COUP IN DALLAS

[Joe Bauer]

We knew the woman DLI student fairly well. This was in the 1990's.

I admit I didn't know exactly how long her immersion stint there was.

Yet, I do remember well her ( or her husband ) stating that she couldn't see her husband and their two young boys while she was in the immersion.

Maybe this was a later year "mini" immersion program as one of you stated?

Things were always changing at the DLI over the years from the 1950's through today.

 

 

[Michael Griffith]

On 10/9/2022 at 11:21 AM, Joe Bauer said:

We knew the woman DLI student fairly well. This was in the 1990's.

I admit I didn't know exactly how long her immersion stint there was.

Yet, I do remember well her (or her husband) stating that she couldn't see her husband and their two young boys while she was in the immersion.

Maybe this was a later year "mini" immersion program as one of you stated?

Things were always changing at the DLI over the years from the 1950's through today.

Oh, I heard from several fellow DLI grads about DLI's development of immersion programs in the '90s. As mentioned, when I was there the second time, such programs were just getting started on an experimental, limited basis by one or two of the larger language departments. While the students were in the immersion building, they had to stay there the whole time and could only speak their target language. 

[Leslie Sharp]

Posted March 17

World Commerce Corporation and Otto Skorzeny, future strategist for the assassination of President John Kennedy.

" . . .quango, an acronym for ‘quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organization, a term coined in the 1970s inspired by remarks of the president of Carnegie Corporation in 1967 describing “a genus of organization which represents a noteworthy experiment in the art of government.”  

" . . . At first [Gen. Wild Bill] Donovan appears to have played no formal part in the establishment of either BACC or WCC, although his law firm, at that time known as Donovan Leisure Newton Lombard & Irvine, acted as "legal advisers.” (A few amateur historians have written that Allen Dulles’s law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, served as advisers to BACC and WCC, but we found no hard evidence of that. Additionally, it has been written that Dulles encouraged Donovan to participate in BACC and WCC, but again no hard evidence of that was found.) This leads us to speculate that Donovan may have initially been the “face” of WCC rather than the inspiration as those listed in early documents for WCC include Harry Beaston Lake and W. W. Cumberland, both investment bankers at the firm Ladenburg Thalmann, 25 Broad St. NYC.

In 1879, American banker Ernst Thalmann, teamed up with Adolph Ladenburg, the scion of a German banking family. As confirmed in “History of Ladenburg Thalmann,” by World War II the firm was providing banking services for British Security Coordination (BSC), including acquisition of foreign currency which was required in small denominations by a plethora of British covert wartime agencies as well as escape packs for Allied aircrew. The SOE turned to the BSC, and the close links between the BSC and Donovan's OSS meant that there was continual collaboration between all three entities in support of this task. Harry Lake and Bill Donovan shared an address at the exclusive One Sutton Place for a number of years. It should be noted that Lake was on the board of the American Moroccan Corporation, which will have greater relevance as we pursue the role of Thomas Eli Davis, Jr. in Chapter 5.

In a convenient web of other addresses, Donovan’s law partner, George Stanley Leisure lived at 640-660 Park, sharing a prestigious address with J. Russell Forgan, another founding board member of World Commerce. Leisure was on the board of financial investment giant Empire Trust whose web extends over time to those active on the ground in Dallas that managed the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Forgan’s company, Glore Forgan was heavily invested in J. Peter Grace’s W. R. Grace & Co., a global maritime shipping concern. Grace, the first Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a.k.a. the Knights of Malta, in America, sat on Forgan’s board for decades.

Of note, at the height of the war, the man at the official helm of the SOE, Roundell Palmer, the 3rd Earl of Selborne, was also in charge of economic warfare, placing him in close proximity to decisions involving the services Ladenburg Thalmann provided. Reporting directly to Lord Selborne was Viscount Frederick Leathers, a former Minister of Transport who was placed in charge of war support. For those more familiar with the esotericism that pre-occupied the shadows of power at the time, both in the US and Britain, both men were alleged members of the Prieuré de Sion, a neo-chivalric fraternal order with alleged roots in the Crusades, established legally in 1956 in France. In an instance of continuity, Viscount Leathers later appears in the roster of board members of the World Commerce Corporation.

Brown explains that among those legal advisers [Donovan and Leisure’s firm] was Lt. Col. Otto C. Doering, Donovan’s second in command at the OSS. Donovan only became an official director of WCC in October 1947. At the same time, Edward R. Stettinius, Secretary of State from November 1944 to July 1945, who had substantial holdings in WCC joined the board. According to Brown, in due course a number of other people prominent in intelligence and special operations joined the firm, as directors, officer, or shareholders. They included J. Russell Forgan of the Glore Forgan group of merchant bankers (and future career ambassador David Bruce’s successor as chief of OSS Europe; Lester Armour (former deputy chief mission to Moscow who would inherit the chairmanship of the Swift Armour packing company of Chicago); W.K. Eliscu (a member of Donovan’s OSS staff); Lieutenant Colonel Rex L. Benson (staff member of the British Secret Intelligence Service and chairman of merchant bankers Robert Benson and Company of London. Here it should be noted that Benson was the lead SOE interrogator of Otto Skorzeny after his surrender. Brown adds that the WCC board also included several persons who had been prominent in the Canadian intelligence services.

