StashAugustine posted:

lol ended up googling george de mohrenschildt and wiki has some fun stuff

quote:

Brown Brothers Harriman also had a stake in Cuban affairs that went back at least to the 1920s. Its affiliate, the Punta Alegre Sugar Corporation, controlled more than two hundred thousand acres in the province of Cam-agüey.34 Officials of the firm served on the board of Punta Alegre up to the moment that Castro expropriated its land—and even afterward, as the sugar company began moving its remaining assets to the United States.

The CIA’s Allen Dulles responded quickly to developments on the island. He created the Cuban Task Force, with teams in charge of clandestine operations, psychological warfare, and economic and diplomatic pressure. Out of these emerged Operation 40, an elite group of Cuban exiles who, after specialized training, were to infiltrate Cuba and deal a mortal blow to the revolution, including the assassination of its principal leaders.

The chief of the task force was Tracy Barnes, a Yale graduate and Dulles’s wartime OSS comrade who was related to the Rockefeller clan by marriage. More than a decade earlier, Barnes’s first CIA job had been as deputy director of the Psychological Strategy Board, a little-known entity that explored everything from the use of psychotropic drugs as truth serum to the possibility of engineering unwitting assassins, i.e., Manchurian candidates. Later, he worked on the successful 1954 operation to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. Barnes had received propaganda support from David At lee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt, including the distribution of faked photographs purporting to show the mutilated bodies of Arbenz opponents.

Phillips and Hunt would be hounded by allegations that they had been present in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Both men consistently denied it. But according to his son St. John Hunt, E. Howard began confessing knowledge of a plot against Kennedy near the end of his life and named Phillips as one of the participants.35
 
Hunt and Phillips attended the first meeting of the Cuban Task Force, held January 18, 1960, in Barnes’s office. Barnes spoke at length on the objectives. He explained that Air Force General Charles Cabell, a Texan (and brother of Dallas’s mayor), would be in charge of air cover for an invasion, and that Vice President Richard Nixon, whose brief included some national security areas, was the administration’s Cuba “case officer.”
 
In his memoirs, former Cuban intelligence official Fabian Escalante asserted that Nixon had met with an important group of Texas businessmen to arrange outside funding for the operation. Escalante, whose service was vaunted for its U.S. spy network, claimed that the Texas group was headed by George H. W. Bush and Jack Crichton. Escalante’s assertion cannot be easily dismissed: Crichton’s role in covert operations, about which extensive new information is provided in chapter 7, was little understood at the time Escalante published his memoirs.36
 
In March 1960, the Eisenhower administration signed off on a plan to equip and train Cuban exiles, and drills soon began in Florida and Guatemala. One of Dulles’s top three aides, the covert operations chief Richard M. Bissell (Yale ’32), was made director. Around this time, George de Mohrenschildt happened to take a business trip to Mexico City, where the CIA station was deeply involved in the coming attractions.
 
By the fall of 1962, when de Mohrenschildt was devoting much of his time to squiring Lee Harvey Oswald, he had gained entrée to the crème delacrème of the petroleum world. One longtime buddy of his and of Poppy Bush’s, offshore drilling expert George Kitchel, would tell the FBI in 1964 that de Mohrenschildt counted among his good friends the oil tycoons Clint Murchison, H. L. Hunt, John Mecom, and Sid Richardson. Other commission testimony revealed that in the couple of years prior to the Kennedy assassination, de Mohrenschildt had traveled frequently from Dallas to Houston, where he visited with figures such as George Brown of Brown and Root, the construction and military contracting giant that helped launch LBJ’s career, and Jean de Menil of Schlumberger, the huge oil services firm.

Several of these men had even sent de Mohrenschildt abroad on business; one could be forgiven for wondering if these trips were in fact what the CIA calls “commercial cover.” George Brown had dispatched him to Mexico, where his mission seemed to be heading off a Mexican government oil deal with the Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan, who arrived at the same time.37 Murchison dispatched him to Haiti on several occasions. In 1958, he went to Yugoslavia on what was said to be business for Mecom— whose foundation, the San Jacinto Fund, was later identified as a CIA funding conduit.

The Warren Commission knew at least pieces of all this. Yet in 1964, after two and a half days of testimony by George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne, the commission would conclude that George was essentially an eccentric if well-connected figure whose life encompassed a series of strange coincidences.

quote:

IN 1976, MORE THAN A DECADE AFTER the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a letter arrived at the CIA, addressed to its director, the Hon. George Bush. The letter was from a desperate-sounding man in Dallas, who spoke regretfully of having been indiscreet in talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and begged Poppy for help:
 
Maybe you will be able to bring a solution into the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere. Either FBI is involved in this or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by this situation . . . I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people . . . Could you do something to remove this net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more.
 
