​In the mid '70s I went to live in Israel. I stayed with my mother's Aunt Regina who was the only survivor from Mother's previous generation.

During that time my father came to live in Israel with his second wife and they settled into the fanciest building in Tel Aviv. That is why I was having a coffee on the street on Dizengoff Avenue, the fanciest street in Tel Aviv.

An older woman I had never met before with a number tattooed on her arm came up to me demanding to know where in Poland my family was from because she could tell by my coloring. I explained who my parents were and she contradicted me and asserted that my mother was long dead in the Holocaust. I told her she was incorrect and that she was an American with children and grand children.
 
Americans were easy to identify because we were "shiny" and had great teeth.

We talked and I told her that I was among other things, a radio broadcaster although I was in Israel doing archaeological field work. That was when she told me her friend needed a production engineer for his radio station and English language broadcaster with rock and roll knowledge. I told her I was interested and I got the job just on her say so.

The radio station turned out to be the 'Voice of Peace' which was a pirate radio broadcasting ship in international waters in the Mediterranean sea just off the coast of Israel.

Because broadcasting is free and uncensored in the USA I had no idea what I was involved with, especially because the Beatles financed the venture and its significance to them and Europe was lost on me because I did not understand the basic issues of freedom.

Israel was founded as a Marxist state and functioned in Marxist purity until the 1980's when it was on the verge of an economic collapse and reinvented itself as a market economy. The importance of this cannot be understated because without complete freedom there must be coercion to function.

Israel had two state controlled radio stations: 'All Israel 1' and 'All Israel 2'. News was controlled and the music was highly programmed to reflect what the State approved of. David Ben Gurion did not like or approve of television, so it was restricted until the mid '70s when highly curated and censored programming was permitted for a small portion of the day.

On broadcasting freedom Israel split the baby. Print and art and spoken speech were completely free and unregulated. Radio, television and recording were not considered speech. They were electro magnetic impulses and therefore could be regulated by the State.

Why then did Israel Defense Forces not blow the radio ship out of the water? Because in a Marxist State, labor is always striking for something and this was true of 'Israel 1' and 'Israel 2'. When both were on strike then the state controlled radio stations had to shift their program output to the "pirate station" for transmission. Israel practiced a sort of seat of the pants socialism and never claimed intellectual honesty.

The 'Voice of Peace' was started by Abie Nathan, a cantankerous and argumentative person tired of the State of war between Israel and the world. He deduced that everyone wanted freedom and that freedom could unite relatives who should have been together in comity, not infighting over matters of liturgy.

Once I understood these new issues, for me I fully embraced my role in being a pirate for real. I had my job on Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot in its Holocaust Museum and my archaeology field work. I also fully embraced my "Americanness" at a time that others were critical of Americans.

Shipboard I was someone who had lived freedom and everyone wanted to understand the abilities that freedom brings to lives. Open and original thinking and not taking no for an answer made me a delight to listen to when I produced American style radio programs.

That is why the day that Mervyn Hagger called me into his office at 'City Digest' and started talking about his youth and listening to the English 'pirates' was so memorable. He was the only one who understood what I understood.

More tomorrow ....

Because this first book in our storyline is primarily based upon the biographical accounts of three people, and because at the time that these events took place none of these three people were looking at events from the standpoint of becoming contributing authors to this work now in progress, the notes being individually kept were primarily circumstantial and by chance, rather than as carefully stored documents. At the time the Internet and its facilities such as newspaper archives and the 'Wayback machine' did not exist, but now they are proving to be invaluable tools in reassembling a record of the past. Court documents are also invaluable for this purpose because evidence recorded was evidence often given under oath. Peer reviewed academic monologues serve a similar purpose if they are created as a result of first-hand knowledge.

So when this storyline reached the point where Genie entered the picture forming as the second member of 'The Trio', we began by asking her to recall from human memory, the life she lived at the time. But because recall can be quite hazy and distorted, it is then necessary to find documentation that either supports the timeline of the narrative, or it makes a correction.

Sometimes that correction involves more than just the timeline when it touches upon more than the primary event, and makes reference to geography and other people involved. Such was the case when Genie began trying to recall the sequence of events that led to her becoming the second member of 'The Trio'.

Looking at a single event through the eyes of one person, when the event concerns more than one person, means that aspects of the event may not be understood until much later when other perceptions of that same event are taken into account as a result of research. This is what we have been doing in the last few days using our unique YesterCode as a guide, while delving into documented archives created by a variety of other authors and stored in many different archives.

Genie's story continues tomorrow ....

In our edition for February 18, 2022 called ''A 'Spooky' YesterPocket", we began to introduce Genie Baskir as the second member of our 'Trio', and then we took an Intermission. We suggest you take another read of that rather lengthy article to provide a lead-in the events that follow in tomorrow's edition.

Hopefully we will be able to resume our storyline tomorrow, because the real back story to what is taking place in the Ukraine with the invasion by Russia, has the same root cause of what is now called 'Climate Change', and in the Nineteen Sixties in the United Kingdom was called 'offshore' or 'pirate' radio. The real story behind the 1964 advent of 'Radio Caroline' took place at the very same time that the North Sea was being carved up to exploit its underwater wealth of oil and gas.

Heading up that exploration was a man who linked to Brown and Root which became part of Halliburton with its base in Texas, and to the structure known as REM island. This story goes back in time to the origins of British Petroleum and the intervention in the affairs of Iran by the British MI6 with assistance from the U.S. CIA during the Nineteen Fifties. Before that it went back to the Texans brought over by Winston Churchill to exploit the oil deposits found in and around Sherwood Forest during World War II.

This is not about 'pop' music!

'Free radio' is 'freedom of the press', and in the current war between Ukraine and Russia no one who has a home in the path of exploding shells and troops firing 'live' ammunition cares about old records being played on the airwaves. People want to know what is really going on, but the airwaves have become merely another weapon of war - just as they were in World War II.

Our storyline will peel back the lies and the distortions to show what has really taken place in the development of broadcasting, and why 'mass media' is so important to 'mass brainwashing' by those firing the shells and bullets.

Right now we are trying to untangle a past which 'The Trio' became part of.

Hopefully we can resume our precursory timeline very shortly.

The childish anoraks who think that playing records is the same as 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of the airwaves' are no doubt ignoring the war going on between Russia and the Ukraine where propaganda rules. President Putin is shown on YouTube as a very devout Orthodox Christian, but by the same token, the Pope who heads-up the other branch of that pre-Reformation Christian faith, is taking a different view.

Protestant Christian churches who are by no means a uniform body of believers, are split into umpteen different viewpoints and most of these groups are using the medium of broadcasting to spread their polemical interpretations of current affairs - just as Herbert W. Armstrong once funded the offshore (pirate) broadcasting stations off the coast of the United Kingdom in the Nineteen Sixties.