In addition, Brown tells us that people with intelligence connections, but not formally members of any intelligence service, took an interest in the corporation.They included Nelson Rockefeller (son of John D., and former coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, an organization with intelligence responsibilities and associations in South America); John Jay McCloy (former undersecretary of the War Department and high commissioner in Germany) Richard Mellon (of Gulf Oil corporation); and Sir Victor Sassoon. The list of WCC board members and “interested parties'' reflects America and Britain’s future power brokers that would influence matters on a global scale as the Cold War escalated.

With so many powerful corporate titans interested in the WCC, in hindsight the holding company emerges as a quango, an acronym for ‘quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organization, a term coined in the 1970s inspired by remarks of the president of Carnegie Corporation in 1967 describing “a genus of organization which represents a noteworthy experiment in the art of government.” Were the founders of the WCC following European models established under fascist regimes for the control of and profit from global supply chains and markets, and did that agenda require the services of the sophisticated intelligence apparatus established by Donovan and Stephenson being shuttered by democratically elected government officials after the war? A former employee of WCC recounts, “The idea was to take advantage of the organization and international contacts that were set up during the war… The goal was to set up various companies, mostly in Central and South America.” And as British writer and wartime intelligence officer Roald Dahl argued in support of the creation of WCC, “we all needed jobs in civilian life.”

It is believed that BACC/WCC was initially funded in part with about $10 million that was in the accounts of the OSS London office at the time of Germany’s surrender. Eustice Mullins writes: “This money could not be ‘returned’ to the U.S. Government without stating where it had come from. As proceeds from dealings in gold and jewels, an inquiry could provoke a Congressional investigation.”

Follow the Money and the Arms

About the same time that Donovan and Stephenson began seriously organizing BACC, word began to leak out in certain Washington, D.C. quarters about nefarious activities of certain OSS officials and agents who had been involved in the wartime looting of enormous amounts of gold, gems, diamonds, antiquities and art. Some credible reports centered on what appeared to be a large number of OSS officials who had stolen millions in gold from captured poopoo stockpiles and hidden warehouses. Some prestigious banks in Europe and North Africa were said to have amassed millions of dollars in gold and diamonds. Eventually these reports linked up to post-war accounts concerning former SS officer Otto Skorzeny, and a few of his fellow officers, who had been given substantial amounts of gold, some of which had come from OSS-looted coffers. Substantial amounts of gold also flowed from other sources. There can be little doubt that these rumors either influenced, or made their way into Col. Richard Park’s report. — Coup in Dallas

[Leslie Sharp]

On 11/21/2021 at 11:08 AM, David Andrews said:

Would love to see or hear the Irv Kupcinet "At Random" TV show episode (March 1964) in which Marguerite Oswald is interviewed on a panel featuring Hjalmar Schacht.* 

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/marguerite-oswald-interview-44578/

The Museum of Broadcast Communications doesn't make this available in its Online Collections.

_____

*You know you've read too many WW II books when you can spell that name on the first go.

Dave, I missed this last year.  FYI, the museum advised me that the recording can be reproduced and sent to you for $100++. I put it on the back burner, but will likely order it after the first of the year.  If I do, I'll transcribe it, and — unless there are copyright restrictions — share it here on Ed Forum. 

 

[Paul Brancato]

4 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

Dave, I missed this last year.  FYI, the museum advised me that the recording can be reproduced and sent to you for $100++. I put it on the back burner, but will likely order it after the first of the year.  If I do, I'll transcribe it, and — unless there are copyright restrictions — share it here on Ed Forum. 

 

I’d surely like to hear this too.

 

[Bob Ness]

On 11/21/2021 at 10:08 AM, David Andrews said:

*You know you've read too many WW II books when you can spell that name on the first go.

* Now that's funny! More truth than poetry there!

[David Andrews]

14 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

Dave, I missed this last year.  FYI, the museum advised me that the recording can be reproduced and sent to you for $100++. I put it on the back burner, but will likely order it after the first of the year.  If I do, I'll transcribe it, and — unless there are copyright restrictions — share it here on Ed Forum.

Thank you!  Maybe the transcript can be donated to a JFKA collection.

Edited December 2, 2022 by David Andrews

[Matthew Koch]

On 9/17/2022 at 6:54 PM, Joseph McBride said:

Some of the 1/6 Capitol attackers were armed (it's not

entirely clear how many and with what), but a reason many

were not is that carrying handguns is illegal in DC,

and they didn't want to get stopped and arrested

for that violation. There were, however, caches of weapons

in hotels and motels just outside DC ready and waiting to be

brought in if some of the ringleaders gave the

signal. 

Mr McBride in your book how did you deal with Ray Epps or the 22 Fbi informants in the Oath Keepers and 8 FBI informants in the proud boys organization including it's head Enrique Tarrio? 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-reportedly-had-eight-informants-153404947.html
 

 

Edited December 2, 2022 by Matthew Koch

[Michael Griffith]

3 hours ago, Matthew Koch said:

Mr McBride in your book how did you deal with Ray Epps or the 22 Fbi informants in the Oath Keepers and 8 FBI informants in the proud boys organization including it's head Enrique Tarrio? 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-reportedly-had-eight-informants-153404947.html
 

 

It should be added that some of the 1/6 rioters were not Trump supporters but were leftist agitators dressed as Trump supporters. Although they were wearing pro-Trump buttons, hats, etc., they stood out like a sore thumb and many Trump supporters who were near them suspected they were not who they were pretending to be. 

