O
carte recenta face valva prin State pe motiv ca expune cum ar fi fost
lucrat JFK de interesele complexului militar-industrial prin precursorii
statului-serviciilor http://www.amazon.com/The-Devils-Chessboard-Am…/…/0062276166
. Afla omul destule, chiar si de Malaxa, desi nu am gasit referinte
pentru mai multe din afirmatiile autorului despre contextul romanesc al
perioadei in discutie.
By 1952, Richard Nixon’s triumph as a Cold War inquisitor had won him the number-two spot on the Republican presidential ticket headed by war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower. But on September 29, Drew Pearson, Washington’s leading muckraker, dropped a bombshell on Nixon—one of his favorite targets—that briefly threatened to end his political career. The story was part of a larger theme of corruption that reporters like Pearson believed hovered over Nixon’s career. Nixon, the humble son of Whittier, always seemed hungry for ways to profit from his public service.
Earlier in the race, Pearson had discovered that Nixon’s wealthy Southern California supporters had set up a slush fund for the politician’s personal use—a revelation that had nearly forced the vice presidential candidate to resign as Eisenhower’s running mate. It took Nixon’s brilliantly homespun TV address to the nation—which would go down in history as the “Checkers speech” after the black-and-white cocker spaniel that had been given to Nixon’s daughters by a supporter—to preempt the budding scandal and save his political career. “And you know, the kids love the dog,” Nixon told the largest audience that had ever tuned in for a political speech. “And I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.” His shameless performance managed to transform a case of blatant political corruption into a domestic drama that touched the hearts of millions of Americans.
Nixon’s enormous relief was shared by the GOP power brokers who had picked him for the race. It was the Dulles-Dewey group that had tapped Nixon for vice president. Their decision was conveyed to Eisenhower by Herbert Brownell Jr., a fellow Wall Street attorney who had taken a leave from his blue-chip firm to run the Republican campaign for the White House. The GOP brain trust convinced the aging general that the young senator from California not only brought regional balance to the ticket but the kind of slashing energy and anti-Communist fervor that the campaign needed.
But now, in the final weeks of the presidential contest, Pearson was again on the verge of blowing up Nixon’s career. Reporting in his widely syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column, Pearson revealed that the vice presidential candidate had left out something very important from his Checkers speech: namely, his crooked relationship with a Romanian industrialist named Nicolae Malaxa. The wealthy Romanian émigré had collaborated with the Nazis during the war, and later with the Communist regime that took over his homeland. But Malaxa’s reputation, Pearson reported, did not discredit him with Senator Nixon, who pulled strings on his behalf to allow him to continue living in the United States and to procure a major tax break for him.
Pearson knew that Nixon had performed these favors for Malaxa in return for an impressive bribe. But, lacking the documentary evidence, the columnist had to leave this crucial piece of evidence out of his story.
There was indeed a smoking gun: a $100,000 check from Malaxa deposited in Nixon’s Whittier bank account. But Pearson was unable to get his hands on it. In a twist of bad luck for Nixon, one of the tellers at his bank branch turned out to be a Romanian refugee who loathed Malaxa. He sent a photostatic copy of the check to political rivals of the notorious industrialist in the exile community, who in turn forwarded the copied check to their contact in the CIA, Gordon Mason, chief of the agency’s Balkans desk.
By fall 1952, Allen Dulles was the number two man at the CIA and was in line to take over the agency with an Eisenhower-Nixon victory in November. As deputy director, Dulles was already making the agency his own, working with loyal associates like Frank Wisner—who would soon take over the agency’s action arm—on ways to escalate the covert war against the Eastern bloc. But the ambitious plans that Dulles and Wisner were hatching for a long-awaited Republican presidency suddenly seemed in peril when Gordon Mason walked into Wisner’s office with a copy of the Malaxa check. “Jesus Christ!” Wisner burst out. “We’d better see Allen Dulles.”
As he had long demonstrated, Frank Wisner was quite willing to recruit from among the ranks of ex-fascists for his espionage operations in Eastern Europe—many of whom he had slipped past immigration authorities into the United States despite their barbaric wartime records. But Wisner, somewhat mysteriously, had insisted on drawing the line with Nicolae Malaxa, whom he considered a particularly “unsavory” character. In a March 1951 CIA memo, Wisner had even urged that Malaxa—who had finagled his way into the United States after the war as part of a Romanian trade delegation—be deported. Wisner had served as the OSS station chief in Romania, and he considered the country his turf. He was acutely sensitive to the factions and feuds within the Romanian exile community, where Malaxa provoked feelings passionate enough to tear apart all hope of a united anti-Soviet front.
