WORMSCAN: WORMSCAN.& [PART 4]
Involvement of Politicians, Judges, Lawyers, & Police in the Drug Business
NOTES: I made a few corrections to spellings but left the original document mainly untouched. Some dates are in YYMMDD format. These files are only a portion of the entire WORMSCAN.& file. I had to break it up due to length. There are hundreds of pages. Notice the change in format. There are much more details added to this file.
CIABASE is mentioned in this batch. For reference, CIABASE is a database (of sorts). It was published in 1992 by Ralph McGehee and contains a comprehensive list of all CIA operations that were publicly known at the time. It is preserved on the Internet Archive and can be found here. Please note that the document is 5,265 pages long and may take a while to load.
This is a continuation of the file named WORMSCAN.&.
WORMSCAN: WORMSCAN.& [PART 1]
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950923, San Diego Union-Tribune. Former DEA agent Celerino
Date: Sat Sep 23, 1995 6:19 am CST
From: snet l
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: snet-l@world.std.com
TO: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: CIA: Shooting Up in Public
Control Freaks, Pushers, & a Nation of Junkies
On August 13, an interesting story appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune. According to the report, former DEA agent Celerino Castillo stated that he and three other ex-narcs were willing to testify before Rep. Robert Toricelli's proposed subcommittee on the intelligence community and human rights violations in Guatemala and Central America regarding the extent of direct involvement by the Central Intelligence Agency in international drug trafficking. The estimate he gave the newspaper was that approximately 75 per cent of the drugs that enter the United States do so with the acquiescence or direct participation of U.S. and foreign CIA agents.
Several years ago, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, headed by Sen. John Kerry, held hearings on allegations that the contra forces fielded by the U.S. in its war against Nicaragua were using "national security" as a cover for cocaine smuggling; Oliver North, who was one of the primary organizers of the terrorists, wrote in his diary that at least $14 million that went to his arms operations came from drug kingpins. In its final report, the subcommittee was able to establish, despite stonewalling by the Reagan administration and shortages of staff and time that caused it to cut short many intriguing leads, that involvement of the contras in drug smuggling had been pervasive, with at least four of the "humanitarian" organizations set up to funnel tax money to the front being run by known traffickers.
Other published reports in the mid-Eighties indicated that the Afghani "freedom fighters" that the CIA armed and trained in its biggest operation of the post-Vietnam Cold War were responsible for between 40 and 80 percent of the heroin coming into the United States during those years.
Nor is the involvement of the CIA and its sister agencies in the international narcotics pipeline a recent phenomenon; in the 1950s there was the Burmese and Nationalist Chinese Golden Triangle, source of most of the world's opium; in the 1960s, Gen. Vang Pao and the Hmong growers, who served as the CIA's secret army in exchange for the Agency's aid in transporting its opium to the West; and in the 1970s, the "rogue" operations of Ted Shackley, Edwin Wilson and the Australian Nugan Hand Bank, "rogue" only in the sense that the CIA maintained its deniability and jettisoned the high-level officers in charge when their role threatened to become known. And throughout, there were the experiments with LSD on U.S. citizens, along with other operations whose records were deliberately destroyed when Congress began investigating them after Watergate.
Indeed, the complicity of the U.S. and other intelligence communities in the drug trade is so widespread that last year Shapolsky Publishers titled an expose by a former CIA agent, Ken Bucchi, "C.I.A.: Cocaine In America?"
A number of other well-documented books have traced the sordid facts. Among the best are Alfred McCoy's classic The Politics of Heroin (originally published in 1972 as The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, and reissued in greatly revised and expanded format in 1991); The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism, by Danish journalist Henrik Kruger (1980); The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic, by former top DEA agent Michael Levine (1993); Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall (1991); The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny (1987); In Banks We Trust, by the late Penny Lernoux (1984); Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, by Jay Stevens (1987; the chapter titled "Noises Offstage," regarding CIA MK-Ultra experiments using LSD on unsuspecting American citizens in the Fifties and Sixties); and Acid Dreams: the CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion, by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain (1985).
Despite overwhelming evidence of the direct involvement of agents of the State in pushing both heroin and cocaine, the official stance of the apparat is that it is diligently pursuing a "zero-tolerance" strategy aimed at eliminating the "scourge of illegal drugs" from our society. As the cliche has it, the first casualty in this war has been the truth.
We are now in the 24th year of the Drug War, a war first declared by Richard Nixon during his re-election campaign, and rededicated, as the Boston Globe noted, by "every President within living memory". As a result of the War, the U.S. prison population is now over a million, the highest or second-highest rate in the industrialized world. Almost five out of every eight federal prisoners are in for drug-related crimes, primarily personal possession of marijuana, referred to by a DEA Administrative Law Judge as "the safest therapeutically active substance known to humankind." Growing an acre of hemp, or marijuana, can net you the death penalty, while the crime bill presently before Congress would strip courts of their jurisdiction over prison conditions, declaring that routine brutality and stifling overcrowding are, by legislative fiat, neither cruel nor unusual. Certainly not unusual.