Anyway, all this being said, and taking due notice of the presence of FBI informants, this does not in any way excuse the conduct of those Trump supporters who took part in the storming of the Capitol. Their actions were inexcusable, and I have no problem with their being prosecuted (although I think some of the sentences that have been handed down have been excessive).

[Norman T. Field]

"It should be added that some of the 1/6 rioters were not Trump supporters but were leftist agitators dressed as Trump supporters. "

I have yet to see one iota of evidence of this occurrence via any credible, reputable news source. Nor does this have a damn thing to do with JFK. 

 

[Matthew Koch]

1 hour ago, Norman T. Field said:

"It should be added that some of the 1/6 rioters were not Trump supporters but were leftist agitators dressed as Trump supporters. "

I have yet to see one iota of evidence of this occurrence via any credible, reputable news source. Nor does this have a damn thing to do with JFK. 

 

The guy who filmed Ashley Babit being shot did that, and he was trying to incite people to burn down the capital. 
https://denvergazette.com/news/known-capitol-riot-leader-spent-one-day-in-jail-while-80-others-languish-in-dc/article_86fa0fe6-ba32-5e41-889a-8c7b73bf1228.html

 

https://nypost.com/2021/01/15/who-is-john-sullivan-accused-provocateur-charged-in-capitol-riot/

 

[Chuck Schwartz]

Leslie, I noticed there was not much about LeMay in Coup in Dallas.   I read on another website you might be doing some new research on LeMay.  Finding anything interesting?

[Ed Berger]

Apologies in advance for the super lengthy post. Off and on for the past several years I've been deep in a research hole related to the World Commerce Corporation, with a particular focus on the Canadian aspects of that company's activities. There's some stuff that has come up along the way that I think tie together in odd ways with what is being argued in Coup in Dallas. 

On page 90, and again on pages 219-221, CiD discusses the involvement of Pierre Lafitte in a securities fraud episode involving a Newfoundland-based corporation called Canadian Javelin. The entire interlude is oddball: Lafitte was hooked up with a Boston businessman named Ralph Loomis in the “sale [of] unregistered stock of Canadian Javelin Ltd”. This immediately caught my attention, because I can already gone down a deep deep rabbit whole into Canadian Javelin (will explain this shortly), but had somehow missed the newspaper articles and court cases linking Lafitte to the company.

To make matters more odd—when I was exploring Canadian Javelin the first time around, I had learned that Javelin's owner, an incredibly shady figure named John C. Doyle, was involved with Hilton hotels, and had even owned the Hilton hotel in Panama. Hilton is a reoccurring entity throughout CiD; on page 75 it states that Hilton's owner, Conrad Hilton, appears in a Pierre Lafitte financial ledger. The use of Hilton hotel staffing as cover for CIA operatives in not a new revelation, and CiD spends much time with one eventual Hilton employee, Warren Broglie (see for example page 225).

Another suggestive connection I had found, was that mobster John Roselli appeared in the mix with Canadian Javelin and Doyle. FBI files show that Roselli was holding stock in a company called Jubilee Iron, which was owned by Doyle and located in the same New York City offices as Canadian Javelin. I was reminded of this while reading CiD, due to the relationship between Roselli and another mobster who appears to have been part of William Harvey's ZR/RIFLE program, Harold Meltzer. CiD, on page 109, notes that “Lafitte and Meltzer operated and partly owned together two restaurants”.

Canadian Javelin eventually landed in hot water, precisely because Doyle enjoyed siphoning money away into Swiss banks and engaging in enterprises with strange Lichtenstein-based companies like Societe Transshipping. This was controlled by the even more shadowy Jean Pierre Francois; an obit/profile of him in a French paper links him to the Cagoule of Vichy France, the mafia, and the P2 Lodge in Italy. Once again, I was reminded of this while reading CiD: much of the first chapter is dedicated to the Cagoule. (Doyle, when he wound up in court, would deny knowing who was behind Societe Transhipping—see page 163 of this document). 

The discussion of Javelin in CiD occurs in the midst of a wider analysis of a possible 'nickel plot'—the book purports (page 221-225) that throughout June, 1963, Lafitte's datebook had a number of entries concerning the enigmatic John Wilson Hudson, Skorzeny, and transactions involving nickel. Wilson is described in the book as being involved in “at least two transactions with the WCC, and to have had deep connections in Canada”. I would very much like to know about the nature of these WCC transactions and of his Canadian interests.

This nickel discussion, in turn, widens out with a wider analysis of the Cold War importance of nickel, and how Cuba's nationalization of the Freeport Sulphur nickel mines was of considerable concern to Allen Dulles and President Eisenhower (prompting talk even of a naval blockage of the island). There is the clear possibility of a linkage here with the incident, reported by Jim Garrison and his investigators (and analyzed superbly by Lisa Pease) that Clay Shaw and a Freeport executive were flown to Canada by David Ferrie to organize the importing of nickel ore from Cuba through a Canadian front company. This, in turn, would be shipped to Freeport's Braithwaite nickel plant outside New Orleans.

