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Global Research.ca: Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection
Global Research, September 19, 2008
- 2008-09-06
Global Research.ca - Centre for Research on Globalization
Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection August 17, 2008
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.
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
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
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
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
One significant organizer of the post-war global drug connection -- between CIA, organized crime, and their mutual interest in drug-trafficking -- was former
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
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.”[6]
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.’”[7] 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
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
But Drinkhall did not point out what is now not disputed, that both the KMT troops in
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
Like Chennault and his old associates from his days in
One former federal official who helped scrutinize Castle says, “Castle was one of the CIA’s finance channels for operations against
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,
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
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.”[14] 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.[15] 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.[16]
One of these may have been political payoffs, starting in the
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.[17]
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
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.[19] In May 1965, five months before the anti-Sukarno coup of September 1965, Lockheed payoffs in
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
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
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
According to Alan Block,
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.”[28] 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.[29] And in the 1990s Dennis Dayle, having retired as a top DEA investigator in the
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.”[31] (Kleinman and Helliwell had numerous real estate investments in common with Burton Kanter, the
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,”[33] 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
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
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.[37]
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
According to Doug Valentine, Lovestone’s assistant Irving Brown was implicated in drug smuggling activities in
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.[41] The rival UAW-AFL, which Lovestone favored, turned to mobsters for muscle, and hired as its New York
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.[44]
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.”[45] 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
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.”[47] 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.”[48]
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.”[49] 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
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
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
Angleton’s defense of Lansky’s skim cannot be separated from his second function in the CIA, as handler of the
Angleton’s “Alternative CIA” and Its Legacy
Moreover CI/SIG, the “inner sanctum” of Angleton’s “alternative CIA,” affected
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.[54]
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
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
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
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.’”[58]
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.[59]
CIA Director Bush also promoted Theodore Shackley, who for years had handled the CIA’s maverick Cuban exiles in
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.[64]
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
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.”[66] 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
Kanter and Castle Bank also planned developments with other members of the overworld, such as Henry Ford II and his wife, Christina.[68] 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.[69]
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
I have written elsewhere how the C.V. Starr group was represented in
Corcoran had been a key figure in
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
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
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
Corcoran and Rowe, meanwhile, were Democrats, the latter close to the upcoming
Together with Soong, Corcoran lobbied successfully for a lend-lease program to Nationalist (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
After the war, Soong, Corcoran, and Pawley became strong backers of the pro-KMT
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
After scandals and exposés had forced the revamping of the China Lobby in
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.[82]
How did Helliwell, an influential Republican lawyer working full-time in
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 Melrose
Resorts International, formerly the Mary Carter Paint Company controlled by James Crosby, was the majority owner of a Bahamas resort, Paradise Island
Like Helliwell and
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.”[86] 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
The CIA may have been aware of the allegations, which surfaced in 1972, that funds from the
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,
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
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.[93] 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
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.[96] According to this FBI report, the contact between Varona and the Cellini brothers, representing the mob, was through a
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.”[97]
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.”[98]
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.[99] 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.”[100] 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
Still further FBI information indicated that Dino Cellini “was formerly associated with Joseph Francis Nesline WFO [i.e., Washington Washington
The CIA remembered that Moss was a questionable character; a memo of November 28, 1962 referred to his “‘unscrupulous and unethical’ business practices.”[105] 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;”[106] 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].”[107] On January 23, 1961, the FBI communicated their concerns to the new Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, then in office for less than a week.[108]
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.[109] In 1962 Varona was selected again to participate, as ZRRIFLE-2, in William Harvey’s renewed assassination plots against Castro.[110] 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
In addition, Khashoggi is known to have deposited several million dollars (some say $200 million) in the bank of Nixon’s friend, Bebe Rebozo.[111] 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 Las Vegas
The Sands was one of the
Even in the Hughes era, Las Vegas Las Vegas Florida
There are also reports that in addition to money, Khashoggi “used sex to win over
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
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
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.[124]
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.”[125]
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
Another
E.P. Barry, who had been a
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. Pakistan
And according to Block and Weaver, “Rappaport worked the National Bank of
BCCI and an Israeli intelligence agent were also involved in
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
Klein’s work [was] in
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
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.[135] 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
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
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.[141]
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.[142]
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;[143] and
Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which declined to investigate BCCI.[144]
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.[145] 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
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.[148]
The Global Connection and Narcotics
One of these interlocking banks, the World Finance Corporation in
Another drug-linked bank was the Australian Nugan Hand Bank, which chose as auditor Price Waterhouse in the
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
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 Third World arms deals.[154]
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.”[155]
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.[156]
This pattern of a drug connection repeated itself in the 1990s, after the
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 Clinton
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.
