Sept. 2, 1944? Jack Delaney and Ted White—The deaths of these two individuals almost certainly wasn’t an assassination, but their story sets the stage for subsequent “political plane crashes.” During World War II, a fighter pilot named George H.W. Bush was part of a mission to bomb Japanese forces on the island of Chichi Jima when his plane was hit by enemy fire and was quickly engulfed in flames. The article The Presidency: Bush’s Final Salute: The ex-President closes the book on a terrifying World War II experience (Hugh Sidney, Time, April 7 [1997?]) tells how Bush parachuted to safety while Delaney and White died (one of them because his chute never opened). Bush frequently cited this story as an example of his military heroism to advance his political career.
But an eyewitness came forward with another version. Chester Mierzejewski, who was the turret gunner in another plane, said he saw a “puff of smoke” come from Bush’s plane and quickly dissipate. He claims the plane was never on fire and Bush should have attempted a water landing (standard procedure), which would have given Delaney and White a chance. Other testimony and evidence also contradicts Bush’s account. It is also claimed that Bush’s version(s) of the story changed. There are even questions regarding the date of the incident.Here are some interesting accounts of the incident:
• George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
• Notes on USS Healy’s Deck Log
• George Bush Parachutes Again to Exorcise Demons of Past Betrayal
I haven’t yet researched this story in depth, but I recall another story that aired on the evening news years ago, alleging that Bush may have fired on a life raft. It certainly sounds like the Bush cartel’s style.Incidentally, William Gardner “Ted” White was allegedly a Yale graduate and a member of the infamous Skull and Bones society. White’s father had been a classmate of Prescott Bush, George W. Bush’s grandfather.
October 16, 1972: House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, Louisiana (D) and Rep. Nick Begich, Alaska (D) were killed when their plane disappeared over “Alaska’s Bermuda Triangle” in one of the most sensational plane crashes and search and non-rescue missions ever. The fact that Begich was born in Eveleth, Minnesota, didn’t raise eyebrows until October 26, 2002, when Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash just a couple miles from Eveleth. That’s almost certainly nothing more than a bizarre coincidence, but there are many other coincidences associated with this epic event that some people think are spelled C-O-N-S-P-I-R-A-C-Y.For example, Boggs had served on the Warren Commission, which was created to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He didn’t agree with the Commission’s collusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. Boggs began speaking out publicly in 1971, the same year he called for the resignation of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover. Boggs was also positioned to become Speaker of the House, which would have put him in the line of succession to the presidency, at the very time that government corruption was rampant.Like Paul Wellstone and Mel Carnahan, Boggs and Begich were campaigning for re-election when they died. Hundreds of ships and airplanes participated in what was the biggest search mission ever at that time, all to no avail. But the tragic crash would soon be eclipsed by an even bigger story involving another politician who was campaigning for re-election -.President Richard Nixon.
On June 17, 1972—about four months before the Boggs-Begich plane crash—five men were arrested as they were attempting to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel and office complex. Whistle-blowers like Hale Boggs were especially inconvenient as the Watergate scandal broke. On November 7 (about three weeks after Boggs died), Richard Nixon was re-elected. On December 8, several people associated with Watergate were killed in a plane crash in Chicago. On August 8, 1974, Nixon became the first U.S. President to resign. He was replaced by Gerald Ford, who later pardoned Nixon of all crimes associated with Watergate.
Memories of Watergate and the JFK assassination resurfaced in 1992, after Roll Call, a bi-weekly magazine of news and commentary from Capitol Hill, allegedly obtained two FBI teletypes relating to the Boggs-Begich crash through a Freedom of Information Act Request. They indicated that the government located the downed plane, and there may have even been two survivors!
But why did the FBI withhold the information for so long, and why was some information blacked out? Why would the government want to NOT find the Boggs-Begich plane? Do you suppose J. Edgar Hoover was peeved when Boggs began asking for his head?
