-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes = Political Manipulation and Mond control
in America
Jonathan Vankin
Pargon House©1992
319 pages
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an oldie but a goodie.
Om
K
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--The meaning of terrorism comes down to the meaning of "us" and "them."
"They" are the poor, blacks, foreigners, and so on. "We" are American
mainstream, white folks with a little money in our pockets. The reason the
"we" seem so eager to accept that terrorism is a threat only from the extreme
left is that the extreme left threatens "us." Since communism was concocted,
Americans have been indoctrinated with the notion that the Left wants to take
away all the things we treasure so deeply. The right wing, conversely and
more comfortingly, is primarily concerned with them-minorities, the poor,
foreigners-and directs its violence away from us. Right-wing terrorism isn't
very terrifying because it doesn't terrorize us.
At least, that's how we've been instructed to think.
Despite the American delusion of terrorism as a left-wing phenomena carried
out by radical Marxists lauding the people's struggle as they bomb department
stores and gun down tourists, the right-wing, "Black International" is
actually far more entrenched. The movement was founded by Skorzeny and other
Nazis, include ing, "Butcher of Lyons" Klaus Barble, and, perhaps most
important, the enigmatic old guard Nazi financier Francols Genoud.
That conspiracy could not have formed, it's fair to say, without sustenance
from the CIA. The CIA helped Nazis, Barbie among them, escape prosecution for
war crimes. It used them as intelligence "assets," set them up with new lives
and some of them with new identities. The right-wing terror network is still
in evidence today.
Palestinian terrorist organizations are part of it. Their spark was lit by
Skorzeny and his SS compadres backed by the CIA. Agency connections reveal
themselves right up to the present. The CIA schmoozed with Ali Hassan
Salameh, leader of Black September, mastermind of the 1972 Munich massacre at
the Olympics. The agency was so keen to make Salameh an "asset" that it gave
him an all-expense paid vacation in sunny Honolulu. Salameh's day at the
beach came to an end when the long arm of Israeli vengeance got to him in
1979. But the Israelis waited to hit Salameh until they'd received clearance
from the CIA.
Still more recently, as commandos backed by Iran and Libya were holding
American hostages and staging suicide attacks against U.S. servicemen, a
network of arms dealers based in the White House was arming Iran at the
behest of CIA chief (and longtime intelligence agent) William Casey. That
operation was the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal.--
13
CIA: THE DEPARTMENT OF
CONSPIRACY
There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult—the
cult of intelligence.
VICTOR MARCHETTI and JOHN D. MARKS, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
The United States Central Intelligence Agency was created on September 18,
1947, when Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act. Most of the
debate over the act centered on its restructuring of the military. The Army
and Navy were joined, the Air Force was created, and all three branches were
placed under the secretary of defense, a new position. All but lost on the
public, and Congress as well, was an equally unsettling concentration of
power. The act brought the nation's numerous intelligence services under a
single department. It seemed almost an afterthought.
Following the chaos of Pearl Harbor, the government was desperate to assemble
some sort of clearing house for intelligence. Eisenhower himself bemoaned the
"glaring deficiencies" of the manifold intelligence bureaus. Virtually every
agency of the U.S. government has an intelligence wing. The Central
Intelligence Agency was chartered to collect information from those diverse
outfits, and pull it into a neat little package for the president. Hence the
name, "Central" Intelligence Agency. The CIA was to be the central station
through which all intelligence was routed.
The CIA was never meant to do its own spying. And it certainly wasn't meant
to conduct clandestine operations. The original purpose of the CIA was to
summarize and analyze the information turned up by other intelligence
operations. It was a report-writingdepartment.
Truman's intention appeared innocuous-to create a smoother running
intelligence collation machine. But when he'd created the CIA's immediate
predecessor, the Central Intelligence Group a year earlier, Truman celebrated
by throwing a party at which guests were presented with cloaks, daggers, and
black hats. Strange, for a bunch of supposed pencil pushers. Truman was a
devoted Mason, and therefore accustomed to clandestine rituals and bizarre
symbolism. Maybe he was just being funny.
Truman's possible true purpose notwithstanding, almost every thing the CIA
does today violates the terms of its creation.
The CIA's one loophole is a fuzzy phrase in the 1947 law. According to the
bill signed by Truman, the Central Intelligence Agency would perform "other
functions" at the discretion of the National Security Council. The language
of the act is fairly specific.
Those "other functions" relate only to intelligence. Nowhere does it mention
clandestine operations. Even so, the "other functions" clause has been the
rationale for what over the past more than forty years has become, in
addition to a massive government bureaucracy, a fully functioning,
government-sanctioned, secret society. There is little doubt that Congress
did not mean "other functions" to encompass all of the operations the CIA is
known to have undertaken, and that it definitely was not intended to cover
the things the CIA may have done (namely, the assassinations and dope dealing
covered in the previous two chapters). When they were debating the National
Security Act, some congressmen worried that a centralized intelligence
operation could turn into a United States "Gestapo." Because of those fears,
the agency has remained on the penumbra of government operations.
The CIA stays there for the same reason secret societies over the past few
thousand years have kept their internal workings encrypted. Secret societies
are secret because what they do offends popular morality.
