedom of expression and to demonstrate against the policies of the government. The measures taken by Bush and Blair have been justified by the so-called “war on terror”. These same politicians tell us that we must fight this war in order to protect our way of life. Yet the passing of these legislation in the UK and the illegal action being taken in the US, are removing the freedoms that make up our “way of life”.

My family have a long tradition of fighting for freedom. My grandfather was killed in France in 1916. My father was badly wounded in the Second World War fighting for freedom. My mother enduring several years of constant bombardment from the skies while working in an armaments factory during the war. What were they fighting for? The freedom to vote. The freedom to organize. The freedom to express their opinions. What was the point of fighting against other countries for these freedoms if you allow them to be taken away by your own government. The CIA may or may not be reading my emails sent to friends in America. What I do know is that they have no right to do so? It will not stop me saying what I think about the world. However, my fear is that it might frighten some individuals to do as they think our masters want us to think. The worse form of censorship is always self-censorship. That is what this issue is really about.

It was always argued that the possession of nuclear weapons would protect you from attack. When I was active in the CND in the 1960s this was the main argument of those who wanted to keep nuclear weapons. They would constantly point out that no country with nuclear weapons had ever been invaded. We accepted that point but added that if this was true, it was an argument for all countries to have nuclear weapons. It is not surprising that countries with a history of being invaded should want nuclear weapons for protection. It was inevitable that this would happen. In 1968 the nuclear club agreed to the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Of course they did. However, this idea was completely meaningless to those countries outside the nuclear umbrella. The superpowers have tried to stop other countries from joining the nuclear club. However, that is not the case with Israel. The US actually helped Israel to become a nuclear power. That was a disastrous decision as it has encouraged other countries in the Middle East to want nuclear weapons. I suspect if I was living in an Arab state I would also want my government to have nuclear weapons. It is your only guarantee from being invaded by Israel or the United States. Do you think Bush would have invaded Iraq if they really did have WMD? Doesn’t that explain why the US has not invaded North Korea? I cannot understand the logic of Bush and Blair beating their chest over Iran. They know they are not going to invade. Nor can they afford for them to cut back oil production. The Arabs can now bring down the Western economy if they so wish. The US no longer has the power it once had. It cannot really afford the middle-eastern states forming an alliance with China and Russia (it is highly unlikely that these two nations will join in any sanctions policy). The point is we are in no position to lecture the Arabs on acquiring nuclear weapons. As Simon Jenkins said recently: “If you cannot stop a man buying a gun, the next best bet is to make him your friend, not your enemy.”

I don’t think you have to live in Iran to be aware of its awful government. The only thing I hate more than Muslim Fundamentalism is Christian Fundamentalism. Nor do I have had to live in Israel to realize what an awful government they have had over the last 30 years. The US government since 2000 has also been pretty awful. All three are awful in different ways. However, I believe that the US and Israel both pose a larger threat to world peace than Iran. As the record shows, they have both been responsible for a great deal of death and destruction over the last few years.

Happy new year to you. Are you still at the IST?

What we do know is that Tim supported Barry Goldwater in 1964. He of course was totally against civil rights legislation. He also wanted a full-out war in Vietnam including the use of nuclear weapons (as did Tim’s other buddy, William F. Buckley). As JFK predicted in 1963, the Republicans would never win with Goldwater as its candidate. He knew that right-wingers like Tim were in a small minority. What support he did have was from the racists in the Deep South.

