Once upon a time, in a land far away, lived a man, a man who believed that he, alone among all men, was anointed by God.

In fact, this man believed he was God. This man took it upon himself to organize and lead a great and holy crusade, a vast and powerful movement of the oppressed and victimized. This movement had a powerful symbol – the rainbow.

This man and his select group of followers would redefine everything in the world in which they lived, from the most basic human relationships such as marriage and property, to the ultimate question of whom would live and whom would die. But this story is not some lost fanciful legend or children’s fable. It is one of the most profound lessons in history.

The ideas of this man and his followers are not confined to a remote dustbin of the past, but are very alive today. They have impacted the world (and continue to impact our world) such as few ideas before or since. Such ideas have consequences. Are we prepared to face them?

1:00 am on April 6, 2025

I recently joined Lena Petrova on the World Affairs in Context podcast to talk about the alleged gold at Fort Knox, how the federal government stole all that gold, and whether or not governments need a gold a Bitcoin reserve. We also speculate a bit about what would happen if the official numbers about the US gold reserve turn out to be wrong. But, we may never know because DOGE and the Trump administration have already stopped talking about auditing the gold reserve:

3:56 pm on April 4, 2025

This week on America’s Untold Stories, Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley break down the most chaotic JFK Files hearing yet—where Oliver Stone was confused for Roger Stone during explosive congressional testimony. Oliver Stone himself appeared as a witness, reading his prepared remarks on the assassination of JFK and LBJ’s potential involvement.

Also covered: Laura Loomer claims a secret White House meeting preceded the firing of three NSC staffers, and now Trump has axed his own NSA chief, Timothy Haugh. MAGA-aligned voices are celebrating what appears to be a major security team overhaul.

Matt Taibbi files a $10 million libel suit against a Democratic lawmaker who accused him of “serial sexual harassment.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk wraps up his work at DOGE but will remain as an official advisor to the Trump administration, according to VP JD Vance.

And yes—Trump’s tariffs somehow reached two tiny islands populated only by penguins and seals. No joke.

Don’t miss this wild, wide-ranging Free-form Friday!

Oliver Stone and Others Testify on President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records

The key remaining major issue that merits full investigation and intensive revelation is the supposed “fact” discussed in this “hearing” is that the alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald went to Mexico City, met with Russian and Cuban authorities, and sought to obtain the proper authorized documents to go to Cuba, and later the Soviet Union.

Oswald did NOT go to Mexico City. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told the new president, Lyndon Johnson, that the telephone recordings, and photos taken outside the Cuban and Russian embassies claiming to be Oswald were forgeries.

This information points to the crucial role of the top CIA official in Mexico City, David Atlee Phillips, the CIA’s chief of operations for the Western Hemisphere, in preparing this central element implicating Oswald as the assassin. Sylvia Tirado de Duran of the Cuban Consulate, was later arrested and tortured by Mexican authorities at the direction of the CIA, in order to make her purported statements concerning Oswald align with this concocted narrative. This has probably been one of the key factors why the government has withheld these particular files to the last.

Oswald was framed and was exactly what he said he was — a patsy.

This “Mexico City Legend” lies at the epicenter of the establishment spurious rendition of the Kennedy murder and coup d’état.

There is an ever-growing scholarly consensus among presidential historians, distinguished political analysts, and JFK assassination researchers that on November 22, 1963, an insidious coup d’état by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State was accomplished with the brutal murder of President John F. Kennedy.

What happened on that fateful Friday in Dallas sixty-one years ago led to perhaps the single most important series of events affecting the subsequent history of our nation. It lies at the inner most depth, the dark clotted heart, of what observers now describe as the deep state.

The official full 889-page report by the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, about the assassination of President John Kennedy on November 22, 1963, established the cover-up of this coup.

Their landmark final report was presented to President Lyndon Johnson on September 24, 1964, and made public on September 27.

3:49 pm on April 4, 2025

America has massive problems, which can be summed up in two words — overwhelming government. Despite some impressive exposures from DOGE, our chief problem is being exacerbated. Government spending is increasing, government debt is increasing, President Trump threatens new wars, and now we’re in the midst of a trade war. The troops are not coming home, the 1,000 bases are not being closed, and the “foreign aid,” is not being eliminated. In order to get rid of overwhelming government, all of these variables have to move in the opposite direction.

12:58 pm on April 4, 2025

Old Wealth, the Kuomintang, and the CIA’s Air America

By: Peter Dale Scott

Abstract: An essay of mine, with the title “Private War Enterprise in Asia: Air America, the Brook Club and the Kuomintang,” was sent by me in 1970 to Ramparts magazine. But it was impounded by the CIA, and retained in their archives until released in 2009, under three CIA cover slips (one almost fully redacted). It is now published here, under a 2022 Introduction I have written for it.

Introduction

The essay, like the 2022 Introduction, describes two important facts about the early CIA: (1) how enmeshed the agency was in both policies and personnel with the milieu of New York inherited wealth, and (2) how the early policies of that milieu were determined by private financial interests, sometimes in direct conflict with public USG objectives.

In 2009, the CIA released three pages of their records from 1970, along with the document they referred to. One of the three CIA cover records was from the Security Directorate, classified “SECRET,” and wholly redacted except for an OS file number, presumably mine. The document attached to these records was my long-lost manuscript essay entitled, “Private War Enterprise in Asia: Air America, the Brook Club. and the Kuomintang.”

 

 

 

 

I remember nothing about this essay. CIA notations suggest that I submitted it to Ramparts magazine in September of 1970. However, a cover sheet indicates very clearly that the article was entered into CIA records on August 18, 1970. The article was never published before now, and I have no way of knowing whether it ever reached Ramparts.¹

It was, however, passed from the CIA’s Deputy Directorate of Security to the Office of the Executive Director/Comptroller, Col. Lawrence K. White, who in September forwarded it to the Deputy Director of Plans for brief discussion “at the morning meeting.”²

The year 1970 was a busy one for me. Earlier that year, I had three anti-war articles published in the New York Review of Books and two more in Ramparts. In June, I submitted to Bobbs Merrill the manuscript of my book, The War Conspiracy, which was not published until two years later in June of 1972. By then, the book contained an additional chapter, on “Opium, the China Lobby, and the CIA,” which incorporated some of the prose from this lost August 1970 essay.

A digression: The book contract with Bobbs Merrill gave them two years to publish, a deadline they missed by one week. This brought my book into the time frame of my friend Al McCoy’s monumental The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a book announced with great fanfare in July on the front page of the New York Times, along with the bonus (which of course I would have welcomed) of a vigorous CIA attack.³ Al McCoy’s book was a much more definitive study than my meagre chapter, and it changed history. At the same time his thesis differed from mine: he alleged that “U.S. officials in Southeast Asia… have generally turned a blind eye to official involvement.”⁴ Nor did he conceal the fact that his book was written with input from CIA veterans like Edward Lansdale and Lucien Conein (at “McClean, Virginia,” the site of CIA Headquarters).

My book in contrast argued that the United States (including the CIA) was consciously using “illegal narcotics networks [ and their resources] to fight communism.”⁵ In late 1972, the critic Paul Krassner wrote that my book was being “suppressed,” or as we now say, “privished”: that is, I could find it in bookstores in Berkeley; but most of my friends across the country could not. In retrospect I have wondered if Bobbs Merrill (whose legal counsel at the time was the notorious CIA veteran William Harvey) may not have made a preemptive purchase.

The CIA had been aware of me since at the latest June 1970, when I consented to the request of a fellow researcher, a CIA veteran, that I let the CIA look at my book manuscript.⁶ He told me later that a car drove over from San Francisco to Berkeley, to pick it up from him.

Reading the essay a half century later, I see an argument in it that I would not endorse: the suggestion that the socially prominent New Yorkers named below on the boards of CIA proprietary firms had any control over those firms, rather than merely serving as a front for the agency. However, I do believe that the article demonstrated two important facts about the early CIA: (1) how enmeshed the agency was in both policies and personnel with New York inherited wealth, and (2) how the early policies of that milieu were determined by private financial interests, sometimes in direct conflict with public objectives.

Today we have further evidence in support of the second proposition.

The date of 1970 explains certain glaring omissions in the essay. I could not then have been aware of the impending close to the era of eastern US establishment-Kuomintang cooperation, as Kissinger and Nixon, starting with the “ping pong diplomacy” of 1971, began the delicate task of guiding America towards the major policy change of recognizing Communist China and the deep diplomatic, economic, financial, technological and other relations that followed in subsequent decades.

Nor could I have foreseen the extent to which Nixon would realign the base of the Republican Party, exploiting white racist resentment in the South and thus wresting control of the party away from white establishment liberals in the northeast. That realignment culminated in the Reagan Revolution of 1981 and continuing in fundamentals to 2022. It was accompanied by the creation of a new organization called the Council on National Policy, explicitly designed by people like the Texas oil millionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt to combat the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

But the biggest omission reflects how little I knew then about the postwar development of US support for Kuomintang remnant troops in Burma. A key role in this was played by Paul Helliwell—a Miami lawyer and a veteran of the OSS in Kunming, China. Helliwell acted first in his role in the Far East Division of the Strategic Service Unit (1945-47), a successor to OSS. Later he was instrumental in the creation of two CIA proprietary companies: SEA Supply Inc, and CAT—the latter of which became Air America. SEA Supply and CAT were both incorporated by Helliwell, a Miami lawyer, for Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC).

This direct US support for the chief opium traffickers of the Southeast Asian “Golden Triangle” became official with Truman’s authorization in late 1950 of Operation Paper. This CIA/OPC program—which CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith had opposed—was intended to divert Chinese armed forces towards their southern frontier, away from the conflict in Korea.

A key role in this support to Kuomintang remnants in Southeast Asia had been played earlier by a private Thai trading company set up in 1946 by Willis Bird, OSS Kunming Deputy Chief over Helliwell. After mishandling a post-war mission to Korea, Bird had left OSS under a cloud, but remained a friend of OSS Chief William Donovan. Bird’s trading company is said to have been originally financed by his friend Donovan’s post-war World Commerce Corporation (WCC), and Donovan himself visited Thailand in 1948. William Stevenson writes that Donovan “turned Siam into a base from which to run [postwar] secret operations against the new Soviet threat in Asia.”⁷

I should have written more about the WCC in my 1970 essay, for reasons that will become clear later in this introduction.

With Truman’s approval of the KMT-supporting Operation Paper in 1949, Bird’s trading business was subsumed under the new CIA proprietary that Bird’s old OSS mate Helliwell had incorporated in Miami, SEA Supply, Inc. But Bird himself was now well established in right wing, anti-democratic Thai military circles. He even plotted secretly with them to prepare for a Thai military coup in 1950—against, and sometimes in overt opposition to, the US Embassy’s efforts to consolidate Thailand’s fragile democracy. The 1950 coup brought to power Phao Sriyanon, the Thai general controlling the movement of KMT opium through Thailand from the rebel Shan states in Burma. It was not long before Phao was alleged to be the richest man in the world.

