I dislike Thanksgiving but I have a tradition where I retell my family the story of how the CIA used the artworld to change public opinion and this program was used to help assinate a president when it became clear that human perception could be harnessed by propaganda. Part of this story was retold to you in the podcast above. Here is the second part of the story for you to digest once you finish your Thanksgiving dinner today. I am warning you it may give some of you indigestion.
When I teach people about Bitcoin, I have two go-to stories about asymmetric values to explain how something worth so little can grow to something beyond your imagination. One is the Louisiana Purchase, and the other is Gertrude Stein’s experience with Picasso.
By 1905, Picasso became a favorite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Leo told his sister that his work would become iconic and valuable. She famously told Picasso I wouldn’t say I like your work, but I trust my brother’s eye for value. She began to collect Picasso’s early works for 5-20 dollars a painting. Today, some of those paintings are worth 400 million dollars in private peer-to-peer deals. These deals mimic the peer-to-peer network in Bitcoin. The value of Bitcoin has gone from 1 cent to 69,000 in 13 years.
Alice B. Toklas (pictured above on right) is remembered for being Gertrude Stein’s (left) great love and writing her unusual, revered memoir-disguised-as-cookbook chronicling their life together. On September 8, 1907, her first day as an American expat in Paris, Toklas met Stein. The two fell instantly in love and remained together for the next 39 years until Stein’s death in 1946.
After Gertrude died, her collection of 47 paintings (38 of which were by Picasso) was bequeathed to her nephew but remained on the walls of Toklas’s home. Gertrude’s nephew eventually passed ownership on to his three children, who decided to sell when Toklas died in 1967. Nelson Rockerfeller mother founded the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, and Nelson Rockerfeller was given the chance to buy from Stein’s collection first by the political powers that were in place at this time.
The number of MoMA-CIA crossovers is highly suspicious, to say the least when one reviews the history.
In the years since his death in 1973, Picasso’s stature as an artist elevated to the highest ranks, with some of his works going for more than $100 million in public auctions and reportedly at even higher sums in private deals. He remains the top-grossing artist at auction worldwide, raking $245 million across 3,400 lots in 2020 alone. He is, in many ways, today’s “Bitcoin Standard” of the art market.
For example, Picasso’s Delacroix-inspired Les femmes d’Alger ‘Version O’ (1955) for $179.4 million in 2015 to Steve Wynn.
Femme Assise, pictured above, sold for 63 million dollars. It depicts French artist and model Fernande Olivier, who went with Picasso to a remote village in Spain during the summer of 1909. While there, she posed for a number of his pictures.
PROPAGANDA AROUND ART WAS BORN IN TULANE UNIVERSITY’S MK-ULTRA
The Cold War was the most powerful macropolitical thing on the planet in the late 1940s and 1950s.
The CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting worldwide for over 20 years. The USSR of Stalin post WW2 was about total centralization in all things. The CIA began experimenting with decentralization at this time in reaction to absolute centralization in the USSR.
The artists the CIA supported emphasize free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exercise considerable freedom of technique and execution to attain this goal, with a particular emphasis laid on the exploitation of the variable physical character of paint to evoke expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism.) The CIA task was monumental because few Americans liked decentralized art in the 1950s. MK-ULTRA propaganda techniques were applied to change this perception. It was so successful that it also bleed into the CIA’s operations involved in the assassinations of JFK and RFK Sr.
This was a period when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art – President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.” As for the artists themselves, many were ex-communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era of the 50s, and certainly not the sort of people usually likely to receive US government backing.
Who were the artists the CIA supported?
Clyfford Still, Theodoros Stamos, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, Hans Hofmann, Joan Mitchell are a few.
The connection between the CIA and art is improbable until you know what MK-ULTRA was all about. Many of you heard about this program for the first time in my RFK Jr interview linked above.
This new artistic movement was propped up to be proof of the creativity, intellectual freedom, and cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
GENERAL GROVES GOT THIS IDEA FROM BERNAYS AND NAZI PROPAGANDA USED IN WW2
Many have forgotten General Groves was the most powerful man in the USA in WW2. He controlled the Manhattan Project from start to finish. He was the architect of the Cold War. He single handedly reversed the promise that FDR made to Stalin at Potsdam that the USA would rebuild Russia for the sacrifices Russia made in defeating the Nazi’s in Europe. The picture below is when FDR made this promise to Stalin right before FDR death.
