Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11

[Magda Hassan]

Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11

by Kevin Ryan

November 18, 2010




Just after September 11th 2001, many governments began investigations into possible insider trading related to the terrorist attacks of that day. Such investigations were initiated by the governments of Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, and others. Although the investigators were clearly concerned about insider trading, and considerable evidence did exist, none of the investigations resulted in a single indictment. That’s because the people identified as having been involved in the suspicious trades were seen as unlikely to have been associated with those alleged to have committed the 9/11 crimes.
This is an example of the circular logic often used by those who created the official explanations for 9/11. The reasoning goes like this: if we assume that we know who the perpetrators were (i.e. the popular version of “al Qaeda”) and those who were involved in the trades did not appear to be connected to those assumed perpetrators, then insider trading did not occur.
That’s basically what the 9/11 Commission told us. The Commission concluded that “exhaustive investigations” by the SEC and the FBI “uncovered no evidence that anyone with advance knowledge of the attacks profited through securities transactions.” What they meant was that someone did profit through securities transactions but, based on the Commission’s assumptions of guilt, those who profited were not associated with those who were guilty of conducting the attacks. In a footnote, the Commission report acknowledged “highly suspicious trading on its face,” but said that this trading on United Airlines was traced back to “A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda.”[1]
With respect to insider trading, or what is more technically called informed trading, the Commission report was itself suspect for several reasons. First, the informed trades relating to 9/11 covered far more than just airline company stock. The stocks of financial and reinsurance companies, as well as other financial vehicles, were identified as being associated with suspicious trades. Huge credit card transactions, completed just before the attacks, were also involved. The Commission ultimately tried to frame all of this highly suspicious trading in terms of a series of misunderstandings. However, the possibility that so many leading financial experts were so completely wrong is doubtful at best and, if true, would constitute another unbelievable scenario in the already highly improbable sequence of events represented by the official story of 9/11.
In the last few years, new evidence has come to light on these matters. In 2006 and 2010, financial experts at a number of universities have established new evidence, through statistical analyses, that informed trades did occur with respect to the 9/11 attacks. Additionally, in 2007, the 911 Commission released a memorandum summary of the FBI investigations on which its report was based.[2] A careful review of this memorandum indicates that some of the people who were briefly investigated by the FBI, and then acquitted without due diligence, had links to al Qaeda and to US intelligence agencies. Although the elapsed time between the informed trades and these new confirmations might prevent legal action against the guilty, the facts of the matter can help lead us to the truth about 9/11.
Early signs
Within a week of the attacks, Germany’s stock market regulator, BAWe, began looking into claims of suspicious trading.[3] That same week, Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Martino, made it clear that he had concerns by issuing this public statement: “I think that there are terrorist states and organisations behind speculation on the international markets.”[4]
Within two weeks of the attacks, CNN reported that regulators were seeing “ever-clearer signs” that someone “manipulated financial markets ahead of the terror attack in the hope of profiting from it.” Belgian Finance Minister, Didier Reynders, said that there were strong suspicions that British markets were used for transactions.[5] The CIA was reported to have asked the British regulators to investigate some of the trades.[6] Unfortunately, the British regulator, The Financial Services Authority, wrote off its investigation by simply clearing “bin Laden and his henchmen of insider trading.”[7]
Conversely, German central bank president, Ernst Welteke, said his bank conducted a study that strongly indicated “terrorism insider trading” associated with 9/11. He stated that his researchers had found “almost irrefutable proof of insider trading.”[8] Welteke suggested that the insider trading occurred not only in shares of companies affected by the attacks, such as airlines and insurance companies, but also in gold and oil. [9]
The extent of the 9/11-related informed trading was unprecedented. An ABC News Consultant, Jonathan Winer, said, “it’s absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan to the US to North America to Europe.”[10]
By October 2001, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the four other options exchanges in the US had joined forces with the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate a list of 38 stocks, as well as multiple options and Treasury bonds, that were flagged in relation to potential informed trades. SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt gave testimony to the House Financial Services Committee at the time, saying, “We will do everything in our power to track those people down and bring them to justice.”[11]
Mary Bender, chief regulatory officer at the CBOE, stated “We’ve never really had anything like this, [the option exchanges are] using the same investigative tools as we would in an insider-trading case. The point is to find people who are connected to these heinous crimes.”
The people ultimately found included an unnamed customer of Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown (DBAB). This involved a trade on United Airlines (UAL) stock consisting of a 2,500-contract order that was, for some reason, split into chunks of 500 contracts each and then directed to multiple exchanges around the country simultaneously.[12] When the 9/11 Commission report pointed to a “single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda,” it was referring to either DBAB or its customer in that questionable trade.
Michael Ruppert has since written about DBAB, noting that the company had previously been a financier of The Carlyle Group and also of Brown Brothers Harriman, both of which are companies closely related to the Bush family. Ruppert also noted that Alex. Brown, the company purchased by Deutsche Bank to become DBAB, was managed by A.B. (Buzzy) Krongard, who left the firm in 1998 to join the CIA as counsel to director George Tenet.[13] Krongard had been a consultant to CIA director James Woolsey in the mid 1990s and, on September 11th, he was the Executive Director of the CIA, the third highest position in the agency.
Stock and Treasury bonds traded
In 2002, investigator Kyle Hence wrote about the stocks involved in the SEC’s target list. Those that had the highest examples of trade volume over the average were UAL [285 times over average], Marsh & McLennan (Marsh) [93 times over average], American Airlines (AMR) [60 times over average], and Citigroup [45 times over average].[14] Other stocks flagged included financial firms, defense-related companies, and the reinsurance firms Munich Re, Swiss Re and the AXA Group. Put options for these reinsurance firms, or bets that the stock would drop, were placed at double the normal levels in the few days before the attacks. Regulators were concerned about “large block trades” on these stocks because the three firms were liable for billions in insurance payouts due to the damage inflicted on 9/11.[15]
The four highest-volume suspect stocks — UAL, Marsh, AMR and Citigroup — were closely linked to the attacks of 9/11. The two airline companies each had two planes hijacked and destroyed. Marsh was located in the exact 8 floors out of 110 in the north tower of the WTC where Flight 11 impacted and the fires occurred. Citigroup was the parent of Travelers Insurance, which was expected to see $500 million in claims, and also Salomon Smith Barney, which occupied all but ten floors in World Trade Center (WTC) building 7. Oddly enough, Salomon Smith Barney had both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney on its advisory board until January 2001.
Marsh occupied a number of floors in the south tower as well. This is where the office of Marsh executive, L. Paul Bremer, was located. Bremer was a former managing director at Kissinger Associates and had just completed leading a national terrorism commission in 2000. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that Bremer was a source of early claims that rich Arabs were financing Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. In an article on the 9/11 informed trades, the Chronicle reported that “The former chairman of the State Department’s National Commission on Terrorism, L. Paul Bremer, said he obtained classified government analyses early last year of bin Laden’s finances confirming the assistance of affluent Middle Easterners.”[16]
On the day of 9/11, Bremer was interviewed by NBC News and stated that he believed Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. For unknown reasons, Google removed the interview video from its servers three times, and blocked it once.[17]
The trading of Treasury bonds just before 9/11 was also flagged as being suspicious. Reporters from The Wall street Journal wrote that the “U.S. Secret Service contacted a number of bond traders regarding large purchases of five-year Treasury notes before the attacks, according to people familiar with the probe. The investigators, acting on a tip from traders, are examining whether terrorists, or people affiliated with terrorist organizations, bought five-year notes, including a single $5 billion trade.”[18]
Some reports claimed that the 9/11 informed trades were such that millions of dollars were made, and some of that went unclaimed. [19] Others suggested that the trades resulted in the winning of billions of dollars in profits. One such suggestion was made by the former German Minister of Technology, Andreas von Buelow, who said that the value of the informed trades was on the order of $15 billion.[20]
The FBI Investigations
In May 2007, a 9/11 Commission document that summarized the FBI investigations into potential 9/11-related informed trading was declassified. [21] This document was redacted to remove the names of two FBI agents from the New York office, and to remove the names of select suspects in the informed trading investigations. The names of other FBI agents and suspects were left in. Regardless, some information can be gleaned from the document to help reveal the trades and traders investigated.
On September 21, 2001, the SEC referred two specific transactions to the FBI for criminal investigation as potential informed trades. One of those trades was a September 6, 2001 purchase of 56,000 shares of a company called Stratesec, which in the few years before 9/11 was a security contractor for several of the facilities that were compromised on 9/11. These facilities included the WTC buildings, Dulles airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off, and also United Airlines, which owned two of the other three ill-fated planes.
The affected 56,000 shares of Stratesec stock were purchased by a director of the company, Wirt D. Walker III, and his wife Sally Walker. This is clear from the memorandum generated to record the FBI summary of the trades investigated.[22] The Stratesec stock that the Walkers purchased doubled in value in the one trading day between September 11th and when the stock market reopened on September 17th. The Commission memorandum suggests that the trade generated a profit of $50,000 for the Walkers. Unfortunately, the FBI did not interview either of the Walkers and they were both cleared of any wrongdoing because they were said to have “no ties to terrorism or other negative information.” [23]
However, Wirt Walker was connected to people who had connections to al Qaeda. For example, Stratesec director James Abrahamson was the business partner of Mansoor Ijaz, who claimed on several occasions to be able to contact Osama bin Laden.[24] Additionally, Walker hired a number of Stratesec employees away from a subsidiary of The Carlyle Group called BDM International, which ran secret (black) projects for government agencies. The Carlyle Group was partly financed by members of the bin Laden family.[25] Mr. Walker ran a number of suspicious companies that went bankrupt, including Stratesec, some of which were underwritten by a company run by a first cousin of former CIA director (and President) George H.W. Bush. Additionally, Walker was the child of a CIA employee and his first job was at an investment firm run by former US intelligence guru, James “Russ” Forgan, where he worked with another former CIA director, William Casey.[26] Of course, Osama bin Laden had links to the CIA as well.[27]
Another trade investigated by the FBI, on request from the SEC, focused on Amir Ibrahim Elgindy, an Egyptian-born, San Diego stock advisor who on the day before 9/11 had allegedly attempted to liquidate $300,000 in assets through his broker at Salomon Smith Barney. During the attempted liquidation, Elgindy was said to have “predicted that the Dow Jones industrial average, which at the time stood at about 9,600, would soon crash to below 3,000.”[28]
The 9/11 Commission memorandum suggests that the FBI never interviewed Mr. Elgindy either, and had planned to exonerate him because there was “no evidence he was seeking to establish a position whereby he would profit from the terrorist attacks.” Apparently, the prediction of a precipitous drop in the stock market, centered on the events of 9/11, was not sufficient cause for the FBI to interview the suspect.
In late May 2002, Elgindy was arrested along with four others, including an FBI agent and a former FBI agent, and charged with conspiracy to manipulate stock prices and extort money from companies. The FBI agents, Jeffrey A Royer and Lynn Wingate, were said to have “used their access to F.B.I. databases to monitor the progress of the criminal investigation against Mr. Elgindy.”[29] A federal prosecutor later accused Elgindy, who also went by several aliases, of having prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Although the judge in that case did not agree with the prosecutor on the 9/11 informed trading accusation, Mr. Elgindy was eventually convicted, in 2005, of multiple crimes including racketeering, securities fraud, and making false statements.
