John Train and the
Bankers' Secret Government
by Jeffrey Steinberg
On April 23, 1983, an unlikely collection of government agents, journalists, and right-wing money-bags gathered at the Manhattan East Side home of investment banker and self-styled Anglophile literati "spook" John Train. The purpose of the "salon" session, and two subsequent gatherings at the same venue in the Autumn of 1983 and the Spring of 1984, was to execute a black propaganda "hit" campaign against Lyndon LaRouche, in conjunction with an already-ongoing bogus government "national security" probe into LaRouche, which had been launched in January 1983. The effort would lead, by 1986, to a massive para-military police raid on LaRouche publishing offices and on LaRouche's home in Leesburg, Virginia—intended to provoke a shootout, in which LaRouche could be murdered; a string of Federal and state frame-up prosecutions, leading to jail sentences of up to 86 years for LaRouche and colleagues; and the illegal bankrupting of a string of LaRouche publications and companies, including a tax-exempt science foundation.
While the "Get LaRouche" campaign had been pushed by the likes of Henry Kissinger, James Jesus Angleton, Jay Lovestone, Sidney Hook, and Leo Cherne for many months, an event, exactly one month to the day before the first Train salon gathering, had added sudden urgency and kicked the criminal "Get LaRouche" effort into high-gear.
The Strategic Defense Initiative
On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan, in a nationwide television address, had announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), later to be caricatured as "Star Wars" by an hysterical Anglo-American and Soviet odd-couple media alliance, and sabotaged from inside the U.S. right wing by circles of the Heritage Foundation, Gen. Danny Graham, and Angleton.
From the very moment that President Reagan uttered his fateful words (see box) and extended an offer to the Soviet Union to collaborate in the development of a global defensive shield against nuclear weapons, the Kissinger-Angleton apparatus knew that the unthinkable had happened: An idea devised by LaRouche back in the mid-1970s, and promoted as a cornerstone of LaRouche's 1980 bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, had been fully embraced by the President of the United States. Suddenly, the entire post-Franklin Roosevelt structure of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the anchor of the reign of terror known as the Cold War, had come unhinged in one brief, concluding segment of President Reagan's TV speech.
According to one eyewitness account, until the President made his televised SDI announcement, not even his White House Chief of Staff, James Baker III, had known that the President would actually go ahead with the ballistic-missile defense plan, which had been under review at the White House for well over a year—despite vehement opposition from the vast majority of Presidential advisors, including Baker, Vice President George H.W. Bush, and Secretary of State George Shultz. Baker had thought that he had excised the ballistic-missile defense paragraphs from the speech before it was presented to the President for final approval. He was unaware that National Security Advisor William Clark had gone to President Reagan, and that the two men had reinstated the section—behind Baker's back. The praetorian guard was outflanked, and history was made.
The backdrop is even more revealing. Under the sponsorship first of the CIA, and then the National Security Council, Lyndon LaRouche had been conducting secret back-channel negotiations with Soviet officials, over the prospect of Soviet-American collaboration in the development of defensive systems based on "new physical principles"—beam weapons—capable of "killing" ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads, once they were launched. The detection systems and advanced lasers deployed to destroy the incoming missiles in flight would tax the existing scientific capacities of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other advanced sector nations, but the prospect of bringing an end to the era of "thermonuclear terror" was so promising, and the science and technologies so clearly within reach, that LaRouche's plan had an immediate impact on President Reagan, who, for decades, had deplored the fact that the human race was held hostage to the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.
From late 1981 through the Spring of 1983, LaRouche traveled between New York City and Washington for frequent meetings with a senior Soviet diplomat, Yevgeni Shershnev, who was posted to the Embassy. Following each discussion with Shershnev, LaRouche would meet with Richard Morris, the special assistant to President Reagan's then-National Security Advisor Judge William Clark, to report back on the exchanges.
In court testimony at LaRouche's railroad trial in Federal Court in Alexandria, Virginia in November 1988, Morris described LaRouche's collaboration with the Reagan White House on seven still-classified national security projects. The U.S.-Soviet back-channel talks, leading to President Reagan's March 23, 1983 SDI announcement, topped the list.