According to Daniel Ellsberg,
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.[160]
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
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
All of the major deep events in recent American history, and all of the major expansions of the
-- The first
-- The
-- The interlocking finance company Deak & Company, founded by
-- 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
--- The introduction of CIA covert forces in
-- 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
-- BCCI provided the initial infrastructure for the CIA intervention in
-- 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
-- Orlando Letelier was murdered in
-- 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
-- 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 Çatli conducted underground operations for the Turkish branch of the CIA’s Gladio (stay-behind) organization, and that one year later Çatli visited
-- Shackley, Khashoggi, and BCCI were instrumental in inaugurating the illegal Iran-Contra Connection of 1985-86, which diverted funds from arms sales to
-- The looting of
-- In 1991, Shackley’s colleague Richard Secord created an airline in
--
(The list could be indefinitely expanded. For example, the conversion of
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
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.[176]
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.”[177] 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.[178] At least one member of Shackley’s group, Richard Secord, then created an airline which brought Islamist mujahideen to
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.[180]
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
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.[181] 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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
ENDNOTES
[1] “9/11,
[2] Alan A. Block, East Side-West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930-1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983), 109.
[3] Gaia Servadio, Mafioso (New York: Dell, 1976), 125-28.
[4] R.T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (New York: Linden/Simon and Schuster, 1987), 295 (“laundromat”). For Helliwell’s ownership, see Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 165-66.
[5] CIA Memo dated 24 April 1974, “RYBAT/JMSPUR/PLVWCADET Traffic Removed from C/WHD Personal Files during Watergate File Search. Traffic can be found in sealed sensitive envelope in safe No. 1322 located in WH/COG, Room 3D46,” NARA # 104-10095-10326. C/WHD (Chief of Western Hemisphere Division) in 1974 was Theodore Shackley, discussed below. All of the CIA and FBI documents discussed in this essay can be seen on the Mary Ferrell website, http://www.maryferrell.org/.
[6] Block, Masters of
[7] Alan Block subsequently learned that it was the bank’s co-founder,
[8] Jim Drinkhall, “IRS vs. CIA: Big Tax Investigation Was Quietly Scuttled By Intelligence Agency,” Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980.
[9] Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980.
[10] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (
[11] Alan A. Block and Constance A. Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized Crime (
[12] Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980.
[13] CIA Memo of 18 August 1976 for Chief, Security Analysis Group,
[14] Jonathan Marshall, Drug Wars: Corruption, Counterinsurgency and Covert Operations in the
[15] Block notes that the spinoff of I.D.C. from Benguet was accompanied by a “payment of $329,439 to a Hong Kong Bank” (possibly into a Marcos account) (Block, Masters of Paradise, 98).
[16] Profits from the Philippine gold mine, and possibly gold itself, reached I.D.C. from
[17] Lernoux, In Banks We Trust, 83.
[18]
[19] For the CIA's close involvement in Lockheed payoffs, see Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 137, 227-8, 238. The U.S. Air Force was also involved. San Francisco Chronicle, October 24, 1983, p. 22, describes one such USAF-Lockheed operation in Southeast Asia, "code-named 'Operation Buttercup' that operated out of Norton Air Force Base in California from 1965 to 1972."
[20] "The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967," Pacific Affairs, LVIII, 2 (Summer 1985), 239-64: “A 1976 Senate investigation into these [Lockheed] payoffs revealed, almost inadvertently, that in May 1965, over the legal objections of Lockheed's counsel, Lockheed commissions in Indonesia had been redirected to a new contract and company set up by the firm's long-time local agent or middleman. Its internal memos at the time show no reasons for the change, but in a later memo the economic counselor of the U.S. Embassy in
[21] A Senate amendment in 1964 to cut off all aid to Indonesia unconditionally was quietly killed in conference committee, on the misleading ground that the Foreign Assistance Act "requires the President to report fully and concurrently to both Houses of the Congress on any assistance furnished to Indonesia" (U.S. Cong., Senate, Report No. 88-1925, Foreign Assistance Act of 1964, p. 11). In fact the act's requirement that the president report "to Congress" applied to eighteen other countries, but in the case of
[22] Tom J. Farer, Transnational Crime in the
[23] Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris, The Green Felt Jungle (New York: Pocket Books, 1964), 217-20. Levinson had fronted for Lansky at the Sands casino in
[24] Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7, 60-61, 198, 207; citing Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 42-44, 84.
