-Caveat Lector-
"I have accepted money on contract work for the CIA, but not
with the same mercenary intent as Secord.
" I didn't have any idea at the time that the checks received were
from [a front used by] Albert Hakim, Ollie North, Dick Secord, or any of
the rest of them. I [agreed because] was asked by a trusted person
in the State Department.
"I was knowledgeable about Operation Watchtower.
"My best friend, A.J. Baker, commanded the first Watchtower
mission, which involved CIA aircraft flying cocaine from Bolivia
to Alford Air Force Base in Panama.
"Everyone associated with it has been killed except myself.
"People aren't disposed to give me threats face-to-face ...
[but I received] a telephone call wherein the caller [warned me]
that the Israeli Mossad figured in the death of three Special
Forces Colonels. Three of them had knowledge of Watchtower; I
was number four But nothing has happened [to me] ...
"I worked with the Mossad, I know them a little bit.
"I'm still alive, so, obviously, I haven't been targeted
well -- if I've been targeted at all."
Militia Leader Talks
Bo Gritz Interrogated by Adam Parfrey
Extracted from New Dawn No.30 (May-June, 1995)
One does not converse with Bo Gritz; like Moses or some
ancient lawgiver, information flows out in one direction,
garrulously, entertainingly, but in a fashion that seems almost
rehearsed. Meeting Gritz is like greeting the incarnation of Jake
LaMotta, a former warrior who now must entertain to make a
living.
The following interview was conducted shortly in February,
1993, at Gritz's suburban-style ranch home in a
sparsely-populated canyon one hour's drive West from Los Vegas.
Parked in front of his house is a twin-engine Cessna; his other
plane was undergoing repair in San Diego. Gritz was winding down
from the 1992 Presidential Campaign, in which he garnered over
100,000 write-in votes despite seemingly suicidal decisions, such
as refusing to appear on Larry King's television program - the
same show that launched Ross Perot - because Gritz didn't want to
disappoint supporters at a Liberty Lobby luncheon.
Gritz's campaign contrasted his Vietnam War heroics to give
credence to his anti-Federal Government diatribes, in which he
accused the CIA of acting in concert with Pentagon officials for
peddling dope for money and influence. He likewise blamed high
officials for deliberately sabotaging several Rambo-like rescues
of MIAs. These revelations apparently turned Gritz into an
anti-government activist, and he shared his information with the
Christic Institute and other liberal watchdog groups.
After becoming a sort of folk hero in Idaho by talking
Christian Identity believer Randy Weaver into peacefully
surrendering to authorities after federal snipers killed his
wife and son, Gritz decided to create a community named "Almost
Heaven" near Kamiah, Idaho, in which like-minded patriots would
construct homes and practice survival techniques, including
preparation for government invasions. Needless to say, leftist
activists, government authorities and the mass media are quick to
condemn Gritz's community as a haven for apocalyptic cultists,
another Waco waiting to happen. Gritz asserts that his community
will strictly observe the Constitution, and is a logical defense
against taking on the mark of the beast and other such
impositions created by the New World Order.
-- Adam Parfrey
Q: What was your larger purpose in writing "Called to Serve?"
A: It's not what we did in Vietnam that's important - there were
some lessons to be learned so we don't repeat them. But the fact
that the government has been involved in illegal narcotics
trafficking, literally overdosing our own people, not third world
target audiences, as we would expect, I think is important. If I
can get people to understand it better and accept it better by
trying to take them from how I got involved in Special Forces to
current time then so be it.
Q: As an insider or former insider, what precipitated your
decision to criticize the government?
A: One is common sense, consciousness. On the far right you find
people like Dick Secord. I know Richard Secord. He was a
Major-General in the United States Air Force. He was a chief
attache and knew the Shah of Iran personally. I worked for
Secord's boss, Erich von Marbod, who still hasn't been uncovered,
except when Ed Wilson was determined to have been a person
selling tons of explosives to Qadhafi, and identified both Secord
and von Marbod as conspirators along with Ollie North, everyone
got the axe except North. Von Marbod had to resign his super
government position; Secord had to give up being a General. But
it didn't mean they gave up the business. You have General
Secord, who has on public record. Playboy magazine, for example,
said he deserved the $8 million dollars he made in selling the
Ayatollah Khomeini missiles, for all his hard work. Before the US
Senate, you have Dick Secord saying he was in business to make
money when he was helping the Contras. Senator Kerry from
Massachusetts asked the question, "I thought you were
administered to help the Contra?!" He said, "Well, couldn't I
have two purposes?" On the other hand you have - I would cast
myself - we do not sell our services. Our services are not for
sale, they are given freely for what the motto Special Forces is.
