Short Stories and Long Tales

Prop Wash of the SS Marion Lykes

 By Peter Pezonus CPW News Service

     At the turn of the 19^th Century cattle that had been introduced into Florida from India, Brahmas, were making a stronger go of the mosquito infestations of the Everglades than other breeds.   Soon they were imported to Texas where the Brahmas were crossed with some meatier breeds.  The shipping family that helped make the transition believed that sacred cows make great ground beef.  In 1959 this Florida shipping company would carry another unique cargo to France on the SS Marion Lykes out of New Orleans.  Lee Harvey Oswald.

     The Lykes had built cattle ranches in Texas and one of over 200,000 acres near Alpine in far west Texas.   Their family members had helped to supply the Confederacy with beef during the Civil War by running the Union blockades and by the early 1900’s theirs' was the largest U.S. shipping company.

     On board the SS Marion Lykes in 1959 with Lee Harvey Oswald as he made his trip to France and then the old USSR was his cabin mate, Billy Joe Lord, and two other passengers, Col. George B. Church, Jr. and his wife, from Tampa, Florida.  Bruce Campbell Adamson has asserted that Lord from Midland was hired by Bush Petroleum in Midland in 1976, though at the time of his testimony for the Warren Commission Lord's deposition was in Travis County, Texas, according to the Commission's records.

      Tampa, Florida would hold an important place in the Lykes shipping empire’s ocean-based galaxy of operation.   Before the Cuban revolt of Fidel Castro, Lykes was a major supplier of beef to the island nation controlled by President Fulgensio Batista and by the U.S. government and its unexpressed, but real concordat with the underworld as it was semi-accurately laid out in the Mario Puzo film, The Godfather. 
     By the early 1960's not even the rancher-class of the Southwest upon which the nation depended to enforce its identity and boundaries could be depended on, with some of their own unwilling to hold the line against the threat of Communism or, alternatively, to promote a penchant for U.S. expansionism. Some of their offspring rebelled as William Ayers in Chicago or like Patti Hearst in California had done.  Albert Lasater Maher, for example, whose family had benefitted from the Lykes' introduction of Brahma cattle in Texas had taken a group to Cuba via Europe only to be invited to appear before Congress to explain his circumvention of the U.S. travel ban on Cuban tourism.

     Castro, the liberator turned dictator and despot, nationalized the Lykes' and other U.S. businesses there.  While Col. George Church was the U.S. Army National Guard’s commander in the Tampa region, Tampa would surface in 2013 and 2014 with Gen. David Petraeus' sex scandal with author of All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.   Paula Broadwell and her co-writer, the Washington Post’s Metro Editor, Vernon Loeb who would move from the Washington Post to the Houston Chronicle where he became the Managing Editor, had tied even Petraeus to Tampa, Florida.  Houston, like Tampa and New Orleans, was also a major Lykes port as had been Galveston before the building of the Houston Ship Channel and the opening of Houston as a deepwater port.   Beyond the Petraeus biography with its connections to the militarily aligned socialites who battled with Paula Broadwell over Petraeus' image and relationships from within Tampa's military wives club, Vernon Loeb had also been responsible for  writing the fictionalized and consent-for-war-building accounts of the death of Pat Tillman and the rescue of Jessica Lynch. 

     Fabian Colbachi..... noting that the Golden Triangle's leading underworld figure and Castro enemy was Tampa, Florida's Carlos Trafficante..... has attempted to explain the problems with Cuba up until Castro.  “It was the rich American’s playground and like Chicago or New York or even Las Vegas, the daily grinder was cranked by the big boys who parceled out the goodies to those they controlled...remembering that even Las Vegas, Nevada was a desert without Lake Meade and the U.S. government built hydroelectric dam there.   In Boston it was the unwashed Irish Catholics who fought the friggin’ Civil War on the premise that slavery was the ultimate evil.  It's evil.   On the surface it's more evil than the China Trade that would be its own form of slavery. So the real unspoken motive for the Civil War was the control of the flat rail route to the Pacific and the Middle Eastern opium crops of Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India which could be used as trading chips with the Chinese for their silks and spices.   The Confederates controlled the Southern ports as well as the Gateway to the Far East, California, from Texas along the old Santa Fe route laid out in the 1850's by Jefferson Davis and drooled over by his buddies, Caleb Cushing and Franklin Pierce,” said Colbachi an independent journalist and chronicler of little published U.S. history.  The Italians' pieces of the action came later than the Irish's according to Colbachi, but both licked the boots of the real power brokers in the U.S..