The writer signed himself “G. de Mohrenschildt.”1

The CIA staff assumed the letter writer to be a crank. Just to be sure, however, they asked their boss: Did he by any chance know a man named de Mohrenschildt?
 
Bush responded by memo, seemingly self-typed: “I do know this man DeMohrenschildt. I first men [sic] him in the early 40’3 [sic]. He was an uncle to my Andover roommate. Later he surfaced in Dallas (50’s maybe) . . . Then he surfaced when Oswald shot to prominence. He knew Oswald before the assassination of Pres. Kennedy. I don’t recall his role in all this.”

Not recall? Once again, Poppy Bush was having memory problems. And not about trivial matters. George de Mohrenschildt was not just the uncle of a roommate, but a longtime personal associate. Yet Poppy could not recall—or more precisely, claimed not to recall—the nature of de Mohrenschildt’s relationship with the man believed to have assassinated the thirty-fifth president.

This would have been an unusual lapse on anyone’s part. But for the head of an American spy agency to exhibit such a blasé attitude, in such an important matter, was over the edge. At that very moment, several federal investigations were looking into CIA abuses—including the agency’s role in assassinations of foreign leaders. These investigators were heading toward what would become a reopened inquiry into Kennedy’s death. Could it be that the lapse was not casual, and the acknowledgment of a distant relationship was a way to forestall inquiry into a closer one?

Writing back to his old friend, Poppy assured de Mohrenschildt that his fears were entirely unfounded. Yet half a year later, de Mohrenschildt was dead. The cause was officially determined to be suicide with a shotgun. Investigators combing through de Mohrenschildt’s effects came upon his tattered address book, largely full of entries made in the 1950s. Among them, though apparently eliciting no further inquiries on the part of the police, was an old entry for the current CIA director, with the Midland address where he had lived in the early days of Zapata:

 BUSH, GEORGE H. W. (POPPY), 1412 W. OHIO ALSO ZAPATA PETROLEUM, MIDLAND.

When Poppy told his staff that his old friend de Mohrenschildt “knew Oswald,” that was an understatement. From 1962 through the spring of 1963, de Mohrenschildt was by far the principal influence on Oswald, the older man who guided every step of his life. De Mohrenschildt had helped Oswald find jobs and apartments, had taken him to meetings and social gatherings, and generally had assisted with the most minute aspects of life for Lee Oswald, his Russian wife, Marina, and their baby.

De Mohrenschildt’s relationship with Oswald has tantalized and perplexed investigators and researchers for decades. In 1964, de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne testified to the Warren Commission, which spent more time with them than any other witness—possibly excepting Oswald’s widow, Marina. The commission, though, focused on George de Mohrenschildt as a colorful, if eccentric, character, steering away every time de Mohrenschildt recounted yet another name from a staggering list of influential friends and associates. In the end, the commission simply concluded in its final report that these must all be coincidences and nothing more. The de Mohrenschildts, the commission said, apparently had nothing to do with the assassination.
 
Even the Warren Commission counsel who questioned George de Mohrenschildt appeared to acknowledge that the Russian émigré was what might euphemistically be called an “international businessman.” For most of his adult life, de Mohrenschildt had traveled the world ostensibly seeking business opportunities involving a variety of natural resources—some, such as oil and uranium, of great strategic value. The timing of his overseas ventures was remarkable. Invariably, when he was passing through town, a covert or even overt operation appeared to be unfolding—an invasion, a coup, that sort of thing. For example, in 1961, as exiled Cubans and their CIA support team prepared for the Bay of Pigs invasion in Guatemala, George de Mohrenschildt and his wife passed through Guatemala City on what they told friends was a months-long walking tour of the Central American isthmus. On another occasion, the de Mohrenschildts appeared in Mexico on oil business just as a Soviet leader arrived on a similar mission— and even happened to meet the Communist official. In a third instance, they landed in Haiti shortly before an unsuccessful coup against its president that had U.S. fingerprints on it.

The press was briefly intrigued by de Mohrenschildt, and especially by the fact that he knew both the assassin and the assassinated. Reported the Associated Press:
 
A Russian-born society figure was a friend both of the family of President Kennedy and his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. A series of strange coincidences providing the only known link between the two families before Oswald fired the shot killing Mr. Kennedy in Dallas a year ago was described in testimony before the Warren Commission by George S. de Mohrenschildt.
 
He was actually much more intriguing—and mystifying. As Norman Mailer noted in his book Oswald’s Tale, de Mohrenschildt possessed “an eclecticism that made him delight in presenting himself as right-wing, leftwing, a moralist, an immoralist, an aristocrat, a nihilist, a snob, an atheist, a Republican, a Kennedy lover, a desegregationist, an intimate of oil tycoons, a bohemian, and a socialite, plus a quondam Nazi apologist, once a year.”

