Jean Rene Souetre expelled from the US 18hrs after JFKA?!

[Paul Brancato]

4 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

 

Tks for this, Steve, and you may already have the Waverly Root article, Neo- N a t z i s sic] Linked to French Algeria.  

(as a side note, I find it bizarre that a forum purporting to uphold freedom of speech prohibits use of a term that is historically accurate, particularly when one is citing a credible source.)

No doubt you’re aware that Otto and Ilse Skorzeny had a residence in Palma de Mallorca. 

Of possible interest, the following is a replication of the first page of Albarelli's April 2019 submission to the publisher of Coup in Dallas . . . 

Note that in the upper left-hand corner he typed a ‘note to self and the editor'  that we were in the process of incorporating Kovacs, Ortiz, Joly in the final draft M/s.

Rene Kovacs 

Joseph Oritz 

Pierre Joly

 

Coup in Dallas: Who Killed JFK and Why

 

By H.P. Albarelli Jr.

With Leslie Sharp and Alan Kent

Organizational and Character Maps by Pete Sattler

Introduction by

Dick Russell

 

*****

The result of that research appears in this excerpt from Coup . . . 

Kovacs, Ortiz and Joly

There is no clear evidence that any of these three men, or a combination of, were present in Dallas on November 22, 1963, so perhaps the reader might question why they end up in these pages. Simply put, they appear among the outstanding items for research left on the desk of author Albarelli.

            A February 26, 1962 exposé “Neo-N a t z I s [sic]Linked to Algeria French” by correspondent Waverley Root, then living in Paris, published in The Washington Post, reveals that European extremists—known as Ultras—in Algeria were “now tied in with the worldwide clandestine neo - N a t z i organization which has existed ever since the end of the war, built around a core of Hitlerites who escaped post war justice. The head of this international National Socialist underground has always been believed to be Madrid’s man of mystery, Otto Skorzeny, the SS trooper who rescued Mussolini from his captors.” More chilling, Root continues, “Skorzeny is reported to maintain contacts with former National Socialists scattered throughout the world, especially in Latin America and the Middle East. They have not given up hope that ????? may yet triumph throughout the world, and they seem prepared to lend their aid in any desperate venture of like political ideology which might achieve a Rightest authoritarian government anywhere.” (emphasis added.) 

            Root’s informed sources said that “two of four defendants in the trial escaped and made their way to Spain.” The trial he refers to was the result of the arrest of those involved in the 1957 bazooka attack on General Raoul Salan. The far-right extremists were convinced that the general wasn’t fully on their side to halt the movement toward independence from France in Algeria. All charged with the attack had been found guilty. Among them was Doctor René Kovacs, who was sentenced to death in absentia following his escape. A physician by training, Kovacs was born in Algeria of [notably for our purposes] Hungarian parents. Along with his aide, Joseph Ortiz, a restaurateur and fellow far-right extremist, the two fled to Spain. 

            Root contends that Algerian Europeans devoted to far-right politics had long been alleged to have international connections. “Thus gave birth to any imperfectly known organization called the Red Hand,” writes Root, referring to a mysterious terror group organized to counter the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria. According to freelance journalist Joachim Joesten, among the earliest sleuths to arrive in Dallas in pursuit of the facts of the assassination of Kennedy, the creator of the Red Hand was none other than the head of France’s DST—a man readers are now familiar with—Roger Wybot. Author Ralph Ganis, who pursued Joesten’s findings in depth, tells us that the Red Hand operated in the manner of paramilitary groups that sprang up after WWI of which Otto Skorzeny participated. Writes Ganis, “It was also very similar to the old Cagoule, the ‘hooded ones.’ 

Waverley Root also concluded that Kovacs and Ortiz, both of whom fled to Spain, were involved in the Skorzeny ring. Rounding out the triad with Kovacs and Ortiz, Root tells us that Belgian citizen Pierre Joly, “turns up regularly in French extreme-right activities of a conspiratorial nature. Joly [whose duties appear to have included propagation of extremist ideology on the printed page] was among those who appeared in Madrid when the refugees from the revolt trial arrived there.” Root then summarizes the significance of these figures ending up in Spain:

The existence in Madrid, on territory where extreme Rightists of all countries can reasonably expect to find political refuge of the headquarters of an international neo-National Socialist organization, helps to encourage a funneling of all revolutionary Rightists groups into the same conspiracy. But political kinship tends in any case to throw the like-minded of all countries together, so that even without formal organization there has been built up an intricate maze of cross-relationships among Right extremists of all countries. 

From there, the correspondent highlights the current crisis in Katanga, a break-away province from the Republic of Congo, which had contributed to the January 17, 1961 assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The success of the operation has been attributed to, among others, Otto Skorzeny.

