Atomic Oswald Three

Part One: https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/atomic-agent-oswald/

Part Two: https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/atomic-oswald-two/

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It is still 1959 in this telling of Atomic Agent Oswald. John Kennedy’s future CIA Director and Eisenhower’s current Atomic Energy Commission chairman, John Alex McCone, has become the ‘reluctant‘ (by his words) facilitator of a nuclear weapons moratorium. As we learned in Atomic Oswald Two, McCone was quietly leading a vanguard delegation of American nuclear scientists on a tour of Moscow and Leningrad at precisely the time of the Robert Webster/Lee Oswald false defections to the Soviet Union.
The depth and breadth of McCone’s own stakeholding in the nuclear business has yet to be told –to the extent possible, it will. In the meantime, one may wonder how McCone came to be the CIA chief: if the offer was an ill-considered political move on the part of Kennedy, or there was much more to it. The root of McCone’s ascent and control of the CIA may lie here, in the following.
*
*For your consideration:

JFK was elected in early November of 1960, remained the “president-elect” until inauguration day on Jan. 20, 1961. In mid-December, JFK is busily lining up his cabinet. “He spent most of November and December at the Palm Beach house his father had bought…There, and later at his house on N Street in Georgetown, he began to put together a government.” (p24, President Kennedy, Profile in Power, by Richard Reeves, 1993) “Kennedy interviewed strangers for hours every day…” (p25) “…he was trying to put together a bipartisan government, with Republicans as shields on defense and economics. ‘Sound’ was the image he wanted to project” (p27) …”On December 15, Kennedy told Robert Kennedy to come to Georgetown for breakfast… John Kennedy said at breakfast ‘You will be Attorney General. I need you… I need someone I know to talk to in this government… So, that’s it, General,’ he said, standing up…. ‘Nine strangers and a brother for a Cabinet,’ said Fred Dutton, one of Kennedy’s talent scouts.” (p29, ibid.)

*

“By December 1960, John W. Finney had been a reporter for three years in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, covering nuclear issues and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) …but he had yet to bust a big one. Finney’s story came late that month as was, as Finney recalled, ‘handed to me on a platter.’ The messenger was the Times redoubtable Arthur Krock, the patriarch of Washington columnists, who approached Finney’s desk late one afternoon…  ‘Mr. Finney,’ Krock said, ‘I think if you call John McCone he’ll have a story for you’… Finney immediately understood the situation: ‘They were looking to plant a story. I was the right person and Krock was the intermediary.’ Finney made the call and was promptly invited to McCone’s office. ‘McCone was mad, sputtering mad,’ Finney recalled. ‘He started talking and saying, ‘They lied to us!’   Who?  ‘The Israelis. They told us it was a textile plant.’ There was new intelligence, McCone said, revealing that the Israelis had secretly built a nuclear reactor in the Negev with French help; McCone wanted Finney to take the story public. Finney’s subsequent article, published December 19 on page one in the Times, told the American people what Art Lundahl [Nat’l Photo Interpretation Center] and Dino Brugioni had been reporting to the White House for more than two years: that Israel, with the aid of the French, was building a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium. ‘Israel had made no public announcement about the reactor, nor has she privately informed the United States of her plan,’ Finney wrote faithfully reflecting what McCone told him…  Finney’s story also noted that McCone had ‘questioned’ Israel about the new information but then added: ‘Mr. McCone refused to go into details.’ It was standard operating proceedure for official Washington: Finney got the story and McCone was able to duck responsibility for giving it to him.

“McCone’s leak to Finney would be his parting shot as AEC commissioner; a few days later he announced his resignation on Meet The Press…  The Finney story was being written that same day. Finney was convinced, as McCone wanted him to be, that the commissioner’s anger stemmed from recently acquired knowledge, some new intelligence about the Israelis. ‘McCone left me with the impression,’ Finney recalled, ‘that they’d suddenly appreciated that the Israelis were lying to them.’ Finney paid a higher price than he realized for his big story; the Eisenhower administration was using him and the New York Times to accomplish what its senior officials were publicly apprehensive about doing themselves –taking on the Israelis over Dimona. McCone, as he did not indicate to Finney, had been briefed regularly on the Israeli nuclear program after replacing Lewis Strauss.. in July 1958; there is no evidence that Strauss, who also received regular briefings on Dimona from Art Lundahl and Dino Brugioni, personally shared his knowledge with McCone. But Lundahl and Brugioni did. McCone, as AEC chairman, was a member of the U.S. Intelligence Advisory Committee, the top-level group at the time, and was, according to Walter N. Elder, a former CIA official who was McCone’s long-time aide ‘in on the action from the beginning. He sat at the table.’ “ pp71-73, The Samson Option, by Seymour M. Hersh, 1991

Background on Dimona and Israel’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is here: Lewis Strauss and JFK, part three at the top

Lewis Strauss and JFK, Part III

*Explanations of Walt Elder’s remarks about McCone are not included in The Samson Option –i.e. when the ‘beginning’ began, what ‘action’ at whose ‘table’–significant questions regarding the complex represented by McCone. Hersh does, however, ask this question: “What made McCone (who died in early 1991 after a long, incapacitating illness) join the [outgoing] administration in suddenly reacting to intelligence that had been around for years?”
— answer it for yourself but read on for a suggestion.
“Whatever the reason, even before McCone’s summoning of John Finney, there was a coordinated effort at the top levels of government to make Israel acknowledge what it was doing at Dimona. Such unanimity of purpose and widespread access to sensitive intelligence about Dimona wouldn’t happen again –ever.” p74, The Samson Option, by Seymour M. Hersh, 1991
*
When the Dimona story broke in the Times, President-elect Kennedy had one month until the inauguration. His new Cabinet met with the Eisenhower team for an official briefing on world affairs only once –January 19, the ‘eve’ of their investment. “Kennedy and Eisenhower..were alone for forty-five minutes… [Eisenhower] began with the black vinyl satchel, “the Football”, which contained nuclear options, commands, and codes… carried by military officers who handed it off to each other in eight-hour shifts… [then] they walked into the Cabinet Room for an official working session with the old and new secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury… Kennedy had requested discussion in four categories; (1) Trouble Spots…. Kennedy asked about atomic weapons in other countries. ‘Israel and India,’ [Christian A.] Herter replied. The Israelis had a reactor capable of producing ninety kilograms of weapons-quality plutonium by 1963. He advised Kennedy to demand inspection and control before there were atomic bombs in the Middle East. In India, he said, the Russians were helping build  a reactor. The meeting ended before noon…” pp29-3o, President Kennedy, by Richard Reeves; And on that note, the official briefing was over. Mr. Reeves offers in the introduction an observation on page 19, “There was an astonishing density of event during the Kennedy years“, escaping no one’s attention.

***

Late 1960 Dimona was ‘domed’ and visible from the nearby road. At any moment or place, news of the reactor could break in the world press. The CIA’s U-2 reconnaisance had overflown the Dimona construction site any number of times on its way to the Soviet borders. The U-2 flightpaths were the same route flown by Francis Gary Powers on his takedown ride.

The spy satellites were coming: “On January 31, 1961, the Americans successfully placed the first SAMOS satellite in orbit. The era of the spy satellite had been born, and the intelligence game would never be the same again.” p70, Cold Warrior, James Jesus Angleton…, by Tom Mangold, 1991

The Powers Incident: “On May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Powers, the most experienced U-2 pilot with twenty-seven completed missions, including overflights of the Soviet Union and China, departed from Peshawar [Pakistan] to carry out Operation GRAND SLAM –the twenty-fourth and most ambitious deep-penetration flight in the U-2 program, which was planned to fly across the Soviet Union from south to north… The primary target [was] Plesetsk, which..might be an operational ICBM facility… But Powers never made it to Plesetsk… Four and a half hours into the mission, while Powers was above Sverdlovsk, an SA-2 anti-aircraft missile had detonated at 70,500 feet just behind Powers’ aircraft, disabling it.” p18, The Wizards of Langley, by Jeffrey T. Richelson, 2001

*The U-2 began formal operations in the summer of 1956 

“Richard Bissell and Kelly Johnson had no illusions that the U-2 would be perpetually invulnerable to Soviet countermeasures. All they hoped for was a couple of good years. The Soviet ability to detect and track the plane from the beginning was not expected, but they began thinking about a successor plane long before the May 1, 1960 Powers incident.     In August 1957, the Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI), a Boston-based CIA proprietary that had been working on ways to reduce U-2 vulnerability, began to investigate the possibility of designing an aircraft with a small radar cross-section. SEI soon discovered that supersonic speed dramatically reduced the chance of detection by radar… Both Lockheed and the Convair Division of General Dynamics were informed of the [SEI] conclusion to guide their research on a possible U-2 successor… To assist him in evaluating proposals, Bissell once again called on Edwin Land [of Polaroid] to serve as chairman of an advisory group… In early August 1960, the U-2 was no longer flying over the Soviet Union… But another CIA-managed project was about to pay huge dividends and revolutionize U.S. intelligence capabilities… The primary objective of the program [underway in 1958], first known as the Advanced Reconnaisance System (ARS), then as SENTRY, and finally as SAMOS, was to develop a satellite that would electronically scan the photographs obtained by its cameras and transmit the data back to a ground station where it could be reconstructed into a picture. A subsidiary objective was to develop a satellite that would return its film back to earth in a canister.    …Not surprisingly, Bissell was assigned to manage the new satellite program, which would soon be designated CORONA…   Out on the West Coast, Charlie Murphy, a longtime Air Force designee to the CIA, served as Bissell’s Field Technical Director at the Lockheed Advanced Projects (AP) facility in Palo Alto…    Five contractors played key roles in the development of CORONA. Itek, a Boston-based company founded by Richard Leghorn, and Fairchild Camera and Instruments were asked to develop camera systems. General Electric and Eastman-Kodak were, respectively, awarded contracts for developing the recovery capsule and supplying the film. The Lockheed corporation would have a dual role..[plus] the responsibility for integrating the entire effort…. [A] small program office.. was established at the Ballistic Missile Division headquarters near Los Angeles. Work on the ‘black’ side of the project was handled down the hall.” pp20-24, The Wizards of Langley

