During the 1920s three countries were targeted for takeover by the Robber Barons: Germany, Russia and what is now known as Saudi Arabia. The tactics were the same: American cartels bribed their way into friendly governments and then protected their investments by hiring local mercenaries – paid terrorist groups who watched over their interests.
In Saudi Arabia, the terrorists for hire were known as the Ikhwan al Muslimeen, the Muslim Brothers, or more colloquially, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Robber Barons armed this group of fanatical Wahhabists, who drove the peaceful Hashemite rulers out of Mecca and Medina and installed the House of Saud. The Saudis named the country after themselves, created an oil company with their American investors (Aramco), and then promptly threw the Ikhwan terrorists out of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were not stupid after all.
The Ikhwan settled primarily in Egypt, where they joined the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood created by Hassan Al Banna in 1928. He was a devout admirer of and correspondent with young Adolf Hitler. “In heaven Allah, on earth Hitler” was their battle cry. Hassan’s Muslim Brotherhood became a fully-integrated arm of the German intelligence and propaganda networks during WWII. They specialized in acts of terrorism and assassinations of Allied troops, promising German General Erwin Rommel that he would not find a single Allied soldier left alive when he arrived in Cairo.
The Arab Nazis remain the only segment of the Third Reich that was never punished or even dismantled.
[22]
After the war, the British Secret Service hired the Ikwahn terrorists, and used them as a fifth column in an attempt to destroy the infant state of Israel in 1948. When Gamal Nasser and the leftists took over Egypt, they banned this huge army of Arab Nazis now numbering nearly three quarters of a million strong. In the 1950s the same Robber Barons who helped fund and create the original Saudi Ikwahn, convinced their Saudi partners to take them back. The Saudis gladly accepted the Nazi refugees from the Egyptian Ikwahn and gave them citizenship.
At least the Egyptian Nazis were literate. The Saudis used the Muslim Brotherhood as school teachers. It was a perfect storm of Nazi racism and Wahhabbi bigotry.
[23]
A perfect storm was rising in America as well. When Eisenhower was elected, one of the Robber Baron’s lawyers, Allen Dulles, former head of OPC, became head of CIA. His brother, John Foster Dulles, became Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. Between them the trickle of Nazi immigration to America became a flood.
The Dulles brothers sold the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist groups to the ever-gullible Eisenhower as a counterweight to the Arab Communists. It was a tragic error. History records the Muslim Brotherhood as the parent organization of every subsequent Sunni terrorist group from Hamas to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Mohammed Qutb, the brother of the chief Nazi propagandist, was the personal tutor of young Osama bin Laden. Although Congress and the CIA did not know it, the roots of the 9/11 tragedy began in the Eisenhower administration.
Shortly before Allen Dulles was fired by President Kennedy, he had already brought the first leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood to America, In 1963, Ibrahim Yazdi founded the Moslem Students Association in Houston, Texas, a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. Yazdi worked with Richard Cottam, a CIA operative in the 1953 OPC team under John Waller and Kermit Roosevelt that overthrew Iraq’s Mossadeq; Yazdi organized campus chapters for the Muslim Brotherhood all over the US during the ’70s, but prohibited protests against the Shah. Then he showed up in Paris standing next to Moosavi Khomeini, the “instant” leader of the so-called Islamic Revolution against the Shah. The machinations of the Muslim Brotherhood gained the Dulles Brothers one decade of Iranian oil profits, but left America with three decades of fanatical Islamic opponents.
The last time the Robber Barons took the Arab Nazis out of the closet was in the early 1980s, when the Muslim Brotherhood was reinforced in America to recruit the second generation of Arab fascists to fight as Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
[24]
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, the Spiritual Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood and head recruiter of the Mujahideen movement, was Osama bin Laden’s religious mentor. The CIA, of course, was kept of out the loop as Vice President Bush
[25]
funneled money through the Saudi and Pakistani governments to put the Ikwahn terrorists back on the payroll.
