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Behind the Gemstone Files |
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The
Skeleton Key AUTHORSHIP ALPHA-1775 GEMSTONES A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z
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UPDATED
June 21, 2002 09:43 PM
This, the second paragraph of the Key just doesn't add up historically. The first, covering 1932, is highly speculative and the second one, here, is nearly impossible. There seems to be virtually no way Aristotle Onassis could have been involved in any kind of an oil agreement with the Seven Sisters, Rockefeller or anyone else. Onassis simply had no fleet of oil tankers in 1934. Onassis had only "dry" ships, not tankers. He may have been exporting heroin from Greece into Argentina and the US through Canada, but he was not importing oil. Oil ships are completely different from "dry cargo" ships because of the liquid fuel they must carry. Dry cargo ships carry things such as tobacco, grain, timber (and, yes, probably opium). Tankers carry liquids. Onassis bought his first ship of any kind (unless you accept the story he bought one before he came to Argentina when he was only 15) in 1931, if you can call her that. She was the 7000-ton Maria Protopapos, found shipwrecked on the Rio de la Plata. Onassis spent a good part of his ill-gotten fortune to repair this old rust bucket, and then it promptly sank in a storm in Montevideo harbor. She was not an oil tanker.(1: 49-50) The Depression was just beginning to wreak havoc worldwide and shipping was hit especially hard. Shippers were losing thousands of dollars on every trip, but it was still cheaper than the cost of laying them up in harbor. It was at this time that Onassis, oddly enough, started thinking about going into shipping. It could have been nothing but vision and foresight, for surely all the omens were bad. It was not the time to go into shipping, and his Argentina friend Costa Gratsos tried his best to talk him out of it. Shortly after Onassis became Greek deputy consul in Buenos Aires, his father died of a heart attack in 1931 (and no, there's no evidence it was sodium morphate!). Aristo returned to Athens for the funeral, then toured Europe. While in London he heard a rumor that the Canadian National Steamship Company was about to go belly up and was desparately trying to unload ten freighters (not tankers, mind you) for $30,000 each up the St. Lawrence River. After crawling through every cubbyhole on his hands and knees for the most thorough inspection the ships had probably ever received, he bought six of them for $20,000 each. Even then, it took nearly two years before he landed his first shipment, according to one biographer (5:44). "It took almost two years before Onassis secured the first cargo for one of his ships, a consignment of newsprint for the London Daily Mail paper. It was the first and only time he would ever carry bulk paper on one of his ships, but it was a profitable shipment and gave him the key push to extricating his ships from their docks." In light of the alleged Canadian-Onassis-heroin shipments, one wonders just what other shipments from Canada Onassis might have carried. Certainly, no heroin shipments would have been recorded in the official shipping registers, but the 9,000-ton ships could have certainly met the Mafia's demands for huge quantities of both heroin and alcohol. Admittedly, the various biographies of Onassis, as well as those of Roosevelt, Kennedy, Rockefeller, Hughes and most of the other big names mentioned in the Gemstones are at wide variance. Some authors such as Gerald Carroll, Kenn Thomas and David Hatcher Childress have never acknowledged this and, indeed, seem to have taken the first account they came across and ran with it. The result is that both books (Inside the Gemstone File and Project Seek) are riddled with errors that could have been easily checked out a little further. Others, such as Peter Renzo and Stephanie Caruana, have made virtually no effort at all to check out any of the contents of the Gemstones, and content themselves with arguing over who wrote the Key and defending Roberts work without one iota of evidence. The truth is that Roberts' work was riddled with errors itself. Some of it is true, some of it is possible - and some of it is just impossible. Any researcher would only have to look into the first two paragraphs of the Key to discover that. Those who claim they have the Roberts "originals" are even more to blame. If those "originals" are as full of valuable information as they claim, they should have realized the truth years ago. Others of us had only a cursory look at Roberts scribbles, and no way to determine quickly what was true and what was not. He made many allegations that sounded factual, complete with names, dates and so on - but no documentation. Even Mae Brussell, who did have 300-400 pages of his originals before they vanished or were stolen, was inclined to dismiss him as a raving lunatic. Caruana claimed authorship of the Key and said that was the final word. That was her story and she stuck to it - more or less, despite many damaging contradictions in her own claims. Moore claimed he presented the Key as a basis for further investigation only, not as fact in and of itself. He felt he could document perhaps 80% of Roberts' claims, but the other 20% needed more work - and that required some finances he didn't have. For that reason he tried to interest several magazines in it, including Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler, hoping he could convince them to finance the rest of the research. It wasn't until the industrial nations began to emerge from the Depression that Onassis started thinking about tankers. Coal was until then, the source of 75% of our energy, and was gradually being usurped by oil. But Onassis did not buy one of the existing tankers, which were a standard 9,000 tons. Onassis designed and custom-built his own tanker - the world's first super tanker. It was 15,000 tons. Ship builders thought he was crazy, insisting it would never float, that it would promptly sink. Onassis had done his math and his homework and remained stubbornly convinced. What did happen with Onassis in 1934 was his meeting Ingeborg Dedichen, the Norwegian daughter of the esteemed Brydes of Sandefjord, a beautiful and wealthy woman going through her second divorce. He met her on the cruiser Augustus and her first impression of him was that he "was a gangster" with his pomaded hair and dark, penetrating eyes. Onassis had a knack for singling out older, wealthy women, and he had spotted this one before the ship ever took off. Onassis the predator paid a steward to move him to the room next to hers and made his move, showering her with attention and sweet talk until he got her into bed. On the last night of the cruise, as they danced together, with Onassis in his best dress, Inge asked him, "Why is it that even when you're wearing a tuxedo, you still look like a gangster?" Onassis replied, "Perhaps because I am a gangster." "No, you're a pirate," she laughed. (1:55-56) She may have been right on both counts. Until he started running with the Hollywood and Mafia-Kennedy-Hughes gang years later (1940-42), he repeatedly pleaded with Inge to marry him, but she never would - until it was too late and Onassis had brutally beaten her into submission, nearly killing her and driving her to attempt suicide - but that's another story.
