PART 2:THE IRAN/CONTRA CONNECTION:SECRET AND COVERT OPERATIONS IN THE REAGAN ERA

WHAT THE TOWER COMMISSION DIDN'T REPORT 

THE 

IRAN 

CONTRA 

CONNECTION 

SECRET TEAMS AND COVERT 

OPERATIONS IN THE 

REAGAN ERA 

BY 

JONATHAN MARSHALL, 

PETER DALE SCOTT, 

AND 

JANE HUNTER

III. 

"Shadow Networks" and Their 

Stake in Covert Operations 

Introduction 

From their inception in 1979, the so-called contra anti-Sandinista forces have been involved in scandals, including the murder and torture of civilians, health workers, prominent clerics, and even members of their own forces.1 These crimes, though they are not our subject, can hardly be subordinated to the more narrow Contragate scandal which has preoccupied the U.S. press since October 1986, and which, initially at least, focused on the way bureaucratic backers of the contras in the Reagan White House National Security Council staff plotted to circumvent a cutoff of CIA aid dictated in 1984 by Congress. 

The investigative reporting of Contragate, however, has revealed more clearly what to some was already obvious: that the scandals of the contras and of their bureaucratic backers are inter-related and indeed part of a much larger and older intrigue, which involved not just the contras and their NSC support team but also a larger "shadow network" of veteran intelligence operatives in and out of government, and their right-wing international allies. This well-organized and experienced cabal, working inside and outside the United States, with access to ruthless operatives and covert international funds, contributed both to Reagan's election in 1980 and to the self-damaging inflexibility of his commitment to the contra operation. The story of Contragate, seen from this perspective, is really a further chapter in the operation of the covert forces that the United States came to know through Watergate.

Looking back, it is clear that Watergate was in part a story of corruption and conspiracy involving the recycling of foreign-based funds into U.S. elections, and also a story of disputes between factions whose power depended on relations with the CIA and other intelligence agencies. It may be that, with so much free-floating money in the world today, U.S. democracy will never be wholly free of such influence: even the reform minded Carter presidency was tainted by the "Billygate" and then the "Irangate" scandals of the 1970s, which were not unrelated (as we shall see) to the Iran-Contra connection of 1986. But in the Carter era there was also a concerted effort to cut back on illegal business payoffs, CIA political operations, and U.S. aid to foreign dictators (such as Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua) who did not hesitate to invest some of the largesse back into the U.S. electoral process.2 

Ironically, Carter's very reform movement, by forcing its opponents into defensive alliance, contributed to a more pervasive Iran-contra scandal of some seven years' standing: an on-going scheme (and in part an illegal conspiracy) to reverse the post-Watergate reforms of intelligence abuses, first by electing Ronald Reagan in 1980, and then by committing him, through the contra program, to a resurrection of abandoned CIA covert operations. 

Contragate, in this larger sense, was not just a covert operation on behalf of a presidency; it can also be seen in part as an electoral conspiracy in support of a covert operation. And though the principal schemers were North American, they did not hesitate to invoke the aid of neofascist foreigners.[For another arm of this in this time frame search (Safari Club+CIA0 D.C.]

Mario Sandoval Alarcon

One principal foreign architect of this contra commitment appears to have been a former CIA Guatemalan protege called Mario Sandoval Alarcon, a leader of the reactionary World Anti-Communist League (WACL) and the so-called "Godfather" to all the death squads of Central America, including those of Major Roberto d'Aubuisson, his client in El Salvador. But Sandoval was not acting alone; his deals with the Reagan campaign in 1980 appear to have been part of a larger coordinated plan involving one of Washington's leading military-industrial lobbies, the American Security Council (ASC) at home, and ASC's WACL allies overseas —especially Guatemala, Argentina, and Taiwan.

In this chapter we shall see how the World Anti-Communist League has evolved since its origins in Taiwan in 1954, with the help of members of the U.S. "shadow network." This league was originally created by the ruling intelligence networks of Taiwan and South Korea to provide a platform to continue the militant cold war propaganda that Eisenhower had seemed to abandon when he negotiated an end to the Korean and Indochina Wars at the 1954 Geneva Conference. The groups attending these conferences from other countries and regions, and which eventually joined in 1967 to create W.A.C.L, all had one thing in common: their (often secret) links to U.S. intelligence and military experts in "political" or "psychological warfare." Through their annual conferences in different parts of the world, they have also played host to rising U.S. anti-Communist politicians, such as Richard Nixon in 1964.

Since their formation, the W.A.C.L chapters have also provided a platform and legitimacy for surviving fractions of the Nazi Anti-Komintern and Eastern European (Ostpolitik) coalitions put together under Hitler in the 1930's and 1940's, and partly taken over after 1948 by the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination.3 In the late 1970's, as under Carter the United States pulled away from involvement with W.A.C.L countries and operations, the Nazi component of W.A.C.L became much more blatant as at least three European W.A.C.L chapters were taken over by former Nazi SS officers. 

With such a background, W.A.C.L might seem like an odd choice for the Reagan White House, when in 1984 W.A.C.L Chairman John Singlaub began to report to NSC staffer Oliver North and CIA Director William Casey on his fund-raising activities for the contras.4 We shall see, however, that Singlaub's and W.A.C.L's input into the generation of Reagan's Central American policies and political alliances went back to at least 1978. The activities of Singlaub and Sandoval chiefly involved three W.A.C.L countries, Guatemala, Argentina, and Taiwan, that would later emerge as prominent backers of the contras. In 1980 these three countries shared one lobbying firm, that of Deaver and Hannaford, which for six years had supervised the campaign to make a successful presidential candidate out of a former movie actor, Ronald Reagan.

Still unacknowledged and unexplained is the role which funds from Michael Deaver's Guatemalan clients played in the 1980 Reagan campaign. Although contributions from foreign nationals are not permitted under U.S. electoral law, many observers have reported that rich Guatemalans boasted openly of their illegal gifts. Half a million dollars was said to have been raised at one meeting of Guatemalan businessmen, at the home of their President, Romeo Lucas Garcia. The meeting took place at about the time of the November 1979 visit of Deaver's clients to Washington, when some of them met with Ronald Reagan.5

The Reagan campaign never admitted having received such illegal contributions. But observers of Latin America were struck by the presence at Reagan's first inauguration of several very controversial Guatemalans. Among these were Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the "Godfather" of the Central American Death squads.6 On Inauguration Day, before dancing at the President's Ball, Sandoval "announced that he had met with Reagan defense and foreign policy advisers before the election, and indicated that the Guatemala rightists expect Reagan will honor 'verbal agreements' to resume military aid to Guatemala and put an end to criticism of the regime's human rights record."7 The existence of these verbal agreements had been disclosed before the election by an American investigative journalist, Alan Nairn, who had learned of them from Guatemalan and U.S. businessmen. On October 30, 1980, Nairn reported that "perhaps most importantly, the Reagan supporters have agreed to cut back U.S. criticism of the death squads."8 

One question to be answered by Michael Deaver is whether he knew of these "verbal agreements." Another is whether these agreements included aid and protection to Sandoval's Nicaraguan death squad on Guatemalan soil, one of the original components of today's contras. At this time members of this cadre had already gone for terrorist training to Argentina, another country represented by Deaver.9 The cadre leaders were being put up at Sandoval's expense in an apartment house behind his home.10 

A small group of these men, headed by Somozista Colonel Ricardo Lau, had arranged the murder of El Salvador's Archbishop Romero in 1980, under the direction of d'Aubuisson.11 

Major Roberto d'Aubuisson,

Thanks to a captured notebook, some of these facts became known to Carter's State Department, so that Sandoval personally had good reason to fear "criticism" of his own human rights record.12 Carter's Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, told Congress in April 1981 that the captured diary gave "the names of people living in the United States and in Guatemala City who are actively funding the death squads." Three years later he charged that "The Reagan Administration took on a great responsibility when it chose to conceal the identity of Archbishop Romero's murderer" and made d'Aubuisson "an honored guest at our Embassy."13 

But Reagan in 1980 had promised a "housecleaning" of the State Department. Among the first to go were the members of Carter's Central America team, including Ambassador Robert White. Not only did the new administration issue d'Aubuisson the U.S. visa which Carter had denied him; it promptly used documents supplied by d'Aubuisson to create, in its so-called White Paper of February 1981, a pretext for supplying aid to Sandoval's contras. All this was done with a speed which suggests the kind of pre-election verbal agreement Sandoval had referred to.14 One need not look only to financial payoffs to explain Reagan's initial enthusiasm for the contra forces in Nicaragua. Support for them was clearly indicated by his ideological anti-Communism and his strategic design for the hemisphere. But where Reagan's anti-communism elsewhere in the region has been at least pragmatically flexible (however ruthless)—in the case of the contras it has been unbending and geo-politically dangerous. For example, Reagan's initial support for the Garcia Meza regime in Bolivia waned as that regime was shown to be a mere front for local cocaine barons. But increasing reports of the contra involvement in the cocaine traffic seem only to have increased the administration's protectiveness and commitment (see Chapter VI).15 

Contragate: A Hypothesis 

The difference can be explained by the existence of a powerful coalition that wished to see the United States itself get back into the business of covert political and paramilitary operations. This coalition included the foreign beneficiaries of such operations: men like Sandoval in Guatemala (whose CIA connections went back to 1954), and, until his murder in September 1980, the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza (who in 1954 had been his father's liaison with the CIA Guatemala operation).16 

Other countries where the CIA had been active had an equal interest in seeing a restoration of CIA covert operations. South Africa wanted CIA assistance in supporting the UNITA rebels in Angola. Thailand wanted CIA help in Cambodia. Arab countries like Saudi Arabia wanted financial support for the tribal resistance in Afghanistan. Each got what it wanted from the new Reagan administration, which, in turn, used these nations to carry out its own ends as well. A global lobby for all of these covert operations, including the contras, existed in the form of the World Anti-Communist League, or W.A.C.L, of which Mario Sandoval Alarcon had been a long-time organizer and leader in Central America.

Before Reagan, the Taiwan-based W.A.C.L had been marginal to U.S. foreign policy, partly because of the involvement of some of its personnel in Nazi operations and the international drug traffic. Since 1984, however, W.A.C.L, under its American President retired General John Singlaub, has moved (with barely disguised White House connivance) into overt support for the contra operation, which its members (including Singlaub) apparently endeared to the Reagan campaign before the 1980 election. 

