Labels: The Truth Is Out There
posted by Gandolfo at 6/18/2008
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Labels: Deek Jackson, The Truth Is Out There
posted by Gandolfo at 6/18/2008
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Labels: The Truth Is Out There
posted by Gandolfo at 6/18/2008
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Labels: The Truth Is Out There
posted by Gandolfo at 6/18/2008
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Labels: The Truth Is Out There
posted by Gandolfo at 6/18/2008
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Labels: Iran, OPEC, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, The Truth Is Out There
posted by Gandolfo at 6/18/2008
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81 Bedford Street & Richard Helms (from
Suzan Mazur's Archives)
..
.. Richard Helms,
chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Clandestine
Services, asked the Agency to start funding a biochemical
warfare program in 1953 called MKULTRA, which included the
drugging of unwitting suspects in New York's Greenwich
Village with LSD and other hallucinogens.
One of the
safehouses was at 81 Bedford Street across from Chumley's
speakeasy.
While many of Greenwich Village's buildings
today bear historic plaques, the CIA's mind control
experiments at 81 Bedford Street go
unacknowledged.
..
Several years ago, when I
was trying to make the distinction between Lewis Lapham, the
Editor of Harper's Magazine -- whose roots are in an
old San Francisco banking family -- and Lewis Lapham, the
Central Intelligence Agency's man, I was directed to author
Doug Valentine by Lou Wolf of Covert
Action Quarterly, who described Valentine as
one of the most knowledgeable people on the CIA.
Valentine told me the two Laphams were not the same man.
I was relieved.
But in the next breath he said that Tony
Lapham, Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham's brother, had
been both a covert CIA agent and General Counsel to the CIA,
appointed in 1976 by then Director of Central Intelligence,
George H.W. Bush. I was again concerned.
Lewis Lapham has
since left Harper's to start his own
publication.
I've kept in touch with
Doug, and recently asked him if he'd help me to flesh-out
the new CIA book, Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, the
New York Times National Security
reporter.
Doug Valentine is a poet and also the author of several
incredibly rich and revealing books on the workings of
National Security.
Best known of these is the
Phoenix Program
about the Vietnam War and
Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History
of America's War on Drugs.
His new book,
Strength of the Pack, volume two
about America's war on drugs, will be published next year by
the University of Kansas Press.
Strength of
the Wolf documents the history of the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics.
The FBN rubbed up against the CIA and
FBI until it was finally rubbed out by "the Establishment"
in 1968.
Valentine attributes the demise of the FBN to the
bureau's success in penetrating the Mafia and the French
connection and case-making agents uncovering "the
Establishment's ties to organized crime".
Unlike the
Weiner book's interviews with 10 CIA Directors, Valentine
says the CIA did its best to prevent Strength of the Wolf
from going forward.
My interview with Doug Valentine
follows.
Suzan
Mazur: The New York Times
National Security reporter, Tim Weiner, is out with a
60-year history of the Central Intelligence Agency’s
failures called Legacy of Ashes.
Weiner
was recently a guest on the Charlie Rose
Show talking about the CIA book.
I’d like to use
that interview as a backdrop for our conversation.
Over
the past 15 years the Charlie Rose
Show's host and executive producer, the elegant
Charlie Rose, has established himself as sort of the US
minister of propaganda, using PBS as a platform, and
funding from major foundations and major banks to broadcast
his public affairs program from New York Mayor Mike
Bloomberg's Bloomberg News studios in
Manhattan.
Sometimes the propaganda is a result of Rose
not knowing the material, making it a perfect showcase for
the Kissingers, Holbrookes, etc.
to maneuver around
in.
For the record, I appeared on the broadcast in the
1990s when the show first went national, to discuss the
crisis in Sudan.
The Khartoum government had been
overwhelmingly condemned for human rights violations by the
UN. It was not letting in Western journalists.
Osama bin
Laden, Carlos the Jackal and Abu Nidal were all based in
Khartoum at the time.
Is it a coincidence that bin Laden
was there? Maybe not.
Khartoum had been the CIA’s most
important outpost in Africa and Sudan’s de facto leader,
Hassan Turabi, had an interesting history with the CIA, most
visibly through
target="_blank">Operation Moses.
I managed to get in
and do a videotaped interview in Khartoum with Hassan
Turabi.
It's
to Charlie Rose’s credit that he attempted a segment on
Sudan when nobody else was really.
Fortunately, John
McLaughlin followed up, inviting me for an in-depth look at
the issues.
However, even in those years, the
Charlie Rose Show seemed controlled or
perhaps bungled so that none of the footage from my
conversation in Khartoum with Turabi or discussion of that
conversation or even discussion of my visit to Khartoum made
it into the broadcast.
