The Red River Brief (The Wrong Brother): Part V
The 12% Mistake.
Presbyterian Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia requires a passcode for entry. To acquire access, one must connect with the historic graveyard’s park ranger and explain the nature of one’s visit.
I arrived there on a Wednesday morning in October 2021 and followed the instructions to contact the ranger, David Heiby, for the code. He asked my intentions and I told him I was there to see the plot for Alick de Montmorency (photo below).
“The Duke?” said Mr. Heiby. “I’ve been here almost thirty years and you’re only the second person to visit his grave who wasn’t a family member.”
“Well, I don’t think he’s a really a Duke,” I replied.
I then asked who that other person happened to be and was told it was a man from the Bosnian Embassy who had worked at the war crimes tribunal at The Hague and had died of cancer.
We spoke for several minutes and I described the brief I had written. Mr. Heiby informed me that he had a retired, two-star Army general friend—and former judge advocate—who had done some research about de Montmorency and had discovered one of the relief acts, but that his trail had reached a dead end at the State Department.
I told Mr. Heiby that there were actually two relief acts and there was silence in response for several seconds.
We had a cordial conversation. I told him I would send him an email with The Red River Brief, that he was welcome to forward it to the general, and that we should keep in touch.
Several weeks later, I received a message via social media from Landon Holden. She informed me that Mr. Heiby had sent the brief to her and that she would like to discuss it with me because Alick de Montmorency was her great-uncle.
Intrigued but rather wary, Mrs. Holden and I began a continuous exchange of information and agreed to meet in December 2021 to discuss our mutual interest in Alick. I already had an obnoxious hockey trip planned for the holidays (five games in five different cities on five nights in a row with no overlapping teams), so flying to D.C. as a starting point to delve further into this investigation of Alick de Montmorency with Landon and her sister, Alexis Delaney Walker, became my chief priority.
We met at The Dubliner—a pub near Union Station that I had not entered in over two decades—and sat at a corner table: me with three legal pad pages full of questions to ask and the sisters with folders, files, and a copy of The Red River Brief with sticky tabs.
The moment of validation for all of the hours and sleepless nights I put into the brief was this paraphrased exchange:
“We don’t think that Alick is the person in the surveillance photos from Mexico City. We think that it’s our grandfather, his brother.”
The hair on the back of my neck came to attention. Chills permeated my spine and lower extremities. I felt light-headed. And I was never happier to have been wrong about something in my entire life!
We spoke for two hours. I was told the story of how Alick and his brother, Alexandre, had fled Russia as young boys with their parents during the Russian Revolution and, like many ex-pats, settled in France. I was shown photographs, passports, and other documents. I was shown photos of Alexandre.
He was the man in Mexico City, not his brother Alick.
The sisters told me that they had allowed their father to read the brief. He was astonished by it and told them it had triggered so many questions about his relationship with his father-in-law (Alexandre) and uncle (Alick).
And, thus, it now made sense why there was a 12% deviation in the match between Alick’s photo in the tea advertisement and the Soviet Embassy photo. I had reached that point. I had gotten so close. Had I never made the decision to visit Alick’s burial plot, to put my hand on his headstone, to sit there and contemplate my findings, I would never have known that I was wrong and the secret of the actual identity of the JFK assassination’s “Rosetta Stone” would never have been accurately determined.
The 88% match would have been good enough had I never visited the cemetery, communicated with David Heiby and Landon Holden, or then met with Landon and Alexis.
But I had to be sure. I had to see that gravesite for myself to connect the countless hours of research with something tangible.
Alick de Montmorency was difficult enough to research. Alexandre Brun de Saint-Hippolyte was impossible to research other than his obituary in The Washington Post at this link.
His profession was listed as “French diplomat.” According to Alexis, even the priest at his funeral service stated that the obituary read like he was a spy.
Landon and Alexis confirmed that their grandfather was in the Central Intelligence Agency. They told me that they often called him Sasha, as did Alexandre’s wife (their grandmother).
And that meant that “Alick de Montmorency,” and all of its iterations, were noms de plume for Anatole “Alick” Brun de Saint-Hippolyte. The clincher? Alick’s headstone made no mention of his real last name.
It was yet another set of brothers in this saga; Kennedy, Dulles, Maroun, Cabell, and Brun de Saint-Hippolyte.
