White Russians/Solidarists

[Robert Howard]

For Example......Madame Nhu had popped in Dallas and felt the unique sensation of being treated like a queen by the far-right, but treated like a Dragon-Lady by some Dallas protesters who were all too familiar with her "bonze barbeque" comments regarding the sad sight of Buddhist monks literally immolating themselves as a protest to the policies of the Diem government of which she she was a member of by ties of blood and officialdom.... (Robert Howard)

Indeed, Robert.

When in Dallas, Madame Nhu was hosted by an anti-Communist oil man named Dudley Dougherty who had ties to all the various right-wing associations. She even gave a speech at his ranch.

The image below shows Mrs. Dougherty in snappy sweater playing hostess to Madame Nhu and her daughter. Dudley Dougherty is at the rear with his cousin.

James

Thanks James for providing the photo. The item that really piqued my curiosity, was her appearance in Paris, that in itself, is not unusual, it's just that I always think of Dez Fitzgerald and AMLASH when Paris is mentioned in and around that time period. If I were to attempt to point out any aspects of the whole dynamic of the "White Russians" as they relate to Dallas, it would be in regards to DeMohrenschildt, although I may be delving into semantics, I have always sensed that the Warren Commission in it's Report, tried to convey the impression that George was an "outsider" to that group, when in reality, he was deserving of that label as any of the names that come to mind regarding that community as anyone.

But that is ancient history.........

Edited March 16, 2007 by Robert Howard

[James Richards]

Robert,

Yes, De Mohrenschildt was right amongst the mix of White Russians demonstrated by the fact that in 1962 he headed the Dallas County Chapter of Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation. Paul Raigorodsky was one of the trustees as were several others in that circle.

D.H. Byrd's wife was also a trustee.

BTW, I meant to post this before. Below is a letter De Mohrenschildt penned to a Dallas paper in 1952. I like his last line.

James

[Thomas Graves]

Robert,

Yes, De Mohrenschildt was right amongst the mix of White Russians demonstrated by the fact that in 1962 he headed the Dallas County Chapter of Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation. Paul Raigorodsky was one of the trustees as were several others in that circle.

D.H. Byrd's wife was also a trustee.

BTW, I meant to post this before. Below is a letter De Mohrenschildt penned to a Dallas paper in 1952. I like his last line.

James

_______________________________

Dobry den!

Good stuff, Robert and James!

In the article, G.D.M. does sound a trifle reactionary, doesn't he?

BTW, if anyone wants to know what the term "White Russian" means (in the context of the Russian revolution and its aftermath, including the White Russian exodus to other countries, like Dallas, for example lol), all they've got to do is google: " 'white russians' ," and (heaven forbid, that goddamned instrument of the evil evil evil evil, dark dark, CIA Capitalist running-dog forces) 'wikipedia' ", i.e.

["white russians" wikipedia] ...............

Enjoy, comrades! I toast this bottle of Vodka to you! (Just like the last one which I drank about hour ago, yes?.)

--Tomas

________________________________

Edited March 16, 2007 by Thomas Graves

[Robert Howard]

Robert,

Yes, De Mohrenschildt was right amongst the mix of White Russians demonstrated by the fact that in 1962 he headed the Dallas County Chapter of Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation. Paul Raigorodsky was one of the trustees as were several others in that circle.

D.H. Byrd's wife was also a trustee.

BTW, I meant to post this before. Below is a letter De Mohrenschildt penned to a Dallas paper in 1952. I like his last line.

James

_______________________________

Dobry den!

Good stuff, Robert and James!

In the article, G.D.M. does sound a trifle reactionary, doesn't he?

BTW, if anyone wants to know what the term "White Russian" means (in the context of the Russian revolution and its aftermath, including the White Russian exodus to other countries, like Dallas, for example lol), all they've got to do is google: " 'white russians' ," and (heaven forbid, that goddamned instrument of the evil evil evil evil, dark dark, CIA Capitalist running-dog forces) 'wikipedia' ", i.e.

["white russians" wikipedia] ...............

Enjoy, comrades! I toast this bottle of Vodka to you! (Just like the last one which I drank about hour ago, yes?.)