During all these examinations, and notwithstanding de Mohrenschildt’s offhand recitation of scores of friends and colleagues, obscure and recognizable, he scrupulously never once mentioned that he knew Poppy Bush. Nor did investigators uncover the fact that in the spring of 1963, immediately after his final communication with Oswald, de Mohrenschildt had traveled to New York and Washington for meetings with CIA and military intelligence officials. He even had met with a top aide to Vice President Johnson. And the commission certainly did not learn that one meeting in New York included Thomas Devine, then Poppy Bush’s business colleague in Zapata Offshore, who was doing double duty for the CIA.

Had the Warren Commission’s investigators comprehensively explored the matter, they would have found a phenomenal and baroque backstory that contextualizes de Mohrenschildt within the extended petroleum-intelligence orbit in which the Bushes operated.
 

The Atomic Man-Boy posted:

I'm also about 75% through "Family of Secrets" by Russ Baker. De Mohrenshilt spent a lot of time with Pantepec Oil in countries that would soon see CIA intervention, including Venezuela, Guatemala, and pre-Castro Cuba.

quote:

Over at Harken Energy—George W. Bush’s next corporate home [...] Bush-connected enterprises were just not the kinds of businesses with which the rest of us are familiar. There always seemed to be something more going on: that overlay of peculiar money-moving, a general lack of profitability, the participation of foreign interests, and a hint of black intelligence operations.

In September 1986, as oil prices continued to collapse and W.’s previous financial savior, the Cincinnati-based Spectrum 7 Energy, was itself failing, along came the Dallas-based Harken, a comparatively little-known independent oil and gas company, riding to the rescue. Harken snapped up Spectrum, put W. on its board, and gave him a handsome compensation package. In return, W. was allowed to go about his business—which at the time meant playing a crucial role in his father’s presidential campaign. But the Harken assist didn’t just benefit Poppy’s political fortunes. Profits from W.’s subsequent sale of his Harken stock would jack up his own political career. The Harken deal ultimately made it possible for him to become part owner and highly visible “managing director” of the Texas Rangers baseball team—a position that would enhance his modest résumé as a candidate for governor a few years later. Thus, the largess of the figures behind Harken played a key role in George W. Bush’s quick march to the presidency.

Virtually everyone who has looked at Harken over the years agrees that it is some strange kind of corporate beast, like a newly discovered species of manatee. The company’s books have never made any sense to outsiders— which might have had something to do with the fact that the only people who seemed to make any money were the insiders. In 1991 Time proclaimed Harken “one of the most mysterious and eccentric outfits ever to drill for oil.

The Harken story reads at times like the stuff of an airport bookstore thriller. One finds figures associated with BCCI, gold caches, and an alphabet soup of secret societies appearing at critical junctures to bail out Harken, traveling to the White House to meet with President George H. W. Bush, then flying off to make deals with the likes of Saddam Hussein or the Chinese in the wake of the Tiananmen Massacre. In Harken we find the future president of the United States deeply involved in an enterprise whose every aspect raises questions about control of power in our country, because it draws our attention to complex and little-understood international alliances that bring America’s leaders, past and future, together with individuals and forces of dubious integrity and ambitions that appear far removed from the public interest.
...
For the first decade of its existence, Harken was a fairly conventional, and mostly profitable, oil exploration firm.3 But in 1983, things began to change. Having been in business for nearly a decade, and now suffering from the collapse of oil prices, founder Phil Kendrick traveled to Asia to consider potential buyers for his Australian subsidiary. One Singapore-based broker happened to bring up a name. “He told me about a guy named Quasha—said he was the man behind Marcos,” Kendrick recalled. “He said he was the one who put him in power.” That may have been something of an exaggeration, but William Quasha was a man to know in the Philippines. An American citizen who had served there during World War II and stayed on to become a powerful lawyer in that country, he was head of the local expatriate group Republicans Abroad, and so well connected that he even played host to a Democrat, President Bill Clinton, when he came through the isles.

William Quasha’s ace in the hole was his relationship with the long-ruling president and strongman Ferdinand Marcos. And Marcos, accused of stealing billions of dollars from the public treasury of the poor country during his twenty-year reign, needed friends with connections abroad. Recalled Kendrick: “The word was, Marcos was trying to get money out of [the] Philippines—he had a lot of money—and place it in legitimate businesses.”

In a curious coincidence, not long after Kendrick first heard the Quasha name, one of Harken’s investment bankers in New York mentioned a client looking to take a major position in an oil company, a New York lawyer named Quasha. He turned out to be William Quasha’s son, Alan.
[...]
Quasha assured him, Kendrick said, that he was going to make Kendrick’s stock options valuable.