It was a history-altering intervention, and even though the Soviet government of President Yuri Andropov suicidally rejected President Reagan's offer of collaboration, thus triggering a "beam defense arms race," the events set in motion by the Reagan-LaRouche SDI collaboration, led, by the end of the decade, to the collapse of Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. LaRouche had warned, from the moment that Andropov rejected Reagan's offer of collaboration, that if the Soviets did not reverse course, and if the United States went ahead with research and development of beam weapons based upon new physical principles, the Soviet system would collapse, under the economic strains brought about by its own go-it-alone ballistic missile defense crash effort, and the long-term cultural and economic flaws in the Soviet Communist system. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, LaRouche proved right on that score as well.
The Anglo-Americans React
The reaction of Kissinger, Angleton, and their Anglo-American Establishment bosses was instantaneous: LaRouche must be destroyed by whatever means necessary. To set LaRouche up for the kill—both literally and figuratively—a massive media onslaught was launched, to soften the population for the brutal attacks on LaRouche and his colleagues that would follow. Furthermore, the vicious and massive slander campaign, ignited at the Train salon, would be critical in forcing the Justice Department to indict LaRouche and scores of his colleagues on patently bogus charges. As the 400-plus-person Federal, state, and local police raid on the LaRouche publishing offices and his home on Oct. 6, 1986 attested, some among the leading figures in the "Get LaRouche" Task Force had murder on their minds—not a lengthy process of trials and appeals.
The man whom the Wall Street-City of London right wing turned to to lead the onslaught against LaRouche, was John Train. By the time he convened the first of the three "Get LaRouche" salon meetings, a month (to the day) after Reagan's SDI speech, Train already had a more than 30-year track record of black propaganda and cultural warfare, on behalf of the right wing of the Anglo-American establishment.
In the early 1950s, Train had been the founding managing editor of Paris Review, one of the flagship literary journals of the British intelligence and CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom. As you will read in an accompanying article by Tony Papert, Paris Review was part of an onslaught against Classical European culture, promoting the most perverse existentialist literature, degenerate post-modernist art, and expressions of music and dance right out of the pit of Weimar Kulturkampf. It was the cultural side of the post-World War II "re-Nazification" of Europe and the Americas—under which many former top Nazi and Fascist bankers and regime figures, were rehabilitated by the Anglo-Americans, recast as "Cold War anti-Communists."
A Cautionary Note
While most of Train's skulduggery over the past 50 years was conducted in close collusion with CIA and British intelligence figures, including the CIA's longtime Counterintelligence Director James Jesus Angleton, it would be a grave error to categorize Train as a "CIA asset" or even a deep cover CIA officer. Train salon participant Sol Sanders, a Business Week senior writer, described Train as "the last of the CIA Old Boys on Wall Street," but, in fact, Train far more perfectly fits the term "American Tory," coined by the late President Franklin Roosevelt, to describe the treason faction of Wall Street, which was loyal only to the Anglo-American financial oligarchy, hated the American Revolution and the U.S. Federal Constitution, and generally saw governments as useful tools for the pursuit of power on behalf of "the Families."
One telling anecdote about Train, during his college days at Harvard, has the Anglophilic undergrad staging a takeover of a commemoration of Paul Revere's ride, dressed in British Red Coat uniform, sputtering insults against the American Revolutionaries, with a crew of Harvard mates cheering him on.
Train's intimate ties to the CIA and other intelligence agencies stemmed from the fact that, upon the death of FDR, a massive purge was conducted within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, in which the vast majority of the "ethnic" Americans (Italian-Americans and others) and unswerving patriots were cleaned out and blackballed from ever playing a leading role in the U.S. intelligence community.