--Tomas

________________________________

"Here's to my Friends" - While history seems to be considered boring, by a percentage of American's, knowledge thereof can come in handy re backgrounds to the labyrinth of groups, individuals and correspondence, as James post of the De Mohrenschildt letter so succinctly reveals.

If I were granted one wish to solve the Kennedy Assassination, it might be to be privy to all the "off the record" conversations that took place between those being deposed and the staff members of the Warren Commission during 1964. I am sure it would be enlightening.........

[John Dolva]

Robert: "...Minsk, where George DeMohrenschildt and Marina's family came from. Marina's uncle was a high-ranking military officer in the NKVD, but her family was White Russian and anti-communist. And Gehlen infiltrated a lot of the KGB and Soviet military and intelligence structures during the war, and left agents in place. There's reason to believe that a number of people that were involved with Oswald, even in the Soviet Union, also tie to this International Fascism".

SS Obersturmführer Ewald Peters, Kommando C, Squad Six, one of about 1000 murderers in the Einsatzkommando, (extermination squad), responsible for the extermination of perhaps a million Nazi Victims as the Wermacht penetrated into Ukraine and Southern USSR (in this instance Minsk.)

Friend of US Presidential Security detail, visited at President Johnson at LBJ Ranch Dec 1963.

In mid January, 1964 during Munich trial of a SS Officer, the name Peters is mentioned in testimony...and within a week this Peters is identified as the 49 year old Ewald.

He is arrested on the return to Germany from a trip to Rome with Chancellor Erhard. "commits suicide" in jail Feb 1964.

Edited March 16, 2007 by John Dolva

[John Dolva]

Alright, I give up. I've read this term over and over without understanding it.

What is a "white russian"?

(No joke answers please; I know what a Russian is.)

Myra, your research has probably by now given you the answer, but just in case.

AFAIK

The Reds have a heritage to the 'Paris Commune' where the blood drenched sheets used to wrap the dead also became the flag* used to represent the revolution. The revolution failed, but the 'Soviet' or a type of worker organisational structure was a lesson learnt and implemented in the Russian Revolution where the Red flag (now with the hammer and sickle representing the working classes in the corner) again became the banner.

Leon Trotsky (Lenins comrade) became the leader of the Red Army (or Red Russians, if you will) of the Bolchevics.

The members of the almost immediate Counter Revolution supported by the rest of the capitalist world became known as the 'White Army', or White Russians.

After the victory of the Red Army over the White Army. the White Russians were dispersed throughout the world through many avenues, one of interest here being through China. (De Mohrenshild's and others).

Today there are very few if any White Russians, but many who can claim it as a heritage. In the 1960's there were still many real 'White Russians' left. Interestingly (to me) the neighbour of my childrens mother when she was a child, was a White Russian who came to OZ through China.

* http://www.cnt-f.org/IMAGES/index.php?deta...ne%20de%20Paris

_______________

(I know this is not really relevant, but it shows how extendings ones research into the past reveals interesting things. I'm of Nordic heritage and it was my ancestors as Vikings who 'discovered' and named "the land of the Rus" in their eastern explorations. We know this area now as Russia.)

Edited March 16, 2007 by John Dolva

[Robert Howard]

John, I knew there was a reason you are one of my favorite people on the Forum, speaking of Minsk, Someone named Enrique Ignacio Zuleta interviewed the Ziger family for a Argentinian publication called "Ambito Financiero."

Like "other" very relevant matters pertaining to the reason we are all here, you will find little if anything about this, unless you are more "internet savvy" than most of us.

I am quite sure, there would be some interesting tidbits contained in the interview if one could find a copy of it, especially if it was in English. lol

As they say, the most interesting items tend to be located in the history you don't know. I heard Halliburton was moving corporate to Dubai, money never sleeps...................

[John Dolva]

Robert, I think I know what you mean.

One can't help beeing steered into 'safe' theories by a huge profusion of available material.

When one finds an indication of another world, where quite possibly VERY important answers lie, for me it's like coming along a lonely isolated dilapidated road, out in nowhereland, at the end of which there is something lke this (image)* shrouded in mist. And the side roads from ther leads to 'lunatic' theories. Nevertheless over time if one keeps names, events and odd notions in mind, slowly the mist clears, and what at first seems like isolated events start to form a pattern.