W.A.C.L in Latin America had moved into a particularly extremist, conspiratorial, and drug-linked phase after 1975-76, with the establishment of the W.A.C.L-backed military dictatorship in Argentina. A new, overtly fascistic branch of W.A.C.L in Latin America (the Confederacion Anticomunista Latinoamericana, or CAL), coordinated international plotting for a chain of right-wing military plots: notably the Bolivian "cocaine coup" of 1980 (involving the Nazi war criminal turned drug trafficker, Klaus Barbie) and Sandoval's schemes for the contras and d'Aubuisson. Sandoval, "according to one right-wing Salvadoran admirer, was to be the 'on-site' manager who would put [CAL's] plans into action in Central America."17

Stefano delle Chiaie,

Licio Gelli

The mechanics of this CAL network seem to have been masterminded primarily by the secret police of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay; its political use seems to have been coordinated with other countries at CAL meetings. The conspiratorial Italo-Argentine Masonic lodge P-2, an outgrowth of old U.S. anti-Communist plotting with the Italian drug trafficking Mafia, and later a political underpinning to the Argentine military junta, is alleged to have siphoned millions of dollars into Latin America in support of their anti-democratic politics. Through such right wing schemes, one Italian veteran of P-2 fascist plotting in Italy, Stefano delle Chiaie, was able to take part in the Chilean murder network which killed Orlando Letelier in Washington, the Argentine-backed "cocaine coup" in Bolivia, and the training of the death squads headed by Sandoval and d'Aubuisson in El Salvador.18 Thus it was all the more ominous that the invitees to Reagan's inaugural balls in 1981 should include not only Sandoval, the Central American "Godfather," but Licio Gelli, the Italian head of P-2.19

In addition to this foreign network, there was a strong domestic lobby for U.S. covert operations as well. At the heart of this lobby were the spokesmen and bank rollers of a "forward strategy" and "political warfare" or "psychological warfare," grouped mainly in the American Security Council, the most powerful lobby in Washington of the military-industrial complex. In the 1970's, with the increasing dependency of U.S. trade on arms exports and of U.S. industry on the defense budget, other U.S. business groups joined in the demand for a more aggressively anti-Communist foreign policy.20 There was assuredly broad corporate support for "overcoming Watergate" and "ending the Vietnam syndrome" and this could only make it easier to overcome the disfavor into which covert operations had fallen.

But in 1980 the A.S.C was also supported by a more desperate, manipulative, and even conspiratorial group pushing for the restoration of U.S. covert operations. These were the CIA's veterans of the clandestine services, who (often in mid-career) had been eased or kicked out of the CIA in large numbers after the CIA began to retrench on such operations in the 1970's.21

 Richard Helms

Of the CIA's five most recent directors before 1980, four (beginning with Richard Helms) had faced the unpleasant task of creating dangerous enemies, by cutting back the CIA's Operations Division, especially after the scaling down of the Vietnam War. A thousand clandestine operators had been fired or forced to retire in 1973 by Nixon's Director of Central Intelligence (D.C.I), James Schlesinger. But the coup de grace to the clandestine services was delivered on October 31, 1977, by Carter's D.C.I, Admiral Stansfield Turner. By eliminating a further 820 positions, Turner is said to have reduced the clandestine services from 1200 to 400. John Ranelagh has written that "when Turner fired virtually all the covert operators in the D.D.O [Operations Directorate]—the whole clandestine service—in effect he eliminated the agency's special-project capability, forcing it to compete with specialized agencies in the burgeoning field of technical intelligence collection and analysis."22

Edwin Wilson

These men, as we shall see, were on good terms with old CIA foreign contacts, such as Somoza and Sandoval, and in the Carter era they were increasingly forced to seek employment with them. As clandestine services fell more and more out of favor, their operators inside and outside the service resorted to more and more questionable activities. Revelations in the press about the work of rogue ex-CIA intelligence operative Edwin Wilson (for Libya's Khadafy) put several high-level CIA operators at risk: they faced possible prosecution unless (as happened) the election of Reagan and the restoration of CIA covert operations would result in the restoration of a de facto "CIA immunity" to prevent investigation of their past activities. 

Michael Ledeen

The story of the contras, and of Contragate, is involved with a number of such individuals: men such as Tom Clines, eased out by Turner because of his financial involvement in Ed Wilson's affairs, who then sought work with Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza. We shall see how, after Reagan was elected, a Reagan appointee, Michael Ledeen, used allusions to a "covert operation" as part of a successful campaign to protect Clines and his suspected co-conspirators, two of whom were still working in the new Reagan administration. One of these, Richard Secord, was indeed already involved in the covert arms flow to the contras, and after his retirement in 1983 he became a "private" arms supplier to the contras, operating much as Wilson had.23 

The Iran-Contra revelations of late 1986 revealed how heavily the Reagan administration, in defying a Congressional ban on support of the contras, had come to rely on a well-integrated network of military and intelligence veterans of covert operations, many of whom (like Secord) had come to have better relations with foreign groups than with their own government. Veteran CIA operatives and future contra backers, like Secord, John Singlaub, and Thomas Clines, came to be trusted by each other, and by the foreign backers of Contragate, more than by their superiors in Washington.

Contragate, the collusion to install and maintain a U.S. covert operation (despite the expressed will of Congress), can be traced back to the decisions of successive CIA directors to scale down and virtually eliminate clandestine services, and to the "offshore" intelligence operations that grew as the CIA's operational assets were dispersed. The major scandals of the Carter-Turner era involving the CIA's clandestine services—Edwin Wilson, the Sindona/P-2 affair in Italy, the drug-linked Nugan Hand Bank in Australia (see below), all strengthened the determination of former CIA operatives and their allies to restore their traditional immunity by reviving their former role in mounting covert operations.

The Covert Operations Lobby

Every historical change in modes of warfare has produced what is known as a disposal problem: what to do with no longer needed troops. This is one of the less apparent causes for America's current "contra" crisis. What is to be done, not just with the Nicaraguan mercenaries, who are now one of the major armies of Central America, but with their ex-CIA Cuban and American handlers, an increasingly powerful constituency inside the Reagan administration?

In the fifteenth century a problem much like this one—what to do with ravaging knights who lived off the land—was a powerful motive for England to prolong the Hundred Years' War and keep its knights in France. America's disposal problem with the contras is on the point of becoming acute, especially if the $100 million voted by Congress is actually used for its stated goal of turning the demoralized Nicaraguan contra forces into a well-disciplined army.

But the root disposal problem is the domestic one: what to do with a small but highly determined American army of covert operations specialists and their ex-CIA Cuban cohorts. This so-called "secret team"—old covert operations buddies like Generals Singlaub and Secord, and their CIA colleagues like Thomas Clines and Felix Rodriguez—are at the center of the Iran-contra conspiracy to keep U.S. funds flowing to the contras in defiance of a Congressional prohibition. 

These men are not just fighting to preserve the contras; they are plotting above all to preserve their own style of clandestine warfare, despite a tentative consensus arrived at in the 1970's after Watergate and the ensuing Congressional investigations of the CIA—a consensus uniting the White House, Congress, CIA, and Pentagon—that such covert operations were counterproductive and ultimately injurious to larger U.S. interests. 

We have seen that, after widespread agreement that the CIA's covert operations bureaucracy had become far too large, CIA directors under both Republican and Democratic presidents moved to cut back the clandestine services to a fraction of their former size with the two biggest steps taken by CIA directors James Schlesinger in 1973 under Nixon, who eliminated some 2000 CIA positions (1,000 people were fired), and Stansfield Turner in 1977 under Carter, who eliminated 820 more.24 

And although Carter grew steadily less hostile to Pentagon paramilitary operations, especially after the fall of the Shah of Iran and particularly the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, even here the rationale for the Pentagon effort was not covert warfare as such, but anti-terrorism. To this end, the military formed two elite commando units ("Blue Light" and "Delta"), and later a joint task force for the rescue of the U.S. hostages, but all this was a far cry from the 15,000 troops which in 1984 the Reagan administration centralized under the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Agency (see Chapter IX).25 

In any case, the disposal problem of what to do with impatient Bay of Pigs troops, which confronted the newly-elected president John F. Kennedy (see Chapter VI), is a problem that has never gone away and has only contributed to a succession of much larger disasters.[911 comes to mind when thinking about rogue elements D.C] For a while Bay of Pigs veterans like Felix Rodriguez (later a supplier of the contras), when they could no longer be used with impunity against Cuba, were reassigned to CIA operations in the Congo and later the Vietnam War. 

When that war ended in detente, the Cubans came home to Miami and a spate of domestic violence. This belligerence was only dispersed when the Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans were recruited for new secret wars: the Angolan fiasco of 1975-76; and then, since 1981, the training, supplying, and "advising" of the contras. 

The key members of the "secret team" behind both the Cubans and the Contragate scandal were all working together by the time of the covert operations in Laos and Vietnam. General John Singlaub, the Reagan administration's chief liaison in the so-called "private" contra supply effort of 1984-86, was from 1966 to 1968 the chief of the S.O.G ("Studies and Operations Group") in Vietnam, which launched covert cross-border operations into Laos.

Harry ("Heinie") Aderholt,

A number of men who were under Singlaub at S.O.G are now associated with him in the world-wide recruitment of mercenaries for the contras, through the branches of the World Anti-Communist League.26 One of these associates is Singlaub's SOG Air Wing Commander, Harry ("Heinie") Aderholt, who now in retirement leads the Air Commando Association (uniting some 1500 U.S. special warfare veterans) in its "nonlethal" anti-Communist support operations in Central America, principally Guatemala.

Aderholt's successor as director of air support operations in Laos was Richard Secord, who after his retirement flew to Iran with Reagan's emissaries Robert McFarlane and Oliver North in the May 1986 Iran arms deal. Through one of his private companies, Secord also sold at least one airplane to the contras.27 Secord's private company, Stanford Technology Trading Group International, was frequently phoned from the "safe house" in El Salvador housing the contra supply team of Eugene Hasenfus and his pilot, William Cooper. 

Hasenfus and Cooper, whom the Los Angeles Times called "one of the CIA's chief pilots in Southeast Asia," were both long-time veterans of Secord's covert air supply operations in Laos.28

Theodore Shackley, 

In 1966-68, at the time of Singlaub's and Secord's Laotian operations, the CIA Chief of Station in Laos was Theodore Shackley, who from 1962-65 had been in charge of the CIA Miami station directing the Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans against Fidel Castro.29 From 1969-72 Shackley was CIA Chief of Station in Saigon. Under him worked both Felix Rodriguez (whom he knew from Miami), and his colleague Donald Gregg, who today is Vice-President Bush's liaison with Rodriguez and the contras. 30 From 1980 to 1983, Shackley was a consultant with Stanford Technology, whose owner was Albert Hakim, Secord's business partner.

