Leslie Sharp Posted July 23, 2023 Share Posted July 23, 2023 (edited) @Ed Berger . . . At first [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 Nazi 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. When Frank T. Ryan who had been stationed in Spain as the Chief of SI (Secret Intelligence) became president of World Commerce in place of Pepper, who remained as executive vice-president, Intrepid arranged for him to see in London a group of men prominent in government, intelligence, and finance. Ryan, who later managed the activities of the Countess of Romanones, and came to know Otto Skorzeny quite well, is elaborated upon later in the chapter as the story of the Countess continues. For now, the men Ryan would be introduced to by Intrepid comprised a virtual who’s-who of high finance in the United Kingdom. They were connected to virtually every large financial institution in the U.K. and the United States. A result of the inspired symbiosis, within a five-year period following the founding of the BACC, its successor, the WCC had organized at least 275 additional corporations worldwide under its umbrella. Many of these enterprises appear to have been aligned with the Swiss based holding company Permanent Industrial Exposition or “Permindex,” alleged to be a trade organization that many researchers argue served as a CIA front. Permindex is studied in more depth as we close this chapter. Edited July 23, 2023 by Leslie Sharp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Berger Posted July 23, 2023 Share Posted July 23, 2023 Picking up on one of the many threads weaving through this passage, with the foreshadowing of Thomas Proctor, and by extension his law partner Paul McNutt... I've seen references here and there that McNutt was affiliated with the BACC/WCC, though I've never been to grasp any hard confirmation on this—his name doesn't appear in the Panama incorporation papers of the WCC, nor is he directly mentioned in any of the small handful of press releases on the WCC in the late 40s and early 50s. One of my research friends and I currently have a line of a number of WCC internal documents and annual reports, so hopefully that question can be settled with respect to the WCC itself in the near future. In the meantime, I believe a case can be made that, at the very least, McNutt was operating in the world of WCC 'adjunct' companies like Argus, Liberia Company, and so on. McNutt was very close with a rather ruthless and buccaneering entrepreneur named Joseph Hirshhorn, who is probably best known for tapping the "Big Z" uranium deposit in Ontario (the circumstances of him landing on this deposit are themselves full of intrigue, and probably track back to the WCC in their own right). On the eve of the Big Z discovery, Hirshhorn made a different—thought not unrelated—set of moves when he directed his Pax Athabasca Uranium Mining company to take a stake in a newly-organized company the American-Canadian Uranium Co. This became something of a small imbroglio, with accusations of stock speculation and the like popping up. This wasn't Hirshhorn and McNutt's first rodeo: in the latter half of the 1940s, Hirshhorn was involved in the Philippine-American Finance and Development Company, which was ostensibly set up as a major mining venture. The chairman of the Philippine-American Finance and Development Co. was Paul McNutt. Was this a WCC 'adjunct' company? I definitely think so, given this clue given in this fairly salty oral history by Hirshhorn: Quote PAUL CUMMINGS: Was there a reason for selling those? JOSEPH HIRSHHORN: Well, I don’t know, maybe I exchanged something. I can’t really tell. I wasn’t broke. I was broke once. When I lost a lot of money in 1943-44 I had a great collection of Inpressionist pictures-a couple of Monets, four or five Rouaults, four or five Chagalls. I sold, I think, twenty-eight or thirty items at Parke-Bernet. Even two beautiful Eilshemiuses for no reason. I took the money and went to the Philippines Islands and lost it all in the mining business. The most corrupt people in the world, the most corrupt people in the world are Filipinos. I spent three years there and it broke my heart. The word of a Filipino wouldn’t mean a damn. Awful people, terrible from the President down. You know when you go over there as an American-I belonged to the American Club-you have to have a chauffeur and a car and so on, and the chauffeur had a wife and a bunch of kids and three girls on the side. Awful people. I had a syndicate and we lost a million three hundred thousand dollars- $300,000 of my money. All those people were millionaires. Even Edward Stettinius was in the deal. He used to be Secretary of State. His father was a partner of J.P. Morgan. This is the same Stettinius I mentioned in my other post, the man who sat at the WCC and the Liberia Company, and who had aborted plans for a similar endeavor in Yemen (and another in Ethiopia!) It's really remarkable—it's an actually small pool of individuals, but the web these companies were generating was truly global in scope, with roots planted down in every corner of the developing world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Berger Posted August 3, 2023 Share Posted August 3, 2023 [Apologies in advance for the lengthy block of text that follows. Much of this is from a currently-on-ice writing project draft, but I've chopped it down a bit and condensed for posting here]. In early 1964, the Warren Commission requested that the FBI re-interview Paul Roland Jones, a close associate of Jack Ruby frontman for the activities of the Chicago syndicate in Dallas, Texas. Jones had several important tasks: he helped run, for instance, amusement companies tied to mob gambling interests in the city, and he helped bribe Dallas law enforcement officials to turn their eyes at the burgeoning power of organized crime. On hand in these latter endeavors was Dallas police lieutenant George E. Butler, later an acquaintance of Ruby and the man who oversaw the ill-fated prisoner transport of Lee Harvey Oswald on the day of his shooting. Jones had decamped from Dallas some years before the assassination of President Kennedy, though he routinely returned and kept in close contact with Ruby—even visiting with him at the Carousel Club in the weeks prior to November 22nd, 1963. In the meantime, Jones had trotted around the United States, where he participated in various 'odd-jobs' strikingly familiar to those who study post-war organized crime networks: he was a promoter in 'low-rent housing development' in Alabama, and in the American southwest he was connected to uranium mining companies. He also found time to dip into fraud: He told the FBI that he was "under indictment for perjury" in connection with a series of scams connected with the Texas Adams oil company. In the Texas Adams case, the main defendants included Francis Peter Crosby and William McCarthy. Crosby is immediately an intriguing character for a figure like Paul Roland Jones to be linked up with: he was the brother of James Crosby of Resorts International fame. It was the Crosby family who had purchased up the stock of the Mary Carter Paint Company—which itself had rumors of CIA and mafia involvement—and transformed it into the dubious Bahamas hotel and casino complex. William McCarthy, meanwhile, was the brother of the “King of the Wildcatters” Glenn McCarthy, perhaps best known for owning the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, Texas. The Texas Adams story is very complicated, but the short of it is that Crosby, McCarthy and other became officers in 1955 of a “dummy company” called American Montana Oil & Gas. They embarked on various acquisition, including one of Homestead Oil & Uranium Co. via another “dummy company”, Sundown Oil of Colorado. It was at Sundown where Paul Roland Jones acted as an officer. In order to take control of Sundown, the Crosby – McCarthy group in American Montana Oil & Gas joined forces with another party to stage a takeover of Continental Car-na-var Corporation. While this ended up falling apart, this same complex of companies and figures staged a fraudulent takeover of Texas-Adams Oil Co. They then “flood[ed] of the market with worthless or overpriced Texas-Adams share certificates; and that defendants had fraudulently authorized the issuance of corporate stock without consideration in return for 'kickbacks' from the proceeds of the sales of those shares.” Where this begins to