mirror of
https://github.com/nhammer514/textfiles-politics.git
synced 2024-10-01 01:15:38 -04:00
606 lines
31 KiB
Plaintext
606 lines
31 KiB
Plaintext
|
[Speech: Massachusetts Libertarian Party:
|
||
|
200th Birthday of the Bill of Rights, December 19, 1991.]
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
The occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Bill of
|
||
|
Rights reminds us to be very worried about the growth since World War Il
|
||
|
of a national-security oligarchy, a secret and invisible state within
|
||
|
the public state.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The national-security state has come upon us not all at once but
|
||
|
bit by bit over a span of several decades. It is useful to review the
|
||
|
episodes -- the ones that are now known to us -- through which the current
|
||
|
situation evolved.
|
||
|
|
||
|
1. 1945: The Gehlen Deal
|
||
|
|
||
|
Wild Bill Donovan of the wartime Office of Strategic Services,
|
||
|
the OSS, proposed to President Roosevelt before the war was over that
|
||
|
the United States should setup a permanent civilian intelligence agency,
|
||
|
but military foes of Donovan leaked his plan to a conservative
|
||
|
journalist, Walter Trohan, who exposed the idea in the Chicago _Tribune_
|
||
|
and denounced it as an" American Gestapo." [1]
|
||
|
|
||
|
But only a few weeks after this. after Roosevelt's death and the
|
||
|
inauguration of Harry Truman. In the utmost secrecy, the Army was taking
|
||
|
its own much more dangerous steps toward an American Gestapo.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Days after the Nazi surrender in May 1945, a US Army command
|
||
|
center in southern Germany was approached by Nazi Brigadier General
|
||
|
Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen was the chief of the Nazi intelligence apparatus
|
||
|
known as the FHO, Foreign Armies East. The FHO ran spy operations
|
||
|
throughout East Europe and the Soviet Union during the war, and it
|
||
|
remained intact during the late-war period when the rest of the
|
||
|
Wehrmacht was crumbling. In fact, the FHO was the one part of the
|
||
|
Naziwar machine that continued to recruit new members right through the
|
||
|
end of the war. SS men at risk of war crimes charges in particular were
|
||
|
told to join with Gehlen, go to ground, and await further orders.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Gehlen presented himself for surrender to the American forces
|
||
|
with an arrogant, take-me-to-your-leader attitude and was for a few
|
||
|
weeks shunted aside by GIs who were unimpressed by his demand for
|
||
|
red-carpet treatment. But he had an interesting proposal to make and was
|
||
|
soon brought before high-level officers of the Army's G-2 intelligence
|
||
|
command.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Gehlen's proposal in brief: Now that Germany has been defeated,
|
||
|
he told his captors, everyone knows that the pre-war antagonism between
|
||
|
the Soviet Union and the United States will reappear - Who emerges with
|
||
|
the upper hand in Europe may well depend on the quality of either side's
|
||
|
intelligence. The Soviets are well known to have many spies placed in
|
||
|
the United States and the American government, but the Americans have
|
||
|
almost no intelligence capability in East Europe and the Soviet Union.
|
||
|
Therefore, Gehlen proposes that the United States Army adopt the FHO in
|
||
|
its entirety, including its central staff, as well as its underground
|
||
|
intelligence units, several thousand men strong, throughout East Europe
|
||
|
and the U.S.S.R. Thus, the FHO will continue doing what it was doing for
|
||
|
Hitler that is, fighting Bolshevism - but will now do it for the United
|
||
|
States.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The OSS was formally dismantled in the fall of 1945 at the very
|
||
|
moment at which General Gehlen and six of his top aides were settling
|
||
|
into comfortable quarters at the army's Fort Hunt in Virginia, not far
|
||
|
from the Pentagon. For the next several months, in highly secret
|
||
|
conversations, Gehlen and the U.S. Army hammered out the terms of their
|
||
|
agreement. By February 1946, Gehlen and his staff were back in Europe,
|
||
|
installed in a new village-sized compound in Pullach, from which they
|
||
|
set about the business of reactivating their wartime intelligence
|
||
|
network, estimated at between 6,000 and 20,000 men, all of them former
|
||
|
Nazis and SS members, many of them wanted for war crimes but now (like
|
||
|
the famous Klaus Barbie) protected through Gehlen's deal with the United
|
||
|
States both from the Nuremberg Tribunal and the de-Nazification
|
||
|
program.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Thus it was that the superstructure of the United States'
|
||
|
post-war intelligence system was laid on the foundation of an international
|
||
|
Nazi spy ring that had come to be the last refuge of SS war criminals who
|
||
|
had no other means of escaping judgment. The Gehlen Org, as it came to be
|
||
|
called by the few Americans who knew about it (and needless to say, the United
|
||
|
States Congress knew nothing of the Gehlen deal, and the evidence is strong
|
||
|
that Truman knew very little, if anything at all, about it) continued to serve
|
||
|
the United States as its eyes and ears on Europe and the U.S.S.R. until 1955.
