Through most of American history, conservatives have insisted on the strict observance of law and have opposed the expansion of executive power. The Reagan administration’s administration of legislation affecting the civil rights of African Americans sometimes seemed a bit lax, and it approached economic regulations and labor law with a business-friendly perspective.
But in its public manifestation, it did not appear bent on expanding executive power or on circumventing statutory law. However, in covert matters, its record was very different. In its dealings in Central America, it constantly circumvented the law and lied to Congress. Its weapons sales in the Middle East also circumvented the law and sometimes violated it outright. In matters involving PROMIS software, its representatives consistently lied to courts about government use and marketing of this software.
Reagan established the White House Working Group to coordinate efforts to sell his policies in Latin America and work with many other interests including the Heritage Foundation, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and Pat Robertson’s Freedom Council in getting out their message. The seeds of a new American world order were here and made possible by a new alliance of nationalists, Neo Conservatives, the religious right, and free marketers. Over time, nationalists like Cheney and Rumsfeld allied so fully with the Neo Conservatives that some thought they had changed. Those involved in orchestrating these operations saw them as ultimately successful, but the Contras never dealt the Sandanistas a military defeat. The reform regime fell due to US economic pressure. 1
In battling Communists and their leftist allies, the actions of the Reagan administration strongly suggest that it believed there were almost no legal restraints on what it could do. In 1986, the United States government began selling arms to Iran and using the profits to help the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Both actions were illegal. Ronald Reagan denied having authorized this program. This turned out to be the tip of a massive iceberg of illegal activity. The US had been selling arms to Iran and Iraq since the beginning of the Reagan administration. 2
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
Arms Sales to Iran After the October (1980) Surprise
The October Surprise deal with Iran did not end US secret and illicit arms sales there. Not counting the sales Associated with the so-called Iran-Contra deal, the United States sold at least $15 billion worth of arms to Iran. Billions more were sold to Iraq. These sales were illegal, violations of the Arms Export Munitions Control Act, but deemed necessary for policy purposes. According to the New York Times, Major General Colin Powell was among the first in the DOD to know that these arms were being transferred, and he facilitated the transfer of 2008 TOW missiles to the C.I.A. which was the middleman in the transaction. 1
Beginning in 1992, the C.I.A. also shared intelligence with Iraq. The act forbade third party transaction, but the latter offered some cover so North and others arranged elaborate third country arrangements. Former Attorney General John Mitchell and former Vice President Spiro Agnew also profited handsomely in arranging them. The profits were needed for Pentagon and intelligence covert operations, and some of the money went to finance the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
The weapons that went to Iran and Iraq were drawn from repositioned stockpiles without the knowledge of the NATO allies or the NATO commander. The allies would have objected as the shortage of arms would have meant at times that only a nuclear response would have been available had the Soviets attacked. The US arranged to let the Soviets learn of this arrangement through a prisoner exchange in 1986. By then the cat was out of the bag as the Italian government discovered that massive shipments were being made out of the ports of Talamone and Tuscania, and an Italian investigative judge turned out a 6,000 page on this part of the arms sales.
At that time, an arms salesman Arif Durrani testified that he witnessed \these dealings and ended up with a long prison term after a trial in which he was prohibited from introducing much evidence to support his claims. In addition, the Israelis sold huge quantities of weapons to Iran and then asked the US to replenish their arsenals. After Iran-Contra was revealed, huge shipments continued from US sources and Israel to Iran. While all of this was going on, the US through Vice President George H.W. Bush manipulated oil prices downward to assure that Iran would have problems buying everything it needed.
The idea was to make money on arms sales while still trying to pick a winner. There is also considerable evidence that Iraq received. Iraq was acquire US chemical weapons through third party channels. US authorities did not consider it a serious matter as these weapons were hard to store and use and had a short shelf life. Some chemical weapons producing equipment and others were shipped by Wakenhut from Eagle Pass,Texas to Chicago, and then to Baltimore. Equipment sometimes originated at a plant in Boca Rotan, Florida.
Some weapons purchases were made with loans diverted from US agricultural credit programs, and the department later had to mislead a House subcommittee under Charles Rose that looked into the matter. C. Nicholas Rostow, special assistant to President Bush, also wrote to departmentofficials on April 8, 1991, instructing them not to give Congress documents about this matter.
Beginning in 1992, the C.I.A. also shared intelligence with Iraq. The act forbade third party transaction, but the latter offered some cover so North and others arranged elaborate third country arrangements. Former Attorney General John Mitchell and former Vice President Spiro Agnew also profited handsomely in arranging them. The profits were needed for Pentagon and intelligence covert operations, and some of the money went to finance the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
The weapons that went to Iran and Iraq were drawn from repositioned stockpiles without the knowledge of the NATO allies or the NATO commander. The allies would have objected as the shortage of arms would have meant at times that only a nuclear response would have been available had the Soviets attacked. The US arranged to let the Soviets learn of this arrangement through a prisoner exchange in 1986. By then the cat was out of the bag as the Italian government discovered that massive shipments were being made out of the ports of Talamone and Tuscania, and an Italian investigative judge turned out a 6,000 page on this part of the arms sales.
At that time, an arms salesman Arif Durrani testified that he witnessed \these dealings and ended up with a long prison term after a trial in which he was prohibited from introducing much evidence to support his claims. In addition, the Israelis sold huge quantities of weapons to Iran and then asked the US to replenish their arsenals. After Iran-Contra was revealed, huge shipments continued from US sources and Israel to Iran. While all of this was going on, the US through Vice President George H.W. Bush manipulated oil prices downward to assure that Iran would have problems buying everything it needed.
The idea was to make money on arms sales while still trying to pick a winner. There is also considerable evidence that Iraq received. Iraq was acquire US chemical weapons through third party channels. US authorities did not consider it a serious matter as these weapons were hard to store and use and had a short shelf life. Some chemical weapons producing equipment and others were shipped by Wakenhut from Eagle Pass,Texas to Chicago, and then to Baltimore. Equipment sometimes originated at a plant in Boca Rotan, Florida.
Some weapons purchases were made with loans diverted from US agricultural credit programs, and the department later had to mislead a House subcommittee under Charles Rose that looked into the matter. C. Nicholas Rostow, special assistant to President Bush, also wrote to departmentofficials on April 8, 1991, instructing them not to give Congress documents about this matter.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
A Pilot's Claims about t he October Surprise and Iran-Contra
An August 22, 1985 memo from Admiral John Poindexter to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane stated that Captain Gunther Karl Russbacher ( 1942-2005) piloted a DC 6 taking Tow missiles[ part of eventual 408] and Hawk parts to Iran as part of what was known as the Iran-Contra deal. Oliver North was aboard, and the missiles were mistakenly taken to the wrong Iranian unit. Robert Hunt(ONI and NSC) was also aboard. [ Hunt is now in prison.] Another of the admiral’s memos describes large deposits made in the accounts of those involved. A May 30 Oliver North memo to the admiral describes a snag in further negotiations with the Iranians, which Russbacher attended. A June 16 memo from Vice President Bush to the admiral asks him to thank Hunt and Russbacher for their efforts. A November 11, 1993 letter from Mossad agent Moshe Ben-Manash confirmed the facts of the Iran/Contral exchange of missiles and Russbacher’s role. 1
Captain Russbacher claims that he was the command pilot on the plane that b rought George H. W. Bush to Paris on October 19, 1980 to negotiate the October Surprise at the Hotel Crillion in Paris, an arrangement whereby the Iranians agreed to hold 52 American hostages until after the presidential election. Richard Brenneke, Russbacher’s cousin and also a Portland arms dealer, was another pilot , and the third was Heinrich Rupp. Brenneke, later in court testimony, revealed that he had never been a C.I.A. employee. Rather he was a sole contractor with the agency. Brenneke was later jailed when he discussed the flight but a jury believed his story and released him. 2
Bush was there only a few hours—long enough to see the deal cemented, and Russbacher shuttled Bush back to the US aboard an SR –71, the Blackbird needle nosed spy plane. George H.W. Bush rambled on about Russbacher’s claim at a 1992 news conference. Adnan Khashoggi, the arms dealer, paid for the return flight’s fuel with his credit card. Khashoggi has invested in real estate and any number of other businesses, at least once as a partner of the head of Saudi intelligence. Khashoggi has often collected commissions through companies in Lichtenstein and Switzerland. In 1986, he was considered the richest man in the world. This ship, the Nabia, was used in the movie “Never Say Never.” He was arrested in Switzerland in 1988 and tried in the United States on fraud charges and, he and codefendant Imelda Marcos, won acquittal. In 2001, his financial empire appeared to have collapsed into bankruptcy
Frank Connolly, writing for the Sunday Business Post, claims Khashoggi made business protection payments to Osama bin Laden. In 1999, Wallace Hilliard, a Khashoggi man, bought Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Long Island Press reporter Sander Hickes found that the C.I.A. was most likely a silent partner. Later Huffman Aviation, where Mohammed Atta trained, was sold to Arthur G. Nadal, who was arrested in 2009 for operating a ponzi scheme. 3
Unfortunately, there is not a solid evidentiary trail for Russbacher's involvement in the October Surprise. . The evidence is amply clear that the October Surprise was negotiated. It is doubtful if Russbacher would have had so many problems in his later life had he not been involved. He has produced flight logs to prove many claims, but there are no logs for the October Surprise.
Russbacher, the scion of an Austria noble family, was born July 1, 1942 amid a strange Teutonic Knights ceremony. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, his grandfather, was head of Austrian intelligence in World War II. .Baron Karl Russbacher was allegedly part of the plot to kill Hitler and had to fake his own death. After the war, he worked for the US government under a different name.
Gunther came to Oklahoma as a child with other. After two years in the Army, he joined the C.I.A. in 1963 which quickly placed him in the navy and flight training. He soon joined the ONI in 1968. In Viet Nam he was wounded and tortured as a prisoner. When he returned to the US, he became qualified to fly the most advanced aircraft. He was involved in black ops in Europe, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as well as the United States. He was apart of a team skilled at murder via car accident and he was also very good at sanitizing intelligence crime scenes here and in Germany. He told his second wife hat he attended assassin school outside Phoenix at Center Point, and that George H.W. Bush was a classmate. The pilot said that Bush was called the Ice Pick because that was his favored tool.
For a time he was on loan to the Department of State for black ops. He infiltrated the Pipefitters Union and even worked for it St. Louis for a time. Gunther also infiltrated criminal and narcotics rings as well as Italian and German terrorist operations. He ran a C.I.A. owned insurance investment advisory service, helped C.I.A. connected companies find tax loopholes, built developments through C.I.A.-financed Crystal Shores Group. All those was part of Operation Cyclops , an effort to put more agents in the business world and expand the number of CIA proprietaries. Gunther has said that Congressman Roy Blunt has repeatedly help the C.I.A. charter proprietary companies in Missouri, and of course this involved pay-offs. Blunt would play a major role arranging Russbacher’s second imprisonment.
Russbacher first served a brief prison sentence in Texas when he was caught moving bags of bearer bonds for the agency. Sometimes he taught languages for the military. He also established a C.I.A. savings and loan that collapsed in Pennsylvania. Within C.I.A. circles he was called “the banker,” because he handled secret accounts and funded black ops.
Captain Russbacher also worked with Robert L. Corson, a known C.I.A. money mule, who was involved in defrauding over twenty savings and loans in Texas and elsewhere, according to the Houston Post sries on the S and L series. To complicate things, Russbacher sometimes even used Corson’s name. He was also involved in assisting the counterrevolutionaries in Central America. Russbacher headed an operation in 1983 that turned sour trying to extricate a Stassi defector from East Germany, lost a close friend in the process, and took a little time off. In the eighties, he also carried PROMIS software to Australia.
In 1989 he married Rayelan Allan Russbacher, his second wife, disregarding the C.I.A. order that he wait two years to remarry. Her late husband was dean of science and engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School, where she first met Gunther. He knew he would never be given permission to marry her because she was a liberal activist, intent on learning about the October Surprise. She had lobbied against the appointment of Donald Gregg as ambassador to South Vietnam, and did not know he then headed the C.I.A. disciplinary committee.
Captain Russbacher defected from the C.I.A. sometime around this time. Maybe he was concerned with abuses of power and maybe it was all about obstacles to his second marriage. In any event, he took a Seal unit with him that had a dozen members.
Two days after the wedding he was arrested and held for several months on trumped up charges. Some months after his arrest, he was released to fly a mission to Moscow and immediately rearrested. In order to save his bride from threatened imprisonment, he pled guilty to impersonating a US attorney and fraud and was sentenced to 21 years. Much of this went back to his operating a C.I.A. proprietary.
His ONI boss, who tried to help him , was killed in a plane crash . Paul Wilcher, his lawyer, was soon suicided July 1, 1993. Wilcher was found dead on his toilet but there was no fecal material in the bown and no urine. His papers and 55 audio tapes of Russbacher were gone. Russbacher was told that Wilcher was taken to Venice, Virginia wherer he was given pizza and questioned about what he knew about the accounts of politicians in BCCI. He was handed a can of pop that was coated with 025 mg of Curare via DSMO. When he weas about to die, he was beaten in the fce to make it appear he had bee mugged. The body was returned to his apartment and because he was in rigor mortis, he was set on the toilet.
His wife embarked on speaking tours trying to get him freed but was nearly killed herself several times between 1990 and 1992. In the first attempt on her life, Gunther’s old Seal team saved her by ramming the car carrying men firing at her.
Missouri released him on probation in December, 1993, after he had been tortured and kept in the hole. Michael W. Brown, the judge who forced his release, died in a head on accident three years later. He had also been subjected to botched heart surgery that left the lower part of his heard dead. Once he had been forced to pull his own tooth and his heart medeicine was often withheld. The ONI then had him orchestrate the transfer of gold from the Philippines to Austria, returning that country gold Hitler had seized in 1938. This was called Operation White Robe. When he completed it, General Hugh Shelton called Gunter to tell him he was reactivated. But he was sent to an Austrian prison for not paying a hotel bill.
In Austria, he ended up in a prison hospital where doctors were appalled by the signs of torture he had endured in the US. Austrian psychiatrists claim to have removed his hospital mind control program. When released from the Austrian hospital December 23, 1996, he had a heart transplant . He resurfaced in a New Mexico hospital with heart complications, and with a beautiful young woman who was not his wife. Because he has skipped out on Missouri probation, he was taken to a Los Alamos jail cell covered with fecies and urine.
When he talked to his wife via telephone he seemed , possibly drugged and still under mind control. He was not the same person and did not seem to remember his wife. He did tell her that the young woman met him at the prison door. After a few calls to his wife,. He vanished for a month. He resurfaced in a New Mexico hospital with heart complications, and with a beautiful young woman who was not his wife. Because he has skipped out on Missouri probation, he was taken to a Los Alamos jail cell covered with feces and urine.
F.B.I. chief William Sessions told his second wife that Russbacher was back at work running intelligence operations for Group 26 ( Defense Intelligence Services—not same as Dia) out of Bristol England. He had a new wife, Jane Ryder, and his father in law was a former MI 6 agent., who freelanced for the C.I.A. and the Vatican Intelligence Service. Allan Frankovich, her former lover who had some intelligence connectiond died of a sudden heart attack a ffew months before Jane and Gunther began to cohabit. Jane, a respected film producer, says that Father Malachi Martin ( 1921-1999) taught her everything she knows. Martin was a former Vatican Jesuit who became an important figure in American right-wing circles.
Somehow Gunter ended up in a Los Alamos jail, rational sometimes and a little demented at other times. It is believed that Jane worked for the C.I.A. and induced him to return to the US. He and Jane returned to England the same year and married, a year before his second wife obtained a divorce in the US.
In 1996, Russbacher published a piece on Jonestown in which he claimed it was a government operation and that members of the cult had been subjected to various degrees of mind control. Wessley Baker of the Department of State headed the project. The programming proved less than effective and there was a revolt followed by as massacre. In another article, the Captain said that Congressman Leo Ryan knew Jonestown was a government operation and was concerned that it was out of control. He has also written about how subjects are found for mind contro in Project Open Eyes and about five levels of training. Some public figures have been subjected to mind control, and he thinks they include Bill Clinton, John McCain, and Madeline Albright.