*John McCone and Steve Bechtel were among the exclusive members of Mandalay Camp at Bohemian Grove, going back the 1930s: “The most elite of the camps is Mandalay. A visitor once said of it, ‘You don’t just walk in there –you are summoned.’ Mr. [Gerald] Ford and Mr. [Henry] Kissinger this year [1977] were guests of Mandalay whose members include Stephen Bechtel Sr., Stephen Bechtel Jr., Leonard Case Firestone and Edgar F. Kaiser, among the industrialists; former CIA director John McCone and [Gen.] Lucius D. Clay, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [and senior partner in Lehman Brothers]. Following closely in Mandalay’s footsteps is Cave Man Camp. Its members have included Herbert Hoover, a dedicated Bohemian who was known to fellow campers as ‘the Chief’…” http://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/14/archives/bohemian-grove-where-big-shots-go-to-camp.html

***

***https://exposebohemiangrove.org/category/camps/mandalay-camp/***

One key individual in the Bohemian web of relationships that united John McCone, Steve Bechtel, Foster and Allen Dulles, Lewis Strauss, Herbert Hoover and many others was John Lowery Simpson, the maternal uncle of Stephen D. Bechtel (Sr.)’s wife Laura, and a member of the club’s Isle of Aves camp. Simpson, a close friend to the Dulles brothers, introduced John McCone to Allen Dulles at an intimate dinner party in Dulles’s home, circa 1947. At that time, Simpson was a vice-president of the J. Henry Schroder bank of London and New York –he stated in a 1978 oral history (e-book) that “Foster was our [Schroder bank] senior lawyer and Allen was also our lawyer…”

…“Schroder Bank, of which Simpson remained a director after joining Bechtel, was recently discovered to have been a bank for the CIA director’s controversial discretionary fund…” http://www.educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/4582-john-alex-mccone/?page=2

**

Simpson photo source:

https://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com/the-reading-library/cia-declassified-document-library/frank-g-wisner-appointed-chief-of-si-mission-istanbul-turkey/*

 

“[I]n Who’s Who in America for 1952, Mr. Simpson states that he served under Herbert Hoover on the Commission for Relief in Belgium from 1915 to 1917; U.S. Food Administration, 1917 to 1918; American Relief Commission 1919, and with P.N. [Prentiss] Gray Company [in] Vienna, 1919 to 1921. Gray was the Chief of Maritime Transportation for the U.S. Food Administration, which enabled him to set up his own shipping company after the war. Like other Hoover humanitarians, Simpson also joined the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corp. (Adolf Hitler’s personal bankers) and the J.Henry Schroder Trust Company… Simpson states he was consultant to the Bechtel-McCone interests in war production during WWII…” http://www.coldcaseupdate.blogspot.com/2011/02/vijay-prashad-frank-wisner-jr.html

Readers can learn more about “Hoover’s Relief” here: https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/lewis-strauss-and-jfk/

For the campers at the Grove, a singular pride in production accompanies coordination of the S-1 Committee, leaders in the Manhattan Project, photographed at Bohemian Grove, September 1942. ***

*

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_bohemiangrove08.htm

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“After graduating from Berkeley, [Simpson] had gone to work for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a joint U.S.-British project… He spent five years in Europe schooling himself in Continental finance, making the social rounds (most notably in Vienna, where he married a well-connected socialite, Margrete Mandel) and developed a close friendship with CRB’s head and his fellow San Franciscan Herbert Hoover. On his return to the United States, Simpson joined the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, a leading New York investment house… One evening during the mid-1930s, as Simpson was thrashing through an especially difficult contract, his friend and boss, Prent Gray..suggested the two of them seek advice from Sullivan & Cromwell, a law firm headquartered in the same building. During the Paris Peace Conference, Gray had met one of the firm’s partners… His name was John Foster Dulles. Perhaps, Gray suggested, he could help.
“‘Foster’ did help.. [and was] so helpful that he and his brother..Allen were subsequently awarded all of Schroder’s legal work. Schroder, in turn, began arranging financing for.. Sullivan & Cromwell clients. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, and during the course of it the brothers Dulles became fast friends with the bank’s rising young executive vice-president, John L. Simpson… Named a Schroder director, he became the firm’s international contact man.. [and] began shuttling between Washington, New York and Central and South America. Officially his missions were undertaken for the bank, but at the suggestion of his friends the Dulleses, he began doing the government favors as well, including ‘smoking out’..South American clients… Simpson passed along the results of his private intelligence-gathering to two men who were regular lunch partners in Washington: Dean Acheson, later to become..Truman’s secretary of State, and William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, founder of the OSS.
“During World War II, when Allen Dulles was organizing OSS networks from Switzerland, Simpson took time off from the bank to become chief financial advisor for the U.S. Army in Europe. After the Allied landings in Italy in 1943 and subsequent Italian surrender, Simpson, working with another Schroder executive attached to the OSS, in effect controlled the country’s treasury. After completing that task in 1944, he returned to San Francisco for..a brief rest at the home of his niece and her husband, Steve Bechtel. Bechtel, however, had an offer for him: a consultancy position with Bechtel-McCone…
“Simpson accepted and brought to Bechtel’s various enterprises a financial expertise they had been sorely lacking. But his real worth was as a door-opener…demonstrated at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in April 1945 Assembled..were many of Simpson friends..and he made a point of introducing most of them to Steve Bechtel who showed them around his shipyards. One who got the tour was Thomas Finletter, later to succeed James Forrestal as..secretary of Defense.” pp74-75, Friends In High Places

**coming up: more Bechtel, McCone , early ties to the Atomic Energy Commission, CIA, World Affairs Councils, Schroder Bank, Allen Dulles, Permindex, and more quotes from “Friends in High Places; the Bechtel Story, the Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World”, by Laton McCartney, 1988

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*BUT…First, my brief lesson from Prof. C.Wright Mills (1916-1962), quoting his 1956 book The Power Elite:

“Changes in the American structure of power have generally come about by institutional shifts in the relative positions of the political, the economic, and the military orders… [B]roadly speaking, the American power elite has gone through four epochs and is now [in 1956] well into a fifth.” p269

*

“The supremacy of corporate economic power began in a formal way with the Congressional elections of 1866 and was consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation. That period witnessed the transfer of the center of initiative from government to corporation. Until the First World War…this [third epoch] was an age of raids on the government by the economic elite, an age of simple corruption, when senators and judges were simply bought up.

 …The military order of this period..was subordinate to the political, which in turn was subordinate to the economic [order of hierarchies: economic, political, military] …that economy was dynamic; the ‘trusts’ ..[that] could readily use the relatively weak governmental apparatus for their own ends… [T]he powers of the industrial and financial corporations concentrated and interlocked… And as private economic power overshadowed public political power, so the economic elite overshadowed the political… Perhaps there has never been any period in American history so politically transparent as the Progressive Era of the President-makers and Muckrakers.” p271

*

“The New Deal [the fourth epoch] did not reverse the political and economic relations of the third era, but it did create within [the political and corporate ‘circles’] competing centers of power that challenged [corporate power].” p272

*

“But during the ‘thirties, the political order was still an instrument of small propertied farmers and businessmen…added [to it] the new struggle of organized labor and…unorganized unemployment… [T]hat is why the ‘thirties was a political decade: the power of business was not replaced, but it was contested and supplemented… The New Deal as a system of power was essentially a balance of pressure groups and interest blocs.”p273

*

“[The] balancing act that Roosevelt performed did not affect the fundamental institutions of capitalism as a type of economy. By his policies, he subsidized the defaults of the capitalist economy which had simply broken down… The ‘welfare state’ [was] created to sustain the balance and to carry out the subsidy, [as] differ[ing] from the ‘laissez-faire’ state…

   “We study history, it has been said, to rid ourselves of it…   Like the tempo of American life in general, the long-term trends of the power structure have been greatly speeded up since World War II, and certain newer trends within and between the dominant institutions have also set the shape of the power elite and given historically specific meaning to it fifth epoch: that [structural] clue is in the decline of politics as genuine and public debate…   The longtime tendency of business and government to become more intricately and deeply involved with each other has, in the fifth epoch, reached a new point of explicitness. The two cannot now be seen clearly as two distinct worlds.” p274

*

“In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the enlarged military state, that clue becomes evident in the military ascendancy. The warlords have gained decisive political relevance, and the military structure of America is now..a political structure. The seemingly permanent military threat places a premium.. upon their control of men, materiel, money, and power: virtually all political and economic actions are now judged in terms of military definitions of reality….