Despite Wisner’s feelings about Malaxa, he realized that Allen Dulles was deeply implicated in the Romanian’s “unsavory” story. Dulles had not only been Malaxa’s lawyer, he had introduced him to Nixon. The Malaxa money trail, in fact, led in many compromising directions, including Nixon’s bank account, Dulles’s law firm, CIA front organizations like the National Committee for a Free Europe, and even some of Wisner’s own secret combat groups. The Romanian industrialist, who reportedly stashed away as much as $500 million (worth over $6.5 billion today) in overseas accounts before he fled to the United States, had made himself extremely useful as a shadow financier for the underground Cold War.
Malaxa was the type of charming scoundrel with whom Dulles enjoyed doing business. The Romanian oligarch had no ideology; he believed only in opportunity. He had a witty sense of humor and the dark good looks of a dashing werewolf, with thick black hair and a pronounced widow’s peak. He conducted himself with a cynical, Mittel-European confidence that everyone had a price, greasing his way through life by smoothly slipping cash to all the right people. Bribery came so naturally to Malaxa that he once tried to buy off the dedicated U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service prosecutor who was handling his case—a man who, to Malaxa’s great surprise, turned out to be incorruptible.
He began his career in modest fashion, as a locomotive repairman, but he had a talent for making connections and opening doors, and soon he amassed a small fortune as a manufacturer of railroad equipment. In the 1920s, he and his family moved into a mansion in Bucharest, where he entertained the capital’s high society, and befriended the mistress of King Carol II, Madame Magda Lupescu. In a deft, Game of Thrones–like move, he cemented his royal connections by arranging for his own daughter to become the mistress of the king’s son, Prince Michael. By forging a partnership with the king, who proved equally avaricious, Malaxa became a dominant player in the country’s steel, munitions, and oil industries.
In the 1930s, as Hitler built his war machine in Germany, King Carol’s rule came under increasing pressure from a homegrown fascist movement known as the Iron Guard. The virulently anti-Semitic organization blamed Jews for Romania’s woes and targeted prominent Jewish figures such as Madame Lupescu. Despite the debt he owed the king’s mistress for her patronage, the ever-opportunistic Malaxa began currying favor with the Iron Guard as the group grew more powerful, financing its activities and flying its flag from the roof of his stone mansion.
In September 1940, the Iron Guard forced King Carol to abdicate and a pro-German fascist government took power in Bucharest. With Hitler’s influence expanding in Romania, Malaxa made another nimble move, merging his industrial empire with that of Herman Goering’s brother Albert. “Your interests, my dear Mr. Malaxa, are the same as ours,” the Nazi industrialist warmly assured him.
In January 1941, Malaxa’s green-uniformed Iron Guard thugs, feeling betrayed by Romania’s new fascist government, launched a coup attempt, using the industrialist’s mansion as a base for their assault. During the coup, the Iron Guard fell upon the country’s Jews in one of the most horrific spasms of violence in Romania’s history. Thousands of Jews in Bucharest were rounded up and beaten and tortured, including one group of more than a hundred—among them children as young as five—who were marched into a municipal slaughterhouse and butchered. The Iron Guardsmen hung their victims, some still alive, on meat hooks and “mutilated them in a vicious parody of kosher slaughtering practices,” according to one later account. The Iron Guard’s Bucharest pogrom was so depraved that it shocked even the country’s fascist regime, which appealed to Hitler to help put down the uprising.
After the coup was suppressed, Malaxa was jailed as a leader of the conspiracy and his industrial empire was confiscated by the Nazis and the Romanian government. But, in 1944, as the advancing Soviet army drove the Germans out of Romania, Malaxa again rose from the ashes, insinuating himself into the new Moscow-backed regime. He was the only Romanian capitalist to whom the Communist government returned his industrial property.
Nevertheless, Malaxa was savvy enough to realize that his future was not bright in a Communist Romania. He had already taken the precaution of salting away much of his huge fortune in U.S. accounts. After the war, by making a generous distribution of bribes—including jewels, Cadillacs, and cash—Malaxa persuaded Romanian officials to allow him to travel to the United States, ostensibly on trade business for the country. He arrived in 1946 and never returned home.