Captain Russbacher wrote that there were seven sleepers in the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, but he did not think their programming was sufficient that they could be triggered to carry out any specific actions. Dr. Chomg Sun Kim of the Stone Mountain facility had programmed them. The Davidian Group had been created with the intention of using it to carry out terrorist actions. For some reason, a Delta Group Force was sent to neut4ralize the seven sleepers only, and something went wrong. Somehow the seven sleepers had been prematurely set off and they were building some kind of nerve gas device for mass destruction. Triggers appear in TV advertisements and in newspapers.
Gunther claimed to have taught mind control at the Life Management Institute outside Waco in the early 60s. He said Mark Phillips and David Koresh were students there. Interestingly, he claims that Charles Keating and William Sessions ran an operation against pedophiles out of the LMI. Elsewhere, Gunther called this Operation Cyclone. It was shut down when it began to threaten prominent people.
Captain Russbacher opposed government drug dealing and claimed that the C.I.A. helped organize the Cali drug cartel. The captain claimed to be at a meeting with the Columbians and said that Columbia was divided between the two cartels. The overall name for C.I.A. drug operations in Latin America was Operation Snow Cone. His story was independently corroborated by former C.I.A. agent Trenton Parker, who went into greater detail on the meetings and the role of the Agency. In 1976-1982, Parker was giving evidence of governmental corruption to Congressman Larry McDonald of the Joint Armed Services Committee, and McDonald subsequently died in a plane crash.
Russbacher also claimed there was a plan to’sanction” Bill Clinton in San Francisco during the 1992 campaign. He was obviously in prison at the time, so his information had to have come from friends in the intelligence network. This Operation Mount Rushmore was to be spearheaded by a Lt. Commander from ONI, but the C.I.A. and Mossad were also involved. Clinton was saved by a leak within the organization, but several people lost their lives. Rodney Stich obtained information from the Lieutenant Commander and other sources confirm the plot. Also named in the plot were two men with Chinese names and a major San Francisco law firm.
Russbacher told his second wife that the Murrah Federal Building was bombed on April 19, 1995 to distract attention from an airplane crash that killed 17 high ranking military officers who were plotting against Bill Clinton. Sherman Skolnick had written about the plotters before the plane crash. The press reported that eight died. 5
Russbacher seemed to have been framed in a bizarre scenario, claiming he was behind the killing of Princess Diana. It is likely that someone put out this bit of disinformation to call into question everything the man has claimed. Russbacher blamed his fate on the activities of a faction within the intelligence community that has placed the interests of George H.W. Bush above those of the nation. He was part of a second faction, mainly ONI, that tried to place the national interest first. Who knows if there re such factions. While in prison, he did historical research and came up with some odd economic theories and the belief that some sort of international conspiracy dating back to the Bavarian Illuminati are behind many human problems. Most of his testimony can be verified, but his historical and economic theories are another matter. He should stick to Black Ops.
Captain Russbacher claims that he was the command pilot on the plane that b rought George H. W. Bush to Paris on October 19, 1980 to negotiate the October Surprise at the Hotel Crillion in Paris, an arrangement whereby the Iranians agreed to hold 52 American hostages until after the presidential election. Richard Brenneke, Russbacher’s cousin and also a Portland arms dealer, was another pilot , and the third was Heinrich Rupp. Brenneke, later in court testimony, revealed that he had never been a C.I.A. employee. Rather he was a sole contractor with the agency. Brenneke was later jailed when he discussed the flight but a jury believed his story and released him. 2
Bush was there only a few hours—long enough to see the deal cemented, and Russbacher shuttled Bush back to the US aboard an SR –71, the Blackbird needle nosed spy plane. George H.W. Bush rambled on about Russbacher’s claim at a 1992 news conference. Adnan Khashoggi, the arms dealer, paid for the return flight’s fuel with his credit card. Khashoggi has invested in real estate and any number of other businesses, at least once as a partner of the head of Saudi intelligence. Khashoggi has often collected commissions through companies in Lichtenstein and Switzerland. In 1986, he was considered the richest man in the world. This ship, the Nabia, was used in the movie “Never Say Never.” He was arrested in Switzerland in 1988 and tried in the United States on fraud charges and, he and codefendant Imelda Marcos, won acquittal. In 2001, his financial empire appeared to have collapsed into bankruptcy
Frank Connolly, writing for the Sunday Business Post, claims Khashoggi made business protection payments to Osama bin Laden. In 1999, Wallace Hilliard, a Khashoggi man, bought Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida. Long Island Press reporter Sander Hickes found that the C.I.A. was most likely a silent partner. Later Huffman Aviation, where Mohammed Atta trained, was sold to Arthur G. Nadal, who was arrested in 2009 for operating a ponzi scheme. 3
Unfortunately, there is not a solid evidentiary trail for Russbacher's involvement in the October Surprise. . The evidence is amply clear that the October Surprise was negotiated. It is doubtful if Russbacher would have had so many problems in his later life had he not been involved. He has produced flight logs to prove many claims, but there are no logs for the October Surprise.
Russbacher, the scion of an Austria noble family, was born July 1, 1942 amid a strange Teutonic Knights ceremony. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, his grandfather, was head of Austrian intelligence in World War II. .Baron Karl Russbacher was allegedly part of the plot to kill Hitler and had to fake his own death. After the war, he worked for the US government under a different name.
Gunther came to Oklahoma as a child with other. After two years in the Army, he joined the C.I.A. in 1963 which quickly placed him in the navy and flight training. He soon joined the ONI in 1968. In Viet Nam he was wounded and tortured as a prisoner. When he returned to the US, he became qualified to fly the most advanced aircraft. He was involved in black ops in Europe, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as well as the United States. He was apart of a team skilled at murder via car accident and he was also very good at sanitizing intelligence crime scenes here and in Germany. He told his second wife hat he attended assassin school outside Phoenix at Center Point, and that George H.W. Bush was a classmate. The pilot said that Bush was called the Ice Pick because that was his favored tool.
For a time he was on loan to the Department of State for black ops. He infiltrated the Pipefitters Union and even worked for it St. Louis for a time. Gunther also infiltrated criminal and narcotics rings as well as Italian and German terrorist operations. He ran a C.I.A. owned insurance investment advisory service, helped C.I.A. connected companies find tax loopholes, built developments through C.I.A.-financed Crystal Shores Group. All those was part of Operation Cyclops , an effort to put more agents in the business world and expand the number of CIA proprietaries. Gunther has said that Congressman Roy Blunt has repeatedly help the C.I.A. charter proprietary companies in Missouri, and of course this involved pay-offs. Blunt would play a major role arranging Russbacher’s second imprisonment.
Russbacher first served a brief prison sentence in Texas when he was caught moving bags of bearer bonds for the agency. Sometimes he taught languages for the military. He also established a C.I.A. savings and loan that collapsed in Pennsylvania. Within C.I.A. circles he was called “the banker,” because he handled secret accounts and funded black ops.
Captain Russbacher also worked with Robert L. Corson, a known C.I.A. money mule, who was involved in defrauding over twenty savings and loans in Texas and elsewhere, according to the Houston Post sries on the S and L series. To complicate things, Russbacher sometimes even used Corson’s name. He was also involved in assisting the counterrevolutionaries in Central America. Russbacher headed an operation in 1983 that turned sour trying to extricate a Stassi defector from East Germany, lost a close friend in the process, and took a little time off. In the eighties, he also carried PROMIS software to Australia.
In 1989 he married Rayelan Allan Russbacher, his second wife, disregarding the C.I.A. order that he wait two years to remarry. Her late husband was dean of science and engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School, where she first met Gunther. He knew he would never be given permission to marry her because she was a liberal activist, intent on learning about the October Surprise. She had lobbied against the appointment of Donald Gregg as ambassador to South Vietnam, and did not know he then headed the C.I.A. disciplinary committee.
Captain Russbacher defected from the C.I.A. sometime around this time. Maybe he was concerned with abuses of power and maybe it was all about obstacles to his second marriage. In any event, he took a Seal unit with him that had a dozen members.
Two days after the wedding he was arrested and held for several months on trumped up charges. Some months after his arrest, he was released to fly a mission to Moscow and immediately rearrested. In order to save his bride from threatened imprisonment, he pled guilty to impersonating a US attorney and fraud and was sentenced to 21 years. Much of this went back to his operating a C.I.A. proprietary.
His ONI boss, who tried to help him , was killed in a plane crash . Paul Wilcher, his lawyer, was soon suicided July 1, 1993. Wilcher was found dead on his toilet but there was no fecal material in the bown and no urine. His papers and 55 audio tapes of Russbacher were gone. Russbacher was told that Wilcher was taken to Venice, Virginia wherer he was given pizza and questioned about what he knew about the accounts of politicians in BCCI. He was handed a can of pop that was coated with 025 mg of Curare via DSMO. When he weas about to die, he was beaten in the fce to make it appear he had bee mugged. The body was returned to his apartment and because he was in rigor mortis, he was set on the toilet.
His wife embarked on speaking tours trying to get him freed but was nearly killed herself several times between 1990 and 1992. In the first attempt on her life, Gunther’s old Seal team saved her by ramming the car carrying men firing at her.
Missouri released him on probation in December, 1993, after he had been tortured and kept in the hole. Michael W. Brown, the judge who forced his release, died in a head on accident three years later. He had also been subjected to botched heart surgery that left the lower part of his heard dead. Once he had been forced to pull his own tooth and his heart medeicine was often withheld. The ONI then had him orchestrate the transfer of gold from the Philippines to Austria, returning that country gold Hitler had seized in 1938. This was called Operation White Robe. When he completed it, General Hugh Shelton called Gunter to tell him he was reactivated. But he was sent to an Austrian prison for not paying a hotel bill.
In Austria, he ended up in a prison hospital where doctors were appalled by the signs of torture he had endured in the US. Austrian psychiatrists claim to have removed his hospital mind control program. When released from the Austrian hospital December 23, 1996, he had a heart transplant . He resurfaced in a New Mexico hospital with heart complications, and with a beautiful young woman who was not his wife. Because he has skipped out on Missouri probation, he was taken to a Los Alamos jail cell covered with fecies and urine.
When he talked to his wife via telephone he seemed , possibly drugged and still under mind control. He was not the same person and did not seem to remember his wife. He did tell her that the young woman met him at the prison door. After a few calls to his wife,. He vanished for a month. He resurfaced in a New Mexico hospital with heart complications, and with a beautiful young woman who was not his wife. Because he has skipped out on Missouri probation, he was taken to a Los Alamos jail cell covered with feces and urine.
F.B.I. chief William Sessions told his second wife that Russbacher was back at work running intelligence operations for Group 26 ( Defense Intelligence Services—not same as Dia) out of Bristol England. He had a new wife, Jane Ryder, and his father in law was a former MI 6 agent., who freelanced for the C.I.A. and the Vatican Intelligence Service. Allan Frankovich, her former lover who had some intelligence connectiond died of a sudden heart attack a ffew months before Jane and Gunther began to cohabit. Jane, a respected film producer, says that Father Malachi Martin ( 1921-1999) taught her everything she knows. Martin was a former Vatican Jesuit who became an important figure in American right-wing circles.
Somehow Gunter ended up in a Los Alamos jail, rational sometimes and a little demented at other times. It is believed that Jane worked for the C.I.A. and induced him to return to the US. He and Jane returned to England the same year and married, a year before his second wife obtained a divorce in the US.
In 1996, Russbacher published a piece on Jonestown in which he claimed it was a government operation and that members of the cult had been subjected to various degrees of mind control. Wessley Baker of the Department of State headed the project. The programming proved less than effective and there was a revolt followed by as massacre. In another article, the Captain said that Congressman Leo Ryan knew Jonestown was a government operation and was concerned that it was out of control. He has also written about how subjects are found for mind contro in Project Open Eyes and about five levels of training. Some public figures have been subjected to mind control, and he thinks they include Bill Clinton, John McCain, and Madeline Albright.
Captain Russbacher wrote that there were seven sleepers in the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, but he did not think their programming was sufficient that they could be triggered to carry out any specific actions. Dr. Chomg Sun Kim of the Stone Mountain facility had programmed them. The Davidian Group had been created with the intention of using it to carry out terrorist actions. For some reason, a Delta Group Force was sent to neut4ralize the seven sleepers only, and something went wrong. Somehow the seven sleepers had been prematurely set off and they were building some kind of nerve gas device for mass destruction. Triggers appear in TV advertisements and in newspapers.
Gunther claimed to have taught mind control at the Life Management Institute outside Waco in the early 60s. He said Mark Phillips and David Koresh were students there. Interestingly, he claims that Charles Keating and William Sessions ran an operation against pedophiles out of the LMI. Elsewhere, Gunther called this Operation Cyclone. It was shut down when it began to threaten prominent people.
Captain Russbacher opposed government drug dealing and claimed that the C.I.A. helped organize the Cali drug cartel. The captain claimed to be at a meeting with the Columbians and said that Columbia was divided between the two cartels. The overall name for C.I.A. drug operations in Latin America was Operation Snow Cone. His story was independently corroborated by former C.I.A. agent Trenton Parker, who went into greater detail on the meetings and the role of the Agency. In 1976-1982, Parker was giving evidence of governmental corruption to Congressman Larry McDonald of the Joint Armed Services Committee, and McDonald subsequently died in a plane crash.
Russbacher also claimed there was a plan to’sanction” Bill Clinton in San Francisco during the 1992 campaign. He was obviously in prison at the time, so his information had to have come from friends in the intelligence network. This Operation Mount Rushmore was to be spearheaded by a Lt. Commander from ONI, but the C.I.A. and Mossad were also involved. Clinton was saved by a leak within the organization, but several people lost their lives. Rodney Stich obtained information from the Lieutenant Commander and other sources confirm the plot. Also named in the plot were two men with Chinese names and a major San Francisco law firm.
Russbacher told his second wife that the Murrah Federal Building was bombed on April 19, 1995 to distract attention from an airplane crash that killed 17 high ranking military officers who were plotting against Bill Clinton. Sherman Skolnick had written about the plotters before the plane crash. The press reported that eight died. 5
Russbacher seemed to have been framed in a bizarre scenario, claiming he was behind the killing of Princess Diana. It is likely that someone put out this bit of disinformation to call into question everything the man has claimed. Russbacher blamed his fate on the activities of a faction within the intelligence community that has placed the interests of George H.W. Bush above those of the nation. He was part of a second faction, mainly ONI, that tried to place the national interest first. Who knows if there re such factions. While in prison, he did historical research and came up with some odd economic theories and the belief that some sort of international conspiracy dating back to the Bavarian Illuminati are behind many human problems. Most of his testimony can be verified, but his historical and economic theories are another matter. He should stick to Black Ops.
Monday, January 17, 2011
The "Shadow CIA": The Revenge of the Spooks and the October (1980) Surprise: Part Three
Italian journalists believe that Licio Gelli, Grand Master of “Raggruppamento Gelli-P2.” Was present at one of the meetings. “P” meant Propaganda 2. Gelli has essentially taken over a defunct Italian Masonic Lodge to use as the superstructure of his criminal and political network. By the 1970s, P-2 practically ran Italy and even had important people posted in the Vatican. Members were very conservative and were dedicated to accumulating power and personal wealth as well as fighting Communism.
The C.I.A. assisted P-2 in Italy, and it worked closely with the C.I.A. in Latin America. 1Gelli took to using the password “Luciano” after the death of Pope John Paul I, suggesting he had something to do with the late pontiff’s death. Gelli eventually took up residence in Uruguay and his influence spread through much of Latin America, and his operatives were deeply involved in the activities of the right-wing death squads.
European journalists claim to have evidence that P-2 eliminated Swedish prime minister Olf Palme because he showed too much interest in the secret deal. Their informant said the C.I.A. used P-2 to help bring drugs into the USA and also to create terrorist incidents in Europe and Italy. 2 The story was circulated all over Europe, but a government inquiry turned up nothing. Often tales like this are linked to real events to discourage interest in the larger occurrence.
The Reagan effort to derail Carter’s efforts to free the hostages was assisted by Republicans in the C.I.A., other parts of the intelligence community, and the State Department. Miles Copeland, a former senior agent, said the “ C.I.A. within the C.I.A.” was invbolved. As a result of their activities, the Reagan campaign often had better information on the Iranian situation than the President of the United States. Sympathetic elements in the press, including columnist Jack Anderson, printed classified information and clever disinformation . A C.I.A.-connected writer for the Washington Star wrote a speculative scenario for rescuing the hostages that predicted Rescue One, the failed effort to extract the detained Americans. Richard Allen’s notes show that the French assisted the Republicans by giving the Iranians spare parts, in an effort to injure Carter;’s negotiations.