Oliver North, who has been depicted as the White House architect of the Iran-Contragate connection, was far junior to these men and, initially at least, guided by them. In 1968, when he graduated from Annapolis, he went out to counterinsurgency activities in Vietnam, where he is alleged by some sources to have served at least briefly with Singlaub and Secord in Laos.31 His introduction to covert arms deals may have come in 1981,when under the guidance of Secord he lobbied for the Saudi AWACS deal that helped pay for the contra covert operation and others. 

It is the collective bureaucratic clout of this well-coordinated team of U.S. secret war veterans, far more than that of the Cubans and Nicaraguans, that stiffens the Reagan administration's inflexibility, and drive towards escalation on the contra issue. They are fighting for the survival of special warfare itself. 

All of these U.S. special warriors were on the outs at the end of the 1970's, unpopular not just with the Carter White House but with their own agencies. While it was President Carter who removed General Singlaub from his South Korea command for his political insubordination, the CIA itself sidetracked Theodore Shackley and his subordinate in Miami and Laos, Thomas Clines, thus provoking their resignations. 

Shackley and Clines were suspected of possible involvement in an arms deal with Egypt, which allegedly "bilked the U.S. government out of $8 million."32 The deal was said to have been put together by Shackley's former CIA contract employee Ed Wilson, who was later convicted for smuggling explosives to Libya.33 

Richard Secord was also investigated in the same arms deal, even after Reagan was elected. He refused to take a lie detector test, was briefly suspended from his job, and after the case was settled out of court left the government in 1983. One of those who intervened with the prosecutor on this case was Michael Ledeen, who has since confirmed that as a National Security Council consultant he helped set up the first contacts between Tehran and Washington on the Irangate arms deals (see Chapter VIII).34 

These men were at the heart of a larger "secret team," of what Administration officials later called a "board of directors of sorts," behind North's Iran-Contra arms dealings.35 In plotting to preserve the contra operation against Congressional disapproval, this team was plotting for the survival of U.S. special warfare itself, since of all the U.S.-backed covert wars only the contra operation was being managed by large numbers of American covert war experts. Having allied themselves in the late 1970's with the incipient Reagan presidential campaign, this team played an important role in writing Reagan's foreign policy platform, and thus were well-positioned to implement covert warfare scenarios they themselves had helped devise. 

More directly than this, all four men were fighting for personal vindication. Only by involving the White House in the once discredited notion of clandestine warfare could they redeem themselves from the personal disrepute into which they had all fallen. Their own fate was thus much like that of the ex-CIA Cubans who flocked to the contra cause, after having been arrested on charges ranging from drug trafficking to (in the case of Luis Posada, Felix Rodriguez' colleague in the contra supply operation) allegedly helping blow up a Cuban civilian airliner. 

What is too little understood in the Contragate affair is the extent to which this secret team even more than their Cuban cohorts, helped engender the initial Reagan commitment to the contra cause. In the 1979- 80 period General Singlaub, having linked his political future to that of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, twice traveled to Central America to forge an alliance between the Reagan campaign and the local backers of what would later become the contra army. 

A biography of Ed Wilson, Manhunt by Peter Maas, charges that Shackley's former assistant Tom Clines, "even before he left the CIA...was promoting a deal with the Nicaraguan tyrant, Anastasio Somoza, to create a search-and-destroy apparatus against Somoza's enemies."36 (Ted Shackley has vigorously denied allegations that he sent Ed Wilson to offer assassination services to Somoza, who at that belated point had been abandoned politically by President Carter and was on the point of being ousted.)37 

If Congress is to deal resolutely with the Contragate crisis, it must deal with more than the complex story of disappearing support funds in Swiss and Panamanian bank accounts. These are but the most recent symptoms of a much more serious disease: a self-serving bureaucratic determination to involve the United States in a covert war for which there is neither Congressional nor popular support. And, behind this, and beyond the scope of this volume, a decades long international policy geared not to enhance the well being of American or international citizens, but of American corporations and multinationals, a very different thing, indeed.[And the CRAP is going on 10 times worse now in 2017 DC] 

What is really at stake in the debate over what happened in the Iran events is the future of covert warfare itself. The difficulties of the "disposal problem" should not once again become an excuse for postponing a clear decision, when the consequences of postponement are so clearly a still greater disposal problem in the future. 

The American "Secret Team" 

and Its Mafia-Drug Scandals 

Though the recent Iran-contra scandal has raised political problems for President Reagan and his National Security Council Staff, it has also revived old concerns about what a Senate committee once called "allegations of substantial and even massive wrong-doing" within the CIA and the rest of the national intelligence system.38 

The present crisis reopens these old controversies, for today's Contragate connection reunites elements of the alliance between the CIA, Cuban exiles, and Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960's, one of the CIA's most notorious plots. More importantly, it also raises two old, and ongoing, institutional questions. The first is the extent to which the current controversy is centered on operations which were controversial in the past, and more particularly on the individuals responsible for them. The second is the more fundamental question whether covert operations are not, by their very nature, inherently inimical to the public interest, likely to transgress statutory authority, and hostile to public accountability. (One can pose these pragmatic political questions without prejudice to the larger moral questions which unilateral expansionism also raises.) 

Histories of the CIA usually trace its covert operations back to the Special Operations of its World War II predecessor agency, the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S). But the continuity glosses over an elemental difference. O.S.S Special Operations were designed to challenge the legal and political authority of our wartime enemies, chiefly Germany and Japan. Covert operations, more often than not, make a similar challenge; but as often as not they challenge authorities with which we are at peace, and indeed have recurringly challenged even our own government and laws. 

From their inception to the present, many CIA operations have been covert, not just to deceive foreign populations, but at least partly because they were designed to violate U.S. statutes and Congressional will. A relevant example is the so-called "Defection Program" authorized in 1947 (by National Security Council Intelligence Directive 4, a document still withheld in full). Despite explicit Congressional prohibitions, this program was designed to bring Nazi agents, some of them wanted war criminals, to this country, to develop the covert operations capability of the United States. [So bottom line with Defection Program is that it is related to Operation Paperclip, which still in 2017, the majority of Americans are unaware of DC][One of the biggest here at this link DC]

http://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2017/06/part-1the-cia-covenant-nazis-in.html

Some of these agents helped supply the cadres and trainers for the nascent U.S. Special Forces or Green Berets, some of whose veterans help supply the training and operational backbone of today's contra army in Central America.39 Others allegedly were among the Central Europeans who helped train the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs; their veterans' organization, Brigade 2506, is now a principal recruiting ground for contra supporters. 

William Corson

According to a U.S. special warfare veteran, William Corson, some of these ex-Nazis became pilots in the 1950-52 supply operation of Civil Air Transport (later Air America) to opium-growing Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang, or K.M.T) guerrilla forces in Thailand and Burma. Corson notes that those knowledgeable about an in-house murder and resulting "Thailand flap" have theorized "that the trafficking in drugs in Southeast Asia was used as a self-financing device to pay for services and persons whose hire would not have been approved by Washington (or condoned if discovered)."40 

Paul L. E. Helliwell(L)

Another book, Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, documents that the K.M.T forces were accompanied by white advisers, and that they were supported with arms and equipment by an American company, Sea Supply, Inc.41 In a sense, the Miami-based drug trafficking of the contras today can be traced back to this Miami-based corporation. As we shall see, its organizer, Paul L. E. Helliwell, had been a member of an O.S.S team in Kunming, Yunnan, that paid for its intelligence operations with opium.42 

Mitch WerBel

Lou Conein,

Howard Hunt

Later Helliwell and three other members of this OSS team Howard Hunt, Lou Conein, and Mitch WerBell—would work with drug dealing Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion. WerBell in turn would work closely with General John Singlaub, the leading "private" backer of the contras today.43 

Colonel Richard G. Stilwell

Two senior CIA officials, one of them Colonel Richard G. Stilwell, left the CIA after the "Thailand flap" of 1952. In 1959 U.S. intelligence officers would tell President Eisenhower that the Chinese Nationalist forces in Burma had caused "nothing but difficulty."44 

The scandals arising from this drug traffic and murder caused the KMT supply operation to be officially "terminated" in 1952, with lasting consequences for the CIA. One was that the offending subordinate group, the Office of Policy Co-ordination (O.P.C), was merged into the Agency. This meant that the O.P.C "cowboys" who had relished their unsupervised use of former Nazis and drug traffickers were now theoretically subordinated to the somewhat more bureaucratic line of command in the CIA's Office of Special Operations (O.S.O). This was an unstable mix at the time, and it has been so ever since. 

Thomas Powers has contrasted the free-wheeling, improvisational, "sometimes harebrained" style of the O.P.C "cowboys" with the professionalism of the O.S.O, who "not only distrusted the trade craft of the O.P.C people, but on occasion went so far as to wonder just who they were working for, anyway."45 That tension would last through three decades of CIA operations to the scandals of Contragate. 