Federal forfeiture laws have ensured the deepest levels of corruption of local law enforcement officials all across the country, as municipalities and counties strapped for cash have taken advantage of the provisions that allow the agencies to keep or dispose of assets supposedly accumulated through drug profits, without having to go through the rigmarole of convincing a jury of guilt; without, in fact, having to bring charges at all.
As I write, police forces from Philadelphia to Los Angeles and all points in between are under investigation for fabricating evidence, torturing prisoners to obtain confessions, and numerous other violations of fundamental rights - primarily in drug cases, and primarily though by no means exclusively directed against minorities. (In Los Angeles County, no white person has been prosecuted through the federal courts on crack cocaine offenses in recent years; the state courts through which their cases are channeled average eight years less in sentencing for the same offense than the feds, who concentrate on Blacks and Latinos. Nationally, first time possession of powder cocaine, an expensive form of the drug favored by white lawyers and yuppies, is treated one hundred times as leniently as first time possession of the same amount of the crack form - cheap, and favored by poorer, darker, inner city residents.)
The "zero tolerance" game has also been used to accustom the average citizen to intrusive urine tests, radar surveillance of neighborhoods, random stop-and-searches of automobiles or persons, and other tools of the totalitarian corporate state. Drug hysteria among officialdom, whether genuine or manufactured to serve the agenda of oligarchy, is so pronounced that bills are introduced to deny tax exempt status to any organization that proposes the legalization of drugs - a position taken by such radicals as pundit William F. Buckley, former Secretary of State George Schulz, and Baltimore Mayor Kurt Shmoke.
Part of the reason for prohibiting discussion of alternatives such as legalization is that the proponents of "tough love" and tougher sentences frequently have no honest argument to make, so that in a genuine debate, they would be almost certain to lose. Thus in 1989 Parents for a Drug Free America was forced to acknowledge that it had been using footage of the brain waves of a person in a coma to represent those of a person under the influence of marijuana - a lapse that they indicated they felt perfectly justified in undertaking. During the campaign to reinstitute prohibition in Alaska, a DEA officer claimed that no one ever died from tobacco use. Other lies that surfaced during the extended campaign were the old, discredited "gateway drug" argument, the unsupported claim that marijuana grown today is ten to thirty times as powerful as that grown fifteen years earlier, and the insinuation of permanent sterility from casual use.
Even as the last veneer of Constitutional protection of individual rights is stripped away, and the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, legally binding as a treaty on every agent of the government in the United States, become a dead letter, all purportedly in order to stop the use of certain officially disapproved psychoactive substances, the marketing of other such substances, far more deadly, proceeds apace - not only under the benevolent eye of Big Brother, but with subsidies provided courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Citizen.
Jesse Helms, who blames AIDS victims for their disease, declares that the government ought to be putting more money into researching the cause and prevention of heart disease - whose single largest cause, as he knows full well, is the use of tobacco, the main cash crop in his home state of North Carolina. Tobacco is not only subsidized by taxpayers, but enjoys the services, gratis, of the U.S. Trade Representative whenever the governments of benighted third world nations such as Thailand assert their intention to reduce consumption of the crop by their citizenry. Other subsidies help the tobacco giants develop stronger and more addictive strains of nicotine to help them increase market share. Meanwhile, tobacco kills 450,000 U.S. citizens a year, when used as intended by the manufacturer.
The second largest mass murderer of note, alcohol, is also a mass-marketed commodity, and despite heroic efforts by well-meaning groups such as AA, is largely off the agenda when it comes to discouraging drug use. A beer after a football game is as traditional as tailgate picnics at Indy, yet few would suggest that they and their friends should go out and shoot some smack after a victory. Yet alcohol is at least as deadly as heroin, and in fact produces similar sensations of euphoria and well-being. Its use, again as intended by the manufacturer, is responsible for over a hundred thousand deaths of our countrymen and women each year, not counting homicides and drunken driving accidents. Legal prescription drugs - prozac, valium, lithium, demerol, xanex - kill thousands more.
Less deadly to the body, perhaps, but more insidiously deadly to the spirit, are the many other substances that escape classification as drugs altogether, despite numerous studies that demonstrate their psychoactive properties. Sugar, coffee, chocolate, religious cults, television, Nintendo, the endless consumption of useless commodities: America is a nation of addicts, endlessly groping for a substitute for community, for self-esteem, for partnership and cooperation, for the good society. Dysfunction and its handmaidens are, indeed, the motor force of the economy, the guarantor of profit and the sine qua non of control and stability.
In the mid-Sixties, when the populations of America's ghettos rose up against institutional and pervasive racism and repression, the availability of heroin increased dramatically. Pure "China White" was suddenly cheaper than rotgut, while Speedballs (heroin, cocaine and LSD in injectable form) made their first appearance in the hippie enclaves and countercultural atolls of the East and West coasts. Militant Blacks, who had chased the pushers out of their communities, found people too high to listen to their rhetoric. Meanwhile, the hippies who had begun to ally with certain sectors of the radical left were kept busy putting up posters warning that "Speed Kills," and trying to recover friends too strung out to know their own name.