          Root draws attention to the likely role played by Algerian Ultras operating outside Toulouse—long a hotbed of French Algerian activity—in delivering three French jet planes from a factory outside Toulouse to Katanga. Of note, on September 25, 1963, Pierre Lafitte writes “LeCatet”; research strongly suggests this could be a location within the commune of Montbeton, north of Toulouse where a number of airfields were located, perhaps related to training camps. 

          As we learned, the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters included Jack Crichton, the Dallas oilman who had been in business with Otto Skorzeny since 1952 and served as his point man on the 22nd of November.

 

 

Thanks for the excerpt. Are we taking Ralph Ganis’s word on Crichton being involved with the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters? Other than Bill Kelly in Countercoup, reviewing The Skorzeny Papers, I could find no ties with Crichton, but I did find Senator James O. Eastland. Hank did drop Crichton’s name to me, and the info on the 1953 Spanish oil deal does check out. Every time I bring up the 488th the story dies, because, well, there is a deep dark hole in the official record on Crichton’s Military Intelligence Detachment. But there is no doubt that it existed. 

[Leslie Sharp]

17 hours ago, Matthew Koch said:

 

Well it was censored because people on the forum can't understand the difference between a Trump supporter and a (N)azi, the end of your book Leslie added to that misnomer..

 

 

Matthew, to satisfy my own curiousity, I searched my Co-author’s Postscript in Coup for the words support(s) and supporter(s) to find only three instances (see below): one is reference to Goldwater having attracted a fringe (border or outer edge) element of the GOP which I doubt anyone who knows this history would challenge; one is a simple reference to those who backed Ronald Reagan; the final is embedded in a direct quote by a conservative writer.

 

Let me know if I overlooked any instances, and/or if you’ve come across the blanket term, “Trump supporters” or “supporters of Trump” or variations thereof in the Postscript?  Otherwise, is it possible that defensiveness clouds your objective analysis?  

 

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the Postscript, following are the relevant references . . . 

 

Stone’s inspiration, Barry Goldwater—acknowledged as having started the twentieth century conservative revolution—had garnered the endorsement and support of what was referred to as a fringe element of the party. In fact, the John Birch Society had been hugely successful in recruiting followers and securing votes for Goldwater.  JBS spokesmen had included Isaac Levine’s mentor and AFC member Arthur Kohlberg. JBS leaders included McCarthy Hearings investigator Robert Morris, and Generals Charles Willoughby and Edwin Walker, both of whom Pierre Lafitte identifies as having been directly involved in the assassination of John Kennedy.

 

In 1980, Stone and Manafort’s firm had gotten behind the presidential candidacy of California Governor Ronald Reagan. When Stone was provided a Rolodex of New York supporters of the governor, the only name he considered of value was Roy Cohn.

***

To his credit, in a piece for the National Review founded by William F. Buckley—whose own attempts to disenfranchise the dangerous fringe of his party, the John Birch Society, had slowed their momentum—fellow conservative writer Windsor Mann summarized, “Buchanan's brand of populist-nationalism is no longer marginal on the right. It is ascendant. A year after National Review released its ‘Against Trump’ issue, it ran a cover story making the case for nationalism. [Fox News pundit] Tucker Carlson discarded his libertarianism in favor of right-wing nanny-statism. Bennett, who accused Buchanan of ‘flirting with fascism,’ supports Trump, who quoted Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, approvingly [stating ‘it's a very good quote’].” According to Mann, Trump made this state of affairs possible, and Buchanan made Trump possible. He writes, “Just as Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964 precipitated Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980, Buchanan's presidential campaigns in 1992, 1996, and 2000, laid the groundwork for Trump's presidency. His three candidacies exposed fissures on the right and showed Trump that there was an untapped market for nativism, protectionism, and isolationism.” 

Mann also called attention to a quote which Donald Trump had borrowed from an online account, @ildulce2016: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” We know that it was Il Dulce, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was rescued by Hitler’s favorite commando, SS Otto Skorzeny; we also know that it was Skorzeny, captured in a cordial if not flagrantly warm photo with Benito’s son Romano in 1960, who served as the tactician for the plot to assassinate John Kennedy in Dallas.

 ***

Matthew, the term NATZI [sic] appears in the following excerpts from the Postscript. Please let me know if you find anything historically inaccurate.

 

According to the authors of NATZI [sic] Hydra, the America First Committee was not originally created to help the NATZI [sic]S; however, thanks to one of the original founders of the AFC [America First Committee],, General Robert E. Wood, pro-NATZIS [sic] from the Silver Shirts and the KKK—whose practice of wearing white hoods had been mimicked by the malicious band of terrorists, La Cagoule—were welcome. The AFC isolationist movement had, in the late 1930s, opted to ignore the diabolical threat that NATZI [sic] Party Fuhrer Adolf Hitler posed to Jews, Romas, homosexuals and “the other” throughout Europe, arguing that America should not engage in deep-rooted “conflicts” outside her shores. Tragically, the undertow proved to be a subtle sympathy for—and for some, an endorsement of—the NATZI [sic]’ anti-Semitism, racism, anti-immigration and homophobia. 