The Boston office of the FBI investigated stock trades related to two companies. The first was Viisage Technologies, a facial recognition company that stood to benefit from an increase in terrorism legislation. The Viisage purchase, made by a former employee of the Saudi American Bank, “revealed no connection with 9/11.” However, the Saudi American Bank was named in a lawsuit brought by the 9/11 victims’ families due to the bank having — “financed development projects in Sudan benefiting bin Laden in the early 1990s.”[30]
The second company investigated by the Boston FBI office was Wellington Management, a company that allegedly held a large account for Osama bin Laden. The FBI found that Wellington Management maintained an account for “members of the bin Laden family” but dropped the investigation because it could not link this to “Osama, al Qaeda, or terrorism.”[31]
Although the connections to al Qaeda in three of these cases (Walker, the Viisage trader, and Wellington Management) can be seen as circumstantial, the amount of such evidence is considerable. The quality of the FBI investigations, considering the suspects were not even interviewed, was therefore much less than “exhaustive”, as the 9/11 Commission characterized it.
The summary of FBI investigations released by the 9/11 Commission also described how the Commission questioned the FBI about damaged computer hard drives that might have been recovered from the WTC. This questioning was the result of “press reports [contending] that large volumes of suspicious transactions flowed through the computers housed in the WTC on the morning of 9/11 as part of some illicit but ill-defined effort to profit from the attacks.”[32] The Commission came to the conclusion that no such activity occurred because “the assembled agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive recovery effort” and “everything at the WTC was pulverized to near powder, making it extremely unlikely that any hard-drives survived.”
The truth, however, is that many such hard-drives were recovered from the WTC and were sent to specialist companies to be cleaned and have data recovered. A German company named Convar did a good deal of the recovery work.
In December 2001, Reuters reported that “Convar has recovered information from 32 computers that support assumptions of dirty doomsday dealings.” Richard Wagner, a data retrieval expert at Convar, testified that “There is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time of the plane crashes in order to move out amounts exceeding $100 million. They thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed.” Director of Convar, Peter Henschel, said that it was “not only the volume, but the size of the transactions [that] was far higher than usual for a day like that.”[33]
By late December 2001, Convar had completed processing 39 out of 81 drives, and expected to receive 20 more WTC hard drives the next month. Obviously, the 911 Commission memorandum drafted in August 2003 was not particularly reliable considering it reported that the FBI and the 911 Commission had no knowledge of any of this.
Statistical confirmations
Considering that the FBI and 9/11 Commission overlooked the suspicious connections of informed trading suspects like Wirt Walker, and also claimed in 2003 to have no knowledge of hard drive recoveries publicly reported in 2001, we must assume that they did a poor job of investigating. Today, however, we know that several peer-reviewed academic papers have reported solid evidence that informed trades did occur. That is, the conclusions reached by the official investigations have now been shown, through scientific analysis, to be quite wrong.
In 2006, a professor of Finance from the University of Illinois named Allen Poteshman published an analysis of the airline stock option trades preceding the attacks. This study came to the conclusion that an indicator of long put volume was “unusually high which is consistent with informed investors having traded in the option market in advance of the attacks.”[34] Long puts are bets that a stock or option will fall in price.
The unusually high volume of long puts, purchased on UAL and AMR stock before these stocks declined dramatically due to the 9/11 attacks, are evidence that the traders knew that the stocks would decline. Using statistical techniques to evaluate conditional and unconditional distributions of historical stock option activity, Professor Poteshman showed that the data indicate that informed trading did occur.
In January 2010, a team of financial experts from Switzerland published evidence for at least thirteen informed trades in which the investors appeared to have had foreknowledge of the attacks. This study focused again on a limited number of companies but, of those, the informed trades centered on five airline companies and four financial companies. The airline companies were American Airlines, United Airlines and Boeing. Three of the financial companies involved were located in the WTC towers and the fourth was Citigroup, which stood to lose doubly as the parent of both Travelers Insurance and the WTC 7 tenant, Salomon Smith Barney.[35]
More recently, in April 2010, an international team of experts examined trading activities of options on the Standard & Poors 500 index, as well as a volatility index of the CBOE called VIX. These researchers showed that there was a significant abnormal increase in trading volume in the option market just before the 9/11 attacks, and they demonstrated that this was in contrast to the absence of abnormal trading volume over periods long before the attacks. The study also showed that the relevant abnormal increase in trading volume was not simply due to a declining market.[36] Their findings were “consistent with insiders anticipating the 9-11 attacks.”
Conclusion
In the early days just after 9/11, financial regulators around the world gave testimony to unprecedented evidence for informed trading related to the terrorist attacks of that day. One central bank president (Welteke) said there was irrefutable proof of such trading. This evidence led US regulators to vow, in Congressional testimony, to bring those responsible to justice. Those vows were not fulfilled, as the people in charge of the investigations let the suspects off the hook by conducting weak inquiries and concluding that informed trading could not have occurred if it was not done directly by Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.
The “exhaustive investigations” conducted by the FBI, on which the 9/11 Commission report was based, were clearly bogus. The FBI did not interview the suspects and did not appear to compare notes with the 9/11 Commission to help make a determination if any of the people being investigated might have had ties to al Qaeda. The Commission’s memorandum summary suggests that the FBI simply made decisions on its own regarding the possible connections of the suspects and the alleged terrorist organizations. Those unilateral decisions were not appropriate, as at least three of the suspected informed trades (those of Walker, the Viisage trader, and Wellington Management) involved reasonably suspicious links to Osama bin Laden or his family. Another suspect (Elgindy) was a soon-to-be convicted criminal who had direct links to FBI employees who were later arrested for securities-related crimes.
The FBI also claimed in August 2003 that it had no knowledge of hard drives recovered from the WTC, which were publicly reported in 2001. According to the people who retrieved the associated data, the hard drives gave evidence for “dirty doomsday dealings.”
The evidence for informed trading on 9/11 includes many financial vehicles, from stock options to Treasury bonds to credit card transactions made at the WTC just before it was destroyed. Today we know that financial experts from around the world have provided strong evidence, through established and reliable statistical techniques, that the early expert suspicions were correct, and that 9/11 informed trading did occur.
People knew in advance about the crimes of 9/11, and they profited from that knowledge. Those people are among us today, and our families and communities are at risk of future terrorist attacks and further criminal profiteering if we do not respond to the evidence. It is time for an independent, international investigation into the informed trades and the traders who benefited from the terrorist acts of September 11th.
Notes
[1] National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, July 2004, p 172, and Chapter 5, footnote 130, http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf
[2] 9/11 Commission memorandum entitled “FBI Briefing on Trading”, prepared by Doug Greenburg, 18 August 2003, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf
[3] Dave Carpenter, Exchange examines odd jump: Before attack: Many put options of hijacked planes’ parent companies purchased , The Associated Press, 18 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...djump.html
[4] BBC News, Bin Laden ‘share gains’ probe, 18 September 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1548118.stm
[5] Tom Bogdanowicz and Brooks Jackson, Probes into ‘suspicious’ trading, CNN, 24 September 2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20011114023845/http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/09/24/gen.europe.shortselling/
[6] James Doran, Insider Trading Apparently Based on Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks, The London Times, 18 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...ading.html
[7] David Brancaccio, Marketplace Public Radio: News Archives, 17 October 2001, http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows...7_mpp.html
[8] Paul Thompson and The Center for Cooperative Research, Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11 – and America’s Response, Harper Collins, 2004. Also found at History Commons, Complete 9/11 Timeline, Insider Trading and Other Foreknowledge http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.j...dertrading
[9] Associated Press, EU Searches for Suspicious Trading , 22 September 2001, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34910,00.html
[10] World News Tonight, 20 September 2001
[11] Erin E. Arvedlund, Follow The Money: Terrorist Conspirators Could Have Profited More From Fall Of Entire Market Than Single Stocks, Barron’s (Dow Jones and Company), 6 October 2001
[12] Ibid
[13] Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: the decline of the American empire at the end of the age of oil, New Society Publishers, 2004
[14] Kyle F. Hence, Massive pre-attack ‘insider trading’ offer authorities hottest trail to accomplices, Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), 21 April 2002, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HEN204B.html
[15] Grant Ringshaw, Profits of doom, The London Telegraph, 23 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...fdoom.html
[16] Christian Berthelsen and Scott Winokur, Suspicious profits sit uncollected: Airline investors seem to be lying low, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 September 2001, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...z14XPGwh6e
[17] Lewis Paul Bremer III on Washington, DC, NBC4 TV, 11 September 2001, Vehmgericht http://vehme.blogspot.com/2007/08/lewis-...on-dc.html
[18] Charles Gasparino and Gregory Zuckerman, Treasury Bonds Enter Purview of U.S. Inquiry Into Attack Gains, The Wall Street Journal, 2 October 2001, http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001...00201.html
[19] Christian Berthelsen and Scott Winokur
[20] Tagesspiegel, Former German Cabinet Minister Attacks Official Brainwashing On September 11 Issue Points at “Mad Dog” Zbig and Huntington, 13 January 2002, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/VonBuelow.html
[21] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[22] The 9/11 Commission memorandum that summarized the FBI investigations refers to the traders involved in the Stratesec purchase. From the references in the document, we can make out that the two people had the same last name and were related. This fits the description of Wirt and Sally Walker, who are known to be stock holders in Stratesec. Additionally, one (Wirt) was a director at the company, a director at a publicly traded company in Oklahoma (Aviation General), and chairman of an investment firm in Washington, DC (Kuwam Corp).
[23] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[24] Sourcewatch, Mansoor Ijaz/Sudan, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?tit...Ijaz/Sudan
[25] History Commons, Complete 911 Timeline, Bin Laden Family, http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.j...1_timeline
[26] Kevin R. Ryan, The History of Wirt Dexter Walker: Russell & Co, the CIA and 9/11, 911blogger.com, 3 September 2010, http://911blogger.com/news/2010-09-03/hi...ia-and-911
[27] Michael Moran, Bin Laden comes home to roost : His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story, MSNBC, 24 August 1998, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101
[28] Alex Berenson, U.S. Suggests, Without Proof, Stock Adviser Knew of 9/11, The New York Times, 25 May 2002, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht...A9649C8B63
[29] Alex Berenson, Five, Including F.B.I. Agents, Are Named In a Conspiracy, The New York Times, 23 May 2002
[30] History Commons, Complete 911 Timeline, Saudi American Bank, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp...rican_bank
[31] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[32] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[33] Erik Kirschbaum, German Firm Probes Final World Trade Center Deals, Reuters, 16 December 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...rives.html
[34] Allen M. Poteshman, Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, The Journal of Business, 2006, vol. 79, no. 4, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/503645
[35] Marc Chesney, et al, Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the Options Markets, Social Sciences Research Network, 13 January 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?a...id=1522157
[36] Wing-Keung Wong, et al, Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September 11 Attacks?, Social Sciences Research Network, April 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?a...id=1588523


