NEWS ANALYSIS:

Where that “Leonard Bayard” Name Came From

More important, what's behind that name today?

The kicker here is that there was no Senator “Leonard Bayard” in 1924 or ever. An unnamed Washington Post society writer simply got the senatorial first name wrong, understandably given the hundreds of names attending. He or she accurately reported the senators from other states, but Delaware, which sent five Bayards to the U.S. Congress from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, never sent a Leonard Bayard. The correct name of the senator attending that social crush for Ambassador Jusserand was Thomas Francis Bayard, Jr., Delaware senator for a term and son of the three-term senator of the same name.

Quite the little gaffe, sure to become internal lore in the earlier Washington Post, as an example of what not to do in your society columns, and in earlier social networks of Bayard descendants in Delaware, as the kind of faux pas that happens when you let inkstained wretches into your social functions.

Either way, it is a good bet as a name source for the CIA.

The Bayard name currently in the news is “Leonard Thomas Bayard,” purported signer of Oregon state filings in August 2003 registering a purported company named Bayard Foreign Marketing LLC. “According to federal records, Bayard Foreign Marketing is the newest owner of a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V executive jet reportedly used since Sept. 11, 2001, to transport suspected Al Qaeda operatives to countries such as Egypt and Syria, where some of them claim to have later been tortured.” Enter the CIA, and the practice euphemized by the current administration as “rendition,” sending prisoners to other countries where they can be tortured. Several news articles have documented extensive reason to believe that the company called Bayard Foreign Marketing is basically a CIA front with no real existence as an operating company.

Furthermore, “A search of commercial databases turned up no information on Leonard Thomas Bayard: no residence address, no telephone number, no Social Security number, no credit history, no automobile or property ownership records--in short, none of the information commonly associated with real people.” The information gaps have also been reported in other news articles, including two published in December 2004, safely after the election, in the Boston Globe and ironically the Washington Post. The “Leonard Bayard” or “Leonard Thomas Bayard” name, like other personal names connected to the shadow companies, strangely lacks any directory telephone or address history. The Globe reported, “An extensive database search of a sample of 44 of those names turned up none of the information that usually emerges in such a search: no previous addresses, no past or current telephone numbers, no business or corporate records. In addition, although most names were attached to dates of birth in the 1940s, '50s or '60s, all were given Social Security numbers between 1998 and 2003.”

Further research points in the same direction. While it is notoriously difficult to prove a negative, or to confirm the existence of a gap, out of 487 Bayards listed in the Social Security death index, not one is named Leonard. Bayards are numerous in Delaware to this day, but Delaware state case law in the Lexis database for all dates, which yields over 1,000 hits for the family name Bayard including attorneys and law firms, has zero results for a Leonard Bayard. Similarly, out of 799 hits for the surname in federal district courts, of 665 hits for the surname in law reviews, or 101 hits in legal news, none are for a Leonard Bayard. There is also no Leonard Bayard in Delaware newspapers or in larger newspapers, except connected to the CIA flights. Only one possibly historical Leonard Bayard appears on record, in a short April 15, 1932, article in the Elyria, Ohio, Chronicle Telegram, when a driver of apparently that name hit and injured a small boy who ran into the street.

In other words, not only was there never a Senator Leonard Bayard, there may never have been any Leonard Bayard. Good name for a spook. Perhaps some CIA thinker reacted the same way this writer did to that 1924 Post anecdote, finding the nonexistent man a funny and appropriate namesake. It may also be appropriate that the name is so thick on the ground in Delaware, where regulation of corporate registrations is also practically nonexistent.

Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer, following up, is asking for inquiry relating to the anomalies: “Congressman Blumenauer is particularly troubled by the use of a Gulfstream V jet registered to a possibly illegal front company, Bayard Foreign Marketing LLC, in downtown Portland. Press reports have found no public record of the company’s alleged owner, nor have calls to their office been successful at locating him. The evidence certainly points to a violation of Oregon law in order to hide the true nature and breadth of this extraordinary rendition program.”

This month, the Oregon state bar association is pressing for answers from the attorney who filed the company registration in Oregon, where the company relocated after unwanted public attention in Boston. According to the Tribune article above, “Leonard T. Bayard--whoever he may or may not be--became the sole owner of the mysterious Gulfstream jet on Nov. 16, according to public records compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The records show that Bayard Foreign Marketing purchased the plane, for an undisclosed sum, from Premier Executive Transport Services, whose address is the same as that of a Dedham, Mass., law firm that incorporated Premier Executive in January 1994.

The Massachusetts law firm's address is shared by a second company, Crowell Aviation Technologies Inc., which according to Dun & Bradstreet claims to have only a single employee and $65,000 in annual revenue.

Government records show, however, that Crowell is one of only nine companies, along with Premier Executive, that has Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide.”