Groves made sure that the DNC had replaced FDR’s Vice President before his fourth term so that Groves could control the power struggle that would result after Germany was defeated. Groves knew that FDR was sympathetic to Stalin. Groves wanted to limit emotion in post war politics because he realized that a chronic war was a powerful way to subvert the power in the executive branch. War allowed for emergency power to be instituted without much controversy. This allowed the industrial military complex to operate freely and covertly. General groves wanted this ability to continue after the war. Groves made sure the OSS office would become a central intelligence post in post war America by installing his own people. Dulles was his hand picked successor. Truman was Groves hand picked president because he could be easily manipulated by propaganda Groves created and the CIA propagated.
HOW DID THIS PROPAGANDA MACHiNE WORK IN THE ART WORLD?
The existence of this supportive policy in the art world in post war America, which had been rumored and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the “long leash” – arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal ENCOUNTER, edited by Stephen Spender.
The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947 by Truman at General Groves’s request. This was how the industrial, military complex captured the executive branch of government in the USA. I covered this in the tweet thread cited below.
Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines, and public information organizations at its peak. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button, it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
The following key step came in 1950 when the International Organizations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office that subsidized the animated version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s international touring program. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, and even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America’s anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism in the art world.
Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organized and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled “Advancing American Art,” with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: “I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash.” The tour had to be canceled.
The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy’s hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. Many of you might have forgotten that RFK Sr worked under Joe McCarthy during these anti-communist times and this theme would come back to haunt the Kennedy family in November of 1963 and in 1968.
It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in to change perception by using mind control techniques developed in the MK-Ultra program.
ALLEN DULLES WAS A GENERAL GROVES ACOLYTE AND HE WAS THE ARCHITECT OF THE KENNEDY DEATHS in 1963 and 1968.
ON APRIL 10, 1953, ALLEN DULLES became the newly APPOINTED DIRECTOR OF THE CIA, and he delivered a speech to a gathering of Princeton alumni. Though the event was mundane, global tensions were running high. The Korean War was coming to an end, and earlier that week, The New York Times had published a startling story asserting that American POWs returning from the country may have been “converted” by “Communist brain-washers.” This was classic Cold War propaganda born in the work of Edward Bernays. Dulles decided to use this technique on the people of the United States.
Some GIs were confessing to war crimes, like carrying out germ warfare against the Communists–a charge the U.S. categorically denied. Others were reportedly so brainwashed that they refused to return to the United States at all. As if that weren’t enough, the U.S. was weeks away from secretly sponsoring the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Iran to install the Shah to gain control of the oil fields in the Middle East. The blow back of this CIA program would haunt future presidents.
DULLES EMPLOYED BERNAYS and GOEBBELS PROPAGANDA MACHINE ON THE US PUBLIC
Dulles had just become the first civilian director of an agency growing more powerful by the day, and the speech provided an early glimpse into his priorities for the CIA. “In the past few years, we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds–the war of ideologies,” he told the attendees. “I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands,” he continued. “We might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’”
Dulles proceeded to describe the “Soviet brain perversion techniques” as effective but “abhorrent” and “nefarious.” He gestured to the American POWs returning from Korea, shells of the men they once were, parroting the Communist propaganda they had heard cycled for weeks on end. He expressed fears and uncertainty–were they using chemical agents? Hypnosis? Something else entirely? “We in the West,” the CIA Director conceded, “are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare.” This sort of non-consensual experiment, even on one’s enemies, was antithetical to American values, Dulles insisted, as well as antithetical to what should be human values. Behind the scenes Dulles was building a CIA program to mimic what the communists and Nazi’s had already done.
Newspaper headlines like “New Evils Seen in Brainwashing” and “Brainwashing vs. Western Psychiatry” offered sensational accounts of new mind-control techniques and technologies that no man could fully resist. The paranoia began to drift into American culture, with books like The Manchurian Candidate and The Naked Lunch playing on themes of unhinged scientists and vast political conspiracies. These current events in the newspapers were like a shark fin breaking the water, announcing to the public that the CIA had an active mind control program at the covert universities in the Deep South. This is why MK-Ultra was born and bred at Tulane University. I mentioned this in the RFK Jr Tetragrammaton podcast .
MK-ULTRA AT TULANE linked to museums, the media, and CBS
Three days after his speech decrying Soviet tactics, Dulles approved the beginning of MK-Ultra, a top-secret CIA program for “covert use of biological and chemical materials.” “American values” made for good rhetoric, but Dulles had far grander plans for the agency’s Cold War agenda.
