-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
--[5]--
George Bush and the Secret Team of Covert Operators
Was The Reagan-Bush White House In Cahoots With Drug Lords?
Did the Reagan-Bush White House do business with drug traffickers? This
question not only applies to the Presidencies of George Bush and Ronald
Reagan, but to every single administration since the end of World War II.
The Christie Institute and its founder, Daniel Sheehan, deserve special
credit for its work in exposing the CIAs ties to drug lords, particularly
during the Reagan years. Founded in 1980 as a non-profit, public-interest law
firm and public policy center, the Christie Institute had previously
prosecuted some of the most celebrated public-interest lawsuits of the
decade, including the Karen Silkwood case and the Greensboro Massacre suit
against the American Nazi Party and Ku Klux Klan.
During one of my trips to Washington I finally got a chance to meet Sheehan.
Although situated only a few blocks from Washington's Union Station, it
seemed only right that a non-profit organization fighting against the
tremendous odds in facing covert operators would be housed in a rundown,
near-slum neighborhood of the nation's capital.
Although we had just a short time together because I was flying back to
Israel that evening, Sheehan struck me as being one of the very few people in
the United States who grasped most of the complexities of the story of how
the CIA had become involved with drug traffickers. The way he rattled off the
names and events, he could probably have repeated them in his sleep.
Sheehan claims that there existed a conspiratorial "secret team" of covert
operators which earned out its own, private foreign policy much of it funded
by proceeds from the international drug trade. The 29 defendants named in a su
it instituted by the Christie Institute in Florida included Lt. Colonel
Oliver North, retired major generals
Richard Secord and John Singlaub, former CIA intelligence officers Theodore
Shackley and Thomas Clines, financier Albert Hakim, Robert Owen, a former
aide to Vice President Quayle, Contra rebel leader Adolfo Calero, mercenary
Thomas Posey, and drug dealers John Hall and Jorge Ochoa.
"We assembled evidence that the Contra resupply network orchestrated criminal
covert operations, including secret wars, assassination prograins and illicit
arms deals. It financed these activities, in part, through the smuggling and
sale of tons of cocaine and other illegal drugs into the United States," says
Sheehan. "Since the Congress, the Reagan-Bush White House's Justice
Department, and the Judiciary had, for the most part, turned a blind eye to
these allegations, we took our evidence directly to the American public. The
public needs to know and has a right to know of covert and illegal activities
undertaken by private citizens in the name of U.S. foreign policy and
'national security.'
In the lawsuit, the institute used the RICO statutes, passed in 1970 to bring
Mafia bosses to justice (the statutes enable a member of a conspiracy to be
held accountable for crimes committed by those under his orders). The
institute was able to formally charge the Reagan-Bush Secret Team as a result
of the 1994 bombing of a press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua. During the
early part of 1984, after the Boland Amendments were passed, Oliver North
came up with a new plan to secretly circumvent the congressional ban on
Contra military aid. The idea was to take away the responsibility of arming
and training them from the CIA and transfer it to a "private" network
controlled directly by him from the White House. This meant uniting the
various Contra forces into one effective fighting force.
One of the Contra leaders, Eden Pastora of the ARDE organization based in
Costa Rica, refused a CIA ultimatum to ally his group with the larger Contra
force the administration was supporting, the FDN. He was told by the CIA to
"unite with the FDN or suffer the consequences."
At a press conference where Pastora was to announce that he was not going to
accede to these demands, a bomb exploded, killing eight people and injuring
many others. The White House obviously wouldn't take no for an answer.
Sheehan alleges that the explosion was arranged by Hull, a drug trafficker
who helped Oliver North's Contra supply operation, and Felipe Vidal, another
narcotics smuggler who worked with Hull. At a crucial December 1984 meeting
at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel in Houston, Texas, attended by Hull and Owen,
Jack Terrell, another participant in North's supply network, claims that Hull
told him. "Pastora had to be killed" (The Progressive, March 1990).
The CIA helped cover up the bombing through extensive use of disinformation
within Costa Rica. A Costa Rican government report revealed that in 1984 CIA
agent Dimitrius Papas trained an elite 15-member group of Costa Rican
intelligence agents known as "the Babies" to organize a network of illegal
telephone taps and a slush fund for payoffs to Costa Rican leaders (The
Progressive, March 1990; Newsweek, February 12th, 1990).
During the course of preparing for the suit, Sheehan met Paul Hoven, a
Vietnam veteran who led a group called "Project on Military Procurement" in
support of military reform in the purchasing and development of weapons (Out
of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua,
the Illegal Arms Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection, 1987). Hoven
introduced Sheehan to a retired military intelligence officer who had first
hand knowledge about a group of former CIA senior officials who formed a
"secret team" to undertake covert operations on a commercial basis. Operating
independently of the U.S. government, some members were even involved in
CIA-sanctioned assassination plots as far back as the Kennedy era. The former
intelligence officer told Sheehan he came in cont[a]ct with the secret team
when he tried to acquire semi-covert mercenary work in Central America and
Iran.