Thomas does not mind because he thinks the CIA are the "good guys" protecting him from the "bad guys". It seems that some people still live in the world of cowboy movies. After all, that is probably the reason why they elected Ronald Reagan as he always wore the white hat in his movies.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKcorcoran.htm One day in early October 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt told Tommy Corcoran that he wanted him to resign from the administration. He wanted him to carry out a covert mission and it was "too politically dangerous" to do this while serving in his government. Roosevelt promised that he would bring Corcoran back into the government as soon as this covert operation had been completed. (1) It came as no surprise that Corcoran had been asked to leave Roosevelt’s administration. For several years there had been speculation that Corcoran had been using his access to government officials for financial gain. No one guessed at the time that Corcoran had been recruited to carry out undercover work in China. In fact, the story was kept a secret until revealed by David McKean in his book “Peddling Influence” that was published in 2004. McKean had been given access to Tommy Corcoran’s unpublished autobiography which confirmed that he had been involved in a secret mission to China in 1940. Ernest Cuneo’s claim that Corcoran “headed FDR’s informal intelligence service and international spy operations long before there was an OSS” appears to be true. (2) More importantly, in October 1940, Roosevelt, became the first president to “contract out” U.S. foreign policy. Corcoran was to play a leading role in this new development for the next twenty years. Who was Tommy Corcoran and why had he been selected for the task? Corcoran was a young lawyer working in Washington when he was recruited in 1932 by Eugene Meyer, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, as general counsel for the newly established Reconstruction Finance Corporation. After Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in November, 1932, he asked Felix Frankfurter to assemble a legal team to review the nation's securities laws. Frankfurter selected Tommy Corcoran, Benjamin Cohen and James Landis for the task. Together they drafted the legislation that created the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the beginning of Roosevelt’s administration, Corcoran, was seen as one of his left-wing advisers. As Howard Zinn has pointed out, Corcoran, like Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes and Ben Cohen, “blamed big business for the Great Depression”. (3) The following year Corcoran was involved in drafting the Public Utilities Holding Company Act. On 1st July, 1935, Owen Brewster claimed that Corcoran threatened to stop construction on the Passamaquoddy Dam in his district unless he supported the Holding Company Bill. Congress immediately ordered the rules committee to investigate the matter. The Senate investigation, headed by Hugo Black, eventually cleared Corcoran of any wrongdoing. Corcoran wrote to a friend: "Storms make a sailor - if he survives them." Roosevelt's personal secretary, Louis Howe, died of pneumonia on 24th June, 1936. According to Corcoran's biographer, David McKean, Corcoran now replaced Howe as Roosevelt's most "trusted adviser and personal companion" (4). Some of Roosevelt's ministers complained about Corcoran's growing influence. Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, claimed that Corcoran was a "crook". As well as drafting New Deal legislation, Roosevelt used Corcoran as his "special emissary to Capitol Hill". Elliott Roosevelt wrote that: "Apart from my father, Tom (Corcoran) was the single most influential individual in the country." (5) In 1936 the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) decided to build the Marshall Ford Dam (now known as the Mansfield Dam). At that time Brown & Root was in serious financial trouble. (6) In the past, the company had been involved in small-scale road projects. Alvin Witz, Brown & Root’s legal adviser, suggested they should bid for this $10 million contract. The company had no experience in this field and therefore joined forces with the McKenzie Construction Company. Witz was also chief counsel for the LCRA. He was therefore in a good position to know details of the various bids for the Marshall Ford Dam contract. In December, 1936, the LCRA awarded the contract to Brown & Root-McKenzie. This joint venture underbid the nearest competitor, Utah Construction, by a margin of $137,000. (7) In the first few months of the project, Brown & Root-McKenzie spent $1.5 million on equipment and a giant cableway. However, it had done this before the bureau of reclamation, the agency responsible for the federal dam projects, had obtained the necessary authorization from Congress. (8) Brown & Root was now in serious trouble. Alvin Witz now introduced George and Herman Brown to Lyndon B. Johnson. This 28 year old director of Texas National Youth Administration, was hopeful of becoming the next representative to the U.S. Congress for the Tenth District of Texas. Witz encouraged the Brown brothers to help finance Johnson’s campaign. (9) Johnson was elected in March 1937. He immediately set about persuading the Rivers and Harbors Committee to authorize money for the Marshall Ford Dam and to ratify all federal contracts with Brown & Root. Johnson now contacted Tommy Corcoran and asked him to plead his case before President Roosevelt. He did and according to Corcoran, Roosevelt replied: “Give the kid the dam.” (10) Corcoran still had work to do. Robert Caro points out that: “The precise nature of Corcoran’s dealings with the previously recalcitrant Comptroller General’s office and the Bureau of the Budget are not known – Corcoran will not discuss them except to say, “I made a hell of a lot of calls on that dam” – but the refusals by these two offices to authorize additional allocations out of the first appropriation abruptly ended, and the previously growing curiosity about the dam abruptly vanished.” (11) The successful acquisition of the Marshall Ford Dam was the beginning of a network that was to last for over thirty years. This highly secret network became known as the Suite 8F Group. The name came from Herman Brown’s suite at the Lamar Hotel in downtown Houston where the men met regularly. The group initially included Herman and George Brown, Lyndon B. Johnson, Tommy Corcoran and Alvin Witz. Later, other business figures from Texas joined this group: Gus Wortham (American General Insurance Company), James A. Elkins Sr. (First City Bancorporation), Robert Kerr (Kerr-McGee Oil Industries) and James Abercrombie (Cameron Iron Works). Corcoran and Witz concentrated on putting the deals together. However, for Suite 8F Group to work it needed to have members like Johnson who held political power. This included Sam Rayburn, chairman of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee and majority leader in the Senate, Jesse H. Jones, chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Secretary of Commerce and Albert Thomas, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. (12) Herman Brown was the gatekeeper and he allowed others to join when they obtained political power and influence. (13) For example, John Connolly and Fred Korth later became important members. Joseph Pratt and Christopher Castaneda described the common goals of the Suite 8F group as working towards a “healthy business climate characterized by a minimum of government regulations, a weak labor movement, a tax system favorable to business investment, the use of government subsidies and supports where needed to spur development, and a conservative approach to the expansion of government social services.” (14) In 1937 Corcoran used this influence to make sure Sam Rayburn of Texas became Speaker of the House. This was a difficult task as James Farley was advocating that John O'Connor got the job. Corcoran's increasing power was indicated by the fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt brought an end to Farley's campaign. This was the beginning of a very close relationship that Corcoran enjoyed with Rayburn and the Texas oil industry. (15) Franklin D. Roosevelt began to have considerable problems with the Supreme Court. The chief justice, Charles Hughes, had been the Republican Party presidential candidate in 1916. Hughes, appointed by Herbert Hoover in 1930, led the court's opposition to some of the proposed New Deal legislation. This included the ruling against the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and ten other New Deal laws. On 2nd February, 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt made a speech attacking the Supreme Court for its actions over New Deal legislation. He pointed out that seven of the nine judges (Charles Hughes, Willis Van Devanter, George Sutherland, Harlan Stone, Owen Roberts, Benjamin Cardozo and Pierce Butler) had been appointed by Republican presidents. Roosevelt had just won re-election by 10,000,000 votes and resented the fact that the justices could veto legislation that clearly had the support of the vast majority of the public. (16) Roosevelt suggested that the age was a major problem as six of the judges were over 70 (Charles Hughes, Willis Van Devanter, James McReynolds, Louis Brandeis, George Sutherland and Pierce Butler). Roosevelt announced that he was going to ask Congress to pass a bill enabling the president to expand the Supreme Court by adding one new judge, up to a maximum off six, for every current judge over the age of 70. Charles Hughes realized that Roosevelt's Court Reorganization Bill would result in the court coming under the control of the Democratic Party. Behind the scenes Hughes was busy doing deals to make sure that Roosevelt's bill would be defeated in Congress. Tommy Corcoran was giving the task by Roosevelt to persuade Congress to pass this proposed legislation. This included working closely with I. F. Stone of the New York Post. Stone, a strong opponent of the conservative Supreme Court, agreed to write speeches for Concoran on this issue. These speeches were then passed on to Roosevelt supporters in Congress. (17) In the past Corcoran had relied heavily on the influence of his close friend, Burton Wheeler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. However, Wheeler had now turned against Roosevelt. Wheeler even argued that Roosevelt had been behind the assassination of Huey Long. (18) Corcoran continued to campaign for the Court Reorganization Bill but he failed to persuade enough to get it passed. Even the most left-wing of all the justices, Louis Brandeis, opposed Roosevelt's attempt to "pack" the Supreme Court. Brandeis was also beginning to oppose some aspects of the New Deal that he believed "favored big business". However, members of the Supreme Court accepted they had to fall in line with public opinion. On 29th March, Owen Roberts announced that he had changed his mind about voting against minimum wage legislation. Hughes also reversed his opinion on the Social Security Act and the National Labour Relations Act (NLRA) and by a 5-4 vote they were now declared to be constitutional. Then Willis Van Devanter, probably the most conservative of the justices, announced his intention to resign. He was replaced by Hugo Black, a member of the Democratic Party and a strong supporter of the New Deal. In July, 1937, Congress