Pug Winokur Is Now History

The collapse of Enron occurred in October 2001, one month after the towers fell on 9/11. It's been more than ten years now, and we still don't know where the Enron money went. But all those years ago there were many researchers attempting to find out. One of them was Linda Minor, who went about the search in a unique way--by digging into the background of one of Enron's directors, a man named Herbert Simon Winokur, Jr., who somehow had acquired the moniker "Pug."  This man who seemed to come from nowhere to become a bigwig at the Harvard Corporation was so intriguing to her because of the behind-the-scenes role he played in the life of one of the researcher's best friends, Catherine Austin Fitts. The two women set out to discover who this man was and what made him tick. Their dream of finding where the money went did not become a reality.

Nevertheless, as a result of their research, which was seen by many thousands of internet readers, Pug Winokur is now history. 


Recently a friend asked if I would republish the Linda Minor's series of articles written ten years ago.  With a new introduction and some revisions from the author, here it is:

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD:

FROM HARVARD TO ENRON

by Linda Minor © 2002

PART ONE                                    

Who is left at Enron?

In the last few months, almost all the directors of Enron have resigned with one very notable exception--Herbert Simon "Pug"Winokur, Jr.--a man in the shadows whose name may not have made an impression on most people who read only the headlines. Why is he still around, and where did he come from? If we hope to discover where the Enron money went, this man is a good place to start.

Winokur, top row, second from right, with other Enron board members in Houston, Texas

Introductory

This series of articles is dedicated to Catherine Austin Fitts, without whose encouragement I would never have attempted the task of writing for internet publication. I had met Catherine online as a member of  a “conspiracy theory research list” (CTRL) or its spinoff, “CIA Drugs” list, set up by Kris Millegan, whose other members included Daniel Hopsicker, DavidGuyatt, Mike Ruppert, Alex Constantine and many other people who were interested in doing research to discover how our government really works. By learning the truth, we hoped to change the course our country had been following for decades.

I had a hope at that time that, just as Dorothy and her companions in the Wizard of Oz had done, we too would follow a yellow brick road to its termination point, where a wizard would be revealed--pulling all the strings behind a curtain. I saw my role as helping to construct that road, constructed of many yellow bricks of information. The task was somewhat akin to putting together a jigsaw puzzle, that when pieced together would show us the real world and how it worked. I hoped that other researchers would be inspired to join in the search for information, each one laying their own bricks to help us reach our destination.

As we look back, we take pride in seeing ten years' worth of construction of that yellow brick road, but the Emerald City still lies before us. There's more work yet to be done.

Linda Minor

Follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City.

 

Google Prison

Because Pug Winokur--whom Catherine believed was a key operative in the process by which her business, Hamilton Securities Group, suffered a takedown by certain Democrats in the Clinton administration--still remained at Enron to the bitter end, we determined he played an essential part in its collapse. We knew nothing of Mr. Winokur at that time, but resolved find out all about it. The truth we discovered would effectively become his “google prison.” Any internet search of his name would reveal all his good or evil deeds, making them apparent not only to us, but to anyone else who desired to know what he might be up to. Transparency was the only tool that could lead to accountability.

Catherine’s approach was what she called a “data dump.” Mine was to build a historical timeline--finding a point of beginning and working forward to the present. In this way I hoped to understand what motivated him in terms of dollars and cents by following his career through a context of where he had worked, who financed his businesses, and who he was making money for; it's how I "follow the money" in my research.

Pug Winokur’s family

Order of Cloud and Banne

Pug was born in 1943 in Columbus, Ga. (where Fort Benning is located), while his father (married to Marjorie Lipman in 1942) was serving in the U.S. Army Air Force, attaining the rank of Major during his 1942-45 enlistment. He was awarded the Order of the Cloud and Banner (China), indicating his involvement in the China Burma India Theatre. The military decoration Major Winokur received was an honor presented from the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek, who fled to Taiwan when the Red Chinese took over China. There were more than 30 of these decorations, for example, awarded to the Flying Tigers of Clare Chennault.

The American troops in the China-Burma-India Theater were commanded by General Joseph Stilwell, who was the Deputy Allied Commander under Lord Mountbatten of Great Britain—the last viceroy of the British colonial empire in India, who was then assigned to Burma. There have been numerous books written about the involvement of these groups in opium smuggling, shown in this slideshow:

With this military background, according to information in Who's Who, Pug’s father returned to his interrupted career in consumer finance--first at Federal Loan Co. and also to Rettews Money Loan beginning in 1958, and Executive Consumer Discount in 1967--all in Philadelphia. These work relationships ended in 1974, followed by his short association with George S. May International in Park Ridge, Illinois, the same city, coincidentally, where Hillary Rodham grew up. In 1975 Winokur, Sr. began a management consulting firm in Wayne, Pa.

The family was of the Jewish religion, and Pug’s father, treasurer of a pawnbrokers’ association, belonged to B’Nai Brith as well as to an association involved with Jewish employment. B’Nai Brith, a Jewish fraternal organization, was the sponsor of the formation of the Anti-DefamationLeague, the seed money of which was put up by Burton Joseph, whose family was involved with the I.S. Joseph Company in Minnesota. Burton Joseph was very closely involved with Meshulam Riklis, whose background will be further explored below.