Nick Begich was also an outspoken critic of the way J. Edgar Hoover was running the FBI and also of President Richard Nixon. Nick’s brother, Joe, was Mayor of Eveleth when Nick was killed in Alaska and served as a Representative in Minnesota before Paul Wellstone was killed. In Bad memories resurface on sad day (Bill Hanna, Mesabi Daily News, October 26, 2002), Joe Begich recalled, “We found out after the crash that Nick’s congressional office had been bugged by the FBI. His phones were tapped.” He also lamented, “There were parts of the report blacked out. Why? An investigation is supposed to reveal information, not conceal it.”
Another curious thing is the widely disparate reactions of family members. Nick Begich, of Anchorage, wanted to find out what really happened to his father. His interest was piqued by the FBI teletypes, the plane crash that killed Senator Mel Carnahan on the anniversary of his father’s disappearance in 2000, and a program on the History Channel focusing on Alaska’s Bermuda Triangle and his father’s disappearance on June 26, 2001. (He was interviewed for the program.) Begich is still fishing for information on the Internet. (See Suppressed Evidence Emerges as to Fate of Congressmen Whose Plane Crashed in Alaska and this letter from Begich)
Bogg’s family is a study in contrasts. Corinne “Lindy” Boggs reportedly flew personal aerial searches up until the latter part of the 1970s. But Nick Begich (Jr.) said she displayed little interest in the FBI teletypes after his mother contacted her, even though she was a member of Congress! (She stated in a 1997 Associated Press interview that she believed the plane went down over the ocean.) Begich added, “This was quite surprising to us. The only thing we could deduce was that the Boggs family already knew or that it was just a chapter in their life they had resolved and wanted to keep closed.” In recalling his father’s ill-fated flight, Begich said, “His first leg on this trip was in Texas where a young Democrat named William Jefferson Clinton [who was working on the McGovern for President campaign in 1972] drove him to the airport from where he flew to Washington and met my father. Then they flew to Alaska. That showed up in Lindy Boggs’s memoir of her years in Washington. I had never known that until I read her book.”
Lindy Boggs inherited her husband’s seat, serving eighteen years in congress until she was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican by President Bill Clinton. (One source claims the position was created just for Lindy Boggs, which would certainly suggest favoritism. However, other sources only say she was the first woman to serve as Ambassador to the Vatican.)
Boggs’ children also prospered without him. His daughter is ABC media whore Cokie Roberts. Curiously, Roberts maintains that her father believed in the JFK lone assassin theory. (Selling out one’s own parents has to be the peak of media whoredom.)
Boggs son is Tommy Boggs, a high-powered lobbyist and one of the most powerful partners of Patton, Boggs & Blow, a political powerhouse, especially within the Democratic Party. Tommy Boggs is close to Bill Clinton, as was Ron Brown, who joined Patton, Boggs & Blow as a partner in 1981. Brown was U.S. Secretary of Commerce until he died in 1996—in a plane crash.
Did I speak too soon? I learned just recently that Tom Boggs cared enough to hire an investigative reporter and columnist (Jack Anderson, who still has a syndicated column in the Mesabi Daily News) to personally investigate his father’s plane crash and investigation. In Bad memories resurface on sad day (Bill Hanna, Mesabi Daily News, October 26, 2002) Joe Begich said, “But he kept running into roadblocks and dead ends.”
This begs an intriguing question: Was Tom Boggs working for the dark side when he hired Jack Anderson, leading him on a wild goose chase and pumping him for information? It’s an eerie thought.
Joe Begich said his brother Nick’s re-election was never really in doubt prior to the plane crash. In 1970, he had won with 72 percent of the vote. But Boggs, who was considered by some a possible Democratic presidential candidate in the future, was campaigning for Nick Begich to help pave the way for the congressman to run for a U.S. Senate seat in Alaska in the near future. Nick Begich’s name remained on the ballot in November 1972, and he easily won the election. However, a special election soon followed, which Nick Begich’s Republican opponent in the general election won.
