Bucky promotes Bush assassin specialist, who then assembles team to take assassination to higher levels. Change? Yeah, the bad just got worse.

New US commander in Afghanistan assembles team of assassins

By Bill Van Auken

Confirmed Wednesday as President Barack Obama’s new commander for the widening war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Stanley McChrystal has been given extraordinary powers to assemble his own staff.

According to press reports published Thursday, in forming a permanent war council-dubbed the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell-McChrystal is drawing heavily from a super-secret assassination squad that he commanded under the Bush administration.

That unit, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), was formed in December 1980 in the wake of the military’s abortive operation to free US hostages in Iran. Comprised of the Army’s Delta Force and Navy SEALs, the command directs Special Mission Units that carry out classified operations, often in collaboration with CIA squads.

Commanded by McChrystal between 2003 and 2008, JSOC has been linked to assassinations in over a dozen countries as well as abduction and torture. Under the Bush administration, it was reportedly used to carry out covert operations inside Iran, which included the abduction and assassination of officials suspected of aiding Iraqi militia groups.

Earlier this year, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who is writing a book on the subject, termed the command “an executive assassination wing.” He said that it was tasked with “going into countries...finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.” Hersh added that, under the Bush administration, the unit reported to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.

According to the New York Times, McChrystal “has been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans.” The newspaper attributed the “extraordinary leeway” granted to the general to the Obama administration’s concern over the war, which over the past year has registered the highest levels of violence since the US invasion of the country in October 2001 and has seen the Taliban and other insurgent elements gain control over much of the country.

Citing Pentagon figures, McClatchy News reported, “The first five months of this year have seen a 59 percent increase in insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, a 62 percent increase in coalition deaths and a 64 percent increase in the use of improvised explosives compared to the same period last year.”

Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the sudden ouster of Gen. David McKiernan and his replacement by McChrystal, a move that reflected increasing desperation in Washington. The shakeup followed the findings of a Pentagon task force headed by McChrystal in May that reported in relation to Afghanistan that the “security situation in key areas is poor, stalemated or deteriorating.”

Tapped to serve as McChrystal’s deputy and assigned to oversee day-to-day operations in Afghanistan is Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was chosen last year by Defense Secretary Gates as his personal military assistant. Rodriguez is reportedly a longtime friend and protégé of McChrystal.

McChrystal has selected Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn as his intelligence advisor for Afghanistan, the Times reported. Flynn, who is currently director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, had previously served as McChrystal’s intelligence chief in the shadowy operations of JSOC.

Chosen as commander of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell is the longtime special operations officer Gen. Scott Miller, who as a captain commanded Delta Force troops in the US military’s “Blackhawk Down” debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the so-called coordination cell is “modeled on a system Gen. McChrystal put in place in Iraq, when he commanded the Navy Seals and other Special Operations personnel.”

The units that he commanded in Iraq are reported to have carried out an assassination program in that country aimed at eliminating suspected leaders of Iraqi insurgent groups hostile to the US occupation. Personnel under his command also ran a detention and interrogation center near the Baghdad airport known as Camp Nama, where prisoners were subjected to systematic abuse amounting to torture. The motto of the unit running the camp was “No Blood, No Foul,” meaning that any form of abuse that did not draw blood was acceptable and would not result in investigations or prosecution. Soldiers assigned to the facility have reported that McChrystal was a regular visitor.

Given this background, it is noteworthy that the Democratic-led Senate Armed Services Committee subjected McChrystal to no serious or sustained questioning during his confirmation hearing last week. The committee’s chairman, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, disposed of the torture issue at the outset by helping McChrystal to lay the blame on then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and on orders from Washington.

The right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal gloated over the Democrats’ failure to make an issue out of torture, writing on June 4 that it assumed this was the case “because General McChrystal happens to have been nominated by President Obama, not President Bush.”

In the end, the only obstacle placed in the way of McChrystal’s nomination was general procedural foot-dragging by the Republicans.

To break the logjam, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went to the Senate floor Wednesday and made a dramatic announcement that he had received a telephone call from Adm. Mike Mullen. The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman had told him, Reid said, that McChrystal had to fly to Afghanistan that very night and was “literally waiting by an airplane,” because there was no commander on the ground in Afghanistan.

“Let’s get the man approved tonight so he can go,” Reid said. Senate Republicans responded by moving to confirm McChrystal and two other military nominees.

Media coverage of McChrystal’s confirmation and the changes in war strategy surrounding the creation of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell has centered on innocuous suggestions that the planned rotation of this core group of 400 between the war in Afghanistan and Afghanistan-related planning in Washington would allow these personnel to “accumulate expertise.”

McChrystal’s military career and those of the chief officers he is selecting as his aides, however, suggest that what is being prepared is a dramatic escalation of the killing in Afghanistan, through the utilization of the type of methods employed during Operation Phoenix in Vietnam or the death squad killings during the US intervention in El Salvador.

Speaking to reporters during a flight to a NATO meeting in Brussels, Defense Secretary Gates reiterated the repeated warnings from senior military officials that, as the US continues to build up its forces in Afghanistan to a target of nearly 70,000 troops by the end of the year, the bloodshed will grow accordingly.

“We've been very upfront about the fact that as we send in more troops, and go into areas that have not had an Afghan government or ISAF International Security Assistance Force presence yet, that there will be more combat and the result of that will be more casualties,” Gates said.

In its escalation of the US war in Afghanistan, and its increasing extension across the border into Pakistan, the Obama administration has chosen as its senior commander an officer who is among those most deeply implicated in the criminal operations carried out under Bush and Cheney. This appointment, and its confirmation by the Democratic-controlled Senate, is a clear warning that the ruling establishment in Washington is pursuing a consensus policy that will involve even greater war crimes against the Afghan people, as Washington continues its attempt to assert hegemony in Central Asia by military means.

Original article posted here.

Do I have to tell you that this reeks of black op bullshit? Hope not

Interesting news regarding US cronies in Georgia

Moscow: 'Georgia used foreign soldiers'

Russia's top investigator claims to have evidence that citizens from Nato member states including the US and Turkey fought for Georgia in the five-day war in August.

Asked to list the nationalities of the foreign fighters it believes were involved, Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Prosecutor-General's investigative committee said: "America, the Czech Republic, Chechnya, the Baltic States, Ukraine and Turkey."

"There were also two snipers - one from Ukraine and I believe a Latvian woman" - Alexander Bastrykin"It was a fairly small number of people. They mainly fulfilled support roles", Mr Bastrykin told reporters in Russia's second city of St Petersburg.

Suggesting that some had conducted training for the Georgian armed forces, he said: "There were also two snipers - one from Ukraine and I believe a Latvian woman."

He added that he considered the presence of foreign fighters a criminal offence and would raise the issue at a meeting with representatives of Interpol.

A senior security official in Tbilisi dismissed the statement and said by law only Georgian nationals could serve in the country's armed forces.

Kakha Lomaia, the Secretary of Georgia's National Security Council, said: "The statement that almost half of the world was fighting in our army in August is just a fantasy of those in the Russian leadership who would like to justify killings of the peaceful population."

Russia launched a massive counter-offensive on land and sea in August after Georgian forces tried to retake South Ossetia, a Moscow-backed separatist region that rejects Tbilisi's rule.

Original article posted here.

New version of September Clues

 

 

The never-ending legal charade of 9/11 insider Jacob Kobi Alexander

Namibia: High Court Rules in Alexander's Favour

Government has complied with the High Court ruling, in effect concurring with fugitive Jacob Kobi Alexander's legal team, that a chief of Lower Court is a public ser-vant and not a magi-strate, hence a person occupying that office could not hear cases such as Alexander's extradition case.

Cabinet has now instructed the Ministry of Justice to delete the definition of the chief of Lower Court in the Magistrate Act and substitute it with the proper definition and expressions.

Alexander, wanted in the United States to face 33 criminal charges consisting mostly of counts of fraud, has been fighting extradition to the US since his arrest in Windhoek in September 2006.

Alexander's legal team has to date mounted a successful legal fight, that has been characterised by legal delaying tactics as well as a challenge that parts of the Extradition Act are not constitutional.

The biggest challenge, however, was when Alexander's legal team protested that the Chief of Lower Court, Petrus Unengu, could not hear the extradition case because he is a public ser-vant and not a magistrate. The legal team wanted the case to appear before Uaatjo Uanavi, the magistrate before whom the case was first heard and who granted the N$10 million bail to Alexander in October 2006.

The legal team argued that as a public servant, the chief of Lower Court could neither be nor regarded as independent. The case went before the High Court that ruled in favour of Alexander. The High Court ruled that the concept of judicial independence stands on two inseparable pillars of individual independence and institutional independence, which as such means complete liberty of individual judges and magistrates to hear and decide the cases that come before them.

At its 20th ordinary meeting on October 28, Cabinet, in principle, permitted the Ministry of Justice to make the required amendments. The amendments are "so as to delete the definition of chief of Lower Court to define the expression chief magistrate, to provide for the administrative head of the magistracy, to substitute the expression chief magistrate for the expression chief of Lower Court, wherever it occurs in certain legislation and to provide for incidental matters," a statement from Cabinet said.

It is alleged Alexander committed fraud while he was Chief Executive Officer of the New York-based Comverse Technology, a software and system company he co-founded in the 1980s. Alexander is alleged to have profited illegally through illegal stock option backdating schemes, earning himself nearly US$10 million in profits.

Original article posted here.

Deja vu all over again. CIA setting itself up for another Bay of Pigs, demanding that Obama cede conventional control of military to spooks. Kennedy 2

CIA Wants Obama to ‘Have Its Back’ When Things Go Wrong

By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff

Let’s say that on Jan. 21 a massive car bomb meant for Osama bin Laden goes off in a Pakistani village, killing 120 local citizens but missing the elusive al Qaeda leader, who was riding in another vehicle.

In an elaborate press conference, the president of Pakistan blames the CIA. On an easel next to him is a three-by-five foot photo of the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, who is sent packing.

President Obama, in office for mere hours, finds out that the CIA did, in fact, plant the bomb, based on what it thought was solid intelligence that bin Laden was in the car.

How will the new president react?

That’s much on the mind of intelligence officials awaiting the Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration of Obama, a short-time U.S. senator with no discernable record and little demonstrated interest, so far, in intelligence issues.

“I was with a group of intelligence officers today,” Roger Cressey, a counterterrorism official in the Clinton White House, said on MSNBC Thursday night, “and I think the most important thing for the president to say is, ‘We’ve got your back.’ That ‘we want you to take risks — risks that conform with our law and our values as a country.’

“What the intelligence community is afraid of more than anything is the game of ‘Gotcha,’” Cressey said. “Which is, if they make a mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, the White House doesn’t support them, they’re left out to dry, and Congress crushes them. And then you get into that risk-averse mentality, which we saw for awhile. So that is what they want. They want support, so they know that the president is going to be behind them. But also that he’s going to lead them.”

CIA spokesman George Little parried a query about the agency’s expectations of Obama, but said, “Risk-taking is, of course, an essential and inherent part of what we do.

“CIA officers work hard every day to confront national security challenges, such as terrorism and weapons proliferation, with a level of creativity, agility, and sense of mission that the American people undoubtedly expect — and do so in accord with U.S. law,” Little said.

The bin Laden car bomb scenario, of course, isn’t far fetched.

In Beirut in 1985, the CIA hatched a plot to kill Sheikh Fadlallah, a leading figure in the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement of Lebanon, with a car bomb, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. The bomb killed 80 people, but not Fadlallah.

But the CIA, at least back then, wasn’t adverse to hiring killers.

In 1969, CIA Beirut station chief Robert Ames recruited a spy at the highest levels of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a charismatic terrorist by the name of Ali Hassan Salameh, AKA The Red Prince.

Three years later Salameh was an architect of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.

How would it play out today if something like that came out? Will Obama permit his CIA to recruit a stone-cold al Qaeda killer, not to mention stand by it if something goes wrong?

(The Israelis took care of the Salameh problem by killing him, according to various accounts.)

Or how about this scenario: The CIA, which has been trying to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program, gets caught shipping centrifuges to Iran?

How will the new president react?

Such questions will only be answered when the new president enters the White House and “takes off the gloves,” in one of those tiresome post-9/11 phrases, with the world’s nasty boys.

I have no doubt the Chicago-made man will do it, and be smarter at it than his feckless predecessor.

And when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, that he’ll stand up and take it like a man, as John F. Kennedy did in April 1961, after he green-lighted his predecessor’s ridiculous plan for the CIA to invade Cuba with a force of 1,511 men.

“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” Kennedy said at a White House press conference, adding, “I am the responsible officer of the government.”

But the best favor a President Obama could do for the CIA is to nix such hare-brained schemes before they hatch, as Kennedy later wished he’d done with the Bay of Pigs caper.

For inspiration, he could take a page from the late Sen. Barry Goldwater. In 1985 the colorful Arizonan was presiding over the Senate Intelligence Committee when a CIA official mentioned the agency was thinking about overthrowing the leftist government of Suriname.

Goldwater was incensed. The CIA should be worrying about bigger things than a tiny country in South America.

“That,” Goldwater said, “is the dumbest f***** operation I’ve ever heard of in my life.”

“Do you really need this?” he asked President Reagan.

The idea was dropped.

Obama will need such friends of his own.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Original article posted here.

Never mind reality, al CIAda is STILL coming to getcha!

US facing second wave of 9/11 attacks

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden

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Boy hailed as Buddha's reincarnation

Thousands of people flocked to see a boy who reappeared after missing for more than a year and who some believe is a reincarnation of Buddha.

Al-Qaeda is reportedly planning a terrorist attack against the United States which will "outdo by far" the attacks of September 11 in 2001.

Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi in London reports a senior Yemen official close to Al-Qaeda as warning of a new wave of terror attacks against the western nation.