There are many other American intelligence agencies besides the CIA. Nor is
the CIA directly responsible for everything its agents do. The agency is
known to contract much of its touchier business out to semimoral mercenary
types, who, even when their CIA obligations expire, still feel free to claim
CIA affiliation as license to do almost anything. The agency probably is
inclined to cover for them, lest past questionable endeavors be exposed. Then
again, these lone operators are so easily written off as "renegades" that,
when they do work for the CIA, they lend convenient deniability to illegal
operations. The sophisticated use of covert agents is but one strategy the
CIA shares with the archetypical, conspiratorial secret society.
The CIA keeps its very charter a mystery. No one on the outside knows the
real purpose of the CIA, as set out in top-secret presidential directives,
piled up over the years, which constitute the "charter." In 1968, the deputy
director of the agency's "dirty tricks" department said (in what he thought
were confidential remarks) that the CIA's charter "must remain secret ... the
problem of a secret charter remains as a curse, but the need for secrecy
would appear to preclude a solution."
"We are not Boy Scouts," added one of the CIA's most storied directors,
Richard Helms. Helms put his unscouting morality to work as the originator of
MKULTRA, the CIA's mind-control project, which tested the brand new drug LSD
on human subjects.
There is a long-standing regulation that any incident that might embarrass or
expose the CIA is to be immediately reported to the agency's Office of
Security, the CIA's internal police force meant to secure it from enemy
infiltration. In reality, the Office of Security spends much time securing
the agency from exposure to the public. That's what happened when a CIA
employee, Frank Olsen, was slipped a dose of LSD without his knowledge. Olsen
was a lab rat for a MKULTRA experiment. The bad trip drove him crazy and he
leapt out of a New York hotel room window.-The CIA denied for years that it
had anything to do with his death.
Secret societies stay secret by draping their real affairs in myth. Some of
the myth is beyond their control. Whenever something is secret, people are
going to speculate about it. Some of the myth is deliberately concocted by
the secret society itself, to mystify the uninitiated, or terrorize them.
With all secret societies, it is difficult to demarcate where the myths end
and truth begins. Often, the two are commingled.
The CIA is no different. The catchall myth the agency whips up to garb its
true designs is "national security." Exposing CIA activities, we're told,
would endanger this "security," which is your personal security, by
implication. The myth, more than a little selfaggrandizing, creates a
mystique, a godlike importance for all the secret practices of the CIA.
As a rationale for too many CIA endeavors, "national security" is about as
real as the cloaking device used by alien spaceships on "Star Trek." And it
serves the same purpose, just as effectively.
The CIA is a deft, effective manufacturer of myth about itself. When the
CIA's station chief for Greece, Richard Welch, was gunned down on his
doorstep on December 23, 1975, the agency wasted little time grieving.
Reflexively and with consummate cynicism, it turned the assassination into
the perfect case for tightening its own security. The CIA's self-serving
disinformation effort in the Welch affair was so sudden and smooth that one
wonders if the CIA itself didn't know about the killing in advance. Welch's
murder couldn't have come at a better time for the CIA. In the aftermath of
Watergate, its secrets were exploding in Congress and in the press with the
severity of an aneurysm. The agency needed to stop the hemorrhage.
Welch's identity had been revealed in CounterSpy, a magazine of
investigative reporting on the CIA, cofounded by CIA dissident Philip Agee.
CounterSpy made a practice of publishing the names of CIA officers, ferreting
out the data from public records. The CIA was not pleased by this practice.
What it didn't want the American people to know is what any interested
citizen of a foreign country already knew: that the names of important CIA
officers were readily available to anyone with the mild determination needed
to discover them.
The Greek revolutionary "November 17" group had been planning Welch's
"execution" long before his name was published. The assassins staked him out
for months. But as soon as CIA headquarters got the news of Welch's killing,
the agency's press spokesman phoned reporters (on "deep background" of
course) to inform them' of both the murder, and the CounterSpy article naming
Welch. The national press needed little prodding to make the link. Official
hysteria was immediate. Eventually, Congress passed the "Intelligence
Identities Protection Act," outlawing publication of CIA names.
It was all a myth. The CIA knew, in the summer of 1975, even before it
shipped Welch to Greece, a nation in loathing of the CIA, that he was in
danger there. Headquarters warned him not to move into the same house that
several previous CIA station chiefs had occupied, but he moved in anyway.
After his name appeared, along with his address and job description in the
English-language Athens News, the CIA, if it were really worried, could have
removed him from Greece, but it did not. Welch's killing had nothing to do
with CounterSpy or any other publication.
But the CIA took the opportunity to rebuild the then-eroding fiction that
public scrutiny of the CIA endangers not only national security, but the
lives of individual men. Such propaganda only fuels more myth, of a type not
as flattering to the CIA.
The conspiratorial demonology of the CIA, the myths that originate with
ordinary people who feel the need to pierce the CIA's secrecy, are different
from the propaganda myths authored by the CIA. Popular myths, seething from
the zeitgeist, are not deliberate falsehoods. They grow to explain things
that we can't understand. There is often far more truth to them, literal and
figurative truth, than we'd like to suppose. The CIA myths explain evidence
that is suggestive but not conclusive. Speculation-ranging from wholly
reasonable, if startling, to utterly farfetched-must fill in the gaps. Hard
facts have been spun into conspiracy theories about the CIA's still-secret
machinations.