|
||
|
At that time, fulfilling one of the terms of the secret treaty of Fort Hunt in
|
||
|
1945, the entire Gehlen Org was transferred to the new West German government,
|
||
|
which gave it the name of the Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, and which
|
||
|
the descendants of General Gehlen serve to this day. The BND continued to serve
|
||
|
as the backbone of NATO intelligence and is said to have supplied well into the
|
||
|
1960s something in the order of seventy percent of the NATO intelligence take.
|
||
|
|
||
|
This is the base upon which the U.S. intelligence system was
|
||
|
founded. The National Security Act of 1947 reorganized the military and
|
||
|
created the CIA, but the Gehlen Org was the base from which U.S.
|
||
|
intelligence developed throughout the decades of the Cold War. I am not
|
||
|
trying to imply here that Stalin was not a villain or that Soviet
|
||
|
communism was not a threat to Europe. I am saying rather that everything
|
||
|
American policymakers believed they knew about Europe and the U.S.S.R.
|
||
|
well into the 1960s was sent to them by an intelligence network made up
|
||
|
completely of Hitler's most dedicated Nazis. I believe this fact helps to
|
||
|
explain how the American national-security community evolved the
|
||
|
quasi-fascistic credo we can observe developing in the following incidents.
|
||
|
|
||
|
2. 1945: Operation Shamrock
|
||
|
|
||
|
This program, set up by the Pentagon and turned over to the
|
||
|
National Security Agency after 1947, was discovered and shut down by
|
||
|
Congress in 1975. As a House committee explained in a 1979 report,
|
||
|
Shamrock intercepted "virtually all telegraphic traffic sent to, from,
|
||
|
or transitting the United States." Said the House report,'Operation
|
||
|
Shamrock was the largest government interception program affecting
|
||
|
Americans" ever carried out. In a suit brought by the ACLU in the 1978
|
||
|
to declassify Shamrock files, the Defense Department claimed that either
|
||
|
admitting or denying that the Shamrock surveillance took place, never
|
||
|
mind revealing actual files, would disclose "state secrets." A judicial
|
||
|
panel decided in the Pentagon's favor despite the ACLU's argument that
|
||
|
to do so was 'dangerously close to an open ended warrant to intrude on
|
||
|
liberties guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.' [2]
|
||
|
|
||
|
3. 1945: Project Paperclip
|
||
|
|
||
|
This is perhaps the most famous of such programs but it is still
|
||
|
not well understood. The U.S. Army wanted German rocket scientists both
|
||
|
for its own interest in rocketry and to keep them out of the hands of
|
||
|
the Soviets, who had the same ambitions. United States law forbade these
|
||
|
scientists' entry into the U.S., however, because they were all Nazis
|
||
|
and members of the SS, including the prize among them, Dr. Werner von
|
||
|
Braun. The Army acted unilaterally, therefore, in bringing the rocket
|
||
|
scientists to the United States as prisoners of war and defining the
|
||
|
Redstone rocket laboratory in Huntsville as a POW compound. Later the
|
||
|
Paperclip scientists were de- Nazified by various bureaucratic means and
|
||
|
emplaced at the center of the military space program. What is not well
|
||
|
understood is that hundreds of additional Nazi SS members who had
|
||
|
nothing at all to contribute to a scientific program were also admitted.