Rose’s focus was on starvation,
and a decade and a half later we still have starvation –
now in Darfur – because the media backed by big money
will not look squarely at the problem.
It takes work and
honesty.
As you’ve said so well in the introduction to
your book, Strength of the Wolf:
The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs:
..“Much of our history is hidden behind
a wall of national security and that sad fact prevents
America from realizing its destiny.
”
..
My first question to you is this: In
Tim Weiner’s hour-long talk with Charlie Rose about his
book on the CIA, Weiner made the point that the late
Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, thought it
was tragic that the US did not care enough anymore about
espionage, which “seeks to know the world” through
secrecy and deception. Charlie Rose replied, “I do too.
”
What is US national security all about really – whose
national security is being served?
Doug
Valentine: It's a class issue.
The CIA has not been
running around the world trying to improve the lives of poor
people, to raise their standard of living, even though they
say they’re out there trying to bring freedom and
democracy to the world.
They’re just as likely to back a
Pinochet, a despot, as they are to fight a Communist.
Suzan Mazur: What do you suppose the
New York Times is up to with the Weiner
book? Why is a reporter from one of the most important
commercial newspapers, sticking it to the CIA by exposing
the CIA’s 60 years of horrific failure, with monarchs and
dictators on the payroll (King Hussein of Jordan for 20
years, Mobutu, etc.
), when as you note in your richly
informative book on the Federal Bureau of Narcotics,
“Establishment privateers run the secret
government”?
Doug Valentine: Most of what
Weiner writes about the CIA is already known.
It’s a
history book with a bias, not an expose, at least not for
the Vietnam generation.
He doesn’t even really get into
the current Bush administration.
He gives us a predictable
treatment of William Casey and the Contras, when there was
an incredible revival of the CIA under Casey.
Suzan Mazur:
Weiner plays up the fact that long-time CIA
counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, was constantly
spilling the beans to Kim Philby during their frequent
liquid lunches – Philby, a British agent who turned out to
be a spy for the Soviet Union.
Doug
Valentine: Angleton was key to understanding the CIA.
Weiner hasn’t detailed Angleton’s relationship with the
underworld through the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
He
hasn’t gotten past CIA 101.
Angleton had his own
mysterious agenda, counterintelligence, seeking out enemy
agents inside the CIA.
He had liaison to the Mafia through
Charles Siragusa, a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent –
and Mario Brod, a labor lawyer from Connecticut and New
York, who as an Army counterintelligence officer had worked
with Angleton at OSS – Office of Strategic Services, the
forerunner of the CIA.
As I say in the book, James
Angleton alone possessed the coveted Israeli account.
His
loyalty was to the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen
Dulles – then Richard Helms, who was chief of Clandestine
Services and later DCI.
Director William Colby was his
enemy.
Through Angleton’s
relationships with Italian royalty, Tibor Rosenbaum [Mossad
agent], Charlie Siragusa [FBN agent], Hank Manfredi [FBN],
and Mario Brod, he was certainly aware of Meyer Lansky’s central
role as the Mafia’s banker in the Caribbean - where
Lansky’s mob associate from Las Vegas, Moe Dalitz, opened
an account at Castle Bank - as well as in Mexico, where
Angleton’s friend, Winston M.
Scott, was station chief,
and certainly kept tabs on Lansky’s associate, former
Mexican president Miguel Aleman.
As ever, Angleton and
Lansky were the dark stars of the intelligence and financial
aspects of international drug smuggling.
Alan Block devotes
some pages to this in his book, Masters of
Paradise.
Angleton thought William
Colby might be a mole.
Angleton exposed the divisions within
the CIA after 1966, the Colby vs. Helms factions.
He also
represented the literary sensibility the CIA once had, where
finding secrets was like teasing the meaning out of a poem.
Now we have sledgehammer spies.
Suzan Mazur:
What kind of cut do the “privateers” take from the
Agency for clearing the way for new markets abroad however
they can do it?
Doug Valentine: History
here: The feds made it illegal for the government to hire
Pinkertons to break up labor unions and so the FBI was
formed.
These industrialists in America then had no foreign
ambitions.
They kept President Wilson out of the League of
Nations.
But other industrialists did have foreign
ambitions. Big division.
It shows the class origins of the
CIA.
How the CIA represents a faction of the United States
Establishment that has imperial ambitions as opposed to the
nativist faction of the American Establishment which is more
concerned about doing business here in the United
States.
The original CIA is the Foreign Policy
Association, which sent representatives to the League of
Nations and survey teams around the world looking for market
opportunities for the non-nativist industrialists.
Depression brought Franklin D. Roosevelt and social reform.
Before WW II, FDR (aristocrat) hired William Donovan (lace
curtain Irish lawyer) to start the office of Coordinator of
Information and then the OSS.