With good reason. Again, just because myths are myths doesn't mean they're
lies. The CIA intersects again and again with other secret societies.
Reagan's director of central intelligence William Casey belonged to the
Knights of Malta, a Catholic order formed several hundred years ago along the
lines of the Knights Templar, and other "holy" military fraternities (the
Teutonic Knights were another).
John McCone, another of the CIA's most prominent directors, was a Knight.
William F. Buckley, "patron saint of conservatives" and a former CIA man, is
a Knight, too, and a member of Yale's quasi-Masonic, elitist Skull and Bones.
The most famous Bonesman hanging around these days is CIA director turned
United States president George Bush.
Through Licio Gelli, the CIA also comes into contact with both the Knights of
Malta and the Masons. Gelli was the founder of Propaganda Due, aka P2, the
shadowy Masonic lodge that became, under Gelli's guidance, a worldwide
fascist conspiracy. A 1987 indictment of 20 P2 members called the group a
"secret structure [that] had the incredible capacity to control a state's
institutions to the point of virtually becoming a state-within-a-state."
P2 has tried to set up a fascist countergovernment in Italy and is known to
be behind a 1980 terrorist bombing that killed eighty-five people in a
Bologna railroad station. At the time, it was Europe's deadliest terror
attack. P2 surfaced again in connection with the Vatican banking scandal, and
the murders and "suicides" that went with it.
Gelli, a real "joiner," is a Knight of Malta, which brought him into contact
with Casey and Al Haig (yet another Knight). Casey was Ronald Reagan's 1980
campaign manager before becoming CIA director, and Gelli helped secure good
press for Reagan in Italy. As a show of appreciation, Gelli was awarded a
ticket to Reagan's 1980 inauguration gala, in the good seats.
There is also some speculation that George Bush may be at least an "honorary"
member of P2, or an affiliated lodge. It would hardly be out of character.
One of Bush's 1988 presidential campaign advisers, Philip Guarino, is
definitely Piduisti (as members of the lodge are called). Guarino also worked
for Reagan in 1980.
Gelli's CIA contacts helped him get P2 off the ground in 1966 (Gelli first
became a Mason in 1963. It took a few years to get his own lodge). The CIA,
according to its lapsed contract agent Richard Brenneke (more about him
later), has financed the P2 organization since 1970 through a corporation
called Amitalia, itself an offshoot of something known as the "International
Fund for Mergers and Acquisitions," based in Panama.
The Masonic Grand Lodge of Italy ultimately suspended P2 for refusing to
reveal the names of its members. Through the P2 membership roster, Gelli also
brings the CIA into contact with another, better known secret society, the
Mafia.
But that's not a new relationship. The best-known snuggle-up between the CIA
and La Cosa Nostra came when the two joined hands in an attempt to knock off
Fidel Castro, whose regime put the mob out of business in Havana, a plot that
may have twisted into the assassination of President Kennedy.
The Italian government has long suspected that P2 is not Gelli's baby (bear
in mind, many members of the Italian government belong to P2). The lodge, it
is widely believed, is controlled by some outside power, with headquarters
beyond Italian borders. Maybe the Mafia, some feel. Maybe even the Prieure de
Sion, the apparently gnostic, proto-Masonic group that became the subject of
all kinds of theorizing after the 1983 publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail,
the book that exposed its existence to an international audience.
journalist Mino Pecorelli, himself a P2 member, wrote an article in 1979
naming the outside power pulling P2's strings. He named the CIA. Pecorelli
had tried to blackmail Gelli before writing the piece. Shortly after it was
printed, Pecorelli was killed as he sat in his car outside the offices of his
magazine. He was shot twice in the mouth, a Sicilian Mafia way of saying,
"Shut up."
The list of CIA types on the rosters of powerful secret societies seems
endless. The Knights of Malta contingent included, conspicuously, General
Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen was. the Nazi spymaster who turned around after the
war to become, in effect, a founder of the CIA. His anti-Soviet Nazi
espionage network was transferred virtually undisturbed to American
intelligence. "He's on our side, said CIA director Allen Dulles. "That's all
that matters."
According this honor to Gehlen, and other top Nazis, exacerbated the Cold War
immeasurably, almost triggering World War III. The very act of signing Gehlen
and his entourage of war criminals and stormtroopers was "a substantial
escalation of the cold war," author Christopher Simpson points out. More
important, Gehlen's intelligence reports systematically exaggerated the
Soviet "threat," fueling American paranoia about the Soviet Union's military
intentions and about domestic communist "subversion."
"The only intelligence provided by the Gehlen net to the United States,"
asserts Carl Oglseby of the Institute for Continuing DeNazification, "was
intelligence selected specifically to worsen EastWest relations and increase
the possibility of military conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union."
The effect of the decidedly undemocratic Gehlen "Org" on America's
institutions of democracy, adds Oglesby, was to "weaken them incalculably."
Who knows how the influence of unrepentant Nazis shaped the philosophy and
methods of the CIA? "Whatever the CIA was from the standpoint of law, it
remained from the standpoint of practical intelligence collection a front for
a house of Nazi spies," Oglesby says.
