Lazard Freres connections with Bronfmans, Bushes

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Lazard Freres connections with Hudson's Bay Company Management

Lazard Freres connections with Hudson's Bay Company Management of the London office of Lazard Brothers has long been delegated to the Kindersley family. Sir Robert Molesworth (Lord Kindersley), while chairman of the board of Lazard Brothers, also sat on the board of the Bank of England. Kindersley had also served as governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, a fact that is instructive to one who has a knowledge of the history of this company. In 1670 Hudson Bay was granted a charter from the King in Canada to engage in fur-trapping, together with title to the land from Labrador to the Pacific. In 1863 the British government supported imperialist Edward Watkin in buying the stock of the company and all its assets. A public issue was floated to raise capital to pay off the former owners and to build the Grand Trunk Railroad also controlled by Watkin. Watkin was also involved in the British North American Association, which attempted to persuade the British government that railroads and other forms of transportation and communication in Canada and the maritime colonies "served a significant Imperial function." The bondholders and stockholders of the Grand Trunk and advocates of the North West Transportation Company (headed by William Dawson) were also having difficulty securing enough funds to complete their projects and employed lobbyists in England to promote their cause. Dawson hired the investment firm of Robert Benson to obtain a government subsidy from London to carry mail from the Atlantic to Pacific. Even before the subsidy was granted, he formed a syndicate of investors in London, which included Pascoe Charles Glyn, younger brother of George Grenfell Glyn (the Glyn family was associated with a number of investment banking firms including Morton Rose, Glyn Mills and Robert Benson himself). The Duke of Newcastle, colonial secretary under Lord Palmerston, was the primary proponent in the government of colonial subsidies. However, his support for reimbursement for certain expenses incurred by the companies for encouraging settlement of the colonial lands was offset by his refusal to agree to pay the companies the value for any of their chartered lands which became Crown Colonies. Newcastle had contact with Watkin as well as other capitalists and financiers interested in Canadian development. An organizational meeting for the British North American Association was chaired by Robert Wigram Crawford, City of London M.P. and director of the Bank of England, and was also attended by Robert Benson, Thomas Baring and George Carr Glyn—the leading bondholders of the Grand Trunk; by William Newmarch of Glyn, Mills & Co.; Arthur Kinnaird of Ransom, Bouvierie & Co.; and Philip Vankoughnet, an agent of the Canadian government. These men on July 5, 1862 requested assistance for the construction of a road and telegraph line across the British North America, asking for a subsidy in the form of land grants rather than money. Signatories of the petition also included William Chapman and Kirkman Daniel Hodgson (Baring Brothers partner and member of Hudson's Bay committee). The land, of course, was to come out of the grant made to Hudson's Bay under its 200-year-old charter. In 1863 Watkin opened up discussions with Hudson's Bay Company's attorney, Joseph Maynard about a possible purchase of the company and its assets. The Company's accountant had valued the chartered rights in Rupert's Land at 1.5 million pounds and other property at another almost half million pounds. Hudson's Bay offered to sell all the stock for 1.5 million cash paid within 6 months. The British government refused to pay, stating that all funds must come from private sources. At that point the International Financial Society was formed--just six weeks after Watkin's meeting with the Hudson's Bay Company. It was capitalized at 3 million pounds—divided into 150,000 shares—all of which were bought by the important London banking firms. The sale of stock was closed in June 1863, and the new shareholders (the London banks) elected Sir Edmund Head as governor of the Company, with other board members being Richard Potter, Daniel Meinertzhagen, James S. Hodgson and J.H.W. Schroeder from the banks. Shares in the new company were then placed for sale on the open market. However, almost a year later, the society still owned a large block of stock. The Society's minutes reflect that by 1867 it owned a mere 3,000 shares. Donald Smith (later Lord Strathcona) was hired in 1869 to run Hudson's Bay with financing from the Bank of Montreal, headed at that time by his cousin and fellow Scot, George Stephen. Besides being chairman of the Bank of Montreal, Stephen was also the major shareholder in the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which was completed in 1886 after many near-bankruptcies. In the beginning of the construction of the railroad, Smith used Phillip Rose's investment banking firm--Morton, Rose —to float issues of stocks and bonds. In the last two issues he was able to convince Barings Bank to assist him because the previous issues had not brought in any much-needed capital. According to the writers of Dope, Inc., by 1916 the Keswick family of Jardine Matheson had secured controlling interest of the Hudson's Bay Company, and they made a deal with Sam and Abe Bronfman to buy the Canadian Pure Drug Company. The networks for smuggling of the drugs were established during the days of American prohibition. Drugs were brought to Canada from Asia via the railroad terminus on the Pacific Ocean. To hide the involvement of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a dummy corporation, Transcanada Transport was set up. After a 1922 scandal airing the Bronfmans ' crime connections in a public hearing, the family relocated their business to Montreal. Whereas they had previously imported whiskey from the Distillery Company of London (owned by "the higher echelons of the British nobility"), they transported a distillery from Kentucky to Montreal and were given distribution rights by the King. The Bronfmans then became a 50-50 partner with their previous supplier in a new holding company set up in 1926 in which William Ross of London was named as president, with Sam Bronfman as vice-president. Following another scandal involving Harry Bronfman, the family acquired a shipping subsidiary—Atlas Shipping Co.—which they moved to two islands on the Newfoundland coast, where their smuggling operations thereafter were based. The interlocking management among Hudson Bay, Seagrams, and the Canadian banks continued to overlap with the management of Lazard Brothers and British Intelligence operators. Between 1920-44 a partner and managing director of the London office of Lazard Brothers was Lord Robert H. Brand (named Baron Brand in 1946), who along with Lords Astor, Milner, Altrincham, and General Smuts made up the "Round Table Group," later called the "Cliveden Set," which controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The Times of London and The Observer. Brand, regarded as the economist of the Round Table Group, was a director of Lloyd's Bank and director of The Times. His wife was Nancy Astor's sister, an American from the Langhorne family in Virginia. Brand was also financial advisor for Lord Robert Cecil. When Lord Brand left Lazard in 1944, his nephew Thomas Henry Brand replaced him. Notes and Sources: Cary Reich also mentions that management of Lazard Brothers was changed in 1965 from Kindersley to a man named Oliver Poole, who was removed in 1973. During that time the firm was advising P&O in a takeover attempt of Bovis. When he left, a member of the Kindersley family was re-installed as manager. John S. Galbraith, The Hudson's Bay Company as an Imperial Factor, 1821-1869 (Berkeley and L.A.: University of California Press, 1957), p. 369. The International Financial Society of London was created in 1863 by Thomas Baring (Baring Brothers) and George Carr Glyn (of Glyn, Mills bank—a few years later the banker that represented British shareholders in transferring shares of the Erie Railroad to Heath & Raphael in New York. Dorothy R. Adler, British Investment in American Railways 1834-1898 (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1970), p. 92. Galbraith, Hudson's Bay Company, p. 390. W. G. Hardy, From Sea unto Sea: Canada--1850 to 1910, The Road to Nationhood (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co. 1960), p. 220. Morton, Rose in England (Morton, Bliss of New York), whose partners were Levi P. Morton (U.S. Ambassador to France and later Vice President. of United States), Sir John Rose (member of Macdonald-Cartier ministry in Canada), Pascoe DuPre Grenfell and George Bliss. Firm was later merged into Guaranty Trust of New York. Dorothy R. Adler, British Investment in American Railways 1834-1898 (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1970), p. 90. Barings was strictly an English firm until 1891 when a New York firm comprised of a family member was established (Baring, Magoun & Co.) by Alexander Baring, formerly of Kennedy, Tod & Co. (NY) and George Magoun, formerly of Kidder, Peabody & Co. The English firm dealt with Baring & Magoun in New York and Kidder, Peabody in Boston. The Baring family had migrated to Exeter, England from Bremen, Germany in 1717, and their descendants, Alexander and Henry Baring, married Americans. Barings had been one of the first English firms to handle American railroad bonds, and had a long-standing relationship with the B&O Railroad in Maryland. Dorothy R. Adler, British Investment in American Railways 1834-1898 (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1970), p. 144. Since 1963 Hudson's Bay Company has been interlocked with the Canadian Corporate Management Corporation headed by Walter Lockhart Gordon of Canada' s Liberal Party. Gordon was also chancellor of York University, which houses the North American center of "explicit Maoism" called the Norman Bethune Institute. Gordon and his accounting partner also created Rochdale College in Toronto, which in the early 1970s was the subject of newspaper headlines when Canadian police shut the college down because of the rampant illicit drug consumption and retail distribution at the campus. Gordon has been closely connected with the Canadian Pacific Co., which is interlocked three ways with Seagrams and with the five major Canadian banks--the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Toronto Dominion Bank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: The Macmillan Company, 19 ), p. 581. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York: Focus, Inc., 1981), pp. 59-60.Lazard Freres connections with Hudson's Bay Company Management of the London office of Lazard Brothers has long been delegated to the Kindersley family. Sir Robert Molesworth (Lord Kindersley), while chairman of the board of Lazard Brothers, also sat on the board of the Bank of England. Kindersley had also served as governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, a fact that is instructive to one who has a knowledge of the history of this company. In 1670 Hudson Bay was granted a charter from the King in Canada to engage in fur-trapping, together with title to the land from Labrador to the Pacific. In 1863 the British government supported imperialist Edward Watkin in buying the stock of the company and all its assets. A public issue was floated to raise capital to pay off the former owners and to build the Grand Trunk Railroad also controlled by Watkin. Watkin was also involved in the British North American Association, which attempted to persuade the British government that railroads and other forms of transportation and communication in Canada and the maritime colonies "served a significant Imperial function." The bondholders and stockholders of the Grand Trunk and advocates of the North West Transportation Company (headed by William Dawson) were also having difficulty securing enough funds to complete their projects and employed lobbyists in England to promote their cause. Dawson hired the investment firm of Robert Benson to obtain a government subsidy from London to carry mail from the Atlantic to Pacific. Even before the subsidy was granted, he formed a syndicate of investors in London, which included Pascoe Charles Glyn, younger brother of George Grenfell Glyn (the Glyn family was associated with a number of investment banking firms including Morton Rose, Glyn Mills and Robert Benson himself). The Duke of Newcastle, colonial secretary under Lord Palmerston, was the primary proponent in the government of colonial subsidies. However, his support for reimbursement for certain expenses incurred by the companies for encouraging settlement of the colonial lands was offset by his refusal to agree to pay the companies the value for any of their chartered lands which became Crown Colonies. Newcastle had contact with Watkin as well as other capitalists and financiers interested in Canadian development. An organizational meeting for the British North American Association was chaired by Robert Wigram Crawford, City of London M.P. and director of the Bank of England, and was also attended by Robert Benson, Thomas Baring and George Carr Glyn—the leading bondholders of the Grand Trunk; by William Newmarch of Glyn, Mills & Co.; Arthur Kinnaird of Ransom, Bouvierie & Co.; and Philip Vankoughnet, an agent of the Canadian government. These men on July 5, 1862 requested assistance for the construction of a road and telegraph line across the British North America, asking for a subsidy in the form of land grants rather than money. Signatories of the petition also included William Chapman and Kirkman Daniel Hodgson (Baring Brothers partner and member of Hudson's Bay committee). The land, of course, was to come out of the grant made to Hudson's Bay under its 200-year-old charter. In 1863 Watkin opened up discussions with Hudson's Bay Company's attorney, Joseph Maynard about a possible purchase of the company and its assets. The Company's accountant had valued the chartered rights in Rupert's Land at 1.5 million pounds and other property at another almost half million pounds. Hudson's Bay offered to sell all the stock for 1.5 million cash paid within 6 months. The British government refused to pay, stating that all funds must come from private sources. At that point the International Financial Society was formed--just six weeks after Watkin's meeting with the Hudson's Bay Company. It was capitalized at 3 million pounds—divided into 150,000 shares—all of which were bought by the important London banking firms. The sale of stock was closed in June 1863, and the new shareholders (the London banks) elected Sir Edmund Head as governor of the Company, with other board members being Richard Potter, Daniel Meinertzhagen, James S. Hodgson and J.H.W. Schroeder from the banks. Shares in the new company were then placed for sale on the open market. However, almost a year later, the society still owned a large block of stock. The Society's minutes reflect that by 1867 it owned a mere 3,000 shares. Donald Smith (later Lord Strathcona) was hired in 1869 to run Hudson's Bay with financing from the Bank of Montreal, headed at that time by his cousin and fellow Scot, George Stephen. Besides being chairman of the Bank of Montreal, Stephen was also the major shareholder in the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which was completed in 1886 after many near-bankruptcies. In the beginning of the construction of the railroad, Smith used Phillip Rose's investment banking firm--Morton, Rose —to float issues of stocks and bonds. In the last two issues he was able to convince Barings Bank to assist him because the previous issues had not brought in any much-needed capital. According to the writers of Dope, Inc., by 1916 the Keswick family of Jardine Matheson had secured controlling interest of the Hudson's Bay Company, and they made a deal with Sam and Abe Bronfman to buy the Canadian Pure Drug Company. The networks for smuggling of the drugs were established during the days of American prohibition. Drugs were brought to Canada from Asia via the railroad terminus on the Pacific Ocean. To hide the involvement of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a dummy corporation, Transcanada Transport was set up. After a 1922 scandal airing the Bronfmans ' crime connections in a public hearing, the family relocated their business to Montreal. Whereas they had previously imported whiskey from the Distillery Company of London (owned by "the higher echelons of the British nobility"), they transported a distillery from Kentucky to Montreal and were given distribution rights by the King. The Bronfmans then became a 50-50 partner with their previous supplier in a new holding company set up in 1926 in which William Ross of London was named as president, with Sam Bronfman as vice-president. Following another scandal involving Harry Bronfman, the family acquired a shipping subsidiary—Atlas Shipping Co.—which they moved to two islands on the Newfoundland coast, where their smuggling operations thereafter were based. The interlocking management among Hudson Bay, Seagrams, and the Canadian banks continued to overlap with the management of Lazard Brothers and British Intelligence operators. Between 1920-44 a partner and managing director of the London office of Lazard Brothers was Lord Robert H. Brand (named Baron Brand in 1946), who along with Lords Astor, Milner, Altrincham, and General Smuts made up the "Round Table Group," later called the "Cliveden Set," which controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The Times of London and The Observer. Brand, regarded as the economist of the Round Table Group, was a director of Lloyd's Bank and director of The Times. His wife was Nancy Astor's sister, an American from the Langhorne family in Virginia. Brand was also financial advisor for Lord Robert Cecil. When Lord Brand left Lazard in 1944, his nephew Thomas Henry Brand replaced him. Notes and Sources: Cary Reich also mentions that management of Lazard Brothers was changed in 1965 from Kindersley to a man named Oliver Poole, who was removed in 1973. During that time the firm was advising P&O in a takeover attempt of Bovis. When he left, a member of the Kindersley family was re-installed as manager. John S. Galbraith, The Hudson's Bay Company as an Imperial Factor, 1821-1869 (Berkeley and L.A.: University of California Press, 1957), p. 369. The International Financial Society of London was created in 1863 by Thomas Baring (Baring Brothers) and George Carr Glyn (of Glyn, Mills bank—a few years later the banker that represented British shareholders in transferring shares of the Erie Railroad to Heath & Raphael in New York. Dorothy R. Adler, British Investment in American Railways 1834-1898 (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1970), p. 92. Galbraith, Hudson's Bay Company, p. 390. W. G. Hardy, From Sea unto Sea: Canada--1850 to 1910, The Road to Nationhood (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co. 1960), p. 220. Morton, Rose in England (Morton, Bliss of New York), whose partners were Levi P. Morton (U.S. Ambassador to France and later Vice President. of United States), Sir John Rose (member of Macdonald-Cartier ministry in Canada), Pascoe DuPre Grenfell and George Bliss. Firm was later merged into Guaranty Trust of New York. Dorothy R. Adler, British Investment in American Railways 1834-1898 (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1970), p. 90. Barings was strictly an English firm until 1891 when a New York firm comprised of a family member was established (Baring, Magoun & Co.) by Alexander Baring, formerly of Kennedy, Tod & Co. (NY) and George Magoun, formerly of Kidder, Peabody & Co. The English firm dealt with Baring & Magoun in New York and Kidder, Peabody in Boston. The Baring family had migrated to Exeter, England from Bremen, Germany in 1717, and their descendants, Alexander and Henry Baring, married Americans. Barings had been one of the first English firms to handle American railroad bonds, and had a long-standing relationship with the B&O Railroad in Maryland. Dorothy R. Adler, British Investment in American Railways 1834-1898 (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1970), p. 144. Since 1963 Hudson's Bay Company has been interlocked with the Canadian Corporate Management Corporation headed by Walter Lockhart Gordon of Canada' s Liberal Party. Gordon was also chancellor of York University, which houses the North American center of "explicit Maoism" called the Norman Bethune Institute. Gordon and his accounting partner also created Rochdale College in Toronto, which in the early 1970s was the subject of newspaper headlines when Canadian police shut the college down because of the rampant illicit drug consumption and retail distribution at the campus. Gordon has been closely connected with the Canadian Pacific Co., which is interlocked three ways with Seagrams and with the five major Canadian banks--the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Toronto Dominion Bank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: The Macmillan Company, 19 ), p. 581. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York: Focus, Inc., 1981), pp. 59-60.