Malaxa wisely chose to apply for permanent residency, instead of American citizenship, knowing the process was not as demanding. But his résumé was so eyebrow raising that his battle to stay in the United States would drag on for years. Malaxa’s OSS, CIA, FBI, and INS files bulged with condemnations of his morally dexterous, shape-shifting life. One government report labeled him “notorious.” Another called him “the most perfidious man in Romania.” He was a “master of the art of bribery” who had ushered in an “era of corruption” in Romania. He was a flagrant “opportunist” who “had been on all sides of the fence at various times.” He had gone from playing “Hitler’s game” to someone who “must be considered an agent of the Soviet government and of the Romanian Communists in the United States, even if he himself is not a Communist at heart.”
According to a 1952 CIA memo, “perhaps the most concise appraisal of Malaxa” came from an American diplomat who found him “entirely unscrupulous, turning with the wind, and like a cat [he] has developed to a high art the knack of landing on his feet. He is considered to be essentially a dangerous type of man.”
None of this mattered to Allen Dulles when Malaxa turned up at his office at Sullivan and Cromwell. The pertinent fact was that the Romanian had a huge fortune, and he was willing to spend millions of it where Dulles wanted him to. In return for financing Dulles’s far-flung anti-Communist network—which stretched from Buenos Aires to Bucharest—Malaxa secured Dulles’s influential help in his battle to stay in the United States. Some of Malaxa’s treasure went to prominent Romanian exile leaders who hoped to take power after the Communist regime was toppled. Other funds went to Juan Perón’s Argentina, where Malaxa was involved in a rising neofascist movement, and France, where he underwrote “scholarships” for exiled Romanian “students” who turned out to be veterans of the vicious Iron Guard.
By 1948, Malaxa was ensconced in a luxurious apartment on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, but his wheeling and dealing had begun to attract unwanted press attention. In May, gossip columnist Walter Winchell exposed the notorious collaborator who was freely enjoying the city’s pleasures—the “Balkanazi on Broadway,” he called Malaxa. Winchell noted that the “distinguished” firm of Sullivan and Cromwell had recently dropped the Romanian as a client, presumably because he had grown too hot.
But Dulles did not abandon Malaxa; behind the scenes, he entrusted the Romanian’s immigration battle to his political protégé Nixon. In return for Malaxa’s substantial gift of $100,000, the California senator began vigorously lobbying INS officials on his behalf and pushing an immigration bill through Congress that was designed to win Malaxa U.S. residency. When those efforts stalled due to determined resistance from legislators who were repelled by the émigré’s past, Malaxa and Nixon tried a different tack. With the help of Nixon cronies in Southern California, Malaxa announced that he was setting up a pipeline factory in Whittier that he called the Western Tube Corporation. Nixon wrote a letter to the Defense Production Administration, claiming that Malaxa’s project was “strategically and economically important, for both California and the entire United States.” The Western Tube factory was never built, but the phantom project succeeded in winning Malaxa a huge tax windfall. And it kept alive the Romanian’s immigration campaign. California congressman John Shelley later denounced the Western Tube affair as “a complete fraud, a springboard for [Malaxa’s] entry to the United States.”
As the smoldering Malaxa scandal threatened to erupt into flames in the final days of the 1952 presidential race, Dulles moved quickly to douse it. After Wisner and Mason showed him Malaxa’s $100,000 check, the deputy CIA director knew that he would have to send it up the chain of command to his boss, General Walter Bedell Smith. But Dulles also realized that, in this case, passing the buck was as good as destroying the evidence. CIA director “Beetle” Smith had served as Eisenhower’s intensely dedicated chief of staff during the war, and he was just as devoted to Ike’s presidential victory as Dulles.
It was Gordon Mason who was given the unpleasant task of showing the evidence of Nixon’s corruption to General Smith, who predictably flew into a rage. “Smith was a man who could cuss in three languages and in almost every sentence,” recalled Mason. “He also had a violent temper, and he acted as though I personally was trying to scuttle Eisenhower.” Smith demanded that Mason immediately gather up every scrap of incriminating material against Nixon and bring it to his office. “The story was cleaned from the books,” said Mason. Wisner, too, had no doubt what was done with the evidence. “Beetle just flushed it all down the toilet.”