   In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the economic order, that clue is the fact that the economy is at once a permanent-war economy and a private-corporation economy… Within the elite as a whole, this coincidence of interest between the high military and the corporate chieftains strengthens them both and further subordinates the role of the merely political men…   During the ‘thirties, the political man was ascendant. Now the military and the corporate men are in top positions. Of the three types of circle that compose the power elite today, it is the military that has benefitted the most in its enhanced power…[and] one is tempted to speak of a political vacuum in which the corporate rich and the high warlord, in their coinciding interests, rule.” p276

*

“Its members exist all over the country, and it is a coalition of generals in the roles of corporation executives, of politicians masquerading as admirals, of corporate executives acting like politicians…

   “The higher members of the military, economic, and political orders are able readily to take over one another’s point of view…”p283

*

“As the requirements of the top places in each of the major hierarchies become similar, the types of men occupying these roles at the top– by selection and by training in the jobs– becomes similar. This is no mere deduction from structure to personnel. [It] is a fact revealed by the heavy traffic that has been going on between the three structures, often in very intricate patterns… As the business between the big three increases in volume and importance, so does the traffic in personnel.” p287

*

“The inner core of the power elite consists, first, of those who interchange commanding roles at the top of one dominant institutional order with those in another: the admiral who is also a banker and a lawyer and who heads up an important federal commission; the corporation executive whose company was one of the two or three leading war materiel producers who is now the Secretary of Defense; the wartime general who dons civilian clothes to sit on the political directorate and then becomes a member of the board of directors of a leading economic corporation.” p288

*

“By their very careers and activities, they lace the three types of milieux together. They are, accordingly, the core members of the power elite.” p289

*

*

Bechtel-McCone was the second incarnation of an ambitious partnership started after World War I by Warren ‘Dad’ Bechtel. W.A. Bechtel built his up his own business on public road contracts:
“As his road-building work continued, Bechtel began to grasp the significance of the.. automotive equation: oil. If more cars meant more new highways, they also meant the rapid, large-scale development of the West’s oil and gas resources… A boom was coming and Bechtel meant to be a part of it. But before he could get under way, though, Bechtel needed help, a partner who could share both his work load and his enthusiasm for the opportunities… Bechtel had to have a partner now, an experienced builder he could rely on completely. He found his man in the summer of 1921. His name was Henry J. Kaiser. [p26, Friends in High Places]
“…Kaiser’s low-balling tactics did not endear him to his rivals..[and] he was regarded as something of a pariah by most of the construction industry. Bechtel, however, was intrigued. Whatever Kaiser’s methods, there was no disputing his doggedness… He was a born promoter and an instinctive, near-habitual risk-taker… Moreover, Kaiser possessed the same sort of driving ambition…
“Within a few months the two men had concluded a partnership deal.. by no more than a handshake. ‘There are two priciples [Warren Bechtel] followed,’ Kaiser said later. ‘He hated to sign papers… And his usual condition for entering any proposition was a 50/50 division’… Together Kaiser and Bechtel were to build many of the major roadways up and down the West Coast. [p27]
“[They] were among the first contractors in the United States to tackle major pipeline projects, first for Standard Oil, then for Continental Gas… As more and more contracts followed, the relationship between Bechtel and Big Oil forged into an alliance, one that.. would [eventually] have a profound impact..on the Middle East and the course of American foreign policy.” [p28]
*
The endeavor that brought Bechtel-Kaiser onto the national stage of heavy construction, and reunited the younger UCBerkeley pals, Steve Bechtel and John McCone, was the Boulder Dam consortium known as ‘Six Companies”. The contracts for the dam were being let under the auspices of Herbert Hoover, lately Secretary of Commerce and Labor, and current President of the United States. It was in the midst of Boulder building that Warren Bechtel ventured alone to Moscow on business (to consult on Soviet hydroelectric projects) and died in a hotel after self-administering insulin. “That night, August 28, 1933, Warren A. Bechtel died in his sleep.” [p45]
“Steve [had] played increasingly larger roles in Bechtel’s pipelining projects, and by the time he was in his mid-20s was managing them on his own –so effectively so that by 1930 he became the functional corporate head of Bechtel-Kaiser Enterprises”..[p48]…his brothers, shortly after Dad’s death named him president of Bechtel’s operations.” [p49] …Neither Bechtel nor any of the Six Companies would ever go broke –on the contrary, all were to make millions more building government dams and roads… In this effort, Steve Bechtel would join with…one of the pivotal figures in American policy. His name was John McCone.” [p51]
*
“[Since ‘Boulder’] Bechtel and McCone had kept in close touch..[as] the core of America’s industrial might..was shifting westward, and what was moving it was oil. ‘Steve and I shared a sense of imminent change,” McCone recalled, ‘…of great projects…[and] We were sure we could have a place in them.’

…”And here Steve Bechtel had an idea. Why not, he proposed to McCone, offer the oil companies an entire construction package? Not just pipelines, but storage tanks, refineries, –the works… The grand plan settled, Bechtel and McCone drew up a contract –one that named McCone president and gave Bechtel, as chairman, controlling interest in the Bechtel-McCone Corporation– rented a suite of offices in downtown Los Angeles and in May 1937 proclaimed themselves in business.” [p53]  “By 1939, Bechtel-McCone had mushroomed into an organization with more than 10,000 employees and was building refineries, chemical plants and pipelines from Montana to Venezuela. ‘We will build anything, any place, any time,’ Bechtel crowed. ‘The bigger, the tougher the job, the better we like it.’ “ [p55, Friends in High Places]

   During WWII, the partners clinched contracts for shipbuilding from the military: “They knew next to nothing about building ships, but when an opportunity presented itself, [they] were always ready to learn.” Bechtel-McCone ran four west coast shipyards in Seattle WA, Sausalito CA, Richmond CA, and Los Angeles —“The War Department found them a site on Terminal Island in Los Angeles harbor, not far from their corporate headquarters. Bechtel and McCone dubbed the operation ‘Calship’.“[p57] “Henry Kaiser had followed Bechtel McCone’s lead into shipbuilding, and during the first few years of the war the two companies had emerged as the country’s leading shipbuilders, running nearly neck and neck in the speed and volume with which they turned out vessels… At its peak during the summer of 1944, Kaiser was turning out 18 ships a month. By October, Calship was producing 20, winning for Bechtel and McCone the satisfaction of running the most productive single shipyard in the world. By then, Bechtel and McCone had become involved in other wartime enterprises… [such as the notorious Canadian pipeline boondoggle called ‘Canol’ which was abandoned and the Willow Run aircraft plant in Birmingham Alabama which produced no aircraft]. “All in all, World War II was a most lucrative enterprise for Bechtel-McCone… [They] had grossed [for themselves] well over $100 million. Their net investment: considerably less than $400,000.” [p69]

    After the war, Bechtel-McCone liquidated “largely for tax reasons” and regrouped its assets under a new name, Bechtel Brothers–McCone, run by its middle-management. In 1946, foundering without its prominent chief executive, Steve Bechtel returned to the company, ostensibly buying out McCone and his brother Ken, and rechristened it Bechtel Corporation… “[and] soon snapped up..major contracts…. Seldom, if ever, did Steve undertake a major move without checking it first with ‘Uncle John.’ “ [p76]*

*

“After the breakup of Bechtel-McCone, McCone had used part of his wartime windfall to buy the San-Francisco-based Joshua Hendy Iron Works [bought by Westinghouse as an independent subsidiary in 1946]. The company..had built ships during the war…[and McCone] became increasingly involved in shipping… when along with Socal in 1947, they assumed ownership of…Pacific Tankers Inc. Transporting oil for the Navy [duringWWII] from the Middle East to the United States, Pacific Tankers’ fleet..grew to 90 ships and by the end of the war had become the largest oil mover in the world.

   “With McCone as majority stockholder and Bechtel and several West Coast associates as silent investors, the company [was] rechristened Pacific Far East Lines and extended its operations to Japan, China and the Philippines. In addition, McCone [and..] Bechtel had entered into a partnership with Henry Mercer, the New York owner of States Marine Lines and U.S. Lines, companies with vast fleets that operated in the Atlantic. [McCone now] ranked as one of the dominant shipping figures in the world.

   “In between business chores, McCone also found time to serve as a director of the Stanford Research Institute and as a trustee and chief fund-raiser for the California Institute of Technology whose scientists had played a critical role in the development of the atomic bomb and were now on the leading edge of nuclear research.” pp 96-97, Friends in High Places

*

*Stanford Research Institute, or SRI, from the footnote on page 78 of ‘Friends’:  “Founded in 1946 by a group of West Coast businessmen, including Steve Bechtel and Henry J. Kaiser, and originally affiliated with Stanford University [until 1969], the Stanford Research Institute eventually grew to become the second-largest corporate-government ‘think tank’ in the country. Its business was supplying government and industry with the latest in applied research… Among its many programs, SRI evaluated the U.S. strategic force; conducted laser radar studies in the upper atmosphere; analyzed ballistic missile defenses; drew up studies for improving Air Force reconaissance and surveillance systems…

   Since SRI’s founding, Bechtel has been one of the institutes major clients and supporters. SRI..evaluat[ed] the development potential of Jubail Saudi Arabia, and drew up the blueprint for Bechtel’s industrialization of Indonesia during the Sukarno regime. Over the years, the Bechtel family has donated millions to SRI… No other company or family matches [them].”

“Steve Bechtel had realized the potential of atomic power and had positioned his company to capitalize on it.  The [Bechtel-McCone] involvement had begun at the dawn of the Atomic Age.” [p101]

   McCartney’s ‘Friends’ makes no mention of John McCone’s sponsorship of Ernest O. Lawrence and his tabletop cyclotrons of the early 1930s, but as the opportunities were presented “in the early 1940s, Bechtel through its connections with General Somervell, had built several ‘heavy water’ storage plants at Hanford Washington as part of the Manhattan Project… Later, after the bomb had proved its destructive potential at Hiroshima, Bechtel had been one of several contractors and utilities that built the ‘Doomsday Town’ in the.. Nevada desert…”

   “For Bechtel, the Doomsday study was one of a series of early projects the company carried out for the AEC.. [and] its energy-minded customers like PG&E. It was work that in the coming years would do much to define the emerging nuclear industry. Not coincidentally, it would also establish the Bechtel Corporation as the world’s largest purveyor of nuclear power.” [p101, Friends..]

…Other Californians were making similar calculations… Henry Kaiser had.. gotten into the game in typically high-rolling fashion by securing a $110 million contract for Kaiser engineers to modernize and expand the [postwar] Hanford facilities.” [p102, ibid.]

*

The ‘Nuclear Negligence’ series on Kaiser Chemical notes that  “Kaiser was under consideration to participate in a program to develop alternate sources of uranium, but it is unclear whether that work ever took place.” http://www.eecap.org/Covered_Facilities/Illinois/Kaiser.htm

Concerning a piece of Kaiser’s Los Angeles real estate:

“Kaiser Permanente [Hospital in] Downey is built on the site of the first nuclear reactor in the state of California. This land [also] became a NASA site… The nuclear reactor was later moved to Santa Susana”  where a catastrophic explosion of the reactor in 1958 left permanente contamination.   “…The Downey facility processed at least 300 uranium slugs for use as nuclear reactor fuel in 1953 for North American Aviation.” http://www.kaiserpapers.org/downeyradiation.html

This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks.

*

Edgar F. Kaiser, who took over the empire from his father between 1956-58, later received a Kennedy appointment to oversee ballistic Missile Site labor relations.