Argentina was one place that the RatLines and ODESSA and presumably Ghelen and his US compatriots relocated many of the Nazis.(New Jersey being another. remembering this was where Oswald disembarked on his return from the USSR.) Then came the rule of the Generals in Argentina, and most likely as their fall approached, something like Hitlers Operation Clausewitz, as the Red Army was poised to take Berlin, wholesale destroying documentation, and shifting some of it to where it could be used to deal with the allies in the west also took place. I'm sure much remains hidden away in various places. How to get ones hands on anything but that which the governments deem harmless and that herds the researcher to acceptable areas is another thing.

* http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c168/yan.../shotagain1.jpg

Edited March 17, 2007 by John Dolva

[Myra Bronstein]

Alright, I give up. I've read this term over and over without understanding it.

What is a "white russian"?

(No joke answers please; I know what a Russian is.)

Myra, your research has probably by now given you the answer, but just in case.

AFAIK

The Reds have a heritage to the 'Paris Commune' where the blood drenched sheets used to wrap the dead also became the flag* used to represent the revolution. The revolution failed, but the 'Soviet' or a type of worker organisational structure was a lesson learnt and implemented in the Russian Revolution where the Red flag (now with the hammer and sickle representing the working classes in the corner) again became the banner.

Leon Trotsky (Lenins comrade) became the leader of the Red Army (or Red Russians, if you will) of the Bolchevics.

The members of the almost immediate Counter Revolution supported by the rest of the capitalist world became known as the 'White Army', or White Russians.

After the victory of the Red Army over the White Army. the White Russians were dispersed throughout the world through many avenues, one of interest here being through China. (De Mohrenshild's and others).

Today there are very few if any White Russians, but many who can claim it as a heritage. In the 1960's there were still many real 'White Russians' left. Interestingly (to me) the neighbour of my childrens mother when she was a child, was a White Russian who came to OZ through China.

* http://www.cnt-f.org/IMAGES/index.php?deta...ne%20de%20Paris

_______________

(I know this is not really relevant, but it shows how extendings ones research into the past reveals interesting things. I'm of Nordic heritage and it was my ancestors as Vikings who 'discovered' and named "the land of the Rus" in their eastern explorations. We know this area now as Russia.)

John, Thank you SO much! Every other definition I've found on the web just confused me more. They were either partial definitions or outright nonsense.

The explanation of the way the red/white colors became symbols and then labels was a huge missing component. Now you've helped me understand the Russian flag as well as answering my question. That image you linked to really made it click.

Thank you for your answer, and for the level of detail. Much appreciated.

Myra

[John Dolva]

As always, you're most welcome Myra.

One 'correction': When I said the hammer and sickle representing the working classes, I would have been more correct in saying it signifies the union of the peasantry* (the sickle) and the working class (the hammer).

*Which formed a huge component of Tzarist Russia. The revolutionary slogan that brought the Bolchevics, as opposed to the Menchevics and a couple of hundred other organisations, rapidly to prominence was 'bread and peace'. WW I had created a very hungry Russian people, and they were just plain sick of the war. If you get a chance, take a look at some of the very early Einsenstein Movies showing starved workers near collapse at their machinery. Small independent movie houses and TV stations will show them once in a while.

[Robert Howard]

As always, you're most welcome Myra.

One 'correction': When I said the hammer and sickle representing the working classes, I would have been more correct in saying it signifies the union of the peasantry* (the sickle) and the working class (the hammer).

*Which formed a huge component of Tzarist Russia. The revolutionary slogan that brought the Bolchevics, as opposed to the Menchevics and a couple of hundred other organisations, rapidly to prominence was 'bread and peace'. WW I had created a very hungry Russian people, and they were just plain sick of the war. If you get a chance, take a look at some of the very early Einsenstein Movies showing starved workers near collapse at their machinery. Small independent movie houses and TV stations will show them once in a while.

I've decided to resurrect this thread in honor of John Dolva..........and for other reasons.....namely

to expound on Greg Parker's post on this thread earlier......There will be more than area covered so one is advised to pay attention......