The source, who is not named, is quoted as being "very close to Al-Qaeda"

The newspaper is edited by Abdel al-Bari Atwan, who was the last journalist to edit Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1996.

The newspaper report, contained on the front page, suggests bin Laden has ordered a large scale attack against the United States which would "outdo by far" the attacks of September 11.

It comes as reports in Britain say there is clear evidence that thousands of extremists are living inside the United Kingdom.

In a message to loyalists, bin Laden is reported to have asked that his followers ignore all efforts to reconcile with Governments and other political parties - in effect keeping extremists isolated.

The newspaper's source said it was likely a sign of an imminent attack may be sent within the coming weeks.

The September 11 attacks against the United States killed nearly 3,000 people.

Original article posted here.

Russia's Pravda breaks the media silence and states the obvious

Al Qaeda does not exist and never has

The basic truth is that Al Qaeda does not exist and never has. Al Qaeda is a manufactured enemy who was created by the Bush Administration in order to have an excuse to wage a war for the control of the world’s oil resources.

Did an American even hear the words “Al Qaeda” before 9-11? Or were we told that its alleged leader Osama Bin Laden has family who themselves have personal business relationships with George W. Bush’s family and that both families had financially profited considerably from the “War on Terror”?

If “Al Qaeda” was such an organized group terrorists as we are being told then why weren’t we the people notified of this evil threat when the US Cole was bombed a few months before 9-11? “Al Qaeda” is nothing more than a broad euphemistic umbrella classification used to group any Middle Eastern fighter under the Sun as an enemy. The most diabolical aspect of this public relations stunt is that it enables the current Administration to label any group it feels necessary to attack to appear to be related to an unprovable organized enemy while at the same time actually increasing its approval ratings by exploiting the basic primal fears of the American public. Furthermore when one realizes the questionable motivations that this Administration has used previously to attack an enemy, as what is now surfacing about the Iraq War, one begins to get the strange feeling that this Orwellian double-speak is nothing more than a smoke and mirror illusion whose true intentions would of made Goebbels himself jealous.

Think about it: How could a bunch of technologically unadvanced group of people from third-world nations such as “Al Qaeda” ever have any real central organization structure? If they had any real organization they would have most certainly attacked us again after September eleventh. Where are all the terrorist cells in this country? Contrary to what has been implicitly presented in the media there HAS NEVER been a single domestic terror cell caught since Bush has been in office! The majority of suspects that have been arrested and detained in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 with the exception of a handful have not been charged with crimes in anyway associated with terrorism. All of their crimes are minor and for the most part are ! related to immigration violations of some sort. There is some ambiguity in all of this though because to this day the Ashcroft Justice Department has been less than forthcoming with the specifics of these arrests. Why would this be the case if the justifications for these arrests were really legitimate? We have been bombarded by the media with every indignity from the duck-tape chronicles to the crop dusting threat. You would think that with all this seeming sensitivity by our government about informing the general populace about possible terror threats, especially when some of their sources came from “unnamed and confidential secondary sources”, that the Ashcroft Justice Department would have gone out of it’s way to mention to the public any terrorist connections that the people detained after 9-11 had and would of sworn by it on a stack of Bibles.

To date the only really suspicious activity of people detained after 9-11 were a group of Israelis who were caught in Jersey City, New Jersey filming themselves in the foreground of the burning World Trade Center with “looks of jubilation on their faces”. It was later confirmed that two of the gentlemen detained had known Mossad ties. While they were detained it is of no matter now as they were subsequently released from jail a few! weeks later and were allowed to go back to Israel with no questions asked by the direct authorization of the Justice Department. I guess they were just dropping off a box of cigars to Governor McGreevy?

What is even more illuminating about all of this is that to this day nobody has taken responsibility for the attacks of 9-11, including “Al Qaeda”. The only thing to link these attacks to anyone is the video tape of Osama Bin Laden that was conveniently found in a cave in Afghanistan that had him talking about the physical structure of the World Trade Center and the plane strike. The audio quality of this tape is so poor that any objective Arab-speaking analyst who was asked to give their opinion was unable to do so! as they claimed that just about all the words on it were inaudible. I believe an objective investigation into this original tape’s authenticity could verify if this admission is in fact genuine and could shed some light on the truth of the existence of “Al Qaeda”. But even if this tape is genuine what would this really prove? As I have already mentioned it is common knowledge that Osama Bin Laden is connected to George W. Bush’s family by a minimum of two degrees of separation. So in the grand scheme of things what does this really matter? That the Cobra Commander said he did it?

In summary, “Al Qaeda” does not exist nor has it ever. If it really existed to anywhere near the extent that we have been told then there would have been an attack on our homeland. Of course this proof of a negative is used by the Administration to justify themselves to the American public that they are doing their jobs, but when one realizes that “Al Qaeda” is really nothing more than an artificially manufactured enemy then what job are they really doing other than capitalizing off of people’s fears? What other issue does the present Administration have to offer the average working-class citizen other than security? And if security is really only a Red Herring platform issue, then of what use are they to begin with? In addition, ! if there were any degree of truth in the strength of “Al Qaeda” or even of their very existence then there would have been a much larger resistance in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. If an organization structure existed within “Al Qaeda” then you would have seen the Iraqi resistance be a much more conventional ! one. They would have had the communication capability and weapons arsenal to mount a more traditional counter-offensive against our troops and they would have been successful doing it because our force’s numbers are so minimal. This would have been a prime opportunity to defeat “the great satan” in front of the entire world. Their motivation to do so would have been so strong that in order for them to of not of done this one must make the quantum leap and conclude that “Al Qaeda” is much to do about nothing and always has been. The emperor is naked and running through the courtyard with a great big barrel of oil.

Original article posted here.

The incontrovertible proof of the 911 controlled demolition -- new video of building 7

After black-slapping about the restoration of democracy, the next civil rights battle will be the ongoing fight for 9/11 Truth. And, make no mistake, the President-elect will be a gatekeeper, not a truth seeker.

For the third time, Japanese parlimentarian, Yukihisa Fujita, challenges 9/11 fairly tale in Japanese Diet

More black ops, false flags and setting up Iraq for the slaying

Abu Nidal, notorious Palestinian mercenary, 'was a US spy' 

Secret papers claim the feared assassin was hired to find links between Saddam and al-Qa'ida. Robert Fisk reports 

Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of The Independent – written by Saddam Hussein's brutal security services for Saddam's eyes only – state that he had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida. 

President George Bush was to use claims of a relationship with al-Qa'ida as one of the reasons for his 2003 invasion, along with Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Western reports were to dismiss Iraq's claim that Abu Nidal committed suicide in August 2002, suggesting that Saddam's own security services murdered him when his presence became an embarrassment for them. The secret papers from Iraq suggest that he did indeed kill himself after confessing to the "treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country". 

The final hours of Abu Nidal, the mercenary whose assassinations and murderous attacks in 20 countries over more than a quarter of a century killed or wounded more than 900 civilians, are revealed in the set of intelligence reports drawn up for Saddam's "presidency intelligence office" in September of 2002. The documents state that Egyptian and Kuwaiti intelligence officers had asked Abu Nidal, whose real name was Khalil al-Banna, to spy for them "with the knowledge of their American counterparts". Five days after his death, Iraq's head of intelligence, Taher Jalil Habbush, told a press conference in Baghdad that Abu Nidal had committed suicide after Iraqi agents arrived at the apartment where he was hiding in the city, but the secret reports make it clear that the notorious Palestinian had undergone a long series of interrogations prior to his violent demise. The records of these sessions were never intended to be made public and were written by Iraqi "Special Intelligence Unit M4" for Saddam. While Abu Nidal may have lied to his interrogators – torture is not mentioned in the reports – the documents appear to be a frank internal account of what the Iraqis believed his mission in Iraq to be. The papers name a Kuwaiti major, a member of the ruling Kuwaiti al-Sabbah family, as his "handler" and state that he was also tasked to "perform terrorist acts inside and outside Iraq". His presence in the country "would provide the Americans with the pretext that Iraq was harbouring terrorist organisations," the reports say. 

"Coded messages indicate that the Kuwaitis asked him indirectly to find out whether al-Qa'ida elements were present in Iraq. Our conclusions were confirmed when he Abu Nidal started to mitigate his actions with irrational answers when asked about the data against him. He attempted to sidetrack his answers by not being specific and referring to historical matters. It was noted by the investigators that he went from short, ambiguous and unclear replies to generalities ... he seemed perturbed ... But once he became convinced of the weight of the evidence against him concerning his collusion with both the American and Kuwaiti intelligence apparatuses in co-ordination with Egyptian intelligence, he realised that his treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country had been exposed ..." 

Abu Nidal was no stranger to Iraq. He had operated from Baghdad, Damascus and the Libyan capital of Tripoli when the regimes wanted to use him as a "gun for hire". It was Iraq which paid him to organise the attack on the Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, in 1982, an attempted assassination which prompted Israel to accuse Yasser Arafat of responsibility and to begin its disastrous invasion of Lebanon, and Colonel Muammur Gaddafi later established a close relationship with Abu Nidal. In 1985, his crazed gunmen attacked Israeli-bound passengers at Rome and Vienna airports, killing a total of 18 people. His biographer Patrick Seale, who suggests that for some time Abu Nidal even worked for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, has written of how, when he feared treachery in his own ranks, a suspected spy would be buried alive, fed through a tube for days and then – if Abu Nidal's "court" deemed death appropriate – a bullet would be fired down the tube. 

His own interrogation at the hands of Saddam's secret police, will therefore appear equally appropriate punishment for so cruel a man. Among the other crimes of which he was accused in the Iraqi intelligence report was the preparation of 14 booby-trapped suitcase bombs to be used on foreigners – Swiss and Austrian, according to the intelligence file – in the northern Kurdish area of Iraq, at the time a US-supported "safe haven", and an attempt to recruit new members for his so-called Fatah Revolutionary Council among Palestinians wounded by the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza who were recovering in Baghdad hospitals. 

There are some oddities in the report and some unanswered questions. It says, for example, that Abu Nidal originally infiltrated Iraq from Iran on a false Yemeni passport years earlier, but that this was facilitated by his own representative in Kuwait, named as Nabil Uthman. Abu Nidal was said to have communicated to Kuwait via coded messages sent through Lebanon and Dubai. The papers give his date of birth as 1939 – he is believed to have been born in Jaffa in what was then Palestine in 1937 – and state that he resided in Libya in 1984 but "had no links with the Libyan authorities". He is also stated to have been imprisoned by the Egyptian security services for two months. The man who is said to have provided Abu Nidal with a "safe house" in Baghdad was interrogated in 2002 alongside the Palestinian and is named as Abdulkareem Mohammed Mustapha. 

Could Abu Nidal really have entered Iraq from Iran, whose own intelligence services, would surely have questioned him? Could Abu Nidal have lived in secret in the Baathist state of Iraq without Saddam's own mukhabarat finding him? And for how long was he interrogated? The documents give us no answers to these questions. 

His end is, however, recorded bleakly. "Upon being asked to accompany those charged with guarding him to a more secure location to continue the interrogation procedures, he requested that he be allowed to change his clothes. On entering his bedroom, he committed suicide. Unsuccessful attempts were made to resuscitate him ..." Nothing is known of the fate of Abdulkareem Mustapha, only that he was "submitted to court". But we do know where Abu Nidal now lies. 

"The corpse of Sabri al-Banna", the final report concludes, "was buried on 29/8/2002 in al-Karakh's Islamic cemetery in Baghdad. Until a final resting place is found, a marker designates the place of burial and it was documented on video as well as on still photographs as 'M7'." No "final resting place" for this savage man appears ever to have been found. 

Years of terror: A man as feared as Bin Laden 

Abu Nidal, was once as feared as Osama bin Laden. His most notorious attacks included: 

• 1978 His "Black June" movement blamed for murdering PLO members in London, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Kuwait and Rome.

• 1982 Israeli ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, shot in Mayfair, leaving him permanently paralysed.

• 1984 Jordanian airliner attacked by rocket on take-off from Athens. Assassinations included the British cultural attaché in Athens and the British deputy high commissioner in Mumbai.

• 1985 Egyptian airliner hijacked – six passengers murdered and 60 killed when the plane is stormed by Egyptian commandos

• 1985 Gunmen massacre 18 and wound 120 in attacks on El Al ticket desks at Vienna and Romeairports, bottom left.

• 1986 Machine-gun attack kills 22 in a synagogue inIstanbul; at least 20 passengers and crew are killed when Pan Am jet hijacked in Karachi, bottom right.

• 1988 Nine killed and 98 wounded when gunmenattack the Greek cruise ship the City of Poros.

Original article posted here.

What we already knew

New Evidence Shows Bush Had No Plan to Catch bin Laden After 9/11

By Gareth Porter

New evidence from former U.S. officials reveals that the George W. Bush administration failed to adopt any plan to block the retreat of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the first weeks after 9/11.

That failure was directly related to the fact that top administration officials gave priority to planning for war with Iraq over military action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

As a result, the United States had far too few troops and strategic airlift capacity in the area to cover the large number of possible exit routes through the border area when bin Laden escaped in late 2001.

Because it had not been directed to plan for that contingency, the U.S. military had to turn down an offer by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in late November 2001 to send 60,000 troops to the border passes to intercept him, according to accounts provided by former U.S. officials involved in the issue.

On Nov. 12, 2001, as Northern Alliance troops were marching on Kabul with little resistance, the CIA had intelligence that bin Laden was headed for a cave complex in the Tora Bora mountains close to the Pakistani border.

The war had ended much more quickly than expected only days earlier. CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, who was responsible for the war in Afghanistan, had no forces in position to block bin Laden's exit.

Franks asked Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, commander of Army Central Command (ARCENT), whether his command could provide a blocking force between al Qaeda and the Pakistani border, according to David W. Lamm, who was then commander of ARCENT Kuwait.

