Chauncey M. Holt
Partner and Great Friend
Born in the Kentucky Alleghenies in 1921. Chauncey grew up in a very violent environment where one of the most popular industries was making moonshine. At the age of 12, he was carrying a .45 to school. Everyone wanted to get out of the area, and if you didn’t you could end up dead or in jail for life for committing murder like a few of his uncles.
By the age of 13, he was walking the high wire and performing on the flying trapeze in what they called a Mud Circus owned by one of his in-laws. Later he took flying lessons in exchange for doing wing walking stunts for the pilot/instructor.
It was around 1940 when he joined the Army Air Corps and soon he ended up in prison for assaulting a noncom. Chauncey was lucky, though, he got out after a few months. Back to the Army he went and off to prison he was sent again, this time for joyriding. There, he met some mob guys, some of whom were connected to the formidable Meyer Lansky with whom he eventually met, worked with and even became friends.
Lansky told Chauncey the mob and our government were working together since the early 40s, even before the CIA was called the CIA. Chauncey would start doing work for the CIA’s Black ops in the 1950s which later involved a policy known as Executive Action (a plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power). Chauncey started forging documents, testing weapons and other odds and ends. One of the weapons modification plants was at the GMB Machine Tool Company at the Goleta Airport outside of Santa Barbara where J Bartell went to high school.
Many years later, J was teaching a course on mind over body control at UCLA and after one of the classes, a man came up to him and introduced himself. He said he was a friend of J’s father and was very interested in what J was teaching. Then over a cup of coffee, Holt told J he needed help with an asset who needed to pass a polygraph or be exposed as a CIA spy.
Over the next few months, they had some fascinating conversations. He would tell J stories of his travels and past and J would teach him about controlling pain and how to better develop his ability to understand more about human behavior.
They had many similarities in their past, including trouble with the law, the Air Force, having an overall dislike of authority, and of course the mind-body connection.
Chauncey (with hat) was one of the 3 CIA agents disguised as tramps found
on a boxcar in Dallas, just minutes after President John Kennedy was killed.
A gift to J from his good friend.
Self-Portrait
by
Chauncey Holt