This convinced Sheehan that a secret team did exist and that his institute
had do something to stop them.
He knew who the criminals were. When he found his victims, two American
journalists based in Costa Rica, Tony Avigran and Martha Honey, who were
injured in the blast, he set the legal work in motion. The institute's
lawsuit was filed on May 29th, 1986, in the U.S. District Court of Southern
Florida. The racketeering charges described a complex criminal enterprise, inc
luding former United States military and intelligence officers, mercenaries,
businessmen, and drug dealers, who conspired to covertly organize military
aid to the Contra forces. The Court Declaration charted the racketeering
activities from 1959 through 1987, and divided them into geographical
locations: Cuba, Southeast Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua.
Cuba
In Cuba, Sheehan's account of the Secret Team's activities begins in the late
1950s and early 1960s with a plan to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro,
which violated the United States' Neutrality Act. Expatriate Cubans were
recruited And sent to one of two secret military training bases established
for this purpose 3/4 one in the south of Miami, Florida, and the other, named
Camp Trax, in Retalhuleu, Guatemala (Inside the Shadow Government, 1988).
The force later became known as the 2506 Brigade. The purpose of their
missions was to allow the expatriate Cubans to re-enter Cuba covertly and
establish a center of guerrilla resistance to the Cuban government and to
disrupt the new economy. A later plan included the assassination of Fidel
Castro (Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with
Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving
Foreign Leaders, 94th Congress, 1975). This would have paved the way for
former President Fulgencio Batista's return to power as well as the narcotics
and gambling activities run by such underworld figures as Meyer Lansky and
Santo Trafficante, Jr.
The low-profile, guerrilla-infiltration assassination strategy, code-named
Operation 40, was replaced with a plan for a full-scale military invasion of
Cuba, to be staged at the Bay of Pigs in April 1962. After that invasion
failed, from 1962 to 1965 Theodore Shackley headed a program of raids and
sabotage against Cuba. Working under Shackley was Thomas Clines, Rafael
Quintero, Luis Posada Carriles, Rafael and Raul Villaverde, Frank Sturgis
(who would later be one of the famous Watergate burglars), Felix Rodriguez
and Edwin Wilson. This operation, called JM/WAVE, was eventually closed down
in 1965, when several of its participants became involved with smuggling
narcotics from Cuba into the United States (New York Times, January 4th,
1975).
Southeast Asia
When the JW/WAVE project ended, Shackley and Clines, Rodriguez, Wilson, and
Quintero left for Laos in Southeast Asia. Shackley was chief of the CIA`s
station in Vientiane until 1969, while Clines was under Shackley's direction
as the base chief in Long Tieng. (The Ravens: The Men Who Flew in A[m]erica's
Secret War in Laos, 1987)
The goal of these two covert operators was to organize, direct, and fund an
army of Hmong tribesmen (historically, opium poppy farmers) on bases in
northern Laos to fight the Communist Pathet Lao insurgent forces. The leader
of this secret army was general Vang Pao, who was also a major opium
supplier. In 1960 a civil war broke out when General Phoumi Nosavan's
right-wing government was overthrown by a group of army officers, together
with former Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma and leftist leader Pathet Lao.
Nosavan recruited Pao to take control over north. eastern Laos with Shackley
and Clines providing air support. In return for fighting the Communists,
Shackley, Clines and Richard Secord helped Pao control Laos' opium trade by
sabotaging competitors. Secord oversaw and authorized the transport of raw
opium by Pao's tribesmen in paramilitary aircraft from the mountain opium
fields to processing centers. Eventually, Vang Pao had a monopoly over the
heroin trade in Laos (Inside the Shadow Government).
Six air bases were built in Thailand and Long Tieng in northern Laos as well
as landing strips for Air America planes throughout Hmong--controlled
territory (David Truong, Running Drugs and Secret Wars, Covert Action Informat
ion Bulletin No. 28, Summer 1987). In 1967 Shackley and Clines helped Vang
Pao attain financial backing to form his own airline, Zieng Khouang Air
Transport Co., to transport opium and heroin between Long Tieng and
Vientiane. In 1968, Shackley and Clines arranged a meeting in Saigon between
Mafia chief Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Vang Pao to establish a
heroin-smuggling operation from Southeast Asia to the United States (The
Politics of Heroin, 1972).
Ron Rickenbach was a former official with the U.S Agency for International
Development who served in Laos from 1962 to 1969. "Early on," he wrote, "I
think that we all believed that what we were doing was in the best interest
of America, that we were in fact perhaps involved in some not so desirable
aspects of the drug traffic, however we believed strongly in the beginning
that we were there for a just cause. These people were willing to take up
arms. We needed to stop the Red threat" (PBS documentary "Frontline: "Guns,
Drugs and the CIA," May 1989).
