January 4, 2001
http://www.almartinraw.com/
by Al Martin
The Old Conspiracy and Coverup Crowd
The Wall Street Journal article, ("At Justice Department, a Conservative
Takeover Looms" by David S. Cloud, Dec. 26, 2000) attempts to portray DoJ's
Public Integrity Division Chief Lee Radek as some sort of left wing lackey. I
find this completely ludicrous. It should be noted that Lee Radek like many
others in DoJ's Public Integrity Section has come out of the CIA. And the CIA
is not known for producing left wing lackeys.
The Public Integrity Section came into its own in the mid 1980s to give
the appearance in the post Iran-Contra environment that the Government was
cleaning up its act. Actually it was part of a DoJ Control Mechanism pursuant
to an Iran-Contra Coverup.
And what is a "Control Mechanism"? It suppresses information. It's a
mechanism which harasses and intimidates those who know too much. It's a
mechanism which is used to subvert Congress vis-a-vis congressional
investigations. It's mechanism to seek out and destroy documents.
The Public Integrity Section's real purpose is to act as a unit within
a much larger political liability control mechanism within the Department of
Justice. The Public Integrity Section also acts to coordinate the management
and suppression of information and the management of political liability with
other federal agencies.
Lee Radek has been Chief of the Public Integrity Section for a very
long time. He has acted with his confederates within the DoJ, namely Dave
Margolis, then Chief of the Domestic Criminal Section and Mark Richards, then
Chief of the International Criminal Section of the DoJ. These three men,
operating under the auspices of Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger,
essentially managed the Iran-Contra Coverup for the Department of Justice.
I have talked with Dave Margolis several times. The only thing he ever
did was threaten me. He would say to me that if I revealed anything to
congressional committees, or if I leaked any thing out into the press, that I
would be subject to all sorts of unpleasant things. Everything was "national
security" with these guys.
In February 1986, I was told by my counsel Michael Van Zampft that
Attorney General Ed Meese and the Department of Justice had authorized me to
invoke reasons of "national security" for refusing to answer questions during
the grand jury testimony I would be giving on March 21, 1986. Consequently
when I did invoke "national security" as a reason for my refusal to answer
questions, the Department of Justice claimed publicly that I was not
authorized to invoke such.
They left me flapping in the wind. This is the incident I write about
in my book.
It all comes back to Radek. Miami was the key place that had to be
controlled. It was where most of the liability vis-a-vis US Government
involvement in Iran-Contra occurred. As I said at the time -- which the
Washington Post began using -- "Washington was where the misdeeds were
thought up and Miami was the place where the misdeeds were executed."
Radek, Margolis and Richards were the three top control guys in the
Department of Justice. They were nominally under George W. Terwilliger.
Margolis had the function of liaising with the CIA pursuant to the
Iran-Contra Coverup. His contact in the CIA was then CLO (Congressional
Liaison Officer) Thomas Rinehart. This position actually involves much power.
This person at the CIA is the officer who ultimately clears all the requests
for documents the congressional investigating committees make to the CIA. The
CLO will often manage a pan-agency coverup and will often be the CIA's chief
guy in liaising with all the other federal agencies, in this case, the
Iran-Contra Coverup.
During the Grand Jury testimony I was questioned by Miami Assistant US
Attorney Scruggs who was accompanied by Miami FBI Special Agent Ross Gaffney,
who was completely out of the loop. He wasn't aware of the real story. I was
prepared to plead guilty in order the protect the deniability of others. I
then would have been compensated for any time I spent in prison.
Gaffney in concert with FBI CI-3 Anna Maria Mendoza, daughter of the
famous Colonel Robert Mendoza of CIA black ops fame, investigated me during
that time. She was under the impression that I was a Russian spy code named
"Redbeard".
Gaffney worked for the WC-1 (White Collar) crime division of the Miami
FBI Field office. Mendoza, who came into my office once, actually tried to
infiltrate my former wife's jazzercise club to get information from her. My
wife had been previously married to a prominent Iranian dissident, who had
been liquidated in 1979 by SAVAK, the former intelligence unit of the Shah of
Iran.
By the way, Special Agent Ross Gaffney was suspected of misstating his
academic credentials on his employment application with the FBI.
However, under Rinehart's control were two of the CIA's most notorious
henchmen, the infamous Lt. Col John Berglund and his equally sinister cohort
Major Karl Wahl. I was the one who exposed these men. These men were
dispatched by Rinehart after my in camera and ex parte testimony before
Federal District Judge Eugene Spellman on Friday, March 21, 1986.
This incident is detailed in my book.
After I gave testimony, the Judge ordered the testimony sealed for ten
days. On the eighth day, the Government suddenly and inexplicably dropped its
request for the material to be unsealed. The reason why is that on the
preceding Wednesday, two men in military uniform bearing insignias of the
Judge Advocate General's office showed up at the judge's chambers. These men
then talked to the judge's secretary, Judy. As it turned out Judy also worked
as a part time secretary for the CIA-controlled Dade County Latin American
Chamber of Commerce, chaired by Jeb Bush.
Judy let these two guys into the judge's chambers when the judge wasn't
there. She also had the combination to his personal safe where my testimony
was kept. They took the transcript out of the judge's safe. That's why the
Government suddenly dropped the request. They already had a copy of what I
had said.
