The “bulletin board” saga continues from the original post, for ease of reading, now after two years of filling in the holes. Atomic Agent Oswald leaves off in the detailing of the 1959 defection of Robert E. Webster, employee of the Rand Development Corporation of Cleveland Ohio, described as a CIA front.
*Catch up with the original post here: https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/atomic-agent-oswald/
Robert Edward Webster*
defected to the USSR on Saturday October 17, 1959, allegedly at a meeting in the American embassy of Moscow accompanied by his “employers” H. James Rand and George H. Bookbinder –however– according to E.J. Epstein’s chapter notes in Legend, Webster defected under duress from a Soviet police station by handing over a written statement.
Webster’s so-called defection came one day after Lee Oswald’s arrival in Moscow on the 16th. There was commotion at the embassy that day, the 16th, when “Russell A. Langelle, the chief security officer in the Moscow embassy, was charged with espionage, declared persona non grata.. [after being]‘kidnapped by five unidentified Russians’ who had then threatened him and his family and tried to blackmail and bribe him into becoming a Soviet espionage agent.” p277, Mole, by William Hood,1982. –the Langelle story appeared in the New York Times Oct. 18. “…Langelle returned to the United States on 25 October…” p280, ibid. Six days later on Saturday 31 October, exactly two weeks after Webster, Lee Harvey Oswald entered the embassy to announce his defection. No record yet indicates the presence of additional people from Rand Development or the Commerce Department during Oswald’s defection.
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The window on Webster’s world reveals a fascinating subset of intelligence activity with direct bearing on the heart of this thesis, perhaps the most speculative aspect of the posts regarding a counter-proliferation role for Oswald. Internal memos from the CIA requested by the HSCA investigation note that Rand and Bookbinder had traveled previously in 1958 to the USSR with “Brigadier General” W. Randolph Lovelace, an eminent physician with Atomic Energy Commission contracts who co-founded the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque New Mexico. One memo reads: “For your information, only Rand, Bookbinder, and Lovelace have had frequent contact with Soviet officials both in the United States and the USSR, including Mikhail Ilich Bruk, formerly with the Soviet Ministry of Health, who was identified by AEDONER [Yuri Nosenko] as an agent of the KGB. You will note that Rand was the employer of Robert E. Webster who defected…”
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Dr. ‘Randy’ Lovelace* 
appointed in 1958 to become NASA’s chairman of its Life Sciences. Later in April of 1964, LBJ invested Lovelace as NASA Director of Space Medicine, a post he held for barely 8 months until dying in a small plane crash with his wife and pilot.
appointed in 1958 to become NASA’s chairman of its Life Sciences. Later in April of 1964, LBJ invested Lovelace as NASA Director of Space Medicine, a post he held for barely 8 months until dying in a small plane crash with his wife and pilot. The Lovelace Foundation, research arm of the clinic, housed and tested U-2 pilots and astronauts for the government looking for The Right Stuff. The foundation was created in 1947 when, after losing two sons to polio, Lovelace left his job as Chief of Surgery for the Mayo Clinic and moved back to New Mexico. He hired Dr. Clayton S. (Sam) White to run the foundation on the “Mayo model”. Dr. White pioneered the AEC contracts, which included nuclear blast effects on humans and the creation of the Fission Products Inhalation Project. The Lovelace Foundation gained extra space for its sophisticated atomic experiments and simulations at Kirtland Air Force Base, home to the Sandia Corporation.
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“Sandia is the direct descendent of Los Alamos’s Manhattan Project ordnance engineering division that turned the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs into deployable weapons… known as Los Alamos ‘Z’ Division, established at what is now Kirtland Air Base… Sandia became a separate lab in 1949..[and] is the most diverse of the three nuuclear weapons labs… Sandia is also the “foreman” of the..nuclear weapons complex, acting as its liason to the Pentagon… Sandia’s secondary mission is studying nuclear weapons ‘effects’, which are not the horrific effects of nuclear weapons on humans and the environment..[but] the effects of nuclear weapons on nuclear weapons, to make sure they are radiation hardened..[to] operate in..a nuclear war.”
The other effects, i.e. on humans, were contracted to Lovelace. This is the era of “nuclear battlefields” where soldiers were expected to take ground contaminated by radioactive fallout. Here’s a sample report of blast and radiation effects produced as a collaboration of the AEC, Lovelace Foundation and Sandia Corp. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc13019/m2/1/high_res_d/CEX-58.8.pdf
*Lovelace Foundation Clinic*
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Dr. Sam White’s adoring younger brother Byron was at that time making his mark in the world of football and law, and in 1960, Byron R. White became the Colorado manager of the JFK for President campaign. JFK rewarded Byron White by appointing him Deputy Attorney General of the United States, under brother Bobby Kennedy. The friendship between them dated back to their college days when White met the Kennedy family in London while he was preparing to enter Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. During WWII as an ONI officer, White wrote up the report on JFK’s PT109 incident.
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*Byron R. White with Kennedys
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*Byron R. White with KennedysHere possibly was an inside track for the Kennedys to get information about nuclear testing, fallout, and a potential back- channel to the Soviets.
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“A choice of cancer or polio”**:
Medical technology was listed as the principal commodity of the Atoms For Peace program when the government distributed its manuals in 1956, a broadly defined field already in advanced development. To this day, the standard history of polio omits a causal relationship with radiation. A famed collaboration to produce a global polio vaccine was well underway with the Soviets by 1958.
“The Russian scientists, led by Deputy Minister of Health Dr. Viktor Zhdanov and leading polio expert, Dr. Mikhail Chumakov of Moscow’s Institute for the Study of Polio, actually refined Sabin’s vaccine and developed it into a useful form that could be taken orally. Russian scientists then conducted trials of the vaccine on a massive scale. In all, well over 70 million people in the Soviet Union received the Sabin vaccine. Its successful use in the Soviet Union established the vaccine internationally, and the Sabin vaccine was subsequently widely used in the United States and became the worldwide standard vaccine for the prevention of polio.”
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In February of 1962, and again in August, the Sabin polio vaccines were shipped into Cuba for mass inoculations. For the record, it was the CIA chief John McCone, most recently chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who stood his ground in August of 1962 that nuclear missiles were being deployed to Castro’s Cuba:
“On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone if the CIA caould stage a phony attack on the American military base at Guantanamo Bay as a pretext for an American invasion of Cuba. McCone demurred. He told John Kennedy in private the next day that an invasion could be a fatal mistake. He warned the president for the first time that he thought the Soviets might be installing medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. If so, an American sneak attack might set off a nuclear war. [p222] He advocated raising a public alarm about the likelihood of a Soviet missile base. The president instantly rejected that idea, but he wondered aloud whether the CIA’s guerillas or American troops would be needed to destroy the missile sites –if they existed. At that point, no one but McCone was convinced that they did.
…Thirty-eight Soviet ships had docked in Cuba in the past seven weeks, McCone told the president.[p223] Their cargo “might contain missile parts. We do not know.”