[25] Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, 22.
[26] Block, Masters of
[27] Newsday, staff and editors of, The Heroin Trail (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 137 (Francisi); McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 39 (Luciano). El-Khoury “used Luciano’s money to buy off Lebanese police and customs agents” (Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press [London: Verso, 1998], 131).
[28] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 541.
[29] James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Government Embrace (New York: Dell, 1978), 70.
[30] Scott and Marshall. Cocaine Politics (paperback edition), x-xi. Dayle made this statement during a videotaped teleconference, in the presence of Marshall and myself.
[31] Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980. Dalitz, Kleinman, and Tucker, all veterans of the gambling scene in Cleveland, later had a controlling interest in the Desert Inn casino in Las Vegas (Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce: Hearings before the [Kefauver] Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, U.S. Senate, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. and 82nd Congress, 1st Sess., Part 10, US Government Printing Office, [Washington DC: 1950], pp. 907-926). Block’s and Weaver’s later and more detailed study claims that Dalitz did not have an account at Castle, but adds former Lansky associate Lou Rothkopf to the list of mob figures who did (Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire, 45).
[32] Block, Masters of
[33] Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984; citing Wall Street Journal, May 23, 1977, February 17, 1981; also, Parapolitics, Spring 1981), 88: “
[34] Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire, 40; cf. Block, Masters of Paradise, 188-91, where Kleinman is called “perhaps a hidden owner” of Castle.
[35] Block, Masters of Paradise, 163; New York Times, September 1, 1989 (“part owner”).
[36] Block, Masters of
[37] CIA Inspector General’s Report of 1967 on CIA-Mafia Plots to Assassinate Castro, pp. 15-16, NARA #151993.08.11.16:44:08:750007, pp. 3-4.
[38] Memo of 5 September 1975 to DDO from CI Staff Chief George Kalaris,
[39]Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, 1991), 314-15.
[40] Douglas Valentine, “The French Connection Revisited: The CIA, Irving Brown, and Drug Smuggling as Political Warfare,” Covert Action, http://www.covertaction.org/content/view/99/75/.
[41] Paul Buhle, “Lovestone's Thin Red Line,” Nation, May 6, 1999, http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990524/buhle.
[42] House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Appendix to Hearings, Volume IX (March 1978), 47.
[43] Ed Reid, The Grim Reapers: The Anatomy of Organized Crime in
[44] Mangold, Cold Warrior, 329-30; cf. 305, 337. Other authors have written that Dulles and Angleton maintained a “second agency,” or “agency-within-the Agency;” see e.g. Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 260.
[45] Mangold, Cold Warrior, 105.
[46] Memo of 4 November 1970 from John K. Greaney, Assistant General Counsel, CIA, NARA #104-10106-10374.
[47] “
[48] Memo of 4 November 1970 from John K. Greaney, Assistant General Counsel, CIA, NARA #104-10106-10374. Robert Sam Anson once claimed that two of the defendants in these kickback trials, John Larocca and Gabriel Mannarino, were acquitted in 1971 when “one of the star witnesses turned out to be the local head of the CIA” (Robert Sam Anson, “They’ve Killed the President,” [New York: Bantam, 1975], 296). Anson told me that this witness was Brod, but I have found no court record that Brod’s testimony was accepted into the court record.
[49] Dan E. Moldea, The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians, and the Mob (New York: Paddington Press, 1978), 130-31.
[50] Time, June 9, 1975, 14.
[51] Church Committee, Testimony of John Scelso, 7 May 1976, 41-42,
[52] William R. Corson, Susan B.
[53] For details see Scott, War Conspiracy, 387; Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in
[54] See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in
1994-1999 (Ipswich , MA
Peter Dale Scott, “Oswald and the Hunt for Popov's Mole,” The Fourth Decade, III,
3 (March 1996), 3; www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=519798.
[55] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.
[56] See discussion in Peter Dale Scott, "The JFK Assassination and 9/11: the Designated Suspects in Both Cases," Global Research, July 5, 2008, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9511.
[57] J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (
[58] McSherry, Predatory States, 95; citing White cable of October 13, 1978, foia.state.gov/documents/State/Chile3/000058FD.pdf (a URL inactive in 2008); also Diana Jean Schemo, “New Files Tie U.S. to Deaths of Latin Leftists in 1970s,” New York Times, March 6, 2001.