open up in a wider tapestry is the party that Crosby-McCarthy/American Montana had joined with to take over Continental. It was Satris “Sonny” Fassoulis, a World War veteran 2 with impressive links to the netherworlds of intelligence and organized crime, and who had a propensity not only for arms dealing, but for convoluted stock fraud schemes. One of the companies that Fassoulis had ran in the years following World War 2 was the Commerce International Corporation, which boasted a Shanghai-based subsidiary called Commerce International (China). Peter Dale Scott, in his 1972 book The War Conspiracy, wrote that Commerce International was a “subsidiary” of the World Commerce Corporation. In a 2010 article, he revised this claim: “Elsewhere I have described Commerce International China as a subsidiary of the WCC. Since then, I have learned that it was a firm founded in Shanghai in 1930. I now doubt the alleged WCC connection.” That Commerce International was founded in 1930 was a claim made by Fassoulis himself. It is also NOT true. Court records show that Commerce International originally went by the very telling name of North African Commerce Corporation. It was incorporated in New Jersey on September 25, 1945—the same year that the WCC was organized—and the name changed to Commerce International on July 19, 1946. If Fassoulis wasn't trying to obscure something about the nature of his company, why would he claim that it had been organized fifteen years earlier, in an entirely different country? Name similarities aren't enough on their own to draw a connection between two entities, so the question remains: was Fassoulis and/or his Commerce International Corp tied to the World Commerce Corp? It can be demonstrated that, at the very least, Fassoulis and his company were operating in the WCC network. In 1945-46, former naval commander Charles M. Cooke and Preston Goodfellow arrived in Taiwan under the cover of private business ('selling fertilizer'), though their actual objective was to establish contacts and study the possibility of establishing a military advisory group on the island. Goodfellow, importantly, had been in the OSS, where he served as William Donovan's right-hand man. By the beginning of 1949, Goodfellow would be serving as the manager of the “Korean branch” of the WCC. As a result of the early Cooke-Goodfellow mission and subsequent expeditions, Cooke established a Special Technical Program (STP) on Taiwan in 1950, which would supply Chiang Kai-Shek with technical advisors, munitions, and raw materials that would allow the KMT to bolster themselves against the communists in mainland China. To run the STP, Cooke hired Fassoulis and the Commerce International Corp, which then ran an impressive, international weapons and ammo procurement program on behalf of the KMT (some of these munitions, incidentally, flowed to Taiwan via Commerce International from the Philippines). Why did Cooke hire Fassoulis? Could have it been with the influence of Preston Goodfellow, a man close to—and eventually a fixture within—the WCC? Goodfellow's official timeline as a WCC manager actually overlaps when all this was going on. That Commerce International began named the North African Commerce Corp seems a bit more curious now. This isn't the only incident where there was a stark overlap between Cooke's activities in Taiwan and the world of the WCC. In 1957, Cooke became a director of the Ingalls Taiwan Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, which worked closely with the Taiwan Shipbuilding Corporation in accelerating the development of Taiwan's shipping industry. One of his fellow Ingalls Taiwan officers was C.C. Wei. Wei was a very busy person: besides Ingalls, he acted as a shareholder in companies such as China Trading and Industrial Development Corp, and as the treasurer and secretary of United Tanker Corp. He was also involved in the China International Foundation, Inc. In 1950, China Trading and Industrial Development Corp worked directly with the WCC in dumping soybeans on the world market—part of a blizzard of speculation that boosted the cash reserves of Chiang Kai-Shek and allies in domestic American 'China Lobby', such as Joseph McCarthy. Two to three years earlier, the United Tanker Corp sold surplus tanker ships to a set of front companies for United Tanker Corp. The sellers of these tankers was a group that included Edward Stettinius and Julius Holmes. Stettinius was, of course, a WCC president and the founder of WCC 'adjunct', the Liberian Company (where WCC's Frank Ryan could be found). Holmes was on the board of the Liberian Company. China International Foundation, meanwhile, was the parent company of United Tanker Corp. So the three C.C. Wei entities—China Trading, United Tanker, and China International—were all connected to the WCC. That Wei would partner with Cooke, who hired Fassoulis, is extremely telling. As for Fassoulis and Commerce International: in the early 1950s, Commerce International became the owner of an oddball company called Pola-Lite. What's strange about Pola-Lite isn't simply the fact that they made 3-D glasses, but that it was intimately connected to figures (aside from Fassoulis) woven to organized crime and intelligence. The chairman of Pola-Lite was Matthew Fox, best known as a major player in television and film (he was involved, during the 1950s, with United Artists and Universal Pictures). But Matthew Fox has two notable attributes. First, he was a client of David Baird's phony philanthropic foundations, and participated in their complex securities-dealing schemes. Second, he had run a CIA front company in Southeast Asia called the American-Indonesian Corporation. Around the same time he was involved with Pola-Lite, Fox was also an officer of C & C Television, a subsidiary of C & C Super Corporation. C & C Super, which appears on a creditor-debtor list of the Baird foundations, had several other notable directors. One was William Zeckendorf, another Baird foundation client and one of the key figures behind the development of the Great Southwest Corporation. Another was a close friend of Zeckendorf by the name of Virgil Dardi, a former Transamerica Corporation executive (Transamerica being one of the companies that helped first capitalize the WCC)-turned-owner of a Pepsi bottling franchise (recall that Pepsi aimed to open a bottling plant at Great Southwest). Dardi's name appears in FBI files as a known associate of Stewart Hopps, the ex-OSS man who transformed into one of the great insurance and stock fraudsters of the 20th century. This is the same Hopps who claimed to have worked closely with Edward Stettinius in the WCC. In 1955, Dardi became embroiled in a series of high-stakes stock frauds run by Alexander Guterma, who had taken control of the United Dye corporation, where Dardi was a director. At the same time, Guterma was involved in attempted acquisition, along with mobsters Samuel Garfield and Irving Pasternak, of Franklin County Coal—a company owned by John and Clint Murchison Jr. The scheme involved Guterma, Garfield and Pasternak buying a load of Franklin stock at a remarkably deflated price, obscuring the ownership in a “profitless” dummy company called Handridge Oil, which was the merged into United Dye. The Franklin Coal stock became United Dye stock, which Guterma and Dardi and his other cronies floated onto the market via over-the-counter exchanges, replete with false claims about the stock's benefits. The conspirators made some $5 million in profit. Running parallel to this was Guterma's efforts to use United Dye to take over another company, Bon Ami. This was apparently accomplished with the help of a Bon Ami board member named Nathan Cummings, who was himself a client of David Baird's foundations. Among the business ventures that Cummings had with Baird were real estate ventures between the pair and Robert R. Young—a businessman named in some of the first press releases on the WCC as somebody that was working with the company. Young would also deploy the resources of Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison in his proxy war to take control of the New York Central Railroad. Guterma proceeded to loot Bon Ami, sometimes by taking money from company's credit account, providing it to a third party company, and then loaning that money to United Dye. He also brought into the fold—finally—Sonny Fassoulis. In 1955, Fassoulis acquired a company called Ichythan Associates