December 8, 1972: Rep. George W. Collins, Illinois (D) was killed when a United Airlines jetliner plane crashed on approach to Chicago’s Midway Airport. Collins’ widow, Cardiss, succeeded her husband in the House. The “politicians killed in plane crashes” articles and sidebars that popped up in the wake of Paul Wellstone’s death curiously didn’t find anything of interest beyond Collins’ death, which was glossed over in some versions (e.g., the Washington Post and News Day) and wasn’t even mentioned by ABC News. Funny, because this was an amazing “accident.” According to Aviation Safety Network, forty-five people were killed, including three crew members and two people on the ground. The other amazing thing is that the dead included Dorothy Hunt—wife of former CIA agent, Watergate burglar and Kennedy assassination suspect E. Howard Hunt—and about a dozen other people associated with the burgeoning Watergate scandal. Howard Hunt was a creepy guy. According to CNN, he played a key role in “Operation PB Success,” the U.S. plot that successfully overthrew the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. (The prime operative in this tacky affair was apparently the United Fruit Company!) Hunt was involved in attempts to remove Fidel Castro from Cuba, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, before he turned his guns on the American people through Watergate.According to PBS, $10,000 found in Dorothy Hunt’s personal effects may have been hush money. According to Sherman Skolnick, Dorothy Hunt was attempting to flee the country with $2 million even as she and her husband were blackmailing the White House. But Dorothy’s fiscal adventures ended in a brutal plane crash, less than two months after the Boggs-Begich plane crash in “Alaska’s Bermuda Triangle.”
February 14, 1975: California Rep. Jerry Pettis (R). Pettis died when his plane crashed into a mountain near Beaumont, California. His wife, Shirley N. Pettis Roberson, replaced in the House five days later.
August 3, 1976: Missouri Rep. Jerry Litton (D). Litton was killed along with his family in a plane crash in the northwest part of the state on the evening he won the Missouri’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination. He was en route to a victory celebration.
August 2, 1981: Panamanian General Omar Torrijos when the instruments in his plane failed to function upon takeoff. In that same year, Torrijos thumbed his nose at the Reagan/Bush administration and threatened to destroy the Panama Canal in the event of a U.S. invasion. Panamanians speculated that the U.S. was involved in the death of the popular dictator. Fortunately, Torrijos was replaced by a fine, upstanding U.S. intelligence operative who worked with George H.W. Bush—Manuel Noreiga.
September 1, 1983: Georgia Rep. Larry McDonald (D). McDonald was killed when Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by a Russian fighter.
August, 1988: Mohammed Zia al-huk died when his plane crashed into the ground with all engines running—on the same day George Bush got the Republican nomination. AND... “The Pakistanis kept the bodies around (in violation of Islamic custom) for weeks, awaiting US experts. They showed up three weeks later and never checked the bodies.” (The Bush Body Count) According to the Bush Body Count, this Pakistani dictator knew all about “Iran/Contra, the training, funding, and arming of narco-terrorists like Osama bin Laden.”
December 1, 1988: Amiram Nir died in a mysterious plane crash in Mexico. Nir, who went under the assumed name Pat Weber, served as both counter-terrorism advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and pointman for Oliver North in the Iran-Contra deals. Thus, he knew things that could greatly embarrass both Israeli and United States officials. According to the Bush Body Count, Nir “perished when his aircraft was shot down with missiles from the helicopter of a man called Gene Tatum, 25-year CIA deep cover agent.” Why? Take a wild guess: Nir was scheduled to testify to the Senate subcommittee.
