Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, planted spies in Nixon’s National Security Council. This was known as the “Moorer-Radford Affair.”
There was much conflict between Lyndon Johnson and the Joint Chiefs and they began to use their NSC liason office to obtain information they could use in their bureaucratic turf battles. It is likely they also fed information to Republican Congressman Melvin Laird, an expert on defense.
When Moorer became chairman he replaced Army personnel with Navy men in the liason office. They were led by then- Captain Rembrandt Robinson. Robinson was then replaced by Rear Admiral Robert Welander. The brass feared Henry Kissinger and thought he believed that the dynamic of history was on the side of the Soviet Union. They wanted to observe his every move. The military disliked Nixon’s tendency to keep policy making confined to a small circle. They were not being informed about détente with China, aspects of SALT talks, or the dimensions of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy. Sometimes Nixon seemed reckless in military planning, and his shifts in Cold War policy, especially détente, seemed downright dangerous. They believe Nixon often followed’soft” policies toward North Vietnam. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt came close to saying in his book that Nixon’s shifts were downright treason.
The military came to rely on Yeoman Charles Edward Radford to learn what was being planned and to bring it useful documents. In all he copied about 5000 documents. Radford accompanied Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Dr. Henry Kissinger on trips. He had full access to their brief cases. On one trip, he even made notes on their conversations. While in Washington, he had access to NSC files, and by his own admission, photocopied “thousands, just thousands” of documents to be fed to Moorer. He would rifle briefcases and read documents. In 1971, Nixon began tilting toward Pakistan in the India-Pakistan dispute. Radford and his wife were sympathetic to India, and some think he started feeding columnist Jack Anderson information. The Radfords were social friends of the Andersons, who were fellow Mormons. Mrs. Anderson helped the radfords with genealogical research that was vital to the practice of their religion.
One famous Anderson column, on December 14, 1971, revealed Nixon”s “tilt” toward Pakistan and matters that suggested he had access to several very sensitive documents. Nixon asked John Ehrlichman to find the leak. Admiral Weander assumed that only Radford had access to all the documents in question and informed Ehrichman of this. Radford was polygraphed and was surprised when the questions went beyond the Anderson matter. The yeoman was sure he could pass questions on that matter. He was asked if he was gathering information for anyone outside the White House, and he had to tell the truth. In this way, the Navy’s spying operation was revealed. nd Radford was found. It turned out that Anderson’s main source was an Army communications specialist who disagreed with administration policy.
Nixon got the details on December 21, 1971. Nixon closed the liason office and had Radford reassigned and kept under surveillance. Admiral Wealander refused to sign a confession, perhaps because it would have admitted to political spying. He did agree to permit Ehrlciham to tape his confession. Moorer was not punished and returned documents to Haig. He was then reappointed chairman of tue Joint Chiefs. Though confessing, he tried to shift most of the blame toward the yeoman. He hinted that Haig must have understood what was going on, but Ehrlichman only came to see Haig’s likely role later. When Kissinger learned what had occurred, he fired Admiral Wealand and shut down the liason office. He unsuccessfully demanded Moorer’s head
Whether the military had any role in bringing down Nixon cannot be established.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Arthur Herman Bremer and George C. Wallace
On May 12, 1972 Arthur Bremer, 21, shot George Wallace in Laurel, Maryland. Bremer had attended other Wallace rallies, but only this time did he get a clear shot. He can be found on films of those rallies. Wallace was paralyzed for life.
Some theorize that there could bave been Nixonian involvement in the shooting of George Wallace. The greatest objection to these theories is that Wallace was not running for president as an independent candidate. After his brother Gerald was investigated for channeling kickbacks to George, Governor Wallace decided to run in the Democratic primary. Nixon had a special IRS project to audit enemies, and part of it was the Alabama Project, in which 75 IRS agents worked at getting dirt on Wallace and his circle.
Nixon worried that Wallace would break his word and had Colson run an operation to take the U.S. Constitution Party off the California ballot. It had backed Wallace in 1968. There was a back channel for communications between Hubert Humphrey and Wallace, and Nixon must have known about it. Then the federal investigation against his brother were dropped. Wallace was still keeping the third party open, but there is no evidence he would deploy it. He had learned that Nixon played hardball. Despite the case for a conspiracy is outlined belief for those who are interested.
It is said that Bremer wanted to become famous by shooting someone of importance. He began a diary in March, 1972 and wrote that he planned to assassinate either Richard Nixon or Wallace. There was no evidence Bremer stalked the president, except once in Ottawa. A second Bremer diary turned up in 1980. Gore Vidal, who had studied the novels of E. Howard Hunt ventured the guess that the diaries were written by Hunt.
It is said that Bremer must have financed his travels and car purchase with $1611 he had saved. This included stays in the Waldorf Astoria and two other top hotels, a plane trip from Milwaukee to New York, a helicopter trip, and renting of a limo. He purchased three guns, a tape recorder, a police radio, and binoculars. He made at least one massage parlor visit. The F.B.I. seized the Waldorf’s recore of his stay and told personnel there not to talk about what Bremer spent there.When arrested, he had less than $2. Bremer told his brother he had been paid by accomplaces to shoot Wallace. $10,000 was found in the floor boards of the Bremer house.
Witnesses commented Bremer seemed to be in a fog of somesort, he had a’spine-tingling" smirk,27 or’silly grin “ In November, a policeman found him pulled over in a no parking zone in Fox Point, an upscale Milwaukee suburb. Bremer seemed incoherent as though he was on drugs of some sort. There were bullets on the car seat. Bremer had a hypnoptist friend named Michael Cullen.
His .38 caliber gun had five bullets, and four bullets actually hit actually hit Wallace that day. The doctors hypothesized that possible a fifth bullet hit Wallace as well. Three other people suffered wounds. At the very least, seven shots were fired, assuming two somehow did double duty. The New York Times noted that four people suffered at a minimum seven separate entry woulds though five shots were fired. A bullet was removed from a woman and another from a secret service agent. The gun found there did not bear Bremer’s prints, and several of the bullets could not be linked conclusively to the gun. CBS footage showed him with a gun, but he was not wearing gloves. The bullet taken from the agent’s jaw was not damaged though police spokesmen said the bullets were all crushed. The gun itself was picked up off the pavement by an agent and not placed in evidence until 9 P.M.
When Nixon learned of the shooting, he instructed Chuck Colson to find a way to blame the McGovern campaign for the shooting. Nixon added, “Wouldn’t it be great if they found left-wing propaganda in that apartment… Too bad we couldn’t get somebody there to plant it.” Nixon said Colson was lying, but these remarks were taped. Of course, left wing and right wing propaganda was found in Bremer’s apartment. The next day Bob Woodward and the Detroit News carried stories that Bremer was a left-winger. Woodward had a way of breaking important stories. It is true that he worked Very hard and lived five minutes away from the Washington Post so that he could log a lot of time there. He came from a Republican family and served 5 years in the Navy as a communications officer and had a top secret clearance.
Aboard the Wright, he served under Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, who would later be involved in the Pentagon ring that was spying on the Nixon White House. In Washington, Woodward was on the staff of Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was also involved with that ring. The evidence is clear that Lt. Robert Woodward gave top secret briefings to ranking brass and the White House and National Security Council personnel, including Alexander Haig. He also took top secret documents to General Alexander Haig, then working for Henry Kissinger. For some reason, Woodward has repeatedly deined the Haig connection. At the time, he supecised an office of 30 navy signals people who handled very secret communications channels, and he also advised Admiral Moorer. Some have assumed that he was working for the Office of Naval Inteligence, but he denies this and the claim that he gave briefings or delivered materials to the White House. However, journalists have come up with audiotape interviews that dispute his last denial.
As soon as Nixon was told of the Wallace shooting, he had the F.B.I. take control of the case. The president was preoccupied with the matter for days, initially demanding reports every 30 minutes.
It was odd that the Secret Service broke into Bremers apartment and removed items. The F.B.I. was surprised to find them there and almost fired on them. There was an 80 minute period when the apartment was unsealed. Some reporters entered and took some items. Among them were people from Transcontinental International Press Services., an agency of the Church of Scientology’s extremist wing, the Guardians. Someone could also have planted the ACLU and Black Panther literature that was found there later. An ACLU attorney was there and claimed he saw womeone with a press pass planting Black Panther and Angela Davis material.
In May, 1974, Martha Mitchell visited Wallace and said that her husband said that Charles Colson had met Bremer four days before the shooting. We know from the Nixon tapes that Colson ran numerous 20 black bag projects out of Boston. He said to Nixon, "I did things out of Boston," “15 or 20 black projects." "We did some blackmail and... my God, uh, uh, uh, I'll go to my grave before I ever disclose it." In The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, Anthony Summers mentions a William Gilday who said Nixon people recruited him in Boston to carry out various schemes including murder. Among the people to be killed were Senator Edward Kennedy and Governor George Wallace. Nixon may have been in an unusual position to recruit c riminals for his schemes.
According to Mrs. Mitchell, ''Nixon is involved with the Mafia. The Mafia was involved in his election.'' The comment, of course, was dismissed as the raving of a drunk. But this writer has learned that alcohol loosens tongues more ofteh than it prompts people to lie. Charles Colson has said that the mob got "their hooks into Nixon early” and that it owned Nixon intimate Charles Beebe Rebozo. One of Nixon’s earliest advisors was Murray Chotiner, who often defended mobsters. In 1968, Murray won Nixon the support of Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, and Mickey Cohen of Los Angeles. Cohen had been helping Nixon since 1946 when he donated $5000 and gave Nixon’s campaign office space. In 1950, he donated $75,000. Cohen said people back East told him to donate, meaning Frank Costello and Myer Lansky. Beebe Rebozo, Nixon’s close friend, was a partner of Lansky in his Hotel Nacional in Havana. In the 1950s, Nixon and Rebozo gambled in Havana and Rebozo covered the vice-president’s losses. The two also made real estate investments together. Through Rebozo, Nixon met other mobsters.
Bill Bonanno, former consiglieore for Joe Bonnanno said Nixon would ''would never have gotten anywhere'' without mob help and added that Nixon worked for years with Florida’s Santos Trafficante's in casino licensing, real estate, and anti-Communist activities. In 1960, the New Jersey and Florida mobs gave the Nixon campaign $500,000. As president, Nixon stopped mob wiretapped and intervened in different ways to help 20 mob figures. Chief of Staff Alexander Haig worried about Nixon’s ties to sinister elements and ordered an investigation through the Army’s Criminal Investigative Unit.
Wallace then had his own investigation and told Jack Nelson that Bremer had been seen with a man who looked like G. Gordon Liddy on a Lake Michigan ferry. The governor said he thought he saw Liddy standing behind Bremer. The bureau advised the Wallace family to drop the matter. George Wallace, Jr. gave an interview to the Montgomery Advertiser on December 13, 1992 in which he said someone close to Nixon was connected to the shooting. We know that Nixon on May 20, 1972, Nixon called Anthony Provenzano's top guy, Joseph Trerotola, an expert money launderer. We do not know about what they said.