A second consequence with equal bearing on Contragate was that the severance of links to the Burma drug traffic was only cosmetic. As recorded elsewhere, the planes of Civil Air Transport, which had supplied the K.M.T troops in Burma, accepted a U.S. government contract to fly them out of Burma in 1954. But in fact it only removed those troops who were ready for retirement. Fresh K.M.T troops were flown in and Civil Air Transport continued to supply them.46 

With Civil Air Transport in the 1950's, as with Southern Air Transport three decades later, the distinction between official and private had become blurred enough to permit the continuation of an operation that had been officially prohibited. What had up to now been an American operation became a KMT-Taiwanese one. However, since Civil Air Transport had a Taiwanese KMT corporate entity as well as an American CIA one, the planes, bases, and nature of the arms flow remained the same.47 

The planes were now being sponsored by a new group, the Asian People's Anti-Communist League (A.P.A.C.L), which had been set up by the governments of Taiwan and South Korea. A.P.A.C.L, later the World Anti-Communist League (W.A.C.L), was set up with the assistance (as we shall see) of members of the CIA "secret team" in 1954, the year the United States "officially" wound up its Burma air supply operation. This support of A.P.A.C.L for the Burma air supply operation became clear in 1961, when Fang Chih, a K.M.T and A.P.A.C.L official, admitted responsibility, on behalf of the Free China Relief Agency, for an unlisted plane that had just been shot down over Thailand by the Burmese Air Force.48 The Free China Relief Agency turned out to be a member agency of A.P.A.C.L, sharing offices with it at the same Taipei address. (Organized groups of ex-Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe, later beneficiaries of the N.S.C.C.I.A Defection Program, have also been principal organizers of A.P.A.C.L/ W.A.C.L from its outset.49) 

Despite the "private" Taiwan cover in the years 1954-61, sophisticated U.S. equipment continued to be shipped via mainland American air force bases to the KMT opium growers, until these were driven from Burma into Laos in 1961 and the CIA again took over.50 In other words, the Civil Air Transport/Air America Burma drug supply operation never really closed down. On the contrary, it became a major factor in the 1961 reopening of the CIA's secret war in Laos, which continued, using local traffickers, Green Berets, and the renamed Air America, for the next fourteen years.51

Phoumi Nosavan

That "secret" Laotian war of 1961-75, like the K.M.T Burma operation, involved air flights in and out of regions where the chief cash crop was opium. The CIA's prime Laotian protege, Phoumi Nosavan, who "had controlled the [drug] traffic for years," and his subordinate Ouane Rattikone, solved their fiscal crisis by having the U.S.-supported Laotian government "become directly involved in the import and export of Burmese opium. This decision ultimately led to the growth of northwest Laos as one of the largest heroin-producing centers in the world."52 

Despite official prohibitions, there is no doubt that, as a CIA investigation conceded, Air America planes flew opium out of isolated opium-growing areas, especially those held by Meo tribesmen in northeastern Laos, where land access was controlled by the enemy.53 Top intelligence and military officials of both our Laotian and Vietnamese allies were involved in this traffic, which led among other things to the seizure in 1971 of sixty kilos of Laotian heroin (worth $13.5 million) from the suitcase of the chief Laotian delegate to the World Anti-Communist League.54 

As we have seen, the CIA secret war in Laos and Vietnam was crucial in generating today's "secret team" behind the covert Iran-contra supply operation. It was in that Laotian war that the key players got to know each other: John Singlaub (now Chairman of WACL), Richard Secord, Theodore Shackley, Shackley's CIA assistant Tom Clines, and Felix Rodriguez (the anti-Castro veteran in charge of the contra air supply operation in El Salvador). 

 Desmond FitzGerald

But in that same Laotian war the Contragate "secret team" of today was subordinated to the reconstituted ex-O.P.C "secret team" of the Burma K.M.T drug operation. In 1965 Richard Stilwell, released from the CIA after the "Thailand flap," returned to Thailand as U.S. military commander to oversee the secret war in Laos. Under Reagan, Stilwell returned from retirement to the Pentagon, to promote the Reagan build-up of special warfare forces (see Chapter IX).55 William DePuy, Stilwell's deputy in 1952, also returned to Indochina under Stilwell in 1964, as the chief of the Vietnam S.O.G before Singlaub. 56 Stilwell's O.P.C deputy and successor, Desmond FitzGerald, perhaps the archetypal CIA "cowboy," had risen in the CIA to be Shackley's superior in the 1963 anti-Castro plots. FitzGerald's promotion in 1965 to be in charge of CIA operations was promptly followed by Shackley's transfer to Laos.57 

Underlying the continuity between the Burma, Laos, and contra operations is the importance to all three of the drug traffic. As John Ranelagh has written of the K.M.T Burma army, it "never fought; it rapidly became a drug-producing operation instead."58 Though the fighting in Laos was real enough, the question has frequently been raised whether America's "secret team" was helping to maintain a drug operation in support of their anti-communist war, or helping to maintain a war in support of a drug operation. Similar questions have been raised about some of the contra leadership and their U.S. supporters (at least in Costa Rica): is their primary motive to fight or to engage in the drug traffic (see Chapter VI).59 In Miami the FBI has allegedly received an eyewitness report of cocaine being loaded on Southern Air Transport planes in Barranquilla, Colombia, at a time when the contra-supporting Southern Air Transport planes were in the Barranquilla area, as confirmed by flight records found in the downed Hasenfus plane.60 (The airline has denied any involvement with drugs.) 

A leading institution in this historic continuity has been the drug linked W.A.C.L, which between 1984 and 1986 was the principal publicly identified source of funding for the contras. Since 1984, General Singlaub, as W.A.C.L World Chairman, has, in his own words, "quite frankly used the W.A.C.L organization...to meet with some people who are capable of contributing" to the contra cause.61 Singlaub identified his three principal W.A.C.L sources as Latin America, Taiwan, and South Korea—the three areas where W.A.C.L members and their allies, as recently as the 1970's, have been recurringly linked to the narcotics traffic.62 

There have been recurring rumors that profits from this same drug traffic have gone to finance an illicit lobby influencing and corrupting the American government. It is known that K.M.T officials in the U.S. narrowly escaped conviction on narcotics smuggling charges in the 1950's; and it has been alleged that the narcotics traffic was at this time "an important factor in the activities and permutations of the [K.M.T Taiwan] China Lobby."63 This is of current concern because of the continuity between the bribery and other illegal activities of the China Lobby of the 1950's, the pro-Somoza and anti-Castro lobbies of the 1960's, the Chilean, Koreagate and Moonie lobbies of the 1970's, and the contra lobby today.64 

John Rosselli

Whether or not the American Mafia continues to play its historic role in the import of drugs from Latin America, one must be concerned by the possibility their ongoing contacts with that part of the CIA-"private" shadow network which is now supplying the contras. 65 Probably nothing ever did the CIA more harm than the decade of rumors, later proven correct, that it had collaborated with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro. As Miami Station Chief from 1962 to 1965, Theodore Shackley did not inaugurate these contacts with Mafia figure John Rosselli, but he apparently helped maintain them in 1962, at a time when another CIA figure prepared an internal memorandum, "which falsely stated that the operation involving Rosselli was then being terminated," according to a Senate report.66 According to that report, the Miami station chief (ie. Shackley) personally helped load a U-Haul truck with explosives, detonators, rifles, handguns, radios, and boat radar for Rosselli, to whom the keys of the truck were given.67

In a recent civil suit filed by attorney Dan Sheehan for the Washington based Christic Institute, a non-profit religious legal foundation, it is alleged that Shackley's Mafia contacts did not end when Shackley moved in 1965 from Miami to Laos. It is a matter of record that in the same year a Miami syndicate representative, John Pullman, paid an extended visit to Hong Kong, and that Santo Trafficante, another figure in the CIA-Rosselli assassination plots, met with prominent Corsican gangsters in Saigon in 1968.68 

The Christic suit charges that Shackley facilitated arrangements to sell opium from the Laotian guerrillas to Santo Trafficante, and that "in return, Shackley's organization received a fixed percentage of the income."69 

Quintero

It also alleges that arms from Shackley and Secord reached the contras via the firm of a Cuban called Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero, once named by the New York Times as a business associate of Shackley and Clines.70 Business Week has just identified Quintero as "a Cuban-American who played a key role in the Bay of Pigs invasion and in subsequent efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro."71 And the Wall Street Journal has identified Quintero as involved, along with Clines, in the controversial NSC contra supply operation.72 

If so, then two of the CIA's most notorious scandals, the post-war opium connection and the 1960's assassination connection, would appear to be origins of the supposedly "private" Contragate connection today. 

The CIA's "Off-Loaded" Operations: 

The Nugan Hand Bank 

Throughout the history of the CIA, exposures of scandals, such as supply operations to opium-growing guerrillas in Southeast Asia, have been followed by the resignation or forced departure of key officials. It has not always been clear, however, that by terminating the employment of the official the CIA intended to end its relationship to the operation. On the contrary, the CIA may merely have "off-loaded" the operation, in effect giving it a deeper cover by giving it a more private appearance (and, more important, a non-Congressional financial base). 

We have seen how in 1954, when the CIA and its proprietary airline CAT Inc. terminated their support for the controversial Burma-K.M.T drug supply operation, the planes continued to fly for A.P.A.C.L (later W.A.C.L) and CAT Inc.'s Taiwan affiliate, C.A.T.C.L. This privatization of controversial operations was carried out on a much larger scale in the period 1971-73, when the CIA was coming under increasing public and Congressional scrutiny for its alleged involvement in the Southeast Asian drug traffic.

In these years the CIA severed its formal connections with one of former Miami Station Chief Ted Shackley's Cuban exile groups (Operation 40) whose drug-running operations had become known to the Justice Department.73 It also ostensibly "sold" its proprietary airlines Air America (formerly CAT Inc.) and Southern Air Transport, after Air America had been publicly identified as to some degree implicated in the narcotics traffic of Southeast Asia. 

Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada

Just how much was changed by this legal off-loading is very much open to question. In 1985-86 two Cubans from Operation 40 (Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada) were found to be overseeing supply operations for the contras, using planes flown by former Air America personnel and operated by Southern Air Transport. 

The press subsequently learned that Southern Air Transport's Chairman and sole stockholder was James Bastian, who before the CIA divestment had been a vice-president of Pacific Corp., the CIA's parent holding company for Air America, and also Southern Air Transport's in-house attorney. 

 Frank Terpil

Between 1970 and 1973 a number of covert operators and subordinate personnel resigned or were dismissed from the Agency. But for one of the most notorious, Ed Wilson, departure from the CIA made little difference. When he was a career contract officer for the CIA, Wilson's job was to set up and run proprietary firms, sometimes profit-making, for his case officer, Thomas Clines. He continued to set up intelligence proprietaries and to deal with Clines after 1971, when he moved from the CIA to a deeper cover in a parallel and more secret intelligence network, Task Force 157, under the U.S. Navy. After 1976, when he was no longer a U.S. employee, his companies received no more government assistance, but his contacts with Clines and Clines' superior Ted Shackley continued.74 He now went into business with another ex-CIA employee, Frank Terpil, who was apparently dismissed outright from the CIA in 1972. 