defeated the Court Reorganization Bill by 70-20. However, Roosevelt had the satisfaction of knowing he had a Supreme Court that was now less likely to block his legislation. Corcoran later took credit for getting Hugo Black (1937), Felix Frankfurter (1939), William O. Douglas (1939) and Frank Murphy (1940) appointed to Supreme Court. He also played an important role in defending Black when it was discovered that he was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Corcoran later claimed he wrote Black's statement asking for forgiveness. (19) Corcoran also became involved in advising Roosevelt over foreign policy. Although he had liberal views on domestic issues, Corcoran was passionately anti-communist. This was partly because of his Roman Catholicism. Roosevelt initially favoured giving help to the Republican government in Spain. However, Corcoran was a supporter of the fascist movement led by General Francisco Franco. As Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson pointed out in their book, The Case Against Congress: “Long before Pope John and Pope Paul made it clear they were not in sympathy with the Catholic hierarchy of Spain, the reactionary wing of the Catholic Church in the United States had been conducting one of the most efficient lobbies ever to operate on Capital Hill. It was able to reverse completely American policy on Spain. During the Spanish Civil War, Thomas G. Corcoran, a member of the Roosevelt brain trust, worked effectively at the White House to keep an embargo on all U.S. arms to both sides.” (20) Corcoran knew that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini would continue to provide both men and arms to Franco. Roosevelt's decision enabled fascism to win in Spain and become entrenched in Europe. Roosevelt later told his cabinet that he had made a "grave mistake" with respect to neutrality in the Spanish Civil War. Corcoran's fascist sympathies resulted in him becoming a firm advocate of isolationism. (21) He told friends that Irish Americans liked him "remembered their parents' repression at the hands of the British". On one occasion, Harry Hopkins told Corcoran: "Tom you're too Catholic to trust the Russians and too Irish to trust the English." (22) Roosevelt was angry with Corcoran over his advice on Spain. He also began to see that Corcoran was becoming a problem for the administration. He had upset a lot of powerful figures in Congress with his arm twisting tactics. Corcoran had also tried to unseat those who attempted to resist Roosevelt. Walter George of Georgia claimed that Corcoran had the "power of saying who shall be a senator and who shall not be a senator." Alva Johnson wrote that Corcoran had become a very powerful figure in the Roosevelt administration: “Cabinet officers, senators, commissioners stand in attention… Smart people who want to get action at headquarters ignore the regular secretariat, overlook the Cabinet and cultivate the acquaintance of White House Tommy. He can get things done.” (23) In June 1939, an article appeared in the Saturday Evening Post accused James Roosevelt of being a war profiteer. It was also claimed that the president's son helped Joseph Kennedy to obtain the ambassador to Great Britain. Corcoran, who was very close to James Roosevelt, got dragged into this scandal. It was not the first time that Corcoran had been accused of corrupt behaviour. Norman Littell, a high-ranking Justice Department official, told Anna Roosevelt that Corcoran had become a liability to her father: No quality is so essential in government as simple integrity and forthrightness. Ability and brilliance of mind are not enough." (24) In February, 1940, it was announced that the US Navy planned to build Corpus Christi Naval Station in Texas. The contract was a “cost-plus” contract. This meant that the contractor would recoup all expenses plus a built-in, guaranteed profit based on a pre-negotiated percentage. In addition, it was agreed that the contract would not be put out for competitive bidding. (25) Brown & Root wanted this contract and asked their friends from the Suite 8F Group to help them obtain it. Corcoran managed to persuade President Roosevelt to inform the Navy Department that Lyndon Johnson should be consulted before the contract was granted. Johnson suggested that Brown & Root should be given the contract that was worth $23,381,000 with a 5% per cent profit on top of that. Corcoran reported back that Brown & Root would have to share the profits of the deal with Californian businessman, Henry J. Kaiser. George Brown later recalled that the “White House said we had to take in Kaiser”. (26) Negotiations with Kaiser resulted in Kaiser being given 25% of the profits. According to Dan Briody, Kaiser “did virtually nothing to earn it.” (27) It is assumed that a percentage of Kaiser’s profits went to Corcoran. It was not the last time that these two men were to work together. In 1940 Corcoran began telling friends that he was considering leaving government. He told Sam Rosenman: "I want to make a million dollars in one year, that's all. Then I'm coming back to the government for the rest of my life." (28) Corcoran's plan was to become a political lobbyist on behalf of companies seeking to obtain government contracts. A large number of government officials had their jobs because of Corcoran. It was payback time. In October 1940, Roosevelt told Corcoran that he wanted him to resign from the administration. Roosevelt believed that the best way of stopping Japanese imperialism in Asia was to arm the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. However, Congress was opposed to this idea as it was feared that this might trigger a war with Japan. Therefore, Roosevelt's plan was for Corcoran to establish a private corporation to provide assistance to the nationalist government in China. Roosevelt even supplied the name of the proposed company, China Defense Supplies. He also suggested that his uncle, Frederick Delano, should be co-chairman of the company. Chaing Kai-shek nominated his former finance minister, Tse-ven Soong, as the other co-chairman. (29) For reasons of secrecy, Corcoran took no title other than outside counsel for China Defense Supplies. William S. Youngman was his front man in China. Corcoran's friend, Whitey Willauer, was moved to the Foreign Economic Administration, where he supervised the sending of supplies to China. In this way Corcoran was able to create an Asian Lend-Lease program. Corcoran also worked closely with Claire Lee Chennault, who had been working as a military adviser to Chaing Kai-shek since 1937. Chennault told Corcoran that if he was given the resources, he could maintain an air force within China that could carry out raids against the Japanese. Corcoran returned to the United States and managed to persuade Franklin D. Roosevelt to approve the creation of the American Volunteer Group. (30) One hundred P-40 fighters, built by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, intended for Britain, were redirected to Chennault in China. William Pawley was Curtiss-Wright's representative in Asia and he arranged for the P-40 to be assembled in Rangoon. (31) It was Tommy Corcoran's son David who suggested that the American Volunteer Group should be called the Flying Tigers. Chennault liked the idea and asked his friend, Walt Disney, to design a tiger emblem for the planes. On 13th April, 1941, Roosevelt signed a secret executive order authorizing the American Volunteer Group to recruit reserve officers from the army, navy and marines. Pawley suggested that the men should be recruited as "flying instructors". In July, 1941, ten pilots and 150 mechanics were supplied with fake passports and sailed from San Francisco for Rangoon. When they arrived they were told that they were really involved in a secret war against Japan. To compensate for the risks involved, the pilots were to be paid $600 a month ($675 for a patrol leader). In addition, they were to receive $500 for every enemy plane they shot down. (32) The Flying Tigers were extremely effective in their raids on Japanese positions and helped to slow down attempts to close the Burma Road, a key supply route to China. In seven months of fighting, the Flying Tigers destroyed 296 planes at a loss of 24 men (14 while flying and 10 on the ground). Corcoran had originally been an isolationist. However, he now knew that he could make a fortune out of the arms trade. His first major client was Henry J. Kaiser, the man who he managed to bring into Corpus Christi Naval Station. Corcoran had also helped Kaiser obtain lucrative government contracts while working for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. (33) Kaiser paid Corcoran a retainer of $25,000 a year. Corcoran then introduced Kaiser to William Knudsen, head of the Office of Production Management. Over the next few years Kaiser obtained $645 million in building contracts at his ten shipyards. Kaiser's two main business partners were Stephen D. Bechtel and John McCone. Kaiser had worked with Bechtel in the 1930s to build many of the major roads throughout California. (34) As I. F. Stone pointed out: “Mr. McCone's rising fortunes, financial and political, have been associated with the war and the arms race”. (35) Corcoran was also informed that a great deal of magnesium would be needed for building aircraft. With the help of Jesse Jones, the boss of the RFC, Kaiser was granted a loan to build a magnesium production plant in San Jose, California. After the RFC loan was secured, Corcoran sent Kaiser a bill requesting $135,000 in cash and a 15% stake in the magnesium production business. (36) Another important client was Brown & Root. Corcoran arranged for George Brown and Herman Brown to meet William Knudsen. Records show that Corcoran was paid $15,000 for "advice, conferences and negotiations" related to shipbuilding contracts. Robert Bryce points out that it was another member of Suite 8F Group who helped the Brown brothers to make a fortune out of the war industry: “The Browns got into shipbuilding business for the U.S. Navy thanks to another friend in Congress, Representative Albert Thomas of Houston. Brown Shipbuilding, a newly created subsidiary, won a contract to build ships even though the firm had never built so much as a canoe.” (37) In 1942 the Brown brothers established the Brown Shipbuilding Company on the Houston Ship Channel. Over the next three years the company built 359 ships and won contracts worth over $500 million. (38) Corcoran's work with China Defense Supplies caused some disquiet in Roosevelt's administration. Henry Morgenthau was a prominent critic. He argued that in effect, Corcoran was running an off-the-books operation in which a private company was diverting some of the war material destined for China to a private army, the American Volunteer Group. (39) Resistance also came from General George Marshall and General Joseph Stilwell, the American commander in Asia. (40) Marshall and Stilwell both believed that Chaing Kai-shek was completely corrupt and needed to be forced into introducing reforms. (41) The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was also having trouble with Chiang Kai-shek. The OSS arrived in July 1942. Known as Detachment 101, members of the OSS had been instructed to train Chiang’s men in guerrilla warfare. One of those officers sent to China was Captain Walter Mansfield. He later wrote: “By ordinary standards of guerrilla warfare, these