Without a copy of the Malaxa check, Drew Pearson could not keep the story going, and it soon petered out. On Election Day, Eisenhower and Nixon swept to a decisive victory, winning 55 percent of the vote and carrying thirty-nine of the forty-eight states.
After the Republican triumph, Dulles and Nixon were finally able to speed Malaxa’s immigration case through the bureaucracy. In December 1953, officials in Eisenhower’s Justice Department bypassed Congress and the INS and granted Malaxa permanent residence through an administrative decree. Justice Department officials explained that they had reached their decision due to the unique technical services provided by the Western Tube Corporation. The fact that Malaxa’s company did not actually exist—and never would—was politely overlooked by the new administration.
Nicolae Malaxa lived out the rest of his days in the comfort of his Fifth Avenue apartment. He began to fancy himself a great benefactor. In January 1953, shortly before Eisenhower’s inauguration, Malaxa reached out the hand of friendship to a prominent Jewish exile named Iancu Zissu. Malaxa sent word that he was eager to meet with Zissu, who was the cofounder of a Romanian exile group. The odd meeting took place in the New York apartment of a popular Romanian singer. According to one witness, “Malaxa told Zissu that he had wanted for some time to know him because he is a great friend of the Jews and a great admirer of the Jewish religion. Malaxa stated that if he could change his own religion, he would adopt the Jewish faith.”
As he bid Zissu farewell, Malaxa “assured him that those who had been his friends had never had reasons to regret it.” It was a surprising burst of goodwill—or, more likely, another attempt by the wily millionaire to buy political support.
From the financial patron of Iron Guard butchers to “great friend of the Jews”—it was just one more grotesque twist in a life filled with them.
By 1952, Richard Nixon’s triumph as a Cold War inquisitor had won him the number-two spot on the Republican presidential ticket headed by war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower. But on September 29, Drew Pearson, Washington’s leading muckraker, dropped a bombshell on Nixon—one of his favorite targets—that briefly threatened to end his political career. The story was part of a larger theme of corruption that reporters like Pearson believed hovered over Nixon’s career. Nixon, the humble son of Whittier, always seemed hungry for ways to profit from his public service.
Earlier in the race, Pearson had discovered that Nixon’s wealthy Southern California supporters had set up a slush fund for the politician’s personal use—a revelation that had nearly forced the vice presidential candidate to resign as Eisenhower’s running mate. It took Nixon’s brilliantly homespun TV address to the nation—which would go down in history as the “Checkers speech” after the black-and-white cocker spaniel that had been given to Nixon’s daughters by a supporter—to preempt the budding scandal and save his political career. “And you know, the kids love the dog,” Nixon told the largest audience that had ever tuned in for a political speech. “And I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.” His shameless performance managed to transform a case of blatant political corruption into a domestic drama that touched the hearts of millions of Americans.
Nixon’s enormous relief was shared by the GOP power brokers who had picked him for the race. It was the Dulles-Dewey group that had tapped Nixon for vice president. Their decision was conveyed to Eisenhower by Herbert Brownell Jr., a fellow Wall Street attorney who had taken a leave from his blue-chip firm to run the Republican campaign for the White House. The GOP brain trust convinced the aging general that the young senator from California not only brought regional balance to the ticket but the kind of slashing energy and anti-Communist fervor that the campaign needed.
But now, in the final weeks of the presidential contest, Pearson was again on the verge of blowing up Nixon’s career. Reporting in his widely syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column, Pearson revealed that the vice presidential candidate had left out something very important from his Checkers speech: namely, his crooked relationship with a Romanian industrialist named Nicolae Malaxa. The wealthy Romanian émigré had collaborated with the Nazis during the war, and later with the Communist regime that took over his homeland. But Malaxa’s reputation, Pearson reported, did not discredit him with Senator Nixon, who pulled strings on his behalf to allow him to continue living in the United States and to procure a major tax break for him.
Pearson knew that Nixon had performed these favors for Malaxa in return for an impressive bribe. But, lacking the documentary evidence, the columnist had to leave this crucial piece of evidence out of his story.
There was indeed a smoking gun: a $100,000 check from Malaxa deposited in Nixon’s Whittier bank account. But Pearson was unable to get his hands on it. In a twist of bad luck for Nixon, one of the tellers at his bank branch turned out to be a Romanian refugee who loathed Malaxa. He sent a photostatic copy of the check to political rivals of the notorious industrialist in the exile community, who in turn forwarded the copied check to their contact in the CIA, Gordon Mason, chief of the agency’s Balkans desk.