Lamm, a retired Army colonel, recalled in an interview that there was no way to fulfill the CENTCOM commander's request, because ARCENT had neither the troops nor the strategic lift in Kuwait required to put such a force in place. "You looked at that request, and you just shook your head," recalled Lamm, now chief of staff of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.

Franks apparently already realized that he would need Pakistani help in blocking the al Qaeda exit from Tora Bora. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a National Security Council meeting that Franks "wants the (Pakistanis) to close the transit points between Afghanistan and Pakistan to seal what's going in and out," according to the National Security Council meeting transcript in Bob Woodward's book Bush at War.

Bush responded that they would need to "press Musharraf to do that."

A few days later, Franks made an unannounced trip to Islamabad to ask Musharraf to deploy troops along the Pakistan-Afghan border near Tora Bora.

A deputy to Franks, Lt. Gen. Mike DeLong, later claimed that Musharraf had refused Franks' request for regular Pakistani troops to be repositioned from the north to the border near the Tora Bora area. DeLong wrote in his 2004 book Inside Centcom that Musharraf had said he "couldn't do that" because it would spark a "civil war" with a hostile tribal population.

But U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, who accompanied Franks to the meeting with Musharraf, provided an account of the meeting to this writer that contradicts DeLong's claim.

Chamberlin, now president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, recalled that the Pakistani president told Franks that CENTCOM had vastly underestimated what was required to block bin Laden's exit from Afghanistan. Musharraf said, "Look, you are missing the point: There are 150 valleys through which al Qaeda are going to stream into Pakistan," according to Chamberlin.

Although Musharraf admitted that the Pakistani government had never exercised control over the border area, the former diplomat recalled, he said this was "a good time to begin." The Pakistani president offered to redeploy 60,000 troops to the area from the border with India but said his army would need airlift assistance from the United States to carry out the redeployment.

But the Pakistani redeployment never happened, according to Lamm, because it wasn't logistically feasible. Lamm recalled that it would have required an entire aviation brigade, including hundreds of helicopters, and hundreds of support troops to deliver that many combat troops to the border region -- far more than were available.

Lamm said the ARCENT had so few strategic lift resources that it had to use commercial aircraft at one point to move U.S. supplies in and out of Afghanistan.

Even if the helicopters had been available, however, they could not have operated with high effectiveness in the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border region near the Tora Bora caves, according to Lamm, because of the combination of high altitude and extreme weather.

Franks did manage to insert 1,200 Marines into Kandahar on Nov. 26 to establish control of the air base there. They were carried to the base by helicopters from an aircraft carrier that had steamed into the Gulf from the Pacific, according to Lamm.

The Marines patrolled roads in the Kandahar area hoping to intercept al Qaeda officials heading toward Pakistan. But DeLong, now retired from the Army, said in an interview that the Marines would not have been able to undertake the blocking mission at the border. "It wouldn't have worked -- even if we could have gotten them up there," he said. "There weren't enough to police 1,500 kilometers of border."

U.S. troops probably would also have faced armed resistance from the local tribal population in the border region, according to DeLong. The tribesmen in local villages near the border "liked bin Laden," he said, "because he had given them millions of dollars."

Had the Bush administration's priority been to capture or kill the al Qaeda leadership, it would have deployed the necessary ground troops and airlift resources in the area over a period of months before the offensive in Afghanistan began.

"You could have moved American troops along the Pakistani border before you went into Afghanistan," said Lamm. But that would have meant waiting until spring 2002 to take the offensive against the Taliban, according to Lamm.

The views of Bush's key advisers, however, ruled out any such plan from the start. During the summer of 2001, Rumsfeld had refused to develop contingency plans for military action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan despite a National Security Presidential Directive adopted at the Deputies' Committee level in July and by the Principles on Sept. 4 that called for such planning, according to the 9/11 Commission report.

Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz resisted such planning for Afghanistan because they were hoping that the White House would move quickly on military intervention in Iraq. According to the 9/11 Commission, at four deputies' meetings on Iraq between May 31 and July 26, 2001, Wolfowitz pushed his idea to have U.S. troops seize all the oil fields in southern Iraq.

Even after Sept. 11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney continued to resist any military engagement in Afghanistan, because they were hoping for war against Iraq instead.

Bush's top-secret order of Sept. 17 for war with Afghanistan also directed the Pentagon to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq, according to journalist James Bamford's book A Pretext for War.

Cheney and Rumsfeld pushed for a quick victory in Afghanistan in National Security Council meetings in October, as recounted by both Woodward and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Lost in the eagerness to wrap up the Taliban and get on with the Iraq War was any possibility of preventing bin Laden's escape to Pakistan.

Original article posted here.

More on the Anthrax black op: Bruce Ivins KNEW who killer was

Anthrax Suspect E-Mailed Himself About Solving the Case

Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of carrying out the 2001 anthrax attacks, e-mailed himself last year saying he knew who the killer was. According to an FBI affidavit, the e-mail was dated Sept. 2007.

Investigators yesterday unsealed the final search warrants executed against the man who they say is responsible for the 2001 anthrax-by-mail attacks, disclosing that Bruce E. Ivins sent an e-mail to himself last year claiming that he had solved the notorious case.

FBI agents examined several e-mail accounts linked to Ivins, a government bioweapons researcher who has been named by prosecutors as the sole culprit behind the spore-laced letters, which killed five people.

In one September 2007 message, Ivins wrote: "I finally know who mailed the anthrax letters in the fall of 2001. . . . I should have been a private eye!!!"

FBI agent Marlo Arredondo wrote in a sworn statement unsealed yesterday that Ivins sent the message "to/from himself."

After learning that FBI scientists had traced the bacteria to his laboratory, Ivins suggested to agents several other scientists who he said might be responsible for the mailings, documents show.

The e-mails deepen the mystery surrounding Ivins, who died July 29 after an overdose of Tylenol as prosecutors inched closer to charging him with responsibility for the largest bioterrorism attack in U.S. history.

Paul F. Kemp, an attorney for Ivins, said the government has failed to offer a direct link between his client and the anthrax killings. In an e-mail yesterday, Kemp said the unsealed materials contain "no new information . . . even two months after his death."

Also yesterday, fresh details emerged about Ivins's work in the final months of his life. Ivins spilled bacteria from a veterinary strain of anthrax on his pants March 17 but walked home to wash the garment in a bleach solution before reporting the mishap to his supervisors, according to a U.S. Army report.

The incident resulted in Ivins being assigned to "administrative duties" and his badge being deactivated for all areas of the bioweapons lab at Fort Detrick, Md., the report said.

Ivins had been banned from the biological select agents and toxins lab, which houses the most dangerous agents, after the FBI executed search warrants at his house in November. But the March episode, first reported by the Frederick News-Post, resulted in further restrictions and the total lab ban, said Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for the Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Ivins continued to report to work, with interruptions for in-patient alcohol and drug treatment, until July, when a counselor raised alarms about his deteriorating mental health and the Frederick police picked him up at Fort Detrick. In a document released yesterday, federal agents said Ivins had shown a piece of paper to his counselor on which he had worked out the "precise recipe" of alcohol and prescription drugs that would cause his death, based on his body weight.

Several friends and relatives of Ivins, who had led a quiet life in the Maryland suburbs, continue to defend him. And lawmakers have called for additional hearings to test the quality of the government's evidence.

Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) introduced legislation yesterday that would create a national commission to investigate the handling of the case. The panel would determine whether investigators pursued all credible leads, would vet other suspects and would make policy recommendations for future cases.

Senior members of Congress, including two senators who were intended recipients of anthrax letters, have called for Judiciary Committee hearings, but they have not backed Holt's proposal. Yesterday Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) praised Holt's efforts but said establishing a commission would be "premature."

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said this month that the bureau would enlist the National Academy of Sciences to review the scientific breakthroughs that investigators developed to advance the case.

Original article posted here.

The US' cloak of secrecy being pulled off in Bolivia

The Destabilization of Bolivia and the "Kosovo Option" by Michel Chossudovsky

The secession of Bolivia's Eastern provinces is part of a US sponsored covert operation, coordinated out of the US State Department, in liaison with US intelligence. The death squads armed with automatic weapons responsible for killing supporters of Evo Morales in El Porvenir are supported covertly by the US. According to one report, "USAID has an "Office of Transition Initiatives" operating in Bolivia, funneling millions of dollars of training and support to right-wing opposition regional governments and movements."(The Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 2008). The US also provides support through to various opposition groups through the National Endowment for Democracy. The expelled US Ambassador Philip S. Goldberg worked under the helm of Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, who directly oversees the various "activities" of US embassies around the World. In this regard Negroponte plays a far more important role, acting behind the scenes, than Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. He is also known as one of the main architects of regime change and covert support to paramilitary death squads both in Central America and Iraq. Philip S. Goldberg's mandate as ambassador to Bolivia was to trigger the fracture of Bolivia as a country. Prior to his appointment as ambassador in early 2007, he served as US Chief of Mission in Pristina, Kosovo (2004-2006) and was in permanent liaison with the leaders of the KLA paramilitary, who had integrated civilian politics, following the NATO occupation of Kosovo in 1999. Supported by the CIA, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose leaders now head the Kosovar government, was known for its extensive links to organized crime and the trade in narcotics. In Kosovo, Goldberg was involved in setting the stage for the subsequent secession of Kosovo from Serbia, leading to the installation of an "independent" Kosovar government. In the course of the 1990s, Goldberg had played an active role in the break up of Yugoslavia. From 1994-1996 he was responsible for the Bosnia Desk at the State Department. He worked closely with Washington's Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and played a central role as Chief of Staff of the US negotiating team at Dayton, leading up to the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995. These accords were conducive to the carving up of Bosnia-Herzegovina. More generally they triggered the destruction and destabilization of Yugoslavia as country. In 1996, Goldberg worked directly as Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott (1994-2000), who together with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, played a key role in launching the war on Yugoslavia in 1999. The Central Role of John Negroponte Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte plays a central role in the conduct of covert operations. He served as US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. As Ambassador in Tegucigalpa, he played a key role in supporting and supervising the Nicaraguan Contra mercenaries who were based in Honduras. The cross border Contra attacks into Nicaragua claimed some 50 000 civilian lives. During the same period, Negroponte was instrumental in setting up the Honduran military death squads, "operating with Washington support's, [they] assassinated hundreds of opponents of the US-backed regime." (See Bush Nominee linked to Latin American Terrorism, by Bill Vann, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/VAN111A.html): "Under the rule of General Gustavo Alvarez Martnez, Honduras's military government was both a close ally of the Reagan administration and was "disappearing" dozens of political opponents in classic death squad fashion. (See Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors by Peter Roff and James Chapin,http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html This did not prevent his nomination to the position of US Permanent Representative to the UN under the Clinton administration. The Salvador Option Negroponte became Ambassador to Iraq in 2004, where he set up a "security framework" for the US occupation, largely modeled on the Central American death squads. This project was referred to by several writers as the "Salvador Option". While in Baghdad, Negroponte hired as his Counselor on security issues, a former head of special operations in El Salvador. The two men were close colleagues going back to the 1980s in Central America. While Negroponte was busy setting up the death squads in Honduras, Colonel Steele had been in charge of the US Military Advisory Group in El Salvador, (1984-86) "where he was responsible for developing special operating forces at brigade level during the height of the conflict.": "These forces, composed of the most brutal soldiers available, replicated the kind of small-unit operations with which Steele was familiar from his service in Vietnam. Rather than focusing on seizing terrain, their role was to attack ‘insurgent’ leadership, their supporters, sources of supply and base camps." (Max Fuller, For Iraq, "The Salvador Option" Becomes Reality, Global Research, June 2005) In Iraq, Steele was "assigned to work with a new elite Iraqi counter-insurgency unit known as the Special Police Commandos". In this context, Negroponte's objective was to encourage ethnic divisions and factional strife, by triggering covert terrorist attacks directed against the Iraqi civilian population. Negroponte was appointed as the Head of the Directorate of National Intelligence in 2005, and subsequently in 2007 came to occupy the Number Two position in the State Department. The Kosovo Option: Haiti This is not the first time that the "Kosovo model" of supporting terrorist paramilitaries has been applied in Latin America. In February 2003, Washington announced the appointment of James Foley as Ambassador to Haiti. Ambassadors Goldberg and Foley are part of the same "diplomatic stable". Foley had been a State Department spokesman under the Clinton administration during the war on Kosovo. He was involved at an earlier period in channeling support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Amply documented, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was financed by drug money and supported by the CIA. ( See Michel Chossudovsky, Kosovo Freedom Fighters Financed by Organized Crime, Covert Action Quarterly, 1999 ) At the time of the Kosovo war, the then ambassador to Haiti James Foley had been in charge of State Department briefings, working closely with his NATO counterpart in Brussels, Jamie Shea. Barely two months before the onslaught of the NATO led war on 24 March 1999, James Foley, had called for the "transformation" of the KLA into a respectable political organization: "We want to develop a good relationship with them [the KLA] as they transform themselves into a politically-oriented organization,' ..`[W]e believe that we have a lot of advice and a lot of help that we can provide to them if they become precisely the kind of political actor we would like to see them become... "If we can help them and they want us to help them in that effort of transformation, I think it's nothing that anybody can argue with..' (quoted in the New York Times, 2 February 1999) In other words, Washington's design was "regime change": topple the Lavalas administration and install a compliant US puppet regime, integrated by the "Democratic Platform" and the self-proclaimed Front pour la libération et la reconstruction nationale (FLRN), whose leaders are former FRAPH and Tonton Macoute terrorists. (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Haiti, Global Research, February 2004) Following the 2004 coup d'Etat which led to the downfall of the Aristide government, KLA advisers were brought into Haiti by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to assist in the country's reconstruction. (See Anthony Fenton, Kosovo Liberation Army helps establish "Protectorate" in Haiti, Global Research, November 2004) Specifically, the KLA consultants were to assist in restructuring the Haitian police force, bringing into its ranks, former members of FRAPH and the Tonton Macout. [In support of] the "Office of Transition Initiatives," (OTI) ... USAID is paying three consultants to help consult for the integration of the former brutal military into the current Haitian police force. And who are those three consultants? Those three consultants are members of the Kosovo Liberation Army." (Flashpoints interview, November 19, 2004, www.flashpoints.net ) The Salvador/ Kosovo option is part of a US strategy to fracture and destabilize countries. The USAID sponsored OTI in Bolivia performs much the same function as a similar OTI in Haiti. The stated purpose of US covert operations is to provide covert support as well as as training to "Liberation Armies" ultimately with a view to destabilizing sovereign governments. In Kosovo, the training of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the 1990s had been entrusted to a private mercenary company, Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI), on contract to the Pentagon. It is worth noting that in Pakistan, recent developments point towards direct forms of US military intervention, in violation of Pakistani sovereignty. Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA forecast a "Yugoslav-like fate" for Pakistan "in a decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries, as seen recently in Balochistan." (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005). According to a 2006 report of Pakistan's Senate Committee on Defence, British intelligence was involved in supporting the Balochistan separatist movement. (Press Trust of India, 9 August 2006). The Bolochistan Liberation Army (BLA) bears a canny resemblance to Kosovo's KLA, financed by the drug trade and supported by the CIA. Washington favors the creation of a "Greater Balochistan" [similar to a Greater Albania] which would integrate the Baloch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly the Southern tip of Afghanistan, thereby leading to a process of political fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan, December 30, 2007)