[URL="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1588523"]http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/11/18/evidence-for-informed-trading-on-the-attacks-of-september-11/all/1
[/URL]

[Peter Lemkin]

The four highest-volume suspect stocks — UAL, Marsh, AMR and Citigroup — were closely linked to the attacks of 9/11. The two airline companies each had two planes hijacked and destroyed. Marsh was located in the exact 8 floors out of 110 in the north tower of the WTC where Flight 11 impacted and the fires occurred. Citigroup was the parent of Travelers Insurance, which was expected to see $500 million in claims, and also Salomon Smith Barney, which occupied all but ten floors in World Trade Center (WTC) building 7. Oddly enough, Salomon Smith Barney had both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney on its advisory board until January 2001.
Marsh occupied a number of floors in the south tower as well. This is where the office of Marsh executive, L. Paul Bremer, was located. Bremer was a former managing director at Kissinger Associates and had just completed leading a national terrorism commission in 2000. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that Bremer was a source of early claims that rich Arabs were financing Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. In an article on the 9/11 informed trades, the Chronicle reported that “The former chairman of the State Department’s National Commission on Terrorism, L. Paul Bremer, said he obtained classified government analyses early last year of bin Laden’s finances confirming the assistance of affluent Middle Easterners.”[16]
On the day of 9/11, Bremer was interviewed by NBC News and stated that he believed Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. For unknown reasons, Google removed the interview video from its servers three times, and blocked it once.[17]

Just other coincidences......in the Mother of all Terrorlands. Good paper....develops the whole topic more than others I've seen on the subject. Sadly, as with Dallas a few know what didn't happen on 9-11 [the official conspiracy version]...but it seems as with Dallas, King, X, RFK, and hundreds of others there will never be a real investigation, nothing will be done and the real perpetrators will NOT be brought to justice; while patsies and now millions of innocents after 9-11 will suffer for these treasonous and genocidal crimes. They hate us for our freedoms. hakehands: and are well on their way to eliminating them.

