-Caveat Lector-
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
From: David P Beiter
Date: Tue, 12 DEC 95
Subject: The Wackenhut Corporation
INSIDE THE SHADOW CIA
===================================================================
by John Connolly
SPY Magazine - Sept 1992 - Volume 6
What? A big private company - one with a board of former CIA, FBI
and Pentagon officials; one in charge of protecting Nuclear-Weapons
facilities, nuclear reactors, the Alaskan oil pipeline and more
than a dozen American embassies abroad; one with long-standing ties
to a radical ring-wing organization; one with 30,000 men and women
under arms - secretly helped IRAQ in its effort to obtain
sophisticated weapons? And fueled unrest in Venezuela? This is
all the plot of a new best-selling thriller, right? Or the ravings
of some overheated conspiracy buff,right? Right?
WRONG.
--
In the WINTER OF 1990, David Ramirez, a 24 year-old member of the
Special Investigations Division of the Wackenhut Corporation, was
sent by his superiors on an unusual mission. Ramirez a former
Marine Corps sergeant based in Miami, was told to fly immediately
to San Antonio along with three other members of SID-a unit, known
as founder and chairman George Wackenhut's "private FBI," that
provided executive protection and conducted undercover
investigations and sting operations. Once they arrived, they
rented two gray Ford Tauruses and drove four hours to a desolate
town on the Mexican border called Eagle Pass. There, just after
dark, they met two truck drivers who had been flown in from
Houston. Inside a nearby warehouse was an 18 -wheel
tractor-trailer, which the two truck drivers and the four Wackenhut
agents in their rented cars were supposed to transport to Chicago.
"My instructions were very clear," Ramirez recalls. "Do not look
into the trailer, secure it, and make sure it safely gets to
Chicago." It went without saying that no one else was supposed to
look in the trailer, either, which is why the Wackenhut men were
armed with fully loaded Remington 870 pump-action shotguns.
The convoy drove for 30 hours straight, stopping only for gas and
food. Even then, one of the Wackenhut agents had to stay with the
truck, standing by one of the cars, its trunk open, shotgun within
easy reach. "Whenever we stopped, I bought a shot glass with the
name of the town on it," Ramirez recalls. "I have glasses from
Oklahoma City, Kansas City, St. Louis."
A little before 5:00 on the morning of the third day, they
delivered the trailer to a practically empty warehouse outside
Chicago. A burly man who had been waiting for them on the loading
dock told them to take off the locks and go home, and that was
that. They were on a plane back to Miami that afternoon. Later
Ramirez's superiors told him-as they told other SID agents about
similar midnight runs-that the trucks contained $40 million worth
of food stamps. After considering the secrecy, the way the team
was assembled and the orders not to stop or open the truck, Ramirez
decided he didn't believe that explanation.
Neither do we. One reason is simple: A Department of Agriculture
official simply denies that food stamps are shipped that way.
"Someone is blowing smoke," he says. Another reason is that after
a six-month investigation, in the course of which we spoke to more
than 300 people, we believe we know what the truck did
contain-equipment necessary for the manufacture of chemical
weapons-and where it was headed: to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the
Wackenhut Corporation-a publicly traded company with strong ties to
the CIA and federal contracts worth $200 million a year-was making
sure Saddam would be geting his equipment intact. The question is
why. In 1954, George Wackenhut, then a 34-year old former FBI
agent, joined up with three other former FBI agents to open a
company in Miami called Special Agent Investigators Inc. The
partnership was neither successful nor harmonious-George once
knocked partner Ed Dubois unconscious to end a disagreement over
the direction the company would take-and in 1958, George bought out
his partners.
However capable Wackenhut's detectives may have been at their work,
George Wackenhut had two personal attributes that were instrumental
in the company's growth. First, he got along exceptionally well
with important politicians. He was a close ally of Florida
governor Claude Kirk, who hired him to combat organized crime in
the state; and was also friends with Senator George Smathers, an
intimate of John F. Kennedy's. It was Smathers who provided
Wackenhut with his big break when the senator's law firm helped the
company find a loophole in the Pinkerton law, the 1893 federal
statute that had made it a crime for an employee of a private
detective agency to do work for the government. Smathers's firm set
up a wholly owned subsidiary of Wackenhut that provided only
guards, not detectives. Shortly thereafter, Wackenhut received
multimillion-dollar contracts from the government to guard Cape
Canaveral and the Nevada nuclear-bomb test site, the first of many
extremely lucrative federal contracts that have sustained the
company to this day.
