From Unlimited Hangout, March 27:
As JPMorgan’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein are being scrutinized in court, Whitney Webb reveals how the same powerful players who brought Epstein to prominence were largely responsible for the rise of JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon.
....MUCH MOREEarlier this month, a judge ruled that two different lawsuits against JPMorgan Chase over the bank’s ties to deceased “financier” and pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, would be allowed to advance in U.S. Courts. One of these cases, brought against the bank by the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), has been a particular focus of independent media since the new year began, in part because the Attorney General of the USVI, Denise George, was fired from her post just days after she filed that case.
In a hearing in the USVI case against JPMorgan earlier this month, a USVI lawyer argued that the CEO of JPMorgan – Jamie Dimon – “knew in 2008 that his billionaire client [Jeffrey Epstein] was a sex trafficker.” The lawyer, Mimi Liu, also stated that former JPMorgan Jes Staley also knew this about Epstein at the time, but noted: “This case was not just Jes Staley … there will be numerous documents that go far beyond his office to the executive suite.” Liu also asserted that “Staley knew, Dimon knew, JPMorgan Chase knew” about Epstein’s criminal activities against minors.
While the bank has disputed that Dimon knew anything about Epstein’s accounts at the bank or what he was really up to at the time, this Unlimited Hangout investigation – a multi-part series – will reveal that Dimon’s rise to the top post at JPMorgan was intimately linked to the very same group of people who enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities as well as his extensive financial crimes.
In this article, we will examine how Dimon’s rise to become one of the most powerful men on Wall Street was largely reliant on top executives and directors of Bank One, which boasts incredibly close ties to The Limited’s Leslie Wexner and his right-hand man for many decades, Columbus-area real estate developer John W. Kessler. Kessler and other individuals tied to Wexner were the dominant forces that saw Dimon installed as Bank One’s CEO in 2000. Bank One was acquired by JPMorgan in 2003 and, shortly thereafter, Dimon became CEO of the combined entity. That acquisition, as well as the role of the Crown family in Chicago in Dimon’s selection as Bank One’s CEO, will be discussed in the second part of this series.
Yet, Dimon’s ties to the same networks as Wexner, particularly those characterized by their connections to organized crime and intelligence, preceded his time as Bank One’s CEO by many years. As this article will show, Dimon’s construction of what is now Citigroup, alongside his mentor Sandy Weill, began with their takeover of a company called Commercial Credit Corporation. That company, as well as its parent company, Control Data Corporation, had a troubling history of ties to intelligence networks that were extensively involved in criminal activity – including the so-called “private CIA” formed by CIA veteran Ted Shackley in the 1970s as well as individuals crucial to the Epstein story like Robert Maxwell.
Given these connections, JPMorgan’s claims that Dimon never knew what Jeffrey Epstein was up to during his time with the bank becomes much harder to believe. Furthermore, as future installments of this series will show, the players discussed here – Dimon and Epstein among them – were instrumental in the creation of what would manifest as the 2008 economic crisis. Not unlike some of the events that sparked today’s banking crisis, figures like Jeffrey Epstein, Dimon’s mentor Sandy Weill and the former Treasury Secretaries with close associations with both men, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, appeared to have engaged in actions that would intentionally provoke the collapse of certain banks to further consolidate the banking sector for their benefit. The goal, both then and now, seems to have been a move towards the logical conclusion of the “too big to fail” banking model — the eventual creation of a centralized cartel of mega-banks that dominate, not only commercial banking, but also central banking.
A Brief History of Control Data Corporation
Created by a group of Naval engineers in 1956, at the dawn of the American military-industrial complex, Engineering Research Associates (ERA) was a military contractor with a focus on cryptography and code-breaking. Shortly after its creation, part of the core ERA team split off and formed Control Data Corporation (CDC) a year later in 1957.
CDC quickly became a defense contractor in its own right and became a major purveyor of super-computers to sensitive U.S. research facilities. These included Sandia National Laboratories and Oak Ridge Laboratories, both of which worked on the U.S. nuclear program. At the same time, CDC also had an odd relationship with the Soviet Union’s own sensitive nuclear facilities, which eventually led to congressional scrutiny. Congressional hearings from the mid-1970s revealed that:
In 1968, a second-generation Control Data Corporation 1604 system was installed at the Dubna Soviet Nuclear Facility near Moscow. In 1972 [CDC] sold the Soviet Union a third-generation CDC 6200 system computer. For these systems, [CDC’s] operating statement had improved by about $3 million dollars in the past three years. And the Soviet Union has gained 15 years in computer technology
The hearings also noted that CDC planned to sell Soviet-controlled Poland computer systems so sensitive that they were only used domestically at the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Atomic Energy Commission. CDC claimed that Poland planned to use the equipment at a Polish “high school.” At the time, no American high school or educational institution of any type possessed this particular system, and there were only 10 in the entire country. As reflected by these and other examples in the hearings’ transcripts, Congress’ concerns were based around the perception that CDC’s business in the USSR involved technology transfers that undermined U.S. national security during the height of the Cold War. Those concerns would only grow with time.
After these hearings in 1974, CDC made an apparent move at increasing its role in technology transfers, despite political concerns. By the late 1970s, they had established a new subsidiary called Worldtech, described in the press as “a division of Control Data Corp that does research and consulting on, and brokering of, technology transfers.”
Once Worldtech was established by CDC, it entered into a joint venture in 1979 with Greek publisher George Bobolas that was called Worldtech Hellas Ltd. 70% was owned by Bobolas and 20% was owned by CDC. The owner of the remaining 10% was not disclosed in reports at the time.
A 1979 letter from one of Bobolas’ companies to A. Afonin, identified as a “representative of the State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations of the USSR Council of Ministers,” proposed the creation of a “joint development company using Worldtech for ‘world-wide technology transfer’” and stressed that “Worldtech Hellas Ltd. will give a lot of help’ to ‘technology transfer on an international base.’” After journalist Paul Anastasi published information about Bobolas and called him a “KGB agent of influence,” one of his companies, Bobtrade, asserted that “no improper transfer of high technology was involved.” CDC moved to dissolve their partnership, likely due to bad publicity.
Around the time that Worldtech was created, CDC’s then-executive vice president, Robert D. Schmidt, was part of the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations (ACUSR, previously the American Committee on East-West Accord). Other members at the time, specifically in 1977, included Robert Maxwell’s lawyer and confidant, Samuel Pisar (stepfather to current U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken), as well as Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, who would become the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1979. Another member was Paul Ziffren, a major figure in the organized crime networks that ran through Chicago and Hollywood described in Gus Russo’s acclaimed work Supermob. Another key figure in the “Supermob” network was Henry Crown. Crown, along with his son and grandson – Lester and James, will be discussed in greater detail later in this series due to their pivotal role in the rise of Jamie Dimon.
Notably, in the early 1970s, Samuel Pisar told Congress that the world was moving “toward a single, unified world economy, in disregard of national frontiers, and even ideological boundaries.” He stated that “all conventional tools of national policy, it seems to me, are rapidly becoming anachronistic [as] the State itself, even a strong one, [..] is no longer a defendable economic entity.” Pisar also claimed that the main drivers of this shift included “the multinational corporation” and “the dissemination of technology.” He later frames technology transfers by major multinational corporations as giving rise to the “trans-ideological corporation” where “capital private enterprises” and “Communist state enterprises” freely intermingled and formed joint ventures. When asked if these “trans-ideological corporations” were forces for good or for evil, Pisar responded that “I believe that on balance, they are a force for good,” but qualified that as depending on how governments and corporate management act “to make certain that they become forces for good.”....
Earlier today:
