William Barr, Trumps AG nominee, heavily involved in Mena, Ark., Bush-Clinton drug-trafficking

[Apollonian]

Trump’s Attorney General nominee Barr a drug dealing assassin?​

By Kevin Barrett -
December 7, 2018

Link: https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/12/07/barr/

By Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor

Anybody who thinks Trump is out to drain the swamp and bust the Deep State just got a dose of reality medicine, in the form of Trump’s nomination of swamp monster William Barr as our next Attorney General.

According to former Bush-CIA black ops specialist Chip Tatum, Barr was part of Operation 40, an Agency-linked criminal gang that moved huge quantities of drugs and was involved in many high-level political assassinations, including those of the Kennedies, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and dozens of others. Ironically, Trump—who tossed a few rhetorical punches at the Bush Crime Family during the 2016 Republican primaries—has just nominated a man who represented the Bush CIA drug cartel, both within the CIA itself (1973-1977) and later when he served as “Opium Poppy” Bush’s Attorney General.

David “DC Dave” Martin sends the following snippet of Tatum’s conversation with FBI investigator Ted Gunderson:

* * *

Chip Tatum: Several of the members that I flew to this meeting in El Ocatal – here are the people who were there: it was General Noriega, Mike Harari, who was a retired Mossad agent assigned to Gen. Noriega, Felix Rodriguez, Joe Fernandez, who was the CIA station-chief in Costa Rica, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez, who was the U.S. – or the Honduran Army chief of staff, and a guy named William Barr, who represented the assets of this enterprise.

Gunderson: Now, wait a moment. William Barr used to be attorney general of the United States.

Tatum: He later became, under his boss George Bush, the attorney general of the United States, that’s correct.

Gunderson: That’s right. He replaced Thornburgh, wasn’t it?

Tatum: Yes, I believe so.

Gunderson: Well, isn’t that interesting? …so we have Vice President Bush, we have Ollie North, we have William Barr involved in the drug-operation. It’s that simple, isn’t it?

Yes, it is.

* * *

So why would Trump fire Jeff Sessions and appoint a depraved denizen of the Deep State to replace him? Because Trump is the slimiest, scaliest reptile from the deepest darkest part of the Deep State swamp. If you haven’t figured that out yet, you aren’t paying attention.

Note that Trump has been slyly boasting of his swamp creature status for years. Watch him rapturously identifying with the title character in his favorite poem, “The Snake.”

 

[Apollonian]

Air Cocaine: the Wild, True Story of Drug-Running, Arms Smuggling and Contras at a Backwoods Airstrip in the Clintons’ Arkansas​

by Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn

Link: https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/1...ras-at-a-small-airstrip-in-clintons-arkansas/

On March 16, 1986, President Ronald Reagan went on national television to make a desperate pitch for the restoration of congressional aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. This particular war had never been popular with Americans, who stubbornly remained indifferent to lurid scenarios proffered by the Great Communicator that the Sandinistas might sweep north through Guatemala and Mexico to menace Texas. So Reagan deployed a new tactic, denouncing the Sandinistas as a regime that had its hand in the drug trade.

For the previous six months, Oliver North and his colleagues at the National Security Council and the CIA had been leaking stories to the Washington press corps charging that the leadership of the Nicaraguan government, including Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, was in league with the Medellin cartel and with Fidel Castro in a hemisphere –wide cocaine-trafficking network. On that March evening, Reagan displayed a series of grainy photographs purporting to show Sandinista officials loading duffel bags of cocaine in a C-123K military transport plane destined for Miami, Florida.

“I know that every American parent concerned about the drug problem will be outrage to hear that top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking,” Reagan said. “This picture, secretly taken at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Frederico Vaughn, a top aide to one of the nine commandants who rule Nicaragua, loading aircraft with illegal narcotics bound for the United States.”

As that Time magazine editor told his reporter Lawrence Zuckerman, this was precisely the kind of drug story that would end up on the front pages of American newspapers. But it turned out to be a setup, part of an elaborate sting operation concocted by Oliver North, the CIA, George Bush’s drug task force and a convicted drug runner named Barriman Alder Seal. It was Seal who had piloted the plane, equipped with CIA-installed cameras, to that Nicaraguan airstrip and brought the cocaine back to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. In return for his services, Seal received more than $700,000 and a reduced sentence on pending drug convictions.

Years later the DEA admitted that Seal’s CIA-sponsored mission was the only drug flight involving the Sandinistas it had any information about. To this day, Frederico Vaughn remains a figure clouded by mystery, with no one quite sure who he is or who he was working for. Seal wasn’t around to answer any questions either. A few weeks before Reagan’s television address, Seal was gunned down while in a federal witness protection program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana- a victim of Oliver North’s press leaks.

Barry Seal was a veteran of both the drug trade and the intelligence business. Born in Baton Rouge, Seal was a bulky, athletic man with a beguiling presence. He was 5-feet-7 inches tall, weighed 250 pounds and wore thick muttonchop sideburns. He had a passion for cars, women and Snickers bars, though he neither smoked nor drank nor used cocaine.

Seal’s first contact with the CIA came in the 1960s while he served as a pilot for the US Army’s Special Forces division. He left the army in 1965 to become, at the age of twenty-six, a pilot for TransWorld Airlines, and it’s apparent that Seal continued his relationship with the Agency during his employment with the airline. In 1972 Seal was busted by the US Customs Service for attempting to smuggle 14,000 pounds of C-4 explosives into Mexico. The bomb-making material was destined for a CIA-trained cell of anti-Castro Cubans. Seal lost his job at TWA but escaped prosecution when the CIA intervened. The agency told the US Attorney’s office that a trial would “threaten national security interests.”

It wasn’t long before Seal turned his considerable skills as a pilot and entrepreneur to Latin America’s emerging black market in drugs and guns. In the mid-1970s he bought a small fleet of planes, recruited a network of ace pilots and mechanics (many of whom were veterans of the war in Vietnam and Laos) and developed ties to the leadership of the Medellin drug cartel.

By his own admission, Seal became the Medellin cartel’s chief link to the cocaine markets of the southeastern United States. In federal court, Seal testified as a government witness in a drug trial that he earned more than $50 million smuggling cocaine and marijuana. But the pilot was most certainly being uncharacteristically modest. Investigators for the Arkansas State Police told the US Justice Department that they believed Seal’s enterprise had raked in between $3 billion and $5 billion from the late 1970s up to his bloody death in 1986. Seal’s bank records show that in 1981 he was making daily deposits of $50,000 in his favorite bank in the Bahamas. The drug money was reinvested in a variety of schemes, from hotels and casinos to a TV network and a drug company.

In 1982 Seal moved his base of operations from New Orleans to the small town of Mena in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas. It was in this same year that Seal once again hooked up with his friends in the CIA, who were anxious to use Seal’s fleet of planes to ferry supplies to Contra camps in Honduras and Costa Rica. The flight plans for Seal’s drug enterprise provided the perfect cover for the illicit resupply missions. Seal’s planes
whiteouthbkwould fly from Mena to Medellin cartel airstrips in the mountains of Colombia and Venezuela, make refueling stops in Panama and Honduras, and then return to Mena, where the planes would drop parachute-equipped duffel bags loaded with cocaine over Seal-controlled farms near Mena. Seal’s men would retrieve the drugs in pickup trucks and deliver them to the cartel’s distributors in New Orleans, Miami and New York. Each flight packed between 200 to 500 kilos of cocaine, a load that would then fetch about $13 million on the street. By the early 1980s Seal’s planes were making several flights a week.

In 1982, the CIA approached Seal about adding a new element to his flight plans. They wanted him to carry loads of supplies and guns on his trips to Central America. The quid pro quo seemed clear enough to Seal. If he would consent to help the US intelligence agencies, they would once again act as his protectors, keeping his planes from being hassled by US customs and the DEA. In addition, the CIA agreed to outfit Seal’s squadron of planes with the latest in high-tech aviation electronics. The CIA was familiar with at least some of Seal’s aircraft, which by then included a Learjet, several helicopters and some large cargo planes, because many of them had been bought from CIA proprietaries, such as Air America and Southern Air Transport. The deal seemed to pay off for Seal. In the early 1980s, the US Customs Service backed off a drug investigation into one of Seal’s pilots. In a memo to his superiors, a Customs agent noted, “Joe [name redacted] works for Seal and cannot be touched because Seal works for the CIA.”

Some of the weapons Seal’s plane flew to the Contra camps were manufactured by a Fayetteville, Arkansas gunmaker named William Holmes. Holmes specialized in the production of automatic pistols mounted with silencers, a weapon of choice for CIA executive actions.

Holmes, who had been making guns for the CIA since the mid-1950s, testified in a federal court case that the Agency asked him to make 250 of the weapons for Seal. He later described Seal as “the ramrod of the Mena gun deal.”

In 1983, Seal’s luck with law enforcement seemed to run out. The DEA nailed him for smuggling 200,000 Quaaludes into a Fort Lauderdale airport, as part of a sting called Operation Screamer. After his indictment, Seal approached the DEA and offered his services as an informant. The DEA turned him down. Seal was convicted in February 1984 and faced the possibility of spending the next ten years in federal prison. Desperate to retain his freedom, Seal, apparently on the advice of his contacts in the CIA, made one last call, this time to Vice President George Bush’s drug task force. The drug runner was swiftly granted an appointment. He fired up his Learjet and flew to Washington, D.C., where he met with a Bush staffer named Jim Howell. Howell, a former drug agent at US Customs, interviewed Seal and then took him to see a top DEA agent named Kenneth Kennedy. Howell vouched for Seal, and Seal complained bitterly that the DEA agents in Fort Lauderdale had brushed him off for personal reasons. Although the official position of the DEA was that Seal offered to help the agency gain information on the Medellin cartel, Kennedy recalls that Seal also boasted that he could help the Reagan administration expose the Sandinistas’ role in the drug trade. Kennedy told a congressional committee that Seal informed him at their initial meeting that “officials of the Nicaraguan government are involved in smuggling cocaine into the United States, specifically the Sandinistas.” Kennedy said that Seal promised to fly to Nicaragua, pick up loads of cocaine and bring them back to the United States.

Kennedy referred Seal to two Miami-based DEA agents, Ernst Jacobsen and Robert Joura. “After he was debriefed in Washington, a phone call was made to Group Six in the Miami Field Division,” Jacobsen said in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in 1989. “We were asked if I wanted to work with Mr. Seal. I said I would.”

Seal flew to Miami the next day, where he met with Joura, Jacobsen and Steve LeClair, an attorney with the US Justice Department. Seal told the DEA men that he could easily set up a delivery of 3,000 kilos of cocaine from Jorge Ochoa’s operation in Colombia. After this meeting, Seal was officially signed up as a confidential informant for the DEA: his DEA ID number was SGI-84-0028. The DEA agreed to pay him $800,000 a year for his services and postponed his sentencing on the Quaalude-smuggling conviction.

A few days later Seal called two of the Medellin cartel’s top operatives in Miami, Felix Dixon Bates and Carlos “Lito” Bustamante, to let them know that he was back in business. Bustamante oversaw the distribution of Medellin cocaine in the US. Bates was a long-time pilot for the Ochoa network who specialized in smuggling exotic animals to Jorge Ochoa’s ranch in Colombia. Bustamante told Seal that Ochoa wanted him to ferry a Titan 404 plane from Miami to Medellin. Seal agreed to the plan and on April 4, 1984, he and Bates flew to Colombia. They were met at the airstrip by Jorge Ochoa. Precisely what happened at this meeting is the subject of some controversy. DEA agents Joura and Jacobsen claim that it was at this session that the subject of Nicaragua first came up. They say that Ochoa told Seal that the cartel was moving most of its operations to Nicaragua because of increasing pressures on them in Colombia. This scenario seems far-fetched for a number of reasons, not least because at that time the cartel seemed to be operating with near impunity in Colombia, Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica. An alliance with the Sandinistas would only antagonize the US government, which the cartel was trying so hard to placate.

A more likely story is that Seal and Ochoa used this meeting to plan a sting operation against the Sandinistas designed to keep Seal out of prison and ensure the Medellin cartel the continued good graces of the US intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Over the next week, Seal visited Panama and Guatemala before returning to Miami, where he conferred with Bustamante and other US representatives of the Medellin cartel. They set up plans for a series of drug flights from Colombia and Panama to Miami, and Seal invited the Colombians to come with him to Mena to inspect the planes that Seal was planning to use for the cocaine flights. The next day Seal flew four Colombians to Mena, where he treated the drug dealers to a lunch of Cajun food and took them for a spin in his new Lockheed Lodestar jet. The Colombians were duly impressed and gave the green light for the drug flights to begin.

The following day Seal relayed the plans to DEA agent Jacobsen, who got approval from the Colombian government for Seal to enter the country and pick up a load of cocaine. Before taking off for Colombia, Seal took the opportunity to make two trips to his bank in the Bahamas, where he deposited several hundred thousand dollars in cash.

A week before Seal was scheduled to fly to Medellin, he blew out an engine on his Learjet during a test run. The DEA paid to have the plane repaired. In the meantime, a DEA agent named S.B. Billbough passed on to the CIA Seal’s contention that the Ochoa organization was preparing to move its base of operations to Nicaragua. According to a memo prepared by DEA agent Joura, the CIA expressed “considerable interest” in the Seal operation.

With his Learjet still in the repair hangar, Seal flew to Panama City on May 18 for a meeting with the equivalent of the board of directors of the Medellin cartel. At the session were Jorge Ochoa, his brother Fabio Ochoa, Pablo Escobar, Bates, and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. Seal arranged to trade one of his helicopters (previously owned by a CIA front) for a Merlin 3B owned by the cartel. It was also at this session that Seal said he was introduced to the mysterious figure of Frederico Vaughn.

The CIA would later claim that Vaughn was a “close associate” of the Sandinistas’ interior minister, Tomas Borge. But Vaughn has long been suspected of having his own ties to the CIA. His cousin Barney Vaughn worked for the Popular Bank and Trust Company, once owned by Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. The bank was also used by the CIA and Oliver North’s operation to funnel money to the Contras. In addition, a telephone number Seal later claimed to be Vaughn’s Managua home number turned out to be a line used by US intelligence assets from 1981 to 1986. The Sandinistas claimed that Vaughn had worked as an assistant manager of an import/export company in the capital after the revolution, but had left Nicaragua for Panama in 1983.

Seal said that he and Vaughn flew the next day on Copa Airlines to Managua, where Vaughn showed the pilot the 3,000-foot Los Brasiles airstrip northwest of Managua. Vaughn, Seal said, also pointed out the location of Sandinista anti-aircraft guns stationed throughout the capital. Seal spent the night at Vaughn’s house and returned to Florida the next day, just in time for his long-delayed sentencing hearing in Fort Lauderdale on his Quaalude-smuggling conviction.

Seal was sentenced to ten years, but because of his cooperation in the drug operation the sentence was reduced to six months’ probation. Federal Judge Norman Roettinger, a law-and-order conservative who had received letters on Seal’s behalf from the DEA and the CIA, praised Seal for his work undermining the Sandinista regime.

These problems behind him, Barry Seal was cleared for his first DEA-sanctioned cocaine run. On May 28, Seal and his longtime copilot Emile Camp took of from Mena’s Intermountain Regional Airport in Seal’s retooled Lockheed Lodestar jet bound for Colombia. They arrived at a small airstrip in the mountains outside Medellin in a driving rainstorm that turned the dirt runway into a strip of mud. Seal nearly wrecked the plane on landing when the jet slid off the runway and into a ditch. The plane suffered damage to its landing gear and Seal was forced to run the return flight in a smaller plane owned by the Medellin cartel. This plane was the same Titan 404 that Seal and Bates had delivered to Medellin a month earlier. According to Seal, senior cartel executive Carlos Lehder himself was at the airstrip to meet his plane. From astride a white Arabian stallion, Lehder supervised a team of Indians who loaded the Titan with more than a tone of cocaine.

The smaller plane’s limited range, Seal claimed, forced him to stop in Nicaragua for refueling. He landed at los Brasiles airport, where he and Camp were greeted by Frederico Vaughn. The plane was quickly refueled and took off for Miami. But almost immediately, Seal told his DEA handlers, his plane was struck by anti-aircraft fire and he was forced to crash-land the plane at the Managua airport. One of Vaughn’s associates arrived in a military-style truck and took the cocaine away for safekeeping. Seal and Camp were detained overnight by the Nicaraguan police. But once again, Seal said, in his thoroughly bizarre narrative of this episode, Vaughn came to the rescue, arranging their release from jail and providing them with a new plane to fly back to Florida. Seal claimed that this plane belonged to Pablo Escobar. Vaughn assured Seal that he would safeguard the cocaine until Seal could come back for it.

Seal arrived back in Miami and told his astounding tale to Joura and Jacobsen. Far from being a disaster, Seal told the DEA men, this created a great opportunity to move against the Sandinistas. Plans were swiftly made by the DEA and CIA for a return flight to Nicaragua. The first order of business was to get Seal a new plane. On June 10, Seal traded his Merlin 3B, recently acquired from Jorge Ochoa, for a C-123K military cargo plane owned by a CIA contractor. Before it could be flown, however, the C-123K needed structural repairs and engine work. DEA agent Jacobsen arranged for the Pentagon to have the planed shipped to Rickenbacker Air Force Base outside Columbus, Ohio, where Air Force mechanics performed $40,000 worth of free work on Seal’s plane. After the repairs were completed, the cargo plane was flown to Homestead Air Force Base outside Miami, where CIA technicians installed two hidden cameras, one in the plane’s nosecone and the other in the rear cargo hold. The cameras were rigged so that Seal could use a remote control button hidden in his pocket to snap photos at will.

On the morning of June 25, Seal, Camp and their mechanic, Peter Everson, landed the C-123K at Los Brasiles airstrip. Although the CIA and President Reagan would refer to los Brasiles as a military airbase, it was in fact a civilian runway used primarily by crop-dusters and other agricultural aircraft. Seal claimed that the plane was met by Frederico Vaughn, Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha and some Nicaraguan soldiers, who helped carry more than 1,200 pounds of cocaine stuffed in duffel bags from a hangar into a the rear of the plane. Seal clicked off a set of grainy and indistinct photos of the drug transfer.

The plane took off about an hour later, after taking on about 2,000 gallons of fuel. The next morning Seal landed his C-123K, nicknamed the Fat Lady, at Homestead Air Force Base, where the DEA took control of the cocaine and CIA agents rushed Seal’s roll of film off to be developed. In the Agency’s photo labs.