|
||
|
This included the SS bureaucrat who oversaw the slave labor efforts in
|
||
|
digging the underground facilities at the Nazi rocket base on
|
||
|
Peenemunde. [3]
|
||
|
|
||
|
4. 1947: Project Chatter
|
||
|
|
||
|
The U.S. Navy initiated this program to continue Nazi
|
||
|
experiments in extracting truth from unwilling subjects by chemical
|
||
|
means, especially mind-altering drugs such as Mescaline. This was at the
|
||
|
same time that U.S. investigative elements detailed to the Nuremberg
|
||
|
Tribunal were rounding up Nazis suspected of having experimented with
|
||
|
"truth serums" during World War II. Such experiments are banned by
|
||
|
international law. [4]
|
||
|
|
||
|
5. 1948: Election Theft
|
||
|
|
||
|
New to the world and eager to learn, the CIA immediately began
|
||
|
spending secret money to influence election results in France and Italy.
|
||
|
Straight from the womb, it thus established a habit of intervention
|
||
|
which, despite being rationalized in terms of the Red menace abroad,
|
||
|
would ultimately find expression within the domestic interior. [5]
|
||
|
|
||
|
6. 1953: MK-Ultra
|
||
|
|
||
|
The CIA picked up the Navy's Project Chatter and throughout the
|
||
|
1950s and '60s ran tests on involuntary and unwitting subjects using
|
||
|
truth drugs and electro-magnetic fields to see if it could indeed
|
||
|
control a subject's mind without the subject's being aware. This
|
||
|
research continued despite the fact that the United States signed the
|
||
|
Nuremberg Code in 1953 stipulating that subjects must be aware, must
|
||
|
volunteer, must have the aid of a supervising doctor, and must be
|
||
|
allowed to quit the experiment at any moment.
|
||
|
|
||
|
7. 1953: HT/Lingual
|
||
|
|
||
|
The CIA began opening all mail traveling between United States
|
||
|
and the U.S.S.R. and China. HT/Lingual ran until 1973 before it was
|
||
|
stopped. We found out about it in 1975. [6]
|
||
|
|
||
|
8. 1953: Operation Ajax
|
||
|
|
||
|
The CIA overthrew Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran,
|
||
|
complaining of his neutralism in the Cold War, and installed in his
|
||
|
place General Fazlollah Zahedi, a wartime Nazi collaborator. Zahedi
|
||
|
showed his gratitude by giving 25-year leases on forty percent of Iran's
|
||
|
oil to three American firms. One of these firms, Gulf Oil, was fortunate
|
||
|
enough a few years later to hire as a vice president the CIA agent
|
||
|
Kermit Roosevelt, who had run Operation Ajax. Did this coup set the
|
||
|
clock ticking on the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80? [7]
|
||
|
|
||
|
9. 1954: Operation Success
|
||
|
|
||
|
The CIA spent $20 million to overthrow the democratically
|
||
|
elected Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala for daring to introduce an agrarian
|
||
|
reform program that the United Fruit Company found threatening. General
|
||
|
Walter Bedell Smith, CIA director at the time, later joined the board of
|
||
|
United Fruit. [8]
|
||
|
|
||
|
10. 1954: News Control
|
||
|
|
||
|
The CIA began a program of infiltration of domestic and foreign
|
||
|
institutions, concentrating on journalists and labor unions. Among the
|
||
|
targeted U.S. organizations was the National Student Association, which
|
||
|
the CIA secretly supported to the tune of some $200,000 a year. This
|
||
|
meddling with an American and thus presumably off-limits organization
|
||
|
remained secret until _Ramparts_ magazine exposed it in 1967. It was at
|
||
|
this point that mainstream media first became curious about the CIA and
|
||
|
began unearthing other cases involving corporations, research centers,
|
||
|
religious groups and universities. [9]
|
||
|
|
||
|
11. 1960-1961: Operation Zapata
|
||
|
|
||
|
Castro warned that the United States was preparing an invasion
|
||
|
of Cuba, but this was 1960 and we all laughed. We knew in those days the
|
||
|
United States did not do such things. Then came the Bay of Pigs, and we
|
||
|
were left to wonder how such an impossible thing could happen.
|
||
|
|
||
|
12. 1960--63: Task Force W
|
||
|
|
||
|
Only because someone still anonymous inside the CIA decided to
|
||
|
talk about it to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, we
|
||
|
discovered that the CIA's operations directorate decided in September
|
||
|
1960: (a) that it would be good thing to murder Fidel Castro and other
|
||
|
Cuban leaders, (b) that it would be appropriate to hire the Mafia to
|
||
|
carry these assassinations out, and (c) that there would be no need to
|
||
|
tell the President that such an arrangement was being made. After all,
|
||
|
was killing not the Mafia's area of expertise?