[David Guyatt]

Thanks for posting this Magda, it's very important in tracing the connections of 911. There is a "smoking gun" in view here, I think, and for me anyway, is a further indicator that the Bush family were deeply mired in either sponsoring or knowingly benefitting from 911

However, what particularly jumped out for me was the name Wirt Walker. The Bush and Walker families go back to WWII and the Union Banking Corporation, seized under the "Trading With the Enemy Act" because of its connections to nazi party paymaster Fritz Thyssen - who owned UBC. If I had the time I would look further into these connections, but for the time being the following will provide some additional insights into Wirt Walker (isn't it curious that Walker connects back to Russell & Co, founder of the Skull & Bones of which Poppy Bush and his foul son were both members - as too was "Uncle Herb" George Herbert Walker, Poppy Bush's father-in-law).

http://911blogger.com/news/2010-09-03/hi...ia-and-911

The History of Wirt Dexter Walker: Russell & Company, the CIA and 9/11
submitted by Kevin Ryan on fri, 09/03/2010 - 12:30am
World Trade Center (WTC) security company Stratesec has been a topic of considerable discussion among independent 9/11 investigators. One point of discussion has been the possible familial relationship between Stratesec’s CEO, Wirt Dexter Walker III, and its director Marvin Bush, whose brother was President of the United States on 9/11. Although Wirt and Marvin are distant relatives, these ties are inconsequential relative to each man’s family connections to old drug money, deep state operatives, and the wealthy, powerful people who have controlled such money and operatives over the last two centuries.[1]

Stratesec was a company that provided security services for several facilities that were central to the crimes of 9/11. In the years leading up to 9/11, the company had security contracts with the organization that managed Dulles Airport, where Flight 77 took off that day, and with United Airlines, which owned two of the other three hijacked planes.[2] Stratesec had also run security for Los Alamos National Laboratories, where, at the time, scientists were developing super-thermite explosives of the type that have been found in the WTC dust.[3],[4] Stratesec worked at the WTC and was developing the security system for the buildings in the period leading up to, and including, the day of 9/11. These connections are important considering the substantial evidence that insiders were involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Investigation into this company has revealed that the Chief Operating Officer, Barry McDaniel, came to Stratesec from a subsidiary of The Carlyle Group called BDM International, which specialized in “black projects.”[5] The Carlyle Group was managed by several Bush cabal insiders including James Baker and former deputy director of the CIA, Frank Carluccci. Carlyle was funded by investors that included the bin Laden family.[6] Prior to working for BDM, McDaniel had worked as a military ordnance distributor at Fort Belvoir, a facility with many links to 9/11 including the terrorist tracking program Able Danger and the terrorist trainer Ali Mohammed.[7]

McDaniel was not the only former Carlyle Group employee at Stratesec, as the company’s director of information technology was also formerly with BDM.[8] Additionally, the vice president of finance at Stratesec came there from Anadac Molybdenum Corporation, a company where the chairman, Roger Taylor, was also the president of Zapata Granby, a subsidiary of Zapata Corporation. This is the same Zapata Corporation that was founded by George H.W. Bush in the 1950s. George H.W. Bush’s son, Marvin, was a director at Stratesec from 1993 to 2000.

Probably the most interesting person associated with Stratesec was Wirt Dexter Walker III. Despite the “III”, Wirt is actually the fourth Wirt Dexter Walker in the same line. To keep the notations clear, however, in this article we will refer to the Stratesec CEO, Wirt Dexter Walker III, as “Wirt Three.” Given the remarkable connections between Wirt Three and the facilities and aircraft compromised on 9/11, a review of all the Wirts, and where they came from, is worthwhile.

Solomon Walker

Wirt Three’s great-great-great grandfather, Solomon Walker, appeared in Claremont, New Hampshire in the early 1800s. Exactly where he came from, no one knows. The first reports of Solomon were that he was a selectman in Claremont and was married to an heiress named Charity Stevens. Charity was the granddaughter of Elihu Stevens, a justice of the peace who shared in large land grants given to certain people in New Hampshire by the King of England.[9] Charity’s cousin, Paran Stevens, later became a famous hotel mogul in New York City and throughout New England.[10]

Nearly one hundred years after Solomon appeared in Claremont, people were still searching for answers as to his parentage and origination.[11] It is unclear how he came to Claremont and, even today, Solomon’s descendants have not been able to determine where their forefather originated.[12]

Much evidence suggests, however, that Solomon Walker of Claremont was the son of Solomon Walker and Sylvia Delano, of Maine. The recorded history of their youngest son, Solomon, is vague and suggests that he married twice to women much older than him. His second marriage was said to be to Sophia Delano (16 years older), whom he supposedly married a day after his 82-year old father had married her.[13] Although Charity Stevens was 15 years older than Solomon, she was not his stepmother.

For a number of other reasons, it is likely that Solomon “Delano” Walker and/or his father, also named Solomon Walker, made the short journey from Maine to Claremont. Solomon’s father’s hometown was Berwick, ME, which is one hundred miles straight east of Claremont. Berwick is very near Kennebunkport, the long-time home of the Walker side of the Bush family. Coincidentally, Dick Cheney’s great-grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was born at about the same time, halfway between Berwick and Claremont, in Boscawen, NH.

Sylvia Delano, Solomon’s mother, was a cousin of Warren Delano, who was a partner of Russell & Company, a China trading firm whose leaders made fortunes through the opium trade. Warren Delano was also the grandfather of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Another reason to believe that Solomon Walker was the son of a Delano is that his wife’s cousin, Mathilda Stevens, married the son of Mary Delano. Mary's dad, Abisha Delano, was also a first cousin of Warren Delano. Abisha and Mary were among the many Delanos who lived in Sullivan County, New Hampshire, where Claremont is located.[14] Banker and railroad executive, Francis R. Delano (1842 to 1892), attended Kimball Union Academy in Sullivan County.

The clearest indication that Solomon Walker was a Delano is that one of his sons was treated very generously by Warren Delano and his colleagues. When their son, James Monroe Walker, was a boy, Solomon and Charity moved from Claremont to Oakland County, Michigan. James went to school at Oberlin College initially, before moving to the University of Michigan to study law. After that, James’ fortunes grew exponentially.