Chinese were a pretty poor lot. I could not help contrasting them with Serbian guerrillas with whom I fought… Here in China, individual bravery was the exception rather than the rule.” (42) However, this was not a problem of race. Chinese communists were putting up a good fight against the Japanese. General Stilwell came to the conclusion that this was a problem of motivation. As one British officer argued that there was a “virtual undeclared peace” between Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese invaders. Stilwell had particularly problems with General Tai Li, head of the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics. According to R. Harris Smith, Tai Li had “acquired great wealth through his control of the opium trade” (43). A wartime OSS report criticized Tai Li’s use of concentration camps and political executions against his opponents. It pointed out that “General Tai was not Admiral Canaris of China, but the Heinrich Himmler”. Stilwell complained about Corcoran's ability to present Chiang in the best possible light with Roosevelt. Stilwell wrote to Marshall that the "continued publication of Chungking propaganda in the United States is an increasing handicap to my work." He added, "we can pull them out of this cesspool, but continued concessions have made the Generalissimo believe he has only to insist and we will yield." (44) The OSS gradually took over the activities that Corcoran had helped set up in China. In 1943 OSS agents based in China included Paul Helliwell, E. Howard Hunt, Mitch Werbell, Lucien Conein, John Singlaub and Ray Cline. It is argued in the Iran-Contra Connection that these men were involved in a small OSS mission at Kumming. (45) This was later confirmed by E. Howard Hunt in his autobiography, Undercover. However, Hunt gives no details of what this mission entails other than the orders came from Colonel Paul Helliwell (46). In his book, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt, Tad Szulc quotes a friend of Hunt’s as saying: “This was when Howard was bitten by the bug of intelligence and espionage and that’s when he flipped.” (47) According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, some officers of the OSS in China were paid for their work with five-pound sacks of opium. (48) It seems that some members of the OSS were aligning themselves with General Tai Li rather than General Silwell. Corcoran continued to work closely with members of the Suite 8F Group. On 4th April, 1941, Texas senator, Morris Sheppard died. Corcoran agreed to help Lyndon Johnson in his campaign to replace Sheppard. This included helping Johnson obtain approval of a rural electrification project from the Rural Electrification Administration. Corcoran also arranged for Franklin D. Roosevelt to make a speech on the eve of the polls criticizing Johnson's opponent, W. Lee O'Daniel. (49) Most of the money for the campaign came from Suite 8F Group members. Robert A. Caro claims that: “No one knows how much Brown & Root gave to the 1941 Lyndon Johnson campaign for Senator, and no one will ever know, but the amount was in the neighborhood of $200,000.” An IRS investigation into Johnson’s campaign funds was unable to discover the true figure. When one of Johnson’s aides, Edward Clark, was asked how much Johnson was given in 1941 he replied: “He had as much as he asked for.” (50) Despite the efforts of the Suite 8F Group, O'Daniel defeated Johnson by 1,311 votes. On the suggestion of Alvin Wirtz, another key member of the Suite 8F Group, Johnson decided to acquire KTBC, a radio station in Austin. E. G. Kingsberry and Wesley West, agreed to sell KTBC to Johnson (officially it was purchased by his wife, Lady Bird Johnson). However, it needed the approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCR). Johnson asked Corcoran for help with this matter. This was not very difficult as the chairman of the FCR, James Fly, was appointed by Frank Murphy as a favour for Corcoran. The FCC eventually approved the deal and Johnson was able to use KTBC to amass a fortune of more than $25 million. (51) Corcoran’s links with right-wing foreign groups began to cause him problems as the war escalated. Corcoran now came under pressure from the work he was doing for Sterling Pharmaceutical. His brother, David worked for the company and was responsible for getting Corcoran the contract. However, it was revealed in 1940 that Sterling Pharmaceutical had strong links with the German company, I. G. Farben. (52) The FBI discovered that Sterling had conspired with Farben to control the sale of aspirin. In other words, the two companies had formed an aspirin cartel. (53) According to one FBI report, Sterling Pharmaceutical was employing Nazi sympathizers in its offices in Latin America. Rumours began to circulate that Burton Wheeler would announce that he was appointing a subcommittee to investigate the relations between American and German firms. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced he was ready to prosecute any American company aiding and abetting a German company in any part of the world. On 10th April, 1941, the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to Sterling Pharmaceutical. Soon afterwards newspapers began to run negative stories about the company. One claimed that Sterling was helping the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels fulfill his pledge that "Americans would help Hitler win the Americas." (54) On 2nd June, 1941, Roosevelt appointed Francis Biddle as his new Attorney General. Biddle was a close friend of Corcoran's. The day after his appointment, Biddle accepted a settlement offer from Sterling in which the company would pay a fine of five thousand dollars. Later, it was agreed that Sterling would abrogate all contracts with I. G. Farben. Corcoran was not the only American being investigated for his business dealings with Nazi Germany. According to Joseph Trento, “Prescott Bush became the American banker for Hitler’s largest single industrial supporter in Germany through an elaborate money-laundering operation” (55) Trento is referring to Fritz Thyssen, the man who controlled the vast German Steel Trust. The bank that Bush used for this operation was the Union Banking Corporation (UBC). Bush did such a good job that in 1934 he was put on the UBC board of directors. During the war the Department of Justice carried out an investigation into Prescott Bush dealings with Nazi Germany. It was discovered that Bush “failed to divest himself of more than a dozen ‘enemy national’ relationships that continued until as late as 1951”. (56) However, Prescott Bush was never to be charged with these offences. David Corcoran also survived this scandal. On 2nd June, 1941, Roosevelt appointed Francis Biddle as his new Attorney General. Biddle was a close friend of Corcoran's. The day after his appointment, Biddle accepted a settlement offer from Sterling Pharmaceutical in which the company would pay a fine of five thousand dollars. (57) In Congress there was speeches made calling for an investigation into the role played by Corcoran in protecting the interests of Sterling Pharmaceutical. Senator Lawrence Smith argued: "It is common gossip in government circles that the long arm of Tommy Corcoran reaches into many agencies; that he has placed many men in important positions and they in turn are amenable to his influences." On 16th December, 1941, Corcoran appeared before the Senate Defense Investigation Committee. He admitted that business had been exceedingly good since he left Roosevelt's administration. Some members of the committee were convinced that Corcoran's activities revealed a need for more stringent lobbying restrictions. Senator Carl Hatch from New Mexico introduced a bill that would prohibit former government employees from working with government departments or agencies for two years after leaving government service. As David McKean points out in Peddling Influence "the bill never made it out of the Judiciary Committee, presumably because Washington lobbyists persuaded their friends on the panel to kill it." (58) In a letter to the Senate Defense Investigation Committee in November, 1944, Norman Littell, assistant attorney general for the lands division, reported conversations between Tommy Corcoran and Francis Biddle that suggested that the two men had a corrupt relationship. Littell claimed that Biddle seemed to be following instructions from Corcoran. In the letter, Littell asked the committee: "What has Tommy Corcoran got on Biddle?" Littell argued that during the investigation of the Sterling Pharmaceutical case, Biddle was "completely dominated by Tommy Corcoran". He added that this company was acting as "an agent of Nazi Germany" and that Biddle's decision to settle this case was "the lowest point in the history of the Department of Justice since the Harding administration". This story was picked up by the national press and demands were made that the relationship between Biddle and Corcoran should be investigated. Sam Rayburn made sure that no committee held a hearing on this issue. Charles Van Devander reported in the Washington Post that: "Strong influence is being brought to bear to block an investigation by Congress into the affairs of the Department of Justice, including Attorney General Biddle's allegedly close relationship with lawyer lobbyist Tommy Corcoran." (59) Tommy Corcoran was also linked to another company that obtained a large number of lucrative government contracts during the war. It is well documented that one of Corcoran’s most important clients was Henry J. Kaiser. It is less well-known that Kaiser was a business partner of John A. McCone and Steve Bechtel. Kaiser began his business relationship with the Bechtel family when he became a partner of Steve’s father, Warren, in 1921. Together they won the contract to build the Boulder Dam (later known as the Hoover Dam). Also involved in this project was John A. McCone. At the time he worked as sales manager for Consolidated Steel. He arranged with Kaiser and Bechtel to provide 55 million tons of steel for the Hoover Dam. The sale saved Consolidated Steel from bankruptcy. McCone got the contract because he was a close friend of Warren Bechtel’s son, Steve Bechtel (they met while students studying engineering at Berkeley). After Warren’s death in 1933, Henry J. Kaiser joined forces with Steve Bechtel. In 1937, McCone joined the team. As a result the Bechtel-McCone Corporation was formed. (60) Over the next few years the three men formed several companies with them taking it in turn to become the front man. In some cases, they remained silent partners. This was especially true after the war when McCone sought a career in politics and was responsible for giving government contracts to Kaiser and Bechtel. The first major customer of Bechtel-McCone was Standard Oil of California (Socal). The company obtained a contract to build Socal’s new refinery in Richmond. It was the first of many refineries built by Bechtel-McCone. By 1939 the company had more than 10,000 employees and was building refineries, chemical plants and pipelines all over the world. (61) It was Kaiser’s connections with Tommy Corcoran that was to be the most important factor in the growth of this business empire. In the summer of 1940 Steve Bechtel and John McCone had a meeting with Admiral L. Vickery of the U.S. Maritime Commission. Vickery told the men he “had received a telegram from the British Purchasing Commission (BPC) urgently requesting that the Maritime Commission arrange the building of 60 tankers to replace the ships the British had lost to German torpedoes”. At another meeting a few weeks later, Maritime Commission chairman, Admiral Emory S. Land, told Bechtel and McCone that: “Besides building ships for the British, they would have to build them for the Americans as well. Not merely tankers, but Liberty and Victory cargo ships, troop transports, the whole makings of a merchant navy.” Admiral Land confidently added that thousands of vessels would be needed as “America was headed into war.” (62) As a result of these two meetings, Bechtel, McCone and Kaiser built shipyards at Richmond and Sausalito. Several of their companies were involved in this project that became known as “Operation Calship”. It was a terrible gamble because at that time they were relying on the predictions of Admiral Emory S. Land. However, Land was right and only a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Maritime Commission awarded Calship its first shipbuilding contract. Within a year, Calship was employing over 42,000 workers at its two shipyards. In 1942 John McCone and Steve Bechtel obtained a contract to build aircraft at Willow Run in Alabama. The War Department agreed to pay all the company’s costs plus 5 percent on work estimates presented by Bechtel-McCone every six months. A 300-acre factory was built and 8,000 employees hired to staff it. However, no aircraft were built. Employees were paid for doing nothing. A local man, George P. Alexander, discovered details of this scam and collected affidavits from workers who admitted that they “went in every day at 9.00, punched the time clock, then went home”. They then returned to the factory at 5.00 to “punch out”. Alexander filed suit against Bechtel-McCone in federal district court on 31st July, 1943. He claimed that the company had made “many and various claims against the government of the United States, or a department or officer thereof, knowing such claims to be false, fictitious or fraudulent.” (63) However, the judge dismissed the case. The problem was with the contract, not the claims by Bechtel-McCone. As John McCone admitted to Fortune Magazine on 17th May, 1943: “Every six months, we estimate how much work we expect to do in the next six months and then we get a fee of five percent of the estimated amount of work regardless of how much work we actually do turn out.” (64) Bechtel-McCone was also involved in another scandal concerning war contracts. Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, head of the Army Sources of Supply Command, decided to build “a major refinery at the Norman Wells oilfields in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and run a pipeline from there 1,200 miles southwest through the Yukon Territory into Alaska.” The contract to do this was given to John McCone and Steve Bechtel. The terms of the contract were very unusual. The Bechtel-McCone Corporation was guaranteed a 10% profit on the project (the kind of deal that George Bush gave to Halliburton in Iraq). The other surprising thing about the Canol Project was that it was to be a secret contract. It seems that Somervell did not want anyone outside the War Department and the Bechtel-McCone Corporation to know about this deal. The reason for this is that Harold Ickes, as Interior Secretary and the head of the Petroleum Administration for War, should have been the person who oversaw this project. The $35 million for the project came from within a massive war appropriations bill that was passed by Congress in April 1942. After working on it for a year the cost had reached over $100 million. It was finished in May 1945. However, the wrong sized pipes had been used and it was discovered that to pump the oil it cost $150 per barrel rather than the $5 estimated by Somervell, Bechtel and McCone. Less that a year after it was finished, the plant and pipeline was abandoned. It had cost the American taxpayer $134 million. (65) After the war the “General Accounting Office told a House Merchant Marine Committee investigation that the company had made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000. The same committee a few months later complained that Mr McCone's company was “paid $2,500,000 by the government to take over a shipyard costing $25,000,000 and containing surplus material costing $14,000,000.” (66) Tommy Corcoran was not the only person arranging for Kaiser, Berchtel and McCone to obtain lucrative government contracts during the war. John L. Simpson was a close friend of an interesting group of people including Allen and John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson and William Donovan. In 1942 Simpson was recruited into the OSS by Allen Dulles. His official title was chief financial advisor for the U.S. Army in Europe. In 1944 Simpson returned to San Francisco and became a consultant to the Betchtel-McCone Corporation. His arrival brought even more contracts from the War Department. (67) In 1945, U.S. forces captured the banking documents held by the Nazis regarding Prescott Bush. Robert Cowley was one of those who saw these documents. He told Joseph Trento that the “file was damning”. (68) It seems that this information was “far more detailed than the records the Justice Department had obtained during its banking investigation”. According to Joseph Trento, this information was passed to Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner and John J. McCloy, the German High Commissioner. (69) This information was kept from the American public. However, over the years, Prescott Bush and his family had to pay a price for this secrecy. Dulles was himself involved in working with fascists fleeing from Germany. In his book ‘The Secret History of the CIA’, Trento argues that “Donovan and Dulles secretly threw in America’s lot with the worst of the Third Reich. America was actively recruiting Nazis – not simply scientists, but high-level military and civilian officials of the Hitler regime.” (70) John J. McCloy helped Dulles to help Nazis to escape punishment. As German High Commissioner he controversially ordered the release from prison of German industrialists such as Alfried Krupp and Friedrich Flick that had been convicted of serious war crimes at Nuremberg. One month after the end of the Second World War, Tommy Corcoran joined with David Corcoran and William S. Youngman to create a Panamanian company, Rio Carthy, for the purpose of pursuing business ventures in Asia and South America. Soon afterwards, Claire Chennault and Whiting Willauer approached Corcoran with the idea of creating a commercial airline in China to compete with CNAC and CATC. Corcoran agreed to use Rio Cathy as the legal vehicle for investing in the airline venture. Chiang Kai-shek agreed that his government would invest in the airline. Corcoran anticipated he would own 37% of the enquity in the airline, but Chennault and Willauer gave a greater percentage to the Chinese government, and Corcoran's share dropped to 28%. (71) Civil Air Transport (CAT) was officially launched on 29th January, 1946. Corcoran approached his old friend Fiorella La Guardia, the director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). He agreed to award a $4 million contract to deliver relief to China. This contract kept them going for the first year but as the civil war intensified, CAT had difficulty maintaining its routes. (72) The OSS had been disbanded in October 1945 and was replaced by the War Department's Strategic Service Unit (SSU). Paul Helliwell became chief of the Far East Division of the SSU. Helliwell worked closely with Tommy Corcoran and Claire Chennault in China. In 1947 the SSU was replaced by the Central Intelligence Agency. CAT needed another major customer and on 6th July, 1947, Corcoran and Claire Chennault had a meeting with Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the new director of the CIA. Hillenkoetter arranged for Corcoran to meet Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination. Wisner was in charge of the CIA's covert operations. On 1st November, 1948, Corcoran signed a formal agreement with the CIA. The agreement committed the agency to provide up to $500,000 to finance an CAT airbase, and $200,000 to fly agency personnel and equipment in and out of the mainland, and to underwrite any shortfall that might result from any hazardous mission. Over the next few months CAT airlifted personnel and equipment from Chungking, Kweilin, Luchnow, Nanking, and Amoy. (73) In 1948, Lyndon B. Johnson decided to make a second run for the U.S. Senate. His main opponent in the Democratic primary (Texas was virtually a one party state and the most important elections were those that decided who would be the Democratic Party candidate) was Coke Stevenson. (74) Coke Stevenson was the favourite to win the contest. This worried George and Herman Brown. Ed Clark, Brown & Root’s lawyer said: “They (Brown & Root) were regulated in a thousand ways, and Stevenson would have run them out of Washington… The Browns had to win this. Stevenson was a man of vengeance, and he would have run them out of Washington. Johnson – if he lost, he was going back to being nobody. They were going back to being nobody.” (75) Stevenson helped his cause by criticizing Johnson for supporting the Taft-Hartley Act. The American Federation of Labor was also angry with Johnson for supporting this legislation and at its June convention the AFL broke a 54 year tradition of neutrality and endorsed Stevenson. Johnson asked Tommy Corcoran to work behind the scenes at convincing union leaders that he was more pro-labour than Stevenson. This he did and on 11th August, 1948, Corcoran told Harold Ickes that he had "a terrible time straightening out labour" in the Johnson campaign but he believed he had sorted the problem out. (76) Sid Richardson was another person who was very keen for Johnson to win the election. He lent Johnson his converted B-24 Liberator, an aircraft that could fly 2,100 miles without refuelling. (77) Senator Ralph Yarborough remarked: “They were spending money like mad. They were spending money like Texas had never seen. And they were brash about how they spent it, and they were utterly ruthless. Brown & Root would do anything.” (78) On 2nd September, unofficial results had Stevenson winning by 362 votes. However, by the time the results became official, Johnson was declared the winner by 17 votes. Stevenson immediately claimed that he was a victim of election fraud. On 24th September, Judge T. Whitfield Davidson, invalidated the results of the election and set a trial date. Johnson once again approached Corcoran to solve the problem. A meeting was held that was attended by Corcoran, Francis Biddle, Abe Fortas, Joe Rauh, Jim Rowe and Ben Cohen. It was decided to take the case directly to the Supreme Court. A motion was drafted and sent to Justice Hugo Black. On 28th September, Justice Black issued an order that put Johnson's name back on the ballot. Later, it was claimed by Rauh that Black made the decision following a meeting with Corcoran. On 2nd November, 1948, Johnson easily defeated Jack Porter, his Republican Party candidate. Coke Stevenson now appealed to the subcommittee on elections and privileges of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. Corcoran enjoyed a good relationship with Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire. He was able to work behind the