Who was hired to run these
organizations? Representatives of the privateers.
This is
how to understand the money part of the CIA.
Suzan
Mazur: So the current Foreign Policy Association is
in essence a CIA?
Doug Valentine: From my
point of view, the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Foreign Policy Association are the original CIA.
They work
for industry that is interested in trade overseas, inviting
themselves into the politics of foreign countries.
They sent
representatives to the League of Nations when the United
States government wouldn’t officially do so.
Suzan Mazur: So nothing has changed in that
sense.
Doug Valentine: No.
It’s a shell
game.
Suzan Mazur: Is there a chance Weiner
and Rose are looking out for the common good, and pushing
for more resources for the CIA in order to prevent a further
Shackleyization of intelligence, a further privatization of
intel, which disenfranchises most people (the late
spymaster, Ted Shackley, operated a political risk group –
Research Associates International – after he left the
Agency in the late 1970s and ran oil shipments into
apartheid South Africa, for example)? (See…
target="_blank">Scoop: John Deuss - The Manhattan
projects)
Doug
Valentine: Trick question.
The CIA created its own
privateers, as spying itself became an industry.
Weiner and
Rose have no say in the matter.
Weiner is doing a history
book. He’s not a player as far as I know.
He’s not
someone who’s actually making foreign policy.
He hasn’t
explained with any depth that would indicate he has any
vested interest in either promoting the CIA or not promoting
the CIA.
It's a superficial account of something that’s
really serious.
Something called "courting the compatible
Left" was also a useful instrument of the Agency, created
after WWII.
That was pretty much devised by a guy named
Cord Meyer, who was head of the CIA’s International
Operations division.
Suzan Mazur: Speaking
of affairs, Weiner’s mention of Cord Meyer on the show had
to do with Meyer’s ex-wife (no name), who was one of
JFK’s lovers, being mysteriously murdered and Angleton
turning up at her house to see if there was a diary.
But as
you illuminate in Strength of the Wolf, Mary Pinchot Meyer
took LSD given to her by Timothy Leary and also distributed
it to the Washington Establishment, possibly to JFK as well.
Doug
Valentine: Cord Meyer worked with Angleton and used
people like labor leader Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone to
travel around Europe in the early 1950s.
Despite all the
strum and drang about battling the Soviet Union, what the
CIA was really trying to do was court Socialists away from
Communists to form Social Democracy governments to counter
the influence of the Soviet Union.
Eventually that strategy
worked.
That was really what was going on behind the
scenes.
The CIA never had to convince right wing
governments that they should fight the Soviet Union.
It was
a battle that was occurring secretly.
Even here in the
United States, the CIA was always trying to recruit
Liberals.
Suzan Mazur: Do you think
Weiner and Rose may be hinting that some kind of a global
intelligence agency should rise up out of the “ashes” of
the CIA, which they repeat has “lost its primacy”?
Afterall, the US has merged Defense operations with the UK
to a degree, etc. etc.
Doug Valentine: That
assumes the CIA is in ashes, I don’t think it is.
But
technically, the CIA has liaison relations with the intel
services of almost every country, so what you see is the
"consolidated" CIA running everyone's intel servces.
..[Lou Wolf of Covert Action Quarterly has emailed saying, "Their [CIA] release of the 'Family Jewels' is a classic case of as the inside terminology calls it -- "limited hangout" -- meaning they are willing to hang out some of their dirty laundry while they hold back by far the majority of the dirty stuff. . . . Also, it was a largely unsuccessful effort to divert attention from the war and various other scandals.
"]..
Suzan Mazur: Why is a Times reporter
the messenger for this? What does it say about the
NYT’'s compromised relations with the National
Security Establishment where Weiner has access to 10
directors and conducts 300 interviews with agency officers?
We know from the Church hearings in the 1970s of the CIA’s
links to major news organizations and foundations – like
the Ford Foundation and Asia Foundation – and dictating
content and direction, getting bureau chiefs to assist in
the overthrow of governments.
Charlie Rose gets his
funding from major foundations, and of course, major
corporations – although he’s just announced he’s now
also considering Internet funding like PayPal.
No doubt
because people are disgusted by the right wing noose he’s
currently in on public television.
Doug
Valentine: Some things never change.
The Weiner CIA
book is revisionism for a purpose.
Suzan
Mazur: More recently, we've had Lewis Lapham running
Harper’s magazine while his brother Tony Lapham was
the CIA’s general counsel.
How tight would you say the
connections between the CIA and the media are at the moment,
including the new media?
Doug Valentine:
Tony Lapham was a George H.W.
Bush appointee as CIA General
Counsel when Bush was DCI.
