Richard McGarrah Helms

[Linda Minor]

David,
Do you remember, years ago, we were looking into the Shickshinny Knights, which seemed to originate in a remote area of western Pennsylvania. I seem to recall finding some links to old banking families in Pennsylvania--Drexels, Biddles, and intelligence assets married into those families--basicially affiliated with the Morgan banking empire (Bullitt) before it was taken over by the Percy Rockefeller group around 1933-34 (which has been operated by the investment banking network of the Bush family including its intelligence assets).

David's work:
http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/the_spoils_of_war.htm

Some of my old research:
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/lm7,1,02,h...ronpt5.htm
Elite Philadelphia Families Tied to Global Agendas of Old World Wealth

The house of Drexel & Co. was founded in 1837 by Francis Martin Drexel, an Austrian, born in Dornbirn, Tyrol in western Austria near Switzerland and Liechtenstein, who arrived in the U.S. in 1817, one year before a branch of Brown Brothers opened in Philadelphia. Associated with him were his sons Francis Anthony, Anthony Joseph, and Joseph William. Francis Anthony Drexel, who married Emma Bouvier (the sister of John Bouvier, Jacqueline Kennedy's great grandfather), in 1863 became the senior member of the firm. 15 He forged an alliance in 1871 with Junius Morgan's son, J. Pierpont, to allow Drexel to tap into the lucrative European market for American bonds. Drexel's place of birth was the province controlled by the German merchant prince family of Fugger, who built the Fuggerei "poor house" in Tirol, and whose wealth had enabled them to make large loans to the German king, Maximilian I. 16 It was the debts to the Fuggers that resulted in the British Crown's being given to William and Mary from Amsterdam, who chartered the Bank of England in 1694. It is not known whether Drexel had connections to the descendants of this wealthy German family. The new firm--established in New York--became Drexel, Morgan & Co., and another firm, called Drexel, Harjes & Co., was in Paris. Anthony married Ellen Roset and had three sons and four daughters, one of whom, Emilie, married a Biddle. In 1891 Anthony Drexel founded, and endowed with $2,000,000, the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry in Philadelphia, now Drexel University, and died at Karlsbad, Germany, in 1893.

Emilie Drexel Biddle's grandson, Andrew Joseph Drexel Biddle, Jr., after his first marriage to Mary Duke of the North Carolina tobacco family ended in divorce, married the daughter of William Boyce Thompson, a graduate of Phillips Exeter and Yale (also Skull and Bones), who controlled an American mining empire. Thompson is a very important player in the story of the American International Corporation, discussed later in this article. In his book, The Duchess of Windsor, Charles Higham mentions that the Duchess was a good friend of A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. and his wife, Margaret, having met with the Biddles on at least two occasions: (1) in 1940 aboard ship, when the Windsors left Portugal to take up the appointment as Governor of the Bahamas, where they entertained the Biddles and U.S. Ambassador to Italy William Phillips (of Massachusetts), at dinner; and (2) in 1951 the Windsors stayed with the Biddles in London while King George was having throat surgery.

A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. was appointed as Ambassador to Poland in 1937, just as World War II began to break out, and fled from one place to another to avoid the invading German Army, ending up in Paris, where he also served as Deputy Ambassador to France. It was in Paris that the Biddles became close friends with the Windsors, who stayed for a considerable length of time in the home of Baron Eugene Rothschild and his wife Kitty. During that time, according to Charles Higham, their "greatest friend in Paris that year was Ambassador William Bullitt ... a tacit Nazi sympathizer who was so fanatically bent upon war with Russia that he was prepared to support every kind of Fascist movement in Western Europe....He was a man after the Windsors' own heart. He schemed against the popular front and collaborated with the so-called 200 Families, which in the words of George Seldes, 'turned out to be the French Fifth Column.' " (The Duchess of Windsor, p. 276). From a reading of the various diplomatic communiqués, however, it appears that Bullitt was more motivated by financial and economic concerns than by mere politics. 17

While serving as Ambassador to Moscow, Bullitt (from an "old," elite Philadelphia family) met Louise Bryant (they married in 1923), who had formerly been married to John Reed, organizer of the American Communist Party. 18 The Bullitts had one daughter, Anne Moen Bullitt, who according to Bullitt's listing in Who's Who 1954, married Nicholas Benjamin Duke Biddle, son of A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. and his wife Mary Duke (married 1915, divorced 1931), and a nephew of Doris Duke, heiress to American Tobacco Co., the Duke Power Co. and real estate investments. It seems very strange, however, that the listing for A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. in the same volume of Who's Who does not mention his marriage to Mary Duke, nor the birth of any children. Bullitt had married Ernesta Drinker in 1916, but they divorced in 1923 without children. A lawyer named William C. Bullitt, born in Bryn Mawr in 1946, is now a partner at Philadelphia's Drinker, Biddle & Reath in the personal and fiduciary law department, as well as being a board member for Philadelphia County. He is not listed as the son of Ambassador Bullitt in the 1954 Who's Who. 19

