George Bush: The super-spy drug-smuggling president

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GEORGE BUSH: THE SUPER- SPY DRUG-SMUGGLING PRESIDENT by

Bill

Weinberg

Illustrations

by Eric Drooker

©1992

Shadow Press

Please address

ii Bill

Weinberg

correspondence

all

All rights reserved

to:

SHADOW PRESS P.O. Box 20298

New

York,

NY

10009

Portions of this monograph appear in the November, 1992, issue of High Times

magazine (235 Park Avenue South, New York,

Dedicated, with nostalgia, to the

NY

10003).

memory

of

Leon Czolgosz

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Weinberg is news editor of High Times magazine and the author War on the Land: Ecology & Politics in Central America (Zed Books,

Bill

of

London, 1991). He

is

also a frequent contributor to lower

anarchist newspaper, The Shadow.

Manhattan's

J

World-class drug trafficker. Sinister spymaster with tentacles spanning

tory.

—

the most corrupt president George Herbert Walker Bush.

the planet. President

As

in

United States

his-

president of the one remaining superpower, standing astride a

unipolar world, George Bush has achieved his personal lifelong goal as well as the longtime strategic aspiration of the elite ruling circle he

represents.

But

all victories

come with a

price,

and Bush, the grand

New World Order, is now attempting to shift the burden Cold War victory onto the backs of the common people outside

architect of the for the

elite. Behind euphemisms like the "War on Drugs" lies an agenda for unprecedented consolidation of planetary power, enforced by a police state. Poised on the eve of the New World Order's first presidential elections, we shall soon see whether this agenda will be

of the power

fulfilled.

The Cowboys

EstabHshment power. Dad Prescott Bush was a

vs the Eastern

veteran of George Bush was born to World War I Army Intelligence and a partner in the Brown Brothers Wall Street firm owned by Averell Harriman, one of the most important US diplomatic figures in World War II. Brown Brothers severed its extensive financial ties to German industry as late as 1942, well after the Nazis had come to power. Brown Brothers owned European-based banks which served as intermediaries to secretly funnel Western investment to Nazi industries. Prescott Bush served on the board of the Union Banking Corporation, a Brown Brothers affiliate which was seized by the US government in 1942 as a Nazi front under the Trading With The Enemy Act.

Harriman was a member of the ultra-elite Council on Foreign Re(CFR), a think-tank/old-boys-club which set policy behind the scenes, and Prescott Bush followed him on the well-worn path between Wall Street and Washington, launching a successful bid for the Senlations

ate in 1953.

expanded

Representing his wealthy Connecticut district, Prescott

his connections in the inner circles of

familiar figure at

DCs

in classic ruling-class

ultra-exclusive Alibi

power, and became a

Club

— so-named

misogynist style, the head-waiter always

because, lies

when

husbands are there! On the Senate floor, Prescott fought against public power projects and other such examples of "creeping socialism" instated by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Prescott also continued to dabble in the cryptic world of the intelligence community. In 1962 he joined with Wall Street magnate and longtime high-ranking CIA man Bill Casey to form the National Strategy Information Center, another elite think-tank aimed at bending

members' wives

call

the club to find out

if

their

public policy to the will of corporate power.

While George Bush would eventually join the CFR, he did not follow the traditional Wall Street-to- Washington route.

how

the

pire,

bastion of the

US power

structure was about to change.

CFR and

He apparently sensed The Rockefeller em-

the "Eastern Establishment," was starting

Standard Oil had been broken up by government trust-busting into several companies (primarily Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and AMOCO) ^although the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank still tied them together. A new breed of businessmen based in the Western states was riding the Eastern Establishment's coattails to fragment since the monolithic

—

to their

own

place in America's ruling class.

to build on old,

and the oil cowboys of the new west.

for the corporate

New money

always has

industry proved an essential stepping stone

Chevron, the California

branch of the Rockefeller empire, formed an alliance with the San Francisco engineering giant Bechtel, which soon became the nation's foremost builder of oil installations, hydrodams and nuke plants. New oil companies emerged, exploiting domestic reserves in Texas and California rather than wheeling and dealing with the sheikdoms of the Middle East like the Rockefeller mainstays

— at

least until they could

The war industry

connections in the Arab world.

develop their

own

also proved a vital

rung on the ladder to power. It was the CFR which charted America's course as the predominant western power to emerge from World War II

and

called for a policy of military rivalry against the

defense contractors like Lockheed and Hughes Aircraft

USSR. But the who built the

expanded Pentagon weapons programs were largely based in such became a power bloc in their own right. These new economic interests would not long remain content vastly

places as southern California, and soon

with the CFR's blue-bloods running the show.

The young George Bush second-guessed tablishment

ties

this trend. His

Eastern Es-

were secure simply by virtue of his birth. He saw his

challenge as acceptance

But before charting

among own

his

the Cowboys.

course to power, he had to pass through

He graduated from Andover Naval Academy in 1942, where he was baptized in several secret societies open only to the chosen few. In the Navy he named his bomber Barbara, after his fiancee Barbara Pierce. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his raid on Japanese positions at Chichi the

manhood

Jima.

Upon

initiation rituals expected of him.

his return

home

in '44

he followed his father's footsteps to

and macabre of the members traditionally

Yale, where he was initiated into the most exclusive

ivy-league secret societies: Skull

k.

Bones, whose

enter the worlds of corporate power and high-level espionage.

(Other Bonesmen include Averell Harriman; McGeorge Bundy, Pres-

and his brother WiUiam Bundy, a high-level CIA man; Henry Luce of Time-Life; conservative pundits William & James Buckley; Dino Pionzio, the CIA man who

ident Johnson's National Security Advisor,

played a leading role in the destabilization of Chile in 1973; and Robert H. Gow, president of Zapata, the oil company which George Bush would found. Prescott Bush had been in Skull

&; Bones with Roland Harriman Brown Brothers partner. In 1988, Apache leader Ned Anderson would accuse Prescott Bush of having stolen the bones of Geronimo for Skull h Bones' collection of famous remains of

—Averell's brother and

also a

the ruling class's enemies.)

Upon

graduation, George exploited a family connection to a west-

company being underwritten by Brown Brothers, Dresser Industook an entry-level job at Dresser and relocated to Odessa, He tries. with his new wife Barbara. After getting a feel for the oil biz Texas, ern

oil

(and a healthy cash infusion from his family), he launched his own firm, which merged with the Liedtke oil company to form Zapata Petroleum in 1953. In 1959, Bush split with partner Hugh Liedtke to form his own drilling-equipment company, the Houston-based Zapata Offshore. But by then he had become embroiled in his first conflict between his Eastern Establishment roots and his new Cowboy world. In 1956 Senator Prescott Bush opposed a bill being pushed by Texas oil interests which would deregulate the industry, the Harris-Fullbright Act aimed at prying open the international cartel dominated by the Rockefellers and their ilk to penetration by the Cowboy upstarts. George resisted considerable

—

from his Texas colleagues to swing was vetoed by President Eisenhower.)

pressure, including personal threats,

influence with his dad. (The

bill

Where Was George Bush on November

22,

1963?

But George Bush had gained the loyalty of the Texas

Cowboy coup

against

over the presidency F.

—

Kennedy, scion of

as a

Cold War hawk but had started to

the Soviets and the

many

oil

crowd by

now see as a the Eastern Establishment's traditional hegemony November 22, 1963. On that day. President John the Eastern Establishment who had been elected

the day of the national tragedy which

leftist

regimes in

drift

historians

towards reconciliation with

Cuba and North Vietnam, was

Texan Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency, in Vietnam and handed out fat defense contracts to Cowboy corporations like Lockheed and General Dynamics. Kennedy's accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was portrayed as a Communist sympathizer, but investigations revealed that he was a former Navy Intelligence operative and was mixed up with the rightwing Cuban exile establishment as was his own asscissin, Dallas mobster assassinated in Dallas.

immediately escalated the war

—

Jack Ruby.

The Cuban

exiles

Mafia (which had

were then working closely with the CIA and the Havana base of operations with the 1959 Cuban

lost its

revolution) to destabilize the Fidel Castro regime. After the failed

Pigs invasion

in 1961, the

right-wing

Cuban

terrorist

Bay of

groups increasingly

turned to the Mafia's heroin trade as a source of funds.

Was George Bush

involved in this milieu?

While Bush's autobiography

is

vague on the early

'60s,

other biogra-

phies report that Zapata Off"shore was deeply involved in deals through-

out Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe at this time. Researchers are frustrated by the suspicious fact that Zapata's SEC files for this

period were "inadvertently destroyed" in the

the Ronald Reagan presidency, as an

SEC

first

year of

spokesperson told reporter

Jonathan Kwitney of Barrens. Speculation that Zapata was a CIA front abounds. Bush himself would point to his globe-trotting on behalf of Zapata in the early '60s as qualifying him for the top CIA post to which he was appointed in 1976, ostensibly with no previous CIA experience. One of Bush's Zapata deals was a Mexican front company called Permargo which ran drilling operations south of the border. Since Mexican law forbade foreign ownership of oil companies, Zapata sought out frontmen to hide their 50% ownership of Permargo. The Mexicans were stand-ins for Zapata shareholders, so Permargo appeared to be 100% Mexican-owned on government records. Bush's principal Mexican partner in Permargo was Diaz Serrano who is today perhaps the most hated man in Mexico. In 1983, as chief of Pemex, the Mexican state oil monopoly, Serrano was convicted and sent to prison on charges of defrauding the Mexican government of $58 million. Some researchers point out that the CIA code-name for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Zapata the name of the region of Cuba targeted for invasion, but also the name of.Bush's oil company. The two ships secured by the CIA for the invasion were the Houston Bush's home, and the Barbara Bush's wife. If indeed Bush was involved in this milieu, closing ranks with the plot on JFK's life may have been a key rite of passage for Bush in winning the trust of the Cowboys.

—

—

—

—

FBI records indicate that "reputable businessman" George H. W. Bush "telephonically advised" on November 22 that "one James Parrott" was plotting to kill JFK. Parrot turned out to be a young right-wing Republican zealot in Houston. Conspiracy theorists say Bush was trying to throw the FBI off" the trail. Also suggestive is a November 29, 1963 FBI memo reporting that "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" had briefed FBI oflficials

on the reaction of Cuban

exiles to the

JFK

slaying.

reporter Joseph McBride of The Nation attempted to chase lead in 1988, a

CIA spokesman

told

him that

When

down

this

the agent in question was

—

George William Bush, not George Herbert Walker Bush violating the CIA's own policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the Agency. But when McBride tracked down George Wilham Bush, it turned out that he had only been with the CIA for six months

—

in

1963-4 as a "lowly researcher." He denied briefing the FBI about the

JFK killing. When McBride

asked where Bush was on the day of JFK's death, House spokesman quoted Bush as saying, "I was in Houston, a White the time at and involved in the independent oil drilling busiTexas, But Bush was ness." apparently just one man away from Oswald. One of Oswald's few close associates was George de Morenschildt, a rightwing Russian exile and purported World War II US-Nazi double-agent involved in the Texas oil business, who was himself mysteriously shot to death in 1977 on the same day that the Congressional committee probing the JFK killing, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, was attempting to reach him for questioning. After his death, which was ruled a suicide, his personal address book was located. It included the entry: BUSH, GEORGE H. W. (POPPY) 1412 W. OHIO. ALSO: ZAPATA

PETROLEUM. Global Power Broker

The

following year, 1964, George

Bush launched a Congressional bid

with the key support of Texas Senator John Tower. He

lost,

but in 1966,

Zapata Offshore for $1.1 million, won on a second bid. He chaired the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources Sz Population, earning a reputation as an authority on the management of global empire. He also displayed the political malleability which would come to characterize his style. Elected as right-wing hawk, when he sensed the political winds shifting he switched to favoring withdrawal from Vietnam. after selling off his share of

In 1970, he lost a Senatorial bid to Lloyd Bentson. But by then he had come to be seen by Richard Nixon's White House as a valuable asset and was appointed US ambassador to the United Nations. Since the Cowboys had elbowed their way onto the turf of the Eastern Establishment, White House administrations had become carefully balanced coalitions. Cowboy Johnson kept JFK's Eastern Establishment appointees on his cabinet, such as CFR member McGeorge Bundy. When Nixon took over in 1969, the balance tilted further towards the Cowboys, but important Eastern Establishment elements remained chiefly. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, the CFR whiz kid and Nelson Rockefeller's personal protege. While he masterminded the rape of Vietnam, Kissinger saw China as in a position to be wooed as an ally and opened to capitalist penetration. While this is the kind of "liberal" position traditionally despised by Cowboys and the far right.

Nixon was in a unique position to make overtures to China: his Cowboy credentials were impeccable and he had proven himself eager to use military force abroad as well as police state tactics against domestic dissidents.

And Ambassador Bush was in a Cowboy interests at the UN

ern and

unique position to balance Eastbecause he was accepted in both

worlds. After Nixon's 1972 trip to Beijing, the question arose whether

the People's Republic or Taiwan would hold China's seat at the

Eastern Establishment elements as a vast viet

market

Communism

willingness to

US

for

who saw

UN.

the massive People's Republic

capitalism and a strategic bulwark against So-

were accused of betrayal by

Cowboy elements

abandon Taiwan. Bush's major undertaking

for their

at the

UN

was to push through his plan for "dual representation," allowing both Communist and Nationalist Chinas to remain on board and appeasing both the wings of the US ruling class. This effort failed and Taiwan bitterly relinquished its UN seat. But the GOP became more convinced of Bush's skill as a power broker. Bush's Cowboy friends were not slow to exploit the China opening. Zapata Petroleum, by then renamed Pennzoil, but still mostly owned by Bush's former partner Hugh Liedtke, was among the first US oil companies to win drilling rights in newly opened China. Hugh's brother and Pennzoil partner Bill Liedtke contributed $700,000 in 1972 to the

—

CREEP Nixon's Campaign to Re-Elect the President, the cabal of former CIA agents who pulled off the Watergate break-in. (A key figure in the CREEP was E. Howard Hunt, the CIA man who oversaw "Operation Success," the right-wing coup d'etat which ousted the democratically elected and moderately leftist Jacobo Arbenz govern-

ment

in

Guatemala

in 1954, replacing

it

with a bloodthirsty right-wing

dictatorship on behalf of the United Fruit

Company's banana

interests.

This came on the heels of a successful CIA-instrumented coup in Iran two years earlier which had ousted the democratically elected Mossadegh

government and replaced

it

with the brutal monarchy of the Shah on

The CIA still had a perfect record. "Operation Zapata," the Bay of Pigs invasion, was to have been a replay

behalf of Rockefeller

oil interests.

Guatemala coup. But the CIA had

failed to do its homework: CasArbenz, had dismantled the old conservative army, replacing it with a new revolutionary army he could trust. So, rather than closing ranks with CIA's mercenaries as the Guatemalan army had in '54, the

of the

tro, unlike

Cuban army crushed them. But

the

CIA and

their

orators couldn't face up to their intelligence error.

Cuban exile collabThey scapegoated

Kennedy

for his half-hearted support.

air cover for the

US

CIA's Guatemalan

Air Force fighters to

bombard

the

While Eisenhower had provided

exile invasion force in '54,

Guatemalan

capital,

sending

Kennedy had

refused to similarly provide air cover for Operation Zapata. This decision

may have sealed JFK's

The CIA

chief at the time of Operation Sucand business associate of Bill Casey and the brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Alan Dulles's rogue espionage role in the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's World War II forerunner, was to establish covert ties with Nazi intelligence with an eye towards the US making a "separate peace" with Nazi Germany against the common Soviet enemy. Alan Dulles would later serve on the Warren Commission, President Johnson's appointed panel to investigate the JFK killing. The Warren Commission, of course, found that both Oswald and Ruby had acted independently. Hunt subsequently left the CIA to join Nixon's private spy team. Nixon's strategy of employing private spies would later be taken to new extremes by George Bush.) In 1973, with the party reeling under the Watergate revelations. Bush was appointed chief of the Republican National Committee. His miscess

fate.

was Alan Dulles, a

close friend

damage control. Following Nixon's self-destruction, the Eastern Establishment was on an offensive to reclaim the party. After Nixon's 1974 resignation, his hand-chosen successor, Gerald Ford, assumed the

sion:

presidency. officially

Balancing

rival interests

within the party. Ford had Nixon

pardoned, but gave the vice presidency to Nelson "Rocky"

Rockefeller

— heir

York governor,

to the Standard Oil mega-fortune, three-time

CFR bigwig and one of the most powerful

lishment figures.

Many

were convinced that

the comparatively brainless Ford,

who was

it

New

Eastern Estab-

was Rocky, rather than running the White

really

House.

Once the transition was complete, Ford immediately offered Bush the ambassadorship in either London or Paris, traditionally the most prestigious envoy posts for Eastern Establishment blue-bloods. But Bush Once

was thinking strategically. US camp. China was in geopolitical transition from the Soviet to the American sphere. By cultivating connections there. Bush would once again be making himself useful to the power elite. Indeed, his China connections would come in handy 15 years later as president. After a year in Beijing, Bush returned to Washington for a new appointment, one which would open still more doors: director of the instead suggested Beijing.

again, he

Britain and France were already firmly in the

Central Intelligence Agency.

—

CIA Man The basic assignment was still post-Watergate damage control. With new revelations emerging daily of Nixon administration dirty deals from wiretapping the Democrats to secretly bombing Cambodia to organizing a violent right-wing coup d'etat in Chile on behalf of ITT's copper interests both houses of Congress had launched committees to

—

probe the CIA's

role in the scandals: the

Senate Church Committee and

Director William Colby was was brought in to create the hastily put out to pasture. George Bush "cleaned up." Bush was perceived perception that the Agency was being was well hidden. Senwork previous CIA as an "outsider." His probable inexperienced to be was too that Bush protested ator Frank Church roadblock his probe trying to Ford of accused and the job, qualified for its midst. right in chiefs by switching CIA Bush and Ford/Rocky created the image of a restrained and professional CIA emerging from the adventurism of the Nixon era. Personnel was cut back, and no major covert operations were undertaken. But Bush's CIA this was a strategic pull-back, not a fundamental shift. continued to consolidate the gains of Colby's CIA. Indeed, the very "rogue elements" the CIA was ostensibly distancing itself from under Bush's directorship would later be incorporated into Bush's private spy network. In September 1976, Orlando Letelier, who had been Chilean ambassador to the US under the democratically elected leftist government of Salvador Allende (which the CIA helped overthrow in 1973), and who then became stateside representative for the resistance against CIA-installed dictator August© Pinochet, was blown to death by a car bomb in Washington. Bush's CIA not only covered up Pinochet's role in the murder, but launched a disinformation campaign aimed at pinning the death on the Chilean resistance. On October 12, 1976, the New York Times reported that the CIA had ruled out a Pinochet role, but was "pursuing the possibility that Mr. Letelier had been assassinated by left-wing extremists as a means of disrupting US relations with the military junta." This despite the fact that two months before the killing, George Landau, the US envoy in Paraguay, had personally cabled CIA Director Bush to alert him that Pinochet secret agents were attempting to enter the US with Paraguayan passports. More than ten years later, the truth would come out and high-ranking officials of DINA, Pinochet's secret police, would be indicted in the US for murder. Another figure linked to the killing was CIA-trained Cuban terrorist

the House Pike Committee.

Nixon's

CIA

Luis Posada, a former officer in the secret police of Dictator Fulgen-

10

(who was overthrown by Castro in 1959). In October 1976 Posada blew up a Cuban Airlines jet, killing all 73 passengers. Upon his arrest by Venezuelan authorities, a map of Washington was found on him with Letelier's daily work route clearly marked. The US never sought his extradition. In fact, after escaping from jail in Venezuela, Posada would join Bush's secret Central America spy network. cio Batista

Bush quietly expanded the CIA's global hi-tech surveillance capabiladding new spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping posts. And he continued to play the role of high-level power broker. In fact, the first step towards the devil's bargain of the Reagan coalition that Bush would help assemble in 1980 emerged under his CIA directorship. ities,

The Eastern Establishment In the

Splits

wake of the Vietnam debacle, Watergate and the other Nixo-

nian scandals, the ruling class was deeply divided over the proper av-

was certainly necessary to avoid future was the solution to abandon the military option in favor of economic penetration and peacefully wooing the Soviet bloc over to capitalism? Or, on the contrary, was it gung-ho militarism shorn of the "restraints" imposed by a probing media, squeamish Congress and naive public?

enues to pursue global power. ficLscos

It

of the sort which had recently humiliated elite sectors. But

Lines were drawn on this debate in the Eastern Establishment, and

a split emerged in the

CFR

itself.

In 1973,

CFR

bigwig David Rock-

Rocky's brother and chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, established a new "international study group": the Trilateral Commission. Just as Rocky had adopted Harvard scholar Henry Kissinger as efeller,

his protege feller

and groomed him to be the

adopted

his

own

CFR

Trilateralist protege,

whiz-kid, David RockeHarvard scholar Zbigniew

—

Brzezinski who, like Kissinger, was obsessed with developing theories on the maintenance and expansion of global power. But the Trilateralists were clearly the "liberal" wing of the CFR crowd. They allowed labor leaders like the AFL-CIO's Lane Kirkland into their ranks, and their very name suggested that the US should accept its role as one pillar of a "trilateral" capitalist alliance along with Western Europe and Japan. In the Trilateralist view, the rival Communist bloc was to be

won

over economically rather than defeated militarily. Gruelling coun-

like Vietnam, CIA adventurism, and thermonuclear brinksmanship had outlived their usefulness.

terinsurgency wars

The

Trilateralists

Cowboys, and

in

knew that

this

view was anathema to conservative

order to establish Trilateral control over the White

11

House they would have win legitimacy by finding partners (or frontmen) untainted by Eastern Establishment connections. David Rockefeller

found such a

man

in

a prosperous Georgia peanut farmer (and

former Naval nuclear engineer) named

Jimmy

Carter.