      “When the southerners lost control of the route by losing the Civil War, they joined in with their Northern brethren for control of everything else that was left over.  It’s a completely understandable turn of events.  Boston’s Joseph P. Kennedy, who was drilling oil in Texas with John Modesett and where Hitler's oil agent was William Rhodes Davis, found his sons, JFK and Bobby, exiting the reservation.  William Rhodes Davis was the grandfather of California Governor and shill for Enron, Gray Davis.   In the 1930's Joseph P. Kennedy had also been hob-knobbing with the Saxe-Gotha-Colburgs in England and supporting Hitler’s Reich.  His U.S. business brethren were becoming leery of the possibility that their brand of corporate fascism would be exposed in the U.S. and simultaneously compromised by some concordat with the old European Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs and the Roman Catholics.  Ironically, their ancestors had needed the Roman Church support to win the Civil War via the Irish as much as Texas' independence from Mexico and the Great Southwest route to the Pacific.  Those Catholics had a natural affinity for the Catholics of Irish, Italian and Spanish origins that the real U.S. power brokers watched guardedly even though they may be, as with Murray Farish, writing from within a Catholic Jesuit institution by repeating in fictionalized form the proper line on the JFK assassination and Oswald's part in it.  JFK and his brother, Robert, didn't appear to follow their daddy's example and, it is now widely believed, the brothers had to be reigned in. 
    The Southern cattle ranchers were the North’s line of defense against the Catholic threat from the South and whether Protestant or Catholic they used their power and might to protect their interests at every point,” said Colbachi noting that New Yorker Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are still doing the Northern power elite's bidding regardless of the political maneuvering from either Trump headquarters in Manhattan or Clinton's Foundation headquarter initially sited for Manhattan, but moved to Harlem.  The Clinton's close connections with the Bush family can best be understood within this context according to Colbachi who pointed to the straightforward questioning of Washington reporter Sarah McClendon about Mena, Arkansas.  "Clinton essentially said 'I did not have sexual relations with that airport in Mena," quipped Colbachi.

     The Lykes would have wanted their Cuban cattle shipping interests returned and the Italian and Jewish mafiosos who controlled the island’s clubs and restaurants before Castro would have wanted Lykes’ prime rib to flow freely once again through their seaside playgrounds.

     Why Lee Harvey Oswald took a Lykes ship, the Marion Lykes,  on his way to France and the USSR is a great mystery, but one about which a Jesuit college of Wesbster University in the Gateway to the West of St. Louis, Missouri, found a professor recently writing a fictional account.    English Professor at Webster University, Murray Farish, has written a fascinating account of the Oswald voyage to France from New Orleans in his 2014 book Inappropriate Behavior (Milkweed, 2014).

      Editor of the Missouri Review, Evelyn Sommers has written of Murray Farish’s account:

Set in 1959, “The Passage” is a fictionalized version of Lee Harvey Oswald’s  passage from the United States to LeHavre on the freighter SS Marion Lykes. The voyage was the first stage in his plan to defect to the Soviet Union. The basic facts of the two-week voyage and of Oswald’s behavior follow the rough outline of testimonies to the Warren Commission by Billy Joe Lord, who shared a state room with Oswald on the voyage, and army Lieutenant Colonel George B. Church and his wife, the only other private passengers besides Oswald on the ship. Lord was a recent high school graduate from Midland, Texas; he was traveling to France to attend university. Together with the Churches, he sometimes ate meals with Oswald; all three witnesses reported that Oswald was unfriendly, had a negative attitude and kept to himself. Lord, who saw him most, testified that Oswald had “discussed” religion with him and argued against the existence of God, possibly because he had seen Lord’s Bible. Otherwise, said Lord, Oswald “did not indicate that he might defect to Russia” and “appeared to be a normal, healthy individual, mentally alert, but extremely cynical in his general attitude.”