The second thing that helped make George Wackenhut successful was
that he was, and is, a hard-line right-winger. He was able to
profit from his beliefs by building up dossiers on Americans
suspected of being Communists or merely left-leaning-"subversives
and sympathizers," as he put it-and selling the information to
interested parties. According to Frank Donner, the author of "Age
of Surveillance", the Wackenhut Corporation maintained and updated
its files even after the McCarthyite hysteria had ebbed, adding the
names of antiwar protesters and civil-rights demonstrators to its
list of "derogatory types." By 1965, Wackenhut was boasting to
potential investors that the company maintained files on 2.5
million suspected dissidents-one in 46 American adults then living.
in 1966, after acquiring the private files of Karl Barslaag; a
former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, Wackenhut could confidently maintain that with more
than 4 million names, it had the largest privately held file on
suspected dissidents in America. In 1975, after Congress
investigated companies that had private files, Wackenhut gave its
files to the now-defunct anti-Communist Church League of America of
Wheaton, Illinois. That organization had worked closely with the
red squads of big-city police departments, particularly in New York
and L.A., spying on suspected sympathizers; George Wackenhut was
personal friends with the League's leaders, and was a major
contributor to the group. To be sure, after giving the League its
files, Wackenhut reserved the right to use them for its clients and
friends.
Wackenhut had gone public in 1965 ; George Wackenhut retained 54
percent of the company. Between his salary and dividends, his
annual compensation approaches $2 million a year, sufficient for
him to live in a $20 million castle in Coral Gables, Florida,
complete with a moat and 18 full-time servants. Today the company
is the third-largest investigative security firm in the country,
with offices throughout the United States and in 39 foreign
countries.
It is not possible to overstate the special relationship Wackenhut
enjoys with the federal government. It is close. When it comes to
security matters, Wackenhut in many respects *is* the government.
In 1991, a third of the company's $600- million in revenues came
from the federal government, and another large chunk from companies
that themselves work for the government, such as Westinghouse.
Wackenhut is the largest single company supplying security to U.S.
embassies overseas; several of the 13 embassies it guards have been
in important hotbeds of espionage, such as Chile, Greece and El
Salvador. It also guards nearly all the most strategic government
facilities in the U.S., including the Alaskan oil pipeline, the
Hanford nuclear-waste facility, the Savannah River plutonium plant
and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wackenhut maintains an especially close relationship with the
federal government in other ways as well. While early boards of
directors included such prominent personalities of the political
right as Captain Eddie Rickenbacker; General Mark Clark and Ralph
E. Davis, a John Birch Society leader, current and recent members
of the board have included much of the country's recent
national-security directorate: former FBI director Clarence Kelley;
former Defense secretary and former CIA deputy director Frank
Carlucci: former Defense Intelligence Agent director General Joseph
Carroll; former U.S. Secret Service director James J. Rowley;
former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley; and acting chairman of
President Bush's foreign- intelligence advisory board and former
CIA deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Before his
appointment as Reagan's CIA director, the late William Casey was
Wackenhut's outside legal counsel. The company has 30,000 armed
employees on its payroll.
We wanted to know more about this special relationship; but the
government was not forthcoming. Repeated requests to the
Department of Energy for an explanation of how one company got the
security contracts for neariy all of America's most strategic
installations have gone unanswered.
Similarly, efforts to get the State Department to explain whether
embassy contracts were awarded arbitrarily or through competitive
bidding were fruitless; essentially, the State Department said,
"Some of both. " Wackenhut's competitors-who, understandably,
asked not to be quoted by name-have their own version. "All those
contracts;" said one security-firm executive, "are just another way
to pay Wackenhut for their clandestine help. And what is the
nature of that help? "It is known throughout the industry," said
retired FBI special agent William Hinshaw, "that if you want a
dirty job done, call Wackenhut." We met George Wackenhut in his
swanky, muy macho offices in Coral Gables. The rooms are paneled
in a dark, rich rosewood, accented with gray-blue stone. The main
office is dominated by Wackenhut's 12-foot-long desk and a pair of
chairs shaped like elephants- "Republican chairs," he calls
them-complete with real tusks, which, the old man says with some
amusement, tend to stick his visitors. The highlight of the usual
collection of pictures and awards is the Republican presidential
exhibit: an autographed photo of Wackenhut shaking hands with
George Bush (whom Wackenhut, according to a former associate, used
to call "that pinko") as well as framed photos of Presidents
Reagan, Nixon and Bush, each accompanied by a handwritten note.
The chairman looks every inch the comfortable Florida
septuagenarian. The day we spoke, his clothing ranged across the
color spectrum from baby blue to light baby blue, and he wore a iot
of jewelry-a huge gold watch on a thick gold band, two massive goid
rings. But Wackenhut was, at 72, quick and tough in his responses.