…A U-2 flight passed over Cuba on August 29. Its film was processed overnight. On August 30, a CIA analyst bent over his light table and shouted: I’ve got a SAM site! It was a surface-to-air missile, an SA-2, the same Soviet weapon that had brought the U-2 down over Russia.”[p224, Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner, 2007]
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They tell us this is what the photoanalyst saw on August 30, 1962*
…Thirty-eight Soviet ships had docked in Cuba in the past seven weeks, McCone told the president.[p223] Their cargo “might contain missile parts. We do not know.”
…A U-2 flight passed over Cuba on August 29. Its film was processed overnight. On August 30, a CIA analyst bent over his light table and shouted: I’ve got a SAM site! It was a surface-to-air missile, an SA-2, the same Soviet weapon that had brought the U-2 down over Russia.”[p224, Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner, 2007]
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They tell us this is what the photoanalyst saw on August 30, 1962*
–a characteristic defensive Russian surface-to-air missile(SAM) site*
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**Song lyrics, The Salt of the Earth: “…Raise your glass to the hard working people… Who need leading but get gamblers instead… And a parade of the gray suited grafters, A choice of cancer or polio” –Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet 1968
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* Albert Sabin and Victor Zhdanov in 1958 
* Governments have concealed the spread of polio (brain infection) occurring with nuclear industry, including x-ray use and electronic RF. Not surprisingly, Oswald’s concealed New Orleans milieu was rooted in activities of cancer and polio. “Webster’s window” in the USSR may have been similar, whether or not Webster himself was any more than a diversionary defector, a “double dangle.” It is inherent in the study of radiation injuries to encounter cancer and polio.
* Governments have concealed the spread of polio (brain infection) occurring with nuclear industry, including x-ray use and electronic RF. Not surprisingly, Oswald’s concealed New Orleans milieu was rooted in activities of cancer and polio. “Webster’s window” in the USSR may have been similar, whether or not Webster himself was any more than a diversionary defector, a “double dangle.” It is inherent in the study of radiation injuries to encounter cancer and polio.*
“In the first five months of 1959, ten million children in the Soviet Union received the Sabin oral vaccine.” http://amhistory.si.edu/polio/virusvaccine/vacraces?.htm
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“In addition to his accomplishments in the field of public health, Zhdanov chaired the [USSR] Interagency Science and Technology Council on Molecular Biology and Genetics, which among its many functions directed the Soviet biological weapons program.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Zhdanov
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According to sources, Robert Webster began planning his defection in May of 1959 as a professional visitor in Russia with Rand Development Corp. Anthony Summers called Rand Development Corp “one of the first American companies to negotiate with the Soviet Union for the purchase of technical products and information… A Congressional Expense Inquiry shows that Rand Development held several CIA contracts. The president of Rand Development, Henry Rand, has been identified as a senior veteran of the Office of Strategic Services –or OSS– the forerunner of the CIA. So too was another top official of the company, George Bookbinder. Rand Development’s onetime Washington representative, Christopher Bird, was a CIA agent.” p148, Conspiracy, by Anthony Summers, 1980
The source on Rand Development’s product sharing with the Soviets appears to come from the Mankind Research Unlimited Inc.’s bio-sketch on Christopher Bird. MRU and its fundraising foundation MRF were not incorporated until 1973, but Bird’s professional relationship with Rand dates from his years “after military service”, about the same time that he became the assistant of Cleveland industrial-financier Cyrus S. Eaton for the purpose of organizing the international nuclear disarmament conferences known as ‘Pugwash’, held first in July of 1957. Eaton sponsored and hosted not less than three Pugwash conferences between 1957 and 1959. The extent of Christopher Bird’s involvement with Eaton and Pugwash is not yet known. Cyrus Eaton, who got his start in working life during school summer vacations on the estate of John D. Rockefeller, made many trips to the USSR including a reception to receive the Lenin Peace Prize in 1960.
–see pages 34-35
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Pugwash 1957 conferees* 
Pugwash, Nova Scotia, hosted by Cyrus S. Eaton. The Fifth Pugwash conference held August 24-29, 1959 in Nova Scotia was the last hosted by Eaton. It was also the first to engage the threat of chemical and biological warfare (CBW): “most of what Pugwash does, whether on CBW or anything else, takes place under ground rules that forbid disclosure [without consent]… Pugwash came into existence because it was able able to build [on] two attributes –access to policy levels of government and trans-national peer-grouping– into something for which a..need existed: an enduring open framework for East-West dialogue on security-related issues at a time when..mutual sus[icions and propaganda were clogging the more conventional channels of communication… [T]he fact that Pugwash did not seek to operate in the public eye..enabled governments to tolerate it…” http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/spru/hsp/documents/pugwash-hist.pdf
Pugwash, Nova Scotia, hosted by Cyrus S. Eaton. The Fifth Pugwash conference held August 24-29, 1959 in Nova Scotia was the last hosted by Eaton. It was also the first to engage the threat of chemical and biological warfare (CBW): “most of what Pugwash does, whether on CBW or anything else, takes place under ground rules that forbid disclosure [without consent]… Pugwash came into existence because it was able able to build [on] two attributes –access to policy levels of government and trans-national peer-grouping– into something for which a..need existed: an enduring open framework for East-West dialogue on security-related issues at a time when..mutual sus[icions and propaganda were clogging the more conventional channels of communication… [T]he fact that Pugwash did not seek to operate in the public eye..enabled governments to tolerate it…” http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/spru/hsp/documents/pugwash-hist.pdf***
“Eaton spent his summer vacations working at Rockefeller’s estate and returned to Cleveland upon graduation… Rockefeller offered him full-time employment. An early assignment was to placate property owners whose lawns were being torn up by the East Ohio Gas Company… [D]uring the 1920s ‘he was into everything, buying, selling, swapping, maneuvering, manipulating. His touch was the purest gold,’ wrote E.J.Kahn Jr. in..New Yorker magazine in 1977. His innumerable holding companies owned utilities, steel mills, a major portion of Goodyear Tire, [mines] and..other businesses… As early as the 1920s he was Herbert Hoover’s guest at the White House…” https://isgp-studies.com/organisations/introduction/1957_Pugwash_Eaton_and_Rockefeller.htm
“Eaton spent his summer vacations working at Rockefeller’s estate and returned to Cleveland upon graduation… Rockefeller offered him full-time employment. An early assignment was to placate property owners whose lawns were being torn up by the East Ohio Gas Company… [D]uring the 1920s ‘he was into everything, buying, selling, swapping, maneuvering, manipulating. His touch was the purest gold,’ wrote E.J.Kahn Jr. in..New Yorker magazine in 1977. His innumerable holding companies owned utilities, steel mills, a major portion of Goodyear Tire, [mines] and..other businesses… As early as the 1920s he was Herbert Hoover’s guest at the White House…” https://isgp-studies.com/organisations/introduction/1957_Pugwash_Eaton_and_Rockefeller.htm*
“There are no Communists in America to speak of except in the minds of those on the payroll of the F.B.I.,” he said in the spring of 1958. It delights him to be able to bring persons he unquestioningly identifies as Communists into his familiar capitalistic orbit…” (Oct.1977 New Yorker article by E.J.Kahn Jr.)