     Also in Farish's Inappropriate Behavior is an account of the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan, John Wayne Hinkley, Jr.'s life titled "Lubbock Is Not a Place for the Spirit."  Pointing to the fact that Webster University is located not far from the University of Missouri where Dan Rather's mentor at CBS, Walter Cronkite, had attended the University of Missouri School of Journalism and where in the fall of 2015 a teacher had tried to shut down free speech, Colbachi offered another warning.   Columbia is where Washington D.C.'s former Director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Steven Weinberg, is now Professor Emeritus.  Weinberg had moderated the debate between Steve Leen and Gary Webb in 1997 before Webb was declared like many of Fahmy Malak's cases, an unbelievable suicide.  Malak is now living near the Venice, Florida flying school where Muhammad Atta, the leading 911 hijacker, trained in JEB's home state that elected what should have been a jailed felon for the biggest Medicare fraud fine in U.S. history at the time, Republican Bush buddy, Flordia Governor Rick Scott, of Columbia-HCA whose fellow associate at HCA, was Senator and Dr. Bill Frist.  Frist had plugged the hole in Petraeus' lung from a stray bullet from 'friendly fire' at Fort Campbell, Kentucky," said Colbachi, "making Petraeus oh so beholding, but understandably a little jittery when testifying about war in Washington.....a war that claimed in 2005 the ethics professor from West Point, Col. Theodore Westhusing after a bitter confrontation with the General.  "I like most Colonels," said Colbachi, noting Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest's bitter confrontation with General Braxton Bragg whose brother was the Confederacy's chief legal counsel while Braxton was the business partner of William Tecumseh Sherman before the Civil War.   "Sherman was working with George F. Bragg and C. Mora Moss in the San Francisco area for the Sacramento Valley Railroad before the Civil War to secure the railroads around the SF Bay area before returning to Vicksburg and Atlanta to turn the South's rail ambitions into corkscrews," said Colbachi...."and if you need an open window on Sherman's motives for war consider his actions at Ebenezer Creek that most black academics dismiss as a hiccup.  Hiccup?  Shit!  A stomach emptying puke-up of his real feelings about things," said Colbachi noting that 90 percent of the South owned no slaves and were too ignorant to dig up the details of their own 19th Century bamboozle.

     “Well,” said Colbachi, “here we have the assertion based on the actual trip made by Oswald that he was on board the SS Marion Lykes with Col. George B. Church, Jr. and his wife and with Midland, Texan, Billy Joe Lord from Midland where GWB would migrate after Yale and where the Lord name is not insignificant, all of whom gave affidavits to the Warren Commission indicating that Oswald was a Communist, an atheist and a loner.  Was he a ‘patsy’, too?” wonders Colbachi who believes that Col. George Church was church-ing Oswald on his mission to the Soviet Union during the voyage that would take Oswald to the England and then on to Scandinavia before entering the USSR.

     “Look,” said Colbachi, “George B. Church was the second husband of Mrs. Beauford Thrower Bailey of Tampa, Florida, the daughter of Laurence L. Thrower.   In 1978 George Church wrote a biography of Confederate Governor Mitchell of Florida who had held court from Key West to the Panhandle.   You have to remember the importance of Key West.  It was the “key to the West” at the time.  French, Spanish, British and other ships had to round the treacherous tip of Florida to get to the Mississippi and to Brownsville…..the beginning of an overland leg of a journey to San Diego, California up the Rio Grand to the Gila River crossing in Arizona.  Jefferson Davis envisioned that camels from Smyrna purchased from the associate of David Sassoon could haul heavier loads faster West than a mule train, but a railroad was the grand prize.   Caleb Cushing who was negotiating the first U.S. treaty with China was drooling over that route as evidenced by the letters of Jefferson Davis at Rice University that have all but sat silent on the issue under the oversight of its celebrated historians for over two decades and known as the Jefferson Davis Project," said Colbachi. 
     "By 1867 Davis' dream of a railroad was a moot issue as Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and with Chinese coolies to light the mountain pass dynamite fuses on the way to Promontory Point there was nothing standing in the way of the more controllable Midwest route through Omaha to San Francisco.  As Braxton Bragg had learned with Nate Forrest, the pesky Southerners were an independent lot and no more reconcilable to a mutual shared vision of the future than Albert Pike's vision of America could coexist with Washington's and Franklin's that was hardly shared by Caleb Cushing and his cohorts.  Still, so important was Key West to controlling  of the South’s competing ambitions for the China Trade that it was an early mission of the Union Navy to control this tip of Florida so it took it from the Rebels.   It was a ship wrecker’s…..a salvager’s  and pirate’s paradise.... with massive warehouses there to hold the confiscated booty.   Earnest Hemingway’s home in Key West had been built next to the lighthouse where he said the lighthouse keeper could look down into his bedroom to see who he was entertaining.   That was when the light wasn’t moved further north to entice the right prizes and cargos to make an early turn onto the reefs while either coming or going into the Gulf  or Atlantic.  Like the prank used at Nagshead, North Carolina,” said Colbachi.