Now that the anoraks have been given a wavelength and the blessing of the UK broadcasting authority for a station they call 'Radio Caroline', they squabble among themselves over which old records should be aired - as if anyone cares - except them. 'Free radio' is not what is being broadcast on Malcolm Smith's 648 station that he calls 'Radio Caroline'. But his childish cult shouts loud in order to drown out the real story which is about the beginnings of North Sea Oil and Gas and Texas interests wrapped up in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), at the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

That is the root storyline of our own recital.

But when events are ongoing it is often not apparent what is taking place, and so attention is misplaced. That is our difficulty with the story that we are trying to document. We have to find hard evidence, and too many in academia have backed the telling of a fake story, and now the anorak children are doing the same thing.

The key is in the split from the original 'Radio Caroline' by the Texas interests who created 'Radio London', and although we became a part of the latter story, we are only now able to put the whole story together and present it here in serial form. We hope to resume our own accounts as individual members of 'The Trio' very shortly.

This work is a key to understanding what is going on right now with Russia and the sideline issue of Ukraine.

It is all about oil and gas.


Somehow the USA and the UK which are both awash in oil and gas, were persuaded to turn off their own domestic supplies. The USA has resorted to buying oil from Russia, and the UK which has enormous reserves underground, is pleading with other nations for supplies.

What you don't know is the story of UK oil and gas and World War II. It was pumped by Texans in secrecy under the direction of Winston Churchill.

You also don't know about the overthrow of the government of Iran by the CIA for MI6 on behalf of the company that became British Petroleum whose boss came to London on behalf of Texans and got the Crown to carve-up the North Sea.

You don't know the real story behind REM island and Dutch gas and oil fields, and how this is linked to Texas and the real story behind the creation of 'Radio Caroline'.

Yes, it is also about North Sea oil and gas.

Others won't tell you the details but we will.

We are!

But first we have to explain HOW we came to know all of this and WHO we are.

That is the first part of this story.

Meanwhile Russia is distracting the attention of everyone by its extravaganza of mayhem, but is is not the story and neither are those Russian-German pipelines. But what was due to flow through those pipelines is a part of the real story.

This story has never been told anywhere by anyone before, even though fragments of the story have been told in reputable publications as separate events.

Unfortunately the public wants pictures and sensationalism and that is why we will not be adding pictures until we have published the text. This is not something for the anoraks or brain dead sensationalists but for readers who want to learn. Our research has been going on for decades and we have been publishing aspects of what we learned. But what we also learned is not to feed sensationism, so 'no pictures, no mass readers.'

​Just because the mass of humanity seems to love wars resulting in mass murder and destruction, does not mean that we have to follow the masses. So we are not. Instead, we hope that you will want to know what the real story is behind the never-ending screams about the oil and gas that powers the world; gives you clothes to wear and a whole lot more.

We are now linking all of our activities and their individual names to JLRI.CENTER. It is not a 'brand' name since we are an educational organization with publications in print and on line linked to the John Lilburne Research Institute (for Constitutional Studies) USA, and to both the social media identifier and physical place name of 'Pebble Theatre'. Both are associated with activities relating to Yesterday Never Happened (UK) Ltd. In order to simplify matters we have now adopted a basic 'parent' identifier of JLRI.CENTER to serve as an ip address. At the present time it is redirected to our index list of monologues. (Please note that .center is the domain.)

This blog is now the precursory location of individual chapters and the source of information about all of our related activities. The Precursory Index to these chapters can be accessed above.

These precursory chapters are creating a combined biographical account of primarily three people who form 'The Trio': Mervyn Hagger; Eric Gilder and Genie Baskir. A narrator who is not a part of the actual storyline sequence of events, is the person creating the text.

However, because this is a work in progress, the text within these chapters is always subject to change by movement of content from one chapter to another, and by revision to include additional information. Footnotes, endnotes and other forms of referencing are not included as this stage, but will be added later.

The format of this work is intended for eventual publication as a part work in print, and then later, as volumes within a series of books. Prior to beginning this storyline a lot of detailed text previously appeared on this blog, Those entries are now in the process of being incorporated at appropriate instances within the storyline itself.

Other previously published content that has appeared in book or monologue formats will also be included in this combined and omnibus version of events in time, place and person.

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.

As of today's date the Narrator is waiting for additional details relating to Precursory Chapter 14 to be supplied by a member of 'The Trio'. This partwork will continue with next chapter once that information has been received and incorporated into the continuing storyline. The text of the previous chapter was updated several times after first being posted Online. Check it out again in case you missed the addition of a lot of new information.

We began this blog in March 2021 after beginning our companion blog in March 2020, and because the purpose of each blog has now morphed into a single endeavor featuring new precursory text with a new chapter index, we are pausing our daily updates on this blog for the moment. The original purpose behind the first blog was to address the theft of our copyright work by Paul Alexander Rusling, but since then we have begun to publish a precursory text that began with the detailed story of 'The Trio'; how this research project began, and where it is going now and in the future.

Because the original companion blog is now serving as the site for the constantly updated chapter index to precursory text, a lot of previous material has become orphaned with no quick way to access it, except via the Archives link. So we are now addressing that problem by building the text that is in date order of sequence into a precursory book format under restricted access. This will appear under the button 'Yesterday Never Happened'. Only known readers who are not hiding behind false identities will be able to access content. In this way time-wasting anoraks will be excluded from the process.

However, all of this additional textual work will take time to accomplish, and because it coincides with the expansion of our library premises, we have to divide our working time between both projects.

As soon as the indexing of the orphaned and archived material on both blogs has been completed, both blogs will continue with updated precursory material which will eventually be published as one text as partworks in printed format.

If you have a genuine interest in this research, we welcome your participation and we will extend an offer to access the completed and indexed precursory partwork as it appears online. New precursory text will still appear on this blog here as before.

Although there are now many books in circulation about 'Radio Caroline' and how and why it began, they are all rooted in either the initial plan to confuse, mislead and obfuscate in order to conceal the real storyline, or they are swimming in a sea of vanity and self-glorification because their authors have based everything in their pages upon hearsay and gossip. Paul Alexander Rusling admits that hearsay and gossip is the foundation of his 'bible'.

Rusling repeatedly made this admission after he stole documentation from us. and tried to weave it into a fictitious narrative of his own, and then basked under a small spotlight powered by his own vanity. He sees nothing wrong in his actions and Rusling is not alone in his amoral behavior. Disc jockeys such as Peter Waters Dingley also engaged in this practice.

Dingley was 'branded' with the name 'Johnnie Walker' in 1966, after he applied at the London Hilton Hotel for a job on Don Pierson's twin offshore stations aboard the mv 'Olga Patricia'. The on-air name he was given came from two names on a sound bite on a non-musical voice cart. Dingley applied the interpretive spelling of that first name to match the one applied to bottles of the eponymous Scotch whiskey brand.