These days, the crack cocaine "epidemic" serves a not dissimilar purpose in distracting the surplus population of the city from uniting to change its desperate situation, while enabling the control combine to whip up support for repealing the Constitution piecemeal. Dissidents of little or no means, especially those outside the mainstream, can likewise be dealt with through the repressive apparatus, as in Wisconsin, Iowa and California's Humboldt County, all of which have recently featured the killing of people in their homes for possession of a harmless herb. For the relatively affluent, on the other hand, the usual co-opting strategies will have to serve; after all, they do possess disposable income, and they tend to vote.
Perhaps it is time to consider, not just the legalization of illicit drugs, but the outlawing of capitalism, the banning of hierarchy, and the abolition of meaningless, numbing and antisocial jobs, labor and production.
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950923, Pacifica Radio Network, Daniel Sheehan interview.
Date: Sat Sep 23, 1995 8:12 am CST
From: snet l
EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414
MBX: snet-l@world.std.com
TO: * David Beiter / MCI ID: 635-1762
Subject: Part 1, DANIEL SHEEHAN: C.I.A. Agents Infest U.S. Mass Media (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 23 Sep 1995 09:28:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: John Di Nardo
To: map@pencil.math.missouri.edu, rich@pencil.math.missouri.edu, nyt@nyxfer.blythe.org
Cc: act@efn.org, beastnet@farces.com, lindat@iquest.net, financial.opportunities@canrem.com, pauls@cic.net, pnpj@db1.cc.rochester.edu, jad@locust.cic.net
Subject: Part 1, DANIEL SHEEHAN: C.I.A. Agents Infest U.S. Mass Media
T H E P E O P L E'S S P E L L B R E A K E R
News They Never Told You .... News They'll Never Tell You
DATE: _________ __, ____ PRICE: __ CENTS
THE NEWSPAPER FOR THE PEOPLE OF MONTANA
* * * * * MORNING EDITION * * * * *
EDITOR: John DiNardo
From the Pacifica Radio Network station,
WBAI-FM (99.5)
505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl.
New York, NY 10018
(212)279-0707 wbai@igc.apc.org
Part 1, DANIEL SHEEHAN: CIA Agents Infest U.S. Mass Media
GARY NULL: The Public's right to know is not always what the Public ends up getting. The Public frequently gets such one-sided, biased information -- and not just from the mass media. It's easy to have a long arm that protects the special interest groups: this kind of a "one world family" of insiders that is capable of affecting federal judges, U.S. attorneys, to slant or obstruct justice, to hide or cover up crucial information, and to interfere with our liberties.
Daniel Sheehan, as much as any attorney in the United States, and the Christic Institute have taken it upon themselves to try to challenge some of these injustices and to give us the information that they have distilled from their work that gives us a different perspective. Unfortunately, rare is it that any of the mainstream media covers the work of the Christic Institute or of Daniel Sheehan. And if they did, it would be a very enlightened Public who would be benefiting from this. Welcome to our program, Daniel Sheehan.
DANIEL SHEEHAN: Thank you, Gary.
GARY NULL: Daniel, earlier on, one of our guests was talking about -- and I'd like for you to follow through on this theme -- that what we're told in the media (and what we're told officially from Government sources) and what is the truth are frequently at varying degrees against each other. Give us one specific .....
DANIEL SHEEHAN: That's absolutely true. There has been a major campaign on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency, for example, to place Central Intelligence Agency agents, trained agents, IN various news media posts. We've found the documents on this. It was called "Operation Mocking Bird". And they placed Central Intelligence Agency operatives in places like TIME Magazine and LIFE Magazine, the New York Times, inside CBS [TV] and ABC [TV] News.
Originally, the intent of "Operation Mocking Bird" was to make certain that these major media outlets reflected an adequately anti-communist perspective. And then, of course, as they became entrenched and in-place, any time the Central Intelligence Agency wanted a story killed or distorted they would just contact their agents inside. Now, they have bragged openly in private memos back and forth inside the Agency about how proud they are of having really important "assets" inside virtually every major news media in the United States. And I've encountered this repeatedly.
For example, the Chief National Security Correspondent for TIME Magazine, Bruce Van Voorst[sp], is a regular Central Intelligence Agency officer. It turns out that Ben Bradlee from the Washington Post was a regular Central Intelligence Agency officer prior to coming to his post at the Washington Post.
Bob Woodward at the Washington Post was the Point-Briefer for U.S. Naval Intelligence of the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff before he went over to the Washington Post.
We find these people constantly in the news media and, as I may have pointed out to you in one of your shows, when the New York Times was refusing to print any information about Oliver North and Richard Secord [President Reagan's assistants], Albert Hakim and Rob Owen, and all of these other men who, throughout 1985 and 1986, were engaged in this MASSIVE criminal conspiracy to violate the Boland Amendment prohibiting any weapons shipments to the Contras, and who were involved in smuggling TOW missiles to Iran .... as this information was being communicated to the New York Times by sources that we had, the New York Times absolutely refused to print any of this. And the reason for it was, according to Keith Schneider -- who was one of the reporters assigned to at least address this stuff and look into it .... he said that they were refusing to print any of it because their high-level sources inside the Central Intelligence Agency refused to confirm the stories.