There is solid evidence that the Reagan campaign, with the help of C.I.A. people and some military and F.B.I. people, made a deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after the American election. Oliver North was involved in getting the payment, in the form of arms, to Iran and his diaries suggest some of the money flowing from the deal went to Hezbollah, perhaps as black mail.
There were a number of meetings between Republican operatives and representatives of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Paris and Madrid.. Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian C.I.A. agent, testified in the 1991-1992 hearings that he accompanied Casey at the two day Madrid meeting with mullah Mehdi Karrubi. After one of the meetings, Casey appeared in London a day later on , July 29, 1980. He went to Madrid four times, were he laid out the main outlines of the deal, which was concluded in mid October at a meeting in a Paris suburb.
The key meetings were in Paris area hotels on October 18-20. A day after they concluded, the Tehran government made it clear it was no longer interested in negotiating with the Carter administration. A key figure at the this meeting was Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian born Mossad agent and arms dealer. Another key figure was Ari Ben Menashe of the Mossad. Iran was represented by Ali Akkabar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then speaker of the parliament, and Mohammed Ali Raja, a future president of Iran. The Iranians were promised weapons for delaying the release of the hostages, and it has been suggested that millions were given to the Iranian leadership in bribes.
The weapons and parts, worth about $5 billion, were shipped to Portugal on ships by means of false documents, where other items were added to their cargoes. The payment in arms then went to Israel for transshipping to Iran The Portuguese Prime Minister, who objected to his territory being used for the transfer of weapons, later died in a plane crash, along with one cabinet minister.
It has often been charged that vice presidential candidate George Bush attended that meeting, and there is evidence to sustain the charge. Israeli agent Ari Ben Menache told Frontline that there were three meetings in Paris, and that George W. Bush attended one of them. An intelligence agent testified at the subsequent hearings that he had seem a November 18, 1980 copy of a French intelligence agency ( SDECD) reporting that it has successfully moved Bush around Paris without being recognized. This agent said Bush attended three meetings with Iranians rather than one.
The Congressional task force that investigated all this found two separate witnesses, who did not know one another, who knew Bush was flying to Paris for the final meeting with the Iranians. The task force people also knew that many current and former C.I.A. people were involved. For them, it was unthinkable that people still on the government payroll could participate in what amounted to a coup against a sitting president. Too little was done to pursue all this, and investigators were further discouraged by the vigorous stone-walling activities of the Republican leadership under Senator Robert Dole.
Bush’s explanation of where he was then cannot be proven and seems somewhat implausible. He has refused to release the kind of information that would settle the matter. Moreover, the Secret Service eventually had to admit that it had lost track of George H.W. Bush for 23 hours at that time. This came out in the trial of intelligence operative Richard Brennecke, who had talked to the congressional investigators in 1991. He was subsequently arrested on charges not related to t he October Surprise of 1980 and eventually acquitted. He was cousin of Captain Russbeacher and part of his flight crew.
Whether Bush was flown there by Captain Gunter Russbacher of ONI is another matter. The captain claimed to have evidence that he was Bush’s pilot. Russbacher had taken part in a number of Naval Intelligence and C.I.A. operations, and was son of a famous US intelligence operative.
A Russian speaker who even knew Gorbachev, Russbacher was eventually accused of profiting from covert operations and imprisoned. However, there is not enough solid evidence to prove that Bush attended the Paris meeting. He claimed to fly a BAC-111, owned by the Saudi royal family. Bush was joined by passengers Bill Casey, Donald Gregg, Robert Gates, Robert McFarlane, Richard Allen and Dr. Carl Brian. The latter was later to own UPI and the Financial Times,, had been on Reagan’s California cabinet, and was a close friend of Ed Meese. He was convicted in 1994 in California of nine counts of fraud, but the court released no information on the exact nature of the charges, and news of trhe case was not made public until 1995.
Jennifer Fitzgerald, Bush’s longtime paramour, was also aboard. According to some sources, two DemocratsBDan Rostenkoweski and Senator Robert Byrd-- were also present. The plane arrived in the military section of a Paris airport, and Bush departed on the same day via a SR71- Sources disagree on whjether it was Le Bourget .
Blackbird was flown by Russhbacher to McGuire AFB in New Jersey. His five Secret Service agents returned later. A second plane piloted by intelligence agent Heinrick Rupp, a former Nazi pilot, brought others to Paris. Later, as a C.I.A. operative, he was convicted of bank fraud in connection with the savings and loan scandal. Testimony at the 1991-1992 joint congressional hearings revealed that Dr. Earl was entrusted with paying the Iranian leaders $40 million, which was deposited in a Luxemburg bank. Bill Casey told CIA agent William Buckley that the money had been contributed by wealthy Republican businessmen. 3
Earl's payment for these services was the right to sell a copy of sophisticated information-gathering software called PROMIS to the Canadian government. The Department of Justice had seized this software from Inlaw, a firm that had leased the software to the government. Justice refused to pay, claiming that not all terms of the contract were met. Litigation over this would continue for years. Brian and others subsequently sold the software to intelligence agencies and banks throughout the world.
During the subsequent hearings, both Newsweek and the New Republic, were parties to efforts to discredit the claim that Casey was in Madrid at that time. When their evidence collapsed, they did not retract their comments. The Congressional Committee staff then tried to prove that Casey was at Bohemian Grove, in northern California, and they stuck with this story even after business receipts showed he was there a week later than that.
The investigation chaired by Democrat Lee Hamilton was shut down, probably for national security reasons. Hamilton’s chief counsel was Larry Barcella, who was lawyer for the Bank of Commerce and Industry, when it was indicted in 1988. That institution was the depository for all manner of covert action funding. Barcella’s senior law partner was former Senator Paul Laxault, a close friend of Ragan. Barcella was also a good friend of Michael Ledeen, whom some believed was tied to the October Surprise. Hamilton was not interested in looking at the arms for drugs business and seemed to accept Oliver North’s testimony. Hamilton and 18 other members of the House pressed hard to force Costa Rica to release drug operative John Hull.
Newsweek assigned Bob Parry to follow the story but forbade him to attend the hearings. He arranged for someone to surreptitiously bring him document transcripts and followed the story subsequently. Later, he played a role in breaking the Iran-Contra story, which ended his career in mainstream journalism.
The hearings into the October Surprise resulted in the jailing of several intelligence agents who spoke to the Joint Committee or its staff. Lee Hamilton, who chaired the investigation let Henry Hyde, a C.I.A. man, veto the hiring of one investigator. Hamilton refused to look at files the Soviet Union provided. 4 After serving in Congress, he was vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, which endorsed the George W. Bush administration’s account of what happened when the World Trade Center and Pentagon wre attacked .
Rossbacher’s incarceration may have been more connected to a recent re-marriage than to the October Surprise. After his divorce, he was ordered not to remarry for two years because there was a fear that the intended bride could be a KGB agent. He quickly wed her and ended up in prison, a situation that prompted him to start talking. As he successfully battled one charge, he would be accused of something else, including the kidnaping of his niece. Michael Riconosciuto, who provided information on how the deal was financed was imprisoned in Pierce County, Washington and then removed to another site. He was accused of operating a meths lab. Two other agents were jailed, one of whom later won acquittal. Covert operatives call the October Surprise C.I.A. agents who later went to jail the Brown Helmet Society. They were expected to do their time and keep quiet. Though not directly involved in the October Surprise, Michael R. Senci had been in a position to know more than one should as he had worked for the C.I.A.’s Republicans Abroad. In 1991, he was convicted of six counts of mail fraud and put on ice.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE OCTOBER SURPRISE
Robert Gates established Operation Ringwind in 1981 to take care of everyone who was likely to reveal the October Surprise. Lt. Commander Robert Hunt (ONI) later named most of the men involved in the operation John Aldridge; Phil Burgess; Bob Burdige; Gregg Note; Robert Lister; Fred White, and Rodney Harmon . Some of the victims were investigators and some were participants. Assassins were trained at Camp Perry in Virginia, Fort Story, and Mint Farm Hill. Among those killed was the Portuguese Prime Minister.
It is unclear who else was killed but there is evidence that the same hit team was active for more than decade. Young named some of the victims: Danny Casolaro, Alan Standorf, Barry Kumnick, Dennis Eisman, Alan May, David May Paul Macesca, David Mayer, Dexter Jacobson, Gary Pimmell. Michael Hand, Anson Ng, Jonathan Moyle, Arnold Raphel Mohammed Rajai, Cyrus Hashemi, and Shahpour Bhktior.
Casolaro was investigating many things including the October Surprise, and Alan Standorf was his NSA source. Kumnick was a software developer who helped the US government refine PROMIS, a program the Justice Department seized from a private firm. Casolaro was also investigating this. Kumnick disappeared while Congress was investigating the matter and it was being litigated. Attorney Eisman was shot to death April 5, 1991. He was defending Michael Riconosciuto, a C.I.A. employee who led in the effort to modify PROMIS.
Iranian banker Cyrus Hashemi , along with his brother, were middle men in the October, 1980 surprise. There were damaging F.B.I. wiretaps on his phone then and his elder brother Jamshid later testified to the Hamilton Committee, which whitewashed the whole business anyhow.
The brothers were tied to BCCI and the shah and had many reasons to cooperate against Jimmy Carter. Reuters reported in 1992 that the tapes showed that Cyrus was also tied to Ronald Reagan and that the Gipper himself appeared on one tape. The Reagan administration indicted him in 1984 for selling arms to Iran and he died in 1986. ( One thing this writer has learned is that the best way to control hostile witnesses was to indict and jail them. This appeared many times in the Reagan-Daddy Bush year.) Three months before he was killed, he started talking to Customs about the Iranian arms trad3e and to Frontline about the October Surprise. Shahpour Bhktiar , the last imperial prime minister of Iran, was assassinated in 1979. It was assumed that revolutionaries were guilty.
Attorney Jacobson was found murdered the night before he was to present evidence about massive corruption in California bankruptcy courts. Michael Hand was a US intelligence agent who helped run the Nugan-Hand Bank. The chairman of the board was a retired US admiral whom this writer has found protecting sderveral unsavory intelligence operatives. Anson Ng, stringer for the Financial Times, was killed in Guatemala wher he went to inverview the agent who paid for the murder of three men who complained about whent on at the reservation where PROMIS was modified and weapons were manufactured for the Contras. Moyle was a British defense expert who was murdered on March 30, 1990 in Chile, where he was checking out a story that the US and Israel were modifying an helecopter so it could be sold to Iraq. Frankly this writer and others thought he was killed by MI6. Rajai, President of Pakistan, died in a bomb blast on August 30, 1981.
Young claimed that some members of the team were involved in Operation Mount Rushmore ( 1992), the failed effort to kill candidate Bill Clinton
The C.I.A. assisted P-2 in Italy, and it worked closely with the C.I.A. in Latin America. 1Gelli took to using the password “Luciano” after the death of Pope John Paul I, suggesting he had something to do with the late pontiff’s death. Gelli eventually took up residence in Uruguay and his influence spread through much of Latin America, and his operatives were deeply involved in the activities of the right-wing death squads.
European journalists claim to have evidence that P-2 eliminated Swedish prime minister Olf Palme because he showed too much interest in the secret deal. Their informant said the C.I.A. used P-2 to help bring drugs into the USA and also to create terrorist incidents in Europe and Italy. 2 The story was circulated all over Europe, but a government inquiry turned up nothing. Often tales like this are linked to real events to discourage interest in the larger occurrence.
The Reagan effort to derail Carter’s efforts to free the hostages was assisted by Republicans in the C.I.A., other parts of the intelligence community, and the State Department. Miles Copeland, a former senior agent, said the “ C.I.A. within the C.I.A.” was invbolved. As a result of their activities, the Reagan campaign often had better information on the Iranian situation than the President of the United States. Sympathetic elements in the press, including columnist Jack Anderson, printed classified information and clever disinformation . A C.I.A.-connected writer for the Washington Star wrote a speculative scenario for rescuing the hostages that predicted Rescue One, the failed effort to extract the detained Americans. Richard Allen’s notes show that the French assisted the Republicans by giving the Iranians spare parts, in an effort to injure Carter;’s negotiations.
There is solid evidence that the Reagan campaign, with the help of C.I.A. people and some military and F.B.I. people, made a deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after the American election. Oliver North was involved in getting the payment, in the form of arms, to Iran and his diaries suggest some of the money flowing from the deal went to Hezbollah, perhaps as black mail.
There were a number of meetings between Republican operatives and representatives of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Paris and Madrid.. Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian C.I.A. agent, testified in the 1991-1992 hearings that he accompanied Casey at the two day Madrid meeting with mullah Mehdi Karrubi. After one of the meetings, Casey appeared in London a day later on , July 29, 1980. He went to Madrid four times, were he laid out the main outlines of the deal, which was concluded in mid October at a meeting in a Paris suburb.
The key meetings were in Paris area hotels on October 18-20. A day after they concluded, the Tehran government made it clear it was no longer interested in negotiating with the Carter administration. A key figure at the this meeting was Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian born Mossad agent and arms dealer. Another key figure was Ari Ben Menashe of the Mossad. Iran was represented by Ali Akkabar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then speaker of the parliament, and Mohammed Ali Raja, a future president of Iran. The Iranians were promised weapons for delaying the release of the hostages, and it has been suggested that millions were given to the Iranian leadership in bribes.
The weapons and parts, worth about $5 billion, were shipped to Portugal on ships by means of false documents, where other items were added to their cargoes. The payment in arms then went to Israel for transshipping to Iran The Portuguese Prime Minister, who objected to his territory being used for the transfer of weapons, later died in a plane crash, along with one cabinet minister.
It has often been charged that vice presidential candidate George Bush attended that meeting, and there is evidence to sustain the charge. Israeli agent Ari Ben Menache told Frontline that there were three meetings in Paris, and that George W. Bush attended one of them. An intelligence agent testified at the subsequent hearings that he had seem a November 18, 1980 copy of a French intelligence agency ( SDECD) reporting that it has successfully moved Bush around Paris without being recognized. This agent said Bush attended three meetings with Iranians rather than one.
The Congressional task force that investigated all this found two separate witnesses, who did not know one another, who knew Bush was flying to Paris for the final meeting with the Iranians. The task force people also knew that many current and former C.I.A. people were involved. For them, it was unthinkable that people still on the government payroll could participate in what amounted to a coup against a sitting president. Too little was done to pursue all this, and investigators were further discouraged by the vigorous stone-walling activities of the Republican leadership under Senator Robert Dole.
Bush’s explanation of where he was then cannot be proven and seems somewhat implausible. He has refused to release the kind of information that would settle the matter. Moreover, the Secret Service eventually had to admit that it had lost track of George H.W. Bush for 23 hours at that time. This came out in the trial of intelligence operative Richard Brennecke, who had talked to the congressional investigators in 1991. He was subsequently arrested on charges not related to t he October Surprise of 1980 and eventually acquitted. He was cousin of Captain Russbeacher and part of his flight crew.
Whether Bush was flown there by Captain Gunter Russbacher of ONI is another matter. The captain claimed to have evidence that he was Bush’s pilot. Russbacher had taken part in a number of Naval Intelligence and C.I.A. operations, and was son of a famous US intelligence operative.
A Russian speaker who even knew Gorbachev, Russbacher was eventually accused of profiting from covert operations and imprisoned. However, there is not enough solid evidence to prove that Bush attended the Paris meeting. He claimed to fly a BAC-111, owned by the Saudi royal family. Bush was joined by passengers Bill Casey, Donald Gregg, Robert Gates, Robert McFarlane, Richard Allen and Dr. Carl Brian. The latter was later to own UPI and the Financial Times,, had been on Reagan’s California cabinet, and was a close friend of Ed Meese. He was convicted in 1994 in California of nine counts of fraud, but the court released no information on the exact nature of the charges, and news of trhe case was not made public until 1995.
Jennifer Fitzgerald, Bush’s longtime paramour, was also aboard. According to some sources, two DemocratsBDan Rostenkoweski and Senator Robert Byrd-- were also present. The plane arrived in the military section of a Paris airport, and Bush departed on the same day via a SR71- Sources disagree on whjether it was Le Bourget .