According to Kendrick, he did exactly the opposite. “I finally figured out what his game plan was,” Kendrick said. Kendrick alleges that this initially consisted of a press release that portrayed the company as a giant mess that needed to be fixed. “The stock just crashed; it went down to nothing—below a dollar.” Then, the new management announced a rights offering, which allowed people like Quasha to buy still more stock, at a heavily discounted price. This, of course, destroyed Phil Kendrick’s stock options while giving the newcomers even more control. Then the company instituted a one-for-ten reverse split, which brought the stock price up to a no-longer-embarrassing level. Meanwhile, management sold off the Australian subsidiary that Kendrick had been told he could run, and, according to Kendrick, pushed him out. The funding for all this was baffling.
[...]

Why did the Quasha family find this particular company so interesting? Kendrick couldn’t stop thinking about what he had heard about the Quashas and Marcos—and couldn’t help wondering whether the money going into Harken wasn’t really Marcos’s money—or, put another way, the money of the people of the Philippines. I had hoped to get some insight, at least a limited one, from Alan Quasha, but he has repeatedly ignored requests for an interview.

With Kendrick out of the way, Harken began metamorphosing in strange and wondrous ways. As mysterious as the workings of the company was its allure for powerful figures and institutions—almost all of whom piled into the company after George W. Bush came on board in 1986.

One of the oddest investors in Harken was the billionaire speculator, investor, and philanthropist George Soros, who first became involved shortly after Alan Quasha took over the company by swapping oil company stocks for Harken shares; Soros was a major shareholder in the first years following Quasha’s takeover, at one point holding one third of the stock. That George Soros held a big stake and served as a board member at the time George W. Bush was welcomed into the company that would make his fortune is rife with irony. Soros, a refugee from Communist Hungary, would found a variety of progressive philanthropies in the United States and abroad, whose causes included promoting democratic institutions, campaign finance, and drug policy reform. Eighteen years after George W. Bush joined him in Harken, Soros would become the leading financier of efforts to deny W. a second term as president. More consistent with Harken’s geopolitical texture is Soros’s longtime backing of Central and Eastern European democracy movements during the Soviet era. Though Soros exited Harken years ago, he continues to play tennis with Alan Quasha.

By far the biggest—and ultimately the most improbable—of Harken shareholders was Harvard University. Harvard, currently the second wealthiest private institution in America after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, entered the picture in October 1986, right on the heels of George W. Bush. Through its investing arm, Harvard Management Company, it agreed to buy 1.35 million shares of Harken for two million dollars and invest another twenty million dollars in Harken projects—eventually pumping fifty million dollars into the company and owning 30 percent of its stock. Harken, in fact, was one of the largest investments the university ever made.

Equally mysterious is how and why the financial whizzes at Harvard chose to bankroll the apparent clunker. In 2002, when the Boston Globe asked for an interview on the subject of Harvard and Harken, Michael Eisenson, managing director and CEO of the Harvard Management Company, who sat on the Harken board with George W. Bush, declined.13 The university’s motto—Veritas—apparently does not apply to its financial dealings.

In 2002, the Boston Globe, seeking to understand the local school’s involvement with Harken, spoke with Robert G. Stone Jr., the longtime chairman of the seven-member Harvard Corporation, the university’s highest governing board. Stone sought to distance himself from the matter.

“I never recommended Harken. I didn’t know anything about them,” Stone said in a telephone interview from his New York City office in what appears to be his first interview about the matter. “I don’t tell them what to invest in.” He said that at the time of Harvard’s investment, he knew then-Vice President George H.W. Bush “very, very slightly.”
[...]
Despite Stone’s efforts to distance himself from the Bushes and from Harvard’s entry into Harken, Stone himself turns out to have both oil and CIA connections—or, perhaps it can be said, CIA-oil connections. Most intriguingly, Stone turns out to have been in business with the “former” CIA officer Thomas J. Devine. That’s the same Thomas J. Devine who purportedly retired from the agency in order to help Poppy Bush start up Zapata Offshore.

In 1950, the same year that Dresser Industries relocated to Dallas and the whole Dallas intelligence complex was coming together, Stone started Stonetex Oil Corporation, a Dallas-based oil company. Some years later, Devine became Stonetex’s treasurer. (When I asked Devine about his association with the Stone family, he explained that the same ground rules applied as with the Bushes before he could speak to me: “That makes two families I need to get clearance from.” He apparently never did get that clearance.)