What was this front company? Was it related to Canadian Javelin? CiD seems to want to ask that question—Javelin did indeed involve itself in nickel mining and refining, among a host of other important natural resources.

Then, there's the admission of Johnny Roselli to the Church Committee, concerning his networking with Cuban exiles for the CIA: he told them that he “represented some business interests of Wall Street that had not [only?] oil interests, but oil, nickel interests and properties around Cuba”. 

Due to John Doyle's blizzard of underworld connections, Canadian Javelin was described as the “most mysterious company known to man”. CiD notes (page 220) that this statement “harkens back to the World Commerce Corporation”. This was shocking for me to read, because I had first gotten on the trail of Canadian Javelin by researching WCC in Canada.

Canada is often overlooked in studies of the WCC, though its footprint there is fairly large—albeit shrouded. When British and American intelligence counterparts William Donovan and William Stephenson organized the WCC, fairly prominent Canadians on the company's board included E.P. Taylor, a businessman who worked at the Department of Munitions and Supply under C.D. Howe during the war, and banker E.W. Bickle. At the same time that the WCC was being formed, E.P. Taylor (along with Bickle) set up the Argus Corporation. Argus was a literal octopus, investing in and taking over companies in practically every sector all across Canada.

I think a good case can be made that Argus was an 'adjunct' company for the WCC. Besides being formed almost simultaneously, Argus was modeled on—and received start-up capital from—the Atlas Corporation, an American investment giant led by Floyd Odlum. Atlas was also part of the syndicate that provided the start-up capital for the WCC, and Odlum's brother-in-law L. Boyd Hatch was its board. In the case of Argus, Odlum's longtime agent, David G. Baird, represented Atlas interests on the Argus board.

Baird gets a few mentions in Peter Dale Scott's unpublished 'Dallas Conspiracy' manuscript, due to a fascinating scandal that he was embroiled in during the first years of the 1960s. He was leading a trio of 'foundations' that he used to carry out unregistered stock dealings for his circle of associations. I'd recommend perusing some of the reports on this, as they outline a lot of his associations. It's a mind-boggling list, expanding circles of deep intrigue. Odlum and Atlas feature prominently, as does Conrad Hilton. The reports show that Baird was a fixture in Hilton hotel executive management. There's also the case of Baird's banker, Serge Semenenko, who was found to be running a hidden "bank within the bank" at First National Bank of Boston, where he was executive vice president.

There's some hints that there is even more than meets the eye in this circle, and may link in weird ways to the assassination. In no particular order:

1) An announcement that was run in American newspapers in April, 1947 (about Edward Stettinius Jr. joining the WCC) notes that one of the WCC's clients was "Robert R. Young, the railroad and film industrialist". Young, the infamous "populist of Wall Street" who took on the Morgans with the help of John McCloy, Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison, was a client of David Baird's foundations.
2) Documents in the Louis M. Bloomfield archives show that Baird was of interest to CMC, the Permindex subsidiary in Rome. “[W]e have now interested a very wealth and substantial group of prominent American businessmen and financiers, including Mr. David G. Baird”.
3) Some of the Baird Foundations named in the scandal above were later revealed to have moved money on behalf of the CIA.
4) Baird's banker, Serge Semenenko, provided funds to the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside of Russia, even using Baird Foundations to carry this out. The Synod of Bishops was also attracting attention from the CIA.
5) Semenenko knew George de Mohrenschildt, having met him through his brother, Dimitri de Mohrenschildt. “Mr. Semenenko stated he has maintained an apartment in New York City for many years which he occupies when in New York on business and that both Dimitri and George had contacted him and visited him at his apartment at various times in the past”.
6) Through his relationship with Conrad Hilton and Harry Crown—a relationship that would have involved David Baird—Semenenko had contact with Frank Brandstetter, the Army intelligence officer who was assigned to Jack Crichton's 488^th Intelligence Unit. This was in the context of Brandstetter going to work for Hilton in Acapulco.

OK, that's all good and weird, but what does it have to do with Canadian Javelin? This is where things really start to go off the rails—because it would seem that Argus wasn't the only WCC 'adjunct' corporation operating in Canada. One, maybe two, more were set up. The first of these was the Newfoundland & Labrador Corp (NALCO), the second the British Newfoundland Corp. Here is how each is related to the World Commerce Corporation:

Newfoundland & Labrador Corp, or NALCO:

1) Chairman of the board was William Stephenson, British spymaster and co-organizer of the WCC

2) Canadian brokerage house Wood, Gundy was named a “major shareholder”. J.H. Gundy of Wood, Gundy was a WCC board member and affiliated with a number of Argus subsidiaries

3) Canada's Willis, Bickle & Company was named as a shareholder. E.W. Bickle of Willis, Bickle was a board member of WCC and Argus

British Newfoundland Corp, or Brinco (syndicate organized by N.M. Rothschild, which included major entities like Rio Tinto, Sogemines and Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa):

1) Hambros Bank was a syndicate member. Hambros was also one of the initial WCC investors, and was represented on its board by Charles Jocelyn Hambro. Charles had been an intelligence officer during World War 2 with the Special Operations Executive.

