-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Inside the Covert Operations of the CIA & Israel’s Mossad Joel Bainerman ©1994 S.P.I. BOOKS/Shapolsky Publishers, Inc. 136 West 22nd St. New York, NY 10011 ISBN 1-56171-350-3 291 pps. – First Edition – Out-of-print --[4]— Vice President Quayle’s Role In President Bush's CIA Agenda When Dan Quayle was chosen as George Bush's vice-presidential candidate most people had never heard of him. Some speculated that he was "impeachment insurance" for Bush in case Iran-Contra blew up in his face if he was elected President. Others claimed that it was to satisfy the conservative wing of the Republican Party While the media labeled Quayle as an "idiot" and the public views him as a dummy, incapable of sophisticated thinking, Bush knew otherwise. He chose Quayle because of the ability of Quayle to carry out covert operations, such as the key role he played in the secret effort to supply the Contras during the Reagan White House. To carry out his secret agendas Bush has to control key committees in the House and Senate, such as Finance, Intelligence, and Armed Forces, and command the loyalty of legislative assistants to congressmen and senators. Senator Quayle served the then-Vice President Bush well in the Senate as an integral part of the Secret Team. He was the Vice President's point man for th e Contras, soothing Congress' mind over the nasty rumors it was hearing about the Contras' ties to drug dealers and unscrupulous mercenary groups. When money is spent, congressmen and senators have to be informed. When "humanitarian aid" for the Contras was granted by Congress, Quayle did the explaining. In the summer of 1991, I got to know William Northrup, the Israeli arms dealer who was arrested in Bermuda in 1986 for selling arms to Iran. Before leaving for the States in September, he told me to try and get gut to California and meet Gene Wheaton. "Gene's a good man," he assured me. Wheaton had been investigating Reagan-Bush covert operations since the early 1980s and had seen from the inside how these secret agendas operated. In addition to his 25 years' experience as a criminal investigator for the U.S. Army, he had designed security systems for airports in the Middle East and served as an anti-smuggling narcotics advisor to the Shah. By that time I had interviewed covert operators like Richard Secord, and Iran-Contra players such as Yaacov Nimrodi. Now I had someone who looked at the world of covert operations from the perspective of an investigator. Unlike intelligence agents, Wheaton didn't thrive on lies and deceit. Judging from his very modest home, he obviously wasn't in it for the money. In 1985 Wheaton was vice president of a small cargo airline company that Oliver North's network wanted to use to haul arms to the Contras and rebels elsewhere, such as in Afghanistan. Wheaton had the expertise the secret team wanted, so they set out to recruit him. While Wheaton may have fit their political profile, he was conservative and right-wing; he was a cop, not an intelligence agent. He was brought into the center circle, where he stayed tong enough to learn about the White House's ties to drug runners, the massive arms transfers to rebel groups, the mountains of falsified documentation and miscarriages of justice. "I had no objection to the covert end of it, as long as it was legal," says Wheaton. "It wasn't. Whenever I asked about the legality of certain operation I was told, "It's all right, this is a vital national security issue.' I talked myself out of the inner circle but I was in- it long enough to get to know the players and their method of operation. The government officials I met in the Pentagon called supporting the private covert operator 'intelligence support activity.' These covert operators trampled on our Constitution and made a mockery of our judicial system. They aren't motivated strictly by anti-communism, power, or money, but by the adrenaline that stems from being able to create chaos. They would gladly destabilize a democratic ally of America just so they can go back in and save it." Wheaton explains that the origins of Oliver North's network was in the mid-1970s. There were, he says, literally tens of thousands of ex-covert operators and former Air America "employees" running around loose in the U.S. These weren't the kind of guys to lay back and run 7-11 stores, so they set up an array of covert airlines using the assets of Air America, the former CIA proprietary airline which had helped fly heroin out of Burma and Laos. When Air America was liquidated it created scores of smaller airlines, including Global, Capital, and Southern Cross. All tolled, these companies employed over 15,000 people. The subsidiary companies of Air America, Southern. Air Transport, Continental Air Services, and Air Asia were also broken up. This meant this secret team was able to supply pilots and mechanics, logistics and control people for future, privatized covert operations. The 800 or so covert operators who got thrown out of the CIA by Jimmy Carter in 1977 allied themselves with the