The HOAX that won't die ....

 The other day I was handed a series of emails.

They originated with Colin Nichol in Australia.

Colin has been very helpful to this ongoing investigation conducted by 'The Trio', because he has followed-up by asking new questions for them concerning people who he worked with at 47 Dean Street during 1964. One of them was a fellow Australian, like Colin and Allan Crawford. That person knew of the plans for Radio Atlanta at the beginning of its second phase in 1963, but few seem to understand that there was an earlier phase. That phase involves a lot of details that have been obfuscated and confused, but which are also at last being unraveled.

Colin is primarily knowledgeable about the second phase and he personally remembers when Allan Crawford told them about the addition of Radio Caroline.

The early broadcasting side of that second phase took place at 47 Dean Street. Colin, and his fellow Australians who had prior training and experience at commercial radio stations in Australia, personally trained the early novice Caroline DJs in a studio on the top floor of Craword's Dean Street office/studio building.

But what they did not know, because Allan Crawford did not tell them, was that the addition of the ship that was to be used by Radio Caroline, was a clause in his own ability to lease the mv Mi Amigo for Radio Atlanta.

In June 1963 Allan Crawford, after first meeting Ronan O'Rahilly during the early part of that same year, sent him off to Houston, Texas to perform an errand. O'Rahilly flew from Heathrow to Idlewild Airport in New York. Later, after the murder of President Kennedy in November that year, it would be renamed 'JFK'. From New York he flew down to Houston where he stayed its Continental Hotel.

O'Rahilly's job was to meet Charles W. (Bill) Weaver. At that time the company called Project Atlanta Limited had not been formed, and would not be registered until O'Rahilly returned with positive news. Even then, the impressive line-up of directors were not to be seen, other forces had to get involved to make both Atlanta and Caroline possible. Those forces had nothing to do with Ronan O'Rahilly who was the mere "dog's body" in all of this. He was paid, he had a good time, but he was not a major player.

During the previous year of 1962, Crawford had unsuccessfully negotiated for the lease of the mv Magda Maria (as the Mi Amigo was then), which was anchored off Brightlingsea, Essex. Bill Weaver was staying at a hotel in London. But the sticking point was a legal issue, and it was only after Crawford had received a favorable legal Opinion from a QC, that he had something new to show to Bill Weaver in order to try to get him to change his mind. But by then it was too late, because Bill Weaver had taken the ship to Galveston Island, Texas under the new name of Mi Amigo.

Bill Weaver was both the national head of sales for Gordon McLendon's radio stations, and manager of McLendon's KILT in Houston, Texas. Another assignment given to Bill Weaver was to go to Stockholm, Sweden and shut down Radio Nord. He was then to dispose of both its land-based and ship board broadcasting equipment, and then to either sell or scrap the ship itself.

Accompanying Bill to Stockholm was his wife, and both she and their daughter have been working in cooperation with 'The Trio', in order for the true story to be told - at last. That true story involves CIA involvement and it is something that Rusling did not understand at all, and which many have dismissed as nonsense. But having not only seen documents courtesy of Weaver's daughter, and being able to subsequently identify a key person involved with the Mi Amigo as a probable CIA 'asset', 'The Trio' are continuing to investigate everything to do with both Radio Nord and its sister station Radio Mercur.

When Ronan O'Rahilly died the other day, Colin sent 'The Trio' an Australian news report with typically misleading information about the Radio Caroline project (1964-1967). He then sent a link to the British paper where all the nonsense had come from. I am of course referring to the 'Caroline Kennedy Hoax', (although these newspaper reports are also full of a lot of additional errors). But that is what happens when reporters dig into their newspaper archives to see what somebody else has previously written, but they don't perform due diligence to discover if the original reports have been revealed to be untrue.

Today the news media in general has restricted its expenditure in the area of original research and 'Wikipedia' actually forbids inclusion of original research, so their own lies and distortions remain uncorrected. The 'Wikipedia' entry for Radio Caroline is a classic example of their untrue reporting.

Consequently there is a need for 'The Trio' to both self-fund and blow the lid off the lies and hypocrisy being passed off as genuine news, especially when 'gems' like this one reproduced from the London Daily Mail, April 23, 2020, are reprinted as 'fact'; over and over again:

So without going into a lot more details at this stage (they will appear in due course within  the timeline of this blog), I have also included a reference to the 2017 newspaper feature written by Mervyn Hagger, who back in 1966 wrote a feature for this same newspaper about offshore radio during it hey-day. In 2017 he blew the lid off the 'Caroline Kennedy Hoax':

Unfortunately the newspaper editor switched the picture of the Fredericia for the Ross Revenge because one was black and white and the other was color. The editor also switched headlines by replacing 'Harold Wilson' for 'Radio Caroline', but the main text was left unchanged and as submitted.

A copy of the recording which is referred to in the Express and Star article, is in the possession of 'The Trio'! That recording is composed of two parts:

The first part contains the introduction by Robin Leach who pretends to be watching from his New York City office window, the St Patrick's Day parade marching past on the street below him. The quality is reasonably good.