Eaton made his first well-publicized ‘peaceful trade’ business trip to the USSR in August of 1958.
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Goodyear Tire and Rubber is another prime example of corporate adventurism into nuclear industry:
“In April 1952, the [U.S.] Atomic Energy Commission announced a proposed new expansion of the nation’s atomic energy program…[which would include] a new gaseous diffusion plant to increase the production of fissionable materials… [T]he commission [chose]..a site in Pike County Ohio for the new plant… A new name would be brought into atomic energy plant operations when Goodyear Atomic Corporation was selected as the operating contractor in September 1952.”
The Secret Life of Plants*
*coauthors Christopher Bird*and OSS veteran Peter Tompkins* 
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*coauthors Christopher Bird*and OSS veteran Peter Tompkins* 
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Peter Tompkins’ WWII/OSS partisan resistance fighter networks in Italy, Corsica, Sicily, and North Africa were largely assumed by James J. Angleton who became the OSS/CIA station chief in Rome.
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*Rand at 1957 press conference holding electron microscope image of viruses. Did “Dr. Henry Rand” participate in the “vaccine diplomacy” of the Sabin/USSR polio campaign? Is this the genesis of Rand’s future cancer vaccine? Ultimately, the vaccine question is if the polio/cancer combination was a nuclear battlefield prophylactic to radiation-harden humans. The same protocols, if successful, had applications for nuclear-powered aircraft, bomber pilots, and deep space travelers.
larger view at https://outlet.historicimages.com/products/rse46835*
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The CBW Pugwash conference of 1959, hosted by Eaton and assisted by Bird, was organized by Dr. Martin M. Kaplan, a Philadelphia veterinarian who became the chief of medical research for the World Health Organization. In 1955, Dr. Kaplan and his colleague from the Wistar Institute, the controversial Hilary Koprowski, spent time in Kenya teaching the locals how to make ‘primitive’ laboratory vaccines. Koprowski was also competing at the time to make a universal polio vaccine and later became embroiled in his own defense over charges that his African lab work was the origin of AIDS.
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Researcher Gary Hill:
…“It occurred to me it is not appearance but personality that links these two individuals [Webster and Oswald]. Therefore since…both men appear to have been manipulated in their behavior, then perhaps they were chosen because of their similarities. If so, then the same forces controlled both men…
“That this company [Rand Development] is a CIA front is not news…however, its interest in hypnosis and mind-control as an intelligence tool may be… Could Bird be the key to Webster’s odyssey? According to [author Dick] Russell, Bird would later become ‘Biocommunications Editor/Russian Translator’ for Mankind Research Unlimited Inc…[with a] company capabilities list included [as] ‘brain and mind-control… acquiring on a daily basis a large amount of unique bio-cybernetics data from Eastern Europe. MKUltra gave the CIA an alternative to false defectors…Programmable defectors..willingly believing [in] false information… It is interesting that at this point the numbers of defectors took a sharp increase… Oswald had been hospitalized and incarcerated for periods adequate to allow the process to occur.” Fourth Decade, July and September 1995 issues
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Christopher Bird may at least be a key to Rand Development and the activities of H. James Rand.
A deeper association of some kind between Rand and Lovelace Foundation is confirmed in the sanitized “papers” collection of Floyd B. Odlum, chairman of the Lovelace Foundation and owner of Atlas Corporation who oversaw a uranium mining empire.
see personal correspondence item section #9 on page 13 of 105: “James Rand”–this could be either father or son, but coincident with the Lovelace Foundation’s collaborations with the Atomic Energy Commission and National Institutes of Health in the 1951-1953 time period. Also of note in this immediate subsection of Odlum’s papers are “scientific psychic studies” which recurs with specificity from this point onward.
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Odlum specialized in the financial investor-funded acquisition, reorganization and merging of companies in the great wave of mega-corporations that arose in the first decades of the 20th century. He owned Consolidated Vultee Aircraft –Convair– when it won the contract to build the first nuclear-powered aircraft.
Odlum specialized in the financial investor-funded acquisition, reorganization and merging of companies in the great wave of mega-corporations that arose in the first decades of the 20th century. He owned Consolidated Vultee Aircraft –Convair– when it won the contract to build the first nuclear-powered aircraft. Additionally, “In 1951, the Air Material Command..awarded Convair Project MX-1593 a contract to develop..an intercontinental ballistic missile. Convair engineer Karl Bossart named the project “Atlas” and Convair began to develop America’s first ICBM… In 1952, Convair received a contract to develop a supersonic bomber to succeed the Boeing B-47…” http://www.456fis.org/CONVAIR_DIVISION_GENERAL_DYNAMICS.htm
Consolidated Aircraft’s history up to the merge with General Dynamics in 1954:
General Dynamics gained the Convair plants in San Diego CA, Pomona CA, and Fort Worth TX. It “could now bid on U.S. aerospace contracts… The Convair Division would operate over the next half century primarily as an independent company under the General Dynamics corporate umbrella.”
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“In 1955 a gift of 320 acres of land from the city of San Diego helped [John Jay] Hopkins to establish the General Atomics Division. In collusion with the City Council, Hopkins was instrumental in persuading the Regents of the University of California [contract operators of Los Alamos weapons lab] to establish a ‘scientific and technical’ branch at La Jolla.” http://www.sandiegofreepress.org/2016/07/general-dynamics-san-diego/ The University of California San Diego was born. Further offspring soon joined the complex as the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Salk Institute of Biological Studies.
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A web of personal associations between H.James Rand and Odlum could be present in the following facts:
Rand’s wife, Martha Osborne Rand,was employed by Bonwit Teller, a women’s quality apparel store in New York, bought by the Odlums/AtlasCorp in 1934 and personally managed by (ex-) Mrs. Odlum for the next fifteen years. Other questions raised above have suggestive answers in the environment of Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, the Case Institute of Technology, and the Pugwash collaborations of Bird and Cyrus Eaton.
Case Western Medical hired Frederick C. Robbins in 1952 who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine for groundbreaking work on the isolation and growing of polioviruses, making the Salk and Sabin vaccines possible. Rand had a working relationship with Case Medical personnel, in at least one instance resulting in a successful product in 1947– a heart defibrillator co-developed with Dr. Claude S. Beck who was also hired in 1952 by the University. Dr. Robbins, incidentally, after retiring as the medical dean in 1980, worked on special tasks for the U.S. government which included becoming chairman of NASA Life Sciences Strategic Planning Study Committee during Reagan/Bush. To say that Robbins was well-connected in the nuclear establishment is an understatement. His father, William Jacob Robbins, was a renown plant physiologist, Director of the New York Botanical Gardens and laboratory, and longtime operative of the Rockefeller Foundation. The elder Robbins’ annual fishing buddies counted among them Karl T. Compton of MIT (native to the Cleveland area) and Jerome C. Hunsaker, a titan of aviation and director of NACA, NASA’s predecessor. All had worked for special projects of the Atomic Energy Commission. Frederick Robbins brother, Daniel Harvey Robbins, was a vice-president of Itek Corporation and optics engineer contributing to classified camera work for the CIA, used in the U-2, Corona, and subsequent spy satellites.