Blackbird was flown by Russhbacher to McGuire AFB in New Jersey. His five Secret Service agents returned later. A second plane piloted by intelligence agent Heinrick Rupp, a former Nazi pilot, brought others to Paris. Later, as a C.I.A. operative, he was convicted of bank fraud in connection with the savings and loan scandal. Testimony at the 1991-1992 joint congressional hearings revealed that Dr. Earl was entrusted with paying the Iranian leaders $40 million, which was deposited in a Luxemburg bank. Bill Casey told CIA agent William Buckley that the money had been contributed by wealthy Republican businessmen. 3
Earl's payment for these services was the right to sell a copy of sophisticated information-gathering software called PROMIS to the Canadian government. The Department of Justice had seized this software from Inlaw, a firm that had leased the software to the government. Justice refused to pay, claiming that not all terms of the contract were met. Litigation over this would continue for years. Brian and others subsequently sold the software to intelligence agencies and banks throughout the world.
During the subsequent hearings, both Newsweek and the New Republic, were parties to efforts to discredit the claim that Casey was in Madrid at that time. When their evidence collapsed, they did not retract their comments. The Congressional Committee staff then tried to prove that Casey was at Bohemian Grove, in northern California, and they stuck with this story even after business receipts showed he was there a week later than that.
The investigation chaired by Democrat Lee Hamilton was shut down, probably for national security reasons. Hamilton’s chief counsel was Larry Barcella, who was lawyer for the Bank of Commerce and Industry, when it was indicted in 1988. That institution was the depository for all manner of covert action funding. Barcella’s senior law partner was former Senator Paul Laxault, a close friend of Ragan. Barcella was also a good friend of Michael Ledeen, whom some believed was tied to the October Surprise. Hamilton was not interested in looking at the arms for drugs business and seemed to accept Oliver North’s testimony. Hamilton and 18 other members of the House pressed hard to force Costa Rica to release drug operative John Hull.
Newsweek assigned Bob Parry to follow the story but forbade him to attend the hearings. He arranged for someone to surreptitiously bring him document transcripts and followed the story subsequently. Later, he played a role in breaking the Iran-Contra story, which ended his career in mainstream journalism.
The hearings into the October Surprise resulted in the jailing of several intelligence agents who spoke to the Joint Committee or its staff. Lee Hamilton, who chaired the investigation let Henry Hyde, a C.I.A. man, veto the hiring of one investigator. Hamilton refused to look at files the Soviet Union provided. 4 After serving in Congress, he was vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, which endorsed the George W. Bush administration’s account of what happened when the World Trade Center and Pentagon wre attacked .
Rossbacher’s incarceration may have been more connected to a recent re-marriage than to the October Surprise. After his divorce, he was ordered not to remarry for two years because there was a fear that the intended bride could be a KGB agent. He quickly wed her and ended up in prison, a situation that prompted him to start talking. As he successfully battled one charge, he would be accused of something else, including the kidnaping of his niece. Michael Riconosciuto, who provided information on how the deal was financed was imprisoned in Pierce County, Washington and then removed to another site. He was accused of operating a meths lab. Two other agents were jailed, one of whom later won acquittal. Covert operatives call the October Surprise C.I.A. agents who later went to jail the Brown Helmet Society. They were expected to do their time and keep quiet. Though not directly involved in the October Surprise, Michael R. Senci had been in a position to know more than one should as he had worked for the C.I.A.’s Republicans Abroad. In 1991, he was convicted of six counts of mail fraud and put on ice.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE OCTOBER SURPRISE
Robert Gates established Operation Ringwind in 1981 to take care of everyone who was likely to reveal the October Surprise. Lt. Commander Robert Hunt (ONI) later named most of the men involved in the operation John Aldridge; Phil Burgess; Bob Burdige; Gregg Note; Robert Lister; Fred White, and Rodney Harmon . Some of the victims were investigators and some were participants. Assassins were trained at Camp Perry in Virginia, Fort Story, and Mint Farm Hill. Among those killed was the Portuguese Prime Minister.
It is unclear who else was killed but there is evidence that the same hit team was active for more than decade. Young named some of the victims: Danny Casolaro, Alan Standorf, Barry Kumnick, Dennis Eisman, Alan May, David May Paul Macesca, David Mayer, Dexter Jacobson, Gary Pimmell. Michael Hand, Anson Ng, Jonathan Moyle, Arnold Raphel Mohammed Rajai, Cyrus Hashemi, and Shahpour Bhktior.
Casolaro was investigating many things including the October Surprise, and Alan Standorf was his NSA source. Kumnick was a software developer who helped the US government refine PROMIS, a program the Justice Department seized from a private firm. Casolaro was also investigating this. Kumnick disappeared while Congress was investigating the matter and it was being litigated. Attorney Eisman was shot to death April 5, 1991. He was defending Michael Riconosciuto, a C.I.A. employee who led in the effort to modify PROMIS.
Iranian banker Cyrus Hashemi , along with his brother, were middle men in the October, 1980 surprise. There were damaging F.B.I. wiretaps on his phone then and his elder brother Jamshid later testified to the Hamilton Committee, which whitewashed the whole business anyhow.
The brothers were tied to BCCI and the shah and had many reasons to cooperate against Jimmy Carter. Reuters reported in 1992 that the tapes showed that Cyrus was also tied to Ronald Reagan and that the Gipper himself appeared on one tape. The Reagan administration indicted him in 1984 for selling arms to Iran and he died in 1986. ( One thing this writer has learned is that the best way to control hostile witnesses was to indict and jail them. This appeared many times in the Reagan-Daddy Bush year.) Three months before he was killed, he started talking to Customs about the Iranian arms trad3e and to Frontline about the October Surprise. Shahpour Bhktiar , the last imperial prime minister of Iran, was assassinated in 1979. It was assumed that revolutionaries were guilty.
Attorney Jacobson was found murdered the night before he was to present evidence about massive corruption in California bankruptcy courts. Michael Hand was a US intelligence agent who helped run the Nugan-Hand Bank. The chairman of the board was a retired US admiral whom this writer has found protecting sderveral unsavory intelligence operatives. Anson Ng, stringer for the Financial Times, was killed in Guatemala wher he went to inverview the agent who paid for the murder of three men who complained about whent on at the reservation where PROMIS was modified and weapons were manufactured for the Contras. Moyle was a British defense expert who was murdered on March 30, 1990 in Chile, where he was checking out a story that the US and Israel were modifying an helecopter so it could be sold to Iraq. Frankly this writer and others thought he was killed by MI6. Rajai, President of Pakistan, died in a bomb blast on August 30, 1981.
Young claimed that some members of the team were involved in Operation Mount Rushmore ( 1992), the failed effort to kill candidate Bill Clinton
Thursday, January 13, 2011
The "Shadow CIA" and the Revenge of the Spooks: The October Surprise, Part Two
Casey was able to get in touch with the Iranians with the help of the French intelligence service, Count Alexandre de Marenches. Carter had unwittingly sealed his own fate by refusing to trade arms for hostages. However, there is strong evidence that the Israeli’s played a major role in opening dialog between the Republicans and the Iranian government. The Israelis had been asked to sell a limited number of arms to Iran, and they wanted a green light from potentially the next American government to sell more. For that reason, Israeli intelligence sent an Arab merchant with Iranian ties to negotiate with Republican operatives at the L" Enfante Hotel in Washington. He proposed the kind of deal Casey negotiated, except that Israel would immediately begin unlimited arms sales The main Iranian spokesman was Ayatollah Mohanned Baheshti, an aid to Speaker Ransanjani and assistant to Ayatollah Khomeini.
Casey was a hard-bitten capitalistic high-roller with intelligence experience. He knew how possession of power would have positive economic consequences for himself and his friends. Others may have been driven more by ideology. Carrying on diplomatic negotiations with a foreign enemy is a violation of the law, as was coordinating arms shipments to Iran, before and after Reagan took power. One would think that patriots would want the hostages returned as soon as possible and would support the nation’s foreign policy in a time of crisis, even if the president was a Democrat. What led these people to violate the law overcame any patriotic impulses to carry on their own destructive foreign policy.
The best answer is that they were so convinced by their own ideology and attacks on the Democrats that they felt justified in doing anything necessary to restore Republican control of the White House. It was as though elected Democrats automatically lack legitimacy, except when they co-operate in enacting and carrying out Republican policy. There was an op-ed piece and a PBS special outlining the facts in this matter in 1991.
Not one Republican politician or pundit expressed any interest in the possibility that this may have happened. So-called liberal politicians and journalists showed little interest when it became clear that there was not overwhelming evidence that President George Bush was involved. The Secret Service records for Bush at that time were only partially made available to Congress. Because they were redacted, Bush’s claims to have been in Washington could not be proven.
One agent claimed to have been with the Bushes much of that day, but it was later proven thqat the agent was jogging along the C and O Canal that day and not on duty. Years later, Yasir Arafat told Jimmy Carter that the Republicans had asked them to help with the arms deal used to keep the hostages captive until after the election. In 1993, Russia Supreme Soviet agreed to give Congressional investigators files that showed that Casey met with the Iranians in 1980 and that Robert Gates and George H.W. Bush were involved in the deal with Iran.
The Russian report added that Robert Gates, then a Carter NSC staffer, was in Paris negotiating on behalf of Reagan and that Casey attended meetings at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid and Paris. The Russians saw a bidding war between Carter and Reagan for control of release of the hostages, with the Republicans able to disrupt the Carter operation and make a deal with the Iranians.
A Congressional task force had just concluded that the Republicans did not interfere in the hostage crisis before the Russian report arrived, and nothing was done to change the Congressional report. Some of the Russian report was based on allegations of former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe. Israel said he had never been a government employee until he produced documents. Then the Israelis simply said he was lying about the October Surprise. The Russian Report was ignored, and ended up in a box of documents in a former ladies room in the Rayburn Building.1
Among other things, Casey promised that Israel would sell some arms and parts to Iran immediately and that they would sell many more after Ronald Reagan became president. The Republicans promised to provide about $5 billion worth of arms. Much later, in May, 1986, McCarlane visited Iran and was taped saying that up until then the Reagan administration had provided 1.3 billion in arms and add3ed that it would provide trhe rest. The Iranians were also promised the return of $12 billion in blocked funds. Prime Minister Menachin Begin, who had promised not to sell so much as a shoelace to Iran, cooperated with the Republicans" efforts to undermine the Carter position. These activities thoroughly undermined the activities of the legitimately elected government of the United States and weakened the U.S. position in bargaining for the return of the hostages. Former Iranian president Bani-Sadr was ale to provide investigators with details of the money transferred to Iranians , along with bank account numbers. 2
Italian journalists believe that Licio Gelli, Grand Master of “Raggruppamento Gelli-P2.” Was present at one of the meetings. “P” meant Propaganda 2. Gelli has essentially taken over a defunct Italian Masonic Lodge to use as the superstructure of his criminal and political network. By the 1970s, P-2 practically ran Italy and even had important people posted in the Vatican. Members were very conservative and were dedicated to accumulating power and personal wealth as well as fighting Communism. The C.I.A. assisted P-2 in Italy, and it worked closely with the C.I.A. in Latin America. 3 Gelli took to using the password “Luciano” after the death of Pope John Paul I, suggesting he had something to do with the late pontiff’s death. Gelli eventually took up residence in Uruguay and his influence spread through much of Latin America, and his operatives were deeply involved in the activities of the right-wing death squads.
European journalists claim to have evidence that P-2 eliminated Swedish prime minister Olf Palme because he showed too much interest in the secret deal. Their informant said the C.I.A. used P-2 to help bring drugs into the USA and also to create terrorist incidents in Europe and Italy. 4 The story was circulated all over Europe, but a government inquiry turned up nothing. Often tales like this are linked to real events to discourage interest in the larger occurrence.
Casey was a hard-bitten capitalistic high-roller with intelligence experience. He knew how possession of power would have positive economic consequences for himself and his friends. Others may have been driven more by ideology. Carrying on diplomatic negotiations with a foreign enemy is a violation of the law, as was coordinating arms shipments to Iran, before and after Reagan took power. One would think that patriots would want the hostages returned as soon as possible and would support the nation’s foreign policy in a time of crisis, even if the president was a Democrat. What led these people to violate the law overcame any patriotic impulses to carry on their own destructive foreign policy.
The best answer is that they were so convinced by their own ideology and attacks on the Democrats that they felt justified in doing anything necessary to restore Republican control of the White House. It was as though elected Democrats automatically lack legitimacy, except when they co-operate in enacting and carrying out Republican policy. There was an op-ed piece and a PBS special outlining the facts in this matter in 1991.
Not one Republican politician or pundit expressed any interest in the possibility that this may have happened. So-called liberal politicians and journalists showed little interest when it became clear that there was not overwhelming evidence that President George Bush was involved. The Secret Service records for Bush at that time were only partially made available to Congress. Because they were redacted, Bush’s claims to have been in Washington could not be proven.
One agent claimed to have been with the Bushes much of that day, but it was later proven thqat the agent was jogging along the C and O Canal that day and not on duty. Years later, Yasir Arafat told Jimmy Carter that the Republicans had asked them to help with the arms deal used to keep the hostages captive until after the election. In 1993, Russia Supreme Soviet agreed to give Congressional investigators files that showed that Casey met with the Iranians in 1980 and that Robert Gates and George H.W. Bush were involved in the deal with Iran.
The Russian report added that Robert Gates, then a Carter NSC staffer, was in Paris negotiating on behalf of Reagan and that Casey attended meetings at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid and Paris. The Russians saw a bidding war between Carter and Reagan for control of release of the hostages, with the Republicans able to disrupt the Carter operation and make a deal with the Iranians.
A Congressional task force had just concluded that the Republicans did not interfere in the hostage crisis before the Russian report arrived, and nothing was done to change the Congressional report. Some of the Russian report was based on allegations of former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe. Israel said he had never been a government employee until he produced documents. Then the Israelis simply said he was lying about the October Surprise. The Russian Report was ignored, and ended up in a box of documents in a former ladies room in the Rayburn Building.1
Among other things, Casey promised that Israel would sell some arms and parts to Iran immediately and that they would sell many more after Ronald Reagan became president. The Republicans promised to provide about $5 billion worth of arms. Much later, in May, 1986, McCarlane visited Iran and was taped saying that up until then the Reagan administration had provided 1.3 billion in arms and add3ed that it would provide trhe rest. The Iranians were also promised the return of $12 billion in blocked funds. Prime Minister Menachin Begin, who had promised not to sell so much as a shoelace to Iran, cooperated with the Republicans" efforts to undermine the Carter position. These activities thoroughly undermined the activities of the legitimately elected government of the United States and weakened the U.S. position in bargaining for the return of the hostages. Former Iranian president Bani-Sadr was ale to provide investigators with details of the money transferred to Iranians , along with bank account numbers. 2
Italian journalists believe that Licio Gelli, Grand Master of “Raggruppamento Gelli-P2.” Was present at one of the meetings. “P” meant Propaganda 2. Gelli has essentially taken over a defunct Italian Masonic Lodge to use as the superstructure of his criminal and political network. By the 1970s, P-2 practically ran Italy and even had important people posted in the Vatican. Members were very conservative and were dedicated to accumulating power and personal wealth as well as fighting Communism. The C.I.A. assisted P-2 in Italy, and it worked closely with the C.I.A. in Latin America. 3 Gelli took to using the password “Luciano” after the death of Pope John Paul I, suggesting he had something to do with the late pontiff’s death. Gelli eventually took up residence in Uruguay and his influence spread through much of Latin America, and his operatives were deeply involved in the activities of the right-wing death squads.
European journalists claim to have evidence that P-2 eliminated Swedish prime minister Olf Palme because he showed too much interest in the secret deal. Their informant said the C.I.A. used P-2 to help bring drugs into the USA and also to create terrorist incidents in Europe and Italy. 4 The story was circulated all over Europe, but a government inquiry turned up nothing. Often tales like this are linked to real events to discourage interest in the larger occurrence.
Monday, January 10, 2011
The "Shadow CIA" and the REvenge of the Spooks: The October (1980) Surprise: Part II
A pro-Reagan operative at the National Security Council stole President Carter’s debate briefing book on foreign policy and delivered it to the Reagan campaign. A subsequent investigation found James Baker’s fingerprints on the book, but a committee suggested William Casey was probably involved in the theft. There was suspicion that Lt. Colonel Oliver North and Major General Richard Secord sabotaged Operation Eagle Claw, the failed rescue mission launched by Carter on April 25, 1980.