The founding members of AFC, many of whom genuinely believed that the US should not be drug into a war in Europe, would soon find themselves standing alongside pro-fascist groups wishing to see Hitler and dictators Mussolini and Franco succeed. Parallels of the effectiveness of General Wood’s extreme arm within the AFC in creating an umbrella for a racist, anti-immigration, homophobic movement re-emerged with a vengeance during the US presidential campaign of 2016.

***

 

In response to questions about the 2016 campaign and election, William “Bill” Regnery, grandson of one of the founders of the America First Committee and nephew of publisher Henry Regnery, seemingly appreciated the archetypal role filled by Donald Trump when he reached for a word to describe the effect: “I think Trump was a legitimizer,” he argued. White nationalism “went from being a conversation you could hold in a bathroom, to the front parlor,” said Regnery. His family publishing house, Regnery Publishing’s first two titles had been critical of the Nuremberg Trials, and the third was a pro-NATZI [sic] book attacking the Allied air campaign of WWII. By 1954, Regnery was doing its part in advancing the Cold War with publication of books for the John Birch Society. According to CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, who is cited in the Lafitte records, the agency had subsidized Regnery because of “its pro-NATZI [sic] stance.” Hunt had been central to many CIA operations run by CIA officer Tracy Barnes.

It was Bill Regnery who philosophically and financially mentored what became known in the mid-2000s as the “alt-right.” Avowed Neo-NATZI [sic] Richard Spencer served as his spokesman. While at Duke University, Spencer had brushed against a future advisor to the 45^th president, Stephen Miller, who would later serve as aid to Senator and future Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Together, the two archconservatives formulated the idea of “nation-state populism”, an economic nationalist movement modeled on the populism of Andrew Jackson, the senator from Tennessee before becoming the seventh president of the United States whose harsh policies toward enslaved people and Native Americans are a blight on America’s past. Nation-state populism would greatly influence the Trump anti-immigration campaign. 

Ten years earlier, in 2005, Bill Regnery had formed the National Policy Institute. The first NPI chairman, Louis R. Andrews explained that in the 2008 election, he had voted for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama because, “I want to see the Republican Party destroyed so it can be reborn as a party representing the interests of white people, not entrenched corporate elites.” In a July 2017 piece titled, “The Moneyman Behind the Alt-Right,” BuzzFeed reporters Aram Roston and Joel Anderson noted, “Suddenly, the seed money Regnery had doled out—often in small grants under $25,000—started to show returns. The alt-right became a political force, trolling America with obscure philosophizing, pro-Trump messages, and outright racism, while Richard Spencer gave Regnery’s movement of aging white nationalists a clean-shaven, camera-ready face. Since Trump’s win, the movement has only gained prominence.” 

 

***

 

The Foreshadowing Friendship

It was Joe McCarthy’s legal counsel Roy Cohn, a founding member of the American Jewish League Against Communism with Isaac Don Levine, that would later leave an ethical and philosophical imprint on a brash young man from Queens, Donald J. Trump. By the time Cohn first met him in 1973, Trump was already in line to inherit control of his father’s real estate empire, but it was Cohn, as much as Trump’s father who was a known NATZI [sic] sympathizer, that schooled the would-be real estate tycoon in the art of war in business, inculcating in Donald his own disdain for democratic government and its institutions. In the estimation of British historian Erick Hobsbawm, author of “Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz,” Cohn made his legal and political career “in a milieu where money and power override rules and law—indeed where the ability to get, and get away with, what lesser citizens cannot, is what proves membership of an elite.”  In an interview for their July 1981 issue, Cohn told Penthouse Magazine, “I decided long ago to make up my own rules.” 
***

Resurrecting America First ideology, Donald Trump initially attracted millions of moderate conservatives of the Republican party [emphasis added]; but alongside them, not unlike the influence General Wood had over the America First Committee of the late 1930s, Trump galvanized nascent white supremacists, anti-Semites, staunch racist anti-immigrationists, Christian evangelicals harboring homophobic prejudice, and unrepentant crypto fascists and Neo-NATZI [sic]S, all of whom found themselves welcome under his tent once he descended the escalator of his prize flagship property, Manhattan’s Trump Tower, to announce his candidacy for Republican nominee for president of the United States.