Shortly after Seal returned to Florida, Ron Caffery, the head of the DEA’s cocaine desk in Washington, D.C., received a call from his boss, David Westrate, assistant administrator of the DEA. Westrate instructed Caffery to brief members of the National Security Council and the CIA on Seal’s mission. The next day Caffery met with Oliver North and CIA agent bernie-the-sandernistas-cover-344x550-e1477943826411Dewey Clarridge at the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. He showed North and Clarridge blowups of Seals’ photos and identified pictures of Seal, Camp, Vaughn and Escobar. But Caffery was surprised to discover that both North and Clarridge were already well-acquainted with the photos. Caffrey recalled being somewhat unaware of Vaughn’s background, but noticed that Clarridge seemed to be packing a dossier on the man. “The CIA representative told me that he [Vaughn] was an associate of a government officer, of the Nicaraguan government, which was news to me,” Caffrey told a congressional committee looking into the Seal affair.

The discussion between North, Clarridge and the DEA man rapidly turned to planning a new sting involving Seal. They decide that Seal should be sent back to Nicaragua with $1.5 million in DEA cash, along with assorted “toys” for Escobar and Vaughn, to arrange a new drug deal. At this point, Oliver North suggested that perhaps Seal could arrange a deal outside Nicaragua, so that Vaughn and Escobar could be arrested and the $1.5 million be turned over to the Contras. Caffery told North that the US Attorney’s office would never countenance such a scheme. Then North suggested that perhaps it was time for the DEA to go public with Seal’s photos. North told Caffrey that “there was an important vote coming up on an appropriations bill to fund the Contras” and that information on Sandinista drug dealing could swing the vote in the administration’s favor.

Again Caffery shot down North’s idea. He told North that release of any information on the Nicaragua flight would jeopardize their investigation of the Medellin cartel and place Seal’s life at risk. But the information was already beginning to leak out as part of the Reagan administration’s propaganda campaign to demonize the Sandinistas. On June 27, General Paul Gorman, head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, made an anti-Sandinista speech at a meeting hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in El Salvador. Gorman claimed to have proof that the Sandinista leadership was involved in drug smuggling.

This exposure, however, didn’t stop the DEA from sending Seal back to Nicaragua for another cocaine buy on July 7. The deal was apparently aborted at the last minute, when, Seal said, he was warned that the Sandinistas had learned about the mission.

By now the NSC and CIA were leaking reports of Seal’s Nicaraguan exploits to their friends in the Washington press corps. The Washington Times, in a July 17, 1984 front page story by Edmond Jacoby, was the first to report on “evidence” of Sandinista drug trafficking. But Oliver North’s diaries reveal that other reporters were also hot for the story. One of the first to lunge at the bait was Doyle McManus, the Los Angeles Times writer who savaged Gary Webb. In North’s July 17 entry he wrote: “McManus, LA Times says NSC resource claims WH [White House] has pictures of Borge loading cocaine in Nic.” McManus’s source was dead wrong, of course. Borge had been nowhere near the Seal plane.

Within weeks all the major national papers and news magazines were running stories quoting “high-level” sources in the US government who claimed that they had hard evidence that the Sandinista leadership was “actively participating” in the drug trade. The two names most often cited in the stories were Borge and Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, brother of the president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega.

On September 7, with the Contra aid vote fast approaching, Senator Paula Hawkins, a right-wing Republican from Florida, convened a press conference in Washington at which she attacked the Sandinistas as “a brutal regime financed by the drug trade.” Hawkins unveiled to the press four obscure photos taken on Seal’s June 25 mission. She also displayed a high-altitude photo of Los Brasiles “military airbase” taken by an American U-2 spy plane. The photos were not released to the press, but her press conference put the story on the front page once again.

By now Barry Seal’s cover as a secret drug agent was completely blown and he went back to what he did best, running drugs and guns. Fortunately for Seal, Congress was not persuaded to renew Contra funding in the fall of 1984 and instead enacted the Boland amendment prohibiting any direct military aid. This meant Seal still had a job shuttling lethal contraband for North’s network from Mena to El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. An Arkansas police officer investigating Seal’s operation in August 1985 wrote in his report: “Every time Bari [sic] Seal flies a load of dope for the US govt., he flies two for himself.”

In late December 1984, Seal was caught flying a load of marijuana into Louisiana. He was released the next day after he posted a $250,000 cash bond. Seal made a call to his friends in the DEA, and on January 7 he was interviewed by Special Agent Dale Hahn of the FBI. According to Hahn’s notes, Seal offered to testify against low-level members of the Medellin cartel in exchange for a guilty plea and light sentence on the marijuana-trafficking charges. Over the next year, Seal testified in three major drug cases, helping the feds secure convictions. Seal was eventually sentenced to a six-month term in a halfway house in Baton Rouge. Shortly after Seal’s arrest in Louisiana, his old friend and co-pilot Emile Camp died when his Seneca plane, equipped with state-of-the-art navigational equipment, slammed into a mountain near Mena. Many of Camp’s associates believe that his plane had been sabotaged and point out that he was one of the few to witness many of Seal’s activities for the CIA and DEA.

In the summer of 1985, Seal decided to sell his C-123K cargo plane for $250,000. The buyer was the same CIA contractor, Harold Doan, from whom Seal had acquired the plane a year earlier. The plane later ended up in the service of Oliver North’s Contra resupply program and entered aviation history on October 3, 1986, when it was shot down over Nicaraguan air space and its cargo kicker, Eugene Hasenfus, was taken into custody by the Sandinistas and paraded before the world as living proof of the Reagan administration’s war against their country.

Although supposedly in a witness protection program, Seal said he considered himself “a clay pigeon.” He was eventually tracked down by a team of assassins working for Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar. On February 19, 1986, Seal’s body was riddled with hundreds of bullets as he sat in his whit Cadillac outside the Salvation Army Center in Baton Rouge.

After Seal’s death, IRS agents examined his bank records. They determined his estate owed more than $86 million in back taxes, but ended up forgiving much of the debt, citing Seal’s “CIA-DEA employment.”

***

By the mid-1980s, Arkansas was an important staging post in the Contra War against Nicaragua being run from Washington. One scheme for maintaining a cover-up for Oliver North’s network was, it appears, played out in the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, Arkansas occupied by a young Bill Clinton.

Among the occupants of that same mansion was buddy Young, the man in charge of Clinton’s security. According to court documents filed by Terry-Reed, a former CIA asset involved in North’s Contra resupply effort, Young was a pivotal figure in a case designed to land Reed in prison not long after Reed had walked out of an arms-for-drugs operation in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he had been working with CIA man Felix Rodriguez.

Arkansas’s role in the Contra War and in an arms-for-drugs supply network goes back to the early 1980s and the airport at Mena. A federal investigation aided by the Arkansas State Police established that Barry Seal had his planes refitted at Mena for drug drops, trained pilots there and laundered his profits partly through financial institutions in Arkansas. Seal at this time was in close contact with North, who acknowledged the relationship in his notebooks and his memoir.

Among those recruited by North was-so the man subsequently asserted in court papers-Terry Reed, formerly with Air America in Thailand. Reed says he was working for North in 1983. North put Reed in touch with a Seal, and by 1984 Reed had established a base at the hamlet of Nella, ten miles north of Mena in Ouachita National Forest. There Nicaraguan Contras and other recruits from Latin America were trained in resupply missions, night landings, precision airdrops and similar maneuvers. Reed, familiar with the commercial affairs of Mena, asserts that large sums of drug money were being laundered through leading Arkansas bond brokers, an allegation also being considered by a federal investigator just as his researches were abruptly terminated.

One of Reed’s contacts in North’s network was William Cooper, another Air America veteran then working for Southern Air Transport. Cooper was at the controls of the C-123K once owned by Seal that was shot down by a Sandinista soldier in October 1986. That plane had been serviced at Mena. Cooper died in the crash. His crewman, Eugene Hasenfus, survived.

Back in 1985, Cooper had suggested to Reed that he go to Mexico and set up an operation expanding the supply network. Reed agreed, traveled to Vera Cruz for discussions with Felix Rodriguez and, in July 1986, set up a front company, Machinery International, in Guadalajara.

Three months later Cooper was dead and Hasenfus was being paraded by Sandinistas before the Managua press corps. Reed says that Machinery International’s business, “trans-shipping items” in “support of our foreign politics,” was put on hold until January 1987, this at a time when the Iran/Contra cover-up was pressing forward in Washington. Seven months later, Reed says, he became aware that drugs were part of the shuttle passing through Machinery International’s premises in Guadalajara and that he himself was a likely candidate for fall guy if things came unglued.

Reed says he confronted Rodriguez and told him he was quitting. By early September 1987 he had returned to the United States. A month later Governor Clinton’s security chief, Buddy Young, was activating from the governor’s mansion- a sequence of events seemingly designed to land the potentially troublesome Reed in prison.

The instrument at hand was a plane owned by Reed.

On March 24, 1983, Reed’s plane had been stolen from a repair shop in Joplin, Missouri (Reed’s home state). Prior to this, Reed says, Oliver North had asked him to contribute this same plane to Project Democracy, a scheme by which individuals would allow their fully insured planes and boats to “disappear” for the sake of counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua. Reed claims he had refused the request. At all events, the plane was removed while Reed was out of town. Reed duly reported the theft to his insurance company and received compensation. He says that in 1985 North’s people contacted him in Mena, told him that his plane was being returned after having been in Central America for two years and asked that he not report its return because they might need to “borrow” it again. Reed consented. He had the plane stored at his hangar in the North Little Rock Airport and left for Guadalajara soon thereafter.

On October 8, 1987, Tommy Baker, a former Arkansas State Police officer and longtime friend of Buddy Young, says he happened to be passing Reed’s hangar when a powerful gust of wind blew the door open, revealing a plane. Baker said he thought the plane looked “suspicious” and so called his pal Young at the Governor’s Mansion. Young later claimed in testimony that he contacted the National Crime Information Center to check if the plane’s registration number came up on a list of stolen planes, found no record of this and then instructed Baker to check if the plane’s markings had been changed, a common practice of plane thieves (also a routine practice at Mena and in North’s Project Democracy). Baker established that they had been altered, and by October 21, the two claim, they turned the case over to the FBI.

Under scrutiny, the sequence of events as set out by Baker and Young did not stand up. On October 5, three days before fortuitous gust blew open the hangar door, Young was phoning Reed’s parents masquerading as an old friend of their son, according to legal papers filed by Reed. Young had called in the plane’s correct registration number to the National Crime Information Center- so the center’s records show-on October 7, before Baker had, by his own account, even set eyes on the plane (and before Young had called in with the doctored number). That same evening Young had called Joplin to inquire about the plane’s original disappearance. In June 1988, Reed was indicted on mail fraud charges in connection with his 1983 insurance claim on the plane.

Reed accused Young and Baker of preparing and presenting false evidence for the purpose of furthering a false prosecution. This much is clear. In efforts to discredit someone familiar with the Mena operation, Buddy Young made his calls from Bill Clinton’s mansion. Young and Baker have admitted to entering Reed’s hangar three times without a warrant. They also admitted to tampering with the plane. When they finally did obtain a warrant, it was on the basis of misrepresentations. According to court documents, they subsequently made false statements to a federal grand jury as well as, on more than one occasion, in hearings related to United States v. Reed. Finally, evidence that might have helped Reed’s case was secreted in Young’s office in Clinton’s mansion when it was supposed to have been in federal court. A federal judge involved in the case, Frank Theis, declared that Baker and Young had acted with “reckless disregard for the truth.” Reed was acquitted when the court determined that the government did not have enough legitimate evidence to convict him.

Three months before his assassination Barry Seal described in sworn testimony to federal and state investigators a nexus of airstrips, front corporations, “legitimate” Arkansas companies and banks participating in the shipment of drugs and laundering of drug profits. His interrogators-IRS agent Bill Duncan and Russell Welch of the Arkansas State Police- had hoped to get Seal to gradually detail the bigger picture and were frustrated in their efforts when Seal, then under a drug conviction in Louisiana, was returned to that state for sentencing. When he was killed, one important path toward uncovering the Contra resupply operation in Arkansas turned cold.

Nevertheless, Duncan and Welch were determined to continue their investigation and follow the trails leading out from Mena into the rest of the state. Where the money trail ultimately led, the investigators never were able to discover fully because their investigation was abruptly halted. One alleged money launderer, conspicuous in Arkansas’s politico-financial world and profitably involved in state business, was- according to a source whose information had proved reliable in the past in receipt of large sums of drug money from Seal. Duncan and Welch eventually prepared a 3,000-page file on Mena, documenting wide spread money laundering and drug running. Duncan prepared thirty-five indictments for the US Attorney, but they were never acted upon and in 1988 the Arkansas State Police began shredding its Mena files, including all documents linking Oliver North to Seal and Seal’s associate Terry Reed.

There is every indication that many of the illicit activities linking intelligence agencies to drug traffickers continued into the 1990s. An IRS report from the fall of 1991, three years after Duncan left the agency, notes that the “CIA has ongoing operations out of Mena, Arkansas airport…one of the operations at the airport is laundering money.”

Duncan, a special agent in the IRS’s criminal division, was assigned to the Mena investigation in 1983. In 1989, he was called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about the goings-on at Mena, The committee had convened to probe the lack of criminal indictments and the possible hampering of the investigations by the CIA and Clinton’s gubernatorial staff in Little Rock. Another agency under scrutiny was the US Attorney’s office, which had been empowered to convene a grand jury and bring indictments in the affair, but did not do so.

Duncan had learned of an alleged payoff to US Attorney General Ed Meese by suspects in the Mena investigation. He was told by the IRS’s attorney to deny to congressional investigators that he had any knowledge of this allegation and to state that he had “no opinion” on the reluctance of the US Attorney to convene a grand jury. He refused. Shortly thereafter Duncan was transferred from his IRS job to a position with the Subcommittee on Crime of the House Judiciary Committee, where he continued to probe Mena. Later that year, Duncan was arrested at the Capitol Building in Washington for possession of a concealed weapon (his service pistol) as he tried to enter his office. The case went to the US Attorney General’s office, where it was held in limbo for more than a year, effectively preventing Duncan from pursuing the Mena case. He quit the House Judiciary Committee and went to a position with the Arkansas Attorney General’s office.

Russell Welch also suffered a similarly rocky career. He had been a criminal investigator for the Arkansas State Police and had worked closely with Duncan on the Mena case since 1983. When the federal government closed down its inquiry, Welch’s superiors in Arkansas also took him off the case. Welch claims that an attempt was made on his life in 1991 while he was meeting with Duncan in Little Rock.

In 1992 Clinton spokeswoman Max Parker was asked why Clinton had never responded to the 1990 request of Deputy Prosecutor Charles Black for assistance in forwarding a state inquiry into “the rather wide array of illegal activities” centering on the Mena airport. Black, whose jurisdiction includes Mena, suspected a federal cover-up of activities there. Parker claimed that Black was merely a subordinate in the prosecutor’s office and that Clinton went straight to the top. She said Clinton told State Police commander Tommy Goodwin that he would allow $25,000 to be released to the chief prosecutor in Black’s district, Joe Hardagree. Hardagree, Parker said, rejected Clinton’s offer of funds as proffered by Goodwin, presumably (according to Parker) because $25,000 was insufficient for such a probe.

But this claim contradicts what Hardagree said in a 1992 letter to Mark Swaney of the Arkansas Committee, a group of citizens looking into the Mena affair: “During my tenure as prosecuting attorney, I did not receive $25,000 in State funds, or any part of this amount of money, nor did I hear anything concerning these State funds, from Colonel Goodwin or anyone at Arkansas State Police or anyone in the Governor’s office. The only investigation that I am aware of which has expended funds or resources has been the Grand Jury investigation of the Federal Court for the Western District of Arkansas.”

In October 1991 the US Congress appropriated another $25,000 upon the intervention of Arkansas Representative Bill Alexander. The money languished unused in the State Police headquarters. Parker said that it was just a matter of completing some paperwork and that Goodwin would straighten everything out.

But Goodwin was less than forthcoming on the matter in an interview during 1992 election season. Where once the policeman had been enthusiastic about the resumption of an investigation, now he said he wasn’t sure there would be any “value” to it, adding that even if the Mena investigation was to proceed, the chief investigator, Duncan who was at that time sequestered from reporters’ inquiries by his superiors in the Attorney General’s office – would not have subpoena power. Hardagree said that it looked as if political pressure had been exerted on Goodwin. “These are all good people, but they are too involved in politics,” Hardagree said “I think the world of Tommy Goodwin, but someone’s put the heat on him.”

***

--------------[END OF PART ONE; SEE BELOW FOR PART 2]--------------------

 

[Apollonian]

-------------------------[HERE'S PART 2 TO ABOVE]-------------------------

At a crucial stage in the Contra War, Governor Bill Clinton’s personal creation, the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, made its first industrial development loan. The year was 1985, and the recipient of the loan was Park on Meter, Inc., or POM, a parking meter manufacturer based in Russellville, Arkansas. POM, it has been alleged by Michael Riconosciuto, a computer expert serving a prison sentence on drug charges in Washington state, was under secret contract to make components of prototype chemical and biological weapons for use by the Contras, as well as special equipment for C-130 transport planes. Such planes were at that time ferrying drugs and weapons in and out of Mena, which is just a few miles away in western Arkansas. Clinton’s state was thus an important link in the Contra supply chain at a time when military aid to the Contras had been banned by Congress.

About a mile north of the airport in Russellville on Highway 331 sits POM’S headquarters and factory in a low building made of corrugated metal. POM began making parking meters at this site in 1976. Except for some superficial alterations, its premises are the same ones once owned and occupied by defense giant Rockwell International. Back when POM took over the site from Rockwell, its property covered a little more than thirty-six acres. But between 1976 and 1992 a complicated series of real estate transactions (the country court documents fifteen mortgages or deeds concerning this property over this period) left POM itself owning only about eight acres. The remainder of the property POM deeded to a partnership called MBVG. In 1990, one of the partners in MBVG, a man named Mac Van Horn, leased a portion of this property to the US Army Reserve. A plot of land northwest of POM’s property housed the 354th Chemical Company of the 122nd Army Reserve Command.

When Mark Swaney of the Arkansas Committee investigated the site he saw two camouflaged trucks with trailers mounted with what looked like generators for creating smoke screens, along with some military transport trucks and a number of industrial drums. Swaney talked to some of the soldiers there, who told him that they were part of a “smoke unit.” A few days later former IRS investigator Bill Duncan took a trip out to Russellville. Duncan saw the drums sitting next to two corrugated metal sheds without windows or markings of any kind. Duncan also saw what he described as “chemical tanker trucks” at the Army Reserve Post. In short, here in a scruffy corner of Russellville was a kind of military/industrial landscape, a setting appropriate to our tale.

Southwest of Russellville there is another kind of military/industrial landscape, this one in a wooded valley that Surrounds Mena. So far we have described Mena as a center for covert operations involving Contra training and resupply missions, as well as drug smuggling and money laundering. Mena was also important as a base for aircraft maintenance and retrofitting.