We Liberate the Oppressed. De Oppresso Liber. I have, but not
with the same mercenary intent as Secord, accepted money on
contract work for the CIA. For example, I trained Afghan
Mujahadeen. The checks we received were from Stanford Technology.
I didn't have any idea at the time that Stanford Technology was
hooked up with Albert Hakim, Ollie North, Dick Secord or any of
the rest of them. These checks come to you, you cash them. I was
asked to do the training by a trusted person in the State
Department working for the Undersecretary of State for Security
Assistance. When I was a commander for special forces in Latin
America I knew Manuel Antonio Noriega personally.
I was knowledgeable about Operation Watchtower. My best
friend, A.J. Baker, commanded the first Watchtower mission, which
was CIA aircraft flying [cocaine from Bolivia to Alford Air Force
Base in Panama]. Everyone associated has been killed except
myself. I'm 240 pounds, I've got a 6th degree black belt. I've
rained hair-covered knuckles down upon people and would do so
again, properly provoked. People aren't disposed to give me
threats face-to-face.
But the only I guess you could call it a threat has been a
telephone call wherein the person said the Israeli Mossad had
figured in the death of three Special Forces Colonels. There were
four who had knowledge of Watchtower, and I was the last. But
nothing has ever happened [to me].
Some, what I believe to be today, partial to, but not real
white supremacist, out in the Midwest, called me a couple of
times to say, "Bo, watch out, the Israeli Mossad has got an
assassination plan for you." How in the world would this guy
know? I worked with the Mossad, I know them a little bit. There's
no way that somebody outside would know what the inside was
doing. I'm still alive, so obviously I haven't been targeted well
if I've been targeted at all.
Q: Was the threatening phone call from a friendly source?
A: Well, that one phone call was just from an unknown source.
We'd call them F-6 in the intelligence vernacular, it's
undeterminable. The point is that I had personal knowledge of CIA
drug-trafficking. Not just in Panama. I had when I was a
commander on Special Forces in Southeast Asia. Francis Ford
Coppola, in 1975 sent me a letter. I was a commander of Special
Forces Latin America. He wanted to use the photograph in General
William C. Westmoreland's book ["A Soldier Reports"] showing me
with Nurse Toi kneeling in front of a lot of really mean-looking
Cambodian mercenaries as the headliner for his new movie
Apocalypse Now. Colonel Kurtz was commanding a Cambodian army
and I was Major Gritz, and I did command a Cambodian army. Matter
of fact I was the first to do so. At that time we had knowledge
that the CIA was trafficking in illegal narcotics using Air
America, which we over there had our own name for. We called it
Air Opium. It doesn't mean that the pilots weren't brave people
and did a lot of heroic things, because they did. But those
flying pigs and rice, and there was a lot of that, they weren't
doing it on their own initiative, this was the government that
was mixing the pigs and rice with loads of opium.
As a matter of fact I was surprised and pleased to see the
movie Air America finally come out because it showed for maybe
the only time in history where the Pepsi Cola plant was set up in
Laos, not to put mom and pop bottling companies out of business
but rather to do the rather more sophisticated steps of taking
opium and morphine into number four Asian [heroin] hell.
Richard Nixon is the person who set [the Pepsi Cola plant]
up when he lost the election to Jack Kennedy. I hate to say it, I
actually voted for Nixon; Lieutenants can be forgiven of
ignorances like that, I would hope. I thought that Nixon had more
experience, it wasn't that Kennedy was a Catholic. After he lost,
he became a director in the Pepsi Cola bottling company. I think
there was a direct relationship between Pepsi Cola and the Bay of
Pigs. [The Bay of Pigs] wasn't Kennedy's show, that was Richard
Nixon's show.
I wasn't on my own going into Burma. [Gritz was asked by the
Reagan White House to confirm rumors that Golden Triangle Khun Sa
was holding American prisoners of war.] George Bush's office
asked me to do that. H. Ross Perot was there when it happened. I
found again that US government officials were still doing
[dealing drugs]. I went to Nicaragua at the invitation of the
State Department to look into some special weapons programs
during the Contra situation. Again, here you have illegal
narcotics being used to fund what the CIA thinks is right but yet
what Congress says is wrong. The American people don't get a
chance to vote because it is kept under the leaves, and, of
course, crime pays when the President happens to be one of the
chief criminals. We've got Bush now who has as of Christmas
exonerated, forgiven and pardoned all the Iran-Contra people.
Why? Not because he's Santa Claus but because he himself could
very well be implicated, and should be. So that's fait accompli
now. But what isn't completed is the government, the bureaucracy,
the mechanics who do the wet work, they never change.