Near the end of our two-and-a-half hour interview, when asked if
his company was an arm of the CIA, he snapped, "No!"
Of course, this may just be a matter of semantics. We have spoken
to numerous experts, including current and former CIA agents and
analysts, current and former agents of the Drug Enforcement
Administration and current and former Wackenhut executives and
employees, all of whom have said that in the mid-197O's, atter the
Senate Intelligence Committee's revelations of the CIA's covert and
sometimes illegal overseas operations, the agency and Wackenhut
grew very, very close. Those revelations had forced the CIA to do
a housecleaning, and it became CIA policy that certain kinds of
activities would no longer officially be performed. But that
didn't always mean that the need or the desire to undertake such
operations disappeared. And that's where Wackenhut came in.
Our sources confirm that Wackenhut has had a long- standing
relationship with the CIA, and that it has deepened over the last
decade or so. Bruce Berckmans, who was assigned to the CIA station
in Mexico City, left the agency in January 1975 (putatively) to
become a Wackenhut international-operations vice president.
Berckmans, who left Wackenhut in 1981, told SPY that he has seen a
formal proposal George Wackenhut submitted to the CIA to allow the
agency to use Wackenhut offices throughout the world as fronts for
CIA activities. Kichard Babayan, who says he was a CIA contract
employee and is currently in jail awaiting trial on fraud and
racketeering charges, has been cooperating with federal and
congressional investigators looking into illegal shipments of
nuclear-and-chemical-weapons- making supplies to Iraq. "Wackenhut
has been used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies for
years," he told SPY. "When they [the CIA] need cover, Wackenhut is
there to provide it for them." Canadian prime minister Pierre
Trudeau was said to have rebuffed Wackenhut's effort in the 1980's
to purchase a weapons propellant manufacturer in Quebec with the
remark "We just got rid of the CIA-we don't want them back."
Phillip Agee, the left-wing former CIA agent who wrote an expose'
of the agency in 1975, told us, "I don't have the slightest doubt
that the CIA and Wackenhut overlap."
There is also testimony from people who are not convicts, renegades
or Canadians. William Corbett, a terrorism expert who spent 18
years as a CIA analyst and is now an ABC News consultant based in
Europe, confirmed the relationship between Wackenhut and the
agency. "For years Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA and
other intelligence organizations, including the DEA," he told SPY.
"Wackenhut would allow the CIA to occupy positions within the
company [in order to carry out] clandestine operations." He also
said that Wackenhut would supply intelligence agencies with
information, and that it was compensated for this- "in a quid pro
quo arrangement," Corbett says-with government contracts worth
billions of dollars over the years.
We have uncovered considerable evidence that Wackenhut carried the
CIA's water in fighting Communist encroachment in Central America
in the 1980s (that is to say, during the Reagan administration when
the CIA director was former Wackenhut lawyer William Casey, the
late superpatriot who had a proclivity for extralegal and illegal
anti-Communist covert operations such as Iran-contra). In 1981,
Berckmans, the CIA agent turned Wackenhut vice president, joined
with other senior Wackenhut executives to form the company's
Special Projects Division. It was this division that linked up
with ex-CIA man John Phillip Nichols, who had taken over the
Cabazon Indian reservation in California, as we described in a
previous article ["Badlands," April 1992], in pursuit of a scheme
to manufacture explosives, poison gas and biological weapons-and
then, by virtue of the tribe's status as a sovereign nation, to
export the weapons to the contras. This maneuver was designed to
evade congressional prohibitions against the U.S. government's
helping the contras. Indeed, in an interview with SPY, Eden
Pastora, the contras' famous Commander Zero, who had been spotted
at a test of some night-vision goggles at a firing range near the
Cabazon reservation in the company of Nichols and a Wackenhut
executive, offhandedly identified that executive, A. Robert Frye,
as "the man from the CIA. " (In a subsequent conversation he
denied knowing Frye at all; of course, in that same talk he quite
unbelievably denied having ever been a contra.)
In addition to attempted weapons supply, Wackenhut seems to have
been involved in Central America in other ways. Ernesto Bermudez
who was Wackenhut's director of international operations from 1987
to '89, admitted to SPY that during 1985 and '86 he ran Wackenhut's
operations in El Salvador, where he was in charge of 1,500 men.
