Skeletons in Rockefeller's Dark Closet

During the War itself, Nelson had combined" promotion of the vast Rockefeller family interests throughout Latin America, with a senior US Government intelligence position, Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs (ClAA), nominally on behalf of the Roosevelt White House. From that strategic position, Nelson could funnel US Government support to Rockefeller family business allies in key countries, from Brazil to Peru, Mexico, Venezuela and even Argentina, under the guise of combating Nazi infiltration of the Americas and of promoting "American democracy:' He was carefully laying the basis for post-war American business expansion.s

Nelson was named as ClAA head in August 1940, in a clear violation of US official neutrality. To conceal that delicate point, the ClAA was given a cover as art organization promoting "American culture" in Latin America.

Skeletons in Rockefeller's Dark Closet In 1941, Standard Oil of New Jersey, later renamed Exxon, was the largest oil company in the world. It controlled 84% of the US petroleum market. Its bank was Chase Bank, and its main owners were the Rockefeller group. After the Rockefellers, the next largest stockholder in Standard Oil was I.G. Farben, the enormous petrochemicals trust of Germany, which at the time was a vital part of the German war industry. The Rockefeller-I.G. Farben relationship went back to 1927, around the same time the Rockefeller Foundation began heavily funding German eugenics research.9

While Nelson Rockefeller was ostensibly combating Nazi economic interests in Latin America as head of the ClAA, the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil, through its President, Walter Teagle, was arranging to ship vital tetraethyllead gasoline to the German Luftwaffe. When Britain protested the shipment of such strategic materials to Nazi Germany, as Britain itself was being bombed by German Luftwaffe planes, Standard Oil changed its policy. The change was purely cosmetic. They merely altered the registration of their entire fleet to Panama to avoid British search or seizure. Their ships continued to carry oil to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco and the Spanish Sahara

in Northwest Africa, where they refueled and siphoned oil onto German tankers for shipment to Hamburg. 10

During the war, US Senator Harry S. Truman charged, in a Senate investigation, that the Rockefeller-I.G. Farben relationship "was approaching treason."ll CBS News war correspondent, Paul Manning, reported that on August 10, 1944, the Rockefeller-I.G. Farben partners moved their "flight capital" through affiliated American, German, French, British and Swiss banks.

Nelson Rockefeller's role in Latin America during the War was to coordinate US intelligence and covert operations in the days before the creation of the CIA. He was the direct liaison between President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's personal intelligence head for the Americas, Sir William Stephenson, who directed a front company called British Security Coordination or BSC. Notably, Stephenson's clandestine headquarters for his covert activity was in room 3603 in Rockefeller Center, in New York City, not far from Nelson's office. It was no coincidence. Rockefeller and Stephenson coordinated closely on mutual intelligence operations in the Americas. 12

Rockefeller brought with him to Washington a team he selected from family business connections, including Joseph Rovensky from Chase Bank, and Will Clayton, a Texas cotton magnate from the agricultural commodity firm Anderson Clayton.13 Nelson's assistant, John McClintock, ran the vast United Fruit plantations across Central America after the war, on whose behalf the CIA later conveniently orchestrated a coup in Guatemala in 1954.

During the war, Nelson Rockefeller's work laid the basis for the family's vast expansion of interests in the 1950's. He shaped a USLatin American defense concept which was to tie the military elite of the region to US policies during the Cold War, often through ruthless military dictators who benefited from the backing of the Rockefeller family and insured favorable treatment of Rockefeller business interests. Nelson called the cooperative Latin military dictators he backed, "the New Military:' 14

Nelson Rockefeller had been a leading figure in US corporate investment in Latin America since the 1930s, a time when he was

a director of Standard Oil's Venezuelan subsidiary, Creole Petroleum. In 1938, he had tried, and failed, to negotiate a settlement with Mexico's President Lazaro Cardenas for Standard Oil in Mexico. Cardenas had nationalized Standard Oil, leading to bitter US-Mexico relations.

In the 1940s, Rockefeller set up the 11exican American DevelopmenfCorp. and was a personal investor in Mexican industries after the war. He encouraged his brother David to set up Chase Bank's Latin American division. One motive was to regain a foothold in Mexico through the guise of helping to solve the country's food problems. IS

As chairman of the US Government's International Development Advisory Board, Rockefeller became the architect of President Harry S. Truman's foreign-aid program. Typically, Nelson used US guarantees to leverage the massive private lending by Chase, National City Bank (today Citigroup Inc.) and other New York banks throughout the Latin American region.

During the War, as head of Roosevelt's CIAA, Nelson had organized a network of journalists and of major newspapers owners throughout the region. He did this by threatening neutral Latin American newspaper publishers with a cut-off of newsprint paper from Canada. Soon Rockefeller boasted of controlling 1,200 newspaper publishers by threatening their newsprint, which had to be carried on US ships.16

Rockefeller's media staff then saturated Latin America with planted news stories friendly to US and especially Rockefeller business interests in the region. Under the guise of fighting Nazi influence in Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers were laying the basis of their vast private business empire for the postwar era.

Among the most far-reaching covert operations carried out by Nelson and his circle in Latin America towards the end of the War, was to secure for the United States the majority votes of participating nations in the founding of the United Nations, and with it, de facto US control of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in 1944-45. It was indicative of how the new US international