Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

James Van Allen - Wikipedia
The Van Allen radiation belts were named after him, following his discovery using Geiger–Müller tube instruments on the 1958 satellites (Explorer 1, Explorer 3, and Pioneer during the International Geophysical Year. Van Allen en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Van…

was introduced to geophysics research under the tutelage of physics professor Thomas C. Poulter.

Poulter had been chosen by Admiral Richard E. Byrd as his chief scientist for the 1933–1935 Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition.

Thomas Charles Poulter (March 3, 1897 – June 4, 1978)

was a scientist and antarctic explorer who worked at the Armour Institute of Technology and SRI International, where he was an associate director.

While he was a physics professor at Iowa Wesleyan College he recognized James Van Allen as a student and put him to work, at 35

cents an hour, preparing seismic and magnetic equipment for the Antarctic Expedition.

After his first expedition he became the Scientific Director of the Armour Research Foundation at the Armour Institute of Technology (later Illinois Institute of Technology) where he developed

the Antarctic Snow Cruiser (a.k.a. "Penguin 1").

The Poulter Laboratory at SRI International was named after him. After he retired from managing Poulter Labs he founded the Bio Sonar Lab and Marine Mammal Study Center for SRI in the Coyote Hills outside of Fremont CA.

He became

interested in seals after visiting the elephant seal colony at Año Nuevo Island off the coast of California in 1961.

SRI employs about 2,100 people. Sarnoff Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of SRI since 1988, was fully integrated into SRI in January 2011.
Sarnoff

Corporation was a research and development company specializing in vision, video and semiconductor technology. It was named for David Sarnoff, the longtime leader of RCA and NBC, and had headquarters in West Windsor Township, New Jersey, though with a Princeton address.

The

cornerstone of Sarnoff Corporation's David Sarnoff Research Center in the Princeton vicinity was laid just before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Although the facility existed under the name David Sarnoff Research Center for many years, Sarnoff Corporation was only created

as an independently operating business following the purchase by General Electric (GE) of RCA in the late 1980s.

On the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war, Camp X had opened for the purpose of training Allied agents from the Special Operations

Executive (SOE), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intended to be dropped behind enemy lines for clandestine missions as saboteurs and spies.

Camp X was established December 6, 1941 by the chief of British Security

Co-ordination (BSC), Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba and a close confidant of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.[7] The camp was originally designed to link Britain and the US at a time when the US was forbidden by the Neutrality Act to be

directly involved in World War II.

One of the unique features of Camp X was Hydra, a highly sophisticated telecommunications relay station established in May 1942 by engineer Benjamin deForest Bayly.

At the onset of World War II, Sarnoff served on Eisenhower's communications

staff, arranging expanded radio circuits for NBC to transmit news from the invasion of France in June 1944. In France, Sarnoff arranged for the restoration of the Radio France station in Paris that the Germans destroyed and oversaw the construction of a radio transmitter

powerful enough to reach all of the allied forces in Europe, called Radio Free Europe.

Radio Free Europe was created and grew in its early years through the efforts of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), an anti-communist CIA front organization that was formed by

Allen Dulles in New York City in 1949.

The original core of Blinken OSA’s holdings is the former archives of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, previously based in Munich and New York.

Blinken Open Society Archives (abbreviated as Blinken OSA) is an

archival repository and laboratory that aims to explore new ways of assessing, contextualizing, presenting, and making use of archival documents both in a professional and a consciously activist way. It was founded by George Soros in 1995, and opened in 1996 as a department of

the at the Central European University. Originally called simply Open Society Archives (OSA), in 2015 it was renamed Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives after receiving a major donation from the couple.

Donald Mayer Blinken (born November 11, 1925) is an American

businessman and former diplomat. He was a director and one of the founders of E. M. Warburg Pincus & Company, an investment bank in New York. He served as the board chairman of the State University of New York from 1978 to 1990 and as United States Ambassador to Hungary from

1994 to 1997. His son, Antony Blinken, is the current United States Secretary of State.

Henry Kissinger was then appointed to Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies. He taught at Georgetown's Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service for several

years in the late 1970s. In 1982, with the help of a loan from the international banking firm of E.M. Warburg, Pincus and Company, Kissinger founded a consulting firm, Kissinger Associates.

