Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: Chapter 5

THE AMERICAN RED CROSS MISSION IN RUSSIA — 1917

Poor Mr. Billings believed he was in charge of a scientific mission for the relief of Russia .... He was in reality nothing but a mask — the Red Cross complexion of the mission was nothing but a mask.

Cornelius Kelleher, assistant to William Boyce Thompson (in George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War)

Here's the deal: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York put together a financial A-team to go over to Russia so that the banksters might have ground-floor control of the new government.



The Red Cross cover was one of the first big cases of the banksters using a nonprofit for cover. Once again our esteemed host, Antony Sutton explains the situation of the American Red cross at the time of WW1:

Up to about 1915 the most influential person in the American Red Cross National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. was Miss Mabel Boardman. An active and energetic promoter, Miss Boardman had been the moving force behind the Red Cross enterprise, although its endowment came from wealthy and prominent persons including J. P. Morgan, Mrs. E. H. Harriman, Cleveland H. Dodge, and Mrs. Russell Sage. The 1910 fund-raising campaign for $2 million, for example, was successful only because it was supported by these wealthy residents of New York City. In fact, most of the money came from New York City. J.P. Morgan himself contributed $100,000 and seven other contributors in New York City amassed $300,000. Only one person outside New York City contributed over $10,000 and that was William J. Boardman, Miss Boardman's father. Henry P. Davison was chairman of the 1910 New York Fund-Raising Committee and later became chairman of the War Council of the American Red Cross. In other words, in World War I the Red Cross depended heavily on Wall Street, and specifically on the Morgan firm.

 So who was footing the bill?

 The members of the mission received no pay. All expenses were paid by William Boyce Thompson and the $200,000 from International Harvester was apparently used in Russia for political subsidies. We know from the files of the U.S. embassy in Petrograd that the U.S. Red Cross gave 4,000 rubles to Prince Lvoff, president of the Council of Ministers, for "relief of revolutionists" and 10,000 rubles in two payments to Kerensky for "relief of political refugees."

 Who was on the team?

THE 1917 AMERICAN RED CROSS MISSION TO RUSSIA
Members from Wall Street financial community and  their affiliations	Medical doctors	Orderlies, interpreters, etc.
Andrews (Liggett & Myers Tobacco)	Billings (doctor)	Brooks (orderly)
Barr (Chase National Bank)	Grow (doctor)	Clark (orderly)
Brown (c/o William B. Thompson)	McCarthy (medical research; doctor)	Rocchia (orderly)
Cochran (McCann Co.)	Post (doctor)
Kelleher (c/o William B. Thompson)	Sherman (food chemistry)	Travis (movies)
Nicholson (Swirl & Co.)	Thayer (doctor)	Wyckoff (movies)
Pirnie (Hazen, Whipple & Fuller)
Redfield (Stetson, Jennings & Russell)	Wightman (medicine)	Hardy (justice)
Robins (mining promoter)	Winslow (hygiene)	Horn (transportation)
Swift (Swift & Co.)
Thacher (Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett)
Thompson (Federal Reserve Bank of N.Y.)
Wardwell (Stetson, Jennings & Russell)
Whipple (Hazen, Whipple & Fuller)
Corse (National City Bank)
Magnuson (recommended by confidential agent of Colonel Thompson)

Are we getting the picture?

So what were all these titans of industry up to? What did they hope to accomplish by visiting Russia at this time?

What then was the Red Cross Mission doing? Thompson certainly acquired a reputation for opulent living in Petrograd, but apparently he undertook only two major projects in Kerensky's Russia: support for an American propaganda program and support for the Russian Liberty Loan. Soon after arriving in Russia Thompson met with Madame Breshko-Breshkovskaya and David Soskice, Kerensky's secretary, and agreed to contribute $2 million to a committee of popular education so that it could "have its own press and... engage a staff of lecturers, with cinematograph illustrations" (861.00/ 1032); this was for the propaganda purpose of urging Russia to continue in the war against Germany. According to Soskice, "a packet of 50,000 rubles" was given to Breshko-Breshkovskaya with the statement, "This is for you to expend according to your best judgment." A further 2,100,000 rubles was deposited into a current bank account. A letter from J. P. Morgan to the State Department (861.51/190) confirms that Morgan cabled 425,000 rubles to Thompson at his request for the Russian Liberty Loan; J. P. also conveyed the interest of the Morgan firm regarding "the wisdom of making an individual subscription through Mr. Thompson" to the Russian Liberty Loan. These sums were transmitted through the National City Bank branch in Petrograd. 

Notice that the first thing they do is work on "education" aka "getting your mind right". Taking a page out of Frederic Howe's Confessions of a Monopolist, they work to get society to work for them. Using propaganda, which I like to think of as mass public lying, they begin to pump up their Red Revolution.