Global Research Articles by Michel Chossudovsky

Peter Dale Scott on the CIA, drugs and covert operations

Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection

by Peter Dale Scott

Introduction

Recently I published two articles pointing to suggestive similarities between the recurring deep events in recent American history – those events which, because of their intelligence aspects, are ignored, misrepresented, or covered up in the American media. The first article pointed to overall similarities in many deep events since World War II. The second pointed to surprising points of comparison in the two deep events which were followed shortly by major U.S. wars: the John F. Kennedy assassination and 9/11. In the background of all these events, I suggested, was recurring evidence of the milieu "combining intelligence officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld."

In this essay I shall first attempt to lay out the complex geography or network of that milieu, which I call the global drug connection, and its connections to what has been called an "alternative" or "shadow" CIA. I shall then show how this network, of banks, financial agents of influence, and the alternative CIA, contributed to the infrastructure of the Kennedy assassination and a series of other, superficially unrelated, major deep events.

In this narrative, the names of individuals, their institutions, and their connections are relatively unimportant. What matters is to see that such a milieu existed; that it was on-going, well-connected, and protected; and that, with increasing independence from governmental restraint, it played a role in major deep events in the last half century.

This of course strengthens the important hypothesis to be investigated, that this on-going milieu may also have contributed to the disaster of 9/11.

Paul Helliwell, OPC, and the CIA

In areas where Communist forces have appeared strong, the United States, at least since 1945, has resorted repeatedly to supportive counterviolence from mobsters involved in the drug traffic. At first, as in post-war Italy, these arrangements were temporary and ad hoc, as when Vito Genovese, a New York mafia leader, was installed as interpreter in the Allied Military Government office of Col. Charles Poletti, a former New York Tammany politician. Then in 1947 William Donovan, now a corporate lawyer and no longer the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), reportedly financed a May Day massacre of leftists in Sicily, organized by the recently deported Detroit mafia figure Frank Coppola.

Such arrangements became more centralized in 1948, after the newly created National Security Council created an Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) to carry out "subversion against hostile states" – i.e., conduct law-breaking as national policy. Thanks to OPC, the U.S. began giving significant covert support to organized drug-traffickers around the world, in the Far East, Europe, and eventually the Middle East and Latin America.

These world-wide activities became more and more inter-related. Since at least 1950 there has been a global CIA-drug connection operating more or less continuously. Especially with the passage of time, this connection has contributed to unexplained deep events and the consolidation of the global dominance mentality, at home as well as abroad. More specifically, the global drug connection is a factor underlying such unexplained deep events as the JFK assassination, the second Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, and Iran-Contra.

The global drug connection is not just a lateral connection between CIA field operatives and their drug-trafficking contacts. It is more significantly a global financial complex of hot money uniting prominent business, financial and government as well as underworld figures. It maintains its own political influence by the systematic supply of illicit finances, favors and even sex to politicians around the world, including leaders of both parties in the United States. The result is a system that might be called indirect empire, one that, in its search for foreign markets and resources, is satisfied to subvert existing governance without imposing a progressive alternative.

One significant organizer of the post-war global drug connection -- between CIA, organized crime, and their mutual interest in drug-trafficking -- was former OSS officer Paul L.E. Helliwell. Helliwell, who was head of the Special Intelligence branch of OSS in Kunming, and later an officer of OPC and the CIA, was simultaneously the owner of the Bank of Perrine in Key West, Florida, "a two-time laundromat for the Lansky mob and the CIA," and its sister Bank of Cutler Ridge. Here we shall see a number of interrelated mob-CIA money-laundering banks in the global drug connection, of which the greatest was undoubtedly the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

Most people have never heard of Paul Helliwell. Mainstream books about CIA wrongdoings, like Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, make no mention of him, of his important CIA-related bank, Castle Bank in the Bahamas, or for that matter of an even more important successor bank to Castle, BCCI. In the flood of CIA documents released since 1992, one does not find the name of Helliwell in the archival indices of the National Archive, the National Security Archive, or the Federation of American Scientists. In the million declassified pages stored and indexed on the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, Helliwell’s name appears exactly once – and that is on a list of documents that were withheld from review during the CIA’s search in 1974 for records concerning, of all things, Watergate! This silence, even in internal CIA files, about the principal architect of the post-war CIA-drug connection, is eloquent.

Most of what we know about Helliwell derives from the press reaction to the successful CIA effort to block an IRS investigation in the 1970s, known as Operation Tradewinds, of his money-laundering banks. This struggle with Helliwell and the CIA began in 1972, when IRS investigator Richard Jaffe, tracing the funds of arrested marijuana and LSD dealer Allan George Palmer, learned that Palmer "had personally brought some of his money south to the Perrine-Cutler Ridge Bank for deposit."

Jaffe learned also that the funds had been deposited in the account of a Bahamian entity called Castle Bank. According to Jim Drinkhall in the Wall Street Journal, this bank was "set up and principally controlled" by Helliwell, who "was instrumental in helping to direct a network of CIA undercover operations and ‘proprietaries.’" Drinkhall wrote that the CIA shut down Jaffe’s investigation of the Castle Bank because Castle

was the conduit for millions of dollars earmarked by the CIA for the funding of clandestine operations against Cuba and for other covert intelligence operations directed at countries in Latin America and the Far East.

Drinkhall further noted what Helliwell is probably most famous for (and what I have written about in The War Conspiracy):

In 1951, Mr. Helliwell helped set up and run Sea Supply Corp., a concern controlled by the CIA as a front. For almost 10 years, Sea Supply was used to supply huge amounts of weapons and equipment to 10,000 Nationalist Chinese [KMT] troops in Burma as well as to Thailand’s police.

But Drinkhall did not point out what is now not disputed, that both the KMT troops in Burma and the Thai Police were the two main arms of the CIA-KMT-Burma-Thai drug connection, and were involved together in the growth and trafficking of opium for the world market, including the United States.

Helliwell’s favors for the CIA were not restricted to the Far East. Along with two old associates from the KMT-Burma drug connection, Frank Wisner of the CIA and General Claire Chennault of the CIA’s airline CAT, Helliwell "also worked CIA operations in Central America as early as 1953-54. In those days, the target was Guatemala and its government."

Like Chennault and his old associates from his days in China, Whiting Willauer and William Pawley, Helliwell then assisted the CIA in operations against Guatemala in 1954, and after 1960 against Castro. According to Drinkhall,

One former federal official who helped scrutinize Castle says, "Castle was one of the CIA’s finance channels for operations against Cuba." Mr. Helliwell reputedly was one of the paymasters for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, as well as for other "extensive" CIA operations throughout Latin America.

As for ex-convict Wallace Groves’ connection to the CIA, a number of CIA documents have since been released that confirm this relationship. According to one of them,

The Wallace GROVES, mentioned in the attachments as being connected with Meyer LANSKY and the Mary Carter Paint Co./Resorts International, Inc., is identical with the Wallace GROVES who is the subject of OS file #473 865. This file reflects that from April 1966 to April 1972, GROVES was of interest to the [CIA] Office of General Counsel for the utilization of GROVES as an advisor or possible officer of one of the Project ████ entities. Additional information in this file would suggest that GROVES was connected with Meyer LANSKY.

I suspect that these "Project ████ entities" involved the use of off-the-books funds not included in the authorized CIA budget.

Helliwell’s Connection to Off-the-Books Operations

Since the publication of Drinkhall’s article, almost every reference to Helliwell has described him as a paymaster for the Bay of Pigs, a claim which I am about to question. But a sense of the scale of Helliwell’s financial involvement with the CIA can be gathered from the CIA’s sequestering of almost $5 million from another Helliwell-related entity, Intercontinental Diversified (I.D.C.). Drinkhall again:

"Although there is no reference to the CIA in the SEC proceeding concerning Intercontinental, a former CIA official in a recent interview made an astonishing statement. He said that between 1970 and 1976, almost $5 million of Intercontinental funds was siphoned out for the agency’s use "because we had friends there." Indeed the CIA apparently had a better arrangement than mere friendship. CIA documents show that Wallace Groves, the founder of Intercontinental and holder of 46% of its shares until he sold his interest for $33.1 million in 1978, was secretly working for the CIA from 1965 to 1972."

Assuredly bankers do not transfer millions of dollars out of friendship. A more credible speculation is that Helliwell was the paymaster, not for officially authorized operations such as the Bay of Pigs, but for dispensing some of the funds from off-the-books operations such as the KMT drug traffic out of Burma supported by his own creations, the CIA proprietaries Sea Supply and Cat Inc. (later Air America).

Jonathan Marshall once wrote categorically that "Helliwell laundered CIA funds through the Bahamas-based Castle Bank." But this claim may require clarification. I.D.C. was a spinoff from an Asian company, Benguet Mining, that was represented by Helliwell’s firm and partly owned by the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Thus payments from Asia reached I.D.C., and it is my speculation that it was these off-the-books funds, rather than funds from the congressionally authorized CIA budget, that were used by Helliwell to finance off-the-books operations.

One of these may have been political payoffs, starting in the Bahamas itself.

In the early 1970s, IRS agents reported evidence, gleaned from taped conversations, that Intercontinental, operating through Castle Bank, had paid Bahamas Prime Minister Lyndon O. Pindling $100,000 to grant the holding company a two-year extension of its [Grand Bahama] casino gambling license.

But the CIA as well as the casino had a penchant for corruption, and Castle was only one part of a network of banks and agents corrupting governments worldwide. Thus Castle

also did mysterious transactions with a Cayman Islands firm, ID Corp. ID’s sole owner, the American Shig Katayama, became know as one of the key facilitators of Lockheed Corp.’s huge payoffs to Japanese politicians in return for airplane contracts. Of Katayama one Japanese journalist charged, "his real job (in the early 1950s) was to handle narcotics for the U.S. intelligence work."

By the 1960s if not earlier, the CIA was using its global connection to distribute non-governmental funds through agents of influence like Adnan Khashoggi and Yoshio Kodama, in the form, for example, of payoffs added into international Lockheed sales contracts. In May 1965, five months before the anti-Sukarno coup of September 1965, Lockheed payoffs in Indonesia were redirected from a supporter of President Sukarno to a new middleman who was backing the anti-Sukarno General Suharto.

This was at a time when "Congress had agreed to treat U.S. funding of the Indonesian military (unlike aid to any other country) as a covert matter, restricting congressional review of the president's determinations on Indonesian aid to two Senate committees, and the House Speaker, who were concurrently involved in oversight of the CIA." Thus, Lockheed payments passed through middlemen were used to frustrate the expressed will of the U.S. Senate, which passed a resolution to cut off military aid to Indonesia altogether.

Helliwell’s Connections to the Mob

But if Helliwell’s CIA connections were big-time, his connections to the mob, and particularly Meyer Lansky, were no less so. The Bank of Perrine was the preferred depository of Lansky funds reaching America from the Bank of World Commerce in the Bahamas, established by Lansky’s point man John Pullman in 1961. One of the bank’s directors was Alvin Malnik, Lansky’s heir in Miami Beach, and a stockholder was Ed Levinson, a business partner of Lyndon Johnson’s Senate aide Bobby Baker, whose title, before he was arrested and convicted for tax evasion, was the Secretary of the Democratic Majority in the U.S. Senate. Helliwell had a second Lansky connection as legal counsel for the small Miami National Bank, used by Meyer Lansky to launder his foreign profits and skim from the Las Vegas casinos.

Though usually described as a mob bank controlled by Lansky, the Bank of World Commerce opened on to an international scene in which the CIA had an interest. Funds reached it from the International Credit Bank in Switzerland, which had been founded by the Israeli gunrunner Tibor Rosenbaum, and acted

as banker to joint business ventures of European Jews and the state of Israel. But it also financed the acquisition and movement of weapons to Israel and its allies, particularly in Africa and central America, and reputedly acted as paymaster for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, in Europe.

According to Alan Block, Pullman’s bank had another subsidiary in the Bahamas, "united in some shadowy way with Intra Bank in Beirut, Lebanon." Intra owned the Casino de Liban, "whose gambling concession was controlled by Marcel Paul Francisi, France’s top heroin dealer. Some investigators were convinced that Lansky and Francisi were partners in heroin racketeering, and that Lansky and his associates had a piece of the casino as well." Francisi in turn teamed with a local Lebanese exporter of morphine base, Sami El Khoury, who in turn had "a long-term business relationship" with Lucky Luciano in Sicily, Lansky’s pre-war ally in New York City and now a major European trafficker.