As I write in American War Machine,

Bird’s energetic promotion of Phao, precisely when the U.S. embassy was trying to reduce Phao’s corrupt influence, led to a 1951 embassy memorandum of protest to Washington about Bird’s activities. “Why is this man Bird allowed to deal with the Police Chief [Phao]?” the memo asked.⁸

But the uncontrollable Bird, in his de facto consolidation of the opium traffic in Thailand, appears to have conformed to the purposes of an unseen higher force which overrode the policy of the appointed officials in the U.S. Embassy. What Bird did was in concert with Helliwell in Miami, as well as with Helliwell’s CIA proprietaries, SEA Supply and CAT/Air America. Additionally, the Thai Border Patrol Police (BPP), part of General Phao’s military forces, had been receiving covert U.S. intelligence support, training, and military aid, from as early as 1948 following their role in an earlier Thai military coup in 1947.

Bird’s collusion with a major drug trafficker was in concert with other CIA-related activities at this time in remote areas, from France, Italy, and the Middle East, to Mexico and Taiwan. In later years, similar operations would be carried out in Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Australia, and Afghanistan.⁹

These widely dispersed grey alliances with drug traffickers were interconnected, but from a base outside the United States. Starting in 1950, Ting Tsuo-shou, civilian advisor to the KMT troops in Burma, began organizing for a larger Anti-Communist League.¹⁰ In 1954, ostensibly as part of the CIA operation to overthrow the Arbenz government of Guatemala, Howard Hunt (the future Watergate plotter), helped organize a Latin-American chapter for the League.¹¹ In the same year, the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League (APACL) was established in Taiwan, allegedly with financial support from the CIA Deputy Chief of Station there, Ray Cline.¹²

In 1950, the Kuomintang ambition of “rolling back” Communism in Asia was endorsed by both the Republican Party and General Macarthur at his SCAP Headquarters in Japan. But it was opposed by the containment policy devised by Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and George Kennan.

Truman and Acheson had even worse news for the KMT, now re-established in Taiwan. “In January 1950, [they] publicly announced that Washington would not provide military assistance to safeguard Taiwan.”¹³

That Taiwan and the KMT survived was due largely to private initiatives taken by Admiral Charles M. Cooke, former commander of the US Seventh Fleet. In February 1950, Cooke flew to Taiwan, on a trip “apparently arranged by SCAP headquarters with MacArthur’s approval [while] the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Taipei were kept in the dark.”¹⁴

A month later,

Cooke worked out a draft contract, in which he proposed the formation of a “Special Technician Program” (STP) under the nominal supervision of the New York–based Commerce International China Inc. (CIC), a subsidiary of World Commerce Corporation chaired by S. G. Fassoulis, another powerful figure in the China lobby…. The CIC’s complex pedigree thus imbued the STP with political intrigue from its inception. As Cooke admitted later in a congressional hearing in October 1951, he never received any governmental authorization for the STP, nor for any of the several related underground activities undertaken through these ostensibly commercial firms.¹⁵

In the same month of March, Cooke and the WCC affiliate Commerce International China began purchasing millions of dollars of munitions for Taiwan. Rumors that they would purchase 426 surplus tanks in the Philippines

…disturbed politicians at both the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office, who worried that these heavy weapons would eventually fall to the Chinese Communists when Taiwan was captured, thus posing a threat to the West.¹⁶

Some of Cooke’s backers in the World Commerce Corporation had personal as well as ideological reasons for covertly opposing the Truman-Acheson Taiwan policy. These backers included wealthy oligarchs from both America (Nelson Rockefeller, John J. McCloy, Richard Mellon, and David Bruce) and Britain (Sir Victor Sassoon and Sir William “Tony” Keswick).¹⁷

In this list, it is relevant that Richard Mellon and David Bruce (his cousin by marriage) were both directors of Pan Am, which Bruce had helped bring into being. Sir Victor Sassoon had been a major pre-war investor in Shanghai, where the chief British interests were represented by the trading company Jardine Matheson—headed by Sir William Keswick, a collateral descendant of the Jardine family, and a director of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.¹⁸ All would gain considerably if the KMT could reestablish itself in mainland China.

Hsiao-ting Lin’s well-researched book, published by Harvard University Press, argues emphatically:

With the advisory assistance of the retired former commander of the Seventh Fleet, Admiral Charles M. Cooke, and his “Special Technician Program” in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek was able to withstand a critical stage of his political career in the months surrounding the outbreak of the Korean War.¹⁹

So we see that in Taiwan with Cooke, just as in Thailand with Willis Bird, Americans backed by the World Commerce Corporation were able to further the interests of the Kuomintang, against the policies of Truman and his administration.

Others have argued that the World Commerce Corporation, perhaps with access to Nazi gold in Austria, played a similar role in preserving the cadres of OSS through the difficult 1945-1947 years, after OSS was dissolved by Truman and before the CIA was created.²⁰ All in all, between 1945 and Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration, we see two historically important trends. First, we see how private wealth—consolidated in the World Commerce Corporation—pursued policies which diverged from those of the public state. Secondly, in the matters we have discussed, the World Commerce Corporation prevailed over the public state.

That is, I believe, the core story underlying my 1970 essay.

Peter Dale Scott
Berkeley, California
August 30, 2022

The Essay: “Private War Enterprise in Asia: Air America, the Brook Club, and the Kuomintang”

[Minor additions and corrections to the 1970 manuscript, such as this one, will be distinguished by the use of brackets.]

It is common practice to speak of the U.S. involvement in Indochina as a chaotic muddle into which America stumbled, as Richard Goodwin has put it, “almost by accident.” A chief source for this soothing notion has been those who were once in the White House under President Kennedy, and who, understandably, have been quick to tell us that an Asian ground war was never what they intended.

Yet the patterns underlying the confusion are, when studied more closely, all too prevalent: America has not “blundered” erratically forwards like one who is drunk or absent-minded, but has inched inexorably down a road which many observers could foresee. At the end of that road, of course, is an ultimate confrontation with either China, the Soviet Union, or both countries together.

To speak of a society’s designs or intentions is I think a false metaphor; but in our pluralistic society there have been for two decades powerful individuals whose explicit design was just such an ultimate confrontation. Many more have accepted it as a risk worth running for a U.S. presence in Asia. Few of the former have held high office, and some of the most prominent have not held public office at all.

[Private Activists and Covert War in Indochina]

Within the government, proposals for “rolling back” Communism on the Chinese mainland have come chiefly from dissident minorities in the CIA — men like Chiang Ching-kuo’s close personal friend Ray Cline, who was in effect “exiled” to a quiet post in Germany after proposing a Chinese Bay of Pigs operation in 1962. For years the cause of rollback has been advocated more energetically by General Claire Chennault and Admiral Felix Stump, the Board Chairmen of the “private” airline CAT Inc., since March 31, 1959, known as Air America.

For two decades these private activists have been working to break down governmental inertia. No one of their successes in this campaign has been spectacular. Cumulatively, however, they have landed us in the third largest [foreign] war of America’s history.

One clear recurrent pattern in Southeast Asia has been the continuous provocations by the CIA and/or CAT/Air America, from the flying of Kuomintang guerrillas into Burma in 1951 to the recent training of Khmer Serai guerrillas and the defoliation of Cambodian rubber plantations—two major factors in the successful overthrow of Prince Sihanouk.

[Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs] Roger Hilsman, citing the CIA’s “fiascoes” in Indochina, Burma, and Laos, admitted that by 1961 there was a recurring “problem of CIA,” a problem which — from the three examples he cited — might equally well be labeled “the problem of Air America.” Hilsman suggests that the problem was one of inadequate control, just as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. criticizes the actions in Laos of irresponsible CIA agents “in the field.”

But the CIA continues to have as large a responsibility as ever for our billion-dollar covert war in Laos. Still more surprising, air support for this and other covert activities in Asia continues to be supplied by Air America, a “private” and hence uncontrollable airline whose capital, as we shall show, is derived in large part from Kuomintang sources in Taiwan.

[The Problem of Air America]

Worse still, though it is commonly hinted in the U.S. press that the CIA “uses” the KMT-linked Air America, I shall argue that the truth is at least as much the opposite way around. Air America is a powerful agent for an expanded war in Asia precisely because it is private, and hence not responsive to Congressional or even Presidential control. Its power, at least until recently, has been derived from that of its financial backers: a strange coalition of KMT wealth in Taiwan and the inherited Wall Street wealth of Manhattan bankers to be found in the New York Social Register. [I would still point to the role of KMT wealth in determining Air America policy. But the central problem on the American side, I would now say, was in fact not “inherited Wall Street wealth,” but the lack of central USG control, perhaps designed for the sake of “plausible deniability.”]

Air America is admittedly a marginal instrument in the present expanded Indochina war; yet it has been from the margins, the covert operations in inaccessible places like Laos and Cambodia, that escalations have proven likely to arise. In Nixon’s projected “low profile” for U.S. actions in Asia, the role of the “private” airline will almost certainly increase; and today Air America is indeed taking steps to increase its roster of pilots.

The important point is that Air America’s “privateness” does not make it remote from the sources of power in this capitalistic society; it makes it close to them. And Washington’s desire for peace in Asia will not have been demonstrated until such time as it ceases its contracts with an airline over which it is convenient to have no control.

For example, it is true that, in January 1970, Nixon terminated the unmanned “drone” reconnaissance overflights which had been secretly resumed in October 1969 a few days after Ray Cline’s return from Germany.

Yet this constructive step is more than nullified by the actions reported on April 13, 1970 in the Dallas Morning News:

American pilots working with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are making low-level, night-time flights over Communist China to further dissension and eventual revolution, the Dallas News has been told by a former government flier. “Our boys are doing quite a bit of flying into China,” said John Wiren in an interview.

“They fly upriver at night in old PBY’s [Patrol Bombers]. They drop [Chinese Nationalist] guerrillas and supplies put in there to stir things up.” Wiren… who spent much of the 1960’s flying for the CIA-sponsored airline “Air America” in Laos… said the clandestine flights are made into China as part of a long-range strategic plan. “The big plan is for revolution in China,” he said.

[Joe Alsop: A Manufacturer of Crises]

Today the excesses of Indochina, and particularly of America’s recent Cambodian adventure, may well have weakened the status of those in America who still harbor such fantasies. It can however be shown that, in the genesis of the Second Indochina War, such individuals, even though “private” rather than “public,” played a role that was central, carefully deliberate, and recurrent.