Lapham had also been a covert
agent.
He ordered the shut down of a CIA MKULTRA New York
safe house at 105 West 13th Street in Greenwich Village
where the agency did some of its mind control experiments.
To
answer your question about the connections between the CIA
and the media and new media – I’d say they’re tighter
than ever.
It has to do with the centralization of wealth
and influence.
News organizations used to be a lot of
independent owners of news outlets.
There’s now less and
less of that.
It goes hand in hand with the consolidation
of capital in the United States.
The media’s in the hands
of fewer and fewer people, and those people are closer and
closer to the imperial interests of the United States
abroad.
Their interests are now more in tune with the
interests of the CIA.
And they’re more likely to skew,
without even being agents of the CIA.
So you don’t
have to rely on the old boy system anymore; accommodating
the CIA is built into the system because of the
consolidation of capital.
It’s been reported that the
CIA writes for Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.
So establishing and corroborating sources is more important
now than ever.
Also, since Watergate and Deep Throat,
there’s a tendency on the part of CIA-connected
journalists like Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh to use
anonymous sources.
Just another sign of how incestuous it
is between the media and the CIA.
Suzan
Mazur: Rose and Weiner agree that Bill Clinton had a
dysfunctional relationship with the CIA.
Would you comment
on the Clintons’ relationship with the CIA? First there
was Operation Chaos, right? And then Mena? You’ve got a
new book coming out this Fall, Strength of
the Pack, that refers to the Mena Cartel.
Can
you name some names – who were the Mena
Cartel?
Doug Valentine: Well, I’m actually
being facetious in the book about the Mena Cartel.
I
haven’t been on the ground in Mena researching the drug
operation there, so I’d prefer not to get into a detailed
discussion about it.
But if anybody should be associated
with the goings on at Mena – Barry Seal and his operations
– it’s William Casey, George Bush I, and Ronald Reagan.
Mena was a CIA operation that existed between 1981 and 1984
but became an issue while Clinton was president and was used
to deflect attention from Iran-Contra and the CIA’s own
involvement in international drug trafficking.
(See…
target="_blank">Scoop: Mazur: Deeper Into The Clintons' CIA
Drug Nexus )
Suzan Mazur: Speaking of
drugs, Weiner does a Holly-go-lightly over the CIA’s
MKULTRA mind control episode.
He says the Agency
href="http://www. counterpunch. org/valentine0621. html"
target="_blank">destroyed almost all the MKULTRA
records.
But beyond Richard Helms' and Allen Dulles'
MKULTRA program of random drugging of Greenwich Village
Leftists at 81 Bedford Street in the 1950s and 60s after
getting them drunk at Chumley’s speakeasy across the
street, or around the corner on Cherry Lane at the Lefty
Blue Mill tavern – in your book, Strength of
the Wolf, you mention the Agency’s
involvement on the Colombian Amazon where the celebrated
American adventurer Mike Tsalickis, the region’s one-time
US Vice Consul, was asked to find some useful tropical drugs
for the CIA – probably along the lines of hallucinogenic
yaje.
Curiously, in the late 1980s, Tsalickis was
busted for smuggling into the US 4.
4 tons of cocaine in a
shipment of Brazilian lumber; it was the biggest cocaine
bust in US history at the time.
Tsalickis told me in a phone
conversation following the bust that the feds were in the
drug business on the Amazon.
The DEA told me they’d been
tracking Tsalickis’ exploits for 10 years.
He was sent to
Marion. Believe he’s out now.
I stayed at Tsalickis'
hotel there in Leticia, the Parador Ticuna, months before
the drug bust, researching a story.
Leticia was indeed the
wild frontier, made wilder because of the armed desperados
high on drugs.
Have fond memories of the night I spent
upriver at Tsalickis’ Monkey Island communing with caiman
by flashlight and their cooing -- nyock, nyock, nyock. . . .
There were clearly no
surveillance cameras in the bird nests along the banks of
the Amazon – it was anything goes on the river.
Peru on
the opposite bank and Brazil a walk across the Colombian
border.
Recall sitting around a table at Tsalickis’
Leticia hotel sipping Aguardiente with a British art scholar
and a lumber dealer from Manaus, the latter anxious about
speaking with Mike about a lumber sale. Kept pacing. .
Weiner does not go into the CIA’s commercial drug
exploits.
In fact, he quotes Helms in his book as follows:
..“We could get money anyplace in the
world . . . We ran a whole arbitrage operation.
We didn’t
need to launder money –
ever.
”..
Would you comment?
Doug Valentine: Angleton ran the CIA's
narcotics operation, in league with the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics, until 1971, when Helms put it under Tom
Karamessines at operations; Karamessines was the former CIA
Athens chief.