S.A. He then turned to his business associate, the aforementioned Matthew Fox, and bought from him a package of rights to television and movies to be shown outside the United States. This 'Ichythan' package was used as collateral by Fassoulis to secure loans, but in 1957 he sold the package to Guterma and Bon Ami. Bon Ami was to use the Ichythan package as a bargaining chip with the Film Guild to gain more television spot time, which would increase Bon Ami's stock value. Fassoulis, for his part, then used the profits of the sale to buy 100,000 shares of Bon Ami. Of course, Fassoulis hid his stake in Bon Ami in a front company called Baltic Investment Corporation. Serving as a Fassoulis straw-man at Baltic was Walter Birge of Bache & Company—a company then under the control of the family of Frank Ryan of the WCC. By 1960, things were crumbling for Guterma and his associates, leading to a parade of indictments against him and his various co-conspirators (Guterma himself would spend time in prison, but would be put back on his feet as a real estate developer in Florida and coal mine owner in Kentucky. The pair who backed his return were none other than David Baird and another insider of the Baird foundations, Charles Allen of Allen & Company). Among those stung—but not indicted—was Paul M. Hughes, a protege of Roy Cohn. When Cohn himself was targeted by the SEC and the Department of Justice, it was disclosed that he had used this same Hughes as a strawman in the purchasing of shares of the Lionel Corporation. It can go on forever. But this seems like a good place to close it, because this brings us to the point in the timeline where Fassoulis was intersecting with the Texas-Adams fraud. But it seems very clear to me, in this convoluted mess, that all these frauds have a revolving door of personnel, and the hazy specter of the WCC is one of the common denominators among all of them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Montenegro Posted August 3, 2023 Share Posted August 3, 2023 2 hours ago, Ed Berger said: [Apologies in advance for the lengthy block of text that follows. Much of this is from a currently-on-ice writing project draft, but I've chopped it down a bit and condensed for posting here]. In early 1964, the Warren Commission requested that the FBI re-interview Paul Roland Jones, a close associate of Jack Ruby frontman for the activities of the Chicago syndicate in Dallas, Texas. Jones had several important tasks: he helped run, for instance, amusement companies tied to mob gambling interests in the city, and he helped bribe Dallas law enforcement officials to turn their eyes at the burgeoning power of organized crime. On hand in these latter endeavors was Dallas police lieutenant George E. Butler, later an acquaintance of Ruby and the man who oversaw the ill-fated prisoner transport of Lee Harvey Oswald on the day of his shooting. Jones had decamped from Dallas some years before the assassination of President Kennedy, though he routinely returned and kept in close contact with Ruby—even visiting with him at the Carousel Club in the weeks prior to November 22nd, 1963. In the meantime, Jones had trotted around the United States, where he participated in various 'odd-jobs' strikingly familiar to those who study post-war organized crime networks: he was a promoter in 'low-rent housing development' in Alabama, and in the American southwest he was connected to uranium mining companies. He also found time to dip into fraud: He told the FBI that he was "under indictment for perjury" in connection with a series of scams connected with the Texas Adams oil company. In the Texas Adams case, the main defendants included Francis Peter Crosby and William McCarthy. Crosby is immediately an intriguing character for a figure like Paul Roland Jones to be linked up with: he was the brother of James Crosby of Resorts International fame. It was the Crosby family who had purchased up the stock of the Mary Carter Paint Company—which itself had rumors of CIA and mafia involvement—and transformed it into the dubious Bahamas hotel and casino complex. William McCarthy, meanwhile, was the brother of the “King of the Wildcatters” Glenn McCarthy, perhaps best known for owning the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, Texas. The Texas Adams story is very complicated, but the short of it is that Crosby, McCarthy and other became officers in 1955 of a “dummy company” called American Montana Oil & Gas. They embarked on various acquisition, including one of Homestead Oil & Uranium Co. via another “dummy company”, Sundown Oil of Colorado. It was at Sundown where Paul Roland Jones acted as an officer. In order to take control of Sundown, the Crosby – McCarthy group in American Montana Oil & Gas joined forces with another party to stage a takeover of Continental Car-na-var Corporation. While this ended up falling apart, this same complex of companies and figures staged a fraudulent takeover of Texas-Adams Oil Co. They then “flood[ed] of the market with worthless or overpriced Texas-Adams share certificates; and that defendants had fraudulently authorized the issuance of corporate stock without consideration in return for 'kickbacks' from the proceeds of the sales of those shares.” Where this begins to open up in a wider tapestry is the party that Crosby-McCarthy/American Montana had joined with to take over Continental. It was Satris “Sonny” Fassoulis, a World War veteran 2 with impressive links to the netherworlds of intelligence and organized crime, and who had a propensity not only for arms dealing, but for convoluted stock fraud schemes. One of the companies that Fassoulis had ran in the years following World War 2 was the Commerce International Corporation, which boasted a Shanghai-based subsidiary called Commerce International (China). Peter Dale Scott, in his 1972 book The War Conspiracy, wrote that Commerce International was a “subsidiary” of the World Commerce Corporation. In a 2010 article, he revised this claim: “Elsewhere I have described Commerce International China as a subsidiary of the WCC. Since then, I have learned that it was a firm founded in Shanghai in 1930. I now doubt the alleged WCC connection.” That Commerce International was founded in 1930 was a claim made by Fassoulis himself. It is also NOT true. Court records show that Commerce International originally went by the very telling name of North African Commerce Corporation. It was incorporated in New Jersey on September 25, 1945—the same year that the WCC was organized—and the name changed to Commerce International on July 19, 1946. If Fassoulis wasn't trying to obscure something about the nature of his company, why would he claim that it had been organized fifteen years earlier, in an entirely different country? Name similarities aren't enough on their own to draw a connection between two entities, so the question remains: was Fassoulis and/or his Commerce International Corp tied to the World Commerce Corp? It can be demonstrated that, at the very least, Fassoulis and his company were operating in the WCC network. In 1945-46, former naval commander Charles M. Cooke and Preston Goodfellow arrived in Taiwan under the cover of private business ('selling fertilizer'), though their actual objective was to establish contacts and study the possibility of establishing a military advisory group on the island. Goodfellow, importantly, had been in the OSS, where he served as William Donovan's right-hand man. By the beginning of 1949, Goodfellow would be serving as the manager of the “Korean branch” of the WCC. As a result of the early Cooke-Goodfellow mission and subsequent expeditions, Cooke established a Special Technical Program (STP) on Taiwan in 1950, which would supply Chiang Kai-Shek with technical advisors, munitions, and raw materials that would allow the KMT to bolster themselves against the communists in mainland China. To run the STP, Cooke hired Fassoulis and the Commerce International Corp, which then ran an impressive, international weapons and ammo procurement program on behalf of the KMT (some of these munitions, incidentally, flowed to Taiwan via Commerce International from the Philippines). Why did Cooke hire Fassoulis? Could have it been with the influence of Preston Goodfellow, a man close to—and eventually a fixture within—the WCC? Goodfellow's official timeline as a WCC manager actually overlaps when all this was going on. That Commerce International