State Dept Topdaddy Antony Blinken attended the Dalton School in New York City until 1971

Donald Barr, author of Space Relations, was the headmaster of the school before heading up to Hackley in Tarrytown by Kykuit. Antony moved to Paris with his mother Judith and Samuel Pisar, whom she married following her divorce from Donald. Pisar was the lawyer and confidant of

British publisher Robert Maxwell.

In 1950, Sam Pisar worked for the United Nations in New York and Paris. He returned to Washington in 1960 to become a member of John F. Kennedy's economic and foreign policy task force. He was also an advisor to the State Department, the Senate

and House committees.

Pisar was the longtime lawyer and confidant of Robert “my daughter blew People Magazines Sexiest Man alive in a toilet stall” Maxwell. Pisar was possibly the last person to speak to Maxwell before he allegedly fell from his luxury yacht in November 1991.

Pisar co-founded Yad Vashem-France, was a Director of the Foundation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, and a Trustee of the Brookings Institution Washington.

In 2017, Antony Blinken co-founded WestExec Advisors, a political strategy advising firm, with Michèle Flournoy, Sergio

Aguirre, and Nitin Chadda. Lisa Monaco, Robert O. Work, Avril Haines, David S. Cohen, and Jen Psaki have also been WestExec employees.

Although WestExec does not disclose its list of clients, some have been reported. Its clients include Google's Jigsaw; Windward, an Israeli

artificial intelligence firm; Shield AI, a drone surveillance company; and "Fortune 100 types".
Under a financial disclosure filed by the Biden transition team in December 2020, Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken declared that clients of WestExec included "investment giant

Blackstone, Bank of America, Facebook, Uber, McKinsey & Company, the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, the pharmaceutical company Gilead, the investment bank Lazard, Boeing, AT&T, the Royal Bank of Canada, LinkedIn and the venerable Sotheby's". In a similar form, Director of

National Intelligence-designate Avril Haines disclosed that WestExec had worked with data-mining company Palantir Technologies.

Palantir Technologies is a public American software company that specializes in big data analytics. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded

by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp in 2003. The company's name is derived from The Lord of the Rings where the magical palantíri were "seeing-stones," described as indestructible balls of crystal used for communication and to see events in

other parts of the world.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company initially struggled to find investors. According to Karp, Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz doodled through an entire meeting, and a Kleiner Perkins executive lectured the founders about the

inevitable failure of their company. The only early investments were $2 million from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and $30 million from Thiel himself and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund.
Lord of Rings theme is under 10 min to SRI.

SRI's first research project investigated whether the guayule plant could be used as a source of natural rubber. During World War II, rubber was imported into the U.S. and was subject to shortages and strict rationing.

SRI's first economic study was for the United States Air

Force. In 1947, the Air Force wanted to determine the expansion potential of the U.S. aircraft industry; SRI found that it would take too long to escalate production in an emergency. In 1948, SRI began research and consultation with Chevron Corporation to develop an artificial

substitute for tallow and coconut oil in soap production; SRI's investigation confirmed the potential of dodecylbenzene as a suitable replacement. Later, Procter & Gamble used the substance as the basis for Tide laundry detergent.

The institute performed much of the early

research on air pollution and the formation of ozone in the lower atmosphere. SRI sponsored the First National Air Pollution Symposium in Pasadena, California, in November 1949.

In April 1953, Walt and Roy Disney hired SRI (and in particular, Harrison Price) to consult on their

proposal for establishing an amusement park in Burbank, California.

Operation Deep Freeze (OpDFrz or ODF) is codename for a series of United States missions to Antarctica, beginning with "Operation Deep Freeze I" in 1955–56, followed by "Operation Deep Freeze II", "Operation

Deep Freeze III", and so on. (There was an initial operation before Admiral Richard Byrd proposed 'Deep Freeze').

The expedition transpired over the Antarctic summer of November 1955 to April 1956, and was filmed by the U.S. Navy and Walt Disney Studios. For having designed

the emblem of Task Force 43, Walt Disney became an honorary member of the expedition.

Edsel Ford was a major art benefactor in Detroit and also financed Admiral Richard Byrd's polar explorations.