Since becoming governor of Georgia, Carter had been pursuing the

company

of powerful Northeast personages as a source of capital to de-

velop the

New

and groomed

South. Carter was invited onto the Trilateral Commission for the presidency.

In 1976, the rival tendency in the Eastern Establishment launched its

CFR offshoot: the Committee on The CPD had one, unequivocal goal: back Truman was the last president to enjoy unri-

counterattack, forming another

the Present Danger (CPD). to

Truman.

Harry

S.

valled nuclear superiority over the rest of the planet. Until the Soviets

developed their own bomb in 1949, US global military hegemony had been uncontested. By 1976, however, Soviet nuclear forces were finally achieving "rough parity" with US nuclear forces. The CPD considered this a terrifying development and wanted to forge ahead with a vastly expanded nuclear weapons program which would put the US so far ahead

arms race that the vast Soviet arsenal would be insignificant in fact, CPD founder Paul Nitze had in 1950, as an aide in Truman's State Department, authored the top-secret NSC-68, the policy document which advocated "any measures, covert or overt, violent or nonviolent, which serve the purposes of frustrating the Kremlin ." The principal "measure" design. NSC-68 called for was massive nuclear weapons stockpiling. The CPD started plotting for a way to return

in the

comparison. In

.

.

US nuclear-military supremacy. George Bush, as usual, was playing both sides. Having displayed certain "liberal" tendencies as a Texas congressman, and, more importantly, having played a role in the "opening" of China, Bush was invited to join the Trilateral Commission, and eagerly accepted. But as CIA Director, he granted the embryonic CPD its first access to oflScial Washington power. When Bush was appointed CIA chief, his dad's old friend Bill Casey was appointed to President Ford's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). Casey's PFIAB suggested that the CIA was seriously underestimating Soviet nuclear might and that a study group of prominent "experts" should be allowed to review the CIA's top-secret data on Soviet strength. This panel was to be called Team B since its role was to review the analyses of the CIA, or "Team A." Bush, Rocky and the fairly oblivious Ford went along with the plan, and Team B was created. to the former glory of complete

12

Team B was founded figures

— with

militarist study

indeed the

Team

just before the

CPD, and

included several

CPD

Paul Nitze at the forefront. The conclusion of the ultra-

group upon reassessing the CIA data surprised nobody: gravely underestimating Soviet nuclear might!

CIA had been

B's official report called for massively beefing

up the nuclear

arsenal and developing plans for "civil defense" and post-nuclear govern-

CPD

ment. The

was subsequently formed to push

politically for

Team

B's agenda.

With the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, the Trilateralists gained White House. Carter's new CIA Director Stansfield Turner really did try to clean up the agency (rather than merely making an appearance of doing so, as Bush had), launching a virtual purge of the adventurist the

cloak-and-dagger types.

CIA

In the October 1977 "Halloween Massacre,"

covert operations personnel were cut from over 1,200 to under 400.

But paradoxically, this merely paved the way for the Faustian alliance which was to be the Reagan administration. The CIA's covert action teams had long been developing sources of income to sustain their secret wars in the absence of Congressionally approved funds (and to fatten their bloated private accounts in Swiss banks). Chief among these cash cows was the drug trade.

The

pioneers of this strategy were the so-called "secret team" revolv-

ing around the leadership of Theodore Shackley, Thomas Clines and Edwin Wilson. Shackley was the Miami CIA Station Chief who organized

the

Bay of Pigs

Cuban exiles like Luis "Max Gomez" Rodriguez

invasion, recruiting ultra-right

Posada, Rafael "ChiChi" Quintero and Felix

to oversee the formation of the mercenary force. After the invasion failed,

Shackley and his team launched Operation Mongoose, a terror campaign against Cuban targets aimed at destabilizing the Castro regime. Cuban

Omega-7 and Alpha-66 were integrated into smuggling network for Turkish heroin, and Miami became a

exile terrorist

the Mafia's

groups

like

key entry point for the deadly substance. As the trafficking infrastructure expanded and found a niche in the shadows of official policy, the heroin supply

By

US

foreign

on America's streets exploded.

the late 1960s, this pattern had spiralled horribly. Shackley was

appointed

CIA

Station Chief in the landlocked Indochinese nation of

Laos, where a corrupt government which had turned opium into the nation's top export was besieged by the Communist Pathet Lao insurgency. Shackley, Clines and Wilson, with a team of Green Berets, took control of the opium-growing Laotian hill tribes known as the Hmong, turning them into a surrogate army against the Pathet Lao and ex-

13

it was processed The Hmong Kong. via Hong and then exported to the US into heroin by then but Lao in the Pathet 1975, abandoned as Laos fell to were Shackley, Clines and Wilson were filthy rich. Michael Hand, a Green Beret who was a veteran of Shackley's Laos team, founded the Nugan-

porting their crop to Mafia contacts in Saigon, where

Hand Bank in Australia to launder the ill-gotten gains of the "secret team." The Nugan-Hand Bank would become a money-laundering scam for the (increasingly "privatized") worldwide covert actions of the "sesuch as the mercenary operations in support cret team" and its friends

—

of the embattled white supremacist regime in Rhodesia. Meanwhile, un-

precedented levels of heroin flooded the streets of America. In response, Nixon had launched the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and

a wholesale militarization of the inner

With the Carter/Turner CIA

cities.

purge, the "secret team" merely went

Clines and Shackley off"ered their services to the embattled Anastasio Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, organizing Somoza's brutal National Guard for search-and-destroy missions against the leftist Sandinista guerillas for cold cash. Wilson, meanwhile, was providing private.

arms, explosives and (with a team of veteran Green Berets) paramilienemy of the US: Colonel Moammar Qaddafi

tary training to an official

of Libya. Paradoxically, the Carter/Turner

CIA purge

only succeeded in mak-

ing the Agency's newly "privatized" covert operations wing even

more

unaccountable.

By 1979, the Trilateralist agenda was collapsing. The strategic US-supported tyranny of the Shah in Iran fell to Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic fundamentafist revolution. The US-backed Somoza tyranny The Soviets invaded in Nicaragua fell to the leftist Sandinistas. Afghanistan. The ruling elite's worst nightmares were coming true.

The

CPD

Strategic

instrumented a ferocious media campaign against Carter's

Arms

Limitation Treaty, portraying

it

as spineless sell-out to

the Soviets. Carter's National Security Advisor Brzezinski, the Eastern

Establishment insider, started to hold ever-greater sway over the administration. Panicking, the Trilateralists capitulated, officially

abandoning

their policy of US-Soviet detente. Playing to the right. Carter launched

contracts for a powerful

the

MX,

new generation of

first-strike

nuke weapons: and

Trident, Cruise and Pershing missiles. Brzezinski drafted,

Carter signed, Presidential Directive 59, the most significant nuclear pol-

document since Truman's NSC-68. PD-59 mandated that be able to carry out a "prolonged" nuclear war and have a icy

US forces command

14

and control system which could "endure" Soviet nuclear strikes. Carter Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate post-nuclear civil defense. A fundamental shift had taken place from seeing nuclear weapons as a deterrent which enforces world staestablished the Federal

bility in a

option.

But the

balance of terror, to seeing their use as a realistic military

The it

back-to- Truman drive had been launched.

wasn't enough to save Carter.

US embassy

hostage, the nation.

home

in

Tehran

in

When

November

media sensationalized and

Carter's fate was sealed

violent

— unless

Iranian militants seized

1979, taking the personnel

xenophobia swept the

he could bring the hostages

before the next year's election.

October Surprise Ronald Reagan, the ultra-Cowboy who, as governor of California in Guard to prevent a bunch of hippies from turning a Berkeley parking lot into a "People's Park," resulting in the death of one young student, had ceded the 1972 Republican nomination to Nixon at the annual gathering of the nation's most powerful men at California's ultra-exclusive Bohemian Grove club (where bizarre But, eight years later, with ritual magic ceremonies are performed). the Eastern Establishment in disarray, it was Reagan's hour. The complex web of conspiracies which put Reagan in the White House in 1980 amounted to a virtual Cowboy coup. And the instrumental player was George Bush. Bush was aiming for the presidency himself, and attacked rival Reagan's "supply side" and "trickle-down" theories that rampant industry deregulation was good for America as "voodoo economics." But by the time of the Republican convention in Detroit, it was clear that the "liberal" wing of the Republican party was being dramatically sidelined. Reagan not only had the big Cowboy money behind him, but the sup1969, had called out the National

port of the then-emergent racist

middle

class

New

Right

— the backlash

vote of frightened,

elements represented by Rev. Jerry Falwell's newly

formed Moral Majority, the Christian fundamentalist political action group based in Lynchburg, Virginia; and radical-right direct-mail wizard Richard Viguerie, who was raising millions of dollars in small contributions from across the country with his streamlined outfit based in Falls Church, Virginia. But was this organizational might sufficient for winning the presidency? The balance shifted in Reagan's favor when he chose George Bush as his running mate.

Bush, of course, eagerly accepted.

He immediately dropped

his

— 15

"voodoo" rhetoric and moved suddenly and sharply to the right, bringown views into conformity with those of the Reagan bloc on

ing his

The Reagan team now had As Bush closed ranks with which would propel him into the

everything from deregulation to abortion.

their essential Eastern Establishment boy.

Reagan and helped forge the coalition White House, an historic alliance was born which would completely alter America's political landscape in the 1980s. Bush brought the CPD wing of the Eastern Establishment into alliance with Reagan's Cowboy and New Right constituencies. The demoralized Trilateralists stood alone behind

Jimmy

Bush

Carter.

also brought important connections within the Carter

camp

which the Reagan team could exploit. Chief among these was Donald Gregg, a member of Carter's NSC staff under Brzezinski. A longtime CIA man, Gregg had been the Agency's station chief in South Korea when Bush was US envoy in China, and the two met in Beijing in 1975. The following year, CIA Chief Bush appointed Gregg the Agency's liaison to the Pike Committee (whose progress they were diligently attempting to block). The now all-but-forgotten "Debategate" scandal, which broke

after the elections

and revealed that the Reagan team had

secretly procured copies of Carter's briefs for the 1980 presidential de-

bates, clearly indicates that there were figures

were secretly working

Two

figures

from

camp

for

this era

—have

on the Carter team who

Reagan-Bush.

— one from the Carter camp and one from

books maintaining that the Reagan-Bush team was secretly conspiring with Iran to keep the hostages captive until after Reagan was safely in the White House. Identically entitled October Surprise, the books were written by Gary Sick, who was then a member of Carter's NSC staff, and Barbara Honegger, a Reagan White House aide. CIA man Bill Casey was appointed Reagan campaign manager, and was to be rewarded with the post of CIA director after the Reagan victory. Casey had emerged from the Watergate humiliation with a vision or answerable to of a "private CIA," which would not be funded by Congress. The technocrats and data analysts at the CIA's sprawling headquarters at Langley, Virginia, would continue to report to the nation's elected representatives, while the covert operations wing which actually runs the secret wars in Latin America, the Middle East, Indochina and Southern Africa would "go private" and would be answerable only to the Reagan White House. Barbara Honegger maintains that Casey and Bush started to build the Reagan

since published

—

—

16

this private spy

network even during the 1980 presidential campaign. John Conyers, who had

She quotes an aide to Michigan Representative

investigated the Debategate and Irangate scandals: "William Casey set

up a mammoth

intelligence operation, including past

and present mem-

bers of the military and intelligence communities, to spy on Carter's

negotiations with Iran. This

debate papers." Honegger

is

cites

the network which obtained the Carter

one operative of

Hall, personal assistant to Carter's

stay on the

White House

NSC

this

network as Wilma She would

chief Brzezinski.

staff after the election to

become

assistant to

Reagan's NSC chief Robert McFarlane. Her daughter. Fawn Hall, would become personal assistant to NSC operative Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, and help him shred documents to hide the administration's secret

arms deals from Congress. Both Honegger and Sick maintain that the Reagan- Bush team got word that Carter was secretly negotiating with Khomeini for the return of the hostages, and launched negotiations of their own. Both authors cite numerous meetings which took place between Reagan-Bush team figures and Iranians. Both authors say that the Reagan- Bush team was attempting to play off rivalries within the new Iranian regime. While Carter's people were negotiating with elements loyal to moderate Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the Reagan-Bush team was dealing with rival extremist Parliament Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani would ultimately win the power struggle and Bani-Sadr be exiled to Paris. In 1991, the Bush State Department would refuse to grant BaniSadr a visa to visit the US on a tour to promote his book, My Turn To Speak: Iran, the Revolution, and Secret Deals with the US, which he says proves that the Reagan-Bush team conspired to keep the hostages Iran

in captivity until after the election.

Gary Sick says the reason the Iranians ultimately accepted the Reagan-Bush deals instead of the Carter deals was that the ReaganBush team offered them what they really wanted: arms. Sick says the Carter team was willing to discuss unfreezing Iranian assets in US banks and turning over the Shah's stateside wealth, but stopped short of offering arms. It becomes tiresome to detail the various meetings between ReaganBush personnel and high-level Iranians which Sick and Honegger say took place during the 1980 campaign. Sick maintains that Donald Gregg met with prominent Iranian arms dealers who had been close to both the Shah and Khomeini regimes, the Hashemi brothers, Cyrus and Jamshid, in New York in 1980. Sick also says Jamshid Hashemi told him he met

17

with both Casey and Gregg

in

Madrid

brothers translated for Iranian clerics

in

July 1980, where the Hashemi

who were

confidants of

Khome-

ini. Casey's cover for the trip to Europe was an address he delivered in London to an historical society on Anglo-American relations in World War II, and the night he returned he dined with Bush at DCs Alibi Club. Sick cites Ari Ben-Menache, the Iran pointman for Israeli mil-

itary intelligence, as saying that Israeli intelligence reports confirmed

Jamshid Hashemi's account of the Madrid meeting. Ben-Menache also claims that Robert McFarlane and Richard Allen, both of whom would later become Reagan White House NSC chiefs, met with Hushang Lavi, an Iranian arms merchant who dealt with both the Khomeini regime and Israeli intelligence, in DC in September or October 1980. McFarlane was then an aide to Bush's old friend, Texas Senator John Tower. On November 29, 1986, Bob Woodward would report in the Washington Post that "McFarlane approached the Reagan campaign's foreign policy advisor Richard V. Allen with an Iranian exile deliver the

American hostages

...

to the

who proposed to ." Lavi, who

Reagan camp.

.

.

had been dealing with US defense contractor Grumman Aerospace on behalf of the Shah and wanted the Iranian assets unfrozen so he could continue his lucrative business for the new Khomeini regime, also tried to reach vice-presidential candidate Bush through his campaign aide James Baker, according to Honegger. (McFarlane would later plead guilty to withholding information from Congress during the Irangate probe. Lavi would die of a heart attack in 1990 just as the FBI was launching a probe into Sen. John Tower following his appointment by President Bush as Secretary of Defense.) Sick also reports that Casey met in the summer of 1980 with Count Alexandre de Marenches, chief of the French intelligence agency SDCE, precisely as the SDCE was launching its own arms deals with Iran to

buy protection for French businessmen still working in the country. The most controversial allegations concern the meetings that allegedly took place in Paris in October 1980, where the deal was supposedly sealed.

Among

the people placed at the meetings at ritzy Paris

Ben-Menache, Lavi, the Hashemi brothers and Casey, Gregg and George Bush. Casey is now dead. Gregg and Bush deny these meetings ever happened. It is clear that after the Reagan-Bush team was elected in November

hotels three nights following October 14 are

—

1980, the Iranians with whom Carter's people were negotiating suddenly dropped their demands for weapons and agreed to release the 52 hostages in exchange for the unfreezing of the assets. But Tehran's nitpicking

— 18

delayed formalization of the deal until mere minutes after Ronald Reagan

had been sworn

in

on January

19, 1981.

The hostages were flown home

the following day.

Was Bush in

at the Paris

a position to

know

meetings? The problem

is

that most of those

are themselves deeply involved in sleazy deals

and

espionage intrigues. These figures include Richard Brenneke, an arms dealer and self-proclaimed

CIA

operative

who

says he was at the Paris

meeting with Casey, Gregg and Bush. He made this claim when testifying on behalf of his friend Heinrich Rupp, a self-proclaimed veteran of the Nazi Wehrmacht, who was indicted in 1989 for money skimming

Aurora Bank and who claimed that the scam was part of a Rupp was convicted and Brenneke indicted for false testimony. At Brenneke's trial, Gregg testified that he had not been in Paris, producing a photo of himself with his daughter in a swimsuit at his Maryland home, allegedly taken on the weekend of the Paris meeting. But when a defense meteorologist testified that the weather had been cloudy and chilly in Maryland that weekend, Brenneke was at Denver's

CIA

laundering operation.

acquitted.

Then

CIA

there

is

Russ Rusbacher, another jailbird and self-proclaimed

operative. Currently serving time for an embezzling scheme, Rus-

bacher claims he was framed after threatening to go public with the fact that he personally flew Bush to Paris.

The

question in these cases

deeply enmeshed

in the

is

obvious:

if

these individuals are as

espionage world as they claim,

how do we know

they have really come clean? Or are they plants spreading misinformation to discredit the story? It is

also tiresome to detail Honegger's laborious

list

of the

many

October Surprise intrigues who met an untimely and mysterious demise. Among the more prominent figures are Cyrus Hashemi, who died suddenly from a rare "fast-acting cancer" in London in 1986. Lavi, who died himself at the age of 55 four years later, claimed that Hashemi was murdered. Lavi and Hashemi had both turned state's

figures associated with

in a US Customs Department sting Hashemi was indicted for smuggling in 1984. (Honegger also cites the 1989 "suicide" of American dissident Abbie Hoff"man, which followed

evidence against fellow arms dealers after

his recent investigative

Playboy story on the October Surprise scandal

long before the story was picked up by the mainstream media. Abbie's

death came shortly after a mysterious automobile accident in which he had been injured. Shortly before his death, Abbie told his friends his brakes had been tampered with.)

19

Also controversial is "former" Israeli intelligence agent Ari BenMenache. He claims that his own arms network was the target of the Customs sting in which Hashemi served as a snitch, and that the sting was launched because his network was competing with that run by Casey and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. In retaliation, Ben-Menache says he started talking to Middle East journalists about the US-Iran arms antideals, resulting in the story of one 1985 shipment of US tank missiles and other arms being picked up by a Lebanese magazine in 1986. The story was, in turn, picked up by the US press, and the Irangate scandal broke. It seemed that the entire sleazy world of the Reagan-Bush secret deals might begin to unravel. But the unambitious US media would never seriously probe the degree of US collusion with the "enemy" regime in Iran. Both the press and the Congressional probe would focus narrowly on the one 1985 arms shipment.

TOW

It seems clear, however, that US arms started flowing to Iran during Reagan's first year in office. Bani-Sadr reports that before the end of 1981, NATO stocks from Europe were arriving in Iran via the Israeli

Honegger cites Israeli intelligence US arms made their way to Iran between 1980 and 1983. Honegger also cites Italian military intelligence connections to the secretive P2 Masonic lodge and the Italian ultra-right terror network as a route used to launder NATO stocks in Italy which were diverted to Iran. According to Honegger, the Syrian heroin trafficking network of Monzer Al-Kassar was utilized to smuggle NATO arms out of Italy and to Iran. Al-Kassar's operations are apparently protected by corrupt right-wing elements in the Italian state security agency, SISMI. Honegger suggests that Casey's CIA station chief in Rome, Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, was also involved. (Clarridge would later be assigned to the CIA's Latin America Directorate, and would oversee production of the CIA's controversial Contra terrorist training manual.) Honneger alleges that similar networks were used to raid NATO stocks in the UK, West Germany, and Belgium. Bani-Sadr says the most incriminating evidence is that Iran was able intelligence arms-laundering network.

sources as saying that billions of dollars in

to fight Iraq to a standstill in the gruelling Persian

Gulf

War which

started in 1980, even though Iraq was being openly

and the

USSR and

financially backed

armed by France the entire Arab world.

by virtually up by the US for 30 years under the Shah, and the replacement parts for the US-made weaponry had to be coming from somewhere. As Bani-Sadr told KPFK Radio in 1988, "Iran fought the war with Iraq for eight years. What else do you want?"