began named the North African Commerce Corp seems a bit more curious now. This isn't the only incident where there was a stark overlap between Cooke's activities in Taiwan and the world of the WCC. In 1957, Cooke became a director of the Ingalls Taiwan Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, which worked closely with the Taiwan Shipbuilding Corporation in accelerating the development of Taiwan's shipping industry. One of his fellow Ingalls Taiwan officers was C.C. Wei. Wei was a very busy person: besides Ingalls, he acted as a shareholder in companies such as China Trading and Industrial Development Corp, and as the treasurer and secretary of United Tanker Corp. He was also involved in the China International Foundation, Inc. In 1950, China Trading and Industrial Development Corp worked directly with the WCC in dumping soybeans on the world market—part of a blizzard of speculation that boosted the cash reserves of Chiang Kai-Shek and allies in domestic American 'China Lobby', such as Joseph McCarthy. Two to three years earlier, the United Tanker Corp sold surplus tanker ships to a set of front companies for United Tanker Corp. The sellers of these tankers was a group that included Edward Stettinius and Julius Holmes. Stettinius was, of course, a WCC president and the founder of WCC 'adjunct', the Liberian Company (where WCC's Frank Ryan could be found). Holmes was on the board of the Liberian Company. China International Foundation, meanwhile, was the parent company of United Tanker Corp. So the three C.C. Wei entities—China Trading, United Tanker, and China International—were all connected to the WCC. That Wei would partner with Cooke, who hired Fassoulis, is extremely telling. As for Fassoulis and Commerce International: in the early 1950s, Commerce International became the owner of an oddball company called Pola-Lite. What's strange about Pola-Lite isn't simply the fact that they made 3-D glasses, but that it was intimately connected to figures (aside from Fassoulis) woven to organized crime and intelligence. The chairman of Pola-Lite was Matthew Fox, best known as a major player in television and film (he was involved, during the 1950s, with United Artists and Universal Pictures). But Matthew Fox has two notable attributes. First, he was a client of David Baird's phony philanthropic foundations, and participated in their complex securities-dealing schemes. Second, he had run a CIA front company in Southeast Asia called the American-Indonesian Corporation. Around the same time he was involved with Pola-Lite, Fox was also an officer of C & C Television, a subsidiary of C & C Super Corporation. C & C Super, which appears on a creditor-debtor list of the Baird foundations, had several other notable directors. One was William Zeckendorf, another Baird foundation client and one of the key figures behind the development of the Great Southwest Corporation. Another was a close friend of Zeckendorf by the name of Virgil Dardi, a former Transamerica Corporation executive (Transamerica being one of the companies that helped first capitalize the WCC)-turned-owner of a Pepsi bottling franchise (recall that Pepsi aimed to open a bottling plant at Great Southwest). Dardi's name appears in FBI files as a known associate of Stewart Hopps, the ex-OSS man who transformed into one of the great insurance and stock fraudsters of the 20th century. This is the same Hopps who claimed to have worked closely with Edward Stettinius in the WCC. In 1955, Dardi became embroiled in a series of high-stakes stock frauds run by Alexander Guterma, who had taken control of the United Dye corporation, where Dardi was a director. At the same time, Guterma was involved in attempted acquisition, along with mobsters Samuel Garfield and Irving Pasternak, of Franklin County Coal—a company owned by John and Clint Murchison Jr. The scheme involved Guterma, Garfield and Pasternak buying a load of Franklin stock at a remarkably deflated price, obscuring the ownership in a “profitless” dummy company called Handridge Oil, which was the merged into United Dye. The Franklin Coal stock became United Dye stock, which Guterma and Dardi and his other cronies floated onto the market via over-the-counter exchanges, replete with false claims about the stock's benefits. The conspirators made some $5 million in profit. Running parallel to this was Guterma's efforts to use United Dye to take over another company, Bon Ami. This was apparently accomplished with the help of a Bon Ami board member named Nathan Cummings, who was himself a client of David Baird's foundations. Among the business ventures that Cummings had with Baird were real estate ventures between the pair and Robert R. Young—a businessman named in some of the first press releases on the WCC as somebody that was working with the company. Young would also deploy the resources of Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison in his proxy war to take control of the New York Central Railroad. Guterma proceeded to loot Bon Ami, sometimes by taking money from company's credit account, providing it to a third party company, and then loaning that money to United Dye. He also brought into the fold—finally—Sonny Fassoulis. In 1955, Fassoulis acquired a company called Ichythan Associates S.A. He then turned to his business associate, the aforementioned Matthew Fox, and bought from him a package of rights to television and movies to be shown outside the United States. This 'Ichythan' package was used as collateral by Fassoulis to secure loans, but in 1957 he sold the package to Guterma and Bon Ami. Bon Ami was to use the Ichythan package as a bargaining chip with the Film Guild to gain more television spot time, which would increase Bon Ami's stock value. Fassoulis, for his part, then used the profits of the sale to buy 100,000 shares of Bon Ami. Of course, Fassoulis hid his stake in Bon Ami in a front company called Baltic Investment Corporation. Serving as a Fassoulis straw-man at Baltic was Walter Birge of Bache & Company—a company then under the control of the family of Frank Ryan of the WCC. By 1960, things were crumbling for Guterma and his associates, leading to a parade of indictments against him and his various co-conspirators (Guterma himself would spend time in prison, but would be put back on his feet as a real estate developer in Florida and coal mine owner in Kentucky. The pair who backed his return were none other than David Baird and another insider of the Baird foundations, Charles Allen of Allen & Company). Among those stung—but not indicted—was Paul M. Hughes, a protege of Roy Cohn. When Cohn himself was targeted by the SEC and the Department of Justice, it was disclosed that he had used this same Hughes as a strawman in the purchasing of shares of the Lionel Corporation. It can go on forever. But this seems like a good place to close it, because this brings us to the point in the timeline where Fassoulis was intersecting with the Texas-Adams fraud. But it seems very clear to me, in this convoluted mess, that all these frauds have a revolving door of personnel, and the hazy specter of the WCC is one of the common denominators among all of them. This post is incredible—absolutely brillant work, Mr. Berger! This post has closed the gap, in my humble opinion, between the overworld of legitimate business entities counter to President Kennedy's policies and the specter of World Commerence Corporation. May I have you permission to republish this data in a different platform—full credit where it is due, of course. 