THE HISTORY OF THE CIA: Red Scare, Blackmail, and the Blue Suite [pt. 5.2]

I found out early in the marriage that my husband was bisexual he was involved with Roy Cohn the assistant counsel to Senator McCarthy this is Susan Kaufman ex wife to renowned bootlegger and founder of Schenley Liquor Corporation Lewis Rosenstiel that he was a gay boy in this clip Susan is describing a situation she outlined in a 1970 affidavit under oath delivered to the New York State Legislative Committee on crime in that affidavit which remains sealed to this day Susan testified in meticulous detail of her witnessing of secret homosexual sex parties at the Plaza Hotel in

New York City in the 1950s between her husband and other powerful deep political actors Through her husband Susan was brought into room 2 33 of the famous Plaza Hotel otherwise known as the Blue Suite where she witnessed her husband bootlegger Lewis Rosenstiel engaged in sexual activities with such figures as FBI Director J Edgar Hoover Catholic cardinal and Archbishop of New York Francis Spellman Joe McCarthy's assistant counsel and future New York power broker And star lawyer Roy Cohn and several other unidentified young men these testimonies remained sealed in the New York Department of justice vault until

Susan broke her silence and testified publicly in the 1990s in an interview in her house in France today I believe that these allegations are especially revealing as they appear to uncover the long standing tradition of sexual blackmail as an instrumental tool within the depths of the American deep state What allegedly happened at the Blue Suite in the mid 1950s would serve as a blueprint for future intelligence affiliated blackmail operations such as the Epstein case that continues to unravel to this day in today's episode we will be embarking on part 2 of our 3 part Gladio

mini series as always I make these videos as stand alone products so I recommend you stick around if this is your first video you've encountered on my channel The other videos on my channel will always be there later and will hopefully give you the fuller picture you may be wondering what the Blue Suite story has to do with our previous part on the Italian election of 1948 but I promise many of the same characters we discussed last time will show up today and this analysis will hopefully help explain some of their actions and motives this

will be especially true For the next episode as well where we'll be outlining the origins of the French connection arguably one of the most prominent heroin trade routes of the Cold War, and also arguably where Gladio started in France furthermore, blackmail plays a key role in future Gladio operations across Europe and is often an overlooked piece of this complex narrative will be engaging in a sort of network analysis today as today we will be diving deep Into the mock of the American underworld and attempting to untangle the key players their connections, their motivations and most

importantly how the interplay between mobsters government officials and spooks in New York and broadly, throughout the United States tied directly to the unfolding of early Operation Gladio in Western Europe specifically in establishing the French connection as I said before And the beginning of CIA activities in Marseille today we are going fully into parapolitics as Peter Dale Scott would say it may be dizzying and confusing at first but I hope to ease us through the fog and slowly put the pieces together to this complex puzzle this episode was deeply researched as probably the most cited work

I have presented yet on this channel please do take the time to check out my citations in the description below as always All my statements will be annotated by a number above so when you see a number show up like this it'll link to a bibliographic citation below in the description I owe a massive debt today to two authors in particular firstly Whitney Web for her groundbreaking work in One Nation Under Blackmail this is such a sprawling book and formed the backbone for my road map today So really I owe a huge debt to Whitney

second I wanna mark the excellent Official and Confidential, The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summers it's a fantastic biography that unraveled a lot of previously unknown information about the famous FBI top cop I highly recommend you check it out if you haven't already there's some really interesting stories in there that I'm not covering today that I think are totally worth checking out So with all that said and all that out of the way let us begin to untangle the web and we are starting in the late 1940s early 1950s with the Red

Scare let's begin I will do my level best to stand up for freedom and democracy around the world by keeping the United States of America strong and by keeping our eyes wide open As we welcome change in the world by keeping our eyes wide open so we are finally entering the 1950s which I feel is significant as we are finally changing decades from the 40s to now the 1950s I wanna take some time to situate ourselves in this place in time as today we are going to be doing some deep analysis of the 1950s as

a whole but also this American political media And I think it will be valuable to have a full picture of the political environment that these events took place in especially today as our story is heavily focused on personal interactions and social circles that were intrinsically linked to the Red Scare and the heightened panic of the time let's get into it this early period of the Cold War was marked by a dramatic escalation and tension with the perceived communist threat both abroad and domestically While the CIA and later NATO began establishing secret underground armies in Europe

in the late 40s and the early 50s under Operation Glaudio and others stay behind organizations stateside, the US was having its own reckoning with Communist subversion and what would be known as the era of McCarthyism or informally, as the Red Scare panic ran rampant through American society especially in the government bureaucracy As communist subversives and Soviet moles were discovered in key areas of the federal government this period in the early 50s saw the US government subjected to a series of trials and investigations spearheaded most famously by one senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin before McCarthy went

on his anti Communist crusade across the federal government however other similar inquisitions were taking place headed by equally relevant characters to our story the postwar Red Scare began almost immediately after the wars end In January 1946 with a proclamation by FBI Director J Edgar Hoover to a Catholic youth group in New York City accompanied on stage by avid anti Communist bishop Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York Hoover claimed to the gathered Catholics that quote there are only 100,000 Communists who are organized and articulate but they are motivated by fanatical frenzy if you watch the previous

episode of this series you will recognize that Francis Spellman was the same Francis Spellman that was a major American propagandist for the Christian Democrats in the 1948 election in Italy that we mentioned earlier Spellman who was previously the Archbishop of New York was about to be appointed as a cardinal by Pope Pius the 12th in February of 1946 One month later he was clearly deeply connected to the papacy but also had a near legendary status in the New York establishment and dubious connections to the CIA that we will establish later J Edgar Hoover would become