We come now to Michael Riconosciuto, a former contract employee of the CIA, who says he worked at Mena on and off between 1980 and 1989. Riconosciuto was arrested on drug charges shortly after being named as a witness in the Inslaw Corporation’s case against the US government for the latter’s alleged unauthorized use of the PROMIS software, which Riconosciuto wrote for Inslaw. Riconosciuto claims he was set up. He is now in prison in Washington state.

According to Riconosciuto, Mena was part of a network of bases that evolved over time, rising and receding in importance with the changing needs of US covert operations. He says that at the time he was involved, Mena was crucial because of its central location relative to other bases, because of its retrofitting and maintenance facilities and because of its role as the administrative center of the operations. Finally, he says, Mena was the main drop-off point for narcotics shipments, the other bases serving as distribution points or as “nesting facilities” for the aircraft, mainly a fleet of about thirty C-130 transport planes.

Thus Riconosciuto is the third person who stepped forward with details of the covert military and narcotics operations at Mena, corroborating information already supplied by Barry Seal and Terry Reed. But unlike Seal, who was primarily a drug smuggler, and Reed, who supervised the training of pilots and participated in resupply operations, Riconosciuto served in a technical and administrative capacity that gave him a broader picture of the whole operation. He came to Mena with a background in computer technology and programming as well as intelligence experience, gained from working with the Wackenhut Corporation, a private security firm whose imbrication with the intelligence world is well known. In Mena, Riconosciuto supervised the transshipment of high-tech equipment (including infrared gun scopes and night vision goggles) to the Contras, maintained the administrative computer network and developed accounting software to facilitate the electronic transfers of funds for the money-laundering side of the operation.

Riconosciuto says that to his knowledge no drugs were ever unloaded at the Mena airport itself. As with Seal’s setup in Louisiana, planes flying at low altitude would use drag chutes to drop containers of drugs in the surrounding countryside. Sometimes the dope would be dropped onto clearcuts in the Ouachita National Forest. More often it would be dropped onto farmland outside Mena. The drugs would be picked up by helicopter or truck and taken to a loading area, from which they would be sent to distribution points via truck or two-engine plane. He described a constellation of support facilities for both the shipment of drugs and for the manufacture of airplane parts. Independent sources for parts were especially necessary both to ensure a ready supply of equipment that could not be easily traced it a plane crashed or was captured.

Riconosciuto’s account of these support facilities matched, in many of its particulars, the evidence gathered by state and federal investigators who were on the trail of the Mena operation from 1983 to 1988. But in the same way that his story augmented the picture drawn from Seal and Reed, so it extends the line of supporting actors beyond the environs of Mena. Which brings us back to the headquarters of POM.

POM, according to Riconosciuto, was not merely in the business of making parking meters. He says that beginning in 1981, the company also made ferry drop tanks-external fuel canisters- for use on C-130s.

Drop tanks are essentially nothing more that aerodynamic metal containers, well within the production capabilities of a company set up to make parking meters. These tanks, attached to pylons on the wings and jettisoned when empty, are necessary to fuel long-range transport missions. While standard on C-130s and other military aircraft, they are virtually unknown in civilian use.

To this point, most of our discussion of Mena has centered on conventional weapons delivery and more or less conventional training. But Riconosciuto points to other, even more sinister, tactics that began to take shape in Arkansas. By 1983, he says, it was clear to US intelligence that the Contras were unable to inflict real damage on the Sandinista troops and needed a tactical advantage – either through the use of high-tech weaponry and equipment, such as the infrared and night –vision devices mentioned above, or through unconventional weaponry. To this end, Riconosciuto says, POM was enlisted in a project with the Stormont labs of Woodland, California, and the Wackenhut Corporation to develop chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed in guerrilla warfare. POM was assigned the task of producing the munitions themselves.

Recall the configurations on the ground in that corner of Russellville described above. According to Riconosciuto, the Army Chemical unit had an arrangement to provide POM with chemical agents once the prototypes had become advanced enough for testing. These prototypes were meant to be fairly simple devices-a hand-held grenade, a mortar shell, a small bomb – all of which could have been produced with the machinery on hand at POM.

Stormont confirmed in 1992 that in the early 1980s it was approached by Wackenhut in connection with the development of biological weapons, but denied that anything went beyond the talking stage. Wackenhut denied any involvement with Stormont, POM or Riconosciuto. When asked in 1992 about allegations by Riconosciuto that POM built aircraft drop-tanks and had been engaged to produce bio-chem munitions, “Skeeter” Ward, boss of POM, said breezily to Bryce Hoffman of the Nation, “Hell no. What we make is re-entry nose cones for the nuclear warheads on the MX missile and nozzles for rocket engines.” He also said “We have got a contract with McDonnell Douglas to make aircraft parts, but I don’t even know what that’s about.” “Skeeter” Ward is the brother-in-law of Webster Hubbell, Clinton’s disgraced assistant attorney general. POM was founded by Seth Ward Sr., the father of Hubbell’s wife, Suzie. While an attorney at Rose Law firm, Hubbell had shepherded POM’s application to become the first company to receive an industrial development loan from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority. This loan for $2.75 million was rushed to completion in the closing hours of 1985.

The Arkansas Development Finance Authority came into being in April of that year as part of Clinton’s sweeping Economic Development Initiative. What had previously been the Arkansas Housing Development Agency, which offered low-interest loans to develop single-family housing, was now revamped into a kind of full-service financial institution charged with attracting capital into the state for the purposes of industrial development, job creation, agricultural and even aquacultural financing. It advertised itself as an agency especially helpful to small companies “who have traditionally been excluded from the bond market by high issuance costs and servicing fees” but which under the umbrella of ADFA bond issues would be able to trim such costs.

The crux of ADFA’s mission was to offer companies long-term loans financed through the sale of tax-exempt bonds. Companies in need of capital would come to ADFA, which in turn arranged for the issuance of a bond from a private bondholder, which ADFA then offered for sale. (The state of Arkansas did not guarantee these bonds, but by virtue of ADFA’s involvement the bonds receive tax-free status.) When the bonds were sold, ADFA delivered the indenture and a record of the bond owners to a bank, which became the trustee of the deal. ADFA thus served as a kind of middleman in a deal between the trustee and the companies. The trustee was responsible for collecting the payments on the loan and interest and was also responsible for paying out dividends and ultimately the principal to the bond holders. In turn, the trustee bank was allowed to invest the money it got from the bond issue in Treasury bills, CDs, money market accounts, or even time deposit accounts at other banks.

The trustee had huge latitude in deciding where to invest these funds. According to ADFA’s standard contract the trustee was limited only by the stipulation that wherever the money was invested, it had to be guaranteed by the US government in some way. However, this stipulation was not always honored. There are records of a deal in which a trustee invested in Fuji Bank’s Grand Cayman Islands branch, a favorite depository of drug dealers.

Many of the beneficiaries of ADFA deals bore the aroma of Clinton’s inner circle. Among underwriters of the agency’s bond issues, Stephen’s INC. featured prominently. The company’s chairman, Jackson Stephens, and his son Warren helped Clinton raise more than $100,000 for his 1992 campaign. In January of that year, the bank Stephens has a controlling interest in, Worthen National, extended to Clinton a $2 million line of credit. The name of the Worthen bank, represented by Hillary’s Rodham Clinton’s Rose Law firm on several occasions, appeared among institutions that have from time to time had liens on POM.

Another familiar name on the bond issues was the now-defunct Lasater and Co. Dan Lasater, who headed the company, is a long-time friend of Clinton and his brother, Roger. Both Roger Clinton and Lasater were convicted on cocaine charges.

This ADFA was at the center of financial dealings in which large amounts of money could be moved around easily and, it would seem, discreetly. Because ADFA was not subject to legislative oversight- being solely within the purview of the governor’s office- and because of the loose strictures upon the trustee bank, it also opened the gate for questionable, possibly illicit financial dealings. As IRS man Bill Duncan explained, theoretically, bonds could be issued to provide a loan to a company involved in laundering drug profits. That loan represented clean money. The loan could in turn be paid back with drug profits, slowly over time and in small increments. In this way drug money could be successfully filtered into the legitimate financial system. If the company in question did nothing more with the loan than redeposit it into its bank account, then the company had lost nothing but it had gained clean money. Thus, in effect, ADFA could serve as a washing machine – dirty money could be cleaned simply by passing through its system. Duncan suggested that it would also be possible for ADFA clients never to repay a loan and for the money simply to be circulated through the trustee’s investment end of the arrangement.

In the case of POM, records concerning the $2.75 million loan were curiously incomplete. One ADFA document stated that twenty-four jobs had been created; another cited total wages paid of $2.56 million. No repayment records for POM were available in 1992, when ADFA’s operations were under our scrutiny, though ADFA officials said that POM had paid off the loan in 1991, two years ahead of schedule.

***

The Mena story was going critical in the spring of 1992 amid Clinton’s bid for the Democratic nomination. The major networks were poised to do big probes. Then beneath the banner headline “Anatomy of a Smear,” Time took up the Mena saga in its April 15, 1992 issue. Time’s reporter, Richard Behar, took a full page to suggest that the story was all non-sense and that Governor Bill Clinton had been maligned.

Leaving aside for the moment the matter of Behar’s motives, Time’s story was ludicrous, claiming that all reports of Contra resupply and CIA activities in western Arkansas stemmed from allegations by Terry Reed, the former pilot, trainer of the Contras and associate of George Bush’s pal Felix Rodriguez. Reed, according to Behar, said that the drugs and arms “enterprise” in Mena was “personally supervised” by Clinton. Reed had never said that to anyone. In an extensive clip file on Mena, including many stories in the Arkansas press dating back to 1987, no trace of any such claim can be found, even in the form of dismissals of assertions too silly to be taken seriously.

But Time’s hit piece was successful. The networks abandoned the story in those important weeks. Later one of Time’s senior editors, Strobe Talbott, was appointed to a high-level post in the Clinton State Department. Talbott’s wife, Brooke Shearer, also landed a job in the administration.

The suppression of the Mena story did not end with the election of Bill Clinton. In 1994, while researching a book on Bill and Hillary Clinton, investigative reporter Roger Morris came across a mound of new information on Mena, including Barry Seal’s notebooks, tax filings and bank records. Morris was a former National Security Advisor to Richard Nixon who resigned his position in protest of the invasion of Cambodia. He went on to write a biography of Nixon, as well as trenchant books on Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig.

To pursue the Mena story, Morris joined forces with another investigative reporter, Sally Denton. Denton was the author of The Bluegrass Conspiracy, a gripping account of political corruption and drug dealing in Kentucky. By the fall of 1994, Morris and Denton had amassed a 2,000-page file on Seal, Clinton and Mena. They wrote up part of the story and submitted it to the op-ed page of the New York Times. The story was swiftly rejected. When Morris asked the Time’s op-ed page editor, Michael Levitas, why the paper turned down the article, Levitas replied that this was a “Wall Street Journal kind of story.” Levitas replied that the Time’s news staff had looked at Mena and declined to cover it.

So Morris and Denton took their piece to the Outlook section of the Washington Post, whose deputy editor, Jeffrey Frank, accepted the story, praising the authors for writing an explosive and extraordinary article. But the story ran into innumerable roadblocks. Over the next eleven weeks the article was edited, re-edited, fact-checked and reviewed by the Post’s legal team. Morris and Denton were subject to detailed questioning from Post reporters and editors from the news section. Finally, on January 25, 1995, the story seemed ready to go. The galleys were set, contracts were signed and the story was scheduled to run on Sunday, January 29, 1995.

As the Outlook section was headed to press, Jeffrey Frank called Morris, leaving a message on his answering message to the effect that the Post’s managing editor, Robert Kaiser, had killed the story. Morris called Kaiser for an explanation, but the Post editor refused to take his call. Kaiser’s secretary told the exasperated writer, “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Why did Kaiser kill the piece? Morris doesn’t know. But a former Washington Post staffer tells us that Walter Pincus, the paper’s long-time intelligence reporter, had dismissed the story as “garbage.” Editors at the Post had leaked the substance of Morris and Denton’s story to both the White House and the CIA, which furiously denied the story.

Eventually, Morris and Denton’s excellent article appeared in Penthouse magazine and hardly met with the explosive reception that such a story deserved. A similar fate awaited Morris’s book on the Clintons, Partners in Power, which was greeted by reviewers in the mainstream press with a mixture of indifference and hostility.

For his part, Bill Clinton has studiously avoided the subject, mentioning Mena in public only once since being elected president. His statement came in response to a question at an October 1994 press conference from the Associated Press White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, who asked the president what he knew about the use of Mena as an outpost for gun/drug runners associated with the Contra War. “They didn’t tell me anything about it,” Clinton said. “The state really had next to nothing to do with it. The local prosecutor did conduct an investigation based on what was in jurisdiction of state law. The rest of it was under the jurisdiction of the United States attorneys who were appointed successively by previous administrations. We had nothing -zero- to do with it.”

But Clinton’s claim of ignorance didn’t ring true. One of his state prosecutors, Charles Black, brought the issue to Clinton’s attention in 1988, emphasizing it role as a nexus for international drug operations.

Five years before that there was a federal investigation into drug money laundering at Mena-an investigation joined by Clinton’s own state police. As part of that investigation, a federal grand jury was assembled. This grand jury was eventually dismissed, and the local press carried reports that members of the panel had been prevented from seeing crucial evidence, hearing important witnesses and even seeing the 29-count draft indictment on money laundering drawn up by an attorney with the Justice Department’s Operation Greenback. In 1989 Clinton received petitions from Arkansas citizens demanding that he convene a state grand jury and continue the investigation. Winston Bryant made Mena an issue in his successful campaign for attorney general in 1990. A year later Bryant turned over the state files involving Mena, along with petitions from 1,000 citizens, to Iran/Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. Later that year, on August 12, 1991, Clinton’s adviser on criminal justice wrote to a concerned citizen to say that Clinton understood the matter of criminal activity in Mena was being studied by Bryant, Walsh and Arkansas Representative Bill Alexander.

Yet with all this knowledge Clinton did nothing. The state attorney general did not have the power to conduct an investigation, but the state prosecutors did. When Charles Black urged Clinton to allocate funds for such an investigation, Clinton refused his request. The Arkansas State Police were taken off the case their files shredded.

Clinton’s protestations of ignorance on the matter also don’t square with the story told by a former Clinton friend and Arkansas state trooper L.D. Brown. Brown worked on Clinton’s security detail in the 1980s. He says that in 1984 Clinton encouraged the 29-year-old trooper to apply for a position with the CIA. Clinton, Brown claims, even helped prepare a writing sample to accompany his application to the intelligence agency. The paper was an analysis of Marxist movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Brown says the essay took a hard-line Reaganite approach and did not display any sympathy for the cause of the Sandinistas or the Salvadoran revolutionaries.

In a 1995 court case, Brown testified that he was contacted by the CIA in October 1984 and instructed to meet with Barry Seal at the Cajun Wharf restaurant outside Little Rock. At the meeting, Seal asked Brown to fly with him on a mission to Central America. Brown testified that he and Seal left Mena airport on October 23 in Seal’s C-123K transport, dropped cartons of M-16s over Contra base camps and landed for refueling at an airstrip in Honduras. There, Brown Said, he saw Seal take on board more than a dozen duffel bags, which were kicked out of the plane over fields near Mena on the return flight. Brown later learned these bags were filled with cocaine.

After two more of these flights, Brown says he confronted Clinton about Seal’s operation. Clinton, Brown testified, didn’t seem surprised, telling the trooper, who was an admirer of George Bush, “Your hero Bush knows about it.” Of the cocaine coming into Mena, Brown testified that Clinton snapped, “That’s Lasater’s deal.” The reference appears to have been to long-time Clinton intimate Dan Lasater, the Little Rock-based bond magnate who was on of the governor’s biggest campaign contributors. Lasater had also been convicted of distributing cocaine and was suspected, according to Roger Morris’s account, of using his deals with ADFA to launder some of his drug profits.

Like Clinton, the CIA kept a low profile during the decade of controversy over Mena. The Agency repeatedly denied any activities at Mena, claiming at most that it was “a Rouge operation of the DEA.” Then, in 1995, with the Republicans newly in charge of congress, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa used his position as chairman of the House Banking Committee to launch a new investigation into money laundering, drug-running and intelligence operations at Mena. One of Leach’s first orders of business was to request that the CIA’s Inspector General, Frederick Hitz, review the agency’s files and prepare a report on Mena.

The report was completed in November 1996. It remains classified, but a summary of the report was released by Leach. Thought still a whitewash, the IG report for the first time admitted that the CIA did have a sustained presence at Mena through the 1980s and early 1990s. According to Hitz’s report, the CIA conducted “authorized and legal activities at the airport.” These activities included contracts for “routine aviation-related services.” They also involved a still top-secret “joint training operation with another federal agency.” The other federal agency is almost certainly the National Security Council, which the Inspector General’s report claims handled the “interface with local officials.” The investigation also confirmed L.D. Brown’s claim that he applied for a position with the Agency in 1984.

The confession that Leach finally extracted from the CIA regarding its operations at Mena received scant notice from the press, with only the Wall Street Journal covering the report in any detail. The Post’s Walter Pincus wrote a short item on the report, faithfully echoing the CIA’s line that it had no involvement in “money laundering, narcotics trafficking, [or] arms smuggling.”

Christopher Reed, a reporter with the Guardian, recalls asking a senior news executive at the Los Angeles Times if the paper had investigated the allegations of drugs and arms smuggling at Mena. “Yes,” the executive told Reed. “But nobody in authority would confirm it.”

Such passivity on the part of the press allowed the CIA and Bill Clinton to portray the Mena scandal as, in the words of White House spin doctor Mark Fabiani, “the darkest backwater of right-wing conspiracy theories.”

This essay is adapted from Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press.

 

[Apollonian]

Terry Reed​

Link: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Terry_Reed

Terry Reed is/was a former-CIA spook who by his own account was employed to train Nicaraguan pilots in Iran Contra, then involved in production of shipping weapons to them, but claimed originally not to have known about the trafficking of cocaine back to USA. In 1994 he published a best-selling book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA and in 1995 produced a film, The Mena Connection, which were both exposes based on his experience working for The Enterprise.

Career

He fought for eight years in the Vietnam War,[1] and was chosen as a member of Task Force Alpha, which he described as "the deniable link between authorized military operations and the unauthorized activities of the Central Intelligence Agency". He set up and ran a machine tools front company in USA, then in Mexico for the CIA, connected to production of weapons without serial numbers for distribution to the Contras in Nicaragua.

Iran-Contra
Full article: “Iran-Contra” [ck site link, above]

Terry Reed was recruited into Iran-Contra by Oliver North (operating under the alias of 'John Cathey') in 1982. His initial brief was to help raise money and secure airplanes for the Nicaraguan Contras. Later, Reed trained Nicaraguan pilots at a rural airstrip at Nella, Arkansas and was relocated to Mexico where he became involved in manufacturing weapon parts without serial numbers to be sent to Nicaragua.[1]

Drug trafficking

When he discovered that his warehouse was being used for the transshipment of tonnes of cocaine to Mena, Arkansas, he decided to quit.