By fall 1952, Allen Dulles was the number two man at the CIA and was in line to take over the agency with an Eisenhower-Nixon victory in November. As deputy director, Dulles was already making the agency his own, working with loyal associates like Frank Wisner—who would soon take over the agency’s action arm—on ways to escalate the covert war against the Eastern bloc. But the ambitious plans that Dulles and Wisner were hatching for a long-awaited Republican presidency suddenly seemed in peril when Gordon Mason walked into Wisner’s office with a copy of the Malaxa check. “Jesus Christ!” Wisner burst out. “We’d better see Allen Dulles.”
As he had long demonstrated, Frank Wisner was quite willing to recruit from among the ranks of ex-fascists for his espionage operations in Eastern Europe—many of whom he had slipped past immigration authorities into the United States despite their barbaric wartime records. But Wisner, somewhat mysteriously, had insisted on drawing the line with Nicolae Malaxa, whom he considered a particularly “unsavory” character. In a March 1951 CIA memo, Wisner had even urged that Malaxa—who had finagled his way into the United States after the war as part of a Romanian trade delegation—be deported. Wisner had served as the OSS station chief in Romania, and he considered the country his turf. He was acutely sensitive to the factions and feuds within the Romanian exile community, where Malaxa provoked feelings passionate enough to tear apart all hope of a united anti-Soviet front.
Despite Wisner’s feelings about Malaxa, he realized that Allen Dulles was deeply implicated in the Romanian’s “unsavory” story. Dulles had not only been Malaxa’s lawyer, he had introduced him to Nixon. The Malaxa money trail, in fact, led in many compromising directions, including Nixon’s bank account, Dulles’s law firm, CIA front organizations like the National Committee for a Free Europe, and even some of Wisner’s own secret combat groups. The Romanian industrialist, who reportedly stashed away as much as $500 million (worth over $6.5 billion today) in overseas accounts before he fled to the United States, had made himself extremely useful as a shadow financier for the underground Cold War.
Malaxa was the type of charming scoundrel with whom Dulles enjoyed doing business. The Romanian oligarch had no ideology; he believed only in opportunity. He had a witty sense of humor and the dark good looks of a dashing werewolf, with thick black hair and a pronounced widow’s peak. He conducted himself with a cynical, Mittel-European confidence that everyone had a price, greasing his way through life by smoothly slipping cash to all the right people. Bribery came so naturally to Malaxa that he once tried to buy off the dedicated U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service prosecutor who was handling his case—a man who, to Malaxa’s great surprise, turned out to be incorruptible.
He began his career in modest fashion, as a locomotive repairman, but he had a talent for making connections and opening doors, and soon he amassed a small fortune as a manufacturer of railroad equipment. In the 1920s, he and his family moved into a mansion in Bucharest, where he entertained the capital’s high society, and befriended the mistress of King Carol II, Madame Magda Lupescu. In a deft, Game of Thrones–like move, he cemented his royal connections by arranging for his own daughter to become the mistress of the king’s son, Prince Michael. By forging a partnership with the king, who proved equally avaricious, Malaxa became a dominant player in the country’s steel, munitions, and oil industries.
In the 1930s, as Hitler built his war machine in Germany, King Carol’s rule came under increasing pressure from a homegrown fascist movement known as the Iron Guard. The virulently anti-Semitic organization blamed Jews for Romania’s woes and targeted prominent Jewish figures such as Madame Lupescu. Despite the debt he owed the king’s mistress for her patronage, the ever-opportunistic Malaxa began currying favor with the Iron Guard as the group grew more powerful, financing its activities and flying its flag from the roof of his stone mansion.
In September 1940, the Iron Guard forced King Carol to abdicate and a pro-German fascist government took power in Bucharest. With Hitler’s influence expanding in Romania, Malaxa made another nimble move, merging his industrial empire with that of Herman Goering’s brother Albert. “Your interests, my dear Mr. Malaxa, are the same as ours,” the Nazi industrialist warmly assured him.