a key instigator and prosecutor of communists within the United States although much of the focus of traditional Cold War histories are on Senator McCarthy but don't worry we will get to him in time Hoover and the FBI on the other hand represented the tip of the spear for domestic repression of leftist organizations and movements within the domestic United States now one last important thing I wanna emphasize before we move on Is that Cardinal Spellman and FBI Director J Edgar Hoover the two men on stage in front of the Catholic Youth group in 1946 were two

of the four Blue Suite guests that Susan Kaufman reported in 1958 were at that party they were clearly close in 1946 and this shows a long injuring relationship between these two power brokers as the Red Scare intensified into the late 40s it provided fertile ground for the rise of several young congressmen and senators One that I would be remiss to not mention who has continued to fascinate me throughout my studies and who I may even have to dedicate an entire mini series to because of just how interesting he is is the one and only Richard

Milhouse Nixon who finally makes his appearance into our narrative now Nixon at the time was a junior congressman from California in the late 40s and was by all account an outsider In the elitist circles of Washington DC he was born in relative poverty in rural California and Nixon had somehow elevated himself to the US Congress unseating the five term congressman and New Dealer Jerry Voorhes Nixon would create his political brand in this Cold War Red Scare environment as an ardent anti communist prosecutor with the House Un American Activities Committee or HUAC for short Nixon's rise

however is tinged with intelligence connections Specifically to one Alan Dulles the cunning future director of CIA according to David Talbot Nixon met Alan Dulles in 1947 aboard the Queen Mary yacht while on a fact finding mission to Europe allegedly among many discussed topics Dulles convinced the young Nixon to support the Marshall Plan which we know now that the CIA skimmed funds from for their activities in post war Europe and maybe more importantly began the process of marrying The East Coast old boy Republican establishment with the burgeoning conservative Republicans in the west according to former Justice

Department investigator and self proclaimed Nazi hunter John Loftus Allen Dulles's partnership with Nixon runs deeper than their meeting in 1947 on the Queen Mary Loftus alleged according to classified documents that he read that Nixon came across Nazi files while working as a naval officer at the end of the war In 1945 on the American East Coast these documents found in a torpedo factory allegedly indicated that Allen and John Foster Dulles had facilitated the laundering of Nazi funds during the war Loftus's allegations are not verifiable but also are not entirely unfounded as we saw in the

first two parts of this series now regardless, Loftus claims that Nixon and Dulles struck a deal in that moment where Nixon agreed to keep his mouth shut regarding the incriminating documents While Dulles secretly funded his campaign against the five time California New Dealer Jerry Voorhis now I'm unsure if we're ever going to be able to substantiate Loftus's claims about earlier Dulles Nixon meeting but what we do know is that the Queen Mary meeting on the boat to go to the fact fighting mission between Dulles and Nixon did happen and from my position it does indicate

the beginning of an alliance between the two major factions in the US establishment this particular instance Reminds me of a fantastic and largely forgotten book written by Carl Oglesby in 1976 titled The Yankee and the Cowboys War the entire book is available for free on the internet archives which I have linked below I highly recommend you read it it's a really quick read and really engaging but essentially, Oglesby's thesis claims that the US establishment was increasingly divided between two competing camps within the power elite That transcended party lines the camps he described were firstly the

Yankees otherwise known as the Eastern Establishment or as authors such as Carol Quigley have called the Anglo American establishment think of this group as the Waspy New York and Upper East Coast old families such as the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts and the Morgans think also of internationalist institutions as their power centers the council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations the IMF and eventually the World Bank These were internationalists who believed in global institutions American integration into foreign markets and the construction of an imperium through covert action and financial pressures the Dulles brothers could neatly fit into

this mold however since these camps run between party lines we could also include such Democrats such as FDR and JFK this could be considered the old power center of America largely concentrated around banking and financial institutions Mining and agricultural interest the second cap outlined by Oglesby is that of the cowboys or the western establishment largely based out of Texas and California with their wealth largely consolidated in oil and gas and the emerging aerospace industry in the western states this second grouping is positioned as an emerging source of power after World War 2 with the ascent

and establishment of the Bush clan and the rise of several prominent Texan and Californian politicians such as Nixon as vice president and later President Lyndon Johnson as longtime Senate majority leader and VP and later president and of course Ronald Reagan throughout the first half of the Cold War the Cowboys would rise to challenge the longtime supremacy of the Eastern Yankees this camp was expansionist viewing the world as an endless frontier of open opportunity favoring overt warfare and direct aggression to gain a foothold across the globe opposing America's enemies was less about meticulous and Machiavellian networks

But about outright opposition through an all means necessary push for victory I see Richard Nixon as an exemplary figure of the cowboy camp alongside figures such as Lyndon Johnson and eventually Ronald Reagan as I mentioned before, now I believe that the alliance between Dulles and Nixon exemplified the beginning of a short lived peace between these two competing power factions throughout the 1950s Peter Dale Scott uses similar language in his book Deep Politics in the death of JFK but he claims the two main camps were the globalist internationalists otherwise known as Oglesbees Yankees and the nationalist

expansionists Oglesbees Cowboys Oglesby's book is mainly focused on the Kennedy assassination and Watergate which represented his titular Yankee cowboy war with the war starting with JFK's assassination and ending with Nixon's impeachment now when we get to the Kennedy assassination I want to use this theoretical model much more loosely but for now we will keep this concept in our back pocket as a useful and in my opinion compelling framework to understanding the elite politics of the Cold War I hope that you all be able to use this framework when reading about the Cold War or learning