James Monroe Walker

Solomon Walker’s son, James Monroe Walker, was an attorney who was President and Solicitor for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (C,B&Q) Railroad, the Michigan Central Railroad, the Wilmington Coal Company, the Kansas City Stockyards, and the Union Stockyard and Transit Company.[15] James M. Walker ran these businesses for the opium traders at Russell & Company, who invested their money in these railroads and other major infrastructure in the US during the mid-1800s.[16]

Russell & Company was started in 1818 by Samuel Russell, cousin of the founder of the “secret society” called Skull & Bones at Yale University, William Huntington Russell. Samuel had gotten his start through merchant companies like Whittlesley & Alsop of Boston, MA. The Alsops were also major investors in the businesses run by James Monroe Walker, and Russell & Company partner John N. Alsop Griswold was a director of the C,B&Q as well as president of the Illinois Central railroad. Many years later, in the 1960s, Washington Post columnist Joe Alsop, a descendant of the Whittlesley & Alsop owners, convinced President Johnson to create the Warren Commission, which was a cover-up for the assassination of President Kennedy.[17]

In 1828, Russell & Company merged with another drug smuggling syndicate run by John Perkins Cushing.[18] Cushing brought in his cousins, Robert Bennet Forbes and John Murray Forbes. Robert Bennet Forbes was Senator John F. Kerry's great-grandfather. John Murray Forbes attended school at Phillips Academy in Andover, the alma mater of George H.W. Bush, and his sons Jeb and George W.

John Murray Forbes coordinated much of the US investment of the Russell & Company partners, and he was the one who hired James Monroe Walker.[19] Walker was first hired as Solicitor for the Michigan Central, and later as Solicitor and President of the C,B&Q. While running these railroads, Walker worked with Nathaniel Thayer Jr, a distant relative of George W. Bush, who was general counsel for the C,B&Q and other Russell & Company businesses that Walker was involved in. Walker worked closely with Sidney Bartlett as well, who was another legal representative for the C,B&Q.

At the same time, Bartlett and Thayer were legal representatives for the railroads owned by Edward H. Harriman, including the Union Pacific.[20] Harriman was a director of the Illinois Central, along with Russell & Co partner John N. Alsop Griswold. Harriman is well known for being the father of William Averell Harriman and Roland Harriman, two Skull & Bones members who founded the Brown Brothers Harriman Co., whose employees included George Herbert Walker and his son-in-law, Prescott Bush. Eugene Delano and his son, Moreau Delano, were partners in Brown Brothers Harriman as well.

The fortunes that Russell & Company invested in US railroads and other infrastructure were the spoils from The Opium Wars, among the most inhumane and socially devastating events in human history. These wars, which occurred between 1839 and 1858, were brought upon the Chinese people by the British government acting on behalf of merchants like Russell & Company, who intended to defy the Chinese government’s ban on opium trading. It was Russell & Company’s business partner, William Jardine of Jardine Matheson, who successfully persuaded the British Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston, to wage war on China.[21]

As a result of these devastating attacks, the British merchants were able to force Turkish opium upon China, thereby making enormous fortunes paid in silver. By 1906, after several generations of this forced drug trade, opium victims in China were estimated to number 100 million.[22]

China ceded Hong Kong to the British in 1842 as part of an early defeat. Jardine Matheson was one of the opium trading companies that survived for much longer in Hong Kong, being taken over by Chinese tycoon Li Ka-shing in 1980. Li Ka-shing later invested in firms owned by Winston Partners, and has also employed Winston Partners cofounder Marvin Bush's brother, Neil Bush, as a consultant.[23]

As opium traders before, during and after the Opium Wars, Russell & Company were agents of merchant banks like Baring Brothers and N.M. Rothschild.[24],[25] Initially, the merchant banks funded the purchase of the opium, and Russell & Company sailed to make the purchase and subsequently smuggled the drugs into China, making tremendous fees for their work as operatives in the drug trade. The company’s biggest client, Baring Brothers, was agent for the US government between 1843 and 1871, and actually sold the Louisiana Purchase to the US. Baring Brothers was later agent for the British government and had a close relationship with the British monarchy from 1891 to 1995.

The names of the partners of Russell & Company are well known in the history of US power circles. Partner Abiel Abbot Low fathered a mayor of New York City, Seth Low, who was also president of Columbia University. The descendents of the Forbes brothers, Robert Bennet and John Murray, are US powerbrokers to this day, and include the owners of Forbes magazine as well as Senator John Forbes Kerry. The Delanos fathered many powerful people including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

President Roosevelt’s grandfather, Warren Delano, was the head of Russell & Company from 1840 to 1842, after which time Russell Sturgis, another relative of John Perkins Cushing, became a partner. Sturgis later became the head of Baring Brothers. Warren's son, Frederic Adrian Delano, eventually took James Monroe Walker’s position as president of the C,B&Q, and was there for twenty years. Frederic was also the first vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank.

It was at the time that James Monroe Walker was president of the C,B&Q, in the 1870s, that these drug dealing investors began to create a vast railroad network that controlled the transport of goods throughout the United States. Controlling the delivery of goods was the same as controlling the price of goods. Additional power over the country was gained through control of the stockyards that fed the masses, and the coal that drove the trains and heated homes. James Monroe Walker was right in the middle of this massive power grab, and served as a trusted operative for these merchant investors from the east.[26]

James Monroe Walker married Elia A. Marsh, of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Elia came from an old New England family as well, as a child of Ransoms and Fletchers and Meigs. Her cousin Betsey Ransom married Claghorn Robinson, who is a member of the Lathrop side of the Bush family. Elia’s brother, Wells Ransom Marsh, was a member of the secret society called Alpha Delta Phi.[27], [28]

James and Elia had a son named James Ransom Walker, and a daughter named Mary Louise Walker. Mary died shortly after her marriage to John Wellborn Root, a noted architect of the time. Root’s uncle was Elihu Root, attorney for prominent Skull & Bones member William Collins Whitney, and early employer of Bonesman Henry Stimson, who later became Secretary of War (twice) and Secretary of State.

The first child born to James and Elia was the original Wirt Dexter Walker, named for James’ law partner Wirt Dexter, the grandson of US Secretary of the Treasury, Samuel Dexter. Since the original Wirt Dexter Walker was not the “first”, in this article we will call him Wirt Zero.

Wirt Zero

It’s fair to say that Wirt Zero’s family was well-connected. That’s a good reason why Wirt went to Yale and was a member of the University’s second oldest secret society, Scroll & Key. Other notable Scroll & Key members have included the famous statesman Dean Acheson, who in 1969, as one of his final acts, passed along his sophisticated knowledge of Washington and his expertise on American policy to Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.[29] Scroll & Key members also included a number of famous CIA agents and the founder of WTC impact zone tenant Marsh & McLennan, Donald R. McLennan. President Bush’s relative, Joseph Walker Wear, was Scroll & Key in 1899.

Moreover, Wirt Zero was a member of the Yale fraternity called Delta Kappa Epsilon (DeKEs), like George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, New York Governor George Pataki, and former President Gerald Ford (of the Michigan Omicron chapter). When George W. Bush was president of the DeKEs, he defended the fraternity's practice of branding its pledges with a red-hot coat hanger.[30]

Delano family connections with Yale are strong. [31] Yale graduates among the Delanos include Eugene Delano Jr., William Adams Delano (Scroll & Key 1895), and Moreau Delano (Scroll & Key 1898).

When Wirt Zero was only 21 years old, and had just graduated from Yale, his father died. Young Wirt was made the executor of the estate and he suddenly became a very rich man. Wirt Zero then attended the Union College of Law in Chicago (now Northwestern), became a lawyer in 1883, and joined his father’s partner’s law firm. He worked in Chicago and belonged to the Union League Club, and the Chicago Club. Wirt appears to have most enjoyed traveling to the area from where his mother’s family hailed, the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, and he built an estate there called Blythewood Farms.

