How the CIA Helped Disney Conquer Florida

[mother earth]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/14/how-the-cia-helped-disney-conquer-florida.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+thedailybeast/articles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29

With advice from former CIA operatives and lawyers, Disney bought up the land for Florida’s Disney World and orchestrated a unique legal situation—and set up an unconstitutional form of government. An excerpt from T.D. Allman’s Finding Florida.

Starting in the mid-1960s when Disney set out to establish the Disney World Theme Park, they were determined to get land at below market prices and Disney operatives engaged in a far-ranging conspiracy to make sure sellers had no idea who was buying their Central Florida property. By resorting to such tactics Disney acquired more than 40 square miles of land for less than $200 an acre, but how to maintain control once Disney's empire had been acquired? The solution turned out to be cartoon-simple, thanks to the CIA.

Disney's key contact was the consummate cloak-and-dagger operator, William "Wild Bill" Donovan. Sometimes called the "Father of the C.I.A," he was also the founding partner of Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine, a New York law firm whose attorneys included future C.I.A. director William Casey. Donovan’s attorneys provided fake identities for Disney agents; they also set up a secret communications center, and orchestrated a disinformation campaign. In order to maintain "control over the overall development," Disney and his advisers realized, “the company would have to find a way to limit the voting power of the private residents" even though, they acknowledged, their efforts "violated the Equal Protection Clause" of the U.S. Constitution. Here again the CIA was there to help. Disney's principal legal strategist for Florida was a senior clandestine operative named Paul Helliwell. Having helped launch the C.I.A. secret war in Indochina, Helliwell relocated to Miami in 1960 in order to coordinate dirty tricks against Castro. At a secret "seminar" Disney convened in May 1965 Helliwell came up with the approach that to this day allows the Disney organization to avoid taxation and environmental regulation as well as maintain immunity from the U.S. Constitution. It was the same strategy the C.I.A. pursued in the foreign countries. Set up a puppet government; then use that regime to do your bidding.


Though no one lived there, Helliwell advised Disney to establish at least two phantom "cities,” then use these fake governments to control land use and make sure the public monies the theme park generated stayed in Disney's private hands. On paper Disney World's "cities" would be regular American home towns—except their only official residents would be the handful of hand-picked Disney loyalists who periodically "elected" the officials who, in turn, ceded complete control to Disney executives.

Corporate welfare has a rich history, aided and abetted by guess who? These are the kinds of true history lessons not taught in school.

[JDPriestly]

1. K&R. Americans need to watch this one. That technique will be repeated.

[mother earth]

2. Kicking to introduce other worthy topics. nt

[GiaGiovanni]

3. The scariest part of this:

Over the decades Disney World has showed that, once tasted, partial impunity is never enough. As Disney World's powers increased, its lobbyists made sure the State of Florida lost even the authority to protect the public from injury and death there. In June 2005 Rob Jacobs, at the time chief of Florida's Bureau of Fair Rides Inspection, summed up the human meaning of such impunity. "We don't have the authority to close the park down or close the rides.”

That's just insane.

[mother earth]

4. That insanity is taking over, i.e., ALEC, corporate personhood, who's running the show anyway?

Corporate welfare, true entitlement, true governance....everything else is for show. Once you get it, you will never see things the same. It is completely revealing our true state.

[GiaGiovanni]

5. What it really reveals is that

without public knowledge and vigilance, the rules of a democracy can be twisted to allow private dictatorships.

The Disney situation seems to be a microcosm for the world we are entering.

[mother earth]

6. Well said, Gia. nt

[GiaGiovanni]

7. Thanks, but I wish

I were wrong.

[starroute]

8. Paul Helliwell -- that's just too much

Helliwell was the guy who set up Air America and Sea Supply as CIA front companies in the 1950s to carry on the drugs-for-arms business that supported Chiang Kai-Shek. He also got into politics around then, helping establish a GOP base in Florida for the first time.

In 1960, he was sent to southern Florida to set up similar drugs-for-arms arrangements with anti-Castro Cubans in order to support CIA operations there, including the Bay of Pigs invasion.

After Kennedy was shot, he went to the Bahamas to establish money-laundering offshore banks and other front companies -- a crucial step in creating the offshore banking network that plagues us today. And he also made sure the CIA maintained its nice, cozy relationship with the Mafia.

And in the middle of all this he also found time to do illegal favors for Walt Disney? Well, golly gee.

[mother earth]

9. Thanks for the info, now here's supporting links, feel free to add more.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Paul_Helliwell
Paul Helliwell "had been the OSS's head of special intelligence in China during the war. Later in, worked closely with the CIA, helping to establish several 'proprietaries,' companies that appeared to be normal private enterprises but were secretly owned by the CIA. He was involved in founding Civil Air Transport, Sea Supply, and Air America...

"Helliwell used Castle and Mercantile in connection with tax-avoidance schemes for a number of famous and infamous people, including American mobsters, prominent Asian politicians, and members of the Pritzker family of Chicago, which control the Hyatt hotel chain. The Pritzkers later went into business with BCCI's Ghaith Pharaon, who developed Hyatt hotels in Saudi Arabia and Latin America."


http://marxistlibrary.org/paul-helliwell-biography/


You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

[starroute]

10. Ah yes, Ghaith Pharaon

As well as being a front man in the purchase of US banks for BCCI, Pharaon was rumored to be a Saudi intelligence chief with connections to Iran-Contra.

He was also business partners in Arabia with Khalid bin Mahfouz, who held a 20% interest in BCCI. When Salem bin Laden died in 1988, his business interests in Houston were transferred to bin Mahfouz (whose sister was married to Osama bin Laden), and Pharaon and bin Mahfouz operated them in partnership with bin Laden's former US representative, James Bath.