Life as a fugitive

In The Mena Connection he tells how he and his wife then spent about 6 months on the run after his handlers accused him of drug trafficking and claimed that he and his wife were both armed and dangerous. Later they spent 2.5 years going through the US justice system before both being found innocent.

Whistleblowing

Terry Reed co-authored the 1994 Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA with John Cummings, which Mark Gorton references,[2]

In 1995 he created the 2 hour 20 minute film, The Mena Connection which was adapted for radio by Unwelcome Guests.[3][4]

Lawsuit

The Reeds filed a civil rights lawsuit in July 1991.

In 1996 he and his wife, Janis Kerr Reed brought a lawsuit against Raymond Young, Tommy L. Baker, Donald Sanders & other unknown parties in connection with the Reed's persecution by the US justice system. He withdrew it after U.S. District Judge George Howard Jr. of Arkansas (who was appointed by Bill Clinton) ruled that the Reeds could not introduce any evidence in their civil suit relating to Terry Reed's missions with the FBI, the CIA, Bill Clinton, the international drug trafficker Barry Seal or Dan Lasater, a Clinton associate convicted on drug charges, since he claimed that their evidence "was based on conjecture, speculation and coincidence" and not on "a factual foundation."

Reed claimed that Howard in the past "condoned" our efforts and then, for unexplained reasons, "decided to protect these scoundrels (Baker and Young) ... In recent months, Judge Howard has gutted our lawsuit and in the process has exposed the strings to which he is attached - strings that are obviously being pulled from Washington, and more significantly, from the White House."[1]


References

1.↑ Jump up to: a b c http://www.iahushua.com/WOI/MENA.html
2.Jump up ↑ Document:Fifty Years of the Deep State
3.Jump up ↑ http://www.worldcat.org/title/mena-connection/oclc/38456474
4.Jump up ↑ http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/733

 

[Apollonian]

Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA​

a book by Terry Reed, John Cummings.

Link: http://whale.to/b/reed_j_b.html

Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA - Google Books

The definitive book on Mena, Reed's first person account of his CIA service on behalf of the Contras opens eyes as to the relationships between the CIA, drug trafficking and recent occupants of the White House. A second edition is in bookstores, however not from bankrupt S.P.I. Books.

Product Description
Compromised is the true story of Bill Clinton’s political sell-out to the CIA.
Clinton’s unbridled political ambitions and his campaign pledge to create "jobs for Arkansans" led him to compromise his ideals in exchange for CIA support in his bid for the Presidency.

He permitted the "Agency" to use Arkansas factories to make untraceable weapons and he allowed CIA contract agents to train Contra pilots on rural airstrips in support of the war in Nicaragua – effectively evading the Congressional ban on military aid to the Contras.

This expose unfolds through the eyewitness account of Terry Reed, a former CIA asset whose patriotism transformed him into a liability when he refused to turn a blind eye to the Agency’s drug trafficking. While helping the CIA set up its secret "black" operations, he unwittingly compromised his family’s safety, ultimately forcing them to become fugitives. Realizing that Reed witnessed the making of a counterfeit President and knew too much about its drug operations, the Agency set out to destroy him and his family.

This Arkansas-CIA connection became Clinton’s darkest secret – a secret he shared by then Vice-President Bush, who himself was compromised by his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. Their shared guilt kept them silent and tied their hands as they faced off in the 1992 Presidential election with neither mentioning Iran-Contra.

The Justice Departments of Reagan, Bush – and now Clinton – have orchestrated an ongoing cover-up of the Arkansas-CIA connection, which has gone undetected for eight years with Bill Clinton its major beneficiary. Clinton's reward for this Faustian pact? The White House.

Reed puts Clinton directly in the "Iran-Contra loop". Both attended a secret meeting where CIA arms arrangements, illegal Contra training and money laundering were discussed. Involved with Clinton in this cabal were Colonel Oliver North, William Barr (George Bush’s attorney general), Felix Rodriguez (Bay of Pigs veteran and George Bush’s CIA contact) and CIA contract agent Barry Seal, who used the cover of a high-profile drug trafficker to carry out his missions.

"Compromised" reveals the details and names of all who were involved, including these faceless power brokers now in positions of public prominence in Washington, D.C.

When the CIA learned Reed had more patriotism than they bargained for, forces within President Bush’s Justice Department, the CIA and the State of Arkansas decided he had to be neutralized. People close to Clinton conspired to set Reed up on false federal criminal charges, forcing him and his family into hiding. But Reed was acquitted, and now wages a one-man legal war to bring those who framed him to justice.

Found innocent by a court of law, Reed was then convicted by TIME Magazine, which aligned itself with a Clinton campaign consumed with protecting its candidate from scandals.

Why did Terry Reed, who performed intelligence services for the US Air Force, FBI, and CIA, come forward with these revelations now? – to set the record straight and to clear his name.

"Compromised" reveals one of the most clandestine operations in recent U.S. history. It also offers behind-the-scenes insights into the sordid world of intelligence, where things are seldom what they seem and powerful people disguise greed and ambition behind the convenient mask of national security.

About the Author
Terry Reed is a former Air Force Intelligence operative who served with the most secret project of the Vietnam War. Task Force Alpha. This was the most sophisticated and highly classified intelligence gathering unit of that period. At the age of 21, armed with a top-secret security clearance provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, a near photographic memory and strong mid western values, he was entrusted with America’s dirtiest secrets. As a civilian intelligence asset, he later worked for the FBI and CIA on projects the law had bared these agencies from undertaking. His problems began when the CIA found he had more patriotism than it had bargained for.

John Cummings is a former prize-winning investigative reporter at N.Y Newsday. He has co-authored the "Heist" (1987), "Goombata: The Improbable Rise and Fall of John Gotti and His Gang" (1990) and "Death Do Us Part" (1993).

For over thirty years, since the Bay of Pigs, he has studied the confluence of intelligence gathering, money laundering and drug trafficking. He resides in New York.

 

[Apollonian]

Trump is TOTAL puppet of Jews and Israel--that's the reason for nomination of this RINO relic, Barr (and a criminal drug-trafficker).

 

[Apollonian]

William Barr’s Connection to Ruby Ridge, Defending FBI Snipers​

Trump's AG pick was top cop during the federal siege and killing of Randy Weaver's wife and son.

By James Bovard
The American Conservative
January 18, 2019

Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/01...nnection-to-ruby-ridge-defending-fbi-snipers/

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Attorney General nominee William Barr have focused heavily on Barr’s views on Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But nobody is asking about Barr’s legal crusade for blanket immunity for federal agents who killed American citizens.

Barr received a routine questionnaire from the Judiciary Committee asking him to disclose his past work including pro bono activities “serving the disadvantaged.” The “disadvantaged” that Barr spent the most time helping was an FBI agent who slayed an Idaho mother holding her baby in 1992. Barr spent two weeks organizing former Attorneys General and others to support “an FBI sniper in defending against criminal charges in connection with the Ruby Ridge incident.” Barr also “assisted in framing legal arguments advanced… in the district court and the subsequent appeal to the Ninth Circuit,” he told the committee.

That charitable work (for an FBI agent who already had a federally-paid law firm defending him) helped tamp down one of the biggest scandals during Barr’s time as Attorney General from 1991 to early 1993. Barr was responsible for both the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two federal agencies whose misconduct at Ruby Ridge “helped to weaken the bond of trust that must exist between ordinary Americans and our law enforcement agencies,” according to a 1995 Senate Judiciary Committee report.

After Randy Weaver, an outspoken white separatist living on a mountaintop in northern Idaho, was entrapped by an undercover federal agent, U.S. marshals trespassed on Weaver’s land and killed his 14-year-old son, Sammy. The following day, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi killed his wife, Vicki, as she was standing in the cabin doorway. Horiuchi had previously shot Randy Weaver in the back after he stepped out of the cabin. The suspects were never given a warning or a chance to surrender and had taken no action against FBI agents. Weaver survived.

After an Idaho jury found Weaver not guilty on almost all charges, federal judge Edward Lodge slammed the Justice Department and FBI for concealing evidence and showing “a callous disregard for the rights of the defendants and the interests of justice.” A Justice Department internal investigation compiled a 542-page reportdetailing federal misconduct and coverups in the case and suggested criminal charges against FBI officials involved in Ruby Ridge.

Barr told the New York Times in 1993 that he was not directly involved in the Ruby Ridge operation. Two years later, the Washington Post revealed that “top officials of the Bush Justice Department had at least 20 [phone] contacts concerning Ruby Ridge in the 24 hours before Vicki Weaver was shot,” including two calls involving Barr.

.In January 1995, FBI director Louis Freeh announced wrist slaps for the FBI officials involved, including his friend Larry Potts, who supervised the operation from headquarters and who approved the shoot-without-provocation orders that “contravened the constitution of the United States,” according to the Justice Department internal report. When Attorney General Janet Reno later nominated Potts for deputy director of the FBI, top newspapers and members of Congress protested but Barr told the New York Times that his friend Potts “was deliberate and careful, and I developed a great deal of confidence in his judgment… I can’t think of enough good things to say about him.” A few months later, the FBI suspended Potts after suspected perjury regarding Ruby Ridge. (Potts was not charged and retired two years later.)

The Justice Department paid $3 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit from the Weaver family. But when Boundary County, Idaho filed criminal charges against Horiuchi, Barr sprang to action seeking immunity for FBI snipers. He spearheaded efforts to sway the court to dismiss all charges because holding a sniper liable would “severely undermine, if not cripple, the ability of future attorneys general to rely on such specialized units in moments of crisis such as hostage taking and terrorist acts.”

Read the Whole Article [ck https://www.theamericanconservative...nection-to-ruby-ridge-defending-fbi-snipers/]

 

[Apollonian]

Bill Barr’s CIA Resume: Cover-Ups, Covert Operations, and Pardons​

Link: http://deepstateblog.org/2019/01/15/bill-barrs-cia-resume-cover-ups-covert-operations-and-pardons/

“I started off in Washington at the Central Intelligence Agency and went to law school at night while I was working at CIA,” recalled William Barr in a 2001 oral history for the University of Virginia.

Trump’s nominee to be attorney general has what Trump might call “deep state” credentials.

Barr came to Langley in 1973. He was a 23 year graduate of Columbia with a masters in Chinese studies His resume shows he toiled at the agency by day and attended George Washington University law school at night. The Watergate scandal was ravaging the agency’s reputation and bringing down president Richard Nixon.

Barr spent four formative years working in the Intelligence directorate and the Office of Legislative Counsel. He even made the acquaintance of CIA director George H.W. Bush. In 1977 Barr moved on to a prestigious clerkship for a federal judge and then a series of jobs in private practice and the Justice Department. In 1991, Bush, who had since been elected president, appointed Barr to be attorney general.

Attorney General William Barr in 1991 (Credit: Justice Department)

At age 41, Barr was one of the younger men ever to hold that office. He left after one year and went on to a long career in corporate law and public service. Barr now returns to his old job at the behest of a besieged president under investigation for his dealings with Russian state agents.

Barr’s confirmation hearings open this week amid questions about the legality of the president’s conduct at home and abroad.

Will Barr protect the investigation of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller? Or will he act on a tightly argued memo in which he claimed Mueller has already exceeded his authority?

A close examination of Barr’s legal career indicates a high tolerance for presidentially sanctioned law-breaking.

In his first turn as attorney general in 1991, Barr handled three legal issues of deep concern to the CIA. He helped resolve all three issues favorably for the agency’s leaders and the president.

Barr’s decisions, it is worth remembering today, were unfavorable to law enforcement, Congress, and the voters.

Bank of Fear

The first deep state fiasco handled by Attorney General Barr was the mother of all scandals, known by the sibilant initials, BCCI.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International was a global institution, which deputy CIA director Robert Gates described, slightly more accurately, as “the Bank of Crooks and Criminals.” Spy novelist David Ignatius dubbed it “The Bank of Fear.”

Barr and BushAttorney General William Barr, left, with President George H. Bush (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

BCCI was a shadowy but very real institution with connections to governments and intelligence services all over the world. BCCI’s owners specialized in evading regulators so that they could speculate and bribe with the depositors’ money. As the fraud mounted and depositor losses spread, law enforcement officials and bank regulators the world over discovered what the CIA had been trying to hide.

Congressional investigators, led by Sen. John Kerry, found the agency had numerous BCCI accounts. Kamal Adham, the former chief of Saudi intelligence and a CIA collaborator, played a leading role in the bank’s dealings.

The final report of the Kerry Committee captures the mind-boggling scale of BCCI’s corruption. BCCI was the kind of true story that makes people believe there is a “deep state.”

In 1991, federal prosecutors in Tampa launched an investigation of money laundering at BCCI. At the same time the District Attorney of Manhattan investigated a broad array of bank activities and suddenly found itself getting zero cooperation from colleagues in the Justice Department and CIA. Barr sat on the deputies committee of the National Security Council which decided the government’s position on what information to share.

“We couldn’t get records. We couldn’t get witnesses. We could barely get a meeting,” said John Moscow, the lead BCCI prosecutor in Manhattan, in a recent interview.

Barr was up for confirmation as Attorney General. Moscow said he heard that Democrats on the Judiciary Committee made Barr promise to let the BCCI investigation go ahead.

“We didn’t have a problem once Barr was in there,” Moscow said. “We got cooperation. We prosecuted a seventeen people here in New York. Of course, the biggest guys got away.”

Several of the BCCI ringleaders were indicted but they all escaped U.S. justice. Barr did not press for their extradition from Pakistan, nor did his successors in the Clinton administration.

Iraq-Gate

Barr played a more direct role in sidelining an investigation in an Italian bank that the CIA used to funnel aid to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The scandal was known as Iraq-gate.

Donald Rumsfeld, left, meets Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, December 1983 (Credit: National Security Archive)

The backdrop was the geopolitics of the horrific war between Iran and Iraq in 1980-88, which killed a million people. In the interests of harming Iran, the U.S. government, via the CIA, secretly aided Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s. In 1983 former White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad for a friendly meeting with Hussein.

Five years later, President Bush authorized a program of covert support for Iraq, including the provision of targeting intelligence and commercial loan guarantees. The latter were made via the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL).

The story was politically potent because Hussein had invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and Bush had to raise an international military coalition to drive him out.

The Iraq-gate story illustrated how, once again, a U.S. covert operation had backfired. The Iraqi dictator had been emboldened by the covert CIA support to launch a war on a weaker American ally. America had to go to war against its covert ally.

“Were the intelligence services of the U.S., Britain and Italy all aware of—and participants in—the West’s secret, unlawful arming of Saddam?” asked New York Times columnist William Safire. “Of course; but the stonewalling strategy of the departing Justice politicians is to have the C.I.A. take the gaspipe for all the wrongdoers.”

One of those “departing Justice politicians” was Barr. He made sure CIA did not “take the gas pipe,” ie commit suicide. Under pressure to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate, Barr passed the decision to a special examiner. A retired judge conducted a cursory investigation and said no independent counsel was necessary.

Incoming president Bill Clinton was not interested in investigating the CIA, and the BNL case was forgotten.

Barr later dismissed the Iraq-gate allegations as “nonsense.” But there was no doubt Hussein had received billions of dollars worth of loan guarantees via the U.S. branch of BNL. How that happened was never explained.

Barr, more than anyone, made sure the Iraq-gate scheme was not investigated.

Iran-Contra Pardons

Mueller SignSign of the times

With President Trump reserving the possibility that he might pardon former aides indicted by Mueller, Barr’s handling of the Iran-Contra pardons of 1992 is revealing.

After President Bush was defeated for reelection in 1992, Barr urged him to use his pardon power freely before leaving office. Like Trump today, Bush was under investigation by a special prosecutor, Judge Lawrence Walsh, for his role in the Iran-Contra conspiracy.

Also under investigation were former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, and two top CIA officials, Clair George and Dewey Clarridge. They had all plotted to evade a congressional ban on aid to the counterrevolutionaries in Central America by illegally selling weapons to Iran.

The CIA was in real danger. The trials of George and Clarridge promised to be a public relations nightmare or worse.. Sen. Pat Moynihan, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee had introduced a bill to abolish the clandestine service. The Cold War was coming to an end and the agency’s future was in doubt.

In his oral history, Barr urged Bush to pardon the CIA men on the grounds that they were victims of the “criminalization” of foreign policy. When it came to pardoning, Barr said he “favored the broadest” use of the power.

“There were some people arguing just for Weinberger, and I said, No, in for a penny, in for a pound,” Barr recalled.

Bush took his advice. Barr had little respect for the special prosecutor’s work, no interests in his findings about how the CIA tried to subvert Congress, and no regrets about consigning Walsh’s work to history. Walsh accused Bush of hiding criminal misconduct but the former president and aides escaped justice.

In all three cover-ups Barr sacrificed the interests of transparency and accountability to the political needs of Langley and the White House.

Can President Trump count on the same if Barr is confirmed? Yes, he almost certainly can.

 

[Apollonian]

CIA Covert Operative William Barr Nominated by Trump for Attorney General. His Role in the Iran Contra Affair​

Link: https://www.globalresearch.ca/ciabu...lliam-barr-nominated-attorney-general/5662609

By Larry Chin
Global Research, January 19, 2019

UPDATE

This article was originally published on December 12, 2018. The serious questions raised in the piece remain completely unanswered.

Why was Barr chosen, given his shocking and deeply criminal/cover-up kingpin background?

Was Trump duped by Deep State enemies, who have placed another predator into his administration with the power to destroy his presidency? Or has Trump co-opted and turned Barr, in the hopes that Barr will do Trump’s bidding? Why would Barr ever turn against his own Deep State cronies?

Does Trump have a plan? With Barr in place, is Trump signaling to his enemies that “I now own the Deep State”? Or is Barr the Deep State’s ultimate and final weapon against Trump, who remains surrounded by Bush/Clinton “swamp creatures” such as National Security Adviser John Bolton, who is one of Barr’s many fellow Iran-Contra co-conspirators, Vice President Mike Pence (who is in ideal position for a coup against Trump, and remains very cozy with the Clintons, dozens of Obama appointees that remain in place, and Republican “Never Trumpers”, all of whom continue to undermine Trump.

READ MOREolitical Succession and “The Bush-Clinton Nexus”: Permanent Criminal State, “A Clinton White House Guarantees War with Russia”

Pay careful attention to the confirmation “hearings”. How many of the senators “questioning” Barr are themselves connected to the Bush/Clinton era criminal operations that Barr supervised as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general?