***

Several weeks before Hank Albarelli suffered a health crisis that would soon take his life in June 2019, he summarized for this coauthor, I think serious consideration should be given now to doing 3-4 end pages that speak generally to Fourth Reich. Rise of—revamped to these times but true NATZI [sic]SM—good way to end the book.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 13, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Matthew Koch]

12 minutes ago, Leslie Sharp said:

 

 

 

Matthew, to satisfy my own curiousity, I searched my Co-author’s Postscript in Coup for the words support(s)and supporter(s)to find only three instances (see below): one is reference to Goldwater having attracted a fringe (border or outer edge) element of the GOP which I doubt anyone who knows this history would challenge; one is a simple reference to those who backed Ronald Reagan; the final is embedded in a direct quote by a conservative writer.

 

Let me know if I overlooked any instances, and/or if you’ve come across the blanket term, “Trump supporters” or “supporters of Trump” or variations thereof in the Postscript?  Otherwise, is it possible that defensiveness clouds your objective analysis?  

 

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the Postscript, following are the relevant references . . . 

 

Stone’s inspiration, Barry Goldwater—acknowledged as having started the twentieth century conservative revolution—had garnered the endorsement and support of what was referred to as a fringe element of the party. In fact, the John Birch Society had been hugely successful in recruiting followers and securing votes for Goldwater.  JBS spokesmen had included Isaac Levine’s mentor and AFC member Arthur Kohlberg. JBS leaders included McCarthy Hearings investigator Robert Morris, and Generals Charles Willoughby and Edwin Walker, both of whom Pierre Lafitte identifies as having been directly involved in the assassination of John Kennedy.

 

In 1980, Stone and Manafort’s firm had gotten behind the presidential candidacy of California Governor Ronald Reagan. When Stone was provided a Rolodex of New York supporters of the governor, the only name he considered of value was Roy Cohn.

***

To his credit, in a piece for the National Review founded by William F. Buckley—whose own attempts to disenfranchise the dangerous fringe of his party, the John Birch Society, had slowed their momentum—fellow conservative writer Windsor Mann summarized, “Buchanan's brand of populist-nationalism is no longer marginal on the right. It is ascendant. A year after National Review released its ‘Against Trump’ issue, it ran a cover story making the case for nationalism. [Fox News pundit] Tucker Carlson discarded his libertarianism in favor of right-wing nanny-statism. Bennett, who accused Buchanan of ‘flirting with fascism,’ supports Trump, who quoted Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, approvingly [stating ‘it's a very good quote’].” According to Mann, Trump made this state of affairs possible, and Buchanan made Trump possible. He writes, “Just as Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964 precipitated Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980, Buchanan's presidential campaigns in 1992, 1996, and 2000, laid the groundwork for Trump's presidency. His three candidacies exposed fissures on the right and showed Trump that there was an untapped market for nativism, protectionism, and isolationism.” 

Mann also called attention to a quote which Donald Trump had borrowed from an online account, @ildulce2016: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” We know that it was Il Dulce, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was rescued by Hitler’s favorite commando, SS Otto Skorzeny; we also know that it was Skorzeny, captured in a cordial if not flagrantly warm photo with Benito’s son Romano in 1960, who served as the tactician for the plot to assassinate John Kennedy in Dallas.

 ***

Matthew, the term NATZI [sic] appears in the following excerpts from the Postscript. Please let me know if you find anything historically inaccurate.

 

According to the authors of NATZI [sic] Hydra, the America First Committee was not originally created to help the NATZI [sic]S; however, thanks to one of the original founders of the AFC [America First Committee],, General Robert E. Wood, pro-NATZIS [sic] from the Silver Shirts and the KKK—whose practice of wearing white hoods had been mimicked by the malicious band of terrorists, La Cagoule—were welcome. The AFC isolationist movement had, in the late 1930s, opted to ignore the diabolical threat that NATZI [sic] Party Fuhrer Adolf Hitler posed to Jews, Romas, homosexuals and “the other” throughout Europe, arguing that America should not engage in deep-rooted “conflicts” outside her shores. Tragically, the undertow proved to be a subtle sympathy for—and for some, an endorsement of—the NATZI [sic]’ anti-Semitism, racism, anti-immigration and homophobia. 

The founding members of AFC, many of whom genuinely believed that the US should not be drug into a war in Europe, would soon find themselves standing alongside pro-fascist groups wishing to see Hitler and dictators Mussolini and Franco succeed. Parallels of the effectiveness of General Wood’s extreme arm within the AFC in creating an umbrella for a racist, anti-immigration, homophobic movement re-emerged with a vengeance during the US presidential campaign of 2016.

***

 

In response to questions about the 2016 campaign and election, William “Bill” Regnery, grandson of one of the founders of the America First Committee and nephew of publisher Henry Regnery, seemingly appreciated the archetypal role filled by Donald Trump when he reached for a word to describe the effect: “I think Trump was a legitimizer,” he argued. White nationalism “went from being a conversation you could hold in a bathroom, to the front parlor,” said Regnery. His family publishing house, Regnery Publishing’s first two titles had been critical of the Nuremberg Trials, and the third was a pro-NATZI [sic] book attacking the Allied air campaign of WWII. By 1954, Regnery was doing its part in advancing the Cold War with publication of books for the John Birch Society. According to CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, who is cited in the Lafitte records, the agency had subsidized Regnery because of “its pro-NATZI [sic] stance.” Hunt had been central to many CIA operations run by CIA officer Tracy Barnes.