When asked what 1 ,500 men were doing for Wackenhut in El Salvador,
Bermudez replied coyly, "Things." Pressed, he elaborated: "Things
you wouldn't want your mother to know about." It's worth noting
that Wackenhut's annual revenues from government contracts--the
alleged reward for cooperation in the government's clandestine
activities-increased by 150 million, a 45 percent jump, while
Ronald Reagan was in office. "You've done an awful lot of
research, George Wackenhut said to me as I was leaving. "How would
you like to run all our New York operations ? "
If that was the extent of Wackenhut's possible involvement in a
government agency's attempt to circumvent the law, then we might
dismiss it as an interesting footnote to the overheated, cowboy
anti- Communist 1980s. However, the U.S. Attorney for the
Southern District of Florida has been conducting an investigation
into the illegal export of dual-use technology-that is, seemingly
innocuous technology that can also be used to make nuclear weapons
to Iraq and Libya. And SPY has learned that Wackenhut's name has
come up in the federal investigation, but not at present as a
target.
Between 1987 and '89, three companies in the United States received
investments from an Iraqi architect named Ihsan Barbouti. The
colorful Barbouti owned an engineering company in Frankfort that
had a $552 million contract to build airfields in Iraq. He also
admitted having designed Mu'ammar Qaddafi's infamous German-built
chemical- weapons plant in Rabta, Libya. According to an attorney
for one of the companies in which Barbouti invested, the architect
owned $100 million worth of real estate and oil-drilling equipment
in Texas and Oklahoma. He may also be dead, there being reports
that he died of heart failure in Hospital in London on July 1,
1990, his 63rd birthday. Barbouti, however, had faked his death
once before, in 1969, after the Ba'ath takeover in Iraq which
brought Saddam Hussein to power as the second-in-command. That
time, Barbouti escaped Iraq; resurfacing several years later in
Lebanon and Libya. There are no reports that he is living in
Jordan -or, according to other reports, in a CIA safe house in
Florida. Those reports can be considered no better than rumor;
what follows, though, is fact.
As reported on ABC's "Nightline" last year, the three companies in
which Barbouti invested were TK-7 of Oklahoma City, which makes a
fuel additive; Pipeline Recovery Systems of Dallas, which makes an
anti-corrosive chemical that preserves pipes; and Product
Ingredient Technoiogy of Boca Raton, which makes food flavorings.
None of these companies was looking to do business with Iraq;
Barbouti sought them out. Why was he interested? Because TK-7 had
formulas that could extend the range of jet aircraft and
liquid-fueled missiles such as the SCUD; because Pipeline Recovery
knows how to coat pipes to make them usable in nuclear reactors and
chemical-weapons plants; and because one of the by- products in
making cherry flavoring is ferric ferrocyanide, a chemical that's
used to manufacture hydrogen cyanide, which can penetrate gas masks
and protective clothing. Hydrogen cyanide was used by Saddam
Hussein against the Kurds in the Iran-Iraq war.
Barbouti was more than a passive investor, and soon he began
pressuring the companies to ship not only their products but also
their manufacturing technology to corporations he owned in Europe,
on which, he told the businessmen, it would be sent to Libya and
Iraq. In doing so, Barbouti was attempting to violate the law.
First, the U.S. forbade sending anything to Libya, which was
embargoed as a terrorist nation. Second, the U.S. specified that
material of this sort must be sent to its final destination, not to
an intermediate locale, where the U.S. would risk losing control
of its distribution. According to former CIA contract employee
Richard Babayan, in late 1989 Barbouti met in London with Ibrahim
Sabawai, Saddam Hussein's half brother and European head of Iraqi
intelligence, who grew excited about the work Pipeline Recovery was
doing and called for the company's technology to be rushed to Iraq,
so that it could be in place by early 1990. And the owner of TK-7
swears that Barbouti told him he was developing an atom device for
Qaddafi that would be used against the U.S. in retaliation for the
1986 U.S. air strike against Libya. Barbouri also wanted the
ferrocyanide from Product Ingredient.
Assisting Barbouti with these investments was New Orleans exporter
Don Seaton, business associate of Richard Secord, the right-wing
U.S. Army general turned war profiteer who was so deeply enmeshed
in the Iran-contra affair. It was Secord who connected Barbouti
with Wackenhut. Barbouti met with Secord in Florida on several
occasions, and phone records show that several calls were placed
from Barbouti's office to Secord's private number in McLean,
Virginia; Secord has acknowledged knowing Barbouti. He is
currently a partner of Washington businessman James Tully (who is
the man who leaked Bill Clinton's draft-dodge letter to ABC) and
Jack Brennan, a former Marine Corps colonel and longtime aide to
Richard Nixon both in the White House and in exile. Brennan has
gone back to the White House, where he works as a director of
administrative operations in President Bush's office. He refused
to return repeated calls from SPY. Interestingly, Brennan and
Tully had previously been involved in a $181 million business deal
to supply uniforms to the Iraqi army. Oddly, they arranged to have
the uniforms manufactured in Nicolae Ceaucescu's Romania. The
partners in that deal were former U.S. attorney general and
Watergate felon John Mitchell and Sarkis Soghanalian, a
Turkish-born Lebanese citizen. Soghanalian, who has been credited
with being Saddam Hussein's leading arms procurer and with
introducing the demonic weapons inventor Gerald Bull to the Iraqis,
is currently serving a six-year sentence in federal prison in Miami
for the illegal sale of 103 military helicopters to Iraq.