According to Mansur Rafizadeh, a secret C.I.A. team directed by William Casey sabotaged the mission.Rafizadeh was a C.I.A. agent who had run SAVAK. Rafizadeh had been a C.I.A. operative for 18-19 years. In his book, he added that the Reagan-Bush people specifically required that the hostages not be released until Reagan was sworn in. They did not want Carter to have any role and opposed return of the hjostages after the election was over.
He also said that people on the C.I.A.’s Iran desk were wildly anti-Carter in 1980. However, it is unthinkable that Americans involved in the rescue effort could have wanted it to fail and there is no good evidence that they did anything to produce this result. Yet, several people who would be closely tied to George H.W. Bush’s black operations in subsequent years were part of the rescue effort. Oliver North was aboard a helicopter near the Turkish border. General Richard Secord was the main planner, and Albert Hakim was involved in ground operations. Hakim fled Baghdad 24 hours before the operation; his job was to obtain ground vehicles. . As is known, only 5 of the eight helicopters got to the site in working condition. The Pentagon review board found astonishing incompetence and negligence in the operation Later, Cynthia Dwyer, who had not yet been taken as the 53rd hostage, told a minister that the C.I.A. deliberately botched the operation.
It is known that the C.I.A. paid for polling by Richard Beale and Richard Wirthlin to learn what would be the effect on Reagan’s lead in the campaign of Carter were to secure the release of the prisoners. The results were swent directly to the Reagan campaign. They confirmed the opinion of some that Reagan must disrupt Carter’s efforts to gain the release of the hostages.
Casey was able to get in touch with the Iranians with the help of the French intelligence service, Count Alexandre de Marenches. Carter had unwittingly sealed his own fate by refusing to trade arms for hostages. However, there is strong evidence that the Israeli’s played a major role in opening dialog between the Republicans and the Iranian government. The Israelis had been asked to sell a limited number of arms to Iran, and they wanted a green light from potentially the next American government to sell more. For that reason, Israeli intelligence sent an Arab merchant with Iranian ties to negotiate with Republican operatives at the L" Enfante Hotel in Washington. He proposed the kind of deal Casey negotiated, except that Israel would immediately begin unlimited arms sales The main Iranian spokesman was Ayatollah Mohanned Baheshti, an aid to Speaker Ransanjani and assistant to Ayatollah Khomeini.
Casey was a hard-bitten capitalistic high-roller with intelligence experience. He knew how possession of power would have positive economic consequences for himself and his friends. Others may have been driven more by ideology. Carrying on diplomatic negotiations with a foreign enemy is a violation of the law, as was coordinating arms shipments to Iran, before and after Reagan took power. One would think that patriots would want the hostages returned as soon as possible and would support the nation’s foreign policy in a time of crisis, even if the president was a Democrat.
What led these people to violate the law overcame any patriotic impulses to carry on their own destructive foreign policy. The best answer is that they were so convinced by their own ideology and attacks on the Democrats that they felt justified in doing anything necessary to restore Republican control of the White House. It was as though elected Democrats automatically lack legitimacy, except when they co-operate in enacting and carrying out Republican policy. There was an op-ed piece and a PBS special outlining the facts in this matter in 1991.
Not one Republican politi C.I.A.n or pundit expressed any interest in the possibility that this may have happened. So-called liberal politicians and journalists showed little interest when it became clear that there was not overwhelming evidence that President George Bush was involved. The Secret Service records for Bush at that time were only partially made available to Congress. Because they were redacted, Bush’s claims to have been in Washington could not be proven.
One agent claimed to have been with the Bushes much of that day, but it was later proven that the agent was jogging along the C and O Canal that day and not on duty. Years later, Yasir Arafat told Jimmy Carter that the Republicans had asked them to help with the arms deal used to keep the hostages captive until after the election. In 1993, Russia Supreme Soviet agreed to give Congressional investigators files that showed that Casey met with the Iranians in 1980 and that Robert Gates and George H.W. Bush were involved in the deal with Iran. The Russian report added that Robert Gates, then a Carter NSC staffer, was in Paris negotiating on behalf of Reagan and that Casey attended meetings at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid and Paris.
The Russians saw a bidding war between Carter and Reagan for control of release of the hostages, with the Republicans able to disrupt the Carter operation and make a deal with the Iranians. A Congressional task force had just concluded that the Republicans did not interfere in the hostage crisis before the Russian report arrived, and nothing was done to change the Congressional report. Some of the Russian report was based on allegations of former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe. Israel said he had never been a government employee until he produced documents. Then the Israelis simply said he was lying about the October Surprise. The Russian Report was ignored, and ended up in a box of documents in a former ladies room in the Rayburn Building.1
Among other things, Casey promised that Israel would sell some arms and parts to Iran immediately and that they would sell many more after Ronald Reagan became president. The Republicans promised to provide about $5 billion worth of arms. Much later, in May, 1986, McCarlane visited Iran and was taped saying that up until then the Reagan administration had provided 1.3 billion in arms and add3ed that it would provide trhe rest. The Iranians were also promised the return of $12 billion in blocked funds. Prime Minister Menachin Begin, who had promised not to sell so much as a shoelace to Iran, cooperated with the Republicans" efforts to undermine the Carter position. These activities thoroughly undermined the activities of the legitimately elected government of the United States and weakened the U.S. position in bargaining for the return of the hostages. Former Iranian president Bani-Sadr was ale to provide investigators with details of the money transferred to Iranians , along with bank account numbers. 2
According to Mansur Rafizadeh, a secret C.I.A. team directed by William Casey sabotaged the mission.Rafizadeh was a C.I.A. agent who had run SAVAK. Rafizadeh had been a C.I.A. operative for 18-19 years. In his book, he added that the Reagan-Bush people specifically required that the hostages not be released until Reagan was sworn in. They did not want Carter to have any role and opposed return of the hjostages after the election was over.
He also said that people on the C.I.A.’s Iran desk were wildly anti-Carter in 1980. However, it is unthinkable that Americans involved in the rescue effort could have wanted it to fail and there is no good evidence that they did anything to produce this result. Yet, several people who would be closely tied to George H.W. Bush’s black operations in subsequent years were part of the rescue effort. Oliver North was aboard a helicopter near the Turkish border. General Richard Secord was the main planner, and Albert Hakim was involved in ground operations. Hakim fled Baghdad 24 hours before the operation; his job was to obtain ground vehicles. . As is known, only 5 of the eight helicopters got to the site in working condition. The Pentagon review board found astonishing incompetence and negligence in the operation Later, Cynthia Dwyer, who had not yet been taken as the 53rd hostage, told a minister that the C.I.A. deliberately botched the operation.
It is known that the C.I.A. paid for polling by Richard Beale and Richard Wirthlin to learn what would be the effect on Reagan’s lead in the campaign of Carter were to secure the release of the prisoners. The results were swent directly to the Reagan campaign. They confirmed the opinion of some that Reagan must disrupt Carter’s efforts to gain the release of the hostages.
Casey was able to get in touch with the Iranians with the help of the French intelligence service, Count Alexandre de Marenches. Carter had unwittingly sealed his own fate by refusing to trade arms for hostages. However, there is strong evidence that the Israeli’s played a major role in opening dialog between the Republicans and the Iranian government. The Israelis had been asked to sell a limited number of arms to Iran, and they wanted a green light from potentially the next American government to sell more. For that reason, Israeli intelligence sent an Arab merchant with Iranian ties to negotiate with Republican operatives at the L" Enfante Hotel in Washington. He proposed the kind of deal Casey negotiated, except that Israel would immediately begin unlimited arms sales The main Iranian spokesman was Ayatollah Mohanned Baheshti, an aid to Speaker Ransanjani and assistant to Ayatollah Khomeini.
Casey was a hard-bitten capitalistic high-roller with intelligence experience. He knew how possession of power would have positive economic consequences for himself and his friends. Others may have been driven more by ideology. Carrying on diplomatic negotiations with a foreign enemy is a violation of the law, as was coordinating arms shipments to Iran, before and after Reagan took power. One would think that patriots would want the hostages returned as soon as possible and would support the nation’s foreign policy in a time of crisis, even if the president was a Democrat.
What led these people to violate the law overcame any patriotic impulses to carry on their own destructive foreign policy. The best answer is that they were so convinced by their own ideology and attacks on the Democrats that they felt justified in doing anything necessary to restore Republican control of the White House. It was as though elected Democrats automatically lack legitimacy, except when they co-operate in enacting and carrying out Republican policy. There was an op-ed piece and a PBS special outlining the facts in this matter in 1991.
Not one Republican politi C.I.A.n or pundit expressed any interest in the possibility that this may have happened. So-called liberal politicians and journalists showed little interest when it became clear that there was not overwhelming evidence that President George Bush was involved. The Secret Service records for Bush at that time were only partially made available to Congress. Because they were redacted, Bush’s claims to have been in Washington could not be proven.
One agent claimed to have been with the Bushes much of that day, but it was later proven that the agent was jogging along the C and O Canal that day and not on duty. Years later, Yasir Arafat told Jimmy Carter that the Republicans had asked them to help with the arms deal used to keep the hostages captive until after the election. In 1993, Russia Supreme Soviet agreed to give Congressional investigators files that showed that Casey met with the Iranians in 1980 and that Robert Gates and George H.W. Bush were involved in the deal with Iran. The Russian report added that Robert Gates, then a Carter NSC staffer, was in Paris negotiating on behalf of Reagan and that Casey attended meetings at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid and Paris.
The Russians saw a bidding war between Carter and Reagan for control of release of the hostages, with the Republicans able to disrupt the Carter operation and make a deal with the Iranians. A Congressional task force had just concluded that the Republicans did not interfere in the hostage crisis before the Russian report arrived, and nothing was done to change the Congressional report. Some of the Russian report was based on allegations of former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe. Israel said he had never been a government employee until he produced documents. Then the Israelis simply said he was lying about the October Surprise. The Russian Report was ignored, and ended up in a box of documents in a former ladies room in the Rayburn Building.1
Among other things, Casey promised that Israel would sell some arms and parts to Iran immediately and that they would sell many more after Ronald Reagan became president. The Republicans promised to provide about $5 billion worth of arms. Much later, in May, 1986, McCarlane visited Iran and was taped saying that up until then the Reagan administration had provided 1.3 billion in arms and add3ed that it would provide trhe rest. The Iranians were also promised the return of $12 billion in blocked funds. Prime Minister Menachin Begin, who had promised not to sell so much as a shoelace to Iran, cooperated with the Republicans" efforts to undermine the Carter position. These activities thoroughly undermined the activities of the legitimately elected government of the United States and weakened the U.S. position in bargaining for the return of the hostages. Former Iranian president Bani-Sadr was ale to provide investigators with details of the money transferred to Iranians , along with bank account numbers. 2
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
THE “SHADOW C.I.A.” AND THE REVENGE OF THE SPOOKS: THE OCTOBER (1980) SURPRISE: Part One
In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s Republican operatives worked with the shadow C.I.A. as well as agents within the Langley based agency and with Iran to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to secure the release of 52 hostages. At the very least, they violated laws prohibiting private diplomacy.
Most of the plotters had backgrounds in national security work and believed that Carter had weakened the C.I.A. and was not following a sufficiently strong foreign policy. Neo-Conservatives and some conservatives were embracing the idea that the Soviet Union was using terrorism across the globe to attack the West, and they were angry that Carter did not seem to accept their theory. Once in power, Bill Casey, one of the key figures in this October Surprise, would plant false information in the press to make Lybia look even worse than it really was in order to strengthen the Reagan administration’s anti-terrorism offensive.
The idea that the Soviet Union was promoting terrorism throughout the world developed among some of the right-wing old guard in the C.I.A. in the late 1970s and was forcefully propounded in Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, the contents of which became an article of faith for right-wingers, including, Reagan, Haig, and Casey. There was very little evidence to support the claim, other than evidence that the Soviets were probably behind the effort to kill John Paul II.
When Director of Intelligence Robert Gates instructed subordinates to flesh out this charge in 1985, there was little evidence to support it, but eventually it developed that his guess was correct. An unbiased observer could claim that the US sponsored more terrorism than the Soviets in the 1980s and probably build a very strong case.
Beginning in 1979, the Department of State began listing states that were involved in sponsoring terrorism. The listing began as part of a serious effort to deal with terrorism. Soon it became the centerpiece of a program to claim that the nation’s enemies, including the Soviets were involved sponsoring terrorism. Claims of about communist state-sponsored terrorism frightened people and were useful in obtaining larger and larger military appropriations. 1
Fifty two Americans were seized by Iranian militants in November, 1979 and were being held as hostages through the 1980 American political campaign. . In the 1980 race for the White House, Republicans heard that the Carter administration might trade plane parts for hostages in Iran. The parts were necessary because Iraq had invaded Iran. F.B.I. wiretaps were to show that Cyrus Hashemi, who was supposed to be helping Carter deal with the Iranians was actually helping the Republicans block Carter and make their own deal. The deal saw large amounts of BCCI money sent into Hashemi’s bank , First Gulf Bank and Trust, sometimes flown into Paris . The F.B.I. followed these transactions because it was looking for drug and arms transactions. When the Reagan administration took power, the wire taps were ended and Hashemi was warned of the activities of US enforcement agencies that concerned him.
Thirteen years later, his older brother Jamshid testified before a Congressional Committee about this, but investigators were blocked from pursuing the matter. The investigators who were Senate employees were even barred by Bob Dole, Mitch McConnell, and Jesse Helms from leaving the District of Columbia to pursue leads. The House side of the investigation was run by a Democrat who had a record of cooperating with Republicans on touchy matters.
Republicans immediately and continuously denounced the possible Carter deal with the Iranians as treasonous. They alerted friendly military officers to keep close tabs on military airports for signs this could occur. Meanwhile, the Republicans secretly negotiated with representatives of a enemy foreign power. Active and former C.I.A. officers and assets played major roles in the deal with Iran. They detested Jimmy Carter for his attempts to reform the agency and were determined to keep him from being reelected. Former C.I.A. men manned round the clock an office at the GOP campaign’s Arlington Operations Center in order to keep tract of developments in Iran.
Years later, in a November 7 interview on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, former Reagan national security advisor Richard Allen inadvertently revealed that the Reaganites had made a deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election. He said that Cynthia Dwyer, a journalist, was retained by the Iranians to make sure that the Republicans carried out their end of the deal. No one asked him “what deal” and to this day it most mainline commentators deny there was a deal. Allen was also to refer to all the former C.I.A. men working in the Bush operation as” a plane load of disgruntled C.I.A." officers "playing cops and robbers." Robert McFarlane also has acknowledged that the October Surprise deal did occur. Mc Farlane eventually told German reporter Martin Kilian that an an Iranian first alerted Senator John Tower that his country was interested in a deal to exchange the hostages. Tower later led an investigation of the Iran/Contra scandal.
McFarlane was then working for Tower and seems to have been the first person to raise the possibility of the Republicans making a separated deal with the Iranians, Outbidding Carter. McFarlane attended the first Washington meeting with an Iranian emissary. Also present were Richard Allen and Lawrence Silverman, a former C.I.A. man, who would later be appointed a federal judge and was to claim that Lawrence Walsh’s investigation of Iran/Contra and Oliver North was unconstitutional.
The talkative McFarlane later told a Greek journalist that the October Surprise involved the promised shipment of $5 billion worth of arms to Iran, and that $1.3 billion worth had been sent by 1986. In 1988, CBS had a documentary on the October Surprise prepared for airing on Sixty Minutes, but it was never shown 2
Republican campaign manager William Casey, a former C.I.A. hand, Edwin Meese, and others successfully negotiated a deal with representatives of the Iranian government to assure that the hostages would not be released while Jimmy Carter was president. Casey had the help of many active and former C.I.A. personnel who resented Carter’s reforms at the agency. Robert Gates, executive assistant to Stansfield Turner leaked word that Carter was negotiating with the Iranians and the Republicans information, and Carter was certain that NSC member Donald Gregg also fed national security information to the Republicans. “Eyes Only” and “ Top Secret” documents from the US embassy in Tehran were found in Reagan’s campaign files. The Gipper simply said he had no idea how they got there.