The

Iranian

army had been

built

20

Contragate Shortly after the Iran arms shipments story broke in 1986, Attorney

General Ed Meese went on

TV

to

announce that

profits

had been diverted to the Contras, the right-wing rebel

from the

sales

army that the CIA

had organized to topple Nicaragua's Sandinista government. Meese was doubtless hoping to beat the media to the punch by exposing the profitdiversion first. But the secret war in Nicaragua was already coming to the public eye and revealing that Casey's dream of a "private CIA" was being realized. Congress had cut off US aid to the Contras in 1983 following reports of human rights abuses by the right-wing mercenaries. But in October 1986, mere weeks before the Iran revelations, a C-123 cargo plane owned by the CIA's privatized Southern Air Transport (and formerly belonging to Medellin Cartel pilot and ex-Green Beret Barry Seal, who had recently been blown away by Cartel hitmen in New Orleans) was shot down over Nicaragua by Sandinista troops. The sole survivor was Eugene Hasenfus, a veteran of Air America, the CIA-owned airline which ran drugs and guns in and out of Laos in the '60s. Records found on board indicated the C-123 had come from El Salvador's Ilopango air base. Among the names that Hasenfus dropped to his Sandinista captors was Max Gomez, who coordinated the Contra resupply flights at Ilopango. "Max Gomez" would prove to be the alias of Felix Rodriguez, the Operation Mongoose veteran whose partner in the Ilopango operation was Cuban terrorist

—

Luis Posada.

Other names dropped by Hasenfus were Vice President George Bush and his National Security aide Donald Gregg. While Reagan was the charismatic cowboy who enticed America in front of the TV cameras. Bush was increasingly the real brains in the White House. A series of National Security Decision Directives signed by Reagan (but drafted by Bush and Casey) shifted ever greater responsibility to Bush. Quietly, without fanfare. Bush was building the bu-

and usher These top-secret Directives made George Bush White House pointman on everything from "conventional arms transfers" to "counter-terrorism" to the "War on Drugs." Bush delegated NSC aide Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North to find "private funding" in lieu of Congressional funding for the Contras, and to establish a private spy network to keep the Contras alive. It was this privatization of foreign policy that brought international drug traffickers and bona fide fascists into the power alliance which was the Reagan

reaucratic infrastructure he needed to launch his secret wars in his

agenda.

21

administration.

The network

that North turned to for private funding at the behest

Bush was that surrounding the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), led by General John K. Singlaub. Singlaub was a longtime CIA operative who had been sacked from his post as chief of US forces in South Korea by Carter after bitterly protesting Carter's phased withdrawal of troops from the Asian dictatorship. Urged by his friends in the ultra-right Lyndon LaRouche cult to seize power from Carter in a coup d'etat, Singlaub instead became chairman of WACL, a globespanning network of CIA operatives, right-wing Cubans, Central American death squad leaders, aging East European Nazi collaborators, Italian and Spanish fascists left over from the Mussolini and Franco regimes, and generals from South American and East Asian right-wing tyrannies. Soon Singlaub was arranging donations for the Contras from far-right organizations across the USA, as well as training from the paramilitary Argentine miUtary (which had just ceded power after a six-year reign of terror in which some 5,000 dissidents "disappeared"). As for the spy network, that was pretty much already in place. Since fleeing the CIA in the Carter years, the "secret team" revolving around Shackley, Clines and Wilson had been working to establish a covert intelligence organization in Central America which they called "Project X," funded by Wilson's private deals with Qaddafi. When the ReaganBush team took the White House, Wilson started sending letters from of Casey and

Tripoli to the National Security Council, offering the services of Project

X

to fight the rising tide of leftist revolution in Central America.

1982, as Peter

Maas

reports in his book Manhunt, Wilson

In

was snared by and lured him

a zealous federal attorney who had intercepted his letters from Libya to the Dominican Republic under the guise of secret meetings with NSC representatives to talk turkey. The Dominican authorities, alerted of his arrival, placed him on a plane to New York, where he was immediately arrested. The claim that his Libya deals were actually deep-cover CIA operations didn't wash with the judge. As Wilson fumed from his cell at Marion Federal Penitentiary, Oliver North stepped into his shoes as the mastermind of the "secret team," and Wilson's "Project X" became North's "Project Democracy" (or "ProDem"). Bill Casey's dream of a private CIA answerable only to the executive branch had

been realized.

Under North's

and Clines recruited their old pals and Luis Posada to run the Contra reEl Salvador's Ilopango, formed shadow com-

direction, Shackley

Felix Rodriguez, Chichi Quintero

supply transfer operation at

)

22 panics to build clandestine jungle airstrips, chartered freighters to smuggle weapons,

bought the cooperation of military bureaucrats throughout finally, established the Contras as a vital link in

Central America, and,

the Medellin Cartel's Andes-to-Miami cocaine

trail.

(Considering their

one would hope, not necessary to point out the Orwellian irony of the name "Project Democracy." With the explosion of the cocaine economy, Colombia's Medellin Carwork,

it

is,

had largely displaced the old Italian Mafia's heroin rackets as a cash cow for the Miami-based Cuban terrorist groups. At the bidding of Project Democracy, Alpha-66 and Omega-7 started purchasing arms for the Contras, which were flown to the Contra camps along Nicaragua's northern border in Honduras via Ilopango. When it was decided that a "Southern Front" needed to be opened in the Contra war, ProDem started sniffing around for connections in Costa Rica, on Nicaragua's southern border. Here, Indiana Senator Dan Quayle would prove useful. An aide in his Washington office, Robert Owen, was a mercenary with ties to right-wing paramilitary groups and the Central American cocaine terror network. In 1983, the Quayle office received a visit from one John Hull, an Indiana rancher with sprawling properties in a remote area of northern Costa Rica. Hull was on his way to Miami to meet with cocaine movers and stopped at Quayle's tel

Owen immediately

recognized him as ProDem. Owen introduced someone who would be useful to his friends in became a key subsequently ranch Hull to North, and Hull's Costa Rica Miami and coke on its down from way transfer point for guns on their Contras established base way up from Colombia. The Southern Front camps nearby. office to off"er his patriotic services.

Hull was indicted on drug trafficking charges in Costa Rica in 1989,

but the charges were dropped after he

fled

back to Indiana and the

US

refused to extradite.

Five other figures involved

in the

operation would also be declared

persona non grata in Costa Rica following a report by that country's National Assembly maintaining that their Contra resupply operation had doubled as a coke-smuggling ring. The five are Lieutenant Colonel

ProDem operative General Richard Secord, ex-NSC chief John Poindexter, ex-US Ambassador to Costa Rica Lewis Tambs, and ex-CIA

North,

Costa Rica Station Chief Joe Fernandez. The legislative commission found that "requests for Contra help were initiated by Colonel North to [Panamanian strongman] General Manuel Noriega."

23

Panamagate Noriega's Panama was

a key link in the Contra operation. Medellin

Cartel profits, a key Contra cash cow, were laundered in

banks, and the

Panamanian

ProDem dummy companies, which bought

land for

Costa Rica and chartered freighters to smuggle arms to Honduras, were mostly registered in Panama. Another Bush connection was once again proving useful. Bush had first met Noriega in 1976 when they were both intelligence Bush at the CIA, Noriega at chiefs of their respective governments Panama's G-2. At that time, Noriega was the CIA's top-paid informant in Latin America, netting $200,000 a year to report on the activities of such figures as Fidel Castro, with whom the Panamanian government of General Omar Torrijos was on friendly terms. Bush faithfully protected this relationship. In 1976, the Pentagon's National Security Agency established an eavesdropping post in Panama to monitor electronic communications throughout the Caribbean. Later that year, NSA chief Lew Allen Jr. contacted CIA chief Bush to complain that Noriega had bribed US personnel for tapes intercepted at the station. The tapes eventually wound up in the hands of Fidel Castro. Despite pressure from the NSA, Bush refused to investigate the matter or support prosecuting the US personnel involved, which would have exposed Noriega's role. In 1981, Noriega's boss General Torrijos, who three years earlier had signed the treaty with Jimmy Carter providing for the return of the Canal Zone which bristles with the elite military installations of to Panamanian control by the year 2000, the US Southern Command was killed in a mysterious air accident. Many Panamanians saw the CIA's hand behind the "accident," and indeed figures such as Gen. John Singlaub had been furious over the treaty. In any event, Noriega came to power just in time to assume his vital role in the Bush-ProDem drive airstrips in northern

—

—

—

to destabilize the Sandinistas. sides, much as Bush has throughBush knew that Noriega's arms networks were aiding leftist rebels in Colombia and El Salvador as well as the right-wing Contras, and that Noriega would not compromise on Panamanian control of the Canal Zone. So after the Contragate scandal broke, Noriega was more useful as a scapegoat. Bush dropped him, and the US launched a campaign to unseat him. One of the complicated deals which fell apart as Noriega and the White House broke ranks was a shipment of East Bloc weapons which Noriega arranged to send to El Salvador, where they were to be "discov-

However, Noriega was playing both

out his career.

—a 24

ered" and falsely used as evidence that the Sandinistas were smuggling

arms arms

to the Salvadoran

FMLN

According to a Miami shipment of East

revolutionaries.

money

dealer quoted in Newsweek, the

German weapons came from South

Africa

for the

—one of the countries

with Saudi Arabia and the Sultanate of Brunei) that

ProDem

(along

up for Contra donations. But as the deal fell apart, Noriega confiscated both the weapons and the freighter carrying them as they were docked in a

Panama

hit

harbor.

In 1989, Bush, then in his first year as president, delivered a Christ-

mas

present to

Panama: a

military invasion, which blatantly violated

the very international law that Bush would later invoke against Iraqi

strongman Saddam Hussein

— another

Bush client-turned-adversary

The invasion human rights orga-

following his annexation of Kuwait the following year.

claimed up to 4,000

lives,

according to Panamanian

nizations, in contrast to the

leaked out of

Bush administration

Panama of massive

piles of corpses

figure of 300.

Reports

being burned with flame

throwers, the remains buried in mass graves. Resistance was particularly

Panama City, which was levbombardment. The use of the new high-tech but still not battle-tested Stealth bomber in the invasion was a dry run for the far more devastating war with Iraq, much as Hitler's bombardment of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War had been a dry run for Luftwaffe campaigns in World War II. But the truth of the Panama invasion's brutality didn't sink in because of the almost complete White House control of the media, with

strong in the poor barrio of El Chorillo in eled by

US

aerial

hand-chosen reporters organized into Pentagon-guided "press pools"

—

strategy which had been pioneered in the 1983 Reagan-Bush invasion of

Grenada, which itself tested the American press and public's new tolerance for military aggression. The media control in Panama was likewise a dry run for the upcoming cataclysm in the Persian Gulf. Embarrassing facts concerning Bush's ties to Noriega largely overThe campaign manager for Bush's 1988 running mate Dan Quayle was a former Reagan White House political advisor named Stuart Spencer who had been employed as a "consultant" (i.e. a paid snoop on Washington affairs) by Noriega in 1986, just as the General's relations with Bush and the White House were turning looked by the media are legion.

—

sour.

The

who had on drug-trafficking charges, to justice.

invasion had ostensibly been launched to bring Noriega,

been indicted

in

US

federal court

But upon being sentenced to 40 years

in

US

federal prison in July 1992,

25

Noriega told the court that the case against him reeked of a "strong He maintained that Bush had only dropped him because he had refused to go along with US plans for an invasion of Nicaragua, political odor."

and that Bush had offered him enough cash for a comfortable lifetime in would cede power quietly. It was only his refusal to cooperate which got him into hot water with the White House. "Why weren't the real drug traffickers offered this?" the General asked, and then answered exile if he

own question: "They couldn't offer anything of interest in exchange. They couldn't offer territory for military bases. Nor could they offer the his

canal beyond the year 2000." Indeed, several high-level coke smugglers that the

much energy

snaring in the

first

place were sprung in

US had expended exchange for their

testimony against Noriega.

Noriega himself had merely been a pawn of the Colombian Cartel and laundering

kingpins. His role was to protect the Cartel's smuggling

America and the Caribbean in exchange for a cut of the profits. But Carlos Lehder, a founder and top boss of the Medellin Cartel, who was serving a life term at Marion Federal Penitentiary after he had been captured in an elaborate government snare, was among those who profited from the Noriega trial. When Lehder told federal investigators that he knew nothing about Noriega's involvement in the coke trade, he was in solitary confinement. But when Bush's Justice Department offered him freedom in exchange for his cooperation, his memory suddenly improved. He was immediately removed from the notoriously harsh Marion to a secret location, his family was brought to the US and placed in a witness protection program, and negotiations were launched on dramatically reducing his sentence. Eleven other such networks

in Central

deals with convicted drug runners were struck. Noriega's personal pilot,

Floyd Carlton, facing

life

imprisonment with no chance of parole until he

agreed to testify against his former boss, was sprung in December 1991 after serving three years.

work permits

He and

his wife

US residency and Other star witnesses were

were given

in addition to over $200,000.

allowed to keep up to $4 million in drug assets.

The Bush administration

apparently had priorities other than stopping the drug trade in their zeal to place Noriega behind bars.

One obvious

motive: to silence Noriega, or to discredit anything he

might say about Bush complicity with drug cared to look, the evidence actually

wound up

came out

traffickers.

in the trial.

For those

who

Carlos Lehder

testifying under defense cross-examination that the Medellin

Cartel had funnelled $10 million to the Contras at the behest of the

26

CIA. He

also testified that a

him a "green

light to bring

US

vice-consul in

Colombia had

offered

drugs into the United States" in exchange

running arms to the Contras. Floyd Carlton

for Cartel cooperation in

he had overseen arms flights to the Contras during the

testified that

same time that he was flying drugs from Colombia more evidence the defense tried to present linking

for the Cartel.

the

CIA

Even

to the coke

trade was censored under the Classified Information Procedures Act or ruled inadmissible by Judge William Hoeveler

that even mentioned the

One

— including

all

testimony

name George Bush.

defense brief which slipped through the

CIA

censors aired ev-

idence that Noriega had used his smuggling network to send Exocet missiles (the French version of the

ing the 1982 Falklands officially sided

the

with the

CIA remained

US

Cruise missile) to Argentina dur-

War— at the behest of the UK in the brief-but-bloody

CIA! While the US conflict,

loyal to Argentine military dictatorship

elements in which they

were then wooing as a source of funds and training for the Contras.

One Exocet

scored a direct hit on the British frigate Sheffield, killing 20

troops.

Meanwhile,

Panama

the

DEA

reports

that

the flow of cocaine through

has more than quadrupled under the US-installed Panamanian

—

despite the heavy hand the US milPanama law enforcement, and the existence of a "shadow cabinet" made up of Pentagon personnel running the country in cooperation with the parallel Endara administration. The 300pound Endara is himself a former board member of Interbanco, named

government of Guillermo Endara itary has been taking in

by the

DEA

after the invasion as a key link in the Medellin Cartel's

money-laundering schemes, and has served as treasurer of several other companies fingered by the DEA as involved in laundering drug profits. Endara has also opened Panama-registered front companies for DIN A, the notoriously brutal secret police of former Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet, with former DINA chief Manuel Contreras, who is wanted in the US for the murder of former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier. Endara's Attorney General Rogelio Cruz has been slow to launch investigations of Interbanco and other sleazy outfits in Panama, and is himself a former board member of First Interamericas Bank, closed down in 1985 by Noriega under US pressure after disclosures that it was depository of the Cali Cartel, Medellin's chief rival in the cocaine trade.

Economic conditions

in

Panama

are agonizing, post-invasion

US

aid

to the country has been minimal, and the Endara government has been denied access to the personal millions Noriega had sequestered in US

27

banks.

The Tower Omission Bush rode out Contragate by exploiting the political connections he had long been cultivating. In 1987, Reagan was forced to appoint a panel to probe the scandal. The so-called Tower Commission was led by ex-Senator John Tower, one of Bush's oldest political alUes and a former employer of Robert McFarlane, the former Reagan NSC chief. McFarlane was himself deeply imphcated in the scandal, having undertaken secret diplomatic missions to Iran to expedite the arms deals. Another leader of the Tower Commission was Brent Scowcroft, who had served as NSC chief in the Ford administration when Bush was CIA chief. The only member of the Commission not personally linked to Bush was Ed Muskie, who had been Carter's Secretary of State. Predictably, the Tower Commission focused narrowly on the Contra kickback from the 1985 arms shipment to Iran which had been a bribe for the release of hostages taken in Lebanon the previous year. The Commission did not examine the humongous arms shipments from 1981

many accounts dwarfed the $30 million 1985 probe allegations that these earlier shipments had been

to 1984, which according to deal.

Nor did

it

bribes for the release of the original Tehran embassy hostages.

Two key Contragate players had been involved in Carter's disastrous hostage "rescue mission" in April 1980, which resulted in eight US personnel being killed as a helicopter crashed in the Iranian desert. the

commandos

One

of

assigned to lead the elite Delta Force mission was Oliver

North, apparently suggested to Carter for his "heroism" in Vietnam. Afman Carter appointed to draw up a follow-up

ter the mission failed, the

who had worked closely with North and Singlaub in Indochina. Secord never arrived at a workable plan. Secord would later become a ProDem operative and would be convicted on felony charges for his Contragate involvement in the federal trials which followed the Congressional probe of the scandal. Were the men who suggested North and Secord to Carter among those secretly working for the Reagan-Bush? Was the "rescue mission" failure intentional?

plan was General Richard Secord,

Interestingly,

to Carter's

Perot,

NSC

who had

among

those

who

served as "rescue mission" advisors

chief Zbigniew Brzezinski,

was Texas

vate paramilitary team to spring employees of his

who were stranded had been

jailed

billionaire H.

Ross

own pricomputer firm, EDS,

organized a successful rescue mission with his

(The EDS employees an embezzling scheme while do-

in Iran after the revolution.

by the Shah's regime

in

28

ing contract work for the tyrant's brutal secret police, SAVAK.) Perot had also funded expeditions to Indochina to search for POWs and MIAs by Green Beret veteran "Bo" Gritz, the "real-life Rambo," who would run for the presidency with neo-Nazi David Duke in 1988 on the radicalright Populist Party ticket. Perot would later provide funds to Oliver North as ransom for Bill Buckley, the CIA Beirut station chief then being held hostage by the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. (The ransom didn't work— Hezbollah killed Buckley.) Perot also pro-

ProDem with funds to purchase a small Danish-registered Erna, for their arms-smuggling operations. In 1982, Perot would be appointed to Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. vided North's

freighter, the

This raises questions about Perot's recent abortive presidential campaign against Bush. Perot chose to highlight the case of self-proclaimed

CIA

him in his Reagan team's

agent Russ Russbacher, sending emissaries to meet with

prison

cell.

Of all

the people

deals with Iran, Russbacher

making is

allegations about the

among

the most suspect.

(He claims to

be the offspring of an arranged marriage between a top-ranking Nazi intelligence officer

and East European

nobility,

groomed from

birth for

among camp secretly working for Reagan-Bush, then he from muddying the record about what happened in 1980.

a powerful role

in the

world espionage community.)

If

Perot was

those in the Carter

stands to gain

Perot dropped out of the presidential race after one of his top cam-

paign advisors quit, leaving his team in disarray. This was none other

CPD and Team B. Under the Reagan administration, both the Delta Force and FEMA would be implicated in gun-laundering schemes aimed at diverting US military stocks to the Contras. Reagan appointed his old friend Louis Giuffrida head of FEMA. Giuffrida had been California National Guard chief under Governor Reagan, and was deeply involved in Project Garden Plot, President Nixon's secret plan to suspend the US Constitution. As FEMA chief, Giuffrida drew up a similar "contingency plan" for martial law, in collaboration with NSC-FEMA liaison Oliver North and White House "crisis management" pointman George Bush. A 1984 FEMA "readiness exercise," REX-84 ALPHA, was a trial run for martial law, with FEMA taking command of all Pentagon personnel and National Guard units. The projected scenario was a US invasion of Nicaragua, sparking massive domestic protest and sending a flood of Central Amer-

than Paul Nitze, Bush's old friend from the

ican refugees over the Rio Grande.

REX-84

ALPHA

included a dry

run for rounding up refugees and detaining them, along with anti-war protesters, on ten predesignated military bases. The FEMA martial

29

law plan was leaked to the Miami Herald, but when North was questioned about it during the nationally broadcast Congressional hearings on Contragate, his testimony was squelched before he could even answer, as hearing chair Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii protested that this was a sensitive matter of "national security." North's testimony on the FEMA plan was scuttled to the Executive Session, which was closed to the media and public.

Despite the Congressional probe and the indictments of figures like

North, McFarlane and Secord (rather than Reagan and Bush), the Con-

Casey conveniently died of a The Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1989 by a Nicaraguan populace weary of war, bringing to power an administration which includes former Contra tra operations were largely successful.

brain tumor mere days before he was scheduled to testify.

leaders.

The Contra-cocaine connection streets of the

mosphere

US

also served the domestic agenda. The were flooded with coke, creating the expedient at-

for beefing

up the

DEA

budget, dramatically expanding the

nation's prison systems, and further militarizing the inner cities.