Sami El Khoury had protection from the Lebanese police, and possibly the CIA as well. Alfred McCoy saw official correspondence of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) discussing, in August 1963, "whether to use Sami El Khoury as an informant now that he had been released from prison." One of the two FBN correspondents, Dennis Dayle, later told James Mills that El Khoury, "among the top international traffickers of all time," did become an informant. And in the 1990s Dennis Dayle, having retired as a top DEA investigator in the Middle East, told an anti-drug conference that "in my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA."

The Castle Bank was yet another "dual purpose laundromat" serving both the CIA and the mob. The mob’s interest in Castle was seriously understated in Jim Drinkhall’s Wall Street Journal article, which mentioned only that among a lengthy list of account holders at Castle were "three men – Morris Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, and Samuel A. Tucker – who have been described in Justice Department documents as organized crime figures." (Kleinman and Helliwell had numerous real estate investments in common with Burton Kanter, the Chicago lawyer who with Helliwell organized Castle Bank.)

Alan Block suggests that in fact Castle became an active bank when it was necessary rapidly to transfer funds from Mercantile Bank and Trust in the Bahamas, another Helliwell bank that, "like Castle…was a conduit for CIA money," and was about to go under. The funds were moved "at the vigorous urging" of Kanter,

because among the accounts in peril was one held by Morris Kleinman, a notorious organized crime figure since the days of Prohibition. On this matter, Castle’s president, Sam Pierson…stated it had to be done or "Kanter will end up face down in the Chicago River."

Kanter seems to have specialized in handling the tax aspects of legitimating mob wealth. In addition to founding Castle Bank with Helliwell, he was "energetically at work in California" on the La Costa real estate development, which also involved former Cleveland syndicate member Moe Dalitz, "a part owner of several gambling casinos, including the Desert Inn and the Stardust Hotel." Block links Kanter to La Costa’s ability to receive major funding from the corrupt Teamsters Central States Pension Fund: "Kanter’s access to the Pension Fund likely came from Allen Dorfman, a friend and business associate. Murdered in 1985 to prevent him from talking about mob investments, Dorfman was an important Fund official and racketeer."

The CIA, the Mob, and Off-the-Books Operations

Helliwell was not the only CIA connection to the mafia, nor the most highly placed. Plots to assassinate Castro in 1960 were initiated from the CIA’s Office of Security through a go-between, Robert Maheu, whose independent business had been launched with the help of an Office of Security retainer. It was Maheu who transmitted the CIA assassination proposal to John Roselli.

A more on-going relationship to the mob was maintained by the CIA’s Counterintelligence (CI) Staff Chief, James Angleton. He too used a go-between--the New York lawyer Mario Brod--who, according to a CIA memo, was a CI Staff agent in New York City from 1952 to 1971. One of the sensitive CI Staff agents handled by Brod in New York was Jay Lovestone, the AFL-CIO International Affairs Chief who transmitted funds to strong-arm gangs in Marseille allied with Corsican drug traffickers who were part of the Lansky-Luciano global drug connection.

According to Doug Valentine, Lovestone’s assistant Irving Brown was implicated in drug smuggling activities in Europe, at the same time that he used CIA money to establish

a "compatible left" labor union in Marseilles with Pierre Ferri-Pisani. On behalf of Brown and the CIA, Ferri-Pisani (a drug smuggler connected with Marseilles crime lord Antoine Guerini), hired goons to shellack striking Communist dock workers.

Lovestone, a former Communist turned militant anti-Communist, together with his mentor David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, had also fought the creation of the more militant CIO union movement in the 1930s, and the United Auto Workers of Walter and Victor Reuther in particular. The rival UAW-AFL, which Lovestone favored, turned to mobsters for muscle, and hired as its New York regional director John Dioguardi, a member of the Lucchese mafia family. Dioguardi was later blamed by U.S. Attorney Paul Williams for the blinding of labor journalist Victor Riesel and the subsequent murder of the man who threw acid in Riesel’s face.

Another sensitive agent handled by CI Staff agent Brod, Angleton’s go-between with the mob, was the Russian defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, whom Angleton segregated from the regular CIA bureaucracy in his unending search for a high-level mole inside the CIA. Angleton (according to his biographer Tom Mangold) was "quietly building an alternative CIA," with its own communication system, archive, and vault, using very dubious information from Lovestone and Golitsyn. The heart of this alternative CIA was CI’s "inner sanctum: the super-secret Special Investigation Group" (CI/SIG), where were assembled files to show that Henry Kissinger and Averell Harriman were possible KGB moles.

A third sensitive agent handled by Brod was Herbert Itkin, a controversial double agent working with the mob on the one hand, and CIA and FBI on the other. But like Itkin, Brod himself "had contacts with the Mafia." A CIA flap occurred in 1970 when Itkin was being used by the Justice Department and FBI to prosecute a number of mob figures with one-time connections to Havana, such as James Plumeri, Ed Lanzieri, and Sam Mannarino, for illegal kickback arrangements with the Teamsters. The U.S. Attorney telephoned the CIA’s Legal Counsel to advise that Mario Brod had entered the courtroom in order to work with the defense.

According to Court records, "The defense sought to call Mario Brod, who was described as Itkin's contact with the Central Intelligence Agency. It was stated that Brod would testify that he would not believe Itkin under oath and that Itkin's reputation for truthfulness was bad." The CIA’s Legal Counsel concurred with the U.S. Attorney’s steps to block Brod from testifying. His office noted Brod’s explanation of his behavior for the record: "One of the defendants by the name of Lenzieri [(sic), i.e., Edward the Buff Lanzieri] was Brod’s only contact inside the Mafia who would alert Brod if he was in personal danger."

But Brod may have been acting out of more than self-interest, for it has been suggested that some of the mafia defendants in the kickback trials also had a deeper CIA connection, even if off the books. According to Dan Moldea, two of the defendants, John La Rocca and Gabriel Mannarino, had been involved in Cuban gunrunning operations with Hoffa; and he suggests that Hoffa persuaded La Rocca and Mannarino, along with two other kickback defendants (Salvatore Granello and James "Jimmy Doyle" Plumeri), "to cooperate with the agency." Moreover, all of the defendants in the kickback trials where Itkin testified, and Brod tried to intervene for the defense, were members of so-called "paper locals" in the Teamsters (and earlier the UAW-AFL), controlled by Plumeri’s nephew, John Dioguardi.

In June 1975, six months after the leak about Angleton and Operation CHAOS that led to Angleton’s ouster, Time magazine alleged that the CIA had used Brod’s mafia contacts, Plumeri and Granello, "to do some spying in Cuba in preparation for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion." (I have found no corroboration for Time’s claim in released CIA documents.)

Like Brod, Angleton himself allegedly had mafia contacts, and on at least one occasion intervened to prevent another part of the CIA from investigating the banking of illegal Lansky skim from Las Vegas. A senior official in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department asked John Whitten, the CIA’s one time chief of the Mexico/Panama desk in Western Hemisphere Division, to investigate numbered bank accounts in Panama because Las Vegas gamblers were using them to smuggle cash, "which they skimmed off the top of their daily take." Using his CIA pseudonym "John Scelso," Whitten testified to the Church Committee about Angleton’s actions.

At that time we were in an excellent position to do this…. I thought it was a great idea. And promptly this came to Mr. Angleton’s attention, and we had to brief him on it, and he said, well, we’re not going to have anything to do with this. This is the Bureau’s [FBI’s] business. And whammo, end of conversation. We were called off. I went to Colonel J.C. King, who was at that time the Chief of the WH Division, and told him this, and J.C. King said….well, you know, Angleton has these ties to the Mafia, and he is not going to do anything to jeopardize them. And then I said, I didn’t know that. And he said, yeah, it had to do with Cuba.

Angleton’s defense of Lansky’s skim cannot be separated from his second function in the CIA, as handler of the Israel desk. Angleton’s connections with Mossad dated back to World War II, when he had coordinated OSS operations in Italy with the Jewish underground headed locally by Teddy Kollek (later Israel’s Mayor of Jerusalem).

Angleton’s "Alternative CIA" and Its Legacy

Moreover CI/SIG, the "inner sanctum" of Angleton’s "alternative CIA," affected U.S. history significantly in 1963. Its so-called 201 or "personality" file on "Lee Henry Oswald" (the man known to the world as Lee Harvey Oswald), had been filled with false and falsified information since it was opened in December 1960. And two messages in the 201 file were falsified again in October 1963, in such a way as to allow Oswald to be a credible "designated suspect" in the assassination of John F. Kennedy one month later.

The falsification of Oswald’s 201 file may have originated as a legitimate counterintelligence operation. I have argued that the uniquely falsified messages were part of a so-called "marked card" or "barium meal" test to determine if and where leaks of sensitive information were occurring. This was a familiar technique, and was the responsibility of the CI/SIG, which was responsible for the 201 file.

But by October 1963 we see signs that CIA cables on Oswald were also being manipulated, in order to enable him to become a designated suspect in the November 22 assassination of President Kennedy. A CIA teletype to the FBI in October 1963 (drafted by a CI/SIG officer) withheld the obviously significant information that Oswald had reportedly met in Mexico City with a Soviet Vice-Consul, Valeriy Kostikov, believed by CIA officers to be an officer of the KGB. This withholding helped ensure that Oswald would not be subjected to surveillance by the FBI after the alleged encounter, surveillance which presumably could have limited his ability to become a designated suspect by his presence at a particularly sensitive corner in Kennedy’s Dallas parade route. I have argued that similar CIA withholding from the FBI of information about two alleged 9/11 hijackers, Nawaz al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdar, likewise made it possible for them to play the role of designated suspects by preventing FBI surveillance, as well.

CIA Director William Colby forced Angleton to resign from the CIA in the post-Watergate climate of December 1974, following public revelations about Angleton’s involvement in the CIA’s possibly illegal Operation CHAOS (the surveillance of Americans in the United States). This spelled the end of Angleton’s "alternative CIA" in the Counterintelligence Staff. For about another year leaks like the one we saw about CIA links to Brod’s mobsters continued to expose (and in this way help terminate) the morass of CIA links to Cuban exile terrorists and other members of the global drug connection.

But in 1976 the climate changed dramatically, after Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the so-called "Halloween massacre" (managed from President Ford’s White House) replaced CIA Director Colby with George H.W. Bush, and sent Rumsfeld from the White House to be Secretary of Defense. If 1975 was the post-Watergate year of dramatic disclosures about CIA involvement with Cuban exiles and mobsters in assassination efforts, 1976 was the year in which mob-connected Cuban exiles and the Chilean intelligence agency DINA, both involved in drug trafficking, indulged in a wave of terrorist killings. These included the blowing up of a civilian Air Cubana airliner and the assassination in Washington of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier.

However, the CIA was now no longer the sole or perhaps even the chief point of U.S. contact with the DINA-sponsored international Operation CONDOR, which carried out multiple killings. U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White, a career State Department official whose antipathy to these murders cost him his job after Reagan was elected, heard from the Paraguayan Armed Forces Commander that "intelligence chiefs from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay used ’an encrypted system within the U.S. [military] telecommunications net[work],’ which covered all of Latin America, to ‘coordinate intelligence information.’"

Henry Kissinger, who in 1976 was in his last year as Secretary of State, played at best an equivocal role vis-à-vis this wave of right-wing violence. Before lecturing Chile publicly in Santiago for its human rights violations ("The condition of human rights…has impaired our relationship with Chile and will continue to do so."), Kissinger privately assured Pinochet that he was compelled by U.S. politics to say this, and that in fact his main concern was the move in the U.S. Congress to cut off aid to Chile.

U.S. protection and even support for the terrorists of 1976 has continued to the present day. Luis Posada Carriles, the principal architect of the Air Cubana bombing, "served prison time in Venezuela for the Cubana bombing;" and "later, in the 1980s, he worked again on behalf of the CIA in Central America, helping to coordinate the Contra supply network." Posada was arrested and convicted again in Panama in 2000 for an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro, this time with Guillermo Novo, one of Letelier’s murderers. Both men were promptly pardoned by Panama’s outgoing president. In May 2008, Posada was honored by 500 fellow Cuban Americans at a sold-out gala in Miami, after charges against him for illegal entry into the United States were thrown out by a federal judge in Texas.

CIA Director Bush also promoted Theodore Shackley, who for years had handled the CIA’s maverick Cuban exiles in Miami. According to Kevin Phillips,

In late 1976, Bush had also protected wayward or hot-triggered Agency operatives – veterans of everything from Chilean assassinations to Vietnam’s Phoenix Program and improper domestic surveillance – from indictment by President Ford’s Justice Department.

But the spirit of post-Watergate restraint returned to the CIA under President Carter and his CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner. Thanks largely to a series of leaks about his friend, Edwin Wilson, Shackley’s standing in the CIA diminished until he left in 1978.

However, it is the argument of William Corson and Joseph Trento that the spirit of an alternative and more activist CIA survived under Shackley in exile. Trento writes that Shackley was supported by the Shah of Iran’s Safari Club (see below), and by Richard Helms, U.S. Ambassador to Iran. The regular CIA Station Chief in Iran "repeatedly complained that Helms seemed to be running his own intelligence operations out of the embassy," and that CIA veterans who had worked under CIA officer Theodore Shackley, "formed the cadre of a private, shadow spy organization within America’s official intelligence service."