about it because I think it's a really useful framework for understanding maybe beyond party lines how American power works so moving on from that When Nixon returned to America from his fact finding mission across Europe he had dedicated himself to the anti communist struggle and would serve as one of the chief prosecutors on the newly formed House Un American Activities Committee which would inspire Joseph McCarthy to begin his crusade in earnest in 1950 so following a provocative testimony by senior editor and writer at time magazine Whittaker Chambers where he claimed to have been a courier

in a secret Soviet spy ring in Washington DC in the 1930s Alongside one Alger Hiss the young Richard Nixon went on the attack bringing State Department official Alger Hiss to trial Hiss was most famous for being one of the head architects of the United Nations a key center piece of Truman's Liberal internationalist post war vision the alger Hiss trial exposed a complex web of connections that spanned across the political establishment firstly, Alger Hiss was a deeply respected member of the Washington establishment graduating from Harvard and working diligently as a new dealer In FDR's Foreign Service

his connections were transcendental of party lines as he had been granted the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace by John Foster Dulles in 1947 an influential internationalist think tank the fog surrounding this case gets thicker when we look at Whittaker Chambers the man who leveled the allegations against Hiss of being a Communist agent Chambers was a respected longtime collaborator for Time Magazine, which is run by one Henry Luce An arch conservative who was close personal friends with Allen Dulles Loose could always be counted on to provide positive coverage of Dulles's OSS activities and

future CIA operations Luce's Time publication wrote a glowing article praising Dulles's treasonous Operation Sunrise rescue and would continue to praise the heroics of his good friend throughout his tenure as the head of Times Dulles and Luce also served together on the board of the National Committee for a Free Europe a front group that Dulles created to fund Radio Free Europe Which was a CIA propaganda center in Europe Also Luce was a member of the skull and bones society at Yale, which was an elite secret society with a long list of influential members of the power

elite most notably, future CIA director and President George H W Bush who happened to also be close personal friends with Luce now, I don't wanna get too deep into Skull & Bones yet as I hope to make a full video on that topic at some point so we'll leave that for now, but finally Henry Luce's Times Life magazine would be the ones to buy the Zapruder film the one piece of film documenting the Kennedy assassination Time Life would hold the Zapruder film in archive for five and a half years away from public view until 1969

this would clearly have been a massive favor for parties that were allegedly involved in the Kennedy assassination so mainly, the CIA allegedly and the mob I bring all this up because remember Luce was Whittaker Chambers'employer who was the main witness against Alger Hiss in the HUAC case and given Luce's closeness to the Dulless and Chamber's high pedigree at time this accusation seems strangely coincidental for the ambitious brothers the Alger Hiss case was also concerning to the Dulles brothers For another reason due to John Foster Dulles's personal connection to Hiss as he had sponsored Hiss to

become the president of the Carnegie Institute Hiss fervently denied all allegations of espionage or treason before HUAC despite his conviction, Nixon was trapped between the eastern establishment of John Foster Dulles and the Republican presidential hopeful and former governor of New York Thomas Dewey who will get to in a second and the anti communist crusade that he had personally devoted himself to the Dulleses, who are forever ambitious Had tied themselves to Dewey's 1948 presidential campaign against President Truman as they hoped to be installed as secretary of state and director of the CIA respectively an unlikely scenario

under the democratic administration of Harry Truman if Foster's connections to the alleged Communist Hiss were to be unearthed it could jeopardize the brothers appointments to those key positions but in the end Nixon consulted with John Foster who agreed that the Hiss trial should proceed so long as his association with the New Dealer not be revealed Hiss was eventually found guilty not for treason or espionage but for perjury, for lying under oath about not knowing his accuser Whitaker Chamber John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles's reputations were saved but Dewey's presidential run was doomed as he was

defeated by the incumbent Harry Truman in 1948 I wanna take a second to discuss the multiple implications of the Hiss case before we move on in 1948 Nixon had told America in no uncertain terms that communist infiltrators were present in the US State Department His evidence was provided by a source deeply tied to Henry Loose and thus Allen Dulles the man accused, Alger Hiss vehemently denied any allegations and to this day his guilt is questionable according to most scholars since 1948 though, the Venona Papers a series of declassified documents showing additional evidence linked to the

McCarthy and HUAC trials proved that some of the convicted communists such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty of spying for the Soviets However with Hiss, historians remain divided on his complicity in the spying, even with the Venona papers now to the conservative pundits of the time the Hiss case solidified the idea that the government was infiltrated by communists to liberals of the time the case was exemplary of the so called witch hunt that would unfold under Senator McCarthy over the next few years my personal analysis of the situation is fairly cynical given John Foster's

ambitions to become secretary of state and his close ties to the ultimate source for the trial through his brother's connections to Henry Luce And Whitaker Chambers being Henry Luce's employee as we had already said, it could be argued that the Alger Hiss case was potentially fabricated to give Foster Dulles a proper reason to purge what he viewed as his new state department of New Dealers when he would be granted the job in the future Dewey administration it could also be argued that since Allen Dulles had made a new partnership with Richard Nixon this could have

been seen as a show trial to give Nixon, the rising star congressman a bit of a step up and to give the whole witch trial a sense of legitimacy Now with all that said, even though John Foster Dulles did not ascend to the role of secretary of state in 1948 he would only do that in 52 under the Eisenhower administration the State Department would be cleansed of New Deal influence through the McCarthy trial later in the early 1950s which were enabled by the Alger Hiss case this is all my own pet theory though we unfortunately

