A 'spooky' YesterPocket ....

THIS TEXT HAS BEEN REVISED BY ADDITIONS SINCE IT WAS FIRST PUBLISHED.

We previously explained that a 'YesterPocket' is a deviation from our main storyline. It provides a backstory that answers questions automatically arising from the main story. Before returning to the story as told from the perspective of Genie Baskir, we will briefly touch upon the reasons why Don Pierson was twice undermined in his determination to create an automated offshore broadcasting station.

On the first occasion his plan was based upon providing an alternative to the highly expensive, but totally confused broadcasting operations of 'Radio Caroline'. Don Pierson was misled by Ronan O'Rahilly into thinking that O'Rahilly had created 'Radio Caroline' and was operating as a competitor to Allan Crawford's 'Radio Atlanta'. In fact, 'Atlanta' and 'Caroline' were really part of one project from the beginning, and O'Rahilly was not operating anything. He was unleashing a pack of lies to deceive.

Don Pierson arrived in England during 1964 to investigate the offshore commercial scene for himself. It was not his first visit to England; he had previously arrived in 1957 for a British car manufacturer's convention. But in 1964 his focus was upon the potential profitability of commercial radio broadcasting in a restricted business market with a huge market potentiality.

In response to the jumbled 'Caroline' broadcasting output, Pierson devised a plan, with permission from Gordon McLendon, to create 'Radio KLIF London' by sanitizing the Dallas output of KLIF in Dallas and rebroadcasting its music and style via an automation system with added new information relating to London. Don Pierson raised his financing based upon this plan, but it was undermined by a Chicago lawyer named Burton Kanter who had his own puppet on a string. His name is Philip Birch.

Birch was Ronan O'Rahilly with a different accent.

Because of his career experience at the J. Walter Thomson advertising agency, Birch was hired to manage the advertising side of 'Radio KLIF London'. However, Birch was convinced that Gordon McLendon's style of Dallas programming would be unacceptable in London, and so Birch began a drive to exclude the Texas influence, including that of Don Pierson.

But Birch had a problem.

Don Pierson had hired another Texan named Ben Toney to be the station manager and Birch would work with Toney as advertising manager. Toney would spend most of his time on the radio ship anchored in the North Sea, and Birch would spend most of his time working out of a short-term leased basement on Curzon Street in London's Mayfair district.

However, Birch was Kanter's man, and Toney was subjected to a de facto job promotion as Program Director, and Birch took it upon himself to act as Station Manager. To this end, Birch rewrote Pierson's business plan for an automated Texas station called 'Radio KLIF London', and then commissioned a series of British-made big band jingles for his own British version of 'Radio London'. This change also required Ben Toney to hire a broadcasting staff and then train them.

Naturally this undermining of Don Pierson's project resulted in a potential verbal explosion, so even though Pierson was in London, Birch refused to talk with him, and instead, he went over Pierson's head to Burton Kanter in Chicago who held the legal and financial secrets of the operation. Kanter let Birch name the ship, forced Pierson to drop the KLIF automation, but not the McLendon format. Toney then had to spend his time trying to produce a clone of KLIF in Dallas by hiring and training a bevy of new radio broadcasters. In this way Birch took control of the station, although Pierson and the investors he brought in all kept their ownership of shares.

However, Don Pierson decided that he was not going to be sidelined by Kanter and Birch. It was his project from the beginning, and he decided to have another go at bringing a new low-cost automation station to the British Isles that could offer a good return on investment for shareholders.

Don Pierson later explained in an audio interview with Mervyn Hagger that he was not in the business of entering into a political fight with the British government over broadcasting policy. He was in the business of making money, and that is all.

Offshore broadcasting was not Don Pierson's first venture into British industry. He had originally come to England from Texas in 1957 in order to attend a convention for car dealers. It was arranged by Roots Motors who wanted to export their Hillman cars. Don Pierson first met Tom Danaher on a train during that convention. Both of them were independent car dealers. Pierson in Eastland and Danaher in Wichita Falls. The Kanter connection arose out of a relationship with another car dealer in Abilene.

