Reply #68: PepsiCo's President Donald M. Kendall also has an interesting

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past. Kendall was elevated to President of the company in 1963. Like Poppy, he also served as a Navy carrier pilot during World War Two in the Pacific.

As VP in charge of PepsiCo foreign operations, he was instrumental in opening the Soviet Union to Pepsi products meeting with Krushchev in 1959, and in 1972 he engineered the first major US-USSR trade deal.

Along with Coca-Cola, PepsiCo was a major corporate ally of the CIA during the Cold War, often providing corporate cover for Agency operations abroad. (Chauncey Holt was interviewed by John Craig, Phillip Rogers and Gary Shaw for a Newsweek magazine aricle on the JFK assassination and the CIA's alledged role, in the 19th October, 1991 issue)

"I should point out of course, one name I haven't mentioned and probably the most important on the West Coast was Phillip A. Twombly. Twombly had been at one time an Executive Vice President of Coca Cola for their Caribbean operations. And along with Donald Kendall (Pepsi Cola), was considered by the CIA to be the eyes and ears of the CIA (down there). So he came to California and bought a bank in Fullerton, which was strictly for the use as a conduit of finances.

SNIP

Phillip Twombly asked us if we would be willing to fly to New Orleans and give some support to Oswald, who was a stranger to us. The only thing we knew about Oswald at the time was we had detected the address on there as being 544 Camp Street. Although we were not familiar with Oswald we certainly knew what was at 544 Camp Street because we had done that before. SNIP http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKtwombly.htm



In 1970, Kendall was instrumental in convincing Henry Kissinger and Kendall's old friend, Richard Nixon, to order the CIA to overthrow the Government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, after Allende pursued a third-way policy of "socialism with a human face" that defied the Soviets as well as the Americans.http://www.gregpalast.com/printerfriendly.cfm?artid=36