|
||
|
|
||
|
It hardly seemed to trouble the CIA that the Kennedy
|
||
|
administration was at the very same time trying to mount a war on
|
||
|
organized crime focusing on precisely the Mafia leaders that the CIA was
|
||
|
recruiting as hired assassins.
|
||
|
|
||
|
13. 1964: Brazil
|
||
|
|
||
|
Two weeks after the Johnson administration announced the end of
|
||
|
the JFK Alliance for Progress with its commitment to the principle of
|
||
|
not aiding tyrants, the CIA staged and the U.S. Navy supported a coup
|
||
|
d'etat in Brazil over-throwing the democratically elected Joao Goulart.
|
||
|
Within twenty-four hours a new right-wing government was installed,
|
||
|
congratulated and recognized by the United States.
|
||
|
|
||
|
14. 1965: The DR
|
||
|
|
||
|
An uprising in the Dominican Republic was put down with the help
|
||
|
of 20,000 U.S. Marines. Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador, Abe
|
||
|
Fortas, a new Supreme Court justice and a crony of LBJ's presidential
|
||
|
advisors (Adolf Berle, Averill Harriman, and Joseph Farland) were all on
|
||
|
the payroll of organizations such as the National Sugar Refining
|
||
|
Company, the Sucrest Company, the National Sugar Company, and the South
|
||
|
Puerto Rico Sugar Company--all of which had holdings in the Dominican
|
||
|
Republic that were threatened by the revolution.
|
||
|
|
||
|
15. 1967: The Phoenix Program
|
||
|
|
||
|
A terror and assassination program conceived by the CIA but
|
||
|
implemented by the military command targeted Viet Cong cadres by name
|
||
|
-- a crime of war, according to international law. At least twenty thousand
|
||
|
were killed, according to the CIA's own William Colby, of whom some 3,000
|
||
|
were political assassinations. A CIA analyst later observed "They
|
||
|
killed a lot of the wrong damn people". [10]
|
||
|
|
||
|
16. August 1967: COINTELPRO
|
||
|
|
||
|
Faced with mounting public protest against the Vietnam War, the
|
||
|
PBI formally inaugurated its so-called COINTELPRO operations, a
|
||
|
rationalized and extended form of operations under way for at least a
|
||
|
year. A House committee reported in 1979 that "the FBI Chicago Field
|
||
|
Office files in 1966 alone contained the identities of a small
|
||
|
army of 837 informers, all of whom reported on antiwar activists' political
|
||
|
activities, views or beliefs, and none of whom reported on any unlawful
|
||
|
activities by these activists." [11]
|
||
|
|
||
|
17. October 1967: MH/Chaos
|
||
|
|
||
|
Two months after the PBI started up COINTELPRO, the CIA followed
|
||
|
suit with MH/Chaos, set up in the counterintelligence section run by a
|
||
|
certifiable paranoid named James Jesus Angleton. Even though the illegal
|
||
|
Chaos infiltration showed that there was no Soviet financing or
|
||
|
manipulation of the antiwar movement, Johnson refused to accept this,
|
||
|
and the operation continued in to the Nixon administration. By 1971, CIA
|
||
|
agents were operating everywhere there were students inside America,
|
||
|
infiltrating protest groups not only to spy on them but to provide
|
||
|
authentic cover stories they could use while traveling abroad and
|
||
|
joining foreign anti-war groups. Chaos was refocused on international
|
||
|
terrorism in 1972, but another operation, Project Resistance, conducted
|
||
|
out of the CIA Office of Security, continued surveillance of American
|
||
|
domestic dissent until it was ended in June 1973.
|
||
|
|
||
|
18. April 1968: The King Plot
|
||
|
|
||
|
The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. led at once to
|
||
|
massive urban riots, the breakup of the nonviolent civil rights movement
|
||
|
and in ten years to a congressional investigation that found evidence of
|
||
|
conspiracy, despite the initial finding that, as in the JFK case, the
|
||
|
assassin was a lone nut. The conspiracy evidence included proof that the
|
||
|
FBI had directly threatened King and that, in the certain knowledge that
|
||
|
King was a target of violent hate groups, the Memphis Police Department
|
||
|
had withdrawn its protective surveillance and had let this fact be known
|
||
|
publically via newspaper, radio, and television broadcasts.