As far as Pierson was concerned, he was in England to make money, not as a sightseer. But when Don Pierson crossed the Atlantic on his business ventures, he brought his wife and two young children with him on more than one occasion. He was a soft-spoken man with fixed objective in his mind, and a detailed plan of how to put it into operation.

Sometimes, people like Birch decide that instead of attempting to sell what they consider to be a better way of putting a plan into action, they adopt a ruthless disregard for any form of moral obligation to the person who gave them their job. Birch came from that type of English manipulative background. He was a devious individual who quietly stabbed his opponent in the back while smiling and pretending to play a morality card of being a loyal employee.

It is a form of behavior that is common within certain types of people in the advertising business which ignores words such as "truth" and "transparency", and specializes instead in obfuscation and misdirection in a gentlemanly sort of way. Their goal is to fleece a "mark" so that onlookers are unaware that a victim is being fleeced. Don Pierson was the victim and when he came to understand what was going on, it was too late. Birch had won.

Philip Birch was a manipulative person, but Birch could not have succeeded without the help of Kanter who was a Chicago tax attorney. He was at the top of his game and he  even outsmarted the U.S. government and its Internal Revenue Service (IRS). That is not something that many people have ever been able to do. Al Capone also came from Chicago, but in the end, it was the IRS in Washington DC who caused his downfall.

Kanter was the mastermind behind scuttling Don Pierson's broadcasting plans, and Philip Birch was his stooge. In the end Kanter 'bought off' Pierson by redefining Ben Toney's job and pushing out the influence of Gordon McLendon.

Meanwhile McLendon had his own political agenda.

In addition to his broadcasting interests, Gordon McLendon was a politician. In February 1964 McLendon was targeted for assassination by a woman named Mary Stone. She shot at the wrong person, but she told police that she was aiming at Democrat candidate Gordon McLendon who at that time was campaigning for the U.S. Senate. Her motive? She claimed that McLendon was a communist who associated himself with the Cosa Nostra.

This was just three months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and ironically during the same month and year that Beatrix Miller resigned as editor of 'Queen' magazine, and that was on the very same day that Planet Productions Limited was registered in Dublin, Ireland. The timing of Miller's exit was related to the registration of the company in Dublin, and the change in editorial direction at 'Queen' magazine that Jocelyn Stevens was undertaking, was tied to a girl named Carolyn.

Her identity would later be buried under the repetitious telling of a ludicrous story about 5 years old Caroline Kennedy. She is the daughter of the slain U.S. President, and although Caroline Kennedy was a child, and her eponymous namesake called 'Radio Caroline' had nothing in common with the stereotypical housewife that 'Radio Caroline' was supposedly aimed at. Disguising the true story was an assignment handed to Ronan O'Rahilly, but it is unclear whether Ronan O'Rahilly ever knew who Carolyn was.

In the end, the job of dispensing this fake story about Caroline Kenney was handed to Robin Leach, a Londoner who emigrated to the USA and eventually found fame with a television series called 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous'. But it was not until one year after 'Radio Caroline' first came on the air that the myth about Caroline Kennedy was launched by reporters working in the print version of mass media. Once told in print, Ronan O'Rahilly had his script and beginning in March 1965 he began to faithfully repeat it with every chance he got.

​Behind Ronan O'Rahilly was a master plan created by a combination of Pye electrical manufacturing interests in combination with the interests of British Petroleum and Shell Oil. None of them were interested in picking a fight with the British Tory government then in office.  They made it clear that there would be no politics on 'Radio Caroline'.

But undermining the non-political agenda of both 'Radio KLIF London', and the combined, but separate ventures known individually as 'Atlanta' and 'Caroline', was a geopolitical game plan involving polemical broadcasting which the BBC did not allow its perpetrators to engage in. That plan centered upon Herbert W. Armstrong.

Now when it came to Don Pierson's second attempt at offshore broadcasting with 'Radio England' and 'Britain Radio', the political masterminds were again initially in charge. The ship used by Don Pierson was the CIA vessel called 'Olga Patricia' which had been a part of the undeclared war on Fidel Castro's Cuba.

But, just as McLendon had to get the 'Mi Amigo' out of Texas waters in a hurry following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, a problem blew-up for the CIA when a spotlight was shone by the Florida press on its secret base station in South Miami. That is where the 'Olga Patricia' was berthed at a US Air Force pen in Florida waters.