Richard E. Sprague turned up some evidence that Donald Segretti and Dennis Salvatore Cossini passed some money to Bremer, and others have claimed that Bernard Barker, one of the Watergate burglars, actually passed the money to Bremer. Cossini was a C.I.A. agent, posing as a Marquette journalism student, used to infiltrate student groups, and was linked by tim Heinam, a Marquette student, to Bremer. After the shooting, Cossini headed to Toronto, where he was found dead of a drug overdose or “hot shot.” He was not known to use drugs.
Film producer Cibacuyo Aguay Banar( a.k.a. "Ciba, who interviewed Wallace, said that burglar Frank Sturgis was Bremer’s control officer on the road and that the two of them stayed at the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa when Nixon was there. Ciba claims the money for Bremer came from Robert Vesco’s drug trade money and was routed in part through Congressman William O. Mills of Maryland.
Bremer had a reputation of being very odd, and prisonerofficials later said he was know for talking to Coke machines and inaminate objects. His behavior was often sisAssociated with behavior and his movements could be robotic. There was a quick five day trial in which his lawyer said it is likely Bremer did not even know he shot Wallace. Bremer maintained his silence on the matter from that day up to now. He is now free.
Some theorize that there could bave been Nixonian involvement in the shooting of George Wallace. The greatest objection to these theories is that Wallace was not running for president as an independent candidate. After his brother Gerald was investigated for channeling kickbacks to George, Governor Wallace decided to run in the Democratic primary. Nixon had a special IRS project to audit enemies, and part of it was the Alabama Project, in which 75 IRS agents worked at getting dirt on Wallace and his circle.
Nixon worried that Wallace would break his word and had Colson run an operation to take the U.S. Constitution Party off the California ballot. It had backed Wallace in 1968. There was a back channel for communications between Hubert Humphrey and Wallace, and Nixon must have known about it. Then the federal investigation against his brother were dropped. Wallace was still keeping the third party open, but there is no evidence he would deploy it. He had learned that Nixon played hardball. Despite the case for a conspiracy is outlined belief for those who are interested.
It is said that Bremer wanted to become famous by shooting someone of importance. He began a diary in March, 1972 and wrote that he planned to assassinate either Richard Nixon or Wallace. There was no evidence Bremer stalked the president, except once in Ottawa. A second Bremer diary turned up in 1980. Gore Vidal, who had studied the novels of E. Howard Hunt ventured the guess that the diaries were written by Hunt.
It is said that Bremer must have financed his travels and car purchase with $1611 he had saved. This included stays in the Waldorf Astoria and two other top hotels, a plane trip from Milwaukee to New York, a helicopter trip, and renting of a limo. He purchased three guns, a tape recorder, a police radio, and binoculars. He made at least one massage parlor visit. The F.B.I. seized the Waldorf’s recore of his stay and told personnel there not to talk about what Bremer spent there.When arrested, he had less than $2. Bremer told his brother he had been paid by accomplaces to shoot Wallace. $10,000 was found in the floor boards of the Bremer house.
Witnesses commented Bremer seemed to be in a fog of somesort, he had a’spine-tingling" smirk,27 or’silly grin “ In November, a policeman found him pulled over in a no parking zone in Fox Point, an upscale Milwaukee suburb. Bremer seemed incoherent as though he was on drugs of some sort. There were bullets on the car seat. Bremer had a hypnoptist friend named Michael Cullen.
His .38 caliber gun had five bullets, and four bullets actually hit actually hit Wallace that day. The doctors hypothesized that possible a fifth bullet hit Wallace as well. Three other people suffered wounds. At the very least, seven shots were fired, assuming two somehow did double duty. The New York Times noted that four people suffered at a minimum seven separate entry woulds though five shots were fired. A bullet was removed from a woman and another from a secret service agent. The gun found there did not bear Bremer’s prints, and several of the bullets could not be linked conclusively to the gun. CBS footage showed him with a gun, but he was not wearing gloves. The bullet taken from the agent’s jaw was not damaged though police spokesmen said the bullets were all crushed. The gun itself was picked up off the pavement by an agent and not placed in evidence until 9 P.M.
When Nixon learned of the shooting, he instructed Chuck Colson to find a way to blame the McGovern campaign for the shooting. Nixon added, “Wouldn’t it be great if they found left-wing propaganda in that apartment… Too bad we couldn’t get somebody there to plant it.” Nixon said Colson was lying, but these remarks were taped. Of course, left wing and right wing propaganda was found in Bremer’s apartment. The next day Bob Woodward and the Detroit News carried stories that Bremer was a left-winger. Woodward had a way of breaking important stories. It is true that he worked Very hard and lived five minutes away from the Washington Post so that he could log a lot of time there. He came from a Republican family and served 5 years in the Navy as a communications officer and had a top secret clearance.
Aboard the Wright, he served under Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, who would later be involved in the Pentagon ring that was spying on the Nixon White House. In Washington, Woodward was on the staff of Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was also involved with that ring. The evidence is clear that Lt. Robert Woodward gave top secret briefings to ranking brass and the White House and National Security Council personnel, including Alexander Haig. He also took top secret documents to General Alexander Haig, then working for Henry Kissinger. For some reason, Woodward has repeatedly deined the Haig connection. At the time, he supecised an office of 30 navy signals people who handled very secret communications channels, and he also advised Admiral Moorer. Some have assumed that he was working for the Office of Naval Inteligence, but he denies this and the claim that he gave briefings or delivered materials to the White House. However, journalists have come up with audiotape interviews that dispute his last denial.
As soon as Nixon was told of the Wallace shooting, he had the F.B.I. take control of the case. The president was preoccupied with the matter for days, initially demanding reports every 30 minutes.
It was odd that the Secret Service broke into Bremers apartment and removed items. The F.B.I. was surprised to find them there and almost fired on them. There was an 80 minute period when the apartment was unsealed. Some reporters entered and took some items. Among them were people from Transcontinental International Press Services., an agency of the Church of Scientology’s extremist wing, the Guardians. Someone could also have planted the ACLU and Black Panther literature that was found there later. An ACLU attorney was there and claimed he saw womeone with a press pass planting Black Panther and Angela Davis material.
In May, 1974, Martha Mitchell visited Wallace and said that her husband said that Charles Colson had met Bremer four days before the shooting. We know from the Nixon tapes that Colson ran numerous 20 black bag projects out of Boston. He said to Nixon, "I did things out of Boston," “15 or 20 black projects." "We did some blackmail and... my God, uh, uh, uh, I'll go to my grave before I ever disclose it." In The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, Anthony Summers mentions a William Gilday who said Nixon people recruited him in Boston to carry out various schemes including murder. Among the people to be killed were Senator Edward Kennedy and Governor George Wallace. Nixon may have been in an unusual position to recruit c riminals for his schemes.
According to Mrs. Mitchell, ''Nixon is involved with the Mafia. The Mafia was involved in his election.'' The comment, of course, was dismissed as the raving of a drunk. But this writer has learned that alcohol loosens tongues more ofteh than it prompts people to lie. Charles Colson has said that the mob got "their hooks into Nixon early” and that it owned Nixon intimate Charles Beebe Rebozo. One of Nixon’s earliest advisors was Murray Chotiner, who often defended mobsters. In 1968, Murray won Nixon the support of Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, and Mickey Cohen of Los Angeles. Cohen had been helping Nixon since 1946 when he donated $5000 and gave Nixon’s campaign office space. In 1950, he donated $75,000. Cohen said people back East told him to donate, meaning Frank Costello and Myer Lansky. Beebe Rebozo, Nixon’s close friend, was a partner of Lansky in his Hotel Nacional in Havana. In the 1950s, Nixon and Rebozo gambled in Havana and Rebozo covered the vice-president’s losses. The two also made real estate investments together. Through Rebozo, Nixon met other mobsters.
Bill Bonanno, former consiglieore for Joe Bonnanno said Nixon would ''would never have gotten anywhere'' without mob help and added that Nixon worked for years with Florida’s Santos Trafficante's in casino licensing, real estate, and anti-Communist activities. In 1960, the New Jersey and Florida mobs gave the Nixon campaign $500,000. As president, Nixon stopped mob wiretapped and intervened in different ways to help 20 mob figures. Chief of Staff Alexander Haig worried about Nixon’s ties to sinister elements and ordered an investigation through the Army’s Criminal Investigative Unit.
Wallace then had his own investigation and told Jack Nelson that Bremer had been seen with a man who looked like G. Gordon Liddy on a Lake Michigan ferry. The governor said he thought he saw Liddy standing behind Bremer. The bureau advised the Wallace family to drop the matter. George Wallace, Jr. gave an interview to the Montgomery Advertiser on December 13, 1992 in which he said someone close to Nixon was connected to the shooting. We know that Nixon on May 20, 1972, Nixon called Anthony Provenzano's top guy, Joseph Trerotola, an expert money launderer. We do not know about what they said.
Richard E. Sprague turned up some evidence that Donald Segretti and Dennis Salvatore Cossini passed some money to Bremer, and others have claimed that Bernard Barker, one of the Watergate burglars, actually passed the money to Bremer. Cossini was a C.I.A. agent, posing as a Marquette journalism student, used to infiltrate student groups, and was linked by tim Heinam, a Marquette student, to Bremer. After the shooting, Cossini headed to Toronto, where he was found dead of a drug overdose or “hot shot.” He was not known to use drugs.
Film producer Cibacuyo Aguay Banar( a.k.a. "Ciba, who interviewed Wallace, said that burglar Frank Sturgis was Bremer’s control officer on the road and that the two of them stayed at the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa when Nixon was there. Ciba claims the money for Bremer came from Robert Vesco’s drug trade money and was routed in part through Congressman William O. Mills of Maryland.
Bremer had a reputation of being very odd, and prisonerofficials later said he was know for talking to Coke machines and inaminate objects. His behavior was often sisAssociated with behavior and his movements could be robotic. There was a quick five day trial in which his lawyer said it is likely Bremer did not even know he shot Wallace. Bremer maintained his silence on the matter from that day up to now. He is now free.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Chappaquiddick, 1969
The sad news of Senator Kennedy’s deadly illness brought to mind the decades he courageously stuck by his guns, bucking a national conservative tide, seeking justice and to improve the lives of his fellow citizens. He was known for a great sense of humor and compassion for the sufferings of others. For example, he often sat by the bedside of Senator Phil Hart and performed many kindnesses for columnist Mary Mc Grory, when a stroke felled her and made it difficult to speak.