scenes to make sure that the ruling did not go against Johnson. Corcoran later told Johnson that he would have to repay Bridges for what he had done for him regarding the election. (79) The matter was now referred to the Texas State Democratic Executive Committee. A meeting was held in Fort Worth to decide who won the election. According to Dan Briody, the “full, immense, weight of the economic power of Brown & Root was thrown behind Lyndon Johnson that night”. (80) Once again it was successful and Johnson won the Executive Committee vote by 29 to 28. On 3rd January, 1949, Johnson became a U.S. senator for the state of Texas. At the end of the Second World War the Bechtel-McCone company was brought to an end. John McCone now invested much of the profits he had made from war production in Pacific Far East Lines. McCone was the majority stockholder but Steve Bechtel and Henry Kaiser were also silent investors in this company. McCone also formed a partnership with Henry Mercer, the owner of states Marines Lines, whose vast fleets operated in the Atlantic. As Laton McCartney pointed out in ‘Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story’, McCone was now “one of the dominant shipping figures in the world.” (81) McCone and Bechtel were also directors of the Stanford Research Institute. McCone was also chief fund-raiser for the California Institute of Technology, whose scientists had been involved in the development of the atom bomb and were now involved in nuclear research. McCone took a keen interest in politics and was a fanatical anti-communist. McCone told his friends that the Soviets intended to achieve “world domination”. I. F. Stone described him as a “rightest Catholic… a man with holy war views.” (82) John L. Simpson, chief financial officer to the various corporations owned by Steve Betchel, introduced McCone to Allen Dulles at a meeting in 1947. It was at this time he became friends with William Knowland and Dwight D. Eisenhower. McCone played a lot of golf with Eisenhower and was later to play a key role in persuading him to become the Republican Party presidential candidate. In 1948 Harry S. Truman appointed McCone as Deputy to the Secretary of Defense. According to Laton McCartney, despite his title “it quickly became apparent that he was the department’s real boss.” (83) In 1949 Sam Zemurray asked Corcoran to join the United Fruit Company as a lobbyist and special counsel. (84) Zemurray had problems with his business in Guatemala. In the 1930s Zemurray aligned United Fruit closely with the government of President Jorge Ubico. The company received import duty and real estate tax exemptions from Ubico. He also gave them hundreds of square miles of land. United Fruit controlled more land than any other individual or group. It also owned the railway, the electric utilities, telegraph, and the country's only port at Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic coast. Ubico was overthrown in 1944 and following democratic elections, Juan Jose Arevalo became the new president. Arevalo, a university professor who had been living in exile, described himself as a "spiritual socialist". He implemented sweeping reforms by passing new laws that gave workers the right to form unions. This included the 40,000 Guatemalans who worked for United Fruit. Zemurray feared that Arevalo would also nationalize the land owned by United Fruit in Guatemala. He asked Corcoran to express his fears to senior political figures in Washington. Corcoran began talks with key people in the government agencies and departments that shaped U.S. policy in Central America. He argued that the U.S. should use United Fruit as an American beachhead against communism in the region. Thomas Corcoran and his business associates were having difficulty making a profit from Civil Air Transport (CAT). Paul Helliwell, CIA’s man in China managed to persuade Frank Wisner of the OPC to provide an annual subsidy of over $1 million. Helliwell also paid CAT to fly Alfred C. Cox, to fly throughout China, giving money and munitions to surviving warlords. (85) In May, 1949, General Claire Chennault, traveled to Washington to ask for more funds for the Nationalists. Tommy Corcoran also used his influence on behalf of Chiang. However, Harry S. Truman had a poor opinion of Corcoran and his pleas were rejected. After the State Department rejected Chennault’s ideas as impractical, Helliwell arranged for him to meet Frank Wisner. It was agreed that the CIA would use its own covert operations group (OPC) to do what it could to help in the fight against the Chinese communists. This included increased subsidies to CAT. Eventually the CIA took full control of CAT. According to Joseph Trento, Paul Helliwell used the airline to fly arms into Burma. “CAT then used the ‘empty’ planes to fly drugs from Burma to Taiwan, Bangkok, and Saigon. There the drugs were processed for the benefit of the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt government.” (86) As Robert Caro pointed out Carcoran had been “transformed, with remarkable speed, into a lobbyist growing rich on fees from some of the country’s most reactionary businessmen who hired Tommy Cork to help them circumvent the laws he had written.” Notes 1. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 125) 2. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 286) 3. Howard Zinn, New Deal Thought, 1966 (pages 140-144) 4. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 69) 5. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 118) 6. Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 1982 (pages 372-73) 7. Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, 2004 (page 44) 8. Robert Bryce, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, 2004 (pages 61) 9. Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, 2004 (pages 49-52) 10. Tommy Corcoran, interviewed by Robert Caro, included in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 1982 (page 460) 11. Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 1982 (pages 460-61) 12. Joseph A. Pratt & Christopher J. Castaneda, Builders: Herman and George R. Brown, 1999 (pages 158-59) 13. Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, 2004 (page 44) 14. Joseph A. Pratt & Christopher J. Castaneda, Builders: Herman and George R. Brown, 1999 (page 159) 15. Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm, 1993 (pages 294-295) 16. Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography, 1985 (pages 473-478) 17. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 78) 18. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 89) 19. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 99) 20. Drew Pearson & Jack Anderson, The Case Against Congress, 1968 (page 356) 21. Donald F. Drummond, The Passing of American Neutrality, 1955 (page 383) 22. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 120) 23. Saturday Evening Post (31st July, 1937) 24. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 118) 25. Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, 2004 (pages 76-81) 26. Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 1982 (page 584) 27. Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, 2004 (page 81) 28. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 126) 29. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 139-40) 30. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1979 (page 273) 31. Fana de l'Aviation Magazine, January, 2002 32. Fana de l'Aviation Magazine, January, 2002 33. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 147-149) 34. For a full account of the Henry J. Kaiser, Stephen D. Bechtel and John McCone business relationship see Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 35. I. F. Stone, I. F. Stone Weekly (9th October, 1961) 36. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 148) 37. Robert Bryce, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, 2004 (page 70) 38. Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, 2004 (pages 86-87) 39. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 150) 40. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1979 (pages 354-57) 41. R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (page 244) 42. Walter Mansfield, Ambush in China, Marine Corps Gazette, March 1946 (page 42) 43. R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (page 245) 44. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 150) 45. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott & Jane Hunter, The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era, 1987 (page 64). 46. E. Howard Hunt, Undercover, 1975 (pages 37-43) 47. Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt, 1974 (page 15) 48. The Wall Street Journal (18th April, 1980) 49. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 157-60) 50. Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 1982 (page 718) 51. J. Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, 1964 (pages 55-82) 52. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 133) 53. For a full account of this subject see Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer, The Aspirin Wars, 1991 54. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 151) 55. Joseph Trento, Prelude to Terror, 2005 (page 4) 56. John Buchanan & Stacey Michael, New Hampshire Gazette (7th November, 2003) 57. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 155-57) 58. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 166) 59. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 171-74) 60. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (page 53) 61. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (page 55) 62. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (pages 56-58) 63. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (pages 66-70) 64. John McCone, interview with Fortune Magazine, 17th May, 1943. The article was never published. 65. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (pages 61-66) 66. I. F. Stone, I. F. Stone Weekly (9th October, 1961) 67. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (pages 74-75) 68. Robert Crowley was a member of the OSS and later became associate director of the CIA. 69. Joseph Trento, Prelude to Terror, 2005 (page 3) 70. Joseph Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, 2001 (page 29) 71. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 211) 72. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 212) 73. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 213) 74. Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, 2004 (page 129) 75. J. Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, 1964 (pages 21-54) 76. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 204) 77. Robert Bryce, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, 2004 (page 56) 78. Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, 1990 (page 286) 79. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 205) 80. Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, 2004 (page 131) 81. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (page 97) 82. I. F. Stone, I. F. Weekly, 7th November, 1960 83. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (page 99) 84. David McKean, Peddling Influence, 2004 (page 214) 85. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA complicity in the Global Drug Trade, 1991 (page 167) 86. Joseph Trento, Prelude to Terror, 2005 (page 25) 87. Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 1982 (page 765)