In 1934, his first tanker was still a pipe dream. He had neither the money nor the credit to even have it built. Shipbuilders didn't trust the Greeks; even Inge had recoiled in horror when Aristo first told her was a Greek ship owner; she should have followed her first instincts), and they insisted on more of a down payment from Greeks than others. It was called, simply, "the Greek rule." It was after running into this roadblock that Aristo took his beloved "Mamita" (Ingeborg) with him, going to the Gotaverken shipyard in Goteberg, run by Ernst Heden. Onassis had been steered there by Gustav Sandstrom, a shipping agent in Buenos Aires.
So it seems we have to take Onassis out of the picture in 1934 as far as the Roberts Gemstone Files are concerned. But what of the other allegations - about Rockefeller and the Seven Sisters and Arab oil? Was there any truth to that?
It is ironic that the Rockefeller fortune, built first on heroin, was later used to force Prohibition. Could it be that it was a ploy and not a "humanitarian" gesture? Surely, the astute Rockefellers knew that outlawing alcohol would only make it more profitable, just as had happened with heroin.
But this era of the Gemstones deals with oil, not heroin, and so we look to the history of the oil companies, seeking any such event in 1934 that would have confirmed the Roberts' charge. "By 1882 the Standard Company," Epstein wrote, " reorganized by Rockefeller's lawyers as a 'trust' (which had previously had a benign meaning) controlled 95 per cent. of the refining capacity, United States. And Rockefeller, at the age of 43 controlled Standard Oil. With this power of refining, he expanded into all phases of the oil industry, including exploration, shipping and marketing.""Before Americans were subject to income tax, the dividends from Standard Oil made Rockefeller the wealthiest man in the country. Eventually, the government, first the states and then the Federal, moved against Standard Oil and laws were passed against 'rebates' and 'trusts . Finally in 1911 under the crusading zeal of President Theodore Roosevelt, the Standard Oil trust was dissolved into 33 separate companies of which the Rockefellers remained large shareholders (receiving about 25 per cent of the shares of each new company)." Let's follow this timeline of major oil company events in the 1930s, compiled by Eric V. Thompson: AMOCO
ARCO
ASHLAND OIL
CHEVRON
EXXON
GETTY OIL
GULF OIL
MOBIL OIL
SHELL OIL
TEXACO
BRITISH PETROLEUM (ANGLO-PERSIAN OIL)
IRAQ PETROLEUM COMPANY
KUWAIT NATIONAL PETROLEUM COMPANY
SAUDI ARAMCO
(Click here for a complete timeline of all the major oil companies). Saudi Arabia was the world's next oil gold mine, and any cartel takeover would most likely be there. Aramco, as such, was not even yet created except for Saudi Aramco. That event, in 1933, not 1934 - has to be what Roberts would have been talking about. Saudi King Al-Saud gave valuable concessions to various Rockefeller Standard Oil interests. Saudi Aramco was the precursor to the later, larger ARAMCO. Under the Saudi deal, Rockefeller got exclusive oil production rights from 1933 to 2000. He also got the exclusive right to arrange transport, normally done through independent carriers. In fact, it was this agreement Onassis did try to overturn 20 years later (December 1953), but it blew up in his face. From the time he began transporting oil until his own Saudi deal, Onassis was like every other oil tanker magnate - he was dependent on the prices set by the Seven Sisters. If anything, Onassis was chaffing under those prices, not part of the power structure that set them. And even this didn't occur until much later than Roberts claimed.