Although Richard Secord claims that "there was no commercial trade in opium
going on," Rickenbach says: "I was in the areas where opium was transshipped,
I personally was witness to opium being placed on aircraft, American
aircraft. I witnessed it being taken off smaller aircraft that were coming in
from outlying areas."
Former Air America pilot Neil Hanses adds, "Yes, I've seen the sticky bricks
come on board and no one was challenging their right to carry it."
Another smuggling route had the opium being traded for guns before being
loaded onto planes operated by the French Corsican drug syndicates and
dropped into the Gulf of Siam. It would later be picked up by fishing boats
and taken to ports in South Vietnam.
As part of their covert operation, with training by Quintero and Rodriguez,
Vang Pao is reported to have killed rival opium warlords, civilian
functionaries, and supporters of the Pathet Lao (Inside the Shadow
Government). These actions were continuing when in 1969 Clines and Shackley
were posted to Saigon, where they are alleged to have directed "Operation
Phoenix" to "neutralize" non-combatant Vietnamese civilians suspected of
collaborating with the National Liberation Front. Former CIA director William
Colby would later testify at a 1971 Senate hearing that "Operation Phoenix"
killed 20,587 Vietnamese and imprisoned another 28,978 between August 1968
and May 1971 (Fred Branfman, South Vietnam's Police and Prison System: The
U.S. Connection, Free Press, 1978).
Alfred McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, wrote
the monumental work on the subject of the CIA's involvement in the drug
trade: The Politics of Heroin in SouthEast Asia. In 1991 he followed it up
with The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.
McCoy has specialized in the area of the CIAs historic ties to the
international drug trade. He asserts that the organization's involvement in
the Asian drug trade actually dates back to the late 1940s, after the
People's Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao Tse-tung. The CIA allied
itself with Kuomintang forces that had fled to the Shan states of northern
Burma to carry out sabotage against China. They supported themselves via the
opium trade by sending caravans of the drug to Laos for sale.
"Whenever the CIA supports a rebel faction in a regional dispute, that
faction's involvement in the drug trade increases," McCoy claims. "Just as
CIA support for National Chinese troops in the Shan states increased Burma's
opium crop in the 1950s, so too did the agency's aid to the mujahideen
guerrillas in the 1980s expand opium production in Afghanistan" (The
Progressive, July 1991).
Victor Marchetti, who worked for the CIA for 14 years and served as executive
assistant to the deputy director under Richard Helms until 1969, is probably
the leading critic today of the CIA's "covert" activities. Having seen how
things work from the inside, in 1975 he wrote The CIA and the Cult of
Intelligence, the first book to expose the workings of the U.S. organization.
The book has become somewhat of a classic in certain circles. On April 18th,
1972, Marchetti became the first American writer to be served with an
official censorship order issued by a court of the United States forbidding
him to disclose any information about the CIA. The verdict was eventually
overturned.
"I guess people like the book," Marchetti told me one morning at a coffee
shop in the Nation Press Building in Washington. "Every once in while I get a
royalty check for a few hundred dollars from my publishers."
Marchetti was a Soviet military specialist at one point was probably the U.S.
government leading expert on Soviet military aid to the countries of the
Third World. He left the CIA and wrote about its shortcomings. He felt the
agency was incapable of reforming itself and that Presidents had no interest
in changing it because they viewed it as a private asset.
Out of all the people I interviewed for this book, Marchetti was perhaps the
most insightful He spoke about covert operations and secret agendas of the
Bush-Reagan White Houses the most people would about yesterday's football
scores.
"It shouldn't surprise anyone that the history of the CIA runs parallel to
criminal and drug operations throughout the world," he says. "The connection
stretches back to the predecessor organization of the CIA, the OSS [Office of
Strategic Services], and its involvement with the Italian Mafia, the Cosa
Nostra, in Sicily and Southern Italy. When the OSS was fighting communists in
France they 'mingled' with the Corsican brotherhood, who were heavily into
drugs at that time.
Many of these contacts were formulated in the late 1940's when the OSS worked
covertly to replace the leftist leaders of the Marseilles dock union, after
it was thought that the union might interfere with American shipping in a
crisis (The Nation, August 29th, 1987).
Exploiting the drug trade amplifies the operational capacity of covert
operations for the CIA. When the CIA decides to enter a region to combat a
communist force or country, the purpose is to seek out allies and assets
which are effective and won't squeal. The CIA's allies' involvement with
narcotics enhances their operational capacity because they are fully
integrated into the household economies of the region and monopolize what is
usually the largest cash crop in that country. Any group which controls such
a lucrative trade commands extraordinary political power that is extremely
useful to the CIA. Powerful drug warlords can mobilize people to die. No
amount of money in the world can buy this operational capacity.