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Excerpts... of early Jew Control of the Bush family ... --CSR

GEORGE BUSH

When George Bush arrived in Texas in 1948—originally in connection with his father's interest, as investment banker and director for Dresser Industries—he did not feel out of place. He felt very much at home, in fact, among natives of Texas, some of whom were members of families whose forebears had known Sam Houston and Mirabeau B. Lamar. Like Bush, these Texans reflect how the Venetian fondi system became entrenched in America. Although it is true that the Venetian oligarchy established itself in the London financial centers, it did not stop there. Family members went out to all areas of the globe looking for business in which to invest. Wherever they settled, they sought financing from their European contacts—thus eventually developing a network of industries, interconnected through corporate structure, shareholders and interlocking directorates. Much can be learned from tracing George's steps from the time he arrived in Odessa, Texas until the present day.

INVESTORS IN BUSH-OVERBEY

 After working a few years for a Dresser subsidiary in Odessa, George decided to form his own oil company—Bush-Overbey—which was set up for him by his uncle, "Herbie Walker," while George went scrounging for funds in "the big cities." His best contact, he says, was Eugene Meyer, then owner of the Washington Post, who invested $50,000 for himself and another unspecified amount for his son-in-law, Phil Graham. George admits in his autobiography that he had met Meyer previously because "Brown Brothers, Harriman and Company managed a lot of his accounts." What his ghost-written autobiography failed to reveal, however, was that the other major investor who bought his stock was an investment trust known as British Assets Trust, whose managers tie in with the same people backing Eugene Meyer's purchase of the Washington Post in 1933. A more detailed description of each of these investors follows.

1. Eugene Meyer—agent for Lazard Freres It is interesting to note that when Meyer bought the Post at public auction in 1933, the competing bidders were Mary Rumsey, Averell Harriman's sister, said to be bidding for her brother and Vincent Astor; Alice Roosevelt Longworth, TR's daughter; and Bascom Timmons, Jesse Jones' friend and biographer. Jones, who once owned both of Houston's daily newspapers, was named by FDR as Meyer's replacement at the Reconstruction Finance Corporation when Meyer, a Republican, resigned. Eugene Meyer's father emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine to California in 1859, about 10 years after his cousins, Simon and Lazare Lazard, had left Alsace-Lorraine. Going first to New Orleans in 1848, they relocated to California when the Gold Rush began. At first they established a dry goods store which soon took on the role of bank.



 2. Alexandre Weill, a cousin of the Lazards as well as Eugene Meyer, came from Alsace-Lorraine to be their bookkeeper. Within four years they became involved in foreign gold exchange and opened an office in Paris. Eugene Sr. was sent to Los Angeles for a time to work at the Lazard department store/banks and officially joined the investment bank in 1864. He married a Lazard relative, the daughter of a rabbi who had established the synagogue on Wilshire Boulevard, returning to San Francisco in 1884, when Eugene Jr. was nine years old. He replaced Alexandre Weill, who was then free to move to New York to run the New York Lazard Freres branch he had started in 1880. The London branch was founded three years later. In 1908 the California bank was sold, eventually to become the Crocker National Bank (later purchased by Midlands Bank of the U.K.). The younger Eugene Meyer spent two years in Paris after college graduation in 1895 where he was in close contact with an uncle, Zadoc Kahn, who had close ties to the Frenuding Morton Rose, Glyn Mills and Robert Benson himself). The Duke of Newcastle, colonial secretary under Lord Palmerston, was the primary proponent in the government of colonial subsidies. However, his support for reimbursement for certain expenses incurred by the companies for encouraging settlement of the colonial lands was offset by his refusal to agree to pay the companies the value for any of their chartered lands which became Crown Colonies. Newcastle had contact with Watkin as well as other capitalists and financiers interested in Canadian development. An organizational meeting for the British North American Association was chaired by Robert Wigram Crawford, City of London M.P. and director of the Bank of England, and was also attended by Robert Benson, Thomas Baring and George Carr Glyn—the leading bondholders of the Grand Trunk; by William Newmarch of Glyn, Mills & Co.; Arthur Kinnaird of Ransom, Bouvierie & Co.; and Philip Vankoughnet, an agent of the Canadian government. These men on July 5, 1862 requested assistance for the construction of a road and telegraph line across the British North America, asking for a subsidy in the form of land grants rather than money. Signatories of the petition also included William Chapman and Kirkman Daniel Hodgson (Baring Brothers partner and member of Hudson's Bay committee). The land, of course, was to come out of the grant made to Hudson's Bay under its 200-year-old charter. In 1863 Watkin opened up discussions with Hudson's Bay Company's attorney, Joseph Maynard about a possible purchase of the company and its assets. The Company's accountant had valued the chartered rights in Rupert's Land at 1.5 million pounds and other property at another almost half million pounds. Hudson's Bay offered to sell all the stock for 1.5 million cash paid within 6 months. The British government refused to pay, stating that all funds must come from private sources. At that point the International Financial Society was formed--just six weeks after Watkin's meeting with the Hudson's Bay Company. It was capitalized at 3 million pounds—divided into 150,000 shares—all of which were bought by the important London banking firms. The sale of stock was closed in June 1863, and the new shareholders (the London banks) elected Sir Edmund Head as governor of the Company, with other board members being Richard Potter, Daniel Meinertzhagen, James S. Hodgson and J.H.W. Schroeder from the banks. Shares in the new company were then placed for sale on the open market. However, almost a year later, the society still owned a large block of stock. The Society's minutes reflect that by 1867 it owned a mere 3,000 shares. Donald Smith (later Lord Strathcona) was hired in 1869 to run Hudson's Bay with financing from the Bank of Montreal, headed at that time by his cousin and fellow Scot, George Stephen. Besides being chairman of the Bank of Montreal, Stephen was also the major shareholder in the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which was completed in 1886 after many near-bankruptcies. In the beginning of the construction of the railroad, Smith used Phillip Rose's investment banking firm--Morton, Rose—to float issues of stocks and bonds. In the last two issues he was able to convince Barings Bank to assist him because the previous issues had not brought in any much-needed capital. According to the writers of Dope, Inc., by 1916 the Keswick family of Jardine Matheson had secured controlling interest of the Hudson's Bay Company, and they made a deal with Sam and Abe Bronfman to buy the Canadian Pure Drug Company. The networks for smuggling of the drugs were established during the days of American prohibition. Drugs were brought to Canada from Asia via the railroad terminus on the Pacific Ocean. To hide the involvement of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a dummy corporation, Transcanada Transport was set up. After a 1922 scandal airing the Bronfmans' crime connections in a public hearing, the family relocated their business to Montreal. Whereas they had previously imported whiskey from the Distillery Company of London (owned by "the higher echelons of the British nobility"), they transported a distillery from Kentucky to Montreal and were given distribution rights by the King. The Bronfmans then became a 50-50 partner with their previous supplier in a new holding company set up in 1926 in which William Ross of London was named as president, with Sam Bronfman as vice-president. Following another scandal involving Harry Bronfman, the family acquired a shipping subsidiary—Atlas Shipping Co.—which they moved to two islands on the Newfoundland coast, where their smuggling operations thereafter were based. The interlocking management among Hudson Bay, Seagrams, and the Canadian banks continued to overlap with the management of Lazard Brothers and British Intelligence operators. Between 1920-44 a partner and managing director of the London office of Lazard Brothers was Lord Robert H. Brand (named Baron Brand in 1946), who along with Lords Astor, Milner, Altrincham, and General Smuts made up the "Round Table Group," later called the "Cliveden Set," which controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The Times of London and The Observer. Brand, regarded as the economist of the Round Table Group, was a director of Lloyd's Bank and director of The Times. His wife was Nancy Astor's sister, an American from the Langhorne family in Virginia. Brand was also financial advisor for Lord Robert Cecil. When Lord Brand left Lazard in 1944, his nephew Thomas Henry Brand replaced him.