The term myriad relationships is a literal reality in JFK lore.....Looking at it another way, from a historical perspective.....There is a montage of relationships which encompass, American politics, Hollywood, and political and intelligence groups, both foreign and domestic....Tyrall, Jamaica first came into this writers mind, not through Ian Fleming, but after reading about former Texas Gov. John Connally and Tyrall, after reading Penn Jones Jr. material in Forgive My Grief......

Alluding to Hollywood earlier, the first case in point concerns the following headline

Bing to Extend Visit March 29, 1960

Gleaner North Coast

Correspondent

Montego Bay, March 27, 1960

Bing Crosby and his wife, actress Cathy Grant have extended their holiday at Round Hill for

another week so much are they enjoying their stay here.

The longtime American singer and performer has spent every moment on the Tyrall golf course

which he says is “wonderful.”The longtime performer dined with Mr. and Mrs. John Pringle,

Lillian Hellman and Mr. Arthur Cowan

lawyer on his first night here.

In and of itself, the article is not significant, but it does provide an example of the interconnections, alluded to above.

The following is an fairly lengthy article of reminisces....

IF you take the coast road west from Montego Bay, after a few miles of high hedgerows and palm trees you reach a sign that reads "Round Hill". Here, 50 years ago on the north shore of Jamaica, a young man founded what became the first great post-war hotel, a meeting place for New York socialites and European royalty, a private retreat for Hollywood on holiday.

Round Hill: President Kennedy was a frequent visitor

Opened by Noël Coward, Round Hill played host to Paul Newman and President Kennedy, Alfred Hitchcock and Grace Kelly, Princess Margaret and Clark Gable. Cole Porter sang in the bar. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote The Sound of Music there. Rex Harrison was thrown out on his honeymoon. Over it all presided John Pringle, seeming less like the owner of a hotel than the host of a very good, very long party, soothing imagined slights, filling everyone's glass and, always, telling stories.

At 75, Pringle still knows the power of a good story. "My dear boy," he says in a full, slow voice that is not so much a drawl as a crawl, "did I tell you about the time Errol Flynn and I burnt down a bawdy house in Trinidad?" The details of the incident are, perhaps mercifully, sketchy. Suffice it to say that the pair had to retreat swiftly on Flynn's yacht.

We are having lunch in a restaurant started by another of Pringle's friends, the writer Quentin Crewe. Although he no longer owns Round Hill, Pringle maintains his contacts with Jamaica through his role as an honorary Ambassador for the island, and has written about his time at the hotel in a book that is published this week.

The elegant cut of his coffee-coloured tweed jacket hints at the perfectionist nature needed to run a good hotel, and the sharp blue eyes show the steel necessary to handle celebrities with confidence. But then, even by his mid-twenties, when he first began to welcome guests to Round Hill, Pringle had already had plenty of practice at dealing with interesting people.

He was born into Jamaica's colonial elite - the so-called "plantocracy" - and grew up on a 1,000-acre estate there, although he insists that "all the family money had gone long before I started to have any fun". After an eventful educational career, which concluded with his being expelled from a Canadian academy after being identified by his school tie at a strip club, he lied about his age to join a Highland regiment during the war. To his initial disappointment, he found himself appointed the most junior equerry to the Duke of Windsor, then Governor of the Bahamas.

He soon fell under the Duchess's spell, obligingly testing shades of face powder for her by chalking them down the expensively refurbished walls of Government House. The Duke he found "a spoilt, sad little man", and their relationship had to survive a difficult first night when Pringle forgot the names of all the guests assembled in the drawing room to meet the Governor.

After the war, Pringle found himself out of a job and was offered one by a rather grand woman he was sitting next to at dinner in New York. When he asked the Duchess what she thought "Mrs Graham" might want him to do, she replied: "Oh Pringle, you are such an ass - that's Elizabeth Arden." He worked for the cosmetics queen for the next three years ("Enormously rich and completely mad. The most fearful language. Shouting her head off at salesmen, yards of chiffon flying everywhere"), but soon began to want to emulate the exciting things being done by friends, such as Leonard Bernstein and Mike Nichols, who were just becoming famous.

"I had this idea," he recalls, "of having a house like my father's, with the same assortment of his interesting friends, such as my godfather the Duke of Sutherland and Steve Donoghue, the jockey, except that this time they would pay." So was born the idea of Round Hill, a village resort of 25 small cottages served by a central hotel, all overlooking the Caribbean. Pringle proposed to sell the cottages to individual stakeholders and, to enhance their appeal, offered to rent them for the owners when they themselves were not using them.