In January 1941, Malaxa’s green-uniformed Iron Guard thugs, feeling betrayed by Romania’s new fascist government, launched a coup attempt, using the industrialist’s mansion as a base for their assault. During the coup, the Iron Guard fell upon the country’s Jews in one of the most horrific spasms of violence in Romania’s history. Thousands of Jews in Bucharest were rounded up and beaten and tortured, including one group of more than a hundred—among them children as young as five—who were marched into a municipal slaughterhouse and butchered. The Iron Guardsmen hung their victims, some still alive, on meat hooks and “mutilated them in a vicious parody of kosher slaughtering practices,” according to one later account. The Iron Guard’s Bucharest pogrom was so depraved that it shocked even the country’s fascist regime, which appealed to Hitler to help put down the uprising.
After the coup was suppressed, Malaxa was jailed as a leader of the conspiracy and his industrial empire was confiscated by the Nazis and the Romanian government. But, in 1944, as the advancing Soviet army drove the Germans out of Romania, Malaxa again rose from the ashes, insinuating himself into the new Moscow-backed regime. He was the only Romanian capitalist to whom the Communist government returned his industrial property.
Nevertheless, Malaxa was savvy enough to realize that his future was not bright in a Communist Romania. He had already taken the precaution of salting away much of his huge fortune in U.S. accounts. After the war, by making a generous distribution of bribes—including jewels, Cadillacs, and cash—Malaxa persuaded Romanian officials to allow him to travel to the United States, ostensibly on trade business for the country. He arrived in 1946 and never returned home.
Malaxa wisely chose to apply for permanent residency, instead of American citizenship, knowing the process was not as demanding. But his résumé was so eyebrow raising that his battle to stay in the United States would drag on for years. Malaxa’s OSS, CIA, FBI, and INS files bulged with condemnations of his morally dexterous, shape-shifting life. One government report labeled him “notorious.” Another called him “the most perfidious man in Romania.” He was a “master of the art of bribery” who had ushered in an “era of corruption” in Romania. He was a flagrant “opportunist” who “had been on all sides of the fence at various times.” He had gone from playing “Hitler’s game” to someone who “must be considered an agent of the Soviet government and of the Romanian Communists in the United States, even if he himself is not a Communist at heart.”
According to a 1952 CIA memo, “perhaps the most concise appraisal of Malaxa” came from an American diplomat who found him “entirely unscrupulous, turning with the wind, and like a cat [he] has developed to a high art the knack of landing on his feet. He is considered to be essentially a dangerous type of man.”
None of this mattered to Allen Dulles when Malaxa turned up at his office at Sullivan and Cromwell. The pertinent fact was that the Romanian had a huge fortune, and he was willing to spend millions of it where Dulles wanted him to. In return for financing Dulles’s far-flung anti-Communist network—which stretched from Buenos Aires to Bucharest—Malaxa secured Dulles’s influential help in his battle to stay in the United States. Some of Malaxa’s treasure went to prominent Romanian exile leaders who hoped to take power after the Communist regime was toppled. Other funds went to Juan Perón’s Argentina, where Malaxa was involved in a rising neofascist movement, and France, where he underwrote “scholarships” for exiled Romanian “students” who turned out to be veterans of the vicious Iron Guard.
By 1948, Malaxa was ensconced in a luxurious apartment on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, but his wheeling and dealing had begun to attract unwanted press attention. In May, gossip columnist Walter Winchell exposed the notorious collaborator who was freely enjoying the city’s pleasures—the “Balkanazi on Broadway,” he called Malaxa. Winchell noted that the “distinguished” firm of Sullivan and Cromwell had recently dropped the Romanian as a client, presumably because he had grown too hot.
But Dulles did not abandon Malaxa; behind the scenes, he entrusted the Romanian’s immigration battle to his political protégé Nixon. In return for Malaxa’s substantial gift of $100,000, the California senator began vigorously lobbying INS officials on his behalf and pushing an immigration bill through Congress that was designed to win Malaxa U.S. residency. When those efforts stalled due to determined resistance from legislators who were repelled by the émigré’s past, Malaxa and Nixon tried a different tack. With the help of Nixon cronies in Southern California, Malaxa announced that he was setting up a pipeline factory in Whittier that he called the Western Tube Corporation. Nixon wrote a letter to the Defense Production Administration, claiming that Malaxa’s project was “strategically and economically important, for both California and the entire United States.” The Western Tube factory was never built, but the phantom project succeeded in winning Malaxa a huge tax windfall. And it kept alive the Romanian’s immigration campaign. California congressman John Shelley later denounced the Western Tube affair as “a complete fraud, a springboard for [Malaxa’s] entry to the United States.”