The problem involving the disposal of 'Olga Patricia', was a continuation of the ill-fated 'Bay of Pigs' fiasco.

President John F. Kennedy lied to the world when he pretended that the war on Cuba was the fault of a rogue CIA, and that he had nothing to do with it. The follow-on 'Cuban Missile Crisis' that nearly triggered a nuclear World War III, then made it essential for President Kennedy to pretend that he would destroy the CIA, and never again try to invade Cuba. In reality, his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was running a secret CIA operation in South Miami, and it was linked to 'Operation Mongoose'.

As part of this secret operation that continued the offensive against Cuba, another ship was called for. The first ship that they talked about using was the 'Mi Amigo'. It was represented by Robert F. Thompson on behalf of his colleagues Clint Murchison, Jr., and Gordon McLendon. They were all members of the Democratic Party. A little later on their attention was switched to the 'Olga Patricia' which did get involved with the clandestine war on Cuba, both before and after it was assigned to Don Pierson for offshore broadcasting.

The later link-person between 'Olga Patricia' and Don Pierson was John Goodwin Tower. He was a Democrat, and in 1951 he switched to the Republican Party. Between 1952 and 1953 while at the London School of Economics, Tower did field research for his graduate thesis about the 'Conservative Party of the United Kingdom'. In 1965, John Tower became a member of the U.S. Committee on Armed Services which had control of the U.S. Department of Defense. Tower was born in Houston, but he moved to Wichita Fallas, Texas, and that is where he seems to have become a puppet on the financial strings held by Pierce Langford III.

Langford III was also a resident of Wichita Falls where he not only acted as Tower's pilot, but he was also the conduit through which Texas oil money flowed to finance campaigns beneficial to those involved with the drilling of oil wells. Years later, Mervyn Hagger came to learn of the connection between Pierce Langford III and John Tower with regards to Don Pierson's twin radio station project on board the mv 'Olga Patricia'.

That moment first occurred during the early Nineteen Eighties when Hagger was going through the same cardboard boxes in which he found the letter which he had written back in 1967 which was addressed to "Don Pearson (sic) of Eastland, Texas." In casual conversation, Hagger mentioned the discovery of his 1967 letter to Grey Pierson, because its British postage stamp had been removed by tearing off the corner of the envelope without opening it in order to read its contents. So Mervyn Hagger wondered whether as a young boy, Grey Pierson had become a stamp collector.

Hagger then told Grey Pierson about other documents in those same cardboard boxes which referred to a relationship between Pierce Langford III, and John Tower in context of the twin radio stations on board the mv 'Olga Patricia'. Both Langford and Tower were from Wichita Falls, and that city had become the last city to be added to the 'City Digest' franchise network. It was also that edition in that city under the control of Grey Pierson's management, which caused the downfall of the entire IFAC/IFAP publishing business. Grey Pierson then suggested that Hagger should ask him about the involvement of Langford and Tower in his father's twin offshore radio station venture.

There is also a backstory to this conversation. During another conversation with Larry West who had been a part of the IFAC/IFAP venture, Mervyn Hagger had remarked that Grey Pierson was not at all like his father, and West then passed this remark on to Grey Pierson. It was Grey Pierson who later informed Hagger that he was aware of Hagger's remark. There were several other 'red flags' raised by Grey Pierson's behavior that should have caught Hagger's attention, but they were either unobserved at the time, or Hagger chose to ignore them and discard the notion that Grey Pierson did not have Hagger's best interests at heart.

So, on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Don Pierson's living room in Eastland, where Don Pierson was sitting in his favorite arm chair facing his wife who was sitting next to Hagger's wife on a couch, while Hagger was sitting on the floor between them and operating a tape recorder, Hagger began to interview Don Pierson about his interests in British offshore broadcasting. The reason for the recorded interview was to get Don Pierson's response to remarks made by Johnnie Walker about Don Pierson's mother which had been put on sale as part of a commercial tape made by Steve England.