[26]
To this day, the US Government is the only major power not to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group. In fact, the State Department still spends our taxpayer dollars to fund a propaganda effort to portray the Muslim Brotherhood as “reformed” and “moderates” with whom we can do business. The hard truth is that our businessmen have been dealing with them all along, both in Egypt and Iran.
[27]
The second major terrorist group the Robber Barons hired was the infant Nazi party of Germany. Here the US Justice Department played a critical role. The Attorney General of the United States worked as a “bagman for the Dulles brothers,” passing out bribes at the Versailles Peace Conference. The terms of the treaty suited only the Robber Barons. The onerous war reparations had to be paid in gold, which the Robber Barons would be happy to lend to Germany in return for German corporate stock. The Rockefeller family, JP Morgan and the Dupont family all gorged themselves on German investments between the wars.
The German currency might have been almost worthless, but German stock was priceless. By the 1930s, Germany had achieved a near-monopoly on high-tech industries, particularly in chemical processes. In fact, the Dusseldorf Patent Conference of 1939 was planned to formalize the Robber Barons domination of world markets through patent cartels.
[28]
Since Germany allowed, indeed encouraged, cartels, it made the Robber Barons feel quite at home. Hitler and his Nazi party were funded to keep the unions and Communists at bay: just a dog on a leash, or so they thought. His finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, had been born in Brooklyn and knew how the game was played on Wall Street.
Herbert Walker, grandfather to President George Herbert Walker Bush, brought in the Brown Brothers investment firm from Britain to team up with the Harrimans and the Rockefellers. Brown Brothers Harriman had so many corrupt ties to the Nazi regime that it became the only bank in New York State history ever to obtain permission to shred its wartime and prewar files. It certainly had the influence to pull this off – two of its Nazi investment clients, Nelson Rockefeller and Averell Harriman, had become Governors of New York.
[29]
Walker’s drunken son-in-law, Prescott Bush, was given a seat on the board of several of the Nazi front companies and served as director of the Union Bank in New York,
[30]
which secretly corresponded with its sister banks in Amsterdam and Berlin. No matter who won WWII, the ownership of the Thyssen holding companies could be shifted to whichever side came out on top.
[31]
It really is not fair to say that any of the Robber Barons were “pro-Nazi” since they actually preferred the conservative Monarchists and Catholics to Hitler. Hitler knew that he was disliked, and the first thing he did when he became head of the government was to ban foreign ownership of German companies.
In response, the Robber Barons used their influence to pass the Swiss Bank Secrecy Act of 1933. The Wall Street crowd secretly owned the stocks of the Swiss Banks, which owned the stocks of the German banks, which owned the stocks of the German companies. Hitler never knew how the Thyssens and their Wall Street investors kept their financial control intact, at least not until after war broke out, and the Wall Street ties to a third group of terrorists was finally exposed.
After the Russian Revolution it was the Harrimans, staunch Democrats, who secretly bankrolled the Russian minority party (the Bolsheviks) against the Majority Mensheviks. Despite the fact that American troops were in Russia trying to prop up the pro-democracy Mensheviks, the Harrimans began illegal gold shipments to Lenin and his Bolshevik party.
[32]
The Bolsheviks promised to continue the former Czar’s policy of condoning cartels. Russia had raw materials such as magnesium and iron ore, while the Thyssens had access to high-tech steel and chemical processes to turn the raw materials into steel.
A decision was made for the Robber Barons to fund a German-Russian industrial park in eastern Poland. The Russian rail gauges were different from the European, so the park had to be close to the Russian border, but near coal fields. In order to help solve the rail problem, a series of canals were constructed to permit the Russians to barge raw materials to the Vistula River. The Polish province of Silesia was selected as the site of that industrial park because of its access to the Vistula and its proximity to huge coal deposits. The Silesian American Coal Company was managed by the Harrimans, with Prescott Bush on the board. Funding Hitler was a bi-partisan event.
[33]
The future industrial park was planned for the town of Oswieczim, or Auschwitz as it was called by the Germans. Holocaust scholars have never even suspected that Auschwitz was originally planned as a profit center for Wall Street, but it was.