[59] “I can do no less, without producing a reaction in the
[60] McSherry, Predatory States, 159.
[61] McSherry, Predatory States, 161.
[62] Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2008, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/07/nation/na-posada7.
[63] Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (
[64] Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (
[65]
[66] Block, Masters of
[67] Block, Masters of Paradise, 192: “The major Pritzker link to the Teamsters was crafted by Stanford Clinton, “ a lawyer “who represented some of
[68] Block, Masters of
[69] Block, Masters of
[70] Block, Masters of
[71] Scott, The War Conspiracy, 46-47, 60, 64-68, 263, 278-79.
[72]
[73] “Lawyers and Lobbyists.” Fortune, February 1952, p. 142; quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy, 47.
[74] Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (
[75] Scott, The War Conspiracy, 278-79
[76] Block, Masters of
[77] McKean, Peddling Influence, 140-43; Scott, War Conspiracy, 64-65.
[78] McKean, Peddling Influence, 149-50.
[79] Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 107, 153; Trento, Prelude to Terror, 9.
[80] Oral History Interview with Arthur R. Ringwalt, June 5, 1974, Truman Library, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/ringwalt.htm.
[81]
[82] Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The
[83] Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 82-83.
[84] Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swann, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (
[85] Memo of 18 August 1976 to Chief, Security Analysis Group, NARA #104-10059-10013; also partially released as p. 6 of Meyer Lansky Security File, 1993.08.13.17:42:12:560059.
[86] Memo of 18 August 1976 to Chief, Security Analysis Group,
[87] Jeff Gerth, in Sid Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian (eds.), Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from
[88] Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of Power, 242, 252; Jim Hougan, Spooks, 398. Cf. Denny
[89] Block, Masters of
[90] Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of Power, 244-45, 253-54.
[91] Block, Masters of
[92] Inspector-General’s report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 29-30; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files, 1994-1995 (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007), 60.
[93] San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1967, 41; quoted in Scott, Deep Politics II, 67.
[94] Block, Masters of
[95] Inspector-General’s report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 29-30; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 59
[96] Some of the documents in this file, including the FBI Report quoted in this paragraph, are incorporated into the Inspector-General’s report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 29-30; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 59. In addition, the CIA’s report on its interest in Resorts International, quoted above, carries the handwritten notation “for file/ Sam GIANCANA/ not mentioned.” The allusion to Giancana makes sense in the context of the CIA-mafia plots, but as far as I know not otherwise.
[97] “MOSS, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 14 May 1973, in Meyer Lansky Security File, p. 9, NARA #1993.08.13.17:42:12:560059. The CIA used the misspelling “
[98] “MOSS, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 14 May 1973 from Jerry G. Brown for Deputy Chief, Security Research Staff, NARA #1993.08.13,17:42:12:560059.
[99] “Moss, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 19 April 1967 [at the time of the I-G Report mentioning Moss], NARA #104-10122-10006; Inspector General’ Report on CIA-Mafia Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro (henceforth I-G Report), NARA # 104-10213-10101, p. 38. Cf. memo of 7 November 1962 in CIA’s Edward K. Moss folder, p. 26,
[100] “Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI Memorandum of January 16, 1961 to A. H. Belmont, 105-76826-20;
[101] “Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI Memorandum of January 16, 1961 to A. H. Belmont, p. 2, 105-76826-20; NARA #124-90055-10139. Cf. “Moss, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 14 May 1973, in Meyer Lansky Security File, p. 9, NARA #1993.08.13.17:42:12:560059; CIA letter of 16 December 1960 to FBI, FBI file 105-76826-18; NARA #124-90055-10133.
[102] CIA letter of 16 December 1960 to Director, FBI, FBI File 105-76826-18;
[103] “Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI Memorandum of January 16, 1961 to A. H. Belmont, p. 2, 105-76826-20; NARA #124-90055-10139.
[104] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 145; cf. 238-40.
[105] “Moss, Edward K. #172646,” CIA Memo of 28 November 1962,
[106] I-G Report, p. 38.
[107] “Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI Memorandum of January 16, 1961 to A. H. Belmont,” p. 2, 105-76826-20;
[108] FBI Memorandum to Attorney General, January 23, 1961,
[109] Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swann, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (
[110] Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession:
[111] Summers with Swann, Arrogance of Power, 283 ($1 million); Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (
[112] Kessler, Richest Man in the World, 170.