David Harold "Dry Hole" Byrd (24 April 1900 – 14 September 1986) was a noted Texan

producer of petroleum, and a co-founder of the Civil Air Patrol. Byrd's cousin, polar explorer Richard E. Byrd, named Antarctica's Harold Byrd Mountains for him.

Civil Air Patrol was conceived in the late 1930s by aviation advocate Gill Robb Wilson, who foresaw general

aviation's potential to supplement America's military operations. With the help of New York Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, in his capacity as then-Director of the Office of Civilian Defense, CAP was created with Administrative Order 9, signed by LaGuardia on 1 December 1941 and

published 8 December 1941. Civil Air Patrol had 90 days to prove themselves to Congress. Major General John F. Curry was appointed as the first national commander. Texas oilman David Harold Byrd was a co-founder of CAP.

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations

stated that available records "lent substantial credence to the possibility that Oswald and [David] Ferrie had been involved in the same [Civil Air Patrol] C.A.P. unit during the same period of time." Committee investigators found six witnesses who said that Oswald had been

present at Civil Air Patrol meetings headed by Ferrie.

In 1937, the Carraway Byrd Corporation purchased the Texas School Book Depository, but they defaulted on the loan. It was sold at public auction July 4, 1939 and purchased by D. Harold Byrd.
Under Byrd's ownership, the

building remained empty until 1940, when it was leased by grocery wholesaler John Sexton & Co. Sexton Foods used this location as the branch office for sales, manufacturing, and distribution for the south and southwest United States.

Sexton Quality Foods eventually became US

Foodservice in 1997. The company was established in Chicago in 1883 by John Sexton.

John Sexton married Anna Louise Bartleman (born May 22, 1866 Chicago) on August 11, 1886 in Chicago. (Anna Louise's parents, Christian and Theresa (Albrecht) Bartleman had emigrated from

Saxe-Coburg Gotha, Germany in the mid-1850s.)

In 1941, Sexton introduced a line of frozen fruits and vegetables. The frozen food line was discontinued in mid-1942 due to the United States entering World War II and the need for Sexton to focus on providing groceries to the war

effort.

On November 16, 1960, John Sexton & Co issued 200,000 shares (26.76%) of the 747,437 shares outstanding at $16.50 per share in the over the counter market (NASDAQ) to become a public company. 33,000 of the shares represented new financing of the company for use as

working capital. The 200,000 share offer were oversubscribed and closed at $16.50 per share. Hornblower & Weeks was the managing underwriter.

Hornblower was active in financing automobile companies in the first half of the 20th century, including Dodge Motors, General Motors,

and Hudson Motor Car Company.
The firm, which by the 1970s, was known as Hornblower & Weeks, Hemphill, Noyes and later, Hornblower, Weeks, Noyes & Trask, was acquired by Loeb, Rhoades & Co. to form Loeb, Rhoades, Hornblower & Co.

Loeb, Rhoades & Co. was a Wall Street brokerage

firm founded in 1931 and acquired in 1979 by Sanford I. Weill's Shearson Hayden Stone. Although the firm would operate as Shearson Loeb Rhoades for two years, the firm would ultimately be acquired in 1981 by American Express to form Shearson/American Express and three years later

Shearson Lehman/American Express.

In 1956, Loeb, Rhoades acquired a controlling interest in the Cuban Atlantic Sugar Company and sold its stake on December 31, 1958, a day before the Cuban Revolution.

Sanford “Sandy” Weill began serving as president of American Express Co. in

1983 and as chairman and CEO of American Express's insurance subsidiary, Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, in 1984. Weill was succeeded by his protégé, Peter A. Cohen, who became the youngest head of a Wall Street firm. While at American Express, Weill began grooming his newest

protégé, Jamie Dimon, the future CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

In 1987, Sandy acquired Gulf Insurance. The next year, he paid $1.5 billion for Primerica, the parent company of Smith Barney and the A. L. Williams insurance company. In 1989, he acquired Drexel Burnham Lambert's retail

brokerage outlets. In 1992, he paid $722 million to buy a 27% share of Travelers Insurance, which had gotten into trouble because of bad real estate investments.