It is difficult to portray what happened next, but the friendly aspects of this low-key interview and recording were suddenly halted due to dramatic hand signals made by Don Pierson. This recording was a pre-edited tape, with many reasons for later editing to take out interruptions such as the one made by a bird crashing into his living room window. Therefore the silent gestures to 'cut' that Don Pierson made were not only unexpected, but totally unnecessary, or so it seemed.

But Don Pierson asked for the tape to be backed-up and over-recorded, which it was, although the spot where this occurred can be detected on the unedited tape. With the recording halted, Don Pierson made it clear that the question that Hagger asked was not to be asked again, either directly or indirectly. It Hagger did ask Don Pierson a similar question, then Don Pierson would immediately sever both his friendship and business relationship with Hagger.

A friend in Norway heard that recording and began to repeatedly ask why Don Pierson had reacted in this way. Hagger responded that he did not know. He had made that recording to simply counter the spurious story told by Johnnie Walker for Steve England's production of 'The Radio England Story'. The question relating to Langford-Tower was just part of the unscripted and spontaneous interview. It was unplanned, and it had no ulterior attachment, other than one that Grey Pierson may have had in suggesting to Hagger that he should ask his father about Langford and Tower in the context of asking about the 'Olga Patricia'.

There the matter rested, except for the friend in Norway who was amassing an encyclopedia of his own about the twin radio stations on board the mv 'Olga Patricia'. Every so often he would raise the same query: why did Don Pierson act in such a strange way. At the time he was repeatedly asking this same question, a mystery surrounded the fate of the mv 'Olga Patricia' when it returned from the North Sea. Eventually that riddle was solved, and in so doing it began to explain why the relationship between Langford and Tower was such an explosive issue. Once the first question was asked and answered, it would immediately trigger a second question, and so on. All of these questions were part of a much bigger story involving a story that officialdom did not want anyone to know.

This question put to Don Pierson was later followed by another question, also relating to Don Pierson and the three people who were by then coming together as 'The Trio', but without any idea that they would eventually be investing the real story of a girl named Carolyn, because the story about a girl named Caroline, was fiction.

It was Grey Pierson who prompted the original question about Langford and Tower, and by the time that the truth had been discovered, Don Pierson's son had become quite negative in his comments about his father. Only much later did it finally emerge that asking the explosive question about Langford and Tower was a trap, because although Grey Pierson may not have known the depth of the dark secrets behind this political story, he knew enough to attract the personal help of William Colby, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

But what is this story ultimately concealing?

Perhaps it also bleeds into the still emerging story about Jeffry Epstein, his pal Prince Andrew and their go-between Ghislaine Maxwell. She is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a man who wrote the book about fraudulently obtaining money from the world of British printing and publishing. That evidentiary source was part of the same financial beginnings of 'Radio Caroline'. The backbone of that complex story is still being blotted-out by the British Royal Family who are accustomed to making payments in exchange for silence.

Some are claiming that 'royal money', is not public money, as if Queen Elizabeth II and her family make money from frying and then selling fish and chips. All 'royal money' is public money! This story is drenched in scandal.

Not only does it involve the British press, but via Maxwell it reaches into the world of nuclear secrets and the Israeli intelligence agency call Mossad. But that story has its beginnings in the invention of the nuclear bomb during WWII, and then developed into the sharp rift in secrets-sharing that developed between the USA and UK. Then came the transition from Eisenhower to Macmillan and Kennedy to Macmillan and then into a period of darkness accompanied by the music of the Sixties.

One of the reasons why this story has been so fiercely subjected to obfuscation, misdirection and pretense is that the real events of yesterday never happened. The so-called events of today are built upon a foundation of fiction.

But, if you ask one question and you get a true answer, it in turn begins to unmask a lie. A second question based upon the first true answer then reveals another lie. A third question answered by another true answer reveals that the first two answers are related and that there is a big picture storyline waiting to be uncovered from beneath a hodge-podge collection contradictory lies and deceit.

Soon the questions about the birth of 'Radio Caroline' reach November 22, 1963, and the murder of a President in broad daylight; in the middle of the day; surrounded by crowds. Yet, that affair is still shrouded in mystery. But contrast this with the lunacy of Ronan O'Rahilly. His story is not just a mystery, it is absurd.