Yet, it is likely that he will be remembered for the incident at Chappaquiddick, in which Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, drowned in an accident most blame on Kennedy. Witnesses said she did not drink that night or at other times, yet she had a high blood alcohol level. There was a puncture mark on the back of her neck, and it is possible to inject ethanol that way. Ms. Kopechne was a self described “novena Catholic,” who did not like bad language or sexual impropriety. She described as an idealist and serious. She was close to being engaged to a foreign service officer. She was one of the “boiler room girls” who had worked in the Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign. They were all well-educated and professional people of good character, not mere secretaries looking for a good time. Mary Jo was simply attending a reunion of campaign friends.
The public perception of that incident is based largely on the assumption that Kennedy was a very different man. It could be that we do not have the full story of the event that was to be forever linked with his name.
Days before the announcement of Kennedy’s illness, Christopher Shays, an allegedly moderate Republican Representative from Connecticut led Republicans in savage denun C.I.A.tions of Kennedy for his conduct back in 1969, when a young woman died in Kennedy’s submerged automobile. The Sharon( PA)Herald the Salem (Oregon) News and many conservative blogs, led by Matt Drudge, have brought up the Chappaquiddick controversy to discredit Ted Kennedy’s efforts to get behind the loss of some torture tapes. Of course, the idea was that somehow torture, water-boarding, and destroying evidence of it are on a par with possibly covering up evidence of driving while drunk, which resulted in an unfortunate death. Conservatives assume heavy drinking and sexual involvement without a shred of evidence about either. Kennedy admits to letting 9 hours elapse before reporting the accident, which would place the blame for a death on him. However, very little of that story makes a lot of sense.
A writer named Bob Cutler put together a scenario of what could have happened. Here it is in the words of Richard Sprague ( in bold print).
The Group hired several men and at least one woman to be at Chappaquiddick during the weekend of the yacht race and the planned party on the island. They ambushed Ted and Mary Jo after they left the cottage and knocked Ted out with blows to his head and body. They took the unconscious or semi-conscious Kennedy to Martha's Vineyard and deposited him in his hotel room. Another group took Mary Jo to the bridge in Ted's car, force fed her with a knock out potion of alcoholic beverage, placed her in the back seat, and caused the car to accelerate off the side of the bridge into the water.
They broke the windows on one side of the car to insure the entry of water; then they watched the car until they were sure Mary Jo would not escape.
Mary Jo actually regained consciousness and pushed her way to the top of the car (which was actually the bottom of the car -- it had landed on its roof) and died from asphyxiation. The group with Teddy revived him early in the morning and let him know he had a problem. Possibly they told him that Mary Jo had been kidnapped. They told him his children would be killed if he told anyone what had happened and that he would hear from them. On Chappaquiddick, the other group made contact with Markham and Gargan, Ted's cousin and lawyer. They told both men that Mary Jo was at the bottom of the river and that Ted would have to make up a story about it, not revealing the existence of the group. One of the men resembled Ted and his voice sounded something like Ted's. Markham and Gargan were instructed to go the the Vineyard on the morning ferry, tell Ted where Mary Jo was, and come back to the island to wait for a phone call at a pay station near the ferry on the Chappaquiddick side.
The two men did as they were told and Ted found out what had happened to Mary Jo that morning. The three men returned to the pay phone and received their instructions to concoct a story about the "accident" and to report it to the police. The threat against Ted's children was repeated at that time.
Ted, Markham and Gargan went right away to police chief Arena's office on the Vineyard where Ted reported the so-called "accident." Almost at the same time scuba diver John Farror was pulling Mary Jo out of the water, since two boys who had gone fishing earlier that morning had spotted the car and reported it.
Ted called together a small coterie of friends and advisors including family lawyer Burke Marshall, Robert MacNamara, Ted Sorenson, and others. They met on Squaw Island near the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport for three days. At the end of that time they had manufactured the story which Ted told on TV, and later at the inquest. Bob Cutler calls the story, "the shroud." Even the most cursory examination of the story shows it was full of holes and an impossible explanation of what happened. Ted's claim that he made the wrong turn down the dirt road toward the bridge by mistake is an obvious lie. His claim that he swam the channel back to Martha's Vineyard is not believable. His description of how he got out of the car under water and then dove down to try to rescue Mary Jo is impossible. Markham and Gargan's claims that they kept diving after Mary Jo are also unbelievable.
Leaving aside talk of an unidentified “group,” Cutler’s still theory makes a lot more sense than Ted Kennedy’s first statement, which follows: ( again in bold print)
On July 18, 1969, at approximately 11.15 on Chappaquiddick Island, Martha’s Vineyard, I was driving my car on Main Street on my way to get the ferry back to Edgartown.
I was unfamiliar with the road and turned onto Dyke Road instead of bearing left on Main Street. After proceeding for approximately a half mile on Dyke Road I descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge. The car went off the side of the bridge.
There was one passenger with me, Miss Kopechne, a former secretary of my brother Robert Kennedy. The car turned over and sank into the water and landed with the roof resting on the bottom. I attempted to open the door and window of the car but have no recollection of how I got out of the car. I came to the surface and then repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt. I was exhausted and in a state of shock. I recall walking back to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage and I climbed into the back seat. I then asked for someone to bring me back to Edgartown. I remember walking around for a period of time and then going back to my hotel room. When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.
It took Kennedy and his circle three days to concoct a more complete explanation of what happened. They had to deal with the fact that young woman died in the back of his car after running out of air. Ted’s pregnant wife Joan was at Martha’s Vineyard, and the girl had been at a party that Kennedy attended.
It was better to let people make assumptions about alcohol than illicit sex. Oddly, the Kennedys paid to have tests conducted to see if the car would have come off the dock and into the water in the manner Ted said it did. They should have looked into the likelihood of his getting out of a submerged car. They must not have really known what happened. It is doubtful if anything the Kennedy circle said after the official story came out can be believed. Their comments all supported a very implausible story.
He said he got out of the car, which was underwater and then started diving into Poucha Pond to save Mary Jo. Did he open the car door, exit, and then close it? This might happen in the movies, but not in real life. and then close it, In The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, Jack Olsen argues that the water pressure would have been too great for Kennedy to open the car door. A window was broken, admitting water, but only Harry Hudini could have gotten out through it.
After eight attempts to rescue her, Kennedy went back to the cottage, got help, and returned to the diving.
The wounds above his ear and the large bump on the top of his head indicate he was probably knocked unconscious. But how and where? Police saw the broken windshield and wondered why Kennedy’s head and face did not reflect the level of damage Associated with a wreck of that scale. . His face bore no marks.
Markings on the bridge suggest the car was at rest and then somehow greatly accelerated. It had to have been in the air for a distance before landing in the water. There was a rope attached to a stick that could have been attached to the rear-view mirror, which was askew and hanging only by one screw.
The Kennedy story does not match the testimony of Deputy Sheriff Christopher Look and three others, that two women were with Kennedy that night at 12:45 . Of course, the senator was completely familiar with those roads, but there had to be an explanation for where the car was found.
There are some other odd things about the official story. All the witnesses who knew Mary Jo said she did not drink at all and that she did not drink that night. Yet there was alcohol in her blood stream.
It is just assumed Kennedy was smashed, but no witness said this was the case. His chauffeur John Crimmins was present and could have driven Kennedy. If he wanted sex with Mary Jo, he would have stayed at the Lawrence cottage. Why did he not have Crimmins drive and Mary J to the hotel?
.
Senator Kennedy said he swam a complicated route from Chappaquiddick back to the inn on Martha’s Vinyard. Professional swimmers have not been able to duplicate swimming that route at the same time against and against the same tides. People assume he swam it dressed, but if it happened at all, he had to be in his shorts. But Kennedy, exhausted from the night’s exertions, claimed he was able to do this. No one saw an all wet Kennedy when he reached the Edgartown inn.
Even at the time, in 1969, many noted that he did not behave at the hotel the next morning as though he knew that Mary Jo was dead or that anything was wrong. It is pretty clear that he did not know until former U.S. Attorney Paul Markham and Joe Gargan arrived and told him about the tragedy. An elderly couple saw Kennedy coming into the dining room. He was relaxed and completely at ease. When the two men spoke to him he seemed to be completely shocked and upset.
The three men then made the trip over to Chappquiddick to use the payphone. . This makes no sense unless they went there to receive a call, not make one. There were pay phones at the hotel.
Some wonder about the June, 1964 airplane crash in western Massachusetts in which only Edward Kennedy emerged a survivor. He was laid up for some time with serious injuries. Teddy came out of that alive. If anyone wanted to harm Ted Kennedy it was either to prevent him from running for president or, more likely, to prevent him from using the power of that office to examine the deaths of his brothers. After the airplane crash and the shooting of JFK and RFK, killing Ted Kennedy would not do. Gullible as the public is, too many would think some sort of plot was afoot. Kennedy had to be neutralized by some sort of scandal that would damage any run for White House. Kennedy was discredited in connection with the death of Mary Joe Kopechne, 29, on 18 July 1969
One witness has said that all through 1969 James McCord, a C.I.A. agent, and one Albert Peterson followed Kennedy throughout 1969. The witness added that Peterson was an alias for E. Howard Hunt. Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt were on Martha’s Vineyard at the time for a Regatta. Both had C.I.A. connections and would be among the Watergate burglars later. Hunt explained to Watergate investigators that he was there to gather dirt on Kennedy but only admitted to getting there after the accident. He came to see some unknown person and admitted to having a disguise and a voice alteration device. Charles Colson later obtained the disguise from the C.I.A. and Hunt used them at the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and at the break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate. Hunt’s son St. John said his father spoke with approval of the murders of JFK and RFK and wanted to finish the job on Ted Kennedy. David Morales, a C.I.A. hit man, was photographed at the Ambassador Hotel.
Richard Milhouse Nixon also had an operative there that day, but the president may not have known about it at the time. Nixon had established Operation Sandwedge to keep track of Kennedy and other enemies. Tony Ulasewicz, a skilled investigator in Nixon’s employ, admits being there the morning after the accident. He said he was sent there to dig up dirt on Kennedy. However, he was seen there that morning before news of the accident was public. In a conversation between John Dean and President Nixon, Dean refers to him without mentioning him by name mentions that he was there again in 1971, both times posing as a reporter and steering other reporters to look into matters that would damage Kennedy. However, it appears he was poking around there for about two years and may have come up with something that showed Kennedy had been set up. Dean said to Nixon, “If Kennedy knew the bear trap he was walking into –” It sounds as though they could prove the White House had nothing to do with the accident, but perhaps they knew who did. If Nixon had an even more damaging story about Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, he would have used it. Ulasewicz’s salary was financed with money left over from the 1968 convention. He was controlled by John Caulfield, who first answered to John Ehrlichman and then to John Dean.
The Boston office of the F.B.I. investigated the incident on orders from the White House. The agency had earlier put out stories that Ted Kennedy had cheated on an exam and was a poor student.