In 1993 he reacquired his old Shearson brokerage (now Shearson Lehman) from American Express for $1.2 billion. By

the end of the year, he had completely taken over Travelers Corp in a $4 billion stock deal and officially began calling his corporation Travelers Group Inc. In 1996 he added to his holdings, at a cost of $4 billion, the property and casualty operations of Aetna Life & Casualty.

In September 1997 Weill acquired Salomon Inc., the parent company of Salomon Brothers Inc. for over $9 billion in stock.

In April 1998, Travelers Group announced an agreement to undertake the $76 billion merger between Travelers and Citicorp, and the merger was completed on

October 8, 1998. The possibility remained that the merger would run into problems connected with federal law. Ever since the Glass–Steagall Act, banking and insurance businesses had been kept separate.

To speed up the process, they recruited to the Board of Directors former

President Gerald Ford (Republican) and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (who served during the Democratic Clinton Administration) whom Weill was close to.

In 2001, Weill became a Class A director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

City Bank of New York was

chartered by New York State on June 16, 1812, with $2 million of capital.

The company's name was changed to The National City Bank of New York in 1865 after it joined the new U.S. national banking system, and it became the largest American bank by 1895. It became the first

contributor to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1913, and the following year it inaugurated the first overseas branch of a U.S. bank in Buenos Aires, although the bank had been active in plantation economies, such as the Cuban sugar industry, since the mid-19th century.

The bank introduced its First National City Charge Service credit card—popularly known as the "Everything card" and later to become MasterCard—in 1967.

Weill served as a Cornell Trustee for many years, and in 1998 he endowed Cornell's medical school, now known as the

Weill Cornell Medical College. As chairman of the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College and an emeritus member of the Board of Trustees of Cornell University, Weill orchestrated a $400 million donation to Cornell, of which he and his wife personally contributed $250

million.

Weill Cornell Medicine is affiliated with NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Hospital for Special Surgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Rockefeller University, all of which are located nearby on York Avenue.

Weill Cornell became

affiliated with New York Hospital, now NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital, in 1913. The institutions opened a joint campus in Yorkville in 1932.

In the 1930s, the neighborhood was the home base of Fritz Julius Kuhn's German American Bund, the most notorious pro-Nazi group in 1930s

United States, which led to spontaneous protests by other residents. This led him to investigate independently the activities of Nazi and other fascist groups, leading to the formation of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda

and Certain Other Propaganda Activities.

The committee's anti-communist investigations are often associated with McCarthyism, although Joseph McCarthy himself (as a U.S. Senator) had no direct involvement with the House committee.

The resulting committee, commonly known as the

Fish Committee, undertook extensive investigations of people and organizations suspected of being involved with or supporting communist activities in the United States.

Beginning in November 1934, the committee investigated allegations of a fascist plot to seize the White House,

known as the "Business Plot". Contemporary newspapers widely reported the plot as a hoax. However contemporary sources and some of those involved, such as Gen. Smedley Butler, confirmed the validity of such a plot.

Roy Marcus Cohn (/koʊn/; February 20, 1927 – August 2, 1986) was

an American lawyer and prosecutor who came to prominence for his role as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954, when he assisted McCarthy's investigations of suspected communists.

In the 1930s, Meyer Lansky and his gang stepped

outside their usual criminal activities to break up rallies held by the pro-Nazi German-American Bund. He recalled a particular rally in Yorkville, a German neighborhood in Manhattan, that he and fourteen other associates disrupted:
The stage was decorated with a swastika and a

picture of Adolf Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We threw some of them out the windows. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit

back and accept insults.

During World War II, Lansky was also instrumental in helping the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)'s Operation Underworld, in which the government recruited criminals to watch out for German infiltrators and submarine-borne saboteurs. Lansky helped

arrange a deal with the government via a high-ranking United States Navy official.

This deal would secure the release of Luciano from prison; in exchange, the Mafia would provide security for the warships that were being built along the docks in New York Harbor. German

submarines were sinking Allied shipping in great numbers along the eastern seaboard and the Caribbean coast, and there was great fear of attack or sabotage by Nazi sympathizers. Lansky connected the ONI with Luciano, who reportedly instructed Joseph Lanza to prevent sabotage on

the New York waterfront.