This is the legacy of Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, and a host of lesser-known Anglophile intelligence mandarins, who were committed to oligarchical power. In the cases of both Dulles and Angleton, their pre-World War II ties to European fascism and the more insidious and powerful Synarchist International would define them as leading assets of the Anglo-American oligarchy within the governing institutions and intelligence services of the U.S.A. As LaRouche described it, "A bankers' secret government has penetrated and subverted the legitimate government of the U.S.A. and of many other nations around the world."
Train's "American Tory" family pedigree traces back generations, and centers around the family's Enoch Train and Co. New England opium trading during the 19th Century, and the early phases of the emergence of the J.P. Morgan Wall Street/London banking cartel. Train's maternal grandfather was a founding Morgan partner and a close personal ally of J.P. Morgan, in charge of Drexel Morgan's railroad speculation. A great-uncle, Charles Francis Train, was a leading financial swindler, founder of Crédit Mobilier, who later showed up on the barricades of the Paris Commune in the 1870s, after looting and speculating on the Trans-Continental Railroad project of the 1860s.
In 1961, John Train married Maria Teresa Cini di Pianzana of Florence, Italy. According to one of her intimate family friends, she was an unabashed booster of Prince Valerio Borghese (the "Black Prince"), who led a string of unsuccessful neo-Fascist coup plots against the Italian government in the late 1960s and '70s. Borghese had been a naval officer and hard-core Mussolini man during World War II, and had joined the Nazi puppet Salò Republic at the close of the war in Europe, fighting alongside Nazi Gen. Karl Wolff against the Allies and partisans. Wolff would be the partner of OSS Berne, Switzerland station chief Allen Dulles in the treacherous "Separate Peace" deal, under which a flock of top Nazis escaped postwar prosecution, many making their way, via the Dulles-Angleton "rat lines," to South America, where they would play pivotal roles in a string of right-wing coups, death squads, and dictatorships up through the 1970s.
Borghese was arrested by Italian partisans after the Allied liberation of Italy, but was then personally saved from certain execution by OSS officer Angleton, who dressed the prince in a U.S. Army uniform and secreted him to Rome, where he was interrogated by Allied officials, jailed, and then released in 1949, to resume his earlier pro-Fascist intrigues.
From Paris to Wall Street
Train returned to New York from Paris and became a partner in the boutique Wall Street investment firm of Train Cabot. Train established his own investment house, Smith Train Counsel, which specialized in the management of old family money—and its funneling into a plethora of right-wing projects.
Along the way, Train also became a devotee and collaborator of the British economist Cyril Northcote Parkinson, who was a radical advocate of the bust-up of nation-states and the restoration of monarchies. In one of his more widely exposed ventures into the breakup of nations, Northcote Parkinson collaborated with Alfred Heineken, the Dutch beer magnate, to devise a "Eurotopia" scheme for European federation, based on splitting up the existing nation-states of Europe into 75 mini-states, each eligible to be led by a restored monarchic house. In a glossy pamphlet that Heineken produced in 1992, the beer baron reported, "Professor Parkinson has his doubts about one united Europe consisting of the present nations, since these nations would be of entirely different size, population and economic importance. He therefore favoured splitting up these existing nations into much smaller states of equal size and importance, which could thus form a more balanced federal unity."
Three years after the publication of Heineken's "Eurotopia" pamphlet, the ultra-right separatist Italian Northern League advocated a scheme for the break-up of Italy into a string of separate mini-states, which conformed precisely to the Parkinson-Heineken map.
According to his protégé Train, Northcote Parkinson's reform plans for the United States were no less radical. He called the duties of the President of the United States "impossible," equating the post with the combined workload of both the English Queen and the prime minister. His call for the restructuring of the Presidency is suggestive of the current Bush-Cheney White House, in which the Vice President has served as the equivalent to prime minister. Northcote Parkinson also demanded that Congress cast secret votes, to disenfranchise voters from influencing their elected representatives; and that the United States be decentralized into mini-states, similar to his schemes for a feudalist form of European federalism.
Northcote Parkinson's greatest public gaffe was his 1969 visit to Spandau Prison outside of Berlin, where he dined with one of the last living captured war criminals of World War II, Hitler's Minister of Arms Production, Albert Speer. "Speer claimed he discovered my principles before I did," Northcote Parkinson was quoted, in describing their encounter. Perhaps he was right.