But at the expense of Don Pierson, and full of puffery, Dingley resorted at one stage to telling a totally fictious tale about Don Pierson's long-deceased mother. It was part of a bogus interview recorded for sale in the UK on a cassette series called 'Tapetrix'. The owner of that brand later issued a correction with the excuse that he did not know that what he had recorded and sold was a fictitious tale. He claimed that he only became aware of this when he heard a personal rebuttal interview with Don Pierson. It was recorded by Mervyn Hagger.

Unfortunately the son of Don Pierson then engaged in a similar practice of misinformation when he made and sold a video about 'Radio England'. Therein rests part of the problem in publishing restorative truth: Infamy sells and self-promoted vanity clouds the question of honesty and moral judgment by those engaging in deception for personal gain.

All of this begs this question: why do individuals attempt to boost their own egos by depressing the reputation of other people?

Vanity, and hoped-for inexpensive self-gain, seem to be the main reasons.

This work has met with howls of personal attacks by individuals who are afraid of being exposed as frauds. But seldom, if ever, is there an academic challenge of line-by-line questions relating to the authenticity of underlying textual source material. It is easier for the fraudsters to attack the messenger rather than the message, even to the extent of pretending that the author is one person and not three people. This is why a narrator is used to link three separate storylines into one central story.

However, the story of 'The Trio' is not about three silhouettes on a wall, it is about three people who have three independent lives with multi-faceted life stories. Only part of their lives come together as 'The Trio'. Although this storyline has a combined central theme, the three individuals who compose that theme, have lived three separate and totally independent lives. They are not biologically related, and neither are they related by politics or religion.

Quite often in relating the main theme of this story, other aspects of the lives of these three individuals have a direct bearing upon their lives lived as a team. These snippets of information must be told later as insets, or backstories, and that is the approach being taken in this partwork.

Therefore we follow our own 'YesterCode' where the 'Event' represents the main theme, and then the chronology follows on. But when it is necessary to explain a backstory, the chronology of the main event may have moved on in time. So the chronology of the backstory will then pre-date the central event or theme.

There will be many examples of this process in the telling of the main storyline that will be covered within these pages.

We have been explaining in detail how this investigation began and how it evolved through a series of events into one story investigated by the 'The Trio'.

For most of the past 55 years since Hagger wrote his letter to "Don Pearson" (sic) on August 16, 1967, the center of this story had been Don Pierson of Eastland, Texas. It was Pierson's 'Radio London', not O'Rahilly's 'Radio Caroline' that the BBC tried to copy in order to create BBC 'Radio One'. But beginning sometime just before Saturday, October 25, 2014 and the lecture at the Communications Museum at Burntisland in Fife, when a mysterious claim made in one paragraph of a book came to our attention, we have had to rethink our original premise.

The lines that appeared on one page of the book 'Radio Man' were published in 2002, and they were part of a biography of Charles Orr Stanley.

Our attention was drawn to Don Pierson when we should have been following Charles Orr Stanley and his son John. Eleven years had elapsed between the time that this book had been published and when our revised review was published on December 5, 2013.

With the help of Chris Edwards of 'Offshore Echos' magazine, whose attention we drew to the text in that book,  we set out to discover the foundational reference material that led to its inclusion, because although a lot of the text had source references, that paragraph did not.

It was then that we began to realize that if the information contained in that paragraph is true, then 'Mister Big' was not Jocelyn Stevens, and it certainly was not Ronan O'Rahilly who was but a fraud; a misdirect who managed to fool Don Pierson in a major way.

But although we had made some progress before a scheduled lecture in Scotland on October 25, 2014, as this revised review makes plain, we were still a long way from knowing the true story.

We are now much closer to knowing exactly who was behind the 1964 creation of 'Radio Caroline' and why it was created. Its real purpose has a much more relevant impact on millions of people alive today, than it did on the lives of its first listeners in 1964, and the real purpose of that ship had little to do with broadcasting.

This is what Mervyn Hagger wrote in his revised book review of 5 December 2013, that is still available to read on Amazon under the heading 'A MISLEADING BOOK!'

"I need to revise my review yet again, because I have now discovered that one very important part of this book that deals with the subject of the introduction of both commercial television and radio into the British Isles, has been presented in such a way that it misleads the reader into accepting a false version of events.

It was not until my associate [Chris Edwards] found the transcribed notes of a key interview produced for this book, that I realized that the writers (Frankland and Busey) had not done their own research, but had relied upon what they were presented with. As a result they produced a very misleading work.

In the instance of the section dealing with the Isle of Man and the creation of the offshore station Radio Caroline, information was redacted to remove the source of the original information, and then that information was further redacted to conceal both the name of an individual and the name of a company, while misleading the reader by changing the words of the interviewee.

I have discovered that this book cost over £92,000 using the funds of a British registered foundation and administered by the person conducting the core research about which I am complaining.. I am now wondering what the ulterior motive was in producing the book.

Did its promoter fear that the truth would one day emerge unless this particular book was produced first to mislead academic researchers?

This book has been cited by Adrian Johns in his equally misleading book called 'Death of a Pirate" which also contains bogus information that even casual research can immediately disprove.

We need a proper biography about Charles Orr Stanley and his son John, but this is not that book.

I give it two stars for alerting me to the fact that there is a concealed and bogus widespread history about Radio Caroline that is in general circulation.

The story of PYE and the stories about radio broadcasting on the Isle of Man as well as the advent of British offshore radio in 1964 are all part of one story, but that story is not told in this book.

Finally, I must add that it was after a three year search for the original source material for this book under circumstances made intentionally difficult by the repository holding them, that by sheer luck and chance, or serendipity, my colleague [Chris Edwards] found the 'smoking gun' that blew the lid off this deception.

After tracking down the family of the deceased source [Alan Bednall], we were informed by his daughter that he was never shown a copy of this book, and his loaned artifacts were never returned to him. As a result of these findings I have therefore downgraded my rating for this book."

Our research began with a letter mailed on August 16, 1967, by Mervyn Hagger in Birmingham, England. It was addressed to "Don 'Pearson (sic) Eastland, Texas, USA."

That was over 55 years ago.

That same letter was recovered by its sender on Sunday, May 21, 1983.

That was over 39 years ago.

This has been a long and exclusive journey and it is still ongoing, and so are the lies and intentional deceit!

It has not been a journey funded or directed by a philanthropic institution or individual.

But it is a true story, and that is why it is being told through the lives of the three people who have made it part of their life work to find the answers to questions that others have clearly not wanted others to know.

More tomorrow.

YesterPockets are those stories inserted into the main narrative.

Often used in novels where the main story continues until you hit a chapter which begins to tell the same story but from a different perspective; this book alternates between storyline one (the main storyline), and storyline two.