Hinckleygate and Other Mysteries White House behind-the-scenes power certainly started to shift to Bush before Reagan's first term was over. In her book, Barbara Honegger actually suggests that the attempted assassination of Reagan in Washington in March 1981 was a Bush plot. She cites a December 1981 report in Jack Anderson's column that Tony Rollini, stateside contact for the Iran-backed Islamic Guerilla Army, told the Secret Service ten days after Reagan's inauguration that John Hinckley Jr. was gunning for the new president. Honegger also says that White House senior reporter Sarah McClendon told her that Reagan's Secret Service guard were not in their usual tight formation around the president as he left the auditorium where he had just delivered a speech and was hit by the bullet. On the NBC News Special Report immediately following the shooting, correspondent Judy Woodruff" maintained on the air that at least one shot came from an overhang above the limo Reagan was about to enter. Some hypothesize that the shot that entered Reagan came from the overhang, since Hinckley would have had to fire straight through a car door to hit him from his angle. (Doctors explained it as a ricochet.) Hinckley's bizarre explanation that he had attempted to assassinate the president to win the love of actress Jody Foster has also raised eyebrows. Some maintain that Hinckley, like Oswald, was a

30

"Manchurian candidate," a mind-control patsy, pointing to his history and neo-Nazi ideology. In any event, it is clear that there were connections between the Bush and Hinckley families. On the night of the shooting, Hinckley's brother Scott had a dinner date with Bush's son Neil in Denver, where Neil was a prominent banker, and Scott was involved in his dad John Hinckley Sr.'s Vanderbilt Energy Company. Before Vanderbilt relocated to Denver in the early '70s, it was based in Texas, where, according to some sources, it had once received a large cash bail-out in a time of need from Bush's Zapata. Vanderbilt seems to have existed mostly on paper, and some speculate that it was a CIA dummy company. In 1983, two psychiatric treatment and his dabbling in the occult

years after the Hinckley

affair,

Vanderbilt folded.

Honegger also sees an Irangate connection in the 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. The Swedish Justice Ministry actually launched a probe of Bani Sadr's allegations that Khomeini was behind the Palme assassination. Bani-Sadr claims the killing may have been in retaliation for Palme's recent decision to postpone an alreadypurchased shipment of missiles from the Swedish arms firm Bofors to Iran until after that year's elections. Danish Press journalist Agmete Vistar reported after the assassination that Stephano della Chiaie of Italy's fascist P2 Masonic lodge had boasted that he knew who killed Palme. Honegger maintains that Swedish arms dealers were deeply involved in ProDem plots to launder NATO arms for diversion to Iran, and that one informant told her that P2's Licio Gelli sent a telegram to an associate just before

FELLED

...

read: THE SWEDISH TREE WILL BE TELL OUR GOOD FRIEND BUSH.

Palme death that

Nuclear War?

No Problem!

Bush and Casey were the two Eastern Establishment figures in an many ways the Reagan administration was a restoration of the predominantly Cowboy Nixon administration. Reagan CIA chief Bill Casey had been Nixon's SEC chief. P.eagan Secretary of State Alexander Haig had been a Vietnam "peace" negotiator on Kissinger's team in the Nixon administration. Haig was administration dominated by Cowboys. In

sacked

in

1982 for being too openly power-hungry.

His replacement,

George Schultz, had been Nixon's Treasury Secretary. Like Reagan's Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (former Nixon Health Secretary, later to face an indictment on charges of withholding evidence from the Contragate inquiry), Schultz v/as a top executive of the Bechtel corporation. Eastern Establishmentarian and former Nixon White House NSC

31

and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was also brought back to Reagan's Central America policy of terror and repression. (It is interesting to note that Haig was sacked a few months after

chief

map

With Reagan sud-

his bizarre behavior during the Hinckley episode.

denly hospitalized with a chest wound, Haig appeared before the

cameras

full

of bluster, claiming to be "in control."

Of

course,

TV

Bush was

and probably perceived Haig's unseemly display of naked ambition as a threat.) But Bush and Casey were also instrumental in getting key figures from the CPD nuclear-hawk wing of the Eastern Establishment on the Reagan team. With the collapse of the Carter forces, both the CPD and the Trilateral Commission had been officially disbanded, but the really next in the presidential succession,

rival exist.

Eastern Establishment tendencies they represented continued to

The massive expansion

of the nuclear arsenal which

had been

started in Carter's final year accelerated monstrously under Reagan,

even reaching the Final Frontier with plans for the space-based antimissile system

known

as the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star

In another Orwellian move,

head of the Arms Team B chairman

Control

CPD k.

nuclear

Wars.

hawk Eugene Rostow became

Disarmament Agency.

CPD

bigwig and

Richard Pipes became the top "Soviet expert" on

Reagan's NSC. CPD founder and Team B veteran Paul Nitze became Reagan's key negotiator on European nuclear forces. In the early '80s, as the US placed Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe and the Soviets placed their counterparts, the SS-20s, in Eastern Europe,

doomsday clock seemed closer to midnight than ever before. Reagan made calculatedly off'-the-cuff" remarks about launching nuclear apocalypse, such as "we begin bombing in five minutes," and told

the

reporters

how he believed in fundamentalist Christian eschatology, which Armageddon is imminent. Haig said the US should consider

holds that

a nuclear "warning shot" over Eastern Europe to intimidate the Soviets. Giuffrida said FEMA could "do New York in five days" in the event

was Bush who came up with a preRobert Scheer: "You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict upon you." When Scheer asked him if two percent would survive. Bush replied: "More than that. If everybody fired everything he had, you'd have more than that survive."

of an emergency evacuation.

It

scription for "winning" a nuclear war, telling reporter

32

Nazigate If

the Reagan-Bush tent had

room for Harvard blue-bloods

like Nitze,

it also had room for more "unsavory" elements who shared the basic agenda of defeat for the Soviet empire: real live, bona-fide fascists.

Upon

returning from his 1985

V-E Day

visit to

the graves of Nazi

SS officers at Bitburg, Reagan attended a Washington banquet hosted by a GOP cabal which had worked with conservative elements in the USA's Eastern European emigre community to bring the Reagan-Bush team votes in 1980. This was the National Republican Heritage Groups Council, a network of aging Nazi collaborators who had fled Eastern Europe after World War II and still maintained links to the international fascism network. As Russ Bellant reports in his book Old Nazis & the New Right, the NRHGC leadership is made up almost entirely of veterans of Nazi-collaborationist regimes in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Belarus and Croatia, as well as Italian

members

of the fascist

Masonic lodge P2.

Bush attended a Michigan banquet hosted by the Captive where he delivered a hawkish speech to an audiCommittee, Nations Ukrainians and Byelorussians. Bush shared the dais ultra-right ence of leader of the Byelorussian-American Veterans with Dr. Joseph Sazyc, made up not of US Army veterans, but an organization Association partisan groups which fought the War II veterans of Nazi-backed World In 1988,

—

US-allied Soviet

Army.

The 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign was

assisted by a film attacking

Carter's arms treaty with the Soviets, entitled The SALT Syndrome, produced by the American Security Council, a branch of the far-right

WACL

network. Starting in 1985, the

ASC

held regular Tuesday morn-

ing meetings in Washington with Oliver North and other NSC staff. In 1987, Senator Dan Quayle of the Senate Armed Services Committee ad-

dressed a luncheon hosted by the

plan with defense contractors.

ASC

to boost Reagan's

In 1986, the

ASC

SDI/Star Wars

hosted a Washington

by Jonas Savimbi, leader of UNITA, the "Contra" group in Angola backed by the CIA and the white supremacist South African regime. In 1981, the ASC hosted Salvadoran death-squad mastermind Roberto D'Aubuisson at an official Wcishington banquet, and in 1987 hosted a visit

D'Aubuisson 's successor in the extremewas in town to win support in Congress his presidential candidacy. (The bid was successful. The US threw support behind Christiani, and he is now president of El Salvador.) In 1988, two prominent Bush campaign figures were forced to quit

banquet right for its

for Alfredo Christiani,

ARENA

party. Christiani

33

under pressure from Jewish groups and Nazi-hunters because of their affiliations with anti-Semitism and fascism. One was campaign advisor Frederic V. Malek, who, as a Nixon White House aide, was chosen to investigate what Tricky Dick, in his paranoiac ravings, called a "Jewish cabal" at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Malek compiled a list of Jews at the Bureau, many of whom were later summarily sacked by Nixon. Despite the flap in 1988, Malek would be quietly appointed manager of

Bush's 1992 campaign. other figure forced to drop from the 1988 Bush campaign was Jerome Brentar, a Croatian- American leader of the Coalition of Amergroup designed to get out ican Nationalities, another ultra-right

The

GOP

the "ethnic vote."

An

investigation by the Nazi-hunters at the

Simon

Wiesenthal Center revealed that Brentar was active in organizing international support for John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian emigre who was then facing trial in Israel for atrocities committed when he was a Treblinka death

camp

guard.

Two other members

of the Coalition of

Amer-

ican Nationalities cited by the Wiesenthal Center investigation but not

dropped from the campaign were Florian Galdau, New York chief of the Romania into a Nazi

Iron Guard, the anti-Semitic party which turned

War II, and Philip Guarino, a member of P2. Reagan became the first US president to admit to fascist sympathies when he told a reporter that he thought the Abraham Linduring World

satellite

In 1984,

coln Brigade, the volunteer militia of US citizens who fought to defend democracy against the Nazi-backed fascist forces of Generalissimo Franco in the Spanish Civil War, had been "fighting on the wrong side."

The

historic link

between the Nazi elements and the Harvard/Wall

Street elements has been the intelligence

community and the

military-

industrial complex, both of which incorporated top Nazi brains after

World War II. The Reagan-Bush SDI/Star Wars plan was directly based on a scheme hatched in the '50s by Third Reich commissar-turned-US Air Force consultant Walter Dornberger.

BAMBI,

Dornberger called his vision

Boost Intercept, and in a 1958 speech to push the project before a defense industry conference, Dornburger said: "We must conquer, occupy, keep and utilize space between Earth and Gentlemen, I didn't come to this country to lose the Third the Moon. for Ballistic Missile

.

World

.

.

War—

I

lost two."

25 years later, the technological wet dreams of this Nazi mad scientist would be resurrected by the Reagan administration as multi-million dollar contracts were doled out for

BAMBI/SDI.

.

34

The New World Order There was however, method to the madness. As the arms race ralled in the 1980s, Bush's old

CPD

spi-

friends were obviously pleased as

punch. But Bush had also been a Trilateralist, and by definition he had to be serving their interests as well, playing his old power game, which

was half mediation and half duplicity. After all, the CPD and the Trilathad the same ultimate aim: the defeat of the Soviet empire. The question was how to achieve that aim: through thermonuclear hardball or economic penetration? To be sure, there was something in the Bush agenda for the Trilateralists. The appearance that the White House was really gearing up for an atomic final conflict both appeased the nuclear hawks in the US ruling class and played into the hands of their counterparts in the Kremlin. But having to match each new US weapons system placed considerable stress on the Soviet economy. By the time the conciliatory Mikhail Gorbachev started to make peace overtures to the West and open the USSR up to capitalist investment in the late '80s, it was becoming obvious how Bush had forged a strategy which at least appeased the Trilateralists. Militarization invariably takes a grave toll on a nation's economy, and throughout history empires have been pushed to the point of collapse by the necessity of maintaining far-flung military machines beyond the economic capacity to support them: a pattern which has repeated itself from the decline of the Romans following the Punic Wars to the decline of the British following the World Wars. Bush was gambling that the USSR, with dramatically inferior economic resources to the US, would be pushed to the point of collapse first and could then be dismantled and economically appropriated by western capitalism. Ultimately, the eralists also

.

.

—

strategy worked.

But there were two contending superpower.

final strategic ploys in this drive to

One was

topple the

luring the Soviets into the virtually

Wars program. The other was keeping Soviet troops mired in the equally hopeless counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan. Both would represent a veritable hemorrhage of impossible task of matching the Star

Soviet resources, and in both cases the myopic Kremlin leadership sui-

The problem was that in driving the Soviets to Bush drove the US to the very brink of collapse. And the CIA's Afghan operation, like the Contra-cocaine ops, was deflected back upon the US populace in the form of a wave of deadly drugs.

cidally took the bait. collapse,

35

Afghanigate Although

it

never received a fraction of the media coverage, the CIA's

many

Afghanistan operation was

times larger than the Contra campaign

against Nicaragua. In Afghanistan, the CIA-backed Mujaheddin

army

was fighting brutal Soviet occupation troops, not idealistic revolutionaries like the Sandinistas. But the Mujaheddin were even more brutal and

Some shared the Islamic fundamentalist US enemy regime in Iran. And, like the Contras,

reactionary than the Contras.

ideology of the

official

they turned to the drug trade as a means of augmenting their war chest.

By

1988,

US

lion

CIA support

for the

since the operation began in 1980.

reported in a 1989 the

Mujaheddin had reached 700 mil-

tax dollars per year, totalling $2 billion in smuggled weapons

CIA

itself

series,

But, as the Philadelphia Inquirer

the arms pipeline was extremely leaky, with

estimating that one out of every five dollars in weapons

destined for the Mujaheddin "disappeared" along the way.

up

in the

corrupt

hands offending

army

officials in

tribal chieftains in the

They wound

Afghan mountains and

Pakistan, the country which served as a stag-

ing ground for the Mujaheddin forces.

Fiefdoms based on the region's suddenly booming opium trade proliferated, and in the early '80s the Pakistan-Afghanistan "Golden Crescent" surpassed the Laos-Thailand-

Burma "Golden

Triangle" as the top global source of heroin.

production areas were

in zones of

Mujaheddin control

in the

The opium mountain-

ous Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, while the secret labs which refined the crop into heroin were established in Peshawar, the Pakistani mountain city from which Mujaheddin resupply was coordinated. The

same

mule convoys carrying weapons to the Afghan from Peshawar carried opium on the way back. The US State Department's own annual study on the global drug trade noted in 1989 that Afghan opium production had jumped from 400 to 800 metric tons between 1985 and 1988. Corrupt elements in the Pakistani miUtary and planes, trucks and

guerillas

ISID, the brutal secret police of Dictator Zia ul-Haq, grew obscenely rich.

A

compliant bank was needed to launder the astronomical profits. fast cash. But the systematic falsification of

Money laundering means

records and skirting of regulations take their

toll,

and banks

built

around

such shady operations usually crumble after a brief era of spectacular growth. This had been the fate of Australia's Nugan-Hand Bank, which

laundered the "secret team" profits from the Southeast Asian heroin

and Italy's P2-linked Banco Ambrosiano, depository of the Sicilian Mafia and Europe's right-wing terror network. But the Pakistan-based

deals,

— 36

Bank

of Credit

k Commerce

International

(BCCI) was

willing to take

the bait.

The BCCI Octopus BCCI became

the world's largest money-laundering operation preAfghan war became the CIA's largest covert operation and precisely as the Golden Crescent became the largest source of global heroin. With cash infusions from the oil-rich Abu Dhabi Persian Gulf cisely as the

sheikdom, the ambitious BCCI started to prowl the world for the ecisy money of laundering for drug-and-arms smuggling operations ^just as

—

was exploding due to the new US military strategy masterminded by the Reagan-Bush team of "LIC" Low-Intensity Conflict Pentagonspeak for using CIA-directed local surrogate forces instead of sending actual US troops into potential quagmires. This was another compromise between the comparatively conciliatory Trilateralists and the intervention-at-any-cost wing of the ruling class. The protests which shook the nation during the Vietnam war proved that direct intervention was politically inexpedient at least for the moment. The problem with LIC was that it meant working with the ugliest elements in the target including brutal right-wing terrorists and drug traffickers. A countries this global trade

:

—

—

brief look at the historical record, however, reveals that the

rarely been

squeamish about

CIA

has

this sort of thing.

As the LIC strategy established the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua, into Latin America, becoming the top depository for Northe iega and the Medellin Cartel, as well as the government of Peru

BCCI moved

—

country which produces the raw coca leaf which at the Cartel labs in

was established

is

refined into cocaine

Colombia. As an LIC counterinsurgency program General Singlaub),

in the Philippines (with the aid of

BCCI became the top depository of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. As US intrigues in the Persian Gulf War escalated, BCCI was used for money laundering by both Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Iran-backed Hezbollah

terrorists.

While BCCI was the CIA's first truly global bank, both Bush and the Agency denied knowing anything about it when the scandal broke in 1987 despite the fact that Washington's most prestigious bank. First American Bankshares, proved to be secretly owned by BCCI!

—

Ironically, the scandal broke because of Bush's falling-out iega.

In 1988, former Noriega intelligence chief Jose

to

Washington and agreed

in

testimony before Congress.

to spill the beans

Bush was

on

with Nor-

Blandon defected

his boss's corruption

ecstatic.

The only problem

37

was keeping a

lid

on Blandon's

politically inexpedient revelations

—such

on US Congressmen investigating him, such as John Kerry of Massachusetts and Jesse Helms of North Carolina! But one wrinkle would come back to haunt Bush: Blandon fingered BCCI as the most important bank in the Medellin Cartel's Panamanian money-laundering network that Noriega protected. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau subsequently launched an investigation of BCCI's stateside frontmen. Bush's claim to have been in the dark about BCCI's slimy deals is no more believable than his claim to have known nothing about Noriega's drug-trafficking until the General was indicted in 1988. Recently indicted on charges related to BCCI's secret takeover of First American Bankshares is the Washington bank's former chairman Clark Clifford, as the fact that the

as longtime

DC

CIA had provided Noriega with

insider,

White House and

later

who

dossiers

started his career as an aide in the

became Secretary

Truman

of Defense under President

Johnson. Also facing a probable indictment for helping hide the slime in

BCCI's stateside deals

is

Sheik

Kamal Adham,

intelligence chief for

the Saudi Arabian monarchy and the CIA's top liaison in the Middle

— doubtless a man Bush has had plenty of close dealings with. When Jimmy Carter's friend and former White House budget pointman Bert Lance was implicated in BCCI's illegal takeover of the NaEast

tional

Bank of Georgia, he

scandal that he

"felt

BCCI in BCCI official

agency to co-opt

A

top-level

subcommittee investigating the was obviously an effort by our intelligence an effort to turn it into the bank of the CIA." backed up Lance's statement, while the CIA told a Senate

there

issued an official denial.

The scandal finally touched the Bush White House in the fall of when Sheik Adham, feeling the heat of stateside investigators on his trail, hired one Edward M. Rogers to provide "legal services" to the tune of $600,000. Rogers had just one month earlier left the White 1991,

House, where he was an aide to Bush's chief of staff John Sununu. Rogers virtually no previous legal experience, and many speculate his real job was to swing influence in DC.

had

Naziv Chinoy, the head of BCCI's Paris branch also admitted

in Sen-

was co-signatory on a BCCI account linked to Iran-backed terrorist groups in Lebanon evidence that North's arms-for-hostages deals began before 1985. North denied having signed the account, just as Bush denied knowing about the Adhamate testimony that in 1984 Oliver North

—

Rogers deal.

Reagan-Bush campaign aide James Lake

is

hired as a stateside

PR

— 38

man

by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the majority-owner of BCCI. A Lake representative told reporter James Ridgeway of the Village Voice that Lake was retained to help "explain" the Abu Dhabi

Investment Authority's "attitude" and "possible impact"

in

the event

that "various federal agencies could possibly take action on matters re-

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority's interests" in BCCI. When BCCI finally folded in 1991, investors worldwide were wiped out overnight — including many small middle class investors who lost lated to the

their life's savings.

Small Scottish hamlets as well as impoverished na-

Panama and Peru had

their coffers drained by the bank's coland furious middle-class investors battled the police in the streets of Hong Kong. But BCCI had served its purpose along with the LIC strategy. The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, shortly before the Warsaw Pact, and then the USSR itself, crumbled. (Two of the first US corporations to move into the ex-USSR would be Pennzoil and Bechtel exploiting, repsectively, oil and bauxite in the Russian republic.) Feuding heavily-armed Mujaheddin factions continue to battle for control of Afghanistan's capital, the "moderate" faction which currently holds power has a policy of public hangings following secret trials for such oflfenses as adultery and hashish smoking, and it seems clear that the Soviet withdrawal will mean neither peace nor freedom for the Afghani people. And the operations also took their toll at home. A heroin plague swept through Europe and America, hastening the collapse of the inner cities into nightmares of violence and despair. US financial institutions crumbed, and social programs were gutted in order to fund the drive

tions like

lapse,

—

towards world domination.

More

Tentacles of

The $800

billion

The Octopus taxpayer bailout of the failed Savings

&

Loans

is

a direct result of the deregulation policies which effectively dismantled the safeguards established during the Great Depression by President

boomed

in the

1980s, suburban sprawl spread like a malignant growth across the

Amer-

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As the real estate industry ican landscape, while soaring tents created an agonizing

wave of urban

Crack appeared on the scene in 1986, just as the Reagan administration unleashed its War On Drugs propaganda and sent troops and helicopters to chase coca producers in Bolivia (where the government itself is deeply enmeshed in the coke trade). This served both foreign and domestic homelessness, contributing to the coke and heroin epidemics.

39

interests. It gave the Pentagon an excuse to station choppers and conduct military exercises in Bolivia, just as a Maoist guerilla insurgency

was starting to threaten the corrupt government of Peru across Bolivia's western border. At home, the War On Drugs became the justification

—

expanding the prison systems and police apparatus as well as imposing on the populace a wave of urine tests, a ritualized submission to authoritarianism which violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments

for vastly

US

of the

The

Constitution.

laundering operations for the LIC ops. The

named is

moneyand S&L's

looting of the financial institutions was also linked to the

as handling

money

list

of failed banks

for intelligence operatives

and organized crime

long and sordid. As Stephen Pizzo relates in his book Inside Job, the

failed Indian Springs State

Bank

in

Kansas, which handled large sums

of Teamsters pension- funds money, loaned $1 million to Farhad Azima, the Iranian chief of Global International Airways, part of "secret team"

rogue

Ed Wilson's Middle East gun-running network. The failed Aurora Colorado was linked by self-proclaimed CIA operative Heinrich

Bank

in

Rupp

to Contra money-laundering operations. Ex-exec Robert

of the failed First National to arrange financing for

Bank

of

Maryland said

his

Maxwell

employers told him

arms shipments through a CIA front company.

