>>10721291
Revealing look at the Director of the CIA when J.F.K.
was assassinated, John A McCone.
Part II
Inspired by the following Notable
>>10716666 Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The CIA Killed My Father & Uncle
John McCone - Spartacus Education File
American History >The Assassination of JFK >John McCone
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmccone.htm
Part 1
"John Alex McCone was born in Los Angeles on 4th January, 1902. A child of Scotch-Irish parents, he was raised a devout
Roman Catholic.
McCord studied engineering at Berkeley, where he met Stephen D. Bechtel, his future business partner. Following graduation, McCone found work at the Llewellyn Iron Works.
He started off as a riveter but by the age of 26 he had become construction manager.
In 1931 McCone was appointed sales manager for Consolidated Steel. The company was in financial difficulty but McCone came to the rescue when he sold 55 million tons of steel to a
group of Californian businessmen building the Boulder Dam (later renamed the Hoover Dam). This group of businessmen included Henry J. Kaiser and Stephen D. Bechtel.
In 1937, McCone left Consolidated Steel to join Bechtel and Kaiser. Initially they established the Bechtel-McCone Corporation. Over the next few years the three men formed several
companies with them taking it in turn to become the front man. In some cases, they remained silent partners in these business ventures.
The first major customer of Bechtel-McCone was Standard Oil of California (Socal). The company obtained a contract to build Socal’s new refinery in Richmond. It was the first of many
refineries built by Bechtel-McCone. By 1939 the company had more than 10,000 employees and was building refineries, chemical plants and pipelines all over the world.
In the summer of 1940 McCone and Stephen D. Bechtel had a meeting with Admiral Howard L. Vickery of the U.S. Maritime Commission. Vickery told the men he “had received a telegram from
the British Purchasing Commission (BPC) urgently requesting that the Maritime Commission arrange the building of 60 tankers to replace the ships the British had lost to German torpedoes”.
At another meeting a few weeks later, Maritime Commission chairman, Admiral Emory S. Land, told Bechtel and McCone that: “Besides building ships for the British,
they would have to build them for the Americans as well. Not merely tankers, but Liberty and Victory cargo ships, troop transports, the whole makings of a merchant navy.”
Admiral Land confidently added that thousands of vessels would be needed as “America was headed into war.”
As a result of these two meetings, Bechtel, McCone and Kaiser built shipyards at Richmond and Sausalito. Several of their companies were involved in this project that became known as
“Operation Calship”. This included Kaiser Company (78 ships), Kaiser-Swan Island (140 ships) and Kaiser-Vancouver (118 ships).
It was a terrible gamble because at that time they were relying on the predictions of Admiral Emory S. Land. However, Land was right and only a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
the Maritime Commission awarded Calship its first shipbuilding contract. Within a year, Calship was employing over 42,000 workers at its shipyards.
In 1942 McCone and Stephen D. Bechtel obtained a contract to build aircraft at Willow Run in Alabama. The War Department agreed to pay all the company’s costs plus 5 percent on work estimates
presented by Bechtel-McCone every six months. A 300-acre factory was built and 8,000 employees hired to staff it. However, no aircraft were built. Employees were paid for doing nothing.
A local man, George P. Alexander, discovered details of this scam and collected affidavits from workers who admitted that they “went in every day at 9.00, punched the time clock, then went home”.
They then returned to the factory at 5.00 to “punch out”.
Alexander filed suit against Bechtel-McCone in federal district court on 31st July, 1943. He claimed that the company had made “many and various claims against the government of the United States,
or a department or officer thereof, knowing such claims to be false, fictitious or fraudulent.” However, the judge dismissed the case. The problem was with the contract, not the claims by Bechtel-McCone.
As John McCone admitted to Fortune Magazine on 17th May, 1943: “Every six months, we estimate how much work we expect to do in the next six months and then we get a fee of five percent of the estimated
amount of work regardless of how much work we actually do turn out.”