Says Alfred McCoy: "In the mountain ranges along the southern rim of Asia 3/4
whether in Afghanistan, Burma, or Laos 3/4 opium is the main currency of
external trade and thus is a key source of political power. Since operations
involve alliances with local power brokers who serve as the CIA's commanders,
the agency, perhaps unwillingly or unwittingly, has repeatedly found its
covert operations enmeshed with Asia's heroin trade. By investing a local
ally such as Hekmatyar or; Vang Pao with the authority of its alliance, the
CIA draws the ally under the mantle of its protection. So armed, a tribal
leader, now less vulnerable to arrest and prosecution, can use his American
alliance to expand his share of the local opium trade" (The Politics of
Heroin, 1991).
Marchetti agrees: "Drug dealers are in a position to know things, to get
things done. They have muscle and no qualms about using it. This is
attractive to the covert operators."
Nugan Hand Bank
Covert operations, like any other type of operation, need financing and the
use of financial instruments. Just as BCCI served a useful purpose for many
countries' and dictators' illicit activities, back in the mid-1970s the
Secret Team decided it needed to control its own bank for covert operations.
Daniel Sheehan gathered information which suggests Clines, Secord, Shackley,
and Quintero siphoned off a percentage of the funds derived from the opium
profits of Vang Pao to a secret bank account at the Nugan Hand Bank in
Sydney, Australia.
The Nugan Bank was founded in 1976 by Francis John Nugan and Michael Jon
Hand. Hand was a member of the U.S. Special Forces in Laos, a former Green
Beret and a CIA agent. Shortly af-ter its establishment the bank boasted
deposits of $25 million. It's board of directors was impressive.
The President of the Nugan Hand Bank was Admiral Earl F. Yates, former Chief
of Staff for Strategic Planning of U.S. Forces in Asia and the Pacific. The
President of Nugan Hand Bank Hawaii was General Edwin F. Black, commander of
U.S. troops in Thailand during the Vietnam War and then-Assistant Army Chief
of Staff for the Pacific. Nugan Hand's representative in Saudi Arabia was
Bernie Houghton, a U.S. Naval Intelligence agent.
Another director of Nugan Hand Bank was Dale Holmgree, a former employee of
Civil Air Transport, which later became the CIA's proprietary company, Air
America (the airline run by the CIA that transported opium out of the Golden
Triangle to Saigon, Hong Kong, and Bangkok). George Farris, a Green Beret and
CIA operative in Vietnam, ran the Washington, D.C., office of Nugan Hand
Bank. General LeRoy J. Manor, former Chief of Staff for the U.S. Pacific
Command, was Nugan Hand's man in Manila. The bank's legal counsel was William
Colby, a former director of the CIA.
The Board of Directors for the parent company that preceded the
establishment of the Nugan Hand Bank, were Grant Walters, Robert Peterson,
David M. Houton, and Spencer Smith, all of whom listed their address as CIO Ai
r America, Army Post Office, San Francisco, California (Canadian Dimension, Se
ptember 1987).
Despite having established branches throughout the world, the Nugan Hand Bank
rarely conducted any banking activities. In fact, the bank was a mini-BCCI,
its rea[c]h spanning six continents, and was involved in drug operations,
laundering money, tax evasion, and investor fraud operations. Not only did it
serve as a transaction center for the profits the CIA earned from the
Southeast Asian drug trade, but it also funneled money to South
African-backed forces fighting in Angola.
The bank made the headlines of Australia in 1980 when Frank Nugan was found
dead from a gunshot wound in his Mercedes-Benz on January 27th of that year.
In his trousers police found the business card of Nugan Hand's lawyer,
William Colby, with the details of Colby's upcoming trip to the Far East.
Inside his briefcase were the names of prominent Australian politicians and
business personalities with dollar amounts handwritten in the five and six
figures (Mother Jones, August/ September 1987).
The circumstances behind how Hand met Frank Nugan, a local lawyer and heir to
a food-processing fortune, have never been properly clarified. Under oath, at
the inquest, Hand claimed he couldn't remember.
The bank grew and had offices or affiliates in 13 countries. According to
Jonathan Kwitny, whose book Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA: Crimes of
Patriots (1987) documented the scandal, the bank did little banking. However,
over its seven-year existence it amassed large sums moving, collecting, and
disbursing money. As soon as investigators began looking into the affairs of
the bank in 1980, it was declared insolvent. Kwitny discovered that in the
immediate days after his death, Nugan's house was taken over by Hand, Yates
and Houghton, as company files were packed in "cartons, sorted, or fed to a
shredder" (Mother Jones, August/September 1987). Its branch in Chiang Mai,
Thailand, writes Kwitny, was the most mysterious of all of Nugan Hand's
activities. Why was a supposedly legitimate bank opening an office in Chiang
Mai, a region awash in the opium-growing trade?