Helliwell, Castle, and the Overworld

We have not yet dealt with the overworld connections of Castle Bank. The most affluent depositors there "were members of the fabulously rich Pritzker family from Chicago, clients of the Kanter firm." Block observes that the Pritzkers, whose vast holdings include the Hyatt hotel chain, also obtained a loan from the Teamsters Pension Fund for a hotel-casino investment in Nevada, and that "Jimmy Hoffa and Allen Dorfman worked personally on Pritzker loans."

Kanter and Castle Bank also planned developments with other members of the overworld, such as Henry Ford II and his wife, Christina. Mercantile, the predecessor bank to Castle, represented investments from two shipping magnates: the billionaire Daniel K. Ludwig, and the extremely wealthy Norwegian shipbuilder Inge Gordon Mosvold, who was perhaps fronting for Ludwig.

Mercantile and Castle interlocked closely with another Helliwell Bahamas bank, eventually called Underwriters Bank, Limited. Here the majority holder with 95 percent was the American insurance conglomerate American International Underwriters Corp. [AIUC], which began as part of the insurance empire headed by former OSS agent C.V. Starr, and is today part of the giant multinational AIG. Block correctly reports that AIUC "was an insurance conglomerate with suspected ties to the C.I.A. in Southeast Asia."

I have written elsewhere how the C.V. Starr group was represented in Washington by Thomas ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran, and headed after World War II by Corcoran’s former law partner, William S. Youngman. It thus interlocked with the so-called Chennault circle (or Chennault’s "Washington squadron"), the powerful cabal put together with Roosevelt’s blessing in 1940 to enable the equipment, staffing, and financial support of General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers in China.

Corcoran had been a key figure in Washington since the 1930s, when he headed "FDR’s informal intelligence service and international spy operations long before there was an OSS." By the 1950s, when he was said by Fortune to maintain "the finest intelligence service in Washington," his lobbying activities had become intimately involved with influencing CIA covert operations:

Most of [his clients] are companies with international interests and he has a choice clientele in this field. It includes United Fruit Co., American International Underwriters Corp. (part of the C. V. Starr interests in Asia and elsewhere) and General Claire Chennault’s Civil Air Transport, Inc. In late 1951 Corcoran, for

one example, was working his intelligence service overtime keeping up with American policy on Iran—what the State Department did in this affair would be a guide to what it might or might not do to keep his client, United Fruit, from being thrown out of Guatemala.

Helliwell and Corcoran played a crucial role together in the prolongation of Chennault’s Asian influence, when the two men persuaded Frank Wisner of OPC to purchase and refinance Chennault’s post-war airline CAT (later the CIA proprietary Air America). Also figuring in this important decision was William Pawley, a key figure in Chennault’s so-called "Washington squadron" during World War II. Together with Sea Supply Inc., Helliwell’s other creation, CAT became the chief logistic infrastructure for the KMT drug-trafficking troops in Burma.

Helliwell and the Politics of Influence

Helliwell and Corcoran’s law firm, Corcoran and Rowe, also cooperated with William Donovan in using Thai money to influence Congress. Helliwell himself was a key organizer for the Republican Party in Florida, helping to win the state for Eisenhower in 1952 and thus launching the Republican ascendancy in the South. (Helliwell later became close to Nixon’s companion, Bebe Rebozo.)

Corcoran and Rowe, meanwhile, were Democrats, the latter close to the upcoming Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson. Corcoran in the 1940s had managed the accounts and political business of Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law, T.V. Soong, who by diverting millions in Chinese gold to his California accounts had become one of the richest men in the world.

Together with Soong, Corcoran lobbied successfully for a lend-lease program to Nationalist (KMT) China, and to a private American Volunteer Group recruiting pilots from the armed forces for a private company headed by Corcoran’s friend, William Pawley. In fact, the pilots were being recruited to fight in China as part of Chennault’s irregular Air Force, for Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT:

In effect, Corcoran was running an off-the-books private war in which a private company, China Defense Supplies, was diverting some of the war materiel destined for China to a private army, the American Volunteer Group.

After the war, Soong, Corcoran, and Pawley became strong backers of the pro-KMT China Lobby. The State Department officers unfortunate enough to be entered in T.V. Soong’s "black book" became targets of the purges conducted by J. Edgar Hoover and later Joseph McCarthy.

The Soong-backed China Lobby’s fortunes declined dramatically with those of McCarthy in 1954. At this point Corcoran and Donovan, who had previously collaborated on Chennault’s preemptive purchase via CAT of China’s commercial air fleet in 1949, collaborated again to maintain the flow of funds from Asia to influence Congress. The new source was the Thai dictator, Phao Sriyanon, a major beneficiary of the KMT drug network established by Helliwell, Sea Supply, and CAT. (At the time of his death as an exile in Switzerland, Phao was said to be "one of the richest men in the world.")

After scandals and exposés had forced the revamping of the China Lobby in Washington,

the private arm of the Thai Lobby had mustered its own resources…. Through Donovan, [OSS veteran Willis] Bird [Sea Supply’s purchasing agent in Bangkok], or his other CIA connections, Phao had, by that time, hired lawyer Paul Helliwell…as a lobbyist in addition to Donovan. Donovan [who received a reported $100,000 from the Thai government] and Helliwell divided the Congress between them, with Donovan assuming responsibility for the Republicans and Helliwell taking the Democrats.

How did Helliwell, an influential Republican lawyer working full-time in Miami, "take" the Democrats? By acting in his role as Thai Consul in Miami: his annual reports as a foreign lobbyist reveal that he passed tens of thousands of dollars a year to James Rowe, of Corcoran and Rowe.

Helliwell, Resorts International, and the Politics of Corruption

Helliwell and his banks also handled real investments for the Lansky crowd:

Among the Florida real estate companies that benefited from Helliwell’s sleight of hand was General Development Corporation, controlled by Louis Chesler, a Florida real estate developer and associate of Lansky, and "trigger Mike" Coppola, a Lansky crony. Chesler was the partner of Wallace Groves….Chesler and Groves were partners in a gambling venture with Resorts International, through a Grand Bahamian company whose counsel was the law firm of Helliwell, Melrose, and DeWolf.

Resorts International, formerly the Mary Carter Paint Company controlled by James Crosby, was the majority owner of a Bahamas resort, Paradise Island, which was unable to obtain a license until Wallace Groves was brought in as a partner in 1966. The well-known reaction of a U.S. Justice Department official to this change of ownership was, "The atmosphere seems right for a Lansky skim." Years later, "lawyers for New Jersey’s Gaming Enforcement Division would oppose the granting of a gambling license to Crosby and his company [Resorts International], citing ‘links with disreputable persons and organizations,’ and specifically their record on Paradise Island."

Like Helliwell and Groves, so Resorts International was part of the global CIA-mob connection. According to a 1976 CIA memorandum included in its Meyer Lansky Security file,

Resorts International, Inc., is the Subject of OS [Office of Security] file #591 722. This file reflects that Resorts International, Inc. was of interest to Cover and Commercial Staff, DDO [Operations Directorate], in 1972 and 1973.

As the same CIA memo makes clear, this was after a 1969 book, The Grim Reapers by Ed Reid, had exposed the company’s connections to Wallace Groves and, through its casino manager Eddie Cellini, to what the CIA memo called "the gambling activities of the organized crime boss Meyer LANSKY." Resorts International, in other words, occupied a "cut-out" intermediary role between the CIA and Eddie Cellini, just as (we shall see in a moment) a similar cut-out role was performed in 1960 by the CIA’s Bay of Pigs leader, Tony Varona.

1972, the year in which Resorts became "of interest" to the CIA, was also the year in which Meyer Lansky was indicted in Miami, along with Dino Cellini (Eddie’s brother). One of the charges in the indictment was that "in 1968 Lansky maintained at least some control over running junkets (a profitable part of a casino operation) to the Paradise Island Casino." I shall argue later that both Resorts and the Lansky indictment may have been "of interest" to the CIA in these two years because of the showdown at that time between Nixon and the CIA in the wake of the Watergate break-in.

The CIA may have been aware of the allegations, which surfaced in 1972, that funds from the Paradise Island casino were being secretly carried to Nixon and his friend Bebe Rebozo, by a casino employee. This was Seymour (Sy) Alter, an associate on the one hand of Lansky and his man Eddie Cellini, and on the other hand "a friend of Nixon and Rebozo since 1962." The funds came from the Paradise Island Bridge Company, a company partly owned by an officer of Benguet International, a firm represented by Paul Helliwell. It is likely that Nixon himself had a hidden interest in the Bridge Company, which might explain the revelation through Operation Tradewinds that a "Richard M. Nixon" (not otherwise identified) had an account at Helliwell’s Castle Bank.

The CIA, Eddie Cellini, Edward K. Moss, and the CIA-Mafia Plots

But there was more to the CIA-Resorts connection. Back in 1967 Resorts casino (at that time, Paradise Island) had hired as its casino manager Eddie Cellini, who had formerly managed Lansky’s casino in Havana’s Hotel Internacional. 1967 was the year that the CIA’s Inspector-General, in his Report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, had written that Eddie Cellini and his more famous brother Dino

were believed to be in touch with [Tony] Varona [member of the CIA’s front group for the Bay of Pigs Operation]… and were reported to have offered Varona large sums of money for his operations against Castro, with the understanding that they would receive privileged treatment 'in the Cuba of the future.’

The Inspector-General’s Report was written to deal with the political flap raised by Jack Anderson’s spectacular charge in 1967 that John F. Kennedy might have possibly been killed as the result of an assassination plot against Castro "which then possibly backfired" against Kennedy himself. Jack Anderson’s ultimate source for the story was John Roselli, a mob member disgruntled that his cooperation with the CIA on the assassination plots had not protected him from conviction and possible deportation.

Researcher Alan A. Block notes that it was strangely imprudent of Paradise Island to have hired Eddie Cellini in 1967, when it had just weathered an organized crime scandal of its own. But the CIA was facing the even bigger organized crime scandal raised by Jack Anderson’s column, and the I-G Report had just told CIA Director Helms that Cellini was possibly a go-between in the assassination plots between the two plot principals Varona and Santos Trafficante. One possibility is that Resorts hired Cellini to ensure that he would not join Roselli in going public.

There is an important FBI report reproduced without demurrer in a CIA document contained in its Lansky Security file, which is almost devoid of references to Lansky but could very well be called a file on the CIA-mafia plots. According to this FBI report, the contact between Varona and the Cellini brothers, representing the mob, was through a Washington public relations agent named Edward K. Moss:

Verona [sic] has taken on Edward K. Moss as his assistant for raising funds to finance operations against Castro….Julia Cellini is alleged to be Moss’ mistress and operates a secretarial service [that] is really a front for Edward K. Moss’ activities….Julia Cellini’s brother, Dino Cellini and his brother (first name unknown), are active fronts for two of the largest casinos that operated in Cuba until the Batista regime….It is alleged that the Cellini brothers are in close contact with Tony Verona [sic] through Edward K. Moss and have offered to contribute considerable sums of money (reported as high as two million dollars) through Edward K. Moss to Tony Verona to finance operations against the Castro regime with an understanding that they would have the major slice "in the Cuba of the future."

According to the same CIA memo, Moss was a past president of the Public Relations Society of America. At the same time, according to a verbal report from Dun and Bradstreet to then-CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson, "Moss’ operation seems to be government contracts for the underworld and possibly surfaces Mafia money in legitimate business activities."

All this supplies some context to the decision of the CIA Office of Security, on November 7, 1962, to secure a Covert Security Approval (CSAS) for the use of Moss by the Political Action Group of the CIA’s Covert Action (CA) staff. This of course was more than a year after the FBI had advised the CIA that reportedly "the Cellini brothers are in contact with Varona through Moss and have offered to contribute as high as two million dollars to finance anti-Castro operations." Furthermore, FBI information sent to the CIA indicated that Moss’s mistress Julia Cellini and her brother Dino Cellini were alleged to be procurers, while "the Cellini brothers have long been associated with the narcotics and white slavery rackets in Cuba." The CIA itself had notified the FBI on December 16, 1960, that Julia "Cellino" had advised that her brothers "have long been associated in the narcotics and white slavery rackets in Cuba."

Still further FBI information indicated that Dino Cellini "was formerly associated with Joseph Francis Nesline WFO [i.e., Washington] top hoodlum, in a gambling operation." I have written elsewhere how Meyer Lansky and Joe Nesline "systematically used sexual blackmail [i.e., through white slavery] to compromise a number of people in Washington who were politically influential."

The CIA remembered that Moss was a questionable character; a memo of November 28, 1962 referred to his "‘unscrupulous and unethical’ business practices." According to the I-G Report and other memos, "A memorandum prepared by CA [Covert Action] staff in 1965 states that records do not show any use made of Moss;" but this carefully worded language would not of course rule out use made of Moss off the books. In fact, the Moss folder’s documents confirm the CIA’s interest in him, and many documents concern Julia, Eddie, Dino, and Goffredo Cellini.

The documents concerning Moss, the Cellinis, and Varona are very revealing. The FBI alerted the CIA to their relationship and the offer of two million dollars to Varona, "in view of the serious implications of [mob] infiltration of this CIA-supported activity [against Castro]." On January 23, 1961, the FBI communicated their concerns to the new Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, then in office for less than a week.

The response of the CIA was the opposite of what decorum might expect: instead of distancing itself from Moss and his associates, the CIA warmed to them. The CIA arranged for poison pills to be supplied via the mafia to Varona, who in February 1961 became the point man in the CIA-mafia plot to kill Castro. In 1962 Varona was selected again to participate, as ZRRIFLE-2, in William Harvey’s renewed assassination plots against Castro. And in the same year, as we have seen, the CIA took steps to use Moss himself.

More on the CIA, Moss, and the Politics of Corruption: Adnan Khashoggi

The indirect relationship of the CIA to Moss through a cut-out (Varona) appears to have survived into the 1970s. By this time the cut-out was Adnan Khashoggi, who for a while (like T.V. Soong and Phao Sriyanon before him) was known as "the richest man in the world." Khashoggi was also listed in the Kerry-Brown BCCI Report as one of the "principal foreign agents of the U.S," and at some point in the 1970s he engaged Edward K. Moss as his public relations agent.