December 21, 1988: Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Among the dead were Charles M. McKee and Matthew Gannon, a military attache for the DIA in Beirut and CIA Deputy Station Chief in Beirut, along with other members of a counterterrorist team in Beirut investigating the possible rescue of nine American hostages in Lebanon. The team had uncovered evidence that a rogue CIA unit called COREA, based in Wiesbaden, was doing business with a man called Monzer Al-Kassar, a Syrian arms dealer and drug trafficker and part of the covert network run by U.S. Lieut. Colonel Oliver North. The McKee team was outraged that the COREA unit in Wiesbaden was doing business with a Syrian who had close terrorist connections and might endanger their chances of rescuing the hostages. So they decided to fly back to Virginia unannounced and expose the COREA unit’s secret deal with al-Kassar. Instead, they exposed it in the wreckage that was strewn across Lockerbie. Beulah McKee, Charles McKee’s mother, later said, “For three years, I’ve had a feeling that if Chuck hadn’t been on that plane, it wouldn’t have been bombed.” And if you think people who repeat this crap are conspiracy nutcases, don’t forget to include Time Magazine on your list.
August 7, 1989: Texas Rep. Mickey Leland (D) was killed in a plane crash during a trip to inspect relief efforts in Ethiopia. Leland chaired the House Select Committee on Hunger and was an outspoken advocate of sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa.
August 13, 1989: Mississippi Rep. Larkin Smith (R). Pilot error in hazy conditions was ruled the probable cause of the plane crash that killed U.S. Rep. Larkin Smith and his pilot, according to a federal report. According to AP: The National Transportation Safety Board report indicated that pilot Chuck Vierling, who was not rated to fly on instruments, probably lost control after encountering conditions that required them. Vierling, 58, of Gulfport had expressed concern about the haziness before leaving, the report said. Vierling had flown Smith to Hattiesburg on August 13. On the return flight to Gulfport, the Cessna 152 crashed into woods near New Augusta in southeastern Mississippi.
July 11, 1990: Gary Caradori was killed along with his 6-year old son in the crash of his small plane, after a mid-air explosion, the cause of which was never discovered. He had told friends repeatedly in the weeks before his death that he was afraid his plane would be sabotaged. Caradori was investigating Lawrence E. King, Jr., a very influential black Republican who was also a friend of George H.W. Bush. King was director of the Franklin Community Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska, and was suspected of embezzling $40 million. In 1988, it was alleged that King was also associated with a child prostitution ring that involved other members of Omaha’s elite. (This was the same year that Seattle’s most powerful pedophile, Judge Gary Little, committed suicide.) One child prostitute allegedly said she saw George H.W. Bush at one of King’s parties. I haven’t verified this story, but you can learn more about it at George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography.
April 4, 1991: Pennsylvania Sen. John Heinz (R). According to AP: A fiery plane-helicopter collision 11 years ago killed U.S. Sen. H. John Heinz III and showered flames on children in a playground. Heinz, a three-term Republican and heir to the Heinz food fortune, died along with the two pilots of his chartered plane and two pilots in the helicopter who were attempting to see if the plane’s front landing gear was down and locked in place. The plane’s captain had radioed that an instrument light failed to confirm the gear was in place. The only sitting senator to die in a plane crash since World War II besides Paul Wellstone, Heinz was no ordinary Republican. He was a liberal Republican who was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War and became a strong proponent of health care, social services, public transportation, the environment and reconciliation with Cuba (ouch!). (Read a bigraphy of a rare Republican with class.)
April 5, 1991: Texas Sen. John Tower (R). Texas Sen. John Tower, his daughter and 21 other people, including NASA astronaut Manley “Sonny” Carter, Jr., were killed in a commuter plane crash near Brunswick, Georgia. Tower was the chair of the Tower Commission, which investigated the Reagan/Bush era Iran/Contra scandal, a mystery that many people were dying to solve—literally. Dying in a plane crash the day after John Heinz died in a plane crash is another one of those eerie coincidences that don’t interest the media.
April 19, 1993: South Dakota Gov. George Mickelson (R). Mickelson died along with seven others when a state-owned airplane slammed into a silo during a rainstorm in Iowa.