Finally, there is the remote possibility that Mary Jo’s death had something to do with dealing with two birds with one stone or event. Mary Jo shared an apartment with Nancy Carole Tyler, a real looker who worked for Bobby Baker, who owned the building and had parties there while the girls occupied it. . She later expressed frustration that Baker did not leave his wife to marry her. Tyler died in a 1965 plane crash. At one point she refused to talk to investigators about Bobby Baker but then had changed her mind. She knew a great deal about Baker and corrupt deals in the Senate and could have shared information with Mary J. Kopechne worked for Senator George Smathers, who was close to LBJ and Baker. Smathers claimed to be a Kennedy friend, but he put out the story about the Kennedy brothers involvement with Marilyn Monroe. She became RFK’s secretary after the assassination of JFK. These two girls knew about JFK’s efforts to dump LBJ and leaked the story. After RFK’s death, Mary Jo allegedly had the job of packing Bobby’s files and then worked for a Kennedy-connected consulting firm.
It is said that Edward Kennedy does not express an interest in getting behind the official accounts of his brothers’ deaths and that he urges friends not to probe these questions. What happened at Chappaquiddick will never be known. He may have learned something then that convinced him it was best to leave these matters alone. Christian Cafarakis, Jackie’s butler in Athens, wrote in 1972 that Aristotle Onassis hired a New York firm to look into the JFK assassination. It gave Jackie the names of the four assassins and told who was behind it. Jackie was dissuaded from turning over the report to LBJ by threats to the lives of members of her family.
There is no way to know what happened that night at Chappaquiddick. We do know that John Dean said to Nixon in 1973, "If Teddy knew the bear trap he was walking into at Chappaquiddick. . . ."[5]Those who have long disliked Senator Edward Kennedy will assume the worst and think that he somehow got out of that car and went back to the inn without another thought about that young woman. Others may see the courageous, compassionate man he has proven himself to be and give him the benefit of the doubt or even analyze the evidence more closely and conclude that Bob Cutler was not that far wrong.
Yet, it is likely that he will be remembered for the incident at Chappaquiddick, in which Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, drowned in an accident most blame on Kennedy. Witnesses said she did not drink that night or at other times, yet she had a high blood alcohol level. There was a puncture mark on the back of her neck, and it is possible to inject ethanol that way. Ms. Kopechne was a self described “novena Catholic,” who did not like bad language or sexual impropriety. She described as an idealist and serious. She was close to being engaged to a foreign service officer. She was one of the “boiler room girls” who had worked in the Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign. They were all well-educated and professional people of good character, not mere secretaries looking for a good time. Mary Jo was simply attending a reunion of campaign friends.
The public perception of that incident is based largely on the assumption that Kennedy was a very different man. It could be that we do not have the full story of the event that was to be forever linked with his name.
Days before the announcement of Kennedy’s illness, Christopher Shays, an allegedly moderate Republican Representative from Connecticut led Republicans in savage denun C.I.A.tions of Kennedy for his conduct back in 1969, when a young woman died in Kennedy’s submerged automobile. The Sharon( PA)Herald the Salem (Oregon) News and many conservative blogs, led by Matt Drudge, have brought up the Chappaquiddick controversy to discredit Ted Kennedy’s efforts to get behind the loss of some torture tapes. Of course, the idea was that somehow torture, water-boarding, and destroying evidence of it are on a par with possibly covering up evidence of driving while drunk, which resulted in an unfortunate death. Conservatives assume heavy drinking and sexual involvement without a shred of evidence about either. Kennedy admits to letting 9 hours elapse before reporting the accident, which would place the blame for a death on him. However, very little of that story makes a lot of sense.
A writer named Bob Cutler put together a scenario of what could have happened. Here it is in the words of Richard Sprague ( in bold print).
The Group hired several men and at least one woman to be at Chappaquiddick during the weekend of the yacht race and the planned party on the island. They ambushed Ted and Mary Jo after they left the cottage and knocked Ted out with blows to his head and body. They took the unconscious or semi-conscious Kennedy to Martha's Vineyard and deposited him in his hotel room. Another group took Mary Jo to the bridge in Ted's car, force fed her with a knock out potion of alcoholic beverage, placed her in the back seat, and caused the car to accelerate off the side of the bridge into the water.
They broke the windows on one side of the car to insure the entry of water; then they watched the car until they were sure Mary Jo would not escape.
Mary Jo actually regained consciousness and pushed her way to the top of the car (which was actually the bottom of the car -- it had landed on its roof) and died from asphyxiation. The group with Teddy revived him early in the morning and let him know he had a problem. Possibly they told him that Mary Jo had been kidnapped. They told him his children would be killed if he told anyone what had happened and that he would hear from them. On Chappaquiddick, the other group made contact with Markham and Gargan, Ted's cousin and lawyer. They told both men that Mary Jo was at the bottom of the river and that Ted would have to make up a story about it, not revealing the existence of the group. One of the men resembled Ted and his voice sounded something like Ted's. Markham and Gargan were instructed to go the the Vineyard on the morning ferry, tell Ted where Mary Jo was, and come back to the island to wait for a phone call at a pay station near the ferry on the Chappaquiddick side.
The two men did as they were told and Ted found out what had happened to Mary Jo that morning. The three men returned to the pay phone and received their instructions to concoct a story about the "accident" and to report it to the police. The threat against Ted's children was repeated at that time.
Ted, Markham and Gargan went right away to police chief Arena's office on the Vineyard where Ted reported the so-called "accident." Almost at the same time scuba diver John Farror was pulling Mary Jo out of the water, since two boys who had gone fishing earlier that morning had spotted the car and reported it.
Ted called together a small coterie of friends and advisors including family lawyer Burke Marshall, Robert MacNamara, Ted Sorenson, and others. They met on Squaw Island near the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport for three days. At the end of that time they had manufactured the story which Ted told on TV, and later at the inquest. Bob Cutler calls the story, "the shroud." Even the most cursory examination of the story shows it was full of holes and an impossible explanation of what happened. Ted's claim that he made the wrong turn down the dirt road toward the bridge by mistake is an obvious lie. His claim that he swam the channel back to Martha's Vineyard is not believable. His description of how he got out of the car under water and then dove down to try to rescue Mary Jo is impossible. Markham and Gargan's claims that they kept diving after Mary Jo are also unbelievable.
Leaving aside talk of an unidentified “group,” Cutler’s still theory makes a lot more sense than Ted Kennedy’s first statement, which follows: ( again in bold print)
On July 18, 1969, at approximately 11.15 on Chappaquiddick Island, Martha’s Vineyard, I was driving my car on Main Street on my way to get the ferry back to Edgartown.
I was unfamiliar with the road and turned onto Dyke Road instead of bearing left on Main Street. After proceeding for approximately a half mile on Dyke Road I descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge. The car went off the side of the bridge.
There was one passenger with me, Miss Kopechne, a former secretary of my brother Robert Kennedy. The car turned over and sank into the water and landed with the roof resting on the bottom. I attempted to open the door and window of the car but have no recollection of how I got out of the car. I came to the surface and then repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt. I was exhausted and in a state of shock. I recall walking back to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage and I climbed into the back seat. I then asked for someone to bring me back to Edgartown. I remember walking around for a period of time and then going back to my hotel room. When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.
It took Kennedy and his circle three days to concoct a more complete explanation of what happened. They had to deal with the fact that young woman died in the back of his car after running out of air. Ted’s pregnant wife Joan was at Martha’s Vineyard, and the girl had been at a party that Kennedy attended.
It was better to let people make assumptions about alcohol than illicit sex. Oddly, the Kennedys paid to have tests conducted to see if the car would have come off the dock and into the water in the manner Ted said it did. They should have looked into the likelihood of his getting out of a submerged car. They must not have really known what happened. It is doubtful if anything the Kennedy circle said after the official story came out can be believed. Their comments all supported a very implausible story.
He said he got out of the car, which was underwater and then started diving into Poucha Pond to save Mary Jo. Did he open the car door, exit, and then close it? This might happen in the movies, but not in real life. and then close it, In The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, Jack Olsen argues that the water pressure would have been too great for Kennedy to open the car door. A window was broken, admitting water, but only Harry Hudini could have gotten out through it.
After eight attempts to rescue her, Kennedy went back to the cottage, got help, and returned to the diving.
The wounds above his ear and the large bump on the top of his head indicate he was probably knocked unconscious. But how and where? Police saw the broken windshield and wondered why Kennedy’s head and face did not reflect the level of damage Associated with a wreck of that scale. . His face bore no marks.
Markings on the bridge suggest the car was at rest and then somehow greatly accelerated. It had to have been in the air for a distance before landing in the water. There was a rope attached to a stick that could have been attached to the rear-view mirror, which was askew and hanging only by one screw.
The Kennedy story does not match the testimony of Deputy Sheriff Christopher Look and three others, that two women were with Kennedy that night at 12:45 . Of course, the senator was completely familiar with those roads, but there had to be an explanation for where the car was found.
There are some other odd things about the official story. All the witnesses who knew Mary Jo said she did not drink at all and that she did not drink that night. Yet there was alcohol in her blood stream.
It is just assumed Kennedy was smashed, but no witness said this was the case. His chauffeur John Crimmins was present and could have driven Kennedy. If he wanted sex with Mary Jo, he would have stayed at the Lawrence cottage. Why did he not have Crimmins drive and Mary J to the hotel?
.
Senator Kennedy said he swam a complicated route from Chappaquiddick back to the inn on Martha’s Vinyard. Professional swimmers have not been able to duplicate swimming that route at the same time against and against the same tides. People assume he swam it dressed, but if it happened at all, he had to be in his shorts. But Kennedy, exhausted from the night’s exertions, claimed he was able to do this. No one saw an all wet Kennedy when he reached the Edgartown inn.
Even at the time, in 1969, many noted that he did not behave at the hotel the next morning as though he knew that Mary Jo was dead or that anything was wrong. It is pretty clear that he did not know until former U.S. Attorney Paul Markham and Joe Gargan arrived and told him about the tragedy. An elderly couple saw Kennedy coming into the dining room. He was relaxed and completely at ease. When the two men spoke to him he seemed to be completely shocked and upset.
The three men then made the trip over to Chappquiddick to use the payphone. . This makes no sense unless they went there to receive a call, not make one. There were pay phones at the hotel.