2) Robert Benson & Co. was a syndicate member. This bank had also been an initial WCC investor, and was represented on its board by Rex Benson. Like Charles Hambro, Rex had a wartime stint in military intelligence. (CiD, on page 67, writes that Rex Benson “was the lead SOE interrogator of Otto Skorzeny after his surrender).

3) A slightly more nebulous connection: one of the syndicate members was Sogemines, an investment vehicle for Belgium's Societe Generale de Minerais (and a close affiliate with the Belgian oil company Petrofina.
A) When Sogemines was established in Montreal in 1952, one of its first directors was J.R. Timmins. Timmins, representing Hollinger mining interests, was the investment partner of James Murdoch, a WCC board member.
B )Timmins was also a board member of Petrofina's Canadian division. The American division of Petrofina carried out business with Atlas Corporation, one of the sources of investment capital for both WCC and Argus.

The network analysis here gets extremely complicated and I won't try to summarize it, other than saying that the operations of Argus, NALCO, and Brinco all intermingled with one another, frequently through complex chains of nested ownership structures and subsidiaries that engaged in joint ventures with one another—most often in the realm of mining. What my research partner and I determined is that this was all part of a cohesive strategy, built out in a Cold War context, to dominate and accelerate the acquisition of strategically important resources. Lumber, water, gold, iron, nickel, and maybe most importantly, uranium, were of immense importance to this complex. In the case of the latter, much of these seems to have grown out from the Combined Development Trust that was set up in 1944, which allowed the US and the UK to have a steady access to uranium. The Combined Development Trust involved C.D. Howe, the boss of E.P. Taylor (Argus/WCC) and Charles Hambro. Again, it gets pretty complicated, but I could unpack this further if people are interested.

In 1958, the government of Newfoundland sold the stake that it held in NALCO to Canadian Javelin. Thus we come full circle, back to Pierre Lafitte's strange 'encounter' with this company—but with this knowledge, the whole looks a little different. It also makes identifying the 'front company' to be used by Freeport and Clay Shaw an important task, if it can be done. One important clue is the Charles Shipman Payson was listed as a director of NALCO when it was first inaugurated. He was married to Joan Whitney, making him the brother-in-law of John Hay Whitney—the majority stockholder and chairman of Freeport Sulphur.

All in all, it's not a smoking gun, but the weight of this history and the way it messes seamlessly into the narrative offered in CiD leads me to think that the Lafitte allegations have teeth. Otherwise we're dealings with coincidences stacked on coincidences, literal high strangeness.

As the icing on the cake, there is the career of Mark J. Millard, a partner at the Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Co. In 1961, he was elected a director of Canadian Javelin, following a large investment in the company from the New York investment bank (a portion of Loeb, Rhoades stock in Javelin was liquidated in 1963, but I haven't nailed down when exactly). Before he turned up at Canadian Javelin, here's some of the other places that Millard was found:

—In 1952, he was on the founding board of Byrd Oil Corporation. This was an oil venture of Dallas tycoon D.H. Byrd, the owner of the building used as the Texas School Book Depository.
—In 1956, he was named a director of Great Southwest, the major development project between Dallas and Fort Worth, organized by the Wynne oil family, the Rockefellers, and their ally William Zeckendorf, of Webb & Knapp. Potential connections between Great Southwest and the JFK assassination are discussed by Peter Dale Scott, in both his unpublished manuscript and briefly in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (maybe important: Zeckendorf was a close associate of David Baird and a client of his shady foundations).
—In 1959, he became director of the Stanton Oil Company of San Antonio, Texas. Other investors and directors in Stanton Oil included David Baird, whose stake in the company came through one of his foundations.

So, incredibly, Canadian Javelin interlocked with a number of Texas interests, including two that might have relevance to the assassination.

Edited January 12, 2023 by Ed Berger

[Benjamin Cole]

9 hours ago, Ed Berger said:

Apologies in advance for the super lengthy post. Off and on for the past several years I've been deep in a research hole related to the World Commerce Corporation, with a particular focus on the Canadian aspects of that company's activities. There's some stuff that has come up along the way that I think tie together in odd ways with what is being argued in Coup in Dallas. 

On page 90, and again on pages 219-221, CiD discusses the involvement of Pierre Lafitte in a securities fraud episode involving a Newfoundland-based corporation called Canadian Javelin. The entire interlude is oddball: Lafitte was hooked up with a Boston businessman named Ralph Loomis in the “sale [of] unregistered stock of Canadian Javelin Ltd”. This immediately caught my attention, because I can already gone down a deep deep rabbit whole into Canadian Javelin (will explain this shortly), but had somehow missed the newspaper articles and court cases linking Lafitte to the company.

To make matters more odd—when I was exploring Canadian Javelin the first time around, I had learned that Javelin's owner, an incredibly shady figure named John C. Doyle, was involved with Hilton hotels, and had even owned the Hilton hotel in Panama. Hilton is a reoccurring entity throughout CiD; on page 75 it states that Hilton's owner, Conrad Hilton, appears in a Pierre Lafitte financial ledger. The use of Hilton hotel staffing as cover for CIA operatives in not a new revelation, and CiD spends much time with one eventual Hilton employee, Warren Broglie (see for example page 225).