Royal Dutch Shell was focused on Oman. British Petroleum (formerly Anglo-Persian Oil Co.) went through a tug of war in 1932-1933 with the Shah of Iran over that country's oil fields, then went into partnership with Gulf to establish the Kuwait Oil Company in 1934, giving the British control of KOC. Texaco joined Standard Oil of California (later Chevron) to found Aramco (the Arab-American Oil Company), but not until after 1934. It was Chevron (Socony) that got the lion's share of the Saudi deal after Bahrain Petroleum struck oil in Bahrain. Socal, as it was then known, won the Saudi oil concessions in 1933 (again, not 1934) and formed the California-Arabia Standard Oil Company to "hold" the Saudi concession, the same year it discovered oil in Saudi Arabia. Gulf Oil in 1934 sold its share of the Iraq Petroleum Company to Socal and joined up with Anglo-Iranian to establish the Kuwait Oil Company. The deal Roberts is probably referring to would most likely be the Chevron Socony deal that. The reader needs to understand just a little about the oil business. First, an oil company gets a government to agree to some "preliminary" exploratory searches. If the oil company thinks it's worth pursuing further, it obtains a "concession" from that country - the right to a certain percentage of the oil or a flat price per barrel. Only then will the oil company go to the enormous expense of actually drilling the wells and building the pipelines and shipping ports. It makes sense, certainly. What indeed did happen, and Roberts is fully correct here, is that the sheiks of the Middle East had no idea what oil was or what it was worth, and so, yes, they got screwed out of their country's most important natural resource. A shrewd businessman would just call it "a good deal." The truth is, it didn't happen in one deal, as Roberts says, evidenced by one oil cartel memo, but it happened in virtually all of the separate deals by all of the companies involved. Years later, when the Arabs got wise, the created OPEC in 1960. Until OPEC, it had been strictly a buyer's market. The oil cartel could turn the spigot on and off as it pleased, to manipulate the worldwide market. Today, the companies work hand in hand with the OPEC cartel and with US politicians, to keep gouging the public by the same manipulation. The huge rise in oil prices in 2001, as the stock market was taking a dive, was just one example. The US oil companies actually shut down their refineries so they could then claim there was an oil "shortage" and the price went through the ceiling. OPEC, which stands for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is a four-letter word synonymous with prodigious wealth, arbitrary power, and fear. The wealth is from the combined oil sales of its thirteen member nations, which exceeded $240 billion in 1981, a sum greater than half of the entire M-1 money supply in the United States; the power from the fact that its members control nearly two thirds of the free world's oil reserves; and the fear from the threat that OPEC might cut off this lifeline of energy, paralyzing the world's economy. No other organization, with the possible exception of the first Communist Internationale, has excited such concerns on a global scale. (3) OPEC is not the huge world power we think it is; the market is still controlled by the Seven Sisters. Through mergers over the years, the names have changed, but if you do some research you will find the big rush for Caspian Sea or South Central Asian oil (one of three reasons for what happened September 11, 2001) , you will still find seven major oil companies controlling it all. They do so through politicalpressure and (some say) bribery. They have become so powerful that US foreign policy has been overwhelmed by them. We went into Afghanistan not to seek our own CIA assset Osama bin Laden, but to "stabilize" the country so we could run an oil pipeline through it. Check it out! The only change has been the fierce independence of countries such as Iran and Russia, which are also seeking control of the Caspian region. Jim Moore has been working on an entirely different book on just this subject - Big Oil, Big War - and it is huge, swelled with documentation which explains not only why 9-11 happened with US foreknowledge, but also shows how the Yugoslavian Balkan wars during the Clinton administration were for the same purpose. The other two reasons are: control of the heroin pipeline from Afghanistan and the "containment foreign policy" to thwart both the European Union and the Russia-China axis. It is, Moore says, all a continuation of the real Gemstone Files - which no other author has touched.
Bruce Roberts' claims regarding 1934 were essentially correct with two exceptions: it took place in 1933, not 1934, and it did not include Aristotle Onassis, who entered the oil shipping picture years later, winning his first oil shipping contract from J. Paul Getty's Tidewater Oil Company in 1937 even before he launched his first oil tanker, the Ariston, in June 1938. Some may be tempted to quit here, concluding Bruce Roberts was either full of crap or, as Martin Cannon contends, "a drunk with a brain tumor" that made him paranoid and irrational, and his claims thus unbelievable. However, the full story was so compelling it justifies at least a little more patience. It seems that as time goes by in the Roberts chronology, his accuracy improves a little. Whether or not his conclusions and connections are valid or invalid, at least in his later writings, he gets the facts a little straighter. NEXT: THE MOB AND THE MEDIA |
Aristotle
Onassis and Ingeborg Dedichen on the Ariston, his
first oil tanker, in June 1938. Onassis could not have been in on an
oil shipping scheme with Rockefeller in 1934, as Bruce Roberts
claims.
Using Inge (and her father's reputation) as
leverage, he struggled through lengthy negotiations before he could
reach an affordable deal. The 15,000-ton Ariston would cost
$800,000, with 25% to be paid in three installments during
construction and the rest at 4.5% interest over ten years. Ariston
meant "the best" in Greek and was also a play on his own
name. And this first super tanker certainly didn't get built
overnight; it typically took 12-18 months to build a ship, and this
one was a first. The Ariston was launched in June 1938 - four
years after Roberts claimed this non-existent Onassis tanker fleet
was carrying oil for the Rockefellers. (66:1) He had only obtained
his first oil shipping contract in 1937, from J. Paul Getty,
shown with Onassis above.