Lansky is credited with having "controlled" compromising pictures of a sexual nature featuring former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover with his longtime aide, Clyde Tolson. In his book, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover,

biographer Anthony Summers cites multiple primary sources regarding Lansky's use of blackmail to gain influence with politicians, policemen and judges. One such stage for the acquisition of blackmail materials were orgies held by late attorney and Lansky protégé Roy Cohn and

liquor magnate Lewis Rosenstiel, who had lasting ties with the Mafia from his bootleg operations during Prohibition.

Cohn worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy and allegedly influenced the judge in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, indicating he had significant political

influence, probably enhanced by knowledge of Lansky's operations and contacts both during World War II and in Cuba. Whether Cohn continued any part of Operation Underworld remains a matter of controversy.

In November 1961 William Harvey was ordered to activate an assassination

plot against Fidel Castro. This became part of what became known as the ZR/RIFLE project. Harvey decided to transfer David Sanchez Morales from Mexico City to the JM WAVE station. Johnny Roselli was also recruited into the project.
Roselli persuaded Santos Trafficante, the senior

Mafia figure in Cuba, to join the conspiracy. Meyer Lansky also became involved in this plot and was reportedly offering a million-dollar reward for the Cuban leader's murder. Richard Cain, a specialist in electronics and wire taps, was also recruited by Roselli. Cain took part

in a failed attempt in March 1961 to poison Castro.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy instructed CIA director John McCone, to halt all covert operations aimed at Cuba. A few days later he discovered that William Harvey had ignored this order and had dispatched

three commando teams into Cuba to prepare for what he believed would be an inevitable invasion. Kennedy was furious and as soon as the Cuban Missile Crisis was over, Harvey was removed as commander of ZR/RIFLE. On 30th October, 1962, RFK terminated "all sabotage operations"

against Cuba. As a result of President Kennedy's promise to Nikita Khrushchev that he would not invade Cuba, Operation Mongoose was disbanded.

In March I960, President Dwight Eisenhower of the United States approved a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plan to overthrow Fidel

Castro. The plan involved a budget of $13 million to train "a paramilitary force outside Cuba for guerrilla action." The strategy was organised by Richard Bissell and Richard Helms.
In September 1960, Allen W. Dulles, the director of the CIA, initiated talks with two leading

figures of the Mafia, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. Later, other crime bosses such as Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante and Meyer Lansky became involved in this plot against Castro.

The CIA JM/WAVE station in Miami served as operational headquarters for Operation Mongoose.

The head of the station was Ted Shackley and over the next few months became very involved in the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. One of Lansdale's first decisions was to appoint William Harvey as head of Task Force W. Harvey's brief was to organize a broad range of

activities that would help to bring down Castro's government.
Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA Technical Services Division was asked to come up with proposals that would undermine Castro's popularity with the Cuban people.
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy also decided that General

Edward Lansdale (Staff Member of the President's Committee on Military Assistance) should be placed in charge of the operation.

One of those who served under him in this job was Daniel Ellsberg. He liked Lansdale because of his commitment to democracy.

In 1969 Daniel Ellsberg

was a man tormented. After months of working with Kissinger, having seen his real peace plan, which was to pressure Hanoi through the Soviet Union and Communist China (hence détente and the China initiative), and to destroy Cambodia with bombs, rather than to talk sincerely in

Paris; having been invited to San Clemente three times to tell Kissinger about "options" and urging him to read the Pentagon Papers, which, incredibly, he had not looked at, Ellsberg felt he had to repudiate everything he had done for the previous ten years.

The Pentagon Papers

leak came at a particularly sensitive time. We were just three and a half weeks away from Kissinger's secret trip to China, and the SALT talks were under way.
In 1971, Jon Huntsman Jr. visited the White House. He was 11 years old, and his father was a businessman and adviser to

Richard Nixon. The young Huntsman, the story goes, met Henry Kissinger that day and helped carry his luggage to the car.

When Huntsman asked where Kissinger was going, the national security adviser said, "Don't tell anyone — I'm going to China."
Almost 40 years later, Huntsman

got his own historic call to China, when President Obama named him the U.S. ambassador. Later as Deputy U.S. Trade Representative under George W. Bush, he launched global trade negotiations in Doha in 2001 and guided the accession of China into the World Trade Organization.