     That Murray Farish has been awarded a Donald Barthelme prize for literature is another indication to Colbachi that this part of U.S. lore may be more rooted in reality than in fiction.   “In Houston Genevieve P. Lykes Duncan, wife of Green Cameron Duncan, the manager of the Lykes Brothers’ Texas cattle interests shows just how well connected the Texas cattle barons are to the core of defenders of the U.S. image and protection of our sense of truth, justice and the American way…..and sensitive about losing a strong grip on U.S. mythology and its accompanying realities.”
     Sadly, in 1968 the daughter of Genevieve Lykes Duncan was vacationing in Port Aransas, Texas with her friend, the daughter of San Antonio newspaper magnate, Houston Harriman Harte, when Harte's daughter was stabbed to death in her sleep....a murder that was never solved.  Houston Harte and his brother, Ed Harte, donated their massive 66,000 ranch near Big Bend, Texas to the Texas Department of Parks and wildlife in a region that was not only close to the Lykes cattle ranch operation there, but also to the CIA connected Terlingua airport covered in Peter Brewton's 1992, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush that was as a supply drop like that in Mena, Arkansas.  "That information has never been refuted," Brewton has claimed and which Winsip Custer has traced in his article Hiding Murder.

     Donald Barthelme's place in the evolution of Houston's contribution to American literature has been explored in detail by Alexander De Large and by Buckley Wright Bragg.  There it is noted that the old Waldec-Nassau Plantation in Texas was owned by ancestors of CBS's Dan Rather where after the Civil War Jefferson Davis' vision of a camel caravan across the Southwest....which was obviously not delivering cotton to the Apaches.....had quartered the Buffalo Soldiers who did the double duty of handling the cranky camels and enforcing Reconstruction up until the Transcontinental Railroad was completed.  "Now you can begin to understand just why Dan Rather and Donald Rumsfeld co-owned the Tecolote Ranch in New Mexico and why Rumsfeld owned Misery Plantation in Maryland where Fred Bailey, AKA Frederick Douglas, had been 'renditioned' before being sent back to slavery in the South," said Colbachi.  "It's all a big game, folks, and it's bad for you," said Colbachi noting that the 1999 book by Stanford University's Thomas Layton, Voyage of the Frolic, that laid out Fred Baileys work in the Gardiner Shipyard of Baltimore laying the hulls of the fastest opium clippers.  "Everything of real historical awareness was closing in on these powerful bloodsuckers in 1999 which tells us just why Y2K was such a pivotal year for all manor of crap and corruption," said Colbachi.
    Colbachi has written about the 2015 film Truth about the Dan Rather and Mary Mapes coverage of the 2004 election using the 1972 Ellington Field Texas Air National Guard memos of JEB Bush's older brother, GWB.  "More bamboozling, folks," said Colbachi who note that the story was available to Mary Mapes and Dan Rather in 2000, but they didn't unpack it then with a similar botch job.
    "How do I know?" he asked.   "Well, Green Cameron Duncan, Jr. operates an investment company from Teseque, New Mexico, the New Society Fund, from the home of Cormac McCarthy, author of Blood Meridian, whose novel was placed at the top in the U.S. literary lexicon by Yale's Dumbledore, Harold Bloom.  Here we can see the obvious shift from the essence of American literature found in the message of say, Herman Melville, with Moby Dick and Billy Budd, to McCarthy's message that Rumsfeld and his neo-con buddies lick up like a bevy of vampire bats.....'War is God'.   You can see the festering boils on American culture putrefy in two centuries just by reading the lack of honest prophetic energy even if it changes nothing, but our understanding of ourselves. That's sightly different from Melville's message or General Smedley Butler's who told us the truth of the matter.....'war is a racket,'" said Colbachi.