I know for a fact that Angleton in the
counterintelligence division of the CIA was in charge of its
relations with law enforcement agencies, including the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which is one of the reasons
organizationally that he ended up having relations with
people like Charlie Siragusa, a high ranking official in the
FBN.
This is how Angleton enters into relationships with
Corsican drug traffickers and uses them for
counterintelligence operations.
I know this because
I interviewed one of the officers who was on Angleton’s
staff and who actually was his liaison to the Bureau of
Narcotics.
And I’ll be talking more about that in my new
book, Strength of the Pack.
The guy’s name was Jim
Ludlum. People say he’s related to Robert Ludlum.
In 1968 the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was abolished
and Lyndon Johnson’s administration created the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Angleton and the CIA
continued to have an official relationship with the BNDD
until 1971, at which point Nixon declared narcotics law
enforcement a national emergency and made it an issue of
national security.
And at that point relations switched
from Angleton at counterintelligence to the operations
branch of the CIA.
That’s incredibly important in
understanding the history of the CIA’s involvement with
drug trafficking, because now it’s no longer a function of
counterintelligence, something deep inside the Agency.
Now
you actually have CIA chiefs of station all around the world
becoming actively involved in collecting intelligence on
drug trafficking.
It became in 1971 a very, very big
business – drug trafficking within the CIA.
Suzan Mazur: When you say big business,
what exactly do you mean?
Doug Valentine:
There was a guy at the CIA who worked with the BNDD.
Jim
Ludlum then gave up his liaison relationship because he was
counterintelligence and the new liaison was an operations
officer.
His name was Seymour Bolton, the father of Joshua
Bolton – now a high ranking official in the Bush
administration.
What the CIA drug business is, is
controlling how the DEA targets foreign drug traffickers.
The CIA’s drug business is the management of how the DEA
conducts foreign investigations.
The CIA reports directly
to the president or the national security council and there
are issues to consider in going after traffickers that
transcend law enforcement and involve national security.
Which is why Nixon made that change.
Nixon did not want
officials going off and investigating Chinese drug
traffickers at the same time he was to trying to secretly
form diplomatic relations with China.
So he had to put the
CIA in control of how the DEA mounted its foreign drug
investigations.
Suzan Mazur: And what are
your thoughts about that arrangement?
Doug
Valentine: If you’re going to go about the business
of empire, creating an empire around the world, you don’t
want to put it in the hands of a law enforcement agency
that’s going to bust Salvador Allende yesterday and
General Pinochet tomorrow.
You want to make sure they only
bust Allende.
And that Pinochet gets away with drug
trafficking for 20 years.
How the CIA evolved over the
past 60 years in all these different ways in relation to
narcotics trafficking, to the media, in relation to foreign
policy, etc. – has enabled it to consolidate power.
It’s far from being out of business or in descent or
rising from the ashes.
It’s more powerful than it ever
was.
Suzan Mazur: Are you familiar with the
target="_blank">Eurasia Group?
Started out as a
mini-foreign policy association back in 1998, backed by the
CIA – the so-called analyst side – and the Council on
Foreign Relations.
I attended some of their fascinating
meetings.
They invited a slew of officials and former
officials of the FSU, as well as business leaders to speak
– Boris Berezovsky, etc.
There's been a controversial
Russian industrialist on the advisory board from the start.
At some point they began charging $100 to attend
meetings.
And I got an angry phone call from EG because
I’d contacted someone I met at one of the meetings
regarding an interview.
Apparently EG was now selling
those contacts the CIA & CFR helped them establish.
Eurasia
Group has had some affiliation with Lehman Brothers and is considered the
world’s largest political risk group.
( http://www. eurasiagroup. net/about/
)
Doug Valentine: One of the great untold
stories of the CIA.
Privatization of intelligence – as you
call it, Shackleyization.
RJ Hillhouse, a blogger who
investigates the clandestine world of private contractors
and US intelligence, recently obtained documents from the
Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI)
showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on
private intelligence contractors, up from $17.
54 billion in
2000.
Currently that spending represents 70 percent of the
US intelligence budget going to private companies.
William Casey sort of paved the way for the downfall of
the Soviet Union.
The CIA officers involved in the Russia
division at that time were responsible for recruiting over
to our side KGB officers, intelligence officers, government
officials who brought about the breakup of that republic.
Those relationships still exist.
And if anybody was REALLY
interested in doing a history of the CIA, that particular
aspect would be the most explosive story.
Suzan
Mazur: In your book you also tie in Agency drug
operations to the JFK assassination.