***

Edgar F. Kaiser, president, Kaiser Industries Corporation; Henry J. Kaiser, founder and chairman of the board
Series: Photograph Files, CF Numbered series 292-430

“…McCone found the challenge of government work stimulating, particularly when it was for the Department of Defense, where he was able to give full vent to his hard-line anticommunist views. Even the Bechtelians.. were sometimes startled by the fervor… To hear McCone tell it, the Soviets were bent on nothing less than world domination. The free forces.. would be strong only if they understood that the atomic bomb was.. a God-given means of defending the American way of life… McCone’s chance to translate those views into action came in 1947 when he was invited to Washington to become a member of the President’s Air Policy Commission… [The] commission turned out a dramatically titled report, ‘Survival in the Air Age,’ which recommended..[a] buildup of nuclear-weapon stockpiles as quickly as possible. The report[s]..military conclusions were written by McCone…” [p97]   …”As his stature in the Defense Department grew, he became close to ..Dwight D. Eisenhower whom McCone first met when Eisenhower returned to Washington to take up duties as Army Chief of Staff. Another important Friendship made during this period was with Allen Dulles, later to be McCone’s predecessor as director of Central Intelligence.” [p98]

“McCone could draw satisfaction from the fact that one of his key recommendations in ‘Survival in the Air Age’ –the buildup of U.S. nuclear-weapons stockpiles– had been put into effect by Truman. As part of the effort, the president authorized the tripling of capacity at the principal weapons plant at Oak Ridge Tennessee, and the building of ancillary gaseous-diffusion plants at Portsmouth Ohio and Paducah Kentucky. McCone was heartened by Truman’s move. So was Steve Bechtel whose company was chief contractor on the work. McCone meanwhile, kept drawing closer to Eisenhower, now NATO commander and being touted by both parties as a presidential candidate. Eisenhower himself, however, was being coy about his candidacy and..had yet to declare his party affiliation. Then, in early January 1951, Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican senator from Massachusetts, told the press that..Eisenhower would soon announce his candidacy as a Republican. McCone, who was in Paris vacationing with his wife, hurried to Eisenhower’s headquarters outside the French capital… ‘Cabot Lodge made this statement and we’ve got to answer it,’ Eisenhower told McCone… McCone quickly discovered ..that [Ike] had still not made up his mind whether he was a Republican or Democrat. McCone pressed and argued with him until Ike finally gave in: all right, he was a Republican… [and] that afternoon, the statement was ready and.. Eisenhower was in. As president, Dwight Eisenhower would remember his friends, including John McCone, whom he would name chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Under McCone’s aegis, the nation would begin gearing up for the age of expectedly cheap and trouble-free nuclear power. Dozens of new plants, costing billions of dollars, would be necessary. Required too would be a construction company to build them. As.. Steve Bechtel had put it, one step was following another.” [pp99-100, Friends…]

*** “Wasting no time extending Bechtel’s lead, Steve flew to Washington where McCone introduced him to AEC chairman Strauss whom he had come to know when both men were working for the Department of Defense. [1947? or earlier in wartime, under Forrestal as Secretary of the Navy?– McCartney is nonspecific]  Bechtel had his own friends at the AEC as well. One was with W. Kenneth Davis, the agency’s director of reactor development who was Socal’s research director, had worked with Bechtel during construction of the MTA [the Materials Testing Accelerator, at the core of the Lawrence Livermore lab]. [Along with] three others…all four [friends] would leave the Atomic Energy Commission and ultimately work for Bechtel…   their friend AEC chairman Lewis Strauss was not having an easy time of it…[and] by November 1957, Strauss..told Eisenhower he would not seek reappointment to the [AEC]. The man he recommended to replace him was John McCone.”

“Since the fateful meeting in Paris, McCone had remained close to Eisenhower and had provided a steady stream of advice during the 1952 campaign. McCone had also struck up a warming friendship with Eisenhower’s vice-president Richard Nixon, whom he had known since Nixon emerged as an ardently anticommunist Californai congressman, and John Foster Dulles, who had asked McCone to be his Deputy Secretary of State. Washington itself, however, had lost much of its charm for McCone, largely because of the flak he had taken as Under-Secretary of the Air Force for awarding a contract to ..his former business partner Henry J. Kaiser… paying Kaiser three times as much as it had..paid the Fairchild Corporation.. to build [an] identical plane… [It] was revealed that the Kaiser-Fraser Corporation..that was building the planes, was partly owned by.. Steve Bechtel. [p108, ibid.]  ..In 1954..Eisenhower briefly lured McCone back with an invitation to serve on a committee.. restructuring the U.S. Foreign Service… The following year, Eisenhower sent him to Rome as his personal representative ..[to] Pope Pius XII. McCone however, was reluctant to do more. His growing shipping business was on its way to making him the American Onassis.”

” [W]hen the call came ..to a meeting with [President Eisenhower] in May 1958… McCone did not turn the president down [as he was] offered the AEC post over lunch at the White House…    The agency John McCone took over had a budget of $2 billion per year, operated $7 billion worth of facilities, employed 105,000 persons and was counted as one of the most complex and diffuse organizations in the federal government… McCone quickly took charge. One of his first –and for Bechtel, most important– moves involved funding for the private nuclear industry… McCone recommended that federal subsidies be paid to utilities for the construction of..nuclear plants…” [p109] ” Another decision..was to halt uranium-buying from foreign sources; henceforth radioactive ore was to be obtained exclusively through U.S. companies, principally Union Carbide (a major customer of the McCone-and-Bechtel-owned Joshua Hendy Corporation), Kaiser, and Utah Construction [two of the Boulder Dam partners]. Next, he appointed three executives from Standard Oil of California [Socal, later-named Chevron] and the president of PG&E –all major Bechtel customers– to study the [process] of federal subsidies for reactors… [McCone] began spreading U.S. nuclear technology overseas, provising foreign aid in the form of experimental reactors to a host of countries large and small… ‘I’ve forgotten how many of these reactors were set up around the world, but maybe a hundred of them. I think.. we went a little too fast on that,’ [McCone said in an interview in 1974]. McCone was equally zealous in his support of U.S. nuclear-arms development, but here Eisenhower finally the line in late summer 1958 when he told his staff that.. [he] was, said the president, firmly committed to imposing a ban on all nuclear-arms testing. The ban was bitterly opposed by McCone ..and the idea lay dormant until the Kennedy administration… Nonetheless, thanks to McCone, Bechtel and General Electric were moving right along and by the fall of 1959, the Dresden I nuclear plant was complete.” [pp110-111, ibid.]

 

**Dresden I, operational in 1960

**

*** “There were many chores Steve Bechtel and his company would perform for presidents, many favors they would do –and had done– for the organs of government, including, though few knew it, the Central Intelligence Agency. [p117] The approval for CIA covers came directly from Steve Bechtel, who had his own ties to the agency… [p118] …Steve Sr. and John Simpson were Bechtel’s liason with the intelligence community at the high levels, but in the field, Bechtel worked with Washington through.. key executives…” [p119]

Stephen D. Bechtel Jr., handed the business by his father at the family Christmas party of 1959

*”There had never been any doubt that one day, Stephen D. Bechtel Jr. would take over the company Steve Senior had built. Besides Bechtel blood, he had all the other requisite qualifications… Steve junior had seen the world of Bechtel and he wanted to be part of it. Conveniently, one of Bechtel’s senior executives was waiting with a job offer. There was a pipeline down in Texas, he said. Was Steve interested? ‘Hell yes,’ he exclaimed.” [p129] “In taking over as Bechtel’s president, Steve Bechtel Jr. sounded a brave note. He would run the business..with the same vigor and vision… but if Steve Bechtel Jr. expected his father to fade into the background, he soon found he was mistaken. Freed from the administrative chores he so detested, Steve Senior was..even more dominant then before… He spent fully six months of the year on the road, popping up one day in London, the next in Toronto, a third in Beirut, Seoul, Sydney or Rome. In his wake, he left a lengthening string of deals:  …mines in South Africa;… smelters in Chile; …pipelines in Germany and Switzerland; nuclear plants in Spain and India…” [p135, Friends in High Places]

*************

   The circle of personal relationships around Herbert C. Hoover and his ‘relief’ endeavors is an essential historic digression in elucidating the web-work of the cold war power elite. The story starts in this blog with “Lewis Strauss and JFK” –Strauss joined Hoover’s Committee for Relief in Belgium as second-in-command. Close behind, Prentiss Gray and John L. Simpson of J. Henry Schroder Bank, the ‘Schrobanco’ group in New York established later in 1923, followed suit and signed up for the WWI CRB.

   Prentiss Gray, an Oakland CA native and UCBerkeley alumnus, built a global grain-shipping business out of “food relief” and became the president of Schroder Bank in New York until his accidental death in 1935. After the war, his son Sherman Gray joined the business. New blood came into Schrobanco when George W. Mallinckrodt joined in 1954. Mallinckrodt married the boss’s daughter,(Baroness Charmaine Schroder) in 1958 and the pair were sent to London in 1960 to grow the business with Europe. Charmaine’s brother Bruno, the holder of 40% interest, reigned over the bank and its branches from London.

   Mallinckrodt is an interesting figure in this atomic version of events: three generations before him, his German forebears founded a chemical company in St. Louis Missouri. The Mallinckrodt Chemical Works became the greater family’s firmament of wealth, and in early 1942, it also became the first contractor to make processed uranium for the Manhattan Project.

*

                                                                                      

*

“Before the creation of the secret cities of Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford, the Manhattan Project hired the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works of St. Louis to refine the first uranium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. For the next two decades, Mallinckrodt continued its classified work for the Atomic Energy Commission…” https://firstsecretcity.com/tag/mallinckrodt-chemical-works/

**

Mallinckrodt Chemical dumped its radioactive waste in the open outside the city’s downtown, what is today the residential neighborhoods of St. Louis’s North County. The local landfill where the majority waste now lies underground is burning in a “Subsurface Smoldering Event” and threatening the entire region with massive contamination. Uncovered piles of dirt-like radioactive tailings were left to ‘drift’ and wash into the Coldwater Creek, already a generational source of sickness to the residents. Watch the HBO documentary “Atomic Homefront” about this disaster.