No. You had to be based in Texas to become a member. Herman Brown was the gatekeeper. The case of Lawrence Bell was an interesting one. He helped finance LBJ’s 1948 campaign. For example, he supplied LBJ with a 47-B helicopter (LBJ was the first American politician to use a helicopter for campaigning). Bell wanted to join Suite 8F Group but he was refused as he was based in New York State. As a result, Bell moved his operations to Fort Worth, Texas. This was the beginning of Bell obtaining lucrative government contracts. Concoran was the only non-Texan member of the Suite 8F Group. He was so important to the fortunes of the group, that he was considered an honorary Texan. Corcoran had been close to Joe Kennedy. When Corcoran left Roosevelt in 1940, Kennedy, unaware of what Corcoran was up to, offered him a full-time job. However, the two men fell out over a deal that took place in 1950 (I will write about this when I cover the period 1950-1960). From that point on, Corcoran lost access to the Kennedy family. That is why Corcoran had to work through LBJ. All this will become clearer, including Corcoran’s links with John McCone, etc. during the 1950s.

I have not been able to find a connection between Howard Hughes and Tommy Corcoran. Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson’s behaviour is very strange during the hearings of the Senate War Investigating Committee in 1946. Its chairman, Owen Brewster appeared to be close to revealing the corruption that had gone on during the war. It would have exposed the activities of businessmen like Tommy Corcoran, John McCone, Steve Bechtel, Henry J. Kaiser but also senior figures in the military who were involved in this scam against American taxpayers. The fact that it had diverted billions of dollars from fighting the real enemy, it could be argued that their activities were close to treason. However, Pearson and Anderson got these people off the hook by launching a campaign to expose Owen Brewster. He was corrupt but he was very small beer compared to Hughes, Corcoran, McCone, etc. Yet they got off as a consequence of Pearson’s campaign. As a result of this campaign, Brewster backed down, and with the help of Sam Rayburn, who had been put in place by Corcoran, the Senate War Investigating Committee never completed its report on the non-delivery of the F-11 and the HK-1. The committee stopped meeting and was eventually disbanded. It seems to me that Pearson was a fairly honest journalist. However, he made two serious errors of judgment. (1) He helped Howard Hughes in 1946 and therefore prevented the exposure of Corcoran, McCone, etc. (2) He backed down from his investigation of the relationship between LBJ and Brown & Root in 1956. Both these cases would have gone to the heart of the conspiracy that have been outlining here: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5799 I don’t think this is a coincidence. The journalist who had discovered this scandal is I. F. Stone. See his articles when McCone was appointed Director of the CIA. Unfortunately, his work, published in the I.F. Stone Weekly, got virtually no press coverage and failed to make an impact. McCone kept his reputation and was therefore in a good position to cover up the JFK assassination.