MK-Ultra’s “mind control” experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, many forms radiation, artificial light and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school to American soldiers to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society.
The CIA targeted cities in the USA for testing as well. St Louis and SF were two of the best documented in this program. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences. Recall how they tested the SV-40 concentrated virus by the LINAC on an Angola death row inmate in August of 1963 to test their bioweapons to kill Castro. MK-Ultra gave birth to this program in the bioweapons lab run by Dr. Alton Ochsner (middle below) and Dr. Mary Sherman (second pic below).
Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-Ultra. “Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state,” Bulger said of the 1957 tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. “Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”
Bulger claimed he had been injected with LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide, or acid, had become one of the CIA’s critical interests for its “brain warfare” program, as the agency theorized it could be useful in interrogations. In the late 1940s, the CIA received reports that the Soviet Union had engaged in “intensive efforts to produce LSD,” and that the Soviets had attempted to purchase the world’s supply of the chemical. One CIA officer described the agency as “literally terrified” of the Soviets’ LSD program, largely because of the lack of knowledge about the drug in the United States. “[This] was the one material that we had ever been able to locate that really had potential fantastic possibilities if used wrongly,” the officer testified.
All this went on right before the bioweapons program that began in the USA in New Orleans in 1950-1964. You need to understand the timeline of history to understand what is going on today in your world. Experiments with LSD was the precursor to the SV-40 experiments.
With the advent of MK-Ultra, the government’s interest in LSD shifted from a defensive to an offensive orientation. Agency officials noted that LSD could be potentially useful in “[gaining] control of bodies whether they were willing or not.” The CIA envisioned applications that ranged from removing people from Europe in the case of a Soviet attack to enabling assassinations of enemy leaders. On November 18, 1953, a group of ten scientists met at a cabin deep in Maryland’s forests. After extended discussions, the participants agreed that to understand the value of the drug truly, “an unwitting experiment would be desirable.”
ART AND MK-ULTRA MERGE
The connection between art and propaganda is not quite as odd as it might appear once you see it from this perspective. At this time, the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites, and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.
Until now, there has been no first-hand evidence to prove that this connection was made, but for the first time, a former case officer, Donald Jameson, has broken the silence. Yes, he has said, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and it ran with it.
“Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I’d love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!” he joked. “But I think that what we did really was to recognize the difference. It was recognized that Abstract Expressionism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylized and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the art exhibitions.
“In a way, our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in denouncing any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticized that much and that heavy-handedly was worth support one way or another.”
To pursue its underground interest in America’s lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. “Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes,” Mr. Jameson explained, “so there wouldn’t be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organization. And it couldn’t have been any closer because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better, perhaps.”
This was the “long leash”. The centerpiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in the early 1950s and run by a CIA agent. It was the beachhead from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its “fellow travelers” in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published over two dozen magazines, including Encounter.
SV-40 SIDEBAR OCCURING AT THE SAME TIME THE CIA WAS USING THE ART WORLD
The success of this program preconditioned the CIA to believe they could build a covert bioweapons lab in the USA and hide it below the noses of the public and keep it covert using propaganda. These same facades where used to link neo-con community of Ochsner to the gay underground community Clay Shaw and David Ferry were in New Orleans. This was how the CIA came to link the medical and gay community in the conspiracy to kill JFK. just look at the familiar links used in the art world via MK-Ultra and the ones I revealed in the RFK Jr podcast.
HOW DID THE CIA USE MODERN ART COVERTLY? IT CORRUPTED THE MEDIA AT THE SAME TIME
The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favorable to the new American painting, and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.
This organization put together several exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s. One of the most significant, “The New American Painting,” visited every big European city in 1958-59. Other influential shows included “Modern Art in the United States” (1955) and “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century” (1952).
Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires, and museums were called into play. Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was pre-eminent among these. As president of what he called “Mummy’s Museum,” Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called “free enterprise painting”). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organize and curate most of its important art shows.
The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges that most of the American public is ignorant of. This is how the First Amendment of the United States was captured by the CIA.
William Paley, the president of CBS Broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members’ board of the museum’s International Program. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency’s wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. The Whitney museum of modern art sat on 75th and Madison Ave in New York City. I lived as a child in this neighborhood and was well aware of its history at an early age. Did you know that Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA’s International Organizations Division (IOD), was executive secretary of the museum in 1949?