Now, that kind of relationship between self-conscious "assets" of the Covert Operations Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a political police force on an international level, if you will, and an economic police force to protect the ostensible economic interests of United States industries .... to place those people inside a news media -- which, under the First Amendment, ostensibly has the responsibility to critique and investigate potential injustices on the part of the State, inside the Government -- is an extraordinarily dangerous development here in the United States.
GARY NULL: Thank you for that insight. Could you also give us some understanding of one case in particular (if you could highlight it) that you're privy to, to show how they can export a form of terrorism, how they can support movements to destabilize DEMOCRACIES in any country whose position they don't choose to support, where multi-national corporations' interests may feel threatened and, as a result, they'll use our various branches of Government to thwart the local populace, invade their sovereignty, disrupt their complete political system, and how they manipulate the stories in the Press so that it's NEVER the way that we're told it is.
(to be continued)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I urge you to repost this episode to other newsgroups, networks, BBSs and mailing lists.
John DiNardo
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950930, Muskogee, OK, AP. Choctaw County Sheriff J.W. Trapp
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 1995 13:27:53 GMT
From: adbryan@onramp.net (Alan Bryan)
To: drctalk@drcnet.org
Subject: Re: Sheriff Indicted For Bribery
Message-ID: <199509301330.IAA16443@MAILHOST.ONRAMP.NET>
MUSKOGEE, Okla. (AP) -- A sheriff has been charged with taking thousands of dollars in bribes to look the other way on drug and gambling operations in his county.
Choctaw County Sheriff J.W. Trapp took more than $150,000 to protect drug operations, in some cases by warning alleged drug dealers about federal investigation, according to a federal indictment handed up Thursday.
Trapp also was accused of taking $500 in exchange for giving a woman a confidential homicide report by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.
The deals took place soon after Trapp became sheriff in 1989, and continued through the fall of 1993 when Trapp asked for $5,000 from a man to warn him about a federal drug investigation, the indictment alleges.
Trapp is being held without bond. The charges carry a maximum penalty of life in prison and more than $4 million in fines.
Four others were also named in the indictment, including Willie Wright, who was accused of paying Trapp $42,000 to protect a marijuana operation during the sheriff's first year in office. Wright was still at large.
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951008, Herndon, VA, Ralph McGehee. Distributing CIABASE of
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
From: lpease@netcom.com (Lisa Pease)
Subject: "Before I Am Arrested"
Message-ID:
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 18:20:22 GMT
[ Article crossposted from alt.politics.org.cia ]
[ Author was Ralph McGehee ]
[ Posted on Sun, 08 Oct 1995 08:02:51 -0700 (PDT) ]
10/8/95
President Clinton
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500
Fax # 202 456 2461
Mr. John Deutch
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C. 20505
Fax # 703 482 6790
Mary Pecora
U.S. Office of Special Counsel
1730 M Street, N.W., Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20036-4505
OSC File No. MA-95-2195
Before I am Arrested.
At the risk of being considered paranoid but in the hope that this published letter might afford me some protection, or the basis for a legal action, I note continuing efforts to stop me from posting information from my data base about the CIA and its covert operations.
It is obvious that commercial installations not only in Herndon but in other areas of Fairfax County have a police "notice" on me - the nature of which I do not know.
My last encounter with this occurred on Thursday, 5 October 1995 at the Woodrow and Lothrop store at Fair Oaks Mall. I spent about an hour looking around, then went to the exit nearest where I had parked my vehicle. As I approached within a few feet of the exit, the alarm bells went off. I, fearing a trap, veered away and avoided exiting for some time - only to be confronted in a few minutes by a tall female who got directly in my face. I assume had I gone through the exit at a minimum I would have been seized and subjected to a search - if not the planting of evidence.
Why doesn't the CIA, (I especially suspect the CIA's lobbying organization the Association of Former Intelligence Officers as also having a role in this harassment), take legal action against me rather than harassing me? First, I challenged its early attempts to censor CIABASE and won written approval to distribute CIABASE's public domain information.
Secondly, to challenge me legally would give me and CIABASE undesirable publicity. Here the danger is real, to demonstrate that one person using a computer can effectively challenge and expose covert operations, raises the possibility that many others, including foreign governments, can do the same. The best way to handle the problem for them is to discredit me by "shoplifting" arrests or some other means - even this letter serves to bolster claims of paranoia.
Actions I have taken. I have written letters, inter alia, to President Clinton, the Director of the FBI and to John Deutch, the Director of the CIA. After about a year of letters, the FBI wrote and denied their involvement and suggested I direct my concerns to the CIA. The CIA also responded in about a year and denied any involvement. Lee S. Strickland, Chief, of the Privacy and Classification Review, answered for the CIA and said they would pursue my FOIA request - but this if it is not assigned any priority, could take years.
The U.S Office of Special Counsel wrote on 6 October 1995, and its letter states the CIA is exempted from its investigative jurisdiction. If I did not write within 16 days it would close my file. This letter is in part a response to that requirement - yes please advise me of any additional rights I may have. Yes please do not close my file.