3. Phil Graham's role At first glance, Phil Graham does not appear to fit into this group of banking families. He was born in 1915 in a South Dakota mining town and lived for a short time in Michigan. Phil's father, Ernest, was a mining engineer who had operated a gold mine in Montana before 1910. In World War I Ernest Graham served in the Corps of Engineers as a captain. In 1921 he became manager of 70,000 acres of sugarcane in the Florida Everglades for the Pennsylvania Sugar Company (Pennsuco), which had contracts to process sugar grown in Cuba. The project was not successful for that purpose, however, and Ernest soon switched to dairy farming with money loaned to him by a Miami lawyer. He later grew rich during the land boom when the value of his farmland skyrocketed. Ernest and his wife, Florence Morris Graham, were both of Scottish ancestry and encouraged Phil to work hard and become a lawyer. After graduating from public school in Miami, he went to the University of Florida and later graduated from Harvard Law School. When Ernest retired from dairy-farming, he became a State Senator for a district stretching from Fort Lauderdale down to Key West, including all of Miami. He knew George Smathers and Claude Pepper, who helped Phil get into Harvard after he was initially rejected. It was while he was in law school and thereafter that he was taken into the inner circle, though his father's political connections did not do him any harm. Instead of returning to Florida to become a politician himself, he became a clerk for Justice Stanley Reed at the Supreme Court, a position secured for him by Harvard insider Felix Frankfurter, who was himself appointed to the Court a year later by FDR. After one year, Phil clerked another year for Frankfurter. During those two years he lived in a house called "Hockley" in Arlington, Virginia with a number of other Supreme Court clerks, which has been called "a kind of commune for young men in the government." It sounds like an American version of the "Round Table," organized by the Astors at Cliveden. In fact, Justice Frankfurter, who recruited most of the clerks for the Court, had himself lived in a similar house on 19th Street in Washington, D.C., a generation earlier with Eugene Meyer's brother, Walter (who never married), Walter Lippmann and Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian). Several of the clerks went to work for Dean Acheson's law firm and continued as Hockley residents. Mr. Acheson was a frequent guest, as were Justices Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Frank Murphy, Harlan Stone and Frankfurter. Eugene Meyer first met Frankfurter in 1912 through his brother. He may have advised Katherine, who was dating another resident of Hockley in 1939, to select her husband from this group. In the beginning of the marriage, Phil and Kay moved to R Street and 37th, while Phil clerked for Frankfurter for a year, followed by a stint at the Office for Emergency Management (the forerunner of FEMA) and then for Lend-Lease. At the same time he was taking part in an informal think-tank called "the goon squad," which met on Monday evenings with economist Robert Nathan to help him develop military requirements for war mobilization (prior to America's entry into the war. Britain desperately wanted the U.S. to enter the war on its side, and the Washington Post was pushing this move as well. Like everything else Phil was involved in, it too was one of Frankfurter's ideas. Felix met daily with FDR as his "administrative consultant, military strategist, legal counselor and cheerleader," and his former clerks carried out his ideas in the "middle echelons" of the bureaucracy. Once the U.S. was in the war, Phil joined the Army Air Corps as a private, but was soon placed in intelligence school in Pennsylvania. It was at that point when Eugene asked Phil to run the Post, a position he assumed in January 1946 upon his discharge from the Army. That left Eugene free to return to manipulation of the world economy. In 1956 Graham first supported Adlai Stevenson, then switched to Lyndon Johnson, who he thought had a better chance of winning than Kennedy. After John Kennedy was elected, however, Phil became very close to him and is said to have convinced him to appoint C. Douglas Dillon as Secretary of the Treasury. He was not successful in persuading JFK to appoint David Bruce as secretary of state, but his mere suggestion of that name as an appointment gives credence to the statement that Graham was "particularly close to the intelligence community." Knowing Bruce's inclinations, it is more accurate to say "British intelligence." It is unknown whether Andre Meyer was an advisor to Phil Graham, though both lived at the Carlyle Hotel in the last months before Graham died.

When Phil Graham "committed suicide" in August 1963—a mere three months before Kennedy was assassinated—Katherine Graham, Eugene Meyer's daughter, inherited both the Washington Post and Newsweek. She then turned to Lazard Freres' Andre Meyer for advice. She is quoted by Andre's biographer as saying: "I was very unsure of myself, and most unsure of myself in the business world at that point. And so it was nice to have this tycoon friend who would talk business with me. It helped build my ego—the fact that Andre liked me and invited me to lunch and sort of treated me as an equal." She turned over half her personal investment portfolio to Andre Meyer and Lazard, which in 1971 also took the Post public. Warren Buffet later bought a significant amount of Post stock—enough to be invited to join the board as a director, despite Andre's warning her to be suspicious of Buffet's motives. During the Watergate exposes by the Post, Andre cautioned her to "be very careful," Graham has revealed. "He was worried about my personal safety, and he obviously knew something." This, of course, was almost a decade after the JFK assassination, and more will be said about what Phil Graham knew about Kennedy subsequently. Graham's purchase in 1960 of Averell Harriman's 12% interest in Newsweek and the controlling interest from the Vincent Astor Foundation, financed by a loan from Prudential, occurred only a few short years after his investment in George Bush's oil company. It tells us a great deal about who actually controlled Bush. Prudential was an insurance company established by Scottish Presbyterian/Quaker actuaries in New Jersey who sold the first life insurance in the American colonies. They are members of the same families who controlled the British Assets Trust, the other investor in Bush-Overbey procured by Brown Brothers, Harriman.

In October 1963 Kennedy appointed Andre Meyer to the foreign-investor task force. He continued in this role under Johnson and was additionally appointed to a presidential study group in May 1965 chaired by C. Douglas Dillon, former Treasury Secretary, to look into international monetary reform. Meyer did not start to become close to Johnson until 1966 as a result of economic problems with the French. Johnson's relationship grew closest after LBJ announced that he would not run for reelection in 1968, at which point Meyer began advising Johnson on his personal finances (the payoff for stepping aside to leave the road clear for Nixon?). Lazard Freres was "Chase's prime investment banker." After JFK's assassination, Andre also became close to Jackie Kennedy, advising her on how to invest, at the same time he was having regular meetings with Katherine Graham when she was taking over Phil's estate after his "suicide." 4. British Assets Trust, Ltd. Considering the fact that Lazard Brothers was controlled by officials in the British government, one is not surprised to find that George Bush's other large investor in Bush-Overbey was British Assets Trust, Ltd., an investment company whose directors interlocked with the management of companies associated with Lord Kindersley, such as Hudson's Bay Company. The chairman of British Assets Trust in 1956 was J.G.S. Gammell in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in 1985 by J.C.R. Inglis, a partner in Shepherd & Wedderburn, WS, an Edinburgh law firm. Inglis was also a director of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Scottish Provident Institution for Mutual Life Assurance, Edinburgh American Assets Trust and Atlantic Assets Trust, as well as chairman of European Assets, N.V., Gammell also had served as director of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, as did such other notables as The Right Hon. Lord Balfour of Burleigh, The Right Hon. Lord Clydesmuir and The Right Hon. Lord Polwarth. Polwarth, incidentally, began serving as a director of the Halliburton Company, parent of Brown & Root, in 1974. A brief synopsis of the history of British investment trusts is given in a book about British investment in American railroads before 1900: "Except for the International Financial Society, which dated from the early 1860's and was set up as a financial company, not an investment trust, the first of these new institutions was the Foreign and Colonial Government Trust established in 1868 [according to a March 20, 1868 article in The Times]. This company was very successful and soon had a number of imitators. In 1873 the five trustees of the Foreign and Colonial Government Trust [Lord Westbury, Lord Eustace Cecil, G.M.W. Sandford, G.W. Currie, and Philip Rose] set up the first trust company specifically devoted to investment in American railway securities, the American Investment Trust....In April the most famous of all these companies, the Scottish American Investment Trust, was inaugurated. The trustees were: James S. Fleming, cashier of the Royal Bank of Scotland; James Syne, manager, British Linen Co.; W.J. Duncan, manager, National Bank of Scotland; and William Thomas Thomson, manager, Standard Life Assurance Co....Most of these companies also engaged in various other financial operations. They not only undertook the flotation of American railway shares but also bought and sold on such short terms that their operations came perilously close to the borderline of speculation. Nevertheless, the investors were highly satisfied with the returns. The trustees also profited, especially from the founders' shares. Moreover, there were also intangible profits. The group of men who made up the trustees of these various companies became a power in the City." The International Financial Society (IFS) was a syndicate formed by all the major investment bankers in London in order to purchase the stock of the Hudson's Bay Company so that land grants could be given to the stockholders of the transcontinental railroad in lieu of cash. The IFC investors sold Hudson's Bay stock to repay themselves. The Scottish American trust was a similar syndicate of Scottish investors to purchase American railroad securities. Eventually the trusts adventured into utilities, industries related to railroads—such as lumber, steel and tank car manufacturing—and into the oil and gas industries. Interlocked with the management of these trusts are the boards of the Scottish shipping, brewery and distilling interests which also sat on the boards of the Scottish and Canadian banks, as well as the London banks. Prudential and British Assets Trust wanted to make big dividends for their investors, and they relied on their field agents to find lucrative businesses in need of venture capital. That was how Dresser Industries was funded. But the participants and agents became greedy. They wanted larger and larger cuts of the profits.