Case Technology employed T. Keith Glennan, who became an AEC Commissioner in 1950, returned to Case after his term and became the first chief of NASA in 1958. Glennan was the head of NASA when H.J.Rand and Bookbinder were escorting NASA’s top medical man around the USSR. Floyd Odlum and his second wife, aviator Jacqueline Cochran, were also traveling in Russia in this time period, extending over the defections of Webster and Oswald.
The operating founders of the Cleveland Clinic, the Drs.Crile, father and son, lived next-door to Rand.
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James H. Rand III bought this ‘sanitarium’ and hotel in 1934 (his approx. age 22) and renamed it Ohio Institute of Oxygen Therapy, used for research and closed down two years later. The hyperbaric steel sphere was later dismantled for scrap in the war effort. “Oxygen therapy” was precisely the shared interest of Dr. Randy Lovelace and Dr. Sam White which brought them together as colleagues and friends.
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Taking the suggestion from Gary Hill that Webster and Oswald were controlled by the same Forces, namely Rand Development Corp. providing oversight of both defectors, a relevant timeline [to be posted] emerges full of possibility. Added to the timeline activity is an even greater resource from the legacy documents of Cyrus S. Eaton: the Eaton Papers at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Cursory perusal of the collection presents nearly every contextual element supporting the Atomic Agent Oswald framework described here.
While the lists make only guesswork of the contents, the evidence of longstanding personal contact with Eaton includes James H. Rand, Christopher Bird, David Rockefeller, Edward Teller, Lewis Strauss, Clint Murchison Sr. and family, the Mellon family, Rockefeller family members and Rockefeller Foundation, John J. McCloy, John McCone, George Kennan, Roger Revelle (of Scripps Institute of Oceanography), Linus Pauling, Leo Szilard, Allen Dulles, Dean Rusk, Alfred P. Sloan, Leo Cherne, Earl Warren, Harry Byrd, Henry Kissinger and many more recognizable people. Business contacts range over the alphabet from Alcoa, Anglo-American (South Africa), Atlas Corporation, Dresser Industries, Dupont, Kerr-McGee, Itek, Loeb Rhodes & Co, Pfizer, Seagram & Sons, Sears Roebuck, Shell Oil, Standard Oil, RCA, Rio Tinto Zinc, TRW, Texas Gulf Sulphur, Textron (owner of Bell Helicopter), U.S. Rubber, Vanadium Corp. and various mining companies in taconite (iron), uranium, coal, gas, oil, gold, diamonds, copper, platinum, etc. Interwoven are the special project folders like the American National Exhibit in Moscow 1959, Atoms For Peace Awards, Atomic Industrial Forum, American Security Council, March of Dimes, Planned Parenthood, “Gary Francis Powers”, Radio Free Europe, Rotary Clubs Int’l, etc., etc, etc
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….Eaton, Bird, Odlum, Rand and Bookbinder… all possibly Webster’s defection ‘managers’. Were they Oswald’s managers, too?
“Twice in the span of his Moscow [exhibition] assignment Webster returned home, presumably in line with his work. He was also trying to make up his mind about other things, Rand believes. Apparently there were attempts even then to dissuade him from defecting. When they failed, Rand flew to Moscow and got in touch with Anastas Mikoyan (Mikoyan visited Cyrus Eaton once and is or was second in command of all the Russians). This was in late fall, 1959…” –ref. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 19, 1962; http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=55073&relPageId=159
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“Mikoyan is still warmly remembered by many Americans for his surprise high-level visit to the United States in 1959 where he opened the Soviet exhibition in New York [N.Y.Coliseum opening night June29, 1959, which may be in error regarding Mikoyan. Mikoyan paid the U.S. an earlier unofficial visit Jan-Feb.] and met with businessmen like Averell Harriman and John J. McCloy… In Washington, he met President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. In Cleveland he visited.. Cyrus Eaton… That same year, Mikoyan also paid a very important visit to Cuba and fell in love with the island.” https://abovyangroup.org/2014/05/25/mikoyan-enigma/
Anastas Mikoyan, Deputy Premier of the USSR, with J.F.Dulles (Dulles died May 24 1959)*
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One can generate narrative from the Eaton Papers folder listing alone, regardless of the content of those folders. The plethora of related “groupings” cannot be coincidence. Below is a brief example of one grouping which can be expanded from the same folder list and journalist sources.
Box 279, folder: Richardson Foundation, 1956
The context of the Richardson Foundation from p77, George Bush, the Unauthorized Biography : “…Prescott Bush was essentially a covert operative in Washington. On June 10, 1954, Bush received a letter from Connecticut resident H. Smith Richardson, owner of Vick Chemical Company (cough drops, Vapo-Rub)…[which read], ”I want to get your advice and counsel on…what should be done with the income from a foundation which my brother and I set up, and which will begin its operation in 1956…” This letter presages the establishment of the H. Smith Richardson Foundation, a Bush family-dictated private slush fund which was to be utilized by the Central Intelligence Agency… The Bush family knew Richardson through their mutual friendship with Sears Roebuck chairman, Gen. Robert E. Wood… General Wood’s daughter Mary had married the son of Standard Oil president William Stamps Farish… In The late 1950s, the H. Smith Richardson Foundation took part in the ‘psychological warfare’ of the CIA…carried out mainly against unwitting U.S. citizens.”
Box 279, folder: Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, 1960-1973
Context from Family of Secrets, pp70-75: “While Dimitri von Mohrenschildt clearly enjoyed the high-society glamour [of elite life in the U.S.], in reality his life was heading underground. Dimitri’s lengthy covert resume would include serving in the [OSS] wartime spy agency and later cofounding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty… When the Hooker marriage unraveled, Dimitri began seeing Betty Hooker… Betty’s son, Edward Gordon Hooker, entered prep school..[and] shared a small cottage with George H.W. ‘Poppy’ Bush… The relationship between Bush and Hooker lasted…until 1967, when Hooker died of an apparent heart attack. He was just forty-three… In 1937, Betty Hooker and Dimitri von Mohrenschildt married. By then, Dimitri had been hired by Henry Luce as a stringer for Time magazine… Meanwhile, Dimitri’s younger brother George…finished highschool and then joined a military academy… [George de Mohrenschildt came to the U.S. in 1938, moved in with Dimitri and Betty, and eventually] “In 1950, together with Poppy Bush’s old friend and former roommate Eddie Hooker, [George] launched a modest oil investment firm, Hooker and deMohrenschildt with ‘offices’ in New York, Denver, and Abilene…”
Box 120, folder: Dresser Industries, 1944-1959
Context from Family of Secrets, Ch.3: “After graduating from Yale in 1948, Poppy [GHWB] headed out to visit ‘Uncle Neil’ at Dresser Industries, which were then in Cleveland. Mallon dispatched [GHW, Barbara, and baby George] to Odessa [Texas]… Poppy’s initial jobs included sweeping out warehouses…but he was soon asked to handle more…[escorting foreign clients and dignitaries]… [T]here is the not-surprising fact that Dresser was well-known in the right circles as providing handy cover to CIA operatives… Continuing his whirlwind ‘training’, Dresser transferred Bush to California…to work the assembly line at Dresser’s Pacific Pump Works…[which was], like Dresser, an important cog in the war machine. The firm…even provided crucial parts for the top-secret process that produced the [first] atomic bombs… In 1950, Dresser was completing a corporate relocation to Dallas, which besides being an oil capital was rapidly becoming a center of the defense industry and its military-industrial-energy elite… Neil Mallon quickly set about bringing the conservative titans of Dallas society together in a new local chapter of the non-profit Council on World Affairs, in whose Cleveland branch he had been active. Started in 1918, the World Affairs Councils of America were a localized equivalent of the Rockefeller-backed Council on Foreign Relations, the presidency of which Allen Dulles had just resigned to take his post at the CIA.”