The sisters then told me that Alexandre’s neighbor in Virginia in the late 1940s and early 1950s was Richard Nixon. Their mother played with Tricia Nixon and the pair attended grade school together.
A future President of the United States and sworn enemy of JFK living next door to a mystery man later photographed outside of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in September 1963 just two months before JFK’s assassination!
Alexandre (on the right) strolling around war-torn Berlin after WWII. Please note The Brandenburg Gate in the background and his sloped-down right shoulder.
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And, so, in the months following that fateful convergence at The Dubliner, there was further research conducted. Here is a passage in one of my many correspondences with the sisters:
Certainly, the appellation "Sasha" has always been a term of reverence for older male relatives of Russian (and other) extractions. And I typically would not suggest any special notation for it, especially in this scholarly pursuit, were it not for the fact that I have not been incorrect about anything related to The Red River Brief other than the person in the Mexico City surveillance photos being Alexandre and not Alick.
And I was happy to be incorrect about that because, in essence, you and Landon verified that I wasn't that wrong at all based on the appearance similarities.
I can assure you that the data produced by the two of you at our lunch meeting was the greatest moment of validation I've ever experienced.
But now I have done—and continue to do—a deeper dive on Alexandre, something that is immensely difficult, and I have found an integral espionage figure involved with the KGB, French intelligence, and the CIA (never publicly identified to date, again!) whose code name was Sasha.
And based on the overlapping recurrences of evidence that I have collected, plus the validation from you and Landon, and the fact that not a single JFK assassination "expert" has replied to my original brief (despite the fact that the foremost among them were in frequent communication with me beforehand), I just don't believe that this (Sasha) would be the one coincidence in a volume of verified facts and connections.
So, I'm updating the brief and also including another psychological element that we need to always keep in mind: modern researchers with instant communication methods need to put themselves in the time and place of their studies and not assume that the techniques so readily available today can be applied to an era with no cell phones or internet. Life was slower, news was slower, research was slower, communication was slower...and it was easy to keep a secret. It was easy, as was the case of your grandfather, to hide in plain sight. So what if surveillance photos of a mysterious figure outside the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City were printed in a few papers? The people in the know, the people involved, would never rat out Alexandre...and eyewitness accounts of neighbors or milk men or cab drivers would never connect the dots.
All of those people are dead now: the people who were in the know and the acquaintances who could have identified Alexandre. But what would it have mattered? Who would they have approached? The intelligence community controlled the media (see NANA). It wouldn't have been reported.
Frankly, I don't know if anyone is going to care about the culmination/conclusion of our joint research. Yes, I include you and your sister now in this. We are some sort of triangular connection, much like the shooter teams in Dallas on 11/22/63. Equilateral.
I am firmly convinced that Alexandre had a much greater historical impact than any of us could have imagined. His obituary is a joke. I mean, seriously? It's a fucking joke. It reads like a caricature of an obituary one would write as a ruse to cover up a known spook's background. Fiction.
If your Sasha is, indeed, the Sasha--and I would bet my life that he is--then Alick's book about Admiral Darlan (and his friendship with Darlan's son) makes a lot more sense in relation to this particular French connection.
And what prompted the memory of the name Sasha? It was a delayed reaction. I heard either Landon or Alexis mention it at the pub, but it was made in such passing fashion at the time that I thought nothing of it. Nothing, that is, until I began correlative research involving The Martel Affair (also referred to as The Sapphire Affair): a spy scandal that took place in 1962 France and involved allegations of KGB agents working within sectors of French intelligence. During the course of the investigation by both French and US interrogators, a central and key figure—KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn—stated that there was also a highly-placed Soviet spy within the Central Intelligence Agency.
The code name for that spy was Sasha.
Mention was made earlier in this chapter below the photo of Alexandre in postwar Germany about his right shoulder sloping down. Why is this significant? Well, Alexandre was shot in the back by a German soldier early in WWII and the resulting damage permanently disfigured his upper right torso.
If you examine the photo of Alexandre in an early family photo (the mother of Landon and Alexis on the right) with the one taken outside of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, you will notice the same, discernible downward slope of the right shoulder.
This is Alexandre Brun de Saint-Hippolyte. This is the mystery man photographed in September 1963 in Mexico. This is Sasha.