Stone was a board member and sometime chairman of a whole range of companies involved with international shipping, the use of inland barges to move oil, and oil exploration. At one point he controlled one of the world’s largest cargo fleets. And he was intimately associated with a small circle of highly politicized oilmen whose names have appeared in previous chapters.
[...]
As a young man, Robert Stone’s marriage into the Rockefeller clan would result in his joining the board of Freeport Mining, a huge Rockefeller-dominated company with gold, silver, copper, and other mineral-extraction operations throughout the world, including major mines in Indonesia and the Philippines. The partners of Freeport Mining were a powerful bunch with an appreciation for the strategic value of minerals. Among the board members over the years was Prescott Bush’s business partner Robert A. Lovett, who served in various administrations as undersecretary of state, assistant secretary of war, and secretary of defense, and is widely regarded as one of the architects of America’s cold war strategy


Freeport’s largest mine was and is in Indonesia—and Freeport is closely identified with the CIA-backed coup that brought the dictator Suharto to power in 1965. Efforts to topple his predecessor, the nationalist Sukarno, were the province of Alfred C. Ulmer, the Allen Dulles confidant who, as noted in chapter 4, visited Poppy Bush in Texas the week of the JFK assassination. Other Freeport board members have included Henry Kissinger and Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations under Ike and JFK. Burke was an ardent advocate in National Security Council meetings for the assassination not just of Fidel Castro but also of others in the Cuban leadership as a “package deal.” JFK, just prior to his death, was taking policy stances on Indonesia inimical to the interests of Freeport.


It is in this context—the control and extraction of precious resources— that we meet Robert G. Stone Jr. and William H. Quasha (Alan’s father), as young men doing their World War II service in the Philippine Islands. The Philippines had been a gem in the American colonial empire since it, like Cuba, came under U.S. control after the Spanish-American War in 1898. The Philippines, even more than Cuba, was rich in resources, including gold, copper, sugar, and other strategic commodities.

And more than a few big names did their apprenticeship in the fertile islands. Before he became president of the United States, Bush family associate and Bonesman William Howard Taft was the civilian governor there. So was Henry L. Stimson, the Bonesman who would serve in five presidential administrations—and would address Poppy’s Andover graduating class.22 The family of future American general Douglas MacArthur was part of this same American cadre “managing” the Philippines. Douglas MacArthur’s father, Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur Jr., was the military governor.

Two other Americans spent time in the Philippines—both in the company of General Douglas MacArthur: Robert G. Stone Jr. and William Quasha.

From a young age, even before marrying into the Rockefeller family, Stone was trusted at the highest levels. In World War II, he did intelligence work related to ports and oil in Iran for the acclaimed marine engineer Benjamin Casey Allin III. After working with Allin, Stone was then sent to the Pacific to serve General Douglas MacArthur, where, among other things, he took personal charge of the security of MacArthur’s yacht and oversaw the sensitive landing preparations for MacArthur’s retaking of the Philippines.

Allin, Stone, and Quasha all attained high status within the secrecy-prizing Freemasonry, with Allin and Stone becoming thirty-second-degree Masons and Quasha eventually attaining the coveted rank of Grand Master. One does not need to put too fine a point on this to recognize that such bonds of loyalty and discretion, seen elsewhere in Skull and Bones, do wonders for preserving secrecy over long periods of time, and are therefore enormously useful for maintaining discipline within vast covert operations networks.

Poppy Bush himself doesn’t talk much about the Philippines, but he too did service there. Among other things, he participated in numerous bombing runs over the islands when they were in Japanese hands—including Manila Harbor as part of MacArthur’s effort to retake the territory. And of course there was his intelligence work. As noted in chapter 2, on his way to the Pacific, Poppy stopped off at Pearl Harbor for some face time with officers assigned to the Joint Intelligence Center for the Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA). The early incarnation of JICPOA was headed by Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter, who would after the war become the director of the CIA. JICPOA remains little known and little discussed, but it was a crucial development in wartime intelligence, and played a key role in Admiral Chester Nimitz’s successful island-hopping campaign, of which Bush was a part.

Thus Bush became part of a joint intelligence effort coordinated with MacArthur’s command. The association with the Bush circle would date back to the days when Douglas MacArthur was a young man and his mother contacted E. H. Harriman, father of Prescott’s future business partners, to ask the railroad tycoon to give her son a job. Years later, when Poppy Bush became U.N. ambassador, he took an apartment next to Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, and in 1978 the widow contributed to George W.’s Midland, Texas congressional campaign

quote:

Being in the Philippines at the close of World War II was a golden opportunity—literally as well as figuratively. The Philippines were chockfull of gold. There was gold in the mines, and rumor had it, there was gold being hoarded.

Even before Douglas MacArthur commanded U.S. troops in the country, he had major holdings in the largest Philippine gold mine. MacArthur’s staff officer, Major General Courtney Whitney, had been an executive of several gold mining companies before the war.

Besides the indigenous gold, a great fortune in gold booty was rumored to be buried in the Philippines, seized by the Japanese as they plundered one East Asian country after another. Marcos’s widow, the famously extravagant Imelda, has claimed that her husband and his buddies got hold of this so-called Yamashita treasure. Several journalists, who have spent combined decades on the Philippines gold story, assert that the cache was actually seized by American forces under MacArthur and that its very existence is a sensitive secret. One reason is that knowledge of this gold could cause world gold prices to plunge and wreak havoc with currency markets. Estimates of the cache vary from forty-five billion dollars to hundreds of billions.