Box 279, folder: Richardson Foundation, 1956
The context of the Richardson Foundation from p77, George Bush, the Unauthorized Biography : “…Prescott Bush was essentially a covert operative in Washington. On June 10, 1954, Bush received a letter from Connecticut resident H. Smith Richardson, owner of Vick Chemical Company (cough drops, Vapo-Rub)…[which read], ”I want to get your advice and counsel on…what should be done with the income from a foundation which my brother and I set up, and which will begin its operation in 1956…” This letter presages the establishment of the H. Smith Richardson Foundation, a Bush family-dictated private slush fund which was to be utilized by the Central Intelligence Agency… The Bush family knew Richardson through their mutual friendship with Sears Roebuck chairman, Gen. Robert E. Wood… General Wood’s daughter Mary had married the son of Standard Oil president William Stamps Farish… In The late 1950s, the H. Smith Richardson Foundation took part in the ‘psychological warfare’ of the CIA…carried out mainly against unwitting U.S. citizens.”
Box 279, folder: Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, 1960-1973
Context from Family of Secrets, pp70-75: “While Dimitri von Mohrenschildt clearly enjoyed the high-society glamour [of elite life in the U.S.], in reality his life was heading underground. Dimitri’s lengthy covert resume would include serving in the [OSS] wartime spy agency and later cofounding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty… When the Hooker marriage unraveled, Dimitri began seeing Betty Hooker… Betty’s son, Edward Gordon Hooker, entered prep school..[and] shared a small cottage with George H.W. ‘Poppy’ Bush… The relationship between Bush and Hooker lasted…until 1967, when Hooker died of an apparent heart attack. He was just forty-three… In 1937, Betty Hooker and Dimitri von Mohrenschildt married. By then, Dimitri had been hired by Henry Luce as a stringer for Time magazine… Meanwhile, Dimitri’s younger brother George…finished highschool and then joined a military academy… [George de Mohrenschildt came to the U.S. in 1938, moved in with Dimitri and Betty, and eventually] “In 1950, together with Poppy Bush’s old friend and former roommate Eddie Hooker, [George] launched a modest oil investment firm, Hooker and deMohrenschildt with ‘offices’ in New York, Denver, and Abilene…”
Box 120, folder: Dresser Industries, 1944-1959
Context from Family of Secrets, Ch.3: “After graduating from Yale in 1948, Poppy [GHWB] headed out to visit ‘Uncle Neil’ at Dresser Industries, which were then in Cleveland. Mallon dispatched [GHW, Barbara, and baby George] to Odessa [Texas]… Poppy’s initial jobs included sweeping out warehouses…but he was soon asked to handle more…[escorting foreign clients and dignitaries]… [T]here is the not-surprising fact that Dresser was well-known in the right circles as providing handy cover to CIA operatives… Continuing his whirlwind ‘training’, Dresser transferred Bush to California…to work the assembly line at Dresser’s Pacific Pump Works…[which was], like Dresser, an important cog in the war machine. The firm…even provided crucial parts for the top-secret process that produced the [first] atomic bombs… In 1950, Dresser was completing a corporate relocation to Dallas, which besides being an oil capital was rapidly becoming a center of the defense industry and its military-industrial-energy elite… Neil Mallon quickly set about bringing the conservative titans of Dallas society together in a new local chapter of the non-profit Council on World Affairs, in whose Cleveland branch he had been active. Started in 1918, the World Affairs Councils of America were a localized equivalent of the Rockefeller-backed Council on Foreign Relations, the presidency of which Allen Dulles had just resigned to take his post at the CIA.”
*
The vignettes above are but a subgroup that can be drawn from a larger group including Box 352, folder: U.S. Rubber Company, 1928-1965. The U.S. Rubber Co. was purchased by W.A. Harriman and Co. in 1928 which promptly installed Prescott Bush as its international sales executive. U.S. Rubber sponsored an array of intelligence activity within its extensive reach. This grouping can also include Box 294, folder: Slick Airways Inc 1956-1972., owned by Texas oilman, adventurer, and CIA operative Tom Slick who also sponsored MK-Ultra programming. Perhaps it suffices to demonstrate that Eaton’s business, and the legacy of his document collection, was an extension of the Anglo-American intelligence establishment.
*
Economic Warfare
*
An Economic Defense Advisory Committee (EDAC) policy paper issued by the U.S. Dept. of State in January 1959 notes that “..Only the Department of Commerce [ headed by Sec. Adm. Lewis L. Strauss] has made recommendations for changing current policy…[to] the reversal of the present attitude toward ‘peaceful trade’ and the substitution of the economic warfare approach… which would deny US exports of strategic or nonstrategic goods to the USSR unless such exports are individually determined to be to the advantage of the US.” https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v04/d342,
The CIA weighed-in with this addition: (item report #d335) “The Soviets probably genuinely desire an increase in US-USSR trade. The possibilities for expanding this trade are severely restricted, however, by the limited range of Soviet goods likely to be marketable in the US… We believe it reasonable.. to modify certain administrative restrictions, especially export licensing, [so that]US export to the USSR might expand over the next few years… the USSR [can balance trade].. by selling more gold to the Free World… [T]his special estimate, submitted by the CIA, was prepared by CIA, INR, and the intelligence organizations of the Departments of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Joint Staff. All members of the U.S. Intelligence Board concurred in this estimate on October 7 [1958] with the exception of the representatives of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation who abstained on the grounds that the topic was outside their jurisdiction.”
The CIA weighed-in with this addition: (item report #d335) “The Soviets probably genuinely desire an increase in US-USSR trade. The possibilities for expanding this trade are severely restricted, however, by the limited range of Soviet goods likely to be marketable in the US… We believe it reasonable.. to modify certain administrative restrictions, especially export licensing, [so that]US export to the USSR might expand over the next few years… the USSR [can balance trade].. by selling more gold to the Free World… [T]his special estimate, submitted by the CIA, was prepared by CIA, INR, and the intelligence organizations of the Departments of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Joint Staff. All members of the U.S. Intelligence Board concurred in this estimate on October 7 [1958] with the exception of the representatives of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation who abstained on the grounds that the topic was outside their jurisdiction.”