After much investigative work, Kwitny discovered that the Chiang Mai branch
of the Nugan Hand Bank was on the same floor in what he believed to be the
same suite as the United States Drug Enforcement Agency office. When asked,
the DEA wouldn't offer an explanation. Kwitny
found that every which way he turned he was stonewalled.
He finally hit pay dirt when he tracked down Neil Evans, an Australian who
was selected by Hand to run the Thailand branch. Evans reported to Kwitny
that during his seven-month stint, Hand told him to deposit $2.6 million from
six major drug dealers. Another employee at the Bangkok office said, "There
was nothing there but drug money." (Before releasing it to the public, the
Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking, an investigation commissioned by the
Australian government, deleted ten pages on Nugan Hand's Thailand activities
from its report.)
The bank collapsed, owing some $50 million. None of the deposits were secured
because they were used for illegal activities. These included defrauding
American military personnel in Saudi Arabia out of nearly $10 million. The
bank sent out "investment counselors" to installations where Americans were
working in Saudi Arabia and, told them to invest their salaries in Nugan
Hand's Hong Kong branch in secured government bonds.
The Australian government eventually investigated the collapse of the bank
and found that millions of dollars were missing and unaccounted for. It
discovered that the main depositors of the bank were connected with the
narcotics trade in the Middle East and Asia, and that the CIA was using Nugan
Hand to finance a variety of covert operations. Government investigations
revealed ties between Nugan Hand and the world's largest heroin syndicates.
The reports said that th[e] Bank was linked to at least 26 separate
individuals or groups known to be associated with drug traffick-ing."
In 1983 the Australian Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking released a report
on Nugan Hand's activities to Parliament which said Shackley, Secord, Clines,
Quintero, and Wilson were people whose background "is relevant to a proper
understanding of the activities of the Nugan Hand group and the peopl[e]
associated with that group."
The investigations also detailed Nugan Hand's involvement in The he sale
of an electronic spy ship to Iran and arms shipments to South African- backed
forces in Angola which were being sup-ported by the CIA. These operations
were run by Edwin Wilson, a career CIA officer who in 1983 began serving a
52-year prison sentence for sell-ing tons of weapons and training expertise
to Libya. Wilson claims he was set up to cheat him out of his fair share of
the profits of the Secret Team's covert operations.
Confirming Nugan Hand's illicit activities and spilling a few beans of his
own, in 1983 Wilson's business partner, Frank Terpil, told journalist Jim
Hougan:
"The significance of Miami is the drug syndicate. That's the base. Shackley,
Clines, the Villaverde brothers, Chi Chi, Rodriquee all the people that I
hired to terminate other people, from the Agency are there. Who's the boss of
Clines? Shackley. Where do they come from? Laos. Where did the money come
from? Nugan Hand. The whole goddamned thing has been moved down there.... Clin
es was running drugs ... The pilot of the plane in Asia was Dick Secord, a
captain in the Air Force.... What was on the plane? Gold!- Ten million bucks
at a time, in gold. He was going to the Golden Triangle to pay off warlords.
The drug loans.... Now what do you do with all the opium? You reinvest it in
your own operation. Billions of dollars—not millions—billions of dollars"
(Covert Action, Information Bulletin, Summer 1987).
None of those involved in the scandal have ever been convicted of any crimes
as all eventually fled Australia.
Marchetti says that Nugan Hand is a good example of a unique type of covert
operation: an independent group of people with ties to the CIA are in
business for themselves, but at the same time carry out tasks for the CIA.
The group is in a position to do the agency special favors, such as
laundering money or providing covet for secret operations. The agency, in
turn, will use its influence to throw business the company's way or to offer
the company protection from criminal investigation" (Mother Jones, August/Sept
ember 1987).
In light of the scandal, Kwitny concludes that "the license to commit crimes
in the name of national security has been granted too often and too lightly"
He asks some very relevant questions the American people should also ponder:
When agents of the U.S. steal, when they get involved in drug deals, how far
should the patriotic cloak granted by national policy stretch to. cover them?
Does it cover an agent who lines his pockets in side deals while working in
the name of national security? (Mother Jones, August/September 1987).
Iran
After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, the focus of operations for the
Secret Team moved to the Middle East. Shackley was now in Washington as CIA
Associate Deputy Director in the Directorate of Operations. Clines was in
Washington as head of CIA operations training. Richard Secord was appointed
chief of the U.S. Air Force's Military Assistance Advisory Group, which
represented U.S. defense contractors selling arms to the Shah's army and
training them in the use of this new military equipment. The secret team was
also advising the Shah on how to use sophisticated communications equipment
so his secret police force, SAVAK, could contain the regime's adversaries and
political opponents.