This web of scandal would also touch figures close to Bush. Over 100 Reagan appointees were implicated in sleaze ranging from influence peddling at the Department of Housing torney General Ed Meese's

eff'orts

&

Urban Development

to grease his friends at the

defense contractor Wedtech and entrepreneurs hoping to build a pipeline through Iraq by arranging

US government

funds.

to At-

New York new

oil

But Reagan

was never as closely linked to the various scandals surrounding him as is George Bush who lies at the very epicenter of a putrid cesspool of

—

globe-spanning corruption.

All In the Family

As Washington correspondent Jack Colhoun Covert Action Information Bulletin, nearly every

mediate family

is

mired

recently reported in

member

in slimy deals exploiting their

of Bush's im-

connections in

the worlds of crime, intelligence and big business. In 1989, Prescott

Bush

Jr.,

George's brother, was hired as a con-

sultant by the Wall Street firm Asset

Management in a joint venture with the Chinese government to develop the People's Republic's communications system. The deal was contingent on $300 million worth of satellites to be supplied by Hughes Aircraft.

The

satellite transfer

40

J=»R.

was barred under the sanctions Congress imposed after the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing that year. But the sanctions had only been in place one month before George Bush lifted them, citing

Management Tokyo investment firm by the Yakuza crime syn-

the "national interest." Prescott also served as an Asset

consultant

in their

take-over by West Tsusho, a

which Japanese authorities say is controlled dicate. The Yakuza uses investment firms to launder their annual $10 billion profits from drug trafficking, prostitution, extortion and racketeering. Asset Management went under immediately after the take-over, and Prescott Jr. is now facing litigation from West Tsusho. Prescott also served on the advisory board of Americares, the "charitable organiza-

41

tion" which delivered food

and medicine to the Contras' Honduran base

camps.

Son George Bush

on the board of Harken Energy, which in 1990 oil rights in the Persian Gulf island emirate of Bahrain, the southern half of which would later be turned into a rest-and- relaxation playhouse for US troops in Operation Desert Storm. Lying immediately south of Kuwait, Bahrain was believed by many to have granted Harken the deal to buy the friendship of the White House, especially since George Jr.'s business record has largely been one of failure. In 1987, Harken was underwritten to the tune of $25 million by a Swiss bank which was in a joint venture with BCCI. Jackson Stephens, the Arkansas investor and Reagan-Bush campaign contributor who arranged the BCCI Harken investment, was also implicated in BCCI's take-over of First American Bankshares. (In 1992, Stephens would beJr. is

signed a deal for the sole offshore

come the top contributor to Bill Clinton's presidential bid.) Top figures monarchy are prominent BCCI investors. George Jr. was also censured for violating SEC regulations when he dumped two-thirds

in Bahrain's

of his Harken stock for a cool 200 percent profit in 1990, just before

Harken Director Alan Quasha is the son represented Pentagon operative LeRoy Manor when he faced litigation in the Philippines over his involvement in Nugan-Hand money-laundering operations. Small world. the stock took a nose dive.

of Bill Quasha, an attorney

who

George's eldest son Jeb, a Miami real-estate developer with strong the right-wing Cuban and Nicaraguan exile communities, was an employee of Miguel Recarey Jr., whose International Medical Centers Corporation (IMC) was embezzling Medicare funds to provide the Conties to

tras with medical supplies. In 1984,

company

IMC

received a waiver from federal

more than half its income from Medicare, an essential part of the skimming scam for which Recarey would be indicted. While Jeb was ostensibly hired to find a new headquarters for IMC, and was paid a $75,000 fee, he never did find them a regulations, allowing the

new get

building.

IMC

Was

to receive

Jeb's real role to use his

Washington connections to

the waiver? Recarey, a longtime close associate of Miami's top

mobster Santos Trafficante, fled to Venezuela. The Bush administration has made no eff"ort to extradite him. Other former Recarey employees

Lyn

Reagan White House aide who was convicted Wedtech scandal. Jeb was also chair of the Dade County Republican Party when it accepted a $2,200 contribution from Leonel Martinez, a Cuban-American supporter of the Contras who would be arrested for coke smugghng in

include

Nofziger, the

in 1981 of illegal lobbying in connection with the

42 1989. Martinez was also a contributor to the GOP Florida gubernatorial candidacy of Bob Martinez (no relation) in 1986, and to the Bush cam-

paign

Bush appointed Bob Martinez Drug

In 1991, President

in 1987.

Czar. In 1988, Jeb dal,

was mentioned

when a representative

Noriega's personal millions)

BCCI

officials

among

ently

Senate testimony on the

in

BCCI

scan-

BCCI-Miami (the branch which had hid named him as having met with Pakistani

of

more than once

in the early '80s,

and said he was appar-

the Washington contacts the corrupt bankers were trying

to cultivate. His

name

BCCI

ing between

also

shows up on a 1987

BCCI memo on One of the

reps and Florida state officials.

a meetFlorida

was Secretary of Commerce Jeb Bush. Jeb and business partner Armando Codina also profited from the federal bailout of Florida's Broward S&L. After Broward's collapse in 1988, the Bush administration decided to bail out the investors, with the FDIC absorbing several bad loans including one for $4.6 million by the Bush-Codina Partnership, allowing the partnership to retain possession of real estate on which they had defaulted. officials

—

Jeb also successfully lobbied the White House for the release of right-

wing Cuban

terrorist

Posada's partner tions

in Florida.

Bosch, Luis

Coordination of United Revolutionary Organiza-

(CORU), was serving time

firing in

Orlando Bosch from prison

in the

for

jumping bail on a 1968 conviction for in Miami harbor. He was paroled

a bazooka at a Polish freighter

1990 after Jeb's lobbying.

Perhaps the most corrupt Bush son is Neil, a former board member S&L, which was bailed out by US taxpayers to the tune of $1 billion. Neil was censured by federal authorities for failing to report his business partnership with Good International when of Denver's failed Silverado

he voted to approve a $900,000 Silverado credit line to the company.

Good, which exploring for ration

later defaulted oil in

Argentina

on multi-million loans to Silverado, was in a partnership with Neil's JNB Explo-

Company. Another major Good

a convicted Mafia operative in the

Marcello (linked by

New

investor

was Herman Beebe

Sr.,

Orleans crime machine of Carlos

many researchers to the JFK assassination). One Wayne Reeder, was a major borrower from Sil-

of Beebe's associates,

verado and defaulted on a $14 million loan. Reeder schemed to develop a munitions plant at California's Cabezon Indian reservation in a joint venture with Wackenhut, the government security contractor

made up

of former CIA and FBI men, and sell the munitions to the Contras. In another Silverado-Contra connection, one of the S&L's top borrowers, E.

43

Trine Starnes

Jr.,

was a major donor to the National Endowment

for the

Preservation of Liberty, run by Carl "Spitz" Channell, which funnelled private donations from right-wing groups to the Contras. Channell

the

first

man

was

indicted in the Contragate scandal, on money-laundering

charges. In addition to carrying on the family tradition of using personal

connections to help his offspring get ahead, President Bush also doled out powerful government posts to friends who had done his bidding in

Reagan years. At the top of the list is Robert Gates, who wcis CIA deputy director under Bill Casey in the critical period of the Contra and Afghan operations. Gates is now director of the CIA. John Tower, whose damage control as head of the Tower Commission was essential, was nominated Secretary of Defense although Congress failed to approve him due to allegations that he was a womanizer and a lush. Brent Scowcroft, who also served on the Tower Commission, became Bush's NSC chief. Thomas Pickering, who was Ambassador to El Salvador in the critical period from 1983 to '85, when the country was used a transfer point for Contra arms, and a revolutionary movement was met with death-squad terror, became Ambassador to the United Nations (where he would help Bush push through UN approval of Operation Desert Storm). John Negroponte, who had been Ambassador to Honduras in the critical 1981 to '85 period when the country was established as a staging ground for the Contras, became Ambassador to Mexico, a far more prestigious post (and where he is helping Bush push through his US-Mexico Free Trade Agreement). Donald Gregg, who ran interference with the Contras for Bush as a vice presidential aide, is now Ambassador to South Korea. Richard Armitage, a Defense Department aide in the Reagan White House who worked with Israeli agents in the Iran arms sales (and who is alleged by former Green Beret Bo Gritz to have been deeply involved in the Southeast Asia heroin trade), was nominated Secretary of the Army, but withdrew, apparently afraid of what the subsequent Senate hearings might bring to light. Armitage is currently coordinating distribution of US material aid to the former republics of the Soviet Union which, inthe

—

—

have been developing into a new source of global heroin since the Soviet collapse, with Central Asian opium being smuggled to the West by powerful new Russian crime syndicates.

cidentally,

Quaylegate Bush's choice of Indiana Senator

Dan Quayle,

as his 1988 running

44 mate, was probably a strategic move. The one thing that Quayle had for him, ironically, was his simpering idiocy.

going

If Bush did, indeed, close ranks with the conspiracy on John F. Kennedy's life, then he knew the lengths that elements of the power structure were willing to go to keep their perceived enemies out of the White House. Bush knew that certain far-right elements perceived him accurately as an Eastern Establishment insider who had elbowed

—

—

way into the Cowboy faction of the power elite. Those elements in the Reagan coalition doubtless recognized Bush as the Trilateral Commission's agent on the Cowboy Reagan team. In the relentlessly conhis

spiratorial world-view of the radical right, this fact carried implications

knew that those elements on Reagan spectrum which had been willing to tolerate a vice president would be far less willing to tolerate one

of betrayal and treachery. Bush doubtless the right of the Trilateralist as

The winds of political change could lead to another albetween these elements and reactionary sectors of the CIA and another alliance of the sort which had probably resulted the Pentagon in the JFK assassination. Bush needed "assassination insurace." That insurance was Dan Quayle a man who was such an obvious idiot that nobody would be comforatble with him in the Oval Office. as president. liance

—

—

(Quayle also served

cis

"impeachment insurance," helping to insure

that revelations about his involvement in Contragate would not force

Bush from

office, as

Nixon was forced from

office in

the

wake of Water-

gate.)

The

choice of Quayle as running mate, however, resulted in another

"October Surprise" in the 1988 elections. Just before the elections, Brett Kimberlin, a convict in an Oklahoma federal penitentiary, announced that he had sold marijuana to Dan Quayle on several occassions in the early 1970s and scheduled a press conference to spill the beans on November 4 ^just four days before the election. Prison authorities suddenly

—

had Kimberlin placed was hastily cancelled.

in solitary confinement,

Kimberlin's attorneys have

filed

and the press conference

a suit charging the Justice Depart-

ment with violating his First Amendment rights. With Bush and Quayle safely in the White House, Kimberlin was released from solitary confinement and transfered to another federal pen

—

Tennessee where he is now free to talk to the press. In a November interview with High Times senior editor Steve Bloom, Kimberlin speaks about his days as pot dealer to then-Indiana University law student Dan

in

Quayle: "Danny became a connoisseur.

One time

I

sold

him

shake.

He

45

said,

'I'll

pay you more

for buds.'"

Vice President Quayle's frequent verbal gaffes, of course, have become a source of ridicule for the media. But sometimes his goofs seem to tell

more about the

true

White House agenda than the Vice Pressuch as his pledge to work for "the

ident's evidently bereft intellect

elimination of

The

first

human

—

rights in El Salvador."

signs of a falling-out between

Bush and the

peared in the build-up to Operation Desert Storm

Pat Buchanan reasons

radical right ap-

— when figures such as

opposition to the war drive for the wrong

initially voiced

the anti-Semitic oversimplification that the drive against

(i.e.

Iraq was "Israel's war"). But, skillfully manipulating his globe-spanning international connections as well as the domestic media. to get his

war and turn

it

into a brilliant

propaganda

Bush was able

success.

Kuwaitgate With the cooperation of a compliant news media. Bush succeeded whipping the US into war fever following Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's annexation of Kuwait in August 1990. Saddam's invasion was indeed an act of aggression, but the US elites seem to have a double an insult standard. While Bush called Saddam "worse than Hitler" he seems to be quite capable of overto the victims of Auschwitz looking such acts of aggression as the US-backed, CIA-installed Indonesian Suharto dictatorship's 1975 annexation of the island nation of East Timor, and subsequent slaughter of nearly a quarter of the island's population. (Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Suharto in Jakarta the very night before the invasion, and made no effort to stop As then-NSC chief Brent Scowcroft explained, "It made no sense it. East Timor was not a viable entity." to antagonize the Indonesians. in

—

—

.

Indeed, the

US

blocked

UN

.

.

resolutions

condemning the invasion and

continued to supply arms to Indonesia. Chevron and Texaco continue to exploit oil in Indonesia.)

Other

examples

are

slaughter of thousands of

the

US-backed

Maya

Guatemalan dictatorship's

Indians in the early 1980s.

Or, even

within the Middle East, Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of the Pales-

West Bank and Gaza, as well as the Israeli "security Or Syria's occupation of other areas of Lebanon. But the Kuwaiti royal family, unlike the hapless Mayan and Timorese peasants, are a pillar of the global power structure, with close ties to Bush and his pals. As reporter Bob Feldman writes in the Manhattan weekly Down-

tinian lands on the

zone" in southern Lebanon.

46 town, Kuwait's emirate owns millions worth of stock in most of the

top 500

US

corporations,

CONOCO

DuPont's

oil

including General Electric

company ($59

million),

($53 million),

AT&T

($90 million),

ARCO/Atlantic Richfield Oil Company ($97 million), and Citibank (a whopping $590 million 15% of the company). In the early 1980s, when he was an important figure in the Trilateral Commission, Brent Scowcroft had been hired by the Kuwait Petroleum Company's US office at New York's Rockefeller Center to sit on the board of KPC's US sub-

—

sidiary Santa Fe International, which produces state-of-the-art drilling

equipment. Scowcroft, now Bush's NSC chief, had also served as Ford's NSC chief and Gerald Ford was also hired by Santa Fe International to sit on the company's board. Santa Fe International also fronts a powerful Political Action Committee (PAC), which contributed over $70,000

—

US

to influential

politicians during the 1984 Congressional race.

Santa Fe International ticated "slant" oil drilling

is

the world's only producer of the sophis-

equipment used by Kuwait

at the

Rumalia

which straddles the Kuwait-Iraq border. The "slant" equipment allows the KPC oil rigs on the Kuwait side of the border to suck oil from under the Iraq side of the border. This practice considerably worsened tensions between Iraq and Kuwait, and pressed Saddam's claims to Kuwaiti territory. (The region's borders had been drawn by Britain and France after World War I.) oilfield,

Bush's Secretary of State, Texas oilman James Baker, whose family

owns stock

in

has family

ties to

such companies as

Bush.

Much

prestigious Texas law firm Baker

ARCO,

AMOCO

and Chevron, also

money comes from the founded by James Baker's

of the Baker

&

Botts,

great-great grandfather, which served as legal counsel for George Bush's

Zapata Petroleum. Baker fc Botts is today the de facto internal legal department of Pennzoil, the company into which Zapata developed under the ownership of Hugh Liedtke, Bush's Zapata partner. (The financial arm of the Baker empire is the Texas Commerce Bank, founded by James Baker's grandfather. Among those who have sat on the board of Texas Commerce Bank are Gerald Ford; "Ladybird" Johnson, President Johnson's wife; Robert Mosbacher, Bush's Secretary of Commerce; Exxon chair Lawrence Rawl; and CEOs from Mobil, DuPont and AMOCO.) In 1984, Liedtke's Pennzoil launched a multi-million lawsuit against

Texaco over which company had the right to gobble up the smaller Getty Oil Company. The courts ruled in Pennzoil's favor, and Texaco was forced to pay a $3 billion settlement. Liedtke used $2.1 billion of the money to purchase a nine-percent partnership in Chevron. It was

47

Gulf had Kuwaiti US royal family's KPC ever since the 1940s. Thus Chevron became (and remains today) the biggest US shareholder in the KPC which is the biggest supplier of petroleum to Japan. And Pennzoil remains among the largest shareholders in Chevron. Chevron's director since 1988 has been George Shultz, who had also also in 1984 that

been the

Chevron purchased Gulf Oil

company with by

oil

for $13.2 billion.

far the greatest share in the

—

served on the board of Bechtel before becoming Secretary of State in 1982. Bechtel

and other

is

the engineering giant which built the refineries, pipelines

oil installations for

the governments of both Kuwait and Iraq,

as well as Saudi Arabia.

In addition to being on the board of

KPC, Brent

Scowcroft

is

a co-

founder, with Henry Kissinger, of Kissinger Associates, a "consulting firm" which

is

contracted by repressive governments around the planet.

III, a director of Midland Bank of Britain, on the board of Kissinger Associates. The Kuwaiti royal family owns ten percent of the Midland Bank of Britain. In pushing for the Congressional vote approving the use of force to "liberate" Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, the Kuwaiti royal family fronted a stateside organization called Citizens for a Free Kuwait which

T. Jefferson

Cunningham

also sits

lobbied Congress for military intervention. Citizens for a Free Kuwait hired Hill

&

Knowlton, one of the top

US

public relations firms, to or-

ganize their high-pressure campaign for a sweet $11.5 million. Citizens for a Free

Kuwait and

Hill

&

Knowlton got a young Kuwaiti

girl

known

only as "Nayirah" to tearfully testify before Congress that she had witnessed Iraqi troops throwing premature babies from their incubators to die

on the

floor of

Kuwait City's

hospital. Hill &:

Knowlton sent a tape

of Nayirah 's emotional testimony to media outlets across the country in a "video press release,"

and the episode was extremely

influential in

building public and congressional support for war. After Kuwait's "liber-

would interview hospital personnel and determine that Amnesty International had to admit that they had been taken in by the ruse. "Nayirah," it turned out, was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US. The Hill & Knowlton exec in charge of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait account was H&K Vice President Craig Fuller who served as George Bush's campaign director in 1988, until James Baker took his place. In 1992, he would be appointed to coordinate the Republican National Convention in Houston, where Bush was nominated for a second term. Craig Fuller was also implicated in Irangate. Washington corresponation," reporters

the atrocity had never taken place. Even

—

48 dent Jack Colhoun reports that in 1986 Fuller met in Jerusalem with

Bush and Amiram

Nir,

an

Israeli

intelligence) agent, to discuss

arms dealer and former Mossad (Israeli missile shipments to Iran. Barbara

TOW

Honegger's October Surprise cites Nir as among the mysterious deaths connected with the scandal. He had apparently been working closely with Oliver North, and died in a 1988 plane crash in Mexico two months before North's trial started. In 1992,

Sam Zakhem, who had

been President Reagan's ambassador

would be indicted

taking a $7.7 million bribe from the

to Bahrain,

for

Kuwaiti royal family to act as a secret agent for Kuwait and push for military action against Iraq in Washington.

US

Unfortunately, the extensive duplicity in the Bush administration's drive for a Congressional approval of military action did not light until well after

Congress had voted

its

approval— and

come

after

to

Oper-

Storm had claimed some 400,000 Iraqi lives. And, signifCongress merely "approved" military action, rather than actudeclaring war— further eroding the Constitutional system of checks

ation Desert icantly. ally

and balances, and accelerating the power by the Executive Branch.

terrifyingly lopsided consolidation of

;j:iKo|t_=(v^

49

Bribery at the cil

UN

Bush's success in pushing through the United Nations Security CounResolution 678, which set the January 15, 1991 deadline for the use

of force against Iraq, was the ultimate test of the international connections he had been cultivating for over a generation. The final step in the

Administration's diplomatic offensive was to pay off $187 million of the United States's longstanding debt to the UN after the Security Council

—

had voted the way Bush wanted. The deals which purchased that vote were hardly

less sleazy.

Secretary of State James Baker shuttled from country to country ar-

ranging meetings with foreign ministers in the prelude to the November 29, 1990 vote. According to the New York Times, "Bush and Baker decided from the very beginning that they were going to negotiate this directly, so that

for a vote.

'As you and

Of

.

.

.

when

all

Baker would be I

in

the foreign ministers gathered in

New York

a position to look them in the eye and say,

agreed in city X.

.'" .

.

the five permanent Security Council members, the most critical

vote was the Soviet Union.

The United Kingdom almost

invariably votes

with the United States. France tends to be more independent, and has longstanding ties to the Arab world especially Iraq but would be un-

—

—

from Bush's agenda once the Soviets, the traditional allies of anti-West Arab states, were on board. The day before the vote. Baker and then-Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze met in New York. This was a particularly vulnerable time for the Soviets. Separatist unrest was growing in nearly all of the Soviet republics, and agricultural collapse had resulted in empty shelves throughout the USSR. Baker offered Shevardnadze economic aid and a guarantee that the US wouldn't protest Moscow's handling of the breakaway republics. And, indeed, there was no talk of sanctions when, just as Iraq's deadline was running out, Soviet troops crushed pro-independence demonstrations in Lithuania, killing 15 and seizing the republic's radio station and govern-

likely to dissent

ment

buildings.

On December

2, the New York Times reported that the Soviets had been swayed to vote with the US because, in part, the Bush Administration promised "to encourage Saudi Arabia to give $1 billion in aid to Moscow to help the Soviets through the winter." On December 11, Baker and Shevardnadze met again, this time in Houston, to work out

US

agricultural credits to the Soviet Union.

Once the Soviets had been swayed to the US position, France fell into line. The only remaining permanent Security Council member to

50

be dealt with was China.