That inserted storyline is what we call a 'YesterPocket'.

As you know by now, we are not claiming to be 'historians', but we are claiming to tell a single story from a biographical viewpoint. However, while there are three main biographical accounts telling this story, and while there are also more than three biographical accounts telling part of this story, those minor accounts are more-or-less sub-biographies as told by, or about individuals such as Herb Jepko.

Jepko is not a part of the main story. But neither is Don Pierson, and yet his biographical insertion is very important to an understanding of the actual storyline.

But wait!

That also applies to Ronan O'Rahilly.

His story is also a 'YesterPocket' because Ronan O'Rahilly lied about his actual biography, and that deception then influenced Don Pierson. So what Don Pierson did was to respond to a lie. In other words, what Don Pierson thought was true was in fact a lie, and that lie promoted by Ronan O'Rahilly turned into a disaster for Don Pierson. That was true.

Now add to that confusion the still ongoing lies and deception spun by people like Paul Rusling in his 'bible'. That book supports the aims and ambitions of Malcolm Smith (who calls himself 'Peter Moore',) while Garry Stevens supports Paul Rusling by giving him advertising space for his bogus bible! But making this into a total muddle (it seems), is the same Garry Stevens who is attacking Malcolm Smith who uses the bogus name of 'Peter Moore', and in return, Malcolm Smith who calls himself 'Peter Moore', is attacking Garry Stevens, or so it seems.

So who benefits from all this?

The British Crown Establishment.

It was the British Crown Establishment that leaned on the British Broadcasting Corporation and told them to create BBC 'Radio One' as a substitute for Don Pierson's 'Wonderful Radio London'. Not 'Radio Caroline', but 'Radio London'.

This story gets more whacky when the interjection of Terry Bate is thrown into the mix, because no one has paid much attention to Terry Bate with regards to the real story behind 'Radio Caroline'. How could they? There was no such company. Therefore the real story behind Terry Bate is not that he was employed personally by Ronan O'Rahilly, because Ronan O'Rahilly was himself a mere scam artist. So who employed Terry Bate?

Now throw into this mix the BBC who reclaimed their use of the name 'Radio London'. Remember, Philip Birch was told that he could not register that name in the United Kingdom, so registered Radlon (Sales) as a substitute. What was the identity of the party that had a preexisting interest in the name Radio London?

The British Broadcasting Corporation.

Another smokescreen has been thrown up as part of a misdirection to 'Radio Luxembourg', but they never claimed to be 'Radio London'. The BBC did since the days of World War II. But the BBC resurrected the name just before they began to box in the new plan to turn the Independent Television Authority into the Independent Broadcasting Authority. That is when the people mixed up in the pre-launch of commercial radio were the same people behind the real story of 'Radio Caroline'. Then back in the saddle, or so it appeared at the time, climbed Terry Bate. He had told everyone that Ronan O'Rahilly asked him rescue 'Radio Caroline' back in the mid-Nineteen Sixties, but that of course was untrue.

This is where and why and how this story gets very complicated indeed. But that was the idea!

However, it is at the end of the Sixties and at the beginning of the Seventies when Mervyn Hagger decided to leave the United Kingdom and go in search of the real story behind the actions of Don Pierson as the person that created 'Radio London', 'Radio England' and 'Britain Radio', only Hagger thought that the mystery only swirled around 'Radio Caroline'.

But since the story that has been promoted up until now about 'Radio Caroline' is 100% fake, it means that Don Pierson reacted to a fake story. What Don Pierson thought was true was not true.

Guess who else was conned by all of those lies?

Tony Benn!

What Tony Benn was addressing was not the problem caused by 'Radio Caroline' (which did not exist as a company), but about the people behind-the-scenes who began to write the real storyline script at the dawn of broadcasting itself.

This is a tangled mess and the only way to untangle it is to start with the storyline that is known to be true, and then add other storylines also known to be true to the first one, and then compare the fiction that those storylines run into, with the known facts. That is what you are reading in this serialized account and part work.

We will resume this precursory storyline in progress after this brief word about its title. The title shown above is intended to cover the mysterious origins of 'Radio Caroline' and its relationship to the beginnings of this investigation. That is why this is a part work. On our companion blog is a proposed book cover that includes all part works in this series, which includes the title shown at the top of this blog.

Because this work is being written as a blog with a precursory format prior to text being presented in a final format for print publication, it is sans illustrations and in a reverse order of presentation so that the most recent additions appear first in order. If this storyline was being presented in print format then the book would begin with the first chapter, instead of the last chapter. So we have added an explanation to be followed by a Precursory Index over on our companion blog. Use the link button at the top of this page to read the chapters in their correct order. Please note that this is a precursory work in progress which will be revised by further editorial changes and additions prior to print publication.

NOTE: This text was amended several times following discovery of additional information relating to both the time schedule and events that are covered.

When Mutual dropped Jepko on May 29, 1977, it had the effect of reversing the 'upward and onward' story of the 'Nite Stand' show. Now it was downward and backward in terms of description for any appraisal of Jepko's financial health. Because although Jepko began putting together a tiny new network of his own, that was still centered around his flagship station in Salt Lake City, when KSL pulled the plug on February 9, 1979, Jepko was in big trouble. He began to liquidate his own assets in order to stay afloat, and consequently Jepko headed for bankruptcy.

On September 13, 1979, Hagger called Don Pierson in Eastland and discussed the possibility of coming to Jepko's rescue with a new broadcasting plan. On October 22, 1979, after receiving positive feedback from Pierson, Hagger called Jepko and proposed a meeting with Don Pierson in Dallas, after Hagger explained to Jepko who Don Pierson is, and what he had created in the United Kingdom back in the Nineteen Sixties.

Jepko agreed and so Hagger and a business colleague, (who was not a member of 'The Trio'), sent Jepko a round trip plane ticket to fly from Salt Lake City, Utah to DFW airport which is located more-or-less halfway between the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth in Texas. Meanwhile, Hagger and colleague would fly from Houston to DFW where they would meet Jepko, and then the three of them would meet Pierson who had driven from Eastland to DFW. Their destination after a short drive, was to be an exploratory business discussion over lunch atop the landmark Reunion Tower. This structure in the heart of Dallas, was made visually world famous by its inclusion in the opening sequence of the television soap opera called 'Dallas'.

But this meeting did not go ahead as planned. Instead it began to immediately reveal the somewhat bizarre but kind nature of quiet spoken Don Pierson. When the three of them stepped outside of the airport to where Don Pierson was waiting in his Cadillac, all three of them entered the back seat because the front passenger seat was already occupied by a young boy of Primary School age.