Do you know who worked for William Paley in Dallas in 1963 and later became their network star?
Dan Rather used propaganda in his reporting to help his boss cover up the CIA operations that occurred 60 years ago yesterday.
Now dead, Mr Braden lived in Woodbridge, Virginia until 2009, in a house packed with Abstract Expressionist works and guarded by enormous Alsatians. He explained the purpose of the IOD.
Baden said, “we wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States were devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War.”
He confirmed that his division had acted secretly because of the public hostility to the avant-garde: “It was very difficult to get the 1950s anti-communist Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do – send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That’s one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness, we believed it had to be secret.”
If this meant that the CIA had to play the role of the Pope to this century’s Michelangelos, well, all the better: “It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognize art and to support it,” Mr. Braden said. “And after many centuries, people say, ‘Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!’ It’s a problem that civilization has faced ever since the first artist and the first millionaire or Pope who supported him. And yet, if it hadn’t been for the multi-millionaires or the popes, we wouldn’t have had the art.”
Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this CIA patronage? The answer is questionable to those outside the art world. Those inside of it would likely disagree. I have been of the opinion for a long time now, that it would not be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting, you are being duped by the CIA propaganda. Today, I am thankful to bring you this story I have told to my family at Thanksgiving because this year after the Tetragrammaton podcast with RFK Jr you can now fully understand how all the parts fit to explain US history the military wants you to forget.
But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms, and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system, which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. The CIA propaganda program succeeded in a big way.
The Covert Art Operation continues to bleed into the New Orleans bioweapons lab
In 1958, the touring exhibition “The New American Painting”, including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell, and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash, bringing the show to London.
However, the money that Fleischmann provided was not his, but the CIA’s. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire’s charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds. This was how Ochsner got his LINAC from a Hill Burton Grant that the politicians who controlled the industrial military complex controlled in the 1950s. Amazing coincidence don’t you think?
So, unknown to the Tate, the public, or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers’ expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. “We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person, and we would say, ‘We want to set up a foundation.’ We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, ‘Of course, I’ll do it,’ and then you would publish a letterhead, and his name would be on it, and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device.” This is what the CIA did with Dr. Alton Ochsner in the 1950s after the Cutter Incident.
Julius Fleischmann was well-placed for such a role. He sat on the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art in New York board, as did several powerful figures close to the CIA. Many Americans in 2023 still do not know how art and the CIA were linked by propaganda.
The world today exists on a belief system that “those in power” can outrun the truth by using intelligence agencies and their technology by manipulating money in the art world – without consequences. The reality of the situation is that the world of art TODAY still is ruled by the consequences that CIA propaganda used to rehypothecate money to manipulate public opinion. They used the art world to create and steal money forever wars in the pre Vietnam era and today they are creating trillions of dollars in cancer patients to create massive piles of fiat money they can funnel from HHS to the DOD and CIA to run the chronic wars today.
MK-ULTRA DEMISE WAS AT THE HAND OF ANOTHER KENNEDY
In 1977, Senator Edward Kennedy oversaw congressional hearings investigating the effects of MK-Ultra. Congress brought in a roster of ex-CIA employees for questioning, interrogating them about who oversaw these programs, how participants were identified, and if any of these programs had been continued. The Hearings turned over a number of disturbing details, particularly about the 1953 suicide of Dr. Frank Olson, an Army scientist who jumped out of a hotel window several days after unwittingly consuming a drink spiked with LSD. Amid the growing criminalization of drug users, and just a few years after President Nixon declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” the ironies of the U.S.’s troubling experimentation with drugs appeared in sharp relief.
But throughout the hearings, Congress kept hitting roadblocks: CIA staffers claimed they “couldn’t remember” details about many of the human experimentation projects or even the number of people involved. The obvious next step would be to consult the records, but that presented a small problem: in 1973, amid mounting inquiries, the director of MK-Ultra told workers, “It would be a good idea if [the MK-Ultra] files were destroyed.” Citing vague concerns about the privacy and “embarrassment” of participants, the men who crafted MK-Ultra effectively eradicated the paper record for one of the United States’ most obviously illegal undertakings. A program born in secrecy would hold onto many of its secrets forever because the government covered its own illegal tracks.