Three writers of these popular spy novels included E. Howard Hunt, William F. Buckley and David Atlee Phillips.

Of course. But it is important for us to know that our emails are being read. The idea is to intimidate those who seek to expose the CIA. During the 1980s a story was leaked that MI5 had constructed a list of people who were members of dangerous political groups (CND, Anti-Apartheid Movement, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, etc.). This blacklist would then be used to stop these people from making progress in their chosen careers. I am not sure this story is true but a lot of people believed it. Especially with Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. With high unemployment in the 1980s, people began to leave these organizations. At the same time students refused to join these left-wing political groups. They did not want to ruin their careers before they started. The left was virtually destroyed during the 1980s. Although I am not sure this blacklist actually existed, a belief in it played its part in reducing the opposition to this right-wing government.

Strange by name, strange by nature. Only joking. I am sure he forced you into saying that.

I have been doing some more research on John McCone. It is an interesting story: On another thread I have argued that Tommy Corcoran was a key figure in developing what became known as the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5799 It is well documented that one of Corcoran’s most important clients was Henry J. Kaiser. It is less well-known that Kaiser was a business partner of John A. McCone and Steve Bechtel. Kaiser began his business relationship with the Bechtel family when he became a partner of Warren Bechtel in 1921. Together they won the contract to build the Boulder Dam (later known as the Hoover Dam). Also involved in this project was John A. McCone. At the time he worked as sales manager for Consolidated Steel. He arranged with Kaiser and Bechtel to provide 55 million tons of steel for the Hoover Dam. The sale saved Consolidated Steel from bankruptcy. McCone got the contract because he was a close friend of Warren Bechtel’s son, Steve Bechtel (they met while students at Berkeley studying engineering). After Warren Bechtel’s death in 1933, Henry J. Kaiser joined forces with Steve Bechtel. In 1937, McCone joined the team. As a result the Bechtel-McCone Corporation was formed. (1) Over the next few years the three men formed several companies with them taking it in turn to become the front man. In some cases, they remained silent partners. This was especially true after the war when McCone sought a career in politics and was responsible for giving government contracts to Kaiser and Bechtel. The first major customer of Bechtel-McCone was Standard Oil of California (Socal). The company obtained a contract to build Socal’s new refinery in Richmond. It was the first of many refineries built by Bechtel-McCone. By 1939 the company had more than 10,000 employees and was building refineries, chemical plants and pipelines all over the world. (2) It was Kaiser’s connections with Tommy Corcoran that was to be the most important factor in the growth of this business empire. In the summer of 1940 Steve Bechtel and John McCone had a meeting with Admiral L. Vickery of the U.S. Maritime Commission. Vickery told the men he “had received a telegram from the British Purchasing Commission (BPC) urgently requesting that the Maritime Commission arrange the building of 60 tankers to replace the ships the British had lost to German torpedoes”. At another meeting a few weeks later, Maritime Commission chairman, Admiral Emory S. Land, told Bechtel and McCone that: “Besides building ships for the British, they would have to build them for the Americans as well. Not merely tankers, but Liberty and Victory cargo ships, troop transports, the whole makings of a merchant navy.” Admiral Land confidently added that thousands of vessels would be needed as “America was headed into war.” (3) As a result of these two meetings, Bechtel, McCone and Kaiser built shipyards at Richmond and Sausalito. Several of their companies were involved in this project that became known as “Operation Calship”. It was a terrible gamble because at that time they were relying on the predictions of Admiral Emory S. Land. However, Land was right and only a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Maritime Commission awarded Calship its first shipbuilding contract. Within a year, Calship was employing over 42,000 workers at its two shipyards. In 1942 John McCone and Steve Bechtel obtained a contract to build aircraft at Willow Run in Alabama. The War Department agreed to pay all the company’s costs plus 5 percent on work estimates presented by Bechtel-McCone every six months. A 300-acre factory was built and 8,000 employees hired to staff it. However, no aircraft were built. Employees were paid for doing nothing. A local man, George P. Alexander, discovered details of this scam and collected affidavits from workers who admitted that they “went in every day at 9.00, punched the time clock, then went home”. They then returned to the factory at 5.00 to “punch out”. Alexander filed suit against Bechtel-McCone in federal district court on 31st July, 1943. He claimed that the company had made “many and various claims against the government of the United States, or a department or officer thereof, knowing such claims to be false, fictitious or fraudulent.” (4) However, the judge dismissed the case. The problem was with the contract, not the claims by Bechtel-McCone. As John McCone admitted to Fortune Magazine on 17th May, 1943: “Every six months, we estimate how much work we expect to do in the next six months and then we get a fee of five percent of the estimated amount of work regardless of how much work we actually do turn out.” (5) Bechtel-McCone was also involved in another scandal concerning war contracts. Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, head of the Army Sources of Supply Command, decided to build “a major refinery at the Norman Wells oilfields in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and run a pipeline from there 1,200 miles southwest through the Yukon Territory into Alaska.” The contract to do this was given to John McCone and Steve Bechtel. The terms of the contract were very unusual. The Bechtel-McCone Corporation was guaranteed a 10% profit on the project (the kind of deal that George Bush gave to Halliburton in Iraq). The other surprising thing about the Canol Project was that it was to be a secret contract. It seems that Somervell did not want anyone outside the War Department and the Bechtel-McCone Corporation to know about this deal. The reason for this is that Harold Ickes, as Interior Secretary and the head of the Petroleum Administration for War, should have been the person who oversaw this project. The $35 million for the project came from within a massive war appropriations bill that was passed by Congress in April 1942. After working on it for a year the cost had reached over $100 million. It was finished in May 1945. However, the wrong sized pipes had been used and it was discovered that to pump the oil it cost $150 per barrel rather than the $5 estimated by Somervell, Bechtel and McCone. Less that a year after it was finished, the plant and pipeline was abandoned. It had cost the American taxpayer $134 million. (6) After the war the “General Accounting Office told a House Merchant Marine Committee investigation that the company had made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000. The same committee a few months later complained that Mr McCone's company was “paid $2,500,000 by the government to take over a shipyard costing $25,000,000 and containing surplus material costing $14,000,000.” (7) Tommy Corcoran was not the only person arranging for Kaiser, Berchtel and McCone to obtain lucrative government contracts during the war. John L. Simpson was a close friend of an interesting group of people including Allen and John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson and William Donovan. In 1942 Simpson was recruited into the OSS by Allen Dulles. His official title was chief financial advisor for the U.S. Army in Europe. In 1944 Simpson returned to San Francisco and became a consultant to the Betchtel-McCone Corporation. His arrival brought even more contracts from the War Department. (8) At the end of the Second World War the Bechtel-McCone company was brought to an end. John McCone now invested much of the profits he had made from war production in Pacific Far East Lines. McCone was the majority stockholder but Steve Bechtel and Henry Kaiser were also silent investors in this company. McCone also formed a partnership with Henry Mercer, the owner of states Marines Lines, whose vast fleets operated in the Atlantic. As Laton McCartney pointed out in ‘Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story’, McCone was now “one of the dominant shipping figures in the world.” (9) McCone and Bechtel were also directors of the Stanford Research Institute. McCone was also chief fund-raiser for the California Institute of Technology, whose scientists had been involved in the development of the atom bomb and were now involved in nuclear research. McCone took a keen interest in politics and was a fanatical anti-communist. McCone told his friends that the Soviets intended to achieve “world domination”. I. F. Stone described him as a “rightest Catholic… a man with holy war views.” (10) John L. Simpson, chief financial officer to the various corporations owned by Steve Betchel, introduced McCone to Allen Dulles at a meeting in 1947. It was at this time he became friends with William Knowland and Dwight D. Eisenhower. McCone played a lot of golf with Eisenhower and was later to play a key role in persuading him to become the Republican Party presidential candidate. In 1948 Harry S. Truman appointed McCone as Deputy to the Secretary of Defense. According to Laton McCartney, despite his title “it quickly became apparent that he was the department’s real boss.” (11) However, it is in the 1950s that this story becomes very interesting. I will post details of this later. 1. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (page 53) 2. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (page 55) 3. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (pages 56-58) 4. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (pages 66-70) 5. John McCone, interview with Fortune Magazine, 17th May, 1943. The article was never published. 6. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (pages 61-66) 7. I. F. Stone, I. F. Stone Weekly (9th October, 1961) 8. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (pages 74-75) 9. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (page 97) 10. I. F. Stone, I. F. Weekly, 7th November, 1960 11. Laton McCarthy, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, 1988 (page 99) John A. McCone and Steve Bechtel during the prosperous Second World War.

Message from Ulrike: "I have been assigned to a new and rather time-consuming job so that I cannot particpiate in the Comenius Project."

In the summer of 1940 Steve Bechtel and John McCone had a meeting with Admiral L. Vickery of the U.S. Maritime Commission. Vickery told the men he “had received a telegram from the British Purchasing Commission (BPC) urgently requesting that the Maritime Commission arrange the building of 60 tankers to replace the ships the British had lost to German torpedoes”. At another meeting a few weeks later, Maritime Commission chairman, Admiral Emory S. Land, told Bechtel and McCone that: “Besides building ships for the British, they would have to build them for the Americans as well. Not merely tankers, but Liberty and Victory cargo ships, troop transports, the whole makings of a merchant navy.” Admiral Land confidently added that thousands of vessels would be needed as “America was headed into war.” As a result of these two meetings, Bechtel, McCone and Kaiser built shipyards at Richmond and Sausalito. Several of their companies were involved in this project that became known as “Operation Calship”. It was a terrible gamble because at that time they were relying on the predictions of Admiral Emory S. Land. However, Land was right and only a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Maritime Commission awarded Calship its first shipbuilding contract. Within a year, Calship was employing over 42,000 workers at its two shipyards. At the same time as Bechtel, McCone and Kaiser were building shipyards for a war that they had been told was coming, Tommy Corcoran was telling friends that he was leaving government. He told Sam Rosenman: "I want to make a million dollars in one year." After leaving government in October, 1940, Corcoran's first client was Kaiser. Corcoran then goes to China and helps establish China Defense Supplies with Chaing Kai-shek. FDR set this up in this way because he wanted to arm the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek without the support of Congress (Most members of Congress believed that this action would trigger a war with Japan). Corcoran then goes on to work with Claire Lee Chennault and William Pawley to establish the Flying Tigers. Another operation that could triggered a war with Japan. Is this why Admiral Land, Bechtel, McCone, Kaiser, etc. were so convinced that America would soon be involved in the Second World War?

I would like to begin to fill in the application form for our Citizenship Project. However, I have been told by Michael Butterworth, Senior Programme Officer at the British Council who deals with Comenius Projects that the new application form has not yet been printed. He tells me that it now needs to arrive by 1st March. As some will know, it is a daunting task to fill in a Comenius application form. I do not want to do this unless I know other members are fully committed to the project. Proposed members of the project have been fairly quiet on the Citizenship Forum. Does this reflect a lack of interest in the project? I await your responses.

A group of left-wing activists, including several investigative journalists, have joined a lawsuit seeking a ban on a domestic spy program authorized by President George Bush. It is claimed that the CIA is listening to their telephone calls and reading their emails. I think it is possible that those people who criticize the CIA on this Forum are having their emails intercepted. Over the last few weeks I have received information from hotmail that some of my emails to fellow investigators have been “delayed” and have not reached their destination. Yesterday, I received a PM on this Forum that they have been receiving the same message when they have tried to email me via their hotmail account. Is it possible that some people’s emails are being redirected so that they can be read by the intelligence services before they are delivered to the intended person? For some time I have been aware that my emails to Philip Agee have not been arriving. However, he lives in Cuba so I assumed that the CIA was blocking these emails. Is it now happening in America?