Another suggestive connection I had found, was that mobster John Roselli appeared in the mix with Canadian Javelin and Doyle. FBI files show that Roselli was holding stock in a company called Jubilee Iron, which was owned by Doyle and located in the same New York City offices as Canadian Javelin. I was reminded of this while reading CiD, due to the relationship between Roselli and another mobster who appears to have been part of William Harvey's ZR/RIFLE program, Harold Meltzer. CiD, on page 109, notes that “Lafitte and Meltzer operated and partly owned together two restaurants”.

Canadian Javelin eventually landed in hot water, precisely because Doyle enjoyed siphoning money away into Swiss banks and engaging in enterprises with strange Lichtenstein-based companies like Societe Transshipping. This was controlled by the even more shadowy Jean Pierre Francois; an obit/profile of him in a French paper links him to the Cagoule of Vichy France, the mafia, and the P2 Lodge in Italy. Once again, I was reminded of this while reading CiD: much of the first chapter is dedicated to the Cagoule. (Doyle, when he wound up in court, would deny knowing who was behind Societe Transhipping—see page 163 of this document). 

The discussion of Javelin in CiD occurs in the midst of a wider analysis of a possible 'nickel plot'—the book purports (page 221-225) that throughout June, 1963, Lafitte's datebook had a number of entries concerning the enigmatic John Wilson Hudson, Skorzeny, and transactions involving nickel. Wilson is described in the book as being involved in “at least two transactions with the WCC, and to have had deep connections in Canada”. I would very much like to know about the nature of these WCC transactions and of his Canadian interests.

This nickel discussion, in turn, widens out with a wider analysis of the Cold War importance of nickel, and how Cuba's nationalization of the Freeport Sulphur nickel mines was of considerable concern to Allen Dulles and President Eisenhower (prompting talk even of a naval blockage of the island). There is the clear possibility of a linkage here with the incident, reported by Jim Garrison and his investigators (and analyzed superbly by Lisa Pease) that Clay Shaw and a Freeport executive were flown to Canada by David Ferrie to organize the importing of nickel ore from Cuba through a Canadian front company. This, in turn, would be shipped to Freeport's Braithwaite nickel plant outside New Orleans.

What was this front company? Was it related to Canadian Javelin? CiD seems to want to ask that question—Javelin did indeed involve itself in nickel mining and refining, among a host of other important natural resources.

Then, there's the admission of Johnny Roselli to the Church Committee, concerning his networking with Cuban exiles for the CIA: he told them that he “represented some business interests of Wall Street that had not [only?] oil interests, but oil, nickel interests and properties around Cuba”. 

Due to John Doyle's blizzard of underworld connections, Canadian Javelin was described as the “most mysterious company known to man”. CiD notes (page 220) that this statement “harkens back to the World Commerce Corporation”. This was shocking for me to read, because I had first gotten on the trail of Canadian Javelin by researching WCC in Canada.

Canada is often overlooked in studies of the WCC, though its footprint there is fairly large—albeit shrouded. When British and American intelligence counterparts William Donovan and William Stephenson organized the WCC, fairly prominent Canadians on the company's board included E.P. Taylor, a businessman who worked at the Department of Munitions and Supply under C.D. Howe during the war, and banker E.W. Bickle. At the same time that the WCC was being formed, E.P. Taylor (along with Bickle) set up the Argus Corporation. Argus was a literal octopus, investing in and taking over companies in practically every sector all across Canada.

I think a good case can be made that Argus was an 'adjunct' company for the WCC. Besides being formed almost simultaneously, Argus was modeled on—and received start-up capital from—the Atlas Corporation, an American investment giant led by Floyd Odlum. Atlas was also part of the syndicate that provided the start-up capital for the WCC, and Odlum's brother-in-law L. Boyd Hatch was its board. In the case of Argus, Odlum's longtime agent, David G. Baird, represented Atlas interests on the Argus board.

Baird gets a few mentions in Peter Dale Scott's unpublished 'Dallas Conspiracy' manuscript, due to a fascinating scandal that he was embroiled in during the first years of the 1960s. He was leading a trio of 'foundations' that he used to carry out unregistered stock dealings for his circle of associations. I'd recommend perusing some of the reports on this, as they outline a lot of his associations. It's a mind-boggling list, expanding circles of deep intrigue. Odlum and Atlas feature prominently, as does Conrad Hilton. The reports show that Baird was a fixture in Hilton hotel executive management. There's also the case of Baird's banker, Serge Semenenko, who was found to be running a hidden "bank within the bank" at First National Bank of Boston, where he was executive vice president.

There's some hints that there is even more than meets the eye in this circle, and may link in weird ways to the assassination. In no particular order:

1) An announcement that was run in American newspapers in April, 1947 (about Edward Stettinius Jr. joining the WCC) notes that one of the WCC's clients was "Robert R. Young, the railroad and film industrialist". Young, the infamous "populist of Wall Street" who took on the Morgans with the help of John McCloy, Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison, was a client of David Baird's foundations.
2) Documents in the Louis M. Bloomfield archives show that Baird was of interest to CMC, the Permindex subsidiary in Rome. “[W]e have now interested a very wealth and substantial group of prominent American businessmen and financiers, including Mr. David G. Baird”.
3) Some of the Baird Foundations named in the scandal above were later revealed to have moved money on behalf of the CIA.
4) Baird's banker, Serge Semenenko, provided funds to the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside of Russia, even using Baird Foundations to carry this out. The Synod of Bishops was also attracting attention from the CIA.
5) Semenenko knew George de Mohrenschildt, having met him through his brother, Dimitri de Mohrenschildt. “Mr. Semenenko stated he has maintained an apartment in New York City for many years which he occupies when in New York on business and that both Dimitri and George had contacted him and visited him at his apartment at various times in the past”.
6) Through his relationship with Conrad Hilton and Harry Crown—a relationship that would have involved David Baird—Semenenko had contact with Frank Brandstetter, the Army intelligence officer who was assigned to Jack Crichton's 488^th Intelligence Unit. This was in the context of Brandstetter going to work for Hilton in Acapulco.