New

According to the

York Times report, Baker met with Chinese

Foreign Minister Qian Qichen in Cairo on

November

7.

"Mr. Baker

prefaced his question regarding China's attitude toward a resolution,"

reported the Times, "by pointing out to the Chinese minister that Bei-

American diplomacy

jing's support for

the Persian Gulf would have

in

a big impact on American attitudes toward China,

Tiananmen Square massacre

still

hostile since the

June 1989, officials said." Officially, US relations with China had been icy since the massacre, with Congress imposing sanctions on trade and investment. But in July 1989, just one month after the massacre, Bush sent Scowcroft to Beijing in violation of publicly-declared policy a secret mission which was not revealed in the press until many months later. (The People's Republic of China is one of the governments which contracts the "consulting" services of Kissinger Associates, of which Scowcroft is a co-founder.) And in Cairo, Baker let the Chinese know that the massacre would be forgiven if Beijing didn't block Resolution 678. According to the Times, Baker "let the Chinese know that if they did not veto the resolution, their Foreign Minister would be received at the White House after 18 month of isolation. ." And indeed, Qian Qichen did visit the White House on November 30, the day after the vote at the UN. in

—

.

.

Unwilling to sacrifice

its

remaining credentials with the

"third

US the But that made

world," Beijing merely abstained, rather than voting with the

way the other permanent Security Council members did. no difference. Bush and Baker still got their war even though

—

technically in violation of the

UN

charter,

nent Security Council members must

all

this

was

which holds that the perma-

vote for a resolution for

it

to

be approved. This charter requirement was conveniently overlooked. In the ensuing

months, Beijing staged show trials for the most visible up in the aftermath of the massacre, sentencing 18 to

dissidents rounded

lengthy prison terms. At least 1,000 more

still

and another 1,000 have been executed. The

languish in prison camps,

trials

were completed, with

barely a notice in the western media, just as the air war against Iraq

was winding down in mid- February 1991. With the five permanent Security Council members all in line, Baker then went to work on building the needed majority among the 10 temporary members doling out promises of aid and investment to the largely

—

impoverished nations. The US-supported, CIA-installed Mobutu dictatorship of Zaire was promised military assistance and partial debt forgiveness. Colombia and Cote d'lvoire were promised financial assistance.

51

Malaysia, an Islamic country, was turned around after a phone call from

Bush

to the prime minister.

The

rest

were no problem. The Ethiopian

regime hated Iraq because of Saddam's support for the Eritrean separatist rebels (who would eventually bring down the Ethiopian government). Canada, Finland and Romania followed the US unquestioningly. Only Cuba and Yemen ultimately voted against the resolution despite the best efforts of the "Baker Boys," as the US diplomatic corps were

—

known at the UN. Cuba's Foreign Minister Isadora Malmierca met with Baker in New York the night before the vote, in the first high-level Cuban-American meeting in ten years. But Cuba didn't not-so-affectionately

budge.

Cuba had far

more

long been iced from

US

aid

and investment, but Yemen had

to lose by standing up to the US. Reports the

New

York Times:

Yemeni delegate joined the Cubans in voting against the resolution at the Security Council, a senior American diplomat was instructed to tell him: 'That was the most expensive vote you ever cast' meaning that it would result in an end to America's more than $70 million in foreign aid to Yemen." "Minutes

after the

—

Bribery in Cairo and Damascus Bush also used blatant bribery to build the "Arab coalition" which was necessary to put the fig leaf of "multilateralism" on the US-led Operation Desert Storm. From a military standpoint, Arab participation was next to meaningless. Desert Storm was a high-tech air assault, and the necessary hardware was overwhelmingly in the hands of the US Pentagon. Britain and France played second fiddle. Saudi Arabia and Turkey were most useful in loaning their territory as staging areas. But Arab participation was necessary in order to undercut the possibility of the war escalating into a Holy Crusade of the Islamic and Arab worlds against the imperialist West. Getting the Persian Gulf mini-states like Bahrain and Qatar on board was no problem. Like Kuwait, they are pro- West, oil-rich monarchies. However, Egypt, and to a greater extent Syria, have pretensions to pan- Arab nationahsm, which makes overt cooperation with Western powers politically messy for them and made their cooperation all the more necessary. Once again, George Bush, the master of Machiavellian manipulation, was called upon to use his special skills and contacts.

—

In the case of Egypt, the bribery could not have been

As Cairo agreed

to join the Allies, the

outstanding debt to

US banks and

US

more

blatant.

cancelled Egypt's $7 billion

lending agencies.

The US then

started

J 52

World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) more than $40 billion in debts to the two agencies. The US also pushed the World Bank and IMF to agree to new loans for Egypt, and by April 1991 both institutions had agreed to new $300 million loans the IMF's first since Egypt had refused to meet the IMF's demands for cuts in social spending, which had sparked riots in to press the

to forgive the rest of Egypt's

—

Cairo ten years

earlier.

Syria was a strange case. Syrian dictator Hafez Assad prided himself hostility toward the US and Israel, but his bitter rivalry Hussein had even led him to side with Iran in the Iran-Iraq war the only leader in the Arab world to do so. Siding with the White House against Saddam was going to be tricky for both parties, however.

on unwavering with

Saddam

—

Washington had long derided Damascus as a "terrorist" regime, much as Damascus had derided Washington as "imperialist." Once agreeing to make common cause against Iraq, both Washington and Damascus were willing to alter history to meet their new political needs.

US investigators had been increasingly convinced that the Syriabacked Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), an extremist renegade faction of the PLO, was behind the 1988 mid-air explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, which had killed all

259 passengers.

Earlier that year, the

USS Vmctnnts had

"accidentally" blown an Iranian commercial flight out of the sky over

the Persian Gulf, kilHng

all

290 passengers (the

US

warship's ultra-

sophisticated computerized radar system having apparently "mistaken" the civilian airbus for an attacking bomber). The US maintained that

the

PFLP-GC had

undertaken the bombing on behalf of Iran (at the

behest of their Syrian sponsors) as revenge for the Vmctnnts incident. But in 1990, as the White House started to woo Syria as a partner in the Allied coalition, blame for the Pan Am 103 bombing suddenly shifted from Assad's Syria to Qaddafi's Libya. "Syria got a bum rap on this one," Bush announced (using precisely the same terminology that Reagan had used to-justify resuming military aid to Guatemala after that nation's government had completed a campaign of genocide against its own Maya Indians). The US now claimed that Libyan terrorists had blown up the jet in retaliation for the 1986 US air strikes against Libya (which were themselves retaliation for the bombing of a West German

disco club which had claimed the lives of

German

US servicemen

— despite

the

had cleared Libya of involvement). In November 1991, the US Justice Department handed down indictments of several Libyan intelligence agents for their alleged involvement

fact that

intelligence

53

bombing, and the White House started the predictable bluster if Libya failed to hand over the agents.

in the 103

of threatening mihtary strikes

However, Pan Am, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and faced with massive lawsuits from the families of those killed on Flight 103, hired the private investigative firm of Interfor to look into the bombing. Interfor

is

run by Juval Aviv, a former

Israeli intelligence

agent

who

had long been Mossad's pointman on Syria, and the Interfor report maintained that Syria and the PFLP-GC had indeed been behind the bombing. Furthermore, the PFLP-GC terrorists had been able to get their bomb onboard the 747 because the flight was part of a heroin smuggling route run by a trafficking ring connected to the Syrian regime and protected by both the US DEA and CIA. Interfor claims the ring is overseen by Syrian kingpin Monzer Al-Kassar, whose wife is the sister of chief, and whose mistress is Assad's niece. Interfor was protecting Al-Kassar's operation because he was feeding the agency information on other Middle East drug-trafficking rings. The CIA was protecting the Al-Kassar operation because he was cooperating with efforts to free US hostages in Lebanon. Al-Kassar is also alleged to have helped French intelligence smuggle arms to Iran and to have provided Oliver North's ProDem with drug profits to purchase arms for the Contras. In any event, the CIA and DEA had apparently instructed both German authorities and Pan Am baggage handlers at the Frankfurt airport, where Flight 103 originated, to allow certain suitcases

Assad's intelligence claims the

DEA

to pass onto

PFLP-GC

US-bound

team,

uninspected. It merely remained for the with the double-dealing Al-Kassar operation,

flights

in league

to substitute a suitcase full of explosive for the usual suitcase full of

heroin.

DEA

The

officially

— but

admitted that the protection program had

maintained that no "controlled shipments" of heroin had passed through Frankfurt since 1987. Other DEA sources privately maintained that the operation had continued until the bombing. The

existed

CIA was the

customarily

pawn

The most

silent.

Pan Am, arguing

in court that

of an international intelligence operation, prestigious

US

airline,

would

it

had been

lose the case.

with important financial links to the

Rockefeller empire, would be forced into bankruptcy. In the wake of Operation Desert Storm, the old adversaries Syria and Israel would cut a deal at US behest and commence "peace" talks. War-ravaged Lebanon, which remains jointly occupied by the two powers, would get the worst of the deal. The Syrian-occupied Bekaa valley in Lebanon remains the source of opium for Syria's lucrative heroin en-

54

terprize.

Was

Smoke and Mirrors?

"Desert Storm"

On

February

11, 1991, well into the war, a

newspaper

in

Amman,

Jordan, published a transcript of UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar's llth-hour meeting with Saddam Hussein nearly a month earlier

— which had been a last-ditch

effort to avert

war before the dead-

The Baghdad meeting had been universally reported in the a failure. Saddam, we were told, refused to consider withdrawal

line ran out.

media as from Kuwait. However, the transcript makes clear that the Iraqi leader discussed the ambiguity of the exact whereabouts of the Iraq-Kuwait border: since it was a British protectorate a century ago, Kuwait has several times

moved

its

borders north into Iraqi territory.

excerpt from the transcript wets quoted in England's

The

leftist

following

paper. The

Guardian:

Saddam: Here

map] are Kuwait's borders when expanded to here then to this point ... in light of this complication, when someone says Iraq where should it withdraw to? should withdraw it

[pointing at a

was a protectorate, then

.

.

it

.

.

.

.

This was interpreted by The Guardian as indicative of Saddam's willingness to discuss the matter.

The

headline on the February 12 story

which ran along with the excerpt read: SADDAM DEAL ON KUWAIT. One paragraph noted:

remains puzzling that the secretary general did not make

It

more

WAS PREPARED TO

effort to explore the implications of President

tive offers.

The

Iraqi leader

Saddam's tenta-

argued that there were serious bound-

The

ary questions at issue between Iraq and Kuwait.

full

text

confirms a willingness to regard the rest of Kuwait, excluding the disputed areas, as not part of Iraq.

However, the Washington Post headline from that same day con-

TRANSCRIPT SHOWS SADDAM REJECTING TALKS WITH PEREZ DE CUELLAR. Greek mythology, Cassandra was a prophetess who foretold the

veyed the exact opposite:

PULLOUT In

IN

future but was cursed with never being believed until

warnings of the impending Trojan

War

it

was too

late.

Her

were ignored until after Troy had

—

been sacked. Desert Storm also had a Cassandra one Charles Allen, who staffed a high-level post at the CIA: National Intelligence Officer for Warning. His main duty was to prepare a biweekly report on developing

55

global trouble spots for then-CIA Director William Webster (Casey's successor). On January 24, 1991, the New York Times reported that official warnings of an imminent Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, "each more pessimistic; one in early July, raising the prospect, one on July 25, placing its likelihood at somewhat greater than 50 per-

Allen had issued three

day before the invasion ocsuperiors were failing to he bucked the react to his warnings, Allen then did something rash bureaucracy and went directly to officials at the State Department and NSC. On August 1, he walked into the NSC office and said, "This is your final warning" that Iraq would invade Kuwait by the day's end. This cent,

and one

virtually flat prediction, the

CIA

curred." Apparently frustrated that his

move only got Allen the

CIA

in trouble.

Publication of his biweekly report to

was suspended and

director

—

his staff" dramatically slashed

— and

he was apparently directed not to talk to the press. Neither Allen nor his CIA superiors would discuss the matter with the Times.

Why

was Allen's prediction, based on meticulous study of Iraqi milThe Times reports that Allen was among the first CIA analysts to predict that the Soviet threat in Eastern Europe was collapsing. He also warned his superiors in October 1986, two

itary analysis, overlooked?

months before it became public, that Oliver North, with whom Allen closely worked in military intelligence analysis, was using profits from Iran arms sales to fund the Contras. Yet Allen's warnings on Kuwait were dismissed, prompting him to bypass protocol which, in turn, pro-

—

vided the justification for silencing him.

Another key figure from the prelude to the Iraqi invasion who was sidelined during the war was April Glaspie, US ambassador to Iraq. On July 25, the same day that Allen was delivering his second warning to the CIA, Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein at the US embassy in Baghdad. According to numerous press accounts, Saddam ranted and raved about Kuwaiti intransigence in his struggle over oil prices and warned in no uncertain terms that he was willing to go to war to resolve the matter:

When we

feel

care, if

you

pride

and death

will

be the choice for

us.

fired 100 missiles for each missile life

away we wiU cease to

that you want to injure our pride and take

the Iraqis' chance of a high standard of living, then

Then we would not care we fired, because without

has no meaning.

But Glaspie responded:

We

have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts

der disagreement with Kuwait.

.

.

.

The

issue

is

like

your bor-

not associated with

56 America. James Baker has directed our officid spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.

Department Press Secretary Margaret Tutweiler had been asked by a reporter whether the US would defend Kuwait in the event that Saddam's saber rattling proved to be more than bluff. Her answer: "We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait."

The

previous day,

State

Baghdad

for a "vacation" immediately after her talk two days before the invasion of Kuwait. She was subsequently confined to a desk job at State Department headquarters in Washington, and kept away from the press.

Glaspie

with

left

Saddam

—

^just

Glaspie apparently gave Saddam a green light for the takeover of Kuwait. Allen tried to warn of that same takeover. Both received humiliation for their efforts. Their stories, which were inconvenient for the war drive the Bush administration was building, were effectively kept out

US troops amassed along Kuwait's border in Saudi Arabia ostensibly launched to defend Saudi AraDesert Shield" "Operation in bia from an hypothesized Iraqi invasion. But once the troops were there, the new mission became to "liberate" Kuwait by restoring the despotic monarchy to power. Bush manipulated the UN into approving escala-

of the press.

—

tion of the "defensive" Desert Shield into the offensive Desert

Storm,

and with the US France, with token troops from a few Arab states like Egypt and Syria thrown in for appearance's sake.) In September 1990, Saddam offered to withdraw from Kuwait, keeping only the contentious Rumalia oilfield as leader of Allied coalition forces (principally Britain

and two uninhabited offshore

islands.

Bush spurned the

offer.

As the UN-imposed January deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait approached, the Soviet Union attemped to negotiate a lastminute diplomatic settlement. This was also rejected by Bush. General Norman Schwarzkopf (the son of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr., who was involved in training the Shah of Iran's thuggish SAVAK secret police for the CIA in the 1950s) would later reveal in his memoirs, // Doesn't Take A Hero, that "hawks" in th.e Bush Administration pushed to start a land offensive against Iraqi forces before he was ready and before diplomatic efforts

were exhausted.

in January, Bush had the Pentagon impose stringent prior censorship on all media accounts of the war. As Iraqi factories, roads, nuclear reactors, sewage treatment plants, bio-warfare facilities and even civilian shelters were hit by US

As Operation Desert Storm was launched

57

and Allied forces

in the

most sustained

aerial

bombardment campaign

world history, wreaking a massive human and ecological disaster, the media glorified the high-tech carnage while offering minimal coverage of the extensive anti-war protests which were held worldwide. After in

the month-long air war ended, ground troops were sent in to "liberate"

Kuwait. Across the United States, citizens were amazed and relieved

Saddam's army

in

Kuwait simply folded

like the proverbial

when

house of

cards as soon as the US-led forces crossed the border. In the prelude to the ground war, Bush had warned that Saddam had amassed a force of 500,000 troops in Kuwait. After Iraq's defeat, the Pentagon claimed to have taken

were killed by

some 60,000 prisoners of war. Another several thousand US aerial bombardment as they attempted to flee north

towards the Iraqi city of Basra, leaving a seven-mile caravan of carnage and twisted metal which TV viewers saw worldwide (although the most gory pictures were censored). Still more Iraqi troops were allowed to

withdraw to the north under the watchful eye of the US army after the cease-fire had been arranged. But there is evidence, studiously ignored by the mainstream media, which throws into question the assumption that the half- million Iraqi troops had ever been there at all. In November 1990, ABC News purchased several satellite photos of Kuwait from a commercial Soviet agency, Soyuz-Karta. The photos had been taken on September 13, only five days before the Pentagon announced that the Iraqi forces in Kuwait had grown to 360,000 troops and 2,800 tanks. But the photos showed no Iraqi presence although the US forces on the Saudi side of the border were clearly visible. ABC

—

officials

were so puzzled that they decided not to

air

the photos. Instead,

they called on two satellite image experts to interpret them: George Washington University nuclear physicist Peter Zimmerman, a veteran of Reagan's US Arms Control Agency; and a former satellite expert from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), who remained anonymous

because of the while the

up St.

in

US

classified

nature of his work.

Kuwait was nowhere

to be seen.

Petersburg Times, one of the few

He described

The experts concurred:

build-up in Saudi Arabia was plain as day, the Iraqi build-

Zimmerman spoke to Florida's US papers to pick up the story.

seeing the transport and fighter aircraft

and the military

staging areas that the camera picked up on the Saudi side of the border,

but said:

We

didn't find anything of that sort

anywhere

in

Kuwait.

We

58

don't see any tent

we don't

cities,

see congregations of tanks,

we

don't see troop concentrations, and the main Kuwaiti airbase seems to be deserted. It's five weeks after the invasion, and from what

we can

flown a single fighter into the

see, the Iraqi air force hasn't

most strategic support large

air

base in

numbers

functioned equivalent.

There

Kuwait.

They have

The DIA the tracks

man

They have to have They have to

per day.

it?

is

even pointing out that the photos showed

specialist agreed,

left

no infrastructure to to have toilets or the

to have food.

water at the rate of several gallons per

have shelter. But where

is

They have

of people.

by vehicles that serviced the Kuwaiti oilfields

— but

no

indication of tank tracks.

Both analysts

tried to

come up with an explanation, such as the Iraqi But Zimmerman said that

troops being extremely well camouflaged.

the Iraqis had demonstrated no such sophisticated camouflage during their

war with Iran

Both analysts said they had clearly

in the 1980s.

seen Iraqi troop positions during the Iran-Iraq war on poorer images

from the French

SPOT

satellite.

or deliberately tried to deceive

If

the Soviets had either accidentally

ABC

by providing photos taken from

before the Iraqi invasion, then the photos would not have positions in Saudi Arabia.

the

St.

When

Petersburg Times to shed

some

light

on the mystery, he hedged:

There's no mystery as far as we're concerned. forces]

We'd

are there.

what our

showed the US

a Pentagon spokesperson was asked by

like it

They

[the Iraqi

to remain a mystery to

intelligence capabilities are.

Saddam

We're not going to make our

intelligence public.

Zimmerman

accepted that there was no doubt that Kuwait City had "But does that mean that there were forces.

been occupied by Iraqi 250,000 troops?

enough to

In

Kuwait

MPs would have been Everything we've seen and heard about

City, 2,000 nasty

terrorize the city.

could have been done by a small enough Iraqi contingent that two Marine divisions might have driven

them back

into Iraq with relatively little

bloodshed." At the time the Soviet photos were taken, there were over 100,000 US troops in Saudi Arabia.

The

St.

Petersburg Times story was reprinted in the late February

1991 edition of the Chicago received a brief mention

in.

biweekly In These Times, and also December 3, 1990 issue of Newsweek on amusing ditties rather than serious news. leftist

the

the page reserved for short,

—

:

59

While the government exercised unprecedented control over the flow of information from the Persian Gulf War, a January 19, 1991 article in

New

the

York Times raises serious questions about whether any media

The Times reported that President Bush had signed a secret authorization allowing "CIA-sponsored propaganda and deception" against Iraq, including anti-government broadcasts into Iraqi territory. The eff"ort was being headed up by elite CIA and Pentagon "psychological operations" ("psy-ops") units. According to the Times, the propaganda broadcasts have backfired against the United States on at least one occasion. On January 7, the Pentagon reported that six Iraqi helicopters had flown across the border into Saudi Arabia, the pilots defecting. The Saudi government immediately denied the report, and embarrassed Pentagon officials later retracted it, saying they had reacted too quickly to an erroneous report from the field. The Times quoted one close observer as saying the Pentagon officials had apparently reported as fact a piece of false propaganda broadcast by Pentagon psy-ops units! "It never happened. They were broadcasting propaganda into Kuwait to demoralize Iraqi troops, and it backfired. reports on the war can be trusted.

We

psy-opped ourselves."

Two

The first is whether there haven't which CIA false propaganda was inadvertently reported as fact without the mistake being caught. The second is whether the Iraqis were the only intended target of the false propaganda. Given the numerous inconsistencies and dirty deals surrounding the Gulf War, perhaps we should not be too quick to dismiss the possibility that false propaganda was also being produced for domestic consumption. questions present themselves.

been other instances

in

Startling evidence that the

over

its

US

public had the proverbial wool pulled

eyes emerged in a story by Susan Sachs in the

York Newsday, "US Troops Faced Iraq's Ghost

Army

March in

1,

1991

New

Desert Assault."