In 1987, in the midst of his involvement in the "Get LaRouche" Task Force, Train established the Northcote Parkinson Fund, a tax-exempt entity, run out of his Smith Train Counsel offices. For the first decade of the fund's existence, the treasurer was neo-conservative "grand dame" Midge Decter, the wife of Norman Podhoretz and the mother-in-law of Iran-Contra criminal and current Bush Administration NSC Middle East director, Elliott Abrams. While serving as treasurer of Northcote Parkinson Fund, Decter was also executive director of the Committee for a Free World, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, a trustee of the Heritage Foundation, and an Overseer of the Hoover Institution.
Another leading neo-con figure, Jeane Kirkpatrick, has been a Fund advisor. The seed money to launch the Northcote Parkinson Fund came from the Bradley Foundation, which is one of the leading sources of cash for the entire neo-conservative movement, and which has bankrolled a revival of the teachings of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt within American law schools.
The Northcote Parkinson Fund serves more as a pass-through of cash for an array of dirty operations—including the ongoing "Get LaRouche" efforts, as Anton Chaitkin documents in his contribution to this Feature.
Curiously, in addition to the Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, Train's Northcote Parkinson Fund has been the recipient of annual donations from a curious Chevy Chase, Maryland consulting company, ISI Enterprises. The sole proprietors of ISI are Michael and Barbara Ledeen. The only other principal of the firm is Dr. Stephen Bryen, the former director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, who was accused but never prosecuted as an Israeli spy in the late 1970s, and later served as an aide to Richard Perle in the Reagan Pentagon. Michael Ledeen, another leading Iran-Contra figure, is a self-professed promoter of "universal fascism," and is presently one of the leading neo-cons pressing for a U.S. military confrontation with Iran.
The Northcote Parkinson Fund otherwise puts seed money into international destabilization efforts, almost always coordinated with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Freedom House—both projects launched and directed by longtime Train ally Leo Cherne, a veteran, along with Angleton and Train colleague Jay Lovestone, of the 1920s and '30s Communist International. Indeed, Train—along with Lazard Bank synarchist Felix Rohatyn—is a longtime member of the International Rescue Committee's advisory board.
Train has his own network of private "Project Democracy" operations, particularly targeted at the nations of the former Soviet bloc. The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is listed as a Prize Advisor of Northcote Parkinson Fund, the group that chooses the winner of the annual $50,000 Civil Courage Prize. The Northcote Parkinson Fund advertises itself as the home of the Free and Democratic Bulgaria Foundation, headed by John Dimitri Panitza, who is also a Prize Advisor.
Other Prize Advisors and directors showcase the deep ties that Train enjoys with the upper echelons of the British imperial establishment—including Dr. John Chipman, the director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. Edward J. Streator, a board member of the Northcote Parkinson Fund and a former Minister in the U.S. Embassy in London, is both a director of the Ditchley Foundation—the British-American-Canadian elite think-tank, dedicated to the reintegration of the United States into the British Commonwealth fold—and a member of the IISS Executive Committee. He is also the chairman of the New Atlantic Initiative (NAI), a project housed at the American Enterprise Institute, which also coordinates trans-Atlantic right-wing political operations. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Kissinger, and Shultz are all "patron luminaries" of the NAI, and Midge Decter and Jeane Kirkpatrick are active with the group.
John Train is also one of six directors of the Paul Klebnikov Fund, which was established following the assassination in Moscow in July 2004 of Train's son-in-law. Paul Klebnikov had been the Moscow editor of Forbes magazine, and had published a book exposing Russian "Mafiya" boss Boris Berezovsky as a major funder of the Chechen separatists. Among the other members of the board of directors of the fund, which promotes "independent" media in Russia and the former Soviet Union, is Boris Jordan, one of the most successful oligarchs of the early post-Soviet Boris Yeltsin-led Russia. Through his Renaissance Capital Group, the American-born Russian bought up millions of "vouchers," individual shares in the privatized Russian state-sector companies, which were disbursed to every Russian citizen, enabling Jordan to grab up some of the most lucrative former state-sector firms at a fraction of their value. Jordan today heads the Sputnik Group of companies in Moscow.