What seems so obvious is that an investigation could take a few hours, query the Herndon police, the mayor, the Town Council, commercial establishments, the Fairfax Police, or any one of the numerous persons and installations I have cited in earlier correspondence.
Addressees - please take appropriate action and advise me re the above.
Ralph McGehee
[REDACTED]
[REDACTED], Va [REDACTED]
[REDACTED]
--
Lisa Pease
----------
If we will not fight for the truth now - when our President has been shot down in the streets and his murderers remain untouched by justice - it is not likely that we will ever have another chance.
JIM GARRISON
Check out my web site at:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com//pub/lp/lpease/realhist.htm
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951016, Caracas, Venezuela, American Reporter. National guard
COCAINE CD IS LATEST TWIST IN SMUGGLING PLOYS
by Roy S. Carson
American Reporter Correspondent
CARACAS -- Venezuela's defense minister General Moises Orozco Graterol has admitted publicly that "national territory is being used as a bridge for drug trafficking" -- and his words were confirmed as he spoke to a press conference here.
National guard officers seized 55 kilos (121 pounds) of high-grade cocaine over the weekend and were immediately able to trace it to the Cali cocaine cartel in Colombia as part of an original shipment of 900 kilos (1,980 pounds).
Drugs police also busted a drug trafficking ring which used an international overnight air courier service to send camouflaged compact discs of cocaine to addresses in the U.S. and Canada.
Audacious smugglers had removed CDs from their covers to fill the cavity with cocaine before putting on a new factory seal. It's feared that thousands of discs may have reached U.S. destinations before the ruse was discovered.
And Gen. Orozco Graterol has just returned to the capital from an aerial survey of mountainous borderlands with Colombia aboard a newly-loaned U.S. aircraft, specially equipped with sophisticated equipment to detect illegal drug plantations.
It's the latest sign of cooperation between the Venezuelan military and Washington, although the Venezuelans still refuse to let a American pilots take the flight controls.
They say it's a matter of national sovereignty -- although they're ready to take U.S. money, helicopters, radar and communications equipment at no cost.
DEA sources say the Venezuelans don't understand that the high-profile arrest and 10-year prison term in Florida given to Venezuelan Brigadier Gen. Alexis Ramon Sanchez Paz and other high-ranking military officers does little to bolster the State Department's or the DEA's confidence in the nation's military.
It's well-known that the Colombian cartels have a stranglehold on their own military, but the Venezuelan defense department also seems less than willing to clean up its own act in the face of widespread allegations of deep-rooted corruption in its armed forces.
Apart from that, the Venezuelan justice ministry's director of security, Army Maj. Edgar Alonzo Uzcategui, says there have been 49 recent attempts at escape from Venezuelan jails -- all financed and manned by the multimillion dollar cross-border drug industry.
A case in point is the recent escape of 30 long-term convicts from the state penitentiary in Tachira. They were all serving time for drug trafficking; police say their escape was efficiently organized from the outside.
DEA agents here, speaking to The American Reporter on condition of anonymity, say it's a matter of perception, since while U.S. administrations traditionally blame producer nations for exporting cocaine, heroin and cannabis to the United States, South American governments -- and Venezuela's is no exception -- see the U.S. drug problem as the fault of the end-consumer, and want the United States to foot the bill to get rid of the menace.
"The U.S. government seems finally to have understood that they must fully cooperate in the destruction of the sources of drugs," Venezuelan Ambassador Leopoldo Taylhardat said, "but they must also realize that until inside the U.S. they apply tough punishment to drug dealers and consumers, and while there is a wealthy market for drugs, nothing meaningful will be achieved by attacking the drug sources or the distribution cartels."
"There is so much money involved that very strong action is needed at the source and consumption ends, not to mention the 'speedways' and 'bridges' we [Venezuela] have become."
"Either that or legalize drug use," says the Venezuelan ambassador. "Which one will come first?"
In vaguely related news from Buenos Aires, president Carlos Menem's anti-drug secretary Alberto Lestrelle has caused a sensation in a broadcast statement about Argentine lawmakers who sometimes sleep through boring marathon night sessions in congress and are somehow able to produce eloquent oratory at drop of a hat.
"Some legislators are half-asleep at night and suddenly explode with great speeches," Lestelle told Radio Mire. "No doubt they go to the bathroom and snort cocaine."
Meanwhile there are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the arrival today Monday in Bogota, Colombia, of PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, who will also visit Brazil before heading to New York for the United Nation's 50th Anniversary celebrations.
Colombian and Brazilian foreign ministry officials are saying nothing officially, but there's widespread speculation in all political and diplomatic quarters about the purpose of the visit.
(Roy Carson is South American Bureau Chief of The American Reporter.)
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951017, Mena, AR, Orlin Grabbe. Operation Black Eagle, under Allegations Regarding Vince Foster, the NSA, and Banking Transactions Spying, Part XXX
by J. Orlin Grabbe
What do the Mena, Arkansas, and Fire Lakes, Nevada, airfields have in common? The answer is they were both secure facilities run by the highly classified National Programs Office (NPO). Other facilities were located at Joplin, Missouri, and Iron Mountain, Texas.