Some years later, Reagan’s Second Attorney General Richard Thornburgh blocked a Freedom of Information Request to obtain F.B.I. tapes of the conversations of Iranian banker and arms dealer Cyrus Hashemi. Among the tapes were two telephone calls from a Houston lawyer who said he represented vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush. The first call was about a $3,000,000 payment to Hashemi and the last was about a large payment that was to be made in 1981. They are called the “Pottinger Tapes,” and reveal that a active C.I.A. official was explaining how arms would be shipped to Iran without detection by the Carter government. In 1995, a sworn deposition from senior C.I.A. agent senior C.I.A. officer Charles Cogan was found among discarded papers of the committee that hastily looked into the October Surprise. Cogan told of a meeting at Langley in 1981 at which high ranking Republican visitors bragged about disrupting Jimmy Carter’e efforts to secure the release of the hostages.
Most of the plotters had backgrounds in national security work and believed that Carter had weakened the C.I.A. and was not following a sufficiently strong foreign policy. Neo-Conservatives and some conservatives were embracing the idea that the Soviet Union was using terrorism across the globe to attack the West, and they were angry that Carter did not seem to accept their theory. Once in power, Bill Casey, one of the key figures in this October Surprise, would plant false information in the press to make Lybia look even worse than it really was in order to strengthen the Reagan administration’s anti-terrorism offensive.
The idea that the Soviet Union was promoting terrorism throughout the world developed among some of the right-wing old guard in the C.I.A. in the late 1970s and was forcefully propounded in Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, the contents of which became an article of faith for right-wingers, including, Reagan, Haig, and Casey. There was very little evidence to support the claim, other than evidence that the Soviets were probably behind the effort to kill John Paul II.
When Director of Intelligence Robert Gates instructed subordinates to flesh out this charge in 1985, there was little evidence to support it, but eventually it developed that his guess was correct. An unbiased observer could claim that the US sponsored more terrorism than the Soviets in the 1980s and probably build a very strong case.
Beginning in 1979, the Department of State began listing states that were involved in sponsoring terrorism. The listing began as part of a serious effort to deal with terrorism. Soon it became the centerpiece of a program to claim that the nation’s enemies, including the Soviets were involved sponsoring terrorism. Claims of about communist state-sponsored terrorism frightened people and were useful in obtaining larger and larger military appropriations. 1
Fifty two Americans were seized by Iranian militants in November, 1979 and were being held as hostages through the 1980 American political campaign. . In the 1980 race for the White House, Republicans heard that the Carter administration might trade plane parts for hostages in Iran. The parts were necessary because Iraq had invaded Iran. F.B.I. wiretaps were to show that Cyrus Hashemi, who was supposed to be helping Carter deal with the Iranians was actually helping the Republicans block Carter and make their own deal. The deal saw large amounts of BCCI money sent into Hashemi’s bank , First Gulf Bank and Trust, sometimes flown into Paris . The F.B.I. followed these transactions because it was looking for drug and arms transactions. When the Reagan administration took power, the wire taps were ended and Hashemi was warned of the activities of US enforcement agencies that concerned him.
Thirteen years later, his older brother Jamshid testified before a Congressional Committee about this, but investigators were blocked from pursuing the matter. The investigators who were Senate employees were even barred by Bob Dole, Mitch McConnell, and Jesse Helms from leaving the District of Columbia to pursue leads. The House side of the investigation was run by a Democrat who had a record of cooperating with Republicans on touchy matters.
Republicans immediately and continuously denounced the possible Carter deal with the Iranians as treasonous. They alerted friendly military officers to keep close tabs on military airports for signs this could occur. Meanwhile, the Republicans secretly negotiated with representatives of a enemy foreign power. Active and former C.I.A. officers and assets played major roles in the deal with Iran. They detested Jimmy Carter for his attempts to reform the agency and were determined to keep him from being reelected. Former C.I.A. men manned round the clock an office at the GOP campaign’s Arlington Operations Center in order to keep tract of developments in Iran.
Years later, in a November 7 interview on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, former Reagan national security advisor Richard Allen inadvertently revealed that the Reaganites had made a deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election. He said that Cynthia Dwyer, a journalist, was retained by the Iranians to make sure that the Republicans carried out their end of the deal. No one asked him “what deal” and to this day it most mainline commentators deny there was a deal. Allen was also to refer to all the former C.I.A. men working in the Bush operation as” a plane load of disgruntled C.I.A." officers "playing cops and robbers." Robert McFarlane also has acknowledged that the October Surprise deal did occur. Mc Farlane eventually told German reporter Martin Kilian that an an Iranian first alerted Senator John Tower that his country was interested in a deal to exchange the hostages. Tower later led an investigation of the Iran/Contra scandal.
McFarlane was then working for Tower and seems to have been the first person to raise the possibility of the Republicans making a separated deal with the Iranians, Outbidding Carter. McFarlane attended the first Washington meeting with an Iranian emissary. Also present were Richard Allen and Lawrence Silverman, a former C.I.A. man, who would later be appointed a federal judge and was to claim that Lawrence Walsh’s investigation of Iran/Contra and Oliver North was unconstitutional.
The talkative McFarlane later told a Greek journalist that the October Surprise involved the promised shipment of $5 billion worth of arms to Iran, and that $1.3 billion worth had been sent by 1986. In 1988, CBS had a documentary on the October Surprise prepared for airing on Sixty Minutes, but it was never shown 2
Republican campaign manager William Casey, a former C.I.A. hand, Edwin Meese, and others successfully negotiated a deal with representatives of the Iranian government to assure that the hostages would not be released while Jimmy Carter was president. Casey had the help of many active and former C.I.A. personnel who resented Carter’s reforms at the agency. Robert Gates, executive assistant to Stansfield Turner leaked word that Carter was negotiating with the Iranians and the Republicans information, and Carter was certain that NSC member Donald Gregg also fed national security information to the Republicans. “Eyes Only” and “ Top Secret” documents from the US embassy in Tehran were found in Reagan’s campaign files. The Gipper simply said he had no idea how they got there.
Some years later, Reagan’s Second Attorney General Richard Thornburgh blocked a Freedom of Information Request to obtain F.B.I. tapes of the conversations of Iranian banker and arms dealer Cyrus Hashemi. Among the tapes were two telephone calls from a Houston lawyer who said he represented vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush. The first call was about a $3,000,000 payment to Hashemi and the last was about a large payment that was to be made in 1981. They are called the “Pottinger Tapes,” and reveal that a active C.I.A. official was explaining how arms would be shipped to Iran without detection by the Carter government. In 1995, a sworn deposition from senior C.I.A. agent senior C.I.A. officer Charles Cogan was found among discarded papers of the committee that hastily looked into the October Surprise. Cogan told of a meeting at Langley in 1981 at which high ranking Republican visitors bragged about disrupting Jimmy Carter’e efforts to secure the release of the hostages.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
The CIA in Crisis: Part III
Jimmy Carter’s administration sought to curb the agency’s appetite for “cowboy” tactics and worse. Carter had campaigned against the “rogue C.I.A..” The Georgian sacked C.I.A. Director George H.W. Bush and replaced him with Admiral Stanford Turner, who eventually fired over 700 agents in the famous Halloween massacre, October 31, 1979. He had previously fired 200 in 1977. He was appalled about the agency’s use of hallucinogenic drugs, its abuse of a Russian defector, its stockpiling of venoms and poisons banned by executive orders, the spying on American critics of the Vietnam war including Jane Fonda, and its abuse of the US mails. The agency gave police departments special instruments to beat up peace groups, spied on reporter Jack Anderson and Brit Hume, and kept a Washington Post report on round the clock surveillance.
Turner also abolished the agency’s private air force, Air America. From the time of his arrival, Admiral Turner encountered the determined opposition of the covert wing and had great difficulty extraction information from those people. He had the firm impression that the people in O He had the firm impression that the people in Oations were reluctant to do anything that could be exposed later and that they were adverse to all of his suggestions for relatively clean operations. It is difficult to determine if he knew much or anything about covert operations underway in Latin America. He later wrote that “The covert operations cupboard was bare.”
Turner was stunned to learn that a former agent, Ed Wilson was possibly involved in murder for hire and in weapon running to Lybia. When the admiral learned that seniorofficials Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines were close to Wilson, he decided their career advancement had to be derailed. Turner also ruled that Mossad no longer had a special status within the C.I.A.. Before leaving the agency, Clines disregarded an order to avoid business relationships with Wilson and set up his own weapons and consulting business before resigning. Shackley also left but kept close ties with George W. Bush. The Wilson matter became public knowledge in 1981, and he eventually went to prison. Former agents as well as covert officers still in service saw the Carter administration as the enemy and did as little as possible to cooperate with it, Much of Carter’s own NSC staff thought him too idealistic and was disloyal to him. There is no way of knowing if the Carter realized that Operation X was still going on, the transplanting from Vietnam to Central America counterinsurgency torture techniques. The Carter policy was that covert action should only be used as last resort. With the accession of Ronald Reagan, that policy was exactly reversed. 1
It is difficult to assess the extent to which the C.I.A. has been under the control of the White House in various times in recent history. Almost certainly, an element within it began to conceal information from the president when Jimmy Carter became president. Later, when Bill Clinton was president, the agency spied on one of his ambassadors because she was concerned about human rights in Guatemala. The agency bugged the bedroom of Ambasador Marilyn McAfee and her her “cooing endearments to Murphy.” The spooks assumed that she was having an affair with her secretary Carol Murphy and it spread the word of a lesbian affair in Washington, hoping to get her removed and protect Guatemala’s brutal intelligence service. It turned out that “Murphy” her two-year old poodle. 2
Gene Wheaton, a military crime investigator with experience in three services, worked closely with C.I.A. agents and reported that C.I.A. officers he knew
decided way back when, ‘75-’76, during the Pike and Church Committee hearings, that the Congress was their enemy... Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear they conversations. They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that was George Bush. Reagan never really was the president. He was the front man. They selected a guy that had charisma, who was popular, and just a good old boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually run the White House."
The former military criminal investigator added that his former friends had a low opinion of the American electorate. The average citizen was ignorant and needed to be guided by true patriots for his own good.
Wheaton believed that the network that Oliver North and George H.W. Bush deployed in the eighties was created among these angry agents. Another term for this network was Ted Shackley’s’secret Team,” in the words of Joe Trento. Shackley thought the best way to procede was to privatize some covert operations. Of course some privatizing had gone on since the early 196os. This renewed privatgization was funded by the ‘safari Club, which was created when Bush was director . It was like the Pinay Circle in Europe, politicians, businessmen, and agents. In February, 2002, speaking at a Georgetown Alumni affair, Prince Turki described it.
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here (in the US), your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything… In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share information with each other and help each other in countering Soviet influence worldwide, and especially in Africa.
The head of Saudi intelligence then was Sheikh Kamal Adham, who was a great friend of DCI Bush. Later his nephew HRH Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Sa’ud held the post.
At that time, the Saudis opened a number of covert accounts at the Riggs Bank, where Jonathan Bush was a director. The Saudis financed some covert operations for renegades in the C.I.A. and its General Intelligence Department worked closely with the C.I.A., sometimes taking the lead in delicate operations. In this way, the Saudis gradually developed a deep knowledge of US intelligence operations and placed plants within the US agencies. In the late 70s, the small Pakistani bank, Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), became a big money lauindering machine for covert operations of all sorts throughout the world. Shackley used some of the money in operations he made sure would not be followed back to Langley. Poppy Bush had an account in the Paris BCCI branch. Time was to report that the bank had its own spies and hitmen, but it is likely that it contracted out the work to existing intelligence services. 3
The activities of the Safari Club were directed by ranking agency retirees and military men from their posts overseas. Richard Helms played an important role when he was ambassador to India. Indeed, the station chief in Tehran complained that Ambassador Helms seemed to be operating an laternative C.I.A. out of the embassy. Others have reported that the Safari Club was using some money that came from the shah or Iran. He added that Theodore Shackley had "formed the cadre of a private, shadow spy organization within America’s official intelligence service."4
In 1966, Shackley was sent to Laos, and he took many of his people with him. Before this Anthony Poshepny (Tony Poe) was having his operators turn in the ears of people they killed in the local war against Communismh. Ted Shackley was to increase the number of operatives from 30 to 250. 5 There is some question about which of their activities in southeast Asia were official ly sanctioned and which were rogue initiatives of Shackley and Clines. Shackley worked with Laotian drug king General Vang Pao and he put the general in contact with Santo Trafficante so that they could cooperate bringing drugs into the United States. Apparently, their assassination program, Operation Phoenix, was sanctioned and funded by drug money administered by a naval officer in Siagon named Richard Armitage until sometime in 1973. After that, its sanction may have been lifted and they found another mechanism to go on, while still using Armitage. By then they had far more money than they required for Operation Phoenix and deposited the rest in Australia. They also established a massive secret arms cache in Thailand. In those years, 1973-1975, Operation Phoenix still had the blessing of the State Department, and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs acted as Kissinger’s liason officer with Phoenix. However, it appears that C.I.A. Direector James Schlesinger moved on May 9, 1973 to shut down all of the agency’s illegal operations. On t hat date he asked active agents to report on illegal activities and invited former agents to do the same.
When Saigon fell, Armitage was sent to Tehran. He was to reroute the flow of money and drugs from Vang Pao drug money so that the secret team could set up an assassination program to wipe out s and communists in Iran. Edwin Wilson was sent to Iran to handle the murders. Daniel Sheehan, who first discovered the operations of the secret team, thought this was a a private, non-sanctioned operation. Armitage was soon posted in Bangkog as a special consultant to deal with missiong prisoners. He was perfectly positioned to handle the finances for Wilson through the Nugen-Hand Bank in Australia. He also organized the escape of Meo tribesmen who had worked for Phoenix from Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Jerry O. Daniels, another diplomat, was Armitage’s bag man.
They also saw that some arms were removed from the secret cache to Iran. The State Department learned of Armitage’s activities and his failure to do anything for the MIAs, and he was forced to resign near the end of 1977. For the next two years, he operated the Far East Trading Company in Bangkog. He was living in a home owned by a friend of Major General Richard Secord, who had become linked to the Shackley team. He then became an advisor to Senator Bob Dole and eventually occupied high positions in the State Department. If the Iranian venture were a rogue operation, it is difficult to believe he could have reached such heights.
Secord was then Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary. In that capacity, he was able to purchase at bargain prices surplus equipment which he would route to Middle Eastern countries through middleman Albert Hakim. The goods were sold at a higher replacement cost. The difference was deposited in the Nugen Hand bank for covert, non-sanctioned operations. A number of front companies existed to serve the needs of these black operations. 6
In those trying years for the “cowboys,” many quit rather than be moved to remote outposts. Former agents frequently created private intelligence organization ( PIOs) and private military or mercenary forces (PMFs). Together with colleagues still with the agency, they created a’shadow C.I.A.” or what they called “the Enterprise.” Later, some called it the “K-Team.” Although The Enterprise worked through existing agents, allies in the military, and friends in the agency, people at the top in Langley, Virginia C.I.A. headquarters often had no clear idea of what was going on. These people were right-wingers and were convinced that Carter and Turner were destroying the agency. Two of the key players were Ted Shackley, General John Singlaub and General Edward Lansdale. Lansdale won a leading position in the Enterprise through his access dormant C.I.A. accounts originally created with Japanese war loot Lansdale fell out of favor with the Kennedy administration, was promoted to lieutenant general, and forced to retire. Lansdale played an important role in financing, and in the late 1970s, he sent Taiwanese officers to train Salvadoran right wing soldiers. Lansdale was also famous for his ring of assassins. A third founder of The Enterprise was former C.I.A. deputy director Ray Cline, whose expertise was in finance, keeping track of C.I.A. proprietary companies, and counterinsurgency. Cline later worked on Reagan’s political campaigns and was a special security advisor. They worked through many organizations including the Council for World Freedom.
Eliot Abrams, a late arrival, is at the hub of the Enterprise today. These people worked with well-known right wingers such as the Hunt brothers, the Unification Church, and the John Birch Society. Later, through its CAUSA and Linda Guells, the church helped Oliver North fund the Contras. Hundreds former C.I.A. agents of them worked hard in the primary campaign of George H.W. Bush. When Ronald Reagan was nominated, C.I.A.-tied Bill Casey became his second campaign manager, and evangelical Christians, often tied through foreign business interests and missions to the C.I.A., proved top be very useful political allies.
In 1979 “retired” C.I.A. officers Richard Helms, Ted Shackley, and and Ray Cline worked actively to oust Carter from the White House. Miles Copeland, organized’spooks for Bush.” Copeland liked Carter personally and praised his intelligence but believed that Carter’s genuine idealism was a threat to national security. He said there was a “ C.I.A. within the C.I.A.” which was the true protector of the nation’s security.