Both Jordan and Train's son-in-law Paul Klebnikov were part of a circle of "White Russian" exiles in New York City, who were longtime social contacts of the Train family, according to one insider in the tightly knit community. The New York City "White Russians" were also assets of James Angleton, during his long tenure as CIA Counterintelligence Director.
In addition to his activities inside the former Soviet bloc, at the time of the "Get LaRouche" salons, Train was also the chief money-bags for the Afghan Relief Committee, another part of the vast privatized intelligence apparatus that ran the Reagan-era clandestine wars, and was a project of the International Rescue Committee. The ARC, under Train's leadership (it was run out of a single desk in Smith Train Counsel's Manhattan East Side offices), backed the most notorious of the Afghan "mujahideen" drug lords, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, later an ally of the Taliban, and still one of Afghanistan's most ruthless heroin barons.
'Get LaRouche' Salon Revisited
An EIR investigation, spanning 20 years, has reconstructed, through eyewitness accounts and court records, much of what took place at the three Train salon sessions targeting the LaRouche movement. According to a 1986 interview with Midge Decter, the "Get LaRouche" gatherings were among a large number of such programs, run by Train over several decades. Given Train's strong ties to Angleton, the paranoid CIA Counterintelligence chief, it is no surprise that almost all of the Train salons promoted the idea that the targets were "KGB agents" or otherwise subversives with Communist roots. The "Get LaRouche" sessions were no exception.
John Rees, a participant in all three of the "Get LaRouche" salon sessions and a longtime operative of the Angleton-Train apparatus, described the LaRouche sessions to an interviewer as a continuation of an earlier project of the Train salon, which labeled the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-leaning think-tank in Washington, as a Soviet front. A 1987 book, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies by S. Steven Powell, was a product of the Train salon, and the author credited John Train and an unpublished manuscript on IPS by Train as key sources for his effort.
John Rees also personified the gray area between illegal government frame-up operations and "private" intelligence activities. Rees's Maldon Institute was bankrolled by Richard Mellon Scaife and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, according to IRS records and the Insitute's own brochures, but Rees was also, according to court records, an informant for the FBI's Washington, D.C. Field Office (No. WF-5728-S).
Who were the other participants in the Train "Get LaRouche" salon? Among the journalists from major "establishment" news organizations were: Sol Sanders, a writer for Business Week and a co-founder with Midge Decter of the Committee for the Free World; NBC-TV producer Pat Lynch; Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Hume; Reader's Digest editor Eugene Methvin; and Peter Spiro of The New Republic.
Also in attendance at the "Get LaRouche" sessions were Chip Berlet, a onetime Washington bureau chief of High Times magazine, who had already famously slandered LaRouche in an article for that publication titled "He Wants To Take Your Drugs Away!"; Dennis King, a paid hack writer for the infamous New York City mob lawyer and former general counsel to Sen. Joe McCarthy, Roy M. Cohn; and Russell Bellant, a writer for the ostensibly left-wing anti-CIA publication Counterspy. King, Berlet, and Bellant had already established themselves as a team, targeting LaRouche and even lobbying the U.S. Department of Justice to open a criminal probe of LaRouche a year prior to the first Train gathering. At the salon, according to several eyewitness accounts, King was tasked to write a book about LaRouche, with the promise of funding (King's hack-job was eventually published, with credits to John Train, and with funding from the League for Industrial Democracy and the Smith Richardson Foundation).
According to several participants in the Train meetings, a number of "gentlemen with government connections" were present. At least one of the government men was Roy Godson, then a consultant to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), the National Security Council, and the United States Information Agency. Godson was a self-professed "expert" on "Soviet active measures," and he repeatedly, in league with former CIA official Donald Jamieson and USIA analyst Herbert Romerstein, attempted to smear Executive Intelligence Review as a Soviet "active measures" project.