Some wonder about the June, 1964 airplane crash in western Massachusetts in which only Edward Kennedy emerged a survivor. He was laid up for some time with serious injuries. Teddy came out of that alive. If anyone wanted to harm Ted Kennedy it was either to prevent him from running for president or, more likely, to prevent him from using the power of that office to examine the deaths of his brothers. After the airplane crash and the shooting of JFK and RFK, killing Ted Kennedy would not do. Gullible as the public is, too many would think some sort of plot was afoot. Kennedy had to be neutralized by some sort of scandal that would damage any run for White House. Kennedy was discredited in connection with the death of Mary Joe Kopechne, 29, on 18 July 1969
One witness has said that all through 1969 James McCord, a C.I.A. agent, and one Albert Peterson followed Kennedy throughout 1969. The witness added that Peterson was an alias for E. Howard Hunt. Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt were on Martha’s Vineyard at the time for a Regatta. Both had C.I.A. connections and would be among the Watergate burglars later. Hunt explained to Watergate investigators that he was there to gather dirt on Kennedy but only admitted to getting there after the accident. He came to see some unknown person and admitted to having a disguise and a voice alteration device. Charles Colson later obtained the disguise from the C.I.A. and Hunt used them at the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and at the break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate. Hunt’s son St. John said his father spoke with approval of the murders of JFK and RFK and wanted to finish the job on Ted Kennedy. David Morales, a C.I.A. hit man, was photographed at the Ambassador Hotel.
Richard Milhouse Nixon also had an operative there that day, but the president may not have known about it at the time. Nixon had established Operation Sandwedge to keep track of Kennedy and other enemies. Tony Ulasewicz, a skilled investigator in Nixon’s employ, admits being there the morning after the accident. He said he was sent there to dig up dirt on Kennedy. However, he was seen there that morning before news of the accident was public. In a conversation between John Dean and President Nixon, Dean refers to him without mentioning him by name mentions that he was there again in 1971, both times posing as a reporter and steering other reporters to look into matters that would damage Kennedy. However, it appears he was poking around there for about two years and may have come up with something that showed Kennedy had been set up. Dean said to Nixon, “If Kennedy knew the bear trap he was walking into –” It sounds as though they could prove the White House had nothing to do with the accident, but perhaps they knew who did. If Nixon had an even more damaging story about Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, he would have used it. Ulasewicz’s salary was financed with money left over from the 1968 convention. He was controlled by John Caulfield, who first answered to John Ehrlichman and then to John Dean.
The Boston office of the F.B.I. investigated the incident on orders from the White House. The agency had earlier put out stories that Ted Kennedy had cheated on an exam and was a poor student.
Finally, there is the remote possibility that Mary Jo’s death had something to do with dealing with two birds with one stone or event. Mary Jo shared an apartment with Nancy Carole Tyler, a real looker who worked for Bobby Baker, who owned the building and had parties there while the girls occupied it. . She later expressed frustration that Baker did not leave his wife to marry her. Tyler died in a 1965 plane crash. At one point she refused to talk to investigators about Bobby Baker but then had changed her mind. She knew a great deal about Baker and corrupt deals in the Senate and could have shared information with Mary J. Kopechne worked for Senator George Smathers, who was close to LBJ and Baker. Smathers claimed to be a Kennedy friend, but he put out the story about the Kennedy brothers involvement with Marilyn Monroe. She became RFK’s secretary after the assassination of JFK. These two girls knew about JFK’s efforts to dump LBJ and leaked the story. After RFK’s death, Mary Jo allegedly had the job of packing Bobby’s files and then worked for a Kennedy-connected consulting firm.
It is said that Edward Kennedy does not express an interest in getting behind the official accounts of his brothers’ deaths and that he urges friends not to probe these questions. What happened at Chappaquiddick will never be known. He may have learned something then that convinced him it was best to leave these matters alone. Christian Cafarakis, Jackie’s butler in Athens, wrote in 1972 that Aristotle Onassis hired a New York firm to look into the JFK assassination. It gave Jackie the names of the four assassins and told who was behind it. Jackie was dissuaded from turning over the report to LBJ by threats to the lives of members of her family.
There is no way to know what happened that night at Chappaquiddick. We do know that John Dean said to Nixon in 1973, "If Teddy knew the bear trap he was walking into at Chappaquiddick. . . ."[5]Those who have long disliked Senator Edward Kennedy will assume the worst and think that he somehow got out of that car and went back to the inn without another thought about that young woman. Others may see the courageous, compassionate man he has proven himself to be and give him the benefit of the doubt or even analyze the evidence more closely and conclude that Bob Cutler was not that far wrong.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Operation Condor
Operation Condor provides the background for Reagan policy in Central America in the 1980s. This term has been assigned to the cooperative efforts of Latin American dictators and/ or national militaries to gather intelligence of dissidents and often kill them. The Condor allies were Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. Condor's roots go back to President Dwight Eisenhower, who briefed John F. Kennedy on plans to rid Latin America of leftists and prepared the way for major US investments. These cooperative efforts were underway from the 1950s but seem to have taken a more organized form after their intelligence chiefs met in Caracas in September, 1973. The C.I.A. laid the groundwork by arranging meetings and urging intelligence officers to meet counterparts in other countries and to organize.
On September 11, 1973, the forces of General Augusto Pinochet, with much help from the C.I.A., overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende. The president and some of his aids died defending themselves; he had refused to permit a militia to be organized in his defense. Subsequent U.S. Senate hearings revealed that ITT also played a role in the coup. Potential opponents, numbering 13,500, of the new regime ere rounded up in two stadiums, where hundreds were killed. Brazilian soldiers were on hand to instruct colleagues on the most effective torture techniques.
Victor Jara, a legendary folk singer, had his hands broken so he could not play a guitar, and then was shot forty-four times. A roving death squad, under General Sergio Arellano Stark, was sent to northern prisons where other opponents had been gathered. The executions were called the Carnaval of Death. The Pinochet regime was to eventually imprison 80,000, and another 3,200 were disappeared. Still another 200,000 fled. The Chileans sometimes pushed mutilated bodies out of choppers over dry land. Pinochet also liked mass graves, to better terrify people. The terror was necessary in part so that the generals could carry out economic reforms with the assistance of scholars called the “Chicago Boys,” Chileans and Americans who had studied Milton Friedman’s ideas at the University of Chicago. Their plans concentrated wealth in the top 10% of society and reduced the standard of living for most other Chileans. State industries were privatized; the safety net was slashed; and economic regulations were greatly reduced. Chile because the first real laboratory for the testing of neoconservative economics. Pinochet was an active supporter of Operation Condor, and his participation led to the assassination of Allende’s close friend Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.
The C.I.A. and military promoted exchanges of information among the CONDOR states and made available its vast computer resources. The US, as in the case of Chile, would conduct economic warfare that would benefit the right wing forces in South America. There was never a threat that Communists would make headway there. The US wanted to remodel those societies and economies on the basis of Milton Friedman’s theories.
In 1974, the C.I.A. suggested to the Nixon administration that Condor activities be coordinated out of Miami. There is no way of knowing if this suggestion was followed. Argentine intelligence did establish a center in Florida for the laundering mof money and procurement of arms.
The military seized power in Uruguay in 1973; and the Argentine generals took over three years later. In Argentina, care was taken to avoid the public executions, but repression was equally effective. The Argentine rightists did engage in some public terror, just enough to keep people in line. For example police might board city busses and pull people off by their hair. Sometimes the early morning arrests occurred after light, just to frighten neighbors. Graves were sometimes barely covered. The Argentines called this “the dirty wear,” implying their opponents employed violence. Recently, in sentencing the former Buenos Aires police commissioner to prison, Judge Carlos Rozanski noted that a one-sided “genocide…took place in the Republic of Argentina between 1976 and 1983.” Rightists in the CONDOR countries targeted leftist guerillas and others who opposed them. This included the “Dirty War” in Argentina and similar activities in Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile.
The Argentines were the most thorough in disappearing people. They would cut open bodies before dumping them into the ocean so they would not float or be found. Union members were preyed upon in the latter. In all about 50,000 people were murdered and another 30,000 disappeared , while hundreds of thousands were incarcerated. One one occasion, their activities extended to a September, 1976 car bombing in Washington, DC, where Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the UN, and his American assistant Ronni Moffitt and were murdered in a car bombing. Recently declassified documents prove that both the C.I.A. and the State Department had enough advance knowledge to prevent the bombing. Some State Department personnel were so concerned about Condor that they drafted a list of admonmitions to be sent to the three countries involved. One was a warning against assassinations. The document reached Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who ordered that “no further action be taken on this matter.” This occurred days before Letelier was murdered.
At about that time, the Uruguayan secret police put out a contract on Congressman Edward Koch because he wanted to cut off that nation’s aid. Condor operative usually were trained at the School of the Americas where they learned that that rounding up progressives, populists, and s was a desirable policy. They also used the torture manual provided at the SOA. The rightist regimes used American torture techniques and used them to break and refashion personalities. Activists were prodded to abandon compassion and a desire to help others. They were placed in situations where they betrayed others and learned there was nothing wrong with selfish and ruthless behavior. Paraguayan materials released in 1993 revealed that these intelligence forces employed former Nazis and that Israeli agents pursuing Nazis were murdered. Two prominent Nazis involved in Condor were Walter Rauf and Klaus Barbee. Stefano Delle Chiaie, an Italian Fascist, was active in Bolivia. The documents showed that these agencies had extensive ties with drug traffickers and the C.I.A..
The public reaction to the murder of the highly respected Orlando Letelier brought an end of Condor as a carefully coordinated and efficient inter-state assassination operation. It had been particularly effective in rooting out enemies of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. Much pleased by these results, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher heaped honors on him. General Pinochet worked closely with a secretive former Nazi enclave in southern Chile called Colonia Dignidad. It was founded in 1961 by Paul Schafer, a former corporal and a very active pedophile. Germans who located there were forced to turn over their children to the leadership and were not permitted to leave. The enclave played a role in Operation Condor and Pinochet used it as a political prison, where people were murdered.
J. Patrice McSherry of Long Island University has demonstrated that the US was a secret partner in Operation Condor. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White complained to the State Department that the military and C.I.A. facilitated communications between the murderous Latin American intelligence groups. It also provided the agencies with special encoding machines. The C.I.A. had close ties to Manuel Contreras, head of the Chilean intelligence agency (DIN) and mistakenly made one payment to him. AS late as 2001, a French judge attempted to question Henry Kissinger about US involvement. The former Secretary of State fled France rather than appear before the judge. There is also an effort to question Kissinger in connection of the murder of US journalist Charles Horman, who was killed by the Chilian military after the US back coup in that country in 1973. Prosecutors in Spain, Argentina, and Chile have expressed a desire to question Kissinger about Condor.
Frank Teruggi, another American reporter, met the same fate as Horman. There are documents that prove that the C.I.A. helped the Condor organization nab sociologist Jorge Isaac Fuentes and deliver him the Chilean intelligence. The F.B.I. assisted by checking out his contacts within the US.
For years, talk about Condor was just the stuff of fiction and those wild “conspiracy theorists.” Then the reformist government of Paraguay released four tons of documents on these terroristic activities. The role of the US in helping the Southern Cone countries round up dissidents is clear. Moreover, the US taught the intelligence people in these countries methods of torture.