[34]
During the last four years independent filmmaker Claire Ragge has done a thorough inquiry into the newly declassified files on the men who funded Hitler. Her film, tentatively titled “American Secrets” should be ready for release in 2011, along with a website listing each historical document sourcing each of the film’s allegations. Ms. Ragge has done a remarkable job, and has uncovered many secrets that would otherwise have escaped public scrutiny.
[35]
In 1979, I was the attorney assigned by OSI Director Walter Rockler to head the “Belarus Project,” ostensibly a comprehensive review of American and German files pertaining to the Holocaust in Byelorussia, or Belarus as the Nazis called it. Privately, my secret assignment from Rockler was to find out who was responsible for sabotaging the postwar investigations of Nazi bankers at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. As a former Army officer, I knew a bit about intelligence operations, and I spent more than two years immersed in the classified files of the United States and its allies. When I was ready in 1981, I submitted my manuscript for government review.
It is quite possible that this little book may be a contender for the title of most censored of American histories, at least at the time it was first published. Although the Justice Department had given me sensitive multi-agency security clearances, they required me to submit my manuscript in advance to the CIA, which coordinated inter-agency pre-publication review. The CIA quickly censored any mention of the Vatican role in smuggling Nazis. But otherwise, to the utter dismay of the Justice Department, the CIA rather liked the book and helped me devise paraphrases and public source “work arounds” to avoid even more censorship.
[36]
After all, I did not put the blame on the CIA for recruiting Nazis as Cold War spies, but on their rival spy agency in the State Department, the OPC. After Truman’s surprising defeat of Dewey in 1948, America actually had two CIA’s. There was the official CIA that worked for President Truman and the Democrats. The other CIA, the OPC, worked for Allen Dulles and the defeated Republicans under cover of the State and Justice Departments. The official CIA hunted Nazis, the other recruited them for the State Department’s OPC.
There was a bit of public uproar when I first revealed some of this on
60 Minutes
in 1982. Apparently WWII veterans were not pleased to learn that there were Nazi war criminals working for American intelligence. Congress demanded hearings, Mike Wallace got the Emmy Award, and my family got death threats. And of course, the censors recalled my manuscript for another vetting. The CIA reviewers are actually very nice people, but they do not have a clue about their own history, or its sensitivity to other government agencies. The CIA does not know what they do not know, a rather sad state of affairs for an agency whose motto is “the truth shall set you free.”
[37]
In my case, knowing the truth did not matter if I was not allowed to tell it. The third round of censorship for this book took place when I updated it for release in the UK. I wanted to include mention of how the British intelligence services used American National Security Agency (NSA) computers at Fort Meade, Maryland for warrantless wiretapping of our citizens, while we used their computers at GCHQ in Cheltenham to tap the telephones of the British public. This arrangement allowed each side to swear to its own legislatures that its law abiding agency never bugged its own citizens without a search warrant.
It was one of those wonderful lies that no one could ever go to jail for because the elected Democratic or Labor representatives were smart enough never to ask the right questions, while the leadership of the Republican party in the US and the Conservative party in the UK knew just enough to see that the questions never came up in the legislature. The problem was that Democrats in Congress had grown more and more suspicious, and in the late 1970s drafted legislation that would have effectively banned all warrantless wiretapping in the United States.
[38]
In order to continue the deception of Congress, my own Justice Department had cleverly crafted the legislative loophole in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Where the draft bill prohibited all wiretapping, the Justice Department inserted the words “by the NSA.” Under the Justice Department’s version, only the NSA would be subject to the wiretap ban, not their British counterparts. The Justice Department version was adopted in the final legislation.
Congress did not know it, but technically they had just authorized a huge loophole to permit our foreign allies to spy on Americans without any judicial oversight, which enabled them to share the ill-gotten wiretaps with each other. The end result of DOJ’s legislative tweaking was that it increased warrantless wiretaps, exactly the opposite of what Congress had intended. Again, mention of the wiretap evasion was censored from the original manuscript of this book.