     Indeed, Genevieve P. Lykes appears on the Shadyside property deeds transaction in Houston with William Stamps Farish, head of George H.W. Bush's blind-trust and Bush insiders John H. Blaffer, John B. Holmes, Oveta Culp Hobby, Corbin Robinson, Libby Rice Farish, Hugo V. Neuhaus and others (Harris County deeds N106812 and C935527).   Genevieve’s husband, Green Cameron Duncan,  was a prominent feature in the Texas cattle business as evidenced by his obituary following his death in 2004.
    "The essence of this Houston and Texas connection to all manor of bamboozling has been covered in the article Truth In Search of A Unicorn and far be it for me to expand," said Colbachi.

    Colbachi noted that John B. Holmes was the Harris County District Attorney whose crime lab like Clinton's in Arkansas headed by Fahmy Malak, had turned to mush.   Harris County would import to Houston, Michael Bromwich, the leading prosecutor and what Colbachi calls the "firewaller" in the Iran-Contra case who protected the tip of the American political pyramid.  "As Prince Machiavelli may have said.....'one cannot underestimate the power of a well-paid, shady, but trusted physician to lay bare the harshest of realities to a cynical and unbelieving public,'" Colbachi reasoned.

    “Well, in 2000 Donald Barthelme’s associate at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum, Mark Lombardi, died in Brooklyn by self-hanging…..kind of like those three Muslim terrorists who hung themselves on the same day in the same way at Guantanamo in 2006....adding to an interesting array of suspicious deaths in that Y2K election year six years earlier and five before the 911 boondoggle that Dr. David Griffin says you have to believe in some serious miracles to have had it happen as it did…..and considering that Lombardi had graphically charted the Iran-Contra network through Houston, Texas where in an earlier election year of 1992 Peter Brewton had written at the Houston Post (Houston, where Vernon Loeb  is now at the Houston Chronicle) with Brewton's articles on the S&L scandal and its well-documented connections to the Iran-Contra network….the 1992 book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush….that looks eerily similar to the Operation Zapata or Bay of Pigs plan for Cuba that was being redesigned for Nicaragua in the 80’s,” said Colbachi.

     “A fictional account of Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to the old USSR could be written in so many ways, but clearly one way would be to hold to Warren Commission’s assessment….that Lee was the lone gunman….warped by his sociopathic tendencies and hatred of the U.S.,” said Colbachi.  “If I were going to write it differently this little trip on the SS Marion Lykes by Oswald, Lord and Church would also be a good place to start,” said Colbachi, “since so much was riding on getting Cuba back into the hands of those who had staked such a lucrative claim there.    These are not international, world-class merchantilists for no reason and with a long history of plowing dangerous waters and delivering all kinds of goods near and far, even as Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes laid out U.S. drug policy and as his surgeon father coined the phrase 'anesthetics' for the New England Brahmin,” said Colbachi adding…. “but as with the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra…..hell, the Iraq War based on yellow cake while totally missing the 15 Saudi hijackers of 911 or that the Bin Ladens had bought a Houston airport, Houston Gulf Manor, they get their intelligence wrong as hell.   Unless, that is, as Anthony Sutton has said…..the West created the USSR as the ‘best enemy money can buy,’ kind of like we created the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Al Qaeda to fight the Russians we had financed for more war-making and we left Cuba un-invaded as a hammer-in-perpetuity with which to pound out the U.S. taxpayers blood money through ever increasing Pentagon protection and hush-up pablum.”