will never know the truth of Alger Hiss's complicity in Soviet spyrings what we do know is that Nixon's HUAC hearings did open the door for Senator McCarthy and more importantly his assistant Roy Cohn, anti communist inquisitions Across the federal government and this my friends is where our story of blackmail organized crime and corruption begins it's February 1950 Two years have passed since the Alger Hiss case brought Communist infiltration to the forefront of the American psyche the previously unknown junior senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin made the now iconic statement that Truman State Department was filled with

some 200 or so communists and best of all, he had undeniable proof McCarthy always had lists of subversives that he pulled seemingly out of thin air However according to journalist and author Anthony Summers McCarthy's meteoric rise and irrefutable Intel was secretly associated with one J Edgar Hoover long time director of the FBI according to one William Sullivan who was the head of the FBI's domestic intelligence program in the 1960s Hoover was feeding dozens of names of suspected subversives to McCarthy during the Red Scare summers goes on to argue that McCarthy was used by Hoover as

a public facing front to instigate a political crusade that he had no authority to undertake himself In his allegedly politically neutral role as FBI director author Peter Dale Scott takes this a step further by arguing that it was J Edgar Hoover with the help of bootlegger turned legitimate businessman and ex husband of Susan Kaufman, Lewis Rosenstiel who had themselves created Senator McCarthy's entire witch trial Scott states that Hoover's list of Communist subversives that was meant to go to McCarthy was passed through US Army intelligence first and then subsequently leaked the Jewish League Against Communism which

was a Lewis Rosenstiel front group that then passed it along to McCarthy This convoluted and roundabout delivery intrinsically linked to the mobbed up Rosenstiel with Jedgar Hoover and the Red Scare according to Whitney Webb Lewis Rosenstiel was a cunning but hot headed operator and financier within Mafia circles he was cunning in the sense that he loved to secretly record his guests and use blackmail efficiently as any smooth operator does he allegedly set up bugs across his liquor distilleries even placing microphones in the bathroom stalls according to some employees A strange anecdote which I have heard

repeated often is that Rosensteel met with one Winston Churchill in the 1920s, on a boat cruise in the French Riviera according to Rosensteel's obituary in the New York Times Churchill, who by all accounts was a total snob took the time to speak with the largely unknown Rosensteel Churchill tipped the young bootlegger off about the end of prohibition in America, and told him to quote "prepare for the return of liquor sales in the United States" and Rosensteel, like other former bootleggers would become a useful ally to the deep operatives due to his dual allegiances between his

organized crime past And his present legitimate front as an alcohol tycoon he would remain a close ally to hoovers and likely acted Hoovers liaison and middleman to legendary mob boss Meyer Lansky's ear Rosensteel's bizarre connections to J Edgar Hoover are multiple and staggering and as we mentioned earlier he was in the Blue Suite with Hoover and Cardinal Francis Spellman my personal favorite connection however was that in 1960, five years after the Blue Suite Lewis Rosenstiel and another bootlegger turned legitimate businessman one Joseph Kennedy, father to John and Robert Kennedy Would together found the J Edgar

Hoover Foundation a charitable foundation that was dedicated to the FBI chief it is strange and fastening how inter woven these worlds are so in summary Rosensteel was instrumental in kicking off the Red Scare and emboldening McCarthy through his close ties to Hoover but as we will see another figure of the McCarthy trials who was also equally mobbed up would bring additional implications to this whole charade For our episode today however it is not Senator McCarthy that we are most concerned about it is instead his chief counsel Roy Cohn Roy Cohn is maybe the first character

in this series that I am ready to give the title of Deep State Operator his allegiances are shadowy and ever changing and his ability to traverse between the overworld of respectable politics and the shady underworld of organized crime and illegal activity allows him and his coart a unique ability to influence power brokers And to be a political fixer which is exactly what Roy Cohn by all accounts would become Roy Cohn was born in New York City to Jewish parents his father Al Cohn, had been a New York Supreme Court justice and was deeply involved in

Democratic Party politics in the city the family's prestige and faulted infamy came from his mother's side the Marcusess his maternal grandfather, Joseph Marcus had founded the bank of the United States in the 1910s which started as a small community bank in the New York Jewish community That had moderate success according to Whitney Web's research the United States Bank had only five branches in 1925 that number would skyrocket through the late 1920s as Cohn's grandfather died and passed leadership of the bank to Coen's uncle, Bernard Marcus Between 1925 and 1930 Bernard Marcus would lead the bank

into an aggressive expansionary period going from five branches in 1925 to 62 in 1930 by 1930 the bank of the United States was the third largest in New York And was working on a potentially huge merger with Goldman Sachs related banks in November 1929 however in December 1929 only a month or so after Black Tuesday and the beginning of the Great Depression rumors started spiraling around New York financial circles that bank of United States assets were not as safe as Bernard Marcus and the board of the bank were claiming this spurred a massive bank run

with customers demanding their deposits and the bank being ultimately unable to fulfill the requests many, including the New York Times claimed that the failure And subsequently revealed fraud of the bank of the United States in January 1930 is what spurred the beginning of the bank run across New York which would in turn really allow the Great Depression to set in this event landed Bernard Marcus and his associates in prison and left a taint on the Marcus family and by association, the Cohn family name as well and this is Roy Cohn's background the McCarthy chief council