On September 11, 1973, the forces of General Augusto Pinochet, with much help from the C.I.A., overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende. The president and some of his aids died defending themselves; he had refused to permit a militia to be organized in his defense. Subsequent U.S. Senate hearings revealed that ITT also played a role in the coup. Potential opponents, numbering 13,500, of the new regime ere rounded up in two stadiums, where hundreds were killed. Brazilian soldiers were on hand to instruct colleagues on the most effective torture techniques.
Victor Jara, a legendary folk singer, had his hands broken so he could not play a guitar, and then was shot forty-four times. A roving death squad, under General Sergio Arellano Stark, was sent to northern prisons where other opponents had been gathered. The executions were called the Carnaval of Death. The Pinochet regime was to eventually imprison 80,000, and another 3,200 were disappeared. Still another 200,000 fled. The Chileans sometimes pushed mutilated bodies out of choppers over dry land. Pinochet also liked mass graves, to better terrify people. The terror was necessary in part so that the generals could carry out economic reforms with the assistance of scholars called the “Chicago Boys,” Chileans and Americans who had studied Milton Friedman’s ideas at the University of Chicago. Their plans concentrated wealth in the top 10% of society and reduced the standard of living for most other Chileans. State industries were privatized; the safety net was slashed; and economic regulations were greatly reduced. Chile because the first real laboratory for the testing of neoconservative economics. Pinochet was an active supporter of Operation Condor, and his participation led to the assassination of Allende’s close friend Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.
The C.I.A. and military promoted exchanges of information among the CONDOR states and made available its vast computer resources. The US, as in the case of Chile, would conduct economic warfare that would benefit the right wing forces in South America. There was never a threat that Communists would make headway there. The US wanted to remodel those societies and economies on the basis of Milton Friedman’s theories.
In 1974, the C.I.A. suggested to the Nixon administration that Condor activities be coordinated out of Miami. There is no way of knowing if this suggestion was followed. Argentine intelligence did establish a center in Florida for the laundering mof money and procurement of arms.
The military seized power in Uruguay in 1973; and the Argentine generals took over three years later. In Argentina, care was taken to avoid the public executions, but repression was equally effective. The Argentine rightists did engage in some public terror, just enough to keep people in line. For example police might board city busses and pull people off by their hair. Sometimes the early morning arrests occurred after light, just to frighten neighbors. Graves were sometimes barely covered. The Argentines called this “the dirty wear,” implying their opponents employed violence. Recently, in sentencing the former Buenos Aires police commissioner to prison, Judge Carlos Rozanski noted that a one-sided “genocide…took place in the Republic of Argentina between 1976 and 1983.” Rightists in the CONDOR countries targeted leftist guerillas and others who opposed them. This included the “Dirty War” in Argentina and similar activities in Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile.
The Argentines were the most thorough in disappearing people. They would cut open bodies before dumping them into the ocean so they would not float or be found. Union members were preyed upon in the latter. In all about 50,000 people were murdered and another 30,000 disappeared , while hundreds of thousands were incarcerated. One one occasion, their activities extended to a September, 1976 car bombing in Washington, DC, where Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the UN, and his American assistant Ronni Moffitt and were murdered in a car bombing. Recently declassified documents prove that both the C.I.A. and the State Department had enough advance knowledge to prevent the bombing. Some State Department personnel were so concerned about Condor that they drafted a list of admonmitions to be sent to the three countries involved. One was a warning against assassinations. The document reached Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who ordered that “no further action be taken on this matter.” This occurred days before Letelier was murdered.
At about that time, the Uruguayan secret police put out a contract on Congressman Edward Koch because he wanted to cut off that nation’s aid. Condor operative usually were trained at the School of the Americas where they learned that that rounding up progressives, populists, and s was a desirable policy. They also used the torture manual provided at the SOA. The rightist regimes used American torture techniques and used them to break and refashion personalities. Activists were prodded to abandon compassion and a desire to help others. They were placed in situations where they betrayed others and learned there was nothing wrong with selfish and ruthless behavior. Paraguayan materials released in 1993 revealed that these intelligence forces employed former Nazis and that Israeli agents pursuing Nazis were murdered. Two prominent Nazis involved in Condor were Walter Rauf and Klaus Barbee. Stefano Delle Chiaie, an Italian Fascist, was active in Bolivia. The documents showed that these agencies had extensive ties with drug traffickers and the C.I.A..
The public reaction to the murder of the highly respected Orlando Letelier brought an end of Condor as a carefully coordinated and efficient inter-state assassination operation. It had been particularly effective in rooting out enemies of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. Much pleased by these results, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher heaped honors on him. General Pinochet worked closely with a secretive former Nazi enclave in southern Chile called Colonia Dignidad. It was founded in 1961 by Paul Schafer, a former corporal and a very active pedophile. Germans who located there were forced to turn over their children to the leadership and were not permitted to leave. The enclave played a role in Operation Condor and Pinochet used it as a political prison, where people were murdered.
J. Patrice McSherry of Long Island University has demonstrated that the US was a secret partner in Operation Condor. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White complained to the State Department that the military and C.I.A. facilitated communications between the murderous Latin American intelligence groups. It also provided the agencies with special encoding machines. The C.I.A. had close ties to Manuel Contreras, head of the Chilean intelligence agency (DIN) and mistakenly made one payment to him. AS late as 2001, a French judge attempted to question Henry Kissinger about US involvement. The former Secretary of State fled France rather than appear before the judge. There is also an effort to question Kissinger in connection of the murder of US journalist Charles Horman, who was killed by the Chilian military after the US back coup in that country in 1973. Prosecutors in Spain, Argentina, and Chile have expressed a desire to question Kissinger about Condor.
Frank Teruggi, another American reporter, met the same fate as Horman. There are documents that prove that the C.I.A. helped the Condor organization nab sociologist Jorge Isaac Fuentes and deliver him the Chilean intelligence. The F.B.I. assisted by checking out his contacts within the US.
For years, talk about Condor was just the stuff of fiction and those wild “conspiracy theorists.” Then the reformist government of Paraguay released four tons of documents on these terroristic activities. The role of the US in helping the Southern Cone countries round up dissidents is clear. Moreover, the US taught the intelligence people in these countries methods of torture.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Far West Ltd.: An Occcasional US Partner
Professor Scott maintains that the business front for this group is Far West LL C, a private security firm once headquartered in Switzerland and now in Dubai. This would represent only one powerful element within the Russian mafia, a large network of competing and antagonistic criminal elements. The firm also has closes ties to Pravda-info. Far West represents the C.I.A., Saudi Arabia, Britain, the Ukraine, and several other countries in opposing the current Russian government. Its officers are Russians and Ukranians, and it is active in Kosovo, Columbia, Afghanistan, and parts of the old Soviet Union. The firm imports cocaine from the Columbian FARC rebels to St. Petersburg. It is estimated that Far West accounts for 80% of the drugs coming into Russia from Columbia and Afghanistan. It also sends some Afghan heroin to Western Europe. It was a creation of four companies in Russia, Turkey, and the United States, but no one will name the firms. One of its founding entities is a division of a major, unnamed American corporation. It has done some work in Georgia for KBR/Halliburton. Closely tied to it are two other private security firms, Diligence Ltd. and New Bridge Strategies. Diligence, Ltd. Is another military company founded by William Webster. It also has a number of Russian figures. New Bridge Strategies is a third such company and has a number of major Republican investors and is headed by Joseph Albaugh, former head of FEMA and a close friend of George W. Bush. Neil Bush is tied to it in some way. Far West is also in the arms sale business and has sold weapons to Iraq and even the anti-American Venezuela.
Major General Vladimir Filin and two other Russian founders of Far West met George W. Bush at the White House in 2005. He owns several Ethanol factories with George Soros in Brazil. He is also a force among the Bavderovites , or Ukranian fascists. Filin, the head of Far West and a major force in Ukranian Military Intelligence, has had C.I.A. ties since the 1980s. They thought about establishing headquarters in Washington but were advised that they could be arrested becauses they sold X-55 missiles to Iran in 2001.
In 2006, General Filin flew to Bolivia for the inauguration of its new president, Evo Morales . Then he made an odd speech to Bolivian intelligence people. Though a longtime C.I.A. asset, he said that the agency is “absolute and universal evil, the Satan and the enemy of human kind" and called the Bolivians to “be vigilant and rely only on themselves.” He said Bolivia could not rely upon the support of foreign leftists and that it should seize control of its natural gas.
Former GRU Major Ruslan Saidov is also inclined to say unpleasant things about his American colleagues. He printed an article in Great Britain that claimed that the US was shipping via plane heroin to the Middle East and that Colonel Caleb Temple of DIA and his colleagues were laundering their share of the profits through Muslim Hawala, the traditional Islamic method of moving money based on mutual trust. SAidov added that they were selling heroin to the very terrorists they were expected to fight.
Far West personnel were involved in provoking a crisis in Georgia, Operation Clean Field, by inspiring actions against the South Ossetians. Robert Kagan, an informal McCain advisor, met with Far West principals in March, and the whole operation had been cleared through the Office of Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Arms were sold to the Georgians through Far West and one of its cut-outs. Their unlicensed arms came from pirate factories in Jordan, Bulgaria, and Poland. Some say the goal was to convince Europeans that the old Cold War was not over and that an incidental goal was to help Senator John McCain in the US election of 2008. His international affairs advisor, Randy Scheunemann, has close ties to Far West.
Far West had an undetermined, probably tangential role in a myusterious missiles sale to Iran. In 2005, the Ukranian Defense Ministry acknowledged that rogue elements within it had sold KH-55 cruise missiles to Iran and China in 2001 and that planes transporting them were able to cross the airspace of several countries with no difficulties. All this was facilitated by forms ultimately owned by Kellogg , Brown, and Root, a firm Richard Cheney headed until he became Vice President of the United States. Israeli intelligence cooperates with the United States in many matters, but not the arming of Iran. It helped the Ukranians piece together the story. The matter resulted in the firing of threeofficials. Some Russian intelligence people, who had been helping Iran with arms since the 1980s, were involved in the sale, as were Alfa Group, a network of off-shore companies, and Diligence LLC, Ameerican firms with ties to the intelligence community and Dick Cheney.
Since the discovery of the missile sales, there have been signs that the Ukranians and Russians in Far West were becoming disillusioned with the US , and by 2009 there were indications they may be going their own way.
Major General Vladimir Filin and two other Russian founders of Far West met George W. Bush at the White House in 2005. He owns several Ethanol factories with George Soros in Brazil. He is also a force among the Bavderovites , or Ukranian fascists. Filin, the head of Far West and a major force in Ukranian Military Intelligence, has had C.I.A. ties since the 1980s. They thought about establishing headquarters in Washington but were advised that they could be arrested becauses they sold X-55 missiles to Iran in 2001.