7These C.I.A. people were joined by Major General John Singlaub. In December, Singlaub and another military retiree, Lt. General Daniel Graham led an American Defense Council delegation to Guatemala where they assured right-wing leaders that Ronald Reagan would not be critical of death squads. Their efforts and those of Michael Deever would result in $10,000,000 from Guatemala and Argentina being funneled into the Reagan campaign. Singlaub became a key figure in the World Anti-Communist League, whose chapters in three European countries were controlled by former Nazis., The WACL would later send arms to the Contras in Nicarauga. 8 It was founded by Chaing Kai-Shek, Reverend Moon, people in the Nisson Corporation, and some figures who had been tied to the Third Reich. Nixon deployed it against as a counterinsurgency took in Latin America and South East Asia. In the Reagan era, it was used for assassinations and operated in many places, including Afghanistan. 9
During the Republican primaries of 1980 retired and active C.I.A. agents worked for the former director, George H.W. Bush. A House committee report later affirmed this. 10 In the 1980s, Robert M. Sensi, sometimes an agent and sometimes a contractor, collected funds abroad for the Republican party. He was so slick that it was said he “could go into a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you." Sensi was also involved in the October Surprise, a deal that prevented Carter from recovering the hostages held by Iran. Sensi made financier Richard Hirshfeld ( aka Richard Marshall) an asset, and in 2004 they developed an elaborate scheme to financially link Democratic nominee John Kerry to Al Qaeda through his campaign treasurer, Robert Farmer. The scheme failed, but only barely ass this writer recalls when the first accusations hit the press. Hirshfeld was close to Senator Orrin Hatch. Representatives Henry Hyde, Bill McCullom and James Sensenbrenner.
Sensi and Hirshfeld were profiting from the sale of unspecified services to the Department of Homeland Security. Hirshfield was enjoying federal contracts while facing federal fraud charges. He tried to scam Habitat for Humanity and markeded "the world's only known cure for herpes," He killed himself January 11, 2005. Sensi twice served time for embezzlement while serving as a C.I.A. agent. He worked closely with the Kuwaiti royal family and was accused of defrauding the firm. Both men, coincidentally, were represented by an attorney who had represented the RNC and George H. W. Bush. 11
When Ronald Reagan became president, he permitted the intelligence agencies to work closely with the PIOs and the PFMs and authorized total secrecy about these arrangements. This meant that the private operations were not burdened with any public accountability.12
In the 1990s, there was a growth of the private intelligence community that paralleled the growth of the PIOs in the late seventies and early 1980s. In the 1990s, President Clinton somewhat accelerated the outsourcing of intelligence work and in 2001 and 2002 George W. Bush greatly accelerated the letting of contracts to the private spy industry. It should be noted, that the NSA has long been operated by private firms. Some of the firms involved were Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Abraxas, and Booz Allen Thompson. One great advantage of using private intelligence officers is that they are less restrained by the rules of government agencies and more difficult for Congress to monitor.
In October, 2006, the
Many of the contract spies are former C.I.A. employees, and there is little question that they perform well. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte ordered a study of the effects of outsourcing intelligence, but the report never made public and was classified as secret. 13 Now in charge of counter-terrorism, he played a major role coordinating UA-inspired terrorism against progressives in Hondouras and Central America in the Reagan Era.
It seems that the felt much more comfortable with Republicans. Yet, it was known to undermine Republican cabinet officers. The Miami Herald found that a “ secret government” was in operation and that it ultimately reported to Bush. Reagan did not always know what this government was doing, and in 1985 it sent William Wilson, Ambassador to the Vatican, to Libya to meet with Colonel Moammar Qadhafi. Secretary of State George Schultz tried to discipline Wilson but was told Reagan knew of this in advance.
People placed in various departments ignored their superiors and reported to intelligence people who, in turn, reported to people in the NSC or tied to the NSC. Arthur Lyman, lead lawyer for the Senate committee that investigated Iran/Contra, referred to a ‘secret government-within-a-government." A key figure in this operation was Reagan intimate and the president’s second national security advisor, Judge William Clark, Reagan’s second National Security Advisor, who saw to it that Oliver North’s power increased.
Under George W. Bush, not all elements in the agency agreed to help fabricate a case that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and it was subsequently necessary to purge some of those who disagreed.
Turner also abolished the agency’s private air force, Air America. From the time of his arrival, Admiral Turner encountered the determined opposition of the covert wing and had great difficulty extraction information from those people. He had the firm impression that the people in O He had the firm impression that the people in Oations were reluctant to do anything that could be exposed later and that they were adverse to all of his suggestions for relatively clean operations. It is difficult to determine if he knew much or anything about covert operations underway in Latin America. He later wrote that “The covert operations cupboard was bare.”
Turner was stunned to learn that a former agent, Ed Wilson was possibly involved in murder for hire and in weapon running to Lybia. When the admiral learned that seniorofficials Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines were close to Wilson, he decided their career advancement had to be derailed. Turner also ruled that Mossad no longer had a special status within the C.I.A.. Before leaving the agency, Clines disregarded an order to avoid business relationships with Wilson and set up his own weapons and consulting business before resigning. Shackley also left but kept close ties with George W. Bush. The Wilson matter became public knowledge in 1981, and he eventually went to prison. Former agents as well as covert officers still in service saw the Carter administration as the enemy and did as little as possible to cooperate with it, Much of Carter’s own NSC staff thought him too idealistic and was disloyal to him. There is no way of knowing if the Carter realized that Operation X was still going on, the transplanting from Vietnam to Central America counterinsurgency torture techniques. The Carter policy was that covert action should only be used as last resort. With the accession of Ronald Reagan, that policy was exactly reversed. 1
It is difficult to assess the extent to which the C.I.A. has been under the control of the White House in various times in recent history. Almost certainly, an element within it began to conceal information from the president when Jimmy Carter became president. Later, when Bill Clinton was president, the agency spied on one of his ambassadors because she was concerned about human rights in Guatemala. The agency bugged the bedroom of Ambasador Marilyn McAfee and her her “cooing endearments to Murphy.” The spooks assumed that she was having an affair with her secretary Carol Murphy and it spread the word of a lesbian affair in Washington, hoping to get her removed and protect Guatemala’s brutal intelligence service. It turned out that “Murphy” her two-year old poodle. 2
Gene Wheaton, a military crime investigator with experience in three services, worked closely with C.I.A. agents and reported that C.I.A. officers he knew
decided way back when, ‘75-’76, during the Pike and Church Committee hearings, that the Congress was their enemy... Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear they conversations. They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that was George Bush. Reagan never really was the president. He was the front man. They selected a guy that had charisma, who was popular, and just a good old boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually run the White House."
The former military criminal investigator added that his former friends had a low opinion of the American electorate. The average citizen was ignorant and needed to be guided by true patriots for his own good.
Wheaton believed that the network that Oliver North and George H.W. Bush deployed in the eighties was created among these angry agents. Another term for this network was Ted Shackley’s’secret Team,” in the words of Joe Trento. Shackley thought the best way to procede was to privatize some covert operations. Of course some privatizing had gone on since the early 196os. This renewed privatgization was funded by the ‘safari Club, which was created when Bush was director . It was like the Pinay Circle in Europe, politicians, businessmen, and agents. In February, 2002, speaking at a Georgetown Alumni affair, Prince Turki described it.
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here (in the US), your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything… In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share information with each other and help each other in countering Soviet influence worldwide, and especially in Africa.
The head of Saudi intelligence then was Sheikh Kamal Adham, who was a great friend of DCI Bush. Later his nephew HRH Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Sa’ud held the post.
At that time, the Saudis opened a number of covert accounts at the Riggs Bank, where Jonathan Bush was a director. The Saudis financed some covert operations for renegades in the C.I.A. and its General Intelligence Department worked closely with the C.I.A., sometimes taking the lead in delicate operations. In this way, the Saudis gradually developed a deep knowledge of US intelligence operations and placed plants within the US agencies. In the late 70s, the small Pakistani bank, Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), became a big money lauindering machine for covert operations of all sorts throughout the world. Shackley used some of the money in operations he made sure would not be followed back to Langley. Poppy Bush had an account in the Paris BCCI branch. Time was to report that the bank had its own spies and hitmen, but it is likely that it contracted out the work to existing intelligence services. 3
The activities of the Safari Club were directed by ranking agency retirees and military men from their posts overseas. Richard Helms played an important role when he was ambassador to India. Indeed, the station chief in Tehran complained that Ambassador Helms seemed to be operating an laternative C.I.A. out of the embassy. Others have reported that the Safari Club was using some money that came from the shah or Iran. He added that Theodore Shackley had "formed the cadre of a private, shadow spy organization within America’s official intelligence service."4
In 1966, Shackley was sent to Laos, and he took many of his people with him. Before this Anthony Poshepny (Tony Poe) was having his operators turn in the ears of people they killed in the local war against Communismh. Ted Shackley was to increase the number of operatives from 30 to 250. 5 There is some question about which of their activities in southeast Asia were official ly sanctioned and which were rogue initiatives of Shackley and Clines. Shackley worked with Laotian drug king General Vang Pao and he put the general in contact with Santo Trafficante so that they could cooperate bringing drugs into the United States. Apparently, their assassination program, Operation Phoenix, was sanctioned and funded by drug money administered by a naval officer in Siagon named Richard Armitage until sometime in 1973. After that, its sanction may have been lifted and they found another mechanism to go on, while still using Armitage. By then they had far more money than they required for Operation Phoenix and deposited the rest in Australia. They also established a massive secret arms cache in Thailand. In those years, 1973-1975, Operation Phoenix still had the blessing of the State Department, and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs acted as Kissinger’s liason officer with Phoenix. However, it appears that C.I.A. Direector James Schlesinger moved on May 9, 1973 to shut down all of the agency’s illegal operations. On t hat date he asked active agents to report on illegal activities and invited former agents to do the same.
When Saigon fell, Armitage was sent to Tehran. He was to reroute the flow of money and drugs from Vang Pao drug money so that the secret team could set up an assassination program to wipe out s and communists in Iran. Edwin Wilson was sent to Iran to handle the murders. Daniel Sheehan, who first discovered the operations of the secret team, thought this was a a private, non-sanctioned operation. Armitage was soon posted in Bangkog as a special consultant to deal with missiong prisoners. He was perfectly positioned to handle the finances for Wilson through the Nugen-Hand Bank in Australia. He also organized the escape of Meo tribesmen who had worked for Phoenix from Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Jerry O. Daniels, another diplomat, was Armitage’s bag man.
They also saw that some arms were removed from the secret cache to Iran. The State Department learned of Armitage’s activities and his failure to do anything for the MIAs, and he was forced to resign near the end of 1977. For the next two years, he operated the Far East Trading Company in Bangkog. He was living in a home owned by a friend of Major General Richard Secord, who had become linked to the Shackley team. He then became an advisor to Senator Bob Dole and eventually occupied high positions in the State Department. If the Iranian venture were a rogue operation, it is difficult to believe he could have reached such heights.
Secord was then Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary. In that capacity, he was able to purchase at bargain prices surplus equipment which he would route to Middle Eastern countries through middleman Albert Hakim. The goods were sold at a higher replacement cost. The difference was deposited in the Nugen Hand bank for covert, non-sanctioned operations. A number of front companies existed to serve the needs of these black operations. 6
In those trying years for the “cowboys,” many quit rather than be moved to remote outposts. Former agents frequently created private intelligence organization ( PIOs) and private military or mercenary forces (PMFs). Together with colleagues still with the agency, they created a’shadow C.I.A.” or what they called “the Enterprise.” Later, some called it the “K-Team.” Although The Enterprise worked through existing agents, allies in the military, and friends in the agency, people at the top in Langley, Virginia C.I.A. headquarters often had no clear idea of what was going on. These people were right-wingers and were convinced that Carter and Turner were destroying the agency. Two of the key players were Ted Shackley, General John Singlaub and General Edward Lansdale. Lansdale won a leading position in the Enterprise through his access dormant C.I.A. accounts originally created with Japanese war loot Lansdale fell out of favor with the Kennedy administration, was promoted to lieutenant general, and forced to retire. Lansdale played an important role in financing, and in the late 1970s, he sent Taiwanese officers to train Salvadoran right wing soldiers. Lansdale was also famous for his ring of assassins. A third founder of The Enterprise was former C.I.A. deputy director Ray Cline, whose expertise was in finance, keeping track of C.I.A. proprietary companies, and counterinsurgency. Cline later worked on Reagan’s political campaigns and was a special security advisor. They worked through many organizations including the Council for World Freedom.
Eliot Abrams, a late arrival, is at the hub of the Enterprise today. These people worked with well-known right wingers such as the Hunt brothers, the Unification Church, and the John Birch Society. Later, through its CAUSA and Linda Guells, the church helped Oliver North fund the Contras. Hundreds former C.I.A. agents of them worked hard in the primary campaign of George H.W. Bush. When Ronald Reagan was nominated, C.I.A.-tied Bill Casey became his second campaign manager, and evangelical Christians, often tied through foreign business interests and missions to the C.I.A., proved top be very useful political allies.
In 1979 “retired” C.I.A. officers Richard Helms, Ted Shackley, and and Ray Cline worked actively to oust Carter from the White House. Miles Copeland, organized’spooks for Bush.” Copeland liked Carter personally and praised his intelligence but believed that Carter’s genuine idealism was a threat to national security. He said there was a “ C.I.A. within the C.I.A.” which was the true protector of the nation’s security.
7These C.I.A. people were joined by Major General John Singlaub. In December, Singlaub and another military retiree, Lt. General Daniel Graham led an American Defense Council delegation to Guatemala where they assured right-wing leaders that Ronald Reagan would not be critical of death squads. Their efforts and those of Michael Deever would result in $10,000,000 from Guatemala and Argentina being funneled into the Reagan campaign. Singlaub became a key figure in the World Anti-Communist League, whose chapters in three European countries were controlled by former Nazis., The WACL would later send arms to the Contras in Nicarauga. 8 It was founded by Chaing Kai-Shek, Reverend Moon, people in the Nisson Corporation, and some figures who had been tied to the Third Reich. Nixon deployed it against as a counterinsurgency took in Latin America and South East Asia. In the Reagan era, it was used for assassinations and operated in many places, including Afghanistan. 9
During the Republican primaries of 1980 retired and active C.I.A. agents worked for the former director, George H.W. Bush. A House committee report later affirmed this. 10 In the 1980s, Robert M. Sensi, sometimes an agent and sometimes a contractor, collected funds abroad for the Republican party. He was so slick that it was said he “could go into a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you." Sensi was also involved in the October Surprise, a deal that prevented Carter from recovering the hostages held by Iran. Sensi made financier Richard Hirshfeld ( aka Richard Marshall) an asset, and in 2004 they developed an elaborate scheme to financially link Democratic nominee John Kerry to Al Qaeda through his campaign treasurer, Robert Farmer. The scheme failed, but only barely ass this writer recalls when the first accusations hit the press. Hirshfeld was close to Senator Orrin Hatch. Representatives Henry Hyde, Bill McCullom and James Sensenbrenner.
Sensi and Hirshfeld were profiting from the sale of unspecified services to the Department of Homeland Security. Hirshfield was enjoying federal contracts while facing federal fraud charges. He tried to scam Habitat for Humanity and markeded "the world's only known cure for herpes," He killed himself January 11, 2005. Sensi twice served time for embezzlement while serving as a C.I.A. agent. He worked closely with the Kuwaiti royal family and was accused of defrauding the firm. Both men, coincidentally, were represented by an attorney who had represented the RNC and George H. W. Bush. 11
When Ronald Reagan became president, he permitted the intelligence agencies to work closely with the PIOs and the PFMs and authorized total secrecy about these arrangements. This meant that the private operations were not burdened with any public accountability.12
In the 1990s, there was a growth of the private intelligence community that paralleled the growth of the PIOs in the late seventies and early 1980s. In the 1990s, President Clinton somewhat accelerated the outsourcing of intelligence work and in 2001 and 2002 George W. Bush greatly accelerated the letting of contracts to the private spy industry. It should be noted, that the NSA has long been operated by private firms. Some of the firms involved were Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Abraxas, and Booz Allen Thompson. One great advantage of using private intelligence officers is that they are less restrained by the rules of government agencies and more difficult for Congress to monitor.
