Executive Intelligence Review
This article appears in the September 26, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Halliburton Is Houston's
`Greater Hermann Göring Werke'

by John Hoefle

In his farewell address to the nation in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the dangers of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the "military-industrial complex," noting that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."

As supreme commander of Allied military forces in Europe during World War II, Ike played a key role in the battle not only against fascism, but against the international Synarchist cabal which orchestrated the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini. During his two terms as President (1953-61), Ike was also well positioned to see this Synarchist cabal's tentacles into the United States, and how they were attempting to use the Cold War to solidify their power. In warning about the military-industrial complex, Ike meant to warn us about the fascists within our own midst.[1]

Events soon proved him right. In 1962 came the Cuban missile crisis; in 1963 the assassination of President John F. Kennedy at the hands of the Synarchist Permindex assassination bureau; the escalation of the Vietnam War in the wake of the phony Tonkin Gulf "attacks" in 1964. These events strengthened the hand of the Synarchists, who have seized power in Washington in the wake of 9/11, and under the guise of fighting terrorism have launched an assault on both the Constitution and the public purse.

Cheney and Halliburton

Chief among the Synarchists in Washington is Vice President Dick Cheney, whose relationship with Halliburton exemplifies the military-industrial relationships of which Ike warned. In 1991, while he was Secretary of Defense in the first Bush Administration, Cheney secretly hired Halliburton's Brown & Root subsidiary to do a study on the privatization of military logistics operations. This study established the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, which gave its first general contract to—Brown & Root.

At the time, Cheney and his Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, were pushing for wars against smaller, resource-rich nations, including the use of "low-yield" nuclear weapons. When George H.W. Bush left office in January 1993, Cheney spent some time at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute, and then in 1995, joined Halliburton as president and chief executive. Cheney added chairman to his titles in 1996, and ran the company until August 2000, when he stepped down to run for Vice President. And during that 1995-2000 period, one dollar of every seven spent by the Pentagon, passed through what is now Kellogg Brown & Root!

At the time Cheney hired Halliburton to do the privatization study, Halliburton was hardly a disinterested party. The company was already a major defense contractor through Brown & Root and had significant military and intelligence connections. There were also, as we shall see, reports of much darker activities.

With its flurry of construction contracts in Iraq, Halliburton is in many respects depending upon Dick Cheney for its survival; but Cheney may not last long either, given his abysmal policy failures and the spotlight put on those failures by Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche has dubbed Halliburton "The Greater Hermann Göring Werke of Houston." It has been clear for some time that Vice President Cheney has been acting as an agent for the international Synarchist movement, which was founded as the oligarchy's counterattack to the American Revolution and the principles upon which America was founded. Cheney and Halliburton have been rightly attacked for the company's war profiteering, but the reality of their corruption runs much deeper.

The Vice President and his neo-con allies such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, et al., are agents of a power which is committed to eliminating the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, in favor of a global bankers' dictatorship. This same oligarchic power, acting through merchant banks like Lazard Frères and Rothschild and other financial institutions, controls a large swath of Wall Street and corporate America, including Halliburton. Halliburton's power does not flow from Cheney, but from Cheney's backers, the Synarchist bankers. Cheney's policy toward the people of Iraq is the same as Halliburton's policy toward its asbestos claimants, and the same as Göring's policy toward the people in the Nazi work camps.

Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free) read the sign over the entrance to Auschwitz. It was an example of Göring's "big lie" tactic in action. The Cheney cabal's pronouncements that we must accept police-state tactics in our own nation and pre-emptive strikes against other nations in the name of freedom, rings just as false. Hermann Göring would be proud.

Company History

Halliburton traces its roots to Erle P. Halliburton, a pioneer in the techniques of cementing well bores, who founded the company in 1919. In 1924, Halliburton was incorporated, with significant investments by seven major oil companies, and Halliburton trucks became common sights in the oil patch. In 1961, after a series of acquisitions, the company moved its headquarters from Duncan, Oklahoma, to Dallas, Texas.