The WTO precursor General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was established by a multilateral treaty of 23 countries in 1947 after World War II in the wake of other new multilateral institutions dedicated to international economic cooperation—such as the World Bank (founded

1944) and the International Monetary Fund (founded 1944 or 1945). A comparable international institution for trade, named the International Trade Organization never started as the U.S. and other signatories did not ratify the establishment treaty, and so GATT slowly became a de

facto international organization.

The core of the World Trade Center was built between 1966 and 1975, at a cost of $400 million. The idea was suggested by David Rockefeller to help stimulate urban renewal in Lower Manhattan, and his brother Nelson signed the legislation to build

it. The buildings at the complex were designed by Minoru Yamasaki. In 1998, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey decided to privatize it by leasing the buildings to a private company to manage.

The idea of establishing a World Trade Center in New York City was first

proposed in 1943. The New York State Legislature passed a bill authorizing New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey to begin developing plans for the project, but the plans were put on hold in 1949.

As a New York City prosecutor and District Attorney in the 1930s and early 1940s,

Dewey was relentless in his effort to curb the power of the American Mafia and of organized crime in general. Most famously, he successfully prosecuted Mafioso kingpin Charles "Lucky" Luciano on charges of forced prostitution in 1936. He was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison,

but during World War II an agreement was struck with the Department of the Navy through his associate Meyer Lansky to provide naval intelligence.

Luciano and his close associates started working for gambler Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein, who immediately saw the potential windfall

from Prohibition and educated Luciano on running bootleg alcohol as a business. Luciano, Costello, and Genovese started their own bootlegging operation with financing from Rothstein.

The Commission is the governing body of the American Mafia, formed in 1931 by Charles "Lucky"

Luciano following the Castellammarese War. The Commission replaced the title of capo di tutti i capi ("boss of all bosses"), held by Salvatore Maranzano before his murder, with a ruling committee that consists of the bosses of the Five Families of New York City, as well as the

bosses of the Chicago Outfit and the Buffalo crime family.

The Commission consisted of seven family bosses: the leaders of New York's Five Families: Charlie "Lucky" Luciano, Vincent Mangano, Tommy Gagliano, Joseph Bonanno, and Joe Profaci; Chicago Outfit boss Al Capone; and

Buffalo family boss Stefano Magaddino.

The Pizza Connection [not Pizza Gate, the word “pizza” was substituted for French as in French Connection Heroin ratline] trial centered on a Mafia-run enterprise that involved processing heroin in Sicily, morphine purchased from Turkey

and Southwest Asia, as well as cocaine from South America, for final distribution of the drugs in the United States through independently owned pizza parlor fronts as the money was laundered through several banks and brokerages in the United States and overseas. The enterprise

was estimated to have imported US$1.65 billion of heroin to the United States, namely the Northeast and the Midwest, between 1975 and 1984.
For about a year, the prosecution, consisting of Richard A. Martin, Louis J. Freeh, Robert Stewart, Robert B. Bucknam and Andrew C.

McCarthy, gathered hundreds of witnesses, wiretaps, and thousands of documents, which cost several million dollars to complete.

To fill the void of the rounded up Commission a new character appears:

Semion Yudkovich Mogilevich[3] (Ukrainian: Семен Юдкович Могилевич,

romanized: Semén Júdkovych Mohylévych [seˈmɛn ˈjudkowɪtʃ moɦɪˈlɛwɪtʃ]; born June 30, 1946) is a Ukrainian-born, Russian organized crime boss. He quickly built a highly structured criminal organization, in the mode of a traditional American mafia family. Indeed, many of the

organization’s 250 members are his relatives. He is described by agencies in the European Union and United States as the "boss of bosses" of most Russian Mafia syndicates in the world, he is believed to direct a vast criminal empire and is described by the FBI as "the most

dangerous mobster in the world."

Mogilevich's nicknames include "Don Semyon" and "The Brainy Don" (because of his business acumen). According to US diplomatic cables, he controls RosUkrEnergo, a company actively involved in Russia–Ukraine gas disputes, and a partner of

Raiffeisen Bank.
Mogilevich currently lives freely in Moscow, and has three children. He is most closely associated with the Solntsevskaya Bratva crime group. He has close alliances with political figures including Yury Luzhkov, the former Mayor of Moscow, Dmytro Firtash, and

Leonid Derkach, former head of the Security Service of Ukraine.