The CIA's involvement with Nazis didn't end with Gehlen, and led it into
contact with another powerful secret society, the Order of the Death's Head,
better known as the Schutzstaffel. The SS. The SS was more than the Nazi
police force and terror unit. It was fashioned by its leader Heinrich Himmler
to be an elite chivalric order. It had mystical rites, oaths, and internal
rankings, or degrees-the trademarks of a secret society.
Hundreds, even thousands, of SS men became part of CIA operations after the
war. Among the most notable was Otto Skorzeny, the hulking hero of numerous
high-risk Nazi adventures, known in Germany as "Hitler's favorite commando."
In the 1950s, Skorzeny worked for the CIA in Egypt. Skorzeny was sent
ostensibly to train that country's security forces, to insure that Egypt
would be safe from the Soviet threat.
Into the Egyptian "security forces" Skorzeny recruited about one hundred
former SS men and neo-Nazis. Skorzeny's mucking about in Egypt eventually
helped trigger the Suez crisis, one of the Middle East's bloodier wars. While
the CIA was underwriting "Scarface" (Skorzeny's face bore a frightful
duelling scar) Skorzeny's nazification project, it was also paying another
former SS man to stave off the Soviets in the Middle East: Alois Brunner,
Adolf Eichmann's gung-ho chief aide, said to be responsible for murdering
128,500 human beings.
It was Dulles who bestowed this congeniality upon Gehlen, Skorzeny, Brunner,
and their Nazi ilk. Before World War 11, Dulles's law firm did considerable
work in Nazi Germany and showed a startling degree of indifference to
Hitler's increasingly evident policies.
It was also Dulles, in all probability, who "rehabilitated" the pro-Nazi
corporation International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) into a South American
host for CIA operatives in the early 1950s. In 1970, the CIA would secure
Chile for ITT with a coup in which its elected president Salvador Allende was
assassinated.
It was Dulles, after all, who once said, "An intelligence service is an ideal
vehicle for a conspiracy."
Commies are bad, but, to committed Nazis like Skorzeny, Jews are worse. Once
in Egypt, Skorzeny busied himself training the first Palestinian terrorist
groups. Descendants of those groups still wreak havoc in the Middle East
today.
The CIA also bumps into secret societies in the Far East. Through its Golden
Triangle operations tied to international opium smugglers, the CIA also
touches base with the "triads," an Asian secret-society equivalent of the
Mafia.
Then there is the unlikeliest intersection of all.
The late Stephen Knight, a British investigative reporter who specialized in
covering Freemasonry, believed Licio Gelli was working for the CIA's Soviet
doppelganger, the KGB. Although it is hard to believe a hard-line fascist
like Gelli would sell out to the Soviets, he is said to have made a number of
Communist contacts after World War 11. He was a survivor first, a fascist
second. Knight says that the KGB made a practice of infiltrating Freemasonry
in a number of countries, because of its convenient blend of access to
influential people and good cover.
The truth, probably, is that all of these organizations- Knights of Malta,
Prieure de Sion, Freemasons, SS Nazis, Asian triads, even the KGB-bond with
the CIA somewhere in the twilight zone of international intrigue.
On a somewhat lighter note, even the initiation rite-that is, the entrance
interview into the CIA-has something in common with secret society
initiations. It is common in secret societies-and in cults, not
coincidentally-for initiates to be put through an egostripping process that
usually involves revealing the details of one's sex habits. Pledges into
Skull and Bones must lie naked in a coffin and recite their entire sexual
histories. The mind reels at the concept of George Bush or William F. Buckley
stripping to their birthday suits, climbing into a coffin, and then reciting
a litany of Godknows-what.
In any case, in 1972 former CIA officer Patrick McGarvey recalled that he was
first welcomed to the CIA by being strapped to a lie detector machine and
asked, "Do you still masturbate?" Stunned by the question, he was taken even
further aback by his examiner's hot-tempered insistence that he answer. The
questioner then proceeded with predictable follow-ups. For example, "Ever had
a blow job?"
Prurient hazing aside, the CIA shares another trait with those secret
societies with which it is so thoroughly enmeshed: money. Most secret
societies are much more than social organizations. They are repositories of
wealth as well as power.
The CIA maintains an impressive financial portfolio, which seems to serve a
dual purpose. It bankrolls the CIA's many adventures and, through a network
of "proprietary" companies, provides cover for clandestine activities.
Among the revelations in the Iran-Contra scandal was the fact that a CIA-run
shrimp fishery, Ocean Hunter, was used as a drug-smuggling operation with
proceeds going to the CIA-financed contras. The CIA also infiltrated Wall
Street in the 1960s and 1970s through a thirty million dollar company called
"Southern Capital." It has owned and operated airlines. Through a technology
company called "Zenith Technical" in Miami, the CIA ran numerous operations
against Cuba in the 1960s. The agency doesn't stop with its own companies
either.
The CIA owned stock in ITT in 1970, at the same time it was staging the coup
that led to the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile—an
action that handed the South American country to ITT. Major oil companies are
often inseparable from the CIA. In Venezuela, for example, according to
investigative reporter Jim Hougan, "Exxon is the CIA." Smaller oil companies
are, too. Zapata Oil, founded by George Bush, is believed by some to have
been CIA connected.
Some executives look at fronting for the CIA as good business. Howard Hughes
figured that if his company took CIA contracts, the CIA would be there to
bail him out when he needed them. They may not have been there for Hughes
(that's another story!), but they seem to be there for a more contemporary
group of big-bucks brigands: savings and loan executives.
The CIA's most recent venture into the universe of high finance may be its
most costly ever, in terms of raw dollars. The collapse of the savings and
loan industry appears to have been caused at least in part by CIA hijinks,
and it may yet cost the United States taxpayers one trillion dollars to
reimburse the lost, federally insured money. What's more, some corrupt S&L
executives are said to have "get out of jail free" cards supplied by the CIA.
None other than the director of the FBI, William Sessions, testified to
Congress that "looting" had more to do with the S&L failures than the
abstruse economic factors that fascinate official analysts. Sessions didn't
say who pulled off this massive looting operation, but a lone investigative
reporter from Texas, where S&Ls were rolling into oblivion like so many
tumbleweeds, followed the money for five years. Along the way, he bumped into
an array of CIA operatives and their mobster pals.
Pete Brewton of the Houston Post listed twenty-two savings and loan
institutions where evidence pointed to plunder by the organized crime-CIA
nexus. The CIA immediately denied the Houston Post stories, saying "that
would be a violation of U.S. laws, and we do not violate U.S. laws."
The CIA maintains deniability on many of its more outlandish escapades by
using contract agents rather than its own full-time personnel. That was how,
in its old rough-and-ready days, the agency used the private detective firm
headed by superspook Robert Maheu, who was also Howard Hughes' alter ego.
Maheu's firm took on assignments the CIA deemed too sensitive to handle. It
was the inspiration for the television series "Mission: Impossible."
If the CIA was involved in looting the S&Ls, it used its contract agents to
do the work. One of the contractors, Brewton reported, was Farhad Azima, a
pro-Shah Iranian who headed one of the largest charter airlines in America,
Global International Airways. The airline borrowed money from an S&L in which
Azima was a major investor, then declared bankruptcy. Global was either a CIA
proprietary, or a heavy contract client of the CIA. Some of Global's pilots
also flew for the defunct Air America, known to be a CIA company. One of
Global's creditors was Southern Air Transport, a Miami company once owned by
the CIA (the agency sold it to an ex-CIA lawyer), which supplied planes for
shipping arms to Iran, and to the contras.
Global Airlines' biggest client was a company called "Egyptian American
Transport and Services Company." (EATSCO), run by some of the same CIA men
named by Daniel Sheehan as defendants in the "Secret Team" lawsuit-men who
have been behind the darkest of the CIA's dark doings for thirty years: Ted
Shackley, Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines. According to Gene Wheaton, a private
eye who once worked as an investigator at the Pentagon, EATSCO actually owned
Fazima's Global Airlines.
Azima milked a Kansas City S&L called Indian Springs State Bank, according to
Brewton's stories. Vision Banc Savings in Kingsville, Texas, was another CIA
target, according to the Brewton series. It loaned millions for a failed
Florida land deal to convicted money launderer Lawrence Freeman, a friend of
Paul Helliwell—a CIA man from the agency's early days and an associate of
William Casey. Brewton cites sources who told him that some of the money
siphoned off by Freeman may have gone to covert operations.
Vision Banc Savings was owned by an alleged money launderer and occasional
CIA contact named Richard Corson, Brewton's stories say. Brewton also reports
that Freeman may have been a front man for Mike Adkison, who borrowed a total
of one hundred million dollars from Corson's bank and five other Texas
thrifts. Adkison, according to Brewton's reports, is reputed to be an
international arms merchant who has sold arms to Iraq.
A Florida-based newsletter called Money Laundering Alert said in April 1990
that "a significant amount of money obtained through fraudulent means from a
number of the nation's failed S&Ls were laundered through the accounts of CIA
front companies ... to fund covert operations."
Former CIA contract agent Richard Brenneke, the same man who testified that
he had flown George Bush to a Paris meeting in 1980 to strike a preelection
arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, told Brewton that money from S&L raids was
being spirited to the contras. Reporter Stephen Pizzo said that in
researching his book about the S&L plunder, Inside Job, he and his
collaborators came across the CIA "about a half a dozen times," but decided
"that's not what we're writing about right now." They resolved to follow only
the trails of mobsters (trails lengthy enough to consume any investigator's
time).
"Who knows how many those [the CIA connections] would have linked to," Pizzo
said. "We just don't know." Eventually, they wrote an article summing up
their CIA-S&L findings for Penthouse magazine.
The savings and loan fiasco, if it unfolds the way Brewton's reports
indicate, would not be the first time the CIA has exploited the banking
industry. Christic Institute counsel Dan Sheehan says that Bank of America,
which came close to collapsing in the 1980s, suddenly reversed its losses
when the Iran-Contra scandal became public. The suggestion is that B of A was
being looted for a contra war. Much better documented, however, is the saga
of Australia's Nugan Hand bank, a CIA operation in every respect but its
name. Under the agency's sage guidance, the Nugan Hand bank was a front for
drug running, a laundry machine for money coming from the Shah of Iran and
Ferdinand Marcos, and a channel for the CIA's covert funding of its preferred
political parties throughout the world.
Nugan Hand met with a fate not unlike that of so many American S&Ls. More
than fifty million dollars in debt, it folded. The fate of its titular owners
was far worse than anything yet meted out to an S&L exec, however. Frank
Nugan was shot to death, and Michael Hand disappeared.
Like all good secret societies, the CIA knows the ancient art of
invisibility. The full story of the CIA-S&L affair may never come out. A
former justice Department prosecutor, quoted by Brewton, summed up the
frustration of trying to apprehend the elusive CIA. "It's like trying to grab
smoke."
Allegations against the CIA get wispier and wispier when puzzling over how
the CIA performs the one duty dear to all conspiratorial societies, fomenting
revolution. On the one hand, there's no question the CIA has been behind more
toppled and subverted governments than could be catalogued here. Guatemala in
1954.
Chile in 1970. Grenada in 1984. Iran. Greece. The Dominican Republic.
Cambodia. Nicaragua. And of course, Vietnam. Those countries make up a
pitifully incomplete inventory of nations whose governments have been
installed, overthrown, or undermined by the CIA.
The subject becomes more ambiguous when we explore the CIA's support for
terrorism. Terrorists (as modern revolutionaries are called) have become the
arch villains of American folklore. In popular parlance as prescribed by
government and the media, a "terrorist" is by definition a hater of America,
so it seems beyond belief that an agency as fanatical as the CIA is about
protecting American interests and enforcing the American will would have
anything to do with terrorism.
Part of that problem of perception has to do with the American definition of
"terrorism." Somehow, terrorism has come to be firmly linked to left-wing
insurgency, as if right-wing terrorism did not exist. Though the idea of
terrorism as a leftist phenomena is certainly perpetuated by official
sources, to say simply that the media or government propaganda invented this
definition and made it stick would be too facile.
The meaning of terrorism comes down to the meaning of "us" and "them." "They"
are the poor, blacks, foreigners, and so on. "We" are American mainstream,
white folks with a little money in our pockets. The reason the "we" seem so
eager to accept that terrorism is a threat only from the extreme left is that
the extreme left threatens "us." Since communism was concocted, Americans
have been indoctrinated with the notion that the Left wants to take away all
the things we treasure so deeply. The right wing, conversely and more
comfortingly, is primarily concerned with them-minorities, the poor,
foreigners-and directs its violence away from us. Right-wing terrorism isn't
very terrifying because it doesn't terrorize us.
At least, that's how we've been instructed to think.
Despite the American delusion of terrorism as a left-wing phenomena carried
out by radical Marxists lauding the people's struggle as they bomb department
stores and gun down tourists, the right-wing, "Black International" is
actually far more entrenched. The movement was founded by Skorzeny and other
Nazis, include ing, "Butcher of Lyons" Klaus Barble, and, perhaps most
important, the enigmatic old guard Nazi financier Francols Genoud.
That conspiracy could not have formed, it's fair to say, without sustenance
from the CIA. The CIA helped Nazis, Barbie among them, escape prosecution for
war crimes. It used them as intelligence "assets," set them up with new lives
and some of them with new identities. The right-wing terror network is still
in evidence today.
Palestinian terrorist organizations are part of it. Their spark was lit by
Skorzeny and his SS compadres backed by the CIA. Agency connections reveal
themselves right up to the present. The CIA schmoozed with Ali Hassan
Salameh, leader of Black September, mastermind of the 1972 Munich massacre at
the Olympics. The agency was so keen to make Salameh an "asset" that it gave
him an all-expense paid vacation in sunny Honolulu. Salameh's day at the
beach came to an end when the long arm of Israeli vengeance got to him in
1979. But the Israelis waited to hit Salameh until they'd received clearance
from the CIA.
Still more recently, as commandos backed by Iran and Libya were holding
American hostages and staging suicide attacks against U.S. servicemen, a
network of arms dealers based in the White House was arming Iran at the
behest of CIA chief (and longtime intelligence agent) William Casey. That
operation was the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal.
On December 21, 1988, just four days before Christmas, thirtyone thousand
feet in the air over the countryside village of Lockerbie, Scotland, a Pan Am
747, whose nickname "Maid of the Seas" was painted across its cockpit,
exploded. The passengers and crew, mostly Americans bound home for the
holidays, were thrown into the air to their deaths, some of them still safety
buckled into their seats. Several more people, residents of Lockerbie, died
when the wreckage of the plane smashed in a blaze to the ground.
The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 from London, originating in Frankfurt, was
Immediately pinned on Palestinian terrorists with links to the Iranian
government. Not surprisingly to those initiated into the mysteries of
terrorist conspiracies, the CIA showed up on the scene as well. The CIA
connection to the horrific mass murder received far less publicity than did
the equally shadowy ArabIranian involvement. From reading most news accounts,
even to this day, one could miss mention of the CIA completely.
The stories, cover stories, and theories about the bombing of 103 have become
numerous. Undisputed, though not often discussed, is the fact that CIA agents
were passengers on the plane. There were at least four, possibly five. Some
accounts say eight. But they were there. What were they doing on board a
civilian airliner, these obvious targets for assassination? That they would
be targets is made more likely by the nature of their mission. They were
returning from Lebanon, where, it is suspected by most who bother to check,
they were working on some sort of deal regarding the American hostages held
by pro-Iranian kidnappers.