In 1962, Halliburton bought Brown & Root, the giant Houston-based construction company. Brown & Root had also been founded in 1919, by Herman Brown and Dan Root, with Herman's brother George Brown coming in a few years later. Brown & Root started out paving roads and building bridges in rural Texas, and in 1940 got the contract to build the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station. It built pipelines and ships during World War II, and in 1961 won the planning contract for the Manned Space Center in Houston. When Herman Brown died in 1962, George Brown sold the company to Halliburton to avoid a hostile takeover, though he remained as company chairman. He died in 1983.

Both Herman and George Brown were important figures in the internationally dominated Houston business world. Herman Brown was a director of the Rothschild-linked First City National Bank and pipeline operator Texas Eastern, which he and George founded to buy the "Big Inch" and "Little Inch" pipelines after World War II. George Brown served as chairman of the politically important Rice University for 15 of his 25 years on its board, and served on commissions for Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, as well as on Texas State commissions from the 1930s through the 1970s.

In 1998, Halliburton made another major purchase, acquiring Dresser Industries for some $7.7 billion. Dresser had been founded by Solomon Dresser in 1880, and taken over in 1928 by W.H. Harriman & Company, the investment bank owned by the descendants of railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, himself a front for the British Royal Family. Under Averell and Roland Harriman, Dresser was a Skull & Bones shop, whose board included Bonesman and presidential father and grandfather Prescott Bush. Both Roland Harriman and Prescott Bush were directors of Union Banking Corp. when it was raided by Federal agents in 1942, under the Trading With the Enemy Act, for its dealings on behalf of Nazi Germany.

The Dresser deal smells like some sort of Skull & Bones rescue operation since, with Dresser, Halliburton acquired several billions of dollars in asbestos-claim lawsuit liabilities. Dick Cheney, who made the deal, is not a Bonesman himself, having dropped out of Yale in his sophomore year, but the Skull & Bones roster contains at least nine Cheneys, more than nearly any other family.

Also with Dresser came construction company M.W. Kellogg, which was merged into Brown & Root to form Kellogg, Brown & Root.

Military-Industrial Complex

In many respects, Halliburton seems to be an "American" version of Schlumberger. The mostly obvious parallel is in the oilfield services field, where Schlumberger is Halliburton's chief rival, but there is also a strong undercurrent of spookery. Both companies operate worldwide, wherever the oil business goes; Brown & Root goes wherever U.S. troops go, and reportedly provides corporate cover for intelligence operations.

Schlumberger is an arm of one of Europe's most important banking and intelligence operations. Banque de Neuflize, Schlumberger, Mallet, Demachy, now a unit of ABN AMRO, is one of those small but important merchant banks which specializes in shaping world events. The families behind the bank have a long history of molding the Synarchist movement as an assault-force against the United States, from the spying of Major André in 1780 to the assassination of JFK. Today, as an indication of its continuing intelligence activities, Schlumberger's board includes former CIA Director John Deutch.

Schlumberger also helped bring Fidel Castro to power by helping overthrow the Batista regime. It was involved in the assassination of Kennedy through company president Jean de Menil, the White Russian husband of Schlumberger heiress Dominique Schlumberger de Menil, acting through the New Orleans office of the Swiss-based company Permindex. Permindex had also organized several attempts on the life of French President Charles de Gaulle.

There are indications that both Halliburton and Brown & Root were also involved in Permindex. According to the Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal manuscript written under the nom de plume "William Torbitt," both Halliburton and George and Herman Brown were among the principal financiers of Permindex, along with Jean de Menil, mob lawyer Roy Cohn, Dallas oilman H.L. Hunt, and others.

Over the years, EIR has confirmed many aspects of the Torbitt manuscript and finds these claims credible, and if the claims about Halliburton and the Browns are true, then it puts Halliburton and Brown & Root firmly in the Synarchy camp, before their merger, and some three decades before Dick Cheney took over the company. It would also confirm the Schlumberger link and suggest that, rather than being a rival, Halliburton is more of a clone and junior partner of Schlumberger.