Khashoggi replicated the politics of corrupt influence through money and sex which we have already encountered. His contributions to Nixon’s election campaigns – some legal, some illicit – were investigated by the Senate Watergate Committee. Khashoggi is said by some to have given $1 million to Nixon covertly in 1972, allegedly in a briefcase which he "mistakenly" left behind in Nixon’s San Clemente residence.

In addition, Khashoggi is known to have deposited several million dollars (some say $200 million) in the bank of Nixon’s friend, Bebe Rebozo. He then "withdrew all but $200,000 of it in the form of checks written to ‘cash’ and signed over to the Sands Hotel" in Las Vegas. It was as if Khashoggi was using the Sands as his personal laundromat. Known as "the biggest high roller ever to hit Las Vegas," Khashoggi would lose as much as $250,000 in one fling.

The Sands was one of the Las Vegas casinos originally part-owned by Meyer Lansky, and from which proceeds were skimmed to be deposited (as we saw) in the Miami National Bank. In the 1970s the Sands was now owned by Howard Hughes; but two veterans of the Lansky era, Carl Cohen and Jack Entratter, continued to work in the casino. Khashoggi meanwhile involved in his business deals the manager of Hughes’ Vegas properties, F. William Gay; and eventually, when Hughes was spirited secretly out of Vegas to Wallace Groves’ resort in Freeport, Bahamas, it was in Khashoggi’s plane.

Even in the Hughes era, Las Vegas casinos continued to be preferred sites for the laundering of money (disguised as gambling losses). This practice was so well established that eventually, in Operation Casablanca, U.S. Customs actually created a fake casino near Las Vegas at which top-level Mexican bank officials congregated and "avidly discussed how to handle the latest half-billion dollars in drug proceeds already on hand." In one important case, thousands of dollars in money wrappers from the Stardust casino (mentioned above) were found on a suspected drug-smuggling plane in Florida.

There are also reports that in addition to money, Khashoggi "used sex to win over U.S. executives." The bill for the madam who supplied girls en masse to his yacht in the Mediterranean ran to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The CIA’s interest in Khashoggi and Moss was not limited to the funds the two men had accessible. By the 1970s, Moss was Chairman of the elite Safari Club in Kenya, where he invited Khashoggi in as majority owner. And as former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once revealed publicly, the intelligence chiefs of a group of countries (France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran under the Shah) met regularly at the Safari Club to conduct covert operations which the CIA was unable to carry out in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

CIA officers such as Miles Copeland and James Critchfield became part of Khashoggi’s milieu. They advised Khashoggi on diplomatic initiatives, such as a proposed Mideast Peace Fund that would reward both Israel and Palestine for recognizing each other. Khashoggi had the ability to negotiate with the Israelis; he is said to have been introduced to the Israelis by former gunrunner Hank Greenspun, the politically influential editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

In general, Khashoggi represented the post-war emigration offshore of immense wealth and the power it conveyed. He served as a "cut-out," or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to those he represented. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting their official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through the bank of Nixon’s friend, Bebe Rebozo.

All this suggests that the CIA’s interest in Moss – as later in Khashoggi, in Wallace Groves, in Operation ███, and in Eddie Cellini’s employers at Resorts International – had to do with irregular funding for off-the-books covert operations. And if any such funds were passed, the context suggests that the man fingered to handle them would have been Paul Helliwell, the man the Wall Street Journal reported was "‘deeply involved’ in financing a series of covert forays between 1964 and 1975 against Cuba."


Helliwell, Castle Bank, Bruce Rappaport, and BCCI

Through this rapid survey of Helliwell’s banks we have seen that he was central to a connection between the worlds of intelligence, organized crime, global drug trafficking, political influence, and speculative investment, often in hotel-casinos, with overworld figures. But the connection was not one engineered by Helliwell himself; there were other powerful people in the background, some of whom would maintain the connection after Helliwell died in 1976 (just as Castle Bank was beginning to attract the attention of journals like Newsweek).

One of the most important may have been former OSS Chief William Donovan (about whom we shall have more to say). According to Pete Brewton,

One of the attorneys in the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest case made the statement that Kanter was introduced to Helliwell by General William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the famous leader of the OSS during World War II, and Helliwell’s OSS boss. Kanter denied that. "I personally never met Bill Donovan. I believe I may have spoken to him once by phone at Paul Helliwell’s request…"

Another OSS figure, more directly involved, was Helliwell’s partner in the Florida bank holding company (called HMT and later Florida Shares) that owned the Bank of Perrine and the Bank of Cutler Ridge. This was

E.P. Barry, who had been a U.S. military intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. By the end of the war, he was the head of U.S. Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna…. Barry … was a longtime associate of [CIA Director] William Casey, according to a Castle Bank officer.

Barry was simultaneously a key shareholder in Florida Shares and in the Inter Maritime Bank of Bruce Rappaport, a close friend and business associate of William Casey. Rappaport, an oilman and oil tanker broker "thought to have ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence," had numerous connections to the world’s largest-ever intelligence-drug laundromat – the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). The Gokal shipping family of Pakistan, leading BCCI investors who later contributed to BCCI’s bankruptcy, was also shareholders with Rappaport and Barry in the Inter Maritime Bank. Alfred Hartmann, a board member of BCCI, was both vice-chairman of Rappaport’s Swiss bank, Bank of New York-Intermaritime, and also head of BCCI’s Swiss subsidiary, the Banque de Commerce et de Placements (BCP).

And according to Block and Weaver, "Rappaport worked the National Bank of Oman (a BCCI/Bank of America joint venture), helping funnel millions of CIA and Saudi dollars to Pakistan for the Afghan rebels during its 1980s war with the Soviets." Rappaport’s key man in Oman was Jerry Townsend, an alleged former CIA operative who now ran Colonial Shipping Co. in Atlanta, where he knew BCCI associate Bert Lance.

BCCI and an Israeli intelligence agent were also involved in Medellin arms sales, via a "melon farm" in Antigua partly financed by William Casey’s friend, Bruce Rappaport.

Bruce Rappaport … owned the land on which Maurice Sarfati, a former Israeli military officer, set up his melon farm. And one of Rappaport’s banks in Antigua made a large loan to Sarfati—which was never repaid. Sarfati (who also walked away from a loan guaranteed by OPIC, the U.S. government insurance agency) took it from there, first cultivating government officials and then providing entree to their offices to his compatriot Yair Klein.

Klein’s work [was] in Colombia, where his Israeli-licensed "security" company, Spearhead Ltd… trained the hit squads of the Medellin cocaine cartel in assassination and bombing techniques, was beginning to attract unwelcome attention. …. In 1988, Klein was in Antigua, looking for a new way to provide arms to his Medellin client, Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha.

Rappaport’s apparent links to Mossad raise the question whether Helliwell’s connections to Lansky’s Bank of World Commerce and Tibor Rosenbaum did not also constitute a connection to Mossad. The same question is raised by Helliwell’s legal representation (according to the Martindale-Hubbell Legal Register) of the Eastern Development Company: a firm of this name cooperated with Lansky, Hank Greenspun, and others in the supply of arms to the nascent state of Israel.

It is clear that Jews were, like many other minorities, a constituent in the global drug connection. More importantly, they were an important part of the financial infrastructure of that connection – but even at this level they did not operate alone. The global drug connection combined Jewish banks in Florida and Switzerland with those of Teochew, Fujian, and Hokkien Chinese in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, the Muslims of Bank Intra and later BCCI in the Middle East, and furthermore Italian banks like those of Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, both members of the intelligence-linked Masonic Lodge P-2, and both murdered after their banks failed from mafia involvement. It is my impression that none of these ethnic minority elements ever surpassed in power the dominant role of figures from the mainstream, like Donovan and Helliwell.

(As a person deeply committed to nonviolence, I also have to acknowledge that the violence of the ethnic groups in the global drug connection, although later powerful and indeed intelligence-related, had its origins in redressive violence, against a system dominated above all by European and American interests.)

One of these mainstream figures was the mysterious E.P. Barry, an investor with both Helliwell and Rappaport. One of the very few things known about Barry is that he was in OSS during World War II, and that towards the end of the war Donovan appointed him head of OSS Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna.

OSS X-2, or Counterintelligence, was the most secretive and highly classified of the OSS branches, and the one whose precise mission was to penetrate the German Sicherheitsdienst [SD]. According to a 1946 OSS Report, "an equally interesting X-2 activity was the investigation of RSHA [SD] financial transactions" (Operation Safehaven). In the course of these investigations, the U.S. Third Army took an SD major "on several trips to Italy and Austria, and, as a result of these preliminary trips, over $500,000 in gold, as well as jewels, were recovered." Some of the Nazi gold recovered under Barry’s supervision was subsequently used to finance U.S. intelligence operations in Germany in the immediate post-war years.

Barry, with this intriguing background, represents the continuity between the Helliwell intelligence-drug connection which flourished until 1972 (the year the IRS’s Operation Tradewinds began to investigate the Bank of Perrine) and the BCCI intelligence-drug connection which flourished after 1972 (the year BCCI was founded).

Like Khashoggi before it, BCCI had the ability to broker Arab-Israeli-China arms deals, as well as its contacts to western intelligence and politicians. Indeed, the bank seems to have largely inherited Khashoggi’s function as an agent of influence in the Middle East and elsewhere after the United States, by the Corrupt Federal Practices Act of 1978, outlawed direct payments by U.S. corporations to foreign individuals.

BCCI also inherited and vastly expanded Khashoggi’s use of money to influence and corrupt American politicians. BCCI’s Pakistani president, Agha Hasan Abedi, rescued Jimmy Carter’s Treasury Secretary Bert Lance from bankruptcy, and thereby developed a relationship with Carter himself.

A Senate report on BCCI concluded that

BCCI's systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries in which BCCI operated. …The result was that BCCI had relationships that ranged from the questionable, to the improper, to the fully corrupt with officials from countries all over the world, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Colombia, the Congo, Ghana, Guatemala, the Ivory Coast, India, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

And from two well-researched books by journalists from Time and the Wall Street Journal, we learn that among later highly-placed recipients of largesse from BCCI, its owners, and its affiliates, were


Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary James Baker, who declined to investigate BCCI; and

Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which declined to investigate BCCI.

The CIA, BCCI, and a "Long Tradition of Shady Banks"

But Barry is not the only link between the drug banks of Helliwell and BCCI. A more central figure is General George Olmsted, the head of the Washington bank holding company known as the International Bank. In March 1973 Olmsted had the International Bank (which "had a reputation as a CIA bank") buy 66 percent of the capital stock of the failing Mercantile Bank in the Bahamas (Castle’s predecessor), even though "International’s officers knew the actual state of Mercantile’s financial health." Starting in 1977, International started to sell its stock in Financial General Bankshares (later known as First American), a major American bank holding company, to BCCI front men, who later took over First American for BCCI.

The most common explanation is that the CIA not only used the bank, but had helped develop it. Journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, the authors of the definitive book on BCCI, speculated that the CIA’s relationship with its founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, might have gone back to before BCCI’s founding in 1972. They observed also that BCCI was only the latest in an overlapping series of money-laundering banks that did services for the CIA – Deak & Company, Castle Bank & Trust, and Nugan Hand.

The Global Connection and Narcotics

One of these interlocking banks, the World Finance Corporation in Florida, became the target of "perhaps the largest narcotics investigation of the decade." But the investigation, "involving scores of federal and state agents, had to be scrapped after a year because the CIA complained to the Justice Department that a dozen top criminals were ‘of interest’ to it."

Another drug-linked bank was the Australian Nugan Hand Bank, which chose as auditor Price Waterhouse in the Bahamas in 1976, the year that both Castle and Mercantile were collapsing. After its spectacular collapse in 1980, Australian investigators concluded that Nugan Hand had been involved in the financing of major drug deals, as well as the laundering of profits: two official investigations "placed Nugan Hand in the critical role of surreptitiously transferring drug income overseas, where it obviously could be reinvested in more illegal drugs."

Nugan Hand collected an impressive number of former CIA officers, including its "mysterious puppetmaster" Bernie Houghton, who back in the 1950s allegedly took the place of Helliwell in Bangkok, and former CIA Director William Colby. Of particular interest is the involvement with Nugan Hand of Thomas Clines, a CIA officer in Laos under Theodore Shackley who later resigned to work in the outsourced intelligence network of Edwin Wilson. When the Nugan Hand Bank collapsed spectacularly in 1980 (with the suicide or murder of Frank Nugan), it was Thomas Clines who helped spirit Houghton quietly out of Australia, The two men, along with Edwin Wilson and Theodore Shackley and BCCI, then participated in off-the-books covert operations against the Soviets in Afghanistan, working not for the CIA but for the Safari Club.

The CIA office in Chiang Mai, when the main business of the city was opium trafficking, was on the same floor as the local office of the DEA. According to Jonathan Kwitny, "The DEA receptionist answered Nugan Hand’s phone and took messages when the bank’s representatives were out." Nugan Hand’s representative there, Neil Evans

has said he was present when Michael Hand and Ron Pulger-Frame – the former Deak & Company courier who went to work at Nugan Hand – discussed the shipment of CIA money to the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, and Panama. Evans has said Nugan Hand moved $50 to $60 million at a time for the CIA, and also that Nugan Hand was involved in Third World arms deals.

Evans also told Australian television that the millions he handled were "garnered from the drugs transiting the area. The bank, he put it starkly, was a ‘laundry’ for Meo [Hmong] tribesmen and other poppy growers."

In The Road to 9/11 I describe how Casey’s reliance on BCCI to distribute U.S. assistance to the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Russians led to most aid reaching the faction of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leading drug trafficker in Afghanistan who soon (thanks to aid from the U.S. and Pakistan) became perhaps the leading heroin trafficker in the world.