ZAPATA OFF-SHORE AND THE JFK ASSASSINATION

 Zapata Petroleum was first formed in 1953. By his own account, George Bush moved to Houston at a point in 1959 when Zapata Petroleum spun off its subsidiary, Zapata Off-Shore [ZOS], each corporation buying out the other's interest. The parent corporation was formed by investors provided by Brown Brothers, Harriman (whom George represented) and by Bill and Hugh Liedtke, the sons of the Oklahoma general counsel to the Mellons' Gulf Oil Corp. As a member of Houston's petroleum community, Bush made contact with other members of the same fondi class of businessmen, including: (1) W.S. Farish—an heir to a fortune in Standard Oil of New Jersey and Sears Roebuck stock—invested through his family's investment banks; (2) James A. Baker III—whose family had control of Rice University's endowment, the law firm of Baker & Botts and the Howard Hughes corporations and foundation; and (3) Robert Mosbacher—wildcat oilman and land developer. Zapata Offshore set up its headquarters in the Houston Club Building, the building which also housed the offices of investor W.S. Farish III of Underwood Neuhaus & Co. After the split from the Liedtkes' company, Bush entered into a joint venture with Jorge Diaz Serrano in a Mexican drilling company called Permargo, which received lucrative contracts from Pemex. Serrano became Pemex head in 1975, but in 1983 was convicted of defrauding the Mexican government. Jonathan Kwitny, the investigative reporter checking into the story, discovered that Zapata's corporate records from 1960 to 1966, stored at the SEC, had been "inadvertently destroyed" shortly after Bush became U.S. Vice-President. 1. Dresser Industries In 1961, shortly after George Bush moved to Houston, his company joined a consortium with Dresser Industries and General Dynamics to bid on the Mohole Project, which was awarded to Brown & Root. In 1950 Dresser Industries had relocated its headquarters to Dallas with a large branch office in Houston--the center of the oil and gas industry. Before the 1961 bid Dresser had rejected the opportunity to acquire Brown & Root, whose chairman, Herman Brown, was the organizer of Houston's own political action committee; Herman's brother George R. Brown, was for many years head of the Rice Institute board of governors and was Lyndon Johnson's biggest contributor and fund-raiser. The Rice board controlled the assets and companies of Howard Hughes, not the least important of which was the patent for the three-cone rolling cutter rock bit. According to the history of Dresser, written by Darwin Payne: A lawyer and inventor named Howard R. Hughes, father of an even more famous son who by now had expanded the family enterprises into the motion picture and aircraft industries, had invented this unique bit, with three revolving cutting elements, before World War I. It was one of the most important contributions of the century to the art of drilling. The company he formed, Hughes Tool Company, now controlled some 80 percent of the bit business. Dresser inquired into the possibility of acquiring the company, sought persistently but in vain to win an audience with the younger Hughes, and finally realized that the firm was not available under any circumstances. Neither was the second most important company in the field, Reed Roller Bit, although a deal had seemed imminent until its principal owner balked at the last moment.

2. W.S. Farish III

 So Dresser had to settle for the third company, a small one in Whittier, California. Reed Roller Bit, incidentally, was also controlled by the same group in control of the Hughes empire—the Rice and Farish families in Houston, whose lawyers were the Bakers. The patent for the Reed bit was filed in 1913, and the company which manufactured it was begun four years later by Niels Esperson and one other stockholder. All the stock was purchased in 1925 by a syndicate formed by Stephen Farish, brother of W.S. Farish. The only other member of the syndicate named in the February 19, 1950 Houston newspaper article was M.W. Mattison, a man whose named has often been found in conjunction with the Masonic Lodge in Houston. Prior to the investment in Reed Roller Bit, Steve Farish had formed Navarro Oil Co., which was sold in 1945 to Continental Oil Co. Steve Farish was married to Lottie Baldwin Rice, sister of Kate Rice Neuhaus and cousin of Libbie Rice Farish. With Zapata Offshore as a cover, Bush could easily have been working as a covert intelligence operative during the 1960s. One declassified document which evidences that is a November 29, 1963 memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. State Department for the purpose of relaying information regarding the reaction of the anti-Casto Cuban community in Florida to the John Kennedy assassination. The memo states as follows: An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that these individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination. The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W. T. Forsyth of this Bureau.

3. United Fruit Company Bush soon made contacts with Houston politicos, and, even though he says he was invited by George Brown to run as a Democrat for U.S. Senate in 1964, Bush became Texas chair of the GOP and, encouraged by party stalwarts Peter O'Donnell and Thad Hutcheson, he ran as a Republican against Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough. After being defeated in that race, however, Bush had "been bitten by another bug," and resigned in February 1966 as chairman and CEO of Zapata to run for Congress full-time. Bush was later appointed National GOP Chairman and served during the same time Texan Robert Strauss was chair of the Democratic Party—helping to ensure Nixon's election in 1968. At the end of 1976 Zapata Off-Shore was still an independently owned subsidiary of Zapata Corporation, but apparently there were plans in the works to merge back into the parent during 1977. By that time the Liedtke brothers had already moved into Pennzoil; though Zapata and Pennzoil were located in the same office complex in Houston, they had separate management. It is impossible to tell from reading the SEC reports whether Bush retained his stock in Zapata and, if so, how much he had. It is clear from newspaper articles, however, in what direction Zapata was moving by 1968. According to a January 20, 1969 Houston Chronicle article by Albert T. Collins, Zapata Norness, Inc. (formerly Zapata Off-Shore) had been seeking to acquire United Fruit Co. stock by offering to exchange one share of convertible stock for every share of United Fruit stock tendered to it. A competing offer to purchase stock had been made by AMK Corp., which was recommended by officers of the fruit company. The following week, after Zapata had already received almost 31,000 shares, AMK Corp.'s chairman, E.M. Black, and Zapata Norness reached an agreement whereby AMK would pay Zapata $3.8 million to withdraw from competition for United Fruit. AMK would buy all United Fruit stock which Zapata had purchased, in cash up to $3 million and would execute a promissory note for any amount in excess of the $3 million, payable at 6-7/8% interest in 10 equal annual installments. The purchase of United Fruit makes much more sense, however, when viewed in light of Dresser's other connections. The Harriman crew had installed Yale Skull and Bones colleague, Neil Mallon, as president of Dresser, when he appeared in town for a visit after spending six months in the "European Alps," presumably in Switzerland—getting an indoctrination in high finance. Mallon's grandfather had been a Cincinnati judge, his father a lawyer with connections to President Taft. Mallon himself had an abiding interest in world cooperation—active in Cleveland's Council on World Affairs while Dresser was headquartered there, and then establishing a branch in Dallas as soon as the company relocated in 1950. The Council was his "chief outside interest." In connection with this interest, Mallon hired a man named Hans Bernd Gisevius to work on a worldwide economic development program called the "Institute on Technical Cooperation." Gisevius, an Abwehr (German Intelligence) member stationed at the German consulate in Zurich, was a friend of Allen Dulles, who served as head of U.S. intelligence in Switzerland from December 1942 until the war ended. While in Switzerland Dulles began a long-lasting love affair with a woman named Mary Bancroft, whom he asked in 1943 to translate a book about the Third Reich which Gisevius had written. Gisevius and some of his Abwehr associates had planned the July 20th plot to kill Hitler with the idea of forming an alliance with Britain and the U.S. against Russia. His group, like Dulles, was anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, "but not necessarily anti-fascist." Dulles' mistress, Mary Bancroft, had previously been married to a man named Sherwin Badger, a Harvard graduate whose first job had been in the head office of United Fruit in Cuba. After a year in Cuba he became a journalist in Boston, later moving to the Wall Street Journal and Barron's in New York, both of which were published by Mary's stepfather, Clarence Walker Barron. Mary also had a long friendship with George Lymon Paine and Ruth Forbes Paine, whose son Michael Paine and his wife Ruth befriended Marina Oswald the year prior to John Kennedy's assassination. The Paines were from Boston and both had family trees tying them to the United Fruit Co.—through Michael's mother (a niece of W. Cameron Forbes) and his father (a descendant of Thomas Dudley Cabot, a former president of United Fruit). Michael's uncle, Eric Schroeder, was a friend and investment associate of geologist Everette DeGolyer and a cousin of Alexander "Sandy" Forbes, former director of United Fruit who "belonged to the elite Tryall Golf Club retreat in Jamaica with former DeGolyer associate Paul Raigorodsky..."