|
||
|
|
||
|
19. June 1968: The RFK Hit
|
||
|
|
||
|
The assassination of Robert Kennedy came on the heels of his
|
||
|
victory in the California presidential primary. This victory had
|
||
|
virtually guaranteed his nomination as an antiwar presidential candidate
|
||
|
at the Democratic convention in August. The assassinations of King and
|
||
|
the second Kennedy were body blows to the civil rights and the antiwar
|
||
|
movements and drove nails in the coffins of those who were still
|
||
|
committed to the principles of democratic nonviolent struggle.
|
||
|
|
||
|
From now on there would be virtually nothing left of the
|
||
|
organized movement except the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, both
|
||
|
committed to violence and thus both of them doomed. The official
|
||
|
verdict in Robert Kennedy's murder was, predictably enough, that it was
|
||
|
the work of another lone nut. This conclusion was reached by a
|
||
|
still-secret Los Angeles Police Department investigation, despite the
|
||
|
fact that L.A. coroner Thomas Noguchi found that most of RFK's wounds were
|
||
|
fired point blank behind him whereas the alleged assassin Sirhan Sirhan, by
|
||
|
unanimous testimony of many eyewitnesses, never got his pistol closer to
|
||
|
Kennedy than six feet and was always in front of him. It was true
|
||
|
nevertheless, that Sirhan fired. It was also true that he was, and
|
||
|
apparently remains, insane. Sirhan has claimed several times that he
|
||
|
was "programmed" to carry out the assassination by unnamed sources. Was Sirhan
|
||
|
the offspring of Project Chatter and/or MK-Ultra?
|
||
|
|
||
|
20. 1969: Operation Minaret
|
||
|
|
||
|
This was a CIA program charted to intercept (according to a
|
||
|
House Report) "the international communications of selected American
|
||
|
citizens and groups on the basis of lists of names, 'watchlists,'
|
||
|
supplied by other government agencies...The Program applied not only to
|
||
|
alleged foreign influence on domestic dissent, but also to American
|
||
|
groups and individuals whose activities 'may result in civil
|
||
|
disturbances...'" [14]
|
||
|
|
||
|
21. April 1971: Helms protests
|
||
|
|
||
|
In a rare public speech to the American Society of Newspaper
|
||
|
Editors, CIA Director Richard Helms asked the nation to "take it on
|
||
|
faith that we too are honorable men devoted to her service." He went on
|
||
|
to say, "We do not target on American citizens." [15]
|
||
|
|
||
|
22. 1972: Watergate
|
||
|
|
||
|
As though to give body to Helms' touching promise, seven CIA
|
||
|
Operatives detailed to the Nixon White House played the same political
|
||
|
game the CIA learned abroad in all its clandestine manipulations from
|
||
|
France to Brazil, from Italy to Guatemala, but now in the context of
|
||
|
U.S. Presidential politics. Whether through sheer fluke or a subtle
|
||
|
counter-conspiracy, Nixon's CIA burglars were caught in the act, and two
|
||
|
years later Nixon was therefore forced to resign. For a moment, a
|
||
|
window opened into the heart of darkness.
|
||
|
|
||
|
23. 1973: Allende Murdered
|
||
|
|
||
|
Frustrated in its 1970 efforts to control the Chilean election,
|
||
|
the CIA resorted to murder once again in the elimination of Salvador
|
||
|
Allende. Allende government official Orlando Letelier along with an
|
||
|
American supporter, Ronnie Moffit, were also killed, not far away in
|
||
|
Chile, but in Dupont Circle in our nation's capital.
|
||
|
|
||
|
24. Late 1970s: "Defenders of Democracy"
|
||
|
|
||
|
As death squads raged through Latin America, FBI agents and U.S.
|
||
|
marshals in Puerto Rico secretly created, trained and armed a super-secret
|
||
|
police unit named "Defenders of Democracy" and dedicated to the assassination
|
||
|
of leaders of the Puerto Rican independence movement. [16]
|
||
|
This was in the Jimmy Carter period. Did Carter know?