Later Ed Wilson and Frank Terpil were both arrested for illegal smuggling of arms and explosives. Press exposure of the interrelated Wilson and Terpil scandals revealed that after their departures from the CIA the two men's "private" companies (some apparently authorized by Task Force 157 and some apparently not) continued to do business with both U.S. and foreign intelligence.75

Some of these companies and their personnel are close to the center of today's Contragate scandal. A Wilson-Terpil company at the heart of Wilson's illegal dealings with Libya was Inter-Technology, set up in the office of a Terpil sales company called Intercontinental Technology, which was doing business with Iran. Intercontinental's parent, Stanford Technology was run by an Iranian-American, Albert Hakim, who was later involved in both the Irangate arms deals and the contra supply operation.76 

The Cuban exile assassin called Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero was associated with Rodriguez and Posada both in Operation 40 and at the Ilopango contra supply base.77 His former CIA case officer (and Wilson's), Tom Clines, who served under Shackley in both Miami and Laos, has also been linked to Colonel Oliver North's covert NSC operations.78 Both Quintero and Clines were also associated in API, another company set up with assistance from Ed Wilson, as were Ted Shackley and yet another Operation 40 veteran, Ricardo Chavez.79 

An affidavit filed by Dan Sheehan in the above mentioned lawsuit brought by the non-profit Christic Institute charges that Wilson and all of these associates (except Chavez, who is not mentioned) were allied in a "secret team" to continue covert operations which were being dropped by the CIA, and to finance these operations by their access to the Laotian and Caribbean drug traffic. It charges in particular that this long-established drug connection underlies the use of the Ilopango air base in an alleged contra arms-for-drugs operation, which is currently being investigated by the Miami FBI.

The affidavit charges that drug profits during the Laotian secret air war were deposited in a secret Ted Shackley bank account at the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. Shackley denies the existence of any such arrangement or account. On the other hand, though they are not mentioned in the affidavit, facts published four years ago by Professor James A. Nathan in the Carnegie Endowment's prestigious magazine Foreign Policy corroborate what his Australian sources called Shackley's "long, close relationship with the Nugan Hand bank."80 According to Professor Nathan, 

The bank's founders, along with Nugan and Hand, were four officials of Air America, a CIA property.... The director of [Nugan Hand's] Chiang Mai office [in Thailand] claimed on Australian television that he handled $2.6 million in less than six months. The money was garnered from the drugs transiting the area. The bank, he put it starkly, was a 'laundry' for Meo tribesmen and other poppy growers. The Bangkok office was run by the former CIA chief of station in Bangkok...records from the Bangkok office were full of descriptions of troop deployments and arms sales in the region. Investigators found it hard to believe Nugan Hand was just a bank and not an abettor of U.S. intelligence.81

Bernie Houghton

The article revealed that the bank's branch managers included U.S. Air Force General LeRoy Manor (who later collaborated with Secord and North on covert U.S. efforts to liberate the U.S. hostages in Iran), and Patry Loomis, a CIA employee who worked in Vietnam under Shackley and then helped Ed Wilson recruit a team of Green Berets to train Libyans. Ed Wilson himself was a close associate of the Nugan Hand Saudi representative, Bernie Houghton (through whom Wilson allegedly supplied 3000 weapons and 10 million rounds of ammunition to the CIA backed rebels in Angola).82 

The extraordinary Nugan Hand story, little known in the United States, was front-page news in Australia six years ago. It was there alleged that the Nugan Hand milieu may have played a role in the 1975 downfall of the left-leaning Gough Whitlam Labor Government, at a time when Shackley was still chief of the East Asia Division of the CIA. 

Australian sources have given an even more sinister account than Professor Nathan of the extraordinary operations of Nugan Hand Bank, suggesting that the bank financed major drug deals in addition to laundering their profits. According to an Australian Royal Commission, Nugan Hand was the chief funding source for a series of major narcotics transactions which first brought heroin from the Golden Triangle to Australia in the early 1970's, at a time when the Nixon White House was giving a high priority to stopping the narcotics flow from the same sources to the United States.83 

These stories are so well known in Australia that in March 1982 the CIA issued a rare public denial (for Australian eyes only): "The CIA has not engaged in operations against the Australian government, has no ties with Nugan Hand and does not involve itself in drug trafficking."84 Technically, the CIA statement may be correct. In the relevant period 1973-75 Wilson was no longer working for the CIA, but (like Houghton) for the more shadowy parallel U.S. military intelligence network, Task Force 157. A company set up by Ed Wilson (who visited Australia in 1976 while still in Task Force 157) was alleged to have helped create the scandal that toppled Whitlam.  85 

If Wilson and Houghton (while still in Task Force 157) used the Nugan Hand bank to channel unauthorized support to CIA-backed rebels in Angola (in the face of Congressional opposition), then the off-loaded intelligence assets of the drug-linked Nugan Hand bank in the mid-1970's may well have been a close precedent for the drug-linked aid to the contras today. 

The same "secret team" seems to have been involved in both operations. According to an informant quoted in an Australian government report on drug trafficking, when the Nugan Bank was being hurriedly closed in 1980, Tom Clines and Rafael Quintero called at the Geneva office of Nugan Hand; and, upon confirming that Houghton had left his travel case there, proceeded to remove a document from it. Clines reportedly said, "We've got to keep Dick's name out of this," meaning by "Dick" Richard Secord, the Iran-Contragate figure.86 

In the same year, 1980, the new President of Nugan Hand, a Miami banker by the name of Donald Beazley, ceded control of a recently acquired British firm, London Capital Securities, to Ricardo Chavez, quite possibly, according to the same report, acting for Thomas Clines.87 

The "secret team" may have been "off-loaded," but it would appear to have lost little of its cohesiveness and influence. In the early 1970's it would appear to have served the U.S. intelligence establishment, even after formal severance from the CIA. The available evidence suggests that it may be playing the same role today. [And there is an operation out of Afghanistan in 2017 logic dictates, because THAT is where the opium is now located DC]

The "Secret Team" and the 

Wilson E.A.T.S.C.O Scandal 

Back in 1980, of course, Shackley and Clines were still hero's of that CIA minority of psy-war "cowboys" (mostly veterans, many of them fired by Jimmy Carter's CIA Director Stansfield Turner) who wished to see the agency return to the business of covert and proxy warfare. Many CIA veterans like Singlaub and his longtime OSS-CIA ally Ray Cline were actively supporting the Reagan-Bush ticket; and at least one senior CIA officer (Security Chief Robert Gambino) resigned from the CIA to join the Bush and Reagan campaigns (under Cline's son-in-law, Stefan Halper). The fact that under Carter the clandestine service had been reduced by 820 positions had produced, among men well trained in political warfare, a concerted will for revenge. Cline was a leader among those ex-CIA people who "now looked on with worry and concern."88 

Michael Townley

What personally concerned Shackley and Clines was the punitive drive which Carter's CIA Chief, Admiral Stansfield Turner, had mounted against the clandestine services, and especially those officials who had been involved in two interlocking scandals: the case of Michael Townley, the assassin of the Chilean Minister Orlando Letelier, and that of Edwin P.Wilson, the renegade ex-CIA agent turned arms dealer and assassination specialist for Libya. Cline's friend and associate, Michael Ledeen, published an article in March 1980 (at the beginning of the Carter-Reagan campaign) "savaging Admiral Stansfield Turner for forcing Ted Shackley [Edwin Wilson's most senior CIA contact, by now a veteran of the anti-Allende operation] out of the agency."89 

The election of Reagan meant a reprieve for the clandestine services. Michael Ledeen, in his new capacity as the Reagan State Department's expert on terrorism, was now in a position to help close off the investigation of those still in government who had been involved with Edwin Wilson, perhaps the world's most notorious ex-CIA terrorist.90 

Shackley's "private" involvement in CIA covert operations appears to have been used by Ledeen to contain the expanding Justice Department investigation into the illegal activities of the ex-CIA terrorist and arms dealer Ed Wilson. Government auditors had learned that one of Wilson's companies (E.A.T.S.C.O), which had been set up to gain shipping contracts on U.S. arms sales to Egypt, "had fraudulently billed the Pentagon for some $8 million, in addition to the big profits it was already making."91 Larry Barcella, the federal prosecutor on the case, had broadened the EATSCO investigation to include two CIA clandestine service veterans driven out by Turner, Tom Clines and Theodore Shackley, and two high level men still in the Pentagon, General Richard Secord and Erich von Marbod. Witnesses told Barcella that the four men and Wilson each had a twenty percent share in the company, whose seed money had been supplied by Wilson. Allegedly, Clines and Shackley joined E.A.T.S.C.O after leaving the CIA; Secord and von Marbod, who generated the contracts, were hidden partners.92 

These men were of course much bigger fish than Wilson. Shackley had been tapped to become CIA Director if Gerald Ford had been re-elected President; and he told Barcella that, except for the investigation, he could have been either the CIA Director or Deputy Director under Reagan.93 

Carlucci

When auditors discovered the E.A.T.S.C.O fraud, von Marbod abruptly resigned, and General Secord, "the only one still in government service, was removed from his key position in the sale of arms to the Middle East, pending a polygraph." At this point Ledeen asked Barcella to lay off Shackley and von Marbod, saying that the "billing abuses...might have gone for a covert operation." Secord was reinstated by former CIA Deputy Director Carlucci, by then the number two man in the Defense Department. Then Barcella was taken off the E.A.T.S.C.O investigation, which ended with Clines (the only defendant) paying by plea bargain a $10,000 fine on behalf of his company.94 [And Carlucci's connection to Bush and 911 is known through the exploits of Carlyle prior to that day DC]

By this point in Barcella's investigation, Secord and von Marbod had allegedly contributed to a covert operation paid for by padded arms sales contracts. This was the controversial sale of AWACS radar airplanes to Saudi Arabia another deal where funds were siphoned off. According to intelligence sources, millions from this initial $3.5 billion contract have gone to arm the contras.95 

Lt. Colonel Oliver North, "the administration's point man on the AWACS sale," later acted as the White House's chief liaison with the contras—working with Singlaub and Secord. (Although Secord officially retired in 1983, at the end of the Wilson affair, he was later a member of the Pentagon's Special Operations Policy Advisory Group.) Both Singlaub and Secord have worked to supply the contras with modern counterinsurgency S.T.O.L (short-takeoff-and-landing) aircraft; and perhaps as many as four S.T.O.L planes have actually been delivered, via one of Secord's companies, to the contras in Honduras.96 

Ledeen suggested to Barcella that the falsified billings might have been a cover for a covert operation. But that hypothesis can also be turned around. A covert operation, such as the contras, can become a justification for putting back into business a clandestine service that has been all but banished from government because of past excesses. That of course has happened. Because of the contras, the CIA airlines are flying again, the "swift boats" are being launched from their mother ships, and operations are once again being co-ordinated out of a possibly illegal CIA operations station in Miami. This is an almost certain formula for the involvement of CIA personnel in the drug traffic—perhaps the chief reason why Shackley's covert operations in Miami were closed down. 