conservative element of the Republican Party. Their goal was to get George Bush elected to either president or Vice President. They didn't care which one it was, as long as their man got into the White House. They rallied around Bush and worked like a political action committee. They put their unique talents into action. They were going to do in America what they had done throughout the 1960s and 1970s in Africa and South and Central America: rig elections and overthrow governments. One aspect of the covert operators' activities was the "October Surprise" theory, which claims members of Reagan's 1980 campaign team, including George Bush and William Casey, made a deal with Iranian leaders not to release the 52 American hostages they were holding until after the November presidential election. Wheaton claims Quayle was brought "into the game," Bush and Casey's network of the Secret Team, early on. He believes that a major source of Quayle's political power in his home state of Indiana comes from an old friend of William Casey's, Beurt SerVaas, who was on the executive board of the Veterans of the OSS, the predecessor organization of the CIA. SerVaas's daughter is married to what Wheaton describes as an "off-the-books" French, intelligence asset, Bernard Marie. Wheaton says that he introduced Marie to Defense Intelligence Agency officials who were part of the Reagan-Bush White House's secret arms deals with Iran in the early 1980s. "Quayle is being groomed," says Wheaton. "Quayle was a true believer and they wanted to bring him up through the ranks. It wasn't easy for Bush and Casey to find people who would go along with their far right-wing philosophy, who at the same time were articulate and presentable." Quayle's "smoking gun" was Robert Owen and Owen's ties were to John Hull, a native of Indiana who owned and managed 8000 acres of land in northern Costa Rica 30 miles from the Nicaraguan border. The CIA and Oliver North used Hull's ranch as a supply depot to move weapons to the Contras. Hull used American government protection to fly drugs from there into the U.S., sometimes on the very same planes. Over the next few years, four companies which were also used by Hull to smuggle Colombian cocaine to the U.S. from his ranch, received more than $800,000 of State Department funds under this program. Frigorificos de Puntarenas, a Costa Rican shrimp company, had cocaine shipped from Hull's ranch to Costa Rican ports packed in frozen shrimp and delivered to Miami and Gu[l]f ports (Out of Control, page 157). In February 1986 Oliver North chose Vortex Aircraft Sales and Leasing to fly the so-called humanitarian assistance to the Contras. At the same time, that company's vice president, Michael Palmer, a fo[r]mer Delta Airlines pilot turned drug smuggler, was under indictment for marijuana trafficking (The Nation, August 29th, 1987). Other companies which received Contra "humanitarian aid" included Setco, which was controlled by a billionaire drug lord currently serving a life sentence in a Federal prison for the torture-murder of a Drug Enforcement Agency agent. According to an FBI report, another company, Diacsa, served as a central distribution point for cocaine trafficking and money laundering (Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Organizations, April 1989). Owen's ties to Calero are confirmed by Joseph Adams, a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, who trained with the elite Delta Force unit of the U.S. Army. Adams was the security chief and consultant to Calero from the fall of 1984 to the spring of 1986. He lead a team of American mercenaries and a Pentagon intelligence agent on a two-month combat mission inside Nicaragua called "Operation Pegasus." Adams says that Calero met Owen on a number of occasions. "Rob Owen was Adolfo's contact,'? Adams says. "I met with Owen several times with Adolfo. Rob was reporting to Adolfo on the Southern Front activities." Adams remembers at least a dozen such meetings in 1984 and 1985 (The Progressive, Ma rch 1987). While being interviewed by the CBS News program West 57th St., Jack Terrel, a military commander for a private American group that supplied trainers for the Contras and who was a key witness for Senator Kerry's Senate investigation of the Contras' ties to drug trafficking, said he met twice with John Hull and Robert Owen and that Owen was the go-between between Costa Rica and the White House, and the "bag man" for Oliver North. Said Terrel: "Owen told me, "I take a $10,000 a month to John Hull from the National Security Council for these types of operations, and, if we need more money, that's no problem'" (West 57th St., June 25th, 1986). When John Hull was asked by CBS News if he knew Owen, he replied: "I've met Rob on several occasions. I have no business dealings with Rob." When asked what he did for living, Hull said; "I have no idea." Mike Wallace of CBS News asked Terrel if he had ever heard about Hull's drug smuggling, to which Terrel answered, "We've got a cancer here; it's like Watergate. It's not going away." U.S. investigative bodies were simply not