*                                                                   

*1942: Mallinckrodt received the Belgian Congo ore shipped by Edgar Sengier to the Archer Daniels Midland docks in New York Harbor

**

The government’s broker for Edgar Sengier’s Congolese uranium was Thomas K. Finletter: “The Navy had arranged for the first approach to the Union Miniere du Haut Katanga to obtain a supply… Edgar Sengier, who represented the Congo mining interests had concluded.. that uranium eventually would become important to the war effort and he managed to divert to the United States some two thousand steel drums..of ore. These were stacked in the open at Port Richmond, Staten Island New York, and plainly marked ‘Uranium Ore, product of the Belgian Congo… Sengier communicated with Thomas K. Finletter, who was then Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, to let him know that the ore was available. Finletter passed the word to Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols of the Corps of Engineers, and Nichols purchased it from Sengier.” [p181, Men and Decisions, by Lewis L. Strauss, 1961] “Prior to 1939, of course, there had not been much interest in the ore… Sengier recalls that in May of 1939, about five months after the news of fission… three French scientists..suggested to him that the Union Miniere should join with them in making an experimental bomb in the Sahara. Sengier accepted this idea in principle and agreed to furnish the preliminary material…but in September 1939 the outbreak of war ended the project… Sengier decided to take some steps on his own responsibility… He gave orders to send to the United States all the radium and certain uranium ores which were then at plants of the Union Miniere in Belgium…[where they] were stacked in the open near the dock..on Staten Island..[and] remained unguarded and unnoticed for nearly two years… [Years later, under the AEC] it fell to me [Strauss] to complete some of the details with Sengier. We had both been connected with Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium in World War I and our friendship dated from those days.” [pp316-317, Men and Decisions]    ***

At the 1945 United Nations Conference in San Francisco, Finletter was appointed as a  former State Dept. official to attend as a consultant. Steve Bechtel gave him the tour: “Assembled at the conference were many of Simpson’s friends from Washington and New York, and he made a point of introducing most of them to Steve Bechtel, who showed them around his shipyards. One..was Thomas Finletter, later to succeed James Forrestal as..Secretary of Defense.” [p75, Friends in High Places] Finletter was later made chairman of the Air Policy Commission where he and John McCone fastened onto each other.

*

From Thomas Finletter’s oral history for the Truman Library:

[Q] “You were appointed chairman of the President’s Air Policy Commission in 1947, why in your opinion, why were you selected for that position?”

Finletter: “I haven’t the slightest idea… I can’t answer the question.”

[Q] “Did you have any association with air matters before this time?”

Finletter: “I’m trying to think… I do not think so.”

[Q] “As you know [the library has] the records…The commsision..predicted that Russia would not develop an atomic bomb before 1953… Why in your opinion were the Russians able to develop the device so much quicker than you had expected?”

Finletter: “It’s impossible to answer that… Of course, my statement was based on information from all sorts of intelligence sources…”

[Q] “And then in April of 1950 [two months before the invasioon of South Korea] you became the Secretary of the Air Force and served..until the end of the Truman administration. Here comes my old question again, why were you chosen?”

Finletter: “I haven’t the foggiest idea. Well..one possible reason [was] the fact that I had been the chairman of the Air Policy Commission…”

https://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/finletter.htm

Finletter’s field of competence, it appears, was international business law with the firm of Coudert Brothers in New York, brokering contracts between governments and corporations. When Finletter accepted the appointment as Secretary of the Air Force, he called on McCone and said, “I need you by my side.” McCone served as UnderSecretary of the Air Force for Finletter’s term: “Though McCone’s title was deputy secretary [sic], it quickly became apparent that he was the department’s real boss. McCone’s first order of business: Get aircraft production moving on a crash basis; get the Sabre jets needed to combat the Russian-built MiGs out of the plants and into the skies over Korea.” [p99, Friends..]

******

In 1947, while the Air Policy Commission was convening,  Laton McCartney writes that John McCone met Allen Dulles:

   “The occasion that initially brought them together was a dinner party at the Dulles townhouse in New York, called to celebrate the expected victory of Thomas E. Dewey as president. Taking a brief respite from his Washington duties, McCone had been staying as the houseguest of Grete and John Simpson, Steve Bechtel’s chief confidant. When the Dulleses asked the Simpsons to dinner, Uncle John brought McCone along… On a deflated note [over the election], the party broke up, but not before John McCone had made an important friend.” [p98, Friends..]

As for John L. Simpson:

“A native San Franciscan and nine years Steve’s senior, Simpson possessed a worldliness and sophistication no one else in the Bechtel organization, including its president, could match. After graduating from Berkeley, he had gone to work for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a joint U.S.-British project..[for] refugees during World War I. He spent five years in Europe schooling himself in Continental finance, making the social rounds (most notably in Vienna, where he married a well-connected socialite Margarete Mandel), and developing a close friendship with CRB’s head and his fellow San Franciscan, Herbert Hoover. On his return to the United States, Simpson joined the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, a leading New York investment house with branches throughout Europe.“[p74, ibid.]

*

Few Europeans of this era have an internet footprint, as expected, but Margarete Mandel is a virtual phantom. It has been noted that a familial (but untraceable) relationship exists with Col. Edward. Mandell House of Texas, known as President Wilson’s alter-ego, but the question remains. Might this Austrian socialite and wife of John L. Simpson be a relative of Georges Mandel who went by the name of Mantello, described himself as Hungarian, but is listed as a citizen of Austria?  Mandel/Mantello has already been introduced in Atomic Agent Oswald as the president of the world trade organization and CIA front PERMINDEX. The logic in the question reflects the postwar focus on a fractured Austro-Hungarian Empire and the reach and autonomy of the Commission for Relief in Belgium and its successor agencies under Hoover’s U.S. Food Administration and the American Relief Administration.

*

“…the evidence suggests that the major emphasis in the Wilsonian policy.. largely sought to rely on the skillful utilization of food relief programs by Herbert Hoover to check whatever revolutionary socialist tendencies emerged among the new nations. In the last analysis, this Hoover-directed..food relief, with its emphasis on the breaking down of nationalistic barriers to trade.. was a classic expression of the.. proto-Marshall Plan tendency of Wilson and his advisers to use America’s expansionist economic power.. to establish international liberal-capitalist stability…  The Hungarian Bolshevik Revolution of March 1919 was naturally of great concern to many Wilsonians at Paris [Peace Conference] who feared.. revolution might spread… In response to the threat.. Wilson and Hoover agreed during April on a program of manipulating food and relief supplies in such a manner as to isolate and contain the Hungarian Revolution… Hoover and Wilson were especially interested in adopting a liberal-reintegrationist approach..to Austrian relief and the diplomatic treatment of the defeated Austrians.. to prevent the possible spread of Bolshevism from Budapest to Vienna.” [pp191-192, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, by N. Gordon Livin Jr.,1968]

……posting in progress…..

 

JFK Conspiracy Con II

Part One of the JFK Conspiracy Con opens with a reference to the book Dr. Mary’s Monkey (DMM) by Ed Haslam as a starting point in my research on the JFK assassination. Haslam’s book, by his own account, is not about the assassination of JFK which he says is “incidental” to his theme –a theme I  call The Disease Continuum (the ‘DC’), inserted in the blog between JFK parts One and Two. I can’t say yet how many serial parts are needed to write out the JFK Conspiracy Con to a satisfying conclusion, but with certainty the DC belongs at the beginning. Ed and I both seem to have noticed that parallel activity in public medicine spirals around the JFK  story like the second spine of a DNA helix –not so “incidental” after all– but structurally essential in the telling.

    It’s the polio connection to Dr. Mary Sherman, and simultaneously to Ed’s own father in 1963 New Orleans, that brings a greater intrigue to author Haslam’s purposes. Several co-conspirators in the JFK assassination/coverup are firmly tied to the creation of the Salk Institute, a monumental reward to its namesake for the vaccine.

*

   Part One reintroduces two familiar characters in the plot to murder JFK; Nelson Rockefeller and Meyer Lansky, and mentions some less publicly known names; Lewis L. Strauss, Abe Feinberg, and Dewey D. Stone. Feinberg and Stone are known for getting the Jewish Vote to swing for Kennedy during his campaigns of 1952 (for the Senate) and the Presidency. 1952 is a very important year in this story– a true turning point in world history. The U.S. went “thermonuclear” with successful tests ( ultra-low temperature hydrogen fusion bombs with fission triggers), polio “peaked” with the highest case numbers on record, Israel started a secret bomb project, etc. etc., and the question that begs at these relationships over the next decade is asking if the composite assassination and disease picture is about nuclear trafficking to the benefit of Israel and Jewish world power. 

https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/the-jfk-conspiracy-con/

*

PART TWO, for you who endure the soap opera, is going to highlight the chronological elements that move things along in self-evident style.  I apologize to regular readers for the slow delivery, the daily paragraph or two, and the bloggy way I’m going about this business.

*

Uranium for the Manhattan Project

*

  Lewis Strauss wrote that “the origin of our supply of the potent element begins..and revolves about the granitic figure of an engineer and industrialist, Sir Edgar Sengier…[who] controlled a mine in the Congo which was the world’s richest producer of uranium ore…[where] the concentration..was uniquely high. Despite all the prospecting that has occurred within the past twenty years, no other deposit has ever rivaled the Shinkolobwe mine for richness.