Firtash is also cited as having part ownership of SCL Group and thus Cambridge Analytica through various shell companies, by the U.S. documentary Active Measures, in its breakdown of the Russian–U.S. relationship

before and after the 2016 election.

SCL/Cambridge Analytica described itself as a "global election management agency". The company's leaders and owners had close ties to the Conservative Party (UK), the British royal family and the British military, and its investors included

some of the largest donors to the Conservative Party.

Among the investors in SCL were banker Paul David Ashburner Nix, whose son Alexander Nix was to become a close associate of Oakes. One of the former directors is Lord Ivar Mountbatten.

In 2005, "with a glitzy exhibit" at

Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), "the United Kingdom's largest showcase for military technology", SCL demonstrated its capacity in "influence operations": "to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception" on the public of a big city like London.

SCL's involvement in the political world has been primarily in the developing world where it has been used by the military and politicians to study and manipulate public opinion and political will. It uses what have been called "psy ops" to provide insight into the thinking of

the target audience. SCL claimed to be able to help foment coups. According to its website, SCL has influenced elections in Italy, Latvia, Ukraine, Albania, Romania, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Mauritius, India, Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Colombia, Antigua,

St. Vincent & the Grenadines, St. Kitts & Nevis, and Trinidad & Tobago.

Emerdata Limited was established in August 2017, by many of the people involved in Cambridge Analytica.

Emerdata's board of directors included Frontier Services Group officer Johnson Chun Shun Ko, a Hong

Kong businessman linked to Erik Prince (founder of Blackwater), Cambridge Analytica investor Rebekah Mercer, and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix.
Frontier Services Group (FSG) is a Chinese Africa-focused security, aviation, and logistics company founded and led until April

2021 by Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide. Prince has described FSG's main corporate mission as helping Chinese businesses to work safely in Africa. The company operates logistical projects for shipping routes in Africa, and also conducts high-risk evacuations

from conflict zones. FSG's area of service has since expanded to the Belt and Road areas of Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.

In 2019, FSG signed contracts to support China's One Belt and One Road initiative, including building a series of bases in China's Xinjiang,

where the internment camps of ethnic Uyghurs attracted widespread allegations of human rights abuse. Chinese Communist Party officials in Xinjiang reported that FSG's work would enhance the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. FSG's CEO, Dongyi Hua, was

the key driver in investing the re-education camps.

Frontier Services Group is partially owned by CITIC Group, a state-run investment fund owned and controlled by the People's Republic of China. CITIC is FSG's largest shareholder.

State-run Chinese conglomerate CITIC Group is

conducting due diligence on CEFC China Energy's stake in onshore oil fields in Abu Dhabi as CITIC prepares, under the Chinese government's direction, to possibly take over CEFC's energy business, said two sources with knowledge of the matter.

Lost in the controversy about the

over-the-top public urging of China to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden is the fact that Hunter Biden accepted a million dollar diamond, ostensibly for access to the UN World Food Program WFP, from Ye Jianming of CEFC China Energy, then an agent of the Chinese government and/or

army and since disappeared. Also disappeared, or still undisclosed: money UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres' took from Gulbenkian Foundation, linked to CEFC China Energy.

Hunter offered to use his contacts to help identify investment opportunities for Ye’s company, CEFC

China Energy, in liquefied-natural-gas projects in the United States. After the dinner, Ye sent a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter’s hotel room with a card thanking him for their meeting....

Now in July The New Yorker reported on CEFC and Hunter Biden, in his role with World Food

Program USA The paragraphs: "Hunter was on the board of the World Food Program USA, a nonprofit that generates support for the U.N. World Food Programme, and he had hoped that Ye would make a large aid donation.

WFP was established in 1961 after the 1960 Food and Agriculture

Organization (FAO) Conference, when George McGovern, director of the US Food for Peace Programmes, proposed establishing a multilateral food aid programme.

In 1972, Strobe Talbott, along with his friends Robert Reich (a fellow Rhodes Scholar) and David E. Kendall, rallied to

his friends Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to help them in their Texas campaign to elect George McGovern president of the United States.