The only thing I did see change was when Jimmy Carter took
over as President. He appointed Stansfield Turner head of CIA.
Turner immediately fired Manuel Antonio Noriega, saying I won't
have a drug smuggler on the payroll of the CIA. While we laughed
a lot because Jimmy Carter had none of the organization of
Richard Nixon, yet the remarkable thing is that the drug
smuggling under Jimmy Carter came almost to a halt. And that to
me was remarkable. With all his failings, Billy Beer and loans
for Libya, the fact is Jimmy did one thing right, he brought
Stansfield Turner in and Stansfield cleaned house for the CIA. It
hasn't been the same since. How could Jimmy Carter do something
that perhaps J.F.K. may have been assassinated for? Who knows?
Jimmy Carter was an insider. He was part of Rockefeller's
newly-formed Trilateral Commission in 1973. He was an insider.
The answer to that is very strange. When you look at Nixon for
example, why would they run him out of office? Boy, you really
got to be deep on the inside to understand a lot of those things.
Why could Jimmy Carter get away with cleaning up a little bit of
government? It's still a basic mystery to me, but I just noticed,
it was like the blind man feeling the elephant, from my point of
view, all of a sudden the government got better, and that was a
paradox under the Democrats. The government got better under
Jimmy Carter.
Q: You speak much about your warrior ethic and nationalistic
ethic in the pages of your autobiography. Is it from that
standpoint that you were disillusioned by government drug
running?
A: Yes. Remember my comparison with Secord and myself. I think
Secord's a mercenary. The guy would sell his mother if he could
make a buck. On the other hand there are soldiers like myself who
are not staff pukes. We didn't come up the ranks slow-stroking
the generals. Instead we came up in the foxholes and the field.
We will not sell our time, our talent, our resources to anyone
regardless. But we'll give them, if the cause is right. And so I
believe that my warrior ethic is going to put me in far better
stead, if there is a God, than Secord and his cash register
ethics. Some day when I prepare to meet my maker, and I'm a
Christian, I have to answer for everything I've done.
... I had been an officer in charge of operations wherein
people had died innocently. Villages had died because of the
Mac-V rules of engagement that allowed bombardment and some
of the things that I talked about in my book. [But] the fact is ...
there was never once I took a life just because I had the power.
And I think that was very important. Like the policeman, if you
take life and you do it needlessly, then I think you're going to have
to account. But if you take life and do it in the course of duty,
and it is not in a selfish point of view, then I think it's a different case.
Q: What was the epiphany, the turning point for you in going
against the corrupt government?
A: The real turning point I think, the real shock I had was when
I came out of Burma in 1987 there was a phone call waiting for
me. We were in a safe house in Minister's quadrangle of Bangkok,
Thailand. A Major Chuck Johnson was listening in; never take
phone calls unless we're on a mission, for this very reason. Two
state department agents that had gone to a friend of mine, Joe
Felter, a former CEO of Wedtech, and he relayed their message
when he said to me, "Bo, you must erase and forget everything
that you've learned in the Golden Triangle. If you don't you're
going to hurt the government." Well, Joe was trying to keep me
from being killed. He said, "Bo, you've got to get on the first
thing smoking out of there, you've got to bring everything you
got back here to the apartment," which was a safe house we've
got, and I said, "Who's going to be there?" He said, "just Tom
Harvey and myself." Tom Harvey was our White House National
Security Council contact, and the person I first turned [Khun Sa]
videotapes over to just before Christmas the year before.
Suddenly I found myself not just in the shadows struggling
against some unseen bureaucratic enemy - we always had that. We
never had the money we needed to do the mission, we always had to
scrounge and work on our own. That's what causes a lot of this
drug trafficking, by the way. You get an enthusiastic CIA
operative who like Ollie North is going to do the job. But they
can't give him the money. And so they say, "Don't tell us how you
do it. Just do it." Then you have all these druggies already in
place, this is what Special Forces was trained to do. Don't go
out and reinvent the wheel. You already have organised crime, do
you not, that is highly successful against what? The very thing
you are trying to avoid, the authorities, in this case. So you
use them, and they're more than happy to pay the bill for the
guns as long as the planes come back full and don't just
dead-head back into Homestead Air Force Base.
So I found myself not in the shadows, but found myself out
in the open, not in verbal judo but in real terms, where the
government, my government, was saying, "You erase and you forget
or we're going to bury you." What do you do? Well, as an officer
I've taken orders all my life since I was a cadet at
fourteen-years-old. I had been conditioned to take orders. But
being in Special Forces helped me because we are a different
army, we march to a different drummer. Oftimes there is no one to
give us orders. We are given a mission and are left alone and it
may be years later until on our own we are able to accomplish
that mission. It allowed me to become more self-reliant, more
independent in my own thought than just blindly following some
staff puke in Washington. D.C. Had I been a West Point officer, I
probably would have clicked my heels, because that's like Tom
Harvey, and I would have marched in their direction. But instead
it made me angry. Here we had an opportunity to clear up some
government bureaucracy that was obviously corrupt. And yet the
White House was not just dragging its feet but they were
threatening me. They came down real hard because they were
desperate.