interested in hearing about John Hull's deeds. "We sent stuff to all the committees," says Tony Avrigan, who together with his wife and fellow journalist Martha Honey, filed suit along with the Christie Institute in a Federal court in Miami charging Calero and officials in the American government with planning the May 30th, 1984, La Penca, Nicaragua, bombing at a press conference held by Contra leader Eden Pastora. "We made everything available to them" (The Progressive, March 1990). The Iran-Contra investigating committees sent Thomas Polgar, a former CIA station chief in Vietnam, to Costa Rica to investigate charges that Hull was involved in drug dealing. He too wasn't too interested in getting at the truth. "Polgar didn't want to hear anything specific dates, evidence, sources," said Beth Hawkins, a journalist who worked for the Tico Times, in San Jose. "His questions were subjective, what we thought about Pastora and Hull- (The Progressive, March 1990). Avrigan remarks on the difference between the U.S. government's treatment of John Hull and that of Manuel Noriega in its efforts to bring drug dealers to justice. "It just shows very clearly that in the eyes of the United States, Noriega only be. came a drug dealer when he stopped taking orders from the CIA. Drug traffickers who continue to take orders from the CIA are protected" (The Progressive, March 1990). There is also ample proof that the U.S. government not only rejected allegations of Contra involvement in drug tracking, but also tipped off these smugglers when they had become targets of an investigation. Journalist Jonathan Kwitny says Hull acknowledged to him that he was warned in early 1985 by a NSC source of a potential investigation. After discussing the matter with the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica, he declined to talk with Justice Department officials (The Nation, August 29th, 1987). Kwitny investigated other charges that the NSC tipped off drug dealers of pending investigations. He says an American filmmaker, Lawrence Spivy, who in early 1985 had worked with the Contra supply operation, saw FBI memos from Miami about North's Office ties to drug smugglers. The U.S. government not only tolerated drug dealers like Hull and informed them of any investigation of their activities, they also assisted them by intervening on their behalf when they got caught. Costa Rican prosecutor Jorge Chavarria Guzman had unsuccessfuly tried to charge Hull for his role in the 1984 La Penca bombing. Guzman claims that Robert Owen had foreknowledge of the bombing. When Hull eventually was arrested for drug trafficking, the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica, officials of the Bush Administration, and no less than 19 Iegislators petitioned Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to have him released (The Progressive, April 1989). In a January 26th, 1989, letter, Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the House committee that investigated the Iran-Contra scandals, wrote, "it is our hope that Mr. Hull's case will be concluded promptly and that it will be handled in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations. We understand that his arrest occurred under unusual circumstances. We urge you to investigate Mr. Hull's case to ensure that the charges against him have been brought with just cause and to ensure that his rights under Costa Rican law and under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are protected" (The Progressive, March 1990). President Arias wrote Hamilton back, reminding him that it was up to the courts, not himself, to judge Hull's case. "It pains me," he responded, "that you insinuate that the exemplary relations between your country and mine could deteriorate because our legal system is fighting against drug trafficking, no matter how powerful the people who participate in it, or what external backing they might have" (The Progressive, March 1990). Hull jumped bail in August 1989 and fled to the United States. He charged that the murder allegations were because the "the government -down there [Costa Rica] is infiltrated and manipulated by communists headed up by the Christic Institute" (The Progressive, March 1990). It may be difficult for most people to comprehend that the American government employs drug dealers in its foreign policy pursuits. Yet unless everyone in this story is lying in order to defame the White House, or John Hull, or Robert Owen, then this is exactly what happened. Quayle could argue that he knew nothing of this because it began after Owen left the position. as his legislative assistant. Yet the question remains: Why was Owen chosen for the task in the first place? At least in 1983, Owen, when he was still working for Quayle, knew Hull, and introduced him around Washington on behalf of Quayle's Office to key senators and congressional supporters of the Contras. Did Owen know then that Hull was involved in CIA run drugs? Did Quayle? pps. 210-221 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations, Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