The second part is of very poor quality, because it was made over a telephone handset held by Bobby Kennedy on one end with Robin Leach holding his handset next to a wire tape recorder.

The hoax itself is quite complicated because Robin Leach never admitted to working as a stringer for the U.S. tabloid National Enquirer when an ex-TV station writer-manager named George Bernard who became Leach's partner decided to write a book in 1977 called 'Inside the National Enquirer ... Confessions of an Undercover Reporter', he obscured Robin Leach's true identity by naming him "Reggie Crawford".

So who was Robin Leach?

Robin Douglas Leach was born on August 29, 1941 and attended Harrow County School for Boys where he edited a school magazine called 'The Gayton Times'. He was 14 years of age. When he turned 15 he became a general news reporter for the 'Harrow Observer' and he started a glossy town magazine at 17 years of age. The following year age 18, Robin Leach then got hired by the 'Daily Mail' as their youngest 'Page One' reporter. In 1963 he emigrated to the USA and took on a number freelancing jobs which included the 'National Enquirer', but although it became a major part of his professional road to success, he never mentioned it, and this is why George Bernard called him 'Reggie Crawford' in his book. 

But it was Leach who convinced George Bernard who had been working for a US TV station, to go into business with him in New York. Together they secured a small office space above what was at the time, the Ed Sullivan Theater. It was on that stage of that theater where the Beatles performed to the screaming delight of both its 'live' audience, and to the millions of teenage television viewers in living rooms across the USA, who were watching Ed Sullivan's weekly showcase of vaudeville performers.

Leach is identified as being one of the National Enquirer's best freelance reporters, but Leach had a problem getting material because the tabloid had a terrible journalistic reputation, yet staggeringly high weekly sales. Few people ever wanted to be associated with the paper in print because of the lurid, fanciful and sensational stories that it carried, and it was known that the Italian-American owner had originally converted his paper to a national publication with help  from funding by a member of the New York Mafia.

The events that follow are founded upon accounts in more than one book and several contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, but there is no single source, but all of the sources are credible and all of them confirm the events that followed. This is where the fate of Radio Caroline after the defeat of the Tory government on October 15, 1964, meets the rise of the New York control over Radio Caroline in London.

There are several threads at work.

One involves a change in the UK gambling laws which allowed the U.S. Mafia to move in with help from the British underworld, to become heavily involved with primarily London casinos. Another thread involves the Leach-Bernard partnership in New York with its links to both the Italian Mafia, and the non-Italian 'members' of this fraternity who were dubbed the 'Jewish Mafia'.

Just after the October 1964 UK General Election, Robin Leach arrived in London "to visit his parents in Perivale". At that moment in time, Allan Crawford's Radio Caroline in the South of England was about to face the challenge of Texas money which had been poured into Radio London, and it was about to go on the air.

Panic set in behind the scenes of both Radio Caroline stations. To the north that station had a mission which was also linked to developments on the Isle of Man, but to the south, Crawford's station was about to be destroyed by a version of McLendon's highly successful KLIF in Dallas, Texas.

The investors behind Radio Caroline had several agendas, and one involved Pye and its eye on a lucrative need for broadcasting equipment, if the Tory government had licensed the nearly 200 sponsored commercial radio stations waiting to go on the air. That dream was over with the win by the socialist Labour Party. However, their aims and ambitions in the Isle of Man were still alive.

This is where the fate and fortune of Iain Calder from Slamannan, which is a village just outside of Falkirk in Scotland, met with the fate and fortune of Robin Leach and the murky and rocky road of chance followed by Radio Caroline. Unlike most of the other offshore radio stations whose origins, once revealed, were relatively simple and straightforward, because Radio Caroline was more of a brand name without a corporate identity because its investors had differing interests but shared a common goal, by the end of 1964 half of the original game plan had been destroyed. So Iain Calder on page 139 of his autobiography, lets us in on an event that changed the course of Radio Caroline in the south as it was about to enter the New Year of 1965:

Remember, George Bernard claimed that "Reggie Crawford" (Robin Leach), had gone to visit his parents in Perivale, but Iain Calder describes another event:

"Robin had emigrated from England to New York before he was twenty-one and impressed the 'Enquirer' news executives with his drive and ability as a freelance reporter. Still in his twenties and now an 'Enquirer' veteran, Robin returned to London on vacation just as I was beginning my career with the paper. That is when I first met him."

I should mention here that Iain Calder later fired Robin Leach, but that was some time after Iain Calder began his management climb that eventually took him to the top post of the 'National Enquirer' at its offices in Miami, Florida. Back to Iain's account of his first meeting with Robin Leach:

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"As London Bureau Chief, I arranged a dinner for Robin. There were seven of us: my wife Jane, my deputy, Bill Dick, and his wife, Margaret, plus my sister Sandra, who was visiting us from Scotland. The seventh was Robin's date - a Miss Something-or-Other and for years both Bill's wife and mine complained about how their husbands couldn't stop staring at this dazzling woman."