Reed appears to have been a tool of the "left wing" forces of the Syndicate. He went to Russia during the Bolshevik revolution as a reporter for a magazine owned by Harry Payne Whitney, then a director of Guaranty Trust. Harry's sister, Dorothy, married Thomas Lamont's protégé, Willard Straight, who re-negotiated loans for J.P. Morgan & Co. at Mukden in Russia and Manchuria the decade before the Russian revolution. The Paynes were heirs of one of Rockefeller's partners in the Standard Oil trust. Dorothy and Harry's brother, Payne Whitney and his wife Helen Hay, were the parents of Joan Whitney Payson and John Hay "Jock" Whitney--a graduate of Yale (Skull and Bones) and Oxford. Jock, an investment banker and member of the syndicate we have described in earlier parts of this series, was Ambassador to Great Britain from 1957 to 1961. It is interesting as well to note that Lamont, while serving as a financial expert at the Versailles negotiations in 1919 had met Lord Robert Cecil, whom he later hosted in New York while Cecil and Philip Noel-Baker were promoting the League of Nations; Lamont was a member of the League of Nations Association and the Foreign Policy Association. 20

Bullitt was part of Col. House's delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, serving as chief of the division of current intelligence. He first visited Russia in 1919 at the behest of Col. House, to whom he sent reports back, and, after meeting with Lenin, he carried a proposal from the Bolsheviks to Versailles, by which Lenin agreed to confine Soviet rule to central Russia and to release claims to all outlying provinces. When Wilson allowed Lenin's proposal to lapse, Bullitt resigned from the foreign service while denouncing the treaty. Sigmund Freud, who co-authored a psychological biography of Wilson with Bullitt, considered this "the most important single decision that he [Wilson] made in Paris." 21 Bullitt returned to a diplomatic role when Roosevelt, secretly being advised by Col. House, made him special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He then served as the executive officer of the American delegation at the London Monetary and Economic Conference of 1933. In the fall of that year Bullitt was deeply involved in the negotiation of the Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreements, which established diplomatic ties between the United States and the Soviet Union. His appointment as the first ambassador to Moscow was announced immediately after the signing of the agreements. He left Moscow in 1936 and became Ambassador to France from 1936-41. From June 1942 to July 1943 Bullitt was a special assistant to the secretary of the navy. In 1944 he joined the French army while retaining American citizenship, and was a foreign correspondent for Life magazine to report on conditions in Italy, which had just fallen to the Allied troops. Bullitt placed a great importance on "the papacy as an institution and on the reigning pontiff." 22

In 1941 A.J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. was named U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Greece, Luxembourg, and Yugoslavia, whose governments were in exile in London. This extraordinary posting was termed at the time the biggest and in some ways the most important diplomatic mission ever handled by a single envoy. Biddle retired from the diplomatic corps in 1944 to resume active duty in the Army as a Lt. Colonel, rising to the rank of Brigadier General in 1951. During those years he worked closely with General Eisenhower as deputy chief of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and as a representative to United States European Command (EUCOM) and Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). 23 The 1950s found Biddle serving as Adjutant General of the State of Pennsylvania, on numerous Pennsylvania state boards and commissions, and as a trustee at Temple University. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy chose Biddle for his last diplomatic position, that of Ambassador to Spain, where he served until his death. It is fascinating to note that between the years 1955 and 1968, the ambassadorship of Spain was held by a Lodge, a Forbes and two Biddles. What could that signify? The Forbes and Lodge families, through intermarriage with Cabots, long-standing trading partners with Spanish merchants, had been global merchants for centuries, involved in trade in both slaves and opium. (Click. Part 1) Spain became a fascist haven, along with Argentina, for many Nazis fleeing Germany at the close of World War II. The Nazis had been allied with Catholics in Croatia, who turned to both the Swiss and to the Vatican to assist them in rescuing gold and other treasures looted from murdered Jews. 24