Take for example Joe Alsop, the man who in the not wholly playful words of Townsend Hoopes, “seemed at times to have invented the Vietnam War.”²¹ “Unexpected” crises in Indochina are not infrequently preceded by Joe Alsop’s ominous visits. The last was to Vietnam in April of this year, when he wrote from Saigon to attack “the possibility that havering and wavering in Washington can cause us to lose the golden opportunity in Cambodia,” to pacify at least half of South Vietnam.”²²

 

[Joseph Alsop in 1974. Source: New York Times]

This timely visit recalls others. Alsop visited Taiwan and Indochina in late 1953, as the French were making their fateful buildup at Dienbienphu; he was the first to report USAF support for Dienbienphu before announcing his conversion to Chiang’s and Macarthur’s view that “there was no substitute for victory” in Asia.²³

He visited Laos and Vietnam in April 1961, in time to witness “Operation Noel,” the first U.S.-advised paratroop operation in Indochina (with transports piloted by Nationalist Chinese and/or American pilots of Air America)²⁴ and to “discover” a colonel in Vietnam’s Kien Hoa Province named Pham Ngoc Thao, who for the next two years was primed by an activist CIA faction as a candidate to displace the increasingly untrustworthy Ngo Dinh Nhu.

This Alsop visit preceded by one month the fateful tour in May 1961 of Vice-President Johnson, which led in turn to Kennedy’s Vietnam commitments. In May 1964, finally, Alsop returned to Indochina and advocated the bombing of North Vietnam, on the eve of the June 1 Honolulu Conference which in turn preceded the Tonkin Gulf Incidents.²⁵

But the most productive of Alsop’s visits was undoubtedly that of August-September 1959, when, as we saw in an earlier issue of Ramparts,²⁶ America’s covert war in Indochina can be said to have begun. On that occasion two cargo planes of the Taiwan commercial airline Civil Air Transport (i.e. two Air America planes) arrived in Vientiane on August 22, four days before an emergency aid program to pay for them was signed in Washington on August 26, and a week before “proof” of an August 30 North Vietnamese invasion was first brought forward.

Written “En Route to Vientiane,” Joe Alsop’s column of August 26 predicted “that the key city of Sam Neua will soon turn into another Dienbienphu,” an absurd charge that was nonetheless echoed almost immediately by the CIA’s protege General Phoumi Nosavan and by the U.S. press. Alsop arrived barely in time to interview the pretended survivors of a non-existent North Vietnamese “invasion” on August 30; his alarmist report of September 2 contributed to a secret U.S. Executive Order of September 4, under which, among other things, the first U.S. ground troops (an Army Signal unit) were apparently dispatched to “neutral” Laos.²⁷

[Secret Orders Adopted in Eisenhower’s Absence]

Denis Warner, another anti-Communist reporter, heard the same “survivors” as Alsop and was contemptuous: “General Amkha accepted as fact what the most junior Western staff officer would have rejected as fiction.”²⁸ Bernard Fall goes further and suggests that the evidence was not only false but deliberately staged. But those who swallowed the bait included not only Joe Alsop, who as Warner must have known had been a U.S. staff officer under Chennault in China during the war, but Alsop’s willing believers in Washington who despatched the undisclosed secret order of September 4.

Apparently, the latter did not include President Eisenhower, who on the crucial day of September 4 was isolated on a one-day golfing holiday at the secluded Culzean Castle in Scotland.

The full content of the secret order is unknown (a later column by Alsop is our only source), but may well have authorized the immediate recruiting of pilots by the “American Fliers for Laos,” a “volunteer” group “said to be negotiating with the Laotian Government for a contract to run an operation like that of the Flying Tigers.”²⁹ Such authorization was necessary to avoid prosecution under Section 959 of the U.S. Criminal Code, which penalizes anyone who hires or retains another within the United States to enlist himself in any foreign military service.

Congress should ask for the publication of this secret order, to see what it authorized, whether Alsop’s misrepresentations were incorporated into it, how and by whom it was signed, and why it was dated on the day of Eisenhower’s seclusion in Scotland rather than awaiting his return to America three days later.

It is possible that talk of a high-level limited war conspiracy in Washington, perhaps even involving members of the present administration, is not as paranoid as writers like Schlesinger would have us think.

[Pan Am and the Wall Street Overworld]

One fact is certain: Joe Alsop, along with his Washington friend Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran, was in on the planning for an earlier secret Executive Order, that of April 15, 1941, which authorized Chennault’s American Volunteer Group or “Flying Tigers.”

Nor was Alsop the only link between the two Executive Orders: behind both was the shadowy presence of Pan Am, America’s largest airline in the Far East and a frequent “private” cover for U.S. military preparations before World War II.

In 1941 a former President of Pan Am’s Chinese subsidiary CNAC, William Pawley, was President of the “Central Aviation Manufacturing Company” which “hired” reserve officers as Flying Tigers pilots. In 1959 (as today) the former Pan Am Regional Director for the Middle East and India, George Arntzen Doole, was Chief Executive Officer of Air America, where he was assisted by two other former Pan Am Executives: Amos Hiatt, Air America’s Treasurer, and Hugh Grundy of CNAC, now President of Air America’s Taiwan operation Air Asia.

More specifically, the pilots for the “American Fliers for Laos” were recruited by a veteran USAF combat pilot, Clifford L. Speer. Speer was described as a “major in the Air Force Reserve and civilian employee at Fort Huachuca, Arizona,³⁰ where Pan Am has a contract to conduct highly secret “electronics weapons” research for the USAF.

Pan Am’s links with the Flying Tigers and CAT/Air America were both intimate and profitable, since Pan Am has always picked up a major share of the supporting charter airlift behind Chennault’s wartime and postwar operations. During the war, Pan Am’s huge Chinese subsidiary, China National Aviation Co. (CNAC), flew the bulk of what was then the world’s largest airlift “over the hump” into China, using many former pilots with the Flying Tigers.

Madame Chennault identifies Gordon Tweedy, a former lawyer with Sullivan and Cromwell who served from 1941 to 1948 with CNAC, as a leading member of Chennault’s “Washington Squadron,” the group organized by Corcoran and Alsop to mount lend-lease for China. Meanwhile, Marion Cooper, one of the many Pan Am directors who at one time or another have belonged to New York’s wealthy and exclusive Brook Club, flew out to China in 1942 to become chief of staff of what was by then Chennault’s China Air Task Force.

Thus, paradoxically, Chennault, a man born in Commerce, Texas, who was never popular with the hierarchies of the War and State Departments, had personal links to the Brook Club and to Pan Am, whose other directors in those days included a Vanderbilt, a Mellon, and two Whitneys.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Pan Am again supplied a trans-Pacific back-up to various CAT/Air America operations, starting with the Korean War. For example, it was on May 5, 1953, that Civil Air Transport, using planes and pilots “loaned” by the USAF, arrived in Hanoi to begin its airlift to Dienbienphu. Seventeen days later, on May 22, Pan Am began its “commercial service” to Hanoi, a service opened with the assistance of the U.S. government “in the national interest,” and a service which became a chief money-earner for Pan Am during the accelerated Vietnam War buildup.

The Wall Street interest in CAT, however, altogether transcended the profits to be reaped from military airlift contracts alone: CAT was the logistical backbone for the new post-Korean formula to stop Communism in Asia. As Eisenhower put it, “If there must be a war there, let it be Asians against Asians, with our support on the side of freedom.”

The world had been simpler before the war. As the U.S. Navy recorded then in its pamphlet, The United State Navy as an Industrial Asset — What the Navy Has Done for Industry and Commerce,

In the Asiatic area a force of gunboats is kept on constant patrol in the Yangtse River. These boats are able to patrol from the mouth of the river up nearly 2,000 miles into the very heart of China. American businessmen have freely stated that should the United States withdraw this patrol they would have to leave at the same time.

After World War II gunboat diplomacy was no longer respectable. Overt intervention was giving way to covert, just as the warship was being replaced by the airplane. In China, above all, there were numerous reasons why the United States wished to avoid too conspicuous an identification with the moribund regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Yet the demands of U.S. businessmen for protection in Asia were as great as ever.

[Civil Air Transport: A Corporate-State Amalgam]

All of these factors must have influenced the decision of the U.S. State Department indirectly to subsidize General Chennault in the establishment of his post-war “private” Chinese airline, Civil Air Transport (at first called Chennault Air Transport). Kuomintang capital was undoubtedly involved as well, reportedly that of T.V. Soong and his sister Madame Chiang, and assuredly that of the Chinese industrialists Wang Yuan-ling, Hsu Kuo-mo, and Wang Wen-san (today’s CAT Chairman), then Manager of the Kincheng Bank which also invested in CAT.³¹

But CAT’s 47 U.S. Army Air Force transports were supplied by the U.S. relief agency UNRRA, for less than a tenth of their original cost, and for no cash. UNRRA gave Chennault contracts for Chennault and his men, including former OSS officers under Chennault such as Malcolm Rosholt

to fly relief supplies into the interior. When his bill for flying the supplies at high emergency rates equaled UNRRA’s low charge for the surplus planes, they became his.³²

At first, UNRRA Director LaGuardia turned down this proposal after he and all other responsible UNRRA officials opposed it as wasteful and unnecessary. However, Laguardia “was called in for consultation by the State Department and told that both Soong and Madame Chiang had insisted on the need for the airline. LaGuardia reversed himself.”³³ The Kuomintang clearly wanted Chennault to stay on to support its widely scattered armies; and indeed when Chennault “got full support of the line, he used it in semi-military support of the Kuomintang.”³⁴

 

[Mail being loaded onto a CAT plane. Source: CAT Association.]

But the U.S. Government was also represented in CAT through Chennault’s partner Whiting Willauer, a graduate of Exeter, Princeton, and Harvard. Willauer had first been used as a trouble-shooter to fight Communists in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Justice Department in the 1930s (when he worked with Benjamin Mandel of the Martin Dies-led HUAC Committee). He went on to help overthrow Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and to represent the State Department in the 1960 planning for the Bay of Pigs.

Willauer was until then a representative of the Foreign Economic Administration engaged in “economic intelligence” in the Far East. During the war, he had worked with Chennault as an employee of the Delaware corporation China Defense Supplies Inc., and as Special Assistant to its President, W.S. Youngman—the postwar partner of Tommy Corcoran. The Chairmen of China Defense Supplies had been T.V. Soong and Frederic Delano, uncle of Pan Am director Lyman Delano.

Another important member of CAT was its treasurer James J. Brennan, a wartime member of Chennault’s Washington squadron, who after the war became a personal secretary to T.V. Soong in China.

CAT in other words, like the Flying Tigers before it, represented a covert alliance between Soong KMT elements and key elements around Tommy Corcoran in the Democratic Administration. This “private” arrangement left Chennault free in 1948 and 1949 to lobby against the State Department in favor of greater aid and airlift to China—particularly to the Chinese Moslem armies of General Ma Pu-fang in the northwestern Qinghai Province which CAT was then supplying through Lanchow.

By 1949 Chennault’s views and activities were visibly much closer to Nationalist China’s than to the State Department’s. For example in November 1949, Chennault, shortly after a similar visit by Chiang, flew up to Syngman Rhee in Korea, “to give him a plan for the Korean military air force”; at this time it was still U.S. official policy to deny Rhee planes and to arm his men with light defensive weapons only, to remove any temptation to invade North Korea.³⁵

[1949: US Governmental Involvement in CAT Grows]

Yet, beginning in this same month of November 1949, covert U.S. government links with Chennault’s Chinese-backed airline began to be markedly increased. At first this new U.S. support was for ad hoc rather than long-term strategic purposes. The State Department feared that China’s civil air fleet, if it continued to serve under the new Chinese People’s Republic, would soon be used to mount an invasion against Taiwan.