Wirt began having trouble with his eyesight around 1887. During this time, he and his brother James Ransom Walker had the distinction of having financed the first steel-framed “skyscraper” in history, the 14-story Tacoma Building in Chicago. But by 1890, Wirt was totally blind and had to abandon much of his work. He then spent a number of years traveling to specialists in the east and in Europe. [32]

Despite being blind, Wirt married Marie Winston in December, 1894. Marie was the daughter of General Frederick Winston, an attorney and founder of the Chicago law firm Winston and Strawn. Coincidentally, this law firm is now run by 9/11 Commission member James R. Thompson, and, in a further coincidence Winston & Strawn represented Underwriters Laboratories in its recent legal battle with the author of this article. [33]

Two of Wirt Zero’s brothers-in-law were members of Yale’s Skull & Bones society. Both Dudley Winston and Frederick Seymour Winston were Bonesman. Dudley Winston became a banker and also served as secretary to his father when his father was US Minister to Persia. Frederick Seymour Winston and his father were both lawyers for the C,B&Q railroad and, along with Marie, they are listed as American descendants of the “Magna Charta Barons.”[34]

Wirt Zero died at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel on April 24, 1899, at the age of 39. He was preparing for another trip to Europe when he contracted a sudden pneumonia while traveling from Chicago to New York.

Wirt Zero’s will, drawn up at the time of his marriage in 1894, became something of a national story. That’s partly because Wirt was totally blind as of 1890 and, more importantly, because his fortune was to be distributed based on Marie’s willingness to remain unmarried after his death. If she chose to marry again, the will said that the majority of Wirt’s estate, minus a small annual allowance for Marie, would go to the creation of an art foundation in Chicago. Marie did decide to remarry a few years later, after newspaper stories decried her financial loss, and the Wirt Walker Gallery was born.[35]

Wirt Zero fathered a child that was never again mentioned other than in early discussions over his controversial will and testament.[36] The child was almost certainly Wirt Dexter Walker I (Wirt One), and we must assume the mother was Marie Winston Walker.

The commonly accepted history, however, suggests that Wirt One was the son of Wirt Zero’s brother, James Ransom Walker. Apart from the never-again-mentioned child of Wirt Zero, there are several other reasons to believe that Wirt One was the son of Wirt Zero. First, in family documents created four years after his birth, Wirt One was not listed as one of the sons of James and Louise.[37] Secondly, the other sons of James and Louise were given the middle name “Meeker” but Wirt One was named precisely after James’ brother, Wirt Dexter Walker. Additionally, Wirt One was born eleven days before the sudden and unexpected death of Wirt Zero, and it seems unlikely that James would give his son the exact name of his living brother.

Wirt One

In any case, Wirt Dexter Walker I (Wirt One) was born on April 13, 1899, eleven days before the sudden and unexpected death of Wirt Zero. Born into a very affluent, “high society” environment that included regular travels between Chicago and the Berkshires, he was raised by Wirt Zero’s brother, James Ransom Walker, and his wife Louise (Meeker) Walker. Wirt One was a boy tennis champion in the Berkshires and also played baseball with James and Louise’s other sons, James Meeker Walker and Arthur Meeker Walker.

Like his brothers (or cousins), Wirt One attended Williams College.[38] Graduates of Williams College have included some of the most prominent CIA employees in history, including Director of the CIA, Richard Helms (1935), who later specifically recruited Williams graduates for the agency.[39] Another famous CIA veteran from Williams was former Bush advisor and Iran-Contra conspirator Donald Gregg (1951). CIA legend Russell Jack Smith taught at Williams until the attack on Pearl Harbor, after which he joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and began a lengthy career in intelligence.

Williams College connections to the Bush family include Lucy Woodruff Walker, daughter of Williams graduate and trustee, William Perrin Walker. Lucy was the wife of Judge David Davis, who was the cousin and benefactor of David Davis Walker, George H.W. Bush’s great-grandfather. Another Williams College alumnus, and close associate of George H.W. Bush, is Carlyle Group advisor and former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (from 1993 to 2001), Arthur Levitt.

Brown Brothers Harriman executive, Eugene Delano, graduated from Williams College in 1866. Delano was also a trustee of Williams College, for twenty-five years, and died two years after Wirt One entered the college.

Wirt One left Williams College to join the Army in the summer of 1918, and was located temporarily at Camp Custer. He served in “Base 14” as a private and returned in April 1919.[40] It’s not clear if he ever returned to graduate from Williams, but soon after his return he married Susan Cramer Stephenson, whose guardian was her uncle Ambrose Cramer of Lake Forest, IL.[41] Susan and Wirt lived for the first two years of their marriage in Buffalo, New York and then moved back to Chicago permanently. Susan and Wirt had one son together, Wirt Dexter Walker II, before Susan sued for divorce in 1924 on grounds of “cruelty.”

In 1929, Wirt One married again, this time to Gertrude Reich. While married to Wirt, Gertrude was sued for stealing the affections of another woman’s husband, in a well-publicized scandal. Wirt later sued Gertrude too, for divorce, based on the claim that she deserted him.[42]

Wirt married a third time, in 1937, to Mildred Walker. They were married for twelve years until Mildred sued for divorce, accusing Wirt of cruelty again, and also of nonsupport.[43] At the time, Mildred claimed that Wirt had an income of over $100,000 per year in 1949.[44]

Aside from the ladies, Wirt One’s endeavors included working for the Arcady Farms Milling company, at first as an employee of his uncle, Arthur Meeker, and eventually as president and chairman of the company. Arcady Farms Milling was a manufacturer of feedstock for turkeys and other livestock.

In 1943, Wirt One was attacked by six men after a dinner party attended by political leaders. The motive for the attack was unclear and Wirt was taken to the hospital with a broken nose, a fractured jaw, and internal injuries. No clues to the identity of the attackers were found.[45]

Like his father, Wirt One was a member of the Chicago Club which was, since its inception in 1869, a highly selective and secretive group of Chicago powerbrokers. In fact, the Chicago Tribune dubbed it the “center of power in Chicago.”[46] Wirt One appears to simply have been a lucky, rich kid amongst a membership list that at one time or another included the likes of Marshall Field, George Pullman and Abraham Lincoln. But perhaps there was more to Wirt than we know.

Immediately after his divorce from Mildred, in April 1949, Wirt One married Rosalie Cohen, “former model and secretary.”[47] Rosalie was twenty years younger than Wirt.

Wirt One died August 8, 1953, the week of the CIA’s famous coup in Iran. His obituary lists private services and no report of how he died.

Wirt Two

Wirt Dexter Walker II (Wirt Two) was born to Wirt One and his first wife, Susan Cramer Stephenson during the two years that they lived in Buffalo.

Like his father, Wirt Two went to Williams College. He graduated and then immediately joined the Army Air Corps during World War II and became a pilot.[48] Just before leaving for duty in 1942, Wirt Two married Margaret Elizabeth Ross, of North Adams, MA.[49] They eventually had three children: Wirt Dexter Walker III (Wirt Three), Wendy Margaret Walker, and William Ross Walker. Both Wendy and William, along with their brother Wirt Three, were shareholders in Stratesec.[50]

In 1954, Wirt Two was in a legal battle with three of his father’s four wives, over his father’s substantial estate.[51] His daughter Wendy later remarked on Wirt One’s exploits, suggesting that her grandfather’s work at Arcady Farms was only one of several of his “ventures.”[52]

Wirt Two became a career officer in the Army Air Corps and then the US Air Force, serving until 1962. He flew combat missions with the Eighth Air Force while stationed in England during the war, and was later stationed in Germany. After the war he was assigned to “various government agencies involved in reconnaissance intelligence.”[53] The Lockheed-made U2 reconnaissance aircraft was assigned to the Eighth Air Force, a part of Strategic Air Command, where U2 operations started in 1956 and involved flights over the Soviet Union and the Middle East.[54] In May 1960, while Wirt Two was working on reconnaissance intelligence, an American U2 was shot down by the Soviets, initiating a worldwide controversy over espionage.