President Ronald Reagan appointed Oliver North as the secret head of this secret organization, and sometime in 1983, the NPO, which is organizationally part of the National Security Agency (NSA), became the effective administrator of a covert plan called Operation Black Eagle.
Operation Black Eagle became a network of 5000 people who made possible the export of arms in the direction of Central America, and the import of drugs from the same direction. According to Navy Lt. Commander Alexander Martin (ret.), he, as an assistant to Major General Richard Secord, worked closely with Oliver North, Richard Secord, Felix Rodriquez, and Jeb Bush (son of Vice-President Bush) in the operation. Different aspects of Black Eagle were consolidated under the office of the Vice President.
Martin himself admits to setting up fraudulent paper "investment projects" through which the wealthy could donate money to the Contra cause. They would "invest" in projects that didn't exist, and write off the investment on a two-for-one basis.
But it is estimated that only 3 (three) percent of the money actually found its way into the hands of the Contras. The rest of the money was diverted to other purposes, and some of it still exists, stashed away in hidden bank accounts in the U.S. and around the world.
For the next several years the importation of drugs into the U.S. was largely a U.S. government monopoly, with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) acting as the government's enforcer to eliminate any private competition.
Not everyone who participated in the operation knew the full picture, nor did they approve of what was going on. I talked to two pilots who used to fly in and out of Mena airport, among other places.
Pilot A was appalled when he found out he was transporting cocaine. Among other things, this was totally contradictory to an apparent "war on drugs". Later on he grew more cynical, as he came to realize that the "war on drugs" was precisely what made the whole operation so profitable, as well as serving as a broad strategy for social control. Later on he was offered a job transporting cocaine by the producers themselves.
"It was good money. They would pay a $100,000 a flight. They would send out maybe eight planes at a time, and if only two of them got shot down, the operation would still be profitable. So there was some risk involved."
But he turned the job down. "You can't do business with those people," he said. "I was used to working in an environment where if you got into trouble, you kept your mouth shut. But in that environment if anyone got into trouble, they would inform on anyone and blab about anything they knew about. That was the risk I couldn't take."
Pilot B let everyone know in no uncertain terms that he wasn't transporting any drugs, anywhere, at any time. "They were quite upset with me for not going along." One day as he was about to fly out of Mena in the direction of Florida, he became suspicious of the "equipment" cargo he was transporting. He feared that not only was the cargo really cocaine, but also that he was being set up to be busted because of his unpopular view of things. He started prying into one of the wooden crates but was warned off by Uzi-carrying guards. So he took off, dumping the entire cargo (which *was* cocaine) all over the runway in the process, leaving a white cloud behind him. He headed East and didn't stop till he arrived at CIA headquarters to scream at Bill Casey.
"They still complain about the millions of dollars I cost them," he says, unrepentantly.
Operation Black Eagle was the basis for the diversion that became known as the "Iran-Contra" affair, a term invented by Attorney General Ed Meese, and obediently repeated *ad nauseam* by the news media. The exposure of the sale of TOW missiles to Iran, which no one really cared about, was intended to divert the attention of reporters toward the Middle East and away from the official government importation of drugs into secured NPO facilities.
In addition to facilities such as Mena and Fire Lakes which were guarded by the Wackenhut Corporation, the operation involved sophisticated electronics developed by NSA contractor E-Systems of Dallas, Texas, to create electronic "holes" which would allow planes to cross U.S. borders without tripping NORAD's Early Warning System. Or, if need be, to hide a flight path from U.S. spy satellites.
The monetary logistics of this operation were overseen in part by Vince Foster of the Rose Law Firm, using the financial software resources of Systematics, Jackson Stephen's Little Rock software company. Vince Foster's "NSA connection" involved an extensive knowledge of the NPO's management of the flow of men and materials, money and drugs.
Today no one wants Operation Black Eagle exposed or talked about. And that's one of the reasons investigations into the death of Vince Foster have been quashed on every side. You might call it a massive outbreak of National Insecurity.
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[The following interview with Lt. Commander Alexander Martin (retired) took place on Tom Valentine's Radio Free America program on July 10, 1995. Valentine's comments follow "Q" while Martin's follow "A".]
Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
A: I'm Alexander Martin of Iran-contra fame. I testified before the Kerry committee and every single investigating committee in Congress from 1987 until 1990. I was the former employer, employee and subordinate of Major General Richard Secord, a name familiar to people. In 1984, I was approached by a representative of the good general with a mandate that I raise money and form a series of corporations to raise money and legitimize flows of money to what Oliver North described as "the cause" and what Secord described as "the enterprise". That was a covert and illegal effort to support and maintain a contra army within the border of Nicaragua.
Q: I've heard you were instrumental in much of this.
A: I don't know how instrumental I was, but I raised millions for these boys.
Q: A lot of us have heard a lot about the so-called "Iran-contra" affair which was very big in the media at one time, during the congressional hearings, etc., but based upon what I know, I don't think the public really knows the whole story. Do you think it has been clarified as to what really did happen?
A: Of course not. Anyone who is in the people's government who is a politician obviously doesn't have a vested interest in telling the people the truth. I'm going to try to tell the truth.
Q: You were a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy prior to your involvement in the Iran-contra affair?