OK, that's all good and weird, but what does it have to do with Canadian Javelin? This is where things really start to go off the rails—because it would seem that Argus wasn't the only WCC 'adjunct' corporation operating in Canada. One, maybe two, more were set up. The first of these was the Newfoundland & Labrador Corp (NALCO), the second the British Newfoundland Corp. Here is how each is related to the World Commerce Corporation:

Newfoundland & Labrador Corp, or NALCO:

1) Chairman of the board was William Stephenson, British spymaster and co-organizer of the WCC

2) Canadian brokerage house Wood, Gundy was named a “major shareholder”. J.H. Gundy of Wood, Gundy was a WCC board member and affiliated with a number of Argus subsidiaries

3) Canada's Willis, Bickle & Company was named as a shareholder. E.W. Bickle of Willis, Bickle was a board member of WCC and Argus

British Newfoundland Corp, or Brinco (syndicate organized by N.M. Rothschild, which included major entities like Rio Tinto, Sogemines and Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa):

1) Hambros Bank was a syndicate member. Hambros was also one of the initial WCC investors, and was represented on its board by Charles Jocelyn Hambro. Charles had been an intelligence officer during World War 2 with the Special Operations Executive.

2) Robert Benson & Co. was a syndicate member. This bank had also been an initial WCC investor, and was represented on its board by Rex Benson. Like Charles Hambro, Rex had a wartime stint in military intelligence. (CiD, on page 67, writes that Rex Benson “was the lead SOE interrogator of Otto Skorzeny after his surrender).

3) A slightly more nebulous connection: one of the syndicate members was Sogemines, an investment vehicle for Belgium's Societe Generale de Minerais (and a close affiliate with the Belgian oil company Petrofina.
A) When Sogemines was established in Montreal in 1952, one of its first directors was J.R. Timmins. Timmins, representing Hollinger mining interests, was the investment partner of James Murdoch, a WCC board member.
B )Timmins was also a board member of Petrofina's Canadian division. The American division of Petrofina carried out business with Atlas Corporation, one of the sources of investment capital for both WCC and Argus.

The network analysis here gets extremely complicated and I won't try to summarize it, other than saying that the operations of Argus, NALCO, and Brinco all intermingled with one another, frequently through complex chains of nested ownership structures and subsidiaries that engaged in joint ventures with one another—most often in the realm of mining. What my research partner and I determined is that this was all part of a cohesive strategy, built out in a Cold War context, to dominate and accelerate the acquisition of strategically important resources. Lumber, water, gold, iron, nickel, and maybe most importantly, uranium, were of immense importance to this complex. In the case of the latter, much of these seems to have grown out from the Combined Development Trust that was set up in 1944, which allowed the US and the UK to have a steady access to uranium. The Combined Development Trust involved C.D. Howe, the boss of E.P. Taylor (Argus/WCC) and Charles Hambro. Again, it gets pretty complicated, but I could unpack this further if people are interested.

In 1958, the government of Newfoundland sold the stake that it held in NALCO to Canadian Javelin. Thus we come full circle, back to Pierre Lafitte's strange 'encounter' with this company—but with this knowledge, the whole looks a little different. It also makes identifying the 'front company' to be used by Freeport and Clay Shaw an important task, if it can be done. One important clue is the Charles Shipman Payson was listed as a director of NALCO when it was first inaugurated. He was married to Joan Whitney, making him the brother-in-law of John Hay Whitney—the majority stockholder and chairman of Freeport Sulphur.

All in all, it's not a smoking gun, but the weight of this history and the way it messes seamlessly into the narrative offered in CiD leads me to think that the Lafitte allegations have teeth. Otherwise we're dealings with coincidences stacked on coincidences, literal high strangeness.

As the icing on the cake, there is the career of Mark J. Millard, a partner at the Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Co. In 1961, he was elected a director of Canadian Javelin, following a large investment in the company from the New York investment bank (a portion of Loeb, Rhoades stock in Javelin was liquidated in 1963, but I haven't nailed down when exactly). Before he turned up at Canadian Javelin, here's some of the other places that Millard was found:

—In 1952, he was on the founding board of Byrd Oil Corporation. This was an oil venture of Dallas tycoon D.H. Byrd, the owner of the building used as the Texas School Book Depository.
—In 1956, he was named a director of Great Southwest, the major development project between Dallas and Fort Worth, organized by the Wynne oil family, the Rockefellers, and their ally William Zeckendorf, of Webb & Knapp. Potential connections between Great Southwest and the JFK assassination are discussed by Peter Dale Scott, in both his unpublished manuscript and briefly in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (maybe important: Zeckendorf was a close associate of David Baird and a client of his shady foundations).
—In 1959, he became director of the Stanton Oil Company of San Antonio, Texas. Other investors and directors in Stanton Oil included David Baird, whose stake in the company came through one of his foundations.