According to former Wackenhut agent David Ramirez, the company
considered Soghanalian "a very valuable client."
Unfortunately for Barbouti, none of the companies in which he made
investments was willing to ship its products or technology to his
European divisions. That, however, doesn't necessarily mean that
he didn't get some of what he wanted. In 1990, 2,000 gallons of
ferrocyanide were found to be missing from the cherry-flavor
factory in Boca Raton. Where it went is a mystery; Peter Kawaja,
who was the head of security for all of Barbouti's U.S.
investments, told SPY, "We were never burglarized, but that stuff
didn't walk out by itself."
What does all this have to do with Wackenhut? Lots: According to
Louis Champon, the owner of Product Ingredient Technology, it was
Wackenhut that guarded his Boca Raton plant, a fact confirmed by
Murray Levine, a Wackenhut vice president. Champon also says, and
Wackenhut also confirms, that the security for the plant consisted
of one unarmed guard. While a Wackenhut spokesperson maintains
that this was the only job they were doing for Barbouti, he also
says that they were never paid, that Barbouti stiffed them.
This does not seem true. SPY has obtained four checks from
Barbouti to Wackenhut. All were written within ten days in 1990:
one on March 27 for $168.89; one on March 28 for $24,828.07;
another on April 5 for $756; the last on April 6 for $40,116.25.
We asked Richard Kneip, Wackenhut's senior vice president for
corporate planning, to explain why a single guard was worth $66,000
a year; Kneip was at a loss to do so. He was similarly at a loss to
explain a fifth check, from another Barbouti company to Wackenhut's
travel-service division in 1987, almost two years before Wackenhut
has acknowledged providing security for the Boca Raton plant .
Two former CIA operatives, separately interviewed, have the
explanation. Charles Hayes, who describes himself as "a CIA asset
" says Wackenhut was helping Barbouti ship chemicals to Iraq,
"Supplying Iraq was originally a good idea," he maintains, "but
then it got out of hand. Wackenhut was just in it for the money."
Richard Babayan the former CIA contract employee, confirmed Hayes's
account. He says that Wackenhut's relationship with Barbouti
existed before the Boca Raton plant opened: "Barbouti was placed in
the hands of Secord by the CIA, and Secord called in Wackenhut to
handle security and travel and protection for Barbouti and his
export plans." Wackenhut, Babayan says was working for the CIA in
helping Barbouti ship the chemical- and-nuclear-weapons-making
equipment first to Texas, then to Chicago, and then to Baltimore to
be shipped overseas. All of which makes the story of the midnight
convoy ride of David Ramirez, recounted at the beginning of this
article rather less mysterious. SPY has learned that this shipment
is now the subject of a joint USDA- Customs investigation.
When we asked George Wackenhut what was being shipped from Eagle
Pass to Chicago, the sharp, straightforward chairman at first
claimed they were protecting an unnamed executive. He then
directed an aide to get back to me. Two days later, Richard Kneip
did, repeating the tale that had been passed on to David
Ramirez-that the trucks contained food stamps. We told him that we
had spoken to a Department of Agriculture official, who informed us
that food stamps are shipped from Chicago to outlying areas, never
the other way around, and that food stamps, unlike money, are used
once and then destroyed. All Kneip would say then was, "We do not
reveal the names of our clients."
Wackenhut's connection to the CIA and to other government agencies
raises several troubling questions:
First, is the CIA using Wackenhut to conduct operations that it has
been forbidden to undertake? Second, is the White House or some
other party in the executive branch working through Wackenhut to
conduct operations that it doesn't want Congress to know about?
Third, has Wackenhut's cozy relationship with the government given
it a feeling of security-or worse, an outright knowledge of
sensitive or embarrassing information-that allows the company to
believe that it can conduct itself as though it were above the law?
A congressional investigation into Wackenhut's activities in the
Alyeska affair last November began to shed some light on
Wackenhut's way of doing business; clearly it's time for Congress
to investigate just how far Wackenhut's other tentacles extend.
Additional reporting by Erzc Reguly, Margie Sloan and Wendell Smith
-** End of article **-
.
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