and deep state operator would embrace this reputation And work with America's legitimate power centers and underbelly to create one of the first successful blackmail schemes in the Cold War era now while the HUAC and Mclee led Red Scare is commonly taught today in school we often overlook the Lavender Scare that was being pursued during the same period the Lavender Scare was a concerted effort to rid the American government bureaucracy and more broadly American society of homosexuals, specifically homosexual men and the influence of homosexuality broadly The rationale was that communists would potentially be able to use

government actors homosexuality as blackmail against them painting gay government officials and employees as potential liabilities and security risks in the 1950s being accused as gay was almost equivalent in the public sphere to being accused of being a communist ironically however it was not the communist to abuse the vulnerability of gay men in the US state apparatus it was the men within that apparatus itself that used homosexuality Which was again a massive social stigma at the time as a blackmail tool against each other now for what reason, why? I will post posit some theories once we

lay it all out so stick with me before we get to it, ponder this was it wholly coincidental that all the men about to cover all had serious allegations of being homosexual all these allegations during a time when they were themselves accusing American bureaucrats homosexuality during a time when they themselves would have been exiled from polite society Their high ranking jobs and their social circles if any of these activities were revealed with hard proof think about this as I go through all this could there have been a higher purpose to these actions I'll obviously get

back to it later and share my thoughts, but for now let's break it down now starting with Roy Cohn he was my several accounts a gay man Whitney Webb outlines several instances of this behavior in her book One Nation Under Blackmail and so does Anthony Summers in his biography of Janger Hoover now maybe most compelling is Webb's meticulous transcription of correspondences between Cohn and another man that was by almost all accounts also gay J Edgar Hoover, and what is alleged to be their first correspondences ever where Cohen is asking the FBI director for information on

communist subversion in the US Hoover writes, and mind you this is the first time these two grown men are talking to each other Hoover says quote "Roy, are you trying to see me?" to which Cohn responds you're darn right I'm trying to see you it's been rather difficult Hoover then replies "whenever you wanna see me" you just pick up the phone and ask for me you'll be able to see me, and he proceeds to say come on over firstly, this seems very strange for a first time correspondence between two men especially, as Hoover uses Roy's

first name and they do speak fairly informally On another level, this feels totally uncharacteristic for a conversation between two high ranking government bureaucrats especially the head of the federal police and the chief counsel in the McCarthy trials taking this alongside what I previously mentioned the fact that Hoover was feeding names to Senator Joe McCarthy and it essentially helped create his entire campaign shows that Hoover and Cohn's relationship may have been much deeper than the McCarthy connection according to Hoover's biographer Anthony Summers Cohen had gotten the job at the Justice Department Through Hoover affiliated contacts and

J Edgar had gone so far to recommend Cohn to McCarthy and attended the Celebration of his appointment Cohn was appointed as chief counsel McCarthy team over another young Justice Department attorney one Robert Kennedy, who would famously feud with J Edgar Hoover throughout his political career the young RFK would not end up with the senior council position but would still participate in a more junior role in the McCarthy hearings this closest to Roy Cohn and exposure to the corrupt machinations of DC politics May have partially inspired RFK to take on his anti Mafia campaign later that

decade, we'll never truly know but what's really important here, is that for all intents and purposes Hoover had created Cohn's career from thin air Hoover himself, likely a gay man may have simply found affection for the young lawyer from New York, or maybe there was a deeper reason that he vouched so heavily for Cohn now Roy Cohn, is our fourth blue suite party goer and was deeply connected to all of them through his law practice To put this into perspective, as an attorney Roy Cohe had as clients at different times Lewis Rosenstiel another Blue Suite

party goer the former bootlegger turned legitimate booze merchant and ex husband to Susan Kaufman the woman at the beginning of this video Cohn was also very closely associated and represented for a time: Donald Trump and by many accounts was also his mentor Roy Cohn could be associated with giving Trump the idea for his famous art of the deal as Cohn operated on an intricate system of deals and blackmail Which he Learned from his mentor a childhood friend's father Gene Pope Senior Cohn was also the attorney for Francis Spellman the Archbishop of New York and Cardinal

of the Holy Sea and as a reminder, one of the four powerful men in the Rosenstiel blue suite according to Gene Pope Junior Cohn's childhood friend Cardinal Spellman was a critical power broker in mid century New York with Pope claiming that he had an ultimate say on who got appointed to bureaucratic roles in the city government rumors also spiraled that he was secretly gay According to Cardinal Spellman's biographer John Cooney the churchman's homosexuality was essentially an open secret with rumors of him seducing young alter boys spiraling around the community and sources claiming that he had

his favorite young priests Spellman bragged about his ability to procure young boys from his diocese and would often flaunt his homosexual escapades his proclivity for homosexual relations was shared by his future lawyer and fellow New York power broker Roy Cohn who would be close to Spellman intrinsically linked to the McCarthy trials Serving as his assistant counsel I want to remind you all that Spellman was also very close to Hoover who together legitimize Cohn and McCarthy's witch trials according to Whitney Webb Cohn was in charge of recuring the young men at these parties which with his

closeness to Spellman it would not be a stress to deduce that he also had a role in this affair given his closeness to young alter boys, anyways I'll let you, your imagination kind of take put those pieces together to add one final synchronicity to Spellman's story In 1956 Cardinal Spellman ordained one Avery Dulles John Foster Dulles's son and Allen Dulles'nephew as a Catholic priest and later future cardinal much later the Dullesses were a Protestant family and Avery in a strange account had a revelation to convert to Catholicism which then turned into his lifelong priesthood thanks