You note that "the CIA
protected its drug dealing assets in the Mexican
intelligence services" and say further:
..“[I]t’s possible that SDECE [French
Intel] agents working for the KGB may have sent an assassin
into Dallas [to kill JFK] through Angleton’s [Irving]
Brown-[Maurice] Castellani drug network, or through Paul
Mondoloni [a Corsican who smuggled drugs from Mexico and
then from Cuba under Batista's
protection].
”..
You say this assassin
may have been the Agency’s own QJ/WIN with Oswald as the
patsy:
.."The best evidence suggests that
this mysterious operative [QJ/WIN] was Jose Marie Andre
Mankel, as Mason Cargill (a staff member of vice president
Rockefeller's Commission to Investigate CIA Activities
within the United Sates) reported in a 1 May 1975 memo. . .
.
According to documents contained in his 201-file, QJ/WIN
was tall and thin, married (although homosexual), with many
friends in well-to-do Parisian circles.
He was a conman
extraordinaire!"..
It’s interesting,
Tim Weiner says in his book that President Lyndon Johnson
requested all the files on Oswald following his murder by
Ruby -- who you say was a Federal Bureau of Narcotics
informant beginning in the 1940s -- and that those files
then vanished.
You say further in your
book:
..“JFK wanted to expel Air America,
the CIA’s drug smuggling proprietary airline from Laos.
And, in 1962 in another attempt to curb the CIA’s drug
smuggling activities in East Asia, Bobby [Kennedy] indicted
Sea Supply manager Willis Bird. . . .
Kennedy’s enemies
ensured that the Bird prosecution was blocked, and that Air
America kept its contract in Laos, and continued to fly
drugs.
Meanwhile, General Walker, the far-right American
Security Council (including General Lansdale and Air America
Chairman Admiral Felix Stump), and the Texas ultras started
plotting their coup d’etat in
Dallas.
”..
And you note that Senator
Estes Kefauver's committee investigation was kept away from a
discussion of Dallas, Ruby would only tell the committee
what he knew about Chicago.
..“Was it to
deflect attention from the Pawley-Cooke mission in Taiwan,
which was funded by ultra Texas oilmen like H.L.
Hunt, and
which in 1951, was facilitating the CIA-Kuomintang drug
smuggling operation that entered the US by crossing the
Mexican border at Laredo, Texas?” ..
You also say that Joseph Civello ran the heroin business
in Dallas with John Ormento and the Magaddino family in
Buffalo and that they were linked to Carlos Marcello, Santo
Trafficante, Jr.
and Jimmy Hoffa – “the House
Subcommitte on Assassination’s three prime suspects in the
JFK murder.
”
Then you note that Hunt and the other Texas
oil men, including the emerging Bush dynasty, were also
outraged at JFK for planning to “eliminate the oil
depletion allowances” not to mention JFK's desegregating
the South.
Jackie Kennedy in a kind of premonition of
Dallas wrote in one of her letters to Clark Clifford that
she was concerned about the 50 businessmen in Texas who
said: "Why should we do anything to help the Kennedys?" --
something I highlighted in one of my FT stories. (See.
href="http://www. scoop. co. nz/stories/HL0412/S00161. htm"
target="_blank">Financial Times: he President's Man
)
Anything you'd like to add? And are you still of the
opinion that QJ/WIN may have been JFK’s assassin and that
the best evidence suggests he was Mankel.
Doug
Valentine: First of all, I don’t pretend to know
who killed Kennedy.
For all I know it could have been Lee
Harvey Oswald.
That chapter on JFK in my book is
speculative, that is to say, if the CIA was involved in
JFK’s assassination, how would it have been involved.
And
it goes back to the relationship the CIA had with the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics and in particular with an agent
named George White.
George White was the guy the CIA
went to when they wanted to start up the MKULTRA program at
Bedford Street.
But prior to that, in 1947, he was head of
the Chicago office and one of his informants was Jack
Ruby.
Jack Ruby went to Dallas in 1948 working for White
and actually infiltrated Bugsy Siegel’s Mafia drug
connection with the Kuomintang in Mexico.
As far as I know
nobody was ever arrested.
Bugsy Siegel was killed because
he was getting a little out of control.
The
CIA needs to manage drug trafficking in a way of providing
internal security for it.
It needed to keep the Mafia
happy. It needed to keep Mexican officials happy.
It
needed to keep the Kuomintang financed and so the CIA
protected this drug route of Nationalist Chinese heroin
going through Mexico through Nuevo Laredo through Laredo and
into Dallas into Chicago.
Suzan Mazur: And
they protected it for how long? Until when?
Doug
Valentine: Well as far as I know .
Suzan
Mazur: They’re still protecting it.
Doug
Valentine: They never stopped protecting
it.
Suzan Mazur: I did a story recently
about the Mormon church – which the CIA and FBI have
traditionally recruited heavily from – and possible LDS
drug money link in Mexico, where the Mormon church doubled
its membership beginning in the mid 1980s when the Latin
American drug epidemic really hit.