Of greater historical significance, however, was the assistance given to the Bolsheviks first by Thompson, then, after December 4, 1917, by Raymond Robins.

Thompson's contribution to the Bolshevik cause was recorded in the contemporary American press. The Washington Post of February 2, 1918, carried the following paragraphs:

GIVES BOLSHEVIKI A MILLION

W. B. Thompson, Red Cross Donor, Believes Party Misrepresented. New York, Feb. 2 (1918). William B. Thompson, who was in Petrograd from July until November last, has made a personal contribution of $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviki for the purpose of spreading their doctrine in Germany and Austria.

Mr. Thompson had an opportunity to study Russian conditions as head of the American Red Cross Mission, expenses of which also were largely defrayed by his personal contributions. He believes that the Bolsheviki constitute the greatest power against Pro-Germanism in Russia and that their propaganda has been undermining the militarist regimes of the General Empires.

Mr. Thompson deprecates American criticism of the Bolsheviki. He believes they have been misrepresented and has made the financial contribution to the cause in the belief that it will be money well spent for the future of Russia as well as for the Allied cause.

Hermann Hagedorn's biography The Magnate: William Boyce Thompson and His Time (1869-1930) reproduces a photograph of a cablegram from J.P. Morgan in New York to W. B. Thompson, "Care American Red Cross, Hotel Europe, Petrograd." The cable is date-stamped, showing it was received at Petrograd "8-Dek 1917" (8 December 1917), and reads:

New York Y757/5 24W5 Nil — Your cable second received. We have paid National City Bank one million dollars as instructed — Morgan.

The National City Bank branch in Petrograd had been exempted from the Bolshevik nationalization decree — the only foreign or domestic Russian bank to have been so exempted. Hagedorn says that this million dollars paid into Thompson's NCB account was used for "political purposes."

Just to review, Trotsky had been living it up in New York City with a furnished apartment with a refrigerator and a chauffeur despite not having a regular job.  In previous installments in this series, we have learned that Trotsky and Lenin were conveyed from Germany to Russia for the purposes of Revolution by monied interests. For all you conservatives out there who decry communism and socialism, you had better pay attention to this. The Bolshevik Revolution was made possible by the Federal Reserve banking cartel, which served as a front for JP Morgan and the Rockefellers among others. Now Morgan, Rockefeller and friends had the world's largest by area nation under their control. You see, physical occupation of a country is so 19th century - this was the 20th century and controlling vast populations with money and propaganda through proxys is so much more efficient.

But don't take it from me, take it from Raymond Robins, the man who took the reigns of the "Mission" from Thompson when he went home for the holidays Dec. 1917.

William B. Thompson left Russia in early December 1917 to return home. He traveled via London, where, in company with Thomas Lamont of the J.P. Morgan firm, he visited Prime Minister Lloyd George, an episode we pick up in the next chapter. His deputy, Raymond Robins, was left in charge of the Red Cross Mission to Russia. The general impression that Colonel Robins presented in the subsequent months was not overlooked by the press. In the words of the Russian newspaper Russkoe Slovo, Robins "on the one hand represents American labor and on the other hand American capital, which is endeavoring through the Soviets to gain their Russian markets."

Raymond Robins started life as the manager of a Florida phosphate company commissary. From this base he developed a kaolin deposit, then prospected Texas and the Indian territories in the late nineteenth century. Moving north to Alaska, Robins made a fortune in the Klondike gold rush. Then, for no observable reason, he switched to socialism and the reform movement. By 1912 he was an active member of Roosevelt's Progressive Party. He joined the 1917 American Red Cross Mission to Russia as a "social economist."

There is considerable evidence, including Robins' own statements, that his reformist social-good appeals were little more than covers for the acquisition of further power and wealth, reminiscent of Frederick Howe's suggestions in Confessions of a Monopolist. For example, in February 1918 Arthur Bullard was in Petrograd with the U.S. Committee on Public Information and engaged in writing a long memorandum for Colonel Edward House. This memorandum was given to Robins by Bullard for comments and criticism before transmission to House in Washington, D.C. Robins' very unsocialistic and imperialistic comments were to the effect that the manuscript was "uncommonly discriminating, far-seeing and well done," but that he had one or two reservations — in particular, that recognition of the Bolsheviks was long overdue, that it should have been effected immediately, and that had the U.S. so recognized the Bolsheviks, "I believe that we would now be in control of the surplus resources of Russia and have control officers at all points on the frontier."