Over several generations, the Drexel family have become very close to the British royal family, with John R. Drexel IV being currently the Chancellor of the American Society of the Most Venerable Order of St. John--formerly known as the Grand Priory in the British Realm of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, formed in 1831 by some French Knights of Malta, who intended to set up a non-Catholic priory in England. This priory was designed along the lines of the German Bailiwick of Brandenburg and of a short-lived Russian Orthodox Grand Priory, which was in existence for a few years around 1800. The English priory was incorporated by royal charter from Queen Victoria in 1888. Chancellor Drexel, who was installed by the Grand Priory (Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth), is married to Noreen Stonor Drexel--from a fragment of English gentry and nobility which stubbornly maintained its Catholic faith through severe persecution during the Reformation. Their family's manor house located southeast of Oxford secretly conducted Catholic worship despite the prohibition. Mrs. Drexel's nephew is the seventh Baron Camoys (Ralph Stonor), the first Catholic to serve as the Queen's chief of staff, or Lord Chamberlain, since the reign of Henry VIII. 25

The Drexels are connected by marriage to the Astor family which was instrumental in combining the American and British elites into the Round Table group which administered the estates of Cecil Rhodes and Albert Beit, mentioned in Part Three. William Waldorf Astor's wife was Mary Dahlgren Paul from Philadelphia. The couple lived in Rome from 1882 to 1885 while Astor was US ambassador to Italy. Mary Paul Astor's brother married her husband's sister. [Source: John D. Gates, The Astor Family: A Unique Exploration of One of America's First Families (Doubleday, 1981), p. 103] Later generations of the Pauls reflect intermarriage with the Delano family--whose members are intermarried with Astors and Roosevelts. This reaffirms the fact that there was a strong link between London and Philadelphia and that an alliance was created by these intermarried drug-running families. 26