But a covert operation can also become a "CIA defense"—a cover for fraudulent profits from arms sales, and even for their diversion into illegal campaign contributions. Moreover, as we have seen from our historical review, it can easily become a cover for new illegal activities, particularly in that historical corollary to clandestine operations, the narcotics traffic. 

The Cuban S-Force and Narcotics 

So far we have studied the role played in the Iran-Contra arms scandal by a "secret team" or "shadow network," composed of Americans like Generals John Singlaub and Richard Secord, whose friendship during the CIA covert war in Laos facilitated their collaboration in the "private" contra supply effort. But for years the American "secret team" has been allied with a more autonomous, close-knit band of Cuban exiles, whose work for their American handlers has included assassination efforts, major terrorist operations, and the famous Watergate burglaries under President Nixon. Some members were arrested in 1970 in the Justice Department's Operation Eagle, which was announced as the largest federal narcotics enforcement operation ever up to that time. 

The recent suit brought by the Christic Institute alleges that members of this Cuban "secret team," in conjunction with its U.S. intelligence allies, have also looked to the narcotics traffic to pay for its so-called "contra" operations. According to an affidavit filed by the Christic General Counsel, Daniel Sheehan, the profit from a drug-smuggling network organized by contra supporters who were Bay of Pigs veterans "was being used to help finance the purchase of military equipment, ammunition and explosives needed by the Contras to wage their private war against the Sandinista government."97 

The political goal of this Cuban "secret team," and of at least some of its American handlers, has always been the overthrow of Fidel Castro. This political agenda has given them priorities different from those of any American president, Democrat or Republican, who has wanted to explore any degree of detente with the Soviet Union. This explains why so many in the Cuban team have turned for support to other right-wing governments like Argentina and Chile, whose own international intelligence operations have been financed by the same narcotics traffic.98 

Today the two most prominent members of this second team are the Cubans in charge of loading the ill-fated Hasenfus supply plane at the Ilopango air base in El Salvador: Felix Rodriguez (alias "Max Gomez") and Luis Posada (alias "Ramon Medina"). But they are working in the contra supply operation with other ex-CIA Cubans, who have been recruited through Brigade 2506, the Bay of Pigs veterans association. Its president, Juan Perez Franco, who in 1985 made Brigade support for the contras official, is the same president who a decade earlier brought the brigade to publicly support acts of terrorism. 

One year later, in June 1976, Posada and Perez Franco, along with the brigade's new president, Roberto Carballo, and its military chief, Armando Lopez Estrada, attended the small ten-man founding meeting of C.O.R.U, a 1976 Cuban terrorist alliance supported by the fascist governments of Chile and Argentina.99 The Wall Street Journal reports Armando Lopez Estrada as saying that "on the instructions of a U.S. official in Costa Rica,"he recruited Bay of Pigs veterans to advise the contras on the Costa Rican southern front.100 

In retrospect, it is obvious that some if not most of C.O.R.U's terrorist operations were financed from the drug traffic. C.O.R.U interlocked with, and was funded by, the Miami-based World Finance Corporation (WFC), set up in 1971 by a Brigade 2506 veteran, Guillermo Hernandez Cartaya. The House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control later agreed with a local assistant U.S. attorney that W.F.C's activities included "political corruption, gunrunning, as well as narcotics trafficking on an international level."101 

For example, Duney Perez Alamo, a W.F.C employee and former CIA agent, was also an admitted C.O.R.U member. His friend Gaspar Jimenez was arrested in 1976 for a C.O.R.U attempt at kidnap and murder in Merida, Mexico. According to the Miami Organized Crime Bureau, "Hernandez Cartaya financed and planned the Mexican action, with help from Perez Alamo." In March 1977 Jimenez escaped from a Mexican prison, apparently with the aid of $50,000 supplied by W.F.C. According to Penny Lernoux, 

One of those who aided in the escape was Nestor 'Tony' Izquierdo, a Cuban exile formerly associated with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was arrested while attempting to reenter the United States from Mexico, but was released on low bail when a retired Navy commander who had once worked with the D.I.A. vouched for his 'good character.'...Government files further showed that Izquierdo's bond and legal fees were paid by W.F.C.102 

The W.F.C. had good relations with both the Washington establishment and, reportedly, the Mafia. One of its six founding stockholders and directors was Washington attorney Walter Sterling Surrey, a veteran of OSS. One of his W.F.C. associates was, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), an alleged narcotics wholesaler and member of the Trafficante Mafia family.103 In 1981, after W.F.C had collapsed, Hernandez Cartaya was convicted and sentenced to five years for income tax evasion. His successor as "godfather" of the Miami narcotics traffic was another Bay of Pigs veteran, Jose Medardo Alvero Cruz.104 

Like Rodriguez and Posada, Perez Alamo and Izquierdo were not average members of Brigade 2506; they were members of a much smaller elite of specialists trained in sabotage and other black arts. At least three members of this inner elite, which we shall call the S-Force, also were in touch with the renegade ex-CIA agent Ed Wilson.105

This S-Force had its origins in the eighty-man force of sabotage teams given special training in Panama and Florida for infiltration into Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs. According to Warren Hinckle and William Turner, many of these Cubans had been recruited from the ranks of the International Anti-Communist Brigade (I.A.C.B), a rag-tag private army funded chiefly by the dispossessed Havana casino owners with Mafia connections, and recruited and trained by the future Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis.106 These origins may explain why so many of the S-Force members ended up taking over the narcotics traffic that had been associated with the Havana casinos, before the Cuban revolution eliminated such goings on. 

Members of this smaller S-Force have been used for illegal purposes from at least 1971, when Howard Hunt attended the Brigade's tenth anniversary meeting to recruit some of the future Watergate burglars for the Nixon White House "plumbers" or "counter-intelligence" break-in teams.107 

Hunt, seeking break-in specialists, went to the elite counter-intelligence operation of the CIA's station in Miami. Most of these 150 or so men were Bay of Pigs veterans who had subsequently been picked for further army training at Fort Jackson, and some, like Rodriguez and Posada, for officer training at Fort Benning. Some of this elite force were then recruited to work for the CIA. This counter-intelligence operation, identified in the New York Times as "Operation 40," finally had to be closed down in the early 1970's, after one of its planes crashed in Southern California with several kilos of cocaine and heroin aboard.108 

Both Rodriguez and Posada, like their close friend the Watergate burglar Eugenio Martinez, have been identified as members of Operation 40.109 The Fort Jackson trainees had their own, more restricted veteran's organization, the "Ex-Combatientes de Fort Jackson." Among those who took part in Hunt's first Watergate break-in, and were never arrested, were Angel Ferrer, the president of the Ex-Combatientes, and Felipe de Diego, identified in Watergate testimony as a member of Operation 40.110 

Eugenio Martinez, a close personal friend of both Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, was an active member of Operation 40 on the CIA payroll when he was arrested, along with his American handlers Howard Hunt and James McCord, for the Watergate break-in of June 17, 1972. In 1981 Martinez was pardoned by newly elected President Ronald Reagan, a little noticed event that may have heralded the cementing of the Reagan Contragate alliance. 

Martinez, Rodriguez, and Posada were all members of an even more elite group within the Ex-Combatientes de Fort Jackson and Operation 40. They had been part of the much smaller S-Force of about 80 men trained for sabotage and other special operations, including assassinations in connection with the 1961 invasion. Although all three have been loosely called "Bay of Pigs veterans," in fact none of them went ashore there. Rodriguez and Posada had been infiltrated covertly into Cuba two months earlier. Martinez, a boat skipper, had taken Rodriguez in.111 

It is this special advance sabotage force, or "S-force," that has had the most intimate and conspiratorial relationship with the American shadow network behind Contragate. "Sabotage" is perhaps a euphemism for the range of tasks this "S-Force" (as opposed to the larger "Ex-Combatientes de Fort Jackson," and still larger Brigade 2506) was trained for. 

The most important of those tasks was the assassination of Fidel Castro. Business Week has identified Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero, a member of the contra supply team at Ilopango and earlier one of the most important S-Force infiltrators, as a man "who played a key role in the Bay of Pigs invasion and in subsequent efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro."112 

Quintero was later hired (along with Ricardo Chavez, another S-force veteran) for a business venture set up by his former CIA case officer Tom Clines; this venture also involved Theodore Shackley, Clines' former boss as head of the CIA Miami station.113 

Richard Nixon learned to his regret the dangers of hiring Cubans with a different political agenda in order to bypass both the CIA and Congress. One can speculate that Ronald Reagan may be about to learn the same lesson. 

The Contragate Cubans: 

A Trojan Horse? 

Like Richard Nixon a decade earlier, Ronald Reagan, in order to bypass Congressional scrutiny in training and supplying the contras, turned to the right-wing ex-CIA Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans of Brigade 2506. The two Presidents' actions were similar but not identical; by the mid-1970's many Brigade 2506 members had turned against the United States government, and forged new alliances with foreign powers and groups that were overtly anti-Semitic and fascist. 

This split became obvious in 1974, under Presidents Nixon and Ford, when Secretary of State Kissinger was reported to be preparing for normalization of relations with Cuba. (In March 1976 Posada's ally Orlando Bosch, who would soon become the ideological leader of C.O.R.U, was briefly jailed in Costa Rica during Kissinger's visit. Miami police had "picked up word that Bosch was planning the bombing assassination of...Kissinger. The apparent motive was Kissinger's earlier overtures to improve relations with Cuba."114) 

Many Brigade members responded to Kissinger's plans for detente with violence in Miami and overtures to fascists and neofascists in both Europe and Latin America. The most prominent of Brigade 2506's new alliances was with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; at its April 1975 anniversary conference, it gave him its first Freedom Award. Speakers at the meeting denounced the United States for betraying their cause, and even threatened to storm the Kennedy Library in Boston if their flag there were not returned.115 

Soon afterwards, for the first time in its history, Brigade 2506 began publicly taking credit for terrorist attacks against Cuba. In April 1976 Brigade President Juan Perez Franco was quoted as endorsing an attack on a Cuban fishing vessel in which a seaman was killed.116 

In June 1976 former Brigade 2506 President Roberto Carballo joined leaders of three other avowedly terrorist organizations—the neofascist CNM of Felipe Rivero Diaz, the FNLC of Frank Castro, Alpha 66, and the Accion Cubana of Orlando Bosch—in creating a new terrorist alliance called CORU, the Congress of United Revolutionary Organizations. The purpose of CORU was to build political support for overthrowing Castro by performing hit jobs with and for right-wing governments, especially that of Pinochet in Chile and Somoza in Nicaragua. 