Thus on November 30, 1949, the day of the fall of Chungking, a dummy Delaware corporation, Civil Air Transport, Inc., was set up to “buy” over 70 planes of Nationalist China’s two government airlines then taking refuge in Hong Kong. This served to keep the planes (by a process which Madame Chennault has since frankly called a “legal kidnapping”) from being acquired by the newly constituted Chinese Peoples’ Republic.

The State Department could now exert pressure upon the Hong Kong and British authorities on behalf of “an American company,” and it did so energetically. Meanwhile, former OSS Chief William Donovan flew out to Hong Kong with Chennault’s old lawyer Tommy Corcoran, now CAT Counsel as well. The U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong (and its air force attaché, Col. Leroy G. Heston, who had served with Chennault in China) played a particularly active role on CAT’s behalf.

One by-product of the deal was that Pan Am, unlike the other U.S. companies in China, secured compensation for its 20% investment in the airline CNAC. In fact, Civil Air Transport Inc.’s action in writing a check directly to Pan Am in New York, rather than to the CNAC offices in China, was one of the weakest links in its rather transparent case (or what Madam Chennault called “one last anti-Communist ‘miracle’”).³⁶

Legally the new Delaware corporation, which supplied $4.8 million for the deal, issued only two of an authorized 2,000 shares — not to Chennault, but to former T.V. Soong employees Willauer and Brennan. It is possible that the $4.8 million really came from the CIA; for when the British Privy Council finally awarded the planes to Civil Air Transport, Inc. (overruling the Hong Kong courts), the seventy planes, which had been “bought” for a fraction of their real value, came home to the United States for repairs on the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Windham Day.³⁷

But the legal work on the dummy corporation was handled by Tommy Corcoran’s law firm, whose business address was that reported over the next seven years by all of Civil Air Transport Inc.’s Washington directors: Tommy Corcoran, his law partner W.S. Youngman, whom Willauer had served as Special Assistant in China Defense Supplies, Corcoran’s brother Howard F. Corcoran, Duncan C. Lee who had flown out to China for OSS during the war,38 and Annetta M. Behan, the Notary Public who notarized the company’s annual reports filled out by herself.

Neither Corcoran nor the CIA seems to have done anything at this stage to help CAT solve its own financial and operating problems. In early 1950 Chennault had to advise his pilots that they would be put on half-pay and were free to look for jobs elsewhere. The outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950 saved CAT, which promptly began to fly the bulk of the U.S. military airlift inside Korea. On July 10, a second Delaware corporation was chartered: CAT Inc., later renamed Air America Inc. The older Civil Air Transport Inc., having served its limited purpose of “kidnapping,” was quietly dissolved in 1956.

Control of the new corporation remained with the officers of the Chinese airline Civil Air Transport, who held four out of seven directorships. The remaining three went to the officer-directors of the holding company Airdale Corp., also chartered on July 10, 1950, allegedly as a pass-through for CIA funds. Airdale Corp. (in 1957 renamed Pacific Corp. has ever since held 100% of CAT Inc./Air America’s stock. With fresh capital, specially-recruited pilots, and its Korean charter contracts, CAT was soon prospering, possessing assets of some $5.5 million, and income in the order of some $6 to $12 million a year.³⁹

But CAT’s new American backing did nothing to change its status as the sole flag air carrier of Chiang’s Republic. On the contrary, from as early as October 1950, the Taiwan Foreign Ministry exchanged notes with various Asian countries to confirm the landing and loading rights of the burgeoning commercial airline CAT.

At some point in the 1950s, at the insistence of the Chiang Government, a 60% controlling interest in the commercial airline (CAT Co., Ltd., or CATCL, a Taiwan company) was granted or returned to the KMT interests who had originally invested in it. Thus, Wang Wen-san—previously Chairman of CAT’s Policy Board—replaced Chennault as Chairman of the CAT Board, a post he holds today. He was joined by Henry K. Yuan, a CAT employee, and by Y.C. Chen, apparently a former section chief in the KMT Ministry of Information and Director of the KMT’s Overseas Affairs Division.

A 40% interest was retained in the name of Airdale Corp., which in 1957 was renamed the Pacific Corporation. Legally speaking, CAT Inc./Air America Inc. (the Delaware corporation) and CATCL (the Taiwan company) are separate entities. In practice it is difficult to distinguish between Air America’s Taiwan subsidiary, Air Asia, and CATCL: the two operations shared directors, officers, facilities, pilots, and above all planes.

[The CIA and “Plausible Deniability”]

In the typical year 1963, for example, the World Aviation Directory attributed 4,600 employees and 300 pilots to CATCL at the same address. According to a former CATCL publicist, Air Asia “holds a service contract with CAT, which is the way the Americans operate the ‘Chinese-owned’ airline.”⁴⁰ CAT’s commercial “Mandarin Jet,” which crashed in 1968, was leased from the CIA-front “Southern Air Transport” in Miami, which flew in the Caribbean at the time of the Bay of Pigs and also worked with Air America in Laos and Vietnam.

Southern Air Transport’s attorney, Alex E. Carlson, also represented the Double-Chek Corporation (same address) which hired American pilots to fly at the Bay of Pigs.⁴¹ And Whiting Willauer, who in 1960 was the State Department’s senior representative on the Bay of Pigs Operation, later testified that CAT pilots trained the Cuban pilots involved.⁴²

Meanwhile, it would appear that in February-March 1952, the CIA ended the anomaly of its direct subsidy to the prospering commercial Taiwan airline, [Civil Air Transport]. This was an outfit whose officers were lobbying against State Department policy in the hopes of overthrowing Mao. The airline seemed to have sold its financial interest in Airdale Corp. and CAT Inc. to a closely allied group of New York businessmen, of whom two (later three) were Joe Alsop’s club-mates in the Brook Club: Samuel Sloan Walker and William A. Read Jr., joined in 1958 by Robert Guestier Goelet. Walker, Read, and Goelet are still the controlling directors of Pacific Corp. and of Air America.⁴³

It is possible of course that the data in the companies’ annual reports is misleading, that the Walker-Brook Club group is merely a front, and that the Airdale Corp. continued to be what is technically known as a “proprietary” directly owned by the CIA.⁴⁴

But the support given by the CIA to Air America, such as the recruitment and security clearance of pilots from the military for covert operations, seems overall to reflect a contractual rather than a proprietary relationship, like the links between CIA and Lockheed in the development of the U-2 Program.⁴⁵

Air America, like CATCL, is clearly also engaged in private business for profit, and is said to make on the order of $10 million a year. According to the New York Times, the airline,

…flies prospectors looking for copper and geologists searching for oil in Indonesia, and provides pilots for commercial airlines such as Air Vietnam and Thai Airways and for China Airlines [Taiwan’s new Chinese-owned flag airline which since 1968 has taken over CAT’s passenger services].⁴⁶

It is the practice of the CIA to disengage itself from embarrassingly distasteful covert war enterprises it has helped to establish, such as Interarmco, the huge small-arms purchasing firm headed by former CIA agent Samuel Cummings (which imported inter alia the Mannlicher-Carcano said to have been used in the assassination of J.F. Kennedy).⁴⁷

In the case of CAT Inc., the divestment seems to have been handled by Walter Reid Wolf, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Administration between 1951 and 1953. Wolf was a trustee of the small Empire City Savings Bank in New York, of which Samuel Sloan Walker was Chairman and Arthur Berry Richardson, a third trustee. A fourth trustee, Samuel Meek, was a director of Time, in those days strongly pro-Chiang, and later served on the CIA-front “Cuban Freedom Committee.”

In early 1952, Walker and Richardson became directors of Airdale (now Pacific Corp.) and CAT Inc. (now Air America) along with a third director, William A. Read, who was Walker’s wife’s former brother-in-law. Wolf was also a Vice-President of the National City Bank, and Senior Vice-President of its investment affiliate City Bank Farmers’ Trust, along with Walker’s cousin, Samuel Sloan Duryee. In addition, Wolf and Duryee sat on the American boards of Zurich Insurance and related Swiss companies. About the time that Wolf became CIA Deputy Director, Desmond FitzGerald, a member of Duryee’s law firm, joined the CIA and became for years in charge of its covert Indochina operations, working in conjunction with Air America. FitzGerald is said to have spent much of his time in Asia, yet he apparently never condescended to become a lowly CIA desk officer or station chief. Instead, his cover was that of a private lawyer with a downtown Washington address…

[The manuscript continues. For more of this detailed essay click here.]

References

APACL–its Growth and Outlook. Taiwan: The League, 1960.
APACL, Free China and Asia. Taiwan: Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League., 1963.
Dibble, Arnold. “The Nine Lives of CAT II.” Saturday Evening Post, May 18, 1968.
Dommen, Arthur J. Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization. United Kingdom: Praeger, 1971.
Fall, Bernard B. Viet-Nam Witness, 1953-66. United Kingdom: Praeger, 1966.
Frillman, Paul., Peck, Graham. China; the Remembered Life. United States: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
Gielen, Alfred. Das Rotbuch über Spanien. Germany: Nibelungen, 1937.
Hilsman, Roger. To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy. United States: Dell Publishing Company, 1967.
Hoopes, Townsend. The Limits of Intervention: An Inside Account of how the Johnson Policy of Escalation in Vietnam was Reversed. United Kingdom: Norton, 1987.
House Committee on Un-American Activities, International Communism: Consultation with Major General Claire Lee Chennault, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess., Apr. 23, 1958.
Koen, Ross Y. The China Lobby in American Politics. United States: Macmillan, 1960.
Labin, Suzanne. The Unrelenting War: A Study of the Strategy and Techniques of Communist Propaganda and Infiltration. United States: American-Asian Educational Exchange, 1960.
Peck, Graham. Two Kinds of Time. United Kingdom: University of Washington Press, (n.d.).
Ross, Thomas B., Wise, David. The Invisible Government. United Kingdom: Random House, 1964.
Ross, Thomas B., Wise, David. The Espionage Establishment. United Kingdom: Cape, 1968.
Steinberg, Alfred. Sam Johnson’s Boy: A Close-up of the President from Texas. United Kingdom: Macmillan, 1968.
Thayer, George. The War Business: The International Trade in Armaments. United States: Simon and Schuster, 1969.U.S. Cong., Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Security Agreements and Comm Abroad: Kingdom of Laos, Hearings, Oct. 20, 1968, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 367.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Communist Threat to the United States through the Caribbean, Hearings, July 27, 1962.
U.S. Senate. Congressional Record, Mar. 28, 1950.
U.S. State Department. U.S. Policy in the Korean Crisis, 1950.
Warner, Denis A. The Last Confucian; Vietnam, South-East Asia and the West. New Ed., 1964.
Wertenbaker, Charles. “The China Lobby.” The Reporter, April 15, 1952.