As the smoldering Malaxa scandal threatened to erupt into flames in the final days of the 1952 presidential race, Dulles moved quickly to douse it. After Wisner and Mason showed him Malaxa’s $100,000 check, the deputy CIA director knew that he would have to send it up the chain of command to his boss, General Walter Bedell Smith. But Dulles also realized that, in this case, passing the buck was as good as destroying the evidence. CIA director “Beetle” Smith had served as Eisenhower’s intensely dedicated chief of staff during the war, and he was just as devoted to Ike’s presidential victory as Dulles.
It was Gordon Mason who was given the unpleasant task of showing the evidence of Nixon’s corruption to General Smith, who predictably flew into a rage. “Smith was a man who could cuss in three languages and in almost every sentence,” recalled Mason. “He also had a violent temper, and he acted as though I personally was trying to scuttle Eisenhower.” Smith demanded that Mason immediately gather up every scrap of incriminating material against Nixon and bring it to his office. “The story was cleaned from the books,” said Mason. Wisner, too, had no doubt what was done with the evidence. “Beetle just flushed it all down the toilet.”
Without a copy of the Malaxa check, Drew Pearson could not keep the story going, and it soon petered out. On Election Day, Eisenhower and Nixon swept to a decisive victory, winning 55 percent of the vote and carrying thirty-nine of the forty-eight states.
After the Republican triumph, Dulles and Nixon were finally able to speed Malaxa’s immigration case through the bureaucracy. In December 1953, officials in Eisenhower’s Justice Department bypassed Congress and the INS and granted Malaxa permanent residence through an administrative decree. Justice Department officials explained that they had reached their decision due to the unique technical services provided by the Western Tube Corporation. The fact that Malaxa’s company did not actually exist—and never would—was politely overlooked by the new administration.
Nicolae Malaxa lived out the rest of his days in the comfort of his Fifth Avenue apartment. He began to fancy himself a great benefactor. In January 1953, shortly before Eisenhower’s inauguration, Malaxa reached out the hand of friendship to a prominent Jewish exile named Iancu Zissu. Malaxa sent word that he was eager to meet with Zissu, who was the cofounder of a Romanian exile group. The odd meeting took place in the New York apartment of a popular Romanian singer. According to one witness, “Malaxa told Zissu that he had wanted for some time to know him because he is a great friend of the Jews and a great admirer of the Jewish religion. Malaxa stated that if he could change his own religion, he would adopt the Jewish faith.”
As he bid Zissu farewell, Malaxa “assured him that those who had been his friends had never had reasons to regret it.” It was a surprising burst of goodwill—or, more likely, another attempt by the wily millionaire to buy political support.
From the financial patron of Iron Guard butchers to “great friend of the Jews”—it was just one more grotesque twist in a life filled with them.
An
explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who
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Smaranda Dobrescu Nu
e deloc exclus ca “the most perfidious man in Romania.” sa fi fost de
atunci depasit in performante de alti romani "talentati"
Preda Mihailescu Mi se pare relativ fantezista tratarea subiectului! Malaxa practicand dezbinarea emigratiei, ca un securist? Oare?
Gavrila Ch Se
stie/thanks to Larry Watt/ ca acel Frank Wisner a fost un 'prieten'
teribil al romanilor si Romaniei, sabotand interesele noastre cu orice
ocazie s-a ivit, din pozitia de mare dulau al serviciilor americane.
Se mai stie ca a avut o viata dominata de demoni. Citez din wikipedia:
"Wisner was devastated when the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Soon after the Soviet crackdown on the Hungarian revolution, Wisner suffered a breakdown, and was diagnosed as a manic depressive. He underwent psychoanalysis and was subjected to electroshock therapy.
[...]
In Maryland, Frank Wisner committed suicide using one of his son's shotguns."
Romanii gresesc prin a crede ca toate natiile sunt binecuvantate cu toate cela ca Romania si nu inteleg ca ceilalti umbla cu japca. Cei care exploateaza naivitatea/bunatatea/credulitatea romanilor par ca si-o fura dela soarta corespunzator.
Nu stiu ce plan are Dumnezeu cu romanii, dar as incerca mai adesea sa-L ajut.
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