A: Yes, but I was retired from the Navy at the time I was brought into what later became known as Iran-contra. That's when I became very closely aligned with Richard Secord, Oliver North, Jeb Bush, Felix Rodriquez and a whole panoply of people who essentially ran Iran-contra as it were.
[Q+A section on public's attitude omitted]
Q: I actually had somebody tell me recently that, in their words, "Iran-Contra was no big deal. They were fighting communism, weren't they?"
A: What became known as Iran-contra (and it was then-Attorney General Edwin Meese who thought up the terminology) was the largest illegal covert operation the government has ever undertaken. It involved nearly 5,000 people at one time, billions of taxpayers' dollars and egregious acts of government which were illegal, including, obviously, the surreptitious trafficking in arms and narcotics, as part of a state-sanctioned policy. There has been great speculation in the press ever since the collapse of Iran-contra about the CIA's sponsorship of narcotics trafficking to generate covert revenues and the illegal trafficking of weapons, etc.
Q: There are still many who believe Iran-contra was not a government-sponsored affair; that those who were responsible were part of a so-called "rogue" operation by people who did it for their own profit.
A: To some extent, it's true. I've been asked about this before. There were billions upon billions of dollars raised, ostensibly to support a 50,000-man rebel army in Nicaragua. And the money raised was certainly vast resources beyond what was necessary to support that army. When Oliver North, before the Kerry Senate hearing was asked by Senator Dan Inouye, how much of those billions that the taxpayers were raped and pillaged for actually went to support the Nicaraguan contras, North himself said in public testimony that it was only 3 percent.
Q: Only 3 percent? That means 97 percent went somewhere else.
A: It went into people's pockets. General Secord certainly profited handsomely. General John Singlaub and a host of others did likewise. However, would it have been possible for these men to carry out such an enormous conspiracy, to traffic in such enormous quantities of illegal items, without the duplicity and complicity of the United States government?
Q: I don't see how it would have been possible.
A: It would not have been possible, and it was not possible at the time to do so. I think George Bush said it very well in an interview with Sarah McClendon, the grand dame of the Washington press corps. When Bush consented to an interview with Mrs. McClendon in June of 1992, he said on record, which she printed in her newsletter that month, when she asked him about Iran-Contra and he said, (and I'm quoting from her newsletter): "If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched." This was a public comment by George Bush.
Q: George Bush actually admitted that?
A: He said it and it was printed in Mrs. McClendon's newsletter in June of 1992.
Q: That's interesting since Bush just got reimbursed for his legal fees arising from the Iran-contra affair. Could you refresh us as to the details of Iran-contra from your unique vantage point as a participant?
A: Very simply put, what became known as Iran-contra was originally an operational policy formulated by the director of central intelligence William Casey, early in the Reagan presidency. It was codenamed "Operation Eagle" at that time. It was essentially put on the shelf until 1983, renamed "Operation Black Eagle", and Oliver North was brought into it at that time. One of the first things Ronald Reagan did was to appoint lowly lieutenant colonel Oliver North to be director of the then-secret National Programs Office (NPO), an agency which, in 1983, was still very highly classified.
Q: Who suggested North's appointment to Reagan?
A: CIA Director Bill Casey. North was his hand-picked fellow. As far as Ronald Reagan's role in Iran-contra (which I'm often asked about), I have only met him once in my official capacity. It was always my impression that Ronald Reagan had the broad concept of establishing a "contra" (or rebel) army inside Nicaragua to act as a ward against what he perceived to be a spreading Red tide in Central America. But that is about all Reagan thought and that is about all he knew, at least based upon what I was able to perceive at the time. He didn't come up with the policy; he was not kept informed in regular briefings. All Iran-contra initiatives were ultimately consolidated under the office of Vice President George Bush who was ultimately responsible for the initiation of policies. He was fully apprised of virtually every operation.
Q: Bush told the public that he was "out of the loop".
A: In fact, it was Reagan who was out of the loop. Certainly that was my perception at the time. It was CIA Director Casey's idea to consolidate Iran-contra operations under the office of the Vice President so that they wouldn't "stick out" so much, as it were.
Q: The contra operations are relatively simple to understand. But how did Iran become involved in the picture?
A: The whole concept of "Iran-contra" is a misnomer. It was thought up by Ed Meese, who went on national television the day after Thanksgiving in 1986 and told the American people that their government had been involved in an illegal act: to wit, the sale of arms to Iran and a diversion of the profits from those weapons to support the Nicaraguan contras. That's all Meese said. The ruse of talking about "Iran-contra" was done to misdirect the media into looking at the Iranian aspect of it and stay away from the contra and Central American aspect of it. It was in the latter case that the real political and legal liability for the government lay.
Q: And this is where the real profit lay as well.
A: Narcotics were not involved with the Iranian operations. The more egregious acts involving our government didn't relate to the sale of some $30 million in TOW missiles to the Iranian government. Frankly, no one cared about it at the time.
Q: The left-learning Sandinistas government was in power in Nicaragua at this time and Ronald Reagan wanted to drive them out. Congress did not.