It was Bill Regnery who philosophically and financially mentored what became known in the mid-2000s as the “alt-right.” Avowed Neo-NATZI [sic] Richard Spencer served as his spokesman. While at Duke University, Spencer had brushed against a future advisor to the 45^th president, Stephen Miller, who would later serve as aid to Senator and future Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Together, the two archconservatives formulated the idea of “nation-state populism”, an economic nationalist movement modeled on the populism of Andrew Jackson, the senator from Tennessee before becoming the seventh president of the United States whose harsh policies toward enslaved people and Native Americans are a blight on America’s past. Nation-state populism would greatly influence the Trump anti-immigration campaign. 

Ten years earlier, in 2005, Bill Regnery had formed the National Policy Institute. The first NPI chairman, Louis R. Andrews explained that in the 2008 election, he had voted for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama because, “I want to see the Republican Party destroyed so it can be reborn as a party representing the interests of white people, not entrenched corporate elites.” In a July 2017 piece titled, “The Moneyman Behind the Alt-Right,” BuzzFeed reporters Aram Roston and Joel Anderson noted, “Suddenly, the seed money Regnery had doled out—often in small grants under $25,000—started to show returns. The alt-right became a political force, trolling America with obscure philosophizing, pro-Trump messages, and outright racism, while Richard Spencer gave Regnery’s movement of aging white nationalists a clean-shaven, camera-ready face. Since Trump’s win, the movement has only gained prominence.” 

 

***

 

The Foreshadowing Friendship

It was Joe McCarthy’s legal counsel Roy Cohn, a founding member of the American Jewish League Against Communism with Isaac Don Levine, that would later leave an ethical and philosophical imprint on a brash young man from Queens, Donald J. Trump. By the time Cohn first met him in 1973, Trump was already in line to inherit control of his father’s real estate empire, but it was Cohn, as much as Trump’s father who was a known NATZI [sic] sympathizer, that schooled the would-be real estate tycoon in the art of war in business, inculcating in Donald his own disdain for democratic government and its institutions. In the estimation of British historian Erick Hobsbawm, author of “Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz,” Cohn made his legal and political career “in a milieu where money and power override rules and law—indeed where the ability to get, and get away with, what lesser citizens cannot, is what proves membership of an elite.”  In an interview for their July 1981 issue, Cohn told Penthouse Magazine, “I decided long ago to make up my own rules.” 
***

Resurrecting America First ideology, Donald Trump initially attracted millions of moderate conservatives of the Republican party [emphasis added]; but alongside them, not unlike the influence General Wood had over the America First Committee of the late 1930s, Trump galvanized nascent white supremacists, anti-Semites, staunch racist anti-immigrationists, Christian evangelicals harboring homophobic prejudice, and unrepentant crypto fascists and Neo-NATZI [sic]S, all of whom found themselves welcome under his tent once he descended the escalator of his prize flagship property, Manhattan’s Trump Tower, to announce his candidacy for Republican nominee for president of the United States.

***

Several weeks before Hank Albarelli suffered a health crisis that would soon take his life in June 2019, he summarized for this coauthor, I think serious consideration should be given now to doing 3-4 end pages that speak generally to Fourth Reich. Rise of—revamped to these times but true NATZI [sic]SM—good way to end the book.

 

 

 

 

 

You might want to read Robert Montenegro's posts because he's the main one who got the term banned.. Because he constantly called MAGA and anyone who wasn't very anti MAGA the censored N word. In your post script you spent the whole thing making the case that America First aka MAGA is a (censored N word)Hydra in America and Trump was a Fascist Dictator like Benito Mussolini. So the word is censored because people like you were connecting it to people's political opinons in an inaccurate way. So the mods being like parents that are tired of their children fighting took the word away. 

Edited February 13, 2023 by Matthew Koch

[Leslie Sharp]

15 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Thanks for the excerpt. Are we taking Ralph Ganis’s word on Crichton being involved with the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters? Other than Bill Kelly in Countercoup, reviewing The Skorzeny Papers, I could find no ties with Crichton, but I did find Senator James O. Eastland. Hank did drop Crichton’s name to me, and the info on the 1953 Spanish oil deal does check out. Every time I bring up the 488th the story dies, because, well, there is a deep dark hole in the official record on Crichton’s Military Intelligence Detachment. But there is no doubt that it existed. 