(See…Scoop: LDS Church -- Mexico Drug Money Connection? )
The treasury of the LDS church is
nobody’s business but the LDS church’s.
The story
followed one about a Roman Catholic bishop who went on
television in Mexico announcing that his church was, of
course, taking substantial donations from drug traffickers.
One of the LDS temples is right there on the border at El
Paso.
Doug Valentine: As far as I’m
concerned, the CIA never stopped protecting those drug
routes. It’s just an ongoing operation.
Suzan
Mazur: Another item Weiner didn’t discuss was that
CIA Director Bill Casey turned up in the VIP section of the
Mormon church in Salt Lake City one day when author Alex
Shoumatoff was visiting, which Shoumatoff writes about in
his book, Legends of the
American Desert.
Shoumatoff said the CIA
recruits heavily from the LDS flock because they’re good
at surveillance technology and tend to be loyal.
I’ve
reported about the FBI recruits from the LDS church,
including the former FBI Chief Information Officer, Darwin
A.
John – a Robert Mueller hiree, coming right from a
decade-long job as chief information officer of the LDS
church.
(See… Scoop: he AZ Polygamy Town Airport Built With Fed $$$Mns )
Doug Valentine: The
CIA doesn’t get arrested. So you never really know.
It’s an espionage organization.
The Rosenbergs in the
United States were tried for espionage and given a death
sentence. But this is what the CIA does for its business.
It goes around the world and it gets foreign nationals to
spy on their government and it has an army of Rosenbergs out
there.
It’s a group of mafia bosses who are getting
people of foreign countries to spy on their own countries
and subvert their own countries and they give them massive
amounts of dollars to do it.
The CIA people who do
these things are no different than the KGB people running
the Rosenbergs.
And the issue I referred to
earlIer, the "courting of the compatible Left".
This takes
us to Bill Clinton and the CIA.
If anybody represented the
compatible Left, it was Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton
destroyed the Democratic party.
There used to be a
difference between Republicans and Democrats until Bill
Clinton came along.
If anybody was a CIA agent, it was Bill
Clinton.
Suzan Mazur: Well, that’s what
Roger Morris is saying in Partners in Power -- his
book on the Clintons --going back to Bill’s days at Oxford University with Operation Chaos.
Doug Valentine: I
don’t see why people say there was a problem between
Clinton and the CIA.
Suzan Mazur:
“Dysfunctional relationship”, say Weiner and
Rose.
Doug Valentine: Clinton and the CIA
were hand-in-glove.
They may have had a problem getting a
director on the payroll for a while, but I think that was
more a problem of the Senate, which was under Republican
control.
Just wouldn’t confirm anybody that he threw up,
because they didn’t want anybody who was too cozy with
him. That was in domestic politics.
But it has nothing to
do with the fact that Clinton and the CIA were expanding the
American empire.
Suzan Mazur: As in the mad
rush for oil in Azerbaijan where we now have a military
base? The wild amounts of oil there heavily promoted in the
major newspapers and then as I discovered in my interviews
in Baku -- the dry holes and subsequent resignation of
Energy Secretary Pena? Another geostrategic
move.
Doug Valentine: Yes, Clinton and the
CIA were expanding the American empire gleefully,
hand-in-hand.
Suzan Mazur: Plus in the
1990s, when Clinton was so chummy with Boris Yeltsin and
money was being thrown at the Russians.
And then the
Russian economy collapsed.
In the 1990s international
organized crime made Russia the biggest money laundering
operation in the world as it primed the new Russian economy.
Weiner also does not mention the CIA-linked banks like
Nugan Hand or founding CIA father Clark Clifford’s role in
BCCI.
Doug Valentine: Drugs again.
Suzan Mazur: But you cite in
Strength then-general counsel for the Thai Consulate
in Miami, Paul Helliwell, establishing and directing a
“string of drug money-laundering banks for the CIA.
And
you mention Vanguard Services set up as a front in 1962
“for yet another batch of CIA-financed, drug-related
anti-Castro operations.
”
Can you say more about these
outlaw banks?
Doug Valentine: A little.
Drugs again, and Nugan Hand, and Golden Triangle stuff,
among other things.
The Mafia connection to Trafficante and
JFK. Angleton.
Paul Helliwell had been in the OSS.
When Nugan died in 1980 or 1981, he had William Colby’s
business card on his body.
William Colby was providing
legal counsel for the Nugan Hand bank and it had on its
board numerous generals, retired US generals who had been in
Vietnam. AND ALL THESE GUYS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY.
And
if they can get the money selling drugs, they get the money
selling drugs.