That CORU alliance, uniting mainstream ex-CIA Cubans with mavericks accustomed to survive from the drug traffic, was a historic step towards the contra alliance with drug-trafficking Cuban exiles today. One sign of this continuity is the presence at Ilopango of Luis Posada, who attended CORU's founding meeting. That meeting was organized principally by FNLC chief Frank Castro, who has been named in connection with alleged arms-for-drug deals through Ilopango in support of the contras.117 

CORU was also actively supported by Alpha 66, the Cuban exile participants in the World Anti-Communist League. Alpha 66 was particularly close to WACL's Guatemalan contingent the MLN, headed by their ally Mario Sandoval Alarcon (later an initial backer of the contras). In July 1976 Alpha 66 also expressed its ideological debt to the Mexican WACL leader Jorge Prieto Laurens, a member of a secret neofascist society, the Tecos, who had circulated at the Roman Catholic Vatican Council II a document denouncing "Jewish imperialism...the worst imperialism the world has ever seen."118 

In September 1976, after publishing CORU "war communiques" Promising that civilian airliners would soon be attacked, Brigade 2506's allegiance to CORU was publicly confirmed at a Brigade conference in September 1976, at which the keynote speaker was the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.119 To make it even more plain that the Brigade and CORU had broken with the constraints of U.S. foreign policy, CORU delegates attended an October 1976 meeting in Rome to charter a new Fascist International, together with representatives of groups responsible for a spate of bombings and bank robberies in Europe.120 Some of these same European neo-fascists began attending the Latin American meetings of WACL, where they were introduced by representatives of Chile and Argentina. 

More importantly, CORU Cubans and European neofascists put together a series of joint terrorist actions and conspiracies designed to undermine U.S. foreign policy. In January 1977, for example, at a time when the United States was supporting Spain's first democratic election after the death of Franco, a CORU Cuban (Julio Carlos Perez) was arrested with an Argentinian and Mariano Sanchez Covisa, the leader of the Spanish "Guerrillas of Christ the King," for one of a number of gratuitous murders, part of a "strategy of tension" to prevent the elections from being held.121 

Behind this "strategy of tension" was the so-called Aginter-Press, a group of former French intelligence officers, once banished to Portugal for their plots to overthrow French President Charles de Gaulle. One of them, Yves Guerin-Serac, was at the center of a plot to restore dictatorship to Portugal, where after the death of the dictator Salazar, official U.S. policy, as enforced by Ambassador Frank Carlucci, was again to support democratic elections. 

Also prominent in this coup attempt were the same Spaniard, Mariano Sanchez Covisa, and "approximately 100 'anti-Castro' Cubans."122 Just where these Cubans came from is not entirely clear. But in 1975 support for the coup came from a Fort Jackson sabotage-trained ex-CIA Cuban and top level drug trafficker, Alberto Sicilia Falcon.123 At the same time the Brigade 2506 office in Miami became a recruiting ground for Cuban exiles willing to fight for the UNITA forces of Jonas Savimbi in the former Portuguese colony of Angola.124 Inasmuch as these Cubans are not known to have arrived in Angola, and the ELP army was originally recruited for a coup in Angola, they may simply have become part of the CORUAginter-GCR alliance for a coup in Portugal. 

For the next five years, Cuban exiles and other members of the Fascist International would meet at the annual meetings of CAL, the Latin American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Blas Pinar, the brains behind the 1977 murders in Spain for which Carlos Perez was arrested, attended the 1979 CAL Congress, as did the wanted Italian terrorist Elio Massagrande, whose bank deposit box was supposed to have contained the treasury for this conspiracy.125 

WACL at this time was supported by four governments (Taiwan and South Korea, the founders, joined by Saudi Arabia and the Philippines) of which at least three were actively opposed to detente. As the United States moved toward coexistence in the 1970s, WACL moved in the opposite direction, toward a more open embrace of Nazi ideology and former war criminals. At least three WACL European Chapters (the German, the Austrian, and the Dutch) were taken over by former Nazi SS officers who had fought against America in World War II. In this same period some WACL members proclaimed themselves (in the words of the Norwegian chapter) united for freedom "from both World Communism and the international financial-imperialism." 

It might seem surprising that this narco-fascist conspiracy, uniting the CORU-Brigade 2506 terrorist alliance, the WACL neofascists, and various European terrorists, should have been so swiftly and eagerly embraced by the incoming Reagan administration. But as we shall see in the next chapter, the shadow network had been busy for some years preparing for just this alliance.