These two men were under the impression that the judge's secretary was
sympathetic, since she worked for Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush told her to let these
two guys in. She later admitted this in an affidavit submitted to the
renowned Iran-Contra private investigator Steve Dinerstein, then under my
employ. She knew what day they were coming. She was playing both sides of the
street. She was paid by Dinerstein to help us on the day these two guys in
military uniform were coming. She didn't even know their real names.
On that day Dinerstein arranged one of his guys, a former Hollywood
Police Department officer in the intelligence unit, who worked on the fourth
floor of the Justice Building, to take pictures of them with a miniature
camera. He was there under the guise of being a maintenance guy. He had a
broom and a pail of water.
Later I exposed these two in the Washington Post as henchmen for the
CIA. They would appear in various places in Miami bearing credentials of the
Secret Service, or the FBi, or BATF. They would also attempt to intimidate
attorneys representing Iran-Contra whistle-blowers, including my attorney.
Radek was the guy at the Department of Justice who acted to screen and
quantify Iran-Contra whistleblowers. It was his job to identify people like
me and find out exactly what we knew and then to recommend a course of action
vis-a-vis control.
Radek reported to Terwilliger and Terwilliger reported to Clair George,
the Deputy Director of the CIA. He didn't report directly to Ed Meese to
maintain his deniability.
This is the direct deep connection that the Deputy Attorney General
represented with the CIA. This has been going on for a long time. It's the
standard operating procedure of those charged with the responsibility to
maintain cover ups and their interconnections when the Department of Justice
has launched a coverup of government wrongdoing. Then Attorney General Ed
Meese was aware of these things, but he professed to be out of the loop.
This is the operational frame work for the internal control mechanism
of the Iran-Contra coverup, the largest coverup ever instituted by the US
Government.
Also, Rinehart would try to get whistleblowers to spy on various
congressional investigative committees by promising people like me that the
CIA would help us and that our grievances would be addressed, if we helped
them.
Those in my position didn't believe that story for one minute. Every
conversation I ever had with Rinehart I tape recorded. I then sent the tape
to the chief investigators of the various Committee Chairmen -- Henry
Gonzalez, Jack Brooks, Charlie Rose -- and they then leaked the tapes to the
Washington Post. Rinehart was actually attempting to recruit people to suborn
Congressional committees, and that ended Rinehart's career.
After this revelation Rinehart was transferred to "unspecified
classified foreign duties" and he could not be contacted through the Agency.
This is how the CIA gets rid of people because it gets them out of the way of
any Congressional subpoenas and it also prevents any media access to them.
His replacement was Dan Moskowitz who was one of the CIA's specially trained
clean-up people.
I will take credit though for helping to end Rinehart's career.
Below the level of Radek, Margolis and Richards, there was a control
mechanism that filtered down to the local US Attorneys' offices. This existed
everywhere Iran-Contra activity occurred -- Washington, Atlanta, Miami, New
Orleans, Little Rock, etc. How it works is that in every US Attorneys office,
there is always one AUSA (Assistant US Attorney) who has a significantly
higher security clearance than the US Attorney himself.
The control man in the Miami US Attorneys Office was none other than
Assistant US Attorney William Richard Scruggs, who reported directly to Chief
of Domestic Criminal Section, Dave Margolis.
Theres actually an official title, Coverup Operations Field Manager.
You will see in the "pink cable" traffic -- restricted cable traffic between
the US Attorneys offices and the Department in Washington, a coded
designation for the guy managing the coverup within the local district.
Scruggs was one of the 1,100 Reagan-Bush holdovers brought into the
Clinton Administration specifically for that reason. They are the C&C Crowd,
the Conspiracy and Coverup Crowd. They control conspiracies and their ensuing
coverups. These are the ones who are held over from administration to
administration.
Scruggs was one of the "Miami Boys" that Reno brought with her to
Washington . He rose to the rank of National Security Advisor to Attorney
General Janet Reno, while at the same time being under indictment for
kidnapping in Costa Rica.
Radek, Margolis, Richards and Scruggs were all involved in the
so-called Reagan-Bush kidnapping policies that started in 1986 and were
extant until 1991. It involved kidnapping both US and foreign citizens on
foreign soil. After the US Supreme Court in its 1986 landmark decision gave
the administration the right to use "extralegal" procedures to bring foreign
fugitives before American courts. There were 21 in all who were kidnapped,
mostly those who were under indictment for cocaine trafficking in the United
States. The commonality is that all of these cocaine traffickers were
controlled by the CIA. In their own defense, they had all begun to leak out
information to Congress and the media about their connections to the CIA.
That's why they were targeted for kidnapping.
It all fell apart when they tried to kidnap a cocaine trafficker named
Israel Abel form Costa Rica in 1991. And how did it fall apart? Someone
tipped off the Costa Rican government -- when, where, and who the people were.
Gee, I wonder who that could have been!
Scruggs was actually stupid enough to go along himself and the Costa
Rican government nabbed him. He got indicted for violating Costa Rican
national sovereignty and other felonies. The US Government exerted pressure
against President Oscar Arias Sanchez to return Scruggs and so he got
returned.
Then the Costa Rican Attorney General's Office proffered a bill of
indictment with the US State Department seeking the extradition from the
United States of William Richard Scruggs to stand charges in a Costa Rican
Court of Law pursuant to these crimes.
On a humorous note, sometimes I would get friends of mine in Costa Rica
to send postcards to Scruggs saying, "Wish you were here."
Scruggs is still being sought by the Costa Rican authorities.