Everett DeGolyer, the famous geologist, who spent his entire career working for the Pearson oil companies—and thus had close ties to Lazard Brothers—was also a director of Dresser Industries. He had begun his career employed by Mexican Eagle Oil Co., owned by Sir Weetman Pearson, who called him to London in 1918 to sell Mexican Eagle to Royal Dutch Shell. The proceeds from the sale were invested by Pearson in the creation of a new oil company founded and operated by De Golyer in 1919 called Amerada (some years later merged into Amerada Hess). After he retired from the oil business to become an owner of Saturday Review, DeGolyer still maintained an office in Houston and was well-known in the Houston and Dallas petroleum clubs frequented by Bush and Liedtke. One of DeGolyer's daughters married George C. McGhee, a U.S. State Department official, who was present in May 1954 at the first Bilderberg meeting with George Ball, David Rockefeller, Prince Bernhard of Holland and Dr. Joseph Retinger. McGhee later served as a trustee of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, established by the Anglo-American establishment to shape the "limits to growth" agenda. By that time McGhee had left the State Department to become a director of Mobil Oil, the company which absorbed Magnolia Oil Company, which played a very strategic part in the Kennedy assassination, as will be shown in the next few pages. Magnolia Petroleum Co., incidentally, as an unincorporated joint stock association with offices in Galveston, acquired a tract of land in downtown Houston in 1926 from the trustees of the Walter Browne Botts Estate—one of the founding attorneys of Baker & Botts. This tract later became the site of the First City National Bank. According to an affidavit on file in the Harris County Real Property Records, the DeGolyer family were the principal shareholders in a Delaware corporation called J.S. Michael Co. In the mid-fifties J.S. Michael and a man named Grover J. Geiselman, Jr. began purchasing land from Italians near the corner of Westheimer and Post Oak, not far from Michel Halbouty's one-storey office building. The other buyers in the area were all people who got rich in the East Texas oil fields—R.E. Bob Smith (and his wife Vivian), the Ginthers and Gulf Interstate Oil Co. In 1951 the General Geophysical Co. bought 3 acres from Sam Lopresti at Post Oak and W. Alabama, and an adjacent tract was purchased somewhat later by a company called Seismic Exploration, which received financing from Rice University, which had also made a loan to Halbouty. The president of the Rice Board was George R. Brown of Brown & Root. Seismic sold to Gulf Interstate in 1963, approximately one week before Kennedy's assassination. In 1967 Neiman-Marcus Realty Co. mortgaged its leasehold in this tract, among others, to the Republic National Bank in Dallas. Other parties involved in the Galleria investment included the heirs of oil men Jim and Wesley West, which included Mrs. William Blakemore of Midland and Mrs. Lloyd. The DeGolyers' investment stayed in their name until 1967, when title went into Hallmark-Hollyhurst Corp. The McGhees signed the deed in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, and Dorothy DeGolyer Arnold and her husband, General Milton W. Arnold, signed in Loudoun County, Virginia. Another tract which they had conveyed earlier to Stephen T. Cochran, as trustee, was quitclaimed to him in 1971 by Gulf Oil Co., then conveyed to a limited partnership called San Felipe, Ltd. and sold to Kalker Co, a New Jersey corporation, which had its office in New York. That tract is now occupied by the Marriott Hotel and U.S. Home Corp. The head of United Fruit in 1969 was Eli Black, successor of Samuel Zemurray, a Romanian from the same province as Edgar Bronfman's grandfather. United Fruit was traditionally financed by New York and Boston banks, which installed their bankers in top management positions of the company. Allen Dulles was a Wall Street lawyer who represented such banks. After the 1954 Guatemalan coup in which the CIA was heavily involved, Walter Bedell Smith, head of the CIA, became a United Fruit director and Allen Dulles, who had been president of United Fruit, replaced Smith at the CIA. At that time the DuPont family also had a large investment in United Fruit. DuPont's significance will become more apparent in connection with the following section on the Bronfman interests in Conoco.

4. Paravicini Bank and Permindex In the same year that Zapata and Pennzoil were moving toward hostile takeovers, a new Swiss bank opened in Houston with J. Hugh Liedtke and George Bush's securities adviser, W.S. Farish III, among the directors. Called "Bank for Investment and Credit Berne" (BICB), its stock was owned by Capital National Bank and Paravicini Bank, but investors included Seagrams, Boeing, Minute Maid in Zurich, the London subsidiary of Brown and Root and the Schlesinger Organization of London and Johannesburg. These investors are more than interesting in light of the fact that Paravicini is a descendant of the Venetian Pallavicini family, whose attorney in Rome, Carlo d'Amelio, was the general counsel to Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), the Italian arm of Permindex. CMC was incorporated in Berne Switzerland, and D'Amelio sat on the board of directors during the time that Seagrams' attorney, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield of Montreal, was chairman of Permindex. When the role of CMC in the attempted assassination of President DeGaulle of France was discovered, it fled Europe and re-emerged in Johannesburg, South Africa. However, the parent company, Permindex, continued to be managed from Montreal by Bloomfield. Clay Shaw, the man prosecuted in New Orleans by Jim Garrison for his role in the Kennedy assassination, was also a board member of CMC, with which his International Trade Mart had connections. According to a 1970 report called "The Torbitt Document," a compilation of information gathered by a Texas attorney from "court-approved and documented evidence" from sources in the U.S. Customs Department and the Narcotics Bureau, from the Warren Commission and the Garrison investigations, Bloomfield's Permindex Corp. supervised five subsidiary groups:

(1) "White Russian" organization called the Solidarists--members Ferenc Nagy of Dallas (former Hungarian premier) and Jean De Menil of Houston (head of Schlumberger);
(2) American Council of Churches--H.L. Hunt organization;
(3) Free Cuba Committee--Carlos Prio Soccaras (Cuban ex-president);
(4) "The Syndicate"--Clifford Jones and Bobby Baker working with Joe Bonanno Mafia family;
(5) NASA's Security Division--Werner Von Braun, headquarters in Redstone Arsenal in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and on East Broad Street in Columbus, Ohio. The Kennedy assassination was planned and carried out by Division Five of the FBI, which acted in conjunction with the Defense Intelligence Agency under the control of the Joint Chiefs. These divisions had a highly secret police agency called the Defense Industrial Security Command, which also worked with NASA, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), USIA and weapons and ammunition supply corporations (munitions makers) which contract with those agencies. The police force originated in the 1930's to work for the Tennessee Valley Authority, then expanded to the AEC, tying it in with army intelligence. Agents of this force included Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and others, and was headed up by Bloomfield. According to this report: The principal financiers of Permindex were a number of U.S. oil companies, H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, John De Menil, Solidarist director of Houston, John Connally, as executor of Sid Richardson estate, Haliburton [sic] Oil Co., Sen. Robert Kerr of Okla., Troy Post of Dallas, Lloyd Cobb of New Orleans, Dr. Oechner of New Orleans, George and Herman Brown of Brown & Root, Attorney Roy M. Cohn, Chairman of the Board for Lionel Corp., New York City, Schenley Industries of New York City, Walter Dornberger, ex-Nazi general and his company, Bell Aerospace, Pan American World Airways and its subsidiary, Intercontinental Hotel Corp., Paul Raigorodsky of Claiborne Oil of New Orleans, Credit Suisse of Canada, and Heineken's Brewery of Canada and a host of other munitions makers and NASA contractors directed by the Defense Industrial Security Command.

5. Permindex and Seagrams Roy Cohn was a very close friend of Lewis Rosenstiel, who was in turn a friend of Sam Bronfman. Bloomfield was also president of Heineken of Canada. What these companies seem to have in common is their shareholders, directors and financiers. They are the same persons who invested in Bush-Overbey, Zapata and Dresser Industries through the investment trusts they controlled. The 1992 edition of Dope, Inc. has this to say about the banks involved: Both Seagram's (and its old Prohibition rum-running partner, Hudson's Bay) are interlocked through a maze of contacts with all five of the big Canadian chartered banks: the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Toronto Dominion Bank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Thus, the dirty money gleaned from the drug trade is conduited through these banks to points further south: The banks' offshore centers in the Caribbean, and from there the money makes its whirlpool round of worldwide laundering. The chairman of this Houston-based international investment bank, BICB, whose investors included Seagrams and the Schlesinger mining interests in South Africa, was Johan F. (Fred) Paravicini. Vice-chairman was L.F. McCollum, Sr.—a long-time Humble Oil employee, who headed Conoco and founded Capital National Bank of Houston in 1965. The bank's president was Baker Lovett, cousin of James A. Baker III, and grandson of the first president of Rice University, Odell Lovett, a friend of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton. In an interview with the Houston Post, Baker stated that his experience of 15 years in banking indicated that Houston had a relatively short supply of money, and that venture capital had to come from New England—from "more mature economies." He believed a bank "should dedicate a portion of its resources to relatively risky situations because it's those which sometimes really pay off." As the 1980s showed, however, it was also that type of investment that resulted in the bailout of the savings and loan industry. In addition to its investment in the BICB set up by Conoco's chairman, Seagrams also owned a great deal of stock in Conoco and caused a major eruption with DuPont in 1981 over who would control the company. Seagrams was interested in Conoco because it owned a 53% interest in Hudson's Bay Oil and Gas Co. in Canada. Since it had recently received $2.3 billion cash profit from the sale of Sunoco stock, with which it had tried and failed to purchase control of DuPont's St. Joe Minerals, the Scottish-financed liquor barons at Seagrams saw another chance to grab something prized by the New Englanders—control of Conoco. In 1969 W.S. Farish III was 31 years old and was a partner in the investment companies of Underwood Neuhaus and W.S. Farish & Co., through which he handled millions of dollars of his family's wealth in addition to George Bush's blind trust. Farish was also serving as president of a company called Fluorex, an international mineral and exploration company, and in 1973 also became a director of Houston Natural Gas. He was the only grandson of one of the founders of Humble Oil, W.S. Farish, Sr., who had been chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey prior to World War II. W.A. Harriman & Co. helped Jersey Standard finance a merger with I.G. Farben, the German chemical corporation which manufactured the gas used to exterminate so many Jews. Lehman Brothers, which had an office in Capital National Bank's building at 1300 Main—on the same floor, incidentally, as George Bush's friend (and later, Commerce Secretary, Robert Mosbacher), was represented on the board of the Capital National and its international investment branch. One director was Lehman Brothers partner, John B. Carter, Jr., and another was director I.H. "Denny" Kempner III, heir to the Imperial Sugar fortune, whose brother was a Lehman representative in Houston. The Kempner brothers' mother was Mary Carroll Kempner, a granddaughter of W.T. Carter and sister of W.T. Carter, Jr., whose wife was Lillie Neuhaus, making them first cousins of Victor J. Carter. Lillie was a niece of C.L. Neuhaus and W. Oscar Neuhaus, the founders of Neuhaus & Co. (later Underwood Neuhaus). Oscar's son, Hugo, married Kate Rice, Libbie Farish's cousin, and after W.S. and Libbie's son died in 1943, their daughter-in-law, Mary Wood Farish, married Kate Neuhaus' son. The Oscar Neuhaus who became trustee for the wealthy Cullen family and secretary of a joint venture between Dresser and Cullen interests, was a key member of the Neuhaus/Farish banking interests—which thus had control of Cullen/Dresser real estate matters in downtown Houston. This relationship resulted in the construction of a complex of office buildings in the southwest part of downtown leased to Dresser, Cullen/Frost Bank, Enron, Oppenheimer & Co. and assorted other interesting companies. The Carter family also were investment bankers in Houston. Still another director of Capital Bank was Bill Barziza, a descendant of Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, founder of Houston Land & Trust, which has since merged into First International Bank. This ancestor was the son of a Venetian count and French-Canadian mother, born in Williamsburg, Virginia, who, during the Civil War, had been captured at Gettysburg and smuggled through the Confederate underground to Canada where he was returned to Houston via the blockade route through Bermuda. The decision to form a partnership with Paravicini may have also been influenced by another Lehman representative—William Mellon Hitchcock--grandson of William Larimer Mellon, founder of Gulf Oil, and nephew of banker Andrew Mellon. Bush's partners in Zapata were the sons of William Liedtke, Sr.—one of the "highest ranking lawyers in Gulf Oil Corp." Billy Mellon Hitchcock worked from 1961 to 1967 for "his father's mentor," Bobby Lehman of Lehman Brothers in Manhattan. Fred Paravicini began an illegal trading relationship with Billy in 1965, for which they were not indicted until 1973—Hitchcock in February and Paravicini in June. Hitchcock pled guilty in April. He then appears to have disappeared from sight. What Hitchcock shows us is a classic fondi member, educated at Harvard, trained at Lazard Brothers during Lord Cowdray's tenure, who while vacationing in Venice, is recruited to work for CIA-connected investment bank with connections to the Bronfman family by a member of his father's polo team! How did he manage to get caught? These people never get caught. But what was never followed up on was how Hitchcock and Paravicini were connected to Conoco, Seagrams, Standard Oil, Brown & Root and the Schlesinger mines in Johannesburg. These connections lead straight to Permindex, the Bronfmans and to the Dallas oil men funding the JFK assassination. They also lead to George Bush through W.S. Farish—investor of his blind trust.