Paul, I'm scouring notes to confirm that Crichton himself stated he was a signatory of the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freed Fighters.  I don't own his book, but I'm virtually certain he mentions it; otherwise Hank had every reason to trust Major Ganis' source. I do have a copy of a January 1963 Washington Post advert for the Committee that includes a partial list of notable members which included Eastland as you note, as well as Gen. Charles Willoughby, Sen. Thomas Dodd, Wm. Buckley, James Burnham, Robert Morris, and fascinatingly, Albert Schweitzer. 

Yes, we can be certain the 488th was a legitimate military intel unit. According to a brief blurb in the DMN in July 1963, the 488th was one of only two from Texas ordered to train at the Pentagon that summer.   A snippet from Coup . . . 

 

 

DALLAS . . . LAY OF THE LAND

Dallas… Dallas, ah goodness, I’m not sure what to say…

I wasn’t there anywhere near as often as Pierre… not at

all. But Pierre would say it was… Dallas was like the arms 

and legs of the American secret service, your CIA….

                                       —Rene Lafitte

 

Rene says oil smooths the way to silent, 

and sometimes deadly, change. — Lafitte notes

 

 

The lay of the land… lay of the land, Dallas

                   —Lafitte datebook, November 19, 1963

. . . Jack Crichton

In 1963, the president of Republic National Bank—parent company of Bob Storey’s Lakewood Bank & Trust—and reporting directly to chairman Karl Hoblitzelle was James W. Aston who was also engaged in a number of private pursuits including oil ventures with one John Alston “Jack” Crichton, the ultraconservative oilman who has long been suspected of involvement in the assassination. This book lays to rest any doubt of Crichton’s role in the COUP of November 22, 1963. 

            According to esteemed assassination researcher and author Prof. Peter D. Scott, Crichton signed on as director of the newly formed H. L. Hunt Foundation as evidenced in a document dated July 22, 1963, one day after Crichton’s 488th Military Intelligence concluded annual training. In 1956, while engaged in machinations in Batista’s Cuba, Crichton had time and inclination to organize the 488^th which he headquartered in Dallas, with himself ultimately responsible. The stated focus of the unit was covert petrochemical intelligence studies at home and abroad, including in the Soviet Union. In direct control of the unit was Lt. Col. George Whitmeyer, commander of all Army Reserve units in oil-rich East Texas, home of Delta Drilling. Delta had been integral to the 1952 Meadows-Skorzeny venture in Spain. It has been repeatedly estimated that at least fifty percent of the Dallas Police Department’s officers and detectives were members of the 488^th Intelligence Detachment. During an interview about the 488^th, Crichton claimed there were “about a hundred men in the unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.”

            The 488th annual training in ’63 took place at The Pentagon, one of only two attachments from Texas to be in DC that summer. 

            Contributing to Crichton’s joining the board of the Hunt Foundation that summer was his shared political views with H. L. Hunt, the eccentric oilman who, but for his wealth might never have been taken seriously. Their rigid position on segregation was best exemplified during Crichton’s 1964 run for Texas governor when he argued against “the unjust, unconstitutional federally forced desegregation in the state of Texas.” In light of datebook entries referring to meetings with Jack Crichton through the year, it is possible that he also served as conduit for funding from H. L. Hunt. 

Edited February 13, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Leslie Sharp]

29 minutes ago, Matthew Koch said:

You might want to read Robert Montenegro's posts because he's the main one who got the term banned.. Because he constantly called MAGA and anyone who wasn't very anti MAGA the censored N word. In your post script you spent the whole thing making the case that America First aka MAGA is a (censored N word)Hydra in America and Trump was a Fascist Dictator like Benito Mussolini. So the word is censored because people like you were connecting it to people's political opinons in an inaccurate way. So the mods being like parents that are tired of their children fighting took the word away. 

Mr. Montenegro's posts are his own, Matthew. Conflating them with the excerpts I provided is illogical. 

It's fascinating that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of the democracy Kennedy died defending, yet a number of assassination research forums have assumed antithetical attributes under the guise of "tough parenting"?  

I believe you're reacting to the Postscript emotionally so there's really no need for further discussion. However, the invitation stands . . . if you spot any historical inaccuracies, please cite them here.

Edited February 13, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Steve Thomas]

1 hour ago, Leslie Sharp said:

. It has been repeatedly estimated that at least fifty percent of the Dallas Police Department’s officers and detectives were members of the 488^th Intelligence Detachment. During an interview about the 488^th, Crichton claimed there were “about a hundred men in the unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.”

 

 

Leslie,

The two statements cannot be simultaneously true.

Batchelor's Exhibit# 5002 in the Warren Report alone lists over 600 Officers in the DPD in 1963.

https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh19/pdf/WH19_Batchelor_Ex_5002.pdf

Steve Thomas

 

[Leslie Sharp]

8 minutes ago, Steve Thomas said:

Leslie,

The two statements cannot be simultaneously true.