His first stroke of luck was to find himself sitting next to Noël Coward on the aircraft taking him to see prospective buyers in New York. Pringle pestered him with photographs and plans of the development until Coward grasped his knee and said: "If you would only stop boring me, I'll buy one of your effing cottages." The next day, Pringle sold his second cottage to Adele Astaire, Fred's sister, and Round Hill was on its way.

"I didn't know anything about running a hotel," Pringle remembers, "although perhaps that was an advantage." He quickly decided, however, on a basic principle that has since underpinned his work in the industry: that a hotel thrives or dies by its standard of service and by the blend of its guests.

"I didn't want it to attract just one group of people - rich Jews from Chicago, for instance - because what makes a resort is the mix of those who come and how you treat them. And I don't really mean the celebrities - they don't want to be fussed - but Joe Smith from Duluth, Minnesota, who has made a fortune in condoms.

"Each day I walked the beach, introducing everybody to everyone else, and I met each guest when they arrived. And I was just the owner, not the manager."

Nevertheless, no detail escaped Pringle's notice. For 10 years he rose at five every morning to supervise each breakfast tray, believing that the first impression of the day is the most telling. He employed eight French chefs, and only American barmen ("English ones fumble around, like men in a chemist's shop"). He even told the maids to clean the tops of the toothpaste in each bathroom. "Do you know who makes a good hotel manager?" he says. "A little man with a little mind doing little things well all day long. I was good at that."

It is a self-deprecating and perhaps misleading piece of criticism. Round Hill's secret lay not in tidy bathrooms but in the glamorous fantasy it offered its guests, and the imaginative style with which Pringle conducted affairs. When Bill Paley, the head of CBS television, moaned one morning that he was missing Jewish food, Pringle had chopped chicken livers and kosher gherkins flown down from Manhattan in time for dinner. Paley never forgot the gesture, and at his funeral Pringle was one of the pallbearers.

It did not hurt Round Hill either that in the decade after the deprivations of the war it acquired a reputation for relaxed, even permissive, behaviour. Pringle and his then wife Liz Benn, once the Ford Agency's top model, saw all the foibles of the rich and shameless.

On one occasion, Pringle was summoned to his cottage by a terrified French aristocrat who had planned to pass a week there with his mistress, only to discover his brother-in-law in the neighbouring cottage. More straightforward to solve was the problem of Rex Harrison, who accused Pringle's trusted beach manager of swiping a signet ring; Pringle promptly ejected the actor, and his new bride Kay Kendall. For good measure, he also rang the newspapers with the story. "I adore personal publicity," he remarks disarmingly.

In 1961, Pringle sold Round Hill and, like his friend Coward, moved to the tax haven of Switzerland. He soon tired of it - "So dull, like immersing yourself in a glass of milk" - and returned to Jamaica as the country's first director of tourism. He regards his experiences of turning Jamaica into a destination for mass travel as the best fun he has had.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries...hn-Pringle.html

[Terry Mauro]

As always, you're most welcome Myra.

One 'correction': When I said the hammer and sickle representing the working classes, I would have been more correct in saying it signifies the union of the peasantry* (the sickle) and the working class (the hammer).

*Which formed a huge component of Tzarist Russia. The revolutionary slogan that brought the Bolchevics, as opposed to the Menchevics and a couple of hundred other organisations, rapidly to prominence was 'bread and peace'. WW I had created a very hungry Russian people, and they were just plain sick of the war. If you get a chance, take a look at some of the very early Einsenstein Movies showing starved workers near collapse at their machinery. Small independent movie houses and TV stations will show them once in a while.

I've decided to resurrect this thread in honor of John Dolva..........and for other reasons.....namely

to expound on Greg Parker's post on this thread earlier......There will be more than area covered so one is advised to pay attention......

The term myriad relationships is a literal reality in JFK lore.....Looking at it another way, from a historical perspective.....There is a montage of relationships which encompass, American politics, Hollywood, and political and intelligence groups, both foreign and domestic....Tyrall, Jamaica first came into this writers mind, not through Ian Fleming, but after reading about former Texas Gov. John Connally and Tyrall, after reading Penn Jones Jr. material in Forgive My Grief......