Notes

¹

The Wikipedia article on Operation CHAOS lists Ramparts as one of five “targets of Operation CHAOS within the antiwar movement.” However CHAOS was a Counterintelligence operation. My essay appears to have been handled in Langley by the CIA’s Office of Security (under DD/S Robert Bannerman), rather than the Counterintelligence Center (under James Angleton). This would suggest that it was impounded as a security matter, rather than as part of Operation Chaos, the counterintelligence project directed at antiwar activists.

²

Two marginal queries on the second page of my MS suggest that a senior CIA officer may not have been aware of the facts I was reporting, including the very relevant one that some Air America planes, despite being funded through a CIA proprietary, were not fully under CIA control.

³

Seymour M. Hersh, “C.I.A. Aides Assail Asia Drug Charge,” New York Times, July 2, 1972.

⁴

Alfred W. McCoy, with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P Adams, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 353, emphasis added.

⁵

Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), 213.

⁶

I am often asked why I consented. My chief reason is that I believed in acting transparently, and declined many offers of software to make my computer inaccessible. My second reason was my conviction that, if the CIA wanted my MS, they would be able to obtain it anyway.

⁷

William Stevenson, The Revolutionary King, 50-51; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, The American War Machine, 72. Cf. William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy: The Anglo-American Search for Order in Asia, 1912-1954 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 184-85: ”[By 1947,] the United States increasingly defined for Thailand a place in Western strategic policy in the early cold war. Among those who kept close watch over events were William J. Donovan, wartime head of the OSS, and Willis H. Bird, who worked with the O.S.S in China…. After the war, Bird,… still a reserve colonel in military intelligence, ran an import-export house in Bangkok. Following the November [1947 Thailand coup] Bird…implored Donovan: “Should there be any agency that is trying to take the place of O.S.S.,… please have them get in touch with us as soon as possible. By the time Phibun returned as Prime Minister, Donovan was telling the Pentagon and the State Department that Bird was a reliable source whose information about growing Soviet activities in Thailand were credible.”

⁸

Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 83; citing Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951, Vol. 6, Pt. 2, 1634. The memo described Bird as “the character who handed over a lot of [US] military equipment to the Police, without any authorization as far as I can determine, and whose status with CAS [local CIA] is ambiguous, to say the least.”

⁹

In the 1990s, Dennis Dayle, a retired senior DEA official, said on camera in my presence that “In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.” (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 149); Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics (1998 edition), xviii-xix).

¹⁰

Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 111–14.

¹¹

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 109. The Conference convened to cement this alliance was chaired by Antonio Valladares, the Nicaraguan lawyer for New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello.

¹²

Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League, 54-55; cited in Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 65. In 1967 the APACL became part of a larger World Anti-Communist League (WACL). According to Wikipedia, Both Hunt and Cline were stationed by OSS in China, where in 1946 they collaborated with OSS Kunming Chief Paul Helliwell (“Ray S. Cline,” Wikipedia). I have not been able to confirm this.
I learned much by studying the American delegations to the annual conferences of the APACL, which included the names of young people from America who later became noteworthy for other reasons. Let me cite in particular:

• Spas T. Raikin, the Secretary-General of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations., who is named in the Warren Report (p. 718) as the “representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society” who met Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina when they landed in Hoboken after their voyage from Russia in 1962;
• Tom Huston, later briefly famous as the nominal author of the “notorious Huston Plan” of 1970 “for expansive surveillance of domestic protest movements during the Nixon presidency” (“Spying on Americans: Infamous 1970s White House Plan for Protest Surveillance Released,” National Security Archive, June 25, 2020, );
• Douglas Caddy, later briefly famous as the first attorney for the seven men arrested for the 1972 Watergate burglaries.

¹³

Hsiao-ting Lin, The Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016]. 141). Earlier, in March 1949, “the White House adopted NSDC 34/2, in which it declared its desire to maintain contact with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. In so doing, it hoped to draw the Chinese communists away from the Soviet Union” (Victor S. Kaufman, “The United States, Britain and the CAT Controversy,” Journal of Contemporary History, 40:1, January 1, 2005, 96).

¹⁴

Lin, The Accidental State, 144: “They were told that the purpose of [the] visit to Taiwan was to conduct private business, including ‘selling fertilizer’.” I presented a version of the Cooke-Fassoulis story in The War Conspiracy (279), adding the detail, not reported by Lin, that “Fassoulis, accused of passing bribes as the vice president of Commerce International, was under indictment ten years later when he surfaced in the syndicate-linked Guterma scandals.” Such collaboration between overworld and underworld is not infrequent, leading me to write on occasion of “The Dark Quadrant” (Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 46).

¹⁵

Lin, The Accidental State, 145-46. The STP proposal was implemented by Cooke, but not initiated by him. In November 1949, a proposal for such a technician mission had been proposed in a letter to Acheson by William Pawley, who before the war had been President of Pan Am’s Chinese Affiliate CNAC, and who was in business after the war with WCC director John J. McCloy. Pawley asked for “approval or acquiescence” of private American citizens going to Taiwan, if their civil services wee contracted directly by the Nationalist government and if the United States took no part therein. Although Acheson gave Pawley the “acquiescence” he requested, nothing substantial followed (Lin, The Accidental State, 141-42). At the same time Pawley participated in the elaborate legal scheme devised by Donovan and OPC to transfer ownership of China’s civil air fleet (including CNAC planes) from Chinese government ownership to an ad hoc Delaware corporation owned by Claire Chennault and his partner Whiting Willauer (Alfred T. Cox, “Civil Air Transport (CAT): A Proprietary Airline 1946-1955,” CIA, Clandestine Services, Historical Paper, April 1967, I, 95ss.

¹⁶

Hsiao-ting Lin, “Taiwan’s Secret Ally,” Hoover Digest, 2012 No. 2, April 6, 2012, cf. Lin, The Accidental State, 148.

¹⁷

The Australian scholar Greg Poulgrain has written that the Rockefeller family controlled the Dutch firm Nederlandsche Nieuw Guinea Petroleum Maatschappij (NNGPM), which in the 1930s discovered in New Guinea what may be the world’s largest and most profitable copper and gold mine, and for decades took conspiratorial steps to conceal the scope of this discovery. After the bloody Indonesian coup and massacre of 1965, the new Indonesian dictator, Col. Suharto, signed an agreement for the mine’s development with Freeport Indonesia, where the Rockefellers also had an interest and sat on the board. See Greg Poulgrain, JFK vs. Dulles, 19-20, 23. I am very impressed by Poulgrain’s life-long research into the Asian part of the story, but I have issues with his claims about the American part.

¹⁸

The fortunes of the Sassoon family and of the Keswick family both derived from the major trafficking of opium through Shanghai (and Jardine Matheson) in the 19th century, when (at least in the eyes of British law) it was still legal.

¹⁹

Lin, The Accidental State, 8.

²⁰

E.g. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 110-11: “The money for the opiates would eventually come from Nazi gold that had been laundered and manipulated by [Allen] Dulles and [Sir William] Stephenson through the World Commerce Corporation.” Cf. Scott, American War Machine, 72: “Helliwell acquired a banking partner in Florida, E.P. Barry, who had been the postwar head of OSS Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna, which oversaw the recovery of SS gold in Operation Safehaven. And it is not questioned that in December 1947 the NSC created a Special Procedures Group “that, among other things, laundered over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].” Note that this authorization was before NSC 10/2 of June 18, 1948, first funded covert operations under what soon became OPC.”

²¹

Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, 149.

²²

Alsop, Washington Post, Apr. 26, 1970, A23. This column of Alsop’s appeared the day that the National Security Council was scheduled to discuss Cambodian proposals from the Special Action Group that had been convened on April 22, and four days before the intervention was finally approved. A column by Evans and Novak on the same day, written from Phnom Penh, also spoke of a “golden opportunity.”

²³

[Alsop, Washington Post, June, 1954; reprinted in Congressional Record Appendix, June 14, 1954, A4366. Cf. Alsop’s report (Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1953, 8) of an interview with Chiang Kai-shek: “‘If the United States remains on the defensive in Asia for another two years, it will be needless to talk about Free China being in danger, for the U.S. and the whole free world will then be in deadly danger.’ It must be added that every fact of the situation in Asia appears to support and confirm this grim forecast by the Generalissimo.”]

²⁴

[Alsop, Washington Post, Apr. 6, 1961, A9; Apr. 7, 1961, A8, A17.]

²⁵

[Alsop, Washington Post, May 22, 1964, A19.]

²⁶

[Ramparts, Vol. 8 no. 8, February 1970.]

²⁷

Alsop, Washington Post, Sept. 10, 1959, A9; London Times, Sept. 11, 1959, 12. An official DOD spokesman said only that a signal corps unit had been assigned to Admiral Felt, CINCPAC, for use “in that area” as he saw fit. However, the Bangkok Post reported the next day that the unit “actually was en route to Laos.”

²⁸

Warner, The Last Confucian, 210.

²⁹

New York Times, Sept. 25, 1959, 4. Nine of the fliers were soon reported to be in Laos, including one active USAF officer (New York Times, Sept. 27, 1959, 16).

³⁰

New York Times, Sept. 27, 1959, 16.

³¹

New York Times, Nov. 11, 1949, 14; Free China Review, Nov. 1953, 31. Air America pilots still repeat the rumor that “Madam Chiang owns the planes and we lease them from her” (San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 1970, 31).

³²

Frillman and Peck, China: The Remembered Life, 288-89.

³³

[Wertenbaker, “The China Lobby,” Reporter, 9.]

³⁴

Peck, Two Kinds of Time.

³⁵

House Committee on Un-American Activities, International Communism: Consultation with Major General Claire Lee Chennault, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess., Apr. 23, 1958, 9-10; U.S. State Dept., U.S. Policy in the Korean Crisis, 1950, 21-22.

³⁶

Congressional Record, Senate, Mar. 28, 1950, 4226.

³⁷

Aviation Week, Feb. 2, 1953, 54.

³⁸

[Ironically, Duncan Lee, who was OSS Assistant General Counsel and before that in General Donovan’s Wall Street law firm, was denounced by Elizabeth Bentley as a Communist Party member and informer in the celebrated HUAC Hearings of 1948. Her testimony seems to have been intended to discredit in that election year not only the Democratic Administration, but also the OSS elements who were returning to it in the infant CIA (despite the bitter opposition of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) and the so-called “liberal” or “Rockefeller” faction of the Republican Party (opposed by the Chicago or “Taft” faction, who for a while were able to help Hoover block the formation of the CIA).]

³⁹

Colliers, Aug. 11, 1951, 35.

⁴⁰

[Dibble, “The Nine Lives of CAT-II,” Saturday Review, 50.]

⁴¹

Wise and Ross, The Invisible Government, 1965, 156.

⁴²

U.S. Cong., Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Communist Threat to the United States through the Caribbean, Hearings, July 27, 1962, 875.