Batchelor's Exhibit# 5002 in the Warren Report alone lists over 600 Officers in the DPD in 1963.

https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh19/pdf/WH19_Batchelor_Ex_5002.pdf

Steve Thomas

 

I agree, Steve.   I should have caught the contradiction. Mea culpa.  . Even though credible sources over the years have "repeatedly estimated", Crichton made clear that approximately 50% of his 100 member-488th were also DPD ...  or — using your figures — only 8.333% of the DPD.  (I admit I'm surprised by the 600 ... presumably that included a wide range of rank in the department?)

Percentages aside — and I'm not discounting our misleading preface to Crichton's own statement  — I'm interested in your reaction to the fact that the 488th trained at the Pentagon in July of 1963, and that evidence secured by Hank Albarelli establishes Crichton's involvement in the plan to assassinate Kennedy in Dallas?

[Paul Brancato]

How many detectives? I always read that as half of the detectives. Still probably hyperbole.

[Leslie Sharp]

36 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

How many detectives? I always read that as half of the detectives. Still probably hyperbole.

Agree. I think most seasoned researchers know that in 1963, the DPD didn't have on their payroll some 600 high ranking officers.  That said, we still should have been more precise. 

I wonder if anyone on the forum has researched motorcycle patrolman Don A. Byrd who served under Capt. Gannaway in November 1963?

In 1969 he became assistant chief, then left for ABQ and returned in 1973, a decade after the assassination to become Chief of Police.

Edited February 14, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Paul Brancato]

3 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

I agree, Steve.   I should have caught the contradiction. Mea culpa.  . Even though credible sources over the years have "repeatedly estimated", Crichton made clear that approximately 50% of his 100 member-488th were also DPD ...  or — using your figures — only 8.333% of the DPD.  (I admit I'm surprised by the 600 ... presumably that included a wide range of rank in the department?)

Percentages aside — and I'm not discounting our misleading preface to Crichton's own statement  — I'm interested in your reaction to the fact that the 488th trained at the Pentagon in July of 1963, and that evidence secured by Hank Albarelli establishes Crichton's involvement in the plan to assassinate Kennedy in Dallas?

It was news to me that Crichton served on HL Hunt’s Board. Hardly surprising though. 

[Steve Thomas]

3 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

 

Percentages aside — and I'm not discounting our misleading preface to Crichton's own statement  — I'm interested in your reaction to the fact that the 488th trained at the Pentagon in July of 1963, and that evidence secured by Hank Albarelli establishes Crichton's involvement in the plan to assassinate Kennedy in Dallas?

Leslie,

Taking your second question first, I have not read the work of Hank Albarelli, so I cannot intelligently comment on it.

With respect to your first question, Paul Brancato and I have gone round and round on this through the years.

It's my opinion that Jack Crichton's 488th is the product of his overworked and fevered imagination.

There was a real 488th Military Intelligence Detachment, (MID)  and it did report to the Defence Intelligence Agency,  but it wasn't Crichton's. He co-opted the name.

See page 20 of this Forum thread:

I  correspnded with Thomas Cagley for several years and he told me that Crichton's 488th was more like a social club (like a VFW) than a real MID. Since Crichton did have an in with the Assistant Director of Intelligence (please forgive me, I can't remember the official title at the  moment), Chrichton's 488th could well have trained at the Pentagon for a. couple of summers.

I once asked Colonel Cagley, "when you signed your name to something, or sent a letter to someone, how would you have signed that document?"

I don't have my notes with me at the moment, but his response was nothing like I have ever seen coming from  Chrichton.

Steve Thomas

 

Edited February 14, 2023 by Steve Thomas

[Ron Bulman]

1 hour ago, Paul Brancato said:

It was news to me that Crichton served on HL Hunt’s Board. Hardly surprising though. 

Hmm.  I tried explaining, again, to my wife yesterday who Clark Hunt is while watching the Superbowl.  Daddy Lamar moved the AFL champion Dallas Texans to KC in 1960 when the NFL Deluxe Plowboys came to town.   Watching the game I didn't go into grandaddy Harlodson Lafayette's oil riches, the richest man in the world at one point, nor his funding of extreme conservative propaganda.  Or Jack Ruby visiting one of the sons at his building the day before the assassination.  The Tramell thing.

[Leslie Sharp]

3 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

Leslie,

Taking your second question first, I have not read the work of Hank Albarelli, so I cannot intelligently comment on it.

With respect to your first question, Paul Brancato and I have gone round and round on this through the years.

It's my opinion that Jack Crichton's 488th is the product of his overworked and fevered imagination.

There was a real 488th Military Intelligence Detachment, (MID)  and it did report to the Defence Intelligence Agency,  but it wasn't Crichton's. He co-opted the name.