*
Perhaps it is emblematic of the FBI and AEC to secretly share their joint responsibility for global nuclear security intelligence –withheld even from the U.S. intelligence community at large . Readers of Atomic Agent Oswald are familiar with the collaboration of the FBI/AEC “dual agent” program (1949-1964), mediated by the FBI’s Charles Bates between the principals, J.Edgar Hoover and Lewis Strauss, and among the erstwhile agents. No remnant of the publicly available declassified file covers the period from 1954 to 1964 (file closed Sep30, 1964) as the world witnessed new international trade in atomic technology.
***Here’s an example of that trade in hindsight: “[I]n 1957, as part of the Atoms For Peace program, Washington had the components for a TRIGA Mark I reactor delivered to [the Belgian] Congo. This compact facility was made by..General Atomic and installed by on-site Belgian technicians. It went operational in 1959 ..[and was] hailed..as a symbol of progress in Africa…[even as] the young nation quickly descended into civil war and chaos… Twenty years later, one of the fuel rods suddenly turned up in Italy. Smugglers offered the uranium, which was at least 20-percent enriched, to what they thought were buyers from the Middle East– in reality agents of the Italian police’s Central Investigating Service… [A]uthorities apprehended twelve people, all of them members of the mafia…” pp154-155, A Short History of Nuclear Folly, by Rudolph Herzog, 2012.
……So, what was jurisdictional to the FBI and AEC regarding economic warfare policy in commercial trade?
“As the investigative arm of the Department of Justice, the FBI is responsible, among its other duties, for catching spies… Contrary to popular belief however, the FBI does have some agents overseas. They are assigned to American embassies, usually under the cover of ‘legal attaches.” [p.203, The Invisible Government, 1964]
“Because of the law which set it up and its close relationship to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the Congress, the AEC is one of the most independent branches of the Invisible Government. One of Eisenhower’s parting admonitions to Kennedy was: ‘You may be able to run lots of things around here. But one of them you can’t run is the AEC.’“ [p201, The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, 1964]
* AEC chairman John A. McCone (center) 1958*
*“McCone gained a reputation as an uncompromising supporter of John Foster Dulles’ doctrine of massive retaliation, the Air Force’s atomic warfare theories, and the hard-line strategy against the Soviet Union.” p196, The Invisible Government
*“McCone gained a reputation as an uncompromising supporter of John Foster Dulles’ doctrine of massive retaliation, the Air Force’s atomic warfare theories, and the hard-line strategy against the Soviet Union.” p196, The Invisible Government*
Roswell Garst (left foreground) offered hybrid corn to the USSR in January 1959, and again for the cameras on Krushchev’s goodwill tour of the U.S., September 15-27, 1959. The Russians wanted industrial chemicals and steel.*
As far as U.S.-USSR atomic relations were concerned, 1959 was an historic breakthrough year under the sway of a nuclear test moratorium. On September 15, after the closure of Moscow’s American National Exhibit, Nikita Krushchev and entourage flew to Washington for a 12-day visit. The first order of business on that day was a Krushchev meeting with Eisenhower and a separate meeting of the Soviet atomic energy chief, Vasily S. Emelyanov, with the AEC’s John McCone.
*
*Ambassador Lodge managed Eisenhower’s presidential campaign* 
*
On September 17, Krushchev and his party boarded a train for New York City, accompanied by an American escort, Ambassador and US representative to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Lodge wrote in his personal notes of the “conversation with Krushchev on the train…[that] he used it as occasion to bring up the subject of nuclear tests… On the negotiations on the cessation of nuclear tests he said that we wanted to get intelligence operators into the Soviet Union….” http://www.dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/frus/frus58-60×1/11soviet5.html
*
The same day in New Orleans, from the premises of the Int’l Trade Mart, Lee Oswald was booked on a freighter to Europe.
*
*
NUCLEAR EXCHANGE
In the name of peace and progress, an immediate schedule of travel was arranged for select officials and scientists: “The exchange of delegations took place at a time –October 1959– when the Soviets were America’s only nuclear rival… The American delegation consisted of top AEC brass…” https://ornl.gov/blog/ornl-review/alvin-weinberg-and-scientific-diplomacy-cold-war
Another Soviet delegation arrived in the U.S. in November: [newspaper clip] “This visit by the Russian scientists is in implementation of the information exchange arrangements agreed to during Prof. Emelyanov’s visit to the United States in September, and is similar to the recent tour of Soviet atomic energy installations by Chairman McCone of the USAEC with a group of U.S. nuclear scientists.”
[newspaper clip] “The Brookhaven National Laboratory..received a visit from the party of top Soviet[s]..which has been touring various atomic energy installations in the [U.S.] since November 5… [F]inal meetings [are] in Washington…”
“[AEC] Chairman John A. McCone and his Soviet counterpart, Professor Vasily S. Emelyanov, signed a Memorandum on Cooperation on November 24, 1959, covering exchanges of visits and information on several unclassified areas of peaceful nuclear application.”
*
Undersecretary of Commerce Frederick H. Mueller with McCone* 
*
The American atomic contingent, led by AEC chairman McCone, took the initiative of visiting the USSR shortly after Krushchev’s 12-day tour. The exact itinerary, arrival and departure, of McCone’s party is not known to this researcher –only this item from the New York Times: “McCone Flies to Leningrad”…”Leaves Moscow for Leningrad”, NYT p23, dated October 11, 1959
*
This newspaper notice follows by one day Oswald’s arrival in Helsinki, Finland:
“The State Department was later concerned that Oswald had received his [USSR] visa in Helsinki in a shorter period of time than usual, which would indicate that there might have been some preparation for his defection. The Warren Commission’s analysts.. assumed that Oswald received his visa on October 14 after arriving in Helsinki on the tenth [a Saturday], though he may have applied for it as late as the twelfth [Monday], leading to the conclusion that ‘Oswald probably received his visa four days after he applied for it, but he may have received it only two days later.’ They [WC] recognized that the speed with which Oswald received his visa could lend credence to the CIA theory they quoted as suggesting that ‘Soviet authorities had advance warning of Oswald’s arrival and had been ready and waiting to handle him rapidly once he arrived.’ ” p288, Legend, the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, 1978, by Edward Jay Epstein
*
As of October 1959, the whereabouts of Robert Webster were unknown to Americans:
“Webster…disappeared on September 10, 1959. Upon returning to the United States, Dr. Rand, Webster’s employer, reported his disappearance to the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow wrote a note to the Soviet Foreign Ministry requesting information on Webster. When he had received no reply regarding his former employee by October 14, Rand returned to Moscow. On October 17 [Rand] and Richard L. Snyder of the American Embassy obtained an interview with Webster who had been brought to Moscow from an undisclosed address in Leningrad, then handed Snyder a signed statement renouncing his United States citizenship… He told Snyder that he would send him his American passport as soon as he returned to Leningrad. (According to the CIA defector list, Webster handed Snyder his passport on October 19, 1959.)” p291 (Notes) Legend, ibid.