[113] Kessler, Richest Man in the World, 142, 181.
[114] It has been alleged that at the Sands in 1960 the FBI saw the casino’s courtesy prostitutes “running in and out of” Senator Jack Kennedy’s suite, and a million dollars was allegedly given to Kennedy in a brown leather satchel by the hotel’s owners (John William Tuohy, “The Sands,”AmericanMafia, August 2001, http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_155.html).
[115] Omar Garrison, Howard Hughes in
[116] Kessler, Richest Man in the World, 149-50.
[117] Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of
[118] Gigi Mahon, The Company That Bought the Boardwalk (New York: Random House, 1980), 136.
[119] Kessler, Richest Man in the World, 275–78. A friend of Khashoggi’s, Larry Kolb, reports that Khashoggi himself essentially corroborated the story that Khashoggi and John Kennedy had a friendship in the 1950s that “evolved primarily out of whoring together” (Larry J. Kolb, Overworld: The Life and Times of a Reluctant Spy [New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2004], 236). The woman who destroyed the presidential aspirations of Senator Gary Hart in 1987 was one of Khashoggi’s many girls.
[120] Kessler, The Richest Man, 238, 240.
[121] Prince Turki bin Faisal gave
[122] Kolb, Overworld, 238, 242–43.
[123] Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of
[124] Investigative reporter Jim Hougan reports the incredulity of congressional investigators that Lockheed was the only large corporation not to have made a contribution to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign (Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents [New York: William Morrow, 1978], 457–58).
[125] Drinkhall, Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980. Drinkhall also reported that “Helliwell reputedly was one of the paymasters for the ill-fated
[126] Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush (1992), 296-97
[127] Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire, 36-37; citing Robin Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 377-78 (X-2 in Vienna).
[128] Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 384 (“ties”).
[129] Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire, 86. Abbas Kassimali Gokal, whom British prosecutors accused of stealing $1.3 billion from BCCI, was a board member of the Inter Maritime Bank from 1978 through 1982. In 1997 Gokal was sentenced to 13 years by a
[130] Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 384. Truell and Gurwin claim that Hartmann went from Intermaritime to BCCI; the Kerry-Brown BCCI Report claims that Rappaport recruited Hartmann from BCCI/BCP for his own bank.
[131] Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire, 85.
[132]
[133] Jane Hunter “Covert Operations: The Human Factor,” The Link , August 1992, Volume 25, Issue 3, 8, http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=139&aid=183&pg=8.
[134] Leonard Slater, The Pledge (New York: Pocket Books, 1971), 175.
[135] Sindona had links to the Italian intelligence service SISMI, to drug traffickers like Rosario Gambino, and to the Nixon Administration. See Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 71, 73; Lernoux, In Banks We Trust, 178-79, 193-95, etc.
[136] Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire, 36; citing Robin W. Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 377-78.
[137] Smith,
[138] Operation Safehaven began as a U.S. Treasury effort to trace the movements of stolen Nazi gold, and possibly implicate Nazi collaborators in
[139] Anthony Cave Brown, The Secret War Report of the
[140] Ronald Kessler, The Richest Man in the World (New York: Warner Books, 1986), 162, 300; Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 54, 80, 263-64.
[141] Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 83-87.
[142] Kerry-Brown Report.
[143] Beaty and Gwynn, 357.
[144] Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 373-77.
[145] Olmsted’s intelligence connections dated back to wartime service on the staff of General Albert Wedemeyer in
[146] Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire, 41; cf. Block, Masters of
[147] Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire, 41-42; Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 40-43, etc.
[148] Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 123-24; cf. 128-29: Expanding over seven pages on these and many other intelligence connections, they asked whether the bank’s illegal acquisition of an American bank holding company, First American Bankshares, was not in fact serving the purposes of
“No one can deny that virtually every major character in the takeover was connected in one way or another to U.S. intelligence: Olmsted who controlled the company [First American] for years; Middendorf, who headed the group that acquired it from him; Abedi, who arranged for clients of BCCI to buy the company from Middendorf’s group; [Mohammed Rahim Motaghi] Irvani,, the chairman of one of the dummy companies set up to carry out the acquisition; [his partner Richard] Helms, who advised Irvani; [former Saudi intelligence chief Kamal] Adham, the lead investor in Abedi’s group; [Clark] Clifford, who steered the deal through the regulatory maze and then became the chairman of the company….Can all this be a coincidence? Or is it possible that First American was affiliated with U.S. intelligence all along and that it was simply passed from one group of CIA associates to another, and then another? No proof has emerged that this is what happened, but it is certainly not a far-fetched theory.”