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/lm7,1,02,h...ronpt5.htm
25 http://www.archdiocese-phl.org/cs&t/120700/news3.htm and http://www.saintjohn.org/history.htm
It may not be a coincidence that a mirror order to the Russian Grand Priory was formed before WWI, which would subsequently be based in Shickshinny, Pa.--thus referred to as the "Shickshinny Knights of Malta." http://www2.prestel.co.uk/church/lumpen/saucers.htm ("Saucers, Secrets and Shickshinny Knights" by Martin Davis): In the early sixties Philip Corso was a member of a secret society called The Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, also known as the Shickshinny Knights of Malta, after the Pennsylvania town where the order was based. The order's "Armed Services Committee" was full of retired military types with ultra-rightist sympathies and included generals from the Douglas MacArthur circle like Bonner Fellers and Pedro del Valle. The Committee also included British Admiral Sir Barry Domville, who was fingered by the English as a Nazi agent and jailed during World War II, and General Charles Willoughby, former chief of intelligence for General Douglas MacArthur, whom MacArthur referred to as "my little fascist." The Shickshinny Knights were fanatical anticommunists. Some of them, like Willoughby, were affiliated with international ultra-rightist organizations like the World Anticommunist League and the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture. Shickshinny, PA was itself the home of many White Russians who had fled Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power. In 1963, the Grand Chancellor of the Order was Col. Charles Thourot Pichel; during the thirties, Pichel had lobbied the German government to appoint him the official American liaison to Hitler. The Shickshinny Knights Armed Services Committee membership list also included Philip J. Corso, who, according to Dick Russell, "had been a twenty-year Army Intelligence career man until his retirement in August 1963". Russell notes that in 1954 Corso had been the Army Operations Coordinating Board's delegate to the CIA team planning the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. (This coup, in which the democratically elected leftist Arbenz was successfully removed from office, was primarily a U.S. intelligence operation. It was celebrated by the CIA as a "bloodless coup" because nary a shot was fired; rather, Arbenz was driven to flee the country by a barrage of U.S.-backed disinformation and propaganda. In other words, it was for the most part what spy folk call a "psy op," or psychological operation.) In 1956, Corso worked with West German paramilitary units connected to the spy network of former Nazi master spy Reinhard Gehlen.13 (Corso himself claims that he participated in Operation Paperclip, the American intelligence operation that repatriated Nazi rocket scientists like Werner von Braun and Walter Dornberger to the U.S., so that they could run the U.S. space program.) According to Peter Dale Scott, after the Kennedy assassination, both Corso and Frank Capell (another Shickshinny Knight, also an editor for the John Birch Society) were instrumental in spreading "stories linking Oswald to Russia and Ruby to Castro's Cuba." In Deep Politics, Scott argues that such stories were systematically disseminated after the assassination as part of a cover-up, i.e., a disinformation scheme whose purpose was to deflect attention away from the real forces behind the Kennedy murder. Russell concurs, saying that Corso was "among the first to spread rumors hinting that Oswald was tied to a Communist ring inside the CIA". Apparently the colonel is still on the case: according to Corso co-author Birne, an upcoming volume from the duo, tentatively titled The Day After Dallas, will give the real insider's lowdown on the JFK assassination, emphasizing alleged penetration of the CIA and "the entire U.S. secret government," by the KGB. (Interestingly, Russell explores indications--admittedly circumstantial--suggesting that the real group behind the assassination was connected to Willoughby and a "right-wing clique inside the Pentagon." Both Russell and Scott link Willoughby, Corso, and company to a power struggle within the national security establishment between ultra-right military intelligence types and more "liberal," civilian CIA men. Willoughby's "old boys" were a vastly different breed from the old-school tie, Ivy League crowd who ran the CIA. Their enmity went back to a battle for hegemony between Military Intelligence and the OSS [the CIA] during World War II. While the CIA's power base expanded, the MacArthur-Willoughby's team's very existence was threatened. One Democratic president, Harry Truman, pushed them out of the far east. But Willoughby and his ilk did not fade away. They melded into global alliances, extending from quasi-religious orders such as the Shickshinny Knights of Malta to the [ex-Nazi] Reinhard Gehlen-Otto Skorzeny spy team in Europe. Such details may have no bearing on Corso's bizarre UFO memoir. But they make clear that Corso has had a lifelong association with military intelligence and the ultra-right. They also suggest that he's no slouch at disinformation schemes and no stranger to hidden agendas. Furthermore, it's clear from such history that Corso is a veteran of CIA-style espionage. Interestingly, in The Day After Roswell, he paints CIA types as the bad guys in the story. It's this branch of the government that is bent on keeping the truth from the American people, Corso implies. Salt of the earth military patriots like himself just want the truth to come out, dadgummit. The Shickshinny Knights who made up the Armed Services Committee of the society were described in the group's literature as "Soldiers of Christ and Advocates of a Free World"--as the shock troops of global anticommunism. Sharing the wealth, it seems safe to say, was not part of their agenda. But even Corso's pseudo-populist position has a Shickshinny feel to it. As both Scott and Russell demonstrate, the Shickshinny milieu represents a faction of the intelligence community that is to the right of the CIA and which views the whole civilian intelligence apparatus as a hotbed of dangerous liberalism. J. Edgar Hoover's own turf war with the CIA during the 1950s factors into this. As Scott writes: "The intra-bureaucratic feud of the 1950s between the CIA and Hoover was much more than a matter of personalities: it was a conflict between alternate visions (globalist/internationalist versus nationalist/expansionist) of how the United States should expand into the rest of the world. Where the major oil companies and their allies in the CIA thought of creating and dominating a global economy, their nationalist opposition in the United States preferred unilateralist expansion into specific areas, above all Latin America and the far east. The latter group allied dissident generals, resentful of civilian control, with exploiters of minerals and independent oilmen opposed to the oil majors, like William Pawley and H. L. Hunt." These days, many would argue that the people would be well served by more opposition to the global economy and its elite promoters. But the "nationalist" opposition to globalization described above might as well be called the "fascist" opposition. Hunt, Hoover, and the Shickshinny types may not be fans of globalization, but they sure aren't the champions of ordinary folk. For "unilateralist expansion into. . . Latin America and the far east," read "Guatemala," "Chile," "Korea," "Vietnam."
http://www.redshift.com/~damason/lhrepor...well3.html At the time Corso joined the exclusive sect, its leader was one Colonel Charles Thourot Pichel. Pichel was an explicit, undeniable Nazi. During the Third Reich, he had begged Hitler's government for the job of representing Nazi political interests in the United States. Willoughby had also joined the Shickshinny Knights at this time, and co-published with the organization a periodical called the "Foreign Intelligence Journal." This journal specialized in anti-Semitic theories and the kind of extremist "enemy-within" anti-Communist blather we associate with groups like the John Birch Society. Apparently, this rather odd group had become, in the early 1960s, something of a dumping-ground for military intelligence veterans who were so zealous they had come to consider the CIA hopelessly "pink." The darling of this Corso's "Knights" was a very strange man named Michael Goliniewsky, whose name pops up in most histories of the CIA "mole-hunts" of the 1960s. Goliniewsky was a high-ranking Polish intelligence officer who sympathized with "the West," and began feeding information to the CIA. Apparently, his info was rather good at first. The Soviets became suspicious of him, so he had to scuttle off to America quickly....The CIA soon learned not to take Goliniewsky seriously. But his demented world-view fit right in with the ideas held by the Knights, Willoughby, Corso and co. So these "Knights" became the chief propagandists for Goliniewsky in the United States. [NOTE: Remember that Drexel Biddle, Jr. had connections to Poland since being appointed ambassador in 1937.] ~~~~~~~

An interesting chart can be seen at http://www.vaticanassassins.org/ (click on "chart" in frames to the left). Notice how many powerful intelligence operatives in America have been connected to Knights of Malta.