In October, 2006, the
Los Angeles Timesreported that more than half the worlers in the Baghdad and Islamabad stations were industrial contractors or “greedbadgers,” as they are called. The private spy companies send case and watch officers to crisis centers, and their people serve as regional desk officers who are in charge of black operations. The various intelligence agencies are still run by “blue badges” or government employees but the supervisory structure below them is increasingly filled by contract employees.
Many of the contract spies are former C.I.A. employees, and there is little question that they perform well. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte ordered a study of the effects of outsourcing intelligence, but the report never made public and was classified as secret. 13 Now in charge of counter-terrorism, he played a major role coordinating UA-inspired terrorism against progressives in Hondouras and Central America in the Reagan Era.
It seems that the felt much more comfortable with Republicans. Yet, it was known to undermine Republican cabinet officers. The Miami Herald found that a “ secret government” was in operation and that it ultimately reported to Bush. Reagan did not always know what this government was doing, and in 1985 it sent William Wilson, Ambassador to the Vatican, to Libya to meet with Colonel Moammar Qadhafi. Secretary of State George Schultz tried to discipline Wilson but was told Reagan knew of this in advance.
People placed in various departments ignored their superiors and reported to intelligence people who, in turn, reported to people in the NSC or tied to the NSC. Arthur Lyman, lead lawyer for the Senate committee that investigated Iran/Contra, referred to a ‘secret government-within-a-government." A key figure in this operation was Reagan intimate and the president’s second national security advisor, Judge William Clark, Reagan’s second National Security Advisor, who saw to it that Oliver North’s power increased.
Under George W. Bush, not all elements in the agency agreed to help fabricate a case that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and it was subsequently necessary to purge some of those who disagreed.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
The CIA in Crisis: Part II
Jimmy Carter’s administration sought to curb the agency’s appetite for “cowboy” tactics and worse. Carter had campaigned against the “rogue C.I.A.” The Georgian sacked C.I.A. Director George H.W. Bush and replaced him with Admiral Stanford Turner, who eventually fired over 700 agents in the famous Halloween massacre, October 31, 1979. He had previously fired 200 in 1977. He was appalled about the agency’s use of hallucinogenic drugs, its abuse of a Russian defector, its stockpiling of venoms and poisons banned by executive orders, the spying on American critics of the Vietnam war including Jane Fonda, and its abuse of the US mails. The agency gave police departments special instruments to beat up peace groups, spied on reporter Jack Anderson and Brit Hume, and kept a Washington Post report on round the clock surveillance.
Turner also abolished the agency’s private air force, Air America. From the time of his arrival, Admiral Turner encountered the determined opposition of the covert wing and had great difficulty extraction information from those people. He had the firm impression that the people in O He had the firm impression that the people in Oations were reluctant to do anything that could be exposed later and that they were adverse to all of his suggestions for relatively clean operations. It is difficult to determine if he knew much or anything about covert operations underway in Latin America. He later wrote that “The covert operations cupboard was bare.”
Turner was stunned to learn that a former agent, Ed Wilson was possibly involved in murder for hire and in weapon running to Lybia. When the admiral learned that seniorofficials Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines were close to Wilson, he decided their career advancement had to be derailed. Turner also ruled that Mossad no longer had a special status within the C.I.A.. Before leaving the agency, Clines disregarded an order to avoid business relationships with Wilson and set up his own weapons and consulting business before resigning. Shackley also left but kept close ties with George W. Bush. The Wilson matter became public knowledge in 1981, and he eventually went to prison. Former agents as well as covert officers still in service saw the Carter administration as the enemy and did as little as possible to cooperate with it, Much of Carter’s own NSC staff thought him too idealistic and was disloyal to him. There is no way of knowing if the Carter realized that Operation X was still going on, the transplanting from Vietnam to Central America counterinsurgency torture techniques. The Carter policy was that covert action should only be used as last resort. With the accession of Ronald Reagan, that policy was exactly reversed.
It is difficult to assess the extent to which the C.I.A. has been under the control of the White House in various times in recent history. Almost certainly, an element within it began to conceal information from the president when Jimmy Carter became president. Later, when Bill Clinton was president, the agency spied on one of his ambassadors because she was concerned about human rights in Guatemala. The agency bugged the bedroom of Ambasador Marilyn McAfee and her her “cooing endearments to Murphy.” The spooks assumed that she was having an affair with her secretary Carol Murphy and it spread the word of a lesbian affair in Washington, hoping to get her removed and protect Guatemala’s brutal intelligence service. It turned out that “Murphy” her two-year old poodle.
Gene Wheaton, a military crime investigator with experience in three services, worked closely with C.I.A. agents and reported that C.I.A. officers he knew
decided way back when, ‘75-’76, during the Pike and Church Committee hearings, that the Congress was their enemy... Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear they conversations. They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that was George Bush. Reagan never really was the president. He was the front man. They selected a guy that had charisma, who was popular, and just a good old boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually run the White House."
The former military criminal investigator added that his former friends had a low opinion of the American electorate. The average citizen was ignorant and needed to be guided by true patriots for his own good.
Wheaton believed that the network that Oliver North and George H.W. Bush deployed in the eighties was created among these angry agents. Another term for this network was Ted Shackley’s’secret Team,” in the words of Joe Trento. Shackley thought the best way to procede was to privatize some covert operations. Of course some privatizing had gone on since the early 196os. This renewed privatgization was funded by the ‘safari Club, which was created when Bush was director . It was like the Pinay Circle in Europe, politicians, businessmen, and agents. In February, 2002, speaking at a Georgetown Alumni affair, Prince Turki described it.
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here (in the US), your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything… In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share information with each other and help each other in countering Soviet influence worldwide, and especially in Africa.
The head of Saudi intelligence then was Sheikh Kamal Adham, who was a great friend of DCI Bush. Later his nephew HRH Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Sa’ud held the post.
At that time, the Saudis opened a number of covert accounts at the Riggs Bank, where Jonathan Bush was a director. The Saudis financed some covert operations for renegades in the C.I.A. and its General Intelligence Department worked closely with the C.I.A., sometimes taking the lead in delicate operations. In this way, the Saudis gradually developed a deep knowledge of US intelligence operations and placed plants within the US agencies. In the late 70s, the small Pakistani bank, Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), became a big money lauindering machine for covert operations of all sorts throughout the world. Shackley used some of the money in operations he made sure would not be followed back to Langley. Poppy Bush had an account in the Paris BCCI branch. Time was to report that the bank had its own spies and hitmen, but it is likely that it contracted out the work to existing intelligence services.
The activities of the Safari Club were directed by ranking agency retirees and military men from their posts overseas. Richard Helms played an important role when he was ambassador to India. Indeed, the station chief in Tehran complained that Ambassador Helms seemed to be operating an laternative C.I.A. out of the embassy. Others have reported that the Safari Club was using some money that came from the shah or Iran. He added that Theodore Shackley had "formed the cadre of a private, shadow spy organization within America’s official intelligence service."
In 1966, Shackley was sent to Laos, and he took many of his people with him. Before this Anthony Poshepny (Tony Poe) was having his operators turn in the ears of people they killed in the local war against Communism . Ted Shackley was to increase the number of operatives from 30 to 250. There is some question about which of their activities in southeast Asia were official ly sanctioned and which were rogue initiatives of Shackley and Clines.
Shackley worked with Laotian drug king General Vang Pao and he put the general in contact with Santo Trafficante so that they could cooperate bringing drugs into the United States. Apparently, their assassination program, Operation Phoenix, was sanctioned and funded by drug money administered by a naval officer in Siagon named Richard Armitage until sometime in 1973. After that, its sanction may have been lifted and they found another mechanism to go on, while still using Armitage. By then they had far more money than they required for Operation Phoenix and deposited the rest in Australia. They also established a massive secret arms cache in Thailand. In those years, 1973-1975, Operation Phoenix still had the blessing of the State Department, and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs acted as Kissinger’s liason officer with Phoenix. However, it appears that C.I.A. Direector James Schlesinger moved on May 9, 1973 to shut down all of the agency’s illegal operations. On t hat date he asked active agents to report on illegal activities and invited former agents to do the same.
When Saigon fell, Armitage was sent to Tehran. He was to reroute the flow of money and drugs from Vang Pao drug money so that the secret team could set up an assassination program to wipe out s and communists in Iran. Edwin Wilson was sent to Iran to handle the murders. Daniel Sheehan, who first discovered the operations of the secret team, thought this was a a private, non-sanctioned operation. Armitage was soon posted in Bangkog as a special consultant to deal with missiong prisoners. He was perfectly positioned to handle the finances for Wilson through the Nugen-Hand Bank in Australia. He also organized the escape of Meo tribesmen who had worked for Phoenix from Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Jerry O. Daniels, another diplomat, was Armitage’s bag man. They also saw that some arms were removed from the secret cache to Iran. The State Department learned of Armitage’s activities and his failure to do anything for the MIAs, and he was forced to resign near the end of 1977. For the next two years, he operated the Far East Trading Company in Bangkog. He was living in a home owned by a friend of Major General Richard Secord, who had become linked to the Shackley team. He then became an advisor to Senator Bob Dole and eventually occupied high positions in the State Department. If the Iranian venture were a rogue operation, it is difficult to believe he could have reached such heights.
Secord was then Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary. In that capacity, he was able to purchase at bargain prices surplus equipment which he would route to Middle Eastern countries through middleman Albert Hakim. The goods were sold at a higher replacement cost. The difference was deposited in the Nugen Hand bank for covert, non-sanctioned operations. A number of front companies existed to serve the needs of these black operations.
Turner also abolished the agency’s private air force, Air America. From the time of his arrival, Admiral Turner encountered the determined opposition of the covert wing and had great difficulty extraction information from those people. He had the firm impression that the people in O He had the firm impression that the people in Oations were reluctant to do anything that could be exposed later and that they were adverse to all of his suggestions for relatively clean operations. It is difficult to determine if he knew much or anything about covert operations underway in Latin America. He later wrote that “The covert operations cupboard was bare.”
Turner was stunned to learn that a former agent, Ed Wilson was possibly involved in murder for hire and in weapon running to Lybia. When the admiral learned that seniorofficials Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines were close to Wilson, he decided their career advancement had to be derailed. Turner also ruled that Mossad no longer had a special status within the C.I.A.. Before leaving the agency, Clines disregarded an order to avoid business relationships with Wilson and set up his own weapons and consulting business before resigning. Shackley also left but kept close ties with George W. Bush. The Wilson matter became public knowledge in 1981, and he eventually went to prison. Former agents as well as covert officers still in service saw the Carter administration as the enemy and did as little as possible to cooperate with it, Much of Carter’s own NSC staff thought him too idealistic and was disloyal to him. There is no way of knowing if the Carter realized that Operation X was still going on, the transplanting from Vietnam to Central America counterinsurgency torture techniques. The Carter policy was that covert action should only be used as last resort. With the accession of Ronald Reagan, that policy was exactly reversed.
It is difficult to assess the extent to which the C.I.A. has been under the control of the White House in various times in recent history. Almost certainly, an element within it began to conceal information from the president when Jimmy Carter became president. Later, when Bill Clinton was president, the agency spied on one of his ambassadors because she was concerned about human rights in Guatemala. The agency bugged the bedroom of Ambasador Marilyn McAfee and her her “cooing endearments to Murphy.” The spooks assumed that she was having an affair with her secretary Carol Murphy and it spread the word of a lesbian affair in Washington, hoping to get her removed and protect Guatemala’s brutal intelligence service. It turned out that “Murphy” her two-year old poodle.
Gene Wheaton, a military crime investigator with experience in three services, worked closely with C.I.A. agents and reported that C.I.A. officers he knew
decided way back when, ‘75-’76, during the Pike and Church Committee hearings, that the Congress was their enemy... Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear they conversations. They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that was George Bush. Reagan never really was the president. He was the front man. They selected a guy that had charisma, who was popular, and just a good old boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually run the White House."
The former military criminal investigator added that his former friends had a low opinion of the American electorate. The average citizen was ignorant and needed to be guided by true patriots for his own good.
Wheaton believed that the network that Oliver North and George H.W. Bush deployed in the eighties was created among these angry agents. Another term for this network was Ted Shackley’s’secret Team,” in the words of Joe Trento. Shackley thought the best way to procede was to privatize some covert operations. Of course some privatizing had gone on since the early 196os. This renewed privatgization was funded by the ‘safari Club, which was created when Bush was director . It was like the Pinay Circle in Europe, politicians, businessmen, and agents. In February, 2002, speaking at a Georgetown Alumni affair, Prince Turki described it.
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here (in the US), your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything… In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share information with each other and help each other in countering Soviet influence worldwide, and especially in Africa.
The head of Saudi intelligence then was Sheikh Kamal Adham, who was a great friend of DCI Bush. Later his nephew HRH Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Sa’ud held the post.
At that time, the Saudis opened a number of covert accounts at the Riggs Bank, where Jonathan Bush was a director. The Saudis financed some covert operations for renegades in the C.I.A. and its General Intelligence Department worked closely with the C.I.A., sometimes taking the lead in delicate operations. In this way, the Saudis gradually developed a deep knowledge of US intelligence operations and placed plants within the US agencies. In the late 70s, the small Pakistani bank, Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), became a big money lauindering machine for covert operations of all sorts throughout the world. Shackley used some of the money in operations he made sure would not be followed back to Langley. Poppy Bush had an account in the Paris BCCI branch. Time was to report that the bank had its own spies and hitmen, but it is likely that it contracted out the work to existing intelligence services.
The activities of the Safari Club were directed by ranking agency retirees and military men from their posts overseas. Richard Helms played an important role when he was ambassador to India. Indeed, the station chief in Tehran complained that Ambassador Helms seemed to be operating an laternative C.I.A. out of the embassy. Others have reported that the Safari Club was using some money that came from the shah or Iran. He added that Theodore Shackley had "formed the cadre of a private, shadow spy organization within America’s official intelligence service."
In 1966, Shackley was sent to Laos, and he took many of his people with him. Before this Anthony Poshepny (Tony Poe) was having his operators turn in the ears of people they killed in the local war against Communism . Ted Shackley was to increase the number of operatives from 30 to 250. There is some question about which of their activities in southeast Asia were official ly sanctioned and which were rogue initiatives of Shackley and Clines.
Shackley worked with Laotian drug king General Vang Pao and he put the general in contact with Santo Trafficante so that they could cooperate bringing drugs into the United States. Apparently, their assassination program, Operation Phoenix, was sanctioned and funded by drug money administered by a naval officer in Siagon named Richard Armitage until sometime in 1973. After that, its sanction may have been lifted and they found another mechanism to go on, while still using Armitage. By then they had far more money than they required for Operation Phoenix and deposited the rest in Australia. They also established a massive secret arms cache in Thailand. In those years, 1973-1975, Operation Phoenix still had the blessing of the State Department, and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs acted as Kissinger’s liason officer with Phoenix. However, it appears that C.I.A. Direector James Schlesinger moved on May 9, 1973 to shut down all of the agency’s illegal operations. On t hat date he asked active agents to report on illegal activities and invited former agents to do the same.
When Saigon fell, Armitage was sent to Tehran. He was to reroute the flow of money and drugs from Vang Pao drug money so that the secret team could set up an assassination program to wipe out s and communists in Iran. Edwin Wilson was sent to Iran to handle the murders. Daniel Sheehan, who first discovered the operations of the secret team, thought this was a a private, non-sanctioned operation. Armitage was soon posted in Bangkog as a special consultant to deal with missiong prisoners. He was perfectly positioned to handle the finances for Wilson through the Nugen-Hand Bank in Australia. He also organized the escape of Meo tribesmen who had worked for Phoenix from Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Jerry O. Daniels, another diplomat, was Armitage’s bag man. They also saw that some arms were removed from the secret cache to Iran. The State Department learned of Armitage’s activities and his failure to do anything for the MIAs, and he was forced to resign near the end of 1977. For the next two years, he operated the Far East Trading Company in Bangkog. He was living in a home owned by a friend of Major General Richard Secord, who had become linked to the Shackley team. He then became an advisor to Senator Bob Dole and eventually occupied high positions in the State Department. If the Iranian venture were a rogue operation, it is difficult to believe he could have reached such heights.
Secord was then Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary. In that capacity, he was able to purchase at bargain prices surplus equipment which he would route to Middle Eastern countries through middleman Albert Hakim. The goods were sold at a higher replacement cost. The difference was deposited in the Nugen Hand bank for covert, non-sanctioned operations. A number of front companies existed to serve the needs of these black operations.
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