Q: So it's not just renegade agents but orders from up on top?
A: Listen, there are a lot of things I know now that weren't in
my mind at that time. Tom Harvey and Richard Armitage are close
friends. Richard Armitage was the Assistant Secretary of Defense.
George Bush appointed him Assistant Secretary of State and then
Secretary of the Army, but he was close friends with Harvey, they
used to lift weights all the time at the Pentagon Officers'
Athletic Club. I betcha this happened. When I brought those
videotapes in, it was natural that Harvey probably called Dick
Armitage, who was responsible for recovery of POWs, over to his
office. When Khun Sa said he was going to reveal the U.S.
officials, and if it was true Armitage was involved, jeez,
Armitage was probably dripping in his knickers. This would have
frightened him. Who authorized Armitage to do this? Again,
Armitage and von Marbod - it all comes back to a nice, tight
little circle. These guys didn't do it on their own initiative.
And so when you go way back and look at Nixon and Armitage and
von Marbod, where did they all come together? In 1973 we got out
with honor under with Nixon before he got run out with Watergate,
but then in 1975, even though we didn't have Tricky Dick anymore,
we had the same bureaucracy. Now you had Armitage and von Marbod
over in Vietnam taking out all the classified and all the very
valuable weapons systems. Armitage took his to the Philippines
and von Marbod took a lot of his into Thailand. These were
cashed. Now what were they cashed for? Because the guerrilla
cannot eat money, they can't put it down the barrel of a gun,
they want stuff they can use. And so did we ever stop the war in
Vietnam? We didn't. We didn't have any money, but that didn't
make any difference as long as we had guns and the wherewithal.
To keep this engine going takes some fuel. Money is the fuel. And
of course, dope is money. And then you had guns. What they had
on their side, in the hills, they had the dope. We didn't want to
make this a one-way trip, because if Armitage and von Marbod had
just given them the guns that they had cached from the Vietnam
war, then they might have not been able to replace them.
Eventually they would have run out. So what they did then, I
believe - it's good business practice, like Secord has said - we
said, "You give us the dope and we'll give you the guns," and the
dope is transferred into money.
Where did the Contras get their guns from? They got them
ultimately from the Israelis. The Israelis captured massive
amounts of arms from the Yom Kippur War and the Six Day War, and
they were selling these guns - plus the Israelis could arm them
through the Communist bloc, where we couldn't. And so we were
dealing through the Mossad to dealing weapons to the Contras.
[cont'd]
NOTE from GOAT: Gritz drops a heavy hint in mentioning Erich von Marbod as
one whose activities in the Secret Government have "still not been
uncovered."
Von Marbod was instrumental in the sale of aircraft to Iran and the
training of the Shah's secret police (Savak) in that period immediately
preceding the return of the Ayatollah and the Iranian Revolution, when the
Bush faction of the CIA (flushed out by President Carter and the
Rockefeller-Church Committee hearings in Congress) was regrouping --off the
stage, out of the public eye-- for Stage Two of its "coup d'etat." Stage One
had been the JFK assassination (in retaliation for JFK's ouster of the Dulles
cabal in the CIA) under Nixon (before and after his Presidency), Nixon's man
in the CIA and protege George Bush, and Al Haig (soon to be NATO commander).
Iran-Contra baddies Clines, Shackley, Secord, and Singlaub, with their Mafia,
Mossad, and Iranian allies, remained in charge of the Coup's "foreign policy"
between Stage One and Stage Two -- as they did afterward, under the Bush
"Octopus."
The intermission between Nixon-Ford and Reagan-Bush is filled with
stories related more than they might seem -- the defense-contractor scandals
(involving Von Marbod's middle-manning the sale of weapons to both Iran and
Saudi Arabia, resulting in huge profits for the Bush-CIA boys), the
NATO/Mafia/P2 Masonic Lodge and Banco Ambrosiano (pre-BCCI) scandal in Italy
(in which Al Haig's name comes up in the context of Vatican-Mafia-Fascist
International support for neo-Nazi death squads in South America), and the
Mossad's mediation of arms deals with Khomeini's Iran (a carryover from its
role under the Shah) leading up to the "October Surprise."
Look back at Von Marbod, Frank Carlucci, et al ...
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