⁴³

[It is now clear that what I wrote in this and later paragraphs was wrong; and that indeed, as I speculated in the next paragraph, Walker, Read, and Goelet were merely providing a respectable front for a CIA proprietary. In 1975, when the CIA finally privatized its proprietary aviation assets, Air America, Air Asia, and Southern Air Transport were all sold off—the first two to the CIA-linked firm E-Systems. The reported information does however illustrate correctly how deeply embedded the early CIA was in the northeastern hereditary culture and milieu of the Brook Club and Wall Street.]

⁴⁴

[I believe this now to be the case. But in fronting for the CIA, Air America fronted even more significantly for the power which brought both agencies into being: the New York financial interests into whose milieu Air America’s controlling directors were born.]

⁴⁵

[Air America pilots, like U-2 pilots, are mostly recruited from the USAF, and are said to have the same rights of return into the USAF at the end of their “civilian” tour.]

⁴⁶

[New York Times, Apr. 5, 1970, 22.]

⁴⁷

[Thayer, The War Business, 43-112.]

Editorial Reviews

In Scott’s view, the American military-industrial complex so feared by Eisenhower has grown into a military-industrial-corporate behemoth. This ‘overclass,’ often functioning independently from the official elected government, has spearheaded countless actions that it perceives to be in the best interest of perpetuating American hegemony. With exhaustive research and extremely persuasive arguments, Scott seeks to prove that the funding and motivation behind America’s assertion of global supremacy can be traced to drugs. Drug money fueled American actions in Laos and Vietnam during the Cold War, American support of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the ’80s, and defines American political action in Latin America and present-day Afghanistan. By looking at covert activity and recorded history through the lens of American global dominance, Scott makes a terrifyingly compelling case; he asks readers to consider what actions taken in the last fifty years have not benefited America’s military-industrial complex, such an integral part of the global economy. . . . [His] carefully structured arguments never fail to interest or disturb. ― Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Scott has written a provocative account of CIA machinations and their link to spikes in global drug production, war, and terrorism. His chapters on Thailand and the Far East are especially well-grounded and of great use to historians. . . . [Scott] is a creative thinker who deserves credit for delving into the netherworld of clandestine operations and global corruption which most academics choose to ignore. . . . At his core, Scott is an idealist who believes that in exposing the sinister forces accounting for the spread of unnecessary violence, an aroused citizenry can mobilize to rein them in. The stakes today are especially high, because if left unchecked, the pattern of warfare and destabilization which Scott describes may lead to a global confrontation of truly catastrophic proportions as well as irreversible environmental damage and the economic bankruptcy of the United States. ― History News Network

There are certain books that, once read, alter one’s mind permanently. This is such a book. Naïve readers and patriots beware: You will never think about the world in the same way after you have read just the first two chapters of American War Machine.

I said of Scott’s last brilliant take on this subject, Drugs, Oil and War, that ‘It makes most academic and journalistic explanations of our past and current interventions read like government propaganda written for children.’ Now Scott has written an even better book. Read it! — Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

What I like most about Peter Dale Scott are his fierce intellectual curiosity, his willingness to investigate radioactive topics, and his tireless commitment to unearthing the truth. Over the years, he has done more than almost anyone to discover and chronicle the forces that covertly shape our policies. American War Machine may be his greatest work yet. — Russ Baker, award-winning investigative journalist and author of Family of Secrets

Peter Dale Scott is our most fearless and illuminating chronicler of the lethal and mysterious web of unaccountable violence linking government to organized crime, the drug trade, state terror, and eventuating in disastrous wars. Read this extraordinary book to understand why this country finds itself gridlocked in Afghanistan, yet another costly quagmire, because a small cabal at the top is still dedicated to the mirage of American global dominance. — Richard A. Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University

Peter Dale Scott writes with his inimitable eloquence about the intersection between U.S. covert operations and international narcotics trafficking and its destructive undermining of American democracy. The past half-century of drug politics―and the country’s complicit acceptance of the violence it has spawned―is an ominous portent for our present and future. American War Machine should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the upper- and underworld marriage that drives contemporary foreign policy. — Sally Denton, author of The Bluegrass Conspiracy

 

 

 

 

 

12:46 pm on April 4, 2025

US ARMY Colonel (Retired) and diplomat Ann Wright calls them all out!

8:26 pm on April 3, 2025

MM Comment:

One of the most persistent objections when presenting the overwhelming evidence that viruses do not exist or cause a particular disease is for someone to immediately ask the following question, expecting to shut the conversation down completely:

Well then, What Causes (It)?

Please watch at least the first 9 minutes this video, HERE.

You will love the examples Dr Tom Cowan gives to clearly answer this question.

Highly Recommended 

For a deeper dive into the scholarship please also read these resources, HERE and HERE.

Thanks to MT for alerting us to this video segment.

6:53 pm on April 3, 2025

For the essential, fundamental explication and examination of this serious cultural problem, turn to Thomas Sowell’s brilliant essay, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, below.

1:14 pm on April 3, 2025

12:35 pm on April 3, 2025

My cover story article in the current issue of The New American.  The issue includes a promotion of the Mises Institute’s new documentary on the Fed, “Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve” which has 716,000 views on YouTube as of today, less than six months from its release.

11:06 am on April 3, 2025

With Robert Breedlove.  

10:34 am on April 3, 2025

Christine Grady, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the wife of Anthony Fauci, was fired during the restructuring at the Dept. of Health and Human Services.

I don’t think she will miss the high salary she earned. The Faucis are worth an estimated $11.5 million.

7:03 pm on April 2, 2025

And sixteen other fascinating speakers at our Revisionist History of War conference in Auburn, Alabama, May 15-17, 2025.  Here’s a short clip of Col. Macgregor.

3:06 pm on April 2, 2025

2:06 pm on April 2, 2025

. . . on April 26 at the Arizona Biltmore for our Mises Circle on the topic of “Our Enemy: The Bureaucracy.”  I will discuss some of the key insights about the evils of government bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, while Tom Woods and Dr. Malone will discuss their dealings with the covid bureaucrats along with their books Psywar: Enforcing the New World Order, and Tom’s Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania.

The registration fee is $120 and $100 for Mises Institute members and includes a catered lunch.  See you in Phoenix!

12:17 pm on April 2, 2025

In this revealing follow-up to their deep dive into the life of Mark Lane, Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley continue exploring the many chapters of one of the most controversial, fearless, and complex figures in 20th-century American legal and political history.

Mark Lane is best known for Rush to Judgment, his groundbreaking book that publicly challenged the Warren Commission’s conclusions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But Lane’s career extended far beyond the pages of that explosive work. He repeatedly inserted himself into some of the most charged and politically radioactive moments of the last century — and often stood where few others dared.

In this episode, Groubert and Hunley uncover Lane’s lesser-known relationships and legal battles. His defense of James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., raised eyebrows nationwide. Was Lane seeking justice, publicity, or uncovering something deeper in the official narrative? The questions continue decades later.

The story expands into his controversial ties to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Lane represented the group in the lead-up to the Jonestown massacre — a relationship that has haunted his legacy. What was Lane thinking? What did he know?

But the contradictions don’t stop there. Lane’s work defending James Joseph Richardson — a poor Black man falsely imprisoned for the poisoning deaths of his own children — speaks to a radically different chapter in his career. Lane’s involvement helped lead to Richardson’s release after more than 20 years behind bars, a major vindication in one of the most egregious wrongful convictions in American history.

Mark Lane also put himself on the line at the Wounded Knee standoff in 1973, siding with the American Indian Movement during a tense 71-day siege against federal forces. Lane’s advocacy on behalf of Native Americans highlighted his consistent — if controversial — willingness to challenge federal power on behalf of the disenfranchised.

And then there’s the personal. Lane shared a home with actress and activist Jane Fonda during a time when both were lightning rods for political outrage. He also maintained a surprising connection to Paul McCartney — adding yet another unexpected layer to a life that defies easy definition.

From celebrity connections to courtroom crusades, armed standoffs to assassinations, Mark Lane’s story is not easily summed up — and that’s exactly why it matters. Join Groubert and Hunley as they trace the wide-ranging impact of a man who repeatedly collided with power, challenged the establishment, and never stopped pushing for his version of the truth.

Subscribe to America’s Untold Stories for more episodes that reveal what history books leave out.

12:35 pm on April 1, 2025

12:24 pm on April 1, 2025

12:30 pm on March 31, 2025

March 30 2025 By Kelvyn Alp, https://nzloyal.com/

The notion that viruses are the primary cause of many diseases has been a cornerstone of modern medicine for over a century.

However, a growing body of research suggests that this paradigm may be fundamentally flawed.

Dr. Mark Bailey’s seminal paper, “A Farewell to Virology,” (2022) and the work of Dr. Sam Bailey, Dr. Andrew Kaufman, and Dr. Tom Cowan, have collectively challenged the conventional wisdom on viruses and vaccines.

Their research posits that viruses do not exist as disease-causing entities, but rather as misidentified cellular components and other biological phenomena.

This idea is not new and builds on the pioneering work of former virologist Dr. Stefan Lanka and The Perth Group.

However, it has gained significant traction in recent years, largely because of the COVID-19 scamdemic.

The implications of this theory are profound, and they raise a crucial question: if viruses do not exist as claimed, what are we vaccinating against?

The vaccine schedules that govern our lives are based on the assumption that viruses are real and pose a significant threat to public health.

However, if this assumption is incorrect, then the justification for vaccines crumbles.

Are we simply creating a future dependent clientele for pharmaceutical companies?

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE HERE

7:23 pm on March 30, 2025

I note that House Republicans have approved a $4.5 trillion tax cut plan, offset by $2 trillion in spending cuts. They are also seeking to raise the debt ceiling.

12:10 pm on March 29, 2025

Tariffs are very risky business. They’re like playing with fire. We run into the same unsolvable problem that we have with The Fed. They don’t know what interest rates should be. It’s all arbitrary. In the same way, the president doesn’t know what the price of cars, or lumber, or any other product should be. While the president is not literally price-fixing like the Fed, he is arbitrarily interfering with market prices and trade. Our inescapable problem in America is the overwhelming size of government, spending, debt and empire. All of these variables are still going in the wrong direction.

1:07 pm on March 28, 2025

Great interview last night with Musk and members of the DOGE team. A good mix of concrete examples (40% of calls to Social Security customer service are crooks trying to reset electronic deposits from the intended recipient to the crook) with a steady return to the overall goal of cutting waste and fraud.

The $1B target of first year cost savings is too low IMHO. DOGE has yet to start with Defense. Social Security is just getting started. We will see.

Everything Musk and his team has found reflects my experience in working with government IT systems. My work for one of “Beltway Bandits” consulting firms to respond to an RFP for fixing Air Force financial systems matches what Musk and his team describe. Hundreds of legacy financial systems (most of which can barely communicate with each other) and no ability to conduct a financial audit, let alone pass one.  Many IT people in the Air Force were very aware of flaws and limitations on the systems, but just had to live with it. That is no longer the case.

Musk is correct to give credit to Trump for pushing this effort to combat waste and fraud. To me, his best comment was that when fraud is exposed, the fraudsters are the loudest ones to shout in outrage and complain.

 

Fox News segment on Baier interview Musk and DOGE team.