One major military contract the group maintained during this time was
Rockwell Int[e]rnational IBEX's electronic and photographic surveillance
project for intelligence gathering, not only in Iran but in the entire
region, including the then-Soviet Union. -On August 28th, 1976, three of the
top managers of the project were shot dead while driving through Teheran.
Officials blamed Libyantrained Islamic Marxist guerrillas (Washington Post, Au
gust 29th, 30th, 1976), but Gene Wheaton, a longtime U.S. military
investigator and former IBEX Director of Security, says that these people
were killed to cover up a scam which skimmed profits from the IBEX project.
>From the start, IBEX was plagued with corruption. According to a report in
the Washington Post, a month before the assassinations, U.S. ambassador to
Iran Richard Helms and a former CIA head, sent a handwritten letter to
then-CIA Director George Bush complaining about the project and urging him to
investigate allegations of corruption (The Nation, August 27th, 1988).
Wheaton discovered that Secord, Clines, Quintero, and Albert Hakim had a
"historical record of skimming off of military projects, taking kickbacks"
and that they had laundered large amounts of payoffs for military programs in
the Middle East through Swiss bank accounts. Gene Wheaton testified in a
deposition for the Christie Institute that the three Rockwell men "were
murdered to cover misdeeds on the project a project where Albert Hakim served
as the bag man and that this was part of the Ed Wilson network." He claims
that John Harper, who served as head of security for the project from
November 1976 to May 1977, was told by Frank Terpil after the murders that
the "Rockwell matter" had been taken care of.
Afghanistan
In May 1980 Dr. David Musto, a Yale University psychiatrist and White House
advisor on. drugs, discovered that the CIA and other intelligence agencies
denied the White House Strategy Council on Drug. Abuse he was heading access
to all classified information on drugs. He warned then that what happened in A
fghanistan. Another White House Drug Council Member, Dr. Joyce Lowinson,
writing the New York Times, accurately questioned: "Are we erring in
befriending these tribes (Afghanistan and Pakistan rebel tribesmen) as we did
in Laos when Air America helped transport crude opium from certain tribal
areas?"
They were both right. After President Carter began shipping arms to the
mujahideen guerrillas in December 1979, drug-related deaths in New York City
rose by 77 percent (The Progressive, July 1991). By 1982, Southern Asia,
although never before a source, supplied 60 percent of the U.S. heroin market.
University of Wisconsin professor Alfred McCoy says that during the more than
ten years of CIA covert support for the mujahideen resistance, the
Bush-Reagan Administration and the mainstream media said almost nothing about
the involvement of leading Afghan guerrillas and Pakistan military in the
heroin traffic.
McCoy tracks the relationship between the CIA and the narcotics trade in
Afghanistan and Pakistan to a May 1979 meeting at Peshawar in Pakistan's
Northwest Frontier province between a CIA envoy and Afghan resistance leaders
chosen by Pakistan's ISI (Inter Service Intelligence). The ISI was said to
offer an alliance with its own Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of
the small Hezbi-i Islamic group, rather than a broad spectrum of resistance
leaders (The Progressive, July 1991).
It's never been fully explained why, but when Reagan and Bush took office
Pakistan-U.S. relations soared. More than $3 billion in U.S. aid, including
F-I 6 fighter jets, flowed to General Zia's army. In return, Zia allowed the
CIA to open an electronic intelligence station in northern Pakistan aimed at
the Soviet Union. This enabled U.S. spy flights over the Indian Ocean from
Pakistani air bases near the Persian Gulf.
With CIA and Pakistani support, Hekmatyar became Afghanistan's leading drug
trafficker. In May 1990, the Washington Post published a series of articles
explaining how the United States had ignored Afghan complaints of heroin
trafficking by Hekmatyar. The newspaper reported that Hekmatyar commanders
close to the ISI ran laboratories in southwest Pakistan and that ISI
cooperated in its heroin operations.
McCoy says that during the time the mujahideen were being supported by the
CIA, their opium harvest doubled to 575 tons. Once these mujahideen elements
brought the opium across the border, they sold it to Pakistani heroin
refineries operating under the Pakistani government's protection (The
Progressive, July 1991).
In September 1985 the Pakistani newspaper
The Herald reported: "The drug is carried in National Logistics Cell [part
of the Pakistani Army] trucks, which come sealed from the Northwest Frontier
and are never checked by the police."
Drug Enforcement Agency officials admitted that the shipment of CIA weapons
into Pakistan played a key role in allowing the trade in heroin to flourish.
No heroin was refined in Pakistan before 1979 but now Pakistan produces and
exports "more heroin than the rest of the world combined," one agent told the
Philadelphia Inquirer (February 28th, 1988).
The free flow of heroin had a devastating effect on the Pakistani people.