During the introductions that immediately followed, Don Pierson explained to a somewhat annoyed Herb Jepko who had come to Dallas to discuss business, that his front seat passenger had been staying as the guest of Don and his wife at their property in Eastland. Don elaborated that he had first met this boy with his mother while travelling on a plane, and that the boy's mother who was seated next to him, explained to Don that her husband and boy's father, had been killed in Vietnam during that war. So Don invited the boy for a holiday in Eastland where he could learn to ride a horse, and now Don was taking the boy back to his home.

Don had made good on his offer. It had been extended to the boy long before the potential life and death business offer had been extended to Herb Jepko. Naturally, Jepko had flown a great distance to meet Don, and so he was not exactly pleased to hear this news. It also changed the schedule. Because Don was doing the driving, the three adults were now captives in the back seat of Don's Cadillac and they would be accompanying the young boy back to his home in a remote part of East Texas where his mother was waiting for him.

Attempts were made by Jepko to discuss the reason why he had come to Dallas, but he was frequently interrupted during his extended and unexpected to who-knows-where, by comments regarding horses and the holiday experiences of a young boy. Prior to this event Hagger did not realise that this was normal behavior for Don Pierson. Needless to say, Herb Jepko was not impressed and he continued to mumble words to that effect while sitting on the back seat of Don's car. It was a poor start to a discussion regarding a new broadcasting plan. However, Don was not seeking anything, it was his companions on the back seat of his car who were the ones attempting to become deal makers.

Eventually the delivery was made and then the return journey to Dallas began. When they finally reached Reunion Tower for a delayed lunch, Jepko's current situation was explained in depth to Don Pierson. Don's immediate reaction was that a relocation of the network to a new flagship station in Dallas had possibilities, if he got involved.

Don then began to think out loud about how he would go about finding that new flagship station to act as a new originating broadcast studio for the 'Nite Cap Show'. Herb Jepko then remarked that the cost of commuting would be too high, to which Don Pierson responded that he was not talking about Jepko commuting from Salt Lake City to Dallas, but about Jepko moving his home to Dallas.

Although Herb Jepko was broke and travelling free on a plane ticket which had been sent to him, Herb Jepko was not inclined to even remotely consider a geographical move almost half-way across the USA. Voicing his displeasure at the entire proposal, Herb Jepko rapidly brought the meal and the discussion to a close. By this time Herb was drinking heavily, and in not too many years hence it was suggested that alcoholic consumption had helped to terminate his life at a relatively young age. 

When this introductory meeting reached its conclusion, Pierson drove Jepko, Hagger and colleague back to DFW, and that is where Jepko left them to board his plane. Also departing were any plans for Jepko to go into business with Don Pierson.

However, this second meeting with Don Pierson did not immediately end, because Pierson then drove Hagger and his colleague to Abilene, and during the journey Pierson unveiled a different plan: Pierson wanted to start a newspaper that would compete with the existing daily publication.

Hagger responded that Pierson's new paper would be competing with a huge operation that Hagger had already come up against when a German lawyer and newspaper proprietor asked Hagger to take over a failing weekly newspaper which the attorney had inherited from an Estate settlement of his legal bill. Hagger explained to Pierson the lengths to which this competitive chain of newspapers was likely to go to in order to defeat a new rival, and Hagger was speaking from experience. Pierson was not too happy with that answer which he regarded as words of defeatism. In response he cited his own battle with the UK General Post Office when he started 'Radio London'. Now another side of Don Pierson began to emerge: one in which he would not take "no" for an answer, even when the facts in play showed that he should.

However, it was from the initial meeting arranged by Hagger with Jepko, which then morphed into a business discussion initiated by Pierson about starting a newspaper, and which then moved on to yet another proposal to start a franchised monthly magazine.

Hagger's colleague at that time was a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and a member of a small Jewish fraternity. Two of his friends were in the business of selling original fine art for an Austrian who had an exclusive fine arts gallery in the heart of New Orleans. The owner of the gallery sought out his buyers for art as an investment by buying full page advertising in 'Architectural Digest' magazine. This lavish publication for the wealthy attracted professional people in Texas with investable income.

The Austrian owner of the New Orleans gallery had a curious linkage to the fine art works primarily confiscated by Hermann Goering's National Socialists from Jews during World War II. Apocryphal tales emerged that some of Goering's full length wall paintings depicting scenes from Wagner's libretto of 'Tannhäuser ' which had once hung on the walls of Nazi headquarters in Munich, were now on display in New Orleans. Known (in English) as the Brown House, the Nazi building containing those art works was destroyed by Allied bombing during the War, so how those art works got from Munich to New Orleans is unclear, and it is not proven that this is what happened. What is known is that works of a similar description did go on display in New Orleans to be offered for sale.

The factor that made this story even more strange is that if the Austrian really did hold National Socialist beliefs, his main salesman was really a "self-hating Jew" who in turn had Jewish friends with more conventionally neutral and even mundane interpretations of their own faith. They equated with many English people of the Nineteen Fifties, who, when asked to describe their belief, would simply answer "C of E" (Church of England), and show little, if any, outward linkage to that institution.

The latter description also describes Hagger's business companion from Houston. He was extremely funny and could have easily become a successful stand-up comedian like Jerry Seinfeld, but he was also full of self-doubt, and that was a pity, because it undermined his own belief in himself and thus it turned him into a poor salesman.

This is how the story of 'The Trio' began. It was quite by accident, or rather a series of 'accidents', because each time that their interest began to fade away from the topic of offshore radio broadcasting during the Nineteen Sixties, someone or something would ramp-up their attention once again.

Tomorrow: The beginnings of our Precursory Index ....

When August of 1979 rolled around, Hagger was still in the USA, back in Texas and living in Houston. Over the years he has had plenty of time to meticulously investigate the movements of Ronan O'Rahilly; O'Rahilly's father and everyone and everything associated with his claims about starting a radio station called 'Caroline'.

All of Ronan O'Rahilly's claims are bogus.

That is, if we accept the courtroom mantra of promising to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But what Ronan O'Rahilly has told those who ask, is a lie, mixed with a little bit of truth, and nothing but a confused and obfuscated story delivered in many intentionally misleading ways. He has fooled most of the people most of the time.

When Hagger was told in the 1970s, that back in June 1963, O'Rahilly had stayed at the Continental Hotel, Hagger began to ask about that location in Houston, but he could not find it. Houston was a city of structures that were "here today and gone tomorrow", and a wrecking ball had demolished the Continental Hotel. But its footprint in time was still traceable, although it took awhile to find the right questions to ask of the right sort of people who would know the right sort of answers. They were the specialists who devoted their free time to a hobby recalling aspects of Houston's past.

Consequently Hagger had to join a group specializing in preserving memories about a bygone Houston in order to locate one person who recalled enough details for Hagger to find a color postcard of the hotel as well as a newspaper advertisement. At the time that O'Rahilly arrived in Houston, the Continental was a modern building in the style of the Nineteen Sixties. A lot of buildings of that time period were constructed in a similar way, but that design style soon fell out of popularity.