Will anyone in Washington, or in the CIA asset-filled mainstream media, dare bring up Iran-Contra? Will anyone dare detail Barr’s corruption, and his longstanding ties to the Bush/Clinton network? What about the fact that Barr is best friends with Robert Mueller?

Even the alternative media, including the whistleblowing research-intensive pro-Trump anon community, has been virtually silent on Barr, despite the fact that his criminal history is glaringly obvious, lurid, and begging to be exposed.

Rumors abound that slippery Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is expected to leave the Justice Department following Barr’s likely confirmation. This further clears the way for Barr to seize the power to determine the fate of the Mueller probe, the John Huber (Inspector General) report, FISAgate, Clinton emails, Uranium One, and other key investigations.

William Barr could well determine the course of the political war between President Donald Trump and his enemies, and decide the fate of Donald Trump’s presidency itself.

Larry Chin, January 14, 2019

***

Should William Barr serve as the highest law enforcement official of the country?

For a presidential administration whose mandate was the eradication of corruption, the “draining of the swamp”, and the restoration of law?

With the nomination of William Barr for attorney general, that is what President Donald Trump wants American citizens and the world to accept.

Fawning mainstream media coverage, and streams of puff pieces laud Barr as a “respected” establishment “legal scholar”, as do Donald Trump’s Twitter posts about Barr.

The fact is, there is nothing to “respect” and everything to condemn about Barr’s work as a key inner circle operative throughout George Herbert Walker Bush’s rise to power, from CIA Director to Vice President to President. These aspects of Barr’s resume remain whitewashed by mainstream coverage. They have been amply documented by whistleblowers and those who worked directly with Barr.

The issue at hand is not Barr’s “legal mind”, but the ruthless mind that he wielded with frightening authority and expertise as George H. W. Bush’s treasonous hatchet man in the Justice Department. William Barr distorted and corrupted the law, as grossly as anyone in modern history.

Barr: CIA operative

It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.

Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno (1993-2001), Dick Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.

Barr, however, is a particularly spectacular and sordid case. As George H.W. Bush’s most notorious insider, and as the AG from 1991 to 1993, Barr wreaked havoc, flaunted the rule of law, and proved himself to be one of the CIA/Deep State’s greatest and most ruthless champions and protectors:

Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting in 1971. Barr’s youth career goal was to head the CIA.

CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy (Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation.

When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA’s “legal office” and Bush’s inner circle, and worked alongside Bush’s longtime CIA enforcers Theodore “Ted” Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines, and others, several of whom were likely involved with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy assassination, and numerous southeast Asian operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden Triangle narco-trafficking.

Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA abuses.

Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean opposition leader Orlando Letelier.

Barr joined George H.W. Bush’s legal/intelligence team during Bush’s vice presidency (under President Ronald Reagan) Rose from assistant attorney general to Chief Legal Counsel to attorney general (1991) during the Bush 41 presidency.

Barr was a key player in the Iran-Contra operation, if not the most important member of the apparatus, simultaneously managing the operation while also “fixing” the legal end, ensuring that all of the operatives could do their jobs without fear of exposure or arrest.

In his attorney general confirmation, Barr vowed to “attack criminal organizations”, drug smugglers and money launderers. It was all hot air: as AG, Barr would preserve, protect, cover up, and nurture the apparatus that he helped create, and use Justice Department power to escape punishment.

Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes, including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all crimes of state committed by Bush

Barr provided legal cover for Bush’s illegal foreign policy and war crimes

Barr left Washington, and went through the “rotating door” to the corporate world, where he took on numerous directorships and counsel positions for major companies. In 2007 and again from 2017, Barr was counsel for politically-connected international law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Among its other notable attorneys and alumni are Kenneth Starr, John Bolton, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and numerous Trump administration attorneys. K&E’s clients include sex trafficker/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital.

A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.

Iran-Contra

To understand the scope, scale, and gravity of William Barr’s central role working for George H.W. Bush, one must grasp the significance of Iran-Contra, the massive criminal operation that was the cornerstone of the Bush era, headed by the Bushes, with the Clintons as partners.

As previously written:

Originally coined “Iran-Contra” (in reference to illegal arms sales to Iran in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon and arms to the Contra “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua), the moniker hides the fact that it became a massive and permanent criminal business and political machine that went far beyond then-current political concerns.

In The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider, Al Martin describes the Iran-Contra Enterprise that a vast operation that included (and was not limited to) drugs, weapons, terrorism, war, money laundering, criminal banking and securities fraud, currency fraud, real estate fraud, insurance fraud, blackmail, extortion, and political corruption that involved countless Washington politicians of both Republican and Democratic parties.

Martin:

“Iran-Contra itself is a euphemism for the outrageous fraud perpetrated by government criminals for profit and control. Offhandedly, this inaccurate term entered history as shorthand for the public scandals of illicit arms sales to Iran coupled with illicit weapons deals for Nicaragua. The real story, however, is much more complex…When George Bush, [CIA Director] Bill Casey and Oliver North initiated their plan of government-sanctioned fraud and drug smuggling, they envisioned using 500 men to raise $35 billion….they ended up using about 5,000 operatives and making over $35 billion.” In addition, the operation became “a government within a government, comprising some thirty to forty thousand people the American government turns to, when it wishes certain illegal covert operations to be extant pursuant to a political objective” with George [H.W.] Bush “at the top of the pyramid”.

The operation’s insiders and whistleblowers place George H.W.Bush as one of its top architects, and its commander. It was carried out by CIA operatives close to Bush since his CIA directorship and even stretching back to the Bay of Pigs. These included Oliver North, Ted Shackley, Edwin Wilson, Felix Rodriguez, and others. Iran-Contra was a replication of the CIA’s Golden Triangle drug trafficking in Southeast Asia (operations also connected to Bush) but on a larger scale and sophistication, greater complexity, and far-reaching impact that remains palpable to this day.

In George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Webster Tarpley wrote that, “many once-classified documents have come to light, which suggest that Bush organized and supervised many, or most, of the criminal aspects of the Iran-Contra adventures.”

Tarpley further points out that George H.W. Bush created new structures (“special situation group”, “terror incident working group” etc.) within the Reagan administration—and that

“all of these structures revolved around [creating] the secret command role of the then-Vice President, George Bush…The Bush apparatus, within and behind the government, was formed to carry out covert policies: to make war when the constitutional government had decided not to make war; to support enemies of the nation (terrorists and drug runners) who are the friends and agents of the secret government.”

This suggests that George H.W.Bush not only ran Iran-Contra, but much of the Reagan presidency. Then-White House press secretary James Baker said in 1981,

“Bush is functioning much like a co-president. George is involved in all the national security stuff because of his special background as CIA director. All the budget working groups, he was there, the economic working groups, the Cabinet meetings. He is included in almost all the meetings.”

Hundreds of insiders, witnesses and investigators have blown the lid off of the Iran-Contra Enterprise in exhaustive fashion. These include the investigations of Mike Ruppert (From The Wilderness, Crossing the Rubicon), Al Martin (The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider), Gary Webb (Dark Alliance), Rodney Stich (Defrauding America, Drugging America), Terry Reed (Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA), Stew Webb (and here), Dois “Chip” Tatum (The Tatum Chronicles) (summarized here), Pete Brewton (The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush), among others. The accounts of Barry Seal, Edward Cutolo, Albert Carone, Bradley Ayers, Tosh Plumley, Bill Tyree, Gunther Russbacher, Celerino Castillo, Michael Levine, Trenton Parker, Russell Bowen, Richard Brenneke, Larry Nichols, William Duncan, Russell Welch and dozens more implicate the Bushes, the Clintons and the CIA.

As described by Mike Ruppert (image left):

“It stood, and still stands today, isolated and immune from the operating principles of democracy. It is autonomous and it operates through self-funding via narcotics and weapons trafficking. To quote [former CIA director] William Casey it is ‘a completely self-funding, off-the-shelf operation.’ It, in fact, dictates a substantial portion of this country’s foreign, economic and military policy from a place not accessible to the will of a free people properly armed with facts.”

CIA deep cover agent pilot Chip Tatum, a key Iran-Contra player who flew drugs into Mena and Little Rock in Arkansas, worked alongside CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal. It is believed that Seal was subsequently murdered by the Medellin Cartel, on order of Oliver North and the Bushes, to prevent him from testifying about his activities. Before he was killed, Seal provided Tatum a list of Iran-Contra “Boss Hogs” who allegedly controlled the drug trade. The Pegasus File summaries Tatum’s activities, and features the “Boss Hog” list.

The Iran-Contra apparatus was byzantine, comprised of a network of connected government agencies, subsidiaries, and shell companies and corporations can be seen in the diagram provided by whistleblower Stew Webb:

Bush Crime Family Flow Chart

Progressive Review (1998)

Why is Iran-Contra still relevant today?

The Iran-Contra Enterprise’s overseers, criminal associates and beneficiaries, to this day, remain at large [including Barr], with most enjoying massive illegally-obtained wealth, privilege, and highest political and corporate positions. The imperial positions of the Bush and Clinton clans exemplify this.

The operation, in essence, evolved and metastasized into ever-more modern and sophisticated incarnation with even more global reach. New names, new banks, new drugs, new wars, same blueprint. It is not a “deep state” or a “shadow state” but a Criminal State that operates “in broad daylight”. It is the playbook of the New World Order. It is globalization at its finest.

All attempts to prosecute were largely unsuccessful—blocked, stalled, or given a “limited hangout” treatment. As written by Ruppert, one of many Iran-Contra whistleblowers, in Crossing the Rubicon:

“[In Congress] Iran-Contra was effectively ‘managed’ by Lee Hamilton in the House [of Representatives] and John Kerry (among others) in the Senate throughout the late 1980s to conceal the greatest crimes of the era, crimes committed by a litany of well-known government operatives.”

Which brings us to this:

Iran-Contra was also managed on both the operational and all-important judicial “legal” end by none other than William Barr.

Barr: Iran-Contra insider alias “Robert Johnson”

In his books Drugging America: A Trojan Horse and Defrauding America: Dirty Secrets of the CIA and other Government Operations, whistleblower Rodney Stich exposed in exhaustive detail the firsthand accounts of whistleblowers and insiders, who participated in the many criminal operations that stretched across the Bush and Clinton presidencies.

Some of the shocking evidence exposes Barr acting simultaneously as a hands-on covert operative, and as Bush’s judicial/political fixer:

In Drugging America, Stich wrote:

[CIA operative] Terry Reed had been in frequent telephone contact with the man he knew as Robert Johnson. Johnson directed the drug trafficking and drug money laundering, the training in Arkansas of Contra pilots and fighters, and authorized Reed to set up the CIA proprietary in Mexico. At a later date, Reed learned that Robert Johnson was really William Barr, appointed by President George Bush to be Attorney General of the United States.

Reed’s CIA contact, William Barr, known at that time by his alias Robert Johnson, told Reed that Attorney General Edwin Meese had appointed Michael Fitzhugh to be US Attorney in Western Arkansas, and that he would stonewall any investigation into the Mena, Arkansas drug-related activities. This obstruction of justice by Justice Department officials did occur.

William Barr, who Bush appointed to be the top law enforcement officer in the United States—US Attorney General—played a key role in the smuggling of drugs into the United States. [CIA pilot Chip] Tatum’s statements about reaching Barr at Southern Air Transport in Miami through the name of Robert Johnson confirmed what [CIA operative] Terry Reed, author of the book Compromised, had told me and had written. Nothing like having members of felony drug operations hold the position of US Attorney General—in control of the United States Department of Justice—and a vice president of the United States [Bush]. With this type of influence, no one needs fear being arrested. And don’t forget the Mafia groups working with the CIA who also receive Justice Department protection that is not available to US citizens.

According to Stich, Tatum also detailed to him meetings that took place in which he was present for meetings and telephone conversations between Bush, [NSC Colonel] Oliver North and Barr, discussing not only operations but the skimming of drug money by the Clintons.

The purpose of the meeting was to determine who was responsible for stealing over $100 million in drug money on the three routes from Panama to Colorado, Ohio, and Arkansas. This theft was draining the operation known as the “Enterprise”…The first call was made by [CIA agent Joseph] Fernandez to Oliver North, informing North that the theft was occurring on the Panama to Arkansas route, and “that means either [CIA pilot Barry] Seal, Clinton, or [Panamanian General Manuel] Noriega”…Fifteen minutes later, the portable phone rang, and Vice President George Bush was on the line, talking to William Barr. Barr said at one point, referring to the missing funds, “I would propose that no one source would be bold enough to siphon out that much money, but it is more plausible that each are siphoning a portion, causing a drastic loss.”..Barr told Bush that he and Fernandez were staying in Costa Rica until the following day after first visiting [CIA operative] John Hull’s ranch. Barr then handed the phone to Tatum, who was instructed by Bush to be sure that Noriega and [Mossad operative Michael] Harari boarded Seal’s plane and departed, and for Tatum to get the tail number of Seal’s plane….Tatum said that Barr dialed another number, immediately reaching then-governor Bill Clinton. Barr explained the missing money problem to Clinton…Barr suggested that Clinton investigate at the Arkansas end of the Panama to Arkansas route, and that he and North would continue investigating the Panama end of the connection, warning that the matter must be resolved or it could lead to “big problems”…(This description of missing drug money provided support to a subsequent meeting in Little Rock, described by Terry Reed, during which William Barr accused Clinton of siphoning drug money and that this had to stop.)

Tatum also described to Stich a March 15, 1985 flight, during which “Tatum met with Barr, Harari, and Buddy Young (head of Governor Bill Clinton’s security detail). Barr represented himself as an emissary of Vice President George Bush, who would be arriving soon. Tatum would note on his flight book “Bush visit/meet with Barr and had dinner at German restaurant”.

The fact is, William Barr was heavily involved in the Iran-Contra.

Cover-up of BCCI and BNL scandals

As attorney general, obviously still working for CIA/Bush purposes, Barr and Richard Thornburgh (George H.W. Bush’s previous attorney general) killed off investigations into BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the notorious CIA drug bank. Barr also stonewalled investigations in the Banca Nationale del Lavoro (BNL), another CIA drug bank.

BCCI was a leading CIA bank used by the Bush/Clinton machine for a vast array of operations, including Iran-Contra drug money laundering.

Barr himself had a personal relationship with BCCI going back to the early 1980s.

William Barr is heading the drive in Virginia to turn prisons into slave labor camps. Here he is shown during a hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Nov. 12, 1991, on his nomination as Attorney General in the Bush administration. Left to right: Sen. Strom Thurmond, Sen. Joseph Biden, Barr, Sen. Patrick Leahy. (Source: EIR)

READ MOREolitical Succession and “The Bush-Clinton Nexus”: Permanent Criminal State, “A Clinton White House Guarantees War with Russia”

According to Rodney Stich,

“before William Barr came to the Justice Department, he was an attorney with the Washington law firm of Shaw Pittman Potts & Trowbridge. This law firm represented BCCI for several years…Barr’s former law firm also represented B. Francis Saul II, a director and powerful shareholder in Financial General Bankshares, Inc. Financial later became First American Bankshares, a covert BCCI operation…Further, Barr had been legal counsel for the CIA, the same agency that was heavily involved with BCCI corrupt activities. He was CIA counsel during the time that George Bush was Director of the CIA.”

When both the CIA and the Justice Department connections and cover-up of BCCI were exposed by the dogged investigations of Congressman Henry Gonzalez, then-FBI Director William Sessions [note: not related to recent Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions] promised an investigation. This prompted Attorney General Barr, who himself was engaged in the cover-up and the obstruction of justice, to remove Sessions on trumped-up ethics charges, replacing him with someone more malleable.

Also, as part of the BCCI “negotiation” as well as to maintain control over the Iran-Contra drug operations, Barr allegedly also crafted a legal justification for then-President Bush to invade Panama and kidnap their associate General Manuel Noriega, in order to imprison and silence him before he could expose the operation.

Cover-up of Inslaw and PROMIS software theft

Barr stonewalled investigations and assisted the cover-up of the theft of Inslaw, and PROMIS software by the Department of Justice and the CIA. The otherworldly power of PROMIS software was and still is so coveted that extreme criminal measures have been get it.

Inslaw

PROMIS (Mike Ruppert, From the Wilderness publications)

PROMIS part 2 (Mike Ruppert, From The Wilderness publications)

The Undying Octopus: the FBI and the PROMIS affair

NSA surveillance: PROMIS

According to Rodney Stich in Defrauding America,

“by misusing the power of their office…three US attorney generals in the Reagan-Bush administrations, Edwin Meese, Richard Thornburgh, and William Barr misappropriated, or aided and abetted, the theft of the software called PROMIS.”

When the scandal became too noisy, Barr

“appointed a former Justice Department crony to conduct an “investigation” of the Inslaw matter, and then report back to him. The special counsel would be selected by Barr; would be subservient to him; and would report to him. Barr could then ignore the recommendations if, in the remote possibility the special counsel did not cooperate in the expected cover-up.”

The Iran-Contra pardons

In the most brazen insult to the American people and the entire world, Barr facilitated George H.W. Bush’s infamous 1992 Christmas Eve pardons of six Iran-Contra co-conspirators Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert McFarlane, Dewey Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George,

With the stroke of a pen, Bush gleefully set free six of his Iran-Contra criminal flunkies, and effectively decapitating Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s six-year long Iran-Contra probe.

It was Barr who closed the lid on Iran-Contra, freeing virtually the entire Bush/Clinton network, including himself, from punishment.

It was Barr who, with this move, “saved their asses”.

The New World Order could not have asked for a better henchman, fixer, and spook than William Barr.

Trump’s nomination of Barr: insanity or “part of the plan”?

Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the power of the single mandate to “drain the swamp”, and Destroy the Deep State. A vicious global struggle continues to be waged on every front between populist reformers led by Trump and the Deep State/New World Order. This war is taking place in every nation and on every continent. The stakes are deadly. Time is running short.

The Justice Department has been ground zero in this war. Jeff Sessions’ tenure as attorney general was opaque and riddled with uncertainties. His interim replacement, Matthew Whittaker, is true Trump loyalist who has the unenviable task of taking immediate action on FISAgate and other investigations into Obama/Clinton administration spying/treason, ending the Robert Mueller’s manufactured anti-Trump “Russian Collusion” witch hunt hoax, and do it all before January 2019, when a new Congress full of emboldened Democrats (who will come into office via rampant mid-term election fraud) pursue new avenues to further attack Trump. Numerous critical and potentially explosive congressional testimonies, including investigations into the Clinton Foundation, are all scheduled to take place before January, which could well decide the course of Trump’s presidency, and the movement behind him.

Why is William Barr—the antithesis of a “patriot” and the swampiest of swamp monsters— now being inserted into the middle of what is supposed to be a “white hat” anti-corruption operation? The move is baffling.

Why did Trump make the pick—the sole pick—so immediately, seemingly without thorough vetting?

Who recommended Barr for the job? The “white hats”, or the “black hats” that have never stopped planting assassins into Trump’s inner circle?