They could have been part of an effort to buy the hostages' release. Bundled,
large-denomination traveler's checks worth more than half a million dollars
were found by two farm boys at the crash site. Or they could have been
planning a rescue operation. Searchers found a diagram of what appeared to be
a building in Beirut, with exact locations of two hostages marked.
The conspiratorial story is much more complex. It came out in a report
prepared by a former Israeli intelligence agent working as an international
private investigator for a firm called Interfor. Pan Am hired him to do the
investigation, and, based on what he found, the airline subpoenaed from the
U.S. government a whole set of material. Most intriguing, Pan Am alleged that
the CIA possessed a videotape of the bomb actually being placed on board the
plane. The Interfor report calls that tape "the gem" of the investigation.
The Interfor report was reported on the front page of the Toronto Star and
several London newspapers, some of which led their own journalistic
investigations of the bombing. In America, it made the rounds of the
alternative press, written up in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and San
Pedro, California's Random Lengths. My paper, the San Jose Metro, also made
some mention of it. But in the daily press and on television, nothing.
The unfortunate CIA squad on board Pan Am 103 are actually the heroes of the
Interfor report. That team, led by an Army major named Charles McKee-on loan
to the CIA from the Defense Department-had in fact been in Lebanon on a top
secret, hostagerelated mission, the report says. In their investigations,
they zeroed in on a Syrian drug smuggler named Monzar Al-Kassar, who had
connections high in the Syrian government. In fact, he was married to Syrian
President Hafez Assad's niece.
Al-Kassar also had connections in other governments. Like many international
drug traders, he also dealt arms and, as such, he was useful to the American
Iran-Contra "Enterprise. " Richard Secord and Albert Hakim paid Al-Kassar
$1.5 million to ship small arms to the contras. Interfor said he was earlier
the go-between between the French government and terrorists when a few French
hostages were set free. According to the Interfor report, a mysterious "off
the shelf" team of CIA agents lurking in West Germany, with their "control"
at an unknown location not at Langley but in Washington, tried to use
Al-Kassar for the same thing.
The McKee team found out about this other CIA operation. And they discovered
that the other agents, in exchange for Al-Kassar's help, were protecting his
drug-running routes. Incensed, the McKee team boarded Pan Am 103, for home.
Unknown to them, presumably, they picked the flight used by Al-Kassar for his
drug smuggling. And on that flight, Al-Kassar's terrorist friends decided to
use the CIA cover of his drug route to plant the bomb. West German police,
with the help of Israeli intelligence, found out about it. They actually
videotaped the bomb going onto the plane. When the CIA agents covering for
Al-Kassar phoned back to their "control" to ask what to do, they were told,
"Don't worry about it. Don't stop it. Let it go."
They did. 259 people died on the plane, eleven more on the ground.
Late in 1990, allegations surfaced in the Italian press that none other than
the P2 Lodge was the real mastermind of the Pan Am 103 bombing, to cover up
its own role in arms deals with Iran. I haven't seen that claim supported or
corroborated anywhere, but it wouldn't be out of character for the P2. And it
suggests a dizzying conspiracy theory: with P2 allegedly funded through an
Italian corporation whose parent company was in Panama (recall Brenneke's
allegations earlier this chapter), CIA man George Bush somehow connected to
the P2, and that Panamanian parent company (according again to Brenneke) in
existence right up through the end of General Manuel Noriega's reign.
Suddenly, from the depths of international intrigue, the possible true motive
for Bush's 1989 invasion of Panama creeps into light: to destroy records that
could link the CIA, and even himself, however indirectly, to the mass murder
aboard Pan Am 103. Of course, there's no evidence for any of that-just
another demon raised from conspiratoriological hell.
Sometime after the crash, George Bush phoned Margaret Thatcher. According to
Jack Anderson, the two leaders agreed that the investigation into the bombing
would be "limited" in order to protect British and American intelligence
interests.
Another stray fact worth noting about Pan Am 103: In addition to the CIA's
McKee team, the plane was also carrying Bernt Carlsson, the U.N. negotiator
with South Africa, who had just carved out a deal on Namibian independence.
He was on his way back to New York to ink the pact. Needless to say, he never
got to sign his name.
The Interfor report, when it's mentioned at all in the major media, is
usually dismissed. The lone exception as of this writing is a December 1990
feature piece in Barron's, a Dow Jones-owned financial weekly. The Barron's
article was quite thorough, with one glaring exception. It never mentioned
the McKee team. The title of the piece, "Unwitting Accomplices?," is also an
odd one, given that the story did mention CIA headquarters' alleged
instructions to "let it go," when warned of the bomb-hardly "unwitting."
Leaving out the McKee team story obscures one possible motive in letting the
bomb go: to eliminate agents who had learned too much about the
drugs-hostages-arms connection.
Other than Barron's, no news organization that I know has even bothered to
check out the Interfor report's allegations, save consulting their
intelligence sources, who, as expected, deride it as a "spitball," meaning a
hodgepodge of fact and fiction with no value as intelligence. I doubt that
much of what the Interfor report says will ever be seriously examined. It
tells a tale that, even for a conspiracy theory, is one of the darkest ever
spun about the CIA.