The magnificent Sanderson office and showrooms complex on Berners Street in the West End of London, met that same sort of description, but not the same fate. After Sanderson as a company merged into a conglomeration of companies, its temple for interior designers and materials became redundant as a building, and then a new owner was able to turn it into a Sixties' period piece called the Sanderson Hotel.

So when it comes to tracking down the past to determine whether Ronan O'Rahilly really did go to Houston it is necessary to locate individuals who live on what other people would regard as mere trivia. Some members of organizations dedicated to preserving the past can only recall parts of the answer being sought. So it is necessary to find several members in order to assemble, and then cross-check, several pieces of information in order to assemble a documented past. That is both a time-consuming and costly process, if you need to find authentic answers to a lot of questions relating to a lot past activities.

People like Ronan O'Rahilly count upon that factor as a form of protection from being discovered to be a fraud. He thought that no one would bother to look, or pay the price. But time again, Ronan O'Rahilly has been proved wrong, because he never counted on 'The Trio' taking an interest in what he was saying, which was more than what he was actually doing.

Long before Hagger stayed in Don Pierson's Pullman train car on May 21, 1983, where he was shown those cardboard boxes in which he discovered his own unanswered letter dated August 16, 1967, he had already made his first visit to Eastland and met Don Pierson for the first time. It was just an initial introduction for Hagger more than anything else.

Hagger explained his interest in the days of 'Swinging Radio England', but he was doing so at a time when Don Pierson was living in a more recent past that resulted in the costly aftermath of his own activities in the Caribbean. Hagger knew nothing about that when he first met Pierson, In fact, Hagger was only interested in the disastrous financial offshore radio exploit which had consumed the time and money of Don Pierson years earlier in the United Kingdom.

That first meeting with Pierson in 1979 came and went, and Hagger returned to Houston over three hundred miles away. No one does distances in a small way in Texas, and back then, flying from Houston to Dallas, and then driving from Dallas Love Field airport to the City of Eastland, was the only way to get to see Don Pierson, unless you had your own private plane or you took a Greyhound or Trailways bus. Train service was not available.

In early 1979, Hagger was drawn back to Eastland due to an event that took place at KSL-AM in Salt Lake City, Utah. At that time Hagger was working with a colleague on project in Houston, but but he was still interested in getting Don Pierson to explain why he had created the twin stations 'Radio England' and 'Britain Radio' in a country so far away, and so unrelated to his own business interests in Texas.

However, although the topic that Hagger used to open the door to a new invitation was radio broadcasting, its source location in Salt Lake City, Utah, was not exactly next door to Eastland, Texas. In fact, it was over one thousand, one hundred miles away! However, on February 9, 1979, clear channel KSL in Salt Lake made a decision that Hagger decided to bring to the attention of Pierson.

The transmissions of KSL with 50,000 watts of power were heard over a huge slice of the geographical United States, although proportionately not a lot of the population of USA. Those that it did reach included a lot of listeners belonging to a pioneering broadcaster named Herb Jepko. His career in radio began around the time that the Beatles and other groups began to invade the U.S. airwaves with British pop music, but the audience of Murray the K and the station raving about "W-A-Beatles-C", was not the the audience that Herb Jepko was concentrating upon.

Jepko's groundbreaking career centered around finding a profitable use for the broadcasting hours that mostly remained silent after midnight. That is when the majority of U.S. commercial radio stations were turning off their transmitters. The reason was the cost of keeping them switched on.

It was not just the cost of staff, but the cost of electricity, and that made broadcasting after midnight unprofitable for most stations. They were deriving their income by selling airtime for commercials, and their sales departments could not generate enough income from selling time in the overnight hours to pay both the costs of operation, let alone generate a profit. Broadcasting overnight was not a worthwhile proposition because few people were awake during those hours.

Jepko knew that the heartbroken who could not sleep; the patients still awake in their hospital beds; the party-goers and bar hoppers; the police and fire station personnel, as well as night-shift workers, were all still awake, and some of them must have been twiddling the dials on their radio sets in the pre-push-button age, hoping to find something to listen to on the airwaves of America.

Long before Music TeleVision (MTV) first debuted just after midnight on August 1, 1981 in New York City, Mervyn Hagger had begun by casually following the career of Herb Jepko. It happened quite by chance as one of Jepko's listeners. In the early Nineteen Seventies, shortly after arriving in the USA, Hagger was working "on the side where the moonbeams play" trying to rescue a failing weekly newspaper which back in the Nineteen Forties had been a daily newspaper. Now with the market contracting, this tiny weekly newspaper was surviving from an income derived from publishing legal notices.

The person who owned the newspaper was a lawyer and it was in his interest and those of his fellow attorneys to publish their legal notices where they would not be seen, read and acted upon to cause these lawyers trouble. But at the same time, this particular Texas lawyer who came from a German genealogical immigrant background, wanted to influence the local voters to veer away from Hispanic interests and support the residents with a European background. The city was divided in its population both by geography and numbers. The only way this could be achieved was by hiving off a part of the paid circulation newspaper in order to create a home-delivered free edition covering a large part of the genetically European population, while leaving the legal notices in the original edition. In that way new and bigger advertisers such as grocery stores could be added to revenue stream.

In an instance of serendipity, Hagger breezed on to the scene and was hired to do the job. But because the paper's resources were meagre, the job involved missing one night's sleep a week, while still working at the paper during the day. This is how Hagger came to hear Jepko at work, because the signal from far away Salt Lake City found its way at night into the past-up and pre-print production area of the newspaper where he also employed his soon-to-be wife. It was her job to type-in copy on extremely noisy, punch-driven 'Justowriters' in thos days prior to computer graphics and barely beyond Linotype hot lead.

Until Herb Jepko came along, most stations turned off their transmitters in the early morning hours, because high-powered stations such as KSL could not sell enough airtime to make enough money to cover their transmitter electricity bills, let alone make a profit. Making a profit was the reason for operating a commercial radio station, even though KSL was owned by a company controlled by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, or 'Mormons').

Jepko spent his career life in radio broadcasting, and his observations were similar in some ways to those of Todd Storz in Nebraska. Storz observed that the same records were being repetitiously played on juke boxes, and Herb Jepko who was working in California, noticed that the same listeners were calling in to Ben Hunter's local 'Night Owl' talk show that was aired over KFI in Los Angeles. They were loyal listeners who wanted to talk to their neighbors, and Herb Jepko understood that nationally there were a lot of potential listeners like that.