So, what happened at this dinner?

Iain Calder immediately switches topics and discusses something else. He does not say. Therefore it is necessary to find other bits of this puzzle and start putting them together. We know that Leach met Calder in London just after the UK General Election. We also know what happened almost immediately on December 19, 1964 when 'Billboard' announced a new Radio Caroline business plan. A few months later on March 1, 1965, 'Broadcasting' magazine revealed that this plan was going ahead with recruitment of staff in the USA.

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This was essentially a rescue plan for Radio Caroline South, although it also applied to Radio Caroline North as well, and it centered upon two New York companies: One  company was called Trans Atlantic Features, and that would be used by Leach as a 'front' when conducting interviews for the 'National Enquirer'. When explanations were called for, Leach and his partner could claim that they represented the news division of Radio Caroline in New York. (Few in America understood that Radio Caroline was deemed to be a 'pirate' radio station by authorities in Europe.)

The other company was Trans Atlantic Entertainment Corporation, and it was a genuine operation, but with Mafia ties. It was via TEAC that WMCA became involved with Radio Caroline using its 'Good Guys' format, and TEAC also had ties to Morris Levy who hired Jack Spector of WMCA to present his sponsored Roulette Records Show. From all of this came many other promotional ties including one of getting Ronan O'Rahilly on to the ABC-TV network show 'To Tell The Truth'. Because the 'Caroline Kennedy Hoax' had not yet been created, no mention was made on that TV show about this fable, but its invention was to allow Robin Leach to gain access to Bobby Kennedy by claiming to represent a British commercial radio station that was named after his niece. Bobby Kennedy 'fell' for the ruse that Radio Caroline had an international new bureau!

The original plan by Robin Leach was to create a sensational news story in which Bobby Kennedy endorsed Irish independence and slagged-off the British occupiers, and he would do so on St Patrick's Day! Just a few years later this theme erupted into a full scale war led by the Irish Republican Army who gained a lot of their funding and weapons from Irish-American sources.

The plan was quite insidious and it does raise some questions about what other interests were being served since Robin Leach does acknowledge a connection to Ronan O'Rahilly as being the source of 'inspiration' for this idea. At the time, IRA bombings on the UK mainland were a distant event, but this is when the O'Rahilly connection to the Dublin uprising was embellished and brought into play. More than this, several sources indicate a sinister overtone behind the faked St Patrick's Day broadcast over Radio Caroline.

A St Patrick's Day dinner was held in London and attended by the new Prime Minister Harold Wilson with Ronan O'Rahilly in attendance. The Robin Leach and Bobby Kennedy tape was played over the loudspeaker system of that event and Bobby Kennedy began by addressing Harold Wilson, and acknowledging Ronan O'Rahilly! Having listened to the speech by Bobby Kennedy, it is obvious that it parallels the speech given in Ireland by his by then murdered brother John at a time when Ronan O'Rahilly was off on his mission to Houston on behalf of Allan Crawford in June 1963.

Robin Leach hoped to ambush everyone with a major story that would create international embarrassment when splashed across the front page of the weekly 'National Enquirer'. But before he could do this he was 'scooped' by a major U.S. daily newspaper which explained to the staff of Bobby Kennedy that he had been 'set-up' by the 'National Enquirer', the daily paper also reported that Radio Caroline was a 'pirate' station operating in defiance of the new Labour government of Harold Wilson. All of this had the possibility of creating international tensions involving the USA, the UK and Ireland, and had this taken place during 'The Troubles', there is no doubt that everyone would understand why the Labour government had to shut down Radio Caroline!

There is a lot more to all of this and it will be revealed in due course.

However, as a footer, before Robin Leach hit the big time as host of the TV show 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous', he began a syndicated pop newspaper called GO. He did this in conjunction with WMCA, and Leach quickly added many other stations such as WFUN in Miami, until its masthead proclaimed that it had become "the largest circulation of any pop weekly".

Back in New York, with TFA-TAEC in full swing and out of the glare of the British news media, Morris Levy and has contacts with both the 'Jewish Mafia' and the Italian Cosa Nostra, opened the doors to WMCA, and then to placing Ronan O'Rahilly on an edition of the ABC-TV network show 'To Tell the Truth'.

It was only after the curtain began to fall on all of the offshore stations due to the coming of the Marine Offences Act, that Phillip Solomon stepped-in to pick-up the pieces. He did that shortly before the two Caroline ships were towed away in ignominy during March 1968.

Well, that's enough of that out of time sequence, so tomorrow we will turn the clock back even further to see how a lot of different people, all with different agendas, came together behind the scenes to eventually create Radio Caroline. However, Ronan O'Rahilly was not a part of any of these groups, he was someone merely picked-up along the way and paid to mislead both fans, politicians and the press.

​He did that job very well.

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