This pattern of a drug connection repeated itself in the 1990s, after the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan and BCCI collapsed soon thereafter. In Azerbaijan (under oil company cover), veterans of CIA operations under Shackley and Clines in Laos, like Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, set up an airline on the model of Air America which soon was "picking up hundreds of mujahideen mercenaries from Afghanistan." The Arab Afghans’Azeri operations were also financed with Afghan heroin.

Loretta Napoleoni has argued that there is an Islamist drug route of al Qaeda allies across North Central Asia, reaching from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan through Azerbaijan and Chechnya to Kosovo. This leads us to the paradoxical fact that in 1998 Clinton came to the support of the al Qaeda-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). He did so even though "[i]n 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA … as an international terrorist organization, saying it had bankrolled its operations with proceeds from the international heroin trade and from loans from known terrorists like Osama bin Laden."

Finally, if former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds is to be believed, this same flow of heroin has been financing the corruption of Congress under George W. Bush. Edmonds was fired from the FBI in 2002, after accusing a colleague of being a security threat. She has since contested her firing in a whistleblower suit which the government has blocked by invoking the State Secrets privilege. She has also been prohibited from speaking publicly about her case.

According to Daniel Ellsberg, Edmonds’ concern is the al Qaeda connection described by Napoleoni:

Al Qaeda, she's been saying to Congress, according to these interviews, is financed 95% by drug money - drug traffic to which the U.S. government shows a blind eye, has been ignoring, because it very heavily involves allies and assets of ours - such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan - all the 'Stans - in a drug traffic where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed

in Turkey, and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of Europe's heroin, by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo - Albanian Muslims in Kosovo - basically the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army which we backed heavily in that episode at the end of the century….Sibel says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money.

In 2005 Sibel Edmonds’ charges were partly aired in Vanity Fair. There it was revealed that she had had access to FBI wiretaps of conversations among members of the American-Turkish Council (ATC), about bribing elected U.S. officials, and about "what sounded like references to large-scale drug shipments and other crimes."

Conclusion: A Continuous Succession of Drug-Related Deep Events

Mafias and empires have certain elements in common. Both can be seen as the systematic violent imposition of governance in areas of undergovernance. Both use atrocities to achieve their ends; but both tend to be tolerated to the extent that the result of their controlled violence is a diminution of uncontrolled violence. (I would tentatively suggest an important difference between mafias and empires: that, with the passage of time, mafias tend to become more and more part of the civil society whose rules they once broke, while empires tend to become more and more irreconcilably at odds with the societies they once controlled.)

In this book we have seen an overlap between the infrastructures of the American mafia and the indirect American empire. And in this chapter I have attempted to describe the epicenter of this overlap in a milieu, expanding at its outer limits into a global nexus that I have called the global drug connections, with intimate links to both the U.S underworld and U.S. overworld. The nexus links U.S. intelligence to the intelligence services of many other countries, including Taiwan, Israel, Italy, and Chile. It also oversees financial contributions to the leading politicians of many countries, including both parties of the United States.

All of the major deep events in recent American history, and all of the major expansions of the U.S. indirect empire since World War II, can be linked to this global drug connection:

-- The first U.S. postwar presence in East Asia was established in conjunction with the drug-financed KMT in Taiwan.

-- The U.S. presence in Southeast Asia began with Sea Supply’s support for KMT drug traffickers in East Burma, then expanded in the mid-fifties with the drug-financed PARU force into Laos, while the CIA secured Saigon by controlling drug distribution there.

-- The interlocking finance company Deak & Company, founded by OSS veteran Nicholas Deak, "was reportedly used by the CIA to finance covert operations, including the 1953 overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq."

-- The 1954 overthrow of democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was partly achieved with the support of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, a major figure in Lansky’s arms pipeline to Israel in the 1940s, and whose Guardia Nacional was deeply involved in Caribbean drug trafficking thereafter.

--- The introduction of CIA covert forces in Laos in 1960, which eventually grew into a drug-financed irregular army of tens of thousands, was achieved with a force that grew out of the Sea Supply operation in Thailand. The CIA’s private war in Laos, which President Kennedy sought vainly to contain, was the true starting point of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

-- Angleton’s "alternative CIA," CI/SIG, manipulated and falsified its "intelligence" about Lee Harvey Oswald in such a way as to prepare him to be the designated suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

-- The overthrow of democratically elected Indonesian President Sukarno in 1965 was achieved in part by covert assistance through Lockheed Corporation payoffs, and in part by the intervention of Sasakawa Ryoichi, a CIA agent of influence, along with his friend Kodama Yoshio, with the yakuza in Japan. Sasakawa and Kodama were also recipients of Lockheed payoffs facilitated partly by Deak & Company, and partly on the scene by Shig Katayama, whose ID Corp. in the Cayman Islands conducted mysterious business transactions with Helliwell’s Castle Bank.

-- BCCI provided the initial infrastructure for the CIA intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, and the ensuing alliance with the major drug trafficker Gulbeddin Hekmatyar. Pakistan’s President Zia arranged for Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, to work with Lt.-Gen. Fazle Haq; while a BCCI informant told U.S. authorities that Fazle Haq was "heavily engaged in narcotics trafficking and moving the heroin money through the [BCCI] bank." Hekmatyar in the next decade received more CIA aid than any other CIA asset before or since.

-- In 1970, a CIA officer with the pseudonym Henry J. Sloman, who was also "a high-risk smuggler directly linked to the Mafia," was dispatched to Chile, where he became involved with the right-wing plotting to assassinate General René Schneider, commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army.

-- Orlando Letelier was murdered in Washington in September 1976 by a team including Cuban exile drug-traffickers, working for the dug-financed Chilean intelligence agency DINA. Though the US Government was already aware of DINA’s Operation CONDOR for such foreign-based murders, CIA Director Bush chose publicly to deflect suspicion away from DINA.

-- According to Robert Parry, Alexandre de Marenches of the Safari Club arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October 1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran. (This was the so-called Republican "October Counter-surprise.") Parry suspects a role of BCCI in both the funding of payoffs for the secret deal, and also the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to Iran.

-- In 1981 Mehmet Ali Agça, a member of the Turkish drug-trafficking Grey Wolves, attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Le Monde diplomatique later reported that the assassination attempt was organized, at the request of Turkish mafia chief Bekir Celenk, by Abdullah Çatli, a drug-trafficking Grey Wolf leader of death squads for Turkish intelligence. Le Monde diplomatique added that one year later Çatli visited Miami with the notorious Operation CONDOR killer, Stefano delle Chiaie.

-- Shackley, Khashoggi, and BCCI were instrumental in inaugurating the illegal Iran-Contra Connection of 1985-86, which diverted funds from arms sales to Iran to support of the Contras in Honduras and Costa Rica.

-- The looting of Russia during the Yeltsin era in the 1990s saw funds channeled through Rappaport’s Inter Maritime Bank into the Bank of New York, where Rappaport also had an important if not controlling interest.

-- In 1991, Shackley’s colleague Richard Secord created an airline in Azerbaijan which arranged to fly in hundreds of mujahideen from Afghanistan recruited by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

-- U.S. support for the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1998, a group backed by al-Qaeda and financed in part by drugs, led to revelations that for years at least one of the KLA leaders had a longtime relationship with the U.S. private military company MPRI. (As late as 1997 the KLA had been recognized by the United States as a terrorist group supported in part by the heroin traffic.)

(The list could be indefinitely expanded. For example, the conversion of Australia into a dependable U.S. ally can be dated to the fall of democratically elected Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, in which Penny Lernoux and others have seen the hidden hand of the Nugan Hand Bank.)

This deep continuity underlying U.S. expansion since World War II helps make credible the startling phenomenon described in our last chapter – namely, that deep events such as the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 are not unrelated, or the product of forces attacking America from outside. Rather, at least in part, they surface into public awareness out of the deep connection described in this chapter, a connection whose presence is ongoing but almost completely unacknowledged.

Further Conclusion: The Increasing Threat to Stable Democracy

But when this list of covert interventions and deep events is viewed synoptically, a pattern can be seen of increasing deviation from the policies of the public state. The assistance of the global connection for the CIA’s interventions in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) was in support of operations previously sanctioned by the National Security Council (and before that the Council on Foreign Relations).

But the drug-financed evolution of a CIA-trained force in Thailand into an offensive force invading Laos was an operation explicitly not authorized by the National Security Council. As Daniel Fineman has noted,

JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] preference for direct aid to French forces forced the NSC [National Security Council] in September [1953] to authorize implementation of only phase one ["strengthening Thailand’s will and ability to resist"], postponing indefinitely execution of the provisions in phase two taking the psychological war to neighboring countries.

And the falsification of Oswald’s file by Angleton’s CI/SIG, although it may have been initially authorized as a legitimate tool in the search for an alleged mole in the CIA, eventually facilitated the successful assassination of John F. Kennedy and the ensuing cover-up. At this point, the global connection was no longer simply a force acting in support of the public American state; it had developed relations with forces attacking the public state.

This pattern of increasing deviation can be used to refine our notion of the American deep state. Initially the deep state can be identified with the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the creation (invisible at the time) of the National Security Council that facilitated the original Helliwell-CIA-mob connection. With the absorption of OPC into the CIA in 1953, the American deep state ceased for many years to exhibit the relatively coherent and disciplined concentration of authority that one sees in the deep states of Turkey or Italy or Colombia, or at one time in Chile and Argentina. At this stage the American deep state was unified by the economy of drugs but not much else. Its nebulous connection to legitimate power had shrunk to Angleton’s "alternative CIA," and even this ceased when Angleton was fired in December 1974.

But according to Joseph Trento, the connection was indirectly restored by a "shadow CIA" working for the Safari Club and Saudi intelligence; and by the 1980s this shadow CIA "was not only working for the Israelis but also was involved in covert operations from Central America to Iran." It is certain that, with the blessing of Casey, – who had his own direct contacts with Rappaport, BCCI, and the global drug connection – Shackley, Khashoggi, and their contacts led to Iran-Contra. At least one member of Shackley’s group, Richard Secord, then created an airline which brought Islamist mujahideen to Afghanistan. Another, neocon Michael Ledeen, contributed not only to Iran-Contra but also, with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, to the creation of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Indeed, the decision of William Casey to work with the global connection, and more specifically BCCI and Theodore Shackley’s contacts in Iran-Contra, cannot be fully understood by focusing on the history of the global drug connection alone. Casey’s actions must be seen in the context of what Irving Kristol has called the intellectual counterrevolution of the 1970s, the successful reversal of Kissinger’s and Carter’s moves towards détente with the Soviet Union, and of the post-Watergate reforms introduced by Senator Frank Church and others. As I have written elsewhere, a key moment was the so-called Halloween massacre in 1975, which saw among other things the firing of Angleton’s nemesis, William Colby, the appointment of Rumsfeld to Secretary of Defense, and the end of Kissinger’s long tenure as National Security Adviser.

By 1976 the intellectual counterrevolution had consolidated a new anti-Kissinger coalition consisting of a) Cheney and Rumsfeld inside the Ford Administration, b) the Committee on the Present Danger lobbying for a vastly increased defense budget, and c) neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who came together to work against Kissinger’s SALT agreements and (with the help of the CIA’s new director, George H.W. Bush) to radically escalate the CIA’s estimate of the Soviet threat. Casey played an important role in this anti-Soviet coalition, and in 1976 he joined the CPD along with long-time members of the global connection like Ray Cline (Helliwell’s old OSS associate from Kunming), Jay Lovestone, and George Olmsted.

The anti-government bias of the new neocon right has extended to increased dislike for the CIA, now seen as an enemy rather than an ally. But even the new outsourced forces of violence in private security companies (PSCs) like Blackwater have recruited from the violent resources of the old global drug connection – specifically, in Blackwater’s case, from the paramilitary forces in countries like Colombia.

In short, the recourse to the illicit violence of the global drug traffic, which began in the panicked early years of the Cold War, has continued ever since to increase and metastasize, until it is now an increasing threat to constitutional democracy. It is not easy for most people to understand this. In the short run, illicit violence breeds the redressively violent opposition which justifies its existence – so that today the PSCs in Iraq and Afghanistan earn multimillion dollar contracts to fight the resistance they themselves have provoked.

But the new system of indirect empire does not appear to be a stable one: if there is a momentary respite in Iraq, it is because opposing cadres have found it more fruitful to fight in Afghanistan. Rather, indirect empire is a violent substitute for politics, to deal with situations which only politics can ameliorate.

If this country were serious in wishing to deal with the problem of terrorism, it would seek to reduce, rather than increase, the oppression which is producing redressive violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, Lebanon, and Palestine. The present course is more likely to aggravate the deteriorating status quo, and also to accelerate the waning of American resources, influence, and good will, even among our allies.

Is it utopian to think that the present course can be corrected? Probably yes, as long as most Americans believe that 9/11 was an attack engineered solely by a group of malevolent Arabs. But a saner policy might ensue if it were shown that 9/11, as Sibel Edmonds has intimated, was a deep event involving elements from America’s global drug connection.

What I have called America’s global drug connection has been responsible in the past for global terrorist activities like Operation Condor, and also for strengthening drug networks as so-called parallel governments in countries like Laos, Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Colombia. For decades this country has been largely in denial about U.S. complicity in this state of affairs, projecting responsibility for terrorism instead on the Soviet Union ("the Evil Empire") and more recently Iraq and Iran ("the Axis of Evil").

To overcome these decades of denial will not be easy. But it will be a necessary step towards diminishing terrorism, and restoring a saner world.

NOTE: [The text of this article does not include text and endnote numerals. To consult Peter Dale Scott's article entitled Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection, with numbered references and endnotes in word document format click here]

Original article posted here.