|
||
|
|
||
|
25. 1980: October Surprise
|
||
|
|
||
|
The facts in this strange first act of the Iran-Contra episode
|
||
|
are still in dispute, but the charge made by Barbara Honegger, activist
|
||
|
in the Reagan 1980 campaign, and by Carter national security aide Gary
|
||
|
Sick, is of megascandal dimensions.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Honegger and Sick claim in outline that in 1980 William Casey,
|
||
|
long-time U.S. super-spy but at that point without the least portfolio,
|
||
|
led a secret Reagan campaign delegation to Europe to strike a secret
|
||
|
deal with Iran, a nation with which the United States was virtually at
|
||
|
war because of the 42 hostages Iran had seized from the U.S. embassy.
|
||
|
|
||
|
In the alleged deal, Iran agreed not to release the hostages
|
||
|
until the U.S. presidential race was over, thus denying President Carter
|
||
|
the political benefit of getting the hostages back. Reagan agreed that,
|
||
|
if elected, he would help Iran acquire certain weapons. Well, for a few
|
||
|
bucks here and there, too, of course, and something for Israel, but the
|
||
|
basic deal was U.S. Arms for U.S. hostages held by Iran.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The basic deal was also so deeply criminal as to go beyond all
|
||
|
statutes but those that deal with treason.
|
||
|
|
||
|
26. 1970s and 1980s: The Noreiga Connection
|
||
|
|
||
|
The CIA was exposed time and again throughout these decades in
|
||
|
big-time international dope trafficking. This was not altogether new.
|
||
|
Already in the late '60s we had discovered that this was happening in
|
||
|
Southeast Asia, where the CIA's regional airline, Air America, was found
|
||
|
deeply involved in the opium trade being run out of the so called Golden
|
||
|
Triangle centered in Laos and involving Chinese drug lords associated
|
||
|
with the anti-Communist Kuomintang. [17] The ClA's support in moving
|
||
|
large amounts of opium was valuable, it seemed, in maintaining good
|
||
|
relations with our anti-Communist friends. In the 1970s and '80s, CIA
|
||
|
drug operations appeared in this hemisphere for a related but even
|
||
|
better reason: they were a convenient way to finance anti-Communist
|
||
|
operations that the Congress would not fund.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The rash of drug cases around former Panamanian strongman Manuel
|
||
|
Noriega--once a darling of the CIA until he dared oppose U.S. policy in
|
||
|
Nicaragua--provides a glimpse into the true heart of the contemporary
|
||
|
CIA. Noriega received as much as $10 million a month from the Medellin
|
||
|
Cartel (whose profits were $3 million a day) plus $200,000 a year from
|
||
|
the CIA for the use of Panamanian runways in transhipment of cocaine to
|
||
|
the north.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Noriega is only in trouble today because he turned against the
|
||
|
Reaganauts. The real attitude of Reagan and Bush toward drug trafficking
|
||
|
is indicated much less in Noriega's trial itself than in the kind of
|
||
|
deals the Justice Department is willing to make to convict him.
|
||
|
According to a recent _Boston Globe_ news story, federal prosecution
|
||
|
have paid at least $1.5 million in "fees" for testimony against Noriega.