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Ed Berger Posted August 3, 2023 Share Posted August 3, 2023 17 minutes ago, Robert Montenegro said: This post is incredible—absolutely brillant work, Mr. Berger! This post has closed the gap, in my humble opinion, between the overworld of legitimate business entities counter to President Kennedy's policies and the specter of World Commerence Corporation. May I have you permission to republish this data in a different platform—full credit where it is due, of course. Thanks for the kind words, Robert, and fire away on republishing! I greatly admire the work you've been doing, so it means a lot to me. The web is even tighter than I presented here, especially due to the fact that the Baird character who recurs repeatedly appears to have functioned as an agent on behalf of Floyd Odlum, whose Atlas Corporation helped provide the WCC with some of its initial capital funds. The banker for his 'foundations', meanwhile, was Serge Semenenko, originally from the First National Bank of Boston (which was closely tied to United Fruit interests). While there, Semenenko crossed paths with partners in the law firm of William Donovan, which of course handled the incorporation of the WCC. Semenenko pops up in the biography of Frank Brandstetter, there working on behalf of Hilton interests and Harry Crown (who ended up partnered with Odlum when General Dynamics purchased Convair from Atlas Corporation). Crown and Hilton were major Baird foundation clients, and Baird himself served on the board of the Hilton Corp. Consider the March 24, 1964 FBI report about Semenenko having met Dimitri von Mohrenschildt in 1926. "Semenenko advised that he first met GEORGE DE MOHRENSCHILDT through his brother, DIMITRI, in New York, possibly fifteen to twenty years ago". Also consider that copies of checks entered in evidence during the congressional inquiry into the Baird foundations show that they worked with the Empire Trust Company in 1957—in other words, when Jack Crichton was an Empire Trust VP—in issues around the transfer of various securities to Odlum's Atlas Corporation. Like I mentioned in a response to @Leslie Sharp the other day, I don't believe that this interlocking carousel of fraud was simply fraud, but bears a lot of the hallmarks of a large-scale, organized and concentrated pattern of money laundering, perhaps moving the proceeds of something (drugs? arms? pilfered gold?) into the coffers of legitimate overworld business interests. The ties are too dense, the links to intelligence too strong, and the stakes too high for them to be written off as conventional, disconnected instances of high financial tomfoolery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Berger Posted August 3, 2023 Share Posted August 3, 2023 (edited) An Intriguing document in the CIA reading room dated March 4th, 1949... 1. On 10 Jan 1949, Luang Pibul sent Major Narong Salirathavibhaya to Willis H. Bird's office to ask for assistance in buying approximately $1,000,000 worth of arms for the Siamese Army. The Army wants carbines, sub-machine guns, machine guns, rifles, jeeps, weapons carriers, and tanks. 2. Bird stated that he would be unable to buy the arms directly and would have to get someone to make the purchase. He has written to the World Commerce Company (Stettinius Group) to see if they can procure the arms. [...] 3. On 11 Jan, Bird was called to see Major Phao Sriyanon in reference to weapons for the Police Force. Phao wants tear gas bombs and police riot disbursing equipment. Bird showed Phao a substantial order from the Siamese Navy for similar types of equipment. From Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: ...William H. Bird, the CAT [Civil Air Transport] representative in Bangkok, is said to have coordinated CAT airdrops to Li Mi's troops in the "fertile triangle." In 1960, after CAT began flying in Laos through "the great Laos fraud," his private engineering firm Bird and Son began the construction of short airstrips in Meo territory which were soon used for the collection of Laos opium, some of it destined to be manufactured into heroin in Marseilles, and forwarded to the National Crime Syndicate in the United States. Soon Bird and Son had its own airline of fifty planes flying US contract airlift to the opium- growing tribesmen, and rumors soon arose that these planes, like Air America's in the same area, were not infrequently used for smuggling. William Bird's brother or cousin in Bangkok, China OSS veteran Willis Bird, headed the Bangkok office of a "trading company" called Sea Supply, Inc. As we noted before, Sea Supply first supplied arms to the KMT troops of General Li Mi, and later trained Phao Sriyanon's Thai border police who were also implicated in KMT opium- smuggling activities. Like William, Willis Bird also branched into construction business on his own. In 1959, as vice-president of the "Universal Construction Company," Bird was said by a Congressional committee investigating corruption in Laos to have bribed an ICA aid official in Vientiane. In 1962, when President Kennedy was struggling to bring the CIA hawks in Thailand under control, his brother, the attorney-general, belatedly returned an indictment against Willis Bird, who has never returned to this country to stand trial. Edited August 3, 2023 by Ed Berger Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leslie Sharp Posted August 3, 2023 Author Share Posted August 3, 2023 (edited) 2 hours ago, Ed Berger said: An Intriguing document in the CIA reading room dated March 4th, 1949... 1. On 10 Jan 1949, Luang Pibul sent Major Narong Salirathavibhaya to Willis H. Bird's office to ask for assistance in buying approximately $1,000,000 worth of arms for the Siamese Army. The Army wants carbines, sub-machine guns, machine guns, rifles, jeeps, weapons carriers, and tanks. 2. Bird stated that he would be unable to buy the arms directly and would have to get someone to make the purchase. He has written to the World Commerce Company (Stettinius Group) to see if they can procure the arms. [...] 3. On 11 Jan, Bird was called to see Major Phao Sriyanon in reference to weapons for the Police Force. Phao wants tear gas bombs and police riot disbursing equipment. Bird showed Phao a substantial order from the Siamese Navy for similar types of equipment. From Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: ...William H. Bird, the CAT [Civil Air Transport] representative in Bangkok, is said to have coordinated CAT airdrops to Li Mi's troops in the "fertile triangle." In 1960, after CAT began flying in Laos through "the great Laos fraud," his private engineering firm Bird and Son began the construction of short airstrips in Meo territory which were soon used for the collection of Laos opium, some of it destined to be manufactured into heroin in Marseilles, and forwarded to the National Crime Syndicate in the United States. Soon Bird and Son had its own airline of fifty planes flying US contract airlift to the opium- growing tribesmen, and rumors soon arose that these planes, like Air America's in the same area, were not infrequently used for smuggling. William Bird's brother or cousin in Bangkok, China OSS veteran Willis Bird, headed the Bangkok office of a "trading company" called Sea Supply, Inc. As we noted before, Sea Supply first supplied arms to the KMT troops of General Li Mi, and later trained Phao Sriyanon's Thai border police who were also implicated in KMT opium- smuggling activities. Like William, Willis Bird also branched into construction business on his own. In 1959, as vice-president of the "Universal Construction Company," Bird was said by a Congressional committee investigating corruption in Laos to have bribed an ICA aid official in Vientiane. In 1962, when President Kennedy was struggling to bring the CIA hawks in Thailand under control, his brother, the attorney-general, belatedly returned an indictment against Willis Bird, who has never returned to this country to stand trial. In 1962, when President Kennedy was struggling to bring the CIA hawks in Thailand under control, his brother, the attorney-general, belatedly returned an indictment against Willis Bird, who has never returned to this country to stand trial. Did not know this. (We were discussing Sea Supply last night, and whether it was the airline that Dulles et al were entirely comfortable traveling under.) This is significant confirmation that WCC was in the drugs and arms business from the outset! Have you come across Dr. Werner von Arx earlier than the Permindex document in the late 1960s? (as a purely side note, another developer construction company of that era was Cord Meyer Sr. who cofounded CAP) Edited August 3, 2023 by Leslie Sharp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Berger Posted August 3, 2023 Share Posted August 3, 2023 6 minutes ago, Leslie Sharp said: In 1962, when President Kennedy was struggling to bring the CIA hawks in Thailand under control, his brother, the attorney-general, belatedly returned an indictment against Willis Bird, who has never returned to this country to stand trial. Did not know this. (We were discussing Sea Supply last night, and whether it was the airline that Dulles et al were entirely comfortable traveling under.) This is significant confirmation that WCC was in the drugs and arms business from the outset! Have