SUMMARY
Remember what John D. Rockefeller promised Congress under the administration of Teddy Roosevelt that the Rockefeller family would bankrupt the US government one day for breaking up the Standard Oil Trust. The relationship between Modern Art and American diplomacy began during WWII when the Museum of Modern Art was mobilized for the war effort. MoMA was founded in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. A decade later, her son, Nelson Rockefeller, became president of the Museum. In 1940, while he was still President of MoMA, Rockefeller was appointed the Roosevelt Administration’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. He also served as Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of State in Latin America.
The Museum followed suit. MoMA fulfilled 38 government contracts for cultural materials during the Second World War and mounted 19 exhibitions of contemporary American painting for the Coordinator’s office, which were exhibited throughout Latin America. Latin America is where Dr. Alton Ochsner made most of his fortune while he was alive. He offered medical sanctuary to all the dictators of Latin America.
This direct relationship between the avant-garde and the war effort was well suited: The term avant-garde began as a French military term describing vanguard troops advancing into battle.
In the battle for “hearts and minds,” modern art was particularly effective. John Hay Whitney, both a president of MoMA and a member of the Whitney Family, which founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, explained that art stood out as a line of national defense because it could “educate, inspire, and strengthen the hearts and wills of free men.”
Whitney succeeded Rockefeller as President of the Museum of Modern Art in January 1941 so Nelson could turn his entire attention to his Coordinator duties. Under Whitney, MoMA served as “A Weapon of National Defense.” According to a Museum press release dated February 28, 1941, MoMA would “inaugurate a new program to speed the interchange of the art and culture of this hemisphere among all the twenty-one American republics.”
The goal was “Pan-Americanism.” This was the environment that Dr. Alton Ochsner was operating in during the 1950s-60s during the Cutter Incident. Ochsner Medical Foundation Hospital had every Latin American flag outside of it for close to 40 years. I know because I saw them every day for 6 years of my residency in New Orleans.
A “Traveling Art Caravan” through Latin America “would do more to bring us together as friends than ten years of commercial and political work.”
When World War 2 ended, Nelson Rockefeller returned to the Museum, and his Inter-American-Affairs staffers assumed responsibilities for MoMA’s international exhibition program: René d’Harnoncourt, who had headed Inter-American’s art division, became the Museum’s vice president in charge of foreign activities. Fellow staffer Porter McCray became the Director of the Museum’s International Program.
Modern art was so well aligned with American Cold War foreign policy that McCray took a leave of absence from the Museum in 1951 to work on the Marshall Plan. In 1957, Whitney resigned his position as MoMA’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees to become United States Ambassador to Great Britain. Whitney remained a trustee of the Museum while he was Ambassador, and his successor as Chairman was… Nelson Rockefeller, who had served as Special Assistant to President Eisenhower for Foreign Affairs until 1955. Who was his VP? Nixon. Who is seated right next to Dr. Ochsner below? His policies began the The War on Cancer in 1971. This is another propaganda technique born at the same time the USD dollar was removed from the gold standard. You are all unaware of the tangled webs the CIA has woven to confuse you to get their agenda through.
In 1947, at the very moment that the Advancing American Art show was being recalled, and the United States Government was selling its O’Keeffe’s for fifty bucks a piece (all seventy-nine pieces in the show together brought in $5,544), the CIA was being created. The CIA grew out of “Wild” Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the U.S.’s wartime intelligence apparatus. The OSS became the CIA and George H. Bush Father ran that office.
George W. Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott S. Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian newspaper in the UK obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott S. Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism. He worked directly with Joseph Goebbels the Nazi Propaganda chief. Imagine that.
His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave laborers at Auschwitz. This only caused a minor ripple in the US Press during his pre-election in 2000. Guess why? The media was already captured by his friends in the CIA decades before this controversy.
The evidence the Guardian found has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue over 80 years ago that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
What is the evidence against the Bush family and their oil empire?
While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. We now have confirmed published evidence from US government archives that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen’s US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered WW2.
Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.
Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler’s efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen’s international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalizing are Bush’s links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labor from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified in 2003 that link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen’s American assets were seized in 1942.
Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush’s involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland. You should fact check Uncle Jack.
The third set of documents, are also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes in Neuremberg.
A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that “since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country’s war effort”.
Prescott Bush, a 6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate himself. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the first world war and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.
In 1924, his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.