|
||
|
In addition, some government witnesses have received freedom from life
|
||
|
sentences, recovery of stashed drug profits and confiscated property,
|
||
|
and permanent U.S. residency and work permits for themselves and family
|
||
|
members.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The best deals go to the biggest offenders, such as Carlos
|
||
|
Lehder. Leader of the Medellin Cartel, Lehder was sentenced to 145 years
|
||
|
in prison, but is probably facing a real sentence of less than five
|
||
|
years on account of his collaboration against Noriega. He is said to
|
||
|
have made a $10-million contribution to the contra cause.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The case of Floyd Carlton is also instructive. Carlton was a
|
||
|
drug pilot whose testimony led to Noriega's indictment in 1988. He was
|
||
|
allowed by Bush's prosecutors to transfer his cocaine profits into the
|
||
|
U.S.tax-free. Bush also promised not to seize his various homes and
|
||
|
ranches and agreed to pay $210,000 to support his wife, three children,
|
||
|
and a nanny and to furnish them with permanent residence in the U.S. and
|
||
|
work permits. [18]
|
||
|
|
||
|
27. October 1986: The Enterprise
|
||
|
|
||
|
A contra supply plane was shot down in Nicaragua. A low-level
|
||
|
CIA agent named Eugene Hassenfus was captured alive. Hassenfus chose not
|
||
|
to make a martyr of himself, and thus was born the Iran-Contra scandal,
|
||
|
a continuation of the politics of the October Surprise but on a far
|
||
|
grander scale. The CIA and the NSC were learning how to operate beyond
|
||
|
the reach of American Law. With the "free-standing, off-the-books"
|
||
|
organization they called "the Enterprise," capable of financing it's
|
||
|
operations from drug profits and thus independent of the exchequer, The
|
||
|
likes of Oliver North and John Poindexter and Theodore Shackley and
|
||
|
Thomas Clines and Rafael Quintero and William Casey had it made. They
|
||
|
could form U.S. policy pretty much by themselves, especially since the
|
||
|
super-patriot Ronald Reagan seemed content to blink and doze. Who cared
|
||
|
what Congress might think or say? As Admiral Poindexter put it so
|
||
|
eloquently, "I never believed . . . that the Boland Amendment ever
|
||
|
applied to the -- National Security Council staff." [19]
|
||
|
|
||
|
28. 1991: BCCI
|
||
|
|
||
|
The main difference between the CIA's early Cold War scandals
|
||
|
and the ones we are seeing today is that the more recent ones are
|
||
|
immeasurably more complex. This is sharply true of our last two
|
||
|
examples, one of which is that of the still emerging scandal around the
|
||
|
Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The BCCI scandal appears to
|
||
|
involve the CIA in a far-flung international financial network created
|
||
|
for the primary purpose of laundering vast amounts of drug money and
|
||
|
with the secondary purpose of ripping off the unsuspecting smaller banks
|
||
|
that BCCI acquired in pursuit of its primary objective.
|
||
|
|
||
|
One fascinating aspect of the BCCI scandal is that it may at last supply
|
||
|
us with the final solution of one of the outstanding riddles of the last
|
||
|
decades--namely, why does the government insist on keeping drugs illegal
|
||
|
since the only evident result of this is to keep the price of drugs (in
|
||
|
both dollars and lives) high? Could this be because it is the secret
|
||
|
elements of the Government--The CIA, the NSC, the Enterprise--that is actually
|
||
|
selling them?
|
||
|
|
||
|
29. 1991: Casolaro
|
||
|
|
||
|
Finally, consider just briefly another case of astounding
|
||
|
complexity, still not at all exposed, still writhing in the
|
||
|
twilight--the case of Inslaw, Inc., involving the George Bush Justice
|
||
|
Department and the death of Danny Casolaro, a free-lance investigative
|
||
|
journalist with whom I happen to identify most closely, even though I
|
||
|
never met him.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The story in brief: Inslaw, Inc. in the early 1980s was an
|
||
|
enterprising computer software company whose most important product was
|
||
|
a software program called Promis. Promis' appeal lay in the fact that it
|
||
|
made it possible for Justice Department attorneys to keep track of an
|
||
|
extremely large number of cases. The Justice Department bought Promis
|
||
|
from Inslaw in 1982 and began installing it in its various offices.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Inslaw had completed nineteen installations of Promis within a
|
||
|
year, and all seemed to be going well. But suddenly the Justice
|
||
|
Department began to complain about Promis and soon was refusing to pay
|
||
|
Inslaw, which therefore careened into bankruptcy.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The fact, however, was that nothing at all was wrong with
|
||
|
Promis. Rather, the Justice Department--so it is alleged--had made a
|
||
|
deal with Dr. Earl Brian, California health secretary under Governor
|
||
|
Ronald Reagan. In this alleged deal--which Dr. Brian denies--the Justice
|
||
|
Department would simply steal Inslaw's Promis software and give it to
|
||
|
Dr. Brian, who--would then be in a position to sell it back to the
|
||
|
Justice Department for an estimated $250 million.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Part of the reason the Justice Department was willing to do this
|
||
|
for Dr. Brian, as the allegation continues, is that Brian had helped
|
||
|
persuade Iranian leaders to cooperate with Reagan in the October
|
||
|
Surprise operation of 1980.