Is it significant or coincidental that the Barr pick came shortly after the death of George H.W. Bush?

Does Trump, who made the pick but claims that he “does not know” Barr (do we believe this?) realize that Barr—“Robert Johnson”—is the Deep State swamp’s most loyal operators and protectors? And that Barr is deeply connected and loyal to everyone and everything that Trump opposes?

What role could Trump possibly envision for Barr? Will Barr go after Bill and Hillary Clinton? Jeb and George W. Bush, with whom Barr managed numerous Iran-Contra operations? Will he go after Robert Mueller and James Comey, and dozens of members of Congress, who were also deeply connected to the “Enterprise”?

Why would Barr go against everything he helped create and everything he stood for? Why would he undo his own criminal handiwork by prosecuting his own lifelong criminal colleagues and friends? Barr’s career has been about saving the Deep State and the New World Order that he helped make invincible. Why would he do any differently now?

For reasons known only to him, Trump has surrounded himself with bad actors, too many to count. Mike Pence (longtime Bush loyalist), John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, etc. etc. Trump’s cabinet has been in constant flux, with many shakeups underway. But William Barr is an entirely different level of criminal. What next? Will Trump invite Dick Cheney to his administration? Bring back Henry Kissinger?

Is Trump being a genius, or is he a dupe and/or a sell-out?

Have Trump and his forces “turned” or leveraged Barr? Is it even possible to control someone like him? “Once CIA, always CIA.”

Imagine the spectacle of the pending “confirmation hearings”. Will any member of this corrupt Congress grill Barr about Iran-Contra or BCCI? Will anyone stand up and ask “Robert Johnson” to tell the truth? Or will Barr look across at a room full of frightened politicians (many of whom he knows too well) and chortle, knowing that no one in the chamber will dare.

Is this the “draining of the swamp”, or is Barr the swamp’s ultimate victory, and the end of Trump?

Of limited hangouts and deceptions

In recent interviews, Barr issued noises that seemed supportive of Trump. Barr obviously caught the Trump team’s attention based on these comments. (Humorously, the CIA-managed corporate mainstream media has labeled Barr, an actual CIA criminal conspirator, a “conspiracy theorist”for his statements.)

While the mainstream media has latched on to quotes in which Barr said that he supports “some” investigations into the Clintons, he also insists that “throwing Hillary Clinton in jail is inappropriate”.

In other words, Barr does not want the swamp to be drained. In other words, Barr only supports limited investigations and limited hangouts.

Barr should be disqualified for the job simply based on this.

Or does the nomination of Barr suggest that President Trump also does not want to fully “drain the swamp”? Is his goal to merely co-opt the New World Order co-opt the New World Order and co-opt the Bush Republican apparatus, in order to take down the Clinton/Obama side of it, while leaving the Bush side intact?

Given that Bush-Clinton/Obama are two sides of the same coin, it is ridiculous and impossible to “go after” one side without “going after” the other, and then claim that any real swamp draining is taking place.

It is also possible that Barr and/or his Bush/CIA colleagues have baited the Trump team with his statements, in order to place him in Trump’s administration as a Trojan Horse.

Muted reaction

It is too much to expect the masses, remain uninformed and controlled by propaganda, to understand the significance and danger posed by the reappearance of Barr.

The few who seem aware of Barr’s background are alarmedfor good reason. But even the more informed observers aren’t getting it. Most of those who “trust Trump” and “trust the plan” have not aggressively questioned the move. Even the research-intensive Internet Anoncommunity has been quiet about Barr.

Some Trump optimists are stretching, trying to convince themselves that Trump is using the Barr nomination to “troll”, and to point attention back to the Bush history, thus forcing the public to research, recoil and awaken to the truth.

They would like to believe that Trump is continuing to play a game of deception. The “4-D chess player”, is merely “keeping enemies close”; manipulating, co-opting, and leveraging compromised figures to his personal bidding; and turn one of the Deep State’s own into a weapon against the Deep State. Perhaps they believe that Trump is purposely elevating Barr, in order to fire him later, as he has already done with numerous others in his administration.

Some argue that Barr is useful because he “knows where the bodies are buried”. Barr himself helped bury them—literally in many cases.

If Trump thinks that he can control or leverage someone as dangerous as Barr, then Trump is taking the biggest risk of his presidency, and of his life.

He is also placing the country and the world at risk.

All in the crime family

The atrocities and crimes of the Bushes and Clintons are unspeakable and unimaginable in depravity and scale.

These atrocities were facilitated by William “Robert Johnson” Barr.

Barr, a hands-on participant, is guilty. Furthermore, he poisoned and manipulated the judicial system—“law enforcement”— to get himself and his friends off the hook.

Barr must be exposed and condemned, along with the entire Bush/Clinton/Obama network, and all must be denied and removed from all positions of influence and power.

In an unguarded moment in 1992, George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon:

“If people ever knew what we had done, we would be chased down the street and lynched.”

 

[Apollonian]

Will this one item be bad enough to sink the Barr nomination?​

Link: https://gunowners.org/alert12216/

Published: 22 January 2019

TAKE ACTION: Click here to urge your Senators to OPPOSE the anti-gun William Barr for Attorney General.

Last week, I wrote to you about all the gun control restrictions that William Barr supports.

As you know, Barr has been nominated by President Trump to be the next “top cop” in America.

Well, Barr’s support for gun control is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reasons why the Senate should defeat his nomination.

An excellent article by James Bovard lays out Barr’s role in planning and covering up the massacre of Randy Weaver’s family at Ruby Ridge.

I will give you the highlights of this article (below), but you can read the entire piece here.

You may remember that Randy Weaver was entrapped by a federal agent for violating a very technical part in the federal gun law.

U.S. Marshals later launched an offensive against the family, first, killing Weaver’s 14-year-old son. Then, an FBI sniper shot Weaver in the back and murdered his wife, as she stood in the doorway of their cabin holding her baby.

Afterwards, an Idaho jury found Weaver not guilty on almost all counts, and a federal judge blasted the Justice Department and FBI for concealing evidence and demonstrating “a callous disregard for the rights of the defendants and the interests of justice.”

All of this was under the leadership of then Attorney General William Barr.

Barr misrepresents his involvement in Ruby Ridge

Barr claimed at the time that he had no involvement in the Ruby Ridge shootings, even though it all happened under his jurisdiction.

But, in 1995, The Washington Post reported that “top officials of the Bush Justice Department had at least 20 contacts concerning Ruby Ridge in the 24 hours before [Weaver’s wife] was shot” — and that two calls involved Barr.

Remember how, in my letter to you last week, I mentioned that Barr had misrepresented the truth (under oath) when he told Senators last week that he did not support the 1991 semi-automatic ban?

Well, Bovard shows that Barr also fibbed when he claimed no direct involvement in Ruby Ridge — even though he had sat in on at least two phone calls.

But that’s not all: When the FBI sniper who murdered Vicki Weaver was faced with criminal charges, Barr tried to get immunity for the killer.

He tried to get the judge to dismiss the charges on the general theory that prosecuting FBI snipers “undermine[d]” the attorney General.

Barr spent two weeks organizing former Attorneys General on behalf of the FBI killer. He “assisted in framing arguments” before the district court and on appeals.

In fact, a majority of Barr’s pro bono activities have consisted of trying to cover up for the massacre at Rudy Ridge and exonerating the government killers.

Is it any wonder that Barr supported semi-auto and magazine bans for “the little people” — and helped create Brady Checks — and then denied it under oath?

Is it any wonder that Barr’s top priority as Attorney General would be “secret police-initiated orders” to raid gun owners’ homes in the middle of the night (aka, “red flag” laws)?

The Attorney General is an important and powerful position. And it is imperative that the Senate does NOT confirm William Barr as the nation’s top cop.

So please contact your senators again and present them with this new information from the Bovard article.

Let them know that his previous “tour of duty” as Attorney General in 1992 does not deserve a promotion in 2019.

 

[Apollonian]

What Barr's work under Bush 41 tells us about how he'll handle his new job​

By David Shortell, CNN
Updated 1356 GMT (2156 HKT) March 7, 2019

Link: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/02/politics/william-barr-george-hw-bush/index.html

[vids at site link, above]

Who is Attorney General William Barr?

Washington (CNN) — Facing down a Democratic-controlled Congress in a time of mounting budget deficits, President George. H. W. Bush made it clear that he wanted the power of the line-item veto to strike down elements of left-leaning spending bills.

In public addresses, Bush asked the American people "to demand" that he gain the tool through legislation or a constitutional amendment. Behind the scenes, his administration explored the possibility that a president held the power inherently -- a theory pushed at the time by some conservative legal commentators.

William Barr, then Bush's assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, led the research effort. "I had my monks in the Office of Legal Counsel going back into hoary antiquity looking for any kind of precedent we could use," he recalled in a 2001 interview with the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.

The only case law they came up with -- from Scottish monarchic rule -- didn't cut it. Barr advised the White House they could not establish the line-item veto, disappointing the President's hopes.

When he discussed his decision with Bush, Barr remembered the President's measured agreement. "My view is that you weaken the presidency by asserting powers that aren't given, and then getting defeated," Bush said, Barr told the Miller Center.

More than 25 years after his first tenure in Washington, which was capped off by a stint as Bush's attorney general, Barr returned to the helm of the Justice Department in February, this time under a President being challenged for an executive action he did make.

Barr has not publicly weighed in on the legality of President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the southern border, announced last month in an attempt to win more funding for a border wall despite a now-realized threat by Democrats to fight it in court.

In written responses submitted to senators during his confirmation process, Barr said he didn't have the necessary awareness of the facts and circumstances surrounding the emergency declaration, which had been threatened at the time, to offer his opinion on it, but he promised to "ensure that the Department's advice on this subject is consistent with any applicable law."

Related Article: William Barr confirmed as attorney general

People who worked with Barr in his last go-round say he's not afraid to make an unpopular decision.

"He made tough decisions when it wasn't in the political interest of his patron. That's Bill," said Stephen Colgate, a friend of Barr's who served as his assistant attorney general for administration.

Barr first met Bush in the 1970s when both men worked at the CIA -- Barr beginning his career in Washington as a junior officer at the agency, Bush as its director.

In the 2001 interview with the Miller Center, Barr described one of their first interactions -- as Bush was quizzed at a congressional oversight hearing.

"He leaned back and said, 'How the hell do I answer this one?' " Barr recalled. "I whispered the answer in his ear, and he gave it, and I thought, 'Who is this guy? He listens to legal advice when it's given.' "

In a statement to CNN, Barr called Bush "a great man by every measure and a gentleman of the old school -- kind, considerate, decent."

"He was a true statesman who guided the country through consequential times. From the time he served as one of the youngest naval aviators in World War II through his presidency and beyond, his dedication to public service was unparalleled," Barr said.

Barr went on to help the 1988 Bush campaign with its vice presidential selection process, and was later appointed to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, a decision made in part because of his support for presidential power, Barr has said.

At the Office of Legal Counsel, he helped shape legal opinions that influenced White House policy and action, and he produced a 10-page memo outlining a broad vision of the executive branch's abilities to rebuff Congress' oversight attempts.

The Mueller probe

Barr's views on executive authority, on display in that memo and a separate one he wrote last year criticizing part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, were a source of anxiety for Democrats during his confirmation fight earlier this year.

In line with the unitary executive theory, a school of legal thought that draws a standard of uncompromising presidential power from the Constitution, Barr's support for executive authority once undergirded a decision to almost fire an independent counsel who had hounded Bush.

Bush was "infuriated" with Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel appointed under Reagan to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, Barr told the Miller Center. In an Oval Office tirade, the day after Election Day, the President blamed an indictment that Walsh had brought just days before the vote for his defeat, and invited Barr to fire him.

Barr, according to an account in Bob Woodward's 1999 tome "Shadow," agreed that Walsh should -- and could legally -- be fired after an inappropriate and apparently political move. Barr had been tempted to fire him before, Woodward reported.

"I've had an itchy finger," Barr said, according to "Shadow." He ultimately decided against it, however, worried that firing Walsh would only create more controversy and bring a new court-appointed independent counsel, Woodward wrote.

This year, in the run-up to his second term as attorney general, now under a President less genteel than Bush, Barr offered Congress a more fulsome defense of the Mueller investigation.

Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, Barr promised to not interfere with the probe and to let the special counsel carry his investigation through until its end.

"I feel I'm in a position in life where I can do the right thing and not really care about the consequences in the sense that I can truly be independent," Barr said. "I am not going to do anything that I think is wrong, and I will not be bullied into doing anything I think is wrong -- by anybody, whether it be editorial boards, or Congress or the President. I'm going to do what I think is right."

 

[Apollonian]

Attorney General Barr on His Job at FBI: I’m Trying to Figure Our Where to Land “Without Being Shot”​

By Government Slaves on 06/09/2019

Link: https://governmentslaves.news/2019/...-figure-our-where-to-land-without-being-shot/

US Attorney General Barr spoke at a ceremony at the FBI academy. He hinted at the dangerous situation he is in as Attorney General at this time in history.

Bill Barr started his presentation by stating :

“As we’ve been watching the coverage of June 6, 1944 D-Day, I had the thought that my arrival this time felt a little bit, I think, like jumping into Sainte-Mère-Église on the morning of June 5, trying to figure out where you could land without getting shot.”

Barr’s comments about the reality of getting shot at received no reaction from the crowd.

Americans want justice. We’ve seen too many Deep State crimes committed under the Obama Administration. We’ve watched a gang of criminals led by Obama and Hillary Clinton attempt to prevent candidate Trump from winning the 2016 election and then work tirelessly to remove him from office.

It is not out of line to want to see these people locked up. It’s demanding that criminals be arrested and put behind bars. It’s demanding justice!

SOURCE: GATEWAY PUNDIT [https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/20...eing-deep-state-fbi-at-this-point-in-history/ ]

 

[Apollonian]

CIA Covert Operative William Barr Nominated by Trump for Attorney General. His Role in the Iran Contra Affair​

Link: https://www.globalresearch.ca/ciabu...lliam-barr-nominated-attorney-general/5662609

By Larry Chin
Global Research, January 19, 2019

UPDATE

This article was originally published on December 12, 2018. The serious questions raised in the piece remain completely unanswered.

Why was Barr chosen, given his shocking and deeply criminal/cover-up kingpin background?

Was Trump duped by Deep State enemies, who have placed another predator into his administration with the power to destroy his presidency? Or has Trump co-opted and turned Barr, in the hopes that Barr will do Trump’s bidding? Why would Barr ever turn against his own Deep State cronies?

Does Trump have a plan? With Barr in place, is Trump signaling to his enemies that “I now own the Deep State”? Or is Barr the Deep State’s ultimate and final weapon against Trump, who remains surrounded by Bush/Clinton “swamp creatures” such as National Security Adviser John Bolton, who is one of Barr’s many fellow Iran-Contra co-conspirators, Vice President Mike Pence (who is in ideal position for a coup against Trump, and remains very cozy with the Clintons, dozens of Obama appointees that remain in place, and Republican “Never Trumpers”, all of whom continue to undermine Trump.

Pay careful attention to the confirmation “hearings”. How many of the senators “questioning” Barr are themselves connected to the Bush/Clinton era criminal operations that Barr supervised as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general?

Will anyone in Washington, or in the CIA asset-filled mainstream media, dare bring up Iran-Contra? Will anyone dare detail Barr’s corruption, and his longstanding ties to the Bush/Clinton network? What about the fact that Barr is best friends with Robert Mueller?

Even the alternative media, including the whistleblowing research-intensive pro-Trump anon community, has been virtually silent on Barr, despite the fact that his criminal history is glaringly obvious, lurid, and begging to be exposed.

Rumors abound that slippery Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is expected to leave the Justice Department following Barr’s likely confirmation. This further clears the way for Barr to seize the power to determine the fate of the Mueller probe, the John Huber (Inspector General) report, FISAgate, Clinton emails, Uranium One, and other key investigations.

William Barr could well determine the course of the political war between President Donald Trump and his enemies, and decide the fate of Donald Trump’s presidency itself.

Larry Chin, January 14, 2019

***

Should William Barr serve as the highest law enforcement official of the country?

For a presidential administration whose mandate was the eradication of corruption, the “draining of the swamp”, and the restoration of law?

With the nomination of William Barr for attorney general, that is what President Donald Trump wants American citizens and the world to accept.

Fawning mainstream media coverage, and streams of puff pieces laud Barr as a “respected” establishment “legal scholar”, as do Donald Trump’s Twitter posts about Barr.

The fact is, there is nothing to “respect” and everything to condemn about Barr’s work as a key inner circle operative throughout George Herbert Walker Bush’s rise to power, from CIA Director to Vice President to President. These aspects of Barr’s resume remain whitewashed by mainstream coverage. They have been amply documented by whistleblowers and those who worked directly with Barr.

The issue at hand is not Barr’s “legal mind”, but the ruthless mind that he wielded with frightening authority and expertise as George H. W. Bush’s treasonous hatchet man in the Justice Department. William Barr distorted and corrupted the law, as grossly as anyone in modern history.

Barr: CIA operative

It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.

Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno (1993-2001), Dick Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.

Barr, however, is a particularly spectacular and sordid case. As George H.W. Bush’s most notorious insider, and as the AG from 1991 to 1993, Barr wreaked havoc, flaunted the rule of law, and proved himself to be one of the CIA/Deep State’s greatest and most ruthless champions and protectors:

Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting in 1971. Barr’s youth career goal was to head the CIA.

CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy (Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation.

When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA’s “legal office” and Bush’s inner circle, and worked alongside Bush’s longtime CIA enforcers Theodore “Ted” Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines, and others, several of whom were likely involved with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy assassination, and numerous southeast Asian operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden Triangle narco-trafficking.

Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA abuses.

Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean opposition leader Orlando Letelier.

Barr joined George H.W. Bush’s legal/intelligence team during Bush’s vice presidency (under President Ronald Reagan) Rose from assistant attorney general to Chief Legal Counsel to attorney general (1991) during the Bush 41 presidency.

Barr was a key player in the Iran-Contra operation, if not the most important member of the apparatus, simultaneously managing the operation while also “fixing” the legal end, ensuring that all of the operatives could do their jobs without fear of exposure or arrest.

In his attorney general confirmation, Barr vowed to “attack criminal organizations”, drug smugglers and money launderers. It was all hot air: as AG, Barr would preserve, protect, cover up, and nurture the apparatus that he helped create, and use Justice Department power to escape punishment.

Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes, including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all crimes of state committed by Bush

Barr provided legal cover for Bush’s illegal foreign policy and war crimes

Barr left Washington, and went through the “rotating door” to the corporate world, where he took on numerous directorships and counsel positions for major companies. In 2007 and again from 2017, Barr was counsel for politically-connected international law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Among its other notable attorneys and alumni are Kenneth Starr, John Bolton, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and numerous Trump administration attorneys. K&E’s clients include sex trafficker/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital.