In 2006, General Filin flew to Bolivia for the inauguration of its new president, Evo Morales . Then he made an odd speech to Bolivian intelligence people. Though a longtime C.I.A. asset, he said that the agency is “absolute and universal evil, the Satan and the enemy of human kind" and called the Bolivians to “be vigilant and rely only on themselves.” He said Bolivia could not rely upon the support of foreign leftists and that it should seize control of its natural gas.
Former GRU Major Ruslan Saidov is also inclined to say unpleasant things about his American colleagues. He printed an article in Great Britain that claimed that the US was shipping via plane heroin to the Middle East and that Colonel Caleb Temple of DIA and his colleagues were laundering their share of the profits through Muslim Hawala, the traditional Islamic method of moving money based on mutual trust. SAidov added that they were selling heroin to the very terrorists they were expected to fight.
Far West personnel were involved in provoking a crisis in Georgia, Operation Clean Field, by inspiring actions against the South Ossetians. Robert Kagan, an informal McCain advisor, met with Far West principals in March, and the whole operation had been cleared through the Office of Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Arms were sold to the Georgians through Far West and one of its cut-outs. Their unlicensed arms came from pirate factories in Jordan, Bulgaria, and Poland. Some say the goal was to convince Europeans that the old Cold War was not over and that an incidental goal was to help Senator John McCain in the US election of 2008. His international affairs advisor, Randy Scheunemann, has close ties to Far West.
Far West had an undetermined, probably tangential role in a myusterious missiles sale to Iran. In 2005, the Ukranian Defense Ministry acknowledged that rogue elements within it had sold KH-55 cruise missiles to Iran and China in 2001 and that planes transporting them were able to cross the airspace of several countries with no difficulties. All this was facilitated by forms ultimately owned by Kellogg , Brown, and Root, a firm Richard Cheney headed until he became Vice President of the United States. Israeli intelligence cooperates with the United States in many matters, but not the arming of Iran. It helped the Ukranians piece together the story. The matter resulted in the firing of threeofficials. Some Russian intelligence people, who had been helping Iran with arms since the 1980s, were involved in the sale, as were Alfa Group, a network of off-shore companies, and Diligence LLC, Ameerican firms with ties to the intelligence community and Dick Cheney.
Since the discovery of the missile sales, there have been signs that the Ukranians and Russians in Far West were becoming disillusioned with the US , and by 2009 there were indications they may be going their own way.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Covert Finance: Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar
Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi, two wealthy foreigners and sometime C.I.A. assets, were both involved in the October Surprise. They both were involved in the preliminary plans for the deal between the Republicans and Iranians. Both would play important roles in other important events and were involved in BCCI, one of the most corrupt enterprises of our day. The Kerry Committee report said both were US agents in the Iran/Contra scandal, Khashoggi as a banker and Ghobanifar as an arms dealer.
Ghorbanifar, and Saudi billionaire and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, according to Wayne Madsen, had economic ties to George H.W. Bush and the Bin Ladens through Potomac Capital, a C.I.A. front which Bush established in Geneva in 1976. It was to be the template for BCCI. After that bank’s demise, Potomac again becme important and is in the same building as Ghobanifar’s Panamanian corporation, TopazLiberty, Inc. It was tied to BCCI and deeply involved in US operations in Central America in the 1980s. Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile, has close ties with Iranian dissidents and the Neoconservative who want to invade Iran. He is considered a long-time Mossad agent of influence. Today, Ghorbanifar seems to be largely discredited due to the bad information he provided prior to the US invasion of Iraq.
Potomac was later investigated for possible imvolvement in Iran/Contra transactions. Some intelligence men complained that Bush sometimes used Potomac to fund domestic political operations.
Arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi would turn up time and again in major events. Khashoggi ( 1935- ) is a Turkoman Saudi billionaire who is a socialite in the West and Middle East and has been involved in arms dealing, legitimate business, and intelligence activities. His business career began in the 1950s, while a student at Chico State College, when he sold a fleet of US trucks to Mohammed bin Laden. His father was the Bin Ladens’ physician. There was an early connection with Barrick Gold in Canada. It was a spin-off of Barrick Resources International, a C.I.A. shell corporation set up by Kermit Roosevelt. Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars worth of arms deals for the Saudi government. His main firm seems to be Triad Holding Company. He runs the firm, but his two brothers are partners. There are other firms he has named Triad, including one chartered in Ohio. He has invested in real estate, oil, broadcasting, and any number of other ventures.
His greatest importance for this work flows from his ties to US intelligence operations. He clearly was a major C.I.A. asset, and probably worked for the Mossad as well. Beginning in the 1960s, he made made payoffs on behalf of the C.I.A. in the form of kickbacks from arms contracts.
Khashoggi became owner of the famous Safari Club in Kenya. Former Saudi intelligence chief openly talked about another Safari Club which met at this location in Kenya. It was a meeting of US, British, French, and Middle Eastern intelligence people who met there to discuss covert activities that were difficult to pull off as a result of the Watergate scandal.
Khashoggi admits he started the ball rolling in the October Surprise. He told Belgiam HUMO in 1987, "I am still convinced that it was all based on a grand idea. I cannot think of it in any other way: after all, I started the ball rolling.” In 1992, the Senate report on BCCI described him as one of the “principle foreign agents of the U.S.”
On September 24, 2007 , a Gulfstream II crash landed 40 miles from the capital of Yucatan. It was carrying 5.5 metric tons of cocaine from Venezuela was downed in Mexico. Ownership has been tied to Khashoggi and his lieutenant Wally Hilliard. Mohammed Atta and a colleague took flying lessons at Hilliard’s school. Hilliard was tied to the C.I.A. through Myron DuBain, who had worked for the OSS and C.I.A.. Du Bain became chairman of Fireman’s Fund, which took over a Hilliard company in the eighties. Later the European of Safety of Navigation investigated the matter because it was believed the same plane was used by the C.I.A. in renditions of suspected terrorists.
One of his business partners was Mario Renda of the Luchesse mafia family. Another business partner was former Chechen First Deputy Premier Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, who entered politics after a successful career in organized crime. His political philosophy is indistinguishable from that of Osama bin Laden. Another partner was banker Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya who has been accused of involvement in arms for drugs trading through Columbia and Cuba and a botched kidnapping.
In 1983, Khashoggi established Five Star Trust to manage the assets of Ferdinand Marcos, but came under the control of the Bush family and was established on the Isle of Man in 1989. Some say the Bushes got Marcos’ gold and assets in return for granting him asylum. In the 1980s, he was a middle man for Oliver North’s deals with the Iranian mullahs. He borrowed much of the money for his part in the transactions from the notorious BCCI. The senior Bush pardoned him for his role in the Iran/Contra scandal. In 1983, Khashoggi established Five Star Trust to manage the assets of Ferdinand Marcos, but came under the control of the Bush family and was established on the Isle of Man in 1989. Some say the Bushes got Marcos’ gold and assets in return for granting him asylum. The senior Bush pardoned him for his role in the Iran/Contra scandal.
Counterterrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard and British reporter Greg Palast write that Khasoggi attended a May, 1996 meeting at which Saudi Arabia bought off Osama bin Laden, in return for protecting his homeland. Turki al-Faisal, then head of intelligence, wass there as well as an unnamed bin Laden brother. Businessman Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, who bailed out George W. Bush’s Harken Energy was also present along with a representative of the Saudi Defense Ministry.
In the same year, Khashoggi represented Saudi Arabia in the Tashkent, Uzbekistan meetings on the formulation of twin pipelines through Afghanistan which was to involve Enron and Unocal. A 1991 Pentagon study, declassified in 2004, listed him as being involved in the drug trade with thee Columbians. He was described as a “narco-terrorist.”
He was also involved with the C.I.A. in the 1990s in efforts to support Bosnian Muslims. He has also entertained Muslim radicals believed to be tied to violence in Russia. In 2008, Indian press reports claim that he has given hundred of millions of dollars to businessman Hassan Ali Khan, who some think was tied to Dawood Ibrahim, the underworld kingpin who could have been behind the bloody attacks on Mumbai. Ibrahim was once a C.I.A. operative; his recent activities might be seen as an effort to settle old scores.
In the early 1960s he worked with Democratic National Chairman Edwin Pauley who was a partner of George H.W. Bush in Zapata Oil. Pauley taught Bush and Khashoggi how to launder money through Mexico, and this system was used by Bush to launder money for the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972. He visited President Nixon several times.
Gus Greenspun, who had run guns for Israel in the late 1940s, provided Khashoggi with contacts that enabled him to do business with the State of Israel. There after, he was able to serve the C.I.A. as a “cut-out” for it in joint opertions with Israel. Cut-outs are necessary when the agency desires to engage in operations that are illegal or forbidden.
He made heavy contributions to the contributions to Nixon and Reagan.campaigns. In 1972, he secretly gave Nixon $1 million. Presumably he “accidentally” left the cash behind in a suitcase after visiting the president. He also left several million in Rebozo’s bank to be drained by the president’sw close friend. Beebe left $200,000 in the account. Al Ahram editor Mohammed Haykal claimed that Arabs pumped between $ 10 and 12 million into that campaign.. Teresa LaPore, deputy elections supervisor of Palm Beach County, who was moonlighting as a stewardess on Khashoggi’s private airplanes in the 1980s, designed the famous butterfly ballot that confused thousands into inadvertently voting for Pat Buchanan rather than than Albert Gore 2000. Some have reported that Khashoggi probably servd as a conduit for a great deal of off-shore money finding its way into the 2004 George W. Bush campaign.
Khashoggi is a resident of Monaco and a close friend of neoconservative leader Richard Perle, who also has a residence there. Adnan was the uncle of Dodi Fayed, After the death of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie Kennedy was briefly involved with him. He has invested in real estate, oil, broadcasting, and any number of other ventures. Once the richest man in the world, he is now down to his last $50 million and spends much time in Spain fighting litigation against him.
On July 4, 1999, an interesting meeting took place at his villa in Beaulieu , near Niece. Present were representatives of the Yeltysin crime family and people from the United States, Columbia, Venezuela, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany. Peter Dale Scott believes they comprise the “meta-group” that controls the international drug trade. They represented Al Qaeda, the revolutionary FARC in Columbia, the Turkish military, the Kosovo Liberation Army, Cuban and Russian military intellience, Saudi intelligence, and the C.I.A.. The first postwar meta-group was BCCI, and this group has some ties to its historical predecessor. BCCI inherited from American agent Kheshoggi the ability to broker deals with partners all around the world. Before, 1977, the US used him arrange trans-global transactions and move money. Congress, in that year, made it illegal for American corporations to make payments to foreignofficials. BCCI emerged to carry out that function and to laundere drug and intelligence money.
The meeting at Kheshoggi’s villa is claimed to be where a vew men also planned the Russian 9/11, the bombings of 1999. This story need not concern us. An American scholar at the Hoover Institution believes it was planned by people in the Putin administration to make him more popular. The Russian version, attributes the work to Russians tied to Far West Ltd. who happened to be anti-Putin. The firm is now known as Far West DDC and has headquarters in Dubai. They are part of what Russians call OPS, Organized Crime Society.