April 3, 1996: U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. A U.S. Air Force jetliner carrying Brown and American business executives crashed into a mountain in Croatia, killing all 35 people aboard. Brown is of special interest because he’s a shady character who’s also indirectly connected to the 1972 Boggs-Begich plane crash. Brown was a controversial millionaire and former Democratic National Committee Chairman who was accused of trading on his personal and political contacts for his own gain or to unfairly help his political allies. Brown was an international “Oreo;” though he began as a civil rights activist, he later lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of Haiti’s brutal dictator, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier.In 1981, Brown joined the Washington law firm of Patton, Boggs & Blow as one of its first black partners. The firm has long been a political powerhouse, especially within the Democratic Party. One of its most powerful partners is Tommy Boggs. One of the capitol’s premier lobbyists, Boggs is personally close to President Clinton. Oh, yes—he’s also the son of Hale Boggs, killed in the infamous Alaskan plane crash. His sister is media whore Cokie Roberts.Some of Brown’s Republican critics wanted to eliminate the Commerce Department altogether. They got the next best thing when Brown was killed in a plane crash.You can learn a lot of interesting things about Ron Brown by reading So You Want to Buy a President? (PBS). It sounds like Brown and Clinton were eerily similar to George W. Bush’s administration—wallowing in corruption and intrigue.
October 16, 2000: Missouri Senator (and ex-Governor) Mel Carnahan (D). Carnahan, his son and an aide were killed when their small plane crashed in bad weather in Missouri. He was elected posthumously, and his widow, Jean, was appointed to take his seat.
April 1, 2002: Dan Rocco died in a plane crash in Gainesville, Georgia. Witnesses said they were practicing “touch and go” landings when the 1944 Delta trainer started smoking, according to News Channel 32. The police believed one of the men had recently purchased the airplane. Rocco was an executive vice president at ChoicePoint, the firm that gained infamy with their faulty “felons” list supplied to Katherine Harris during the 2000 election in Florida. As a result of this list, thousands of voters (mostly African-American voters) were wrongly identified as felons and purged from the rolls.
September 11, 2001: John O’Neill quit the FBI before he was killed by a plane crash—though he wasn’t in the plane. Director of Counterterrorism at the New York offices of the F.B.I., O’Neill was one of the world’s top experts on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. He believed that “all the answers” regarding what they needed to destroy Al Qaeda lay in Saudi Arabia. However, starting in January 2001, President George W. Bush blocked O’Neill’s efforts to investigate Saudi ties to bin Laden. In the summer of 2001 O’Neill declared that the main obstacles to his investigation were U.S. oil interests. In late August, a frustrated O’Neill quit the FBI and took a position as head of security for the World Trade Center. In fact, he was on the 34th floor of the World Trade Center on September 11 when it was struck by the first of two commercial airliners reputedly piloted by terrorists. But O’Neill wasn’t killed immediately. He escaped the building, called his son to say he was OK, then went back inside to help lead others to safety. Minutes later, he was dead. While corporate media endlessly praised firefighters, they forgot a hero who might have prevented the Attack on America in the first place. To learn more about the tragic death of an American oddity—a true hero—see PBS’ presentation, The Man Who Knew. Also, see this John O’Neill tribute.
October 26, 2002: Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone (D) was killed while campaigning for re-election, just two miles from Eveleth, Minnesota, where Nick Begich was born.
October 29, 2002: Trent Lott made the news (News Day, Austin American-Statesman) when it was reported that pilots who flew him to a campaign event reported problems with the landing gear after they landed in Mobile, Alabama. Lott—the Senate’s Republican leader, a Christian bigot and a chickenhawk (he served during the Vietnam War as a cheerleader) who is one of America’s most hated politicians—also made the news when he was booed at Paul Wellstone’s memorial. Was it a genuine malfunction, a pathetic attempt to wrest the sympathy vote away from Democrats, or a Democratic assassination plot gone bad? Draw your own conclusion.
You can find more information about most of these crashes (except
the Trent Lott mini-disaster) at Plane Crash Info.
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