Addiction rose to 5000 in. 1980, to 70,000 in 1983, and to more than 1.3
million by 1985. At more than $10 million in sales made each year from the
sale of heroin, it was larger than Pakistan's governmental budget and equal
to more than one quarter of the gross national product.
When investigative journalist Larry Lifschultz began looking into the ties
between General Zia and the Afghan drug trade, he discovered that European
and Interpol police investigations of the major heroin traffickers had been
aborted at the highest levels of the Pakistani government. The U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency itself had 17 agents working out of the U.S. Embassy in
Islamabad and compiled reports on 40 narcotics dealers in Pakistan. Yet not a
single major syndicate was investigated by Pakistani police.
Typical of the misinformation that had blocked U.S. action against Pakistan's
heroin trade, the State Department's semi-annual narcotics review in
September 1998 called General Zia "a strong supporter of anti-narcotics
activities in Pakistan."
"Once the CIA has invested its prestige in, one of these opium warlords, it
cannot afford to comprise a major covert action with an investigation," McCoy
points out. "Respecting the national security imperatives of CIA operations,
the DEA keeps its distance from agency assets, even when they are the major
drug lords" (The Progressive, July 1991).
Nicaragua
The Secret Team's activities can be connected from Cuba, to Laos, through
Iran, and to Nicaragua. It was the same network, the same people, and the
same set of covert operators. The reasons the CIA became entangled with drug
traffic in Central America were the same as they were in Burma and Laos.
Victor Marchetti contends that the CIA got involved with the Kuomintang drug
runners in Burma because they, too, were resisting the drift towards
communism there. The same thing happened in Southeast Asia, and in the 1980s
in Latin America.
"Some of the very people who are the best sources of information, who are
capable of accomplishing important tasks to stifle communist movements,
happen to inhabit the criminal world," he says. "The CIA keeps getting
involved with these kinds of people, not for 'drug purposes' or for personal
gain, although that has become a major part of it, but to achieve the higher
ideological goal of fighting communism" (Frontline, May 1989).
The use of drug profits to finance the Contra war was confirmed in April 1989
by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism.
Chaired by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the investigation discovered
that, through a web of business relationships with Latin American drug
cartels, the Contras were supplied with "cash, weapons, planes, pilots, and
air supply services." The subcommittee found that senior officials, in the
Reagan-Bush White House were fully aware that the Contras were shipping drugs
into the United States, but did nothing to stop it.
"The logic of having drug money pay for the pressing needs of the Contras
appealed to a number of people who became involved in the covert war," the
report of the Subcommittee stated. "Indeed, senior U.S. policy makers were
not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras'
funding problems."
Daniel Sheehan says that evidence of drug trafficking by the Contras and
their supporters centers on three related allegations: that a major
"guns-for-drugs" operation existed between North, Central, and South America
and that helped finance the Contra war; that the Contra leadership received
direct funding from major drug dealers; and that some of the Contra leaders
themselves have been directly involved in drug trafficking.
Some of these allegations come from less than ideal sources. For instance,
Pilot George Morales says after he was indicted in the spring of 1984 for
drug trafficking that he was approached by Contra leaders offering him "a
deal." If he set up a Contra drug-smuggling operation, his indictment would
be "taken care of by people in Vice President Bush's office." He agreed, and
flew weapons to John Hull's ranch (a liaison to the Contras) and returned
with narcotics (CBS's West 57th St., April 6th, 1987). Morales said his
planes landed at Hull's ranch in Costa Rica.
Gary Betzner, one of Morales' pilots, said he himself took two' tons of
small-aircraft weapons and returned to Florida with a thousand kilos of
cocaine (Out of Control). In March 1986 another pilot, Michael Tolliver, flew
28,000 pounds of weapons to Honduras and returned to South Florida with
25,360 pounds of marijuana (Newsday, April 6th, 1987). "1 smuggled my share
of illegal substances, but I also smuggled my share of weapons to the Contras
in exchange, with the full knowledge and assistance of the DEA Drug
Enforcement Agency and the CIA," Betzner claims (Newsweek-, January 26th,
1987).
The cocaine originated from Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa, Colombian drug
traffickers who worked with the Medellin cocaine cartel. The drugs were
shipped to John Hull's ranch and then sent on to the U.S. Two Cuban
Americans, Felipe Vidal and Rend Corvo, arranged the money transfers. Hull,
Vidal, Ochoa, Escobar, and Corvo were defendants in the Christic Institute's
lawsuit.
Ramon Milian Rodriguez, chief accountant of the Colombian Medellin cocaine
cartel, who is currently serving a 43-year prison sentence for money
laundering, told CBS News and the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee that
he personally arranged to have $10 million of Colombian drug money funneled
to the Contras from late 1982 through 1985. "The cartel figured it was buying
a little friendship," Milian Rodriguez told congressional investigators.