This may help to explain why so many of the companies mentioned in this book seem able to function in apparent defiance of economic logic. Entities such as Zapata Offshore, Stratford, Arbusto, and Harken appear to persist without profits for great stretches. To the trained eye, they look like classic money-laundering ventures, raising the question of where all that money originates. And that leads in turn to another explanation proffered about the Philippine gold: that it has been used—and perhaps is still being used—to fund unauthorized covert operations. This would not preclude a variety of funding sources, ranging from oil concessions to profits generated by the “legitimate” side of airlines and other enterprises. But it is hard to top gold as a negotiable mineral.

Rumors about MacArthur’s involvement with gold were so widespread that the general himself called a press conference to dispel such notions. In his statement, he sought to downplay his own gold investments, and did not mention the Japanese gold at all.

At the end of the war, MacArthur appointed William Quasha as alien property administrator. “Alien property” would have included anything of value captured from the Japanese. If in fact the Japanese possessed gold, this would have been by far the top priority.

Authors Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave contend that former CIA deputy director Ray Cline told them that the United States did locate the Japanese gold and used it to fund anti-Communist operations the world over. Investigators in the Philippines have said that the gold was stashed in bank vaults in forty-two countries. Some of the money is believed to have been used in Japan, to quickly reestablish the ruling clique, and a pro-U.S. ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party; MacArthur oversaw the postwar occupation of Japan. The administrator of the so-called M-2 slush fund that secretly channeled these monies to Tokyo was none other than Poppy Bush friend and CIA officer Alfred C. Ulmer.

The Seagraves cast the Pacific gold operation as an offshoot of a secret program that began in Europe after the war. The key figures will be familiar to readers of this book:

The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot actually originated during the Roosevelt administration, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a brain trust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled after the war. As the tide turned against the Axis, it was only a matter of time before treasure began to be recovered. Much of this war prize was in the form of gold looted by the Nazis from conquered countries and civilian victims . . . Stimson’s special assistants on this topic were his deputies John J. McCloy and Robert Lovett, and consultant Robert B. Anderson . . . (This was confirmed, in documents we obtained, by a number of high-level sources, including a CIA officer based in Manila, and former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline . . . ) [The next target was Japanese gold.] After briefing President Truman and others in Washington including McCloy, Lovett and Stimson, [intelligence officer] Captain [Edward] Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila where they set out for a tour of the vaults [that] already had [been] opened.

Probably the key figure in all this was Edward Lansdale, who, according to the Seagraves, was the point man for the gold operation. Lansdale was almost larger than life, a figure deeply involved with high-stakes covert operations for many presidents. He was said to be an inspiration for the popular novel The Ugly American. New York Times Pulitzer Prize–winner Tim Weiner writes of Lansdale: “His specialty was counterinsurgency, and his trademark was winning third-world hearts and minds with American ingenuity, greenback dollars, and snake oil.”

This much is clear: Lansdale helped direct counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines in the 1950s. He was prominent in counterinsurgency meetings in the Kennedy White House, in which Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush’s friend and business partner, was an ardent advocate of such activities. Lansdale was also the titular head of Operation Mongoose, the part-CIA, part-Pentagon project to assassinate Cuban leaders, as well as a top figure in counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. If indeed Lansdale was involved with gold operations in the Philippines, then the gold operations were of paramount importance in the larger cold war battle.

IN THE POSTWAR period, and especially the 1950s and ’60s, the United States was desperate for allies in East Asia. The deal, at least as U.S. officials saw it, was that Marcos would hold the fort against Communist incursions in the region as well as allow the continued operation of giant U.S. military bases, notably Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Station, that would serve specific cold war strategic objectives. In return, he would receive protection from the U.S. embassy and intelligence operations emanating from it, as well as from prominent local Americans acting as surrogates.

As part of the deal, Marcos would play a role in the international money machine through which vast undocumented sums sloshed, ostensibly to pay for covert operations. Implicit in this was a wink when he looted his own country—and maybe even an assist. Whether the wealth he amassed included the Yamashita gold is uncertain. After his death, his wife, Imelda, would claim that Marcos had indeed found some of the stash—which at least was justification for the couple’s ability to amass such a fortune. But even without the Japanese treasure, the Philippines certainly had a domestic supply—which had been mined steadily, including during the war years, when the Japanese occupiers oversaw continued production.

In 1978, Marcos issued a decree mandating that all gold mined in the islands had to be sold directly to the government. As the Seagraves note: “This made it possible for him to sell some of his own gold to the Central Bank through a variety of intermediaries, and the bank could then send the gold to financial centers without attracting attention.” In effect, Marcos seems to have turned the Philippine government into a laundry for his own stash. From there, according to this analysis, the gold, its origins obscured, made its way into bank vaults abroad and into international markets.

