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.