That's the same James Bath who was an old pal of George W. Bush's -- the two of them had skipped out on the National Guard together in the early 70s, and in 1979 Bath invested $50,000 of what may have been bin Laden's money in Bush's Arbusto Energy.

So the story gets remarkably twisty -- but offshore investments and money-laundering banks are at the heart of it. And we owe it all to Paul Helliwell.

[mother earth]

11. Ah yes, lack of transparency and covert activity, what else would it bring? There's a reason we are

in the mess we are in.

[starroute]

13. The CIA did such a great job of finding ways around the system

Money-laundering banks. Front companies. Destabilization efforts. Political dirty tricks. Playing electoral democracy with the objective of destroying the opposition rather than finding ways to work together.

They didn't invent these things, but they brought them together, perfected the model, and taught a bunch of eager young conservatives to play by those rules. The CIA did a lot of nasty stuff in its heyday, but figuring out how to destroy democracy from within may be its most lasting contribution.

[Baitball Blogger]

12. The Disney model has been repeated throughout Central Florida.

Actually, I shouldn't be laughing.

[hunter]

14. Yet another "Company Town"

The history of those goes way back, long before the CIA existed.

There's still quite a few places like that in California; they used to be quite common.

There are cities, counties and even entire states in the USA that are essentially owned by corporations.

In far too many ways the USA itself is owned by big corporations, the top dog banana republic of the banana republics masquerading as a western democracy.

[grantcart]

15. A couple of points

Bill Donovan had an admiral role in leading the OSS during wartime under FDR.

He was only considered the "Father of the CIA" because he was the original author of the idea. He never worked for the CIA or held any leadership position there.

Secondly it is somewhat of a revisionist view of history to paint the CIA with draconian features in the late 40s and early 50s. It was the liberals who wanted the policy leaders to have better information about what was happening outside of the US. It was fought by the radical conservatives and J Edgar Hoover.

In any case the early history of the CIA can be considered to have a liberalizing effect on American Foreign Policy. Without the CIA it is almost certain that the pro Nuke, radical interventionist military types like Patton and Lemay would have had a much greater impact on American foreign policy if it weren't for the CIA.

The clearest example of this was China. The CIA used information from a collection of outstanding State Department Officers to counter domestic right wing war champions, especially the China Hands. The greatest of these was certainly John Stewart Service who, more than any other person, was responsible for us not escalating the conflict in North Korea into a war with China.

The son of missionaries to China he was fluent in Chinese and walked to the Northern caves to interview Mao Tse Tung and prophesied very early on that the Communists would follow the traditional dynastic reform path of arming the peasants in the north and successfully ring the cities in the South and win ultimate victory. Years before Nixon put it into practice he explained how it would be possible to create a wedge between China and the Soviet Union that would help create stability.

It was only after McCarthy launched his red scare against American academics in the State Department and the CIA that these two agencies became intimidated and succumbed to the Cold War warmongers with tragic consequences in Vietnam.

Provided for general background, don't really have an opinion on the main point of the article regarding cloaking land purchases for Disney.

Its use of CIA as a domestic bogeyman is misleading because a)Donovan never was involved in the operations of the CIA (and his service as leader of the OSS - under FDR - was considered most honorable) b) It is casting a jaundiced view of the CIA based on events that happened after McCarthy had a negative impact on it back to the prior period when its effect on American foreign policy was a major moderating influence on the interventionists and the Big Nuke guys.

[mother earth]

17. See my reply #9 re: Donovan, as for the CIA, their history speaks for itself, both good and bad,

and as for the author's claims, I suspect he has supporting info to back his claims, or he is certainly putting himself at risk legally.

[DeSwiss]

16. K&R

[BethanyQuartz]

18. This is older but I just now found it

I think it illustrates the point:

Active CIA Agents Working for Corporations on the Side

We need to shake these guys out of their bubble. It's bad enough a lot of recruiting is done out of Ivy League schools, but they're also immersed in corporate culture on the side. How can they see the real picture in such a narrow environment coupled with the institutional insanity left over from the 'Cold War'?

They're after the wrong targets because it's corporate America and their politician puppets that tell them what is going wrong in the world. And no corporate head or big shareholder is going to pull a CIA agent aside and say, "Know what I really think is the biggest threat to national security and the survival of our species? Too much money in too few hands coupled with too few worldwide regulations on how companies can and can't treat people."

[quaker bill]

19. It is fun to color it up as some conspiracy

but in fact it was known and reported on that FL was working a deal with Disney. Details of the deal were somewhat secret until it was closed. The ranchers knew who they were selling to. $200 an acre was a more than fair price for native range in what was backwater Osceola / Orange County at the time. The ranchers kept holdings around the park that they then sold to developers over the next 20 years. All of them became very wealthy.

RCID (Reedy Creek Improvement District) is the Disney quasi government. It took an act of the FL legislature to create and charter it. There were no secrets there, it was a deal to give WDW its own gov't as plain as day, and it was wrapped in a deal that prevented them from owing property taxes on the park. (or to the extent taxes were collected, they went to the WDW controlled RCID)

The deal was controversial because people knew about it in detail pretty quickly.

[gejohnston]

20. how come Alex Jones never brought this one up?

he is always ranting about he CIA.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

21. This Floridian has no love for Disney thanks to the story of how WDW was built

Just the sneaky land grab alone left a bad taste. Not to mention the fact that it scarred the Central Florida landscape forever.

In all my years as a Floridian, I've never once voluntarily been to Disney World. (Been dragged along a couple of times involuntarily, however)