Wirt Two is also listed as an ex-employee of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), an agency of the CIA that analyzed aerial spy photographs.[55] The significance of the NPIC to major intelligence activities during the twentieth century cannot be overstated. NPIC was the agency that was responsible for the intelligence that originated the Cuban missile crisis.[56] NPIC was also central to the analysis of the photographic evidence related to the Kennedy assassination, including the Zapruder film. Whether or not Wirt Two participated in these historic activities is not publicly known.

In his obituary, Wirt Two is listed as having been an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for which it is said he worked until 1977. He died of leukemia in 1997.

Wirt Three

Wirt Three lives in McLean, Virginia, home of the CIA. He graduated from Lafayette College in 1968 and in 1971 he married Sally Gregg White, a Washington DC debutante. Sally is a descendant of architectural ironwork magnate George White, whose son “Doc” White was a World Series winning pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. “Doc” was actually a dentist but his brother, Charles Stanley White, was a famous Washington DC surgeon and grandfather to Sally. Sally’s father, Charles White Stanley Jr, was a surgeon too and, like Wirt Two, he was an officer in the Army Air Corps. [57]

Wirt was fortunate to land a position, right out of college, as a broker for an “investment” firm called Glore Forgan.[58] Originally a company called Field Glore, financed by Marshall Field III, Glore Forgan was renamed in 1937 for its new partner, James “Russ” Forgan. Russ was one of the most influential men in the history of US intelligence, having led the European division of the CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In the OSS, Forgan focused on infiltrating the German intelligence apparatus with the help of William J. Casey. Casey later became SEC chairman under Nixon and the director of CIA under Reagan. Before going back to work in the “investment” business, Forgan helped to write the documents that created the CIA.

While Wirt Three worked there, William Casey was House Counsel for Glore Forgan. It was at this time that the firm was at the center of a near collapse of Wall Street. In 1970, it began to be clear that Glore Forgan had somehow sold many millions of dollars more in securities than what its customers thought they owned. As a result, the company was expected to fail and, due to a cascading effect, its failure was projected to take down dozens of other firms causing a panic and huge losses on Wall Street. [59] These projections compelled President Nixon to ask Ross Perot, through Treasury Secretary John Connally, to intervene and save Glore Forgan. Perot suffered dramatic losses in an attempt to save the company (the only business loss of his career) and Glore Forgan went bankrupt anyway. The US government created the Securities Investor Protection Corp (SIPC) in response.[60]

A few years later, Wirt Three went from being a broker at Glore Forgan to running a series of other companies that went bankrupt. Yet somehow, Wirt Three always had cash flow. That could have been due to the fact that, by 1982, Wirt Three was a director of the Kuwaiti-American Company (or Kuwam).

Stratesec started off in 1987 as Burns & Roe Securacom, founded by Nelson Rockefeller assistant, Sebastian Cassetta. The company changed its name to Securacom when it was taken over by Kuwam in 1992, at which time Wirt Three became CEO. When Wirt Three was sued by the president of an existing company with an identical name, Wirt became abusive and told the other businessman that he “would bury him financially and take everything he had “ by “filing a barrage of frivolous arguments...in multiple jurisdictions."[61] Wirt lost the case and had to change his company’s name to Stratesec. While this incident suggested that Wirt Three was abusive, it also indicated that he had the kind of deep pockets that allowed for frivolous lawsuits.

Kuwam also owned two companies called Commander Aircraft and Aviation General, both of which had Wirt Three as CEO, and both of which went bankrupt shortly after 9/11.

As CEO of Stratesec, Wirt Three did business with some shady characters. For example, Stratesec owed money to a company called Bankest Capital, which appeared to be a money-laundering operation or similar fraud. Wirt Three transferred seven million dollars in shares of his Stratesec stock to Bankest as a way to reduce that debt ($1.75 MM).[62] Bankest ‘s owners, brothers Eduardo and Hector Orlansky, were later convicted of conspiracy and bank fraud when $185 million went missing due to "hug overadvances."[63] Apparently $2 billion was "flowed through the Orlansky's two businesses from 1998 to 2003 to create the appearance they were healthy and growing."[64]

A company called Hanifen Imhoff was the underwriter for Wirt’s company, Commander Aircraft.[65] This gives further evidence that the companies Wirt Three was running were not only bound for bankruptcy, but were probably CIA fronts all along. Hanifen Imhoff was "nailed for Correspondent's fraud" in December 2000.[66] Hanifen Imhoff also happens to be a division of Stifel Nicolaus & Company, whose long term chairman was George W. Bush’s first cousin, Yale Skull & Bones member George Herbert Walker III.[67],[68]

In any case, Wirt Three has a tendency to show up when airplanes crash into tall buildings. The only other such occurrence since 9/11 led to Wirt Three being interviewed because the plane that crashed was related to his company, Aviation General. [69]

Conclusion

It appears that Wirt Three manages CIA front companies and that Stratesec was one of them. There are many ways to see this, including Wirt’s shady business dealings and his tendency to run companies into bankruptcy while still maintaining cash flow. Wirt is, at a minimum, a child of the CIA (and the DIA), but he also worked with William Casey for Russ Forgan’s company, making him an associate of some of the most influential deep state operatives of the last sixty years.

Wirt’s family has been connected to drug money and Yale’s secret societies for over 150 years, and these connections include many links to the Bush family. Of course, George H.W. Bush was a CIA director and other Bush family members were operatives, like Louis Walker (Skull & Bones 1936). Another institution with many links to prominent CIA veterans is William College, where two of the Wirts went to school.

Wirt Three is also a distant relative of the Bush family, through the intermarriage of Ransom and Robinson family members and through the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke, who is an ancestor of both the Delanos and the Bush clan. Such distant relations are not of importance to most people today, although they are quite important for the Bush family as indicated by how that family chooses its relationships, including its business partners. For example, George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara are distant cousins along four different lines.

Marvin Bush is but one of several Bush family links to Stratesec, in that several of Stratesec’s directors and employees came from Bush-connected companies, and at least one of Wirt Three’s ventures was underwritten by George Herbert Walker III’s company. Add to this the fact that the COO of Stratesec , Barry McDaniel, came from a subsidiary of The Carlyle Group that conducted “black projects,” and Stratesec seems worthy of a detailed investigation.

After 9/11, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recommended that Stratesec be investigated for insider trading related to the crimes of that day. Oddly enough, the FBI and SEC never followed through with the investigation, claiming it was unnecessary because the officers of Stratesec had no “ties to terrorism or other negative information.” [70] That assessment does not appear to be valid for many reasons, including that The Carlyle Group was financed in part by Osama bin Laden’s family and that Stratesec director James Abrahamson was the business partner of Mansoor Ijaz, who claimed on several occasions to be able to contact Osama bin Laden.[71]

Maybe the investigation didn’t happen because no one wanted to embarrass the President, who was busy making tremendous political and personal profit from 9/11, and whose family was deeply connected to The Carlyle Group, and whose brother was a Stratesec director. But it’s likely that Stratesec was not investigated simply because it would have resulted in discoveries that no one in a position of power wanted to make.

Ultimately though, we know that Stratesec was a security contractor for several of the facilities that were compromised on 9/11, including the WTC buildings, Dulles airport where Flight 77 took off, and also United Airlines which owned two of the ill-fated planes. We also know that the CEO of Stratesec came from a background of deep-state connected, opium-funded wealth, and that the many Wirt Dexter Walkers were thereafter steeped in a culture of power and secrecy that has ruled the United States for many years.


[1] Peter Dale Scott, in The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (University of California Press, 2007) defines the “deep state” as the covert part of government that responds to wealthy private influences as those influences shape government policy outside of normal democratic processes.