…”We had both [Sengier and Strauss] been connected with Hoover’s Commission for Relief of Belgium in World War I, and our friendship dated from those days…In the field of atomic energy, a special relationship thus existed between the United States and Belgium, and the two governments have closely co-operated ever since.” [p317, Men and Decisions, by Lewis L. Strauss, 1962] “Belgium was our mainstay in the beginning. Canada and South Africa later became important suppliers.” [p318]

*

Edgar Sengier “arrived at the beginning of the European mining of Africa and over the next forty years he was to oversee Belgium’s large share in the world markets trading copper, cobalt, tin, diamonds and uranium. He came to manipulate and maneuver an enormous industrial empire of such complexity that very few ever came to know, let alone understand, how a deep uranium mine –called Shinkolobwe– in the heart of Africa could be the source of radium, a miracle cancer cure, and then become the piece of earth most wanted by the military for the nuclear armaments of World War II…  Sengier moved easily within the international business worlds of Brussels, Paris, London and New York and knew as soon as did the scientists around the world of the momentous scientific breakthrough… It was he who sent the uranium ore to a Staten Island warehouse. It was nearly two years before the Manhattan Project managers knew about that uranium ore and realised they needed it. M.Sengier spent the war years in New York City –and Saratoga Springs… He set up a branch of Union Miniere on Broad Street in Lower Manhattan –named African Minerals, to funnel uranium ore from the Belgian Congo through New York Harbor to Middlesex New Jersey and Port Hope Ontario on its way to a more pure existence in the bombs of America… The office of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Manhattan District was in Madison Square..about half way between Pregel’s office in the Rockefeller Center and Sengier’s near Wall Street –the three of them almost in a straight line… Sengier was the most critical supplier of all.” http://www3.amherst.edu/~mrhunt/uranium/scene2.htm

   The account of how one thousand or so tons of “yellowcake” (uranium oxide) sat on a warehouse dock in New York Harbor, packed in drums for two years, and nobody noticed, should be a good story when more of it comes to light. What we know so far is that in 1939 “Sengier was visited by [French scientists] Joliot-Curie, [Francis] Perrin and Halban..who suggested to him that the Union Miniere should join with them in making an experimental bomb in the Sahara. Sengier accepted this idea in principle and agreed to furnish..material and to bear part of the cost, but in September 1939 the outbreak of war ended the project.” [p316, Men and Decisions]

   So here we have an atomic bomb project underway in 1939 by French communists before the war. Strauss had to be making a special point when he published this is in 1962.

*

Boris Pregel, radium/uranium dealer mentioned above in the non-Strauss quote (not italicized), left a few words about the French:  “..The centralization was at the Institute Curie… It was also a kind of scientific monopoly. They did the whole thing…  they were the most important… In fact, the Institute of the Curies had tremendous quantities of radium all along… That’s why later also, when Joliot-Curie and Halban and Kowarski wanted to discuss the..application of atomic energy, they were received very well… [A] lot of the most important work was done in France, because of the establishment of the Institute… The point is, it was only for medical purposes.”  http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4833.html  The Curies Institute of Radium in Paris was established in 1919 while the city played host to the Peace Accords at Versailles and Lewis L. Strauss was invited by Mortimer Schiff (son of Jacob Schiff) to join the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York. Schiff was in Paris “on a mission for the American Red Cross” and Strauss was there as a delegate with Herbert Hoover.

   Pregel says, “The whole thing has to begin at the beginning… [T]he discoveries..made by the Curies, at the end of the last century…[led to] some small industrial productions of radium, most of them laboratory type and not really industrial type. There were in France, sponsored by Rothschild, something which was extracted from the Madagascar ores… Most of [the ore] was in Czechoslovakia, of course… But the real development..came only when the Union Miniere stepped in.”

…”The Union Miniere understood very well that the development of their business depended largely on research and on therapeutic use of radium. At that time therapy was the main use… We [dealers] helped the creation of centers, medical centers throughout the world –hunting cancer centers– in which there was sometimes very large amounts of radium… [I]t’s still, in my opinion, the best of the radioactive substances that can be used for therapeutic purposes… it was a stepping stone to many other things..because it let the people see the isotopes of the different metals.”

*

    [wikipedia] “During World War II, Pregel was the agent for the Canadian Eldorado Mining & Refining Co. which supplied the Manhattan Project with nearly all the uranium mined in the North America.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pregel

In 1942, the Canadian government authorized purchase of Eldorado [Mining and Refining Ltd] shares. “Shortly after nationalization, the Minister [of Munitions and Supplies] became aware of serious management problems at Eldorado. [An] inquiry took two years [from 1945-1947] and led to fraud charges against Marcel Pochon and Boris Pregel, in charge of sales abroad. The case was settled out of court…

…”Intensified prospecting efforts by Eldorado led to the discovery in 1946 of new pitchblende deposits near Athabasca… Beaverlodge mine, started in 1952, led to the birth of Uranium City… Government control…relaxed somewhat…

   “In 1949, Eldorado became the only agent in Canada authorized to buy uranium ore and uranium concentrate… In 1959 uranium was the principal mineral export of Canada, and fourth in line among natural resource exports… The period of prosperity ended in 1959, when the US government announced that it would not renew uranium purchase contracts beyond 1962.“ http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/pam_archives/public_mikan/index.php?fuseaction=genitem.displayItem&lang=eng&rec_nbr=393&rec_nbr_list=393

“The world’s first colbalt-60 cancer-therapy machine was built by Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd… Canada is now home to the world’s largest medical isotope industry.” http://www.cna.ca/curriculum/cna_can_nuc_hist/nrx_reactor-eng.asp?bc=NRXReactor&pid=NRXReactor

*

                                                        Beaverlodge mine outflow

*

Union Miniere du Haut Katanga  (UMHK)  “was created on October 28, 1906 as a result of a merger [between] a company created by Leopold II and Tanganyika Concessions Ltd. (a British company…) to exploit the mineral wealth of Katanga. It was jointly owned by the Societe Generale de Belgique, Belgium’s largest holding company..and Tanganyika Concessions Ltd…  In 1922, the UMHK built its first refinery for uranium ore, and by 1926 had a virtual monopoly of the world uranium market” http://www.aadet.com/article/Union_Mini%C3%A8re_du_Haut_Katanga

>>>Leopold II was the first cousin of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (a marriage of first cousins of the Saxe-Coburg line) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_I_of_Belgium

   The UMHK was not included in an article I wrote about early atomic development –at the time I didn’t know about the French project in the Sahara, which is a vital piece of information. Nonetheless, the guiding influences (“fathers of the bomb”) and key people (e.g. Herbert Hoover and Lewis Strauss) are here: https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/atomic-power-no-contest/

                                ___________________________________________________________

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                                                               Saratoga Springs, NY

*

…”where America’s high society and the underworld mingled amidst the glamour of the racetrack and illegal casinos, like Piping Rock.. owned by mobsters Frank Costello, Joe Adonis and Meyer Lansky, who fronted for some of America’s socially privileged”…

*

Lansky owned at least two casinos in Saratoga Springs; The Piping Rock Inn (pictured below), burned in a 1954 arson fire, and the Arrowhead Inn, burned in 1969.

photo source http://www.timesunion.com/saratoga/slideshow/Historic-Saratoga-Around-town-16124.php#photo-1121940

“Sidney Robinson of Copacabana says there was no gambling on Saratoga premises, does not know Costello,..disclaims acquaintance with Adonis, Lansky…” http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10F13F73454107B93C0A81782D85F408485F9

In 1934 “Costello..was to accept Louisiana governor Huey Long’s proposal to put slot machines throughout Louisiana for 10% of the take. Frank Costello placed Kastel as the overseer of the Louisiana slot operation. Kastel had the assistance of..Carlos ‘Little Man’ Marcello [birth surname Minacore]…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Frank_Costello

“By the end of 1947, Marcello had taken control of Louisiana’s gambling network… Marcello was also assigned a cut of the money skimmed from Las Vegas casinos in exchange for providing muscle in Florida real estate deals. By this time Marcello had been crowned as the Godfather of the Mafia in New Orleans… He was to hold this position for the next 30 years. On March 24, 1959, Marcello appeared before the Senate Committee investigating organized crime. Serving as chief counsel to the committee was Robert F. Kennedy; his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy, was a member of the committee..” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_crime_family

AFTER PEARL HARBOR

“Meyer’s activities, sanctioned by the government as part of ‘Operation Underworld’ included a..mobilization of Jewish American mobsters against Nazi sympathizers…when the cruise ship Normandie caught fire and capsized at Pier 88 in Manhattan in early February 1942. The Normandie, the largest luxury liner in the world, [had been] seized by the U.S. after France fell to the Nazis. It was being retrofitted..when it was destroyed… The Navy understood that the mafia controlled the waterfront…” http://spectator.org/archives/2011/09/14/operation-underworld/print/

…”U.S. Naval Intelligence approached Joe ‘Socks’ Lanza..who in turn deferred to Lucky Luciano… U.S. Attorney Frank Hogan approached Lansky as a go-between…”

“A meeting was arranged between Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden of the Third Naval District and Meyer Lansky at Longchamps restraurant… Domestic sabotage was a non-issue for the remainder of the war.”  http://spectator.org/archives/2011/09/14/operation-underworld/print/

…”Meyer was intensely proud of his service in World War II”…[He said] “I knew it was very necessary to watch the docks.” http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_331.html  “After World War II, Lansky set up real-estate firms and invested in Florida and Caribbean real estate…”  http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1989-09-24/features/8903040939_1_al-capone-palm-island-miami-beach/2

 “In 1947 and 1948, [Lansky] pressured Jewish and Italian mobsters to raise money for Israel. Lansky also used his contacts on the New York waterfront to expedite forbidden arms shipments to Israel…” http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/990305/lansky.shtml

…”between 1947 to 1951 a campaign eventually led by..Senator Estes Kefauver, exposed more than two decades of illegalities… Lansky and his associates..found a hospitable climate in Batista’s Cuba and even more opportunity in the..legalized..gambling in Las Vegas… by 1952 all major investment in gambling enterprises had been transferred to other localities.” http://www.hollywoodpolice.org/your_police/history.htm

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Lansky and his compatriots Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, and Joe Adonis, were nutured by Arnold Rothstein during Prohibition: “The Reinfeld Syndicate -named after the Newark, New Jersey bootlegger and accused murderer Joseph Reinfeld -functioned as the middleman between the British liquor distilleries and the “Rum Rows” of Boston and New York. Its controlling shareholders were the four Bronfman brothers, Allan, Sam, Edgar, and Charles. The U.S. leg was handled by Reinfeld and Abner “Longie” Zwillman, later the boss of Atlantic City, and Rothstein’s gangs in New York…Under the auspices of Lansky and Torrio, Lucky Luciano succeeded in wiping out all recalcitrant godfathers…A special assassination bureau was set up by Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugs” Siegel. The “Bugs and Meyer Gang” had been distinguished by the fact that they owed allegiance to no one (except maybe Arnold Rothstein); they had originally been used to protect Bronfman liquor shipments across the border against ‘freelance’ hijackers.” …”Arnold Rothstein, Yasha Katzenberg’s employer, was a product of the Rothschild ‘dry goods’ empire that included the Seligman, Wannamaker, and Gimbel families. During Prohibition, according to the Bronfman’s own testimony, Rothstein, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano were the Bronfman’s main distributors…”  [ref. pp274-275 and 278, Dope Inc.]