And its implications are even more daunting. If the report proved true, it
would connect the bombing of Pan Am 103 to the IranContra scandal; the
bombing would become part of the IranContra cover-up.
Iran-Contra, the real story, was costly enough without 270 lives added to the
price tag. The Iran-Contra operators, particularly Richard Secord and Albert
Hakim, were hooked up with "renegade" CIA operatives Edwin Wilson and Frank
Terpil. Wilson and Terpil sold arms and explosives to Libya's Colonel
Qaddafi. They were indicted, convicted, and imprisoned for it. Secord and Haki
m were not. Nor was Ted Shackley, an almost godlike figure in spook circles.
Shackley was Wilson's CIA supervisor. He had distinguished himself in Vietnam
as a prime mover behind the neargenocidal Phoenix program, in which the CIA
killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians.
Shackley is author of a book, The Third Option, that advocates in no
uncertain terms U.S. covert operations to control the politics of foreign
countries. He is also widely believed to have been a leader of the CIA's
Golden Triangle opium smuggling activities, which he angrily denies.
When Wilson and Terpil were caught arming terrorists, Shackley was allowed to
quietly resign his CIA post. The CIA's deputy director at that time, who
supported Shackley, was Frank Carlucci. After National Security Adviser John
Poindexter was forced to resign when accused of masterminding the Iran-Contra
cover-up, Carlucci got his job.
Iran-Contra and the Wilson affair got a lot of press, although their
significance was never fully explained in the mass media. Less publicized are
the CIA's strange encounters with characters like Licio Gelli and its darker
weavings with the fascist terrorist cabal. Gelli is said to have conspired
with "Black" terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie to plan the Bologna train station
bombing. The European Black International in which Delle Chiaie was a
preeminent figure consisted of old and "neo" Nazis, including SS officers,
and other elements of European fascism and anti-Semitism. Among its list of
accomplishments, this same network was responsible for bombing a Paris
synagogue just weeks after the train station bomb went off.
Delle Chiaie, as well as Gelli, had his own CIA friends. Both are linked to
the Mafia. No surprises there. But both are also tied in with the "Red
International," that is, with international left-wing terrorism. In recent
years, the two terrorist factions have become so close that the distinction
is not much more than semantic.
In late 1990, around the time I was finishing this book, a story broke in
Europe that put the CIA's connection to right-wing terrorism into focus. The
story became a huge scandal in Italy, threatening to topple the Italian
government. In America, it received limited play. The Washington Post ran an
article headed "CIA Organized Secret Army in Western Europe. " The New York
Times offered its own summary of the affair, but did not mention the CIA.
The "secret army," European press revealed, was part of the CIA's "Operation
Gladio," its Cold War project to organize the extreme right in Europe into an
anti-Communist resistance. The German arm of the Gladio army was made up of
former SS men. The Italian branch contained such sterling characters as Delle
Chiaie and his P2 cohorts. The London Independent newspaper wrote that the
killing of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro may have been carried out with
the cooperation of these CIA-backed elements-namely, P2 members in the
Italian government. Moro's kidnapping and execution were pulled off by the
supposedly leftwing Red Brigade.
As early as 1969, the Black International held a summit conference in
Barcelona, Spain, with good wishes from the country's fascist dictator,
Francisco Franco. The summit was called to plan strategy for Yasser Arafat
and his burgeoning cabal of Palestinian terrorists. Left wing? Or right wing?
The fact of the matter is, while it's easier to link the CIA to rightwing
terrorism than to left-wing terrorism, the line between right and left is
blurred beyond recognition. The alliance goes beyond their shared tactics of
extreme violence aimed at oblivious civilians. Their new unity is known as
the "Third Position," and its adherents rally around the slogan "Hitler and
Mao united in struggle."
"Third position" interlocks explain some apparent anomalies. Klaus Barbie,
CIA-backed Nazi war criminal, was represented at his 1985 Paris trial by
left-wing lawyer Jacques Verges. Verges became famous for using the courtroom
as his platform for lashing out at Western imperialism. He married one of his
most famous clients, Algerian bomber Djamila Bouhired, converted to Islam,
and became a doctrinaire Maoist after traveling to China and meeting Chairman
Mao himself. He is named in connection with many of the best-known "Red"
terrorists. Yet he represented the most infamous Nazi war criminal since
Eichmann, and has known Francois Genoud for four decades.
Left-right intercourse also explains why the hijackers of the Achille Lauro
cruise ship demanded the release of Odifried Hepp, a prolific neo-Nazi
terrorist then incarcerated in West Germany. In the early 1980s, Hepp planned
and carried out attacks on several American army installations, NATO bases,
and night spots where U.S. soldiers liked to hang out. Some of the attacks
were attributed in the press to leftists. Sometimes, left-wing groups went
out of their way to claim credit for the attacks.
Right and left lose their meaning in the swirling eddy of global
insurrection. The connections are dazzling. They set the legend of the CIA in
the same light as legends of secret societies from the Illuminati to the
Hashishim to the Freemasons. They are committed not to national alms, nor to
explicitly ideological ones. They are devoted only to their own subversive,
secret agenda.
pps 170-190
----
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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