[2] Margie Burns, Bush-Linked Company Handled Security for the WTC, Dulles and United, Prince George's Journal (Maryland), February 4, 2003, http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0204-06.htm

[3] Super-thermites are known as “nanothermites”. See W.C. Danen et al, "Los Alamos Nanoenergetic Metastable Intermolecular Composite (Super Thermite) Program," 221st ACS National Meeting, San Diego, CA, April 2001.

[4] Niels H. Harrit, et al, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume 2, http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/conten...7TOCPJ.SGM

[5] Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of The Carlyle Group, Wiley publishers, 2003, p35

[6] History Commons, Complete 911 Timeline, Bin Laden Family, http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.j...1_timeline

[7] Peter Dale Scott, 9/11, JFK, and War: Recurring Patterns in America’s Deep Events, Journal of 9/11 Studies, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volum...andWar.pdf

[8] STRATESEC Incorporated Appoints Dr. Amos Lu To Head Information/Network Security Business, Business Wire, March 29, 2000, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0..._60865231/

[9] Otis Frederick Reed Waite, The early history of Claremont, New Hampshire: A paper read before the New Hampshire Historical Society, September 29, 1891

[10] New York Times, Mrs. Paran Stevens Dead, April 4, 1895

[11] The Washington Herald, Genealogical Department, December 23, 1906, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/s...Washington

[12] DAWSON-L Archives, Rootsweb, Dawson DNA testing, October 23, 2004, http://listsearches.rootsweb.com/th/read...1098549985

[13] Dave Utzinger's Database, Entry for Solomon Walker (2nd of three), http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/...id=I504940

[14] Genealogy Trails History Group, DELANO FAMILY of Sullivan County, NH, http://genealogytrails.com/newham/sulliv...elano.html

[15] Josiah Seymour Currey, Chicago: its history and its builders, a century of marvelous growth, Volume 5, The S,J, Clarke Publishing Company, Chicago, 1912

[16] Ed. By Ernest R. May and John King Fairbank, America's China trade in historical perspective: the Chinese and American Performance, President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1986

[17] Mary Ferrell Foundation, LBJ Phone Calls, http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.ph...hone_Calls

[18] William P. Litynski, An Illustrated History of The China Trade & The Opium Wars

[19] John N. Ingham, Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders, Greenwood Press, 1983

[20] New York Times, Funeral of Sidney Bartlett, March 9, 1889

[21] Wikipedia page for William Jardine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jar...%80%931843)

[22] New York Times, China Decrees death to the Use of Opium, December 30, 1906

[23] National Corruption Index webpage for Li Ka-Shing, http://www.nationalcorruptionindex.org/p...file_id=16

[24] William C. Hunter, The 'fan kwae' at Canton before treaty days, 1825-1844, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1882

[25] Robert B. Forbes's autobiography, Personal Reminiscences(1882), http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listser...35515.html

[26] Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company, Record book of trust mortgages and agreements; also, leases, conveyances, contracts, agreements, and articles of consolidation, A. Mudge & son, printers, 1882

[27] The Peninsular Chapter History, Peninsular Chapter of Alpha Delta Phi, http://peninsular.alphadeltaphi.org/Defa...?tabid=952

[28] Wikipedia page for Alpha Delta Phi, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Delta_Phi

[29] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, Viking Penguin, 2004, p 31

[30] Yale Daily News, reproduced at DailyKos, Dec 10, 2005, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/10/233039/84

[31] Yale University. Class of 1908, History of the class of 1908, Yale College, Volume 1

[32] Chicago Daily Tribune, Wirt D. Walker’s Death, April 26, 1899

[33] Website for Winston & Strawn, page for James R. Thompson, Partner and Senior Chairman, http://www.winston.com/index.cfm?content...emid=10873

[34] Charles H. Browning, The Magna Charta Barons and Their American Descendants, Genealogical Publishing Co. Baltimore, 1969

[35] Bevier-Elting Family Association, The $15,000 Misunderstanding, http://www.b-efa.org/elting/misunderstanding.htm

[36] Chicago Daily Tribune, To Found Art Gallery: Will of Wirt Dexter Walker Plans a Public Collection, June 13, 1899

[37] Wyllys Cadwell Ransom, Historical outline of the Ransom family of America, The Richmond & Backus Company, 1903

[38] Williams College, Catalogue 1917-1918, Williamstown, MA

[39] Jack Davis, Improving Intelligence Analysis at CIA: Dick Heuer's Contribution to Intelligence Analysis, Central Intelligence Agancy, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-t.../art3.html

[40] Chicago Daily Tribune, Many Chicagoans Who Served In Base 14 Return, April 21, 1919

[41] Chicago Daily Tribune, Marriage Announcement 1, May 56, 1918

[42] Chicago Daily Tribune, Wirt D. Walker Sues to Divorce Gertrude Reich, March 19, 1935

[43] Chicago Daily Tribune, Wife Sues W.D. Walker, Miller, For Separation, February 18, 1949

[44] Chicago Daily Tribune, Asks $3,500 a Month Temporary Alimony from Milling Head, February 24, 1949

[45] Chicago Daily Tribune, Firm President Slugged By Six At Club’s Door, December 30, 1943

[46] Wikipedia page for The Chicago Club, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Club

[47] Chicago Daily Tribune, Wirt D. Walker, Head of Milling Company, Married Fourth Time, April 9, 1949

[48] Chicago Daily Tribune, 89 Illinois Men Awarded Wings As Army Pilots, July 4, 1942

[49] Chicago Daily Tribune, Lieut. Wirt D. Walker Jr. Weds Eastern Girl Today, July 4, 1942

[50] Securities and Exchange Commission, FORM S-3 filing for Stratesec Incorporated, June 12, 2000, http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/EFX_...qRGPhOZT77

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[52] Wendy Walker, Re: Wirt Dexter of Chicago History Fame, GenForum presented by Genelogy.com, October 9, 2001, http://genforum.genealogy.com/dexter/messages/444.html

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[55] NPIC Reunions Database, List of Deceased NPIC Employees, http://npicreunions.blogspot.com/

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[57] The Washington Post, Times Herald, Dr. C.S. White Jr., 48, Surgeon, Chief of Staff, April 13, 1964

[58] The Washington Post, Times Herald, White-Walker wedding announcement, April 29, 1971

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[60] Donald Morrison, Ambush on Wall Street, Texas Monthly, April 1974

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[Ed Jewett]

Insider Trading: Criminal Charges, Fines Against Large Number of Wall Street Executives and Investors

November 22nd, 2010 Upstarts get busted in an attempt to maintain appearances while public menaces Goldman Sachs and AIG are allowed to slip from the headlines.

Via: Los Angeles Times:

Federal investigators in New York are wrapping up an extensive investigation into allegations of insider trading and other stock-trading irregularities that could bring criminal charges or monetary fines against a large number of Wall Street executives and investors, a Washington official who has been briefed on the inquiry said Saturday.

Speaking anonymously so as not to jeopardize the case, the official said the investigation has been underway for “several years” and is likely to result in the prosecution of traders “around the country.”

“They are in the final stages with this,” the official said. “It could bear fruit by the end of this year.”

Speculation first arose that the FBI and other federal investigators were nearing the end of a years-long inquiry into irregularities when Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, gave a speech in October warning that “illegal insider trading is rampant and may even be on the rise.”

Bharara added, “Disturbingly, many of the people who are going to such lengths to obtain inside information for a trading advantage are already among the most advantaged, privileged and wealthy insiders in modern finance. But for them, material nonpublic information is akin to a performance-enhancing drug that provides the illegal ‘edge’ to outpace their rivals and make even more money.”

Related:
Insider Crimes, Funny Money and Options Rackets

They Made a Killing: The Use of Knowledge of Covert Operations in the Stock Market