"What the hell is 10 million bucks? They thought they were going to buy some
goodwill and take a little heat off them" (Newsday, June 28th, 1987).
When Congress cut of funding for the Contras in 1984, replacement funds had
to be found. Milian Rodriguez testified that although he had been laundering
foreign payments for the CIA up through 1982, the CIA turned to him again (Fro
ntline). He says he used Cuban-controlled front companies in Miami to funnel
the money to the Contras, and that the money pipeline to the Contras was
arranged by CIA veteran Felix Rodriguez, who would call him and tell him
where to drop the money (Out of Control).
"To have people like me in place, that can be used, is marvelous for them,"
Milian Rodriguez points out. "The agency, and quite rightly so, has things
that they have to do which they can never admit to an oversight committee,
and the only way they can fund these things is through drug money or through
illicit money that they can get their hands on in some way (Frontline). Adds
General Paul Gorman, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama
from 1982 to 1985: "If one wants to organize an armed resistance or an armed
undertaking for any purpose, the best place to get the money, the easy place
to get the guns are in the drug world."
Probably the most disturbing aspect of the entire connection of drugs to the
Bush-Reagan White House's Contra, supply effort is the way Congress dealt
with the issue. For instance, on July 23rd, 1987, Senate and House Select
Committee investigator for the Iran-Contra Affair Robert Bermingham sent a
memo to Co-Chairman Sena-tor Daniel Inouye and Congressman Lee Hamilton,
requesting them to issue a statement stating that the investigative staff
found no direct evidence of Contra- involvement in drug traffick-ing. Yet
Bermingham hadn't even consulted with the investigator on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee looking into the Contra-drug link (Boston Globe, July
29th, 1987).
To their credit, some politicians, like Senator John Kerry, did try to
investigate the matter. He learned that not everyone was as earnest as he was
in getting at the truth. He discovered that Richard Messick, a Republican
staff member of the committee, was believed to be passing documents and
information to the Justice Department (Village Voice, July 14th, 1987).
Messick was also found to be relaying misinformation from the Justice
Department to discredit witnesses before the committee.
The Christic Institute was the only investigation that got even as far as the
courts. Yet its lawsuit was eventually dismissed by a Miami judge as Sheehan
believes, because of intervention by the Justice Department in the judicial
process.
Prior to this decision David Corn wrote an article in The Nation (July 2nd.,
1988) entitled "Is There Really a 'Secret Team'?" which put the entire affair
into perspective. Corn was critical of the effort by the Christic Institute.
He thought Sheehan was trying to do too much: to make a legal point, as well
as to educate the American people of the evils of the national security
-apparatus in order to rally public opposition to it. "These various aims,"
he writes, "though, can collide with one another. The reliance of a Secret
Team may work fine given the confines of a RICO suit. Outside, however, it
may undermine the Christic Institute's broader public education campaign,
which aims to raise questions about 'the national security state and U.S.
foreign policy as a whole."
Corn argues that by ascribing the events in the affidavits as the work of a
"Secret Team," it lets the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and
various Administrations off the hook. For in-' stance, the secret war in Laos
was a massive, "and official, CIA operation with the support of a full range
of U.S. government agencies. It wasn't carried out exclusively by a "secret
team" of covert operators.
Edith Holleman, a Christic Institute lawyer. says that these actions should
be considered nongovernmental because those involved were acting above and
beyond their authority, even if they were employed by the U.S. government.
She believes journalists are making the mistake of not seeing the cas[e] as a
legal finding. "Lawsuits," she adds, "are not history books. They're only
parts of history books. To suggest that these events reflected a pattern of
government action is to look at it from a political scientist or historical
perspective. Are the courtrooms the place to decide the crucial issues of
political analyses?"
Corn wondered whether the individuals in the Secret Team were (are) acting on
behalf of themselves, or the "enterprise" the term which the Christic
Institute eventually began using after it was brought out in the Iran-Contra
hearings or were semi-official agents of the CIA.
"With its advocacy of the Secret Team theory," Corn writes, "the Christic
Institute has painted itself into a corner. If all these ventures are the
handiwork, of a few rogues, there is no reason to worry about the national
security system at large.
What's the remedy for a few bad apples? Better screening of personnel. . . .
If anything like the Secret Team exists, the issue is the system that spawned
it" Corn believes that the guilty party is not the Secret Team, but rather
decisions made by Presidents and Vice Presidents, in most cases, supported by
the entire national security bureaucracy, to employ the Secret Team (The
Nation, January 27th, 1992). The question is whether the system that spawned
it can stamp it out?
A more important question is whether George Bush knew that his office,
through his National Security Advisor, Donald Gregg, was associated with and
jointly, carried out operations together with elements of Latin America's
drug cartel? If so, what does that say about the Reagan-Bush Administration's
so-called "war against drugs"?
pps. 222-257
-----
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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