 

11:42 am on March 28, 2025

We are in a culture war. Tax payer financed institutions are being used to amplify the culture war. I completely agree with Trump’s approach. If you want the federal dollars, then you will drop the DEI nonsense.

It was in the news yesterday that a DEI inspired private foundation just closed shop. The DEI types running it had stolen donor money, bankrupting the foundation. There is no reason to allow such behavior in taxpayer financed institutions. And no reason to allow your own money to support such behavior.

Link to New York Post article on Trump cutting federal funds to Smithsonian over DEI.

 

11:12 am on March 28, 2025

Four U.S. soldiers recently died during a training exercise in Lithuania. Many Americans want to know how this could have happened. A better question is simply this: What are U.S. troops doing in Lithuania? How many Americans even know where Lithuania is?

7:41 pm on March 27, 2025

MM Comment:

Today I’ve two very connected offerings:

1. Understanding the Mechanics of Silver Price Suppression

 

When I worked in the Futures Industry I worked extensively in the Gold and Silver Markets…and I knew things were “Unusual” there – to put it mildly.

I could easily see that Gold & Silver were UNIQUE in that the Future’s Price WOULD DETERMINE the Physical Price instead of FOLLOWING the Physical Price.

I knew this was backwards.

Unlike other Physical Commodities, like Corn for example, where the condition of Physical Corn in the fields price WOULD DETERMINE the Futures Price – with Precious Metals it was the OTHER WAY AROUND.

With Precious Metals the Futures price quoted on the COMEX Futures Exchange WOULD DETERMINE what price an ounce of Gold and/or Silver would cost to the retail customer.

This made it obvious to me 30 years ago how UNIQUELY Manipulated Gold and Silver prices were – and unfortunately still are – today.

However, this may be coming to an end. Why now? 

First, today it’s harder and harder to hide in the shadows…Thank Goodness! 

Second, there are forces in motion today that could end this manipulation – finally!

So, first, please read this article HERE which I believe is the single best explanation I’ve ever read of How & Why this manipulation of Gold and Silver is done and has been done for decades.

I encourage everyone interested in this topic to read and, in fact, study this article.

***I’ve also always believed that there were limits to this manipulation and therefore strongly recommend reading the next article below as well.

We may very well be on the cusp of the historic moment when Manipulated Gold and Silver prices come to an end.

Then we’ll see what the Free Market has to say about these prices. Please read on.***

2. An Excellent Analysis of Silver Right Now

The author, my good friend Sean Ring, is a former International Banker and Financial Educator who writes a daily column and a weekly column, both of which I highly recommend. 

This superb article will help you understand China’s recent movements in the Metals Markets and why they may help cause the decades of Price Manipulation in the Precious Metals to come to an end – and perhaps soon.

If you’re interested in Gold and/or Silver I consider these two articles very important reading.

Please share. 

4:38 pm on March 27, 2025

Two Excellent Cinema Classics Which Explore Poet Rudyard Kipling’s Relationship with British Imperialism and Freemasonry. The Films are Based on Famous Works by Kipling and Feature Actors Portraying Him.

The Man Who Would be King
https://m.ok.ru/video/1104943647412
The Man Who Would Be King (1975) Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer

The film’s director John Huston was the son of actor Walter Huston who portrayed arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes in the 1936 epic Rhodes of Africa.

Kipling, known as the “Poet of the Empire,” was a close admirer and friend of Cecil Rhodes, a prominent figure in the British Empire and founder of the Rhodes Trust and the Rhodes Scholarship. Both were noted Freemasons. Kipling served as a Trustee of the Rhodes Trust.

Two British former soldiers decide to set themselves up as kings in Kafiristan, a land where no white man has set foot since Alexander the Great.

Gunga Din
https://tubitv.com/movies/100021232/gunga-din
Starring: Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr,.Sam Jaffe, Eduardo Ciannelli, and Joan Fontaine

Helped by their valiant water carrier, three British soldiers face off against a Thuggee religious cult on a dangerous mission in 1880s India.

Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717-1927, by Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs

They built some of the first communal structures on the empire’s frontiers. The empire’s most powerful proconsuls sought entrance into their lodges. Their public rituals drew dense crowds from Montreal to Madras. The Ancient Free and Accepted Masons were quintessential builders of empire, argues Jessica Harland-Jacobs. In this first study of the relationship between Freemasonry and British imperialism, Harland-Jacobs takes readers on a journey across two centuries and five continents, demonstrating that from the moment it left Britain’s shores, Freemasonry proved central to the building and cohesion of the British Empire.

The organization formally emerged in 1717 as a fraternity identified with the ideals of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, such as universal brotherhood, sociability, tolerance, and benevolence. As Freemasonry spread to Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Africa, the group’s claims of cosmopolitan brotherhood were put to the test. Harland-Jacobs examines the brotherhood’s role in diverse colonial settings and the impact of the empire on the brotherhood; in the process, she addresses issues of globalization, supranational identities, imperial power, fraternalism, and masculinity. By tracking an important, identifiable institution across the wide chronological and geographical expanse of the British Empire, Builders of Empire makes a significant contribution to transnational history as well as the history of the Freemasons and imperial Britain.

2:03 pm on March 27, 2025

12:31 pm on March 27, 2025

The history of the welfare state is the history of the state’s savage war of aggrandizement and seizure of authority against civil society.

Whether in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the United States, the coercive state systematically destroyed the “voluntary sector” of civil society and those intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state [much as the Church did for nearly all of the previous two millennia].

Within the short space of two or three decades the protective sphere covered by workingmen’s social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations, with all other matters taken over by the state apparatus. Henceforth, the workingman and much of the middle class reported directly to the bureaucracy of the state’s intrusive regime.

Everything they did was in some way or another regulated, regimented and overseen by the state.

The dire effects of this calculated collectivism was malevolence not benevolence, aggression not altruism, genocide not generosity. Highly recommended as a beginning scholarly examination of this topic is the online Mises Institute article by economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard, Origins of the Welfare State in America.

1. The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850-1914: Social Policies Compared, by E. P. Hennock

Hennock examines the array of independent and only loosely connected Friendly Society health and unemployment [social insurance] regime throughout Britain & Wales. He sees that this motley ‘organization’ of free & voluntary organizations that dealt amazingly well with the delivery of social, medical, or burial services should have been ‘rationalized,’ centralized, & brought under state control.

2. British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance 1880-1914, by E. P. Hennock

The title pretty much sums up the contents of this very informative and useful study. The flow of ideas and policies from Germany to England are as important as the slightly later flow of those ideas and policies (as modified by the Brits) from the UK to America. This book also serves, in part, as a foundation and as an introduction to Hennock’s later book, above.

3. No Wealth but Life: Welfare Economics and the Welfare State in Britain, 1880-1945, by Roger E. Backhouse

This is an extraordinary collection; all of the essays are extremely good and helpful towards understanding the first principles and the initial foundation of the welfare state in the UK.

4. Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830-1990, by Geoffrey B. A. M. Finlayson

The state in the UK systematically destroyed the ‘voluntary sector’ and the intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state. Within two or three decades the sphere covered by workingmen’ social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations.

5. The British Political Tradition: The Rise of Collectivism, by W. H. Greenleaf

This volume establishes the central theme that the most important feature of British political life since the nineteenth century has been the extension of the role of government at all levels. Part of an outstanding three part series.

6. The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State (Oxford Handbooks), by Francis G. Castles

Described as the authoritative and definitive guide to the contemporary welfare state, consisting of nearly fifty newly-written chapters, a broad range of the world’s leading scholars offer a comprehensive account of the modern welfare state. Divided into eight sections, it opens with three chapters that evaluate the philosophical case for (and against) the welfare state.

7. The Welfare State Reader, by Christopher Pierson

The Welfare State Reader has rapidly established itself as a vital source of outstanding original research.

8. The Servile State, by Hilaire Belloc

Belloc famously predicted the rise of the ‘Servile State,’ along the lines adopted by Parliament as the Welfare State.

9. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, by Daniel T. Rodgers

While this is a sweeping and substantial study of how the ideas that ultimately created the social welfare state were transferred back and forth between England and the United States, it is an ultimately flawed analysis.

10. Before Beveridge – Welfare Before the Welfare State, (Choice in Welfare 47) by David A. Green

These are three works by David A. Greene (items #10, 11 and 12) which must read together in order to get a properly balanced account of the heyday of the mutual society system of social and medical insurance on the one hand, and on the other hand, the complete strangulation of civil society by the British state.

11. Reinventing Civil Society: Rediscovery of Welfare without Politics (Choice in Welfare), by David G. Green 12. Mutual Aid or Welfare State?: Australia’s Friendly Societies, by David G. Green 13. From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967, by David T. Beito

Just as David Green’s studies above are mainly about the UK, Beito’s study is about the similar story in America. This is a deep and meticulous scholarly study of America’s mutual aid societies and all of the social insurance sorts of personal distresses and misfortunes that often afflicted the workingman and the middle classes [i.e., civil society].

14. Imperialism and social reform: English social-imperial thought 1895-1914, by Bernard Semmel (Studies in society [5]), by Bernard Semmel

The spawning of the welfare state and the warfare state went hand in hand. In particular note the pivotal role of the Fabian Society and race imperialist Viscount Alfred Milner, the force behind Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table movement to consolidate the British Empire (see Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope, and The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden).

15. Fabianism and the Empire A Manifesto by the Fabian Society, by Bernard Shaw

Fabian socialists such as George Bernard Shaw supported both the welfare and warfare state as essential to the survival of the British Empire. It was called “Social Imperialism. Shaw was a prominent eugenicist and imperialist.

16. The British Socialist Ill-Fare State; an Examination of Its Political, Social, Moral, and Economic Consequences, by Cecil Palmer

Palmer details how the Fabian-led British socialists of the Labor Party were destroying Great Britain.

17. The Higher Circles, by G. William Domhoff

Domhoff details the origins of the welfare-warfare state from Otto von Bismarck to Richard T. Ely to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

18. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, by Robert Higgs

Higgs charts the accelerated growth and development of the welfare-warfare state in war and peace during the 20th century.

19. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition by Charles A Murray

Murray relentlessly destroys the empirical and ideological basis of the modern welfare state

20. The Welfare State We’re in, by James Bartholomew

This is by far the best book on England’s welfare state. It describes how the welfare system operates, day to day, how it punishes both the young and the elderly just for trying to get ahead, or just trying to keep one’s head above water.

21. Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State, by Charles Noble

22. Is the Welfare State Justified? by Daniel Shapiro

In this book, Daniel Shapiro argues that the dominant positions in contemporary political philosophy – egalitarianism, positive rights theory, communitarianism, and many forms of liberalism – should converge in a rejection of central welfare state institutions.

23. Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, by Sheldon Richman

Richman further details the origins of the welfare state in Bismarck’s Prussia and antebellum Civil War pensions in America.

24. A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State, by David Kelley

The welfare state rests on the assumption that people have rights to food, shelter, health care, retirement income, and other goods provided by the government. Kelley examines the historical origins of that assumption, and the rationale used to support it today.