So, incredibly, Canadian Javelin interlocked with a number of Texas interests, including two that might have relevance to the assassination.

That is a lot of history. Congratulations on your presentation (IMHO). 

I think it is largely true that US foreign policy, especially in the Western Hemisphere in the pre- and postwar era, was run for the multi-nationals, then largely in the resource businesses---oil, agriculture, mining and so on. 

In latter years, the multinationals became dominated by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, tech, media---all of whom have close ties to China. 

In terms of foreign policy, Latin America has just about fallen off the map. 

Interesting how times change. 

 

 

[Leslie Sharp]

On 1/4/2023 at 12:33 PM, Chuck Schwartz said:

Leslie, I noticed there was not much about LeMay in Coup in Dallas.   I read on another website you might be doing some new research on LeMay.  Finding anything interesting?

Chuck, apologies for a belated response.  Yes, I've been researching the November 22 meeting in the Gold Room at the Pentagon between the Joint Chiefs and their equivalent from the Federal Republic of Germany. As you probably know, records indicate that Curtis LeMay was not in DC that day, but was, instead, on a hunting trip in Canada. A seasoned Canadian researcher has done extensive research into the circumstances of that trip. With his permission, and in light of our pursuit of former members of Hitler's Third Reich apparatus, I'm incorporating those details in a (forthcoming) monograph specific to the military history of the Bundeswehr generals who met with Taylor, Lemnitzer, et al as President Kennedy was being assassinated in Dallas.

A draft introduction . . . 
 

While searching for information that might explain how John Connally ended up in the jump seat of the president’s limo, I was advised by Vince Palamara to check William Manchester’s account of the day.  Although Manchester merely reiterates that the seating arrangements were as chaotic at Love Field as they had been earlier that morning in Fort Worth, the following jumped off the page of his award winning book, "The Death of a President: November 22-November25, 1963":
 

 

On Friday, November 22 in Washington DC, "Tight security was also enforced in the Pentagon's Gold Room, down the hall from McNamara, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in session with the commanders of the West German Bundeswehr [armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany]. General Maxwell Taylor, the Chiefs' elegant, scholarly Chairman, dominated one side of the table; opposite him was GENERAL FRIEDRICH A. FOERTSCH* [emphasis added], Inspector General of Bonn's armed forces. Everyone was dressed to the nines—the Germans out of Pflicht [duty], the Americans because they knew the Germans would be that way—and the meeting glittered with gay ribbons and braid. . . .

Simultaneously the Pentagon’s command center sounded a buzzer, awaken- 

ing General Maxwell Taylor, who was napping in his office between sessions 

with the Germans. McNamara had a tremendous reputation, and he 

deserved it. Despite his deep feeling for the President — the emotional 

side of his personality had been overlooked by the press, but it was very 

much there — he kept his head and made all the right moves. An ashen- 

faced aide came in with the bulletin. Jerry Wiesner studied the man’s 

expression as the secretary read it. Wiesner thought: The Bomb’s been 

dropped. McNamara quietly handed the slip around — Wiesner felt momentary relief; anything was better than a nuclear holocaust — and then 

the Secretary acted quickly. Adjourning his conference, he sent Mac 

Bundy back to the White House in a Defense limousine and conferred 

with Taylor and the other Joint Chiefs. Over the JCS signature they dis- 

patched a flash warning to every American military base in the world; 

 

1. Press reports President Kennedy and Governor Connally of Texas shot 

and critically injured. Both in hospital at Dallas, Texas. No official in- 

formation yet, will keep you informed. 

  In the Pentagon McNamara and the Joint Chiefs remained vigilant, 

though after their conference in the Secretary's office the Chiefs decided 

they should leave sentry duty to subordinate sentinels and rejoin their 

meeting. General Taylor in particular felt that it was important to present 

a picture of stability and continuity, that it would be an error to let their 

visitors from Bonn suspect the depth of the tragedy until more was known. 

At 2:30 he and his colleagues filed back into the Gold Room. He told the 

Germans briefly that President Kennedy had been injured. General Fried- 

rich Foertsch replied for his comrades that they hoped the injury was not 

too serious. The Chiefs did not reply, and for the next two hours they 

put on a singular performance. Aware that the shadow of a new war might 

fall across the room at any time, they continued the talks about dull mili- 

tary details, commenting on proposals by Generals Wessel and Huekelheim 

and shuffling papers and directives with steady hands. Even for men with 

their discipline it was a stony ordeal, and it was especially difficult for 

Taylor, who had to lead the discussion and whose appointment as Chair- 

man had arisen from his close relationship with the President. As America’s 

first soldier he would be expected to make the first military decision should 

war come. Meanwhile he had to sit erect and feign an interest in logistics 

and combined staff work. At 4:30 the meeting ended on schedule. The 

Joint Chiefs rose together and faced their rising guests. Taylor said evenly, 

“I regret to tell you that the President of the United States has been killed.” 

The Germans, bred to stoicism, collapsed in their chairs.

 

Edited February 1, 2023 by Leslie Sharp