Poppy Bush and Ferdinand Marcos cultivated a relationship of mutual appreciation. “We love your adherence to democratic principles,” Poppy gushed during a visit to Manila in 1981. Marcos knew how to play the anti-Communist card, and like nearly all U.S. leaders, Poppy avidly helped prop up the dictator. A number of Poppy’s lieutenants, including Lee Atwater, Paul Manafort, and the notorious “dirty trickster” Roger Stone (no relation to Robert G. Stone Jr.) did political consulting for Marcos. Ed Rollins, the manager of the Reagan-Bush 1984 reelection campaign, admitted that a top Filipino politician illegally delivered ten million dollars in cash from Marcos to Reagan’s 1984 campaign, though he declined to name him.

Poppy also is known to have personally urged Ferdinand Marcos to invest money in the United States. Imelda has claimed that Poppy urged her husband to put “his” funds into something that Imelda knew only as the Communist Takeover Fund. That suggests that gold in the Philippines has long been seen as a funding vehicle for off-the-books intelligence, covert operations, weapons trafficking, and even coups—plus protection money that Marcos felt he had to pay.

Shear Modulus posted:

E. Howard Hunt named his son St. John?

Fried Watermelon posted:

We trained an AI to become obsessed with child porn

cohsae posted:

drat Ghislaine is stacked

mycomancy posted:

cohsae posted:

drat Ghislaine is stacked

quote:

The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts, and Lyrics, a 600-page coffee-table book published by HarperCollins on June 8, gathers together most of the previously published writings of the songwriter, poet and vocalist for the 1960s’ band The Doors, along with poems, lyrics and other writings culled from 28 recently discovered notebooks.

The new volume—published in advance of the 50th anniversary of Morrison’s death on July 3—presents for the most part the artist in his own words. Along with rare family photos from his youth and later years, the book contains scans of original pages from Morrison’s legal pads, stenographic notebooks and journals in which he wrote down poems, notes and other fragments.


The Collected Works of Jim Morrison- Poetry, Journals, Transcripts, and Lyrics
The material previously published includes The Doors’ song lyrics from 1967–71, several self-published collections of poems entitled The New Creatures and The Lords/Notes on Vision and the posthumously published poem An American Prayer.

Among the newly published items are a poem Morrison wrote at age 10, numerous never before seen song lyrics, notes from his September 1970 obscenity trial in Miami, a movie script for his unreleased film, HWY, a full reproduction of his “Paris Journal”—believed to have been written during the final months of his life—and an outline for a new book.

The new anthology was supported by Morrison’s estate and contains a prologue by his sister, Ann Morrison Chewning. This element provides a glimpse into the artist as seen by those who were close to him before and during the years of his rise to popularity.

One of the aims of both publisher and family is to detach Morrison from his rock-star persona, present him as a serious poet and introduce a wider audience to his poetry and other works outside of his music.

For example, Morrison’s sister Ann Chewning writes in the prologue, “After The Doors’ first album came out, I followed Jim’s career, loved the music, and, when I returned to California [from London], visited Jim and Pam Courson in LA. Seldom without a notebook and pen, he self-published his poems and published others with Simon & Schuster and in literary magazines. He wrote a movie script and filmed it with friends. Some of his poetry and his film were personal works, exclusive to him, and some of his writings became an integral part of The Doors’ lyrics.”

Chewning explains that after the death of Morrison’s parents, she became the executor, along with the Courson family, of half of the estate of Jim and Pamela. When it came to projects related to the band, family members always followed the lead of the remaining members of The Doors, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie Krieger and drummer John Densmore. She writes, “But when considering what to do with Jim’s work, we tried to follow his intent.”

The result is something of a large scrapbook of Morrison’s poems, notes, musings and writings, much of it incomplete and fragmentary. The various sections contain pages of quotes from Morrison’s interviews and comments that help explain the context in which the material that precedes them was produced.

The largest chunk, more than 300 pages, is “Poems and Writings.” Generally, Morrison’s poetry reveals the influence of the Beat poets and writers (Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac and others) and through them, the Surrealists and other modernist trends. He also apparently read William Blake (from whose work indirectly the band derived its name), Hart Crane, Antonin Artaud, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche and more. Morrison’s poems also include various profane, sexual, Zen and Native American “spiritual” references, fairly typical for his time and generation. Most of this, unfortunately, is done at a relatively low level, much of it deliberately obtuse and forced.

An example from the opening of the poem entitled “The Universe”:

The Universe, one line, is a
long snake, & we each are
facets on its jeweled skin.
It moves inexorably, slowly
winding peristaltic intestinal
phallic orgasmic rear end-wriggling
slow. gently caress poo poo piss kill.
The skin of the dead beast
shivers in hair raising waves
of love. Die brute. Claim
your world. Join the snake
on its slow journey.