you come across Dr. Werner von Arx earlier than the Permindex document in the late 1960s? (as a purely side note, another development construction company at the time was Cord Meyer Sr. who was a cofounder of CAP) Leslie, the name Werner von Arx definitely rings a bell for me. Let me check the papers I have from the Nagy archive collection—it's possible that I recognize it through that, but I don't think I know the name outside of a Permindex context (assuming I'm thinking of the right guy in the first place!) Do you know the name of Meyer Sr.'s development company? I'm at the point where the words 'development company' alone send up massive red flags. As for the Bird bit—just checked out PDS's citation, a New York Times article from February 2nd, 1962. Viewable here: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/02/02/89495746.html?pageNumber=8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leslie Sharp Posted August 3, 2023 Author Share Posted August 3, 2023 1 hour ago, Ed Berger said: Leslie, the name Werner von Arx definitely rings a bell for me. Let me check the papers I have from the Nagy archive collection—it's possible that I recognize it through that, but I don't think I know the name outside of a Permindex context (assuming I'm thinking of the right guy in the first place!) Do you know the name of Meyer Sr.'s development company? I'm at the point where the words 'development company' alone send up massive red flags. As for the Bird bit—just checked out PDS's citation, a New York Times article from February 2nd, 1962. Viewable here: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1962/02/02/89495746.html?pageNumber=8 I think I featured Dr. von Arx in an EF Thread. I'll find the title. Cord Meyer Development Co. as far as I recall. I'll track down my file. Agree, "development" suggests "cover" although I think he made a serious fortune in construction. Tks for link to NYT. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leslie Sharp Posted August 3, 2023 Author Share Posted August 3, 2023 @Ed Berger Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Montenegro Posted August 3, 2023 Share Posted August 3, 2023 (edited) 3 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said: In 1962, when President Kennedy was struggling to bring the CIA hawks in Thailand under control, his brother, the attorney-general, belatedly returned an indictment against Willis Bird, who has never returned to this country to stand trial. Did not know this. (We were discussing Sea Supply last night, and whether it was the airline that Dulles et al were entirely comfortable traveling under.) We spoke about this before, Leslie—James Harrison Wilson Thompson, president of the World Commerce Corporation's, Bangkok branch was the original comptroller of Willis H. Bird's South East Asian Supply Incorporated, aka S.E.A. Supply Inc. Fascinatingly enough, James Harrison Wilson Thompson (president, WCC, Bangkok) said it was a former Office of Strategic Services officer by the name of Capt. Edwin Fahey Black that first approached him with getting involved with WCC, Bangkok. By the late 1970's, then United States Army Maj. Gen. Edwin Fahey Black was serving as Secretary to the Scientific Advisor to the Policy Council of the Joint Research and Development Board in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Defense—where Maj. Gen. Black oversaw the development of Nugan-Hand Bank with a close associate of Willis H. Bird, former OSS commander COL. Paul Lionel Edward Helliwell: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jul/28/fbi-cia-edwin-black/#:~:text=Brigadier General Edwin Black - not,trafficking and money laundering purposes. Even stranger still, is the fact that one of the financiers of Thomas Dudley Cabot's Gibraltar Steamship Company (a CIA front company set up to cover the covert radio broadcast networks supporting Brigada Asalto 2506), was a man named Richard Samuel Greenlee, the former OSS Chief of Special Operations Branch, Detachment 404, in Ceylon-Sri Lanka. While Richard Samuel Greenlee was Special Ops Chief for Detachment 404, he oversaw the training and finaical support for Kuomintang narco-terrorist Lieutenant General Dai Li, commander of the KMT's intelligence service Bureau of Investigation and Statistics. Lt. Gen. Dai Li was such a brutal fascist, that OSS commandos nicknamed him, "China's Himmler." Rumors abound that Lt. Gen. Dai Li was murdered by his own OSS handlers in 1946, so they could take over Du Yuesheng's narcotics empire, dubbed "The Green Gang," which was a financial support network for Lt. Gen. Dai Li's bloodthirsty secret police called, "The Blue Shirt Society." After WWII, Richard Samuel Greenlee became a tax lawyer for Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine and by 1962, was secretary for a CIA front company called, Vanguard Service Corporation, which provided covert financial support for Thomas Dudley Cabot's Gibraltar Steamship Company—which, in turn, was a cover for covert CIA broadcasts into Cuba via Radio Swan. Perhaps not so incidentally, Radio Swan's broadcasts were co-opted by William Wayne Dalzell's "Radio Cuba Libre," which in turn was bing supported by Pan-American Radio Inc., a subsidiary of Thomas Dudley Cabot's Gibraltar Steamship Company. So, I guess, technically, William Wayne Dalzell was being subsidized in his covert radio message relay to anti-Castro elements in Cuba, via a series of front companies connected to James Harrison Wilson Thompson's World Commerce Corporation's, Bangkok branch. Of course, COL. Paul Lionel Edward Helliwell (Willis H. Bird's partner in administering South East Asian Supply Incorporated, aka S.E.A. Supply Inc. day-to-day activities), was running a network of CIA-connected narcotics money laundering schemes connected to supporting anti-Castro operations, such as Red Sunset Enterprises, Bank of the Caribbean, Ltd., Mercantile Bank of the Americas, Ltd., Castle Bank & Trust, Underwriters Bank, Ltd., Mercantile Bank Freeport, Inter Maritime Bank, International Diversified Corporation, Diaz-Nanette-Poirrotte Enterprises, & Benguet International—Paradise Island Bridge Company. It is difficult to identity any aspect of the funding of anti-Castro operations from an entity that isn't intrinsic to the phenomenon of international narco-terrorism. And appearently, all roads lead to World Commerence Corporation. What was it that John Garrett Underhill Jr. (himself the former Chief Editor of the War Department's Military Intelligence Division during WWII, and later military affairs advisor to Time-Life) said about the forces that murdered President Kennedy, right before his apparent suicide in May, 1964: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2021/docid-32419805.pdf QUOTE— "...The friends whom Underhill visited say he was sober but badly shook. They say he attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics and other contraband, and manipulating political intrigue to serve it's own ends. Kennedy supposedly got wind that something was going on and was killed before he could 'blow the whistle on it.' Although the friends had always known Underhill to be perfectly rational and objective, they at first didn't take his account seriously. "I think the main reason was,' explains the husband, 'that we couldn't believe that the CIA could contain a corrupt element every bit as ruthless—and more effective—as the mafia.'