Alluding to Hollywood earlier, the first case in point concerns the following headline

Bing to Extend Visit March 29, 1960

Gleaner North Coast

Correspondent

Montego Bay, March 27, 1960

Bing Crosby and his wife, actress Cathy Grant have extended their holiday at Round Hill for

another week so much are they enjoying their stay here.

The longtime American singer and performer has spent every moment on the Tyrall golf course

which he says is “wonderful.”The longtime performer dined with Mr. and Mrs. John Pringle,

Lillian Hellman and Mr. Arthur Cowan

lawyer on his first night here.

In and of itself, the article is not significant, but it does provide an example of the interconnections, alluded to above.

The following is an fairly lengthy article of reminisces....

IF you take the coast road west from Montego Bay, after a few miles of high hedgerows and palm trees you reach a sign that reads "Round Hill". Here, 50 years ago on the north shore of Jamaica, a young man founded what became the first great post-war hotel, a meeting place for New York socialites and European royalty, a private retreat for Hollywood on holiday.

Round Hill: President Kennedy was a frequent visitor

Opened by Noël Coward, Round Hill played host to Paul Newman and President Kennedy, Alfred Hitchcock and Grace Kelly, Princess Margaret and Clark Gable. Cole Porter sang in the bar. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote The Sound of Music there. Rex Harrison was thrown out on his honeymoon. Over it all presided John Pringle, seeming less like the owner of a hotel than the host of a very good, very long party, soothing imagined slights, filling everyone's glass and, always, telling stories.

At 75, Pringle still knows the power of a good story. "My dear boy," he says in a full, slow voice that is not so much a drawl as a crawl, "did I tell you about the time Errol Flynn and I burnt down a bawdy house in Trinidad?" The details of the incident are, perhaps mercifully, sketchy. Suffice it to say that the pair had to retreat swiftly on Flynn's yacht.

We are having lunch in a restaurant started by another of Pringle's friends, the writer Quentin Crewe. Although he no longer owns Round Hill, Pringle maintains his contacts with Jamaica through his role as an honorary Ambassador for the island, and has written about his time at the hotel in a book that is published this week.

The elegant cut of his coffee-coloured tweed jacket hints at the perfectionist nature needed to run a good hotel, and the sharp blue eyes show the steel necessary to handle celebrities with confidence. But then, even by his mid-twenties, when he first began to welcome guests to Round Hill, Pringle had already had plenty of practice at dealing with interesting people.

He was born into Jamaica's colonial elite - the so-called "plantocracy" - and grew up on a 1,000-acre estate there, although he insists that "all the family money had gone long before I started to have any fun". After an eventful educational career, which concluded with his being expelled from a Canadian academy after being identified by his school tie at a strip club, he lied about his age to join a Highland regiment during the war. To his initial disappointment, he found himself appointed the most junior equerry to the Duke of Windsor, then Governor of the Bahamas.

He soon fell under the Duchess's spell, obligingly testing shades of face powder for her by chalking them down the expensively refurbished walls of Government House. The Duke he found "a spoilt, sad little man", and their relationship had to survive a difficult first night when Pringle forgot the names of all the guests assembled in the drawing room to meet the Governor.

After the war, Pringle found himself out of a job and was offered one by a rather grand woman he was sitting next to at dinner in New York. When he asked the Duchess what she thought "Mrs Graham" might want him to do, she replied: "Oh Pringle, you are such an ass - that's Elizabeth Arden." He worked for the cosmetics queen for the next three years ("Enormously rich and completely mad. The most fearful language. Shouting her head off at salesmen, yards of chiffon flying everywhere"), but soon began to want to emulate the exciting things being done by friends, such as Leonard Bernstein and Mike Nichols, who were just becoming famous.

"I had this idea," he recalls, "of having a house like my father's, with the same assortment of his interesting friends, such as my godfather the Duke of Sutherland and Steve Donoghue, the jockey, except that this time they would pay." So was born the idea of Round Hill, a village resort of 25 small cottages served by a central hotel, all overlooking the Caribbean. Pringle proposed to sell the cottages to individual stakeholders and, to enhance their appeal, offered to rent them for the owners when they themselves were not using them.