Some of the more interesting material comes from the previously published The Lords/Notes on Vision, which Morrison explains in the supplemental quote, was written, “when I was at film school in LA.” It consists of notes about the evolution of visual entertainment leading up to cinema. In one passage, he writes:

Phantasmagoria, magic lantern shows, spectacles
without substance. They achieved complete
sensory experiences through noise, incense,
lightning, water. There may be a time when
we’ll attend Weather Theatres to recall the
sensation of rain

Much of Morrison’s poetry comes off as undeveloped, rambling stream of consciousness. In part, this is because it was never intended to be published in book form. More generally, however, it has to be said that by and large Morrison’s poems are sophomoric and the kind of thing that many middle-class adolescents attracted to the “counter culture” wrote in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Elements of social or youth protest, references to previous anti-establishment literature and a great quantity of self-indulgence and intellectual sloth abound.


The Doors, 1966
This not to say that Morrison did not possess talent. The merger of his lyrics, singing voice and charismatic stage presence with the music of The Doors did, in multiple instances over the four years of the band’s popularity, produce some memorable popular songs. However, it would be a mistake (and unnecessary) to extrapolate from this and conclude that everything else that Morrison wrote or recorded was somehow the work of a great American writer. There has been an attempt ever since his tragic death at 27 to turn Morrison into a “visionary poet.” Various factors have been at work, including financial considerations, but it is misguided. Of course, he was very young when he died and might have developed as an artist, but one is obliged to judge him on what he accomplished during his lifetime.

In certain writings, Morrison himself seemed to be aware of his limitations and took a fairly sharp look at himself. In one of the newly discovered items, “As I look back,” contained in a Paris journal and written in the final days of his life in 1971, he reflects on his experiences from childhood up to that point and includes this self-evaluation:

Elvis had sex– wise
mature voice at 19.
Mine still retains the
nasal whine of a
repressed adolescent
minor squeaks & furies
An interesting singer
at best – a scream
or a sick croon. Nothing
in between

Morrison identified with the youth movement of the late 1960s and recognized the connection between it and the popularity of The Doors’ music. While he may have wanted to be a poet rather than a rock ‘n’ roll star, the fact is that writing significant poetry, on the one hand, and good song lyrics, on the other, are not the same thing. There is also the fact that the other members of The Doors were exceptionally talented musicians able to create the instrumental environment within which Morrison’s gifts as a singer and lyricist could find expression.


Jim Morrison's grave in Paris, 1981
Morrison’s death at the height of The Doors’ success—along with persistent rumors that he faked his own demise—has created fertile ground for all manner of charlatanry, idol worship and money-making over the past five decades. Many people who came into contact with Morrison during his short life have sought to tell their story and cash in on the mythology of the man.

At least three dozen books have been published about Morrison during the intervening years by music critics and former managers, friends, girlfriends and band members. Many of these focus on one or another aspect of the rock star’s life and celebrity, typically concentrating on his self-destruction, libidinous lifestyle and on-stage antics. It is rather sad. Others paint Morrison as a rebel-poet and the American equivalent of 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who withdrew from public life at age 20 and died young in 1891. This is simply inappropriate and foolish.

Son of Thunderbeast posted:

Bad! Down!

Tubgoat posted:

I think mycomancy meant mycomancy is stacked.

Shear Modulus posted:

sure she might be an international child trafficker and pedophile but did you see that rack?

Shear Modulus posted:

sure she might be an international child trafficker and pedophile but did you see that rack?

Spergin Morlock posted:

sonatinas posted:

I thought google already does the same thing Apple is doing? it’s been going on for years.

https://www.itv.com/news/story/2013-11-18/search-engines-google-child-porn-child-abuse-images/

Regulus74 posted:

ghislaine stackedwell

Real hurthling! posted:

kojima ever gonna miss?

gay_crimes posted:

anti pedophiles all immediately swooning at a pedophile because of tiddies smdh

smarxist posted:

also lmao why is Blizzard Activision / WoW so riddled with spooks, ex-CIA and war crime dudes?!?!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hasan_Piker/comments/ov3eto/activision_blizzards_ties_to_the_cia_and_the_war/

Shear Modulus posted:

because Call of Duty is the most important PR campaign for the US military with the possible exception of marvel movies and the NSA was tapping MMOs and xbox live just like they were tapping facebook and email

Shear Modulus posted:

because Call of Duty is the most important PR campaign for the US military with the possible exception of marvel movies and the NSA was tapping MMOs and xbox live just like they were tapping facebook and email

The Atomic Man-Boy posted:

That's how I learned about how the Russians did the Highway of Death