25. From Poor Law to Welfare State, 6th Edition: A History of Social Welfare in America, by Walter I. Trattner

26. From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order, by Marc Allen Eisner

Eisner further outlines the tremendous impact and rationale World War I ‘war collectivism’ played in ushering in FDR’s New Deal welfare state. (see Murray N. Rothbard’s two pivotal essays, ‘War Collectivism in World War I,’ and ‘World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.’ Both available online.)

27. Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, by Theodore Dalrymple

Dalrymple’s key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.

28. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, by Frances Fox Piven

Marshaling a vast array of research, Piven and Cloward persuasively demonstrate how public relief has been used to avert civil chaos during economic downturns and to exert pressure on the work force during periods of stability.

29. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg

Critics such as David Gordon have pointed out its factual flaws in interpretation but Goldberg gets 90% of it brilliantly correct. Not a scholarly treatise but a fast-paced polemic showing the common ideological roots of American progressivism and European fascism, a legacy continuing with today’s welfare-warfare state.

30. As We Go Marching, by John T. Flynn

Flynn’s brilliant expose of the fascist origins of FDR’s New Deal, and its close ideological relationship to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes.

31. Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

Schivelbusch dares compare the collectivist ideology and pragmatic public policy applications of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Mussolini’s Corporate State, and Hitler’s National Socialist Third Reich. Excellent companion volume to Flynn’s As We Go Marching above.

32. Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, by Götz Aly

In this groundbreaking book, historian Götz Aly addresses one of modern history’s greatest conundrums: How did Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans? The answer is as shocking as it is persuasive: by engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale – and by channeling the proceeds into generous social programs – Hitler literally ‘bought’ his people’s consent.

33. The Third Reich: A New History, by Michael Burleigh

Excellent in documenting the social welfare component of National Socialist Germany under Hitler.

34. The New Totalitarians, by Roland Huntford

Huntsford dissects the fascist model of the social welfare state of Sweden.

35. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition, by Edwin Black

Eugenics was not new in the Progressive Era, but acquired impetus with the advent of a more expansive government. Expansion of state coercion meant that it became possible to have not only eugenic thought, but also eugenic practice. Millions of ‘the unfit’ were targeted for sterilization and elimination. Weimar and National Socialist Germany looked to the US as a model.

36. Ex America: The 50th Anniversary of the People’s Pottage, by Garet Garrett

Garrett’s classic expose’ of the destructive nature of the welfare-warfare state under presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

37. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents – The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2), by F. A. Hayek

Originally published in 1944, this book was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

38. The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, by David A. Stockman

A searing look at Washington’s craven response to the recent myriad of financial crises and fiscal cliffs. It counters conventional wisdom with an eighty-year revisionist history of how the American state – especially the Federal Reserve – has fallen prey to the politics of crony capitalism and the ideologies of fiscal stimulus, monetary central planning, and financial bailouts.

39. Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse, by Thomas E. Woods

America is on the brink of financial collapse. Decades of political overpromising and underfunding have created a wave of debt that could swamp our already feeble economy. And the politicians’ favorite tricks – raising taxes, borrowing from foreign governments, and printing more money – will only make it worse. Only one thing might save us: Roll back the government.

40. The Progressive Era, by Murray N. Rothbard

And I saved the best authoritative book for last.

“Rothbard’s posthumous masterpiece is the definitive book on the Progressives. It will soon be the must read study of this dreadful time in our past.”— From the Foreword by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, “The current relationship between the modern state and the economy has its roots in the Progressive Era.”— From the Introduction by Patrick Newman. “Progressivism brought the triumph of institutionalized racism, the disfranchising of blacks in the South, the cutting off of immigration, the building up of trade unions by the federal government into a tripartite big government, big business, big unions alliance, the glorifying of military virtues and conscription, and a drive for American expansion abroad. In short, the Progressive Era ushered the modern American politico-economic system into being.”— From the Preface by Murray N. Rothbard.

11:27 am on March 27, 2025

Tucker Carlson

@TuckerCarlson
Obituary for my father.

Richard Warner Carlson died at 84 on March 24, 2025 at home in Boca Grande, Florida after six weeks of illness. He refused all painkillers to the end and left this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his feet.

He was born February 10, 1941 at Massachusetts General Hospital to a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl and placed in the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston, where he developed rickets from malnutrition. His legs were bent for the rest of his life. After years in foster homes, he was placed with the Carlson family in Norwood, Mass. His adoptive father, a tannery manager, died when he was 12 and he stopped attending school regularly. At 17, he was jailed for car theft, thrown out of high school for the second time, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.

In 1962, in search of adventure, he drove to California. He spent a year as a merchant seaman on the SS Washington Bear, transporting cargo to ports in the Orient, and then became a reporter. Over the next decade, he was a copy boy at the LA Times, a wire service reporter for UPI and an investigative reporter and anchor for ABC News, covering the upheaval of the period. He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time, including Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, Eric Hoffer, Jerry Garcia, as well as Mafia leaders and members of the Manson Family. In 1965, he was badly injured reporting from the Watts riots in Los Angeles.

By 1975, he was married with two small boys, when his wife departed for Europe and didn’t return. He threw himself into raising his boys, whom he often brought with him on reporting trips. At home, he educated them during three-hour dinners on topics that ranged from the French Revolution to Bolshevik Russia, PG Wodehouse, the history of the American Indian and, always, the eternal and unchanging nature of people. He was a free thinker and a compulsive book reader, including at red lights. He left a library of thousands of books, most dog-eared and filled with marginalia. His reading and life experiences convinced him that God is real. He had an outlaw spirit tempered by decency.

In 1979, he married the love of his life, Patricia Swanson. They were together for 44 years, all of them happy. She died sixteen months before he did and he mourned her every day.

In 1985, he moved to Washington to work for the Reagan Administration. He spent five years as the director of the Voice of America, and then moved to the Seychelles as the US ambassador. In 1992, he became the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and later ran a division of King World television.

The last 25 years of his life were spent in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting. He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues. He knew a number of colorful national leaders, including Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, Aslan Abashidze of Adjara, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and whomever runs Somaliland. He was a fundamentally nonjudgmental person who was impossible to shock, and he described them all with amused affection.

He spoke to his sons every day and had lunch with them once a week for thirty years at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, always prefaced by a dice game. Throughout his life he fervently loved dogs.

Richard W. Carlson is survived by his sons, Tucker and Buckley, his beloved daughter-in-law Susie, and five grandchildren. He was the toughest human being anyone in his family ever knew, and also the kindest and most loyal. RIP.

America’s Untold Stories – Who is Dick Carlson?

9:59 am on March 27, 2025

History… The Last Will of Cecil Rhodes and the Anglo-American Establishment

“Tonight, on History… So it Doesn’t Repeat: We feature a research discussion led by Brett Veinotte, digging into the relevant, substantial, and credible evidence of an agenda of the New World Order. We’ll discover how to organize and assemble the puzzle, one piece at a time, revealing the big picture; and what we can do about it. Learning’s the Answer. What’s the Question? It’s all coming up, on History… So it Doesn’t Repeat!”

The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carrol Quigley

Tragedy and Hope: A History of Our World in Our Time, by Carrol Quigley

Union Now, by Clarence K. Streit

The Last Will and Testament of Cecil J. Rhodes

“The Special Relationship” (book list)

The Importance of the Congressional Investigations of Tax Exempt Foundations: Hearings – Reece Committee – 1953

Powerful Norman Dodd Interview Concerning the Reece Committee Report on Tax Exempt Foundations; Who Was Norman Dodd and Why What He Had To Say Is Vitally Important?

Rhodes of Africa
The 1937 film starring Walter Huston. It is the story of Cecil John Rhodes and the founding of Rhodesia.

Cecil Rhodes, by Apollon Davidson
A Marxist interpretation of the life and legacy of Cecil John Rhodes

Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717-1927, by Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs

They built some of the first communal structures on the empire’s frontiers. The empire’s most powerful proconsuls sought entrance into their lodges. Their public rituals drew dense crowds from Montreal to Madras. The Ancient Free and Accepted Masons were quintessential builders of empire, argues Jessica Harland-Jacobs. In this first study of the relationship between Freemasonry and British imperialism, Harland-Jacobs takes readers on a journey across two centuries and five continents, demonstrating that from the moment it left Britain’s shores, Freemasonry proved central to the building and cohesion of the British Empire.

The organization formally emerged in 1717 as a fraternity identified with the ideals of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, such as universal brotherhood, sociability, tolerance, and benevolence. As Freemasonry spread to Europe, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Africa, the group’s claims of cosmopolitan brotherhood were put to the test. Harland-Jacobs examines the brotherhood’s role in diverse colonial settings and the impact of the empire on the brotherhood; in the process, she addresses issues of globalization, supranational identities, imperial power, fraternalism, and masculinity. By tracking an important, identifiable institution across the wide chronological and geographical expanse of the British Empire, Builders of Empire makes a significant contribution to transnational history as well as the history of the Freemasons and imperial Britain.

Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism, by Philip J. Stern

“Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. A remarkable contribution to the current global debate about empire.” ―William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“Remarkable…The richness of detail and evidence that Stern…brings to his subject is [new]―as is the lucidity with which he organizes his material over six long chapters that stretch from the mid-16th century almost to the present.” ―Linda Colley, Financial Times

“[A] commanding history of British corporate imperialism.” ―Michael Ledger-Lomas, London Review of Books

Across four centuries and multiple continents, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan―a legal fiction with very real power.

Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, colonialism’s legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.

Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.

Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, by Niall Ferguson

A bestselling historian shows how the British Empire created the modern world, in a book lauded as “a rattling good tale” (Wall Street Journal) and “popular history at its best” (Washington Post)

The British Empire was the largest in all history: the nearest thing to global domination ever achieved. The world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s Age of Empire. The global spread of capitalism, telecommunications, the English language, and institutions of representative government — all these can be traced back to the extraordinary expansion of Britain’s economy, population and culture from the seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth. On a vast and vividly colored canvas, Empire shows how the British Empire acted as midwife to modernity.

Displaying the originality and rigor that have made Niall Ferguson one of the world’s foremost historians, Empire is a dazzling tour de force — a remarkable reappraisal of the prizes and pitfalls of global empire.

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, by Niall Ferguson

The instant New York Times bestseller.

A brilliant recasting of the turning points in world history, including the one we’re living through, as a collision between old power hierarchies and new social networks.

“Captivating and compelling.” —The New York Times

“Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book…In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it.” —The Wall Street Journal

“The Square and the Tower, in addition to being provocative history, may prove to be a bellwether work of the Internet Age.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Most history is hierarchical: it’s about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that’s simply because hierarchies create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks-leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati? The twenty-first century has been hailed as the Networked Age. But in The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Far from being novel, our era is the Second Networked Age, with the personal computer in the role of the printing press. Those looking forward to a utopia of interconnected ‘netizens’ may therefore be disappointed. For networks are prone to clustering, contagions, and even outages. And the conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries already have unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld.”–

12:28 am on March 27, 2025