If the Legend notes are accurate and Webster surrendered his American citizenship at a police station and then left the city –for a month-long vacation with his girlfriend, as it stands– avoidance of the U.S. Embassy may have preserved his anonymity with embassy staffers. If the embassy needed to write “a note to the Soviet Foreign Ministry requesting information on Webster”, what didn’t they know? Is it possible that Robert Webster assumed the identity of Lee Oswald at this time to make a record of Oswald’s pre-defection activity in England, Sweden and Finland?
According to Mark North in Act of Treason: “On 6/3/60 Hoover sent a memo to the State Department entitled ‘Lee Harvey Oswald, Internal Security’ in which he stated ‘Since there is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald’s birth certificate, any current information the Department of State may have concerning subject will be appreciated.’ The [birth] certificate had disappeared in New Orleans around the time of Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union.” p57, Act of Treason, by Mark North, 1991.
Oswald’s means and timing of travel from the U.K. is still unknown and in dispute: He told the U.K. customs office, on or about October 9, that he planned to spend a week in England. Late the next day, “According to Finnish hotel records, he checked in midnight on Friday at the Torni Hotel in downtown Helsinki, then moved on Saturday to the less expensive Klaus Kurki Hotel where he remained registered for five days. Swedish intelligence has found evidence that Oswald traveled to Stockholm during this period…” pp93-94, Legend
In addition to later statements from Marina that her husband worked for the American exhibition, there is a more direct reference in Legend that suggests Webster was using Oswald’s name: “The close coincidence between the movements of Oswald and Webster, as well as their not dissimilar physical appearance, possibly accounts for a number of mistaken identifications. Fritz Dieter Jaeger of the German Merchant Marine told the FBI in 1963 that he had met Oswald in Leningrad in 1961 and gone to the movies with him. It turned out that he had met Webster.” p.292, ibid.
*
6-week concentrated timeline of the Webster–Oswald defections:
September 4 —last day of the American National Exhibition in Moscow. In Santa Ana CA, Oswald is released from his MACS unit and goes to the local courthouse to apply for a passport which he receives Sept. 10
September 10 or 11 — Webster ‘disappears’, reportedly last seen at a party attended by KGB to celebrate his defection.
September 11 — Oswald is formally discharged from the active duty Marines. He arranges bus travel to Ft. Worth TX, arriving Sept. 14
September 15 — Krushchev, Atomic minister Emelyanov and entourage arrive in Washington D.C. for a goodwill tour. Oswald visits his brother’s family.
September 17 — Krushchev advises Ambassador Lodge, on the subject of nuclear test cessation, to ‘get intelligence operators into the Soviet Union.’ Later the same day, Oswald books an ocean passage to Europe on the S.S. Marion Lykes. He registers at the Liberty Hotel –his birth certificate is stolen, according to the FBI.
September 20 — Oswald sails for the port of LeHavre, France
September 21 — Webster is granted a Soviet passport.
*
Over the course of the next two weeks, Krushchev returns to the USSR and a U.S. Atomic Energy delegation headed by John Alex McCone arrives in Moscow.
*
October 8-10 — Oswald disembarks in France (8), ferries to U.K. (9), and flies to Helsinki (10) arriving at approx. midnight
October 11 — McCone and company ‘leave Moscow for Leningrad’. Webster is assumed to reside in Leningrad.
October 12 — Oswald applies for a Soviet visa at the consulate in Helsinki. He receives it October 14
October 14 — H.J. Rand, from the U.S., reports his former employee Webster is missing. Rand arranges travel to Leningrad.
October 17 — Rand and Bookbinder accompany Webster to Moscow where he defects from an OVIR office
October 18 — Webster and KGB girlfriend/co-worker leave together for a one month vacation in Sochi.
Oct. 17-19 — Oswald makes his first ‘attempt’ to defect. On Oct. 20, he is called to a meeting by Soviet authorities about defection.
*
*
AEC chief McCone’s official atomic exchange visit with the Soviets in October of 1959 presents a remarkable intrigue for coinciding with the Webster/Oswald defections.Had they revived the FBI/AEC Dual Agent program? Is this a display of coordinating the “same forces” controlling both men? The background of this timing plays out amidst thousands of professional ‘exchange’ visitors and tens of thousands of tourists crossing the Atlantic between the U.S. and USSR, not to mention visitors and defectors from other countries. The Lacy-Zaroubin Agreement signed in January of 1958 formalized a negotiated minimum of professional visitors; from scientists to ballet dancers to film crews and students. Ruth Paine is associated with a 1958 exchange student effort from the anti-nuclear Society of Friends in Philadelphia. Mind-control theme research from the guests and hosts of gnosticmedia.com relate that George DeMohrenschildt co-operated the Russian Student Fund with CIA- affiliated anthropologist R. Gordon Wasson.
The relevance of questions concerning McCone’s oversight of Oswald is substantiated in the immediate aftermath of the assassination: McCone “rushed to Hickory Hill…to be with Bobby” and was present for the phone call confirming JFK’s death. “A few minutes later, he and Robert left the house and walked around the lawn, speaking privately…” These were the moments in which RFK asked McCone ‘if they had killed my brother’ according to RFK aide Walter Sheridan. “McCone returned to [CIA] headquarters at around 1530, summoned the CIA Executive Committee… [I]ssued orders for all stations and bases… [and] directed that a special cable channel be established so that all [communication] traffic related to Lee Harvey Oswald..went to a central repository, and he sent a [blank] to Parkland Hospital..to coordinate activities with the Secret Service and the FBI. After the Secret Service obtained a graphic film of the assassination taken by.. Zapruder, McCone had the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) officers.. prepare briefing boards…”. In the months ahead, as the Warren Commission set upon its duties, “…DCCI Marshall Carter recalled that McCone said he would ‘handle the whole [commission] business myself, directly’…” http://www.nsarchiv2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB493/docs/intell_ebb_026.PDF
In this 2015 ‘report’ by David Robarge, published by the CIA’s own Studies on Intelligence, is noted that “Mr. McCone withheld evidence the CIA secretly monitored Oswald’s mail after he attempted to defect… [and] it suggests the White House may have directed him to hide the information.” It just doesn’t say which White House.