to Cardinal Spellman Alan and John Foster were both working in the Eisenhower administration at this time and by this point, Cardinal Francis Spellman was adjacent to many CIA activities in Italy important to keep in mind Strange coincidence, or maybe not so coincidental we will never truly know, either way this incident is indicative of how symbiotic these ruling ties and blackmail circles ended up being, for the CIA men and the mobsters and power brokers J Edgar Hoover had allegedly been compromised by sexual blackmail long before he met Roy Cohn in 1952 countless historians and scholars have

speculated that Hoover and his long time second in command Clyde Tolson were gay lovers Both men were lifelong bachelors they traveled everywhere together and were the fuel of gossip pages across the United States most notably for our story however as early as 1946 Hoover was the target of blackmail several sources have claimed that both James Angleton the future head of counter intelligence for the CIA and Allen Dulles's prodigy and one Meyer Lansky the brains behind the National Crime Syndicate a nationwide criminal underground network had in their possession compromising pictures of FBI Director J Edgar Hoover

receiving oral pleasure from allegedly his second command, Clyde Tolson it was electronics expert in CIA affiliate Gordon Novel who claimed that Angleton had showed him the compromising photos of Hoover in 1967 according to Novel Angleton showed him the compromising pictures of Hoover to prove that he was not all powerful in his orders to stop the lawsuit that Novel was pursuing against JFK investigator Jim Garrison there was also John Weitz a former OSS officer who alleged to have been shown the photos of Hoover By Angleton at a dinner party hosted in the 1950s Angleton identified the

two men in the photo as Hoover and his deputy Clyde Tolson Hoover's homosexuality was such an open secret around Washington DC power that Allen Dulles's mistress Mary Bancroft even called him "that Virgin Mary in pants" referring to Hoover's female name Mary this is actually the same name that Susan Kaufman wife to Rosenstiel and Blue Sweet whistle blower reported Hoover being called at the orgies she witnessed as for Meyer Lansky's possession of the photographs authors such as Whitney Web Are divided as to whether Angleton gave the photos to Lansky or if Lansky gave the photos to

Angleton the important thing to know here is that if we are to take these allegations at face value and I still feel like I need to insert an allegedly here so allegedly the CIA and the mob worked together to blackmail the highest runs of the FBI therefore this clearly displays that the CIA and the mob had shared interests which throughout this series we have shown to be the free flow of narcotics Specifically heroin at this point throughout the United States and the continued activity of the mob this compromising blackmail give both organizations a weapon against

the FBI to maintain the free activity of organized crime and the continued flow of narcotics as we will see later the Federal Bureau of narcotics, or the FBN for short the predecessor of the modern DEA which would have been the other major authority involved in intercepting drug trafficking Alongside the FBI was largely complicit with the CIA and the Mafia in allowing the crime syndicates to continue their domestic operations we'll touch on that in a bit but my point here is that the CIA and Mafia together coerce the FBI to turn the other way so I

guess it's finally time to return to Susan Kaufman's allegations that we highlighted at the beginning of this episode so to recap, Susan Kaufman ex wife to former bootlegger Lewis Rosenstiel Claimed that her husband, who let me remind you was obsessed with bugging rooms brought her to the Plaza Hotel in 1958 in Room 3 22 otherwise known as the Blue Suite there Susan witnessed one J Edgar Hoover dressed in full drag going by the name Mary Hoover the same name that had been reported by Allen Dullas's mistress CIA counterintelligences arm James Angleton and mob accountant Meyer

Lansky both already possessed photos of Hoover engaged in compromising homosexual acts from the 1940s so this account of Hoover is not singular Also in the room with Kaufman, her husband, and Jedgar Hoover was Cardinal Francis Spellman a massively powerful man in New York and with the Vatican who was also a vocal anti Communist propagandist in the 1948 Italian election where the CIA was heavily involved the fourth man in this orgy was allegedly one, Roy Cohn J Edgar Hoover's protege and Rosenstiel and Spellman's attorney and the chief legal counsel on McCarthy's witch hunt Roy Cohn had

also been caught by Susan Kaufman in bed with her at the time husband Lewis Rosenstiel Before he dragged her to the Blue Suite in 1958 she remarked that this was not normal behavior for a lawyer and his client Cohen was also allegedly the one who procured the young men who were running around the Blue Suite as well he was clearly at the center of this web in some way and his continued closeness to the New York power elite the Nixon and Reagan administrations and future President Donald Trump would raise questions about further blackmail throughout these

elite political circles well now that we have painted this picture and the players are all out in the open I wanna ask one final question who is blackmailing who? I personally have two answers firstly in my opinion, and this is the boring answer but appears that the main target here is J Edgar Hoover his FBI largely looked the other way while the Mafia grew to a staggering level of power in the United States and by all accounts mobsters such as Meyer Lansky owned Hoover but this does also raise my second answer what if they were

all blackmailing each other look at this way If each powerful member of this elite circle has dirt on each other wouldn't that make them all infinitely loyal to each other one cannot be the weak link in this type of arrangement as using the blackmail against each other ultimately compromises the blackmailer themselves thus we get into a weird situation where the blackmail is not so much active but it is passive by participating in the Blue Suite orgies these men were binding themselves together on a common mission In this case I will argue, to protect organized crime

and the global drug trade to critical elements of Gladio as I've argued throughout this series overall this tactic succeeded mob activity in the United States would continue to balloon throughout the 1950s and 60s especially as the FBI continued to look the other way while overwhelming evidence showed that the CIA continued to use mob elements for operations across the globe as we continue to unpack Gladio next time we will continue to see mob figures shine through As key members of the Gladio stay behind networks furthermore, narcotics profits will continue to be an unaccountable funding source for