..." —END QUOTE. Sure as Hell sounds like Gary Underhill knew about some aspect of World Commerence Corporation activities in the Caribbean, got wise to it, but failed to recognize what it really was, since he mistakenly attributed the activities to CIA proper. In any case, Gary Underhill was correct about one thing—the Kennedy Administration did get wise to this narco-terrorist empire that World Commerence Corporation & CIA was running, because as Mr. Berger pointed out, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was targeting Willis H. Bird, who in 1962, was president of a WCC subsidiary—South East Asian Supply Incorporated, aka S.E.A. Supply Inc. If I were CIA or WCC and I saw that the President and his Attorney General sidekick kid brother were going to muck up a multi-billion dollar covert narcotics slush-fund—I'd organize their murders as soon as humanly possible, and use every asset at my disposal to pull it off—segregationist right-wing yokels, anti-Castro Cuban commandos, Mafia hitmen, military intelligence, security agents for defense contractors, international neo-fascist reactionaries, and yes, even revanchist veterans of the Third Reich... ...a full-court press to aligned interests. A fascist paramilitary "Unite The Right" watershed moment took place in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. Edited August 3, 2023 by Robert Montenegro Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leslie Sharp Posted August 3, 2023 Author Share Posted August 3, 2023 (edited) 1 hour ago, Robert Montenegro said: We spoke about this before, Leslie—James Harrison Wilson Thompson, president of the World Commerce Corporation's, Bangkok branch was the original comptroller of Willis H. Bird's South East Asian Supply Incorporated, aka S.E.A. Supply Inc. Fascinatingly enough, James Harrison Wilson Thompson (president, WCC, Bangkok) said it was a former Office of Strategic Services officer by the name of Capt. Edwin Fahey Black that first approached him with getting involved with WCC, Bangkok. By the late 1970's, then United States Army Maj. Gen. Edwin Fahey Black was serving as Secretary to the Scientific Advisor to the Policy Council of the Joint Research and Development Board in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Defense—where Maj. Gen. Black oversaw the development of Nugan-Hand Bank with a close associate of Willis H. Bird, former OSS commander COL. Paul Lionel Edward Helliwell: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/jul/28/fbi-cia-edwin-black/#:~:text=Brigadier General Edwin Black - not,trafficking and money laundering purposes. Even stranger still, is the fact that one of the financiers of Thomas Dudley Cabot's Gibraltar Steamship Company (a CIA front company set up to cover the covert radio broadcast networks supporting Brigada Asalto 2506), was a man named Richard Samuel Greenlee, the former OSS Chief of Special Operations Branch, Detachment 404, in Ceylon-Sri Lanka. While Richard Samuel Greenlee was Special Ops Chief for Detachment 404, he oversaw the training and finaical support for Kuomintang narco-terrorist Lieutenant General Dai Li, commander of the KMT's intelligence service Bureau of Investigation and Statistics. Lt. Gen. Dai Li was such a brutal fascist, that OSS commandos nicknamed him, "China's Himmler." Rumors abound that Lt. Gen. Dai Li was murdered by his own OSS handlers in 1946, so they could take over Du Yuesheng's narcotics empire, dubbed "The Green Gang," which was a financial support network for Lt. Gen. Dai Li's bloodthirsty secret police called, "The Blue Shirt Society." After WWII, Richard Samuel Greenlee became a tax lawyer for Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine and by 1962, was secretary for a CIA front company called, Vanguard Service Corporation, which provided covert financial support for Thomas Dudley Cabot's Gibraltar Steamship Company—which, in turn, was a cover for covert CIA broadcasts into Cuba via Radio Swan. Perhaps not so incidentally, Radio Swan's broadcasts were co-opted by William Wayne Dalzell's "Radio Cuba Libre," which in turn was bing supported by Pan-American Radio Inc., a subsidiary of Thomas Dudley Cabot's Gibraltar Steamship Company. So, I guess, technically, William Wayne Dalzell was being subsidized in his covert radio message relay to anti-Castro elements in Cuba, via a series of front companies connected to James Harrison Wilson Thompson's World Commerce Corporation's, Bangkok branch. Of course, COL. Paul Lionel Edward Helliwell (Willis H. Bird's partner in administering South East Asian Supply Incorporated, aka S.E.A. Supply Inc. day-to-day activities), was running a network of CIA-connected narcotics money laundering schemes connected to supporting anti-Castro operations, such as Red Sunset Enterprises, Bank of the Caribbean, Ltd., Mercantile Bank of the Americas, Ltd., Castle Bank & Trust, Underwriters Bank, Ltd., Mercantile Bank Freeport, Inter Maritime Bank, International Diversified Corporation, Diaz-Nanette-Poirrotte Enterprises, & Benguet International—Paradise Island Bridge Company. It is difficult to identity any aspect of the funding of anti-Castro operations from an entity that isn't intrinsic to the phenomenon of international narco-terrorism. And appearently, all roads lead to World Commerence Corporation. What was it that John Garrett Underhill Jr. (himself the former Chief Editor of the War Department's Military Intelligence Division during WWII, and later military affairs advisor to Time-Life) said about the forces that murdered President Kennedy, right before his apparent suicide in May, 1964: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2021/docid-32419805.pdf QUOTE— "...The friends whom Underhill visited say he was sober but badly shook. They say he attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics and other contraband, and manipulating political intrigue to serve it's own ends. Kennedy supposedly got wind that something was going on and was killed before he could 'blow the whistle on it.' Although the friends had always known Underhill to be perfectly rational and objective, they at first didn't take his account seriously. "I think the main reason was,' explains the husband, 'that we couldn't believe that the CIA could contain a corrupt element every bit as ruthless—and more effective—as the mafia.'..." —END QUOTE. Sure as Hell sounds like Gary Underhill knew about some aspect of World Commerence Corporation activities in the Caribbean, got wise to it, but failed to recognize what it really was, since he mistakenly attributed the activities to CIA proper. In any case, Gary Underhill was correct about one thing—the Kennedy Administration did get wise to this narco-terrorist empire that World Commerence Corporation & CIA was running, because as Mr. Berger pointed out, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was targeting Willis H. Bird, who in 1962, was president of a WCC subsidiary—South East Asian Supply Incorporated, aka S.E.A. Supply Inc. If I were CIA or WCC and I saw that the President and his Attorney General sidekick kid brother were going to muck up a multi-billion dollar covert narcotics slush-fund—I'd organize their murders as soon as humanly possible, and use every asset at my disposal to pull it off—segregationist right-wing yokels, anti-Castro Cuban commandos, Mafia hitmen, military intelligence, security agents for defense contractors, international neo-fascist reactionaries, and yes, even revanchist veterans of the Third Reich... ...a full-court press to aligned interests. A fascist paramilitary "Unite The Right" watershed moment took place in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. Great material, @Robert Montenegro I had forgotten Dalzell's Radio Swan connection. A fella on FB years ago published an extensive body of research into Radio Caroline. We might should dig that out as well and see if there is crossover; it linked to Gordon McLendon, and to a small town in Texas (where my mother was born!) 🙂 Edited August 3, 2023 by Leslie Sharp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Montenegro Posted August 3, 2023 Share Posted August 3, 2023 1 minute ago, Leslie Sharp said: Great material, @Robert Montenegro I had forgotten Dalzell's Radio Swan connection. A fella on FB years ago published an extensive body of research into Radio Caroline. We might should dig that out as well and see if there is crossover; it linked to Gordon MacLendon, and to a small town in Texas (where my mother was born!) 🙂 "Radio Nord," the pirate radio entity that Gordon Barton McLendon was broadcasting from a converted fishing trawler, I believe was completely subsidized by Clinton Williams Murchison Jr. and some unidentified business partners Murchison had in Spain. Perhaps not so incidentally, "Radio Nord's," radio antenna was provided by Ling-Temco-Vought's Continental Electronics subsidiary. And the connections never end... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leslie Sharp Posted August 3, 2023 Author Share Posted August 3, 2023 (edited) 23 minutes ago, Robert Montenegro said: "Radio Nord," the pirate radio entity that Gordon Barton McLendon was broadcasting from a converted fishing trawler, I believe was completely subsidized by Clinton Williams Murchison Jr. and some unidentified business partners Murchison had in Spain. Perhaps not so incidentally, "Radio Nord's," radio antenna was provided by Ling-Temco-Vought's Continental Electronics subsidiary. And the connections never end... to quote Albarelli, YUP! (Eastland) Sweetwater, Clint Murchison along with the Wynne dynasty and Trammell Crow ... father of Harlan Crow who is the big daddy of the NO LABELS movement that is playing a role in the likelihood Trump will seize the WH in 2024. Continuity of the Coup. PS other potential significance: North Sea / Hughes' Glomar / and Texas Gulph Sulphur. Former Gov. Allan Shivers was a long-term director of TGS; McInerney and Sons in the Republic of Ireland served as local/political/business conduit for their operations. McInerney held the contract to build the first runway at Shannon Airport; Hank and Ganis suspected that Otto Skorzeny later played a role in Shannon construction. (McInerney's were godparents to several of my in-laws. "you can't make this stuff up" regardless of how Santos-ish it must sound to some. 🙂 ) Edited August 3, 2023 by Leslie Sharp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Berger Posted August 4, 2023 Share Posted August 4, 2023 Amazing post @Robert Montenegro, and I can't agree more. I've also long pondered this critical link that you lay here, the passage that goes from the WCC to the "Thai Silk King" James Thompson to Edwin Black to Nugan Hand—this latter bank being, in my opinion, one of three primary 'successor' banks to Castle Bank, set up early on but truly activated when Castle began to shatter. And think you for drawing out this connection with Dalzell and Gibraltar Steamship. I've looked at Dalzell quite a bit, mostly in connection to his Yemen and Ethiopian adventures and the connections these might have to Crichton's own ramblings in that region, but this line had evaded me. This trail leading back to Donovan's law firm is critical. Quote Of course, COL. Paul Lionel Edward Helliwell (Willis H. Bird's partner in administering South East Asian Supply Incorporated, aka S.E.A. Supply Inc. day-to-day activities), was running a network of CIA-connected narcotics money laundering schemes connected to supporting anti-Castro operations, such as Red Sunset Enterprises, Bank of the Caribbean, Ltd., Mercantile Bank of the Americas, Ltd., Castle Bank & Trust, Underwriters Bank, Ltd., Mercantile Bank Freeport, Inter Maritime Bank, International Diversified Corporation, Diaz-Nanette-Poirrotte Enterprises, & Benguet International—Paradise Island Bridge Company. Just to draw the webs of some of these entities into what I wrote above, with a little continued aid from PDS' The War Conspiracy... Underwriters Bank, one of the Helliwell-linked banks, had the bulk of its stock owned by American International Underwriters—part of the burgeoning American International Group insurance empire (THAT AIG) run by former OSS China hand C.V. Starr. In Shanghai, before the war, Starr was a fixture in the social and business circles that included the powerful Keswick family of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (later HSBC) and Jardine Matheson. Jardine, a legacy of the old British opium empire, would end up a close cooperating partner of the WCC, and the Keswick name appears in the original Panama incorporation papers for the spook company. Specifically: a Keswick Steamship Company SA. Why this company this company is in the incorporation papers is something of a mystery; I suspect it was either a stockholder in the WCC or a subsidiary company. Either would be logical, given the heavy presence of Keswicks within the Special Operations Executive and direction connections to leading WCC figures like Charles Hambro and William Stephenson. Is it any coincidence, then, that Paul Helliwell was counsel for Starr interests in Florida? Or, as PDS writes, ...it is a striking fact that the law firm of Tommy Corcoran, the Washington lawyer for CATCL and T. V. Soong, has had its own links to the interlocking worlds of the China Lobby and of organized crime. His partner W. S. Youngman joined the board of US Life and other domestic insurance companies, controlled by C. V. Starr (OSS China) with the help of Philippine and other Asian capital. Youngman's fellow-directors of Starr's companies have included John S. Woodbridge of Pan Am, Francis F. Randolph of J. and W. Seligman, W. Palmer Dixon of Loeb Rhoades, Charles Edison of the postwar China Lobby, and Alfred B. Jones of the Nationalist Chinese government's registered agency, the Universal Trading Corporation. The McClellan Committee heard that in 1950 US Life (with Edison a director) and a much smaller company (Union Casualty of New York) were allotted a major Teamsters insurance contract, after a lower bid from a larger and safer company had been rejected. Hoffa was accused by a fellow- trustee, testifying under oath before another committee, of intervening on behalf of US Life and Union Casualty, whose agents were Hoffa's close business associates Paul and Allan Dorfman. What PDS doesn't mention, when he references Pan Am, is that the company's founder and longtime administrator, Juan Trippe, was the brother-in-law of Edward Stettinius, and was found on the board of one of Stettinius' WCC adjunct companies, the Liberian Development Company... or that Charles Edison served on the China Lobby's Committee of One Million alongside Joseph Grew, himself a fixture in the management of Stettinius' Liberian companies. When Stettinius suffered his ultimately death, who took his place on the WCC board? The same Joseph Grew. An interesting nugget of information: Liberia had an embassy located in the International Trade Mart in New Orleans. Similarly, Tibor Rosenbaum, banker to the Trade Mart-connected Permindex, traveled on a Liberian passport and headed up the Swiss-Liberian Finance Corporation. This is all about the control of hot money, the monopolization of natural resources in the developing world, the logistics of managing the global arms and narcotics trade. It is narcoterrorism and economic cartelization on a staggering scale. As for Starr and the AIG complex—Starr's companies in the Philippines provided financing for another entity mentioned in your roster, the gold mining concern Benguet. Benguet was taken over by Charles Allen and his brother, Herbert Allen; due to a law in the Philippines barring foreigners from holding domestic natural resources, they had to liquidate their holdings in the company. A complex scheme was hatched, where Benguet would be purchased by the Grand Bahama Development Corporation (DEVCO)—launched by Lou Chesler, Wallace Grove, Charles Allen—and then the gold and natural resources operations would be returned to Philippine control, right in the hands of Marcos frontmen. The non-natural resources assets would be spun off, and were sold from DEVCO to Intercontinental Diversified Corporation (IDC). Who controlled IDC? A DEVCO board member and banker from Cosmos Bank named C. Gerald Goldsmith. Since IDC also appears in your roster alongside Benguet, I'm sure this is old news. I mention it only to show how tightly this web folds into the parade of fraud mentioned above, due to the presence of Baird foundation insiders at every step of the chain. Jonathan Marshall writes of Cosmos Bank, connected intimately to the DEVCO-Benguet-IDC transaction: [Harry] Crown also installed Frederick M. Glass as vice chairman and chief executive of Empire State Building Corp. Glass was a former employee of American News Corp.’s Henry Garfinkle, Lansky’s partner in the Miami International Airport Hotel. Glass later became a director of Cosmos Bank in Zurich. Another Cosmos director, William G. Dillon, was a senior partner of Ed Weisl’s Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett and a director of Atlas Corp., Hilton’s investment partner. General Dynamics CEO Frank Pace Jr. was also one of Cosmos Bank’s “friends and directors” in the mid-1960s... Glass, Dillon, and Pace show up on the Cosmos list of shareholders in 1966, in “Cosmos Bank Correspondence (3)” file, Robert Anderson papers, Dwight Eisenhower Library. Lou Chesler of DEVCO: Baird client Charles Allen of Allen & Company, DEVCO, and Benguet: Baird client Harry Crown of Material Services Corporation, the Empire State Building Corporation, Hilton, and General Dynamics: Baird client American News Company: stock traded by the Baird foundations Atlas Corporation, investor in the World Commerce Corporation, Pan Am, General Dynamics, etc: headed by Floyd Odlum, Baird client Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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