|
||
|
|
||
|
But there's more to the allegation. The attempt to get Promis
|
||
|
out of Inslaw's hands and into Dr. Brian's had two other purposes,
|
||
|
according to Inslaw's attorney, Elliot L. Richardson. The first was "to
|
||
|
generate revenue for covert operations not authorized by Congress. The
|
||
|
second was to supply foreign intelligence agencies with a software
|
||
|
system that would make it easier for U.S. eavesdroppers to read
|
||
|
intercepted signals." That is, a back door access was built into the
|
||
|
Promis software. Anyone who bought Promise was buying a Trojan Horse.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Danny Casolaro had talked to many of the informants in this
|
||
|
case. Telling friends he was on his way to contact an informant who
|
||
|
would put the last piece in the picture, he left his home in Washington
|
||
|
in August l99l to travel to Martinsburg, West Virginia, where he took a
|
||
|
hotel room and waited for the informant to contact him. Before leaving
|
||
|
he had told his friends not to believe it if he died in a car accident.
|
||
|
|
||
|
He was found dead in his room, in the bathtub, with both arms
|
||
|
slashed a total of twelve times. The Martinsburg police quickly ruled
|
||
|
his death a suicide and allowed his body to be embalmed immediately,
|
||
|
even before notifying his family of his death. His hotel room was
|
||
|
cleaned of the least indication that he had been in it. His briefcase
|
||
|
and his notes were never found. In his _New York Times_ op-ed piece
|
||
|
about this last October, Elliot Richardson ended by reminding his
|
||
|
readers that he had called for a special prosecutor once before.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Richardson was the nominated Attorney General in 1973 and
|
||
|
resigned in disagreement with Nixon, calling for a special prosecutor to
|
||
|
investigate Watergate.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Now Richardson wants another special prosecutor to probe the
|
||
|
Inslaw case. He believes Casolaro was murdered and that evidence points
|
||
|
to "a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser government officials in
|
||
|
the theft of Inslaw's technology." These same officials, of course,
|
||
|
would also be involved in the apparent attempt to generate funding for
|
||
|
illegal covert operations and to sneak Trojan Horse software into the
|
||
|
systems by which other governments monitor their litigation caseloads.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
We can be sure at least that the events we have briefly reviewed
|
||
|
here are not isolated and separate. In the painful story that begins
|
||
|
with General of the Third Reich Reinhard Gehlen and continues down to
|
||
|
the death of Danny Casolaro, we face a stream of systemically connected
|
||
|
corruption and abuses of power.
|
||
|
|
||
|
A secret state has set itself up within the darkest corners of
|
||
|
the American government. It is what Nixon adviser John Dean called a
|
||
|
cancer on the presidency, but it has metastasized well beyond the White
|
||
|
House. It is not paranoia to call attention to this, but a simple act
|
||
|
of realism.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
NOTES
|
||
|
|
||
|
1. John Ranalegh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New
|
||
|
York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 80.
|
||
|
|
||
|
2. House Select Committee on Assassinations: Report, vol. Vlll, pp.
|
||
|
506-08.
|
||
|
|
||
|
3. Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda (New York: St. Martins Press, 1990).
|
||
|
|
||
|
4. Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams (New York: Grove
|
||
|
Press, 1985).
|
||
|
|
||
|
5. Ranalegh, p. 131.
|
||
|
|
||
|
6. Ibid., p. 270.
|
||
|
|
||
|
7. Ibid., p. 261-64.
|
||
|
|
||
|
8. Ibid., p. 268.
|
||
|
|
||
|
9. Ibid., p. 246, p. 471.
|
||
|
|
||
|
10. Ibid., p. 440, p. 553.
|
||
|
|
||
|
11. HSCA, vol. VIII, p. 524.
|
||
|
|
||
|
12. Ranalegh, p. 534.
|
||
|
|
||
|
13. The HSCA Report. Findings and Recommendations (Washington: U.S.
|
||
|
Government Printing Office, 1979). See p. 407 re the FBI and p.
|
||
|
418 re the MPD.
|
||
|
|
||
|
14. HSCA, vol. VIII, p. 507.
|
||
|
|
||
|
15. Ranalegh, p. 281.
|
||
|
|
||
|
16. See Boston Globe and New York Times stories of January 29, 1992.
|
||
|
|
||
|
17. See Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New
|
||
|
York: Harper Colophon, 1973).
|
||
|
|
||
|
18. Boston Globe, Dec. 13, 1991.
|
||
|
|
||
|
19. Iran-Contra Trading Cards #35.
|