Sachs reported that the massive Allied military assault on Kuwait faced a "phantom enemy"

The bulk

of the mighty Iraqi

army couldn't be found. Saddam

Hussein's supposed chemical warfare capability didn't materialize.

No

artillery

equipped with chemical warheads has been discovered.

Iraq's defensive trenches

and bunkers, described by military experts

as heavily fortified, turned out to

be reinforced with

little

more

than crumbling bricks and were abandoned days, perhaps weeks, before the allied ground assault began.

And

after

months of hearing

the Iraqi lines in southern Kuwait described a^ 12-foot-high sand

60

berms, miles of deadly mine fields and treacherous oil-filled gullies, US Marines found themselves faced by a flat landscape laced with

above-ground mines that they passed virtually unscathed. "We've

known

for

weeks that the

Gen. Waiter Boomer,

lines weren't that formidable," said Lt.

commander

divisions ploughed through the

the Iraqis think

we

still

of

mine

aJl

Marine

fields.

forces, after his

two

"But we wanted to

let

thought they were big."

Did the White House also want the US public to think the "Iraqi still big" to produce the desired atmosphere of post-war patriotic euphoria which George Bush could ride into a second White forces were

House term?

More Gulf War

Intrigues

Operation Desert Storm served Bush's interest in

many

ways.

It

got

—such as the S&Ls crumbling under their own corruption, one of them linked to the president's own son — out of the gave the public an external enemy — Saddam Hussein — on headlines.

embarrassing news stories It

whom

to vent rage just as the

economy

started to go bust

and hard

times hit the middle class. Popular anger was deflected away from Bush

and onto the so-called "Butcher of Baghdad." up oil prices, putting environmental concerns on the backburner, paving the way for the new administration energy policy which calls for increasing oil and nuclear output, shelving conservation efforts, and sacrificing Alaskan wilderness to ARCO and Exxon. Finally, it proved that the United States has finally recovered from the "Vietnam syndrome," that our nation has no qualms about using its massive firepower. This sent an unequivocal message to our former "enemies" in the Kremlin. Iraqi weaponry was largely Soviet-made, and the Desert Storm air war was essentially an adaptation of the Pentagon Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP) which had been developed for nuclear war against the USSR only scaled down to a country the size of Iraq and carried out with "conventional" explosives rather than nuand

his pals

The war

also drove

—

wUh bombardment by aircraft and medium-range rockTomahawk Sea-launched Cruise Missiles (SLCMs), instead of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) like the Minuteman and MX. Desert Storm targeted Iraqi cities, transportation infrastructure and military and industrial potential, much as the nuclear-war SIOP clear warheads,

ets like the

did with the Soviet Union. Desert Storm was, in part, a demonstration for consumption in Moscow. The Kremlin realized that the could indeed work, and that Soviet military equipment would be

war intended

SIOP

61

US weapons August 1991, the Kremlin hard-liners attempted a coup in desperation, realizing that a total Soviet capitulation was imminent. The coup failed, the slavishly pro-capitalist Boris Yeltsin came to power in Russia, and the USSR was dismantled. Desert Storm also sent an unequivocal message to the United States' European and Japanese "friends" who are rapidly outstripping us economically and (obviously) to any "third world" upstarts like Saddam Hussein who would dare challenge US hegemony. outshined by the automated, high-tech computer-guided

systems.

In

—

Of

Saddam, before he suddenly became "another was a US client. Bush's arranging of the convenient Persian Gulf War was a masterpiece of cynical Machiavellian political manipulation. Just as April Glaspie in Baghdad was giving Saddam a "green light" to invade Kuwait, the CIA was giving Kuwait a "green light" for the very behavior which provoked Saddam's invasion! Investigative journalist Michael Emery reported in the Village Voice on March 5, 1991, that course, the tyrant

Hitler,"

shortly after the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq released a

document to the

Reuters press agency purported to be a letter from the chief of Kuwait's security apparatus to the Kuwaiti interior ministry, describing a six-day

the security chief had

visit

in

November

and

made

to

CIA headquarters at Langely, VA, CIA chief William Webster

1989. According to the letter,

his colleagues suggested "that

it

was important to take advantage of

the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country's government to delineate our countries'

common

border."

economic situation" had, of course, been brought about by the country's eight-year war with Iran. In 1980, ruling regimes throughout the Arab world, both pro-US monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and radical nationalist regimes like Iraq, agreed that "deteriorating

Iraq's

the threat of Iran-sponsored Islamic fundamentalist revolution effectively

stymied

ply the cannon fodder. cal still

The war would

fuel

Saddam's megalomania-

ambitions to become the savior of the Arab world.

shaken by the

fall

of their old friend the

The US

the Persian Gulf), also agreed that Iran's

As

then-US

writer Eric Rassi reported in the

NSC

elites,

Shah (whose massive US-

supplied military had served as a surrogate policeman for

bled.

must be

— and Saddam's militarist regime was willing to sup-

US

policy in

new rulers needed to be humManhattan weekly Downtown,

chief Zbigniew Brzezinski gave

Saddam

a "green light" for

and September of that year, of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, both

the Iraqi invasion of Iran in a secret meeting with the Iraqi dictator

Saudi Arabia's King Fahd

in

the invasion was launched.

Kuwait

The

role

in 1980. In

— 62

was to underwrite the war effort. Eight gruelling, brutal years later, the war ended in a stalemate. Saddam was massively in debt to his Saudi and Kuwaiti sponsors, and his oil facilities and industrial capacity had been crippled by Iraqi rocket fire. He needed to rebuild in order to pay back, and requested more economic aid from his smaller but more prosperous neighbor to the south Kuwait. But the Emir of Kuwait heeded the CIA's advice. At a July 31, 1990 Arab summit in Saudi Arabia's Red Sea port of Jidda, the Kuwaitis responded to Saddam's request for $30 bilhon in assistance with an offer

awash

in petrodollars,

of the humiliating

sum

of $500,000.

Three days later, Saddam's tanks and troops poured across the Kuwaiti border, sending the royal family fleeing into Saudi Arabia. The Voice reports that the next day, August 3, US Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ensured an Arab League denunciation of Saddam's invasion by panicking King Fahd with CIA-supplied photos of Iraqi forces near Kuwait's border with Saudi Arabia. The Arab League denunciation was perfectly timed to coincide with the US-drafted United Nations Security Council Resolution calling for economic sanctions against Iraq.

On

July 26, just six days before the Kuwaitis humiliated

Saddam

at

Jidda and just one day after April Glaspie's conversation with the Iraqi leader, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),

met in Baghdad. The price of oil had been a bitter source of contention between Iraq and its prosperous neighbors Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, ever since the end of the war with Iran in 1988. During the Iran-Iraq war, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf ministates such as Bahrain and Qatar, had pumped out oil furiously, flooding the global market and sending the price into a nosedive. The wealthy monarchies which were subsidizing Saddam's war could afford it. Iran, on the other hand, had no such wealthy sponsors. Due to less favorable geological conditions, Iran must also spend more to extract oil than the Arab states. Therefore, the price drop hurt Iran economically— as intended. When the war ended, however, Saddam started demanding a drop in output (which would, of course, result in a rise in prices). He needed the revenues from higher prices to rebuild his war-ravaged nation and pay back his war debts. But the Saudis and Kuwaitis refused to cooperate.

As the

largest producers, they

had the most

OPEC, and they Whether this was due Norwegian and American pull in

refused to allow prices to rise above $18 per barrel. to fear of losing their market share to British,

from the North Sea and Alaska (the conventional wisdom), or to the CIA's advice that Kuwait "take advantage of the deteriorating economic

oil

63

situation in Iraq"

is

open to debate.

Saddam steadfastly demanded

a rise to $25 per barrel.

He

also

moved

At the Baghdad conference, Saddam's saber-rattling succeeded in getting the Saudis and Kuwaitis to agree to the compromise of $21 per barrel. Perhaps this would have satisfied the dictator if the Kuwaitis had been forthcoming with the $30 billion in reconstruction aid. But, as Saddam told his good friend King Hussein of Jordan before he flew to Jidda for the Arab summit six days after the Baghdad conference, "If they do not give it to me, I will know how to troops to the Kuwaiti border.

get

it."

Journalist Helga

Graham

reports in the

London Observer that

in the

days between the Baghdad and Jidda meetings, as Iraq's army gathered menacingly at Kuwait's border, Saddam sent an envoy on a mission of intimidation to Kuwait City, declaring with "total confidence" that "the

US

will

not do anything."

Graham

also reports that Saddam's target price of $25 per barrel had been suggested by a report he had commissioned from a Washington

DC

think-tank, the Center for Strategic

The

&

International Studies (CSIS).

CSIS Energy Security Program Director and George Washington University scholar Henry Schuler spoke about it in an interview in the March, 1, 1990 edition of Arab Oil & Gas Journal, an elite trade publication. In the interview, entitled "The Oil Exporters are Leaving Money on the Table," Schuler states that the Arab nations report was secret, but

could get $25 per barrel any time they decide search for alternative energy sources.

The

to,

without this leading to a

present Saudi/Kuwaiti policy

was "leaving money on the table" for US consumers and oil companies to pick up. How could this change? By one of the Gulf states breaking "one with the power to force all the states of the Gulf to follow ranks suit," resulting in "some change in leadership."

—

Saddam by the CSIS also turns up in Graham of a conversation between Saddam and then-US Charge d'Aff"aires in Baghdad, Joseph Wilson. The conThe $25

figure suggested to

a transcript obtained by

versation, which took place within days of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,

indicates that the $25 figure

Wilson:

I

had been suggested to Saddam by the US:

think the situation

is

dangerous to the world.

Saddam: Why? Wilson: Because there

Saddam: You

did this.

The CSIS developed out

is

unrest in world markets.

We

accepted $25 per barrel.

of the National Strategy Information Center

64

which Prescott Bush and Bill Casey had co-founded in 1962. In addition to having former CIA analysts on its staff, the CSIS's five counselors are former NSC chief and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former NSC chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, former CIA Director and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, former Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff commander William Crowe, and former Labor Secretary and Republican Party chair William Brock.

The CSIS has

also helped prod In 1982,

policy in the past.

when

OPEC

countries into line with

Iran launched

driving Saddam's forces back into Iraq,

its

ARAMCO,

US

counter-offensive,

the

US

oil

conglom-

erate in Saudi Arabia, an Exxon- Mobil-Chevron-Texaco joint venture, started pressuring the Saudi throne to increase output, thereby drop-

The Saudi below $30 per oil minister. Sheik Zaki Yamani, refused to let prices fall barrel. CSIS energy pointman Schuler testified before the US Senate that "Yamani made a very serious mistake on both tactical and strategic levels." Eventually, the Saudis capitulated, and prices dropped to ping prices and depriving the Iranian war machine of capital.

below $9 per barrel. In

1984, a Saudi tanker hauling Iranian oil to France

dramatic increases Persian Gulf.

in insurance

In 1986, the

US

was

hit

by

Lloyds of London announced

a French-supplied Iraqi Exocet missile.

premiums against

acts of

war

in the

introduced warships into the Gulf to

protect Kuwaiti tankers flying under the

US

flag.

But

it

was

also in

1986 that that Vice President George Bush travelled to Saudi Arabia to persuade

King Fahd to press

ProDem was working

OPEC

to raise prices. Simultaneously,

with Saudi arms merchants to supply Iran with

TOW

anti-tank missiles and other arms. Sheik Yamani was ousted as Saudi oil minister a post he had considered permanent. This time his crime had been keeping prices too low— the exact opposite of the position for which the CSIS had lambasted him just four years earlier. Yamani's ouster was popularly portrayed as a Saudi capitulation to threats of Iran-sponsored terrorism, but many saw the hand of US pressure behind the move. The US was clearly playing both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, prolonging the conflict by "tilting" to whichever power happened to be losing at the moment, keeping the two most powerful

sophisticated

anti-West states

in

—

the Islamic world slaughtering each others' draftees

and hurling rockets at each others' capitals. As a 1985 CIA memo to Bill Casey put it: "Our tilt to Iraq was timely when Iraq was against the ropes and the Islamic Revolution was on a roll. The time may now ." have come to tilt back. .

.

65

Iraqgate

J=»(»^»olt-

tx

But the US did not completely sever its ties to the Saddam regime by any means after all, the time might come to "tilt back" again. In 1985, the US-Iraq Business Forum was founded to promote closer diplomatic and trade links between the two countries. As economist Doug Hen-

—

wood

reports in his newsletter Left Business Observer,

included

ARCO, AMOCO, AT&T,

Forum members

Exxon, Hunt Oil, Lockheed, Mobil, Shearson and Westinghouse. The Forum's president was former US envoy to both Iraq and Oman, Marshall Wiley, who told the Los Angeles Times in August 1990 that in person Saddam is "charming." In June 1989, Wiley led a delegation including a representative from Kissinger

66

Associates to Baghdad to meet with

Saddam.

The US was deeply involved in the development of the Iraqi war machine. The Soviet Union and France were Saddam's principal suppliers of arms and nuclear materials, while West German firms provided chemical warfare production infrastructure and state-of-the-art military bunkers The now-defunct East German intelligence agency, Stasi, provided training for Saddam's brutal secret police. The US corporate was to provide the high-tech refinements for the military hardware.

role

For instance, California's Hewlett-Packard provided a computer system

which was used to enhance navigation on Saddam's notoriously inaccurate Soviet-made rockets. On October 2, 1989, President Bush signed National Security Directive 26, a top-secret order calling for closer ties to Iraq and, despite

Saddam's increasingly poor credit rating, $1 billion in US governmentbacked commodity credits, primarily for agricultural goods. The directive referred to Iraq as

one of the "key friendly states"

in the

Persian

Gulf. Later that month, as Robert Hennelly reports in the Village Voice,

James Baker met with Saddam's Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz an additional $500 million

in credits

to discuss

guaranteed by the federal govern-

ment. The Los Angeles Times reports that when the Agriculture Department wanted to reduce the $1 billion credit package to $400 million, James Baker contacted then-Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter and asked him to support the full $1 billion on "foreign policy grounds." Yeutter capitulated. Britain's

before

Guardian reports that on August

Saddam

1,

1990, the very day

sent his troops across the Kuwaiti border,

the Bush

administration approved the sale of $695,000 of advanced data transmission devices to Iraq. Between 1985 and 1990, the Reagan and Bush administrations approved 771 sales of technology to Iraq, totalling a

whopping $1.5

billion.

Technology sold by such

US

firms as Hewlett-

Packard, Teledyne, Tektronix, Textron, and Hughes Aircraft to such key branches of the Iraqi government as the defense and interior ministries

and the atomic energy commission, included advanced computers, radio equipment, computerized mapping systems for analyzing rocket trajectory, and imaging devices for reading satellite photos, according to US

Commerce Department

records. In the 15 days prior to the invasion of Kuwait, the White House approved $4.8 million in advanced technology

sales to Iraq.

In 1979, the year that state, President Carter

Saddam wrested

had the country

control of Iraq's one-party

oflRcially

declared a "terrorist

67

meant that severe trade restrictions were imposed. Saddam's support for the extremist Palestinian faction Abu Nidal was cited. But 1979 was also the year that Ayatollah Khomeini's theocratic revolution toppled the Shah in Iran. In 1983, the White House removed Iraq from the list of "terrorist nations," and the following year full diplomatic ties were restored. By 1990, Iraq would be the United States's third-largest trading partner in the Middle East, after Saudi Arabia and nation," which

Israel.

With

its

entire

the war drive, Iraq the late '80s, the

May

male workforce over the age of 14 conscripted into especially dependent on the US for food. In

became

US

sold

up to 20% of its

1989, the US-Iraq Business

Saddam's Iraq. In of "booming" food imports. "The best prospects

commerce and "sharp" increases in American firms in the near term

for oil

rice crop to

Forum newsletter boasted

will include agricultural products,

equipment, computers and other high-technology.

." .

.

two months before the invasion of Kuwait, Bush's request for expanding the Missile Technology Control Regime to restrict export to Iraq of such items as computerized rocketry navigation systems. US-Iraq trade relations seemed to have been dealt a blow when Saddam had the Kurdish city of Halabja gassed, instantly killing 5,000 civilians in a clear act of genocide against an ethnic minority non-combatant population. A bill calling for sanctions was introduced to Congress. USIraq Business Forum President Marshall Wiley immediately jumped into action, spouting the same line that corporate mouthpieces have used to justify trade with apartheid South Africa. In a letter to the Washington Post, Wiley wrote: "The imposition of sanctions at this time would reduce, rather than increase, our ability to influence Iraqi behavior. The In June 1990, just

NSC

vetoed a

Commerce Department

president should veto the sanctions legislation."

The

bill

never got out

of Congress.

During Operation Desert Shield, President Bush would sign an execuSaddam's biological warfare threat a "national emergency," and allowing the Pentagon to override FDA regulations barring the use of new experimental anti-germ warfare drugs on human beings. The Pentagon began a mandatory program of testing the experimental vaccines on Desert Shield troops in Saudi Arabia. The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen brought suit against the program, charging the administration with using US GIs as human guinea pigs a violation tive order declaring

—

US comphc-

of the

Nuremberg

ity in

the development of the very Iraqi bio-warfare capability that the

test

Principles. Ironically, evidence points to

program was supposed

to defend against.

The Simon Wiesenthal

68 Center, the watchdog group on anti-Semitism and genocide, cites US Commerce Department records of transactions in which a Maryland-

based nonprofit group, the American Type Culture Collection, sent approximately 20 biological agents to Iraqi scientists. The center also cites

an

NBC

report from April 11, 1990 that the federal Centers for

News

in Atlanta sent three shipments of West Nile Fever Virus Salman Pak bacteriological research station. Bush's new CIA Director Robert Gates was also apparently involved the covert arming of Iraq. The TV news show Frontline reports that

Disease Control to Iraq's

in

Richard Babayan, a former agent of the Shah's SAVAK secret police in Iran who became an opposition figure under the Khomeini regime, says that he met with Gates on numerous occasions to arrange secret

weapons shipments from South Africa to Saddam's Iraq. Former Israeli intelligence agent Ari Ben-Menache told Frontline that Gates worked with Chilean arms dealers to send a half-billion-dollar arms shipment to Iraq in 1986. Gates had also been instrumental in the NSC decision to axe the 1990 Commerce Department suggestion that exports of missile technology to Iraq be curtailed: Gates was deputy NSC chief at the time. In

August 1989, FBI agents raided the Atlanta branch of the Banca

Nazionale del Lavoro, or BNL, Italy's largest bank (and a Kissinger Asso-

US

ciates client). Apparently, without informing either

authorities or the Italian government, which

lanta branch had

Hussein regime

in

made

$3 billion

in

federal

banking

owns 75% of BNL, the At-

unauthorized loans to the

Iraq over the past four years.

Saddam

By the time a

federal

grand jury had handed down three indictments of Atlanta BNL officials on money-laundering charges in February 1991, a House Banking Committee probe had unearthed a vast network of dirty deals with Saddam's

—

US corporate power and cerBush White House. The money had been routed through such major New York banks as Chase Manhattan, Irving Trust, Manufacturers Hanover and Morgan Guaranty in order to Iraq which touched the highest levels of tainly had the connivance of the

hide the

trail.

Two

officials

of the Iraqi Ministry of Industry

production were also indicted.

The more than 3,000

&

Military

between BNL-Atlanta and Baghdad found in the raid indicated that much of the BNL money was used to develop Iraq's Taji industrial complex, a major

producer of

The

telexes

artillery.

use of unauthorized loans for military aid

eral law. Since

BNL

facilitate these deals,

borrowed upwards of $2

US

taxdollars

is

billion

may now have

a violation of fed-

from

US banks

to

to be used to repay

69

them; war-ravaged Iraq

will

almost certainly default.

In a speech

on

the House floor, Texas Democrat Henry Gonzalez, chair of the House

Banking Committee, asserted that the Bush administration had been aware of BNL's illegal transactions: I

have obtained from a source

must protect a memorandum

I

that indicates a top-ranking administration level

official

military goods.

the revelation of

BNL

financing of military articles would cause

adverse congressional reaction and press coverage.

memorandum:

from a cabinet-

BNL

was used for purchasing This administration official was concerned that

department had knowledge that

He

stated in his

"In the worst-ceise scenario, congressional

and other

investigators would find a direct link to financing Iraqi military

expenditures, particularly the Condor missile." in the scam was furwas obstructed by the Justice,

Gonzalez claimed that administration complicity ther evidenced by the fact that his probe

State and Treasury departments: hard to believe that BN.L escaped the attention of the

It is

ligence community.

and phone conversations. Did they telexes

between

BNL

intel-

These organizations monitor overseas telexes fail

to discover the over 3,000

and Iraqi government agencies, many provid-

ing information detailing loans to companies that were building the

Taji complex and other military-related projects in Iraq.

Gonzalez continues to charge the Bush White House with roadblockThe Los Angeles Times reports that both NSC chief

ing his probe.

Brent Scowcroft and

Commerce

Secretary Robert Mosbacher invoked

the president's "executive privilege" to justify withholding information

from Congressional

The

investigators. Says Gonzalez:

President, or at least people acting in his

name and

ap-

parently with his knowledge conspired to keep the truth about his Iraqi policy

from the very public that elected him and fought and

died to support his efforts in the Gulf.