*
John McCone, in a 1988 legacy interview, elaborated on a few features of his early career after graduating from UCBerkeley: “I knew Ernest Lawrence…an extraordinarily bright young man…And I saw him on and off until the war [WWII] started and he became involved with the Manhattan Project.” [Q: Did you know him when he was working on the first cyclotron?] “Yes, I raised some money in the early 1930s to help him develop his cyclotron…We are talking about a very small unit and small amounts of money –hundreds of dollars, not thousands…to build a little machine… So, it wasn’t any great undertaking but it was the opening step in the whole area of [U.S.] nuclear science.” [Q: Tell us about your business interests after World War II.] “After the close of the war, we [e.g.Steve Bechtel] liquidared the shipbuilding companies… Then we returned, Mr. Bechtel and I, to our original objective of construction-engineering…[and] we had a shipping enterprise that I was very much interested in…And so we came back in the shipping business, with tankers and so on… We had some manufacturing activities and the Joshua Hendy company in Sunnyvale [CA] and I was looking after those. And then in 1947, my life was kind of divided.. in government…[and] I wanted to do it. So, in the late 1940s I guess, I dissolved my interest with the Bechtels and acquired all of the equity in Hendy and directed that strictly toward the shipping business. I liked that type..of shipping that I was in, which was bulk movement of oil and ore…and I carried that on until 1970 when I liquidated all my business activities and retired.”
*
* Joshua Hendy Iron Works, Sunnyvale : “Hendy was acquired in 1946 by Westinghouse to make equipment for electrical utilities” http://www.asme.org/about-asme/who-we-are/engineering-history/landmarks/34-joshua-hendy-iron-works/
“In the postwar period, the [Hendy] plant continued to produce military equipment including missile-launching and control systems for nuclear-powered submarines. It also produced.. nuclear power plant equipment.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Hendy_Iron_Works
Hendy today: U.S. Air Force Satellite Test Center, Onizuka Air Force Station, http://facilities.fhda.edu/_downloads/HABS Onizuka
“After the war, Mr. McCone took over the Joshua Hendy Corp., a shipping firm that operated a fleet of tankers and cargo vessels…” [obituary] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1991/02/16/john-mccone-cia-director-for-kennedy-johnson-dies/…
*
McCone, as president of Hendy, became a member of President Truman’s Air Policy Commission: “I had not served in government at all when President Truman, in 1947, appointed a five-man Air Policy Commission… Through the recommendations of the Air Force, with whom I had worked very closely, I was asked to..serve as a counselor to that commission…[But]..ahenry Ford, who was the fifth member, was asked to withdraw by his board of directors..[concerned about] conflict of interest. So he withdrew and the president asked me to take the fifth position…which I did..on the condition that I devote time to the military aspects and that others could devote their time to civil aviation. So I wrote the part of the report dealing with the military myself. I took that part..before it was released, over to [Sec.of Defense] Forrestal and he read it and said….’why don’t you come in and act as acting deputy [secretary of defense]… So the next day…it was agreed… That’s the day that changed my life because it got me into government. I carried my business interests at the same time… The reson for that was that I was never committed exclusively to serving government as many men are. I preserved a two-track existence…[and] Throughout my business career…I was in close touch with military activities… [with] a respect for some of the officers and civilians that were involved in it. I had great respect for Forrestal, great respect for [John J.] McCloy and [Robert A.] Lovett…”
[conversation, The Eisenhower Years]
[Q: You served Eisenhower as head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Tell us about the argument that you made during that time concerning a possible test ban.]
“We were testing through the 1950s and there was a demand to stop it… [W]e made various attempts at a treaty which would suspend nuclear tests in the atmosphere. Everybody was in favor of it. It had to be a treaty that could be verified, so then they, the Soviets, proposed a moratorium. They said that they would not test. This was appealing to Eisenhower but it was not appealing to me as chairman of the [AEC] because our resources were detecting what they were doing. They would not guarantee against their violation of any arrangement. We wouldn’t know if they were continuing with development tests…[i.e] small weapons but large enough to advance the state-of-the-art as far as they were concerned. It posed a very tough argument to the president… pursued all the way through the last year of the Eisenhower administration and on into the Kennedy administration.”
[Q: Your first contacts with the Kennedy administration were also over the test ban issue?]
“There were several members of the Joint Committee [on Atomic Energy] who came to me and asked me if I would go and talk to President Kennedy… I wouldn’t do it… [But] then after a little while [October 1961] the Soviets suddenly exploded a big bomb [the largest ever] that was detected… And at that point President Kennedy asked if I would come talk to him and I did. That was the first meeting on this subject…”
[Q: Did the debate on the test ban involve you in further controversy?]
“In 1956 Adlai Stevenson had made a speech in San Diego in which he advocated that the United States unilaterally abandon all testing of nuclear devices. He was quite sure that if we did, the Soviets would follow the lead. I violently opposed that approach because I didn’t think the Soviets would follow. I didn’t think we had the detection devices to know whether they were following for sure, and that became a source of argument…. In any event, we finally got an arrangement with the Soviets that was satisfactory. We improved our detection capabilities so that they could not light a match without our knowing it…”
[Q: When President Kennedy brought you in to offer you a government job, were you surprised?]
“Sure, I was very much surprised. I never expected to serve in his administration in any capacity.”
[Q: ..because you were a Republican?]
“Because I did not know Kennedy. And I did not know..any of the people who were in his administration. I made this report [for him] when the Soviets violated the test moratorium. I thought that was the end of it. Then he asked me to come in and see him, and he proposed to me that I become the director of Central Intelligence… This surprised me… and he said a very interesting thing… ‘Now, there are only four people besides…Allen Dulles that know we are having this discussion [and] I don’t want anybody else to know about it’ …So, I..[only] talked to my wife about it, and we decided to go ahead…”
—1987-1988 interview of John A. McCone by Harry Kreisler, alumni of UCBerkeley
**
The old UCB Rad Lab (1920s and 1930s)
**
** **new Rad Lab c.1940 
**E.O. Lawrence’s first working cyclotron c.1928 
**1932, Lawrence with a 27inch table top model
*
**1932, Lawrence with a 27inch table top model
* Around the same time (1988) that the elderly McCone was dusting off his remembrances for UCBerkeley, a new book about his business activities was due for release — “Friends in High Places” by Laton McCartney, which was predominantly a look into the Bechtel Corporation run by McCone’s friend and partner Stephen D. Bechtel (Sr.). **
*
* Bechtel, the family held corporation, boasts today that “We have designed or built more than half of the nuclear power plant construction projects in the U.S. and provided services on 88% of them over the years.” And this just for the U.S.
The relationships making this possible revolve around McCone and date back no later than the early 1930s when the former UCBerkeley schoolmates, John McCone and Steve Bechtel, reconnected with each other in 1931, according to McCartney. Left out of ‘Friends’ is McCone’s early sponsorship of Ernest Lawrence and the Berkeley Rad Lab –the man and the lab that hired-on physicist Luis Alvarez in 1936. Alvarez’s sister was Lawrence’s devoted secretary. Luis Alvarez gave his approving imprimatur to the Warren Commission, the altered Zapruder film, the “shots from behind” and “single bullet” theories of the JFK assassination. Also missing from ‘Friends’ was the ownership of Joshua Hendy Iron Works by nuclear reactor builder and supplier Westinghouse.
It was up to McCone as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, expressly selected, to carry on the work of his predecessor, Adm. Lewis L. Strauss, and preside over the moratorium and disarmament goals of the American president.
*
NEXT: Atomic Oswald Three
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