See page 20 of this Forum thread:

I  correspnded with Thomas Cagley for several years and he told me that Crichton's 488th was more like a social club (like a VFW) than a real MID. Since Crichton did have an in with the Assistant Director of Intelligence (please forgive me, I can't remember the official title at the  moment), Chrichton's 488th could well have trained at the Pentagon for a. couple of summers.

I once asked Colonel Cagley, "when you signed your name to something, or sent a letter to someone, how would you have signed that document?"

I don't have my notes with me at the moment, but his response was nothing like I have ever seen coming from  Chrichton.

Steve Thomas

 

Thanks Steve, and we're not necessarily at odds on this matter.

We frequently encounter those who insist that the plot conformed to a proscribed institutional structure, so I can understand if you and others argue Crichton couldn't have been involved because his military unit was in name only, or as you suggest, guys dressing up playing soldier.  However, when you read Coup, you'll note that we don't argue "THE military" was overtly behind the plot to assassinate.

We do identify that Jack Crichton had pull at a local, state, national and international level within the oil industry, that he had served in the OSS, that he knew Otto Skorzeny since the early 1950s, that he worked for the Bronfman's Empire Trust, that he traveled to the Middle East frequently, that he was in Romania with representatives from Standard Oil in October of '63, that his 488th was created to provide covert petrochemical intelligence studies at home and abroad, including in the Soviet Union. And that he appears in the records of one Pierre Lafitte, project manager of the Dallas plot.

I'm curious if you concur that Col. Whitmeyer was in Crichton's 488th, as was Frank "Brandy" Brandstetter who also appears in Lafitte's records?   

Edited February 14, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Leslie Sharp]

3 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

Leslie,

Taking your second question first, I have not read the work of Hank Albarelli, so I cannot intelligently comment on it.

With respect to your first question, Paul Brancato and I have gone round and round on this through the years.

It's my opinion that Jack Crichton's 488th is the product of his overworked and fevered imagination.

There was a real 488th Military Intelligence Detachment, (MID)  and it did report to the Defence Intelligence Agency,  but it wasn't Crichton's. He co-opted the name.

See page 20 of this Forum thread:

I  correspnded with Thomas Cagley for several years and he told me that Crichton's 488th was more like a social club (like a VFW) than a real MID. Since Crichton did have an in with the Assistant Director of Intelligence (please forgive me, I can't remember the official title at the  moment), Chrichton's 488th could well have trained at the Pentagon for a. couple of summers.

I once asked Colonel Cagley, "when you signed your name to something, or sent a letter to someone, how would you have signed that document?"

I don't have my notes with me at the moment, but his response was nothing like I have ever seen coming from  Chrichton.

Steve Thomas

 

Steve, previously in this thread I wrote, "Yes, we can be certain the 488th was a legitimate military intel unit. According to a brief blurb in the DMN in July 1963, the 488th was one of only two from Texas ordered to train at the Pentagon that summer."  I trust you agree that at least one 488th did train at the Pentagon that summer.  Crichton's schedule for the month allows a window for him to have been in DC, but the article doesn't state specifically it was his 488th.    

Edited February 14, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Steve Thomas]

8 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

I'm curious if you concur that Col. Whitmeyer was in Crichton's 488th, as was Frank "Brandy" Brandstetter who also appears in Lafitte's records?   

Leslie,

On August 9, 2021, Paul Brancato wrote an entry in Education Forum in the Thread entitled,
"Were Dallas Police officers involved in the murder of President Kennedy ?"
See page 3.

Paul wrote,
"Steve et al - I received Jack Crichton’s oral history transcript. The key sentence, in describing how Colonel Lumpkin, Deputy police chief, called him on the evening of Nov 22  to ask if he knew a Russian interpreter for Marina. Quote - “ He (Lumpkin) was Deputy Chief of Police at that time. But he also had an Intelligence unit. And I, at that time, I was CO of the 488th Strategic Intelligence Unit. And I had previously been a CO of a counter-intelligence detachment here in Dallas and about 100 people in that unit and about 40 or 50 of them were from the Dallas Police Department."

It is my contention that a "Strategic Intelligence Unit" is not the same thing as a Military Intelligence Detachment ( MID) of the U.S. Army.
From what Paul has researched about Frank Brandstetter, I believe that he did work with Jack Crichton, but Whitmeyer, I'm  not so sure.
Crichton can claim that 40-50 DPD officers were in his "Strategic Intekkigence Unit", but I don't ever remember any actual Police Officer saying, "Yes, I was a member of  Crichton's group."
In his WC testimony, Winston Lawson said that George Whitmeyer "taught Army intelligence".
I have suggested that George Whitmeyer taught Army intelligence at the 4150th USAR Training School in Dallas, where he lived and where George Lumpkin was the Commandant.
See this thread on the 4150th:
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/25557-4150th/#comment-395116

 

Steve Thomas