“After World War II, Mr. Sam [Bronfman] established the National Conference of Israeli and Jewish Rehabilitation, using his considerable smuggling skills to run guns to the Haganah.”  [p281, Dope Inc]  http://lyndonlarouche.org/dope9.pdf

*

A point of interest about the Bronfman’s smuggling operations with Al Capone takes place in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, the “little Chicago” of Prohibition. The most well known health lobbyist of all time, Florence Mahoney, got her start in Moose Jaw. Mahoney teamed up with Mary Lasker of the American Cancer Society to become the most formidable duo in D.C. health politics. Mary Lasker, in turn, was the wife of Albert D. Lasker who was introduced to her husband-to-be by Lewis Strauss and friends, Bill (Wild Bill) Donovan of the OSS and Max Epstein. Here’s a link about Moose Jaw, Mr. Sam and Al Capone http://www.lonepinepublishing.com/cat/1-894864-11-5/gallery/excerpt

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Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote:

“In March of 1948 Robert Kennedy received his A.B. degree [from Harvard]… The next step..was a trip abroad… Robert set forth on the Queen Mary on March 5 accompanied by a college friend”. He met with his father’s friend, Lord Beaverbrook, aboard for dinner at Joe Kennedy’s request. “Robert remarked that he was going to the Middle East. Beaverbrook said that the United States was a ‘subjugated nation to a Jewish minority’. As for Britain, it had become a ‘satellite to the United States’… After [the first] few days in London, Robert and his companion went on to Cairo…

   “He met a young Jew from Tel Aviv who gave him letters to leaders of Haganah, the Jewish defense organization… The RKO Radio Pictures representative in Cairo, to whom Joseph Kennedy had entrusted the boys, told them they should not go to so agitated a land… On March 26, Good Friday, they flew to Lydda airport and traveled to Tel Aviv by armored car, with Haganah escort… Remembering [he was on] assignment for the Boston Post, Robert talked to everyone he could find –to Haganah soldiers who held the British responsible for everything… He talked to members of the Irgun..that had recently dynamited a British train and the King David Hotel… He visited a kibbutz through the kindness of a Jew who, forty years before, had made speeches in Boston for [RFK’s grandfather] Honey Fitz… he talked to a former major in the Russian army who believed that the Russian[s]..’as a whole are more anti-Semitic than the Germans’… He summed up Jerusalem: ‘Firing is going on at all times… More and more horrible stories pouring in… Correspondents all very jumpy…’  [The two] went on to Lebanon…

   “[Kennedy] was considerably impressed by the Jews. ‘They are different from any Jews I have ever known or seen..’  The Boston Post ran four articles from its ‘Special Writer’ in the Middle East on June 3-6. The first bore a headline guaranteed to sell papers in Boston: BRITISH HATED BY BOTH SIDES… His second piece revealed his own commitment. The Jews in Palestine, he wrote, ‘have become an immensely proud and determined people. It is already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect’… [He] praised the Jews in Palestine as ‘hardy and tough’, their ‘spirit and determination’ created not only by their desire for a homeland but by ‘the remembrance of the brutal inhuman treatment received..in the countries in Europe.’ He gave a lyrical account of his kibbutz visit… The Jews, he said, had ‘an undying spirit’ the Arabs could never have. ‘They will fight and they will fight with unparalleled courage.’

   “The third piece was sharply critical of British policy for its ‘bitterness towards the Jews’. As for the United States… We failed because we had been taken in by the British… The final piece dismissed the notion, then prevalent, that a Jewish state might go Communist. ‘That Communism could exist in Palestine,’ Robert Kennedy said, ‘is fantastically absurd. Communism thrives on static discontent… With the type of issues and people involved, that state of affairs is nonexistent. I am as certain of that as of my name.’ …If a Jewish state were formed, it might be the ‘only stabilizing factor’ in the Middle East. ‘The United States and Great Britain before too long a time might well be looking to a Jewish state to preserve a toehold in that part of the world… The United States, through the United Nations, must take the lead in bringing about peace in the Holy Land.’

   …”He did not evidently share his father’s view that the United States should stop minding other peoples’ business.” [pages 73-81, Robert Kennedy and His Times, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 1978]

Boston Post articles: http://robertkennedyandisrael.blogspot.com/2008/06/bobby-kennedy-in-palestine-boston-post.html

   RFK moved on to law school at Charlottesville (Virginia): “He graduated in June 1951, fifty-sixth in a class of 124.” [p87]… “Congressman John F. Kennedy invited him and their sister Patricia to come along on a trip from Israel to Japan in early October. In Israel an old friend, Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., received all the attention..” [p91] Schlesinger wrote that “Seven weeks of arduous travel made them closer than ever before.”

   “At the end of 1951, Robert Kennedy began work for the Department of Justice. The Internal Security Division was engaged in investigations of Soviet agents…[In] a short time Kennedy transferred to the Criminal Division… The work absorbed him –so much so that when his older brother decided to run for the Senate in Massachusetts, Robert, Kenneth O’Donnell later said, was really ‘out of touch with Jack and unaware of Jack’s problems’… The campaign, O’Donnell thought, was headed toward ‘absolute catastrophic disaster’. [O’Donnell] pleaded with Robert Kennedy in New York to come up and take over…

   “Franklin D. Rossevelt Jr. campaigned [for JFK] in Jewish areas where John Kennedy, because of his father’s reputation, was supposed to be weak… Kennedy won by 70,000 [votes]. It was a triumph for Robert as well… Their intimacy grew in the senatorial campaign… ‘All this business about Jack and Bobby being blood brothers has been exaggerated,’ their sister Eunice said. ‘They had different tastes… They didn’t really become close until 1952, and it was politics that brought them together.’ ” [pages 90-96, Robert Kennedy and His Times]

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“John Kennedy was the only Democrat running statewide in Massachusetts to have survived the Eisenhower sweep” –p99, Robert Kennedy and His Times

*

Joe McCarthy’s early political career pegged him as “a man of marked personality without known political principles”, according to Schlesinger, whose “crusade against Communists..[was] inadvertantly launched at Wheeling, West Virginia in February 1950.” [ref. p100, Robert Kennedy and His Times] This was literally days after Truman committed the U.S. to thermonuclear weapons, and then “The Korean War began four months after Wheeling.” Lewis Strauss, incidentally, was born near Wheeling, W.V. and though moving his base to Virginia, maintained a powerful ‘toehold’ himself over greater Virginia politics. After the election victories of 1952,  Joe Kennedy appealed to the up-and-coming McCarthy to hire Bobby.  McCarthy had been set up as the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate’s Government Operations Committee. Lawyer Roy Cohn, “notable for anti-Communist zeal“, had already taken the top post. McCarthy “named young Kennedy an assistant counsel…[where he] undertook a more prosaic inquiry into the trade carried on by American allies with Communist China… Kennedy..pored over the Lloyds of London shipping index… In a couple of months they were able to demonstrate that, since the outbreak of the Korean War, 75 percent of all ships carrying goods to mainland China had sailed under western flags… The British role in the China trade appeared particularly reprehensible… Kennedy’s statistics also showed a large Greek role in the China trade.”

    …Robert’s job on McCarthy’s staff, published by the Boston Post, was “to work on ways to shut off strategic materials of war to countries in the Russian zone, including North Korea. He’ll continue to do so.”[pp101-103, Schlesinger]

*

   Korea was the ostensible incentive to re-activate the WWII Nevada Proving Grounds (renamed the Nevada Test Site, NTS) and bring atomic tests home to the desert on the premise that Pacific islands were precariously subject to hostile takeover. In a short time, the NTS proved out its strategic value as a ‘nuclear battlefield’ for imaginative tests of all kinds staged by all branches of the armed forces. The NTS initiated its first series in January of 1951: “All five [weapons] were fired in just eight days.” http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/LANL/Ranger.shtml  They were the first of nine-hundred-eighty-something (or more) detonations in Nevada during the “atmospheric” period (1951-1963). The radioactive fallout value of these tests has been recently estimated to be worth 40,000 Hiroshima bombs –but fallout was still a distant commodity in 1951.

   It was McCarthy’s epic Red Scare over the course of 1953 and 1954 that grabbed attention and set the stage for the legendary brotherly teamwork of Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

*

Meanwhile…

   The health sector was hastily addressing its fallout problem. In the immediate aftermath of the first Nevada blasts, radioactive snow was scooped up and measured from Ann Arbor to Schenectady. Jonas Salk had been set-to-task at the University of Pittsburgh since 1948, but he wasn’t ready. A colleague in the vaccine effort who came to Pitt to participate in the larger project suggested that the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP, the March of Dimes) throw its financial weight behind a trial of gamma globulin, the antibody-containing blood factors that confer passive immunity.  The March of Dimes was about to sponsor an historical first in human medicine.

   Dr. William McDowell Hammon, who suggested the trial, had been a medical missionary in the Congo before normalizing his career and gaining renown as the dean of medicine at the Univ. of California Berkeley (overseer of Los Alamos). Gamma globulin (‘GG’) had already shown promise against polio as much as two decades earlier. Hammon moved his small contingent of helpers out to Provo Utah and staged the first-ever “double-blind” trial on people (children) during the next Nevada series (Operation Buster-Jangle), smack in the fallout tracks of the previous test. Provo’s trial was “inconclusive”, they said.  Buster-Jangle’s many swaths cut paths over northern Iowa and southern Texas– the ‘GG’ trials moved along to Sioux City IA and Houston the next year.