One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125. You may now understand why the Bush family favors a CBDC over Bitcoin now. You may also understand why the Bush family is no friend to anyone named Kennedy. They had a hand in JFK and RFK Sr. demises.
The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush’s father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany’s most powerful industrial family.
August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany’s first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.
By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany’s economic recovery was faltering under Weimar hyperinflation. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerized by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.
By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world’s largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler’s build-up to war. Interesting history lesson huh? I hope you do not choke on your turkey today.
Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents now published in many books and FOIA requests, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.
In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained there for the remainder of the war.
Mind you, there was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America’s best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. This seems ironic when you see how the Biden administration treats corporations who do business with Russia today over Ukraine. The play book continues for the Deep State.
However, everything changed politically after Germany invaded Poland in 1939 because the covert plan could no longer stay hidden. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled “Hitler’s Angel Has $3m in US Bank”. UBC’s huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a “secret nest egg” hidden in New York City for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation. It turns out the Bush family did hide Nazi assets during the war. This is how the modern neo-cons were born in the US politics.
There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH – including UBC and SAC – in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.
Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC’s business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn’t actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC’s president.
May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: “Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest.”
May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.
By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven – who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC – had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen’s Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen’s steel and coal mine empire in Germany.
Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush’s name, and wrote: “Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC,” according to the memo from the National Archives.
The Bush family was caught RED HANDED.
Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m – a huge amount of money at the time – but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler’s rise to power.
The most sensational part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.
Thyssen’s partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.
Flick’s plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labor from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while “American interests” held the rest.
The US National Archive documents show that BBH’s involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush’s friend and fellow “bonesman” Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalize the plant. “The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected,” wrote Knight. “After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors.”
John Foster Dulles was the brother of Allen Dulles who JFK fired in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs. Coincidence?
Continuing the history lesson: But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.
“SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939,” says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, was published in 2004.
Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.
The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40billon in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labor during the second world war.
Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of “state sovereignty”.
Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: “President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton’s signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family.”
Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.
In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.
The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case.
The petition to The Hague states: “From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented.”
The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.
The US government and the Bush family denied all the claims against them.
In addition to Eva Schweitzer’s book, two other books were published in 2004-05 that raised the subject of Prescott S. Bush’s business history. The author of the second book, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. At that time he lived in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus worked on a novel which used some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.
“You can’t blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did – bought Nazi stocks – but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?” he said.
Those implications lead right to the death of JFK and RFK Jr.
“This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich’s defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted,” said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg. The US Treasury and Senator Warren wants you to believe in 2023 that Bitcoin is used to launder money when it is clear that this blog is laying the case out why rehypothecation of money is the strong suit of the CIA and all the people affiliated with them.
“The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen,” said Loftus. “At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn’t until the Nazis took over Holland that they realized that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American Treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it’s absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were.”
“There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it,” said Loftus. “As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott S. Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany.”
Loftus said Prescott S. Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. “My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses, they didn’t care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks.”
What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in “the banking and intelligence communities” and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5m out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.
The third person going who went into print in the early 2000s on this subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. In 2003, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline “Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush’s Grandfather Traded With the Nazis – Even After Pearl Harbor”. He expands on this in his book – Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.
In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, claimed that “the essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books but were dismissed by the media as propaganda and Bush family as undocumented diatribes”.
One of the USAs oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail in print. Review it at your leisure.
Please recall that President George W. Bush gave us the Patriot Act after “the emergency” of the Twin towers “happened”. I no longer think the Twin Towers was a terrorist action. I believe Bush pulled a play out from his family blue print.
George H.W. Bush, George W. father, also served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from January 1976 to January 1977, just ten days shy of one full year. Though his tenure was limited, his accomplishments were many, and we are grateful to have served under his leadership. He became president after Ronald Reagan.
There is the link to Big Oil families who had a hand in killing the 35th President of the USA. MoMA’s John Hay Whitney and Thomas W. Braden were members of the OSS. The OSS became the CIA in 1947. Never forget what this criminal cabal has done and continues to do.
Game, Set, and Match.
That is conclusion of the RFK Jr interview you did not hear and what i said live on stage in Lisbon, Portugal.
Happy Thanksgiving.
CITES
2. https://twitter.com/DrJackKruse/status/1727329402571067413
3. https://twitter.com/DrJackKruse/status/1727370879460376756
4. https://twitter.com/DrJackKruse/status/1727371695017558289
5. http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/braden_20may1967.html