Gladio operations across Europe as will become evident in our investigation of the establishment of the French connection and the beginning of French Gladio in the next episode but most importantly to the topic today sexual blackmail continues to be a main fixture within the history of intelligence and more specifically within Gladio stay behind networks Just as a few examples if you wanna see what I mean let's start with Marc Dutroux who created a depraved network of pedophiles in 1990s Belgium that involved several high ranking Belgian and NATO affiliated figures during the same period Belgium was shaken

by the Brabant attacks which many many many researchers have argued have dubious ties to NATO, the CIA and Belgian officials another example is that of the Stockholm brothel according to sources in Stockholm Sweden which keep in mind, Sweden wasn't even a NATO country The CIA operated a honey pot brothel used to blackmail and entrap people within the Swedish underground people affiliated with this brothel have been alleged by Olof Palme researchers to be connected to the assassination of the Prime Minister in 1986 and finally my favorite example and one that my Turkish viewers will appreciate is

the case of the Susurluk car crash where a prominent Turkish politician was in a car wreck with a high ranking member of the fascist Turkish paramilitary group, the Gray Wolves Who have deep alleged ties to NATO and a famous beauty queen the Turkish deep state is one that is infinitely complex and dense but this is a small incident that shows how the worlds of organized crime and NATO stay behind organizations tied to the larger power structure through the sexual blackmail schemes of course I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Epstein case the true

depraved pinnacle of sexual blackmail I want to end on this point I would argue that what was alleged to have taken place in the Blue Suite is a miniature version of what has been alleged in the Epstein case the use of blackmail not as an active measure to get someone to do what you want but as a passive tool to maintain cohesion across an entire network when people say conspiracies could never happen because there would inevitably be people who would fall out of line and either go against the conspiracy or speak out remember that often

Behind these vast seemingly endless conspiracies and networks, lies a lot of dirt and since everyone is dirty everyone looks out for each other as we will see in the last section of this video the characters buzzing around this Blue Suite circle had some helpful CIA and Federal Bureau of narcotics allies especially the man we will be ending this episode with before we end today's episode I want to return to one character that we briefly discussed in the previous episode that I believe is vastly overlooked When discussing the history of the CIA until I started researching

the series I had never heard mention of this man but since reading more about his exploits and his position within the Cold War intelligence environment I believe that breaking down George Hunter White's early career as an agent in the office of Strategic Services The Federal Bureau of narcotics and the CIA will provide a good castone to today's winding and dizzying episode so let's do a quick fire round of George White's career until 1950 George White's criss crossing between American Mafia circles and three lettered agencies earned him the title of Mr Deep Politics from Peter Dale

Scott and I don't think this is unwanted we first discussed George White in connection to infamous Sicilian American mob boss Lucky Luciano's cooperation with the federal government during World War 2 under Operation Underworld I continue to come back to Operation Underworld because this moment, where Luciano was employed by the office of Naval Intelligence To help the Americans secure the docks and invade Sicily was really the moment that the door opened between government and organized crime and to put this into perspective the door never really closed again the American Mafias and the security state would continue

to intermingle until they essentially became indistinguishable from the agencies they served into the 1980s and beyond I really think Iran Contra was really a turning point for that But we'll get to that much much much later as I previously mentioned in the last part of this series George White was best known for being instrumental in liaizing with Lucky Luciano in prison under Operation Underworld and securing his extradition to Italy while he worked for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics White approached governor of New York at the time Tom Dewey, to extradate Lucky Luciano to Italy in

1946 as a reward for his service to the war effort yes this is the same Thomas Dewey that the Dulleses would attach themselves to For his doomed 1948 presidential campaign against Harry Truman Thomas Dewey had actually locked up Lucky Luciano in the first place in 1936 when, he was still a US state attorney strange that Dewey would be swayed to release the prisoner that had gotten him so much fame as a prosecutor of organized crime in the 1930s well, Whitney Webb and other authors have pointed to an interesting investment opportunity that Dewey takes part in

the 1950s Dewey invests into the obscure Mary Carter Paint Company which throughout its existence would be rumored to be a CIA and Mafia front company Dewey's investment would mature nicely as Mary Carter Paint company would eventually be renamed to Resorts International based in the Bahamas and would come to own several high profile casinos and resorts Resorts International was also intrinsically tied to Castle Bank and trust a Bahamian bank which was very likely a CIA shell bank due to it being founded by one Paul Helliwell the man who allegedly established Operation X and directed the opium

flows from the Golden Triangle during World War 2 As we saw in episode 3 of this series that has been age restricted, funny right? Mary Carter Paint company and later Resorts International would likely become a key money laundering vector for the Mafia Castle Bank and trust on the other hand could be its own video on its own due to its depth of its ties but sources alleged that the CIA used Castle Bank and trust to fund their illegal operations specifically in Southeast Asia and Latin America now one last interesting note here before we continue with