A: As early as 1983 Congress was fighting aid to the contras. They were afraid of another Vietnam-style involvement. We were facing a well-equipped 120,000 man Sandinista army, thanks to arms from the Soviets. Therefore they appropriated very little money (less than $100 million) during 1983 to 1986. Even that, Congress stipulated, would only go to "civilian materiel assistance." That is, non-weapons. However, as it turned out, as Oliver North pointed out, it didn't work out that way, but that is what Congress intended.
Q: Somebody is going to make a lot of money in any war.
A: As Richard Secord was fond of saying, "If you look up the word 'covert' in the dictionary, you'll find a dollar sign next to it."
Q: You were part of the financial end of Iran-contra, setting up dummy companies that handled money for the operation.
A: Effectively, I was "legitimizing" money for the operation. I would set up an investment company, let us say oil and gas, which tends to be one of the oldest of right-wing favorites, for the production of covert revenue. I would be provided by Richard Secord with lists of very well-heeled Republicans who were supportive of "the cause" (Iran-contra) and wish to contribute money but could not do so insofar as it was an illegal action of state. Therefore I would set up an investment which existed nowhere else but in a file drawer and I would sell this investment product to these "investors" and the money would wind up in the hands of Oliver North and Richard Secord, ostensibly to support "the cause". When the fraud was perpetrated in this act was on the U.S. Treasury, insofar as the money that these people were supposedly investing they got to write off on a very high-levered basis. Consequently the IRS was denied substantial revenues that they should have received.
Q: How did people manage that since there is very little that is able to be written off these days?
A: This was prior to the 1986 tax reform laws. These are 50 percent maximum tax bracket days. These are the days of many tax shelters, oil and gas certainly being premier among them. Obviously if you had a very well-heeled gentleman in the 50 percent tax bracket, and you could provide him with an investment where he could write off his money on a two-for-one leveraged basis, then after taxes, his so-called "investment" didn't cost him a dime. And, as Oliver North used to remind me, he had the gratification of serving America--certainly Oliver North's version of America. One reason I've been speaking out is that I have to defend myself. Obviously, Oliver North has criticized me publicly in the past, even on his radio talk show.
North has said, for instance, that by telling the American people the truth about what he and other did that I am being "unpatriotic". That is essentially what he has said in his criticisms of me. That it is obviously "unpatriotic" to tell the American people the truth about what their government has been doing to them, a truth that if the American people ever fully realized what has been done to them and did something about it, could--in North's words--"prove dangerous to the political order of the state."
Q: Let's hope so. The political order of the state brought us Oliver North and his scandal. Now if they had been able to solve the problem in Central America, we might conclude that they had done a good deed. How do you look at that?
A: The original concept, in my estimation, was noble. But after 1983 it became twisted as those in the shadows of government recognized an opportunity to profit by this. They recognized that in the name of "patriotism" they were able to rape and pillage banks, securities and insurance firms, to traffic in illicit items, all in the name of profit, and nothing in the name of patriotism.
Q: This was a secret, covert operation so they could virtually get away with murder.
A: Absolutely correct. The government was forced endlessly to cover up for fraud by people who were only marginally connected to Iran-contra operations.
Q: The rape of the savings and loans was all part of this tax scam, for this covert operation (Iran-contra), which became a scam.
A: The best description of what Iran-contra became was said to me in a conversation with Richard Secord in September of 1985. I told the general that I was becoming nervous about the volume of activity that we had become engaged in. I was concerned that if the American people found out that the political repercussions would be enormous. I pointed out to him that the vast amount of money being raised was far beyond what was necessary to support a 50,000-man army. It wouldn't have taken a tenth of what we were raising.
Q: Where does the CIA's Mena, Arkansas drugs-and-arms smuggling operation fit into all of this?
A: Mena was essentially the hub of Olive North's so-called guns-for-drugs operations. It was drugs flowing north and guns flowing south. How Mena actually came into existence was that Mena was actually a secure facility of the National Programs Office in 1983. You will notice that all of the facilities used in the weapons and narcotics transactions--that is, at the well-known places mentioned in the press before, such as Iron Mountain, Texas, the airfield at Joppa Missouri, the airfield at Fire Lakes, Nevada, etc. had a common link in that they were all facilities controlled by the National Programs Office, an office that could operate in extreme secrecy and initially keep these sites extremely secure. That is how we got to Mena. Also at Mena there were existing CIA facilities and you had an existing CIA command structure: communications and logistics support. I was the first person to reveal the names of the CIA support people on the ground at Mena. Now Mena is coming back in the news. There is a move within some GOP circles on Capitol Hill to bring it back. We have not heard the last of Mena.
Q: Are you not afraid for your personal safety in exposing all of this? There have been a lot of "suicides" we've been hearing about and other strange deaths related to all this.
A: Out of the roughly 5,000 of us who were originally involved in Iran-Contra, approximately 400, since 1986, have committed suicide, died accidentally or died of natural causes. I knew every single person who has died. In over half of these deaths, official death certificates were never even issued. In 187 circumstances, the bodies were cremated before the families were even notified. I am lying low, so to speak. I have been forced to do so. ###
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CIA = Cocaine In America. Seems appropriate. 🤯