6. The Pearson Group and Texas oil men Although it has never been proven that Farish, Liedtke or George Bush had any background in intelligence operations before Bush was appointed director of the CIA by Gerald Ford in 1976, an inference can be made just by reviewing the associations that existed in the Texas oil community in the 1960s. Billy's training as an investment banker had taken place at the English branch of Lazard Freres, which has been shown to be closely tied to one of George Bush's original investors, Eugene Meyer, and to Everett DeGolyer, a Dresser director who had spent most of his career working for Sir Weetman Pearson (Viscount Cowdray). DeGolyer left his job at Amerada Petroleum in New York and moved to Dallas where he established a geological consulting firm called DeGolyer and MacNaughton and served from 1954 until his death in 1956 on the board of Dresser Industries in Dallas. He was replaced on the board by his partner, Lewis W. MacNaughton, who remained until 1969. Lewis MacNaughton was also a director of Empire Trust, a company whose largest single holding of stock was comprised of Loeb-Lehman, Bache and Bronfman holdings, in which Edgar Bronfman became a director in 1963. Edgar Bronfman, Sr. married the daughter of John L. Loeb (Loeb, Rhoades), who was himself married to a Lehman. A vice-president of Empire Trust in Dallas was Jack Crichton (also president of Nafco Oil & Gas, Inc.) who was connected with Army Reserve Intelligence. In a 1995 book written by Fabian Escalante, the chief of a Cuban counterintelligence unit during the late 1950s and early 1960s, he describes that as soon as intelligence was received from agents in Cuba that Fidel Castro had "converted to communism," a plan called "Operation 40" was put into effect by the National Security Council, presided over by Vice-President Richard Nixon. Escalante indicates that Nixon: "was the Cuban "case officer" who had assembled an important group of businessmen headed by George Bush and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary funds for the operation. Nixon was a protégé of Bush's father Preston [sic] who in 1946 had supported Nixon's bid for Congress. In fact, Preston Bush was the campaign strategist that brought Eisenhower and Nixon to the presidency of the United States. With such patrons, [Tracy] Barnes was certain that failure was impossible." According to Peter Dale Scott, Crichton arranged for Marina Oswald to have Ilya Mamantov as her interpreter when she was questioned after Oswald's arrest. Mamantov also taught scientific Russian classes at Magnolia Oil Co. Lee and Marina Oswald first met the Paines at a party at the home of Richard Pierce and Everett Glover where practically all the guests worked for Magnolia Oil. The guests included a German named Volkmar Schmidt who came to Dallas in 1961 to do geological research at Magnolia's laboratories in nearby Duncanville. MacNaughton's personal accountant was George Bouhe, who also worked at the Tolstoy Foundation with Paul Raigorodsky—a man involved with the National Alliance of Solidarists.

 Bouhe was closely tied to George DeMohrenschildt, who later became famous as the White Russian assigned to "handle" Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. It was DeMohrenschildt who had taken the Oswalds to a party where they met Volkmar Schmidt, and then a later party at the same house where they met Michael Paine. DeMohrenschildt was also the one in charge of getting Marina a place to stay at Ruth Paine's home, and it was Ruth Paine who found Oswald the job at the book depository office in the building owned by Jack Crichton's friend. DeMohrenschildt also was involved with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in Dallas which received subsidies from the Baird Foundation, which was determined to be a CIA conduit by the Patman House Select Committee hearings [cf. New York Times, March 5, 1967, p. 36]. DeMohrenschildt immigrated to the U.S. in 1938, having been involved in espionage with the OSS and probably with the Nazis. He had a doctorate in commerce from the University of Liege, Belgium, when he came to the United States at age 27 where his brother Dmitry was a professor at Dartmouth, having degrees from Columbia and Yale. While visiting his brother and American sister-in-law at Bellport, near East Hampton, on the eastern, ocean tip of Long Island, DeMohrenschildt met many influential people, including stockbroker Jack and Janet Bouvier (Jackie's parents). He was also a friend of Margaret Clark Williams, whose family had vast land holdings in Louisiana, who gave him a letter of introduction to Humble Oil. DeMohrenschildt came to Texas by bus "where he got a job with Humble Oil Company in Houston, thanks to family connections," and, "[d]espite being friends with the chairman of the board of Humble," he worked as a roughneck in the Louisiana oil fields. DeMohrenschildt came to Texas in 1944 and got a master's degree in petroleum geology at the University of Texas at Austin. For a time he worked overseas for the Murchisons' Three States Oil and Gas and for Pantipec, an oil company owned by William F. Buckley, Jr.'s father operated in Mexico at the same time Sir Weetman Pearson (later Viscount Cowdray) and DeGolyer were there running the Mexican Eagle. In fact, Buckley and his brother were the attorneys for the Mexican oil companies after their properties were taxed illegally by the Mexican government. According to William Engdahl, Pearson worked for British Secret Intelligence, "as did all other major British oil groups." They had financed and put in power the regime of General Victoriano Huerta, subsequently overthrown by President Woodrow Wilson, who was supporting the objectives of Standard Oil in attempting to take from Britain at least a portion of its concessions for half of Mexico's oil. The U.S. under Rockefeller cover sent money and arms to Carranza.