A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.

Iran-Contra

To understand the scope, scale, and gravity of William Barr’s central role working for George H.W. Bush, one must grasp the significance of Iran-Contra, the massive criminal operation that was the cornerstone of the Bush era, headed by the Bushes, with the Clintons as partners.

As previously written:

Originally coined “Iran-Contra” (in reference to illegal arms sales to Iran in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon and arms to the Contra “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua), the moniker hides the fact that it became a massive and permanent criminal business and political machine that went far beyond then-current political concerns.

In The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider, Al Martin describes the Iran-Contra Enterprise that a vast operation that included (and was not limited to) drugs, weapons, terrorism, war, money laundering, criminal banking and securities fraud, currency fraud, real estate fraud, insurance fraud, blackmail, extortion, and political corruption that involved countless Washington politicians of both Republican and Democratic parties.

Martin:

“Iran-Contra itself is a euphemism for the outrageous fraud perpetrated by government criminals for profit and control. Offhandedly, this inaccurate term entered history as shorthand for the public scandals of illicit arms sales to Iran coupled with illicit weapons deals for Nicaragua. The real story, however, is much more complex…When George Bush, [CIA Director] Bill Casey and Oliver North initiated their plan of government-sanctioned fraud and drug smuggling, they envisioned using 500 men to raise $35 billion….they ended up using about 5,000 operatives and making over $35 billion.” In addition, the operation became “a government within a government, comprising some thirty to forty thousand people the American government turns to, when it wishes certain illegal covert operations to be extant pursuant to a political objective” with George [H.W.] Bush “at the top of the pyramid”.

The operation’s insiders and whistleblowers place George H.W.Bush as one of its top architects, and its commander. It was carried out by CIA operatives close to Bush since his CIA directorship and even stretching back to the Bay of Pigs. These included Oliver North, Ted Shackley, Edwin Wilson, Felix Rodriguez, and others. Iran-Contra was a replication of the CIA’s Golden Triangle drug trafficking in Southeast Asia (operations also connected to Bush) but on a larger scale and sophistication, greater complexity, and far-reaching impact that remains palpable to this day.

In George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Webster Tarpley wrote that, “many once-classified documents have come to light, which suggest that Bush organized and supervised many, or most, of the criminal aspects of the Iran-Contra adventures.”

Tarpley further points out that George H.W. Bush created new structures (“special situation group”, “terror incident working group” etc.) within the Reagan administration—and that

“all of these structures revolved around [creating] the secret command role of the then-Vice President, George Bush…The Bush apparatus, within and behind the government, was formed to carry out covert policies: to make war when the constitutional government had decided not to make war; to support enemies of the nation (terrorists and drug runners) who are the friends and agents of the secret government.”

This suggests that George H.W.Bush not only ran Iran-Contra, but much of the Reagan presidency. Then-White House press secretary James Baker said in 1981,

“Bush is functioning much like a co-president. George is involved in all the national security stuff because of his special background as CIA director. All the budget working groups, he was there, the economic working groups, the Cabinet meetings. He is included in almost all the meetings.”

Hundreds of insiders, witnesses and investigators have blown the lid off of the Iran-Contra Enterprise in exhaustive fashion. These include the investigations of Mike Ruppert (From The Wilderness, Crossing the Rubicon), Al Martin (The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider), Gary Webb (Dark Alliance), Rodney Stich (Defrauding America, Drugging America), Terry Reed (Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA), Stew Webb (and here), Dois “Chip” Tatum (The Tatum Chronicles) (summarized here), Pete Brewton (The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush), among others. The accounts of Barry Seal, Edward Cutolo, Albert Carone, Bradley Ayers, Tosh Plumley, Bill Tyree, Gunther Russbacher, Celerino Castillo, Michael Levine, Trenton Parker, Russell Bowen, Richard Brenneke, Larry Nichols, William Duncan, Russell Welch and dozens more implicate the Bushes, the Clintons and the CIA.

As described by Mike Ruppert (image left):

“It stood, and still stands today, isolated and immune from the operating principles of democracy. It is autonomous and it operates through self-funding via narcotics and weapons trafficking. To quote [former CIA director] William Casey it is ‘a completely self-funding, off-the-shelf operation.’ It, in fact, dictates a substantial portion of this country’s foreign, economic and military policy from a place not accessible to the will of a free people properly armed with facts.”

CIA deep cover agent pilot Chip Tatum, a key Iran-Contra player who flew drugs into Mena and Little Rock in Arkansas, worked alongside CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal. It is believed that Seal was subsequently murdered by the Medellin Cartel, on order of Oliver North and the Bushes, to prevent him from testifying about his activities. Before he was killed, Seal provided Tatum a list of Iran-Contra “Boss Hogs” who allegedly controlled the drug trade. The Pegasus File summaries Tatum’s activities, and features the “Boss Hog” list.

The Iran-Contra apparatus was byzantine, comprised of a network of connected government agencies, subsidiaries, and shell companies and corporations can be seen in the diagram provided by whistleblower Stew Webb:

Bush Crime Family Flow Chart

Progressive Review (1998)

Why is Iran-Contra still relevant today?

The Iran-Contra Enterprise’s overseers, criminal associates and beneficiaries, to this day, remain at large [including Barr], with most enjoying massive illegally-obtained wealth, privilege, and highest political and corporate positions. The imperial positions of the Bush and Clinton clans exemplify this.

The operation, in essence, evolved and metastasized into ever-more modern and sophisticated incarnation with even more global reach. New names, new banks, new drugs, new wars, same blueprint. It is not a “deep state” or a “shadow state” but a Criminal State that operates “in broad daylight”. It is the playbook of the New World Order. It is globalization at its finest.

All attempts to prosecute were largely unsuccessful—blocked, stalled, or given a “limited hangout” treatment. As written by Ruppert, one of many Iran-Contra whistleblowers, in Crossing the Rubicon:

“[In Congress] Iran-Contra was effectively ‘managed’ by Lee Hamilton in the House [of Representatives] and John Kerry (among others) in the Senate throughout the late 1980s to conceal the greatest crimes of the era, crimes committed by a litany of well-known government operatives.”

Which brings us to this:

Iran-Contra was also managed on both the operational and all-important judicial “legal” end by none other than William Barr.

Barr: Iran-Contra insider alias “Robert Johnson”

In his books Drugging America: A Trojan Horse and Defrauding America: Dirty Secrets of the CIA and other Government Operations, whistleblower Rodney Stich exposed in exhaustive detail the firsthand accounts of whistleblowers and insiders, who participated in the many criminal operations that stretched across the Bush and Clinton presidencies.

Some of the shocking evidence exposes Barr acting simultaneously as a hands-on covert operative, and as Bush’s judicial/political fixer:

In Drugging America, Stich wrote:

[CIA operative] Terry Reed had been in frequent telephone contact with the man he knew as Robert Johnson. Johnson directed the drug trafficking and drug money laundering, the training in Arkansas of Contra pilots and fighters, and authorized Reed to set up the CIA proprietary in Mexico. At a later date, Reed learned that Robert Johnson was really William Barr, appointed by President George Bush to be Attorney General of the United States.

Reed’s CIA contact, William Barr, known at that time by his alias Robert Johnson, told Reed that Attorney General Edwin Meese had appointed Michael Fitzhugh to be US Attorney in Western Arkansas, and that he would stonewall any investigation into the Mena, Arkansas drug-related activities. This obstruction of justice by Justice Department officials did occur.

William Barr, who Bush appointed to be the top law enforcement officer in the United States—US Attorney General—played a key role in the smuggling of drugs into the United States. [CIA pilot Chip] Tatum’s statements about reaching Barr at Southern Air Transport in Miami through the name of Robert Johnson confirmed what [CIA operative] Terry Reed, author of the book Compromised, had told me and had written. Nothing like having members of felony drug operations hold the position of US Attorney General—in control of the United States Department of Justice—and a vice president of the United States [Bush]. With this type of influence, no one needs fear being arrested. And don’t forget the Mafia groups working with the CIA who also receive Justice Department protection that is not available to US citizens.

According to Stich, Tatum also detailed to him meetings that took place in which he was present for meetings and telephone conversations between Bush, [NSC Colonel] Oliver North and Barr, discussing not only operations but the skimming of drug money by the Clintons.

The purpose of the meeting was to determine who was responsible for stealing over $100 million in drug money on the three routes from Panama to Colorado, Ohio, and Arkansas. This theft was draining the operation known as the “Enterprise”…The first call was made by [CIA agent Joseph] Fernandez to Oliver North, informing North that the theft was occurring on the Panama to Arkansas route, and “that means either [CIA pilot Barry] Seal, Clinton, or [Panamanian General Manuel] Noriega”…Fifteen minutes later, the portable phone rang, and Vice President George Bush was on the line, talking to William Barr. Barr said at one point, referring to the missing funds, “I would propose that no one source would be bold enough to siphon out that much money, but it is more plausible that each are siphoning a portion, causing a drastic loss.”..Barr told Bush that he and Fernandez were staying in Costa Rica until the following day after first visiting [CIA operative] John Hull’s ranch. Barr then handed the phone to Tatum, who was instructed by Bush to be sure that Noriega and [Mossad operative Michael] Harari boarded Seal’s plane and departed, and for Tatum to get the tail number of Seal’s plane….Tatum said that Barr dialed another number, immediately reaching then-governor Bill Clinton. Barr explained the missing money problem to Clinton…Barr suggested that Clinton investigate at the Arkansas end of the Panama to Arkansas route, and that he and North would continue investigating the Panama end of the connection, warning that the matter must be resolved or it could lead to “big problems”…(This description of missing drug money provided support to a subsequent meeting in Little Rock, described by Terry Reed, during which William Barr accused Clinton of siphoning drug money and that this had to stop.)

Tatum also described to Stich a March 15, 1985 flight, during which “Tatum met with Barr, Harari, and Buddy Young (head of Governor Bill Clinton’s security detail). Barr represented himself as an emissary of Vice President George Bush, who would be arriving soon. Tatum would note on his flight book “Bush visit/meet with Barr and had dinner at German restaurant”.

The fact is, William Barr was heavily involved in the Iran-Contra.

Cover-up of BCCI and BNL scandals

As attorney general, obviously still working for CIA/Bush purposes, Barr and Richard Thornburgh (George H.W. Bush’s previous attorney general) killed off investigations into BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the notorious CIA drug bank. Barr also stonewalled investigations in the Banca Nationale del Lavoro (BNL), another CIA drug bank.

BCCI was a leading CIA bank used by the Bush/Clinton machine for a vast array of operations, including Iran-Contra drug money laundering.

Barr himself had a personal relationship with BCCI going back to the early 1980s.

William Barr is heading the drive in Virginia to turn prisons into slave labor camps. Here he is shown during a hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Nov. 12, 1991, on his nomination as Attorney General in the Bush administration. Left to right: Sen. Strom Thurmond, Sen. Joseph Biden, Barr, Sen. Patrick Leahy. (Source: EIR)

READ MOREolitical Succession and “The Bush-Clinton Nexus”: Permanent Criminal State, “A Clinton White House Guarantees War with Russia”

According to Rodney Stich,

“before William Barr came to the Justice Department, he was an attorney with the Washington law firm of Shaw Pittman Potts & Trowbridge. This law firm represented BCCI for several years…Barr’s former law firm also represented B. Francis Saul II, a director and powerful shareholder in Financial General Bankshares, Inc. Financial later became First American Bankshares, a covert BCCI operation…Further, Barr had been legal counsel for the CIA, the same agency that was heavily involved with BCCI corrupt activities. He was CIA counsel during the time that George Bush was Director of the CIA.”

When both the CIA and the Justice Department connections and cover-up of BCCI were exposed by the dogged investigations of Congressman Henry Gonzalez, then-FBI Director William Sessions [note: not related to recent Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions] promised an investigation. This prompted Attorney General Barr, who himself was engaged in the cover-up and the obstruction of justice, to remove Sessions on trumped-up ethics charges, replacing him with someone more malleable.

Also, as part of the BCCI “negotiation” as well as to maintain control over the Iran-Contra drug operations, Barr allegedly also crafted a legal justification for then-President Bush to invade Panama and kidnap their associate General Manuel Noriega, in order to imprison and silence him before he could expose the operation.

Cover-up of Inslaw and PROMIS software theft

Barr stonewalled investigations and assisted the cover-up of the theft of Inslaw, and PROMIS software by the Department of Justice and the CIA. The otherworldly power of PROMIS software was and still is so coveted that extreme criminal measures have been get it.

Inslaw

PROMIS (Mike Ruppert, From the Wilderness publications)

PROMIS part 2 (Mike Ruppert, From The Wilderness publications)

The Undying Octopus: the FBI and the PROMIS affair

NSA surveillance: PROMIS

According to Rodney Stich in Defrauding America,

“by misusing the power of their office…three US attorney generals in the Reagan-Bush administrations, Edwin Meese, Richard Thornburgh, and William Barr misappropriated, or aided and abetted, the theft of the software called PROMIS.”

When the scandal became too noisy, Barr

“appointed a former Justice Department crony to conduct an “investigation” of the Inslaw matter, and then report back to him. The special counsel would be selected by Barr; would be subservient to him; and would report to him. Barr could then ignore the recommendations if, in the remote possibility the special counsel did not cooperate in the expected cover-up.”

The Iran-Contra pardons

In the most brazen insult to the American people and the entire world, Barr facilitated George H.W. Bush’s infamous 1992 Christmas Eve pardons of six Iran-Contra co-conspirators Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert McFarlane, Dewey Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George,

With the stroke of a pen, Bush gleefully set free six of his Iran-Contra criminal flunkies, and effectively decapitating Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s six-year long Iran-Contra probe.

It was Barr who closed the lid on Iran-Contra, freeing virtually the entire Bush/Clinton network, including himself, from punishment.

It was Barr who, with this move, “saved their asses”.

The New World Order could not have asked for a better henchman, fixer, and spook than William Barr.

Trump’s nomination of Barr: insanity or “part of the plan”?

Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the power of the single mandate to “drain the swamp”, and Destroy the Deep State. A vicious global struggle continues to be waged on every front between populist reformers led by Trump and the Deep State/New World Order. This war is taking place in every nation and on every continent. The stakes are deadly. Time is running short.

The Justice Department has been ground zero in this war. Jeff Sessions’ tenure as attorney general was opaque and riddled with uncertainties. His interim replacement, Matthew Whittaker, is true Trump loyalist who has the unenviable task of taking immediate action on FISAgate and other investigations into Obama/Clinton administration spying/treason, ending the Robert Mueller’s manufactured anti-Trump “Russian Collusion” witch hunt hoax, and do it all before January 2019, when a new Congress full of emboldened Democrats (who will come into office via rampant mid-term election fraud) pursue new avenues to further attack Trump. Numerous critical and potentially explosive congressional testimonies, including investigations into the Clinton Foundation, are all scheduled to take place before January, which could well decide the course of Trump’s presidency, and the movement behind him.

Why is William Barr—the antithesis of a “patriot” and the swampiest of swamp monsters— now being inserted into the middle of what is supposed to be a “white hat” anti-corruption operation? The move is baffling.

Why did Trump make the pick—the sole pick—so immediately, seemingly without thorough vetting?

Who recommended Barr for the job? The “white hats”, or the “black hats” that have never stopped planting assassins into Trump’s inner circle?

Is it significant or coincidental that the Barr pick came shortly after the death of George H.W. Bush?

Does Trump, who made the pick but claims that he “does not know” Barr (do we believe this?) realize that Barr—“Robert Johnson”—is the Deep State swamp’s most loyal operators and protectors? And that Barr is deeply connected and loyal to everyone and everything that Trump opposes?

What role could Trump possibly envision for Barr? Will Barr go after Bill and Hillary Clinton? Jeb and George W. Bush, with whom Barr managed numerous Iran-Contra operations? Will he go after Robert Mueller and James Comey, and dozens of members of Congress, who were also deeply connected to the “Enterprise”?

Why would Barr go against everything he helped create and everything he stood for? Why would he undo his own criminal handiwork by prosecuting his own lifelong criminal colleagues and friends? Barr’s career has been about saving the Deep State and the New World Order that he helped make invincible. Why would he do any differently now?

For reasons known only to him, Trump has surrounded himself with bad actors, too many to count. Mike Pence (longtime Bush loyalist), John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, etc. etc. Trump’s cabinet has been in constant flux, with many shakeups underway. But William Barr is an entirely different level of criminal. What next? Will Trump invite Dick Cheney to his administration? Bring back Henry Kissinger?

Is Trump being a genius, or is he a dupe and/or a sell-out?

Have Trump and his forces “turned” or leveraged Barr? Is it even possible to control someone like him? “Once CIA, always CIA.”

Imagine the spectacle of the pending “confirmation hearings”. Will any member of this corrupt Congress grill Barr about Iran-Contra or BCCI? Will anyone stand up and ask “Robert Johnson” to tell the truth? Or will Barr look across at a room full of frightened politicians (many of whom he knows too well) and chortle, knowing that no one in the chamber will dare.

Is this the “draining of the swamp”, or is Barr the swamp’s ultimate victory, and the end of Trump?

Of limited hangouts and deceptions

In recent interviews, Barr issued noises that seemed supportive of Trump. Barr obviously caught the Trump team’s attention based on these comments. (Humorously, the CIA-managed corporate mainstream media has labeled Barr, an actual CIA criminal conspirator, a “conspiracy theorist”for his statements.)

While the mainstream media has latched on to quotes in which Barr said that he supports “some” investigations into the Clintons, he also insists that “throwing Hillary Clinton in jail is inappropriate”.

In other words, Barr does not want the swamp to be drained. In other words, Barr only supports limited investigations and limited hangouts.

Barr should be disqualified for the job simply based on this.

Or does the nomination of Barr suggest that President Trump also does not want to fully “drain the swamp”? Is his goal to merely co-opt the New World Order co-opt the New World Order and co-opt the Bush Republican apparatus, in order to take down the Clinton/Obama side of it, while leaving the Bush side intact?

Given that Bush-Clinton/Obama are two sides of the same coin, it is ridiculous and impossible to “go after” one side without “going after” the other, and then claim that any real swamp draining is taking place.

It is also possible that Barr and/or his Bush/CIA colleagues have baited the Trump team with his statements, in order to place him in Trump’s administration as a Trojan Horse.

Muted reaction

It is too much to expect the masses, remain uninformed and controlled by propaganda, to understand the significance and danger posed by the reappearance of Barr.

The few who seem aware of Barr’s background are alarmedfor good reason. But even the more informed observers aren’t getting it. Most of those who “trust Trump” and “trust the plan” have not aggressively questioned the move. Even the research-intensive Internet Anoncommunity has been quiet about Barr.