His first stroke of luck was to find himself sitting next to Noël Coward on the aircraft taking him to see prospective buyers in New York. Pringle pestered him with photographs and plans of the development until Coward grasped his knee and said: "If you would only stop boring me, I'll buy one of your effing cottages." The next day, Pringle sold his second cottage to Adele Astaire, Fred's sister, and Round Hill was on its way.

"I didn't know anything about running a hotel," Pringle remembers, "although perhaps that was an advantage." He quickly decided, however, on a basic principle that has since underpinned his work in the industry: that a hotel thrives or dies by its standard of service and by the blend of its guests.

"I didn't want it to attract just one group of people - rich Jews from Chicago, for instance - because what makes a resort is the mix of those who come and how you treat them. And I don't really mean the celebrities - they don't want to be fussed - but Joe Smith from Duluth, Minnesota, who has made a fortune in condoms.

"Each day I walked the beach, introducing everybody to everyone else, and I met each guest when they arrived. And I was just the owner, not the manager."

Nevertheless, no detail escaped Pringle's notice. For 10 years he rose at five every morning to supervise each breakfast tray, believing that the first impression of the day is the most telling. He employed eight French chefs, and only American barmen ("English ones fumble around, like men in a chemist's shop"). He even told the maids to clean the tops of the toothpaste in each bathroom. "Do you know who makes a good hotel manager?" he says. "A little man with a little mind doing little things well all day long. I was good at that."

It is a self-deprecating and perhaps misleading piece of criticism. Round Hill's secret lay not in tidy bathrooms but in the glamorous fantasy it offered its guests, and the imaginative style with which Pringle conducted affairs. When Bill Paley, the head of CBS television, moaned one morning that he was missing Jewish food, Pringle had chopped chicken livers and kosher gherkins flown down from Manhattan in time for dinner. Paley never forgot the gesture, and at his funeral Pringle was one of the pallbearers.

It did not hurt Round Hill either that in the decade after the deprivations of the war it acquired a reputation for relaxed, even permissive, behaviour. Pringle and his then wife Liz Benn, once the Ford Agency's top model, saw all the foibles of the rich and shameless.

On one occasion, Pringle was summoned to his cottage by a terrified French aristocrat who had planned to pass a week there with his mistress, only to discover his brother-in-law in the neighbouring cottage. More straightforward to solve was the problem of Rex Harrison, who accused Pringle's trusted beach manager of swiping a signet ring; Pringle promptly ejected the actor, and his new bride Kay Kendall. For good measure, he also rang the newspapers with the story. "I adore personal publicity," he remarks disarmingly.

In 1961, Pringle sold Round Hill and, like his friend Coward, moved to the tax haven of Switzerland. He soon tired of it - "So dull, like immersing yourself in a glass of milk" - and returned to Jamaica as the country's first director of tourism. He regards his experiences of turning Jamaica into a destination for mass travel as the best fun he has had.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries...hn-Pringle.html

Page 481

Dope, Inc. 1992 edition

“In 1946, Ferrie dropped out of a Roman Catholic seminary in Ohio and joined the Byelorussian Liberation Front, simultaneously being ordained as a priest in the old Orthodox Catholic Church of North America, an agency we have already identified as a front for the Solidarist movement , the KGB, and FBI Division Five. Ferrie was subsequently redeployed to the southern region of the FBI, where he operated as a recruitment officer for Division Five (placing him under the direct jurisdiction of Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield).

According to testimony before both the Warren Commission and the Garrison grand jury, given by FBI operative Jack Martin, LHO was recruited into FBI Division Five in 1956 by none other than David Ferrie. While nominally in the Marine Corps, Oswald received special training in covert espionage activities at the Naval Intelligence School on the Memphis naval base. One aspect of his training included special instructions in the Russian language, provided by an agent of the Solidarist movement operating in San Francisco under the cover of the Federation of Russian Charitable Organizations, a West Coast branch of the Tolstoy Foundation.

From 1956 until his untimely death in the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters in November 1963, LHO had been on a secret Division Five payroll, maintained through a secret account concealed in the budget of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, within the Department of Justice.