Meshulam Riklis

Pug has [in 2002] a sister named Lisbeth Cload, married to Nigel Cload, a Mercedes car dealer in Allendale, N.J. Lisbeth is an attorney at McElroy, Deutsch & Mulvaney, LLP in Morristown, New Jersey after spending 11 years at Orbe, Nugent and Darcy. She was a 1969 graduate of Boston University, studied at the University of Lyons (France), and received her law degree from Pace University School of Law in 1986.

Harvard and Clark Clifford

Pug himself went to Harvard, where he received three degrees: A.B. '65 ('64), A.M. '65, and Ph.D. '67. His doctoral degree is in applied mathematics (decision and control theory). His first job out of Harvard was with the U.S. Army, assigned to the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C. That was at the end of Robert S. McNamara’s seven years in that job. McNamara left the office in March 1968 to head the World Bank, with Clark Clifford filling out Lyndon Johnson’s term at Defense.

Sixteen years prior to the JFK assassination, Clark Clifford, working for President Truman, wrote the National Security Act of 1947 (creating the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Department). At that time he also advised Truman to recognize the State of Israel, being created in 1948--a move violently opposed by Secretary of State George Marshall. Clifford’s advice about Israel’s recognition was allegedly influenced by Jewish contributions to Truman’s fund-raising efforts, which Clifford headed.

Nineteen years after Kennedy’s murder (1982) Clifford and his law partner (Robert Altman) would secure a banking license for the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) to operate through First American Bancshares of Georgia; Clifford had been representing the foreign investors in BCCI since 1978, when he was also a big fund-raiser for Jimmy Carter.

Pug's First Business--ICF

It is not known whether any contact between Winokur and Clark Clifford—his boss in the Defense Department for only 10 months—continued after 1969, when both men left the government. But when Nixon took office that January, Pug and two other Defense Department analysts did start a "private consulting firm" in Washington, D.C. called Inner City Fund with a black figurehead named Clarence D. “Lucky” Lester, a former Tuskegee airman, as president--ostensibly to promote minority entrepreneurship. Lester was a military science instructor at Howard University while still in the military, retiring as a colonel in 1969. Col. Lester was then assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the same time the Inner City Fund was created. (See Obituary 20 March 1986 Washington Post)

Col. Lucky Lester

Pug remained at ICF during Richard Nixon’s first term and into the second before Watergate's culmination. However, ICF never had any volume of work until after Pug moved on. Normally, we would expect him to have sold his interest in the business to his successors, possibly taking a promissory note secured by preferred stock in the company. It would therefore have been to his advantage to ensure that the company did well even after he left in 1974. He may have even helped to throw money its way in the form of consulting contracts, with such revenues increasing his own stock's value. But it was not a public company, so its records were not open to our perusal, but we can get a hint of how the Inner City Fund was evolving by taking a quick look at its executives.

Winokur's replacement at ICF, James O. Edwards, joined the consulting firm in 1974, when ICF had only $300,000 in annual revenue; by 1982 the revenue had increased to $14.3 million, due primarily to services to the government on energy and environmental issues. As Chairman of American Capital and Research (ACR),  Edwards had worked in the Office of Management and Budget (formerly called the Bureau of the Budget) and was a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. As we shall see, his tenure at OMB would have coincided with some of Pug's associates in California.

ICF in 1975 hired Richard Gordon Darman with degrees from Harvard in 1964 and 1967, having worked in Nixon’s administration as an adviser to Elliott Richardson until he resigned in the wake of the Saturday night massacre in 1973. He would, however, reappear in every Republican administration until his death, ascending as high as (here it is again) Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George H.W. Bush.

Just before ICF began its huge transformation from a services company to a consulting firm, Pug had married a California woman, Deanne Lynn Howard, who had come to work in Washington, D.C. as a program analyst at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The NEH was set up in 1965 after President Lyndon Johnson apparently realized that his assassinated predecessor John Kennedy had appointed a close friend, William Walton, Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, to assume a covert role in making a back channel contact with Nikita Kruschev of the Soviet Union. Citing David Talbot's book, Brothers, Peter Janney reveals in his own book, Mary's Mosaic, that within days of the assassination of JFK,

Bobby and Jackie [Kennedy] asked their close friend to quickly reschedule his artistic mission to Russia. They wanted him to deliver a special, secret message to Georgi Bolshakov, formerly a KGB agent under journalistic cover in Washington, who the Kennedys had come to rely upon when they needed to communicate with Khrushchev directly during critical moments. Indeed, Bolshakov had once been referred to by Newsweek as the "Russian New Frontiersman" because he had become so close to Bobby....Bobby and Jackie knew that through Bolshakov their message to the Soviets would be directly communicated to Nikita Khrushchev. They wanted "the Russian who they felt best understood John Kennedy to know their personal opinions of the changes in the U.S. government since the assassination."

 After passage of a federal statute setting up the NEH in 1965, President Johnson named former president of Brown University, Barnaby C. Keeney, to be its first chairman. We learn from Martha Mitchell’s Encyclopedia Brunoniana:

In 1978 it was revealed that Keeney had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency while he was president of Brown. He admitted that he had advised the CIA in matters such as “setting up covert funding operations,” adding in explanation, “I suppose nowadays it is improper to attempt to serve your country ... but then I felt I was doing what I should.”

In 1962 Keeney set up the Human Ecology Fund, which Alex Constantine describes in Virtual Government as "the financial hub of MK-ULTRA."

So we have to wonder what Deanne Howard was engaged in while employed at this ostensibly charitable agency of the government at the time she married Pug. What exactly does a program analyst do?

Pug and Deanne Howard Winokur