The ADL's Mira Lansky Boland and Leonard Sussman both attended the Train "Get LaRouche" sessions, along with right-wing writer Rael Jean Isaac and Mellon family heir and right-wing money-bags Richard Mellon Scaife. The foundations under the control of Richard Mellon Scaife would regularly bankroll Train projects, as well as the "Get Bill Clinton" campaign, which ultimately led to the President's impeachment by the House of Representatives. If Hillary Clinton was right when she charged that a "vast right-wing conspiracy" had targeted her husband's Presidency, then Mellon Scaife was the chief financial officer of the plot.
A pair of flow-charts, prepared by Virginia Armat, John Train's longtime editor and a former Reader's Digest editor, portrayed the LaRouche organization, as per instructions, as a Soviet front, which "believes in the establishment of an American dictatorship, a purge of Jews and all British influences, and the militarization of society."
Between the date of the first Train salon session and the late 1980s, every "journalist" participant in the sessions had issued at least one major slander piece against LaRouche—in a major newspaper, magazine, or TV news show. Even Dennis King, the Roy Cohn poison pen, had been given space on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, to publish leaks from the Federal grand jury that had been convened to railroad LaRouche and colleagues within a little more than a year after the first Train salon session.
The "LaRouche as a Soviet active measures agent" line, coming out of the Train salons, had both an ideological as well as a practical dimension. At the outset of the Reagan Administration, the President had signed Executive Orders 12333 and 12334, which, in effect, authorized the Federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to "deputize" private citizens and organizations, to conduct activities against deemed enemies of the state. Under the rubric of 12333 and 12334, a multitude of sins were carried out, including the Iran-Contra scandal, that nearly brought down the Reagan Presidency. The "Get LaRouche" operation was another of the 12333 and 12334 programs.
Indeed, on Oct. 6, 1986, as swarms of Federal, state and local police, backed up by military units with armored personnel carriers and fixed-wing aircraft, surrounded the farm outside of Leesburg, Virginia where Lyndon and Helga LaRouche were living, it would only be a telegram from LaRouche to President Reagan, that would thwart the assassination plan, and force a fall-back to the frameup prosecutions that would take up the better part of the next six years.
President Reagan, who collaborated with LaRouche on the SDI and a number of other programs of vital benefit to the national security of the United States, was clearly "out of the loop" on the Get LaRouche campaign—underscoring the fact that the effort was launched and conducted from outside the government, utilizing assets within the Federal law enforcement and intelligence community, who could be tapped by Train, Angleton, Kissinger, Cherne, Lovestone, et al.
Author Ted Morgan, who published a 1999 biography of the infamous Soviet Comintern agent-turned Angleton CIA asset, Jay Lovestone, revealed that, during the 1980s, Lovestone had joined with Angleton and Kissinger in their own private conspiracy against LaRouche. Soon after the book's publication, Morgan told an investigator that his source on the vignette was none other than John Train.
All in the Family
A sub-theme of the Train salon's smear campaign against LaRouche was that the "fanatical Communist agent," LaRouche, had turned his organization into a cult, which indoctrinated new recruits using clever Soviet psychological tricks.
To spread the "LaRouche cult" fabrication, Train would turn to another segment of the extended apparatus of public/private Anglo-American intelligence operations—the American Family Foundation, now renamed, in more academically correct lingo, the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA).
AFF was a late-1970s redeployment of a nexus of CIA and Pentagon-financed psychiatrists, sociologists, and spooks, who all worked in secret government programs on mind-control and the uses of mind-altering psychedelic drugs. Following CIA Director (1973-76) William Colby's clean-out of some of the Agency's most egregiously criminal operations and operatives—starting with James Angleton—such intelligence community "black programs" in mind-control as "MK-Ultra" and "Artichoke" were ostensibly shut down. In reality, they were merely relocated into the "private sector," under the rubric of agencies like the American Family Foundation and the Cult Awareness Network. The Jonestown mass suicides of 1978, in which nearly a thousand members of Rev. Jimmy Jones' Peoples Temple committed suicide or were murdered in their remote Guyana village, created a mass outcry over the danger of cults.