Since the early 1990s, then OPS, with the help of elements in the Russian military, have been moving drugs from Afghanistan to Europe. Some of the drug dealing tied to this group finances Islamic insurrections in Russia. Macedonia, and Kosovo. A reason for this may be that it is easier to move drugs in areas where governments are weak. From 2000 on, they have also moved Columbian drugs to Europe via Novorossiysk and St. Petersburg. So much heroin has been moved into Russia, that the government has had to act against OPS, resulting in a truce, sharing of profits, stabililization of the situation in Chechnia, and killing of some troublesome ethnic leaders.
Seven days after the 1999 meeting, Russian paratroopers seized the Pristina, Kosovo airport. The action was taken without the knowledge of the Russian Defense minister. The official position of the Russian government was to support Serbia against the Islamic extremists in the KLA. After some debate, the Russias troops were permitted to remain until 2003, and that airstrip was for that time the main outlet for Russian drugs. Anton Surikov, a Russian scholar with C.I.A. ties and links to Putin’s opponents, comfirmed in 2006 that the seizing of the strip had been planned at the Beaulieu meeting and arranged in conjunction with the KLA.
Ghorbanifar, and Saudi billionaire and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, according to Wayne Madsen, had economic ties to George H.W. Bush and the Bin Ladens through Potomac Capital, a C.I.A. front which Bush established in Geneva in 1976. It was to be the template for BCCI. After that bank’s demise, Potomac again becme important and is in the same building as Ghobanifar’s Panamanian corporation, TopazLiberty, Inc. It was tied to BCCI and deeply involved in US operations in Central America in the 1980s. Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile, has close ties with Iranian dissidents and the Neoconservative who want to invade Iran. He is considered a long-time Mossad agent of influence. Today, Ghorbanifar seems to be largely discredited due to the bad information he provided prior to the US invasion of Iraq.
Potomac was later investigated for possible imvolvement in Iran/Contra transactions. Some intelligence men complained that Bush sometimes used Potomac to fund domestic political operations.
Arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi would turn up time and again in major events. Khashoggi ( 1935- ) is a Turkoman Saudi billionaire who is a socialite in the West and Middle East and has been involved in arms dealing, legitimate business, and intelligence activities. His business career began in the 1950s, while a student at Chico State College, when he sold a fleet of US trucks to Mohammed bin Laden. His father was the Bin Ladens’ physician. There was an early connection with Barrick Gold in Canada. It was a spin-off of Barrick Resources International, a C.I.A. shell corporation set up by Kermit Roosevelt. Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars worth of arms deals for the Saudi government. His main firm seems to be Triad Holding Company. He runs the firm, but his two brothers are partners. There are other firms he has named Triad, including one chartered in Ohio. He has invested in real estate, oil, broadcasting, and any number of other ventures.
His greatest importance for this work flows from his ties to US intelligence operations. He clearly was a major C.I.A. asset, and probably worked for the Mossad as well. Beginning in the 1960s, he made made payoffs on behalf of the C.I.A. in the form of kickbacks from arms contracts.
Khashoggi became owner of the famous Safari Club in Kenya. Former Saudi intelligence chief openly talked about another Safari Club which met at this location in Kenya. It was a meeting of US, British, French, and Middle Eastern intelligence people who met there to discuss covert activities that were difficult to pull off as a result of the Watergate scandal.
Khashoggi admits he started the ball rolling in the October Surprise. He told Belgiam HUMO in 1987, "I am still convinced that it was all based on a grand idea. I cannot think of it in any other way: after all, I started the ball rolling.” In 1992, the Senate report on BCCI described him as one of the “principle foreign agents of the U.S.”
On September 24, 2007 , a Gulfstream II crash landed 40 miles from the capital of Yucatan. It was carrying 5.5 metric tons of cocaine from Venezuela was downed in Mexico. Ownership has been tied to Khashoggi and his lieutenant Wally Hilliard. Mohammed Atta and a colleague took flying lessons at Hilliard’s school. Hilliard was tied to the C.I.A. through Myron DuBain, who had worked for the OSS and C.I.A.. Du Bain became chairman of Fireman’s Fund, which took over a Hilliard company in the eighties. Later the European of Safety of Navigation investigated the matter because it was believed the same plane was used by the C.I.A. in renditions of suspected terrorists.
One of his business partners was Mario Renda of the Luchesse mafia family. Another business partner was former Chechen First Deputy Premier Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, who entered politics after a successful career in organized crime. His political philosophy is indistinguishable from that of Osama bin Laden. Another partner was banker Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya who has been accused of involvement in arms for drugs trading through Columbia and Cuba and a botched kidnapping.
In 1983, Khashoggi established Five Star Trust to manage the assets of Ferdinand Marcos, but came under the control of the Bush family and was established on the Isle of Man in 1989. Some say the Bushes got Marcos’ gold and assets in return for granting him asylum. In the 1980s, he was a middle man for Oliver North’s deals with the Iranian mullahs. He borrowed much of the money for his part in the transactions from the notorious BCCI. The senior Bush pardoned him for his role in the Iran/Contra scandal. In 1983, Khashoggi established Five Star Trust to manage the assets of Ferdinand Marcos, but came under the control of the Bush family and was established on the Isle of Man in 1989. Some say the Bushes got Marcos’ gold and assets in return for granting him asylum. The senior Bush pardoned him for his role in the Iran/Contra scandal.
Counterterrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard and British reporter Greg Palast write that Khasoggi attended a May, 1996 meeting at which Saudi Arabia bought off Osama bin Laden, in return for protecting his homeland. Turki al-Faisal, then head of intelligence, wass there as well as an unnamed bin Laden brother. Businessman Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, who bailed out George W. Bush’s Harken Energy was also present along with a representative of the Saudi Defense Ministry.
In the same year, Khashoggi represented Saudi Arabia in the Tashkent, Uzbekistan meetings on the formulation of twin pipelines through Afghanistan which was to involve Enron and Unocal. A 1991 Pentagon study, declassified in 2004, listed him as being involved in the drug trade with thee Columbians. He was described as a “narco-terrorist.”
He was also involved with the C.I.A. in the 1990s in efforts to support Bosnian Muslims. He has also entertained Muslim radicals believed to be tied to violence in Russia. In 2008, Indian press reports claim that he has given hundred of millions of dollars to businessman Hassan Ali Khan, who some think was tied to Dawood Ibrahim, the underworld kingpin who could have been behind the bloody attacks on Mumbai. Ibrahim was once a C.I.A. operative; his recent activities might be seen as an effort to settle old scores.
In the early 1960s he worked with Democratic National Chairman Edwin Pauley who was a partner of George H.W. Bush in Zapata Oil. Pauley taught Bush and Khashoggi how to launder money through Mexico, and this system was used by Bush to launder money for the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972. He visited President Nixon several times.
Gus Greenspun, who had run guns for Israel in the late 1940s, provided Khashoggi with contacts that enabled him to do business with the State of Israel. There after, he was able to serve the C.I.A. as a “cut-out” for it in joint opertions with Israel. Cut-outs are necessary when the agency desires to engage in operations that are illegal or forbidden.
He made heavy contributions to the contributions to Nixon and Reagan.campaigns. In 1972, he secretly gave Nixon $1 million. Presumably he “accidentally” left the cash behind in a suitcase after visiting the president. He also left several million in Rebozo’s bank to be drained by the president’sw close friend. Beebe left $200,000 in the account. Al Ahram editor Mohammed Haykal claimed that Arabs pumped between $ 10 and 12 million into that campaign.. Teresa LaPore, deputy elections supervisor of Palm Beach County, who was moonlighting as a stewardess on Khashoggi’s private airplanes in the 1980s, designed the famous butterfly ballot that confused thousands into inadvertently voting for Pat Buchanan rather than than Albert Gore 2000. Some have reported that Khashoggi probably servd as a conduit for a great deal of off-shore money finding its way into the 2004 George W. Bush campaign.
Khashoggi is a resident of Monaco and a close friend of neoconservative leader Richard Perle, who also has a residence there. Adnan was the uncle of Dodi Fayed, After the death of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie Kennedy was briefly involved with him. He has invested in real estate, oil, broadcasting, and any number of other ventures. Once the richest man in the world, he is now down to his last $50 million and spends much time in Spain fighting litigation against him.
On July 4, 1999, an interesting meeting took place at his villa in Beaulieu , near Niece. Present were representatives of the Yeltysin crime family and people from the United States, Columbia, Venezuela, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany. Peter Dale Scott believes they comprise the “meta-group” that controls the international drug trade. They represented Al Qaeda, the revolutionary FARC in Columbia, the Turkish military, the Kosovo Liberation Army, Cuban and Russian military intellience, Saudi intelligence, and the C.I.A.. The first postwar meta-group was BCCI, and this group has some ties to its historical predecessor. BCCI inherited from American agent Kheshoggi the ability to broker deals with partners all around the world. Before, 1977, the US used him arrange trans-global transactions and move money. Congress, in that year, made it illegal for American corporations to make payments to foreignofficials. BCCI emerged to carry out that function and to laundere drug and intelligence money.
The meeting at Kheshoggi’s villa is claimed to be where a vew men also planned the Russian 9/11, the bombings of 1999. This story need not concern us. An American scholar at the Hoover Institution believes it was planned by people in the Putin administration to make him more popular. The Russian version, attributes the work to Russians tied to Far West Ltd. who happened to be anti-Putin. The firm is now known as Far West DDC and has headquarters in Dubai. They are part of what Russians call OPS, Organized Crime Society.
Since the early 1990s, then OPS, with the help of elements in the Russian military, have been moving drugs from Afghanistan to Europe. Some of the drug dealing tied to this group finances Islamic insurrections in Russia. Macedonia, and Kosovo. A reason for this may be that it is easier to move drugs in areas where governments are weak. From 2000 on, they have also moved Columbian drugs to Europe via Novorossiysk and St. Petersburg. So much heroin has been moved into Russia, that the government has had to act against OPS, resulting in a truce, sharing of profits, stabililization of the situation in Chechnia, and killing of some troublesome ethnic leaders.
Seven days after the 1999 meeting, Russian paratroopers seized the Pristina, Kosovo airport. The action was taken without the knowledge of the Russian Defense minister. The official position of the Russian government was to support Serbia against the Islamic extremists in the KLA. After some debate, the Russias troops were permitted to remain until 2003, and that airstrip was for that time the main outlet for Russian drugs. Anton Surikov, a Russian scholar with C.I.A. ties and links to Putin’s opponents, comfirmed in 2006 that the seizing of the strip had been planned at the Beaulieu meeting and arranged in conjunction with the KLA.
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