   The odd epidemiological turn-of-events in Hammon’s GG trials was the way the vaccinators followed after the exposure. The requirements of the double-blind protocols meant that half of the inoculated kids were receiving placebo –saline, as noted. Blood was regularly drawn from everybody for the term of the trial. Curiously, the Nevada Test Site operations between ’51 and ’53 involved slightly less than half the number of total GG vaccinees.  They were Army troops and support staff, near 25,000 men, made to stand ready on the desert floor to witness and experience the A-bombs close up. There are no available records mentioning the Army as giving GG to soldiers at the NTS but by the end of 1953 the GG trials were over anyway. It was expensive and was never intended to be a viable polio vaccine for the public. The NFIP told the press it was organizational “practice”.

    Jonas Salk finally told the NFIP that he was ready, and during 1954, while Salk’s IPV (inactivated poliovirus) was launched on a massive scale, vaccinating 1.8 million schoolchildren in a double-blind trial, the NTS went quiet. There were no atomic blasts in Nevada. Washington, on the other hand, was exploding all over the place. 20 million witnesses watched for thirty-five days as the Red Scare melted down on national television with Robert Kennedy’s help.

   Six months after RFK was hired by McCarthy in ’53, he resigned: “he completed the only solid report ever issued by the committee [and] got out…. ‘With the filing in the Senate of the Subcommittee report on Trade With the Soviet Bloc,’ Kennedy wrote McCarthy formally, ‘the task to which I have devoted my time since coming with the Subcommittee has been completed. I am submitting my resignation’…” [pp106-107, Schlesinger]. For a while, Robert joined the Hoover Commission as his father’s assistant until “the mid-term elections in 1954 produced a Democratic majority in the Senate. John McClellan became chairman of the Investigations Subcommittee, and Robert Kennedy [came back as] chief counsel…[p115]…His brother, though now a member of the Government Operations Committee, was not on the Investigations Subcommittee. [p120] …’Bobby Kennedy’s job was to write out pertinent questions for the Democratic senators to ask at the hearing…He fed his questions to Senator [‘Scoop’] Jackson, who used them to fire a barrage of ridicule..’ [Roy Cohn’s account, p113]  …Later [Kennedy] commented,’Cohn and Schine took [McCarthy] up the mountain and showed him all those wonderful things. He destroyed himself for that –for publicity..’ [p105]…[RFK] said that he thought the Investigations Subcommittee would gradually return to its old function –looking into waste, fraud, corruption and mismanagement in government.” [p116]  And so it did. As 1955 progressed “The committee dropped out of the headlines… These were good years for the young Kennedys.“ [pp117-118, Robert Kennedy and His Times, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.]

*

PART III,  still to come…Texas oil, “Peak Oil” declared in 1956 to the benefit of nuclear proliferation, Lewis Strauss in the nexus of JFK assassination events, comparison of ‘legacy papers’ in the creation of books, Oswald in New Orleans, the Rosenwalds, Freeport Sulfur (Freeport McMoRan) and more.

Timeline 1941-1960 https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/timeline-1941-1960/

*

Additional events:

1951 – Ludwik Gross discovers the polyoma  ‘tumor’ virus, related to SV40 monkey virus; the HeLa cancer cells are taken from patient Henrietta Lacks in February 1951 after the Nevada Test Site’s Operation Ranger and become the culture medium of polioviruses grown for the Salk and Sabin vaccines http://polioforever.wordpress.com/sv40-monkey-virus/

*

1952-1953

— Earl Warren’s appointment by Eisenhower as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during Warren’s third term as Governor of California

—Christian A. Herter becomes the Governor of Massachusetts (later to become Undersecretary and Secretary of State, offering the ‘transition’ advice to Kennedy to press Israel for nuclear inspections)

–Death of 48-yr-old Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy and his replacement by Prescott Bush, October-Nov 1952.” Prescott Bush was a most elusive, secretive Senator…” http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/bush/bush4.htm  A little-known fact about Bush that unauthorized biographies don’t mention is his less-than-one-year assumption of McMahon’s seat on the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy committee (the JCAE), a committee so powerful and unbeholden that it was later ruled unconstitutional.

—The Great Canadian Uranium Rush was on by 1952. The first commercial strike in 1930 in the Great Bear Lake region of the NWT (Saskatchewan) which launched the Canadian radium industry, turned an unprecendented tide of prospecting into the world’s biggest and best uranium finds. Gilbert LaBine, “Mr. Uranium”, discovered the Gunnar mine in July 1952, but “the best example..is the Algoma (Lake Elliot) discoveries in 1953… By the end of August more than eight thousand claims had been staked..[with] repercussions clear around the globe… giving Canada..the raw material of atomic energy.” http://db.world-nuclear.org/reference/grand.html

1953 — President Eisenhower publicly articulated his plans to promote ATOMS FOR PEACE

Part Three https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/jfk-conspiracy-con-iii/

                                                        

The Host and the Parasite

“The Host and the Parasite”, presented by its author Greg Felton from Vancouver B.C. in February 2008

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1RxC1KDOg8&feature=related

“September 11…led to the passage of the USA Patriot Act and from there, people might argue, we went into a spiral toward the abyss of statism, torture, imperial overreach and all sorts of other things you can associate with undemocratic activity.”

 

“On October 3rd, 2001, 24 days after September 11th happened, the Department of Justice handed Congress a document; it was called the USA Patriot Act and Congress was told to pass it….here we have a congress being told to follow a dictate from the Executive….

…the Patriot Act was entered into the House on October 23 and signed by GWBush on October 26. For legislation, that is an absurdly fast scenario.

…that document did something very strange and very sad –it legislated the Republic out of existence, legally.”

 

“We have to explain why a Congress would commit political suicide. Why would Congress do this? My book takes the perspective that Congress was incapable of defending the Constitution, which..the Patriot Act utterly destroys.

…beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, and through a period of 25 years, the United States managed to mutate from a republic.. toward a police state and it did so because of events that came out of the Vietnam War”…

 

[part 2]”In 1967…Israel provoked a war in the Middle East and managed to seize control of the Suez….They occupied East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Suez, the West Bank, Gaza Strip –it is still an illegal occupation…

The Israel Lobby which came to prominence under Harry Truman in 1948 and owed its allegiance to the Democratic Party was considering supporting a Republican [after Carter, who supported a Palestinian treaty]…with the election of 1980, ..the Zionists and Neoconservatives came to power and their front man was Ronald Reagan.

Through the 1980s we have a transition..between the role of oil as the dominant influence and cause of US policy in the Mid-East and that of supporting Israel, to the detriment of oil and to the detriment of the United States.”

 

“Throughout the 1980s, Israel virtually ignored everything the US wanted to do…It had carte blanche to do what it wanted”…

 

“In 1991, Dick Cheney had acknowledged there was no threat of nuclear weapons from Saddam Hussein. Colin Powell said the same thing in 2000, so did Condoleeza Rice…that Iraq posed no threat to the US or Israel. [Then] the US policy flip-flopped 180 degrees”…

 

[part 3]” the only interested party involved in Iraq was Israel, for three reasons. Iraq has a lot of oil –Israel needs oil. Iraq has a lot of water; the Tigris and the Euphrates all within the ambit of what’s called the Zionist claim on Middle Eastern land, “from the Nile to the Euphrates”…

…it’s also the case that Saddam Hussein was one of the few Arab leaders courageous enough to stand up and defend the Palestinians against the repression and sadism of the Israeli state.

Israel wants complete military superiority over the region and so ‘we’ had a provocation to bomb Iraq.”

 

“The United States government, especially since Clinton, has been populated by people who owe more of an allegiance to Israel than to the United States itself. To this day there are people in the United States government who are citizens of Israel, and to have dual citizens form the policy really brings up questions of duplicity and treason…

…it makes more sense to believe that the United States Congress is not in control of itself. The people making policy would rather serve Israel than serve their own public…and if we’re ever going to have a discussion of what happened on September 11, ..we have to look at who benefitted from it.”

 

“The United States has been humiliated, abused, disgraced, internationally and domestically, as it moves to support Israel in whatever it does. And it is impossible to think that this has been done willingly…The only possible thing that we can conclude is that the United States has been under Israeli occupation, to all intents and purposes.

…The United States..has slowly and quite clearly allowed itself to be occupied and humiliated by a lobby that had as it’s primary interest the interest of another government…

   If you look at the people who run the United States…the interplay between them and the Israeli lobby is very very close, and it makes no sense for the United States to murder Arabs en mass…to repudiate its principles and to declare war on its own citizens. The only way we can make sense of this is that the people in Washington are serving another government…We have essentially a treasonous government.”

*

[part 4,5,6 are question/answer and very instructive]

For a listing of government employees:  http://fedupusa.wordpress.com/  –‘fed up usa’ kicks butt

 

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Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the host.

In general, parasites are much smaller than their hosts, show a high degree of specialization for their mode of life, and reproduce more quickly and in greater numbers than their hosts. Classic examples of parasitism include interactions between vertebrate hosts and diverse animals such as tapeworms, flukes, the Plasmodium species, and fleas. Parasitism is differentiated from parasitoidism, a relationship in which the host is always killed by the parasite such as moths, butterflies, ants, flies and others.

The harm and benefit in parasitic interactions concern the biological fitness of the organisms involved. Parasites reduce host fitness in many ways, ranging from general or specialized pathology (such as castration), impairment of secondary sex characteristics, to the modification of host behaviour. Parasites increase their fitness by exploiting hosts for food, habitat and dispersal……….. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite

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The parasitic financial class: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/world_order/WorldOrder.htm

Americans spying for Israel –scientists selling secrets to the ‘Mossad’ http://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2009/12/02/the-israel-lobby-celebrates-espionage-in-new-york/