Soon MK-Ultra veterans like Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Margaret Singer were passing themselves off as "experts" on dangerous cults, and proffering their services as "deprogrammers."
The AFF was heavily funded by a network of small, tax-exempt foundations with intimate ties to John Train. The Achelis and Bodman Foundations, both tax-exempt trusts of the Bodman family, are run by John N. Irwin III, the son of John Irwin II, a top aide to Henry Kissinger at the State Department, and Walter J.P. Curley, a former U.S. Ambassador to France. John Irwin is also a blood relative of Thomas "Pop" Watson, the founder of IBM and the author of the Truman-era proposal to constitute the postwar CIA as a private agency, run through Wall Street and the American multinational corporations.
Achelis and Bodman also are funders of Train's Northcote Parkinson Fund, along with SPES Trust, the London-based funding arm of the Argentine branch of the AFF, Servicio Para el Esclarecimiento en Sectas.
Train, John Irwin II, and Walter Curley are also all leading figures in the French American Foundation, an elite organization of French and American diplomats and financiers, through which Train has maintained his "French Connection" since his Paris days with the Congress for Cultural Freedom's Paris Review. Edward Hallam Tuck, a Northcote Parkinson Fund trustee, as of 2001, was president of the French American Foundation from 1988-95.
And Northcote Parkinson Fund director Edward Streator shares a seat on the Ditchley Foundation board of governors with Baroness Liz Symons of Vernham Dean, a former Tony Blair Minister of State for International Trade and Investment, friend of Mrs. Lynne Cheney, and an active player in recent AFF-steered filthy slander operations against Lyndon LaRouche.
'Mother' England
Above all else, John Train is a particular species of rabid Anglophile ("American Tory"), whose attachments to the City of London financial oligarchy and the intelligence and policy institutions of the British Commonwealth are primary. A source familiar with Train's operations bluntly described him as an appendage of the London IISS.
Furthermore, Train's personal financial empire is, in fact, centered more in Britain and continental Europe than in the United States. In 1984, Train Smith Counsel, the Wall Street firm 75% owned by John Train, went through a financial restructuring, with English Association Trust (EAT) of London purchasing 50% controlling interest. EAT, a 100-year old firm and a wholly owned subsidiary of English Association Group PLC, specializes in British takeovers of American businesses. English Association Group PLC, in turn, was, at the time, a wholly owned subsidiary of PK Banken of Sweden, a state-owned bank.
With the buy-in to Train Smith Counsel, two directors of EAT were added to the board of the New York firm, and Train was put on the board of EAT. The two British directors were Richard Cox-Johnson and Roderick Macleod. Cox-Johnson, the chairman of EAG and EAT and a director of PK Banken, was formerly a merchant banker with NM Rothschild. Macleod was a senior partner at Carr Sebag and Co.
In 1993, Train Smith Counsel, renamed Train Babcock Advisors, went through another metamorphosis, when a majority stake in the firm was bought by another financial institution with deep ties into the upper echelons of the City of London. Concord International Investment Group, a 50/50 joint venture of Mohamed Saleh Younes and Baring Brothers, bought into the Train firm. At the time of the purchase, Younes was chairman and CEO of Baring Brothers and Co., Inc., the New York City affiliate of the London bank, and was a director of Baring Brothers and Co., London. Baring Brothers and Co. was subsequently taken over by the Dutch banking and insurance conglomerate, ING.
The Egyptian-born Younes got his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1963, and worked for a number of banks in Europe, before becoming the head of Kidder Peabody International—a J.P. Morgan-affiliated firm, and then founding Concord in 1986 with Baring.
The following people contributed invaluable research to this article: Pierre Beaudry, Mark Bender, Claudio Celani, Anton Chaitkin, Roger Moore, Michele Steinberg, and Scott Thompson.