The

reference to the

military-related projects"

Condor

missile project indicates that

may have

included the Saad 16

site,

rocketry and nuclear production infrastructure was being built.

Saad 16 that

"other

where was

It

improving on the primitive navigacomputer technology from Hewlett-Packard. The Condor missile was an improvement on the at

Iraqi scientists were

tional systems of their Soviet-supplied rockets with

70 Soviet Scud which Iraqi technicians were attempting to prociuce in a joint venture with Argentina and Egypt, according to London's Financial Times.

According to an article by Jack Colhoun in New York's Guardian newsweekly, laundered BNL money was also involved in yet another this one being built by the US engineering Iraqi industrial complex

—

giant Bechtel. The complex was known as PC2, and an anonymous official of Bechtel Overseas in London, which was managing construction of the project, told Colhoun that the corporation had received "direct encouragement" from the US Commerce Department to take on the job, and that "our client, the government of Iraq, told us we would be paid through letters of credit from the BNL-Atlanta branch."

The PC2

plant was to produce ethylene oxide, which

manufacture of the chemical warfare agent mustard gas, things.

is

used in the

among

unclear whether construction of the complex was

It is

other

underway

impending storm prompted Bechtel to pull out of The deal was scuttled by the timely intervention of George Schultz, a Bechtel board member who is wellconnected to the intelligence community- he was a close friend of the late Bill Casey, with whom he served in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations. Schultz told the Financial Times that at a 1990 Bechtel board meeting, "I really hit it very hard and I said something is going to go very wrong in Iraq and blow up and if Bechtel were there it would get blown up too. So I told them to get out." However, after Operation Desert Storm, with "liberated" Kuwait under the control of the US Green Berets and FEMA, with the despotic monarchy and its secret police restored to power and organizing a network of death squads to exact random vengeance on Palestinian workers

when word

the deal

—

of the

in

the nick of time.

—

(nearly

all

of

whom

were apparently suspected of "collaborating" with

under martial law and giant detainment camps being built in the desert, and thousands of the Palestinians who had previously run Kuwait's banking system being rounded up, with the sky blackened by the noxious fumes of oil fires raging out of Iraqi occupation forces), with the country

control

— Bechtel

Kuwaiti

Even

won

oil facilities it

in defeat,

it

lucrative contracts to rebuild the very destroyed

had originally

seems,

Saddam

built 40 years ago.

Hussein was good for George Bush's

corporate pals.

The Environmental President George Bush's campaign pledge to be the "environmental president"

71

making a campaign issue out of "family values" in Washington that he is an adulterer. {Spy magazine reports that Bush has long maintained a not-so-secret affair with one Jennifer Fitzgerald, who he met in the Nixon White House where she was working as an aide. Bush has managed to keep Fitzgerald close at hand ever since, even taking her to Beijing as his "personal assistant" when he was appointed US envoy to China. After Bush became president. Spy reports, Fitzgerald was given a "cushy patronage is

as hypocritical as his

when

it

is

an open secret

appointment" at the State Department.) Operation Desert Storm was an ecological disaster of the first magnitude. It is impossible to get an definite number on the amount of oil spilled into the Gulf during the war, destroying mangrove forests and habitat for dolphins, sea turtles and dugongs as well as local fishing economies, but rate,

if

the higher estimates of 300 million gallons are accu-

then this constitutes by far the largest

The

spill in

the history of the

Kuwait burned for months and blackened skies as far away as Turkey and Iran. George Bush initiated Desert Storm knowing full well that this would be the cost. On January 9, 1991, mere days before the air war against Iraq was launched, the Energy Department's elite Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico released a report entitled "Potential Impact of Iraqi Use of Oil as a Defensive Weapon." The report has since been classified, but sections leaked to the press were printed in Science News. The report warned that Iraq would dump oil into the Gulf and set Kuwaiti oilfields on fire, resulting in "measurable climatic eff"ects on a regional industry.

oil fires in

level."

Bush administration unveiled its new enoil output and opening Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska's north coast

In the midst of the war, the

ergy plan for the 1990s, which called for boosting

up the

pristine

companies which have long been salivating over and British Petroleum. One of the last migratory caribou in North America, the lies

to exploitation by the it

—

principally,

oil

Exxon,

calving grounds for

ARCO

ANWR

adjacent to Prudhoe Bay, a large area which has already been destroyed

by

oil

exploitation.

The Bush energy plan

also calls for significantly

new nuclear power "new generation" of nuke plants, and gutting government programs for energy efficiency and conservation. Fortunately, the plan was axed by Congress and sent back to the administration for loosening ("streamlining") the licensing guidelines for plants, developing a

redrafting.

Simultaneous with the energy plan, the administration released a

72

proposal for significantly loosening federal guidelines regulating biotech-

nology and recombinant

The administration

DNA is

research.

also pushing for the creation of a

US

"free

trade bloc" with Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean, to counterbalance a newly united Europe and Japan's "co-prosperity sphere"

East Asia and the Pacific. Canada has already signed a Free Trade Agreement, and negotiations with Mexico are now nearing completion. The "Free Trade Agreements" entail eliminating "unfair trade barriers," but environmentalists and trade unionists fear that standards for environmental protection and worker health and safety could be among the dropped "barriers." A study by the Canadian Environmental Law in

Association has already written that "by limiting the rights of govern-

ments to regulate the development of natural resources or to control that development to accomplish environmental objectives, the trade deal has undermined critical opportunities to accomplish goals that are necessary to abate global warming." Bush, whose largest campaign contributors have been his friends in the

oil

house

industry, continues to block global progress effect

cutting

on fighting the green-

by refusing to accept the concept of binding time-tables for

fossil fuel

use

— long after the European Community has already

accepted the idea (and even as the impending Greenhouse Effect starts

mass starvaand elsewhere). Under Bush, the US

to take its toll in devastating African droughts, leading to tion in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia

has consistently vetoed the time-table resolutions at

all

the international

conferences called to confront the issue. In May 1989, as NASA scientist and global climate expert James Hansen prepared to present testimony on the Greenhouse Effect to the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology & Space, he found that the White House Office of Management and Budget (0MB) had stepped in at the last minute and censored his prepared text. The 0MB had expunged from Hansen's text references to the results of computer studies indicating an imminent upheaval in Earth's climate. Also expunged were assertions that this upheaval is due to human activity. When Hansen reported the changes to the subcommittee, an outraged Senator Al Gore of Tennessee went public, charging the White House with attempting to change science to conform to policy. It was later revealed that other scientists had been pre.ssured by the White House to alter their testimony as well. National Oceanic ^ Atmospheric Administration scientist Jerry Mahlman told reporters that the 0MB had attempted to make "objectionable and unscientific" changes in the text he had prepared for the

73

same

hearings.

Mahlman

said that

if

he had allowed the changes to be

made, his testimony would have been "embarrassing." While Mahlman says that he prevailed in his effort to prevent the from altering his

0MB

testimony, Hansen says the

0MB

officials

had

insisted over his strong

objections.

The in

role of the

Rio de Janeiro

turn.

The US

"environmental president" at the Earth

in

Summit

held

June, 1992, was similarly to block progress at every

delegation led by Bush pushed for a. revision of the Rio

Declaration, a set of principles unveiled at the

Summit

to guide future

global relations on environment and development. Unable to get their revision, the

Bush delegation had

to settle for issuing a statement object-

Among

ing to several of the Rio Declaration principles.

the

US

the principles

objected to were:

• acceptance of international corporate liability for environmental de-

struction • the use of trade restrictions to address environmental concerns • the right of poor nations to develop

As environmental activist John Miller reports in the October 1992 High Times, the Earth Summit was stymied by Bush's inflexible opposition to placing controls on corporations, and refusal to vary his mantra that "free trade" will solve

all

problems. At

US

insistence, the

Climate

Convention, one of the two binding treaties to come out of the Earth

Summit, includes no timetables

for

reducing the carbon emissions

sponsible for global warming (of course).

The US

the Biodiversity Treaty, designed to preserve global plant and animal at a time

when massive

species extinction

is

re-

also refused to sign life

at its greatest height since

the end of the Mesozoic era and threatening the biosphere with plane-

More concerned with protecing the biotechnology biz than Bush objected to the provisions encouraging biotech corporations to share the benefits of their research with the nations from which the "genetic material" they manipulate (i.e. plant and animal

tary collapse. biodiversity,

species) originate

The Bush blueprint for

— usually "third world"

nations in the tropical South.

delegation also bottlenecked

human

Agenda

survival into the 21st Century

Earth Summit. Bush fought against Agenda 21 's

21,

the 700-page

drawn up

call for

at the

regulating the

world's militaries, one of the biggest toxic polluters, and insisted that

any reference to nuclear weapons production be dropped from Agenda section on nuclear waste. The Bush delegation also refused to

2rs

74

promise any action on changing bloated consumption patterns in the super-developed North. "Our lifestyle is not up for negotiation," said Bush. (These words echo Bush's justification for Desert Storm: "Iraqi aggression threatens our way of life." For Bush, the American "way of life" evidently means profligate consumption, ostentatious waste even amidst

growing poverty, and ever-expanding corporate mega-profits.) Bush is also trying to have "free trade" principals instated worldwide through the rewritten version of the General Agreements on Tariffs & Trade (GATT), which would severely limit the ability of governments to restrict importation of pesticides, biotechnology products or other ecologically dangerous products, or to bar foreign corporations access

The globe-spanning multinationals would have anywhere on the planet, and those nations which refused to sign on would face a devastating trade cut-off", such as that which crippled Nicaragua in the 1980s. So far the new GATT has been stalled due to militant protest by European farmers who fear losing their to natural resources.

access to resources

livelihood to cheap "third world" labor.

But the

"free trade"

agenda

is

already underway.

US manufactur-

ing jobs are already being exported to dollar-a-day exploitation plants

Guatemala where environmental standards are virtually non-existent and the atmosphere of death-squad terror keeps the labor

in places like

force compliant.

Bush's "enterprise zones" plan calls for a domestic

"free trade" strategy for the devastated

US

inner

cities,

creating inter-

US environmental and labor safety regulations would loosened in the name of "encouraging investment." In Bush's "free trade" future, US oil companies would no longer have

nal pockets where

be

to resort to subterfuge in order to extract resources abroad, as

had

in the

Permargo scam

in

Zapata

Mexico. Laws restricting foreign control

of local resources in the developing world would be simply eliminated. it looks as though the Mexican oil industry will indeed be privaand gobbled up by US firms following the US-Mexico Free Trade Agreement. The White House Council on Competitiveness headed by Vice President Dan Quayle has been given virtual veto-power over any government regulations, and has been using its power to dole out favors to industries friendly to the administration. Created by a Bush executive order, the so-called Quayle Council has already gutted EPA regulations calling for more stringent standards on power plant emissions, preservation of wetlands and release of toxins into the environment.

In fact, tized

— 75 recently guided the FDA in drawing up guideapproving the marketing of genetically altered food products

The Quayle Council lines for

by the biotech industry. Over 500 such products are currently being tested for approval by the FDA, including fruit, vegetables, livestock, fish and poultry. They are frequently engineered to be resistant to pesticides,

thereby allowing continued spraying of ever greater quantities

of ever

more

Under the new guidelines handed down by will treat products genetically altered by no differently than new products created by conven-

toxic mixes.

the Quayle Council, the

recombinant

DNA

FDA

tional hybrid breeding techniques.

Among

the

many

private corporations which have held closed-door

meetings with the Quayle Council

is the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly one of the biggest polluters both in Indiana where the company is based and in Puerto Rico where it operates notoriously dirty factories. Eli Lilly has been censured by the FDA on numerous occasions for failure to file

timely reports on the testing of facturing practices.

It

its

new drugs and

for

improper manu-

has also been the target of numerous citizen law-

—

marketing of potentially dangerous drugs such as supposed to ease arthritic pain, and has been linked to numerous deaths of elderly users. Eli Lilly has been a major campaign contributor to Quayle, and George Bush sat on the company's board in the late 1970s. (Mitch Daniels, who was on the Quayle staff" during the 1988 campaign, is today a vice president at Eli Lilly.) Upon becoming suits for irresponsible

Oraflex, which

is

vice president in 1980, Bush's $180,000

worth of

Lilly stock

was put into

a blind trust, but he continued to (illegally) lobby the Treasury Department to lower taxes for Lilly's Puerto Rican investments. Lilly has long

been well connected with the power elite. It was contracted by the CIA to produce LSD for the Agency's MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments in the 1950s,

to the the

and

is

also purported to have exported psychiatric drugs

USSR — where

they were presumably used against political

dissidents.

A New

Realignment?

The USA's ransacked economy off"

is

his "victory" over Iraq (a victory

haunting Bush. As the shine wears which left Saddam in power and

exacting brutal vengeance on the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites

—

who were

fool-

enough to trust Bush when he encouraged them to revolt against the tyrant during the war). Bush is wooing Britain and France for renewed military conflict against Iraq. But will the same trick work twice? ish

Bush's double standard in "standing up to aggression"

is all

the

more

76

evident

now

that the world watches in horror as the Serbian forces un-

campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against the Muslim Slavs of Bosnia. New York Newsday has revealed that CIA reports about the internment of thousands of Muslim Slavs in concentration camps in Serbian-occupied Bosnia reached George Bush months before the existence of the camps was revealed in the media and the President chose to remain silent about them. But then, Bush's pals leash their quasi-genocidal

—

have close connections among the Serbian

elites.

The Serbian

state

is, of course, the surviving remnant of what had been the Yugoslavian which had been a client of Kissinger Associates. Bush's Deputy state Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger (who assumed the top post at

—

the State Department election

campaign)

is

when James Baker

left in

1992 to run Bush's

re-

a former president of Kissinger Associates. (Eagle-

burger was also president of

ITT

of Kissinger Associates' top clients.

ITT and US Ambassador to

same time, and ITT was another By consulting himself, he received

at the

Eagleburger

bonuses from both

Kissinger Associates.)

a former

Yugoslavia, and sat on the board of

is

also

Yugo

America, the automobile export subsidiary of Yugoslavia's industrial powerhouse Zavodi Crvena Zastava, which sold arms to both Iran and Iraq

when the two

countries were at war with each other. Such

major US

defense contractors as Lockheed, Textron and Rockwell also had major military contracts with the Yugoslav regime. ciates,

While

at Kissinger Asso-

Eagleburger also served on the board of Yugoslavia's

LBS

bank,

which was convicted in 1988 of money laundering operations connected to the smuggling of weapons throughout Africa and the Middle East.

About one-quarter del

of LBS's business

— whose

Lavoro

agricultural loans to

The

came from

Italy's

Banca Nazionale

Atlanta branch was instrumental in diverting

US

arms purchases by Saddam Hussein.

throughout Eastern Europe is masterminded by Bush. When the Stalinist tyrannies were destabilized in 1989, there was an historic opening, a moment of infinite possibilities, a moment which always emerges in any revolution. Greens, radical environmentalists, democratic socialists, human-rights advocates, left libertarians and nonviolent anarchists were at the cutting edge of the resistance movements which finally toppled the old regimes from the Baltics to East Germany. But massive funds from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy (which also helped bring the counter-revolutionary Chamorro regime to power in Nicaragua in 1989) flooded into the coffers of right-wing and pro-capitalist parties in the Eastern European nations, assuring that the progressive elements in

terrifying re-emergence of fascism

part a result of the

US

policy

77

would be sidelined and that the final outcome of the Eastern revolutions would be a conservative restoration. Many of these parties were re-emergent fascist parties which had collaborated with the Nazis 40 years earlier, such as Lithuania's Sajudis.

The new democracies of Latin America, which emerged in the 1980s from a long and nightmarish era of domination by brutal military regimes (mostly installed with the aid of the CIA),

now

teeter

on the edge of

destablization. Constitutional government has already been overturned in Haiti

and Peru since Bush took the White House

ton denies involvement in the coups d'etat,

many

— and while Wcishing-

Haitians and Peruvians

remain skeptical, and the Bush White House has certainly made little government to power. A high-level US State Department delegation was in Lima when President Alberto Fujimori suspended Peru's constitution. The US is actually paying the Haitian military regime's processing costs for the thousands of refugees which the US Coast Guard has forcibly repatriated to the island to face politeffort to restore civilian

The

America propaganda obstacle to the establishment of the region as a US-dominated "free trade zone." In addition, the war which the Bush administration is eyeing in Peru a war on poor Indian peasants and the Maoist Shining Path insurgency, disguised as a crackdown on the cocaine trade is likely viewed by rational elements in the Penatgon as another counter-insurgency "quagmire" like Vietnam (as opposed to the "conventional" war against Iraq, easily won by superior US air power). US DEA agents and Green Berets are already fighting in the remote mountains and jungles of Peru under Bush's multi-million-dollar Operation Snowcap and have been accused of participating in atrociical persecution.

would be a

return of overt military control to Latin

significant

—

—

—

ties

against defenseless Indian communities.

The

and the secret strategy which Bush forged has But from the recent explosion in Los Angeles (to which Bush responded by sending in Marines with combat experience in Panama and Desert Storm, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the use of military troops for domestic elite coalition

achieved brilliant,

if

Machiavellian, victories.

law enforcement) to the swelling unemployment figures, obvious that the nation which won the Cold

War

it is

has driven

becoming

itself

deeply

into crisis.

Another realignment of elite power of the sort which followed the Vietnam War and Watergate may be in progress. Bush's 1992 presidential candidacy has been denounced as a losing proposition even by such key architects of the New Right as Richard Viguerie. Even ultra-hawk

78 Paul Nitze has thrown his support first behind H. Ross Perot, and then, after Perot's self-destruction, behind Democratic candidate Bill Clin-

emerging within the Republican Party over the official anti-abortion dogma. Twelve years of Reagan-Bush rule has moved the entire political Dissension

ton.

is

finally

center-of-gravity in the

US dangerously

to the right.

Figures like "for-

mainstream. The

mer" Klansman David Duke have Democrats have themselves largely capitulated to the right-wing ideoentered the political

logical assault.

Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council, which has centralized power within the party and sidelined the traditional left wing of the Democrats, is financially supported by the likes of Martin Marrieta, Boeing and Dow Chemical. Clinton supports "free trade" and the instating of a "national youth service" which would further militarize the inner cities by conscripting low-income kids into "anti-crime" police corps. Clinton's running mate Al Gore is frequently lauded as an "environmentalist," but he cast a swing vote in the Senate approving Bush's Operation Desert Storm, and repeatedly voted to approve MX missile

funding

in

the

Reagan

years.

Bush, meanwhile, apparently in a panic reaction to his suddenly

plummeting popularity, is lurching yet further to the right. "Family values" has become the lynchpin of his campaign, and the address by Marilyn Quayle (VP Dan's wife) before the Republican convention in Houston was an unabashed attack on the recent gains of women's emancipation which sounded dangerously like the "Kinder, Kirche, Kiiche" (children, church, kitchen) rhetoric that the Nazi Party used to describe

the enforced role of list

women

in their

new

order. Figures such as televange-

Pat Robertson and the quasi-fascist Pat Buchanan (a Nixon White

House speechwriter), once considered part of the looney-toons radical were also invited to address the convention. Bush's own nomination acceptance speech railed against the Democrat-controlled Congress and the legal system as if he were salivating for a Reichstag fire. All this is merely evidence of Bush's desperation. Significant chunks of the coalition he built are deserting him, viewing him as someone right,

who

it is time to build a new moving back towards the political center. But the wheel is still in spin, and Bush is attempting to consolidate support from the most reactionary and dangerous elements in his own coalition. Will this monograph prove to be a post-mortem on what was perhaps the most corrupt presidency in US history? As we go to press, we

has outlived his usefulness, deciding that

coalition

and

start

79 can only speculate.

The architect of the New World Order may have up his sleeve yet. By the time you are reading this we may be witnessmg a new "October Surprise" in Iraq-or several tricks

perhaps a con-

trived "domestic crisis" which could "justify" re-election, or postponing the elections themselves in the name of

maybe even

"national security."

In any event, those who remain committed to fighting for popular empowerment and meaningful democracy would do well to remember the old adage: Know Thine Enemy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (Works not cited

in text)

Kaku, Michio To Win A Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans South End Press, Boston, 1987 Kornbluh, Peter Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, 1987

Kwitney, Jonathan The Crimes of Patriots:

A

True Tale of Dope, Dirty New York, 1987

Money and

the

CIA

Norton, Lane,

Mark

Plausible Denial-

Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? Thunders Mouth Press, New York, 1991*** ***

CAUTION:

Right-wing source material. To be treated with

appropriate skepticism.

Lundberg, Ferdinand The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today Bantam, New York, 1968 Marshall, Jonathan, et al The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations South End Press, Boston, 1987

in the

Reagan Era

80 Oglesby, Carl

&

Cowboy War: Dallas to Watergate from Conspiracies Kansas City, 1976 McMeel, Andrews k The Yankee

&

Beyond

Pringle, Peter, et al

SIOP: The Secret US Plan for Nuclear Norton, New York, 1983

War

Sale, Kirkpatrick

Power

Shift:

The Rise of the Southern Rim and

its

Challenge to the Eastern

Establishment

Random

House,

New

York, 1975

Sampson, Anthony The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies Bantam, New York, 1975

&

the

World They Shaped

Scheer, Robert With Enough Shovels:

Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War Random House, New York, 1983 Scott, Peter Dale, et al

Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA

in Central

University of California, Berkeley, 1991

America