Russ Baker on Jack Crichton, Stage Manager

From Bush and the JFK Hit, part 10 

by Russ Baker (Family of Secrets)

http://whowhatwhy.org/2013/11/20/bus...after-camelot/

Jack Crichton, Stage Manager

If Poppy Bush was busy on November 22, 1963, so was his friend Jack Crichton. Bush’s fellow GOP candidate was a key figure in a web of military intelligence figures with deep connections to the Dallas Police Department – and as previously noted, to the pilot car of JFK’s motorcade.

Crichton came back into the picture within hours of Kennedy’s death and the subsequent arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, when a peculiar cordon sanitaire went up around Marina Oswald. The first to her side was Republican activist and precinct chairman Ilya Mamantov, a vociferous anti-Communist who frequently lectured in Dallas on the dangers of the Red menace.

When investigators arrived, Mamantov stepped up as interpreter and embellished Marina’s comments to establish in no uncertain terms that the “leftist” Lee Harvey Oswald had been the gunman – the lone gunman – who killed the president.

It is interesting of course that the Dallas police would let an outsider – in particular, a right-wing Russian émigré – handle the delicate interpreting task. Asked by the Warren Commission how this happened, Mamantov said that he had received a phone call from Deputy Police Chief George Lumpkin. After a moment’s thought, Mamantov then remembered that just preceding Lumpkin’s call he had heard from Jack Crichton.

It was Crichton who had put the Dallas Police Department together with Mamantov and ensured his place at Marina Oswald’s side at this crucial moment.Despite this revelation, Crichton almost completely escaped scrutiny. The Warren Commission never interviewed him. Yet, as much as anyone, Crichton embodied a confluence of interests within the oil-intelligence-military nexus. And he was closely connected to Poppy in their mutual efforts to advance the then-small Texas Republican Party, culminating in their acceptance of the two top positions on the state’s Republican ticket in 1964.

During World War II, Crichton had served in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA. Postwar, he began working for the company of petroleum czar Everette DeGolyer and was soon connected in petromilitary circles at the highest levels. A review of hundreds of corporate documents and newspaper articles shows that when Crichton left DeGolyer’s firm in the early fifties he became involved in an almost incomprehensible web of companies with overlapping boards and ties to DeGolyer. Many of them were backed by some of North America’s most powerful families, including the Du Ponts of Delaware and the Bronfmans, owners of the liquor giant Seagram.

Crichton was so plugged into the Dallas power structure that one of his company directors was Clint Murchison Sr., king of the oil depletion allowance, and another was D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building.

A typical example of this corporate cronyism came in 1952, when Crichton was part of a syndicate – including Murchison, DeGolyer, and the Du Ponts – that used connections in the fascist Franco regime to acquire rare drilling rights in Spain. The operation was handled by Delta Drilling, which was owned by Joe Zeppa of Tyler, Texas – the man who transported Poppy Bush from Tyler to Dallas on November 22, 1963.

It was in 1956 that the bayou-bred Crichton started up his own spy unit, the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment. He would serve as the intelligence unit’s only commander through November 22, 1963, continuing until he retired from the 488th in 1967, at which time he was awarded the Legion of Merit and cited for “exceptionally outstanding service.”

Gimme Shelter

Besides his oil work and his spy work, the disarmingly folksy Crichton wore a third hat. He was an early and central figure in an important Dallas institution that is virtually forgotten today: the city’s Civil Defense organization. Launched in the early 1950s as cold war hysteria grew, it was a centerpiece of a kind of officially sanctioned panic response that, like the response to September 11, 2001, had a potential to serve other agendas.

So avid and extensive was the Dallas civil defense effort that the conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey singled it out for special praise in his syndicated column in September 1960: “The Communists, since 1917, have sold Communism to more people than have been told about Christ after 2,000 years,” Harvey wrote, a sentiment common in rightist circles of the era.