George White Resorts International would briefly be owned by one Donald Trump in the 1980s, in another strange synchronicity especially given Roy Cone's closeness to both Lansky who is rumored to be behind Resorts International and Donald Trump Trump acquired the company in 1986 and Cohn died the same year and Lansky was also dead by that point but it's nonetheless an interesting turn of events George White may have been best known for his strong advocacy for Lucky Luciano while working with the Federal Bureau of narcotics But he wore multiple hats George White worked simultaneously for the OSS

and later the CIA and the Narcotics Bureau giving him unique access to both organizations Intel however from my research I'd argue that he was always more loyal to the OSS and CIA than he was to the FBN George White started his intelligence career during the war working as an instructor at the New York staging ground for the new OSS agents being shift off to Europe and the Pacific during the war George White would personally train The future class of CIA spy masters according to author Jefferson Morley White would train future director of Plans Frank Wisner

future CIA Director Richard Helms and William Colby and maybe most significantly to White's career the future CIA counter intelligence ace James Angleton Angleton and white would work together closely and form a strong working relationship by all accounts George White was not opposed to working with mobsters and criminals to accomplish a task this closeness in collaboration with mob elements Was likely noticed by Jim Angleton who himself would become closely aligned with organized crime throughout his career now the main reason I wanted to discuss George White was to add one last takeaway about the evolving structure of

the CIA before the end of this episode so up to this point I have really emphasized the fact that the OSS and later the CIA were made up almost entirely of elite Americans from Wall Street and corporate law firms although this is largely true for the early OSS And the first years of the CIA as the agency grew and its mandate shifted and in my opinion it grew closer to organized crime the cohort of CIA agents began to resemble two broad groups the first group which we will call the spies were the classic Yale and

Harvard old boys from the OSS the Jim Angletons, the Allen Dullesses and the Richard Helms these elite men were the executive class of the CIA and were the primary decision makers and planners think of them as the senior management of the agency as some call it "the company" Well as operations got rougher and the operational needs of the agency evolved a second class of CIA employees began to emerge of the likes of 5 foot 7 200 pound former narcotics detective George White we will call these, the operators these men were usually from the Midwest or

the south so usually not large urban centres and did not share the same elite background as their leaders however men such as George White, Bill Harvey and Frank Sturgis for example, would be the ones to carry out the dirty work of rubbing shoulders with mobsters Delivering bags of cash or breaking into the Watergate building for example if we take George White as an example and compare him to Jim Angleton both of these men had intimate connections to organized crime just these connections would manifest themselves in different ways George White for example would later set up

safe houses in New York and San Francisco for the CIA's mind control program MK Ultra and would procure victims from Mafia pimps for the CIA scientists Jim Eagleton would never do this kind of work He instead negotiated deals with the likes of Meyer Lansky while establishing shell companies with Heliwell and ensuring the dispersement of funds through the Vatican secret banking network these two sets of CIA rolls were equally critical to the agency's plans but attracted two very different crowds throughout the CIA's history we will see these two camps come together in operations, but also clash

in moments of miscommunication or misunderstanding now, before George White was recruited in 1952 To work on Operation Midnight Climax which was an MK Ultra project he worked with Joseph McCarthy on the committee investigating Communist influence in the State Department in 1950, and that same year White was also present on the Kefauver Committee which was a Senate committee investigating the influence of organized crime in the United States named after Senator Estez Kefauver on both of these committees white performed his role as an operator it is unclear what his role exactly was with McCarthy But my pet

theory is that he was a CIA attache within the Red Scare during the Kefauver committee White himself presented a testimony on behalf of the OSS that the agency had no awareness of Operation Underworld or the collaboration with Lucky Luciano claiming that quote the OSS remained aloof this was almost certainly a blatant lie given the CIA's future collaborations with Luciano connected elements in Italy and Meyer Lansky and Santos Traficante in Cuba so the reason I wanted to rapidly go over George White's biography Was because I believe that his journey displays the CIA's total integration into the

mob the Red Scare and this early narcotics network we mentioned that White helped secure Luciano's release from prison last episode but according to his diary he was also present in Rome in 1948 where he met with Wild Bill Donovan the former director of OSS and at the time a private citizen and he himself had allegations of funding Mafia elements in Italy shortly before the election as we saw last episode accordingly, two more men allegedly met in Sicily in 1950 Who both had paths that intersected with George White in 1950, Meyer Lansky took a trip to

Sicily and met with old friend Lucky Luciano although the purpose of this trip remains obscured we can observe that in 1950 and 1951 the CIA would take aggressive action in southern France to place the docks under Corsican Mafia control in the Golden Triangle, CIA fighting would resume to ensure that breakaway KMT factions and supported warlords would remain in control of the opium fields of Shan and most importantly George White would return with a mysterious French mobster under CIA employ But this is all for next time and with that I think this is a good place

to stop for today we have already gone long but there's still so much to cover as I have hinted at throughout this episode our next part will cover the establishment of the French connection the shift of global heroin flows away from Sicily and towards arguably the most famous and prominent trade route of the early Cold War the Marseille French connection This will all be linked to the establishment of early Gladio forces in France the beginning of the Gladio stay behind in that country and everything associated with that we're going to be encountering mafiosos as always

but also, more former Nazis crooked cops and most importantly devious CIA agents thank you all so much for watching as always this channel has absolutely blown up since the last part of this series and I wanna thank you all so much for the outpouring of support I want to most humbly state that I have added a Patreon to my account if you wish to support my independent coverage of these events it would be infinitely appreciated I do not make a single cent off of ad revenue and I'm fully independent any amount helps to pay the

bills and shows your support to my craft by joining my Patreon I will give you access to my exclusive discord server or fans of the channel content can discuss theories video topics and where I can connect with you on a more personal level I hope to be able to offer more perks and time through Patreon, but for now it is simply a way to show your appreciation for my work maybe a few smaller things will be added shortly we'll see finally as always a like on this video was a long way in the algorithm if

you did enjoy this video and believe it or not at the expense of my mental health I still read all the comments down below I do generally enjoy hearing your feedback And your respectful and well meeting comments, please keep it civil down there it really helps me out and as always thank you so much for watching and remember to keep your eyes wide open, take care