One of the weirder things about Wiliam Egan Colby, CIA director for a few years in the mid Seventies, was the connections he had with The Lucky Country, connections that existed before, during and after his intelligence career.
These connections weren’t accidental and date back to his Midwestern roots in Minnesota, an iron-mining state. The Midwest’s mining moguls saw Australia as a likely place for profit— if not from the mines themselves, then from financial manipulation of those mines on London’s stock market. This Australian exploitation built the reputation of a Rothschild mining surveyor named Herbert Clark Hoover, whose despotic political career was underwritten by Duluth’s robber barons. One of these barons, Julius H. Barnes, became a shipping magnate on the back of White House-originated shipbuilding contracts. Money for private freight carriers and warships for both WWI and WWII build the “Barnes-Duluth Shipbuilding Company”. Then power shifted in Washington D.C.
In 1943 the “Barnes-Duluth Shipbuilding Company” was bought by Walter Butler, the chairman of the Democratic Party’s finance committee in Minnesota and a good friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The company name changed to “Walter Butler Shipbuilders” but all the military contracts remained the same. According to leading contemporary investigative reporter ***********, Walter Butler boasted that he controlled the AFL-CIO in Minnesota and could hit any of his subcontractors with illegitimate strikes should they fail to contribute to FDR’s political endeavors. With the end of the war in 1945, all of Butler’s Navy contracts dried up and President Truman made him the United State’s first ambassador to Australia.
Regular readers may remember that it was at Ambassador Butler’s celebration party that the only known photograph of “Col. William Egan” was taken.