[149] Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (New York: Norton, 1987), 96.
[150] Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 162. BCCI also used Price Waterhouse as its auditor. In addition
BCCI and Nugan Hand used the same law firm and registered agent (Bruce Campbell & Company) in the
[151] Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 243.
[152] Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 334-35.
[153]
[154] Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 207, 208.
[155] James A. Nathan, “Dateline
[156] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 126-27.
[157] Thomas
[158] Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks (
[159] “KLA Funding Tied To Heroin Profits,”
[160] Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06, http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.com/2006/10/ellsberg-hastert-got-suitcases-of-al.html .
[161] Vanity Fair, September 2005. According to the ATC web site, “As one of the leading business associations in the United States, the American-Turkish Council (ATC) is dedicated to effectively strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of commercial, defense, technology, and cultural relations. Its diverse membership includes Fortune 500,
[162] Marshall, Drug Wars, 55; citing Tad Szulc, “The Money Changer,”
[163] See Scott, The War Conspiracy.
[164] Peter Dale Scott, "The
[165] AMPO (
[166] Beaty and Gwynn, The Outlaw Bank, 48.
[167]
[168] Dinges, The Condor Years,, 190-98.
[169] Robert Parry, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to
[170] "
[171] Iran-Contra Affair, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, 100th Congress. 1st Session, H. Rept No 100-433, S. Rept No. 100-216, pp. 164, 166, 228, etc.
[172] Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire, 95-116, etc. Burt Kanter, the co-founder of Castle Bank, was recurringly involved in Rappaport’s IMB-BONY dealings (Block and Weaver, 100, 102, 193, 105, 113).
[173] Scott, Road to 9/11, 163-65, 351; Thomas
[174] Scott, Road to 9/11, 167-68, citing Michel Chossudovsky, “
.transnational.org/SAJT/forum/meet/2001/Chossudov_WashingtPloy.html.
[175] Lernoux, In Banks We Trust, 72; cf. Mother Jones, March 1984.
[176] Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The
[177]
[178] Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, 100th Congress. 1st Session, H. Rept No 100-433, S. Rept No. 100-216, p. 164.
[179]
[180] Scott, Road to 9/11, 52-53.
[181] See Rowan Scarborough, Sabotage: America’s Enemies Within the CIA (
[182] “It works like this: Blackwater, for example, will win a
[183] This false ideology was enforced even inside the CIA. Author Claire Sterling wrote a book called The Terror Network, claiming “that all major terrorist groups were controlled by the
© Copyright Peter Dale Scott, Global Research, 2008
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10095
All copyrighted sources are quoted and used for comment and education in accord with the nonprofit provisions of: Title 17 U.S.C., Section 107. The use of these sites is in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., Section 107 and is protected under "Fair Use."
See:
19 crime families of Israel
Justice of God: Vatican Bank
Michael Collins Piper - Final Judgment
Salvador Astucia - The Opium Lords, Israel, The Golden Triangle, and The Kennedy Assassination
God and His Messiah Jesus Christ our Lord - our right and duty to witness to Him: The Kennedy Assassination in full - all of who did it, intelligible and fully explained
God and His Messiah Jesus Christ our Lord - our right and duty to witness to Him: Triad - Targets Palestine and the United States of America - Triad's hidden out in wide open plan
The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10095
All copyrighted sources are quoted and used for comment and education in accord with the nonprofit provisions of: Title 17 U.S.C., Section 107. The use of these sites is in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., Section 107 and is protected under "Fair Use."
See:
19 crime families of Israel
Justice of God: Vatican Bank
Michael Collins Piper - Final Judgment
Salvador Astucia - The Opium Lords, Israel, The Golden Triangle, and The Kennedy Assassination
God and His Messiah Jesus Christ our Lord - our right and duty to witness to Him: The Kennedy Assassination in full - all of who did it, intelligible and fully explained
God and His Messiah Jesus Christ our Lord - our right and duty to witness to Him: Triad - Targets Palestine and the United States of America - Triad's hidden out in wide open plan
Bank of World Commerce, BCCI, CIA Director Bush, CIA-Mafia Plots, drugs, Iran, Israel, Jews, Khashoggi, Kissinger, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Mossad, Nixon, Oswald - Lee Henry - nee Harvey, Pinochet, Safari Club
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