Although the overnight hours were lonely hours when the majority of people were asleep in bed; stores were shut and offices were dark, except for the cleaners who came in after everyone else had gone home. But there were night workers, insomniacs, patients in hospital, and those individuals who are today classified as 'front line' employees maintaining essential services. All of them could be linked by radio signals that can travel hundreds of miles to reach their listeners.

Beginning on February 11, 1964, Jepko applied this formula of broadcast repetition to his idea of neighbors leaning over their garden fence and repeatedly chatting to each other in a low-key way that neighbors are want to do. It was all low key and with Jepko as a moderating friend, he kept the conversation neutral and steered it away from anything controversial such as discussions about party politics or denominational religion.

As time went on and the format became established, at the top of each hour the program restarted following station identification, news and local station announcements with the 'Ballad of Herb Jepko. It was a recording made by Don Ray who sang to lyrics written by a Jepko listener: ".... we rally round our Nite Cap Show on the brand new side of the day; on the quiet side, on the starry side, on the side where the moonbeams play, yes we rally round on the morning side on the early side of the day ...." But that rallying call fell silent on Jepko's flagship station KSL after February 9, 1979, when his contract was not renewed, and that put his entire operation in financial jeopardy 

From a small beginning Jepko began to build his own network of radio stations. He bought the time, resold it to his own sponsors and produced the show in his own studio. On November 4, 1975 his audience increased overnight when his 'Nite Cap Show' took place when the Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) added it to their roster of about 90 station affiliates. But when it became obvious that Jepko had proved that there was money to be made after dark, MBS ramped-up their own expectations and wanted to put him on more of their affiliate stations.

There was just one snag: Jepko had to surrender his neutrality and become a controversial tall show host. Jepko refused, and so Mutual dropped Jepko's show on May 29, 1977. This gave rise to competitors such as Larry King. He began to do what Mutual wanted him to do, and occasionally he would cut off his callers in mid-sentence just to prove that he was not going to be another Herb Jepko.

Meanwhile Jepko continued on with his own format, but over a greatly reduced network of his own. He was still on KSL in Salt Lake City which remained as his flagship station. However, the loss of Mutual also meant a huge drop in his potential audience size, and with that cut back came a drop in advertising revenue.

​Tomorrow: Herb Jepko meets Don Pierson

After leaving the U.K., Hagger toured much of the USA beginning in 1971, and as he did so he stopped off from time-to-time to write and sell freelance articles, and make occasional documentary broadcasts. This is how he met Frank Laseter who had been known as Larry Dean on Don Pierson's 'Radio England'.

Hagger first arrived in North America at Montreal, Canada, and then he gradually made his way across New York State and down the East Coast of the USA until he arrived at South Miami in Florida. Turning on his radio to WFUN, on came Larry Dean and after a phone call the two got together, first at the radio station and then at his home. Moving on from the east coast of Florida, he stopped long enough to replenish his reserve funds by another spell as a visiting journalist and broadcaster in the panhandle of eastern Florida. Then he crisscrossed most of the southern states and went to California via Wyoming and Utah.

Then it was back to Texas where he became editor of a weekly newspaper. It was then that he came to know and appreciate the vastness of the Lone Star State, and to understand the true meaning of the word freedom. This was especially true when working for yet another publisher in the community adjoining the huge King Ranch that straddled the top of the Texas Valley. This was a cattle ranching; fertile fruit growing, and oil pumping area that stretched down alongside beautiful sands flanking the Gulf of Mexico. It terminated at the rather dismal waters of the Rio Grande River which separates the Texas border of the USA from Mexico.

It was in the lower Valley that he met Charles William Weaver who everyone knew as Bill. After retiring as both the manager of Gordon McLendon's KLIF radio station in Houston, where he also served as National Manager for all of the McLendon stations, Bill decided to take a break and for a time he opened and operated an import business that brought in goods from Mexico which he then sold on to vendors in the USA.

It was Weaver who had been sent to Sweden to shut down 'Radio Nord' and try to sell it in 1962 to Allan Crawford. Because Crawford wanted to lease it instead of buy it, Weaver took the radio ship to Galveston Island, Texas where it was stripped of its radio station equipment. Weaver was also station manager of McLendon's KILT in Houston, and so he stored the transmitters and studio gear in a KILT warehouse to use as spare parts for other McLendon stations.

Weaver was a gold mine of information because he told Hagger about the arrival of Ronan O'Rahilly in June 1963 as the agent for Allan Crawford. Weaver went into detail telling Hagger where O'Rahilly stayed and what he did and who he met. O'Rahilly never mentioned this trip of June 1963, and instead he invented a story about flying to New York to buy transmitters.

The time period being discussed was within months of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and despite later claiming to be a big fan of Kennedy. It is also ironic that the same month O'Rahilly went on his secret trip to Houston, Kennedy was making a very public visit to the Republic of Ireland, and Ronan O'Rahilly was not there to meet him.

Throughout the Seventies this investigation was a casual matter that was centered upon the idea of eventually meeting Don Pierson and writing a book about his life, especially with regards to offshore broadcasting. In those years no one was even suggesting that listeners in the United Kingdom and Europe had been fooled into believing a fable about the origins of 'Radio Caroline', and consequently Hagger was not asking questions about that hidden story.

More media adventures in radio and publishing brought Hagger to Houston, the oil capital for much of the USA. It was here that he met many of the people who had a hand in managing the ship mv 'Mi Amigo'; ex-Magda Maria; ex-Bon Jour which had been used as the home of 'Radio Nord' broadcasting from the Baltic Sea into Sweden. They included Gordon McLendon's Chief Engineer Glenn Callison who had reassembled its Texas transmitters in Europe, because they had been previously disassembled and then shipped via New York, in order to avoid U.S. Customs inspection. 

The meeting with Glenn Callison took place at his home at Dallas. He had to hand a copy of Paul Harris' redacted translation of Jack Kotchack's book about 'Radio Nord' while he began to fill in more details about O'Rahilly's June 1963 visit to Houston. Callison made an introduction to Dick Witkovski, his Dallas neighbor and former salesman of the New York company that exported the 'Nord' transmitters to Europe. That firm also acted as sales agents for the 'Spotmaster' cartridge machines.

But in hindsight, what now stands out demanding scrutiny, are Hagger's handwritten notes made back then that just didn't seem to make any sense for many years. Callison mentioned introductions that were made to O'Rahilly in Houston. The names included a Captain de Jong, and a Liechtenstein prince.

Hagger tried unsuccessfully to reconcile those introductions in Houston with O'Rahilly's avoidance of any mention that he had even been to Houston in June 1963. Those meetings did not square with the supposedly enthralling story that captivated the imagination of Ronan O'Rahilly as he gazed at a picture of five years-old Caroline Kennedy. His excuse was that he was really fascinated by her father John, but he never met the man when he had the opportunity.

These were early but subtle clues, and they all pointed to the fact that the tales of yesterday as told by Ronan O'Rahilly, never happened!