To contrast real Red Cross work, the Red Cross Mission to Romania desperately needed money and applied to the Mission in Russia, which controlled the purse strings for help, and was constantly ignored. Antony Sutton summarizes this chapter and gives us examples of where the Red Cross had been used to shield and equip revolutionaries at this same point in history:

Unknown to its administrators, the Red Cross has been used from time to time as a vehicle or cover for revolutionary activities. The use of Red Cross markings for unauthorized purposes is not uncommon. When Tsar Nicholas was moved from Petrograd to Tobolsk allegedly for his safety (although this direction was towards danger rather than safety), the train carried Japanese Red Cross placards. The State Department files contain examples of revolutionary activity under cover of Red Cross activities. For example, a Russian Red Cross official (Chelgajnov) was arrested in Holland in 1919 for revolutionary acts (316-21-107). During the Hungarian Bolshevik revolution in 1918, led by Bela Kun, Russian members of the Red Cross (or revolutionaries operating as members of the Russian Red Cross) were found in Vienna and Budapest. In 1919 the U.S. ambassador in London cabled Washington startling news; through the British government he had learned that "several Americans who had arrived in this country in the uniform of the Red Cross and who stated that they were Bolsheviks . . . were proceeding through France to Switzerland to spread Bolshevik propaganda." The ambassador noted that about 400 American Red Cross people had arrived in London in November and December 1918; of that number one quarter returned to the United States and "the remainder insisted on proceeding to France." There was a later report on January 15, 1918, to the effect that an editor of a labor newspaper in London had been approached on three different occasions by three different American Red Cross officials who offered to take commissions to Bolsheviks in Germany. The editor had suggested to the U.S. embassy that it watch American Red Cross personnel. The U.S. State Department took these reports seriously and Polk cabled for names, stating, "If true, I consider it of the greatest importance" (861.00/3602 and /3627).

Socialism is a tool to bundle up a country's wealth into one place. Spreading the Bolshevik revolutionaries around was a way for the bankster to dig ditches that would channel wealth into a pool that they controlled. If they could re-educate useful idiots into thinking this ideology was their idea, all the better, as they could self-propagate the idea with the banksters not being attached to continuous education programs. But to apply this to our country, we see that the commie/socialist/lib professors in academia either got their start or are funded by foundation grant money, which as I have pointed out before, comes from Wall Street Banksters.

To summarize: the picture we form of the 1917 American Red Cross Mission to Russia is remote from one of neutral humanitarianism. The mission was in fact a mission of Wall Street financiers to influence and pave the way for control, through either Kerensky or the Bolshevik revolutionaries, of the Russian market and resources. No other explanation will explain the actions of the mission. However, neither Thompson nor Robins was a Bolshevik. Nor was either even a consistent socialist. The writer is inclined to the interpretation that the socialist appeals of each man were covers for more prosaic objectives. Each man was intent upon the commercial; that is, each sought to use the political process in Russia for personal financial ends. Whether the Russian people wanted the Bolsheviks was of no concern. Whether the Bolshevik regime would act against the United States — as it consistently did later — was of no concern. The single overwhelming objective was to gain political and economic influence with the new regime, whatever its ideology. If William Boyce Thompson had acted alone, then his directorship of the Federal Reserve Bank would be inconsequential. However, the fact that his mission was dominated by representatives of Wall Street institutions raises a serious question — in effect, whether the mission was a planned, premeditated operation by a Wall Street syndicate. This the reader will have to judge for himself, as the rest of the story unfolds.

 Now some of you will just blow all of this off because if you take it seriously, that means you will have to shift your paradigms. Because what this information implies is that everything your state (fed reserve banking cartel) textbooks told you about communism and the Soviet Union/Cold War was a complete and total lie. If the Cold War was a lie, then the need for a permanent armament industry was also a lie. When Antony Sutton tried to bring this information to the attention of Republicans in the 1972 RNC Convention, he was effectively ignored, lampooned, and blacklisted. Why? Because they were making money hand over fist from this criminal military-industrial setup. There is a reason why so much of 20th century government documentation is classified under the auspices of "national security." They don't want you putting this stuff together. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution by Antony Sutton was written in the '70s when these State Dept. files were recently declassified and some are still classified. By then, everyone who profited from committing treason was dead and could tell no tales. But the scam is still going on, it has just gotten bigger and bigger and only "widespread knowledge of the facts" will defeat it.

Catch up on this series here:


Wall Street and Bolshevik Revolution Chapter 4
Wall Street and Bolshevik Revolution Chapter 3
Wall Street and Bolshevik Revolution Chapter 2
Wall Street and Bolshevik Revolution Chapter 1


Wall Street and Bolshevik Revolution by Antony Sutton may be read in its entirety at Reformed Theology.

cross-posted at Don't Tread on Us