Halliburton and Brown & Root do have direct links to two of the most important merchant banks in the world, Lazard and Rothschild, both of which serve as controllers of the Synarchist movement. Lazard banker James Glanville sat on the Halliburton board in the 1980s, as did Lord Polwarth of the Royal Bank of Scotland; another British lord, Lord Clitheroe, has been on the Halliburton board since 1987. Brown & Root was one of the companies centered around First City Bancorp. of Houston and the Vinson & Elkins law firm. First City, which was founded by Vinson & Elkins founder James Elkins, was identified by 1976 House Banking Committee report as part of the Rothschild banking network. Vinson & Elkins was the outside counsel for Enron, whose board included Lord John Wakeham, the former British Energy Minister who joined the board of N.M. Rothschild after he left government service. Enron's accountant, Arthur Andersen, also handled Halliburton, and there have been suggestions that Halliburton engaged in some Enronesque accounting of its own under Cheney.

Halliburton also has strong intelligence ties, notably through the presence on its board from 1977 through 2000 of the King Ranch's Anne Armstrong, who chaired the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) from 1981 until 1990, in addition to a stint as U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, and her long-standing role as chairman of the executive committee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a powerful Washington think-tank.

Armstrong's successor as Halliburton's top spook is Ray Hunt, one of five Dresser directors to join the Halliburton board. Hunt, the son of reputed Permindex funder H.L. Hunt, was appointed to the PFIAB by President George W. Bush in October 2001. Oilman Hunt is also a trustee of the CSIS and a director of the King Ranch, suggesting that Hunt is taking the retiring Armstrong's spot in a long-standing Texas intelligence network. Hunt is also a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Another of the directors who came over from Dresser was Lawrence Eagleburger, the former U.S. Secretary of State and president of Kissinger Associates.

Asbestos

Most of Halliburton's exposure to asbestos litigation comes from Harbison-Walker Refractories, which Dresser acquired in 1967. Harbison-Walker built large industrial ovens, using asbestos for insulation. Harbison-Walker filed for bankruptcy in early 2002, and is now owned by RHI AG of Vienna, Austria, whose board includes Stanislaus, Prince zu Sayn Wittgenstein-Berleberg.

The full extent of Halliburton's asbestos exposure can not be known, because claims are still being filed; but as of June 30, 2003, some 661,000 asbestos cases had been filed against the company, of which approximately 425,000 remain open. One estimate done for the company projected between $2.2 billion and $3.5 billion in settlements, court judgments, and defense costs through 2052. The uncertainty has caused Halliburton's stock to plunge, particularly in the wake of $100 million in judgments rendered against Halliburton by a Texas court in November 2001, on top of Halliburton's $21 million share of a $150 million court verdict rendered in Mississippi in October 2001. Despite its surge from the recent Iraq contracts, Halliburton's stock is still running about half of its 2000 peak.

In an effort to placate investors, Halliburton has promised to take an aggressive posture toward its asbestos suits, and has rejected—or reneged upon, depending upon whom you believe—a large number of settlements reached by Harbison-Walker. By rejecting these settlements, forcing the claimants back to court, the company is playing a form of chicken, hoping it can reach new, and cheaper, settlement agreements. If it has miscalculated, the penalty could be enormous.

One reason why Halliburton might have dared to play this game is its White House connection to Dick Cheney. BusinessWeek reported in February 2002 that "rumors spread that President Bush would propose limiting corporations' exposure to asbestos litigation in his State of the Union Address" on Jan. 29. That did not happen, and a cloud remains over the company.

Halliburton insists that it is adequately insured against its asbestos claims. That may, or may not be; but even if it has the insurance, that does not necessarily mean it can collect. Much of Halliburton's insurance is with Equitas, the company formed by Lloyd's of London several years back as a place to dump its own asbestos exposure. Equitas's survival depends upon its ability to deny or downsize claims against its insurance policies, just as Halliburton depends upon payment of those claims for its own health. For a company which reported a net loss of $998 million in 2002, these are not small matters.


[1] See Edward Spannaus, "The Enigma of the Fulbright Memorandum," in Zbigniew Brzezinski and September 11th, Washington, D.C.: LaRouche in 2004, February 2002.

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