Was Caroline Kennedy the reason for the name of 'Radio Caroline'?

Hardly.

That myth did not begin until a year after 'Radio Caroline' came on the air.

Then who was 'Caroline'?

Was it 'Caroline' or was it 'Carolyn' that became the source of inspiration for Beatrix Miller's Style Sheet?

It is more than probable that the name she chose was 'Carolyn', and that has everything to do with the reason why Beatrix Miller resigned as Jocelyn Stevens' editor of 'Queen' magazine on the very same day that Jocelyn Stevens went ahead with his decision to cause the registration of Planet Productions Limited in Ireland.

In the real world where bodies have to be fed and bills have to be paid, being a private and non-subsidized researcher is somewhat problematic due to the limitations of both time and resources. The beginning of this project was no exception.

In 1970, the financial conditions for employment in the United Kingdom became bleak and worse was to follow. One day that year the entire department that Mervyn Hagger worked in was suddenly shut down as part of the contraction and British rationalization process which had begun by the group of companies that he worked for. The 'luxury' of having a printing and publishing arm was something that was not essential to a conglomeration making everything from electrical switchgear to hospital beds, and parts for the Concorde, and so his job, and those of his colleagues, vanished overnight. But with that termination came an opportunity in the form of choice and money.

Choice was presented because Hagger now had all the time in the world and with severance pay he had a momentary opportunity to pause, take stock and decide what to do next. His choice was to go to the U.S. Embassy and get and extended travel visa. While getting his travel plans together he spent some time listening to the uproar that had been caused by the arrival of a new offshore station called 'Radio North Sea International' (RNI).

What exactly the fuss was all about is still not clear, but the U.K. government decided to recycle the same U.S. made transmitter it had used to blast propaganda at Premier Ian Smith's independent nation of Rhodesia from just outside its borders, in order to blast interfering noises on top of the main broadcast signal emanating from RNI. Just prior to departure for the USA, Hagger listened to the station via a shortwave signal that was not being jammed.

Much later, journalist Paul Harris who had written the first independent book about the offshore stations of the Sixties, wrote an amended version of his story in which he asserted that the owners of RNI, who were connected by British police to an electronic fragment discovered near the site at Lockerbie in Scotland where PanAM flight 103 had crashed, was linked to the East German secret police (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit), Ministry for State Security (referred to as the 'Stasi'.)

But the strange thing about that still unresolved episode, is that although the U.K. Foreign Office and therefore the British Crown with its Secret Services must have viewed RNI as a political threat, for some reason they chose to ignore the anti-European polemical broadcasts by Garner Ted Armstrong. Yet it was those broadcasts which had provided the backbone funding for most of the offshore radio station of the Nineteen Sixties.

Years later on November 13, 2014, ex-Radio London DJ Dave Cash, then employed by BBC on their 'Radio Kent', interviewed Tony Benn about Dr Gilder's academic monologue regarding Armstrong's 'The World Tomorrow' radio program. The article asserted these broadcasts had Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) connections. Benn replied to the effect that he didn't know that, but it would not surprise him if it was true.

So although the non-political music programs of RNI were deemed to be a threat to the British Crown, the political broadcasts heard on most of the offshore stations and paying the core of their bills, were not seen as a threat worthy of setting up a jamming station.

This is curious, to say the least.

In between that biographical jigsaw fragment where Hagger was working in Birmingham as an industrial editor and moonlighting as a freelance writer to document a feature story about the offshore radio stations of 1966, is another piece in this puzzle that is connected back in time to his work at Arthur Sanderson in London. That is where he invented a reusable wallpaper that works with static electricity, instead of glue.

His father thought enough of his idea which his son had invented outside of company hours, to register a company called Stay Decor Limited. With a portable display unit they both arrived at 47 Dean Street, the home of Allan Crawford and his numerous business interests. Crawford joined the Stay Decor company and on the same day he entertained Hagger and his father with his own account of what had recently taken place in his office.

It concerned the shooting death of Reginald Calvert, the boss at 'Radio City', and the gunman Major Oliver Smedley, Crawford's former Chairman of Project Atlanta Limited. Before the killing, Smedley had formed a new company that Crawford was not a part of, but the events that led up to the violent end of Calvert were related to an imported transmitter which had been part of a former business relationship initiated by Project Atlanta Limited with Reg Calvert.

In the week preceding Hagger's meeting with Crawford, Calvert had been standing, according to Crawford, in front of his desk and on the very spot upon which the chairs seating Hagger and his father were now occupying. Those events were all very new, very fresh and very topical, and therefore still of interest to the media.

Crawford explained to Hagger and his father how he became involved with offshore broadcasting beginning with 'Radio Atlanta', and how that station had then become 'Radio Caroline South'. Like a lot of people that Hagger would come to meet in various ways, Crawford was one of many who told told Hagger his own version about how and why 'Radio Caroline' came into existence.

It seemed that a lot of people knew about pieces of a puzzle but they really had no idea about what the puzzle really represented. At the time that these individuals became involved, they thought that they knew what they were doing and why they were doing it, but as time went on and Hagger met more of the key players, it soon became obvious that they did not know what they had got involved with. Their stories did not match and neither did they make sense.

One story and one individual remained a constant factor. His story concerned a five years old American girl who was the daughter of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. It was the same story told to many people, over and over again by Ronan O'Rahilly. The same Ronan O'Rahilly who tried to get a recording made for singer Georgie Fame. The same Ronan O'Rahilly whose father owned the only private port in Southern Ireland, just over the border from Northern Ireland.

The papers, magazines, radio and television documentaries all repeated Ronan O'Rahilly's story as if it was the true story. Hagger repeated this story and so his colleagues who became the 'Trio'. Part of that story even appeared in an academic paper written by Dr Gilder with Mervyn Hagger. It was peer reviewed and published in a university journal of higher education.

But as you will discover, as time went by and this investigation continued, various factors eventually led up to the discovery that everything that had been published about Ronan O'Rahilly and 'Radio Caroline' being his creation, was and is a hoax designed to hide the real story which had nothing to do with broadcasting. In fact, it had more to do with Ronan O'Rahilly's father than it did with Ronan O'Rahilly as a person. Only now is it possible to reveal the true story, or at least the major portion of it that has now been uncovered.

It is neither straightforward nor is it of limited interest today to a few old men who still remember the Nineteen Sixties. It is part of an ongoing and very involved geopolitical game that concerns the lives of millions of people, not just in those living in the UK or the USA, but everywhere that the shadow of the British Crown has fallen across the nations and the seas of the world.

It just so happens that the story of 'Radio Caroline' is like a stray thread of a fraying garment. It you are lucky enough to spot that thread and you pull on it, all of a sudden the garment comes apart and it is as if that saying about the emperor having no clothes, is also proved to be true.