next
IV. The Growth of Reagan's Contra Commitment

footnotes chapter 3
1. Christopher Dickey, With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), passim. 
2. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Activities of Nondiplomatic Representatives of Foreign Principals in the United States, Hearings, 88th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. 1587, 1626; cf. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up (Berkeley: Westworks, 1977), pp. 26-28, etc. 
3. Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: the Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), pp. 10-45. The European regional secretary of the original steering committee in 1958 to convene a World Anti-Communist Congress for Freedom and Liberation was Alfred Gielen, a former Nazi publicist for Goebbels' Anti-Komintern. 
4. James Ridgeway, Village Voice, December 9, 1986. 
5. Jenny Pearce, Under the Eagle: U.S. intervention in Central America and the Caribbean (Boston: South End Press, 1981), pp. 178, 180. Officially Deaver's firm did not register as agent for the group until August 27, 1980. However it did so after coming under Justice Department scrutiny for possible violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, for failure to register the contract within the required ten days (Washington Post, September 8,1980). A former Vice-President of Guatemala told the BBC in 1981 that the contributions to Reagan's victory, "all in all...went up to 10 million dollars" (Pearce, p. 180; cf. Marlene Simons, "Guatemala: The Coming Danger," Foreign Policy [Summer 1981], p. 101; Anderson, p. 175). 
6. Simons, p. 101; Anderson, p. 200. According to Simons, Sandoval "mixed with the Reagan inner circle during inauguration week." 
7. Washington Post, February 22, 1981. 
8. Alan Nairn, "Controversial Reagan Campaign Links with Guatemalan Government and Private Sector Leaders," Research Memorandum for Council on Hemispheric Affairs, October 30, 1980, p. 11. 241 242 The Iran-Contra Connection 
9. Shirley Christian, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 197; Anderson, p. 176. 
10. Dickey, p. 87. 
11. Dickey, p. 88. 
12. Dickey, p. 88; Anderson, p.202. According to Dickey, "the CI A took more than two years to begin seriously analyzing these papers." By this time the Reagan administration had backed away from d'Aubuisson, who once told German reporters, "You Europeans had the right idea. You saw the Jews behind Communism and you started to kill them" (Oakland Tribune, August 15, 1986). 
13. Anderson, pp. 202, 207-08; citing White's testimony to Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 1981, and to House Foreign Relations Committee, 1984. 
14. Ronnie Dugger, On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (New York: McGraw Hill), p. 273; Anderson, p. 208. The Andersons charge categorically that the documents supplied by d'Aubuisson were forged. 
15. Cf. e.g. "Is There a Contra Drug Connection?" Newsweek, January 26, 1987. South Africa, the other most prominent example of Reagan's inflexibility, was like Deaver's three international clients in 1980 one of the hard core members of WACL. 
16. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), p. 11 
17. Anderson, p. 140. 
18. Magnus Linklater et al., The Nazi Legacy (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), pp. 278-85 (see Chapter IV). 
19. Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/ Doubleday 1984), p. 217. 
20. Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 89-100. 
21. John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 549, 644. 
22. Ranelagh, p. 644. Under Schlesinger a total of 1500 are said to have left the CIA; under Turner, 2 800. Cf. Theodore Shackley, The Third Option (New York: Reader's Digest Press/McGraw Hill, 1981), p. ix. 
23. San Francisco Examiner, July 27,1986; Newsweek, December 15,1986, U.S. News and World Report, December 15, 1986. 
24. Ranelagh, pp. 644-65. 
25. John Prados, Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II (New York: William Morrow, 1986), pp. 351-54, 377. 
26. One of these men is Robert K. Brown, today the publisher of the mercenary magazine Soldier of Fortune. Cf. Search-light (London), May 17, 1985; reprinted in Intelligence/Parapolitics (July 1985), pp. 25-26. Footnotes 243 
27. According to Newsweek (December 15, 1986), "in the late 1960s Secord directed air operations in support of the CIA's secret war in Laos." 
28. Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1986. 
29. Prados,p. 275. 
30. Miami Herald, October 23, 1986; Washington Post, October 24, 1986. 
31. Peter Maas, New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1987. 
32. Newsweek, December 15, 1986; Peter Maas, Manhunt (New York: Random House, 1986), pp. 279-80: "Although he had taken out at least two and a half million from EATSCO before being forced to depart...Clines in his own plea bargain...was let off with a corporate fine [and] paid $10,000" (p. 280). 33. Peter Maas, Manhunt (New York: Random House, 1986), pp. 138-40. 34. New York Times, November 27, 1986. 35. Ibid. Shackley has denied any involvement in the Contra supply operation and we know oi no contrary evidence. 36. Peter Maas, p. 138; cf. p. 231. 37. Daniel Sheehan, Affidavit, (Washington: Christic Institute, 1324 North Capitol St., Washington DC 20002, 1986), Para. 70.33. 
38. U.S. Cong., Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book I Foreign and Military Intelligence, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess., Report No. 94-755 (April 26, 1976), p. 1. 
39. John Prados, Presidents' Secret Wars (New York: Morrow, 1986), pp. 119-21. 
40. William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1977), pp. 322-23. 
41. Alfred W. McCoy, with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 126- 35. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), pp. 194, 199-212. At the time Washington officials countered the charge that the white advisers were American with the speculation that "the men may have been German deserters from the French Foreign Legion" (Time, August 13, 1953, p. 38). 
42. Scott, pp. 210-11. 
43. Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 16, 20, 129-31, 181-82. 
44. Prados, p. 77. A vivid eyewitness description of Stilwell's departure will be found in Ranelagh, p. 221; cf. p. 223. 
45. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 48-49; cf. Ranelagh, p. 199. 
46. Scott, War Conspiracy, p. 199. 
47. Technically, what happened was as follows: the CIA's American proprietary CAT Inc. (renamed Air America in 1959) had been supplying planes and pilots to a Taiwan airline, CATCL, which was controlled chiefly by 244 The Iran-Contra Connection KMT interests in Taiwan (with a 40% CIA minority interest). Thus it was not surprising that, despite the official CIA termination, the planes of Civil Air Transport (i.e. CATCL) continued to fly into Burma. See Scott, War Conspiracy, p. 197. 
48. New York Times, February 16, 1961; Singapore Straits-Times, February 20, 1961, p. 1; Scott, War Conspiracy, p. 204. 
49. Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), pp. 10-45. 
50. McCoy, p. 315; New York Times, February 23, 1961. 
51. Scott, War Conspiracy, passim; especially pp. 8-24, 199-206. 
52. McCoy, p. 259. 
53. McCoy, p. 263. 
54. McCoy, pp. 186-87, 242-44. 
55. Prados, pp. 171, 176. 
56. Peter Dale Scott has speculated about DePuy's and SOG's possible responsibility for the South Vietnamese-U.S. provocations which preceded and possibly led to the Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964: New York Review of Books, January 29, 1970; reprinted in Scott, War Conspiracy, p. 64. 
57. Ranelagh, pp. 223, 457 (FitzGerald). 
58. Ranelagh,p. 221. 
59. For example Jesus Garcia, a former contra supporter in Miami, told freelance reporters Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein in a telephone interview that "it is common knowledge here in Miami that this whole contra operation in Costa Rica was paid for with cocaine" (In These Times, December 10, 1986). 
60. Newsweek, January 26, 1987. 
61. Washington Post, October 19, 1986. 
62. Anderson, p. 141 (Paraguay). The Korean CIA is closely linked to the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, some of whose business enterprises are believed by some Moonie-watchers to be "actually covers for drugtrafficking" (Anderson, p. 129). The church's political arm, CAUSA, collaborated with WACL members in the 1980 "Cocaine coup" in Bolivia (ibid.; Le Monde Diplomatique (February 1985); Covert Action Information Bulletin, 25 [Winter 1986], pp. 18-19); and since the cutoff of CIA aid in 1984 has supported the Miskito Indian anti-Sandinista guerrilla force Misura of Steadman Fagoth (Anderson, p. 23). 
63. Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. ix; Scott, War Conspiracy, pp. 203-04; cf. Kruger, pp. 15- 16. 
64. For this continuity in the 1950s and 1960s, and its connections to organized crime, cf. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas- Watergate Connection (Berkeley: Westworks, 1977), pp. 8-11. For Koreagate, cf. Robert Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandal (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980). 
65. For Mafia involvement in KMT drug activities in the United States, cf. Scott, War Conspiracy, p. 203. For Mafia involvement in the Caribbean and Footnotes 245 ex-CIA drug traffic, cf. Kruger, pp. 7, 105, 223-24. 
66. U.S. Cong., Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., Report No. 94-465 (November 20, 1975, henceforth cited as Assassination Report), p. 132. 
67. Assassination Report, p. 84. 
68. Assassination Report, p. 84. 
69. United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Avirgan v. Hull, et al., Case No. 86-1146-CIV-KING, Amended Complaint, October 3, 1986, pp. 25-26. 
70. New York Times, September 6, 1981; Maas, Manhunt, p. 223. 
71. Business Week, December 29, 1986, p. 45; cf. Maas, p. 65. 
72. Wall Street Journal, January 2, 1987, p. 2. 
73. New York Times, January 4, 1975, p. 9; Kruger, p. 16. 
74. Maas, pp. 24-27, 37, 54-56, 77. 
75. In 1976 Wilson's company Consultants International was shipping riot-control equipment to the new military junta of Argentina (see Chapter IV): Maas, p. 60. 
76. Maas, pp. 58-59; Newsweek, December 15, 1986. 
77. Wall Street Journal, January 2, 1987, p. 2. 
78. Wall Street Journal,January 2, 1987, p. 2. 
79. Maas, p. 223. 
80. James A. Nathan, "Dateline Australia: America's Foreign Watergate?" Foreign Policy (Winter 1982-83), pp. 168-85 (p. 183). 
81. Nathan, p. 182. 
82. Nathan, pp. 182-83; Commonwealth-New South Wales Joint Task on Drug Trafficking, 1983 Report, pp. 697-703. 
83.Jonathan Marshall, "The Friends of Michael Hand," Inquiry, November 24, 1980, pp. 9-12; Wall Street Journal, August 24, 1982; National Times, September 12, 1982; Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), p. 75. 
84. Nathan, p. 170. 
85. Lernoux, p. 72, Mother Jones, March 1984). 
86. Commonwealth-New South Wales Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking, Report (March 1983), IV, "Nugan Hand," p. 744. 
87. Joint Task Force Report, p. 763; Lernoux, p. 75n; National Times, September 12, 1982; Parapolitics/U.S.A, March 1, 1983. 
88. Ranelagh, p. 636; Joseph C. Goulden, with Alexander Raffio, The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin P. Wilson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 15, 176. 89. Peter Maas, Manhunt: The Incredible Pursuit of a CIA Agent Turned Terrorist (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 247; Michael Ledeen, New York, March 3, 1980. 
90. Maas, p. 247. 246 The Iran-Contra Connection 
91.Maas, p. 279. 
92. Maas, pp. 139,278. 93. Maas, pp. 8, 233. 
94. Maas, pp. 247, 280. 
95. San Francisco Examiner, July 27, 1986. 
96. Ibid. Von Marbod by 1986 was also in the private arms sales business, having been hired by his former boss Frank Carlucci, who once ordered the reinstatement of Secord. The two men worked for a subsidiary of Sears Roebuck, perhaps the largest corporate backer of the American Security Council (Maas, p. 288). 
97. Affidavit of Daniel P. Sheehan (Washington: Christic Institute, 1324 North Capitol St., DC 20002, 1986), p. 22. 
98. According to John Dinges and Saul Landau, Manuel Contreras, the chief of the Chilean Intelligence Service DINA "set up his own men in...cocaine factories and shipping points. The anti-Castro Cubans had a piece of the action. The enormous profits went to supplement DINA's clandestine budget. The Cubans' share went into individual pockets and to the anti-Castro cause:" John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 264n. For the drug involvement of Argentine intelligence under Lopez Rega in 1973-75, cf. e.g. Lernoux, p. 177. 
99. Wall Street Journal, January 16, 1987, p. 11. Luis Posada, who once allegedly helped blow up a Cuban civilian airline for CORU, has also been linked by a Congressional staff investigation to CORU assassination plots against Cuban officials, including two who were murdered in Argentina on August 9, 1976, with the aid of Argentine intelligence (House Assassinations Committee, X, 44). 
100. Wall Street Journal, January 16, 1987, p. 1. 
101. Lernoux, pp. 147, 152. 
102. Lernoux, pp. 153-54. In 1977 the daughter of Orlando Bosch, CORU's most famous terrorist and spokesman, was arrested for allegedly attempting to import seven pounds of cocaine. In her address book was the name and address of WFC. Local police also learned that WFC had been printing and selling "bonds" to raise funds for CORU. 
103. Lernoux, pp. 147-48; 160. At one point a WFC-linked firm at the same Coral Gables address, Dominion Mortgage Corporation, was negotiating to buy the Las Vegas casino Caesar's Palace. 
104. Wall Street Journal, January 16, 1987, p. 11. 
105. The three-man team included Tom Clines' business partner Rafael Quintero and Hernandez Cartaya's close friend Rafael Villaverde. 
106. Hinckle and Turner, p. 53. The funds were handled by Norman "Roughhouse" Rothman, who had served as manager of the Sans Souci and Copacabana Clubs in Havana, representing the interests of the Mannarino brothers of Pittsburgh (Assassination Hearings, X, 183). 
107. Lukas,p. 95 
108. New York Times, January 4, 1975; Hinckle and Turner, p. 314. Footnotes 247 
109. Hinckle and Turner, p. 308; Warren Hinckle, San Francisco Examiner, October 12, 1986. 
110. San Francisco Chronicle, June 23, 1972; New York Times, June 23, 1972; Watergate Hearings, I, 375. 
111. Miami Herald, October 23, 1986. 
112. Business Week, December 29, 1986, p. 45. The 1961 mission of Felix Rodriguez and his companion Edgar Sopo was to establish contact with resistance leaders in Las Villas and Havana, and to seize the Havana radio station. It has also been alleged that Quintero was a member of Rodriguez' four-man team. Compare the piecemeal accounts in Hinckle and Turner, pp. 71-73 (assassination plot); Miami Herald, October 23, 1986 (Rodriguez and Sopo); Wyden, pp. 76, 112-13, 246-48 (Sopo). Sopo was subsequently a source of information on the CIA's AMLASH assassination plot of 1963-65, involving Manuel Artime and Rolando Cubela: cf. Jaime Suchlicki, in Donald K. Emmerson (ed.), Students and Politics in Developing Nations (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 349. 
113. Maas, p. 223; New York Times, September 6, 1981. 
114. Hinckle and Turner, p. 320. 
115. Washington Post, November 7, 1976. 
116. Miami Herald, April 9, 1976. Perez said he had "no official knowledge of the attack. These are individual efforts of some of our members, but we congratulate them for carrying out operations of this type." Earlier a caller had taken credit for the action in the name of both the FNLC and Brigade 2506. 
117. U.S. Senate, Office of Senator John Kerry, "Private Assistance" and the Contras: A Staff Report (October 14, 1986), p. 9. 
118. Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League (New York: Dodd Mead, 1986), pp. 76,280,298. The three foreign guests at the July 1976 Congress of Alpha 66, one month after the CORU meeting, were Sandoval's nephew and personal representative Carlos Midence Pivaral, as well as another Guatemalan MLN representative and Dr. German Dominguez from the Chilean junta. 
119. Hinckle and Turner, p. 322. 
120. Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup (Boston: South End Press, 1980), p. 209; citing Information, February 22, 1977. 
121. Kruger, pp. 10-11, 204, 213; New York Times, Feb. 1, 1977, p. 8. 
122. CounterSpy (Spring 1976), p. 41; citing Temoignage Chretien, August 21,1975. 
123. James Mills, The Underground Empire (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1986), pp. 361-64. 
124. Hinckle and Turner, pp. 321-22. 
125. Anderson, p. 101; Laurent, p. 308. In the mid-1970s, a time of great international economic and political upheaval, European fascists were supported by some Americans as well as CORU Cubans. In 1975 Ray Cline, a key supporter of the contras and of WACL today, called upon the United States to rally behind Spinola.