If they can get the money breaking up the
Soviet Union, and then cutting deals with the Mafia and
robbing the Russian treasury, then they’ll do it that way.
THE CIA IS REALLY INTERESTED IN FINANCIAL CRIME.
And one
of their stronger suits is financial intelligence and
following the money.
Something they’re light years ahead
of the FBI or DEA on.
The CIA was able to put together
strong boxes full of $750 million dollars and bring them
over to Iraq for paying off Iraqi officials in $20 bills.
Where did this covert cash come from?
They’ve got a
diversified portfolio after 60 years in the business: The
institutions they started building up from Ford franchises
in the Philippines, kickbacks from Westinghouse for helping
them get contracts in Korea, deals with the Mafia, drug
traffickers and arms dealers.
The CIA gets oodles of
money from the arms business.
Most of their income comes
from criminal activity.
The Russian Mafia operates with a
sort of impunity. And so does the Israeli Mafia.
And one
of the reasons they have this sort of impunity is that
they’re sharing their profits with the CIA.
And I think
a lot of CIA money is capital investments.
They’re like
movie producers.
They want to overthrow the Iraqi
government, they go to companies like Halliburton and others
who are going to profit from the overthrow of Iraq.
And
like the executive producers of some movie, they get them to
ante-up some cash.
Telling them, don’t worry about it,
the government contracts you get in return will cover your
investment.
Plus they have the old boy network – which now
is so far flung.
Suzan Mazur: Plus some of
the military contractors are organized crime and have had
contracts since the 50s.
Doug Valentine:
Exactly. Which bring us back to Barry Seal (Iran-Contra).
Because in 1972, Barry Seal was to fly some arms and some
explosives into Mexico.
What the Brooklyn Drug Task Force
found out is that this guy named Murray Kessler, who was
involved with the Gambino family in Brooklyn, had an arms
manufacturing company in New Jersey where the guns and the
bombs came from.
Suzan Mazur: And some of
these arms merchants also had security clearance during the
McNamara and Clifford years of heading the Defense
Department.
They make weapons for the US government and
some for whoever they feel like.
Doug
Valentine: From my perspective, the spy industry and
especially the arms industry, is the foundation on which the
American empire is built.
The United States has a military
budget of I think $300 billion dollars and the CIA budget is
like $50 billion – that’s a year.
Together that’s
bigger than the gross national product of any country in the
world.
And in the meantime we’re worried about 20 guys
in Al-Qaeda.
Suzan Mazur: And the American
people are largely innocent captives of this ever-turning
screw.
Weiner considers Helms the greatest of the CIA
directors.
He notes: "When Richard Helms was in charge, the
agency spoke the truth to Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara
about the war in Vietnam and they listened.
" Even though in
another breath Weiner says Helms (like George Tenet)
"caved": Regarding the reporting of numbers of Vietcong
irregulars, Helms said the numbers "didn't mean a damn".
"Helms felt a crushing pressure to get on the team -- and to
trim the CIA's reporting to fit the president's policy.
"
Weiner says the agency officially accepted the falsified
figure of 299,000 enemy forces or fewer.
What are your
thoughts about Helms?
Doug Valentine: A
patrician, old school, but destroyed by Kissinger and the
neo-con Nixon wave.
Suzan Mazur: Former DCI
Robert Gates, now serving as Secretary of Defense, who
Weiner says was the Agency’s chief Kremlinologist but had
never been to the Soviet Union?
Doug
Valentine: Boy, you ask a lot of
questions.
Suzan Mazur: How about Frank
Carlucci? Weiner citing an oral history of Carlucci’s
describes him as instrumental in ending the Cold War as a
result of his “disarming” talk to some Soviet generals
in Moscow in 1988 in which he was asked how the US knew so
much about them.
Carlucci said the US had to do it from
satellites and it would be "a lot easier" if the Soviets
would publish their military budget.
The generals laughed;
it dawned on them America did not want to kill them and that
even if they were stronger militarily, the system of secrecy
left them weaker.
A closed society couldn't match an open
one -- end of game.
Doug Valentine: The
Russian people may have a different view.
Suzan
Mazur: Which exploits of the agency do you consider
the most diabolical – aside from the fact that one of its
target="_blank">founding fathers molested two of his own
children – and a reason why the CIA should have been
dismantled years ago?
Doug Valentine: Your
readers don't want to know that answer.
The most dastardly
thing that the CIA has done is to wage this campaign of
psychological warfare against the American people.
Where the
American people don’t see t
Labels: The Truth Is Out There
posted by Gandolfo at 6/18/2008
0 comments
Labels: The Truth Is Out There
posted by Gandolfo at 6/18/2008
1 comments
Just a good old country boy raised in the city. I am an escapee from the concrete jungle.