But they got their converts one at a time. You and I can ‘convert’ two others to become militant Americans this week . . . That’s precisely the nature of the counterattack that has been mounted in Dallas.

Early in 1961, Crichton was the moving force behind a cold war readiness program called “Know Your Enemy,” which focused on the Communist intention to destroy the American way of life. In October 1961, Dallas mayor Earle Cabell introduced a short documentary Communist Encirclement – 1961. Afterward, the Dallas Morning News wrote that the Channel 8 switchboard was “flooded . . . with calls from viewers lauding the program, which deals frankly with Communist infiltration.”

So great was the sense of alarm that at the 1961 Texas State Fair in Dallas, 350 people per hour made their way through an exhibitor’s bomb shelter.

 In April 1, 1962, Dallas Civil Defense, with Crichton heading its intelligence component, opened an elaborate underground command post under the patio of the Dallas Health and Science Museum. Because it was intended for “continuity-of-government” operations during an attack, it was fully equipped with communications equipment.

With this shelter in operation on November 22, 1963, it was possible for someone based there to communicate with police and other emergency services. There is no indication that the Warren Commission or any other investigative body or even JFK assassination researchers looked into this facility or the police and Army Intelligence figures associated with it.

On November 22, Crichton suggested Mamantov to the police department as the ideal person to interpret for Marina. His basis for knowing this was that in his role in military intelligence he maintained surveillance of Russians in Dallas, working closely in this regard with the police department.

Marina’s statements through Mamantov would play a crucial role in starting a chain of events that could have led to a U.S. missile strike on Cuba. In the hours following Kennedy’s assassination, the Dallas Police Department passed along information purportedly gleaned from Marina Oswald that suggested possible ties between her husband and the government of Cuba.

Though the information would turn out to be wrong, it was quickly passed to Army Intelligence, which then passed it along to the U.S. Strike Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, the unit that would have directed an attack on the island had someone ordered it in those chaotic first hours after Kennedy’s death. That this sequence of events took place is confirmed by the original Army cable from military intelligence in Texas, declassified a decade later. What is not clear is how close matters ever got to zero hour.

A key element in this tangled tale is the little-appreciated overlap between the Dallas Police Department and Army Intelligence. As Crichton, who has since died, would reveal in a little-noted oral history in 2001, there were “about a hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.”

Thus Crichton was a crucial figure linking many seemingly disparate elements: military intelligence, local police, the GOP, the White Russians, the oil community, George de Mohrenschildt, and Poppy Bush.

The Poppy and Jack Show

In the fall of 1963, about two months before JFK’s assassination, the two political neophytes Jack Crichton and George H.W. Bush both decided to mount GOP races for statewide office. The following year, they would head the Texas GOP’s ticket, with Crichton the nominee for governor and Bush for U.S. Senate. Both used the same lawyer, Pat Holloway, who worked out of the Republic National Bank Building.

The man who recruited them as candidates, state GOP chairman Peter O’Donnell, would several years later be forced by newspaper revelations to admit that his family foundation was a conduit for CIA funds.

Thus in November 1963, Bush and Crichton were essentially working in tandem. Given that alliance, Poppy would need to explain not only where he was on November 22 and why he tried so hard to hide that, but also what he knew about Crichton’s activities that day and about Crichton’s Army Intelligence colleagues in the pilot car of the motorcade.

In his oral history, Crichton couches his relationship with Bush in benign and casual terms. He says that he and Poppy “spoke from the same podiums and got to be fairly good acquaintances.” Their appearances on behalf of the Texas Republican Party evolved into a private friendship that continued over the years. “When he was head of the CIA, I called him one day and I said, ‘George, I’m coming to Washington, would you have time to play tennis?’ And he said ‘Yeah.’ He said, ’How would you like to play at The White House?’ And I said ‘Man, that’d be a real deal.’ So he said, ‘Well, I’ll have you a partner.’\

Russ Baker, author of "Bush Family of Secrets," posts at WhoWhatWhy - Groundbreaking Investigative Journalism