7. Eugene Meyer, Phil Graham and the Drug Conspiracy Eugene Meyer had placed the Washington Post in Phil Graham's name, rather than Katherine's, and Newsweek was acquired at the outset in Phil's name. But he was not free to print the truth. It is clear from looking at the list of bidders at the 1933 auction at which Eugene Meyer acquired the Post, that British interests were going to end up in control of a very important part of the American media. In his heyday, Phil Graham had been the liaison between the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson. In 1956 Graham had worked in Johnson's campaign after initially supporting Adlai Stevenson. Phil allegedly designed Johnson's "Great Society" during the 1956 campaign, and then continued the connection with Johnson in the Senate, acting as liaison with Felix Frankfurter who was still on the Court. In 1960, Graham again supported Johnson, but when he saw JFK had the nomination, he started lobbying for Johnson as vice-president. As Bobby Baker remembered the events, Johnson was told by Jack Kennedy that the people pushing him to put Johnson on the ticket were Joe Kennedy, Phil Graham and Joe Alsop. The person most opposed was LBJ's mentor, Sam Rayburn, who objected to Johnson's leaving the Senate to become vice-president. He was "worked on" by John Connally and Phil Graham. When Bobby Kennedy tried to negotiate with Lyndon, Rayburn's response to Johnson was: "You don't want it, you won't negotiate for it, you'll take it only if Jack drafts you, and you won't discuss it with anyone else." It was Phil Graham who relayed this message to Jack. Kennedy waffled somewhat before calling Graham back to confirm Johnson's selection, but then Graham failed to report back to Johnson. In the meantime, Bobby Kennedy reported to the Johnson group that there was too much objection by the liberals and the offer had been withdrawn. Bill Moyers was sent to find Phil Graham, who then got Jack on the phone to straighten out the misunderstanding. Because of the events that unfolded later, the cover story is that, as early as October 1957, Phil Graham was reportedly being treated for mental problems. This was somehow kept from Eugene Meyer until his death in July 1959, so Phil still had title to the Post. After his father-in-law's death, however, the story goes, Phil's erratic behavior increased. Carol Felsenthal, Kay Graham's biographer, curiously mentions that Phil's psychotic episodes became pronounced around the same time as "one of his closest friends," Frank Wisner, Jr. developed depression. She also mentions that Phil Graham was being treated by a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst named Dr. Leslie Farber, who would have preferred to be a writer instead of a doctor. It was Farber who in 1963 committed Phil to Chestnut Lodge, a private psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland. The day he was involuntarily committed, six weeks before his suicide, he had flown to Phoenix with his "fiancee," Robin Webb for a journalistic association meeting. A Newsweek bureau chief in Paris, Larry Collins, had introduced Phil Graham to Robin Webb in 1962 while Graham was in Paris working on a sensitive project for the government. At a banquet he stood up, interrupting the speaker, and proceeded to announce that he would reveal who in Washington was sleeping with whom—ending with the fact that President Kennedy was having an affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, wife of CIA man, Cord Meyer, Jr. At that point Graham left the banquet with Robin, who shortly thereafter called Jean Friendly at home to say she desperately needed help because Phil was beating her up. Why she called Katherine Graham's girlhood friend is not made clear. Not only had Jean Friendly previously alerted Dr. Farber to stand by to commit Phil, but President Kennedy, hearing of Phil's comments from newsmen at the banquet, had called Katherine to tell her he was sending the doctor in a military jet to Phoenix. The plane transported Phil in a straitjacket to Rockville, where he was "treated" for six weeks. The day he was released on a pass, his body was found with his head blown off. Dr. Farber, incidentally, "left town" soon after Phil Graham died, as did girlfriend Robin. Her role is extremely suspicious in this matter, considering she waived all rights to Graham's estate, returned to Australia, refused to ever speak to the press, then went to work for Australia's delegation to UNESCO. She later married an Australian ambassador in the foreign service. It sounds as if this whole scene was orchestrated by British Intelligence. At the same time Phil Graham was living with Robin Webb openly, JFK was having a more secretive affair with Mary Meyer. It was taking place in her studio at the carriage house owned by Phil Graham's employee, Ben Bradlee, who had married Mary Meyer's sister in 1956. A year after the marriage, Bradlee left the Paris bureau of Newsweek, the magazine which Graham later bought in 1960, and moved to P Street in Georgetown, next door to a house where the Kennedys subsequently took up residence. Meyer was allegedly supplying Kennedy with marijuana, who, according to her diary, preferred cocaine. She was murdered while jogging on October 12, 1964 by an unknown gunman who was never caught. Mary's CIA-agent husband, Cord, told Felsenthal that his wife kept a diary which, shortly before her death, she had asked her friends, Ann and Jim Truitt—also a Newsweek writer with CIA connections—to find in case of her death and preserve for her son. However, Ben Bradlee's wife (Mary's sister) found the diary and allegedly turned it over to James Jesus Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief, another "family friend," who was helping in the search. Dick Russell's book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, reveals more details about what was going on at the time of the affair. Citing various sources, Russell says that Mary Meyer, in addition to having been married to one-time number-two CIA official Cord Meyer and a friend of Angleton, was also acquainted with Timothy Leary, who helped the CIA create the drug counter-culture. Leary quoted Mary as follows: "The guys who run things—I mean the guys who really run things in Washington—are very interested in psychology, and drugs in particular. "These people play hardball, Timothy. They want to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing, for control." Leary talked to Mary on the day JFK was killed. She was crying hysterically and saying: "They couldn't control him anymore. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much....They'll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I'm scared." Leary says he never talked to her again. Eleven months later she was dead. Her diary was found in the carriage house where she had rendezvoused with Jack Kennedy. Angleton says he took it to the CIA. He told Dick Russell in an interview on April 2, 1976 that he was acting as a family friend rather than as a CIA official when he searched for the diary. Jim Truitt, another CIA man who also worked for Phil Graham at Newsweek, says Angleton told him he burned it. Truitt later became the Newsweek bureau chief in Tokyo. As Carol Felsenthal relates in her book, as his depressive moods increased, Phil had become sick of "sapless Unitarianism" and was increasingly drawn to Catholicism to "bring some shape and rootedness to his life—real religion." Phil's father had not been happy about his son's marriage to Katherine Meyer. He distrusted Wall Street and Jews. At the end of his life, Phil was coming around to his father's way of thinking. While working to settle a strike involving the International Typographical Union against the publishers in April 1963, Phil told the union leader, Bertram Powers that a publisher could do anything he wanted to do and it wouldn't be reported. "I can go out to Times Square right now and shit," he said, "and you wouldn't read a word about it in any paper." Felsenthal emphasized how true that statement turned out to be the day after Graham's "brilliant" tirade in Phoenix, when he was physically restrained and transported by Presidential jet to the nuthouse. It was almost as if he wanted to prove his point, his self-hatred feeding the disdain he felt for his colleagues. He had undoubtedly chosen to have his ugly breakdown practically in their laps. With the exception of Sarah McClendon at her small Texas news service, no one in the country printed a word of it.

8. Lehman Brothers and Billy Mellon Hitchcock The Mellon family—another established member of the fondi—had, not surprisingly, close ties with the O.S.S. London station chief David K.E. Bruce was married to Andrew Mellon's daughter. Also, the Mellon uncles were social friends of CIA director Richard Helms during the late 60s and early 70s. Bobby Lehman, who gave Billy Mellon Hitchcock a job at Lehman Brothers in 1961 also had participated with W.A. Harriman & Co. in aviation issues (Lehman, Tommy Hitchcock and Averell Harriman were on the same polo team). Lehman Brothers also financed David Sarnoff's Radio Corporation of America, which served as Sir William "Intrepid" Stephenson's headquarters in New York until the O.S.S. was established. Tommy Hitchcock's family were "gentry, a clan whose way of living 'depicted the English country life.'" They had a home in Aiken, South Carolina, where Billy spent his visits fox hunting and playing polo. According to Billy, his grandfather had gone to Oxford, and his great-grandfather had been financial editor of the New York Sun, married to a descendant of William Corcoran, an "eminent Georgetown financier." Billy and his brother attended boarding school in South Carolina, a place run like an English public school. Like George Bush, In the mid-1950s he got a job as a tool dresser on oil rigs in West Texas (Pecos—a short distance from Midland). From there Billy went to a refinery near Vienna, Austria. Later he became a trainee at the English branch of Lazard Freres. There is no doubt Hitchcock was laundering drug money, a fact brought out in his testimony in the 1973 trial of LSD merchants, Nicholas Sand and Robert Timothy Scully. Hitchcock also opened an account for Sand with Paravicini's Swiss bank and helped him set up a Liechtenstein corporation to acquire title to a farmhouse where the drugs were to be manufactured. The supplies for the drugs came from England and were shipped directly to Hitchcock and stored in his safe deposit boxes in Sausalito. Billy also helped carry and set up the equipment for the lab as well as hand-carrying almost $100,000 in cash to Fred in Pittsburgh. Billy first set up an account with Fred Paravicini in 1965, depositing investment profits into a numbered account at the Paravicini Bank in Berne. By 1969 Hitchcock had turned $25,000 into over a million by leveraging his investments with 100% margin loans from Paravicini. The New York account Hitchcock managed for Fred had reputedly contained up to $67 million of profits made on tips Hitchcock received in connection with his brokerage business. In the summer of 1969 Sand and Scully began having legal problems and Billy's source for raw materials to make LSD dried up. At that point he sent a man named Ronald Hadley Stark to the ranch in Idylwild, California, where the group lived. Stark, who took over where Billy left off in supplying products and in laundering profits, was later caught and imprisoned for narco-terrorism in Italy, defended by O.S.S. attorney Walter Sterling Surrey. Writers made Billy Hitchcock out to look like a bumbling new-age hippie after he was caught, but a review of his background shows that not to be the case. He had been hired at age 23 to work for Lehman Brothers by the head man himself, Bobby Lehman, during an "accidental" meeting in Venice, Italy. Within three or four years Billy's commissions reached $250,000 a year, but he was not satisfied. In late 1964 he met Sam Feranis Clapp, a Boston attorney and chairman of the Fiduciary Trust Company in the Bahamas, with whom he set up some offshore trusts. Another of Clapp's customers was Bernie Cornfeld, who turned to Billy for brokerage services for the accounts of his new mutual fund, Investors Overseas Services at about the same time Billy began advising P