Some Trump optimists are stretching, trying to convince themselves that Trump is using the Barr nomination to “troll”, and to point attention back to the Bush history, thus forcing the public to research, recoil and awaken to the truth.

They would like to believe that Trump is continuing to play a game of deception. The “4-D chess player”, is merely “keeping enemies close”; manipulating, co-opting, and leveraging compromised figures to his personal bidding; and turn one of the Deep State’s own into a weapon against the Deep State. Perhaps they believe that Trump is purposely elevating Barr, in order to fire him later, as he has already done with numerous others in his administration.

Some argue that Barr is useful because he “knows where the bodies are buried”. Barr himself helped bury them—literally in many cases.

If Trump thinks that he can control or leverage someone as dangerous as Barr, then Trump is taking the biggest risk of his presidency, and of his life.

He is also placing the country and the world at risk.

All in the crime family

The atrocities and crimes of the Bushes and Clintons are unspeakable and unimaginable in depravity and scale.

These atrocities were facilitated by William “Robert Johnson” Barr.

Barr, a hands-on participant, is guilty. Furthermore, he poisoned and manipulated the judicial system—“law enforcement”— to get himself and his friends off the hook.

Barr must be exposed and condemned, along with the entire Bush/Clinton/Obama network, and all must be denied and removed from all positions of influence and power.

In an unguarded moment in 1992, George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon:

“If people ever knew what we had done, we would be chased down the street and lynched.”

 

[Apollonian]

Attorney General William Barr’s Personal Ties to Jeffrey Epstein​

Link: https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/william-barrs-personal-ties-jeffrey-epstein/

By Emily Bicks
Updated Aug 10, 2019 at 5:29pm

On August 10, Jeffrey Epstein, accused sex trafficker, financier, was found dead of an apparent suicide at a Manhattan jail. Julia Macfarlane announced, “Breaking: Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide overnight at MCC Manhattan, the federal lockup where he had been held pending trial on federal sex trafficking charges, three law enforcement officials told @ABC News.”

As more and more news outlets reported on Epstein’s suicide, there were numerous questions as to how this could’ve happened in the first place. The 66-year-old was already under suicide watch following a previous attempt to take his own life last month, so after discovering on Saturday that Epstein had somehow been removed from suicide watch, U.S. Attorney General William Barr decided to launch an investigation into the alleged suicide.

Barr put out the following official statement on Saturday, “I was appalled to learn that Jeffrey Epstein was found dead early this morning from an apparent suicide while in federal custody. Mr. Epstein’s death raises serious questions that must be answered. In addition to the FBI’s investigation, I have consulted with the Inspector General who is opening an investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Epstein’s death.”

While it was once thought that Barr would be recusing himself from having oversight on the Epstein prosecution, on July 9, it was clarified that Barr consulted with career ethics officials at the department, and concluded that he only needed to recuse himself from the internal Justice Department probe of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, and his involvement of approving a highly controversial no-prosecution deal with Epstein back in the 2008.

Barr did not recuse himself from Epstein’s current prosecution in Manhattan, and is now instructing the Department of Justice’s inspector general to open a probe into the disgraced financier’s death. Before Epstein’s alleged suicide, he was facing 45 years in prison if convicted of conspiracy and sex trafficking dozens of underage girls in New York and Florida.

There is concern over William Barr’s involvement in Epstein’s case, not only for the way he handled Robert Mueller’s testimony over the Russian probe, but because of his personal ties with Epstein himself.

Barr Worked at the Law Firm which Represented Epstein in 2008

AG William Barr: "I'm recused from that matter because one of the law firms that represented Epstein long ago was a firm that I subsequently joined for a period of time." pic.twitter.com/hdwqgOlrWD

— The Hill (@thehill) July 8, 2019

In 2009, Barr joined the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, the same law firm that represented Jeffrey Epstein in 2008 which ended in a no-prosecution. During Barr’s confirmation hearing in January, when Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse asked Barr whether he would conduct a “full and thorough investigation” into the Justice Department’s handling of Epstein’s case, Barr responded, “Senator, I have to recuse myself from Kirkland & Ellis matters, I am told. And I think Kirkland & Ellis was may be involved in that case, so I need to sort out exactly what my role can be. I will say that if I’m confirmed I’ll make sure your questions are answered on this case.”

On July 8, Barr made his final comments on the matter and said, “I am recused from that matter because one of the law firms that represented Epstein long ago was a firm I subsequently joined for a period of time.” Back in 2007, Epstein pleaded guilty to a state charge of soliciting sex and prostitution with an underaged girl, was sentenced to to 13 months incarceration, but spent a bulk of that time on work release or in the jail’s private wing.

The deal was made between Acosta, who previously worked at Kirkland & Ellis, and was the Miami U.S. attorney at the time, and Kirkland & Ellis senior partner Jay Lefkowitz, along with colleagues Kenneth Starr, Gerald Lefcourt, and Alan Dershowitz. Court records show Kirkland & Ellis continued to represented Epstein through 2011, while Barr worked at the firm.

William Barr’s Father Allegedly Hired Epstein in the 1970s

Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI Assistant Director for counterintelligence said that Barr’s Father, Donald Barr, once hired Epstein to teach at Dalton School, a private academy in New York City. Back in 1973, even though Epstein had not obtained a college degree, Donald brought Epstein, who was only 20 years old, and had dropped out of both Cooper Union and New York University’s Courant Institute, was brought board to teach calculus and physics.

The young teacher appeared to be successful at Dalton. A 2003 profile by The New Yorker wrote of his teaching years, “he was something of a Robin Williams-in-Dead Poets Society type of figure, wowing his high-school classes with passionate mathematical riffs. So impressed was one Wall Street father of a student that he said to Epstein point-blank: “What are you doing teaching math at Dalton? You should be working on Wall Street — why don’t you give my friend Ace Greenberg a call.

After Epstein was dismissed from Dalton for “poor performance,” he left to work with Greenberg, who was a senior partner at Bear Stearns.

As reported by The New York Times, Donald Barr, who died in 2004, resigned from Dalton in 1974 after disagreements with the executive board. However, he stayed on throughout the rest of the year, which is when Epstein was hired.

 

[Apollonian]

Insider: ‘Trump Lost His Sh*t’! Exposes AG Barr’s Crimes Against The Nation​

August 9, 2021 in News by RBN Staff

Link: http://republicbroadcasting.org/new...t-exposes-ag-barrs-crimes-against-the-nation/

Source: UAF Report
By Lorri Anderson

President Donald J. Trump released the following statement on Monday that blasts the former Attorney General for being dismissive of the crimes committed against the United States and for ignoring obvious corruption against the American people:

Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

RINO former Attorney General Bill Barr failed to investigate election fraud, and really let down the American people. Even the scam that took place in Georgia of ballot stuffing on camera, he couldn’t see what was wrong with it.

Just like he failed to understand the Horowitz report and let everyone down with respect to getting a timely investigation (where’s Durham?) on all of the corruption of the Obama-Biden Administration.

It’s people in authority like Bill Barr that allow the crazed Radical Left to succeed. He and other RINOs in the Republican Party are being used in order to try to convince people that the election was legitimate when so many incredible facts have now come out to show conclusively that it wasn’t.

He came in with a semi-bang and went out with a whimper. Earlier in his term, Bill Barr went ballistic on CNN with Wolf Blitzer warning Democrats were changing election rules to flood the system with mail-in ballots that “as a matter of logic” are “very open to fraud.” They are, and Bill Barr did nothing about it.

If there was no fraud, why are Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and other States spending so much time and effort on exposing the fraud? We already know that:

101,789 “obsolete” voters on the rolls in Georgia, including 18,486 dead people

Ballot batches off by up to 17.5 percent in Maricopa County, Arizona

“Massive” chain of custody problems with drop boxes in Georgia, missing hundreds of thousands of records for months after the election

Thousands of ballots “wheeled in through the back door” in Fulton County days after the election

“Double feeding” ballots in Fulton County, Georgia

Nearly 200,000 illegal “indefinitely confined” votes in Wisconsin that violated Voter ID law

“Cash for votes” scheme in Nevada

Illegal alien votes

Election law changes were not authorized by the State Legislatures, which is mandated by the U.S. Constitution

And much more!

If he felt this way, why did Barr say he was “greatly honored” and “proud to have played a role in the many successes and unprecedented achievements you have delivered for the American people” in the final letter he wrote to me? He said, “Few could have weathered these attacks, much less forge ahead with a positive program for the country.”

Now it was revealed that Barr was being pushed to tell lies about the election by Mitch McConnell, another beauty, who was worried about damaging the Republicans’ chances in the Georgia runoff.

What really damaged the Senate Republicans was allowing their races to be rigged and stolen, and worse, the American people to no longer believe their vote matters because spineless RINOs like Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell did nothing.

Bill Barr was a disappointment in every sense of the word. Besides this, Barr, who was Attorney General (lawyer) shouldn’t be speaking about the President. Instead of doing his job, he did the opposite and told people within the Justice Department not to investigate the election.

Just like he did with the Mueller report and the cover-up of Crooked Hillary and RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA, they don’t want to investigate the real facts. Bill Barr’s weakness helped facilitate the cover-up of the Crime of the Century, the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!

LORRI ANDERSON

Lorri began writing as an Independent investigative journalist in 2012 and is a proud member of CFAPA.org. She signed her Constitutional Journalist’s Pledge on April 1, 2014. Lorri has written for news blogs such as Freedom Outpost , Gateway Pundit, Resurrect the Republic, RTR Truth Media, etc.. She is Former Co-Host and Host of Resurrect The Republic-RTR Truth Media on the Republic Broadcasting Network. Lorri has been on radio shows such as American Honor with Gordon Martines, Jeffery Sisk Show, GMN Pete Santilli Show, RTR Turth Media, Resurrect The Republic, etc…

Lorri has covered and exposed topics such as the Jade Helm 15 Exercise, Benghazi Select Committee, OPM Data Breach, Governmental FRS failures and plans, Bundy Ranch, Malheur Refuge Standoff, etc…

Lorri strives to report news while educating people about their unalienable rights & history. She believes reporting should always include high integrity & honesty. Facts NOT fiction, Truth NOT Tyranny, News NOT Propaganda. Keeping you informed so you can make informed decisions. Lorri firmly stands for ALL the unalienable rights of the people confirmed in the Constitution of the United States of America.

 

[Apollonian]

CIA Officers Admitted the Agency Ran Drug Traffic During Indochina Wars​

By Jeremy Kuzmarov
-May 25, 2023

Link: https://covertactionmagazine.com/20...gency-ran-drug-traffic-during-indochina-wars/
https://api.whatsapp.com/send?text=...gency-ran-drug-traffic-during-indochina-wars/

https://covertactionmagazine.com/20...ency-ran-drug-traffic-during-indochina-wars/#

[Source: activistpost.com]

In new memoir, CIA expert shares interviews he conducted with CIA paramilitary officers who spilled the beans about CIA drug trafficking along with other major crimes.​

In 1991, during the 1st Persian Gulf War, investigative journalist Douglas Valentine traveled to Thailand and interviewed a group of legendary CIA officers who had helped run the secret war in Laos and other clandestine operations in the Indochina Wars.
Among them was Anthony Poshepny (aka Tony Poe), the prototype for Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s epic 1979 film Apocalypse Now—a covert warrior who went off the deep end and established a secret jungle enclave where enemy body parts were displayed.[1]

Anthony Poshepny during his glory days. [Source: unredacted.com]
Now 66, Poshepny lived at the time in a big, beautiful home in a fancy neighborhood in Udon Thani, Thailand, home of a major U.S. air base during the Indochina Wars used for carrying out secret bombing missions over Laos.
Poshepny owned a lumber and security consultant business and a sugar and tapioca farm; he was considered around town to be a friendly guy but a belligerent drunk.

[Source: heartofdarkness2016.weebly.com]
Poshepny’s father had been a naval officer and he had become desensitized to violence serving with the Marines in the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.
During a meeting with Poshepny, who suffered from diabetes and cirrhosis from years of heavy drinking, Valentine noticed that he was missing two middle fingers. Poshepny also liked to tell obscene jokes.
He told Valentine that he was proud of things he had done with political implications, notably his involvement in a failed CIA coup against Indonesian socialist leader Sukarno in 1958, where he and CIA officer “Pat” Landry supplied mutinous military forces in oil-rich Sumatra with M16s and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “It was an adventure,” Poshepny said.

Sukarno, right, shakes hands with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as Vice President Richard Nixon looks on. Both Nixon and Dulles supported a coup plot against Sukarno using the CIA, which resulted in the genocidal killing of some two million Indonesians. [Source: medium.com]
Poshepny, around the same time, told Valentine that he had created a guerrilla army in Thailand to try to destabilize Cambodia, which was then ruled by neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was seen as too friendly to the North Vietnamese communists.

CIA target Norodom Sihanouk. [Source: rudebutgood.blogspot.com]
After Cambodia, Poshepny went on to Tibet, where he was awarded a coveted intelligence medal for his role in a CIA operation to support the Dalai Lama and recruit his supporters into a guerrilla army that waged war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

[Source: youtube.com]
During the Korean War (1950-1953), Poshepny worked under station chief John Hart[2] in South Korea, training guerrillas and running operations up the eastern coast to the Soviet border near Vladivostok.

John Hart [Source: cia-spotters.blogspot.com]
Subsequently, he was sent to Thailand with Hart—whom a colleague described as a “guy who has strong criminal tendencies—but was too much of a coward to be one [a criminal].” Poshepny worked under the cover of Sea Supply (a military contractor run by OSS veteran Willis Bird) with the Thai Border Patrol Police (BPP) in Chung Mai.
In 1961, Poshepny was sent to Laos where, for the next 12 years, he helped run the CIA’s secret war. The CIA financed a mercenary arm of Hmong guerrillas who served as cannon fodder in the fight against the pro-communist Pathet Lao.

The CIA’s mercenary army: Hmong guerrilla fighters, c. 1968. [Source: mythailand.blog]
Poshepny told Valentine that he was “not proud of his service in Laos.” For one thing, he said that he “chopped up a lot of prisoners.” He and his friends would line up three prisoners, wrap cord around their necks, and then blow the heads off the first two prisoners as an inducement to get the last guy to talk.
Poshepny was one of the CIA liaisons to Vang Pao, a leader of the ethnic Hmong. The CIA molded them into a guerrilla army to fight the communist Pathet Lao after the Royal Lao army proved unable to fight. Poshepny said that Vang Pao “was a bastard who should have been arrested for extortion,” as he was “pocketing” CIA money.

Anthony Poshepny, second from left, with Vang Pao, second from right. [Source: mythailand.blog]

From left to right: Tony Poe (CIA; dark glasses), Jon Randall (CIA), Gen. Vang Pao (Commander, Military Region II), Howard Freeman (CIA; bearded), Theodore Shackley (CIA Station Chief with glasses and smiling), and General Ouane Rattikone (Commander-in-chief, Royal Lao Armed Forces) [Source: search.library.uwisc.edu]
Poshepny added that he “paid the Meos [Hmong] directly for three years” but that, when Vang Pao got control of finances in 1965, he “cut salaries by fifty percent. He said he needed the money for supplies and air transport, but put most of it in his pocket.”
Poshepny continued: “Through his underlings, Vang Pao was selling guns to [Burmese] drug trafficker Khun Sa and his boss Li. We were penetrated by crooks.”
[IMG alt="A picture containing text, person, outdoor, military uniform

Description automatically generated"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...milita.jpeg?resize=330,450&ssl=1[/IMG]General Vang Pao [Source: nytimes.com][IMG alt="A person holding a cigarette

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...-automati.jpeg?resize=350,299&ssl=1[/IMG]Khun Sa [Source: chinawatchcanada.blogspot.com][IMG alt="A person in a military uniform

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...n-automa.jpeg?resize=198,240&ssl=1[/IMG]Major General Richard G. Stilwell [Source: wikipedia.org]
Poshepny noted further that, when he tried to discipline one of the underlings, Vang Pao promoted him. “And the bastards in Bangkok” (meaning the commander of the U.S. Military Advisory Group, Major General Richard G. Stilwell, CIA Station Chief Robert “Red” Jantzen, and Ambassador Graham Martin) “didn’t back me.”[3]
According to Poshepny, Vang Pao “made millions dealing drugs,” drove a Mercedes-Benz and “enjoyed the high life at his villa in Vientiane, where he a made illicit deals under the gaze of CIA officers. The CIA even gave him his own D-3 with a crew of KMT [Chinese Guomindang] mercenaries that flew narcotics to cash customers around Southeast Asia.”

Opium field in Laos. [Source: mythailand.blog]

[Source: thriftbooks.com]
Valentine had previously reported in his book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (Verso, 2004), that Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) officer Bowman Taylor had busted Vang Pao in 1963 for drug smuggling in the Laotian capital, Vientiane, during an undercover sting operation.
Taylor told Valentine that, after he made the case on Vang Pao, he was thrown out of Laos as a result. The CIA in turn “gave Vang Pao back his Mercedes-Benz and fifty kilos of morphine base. I wrote a report to FBN Commissioner Henry Giordano, but when he confronted the CIA, they said the incident never happened.”[4]
In his interview with Valentine, Poshepny described the arrangement by which “the KMT managed, from Nam Yu, units in Burma that sent spies into China. In return, the CIA allowed the KMT to traffic in narcotics.”
According to Poshepny, “wet-wing C47s (with auxiliary tanks) flown by Taiwanese pilots” with Chinese technicians on board “would fly for thirteen hours out of (the Thai-Laos border town) Houei Sai with opium packed in Styrofoam drums and free drop them into flaming T’s in the Gulf of Siam. Receivers would gather the floating drums into boats (one was equipped with machine guns, a 40mm cannon, and the latest radio equipment) bound for Taiwan where the opium was processed into heroin and sold to traffickers in Hong Kong for sale in America.”

Air America in Laos: flying weapons and drugs. [Source: mythailand.blog][IMG alt="A picture containing text, old

Description automatically generated"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...on-automa.png?resize=218,302&ssl=1[/IMG]David Morales [Source: pinterest.com]
Poshepny said he knew it was wrong for America’s allies to sell U.S. government weapons on the black market and for the CIA to engage in drug trafficking. He wanted everyone to know, and he told anyone who would listen.
According to Poshepny, CIA officers who worked with Vang Pao directly oversaw and profited from the drug trade. Laotian CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley’s “pet from Miami,” David Morales, for example, “built a castle in Pakse from drug money.”[5]
Poshepny also told Valentine that the huge campaign to publicize the search for American prisoners of war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia after the war was a “CIA psychological warfare operation that provided a cover for CIA efforts to track and try [to] assassinate 55 U.S. deserters who had escaped from military prisons, mostly Negroes and Hispanics guilty of fraggings, and had gone into tunnels and onto farms with the Vietcong.”

Another CIA psy-war operation. [Source: ebay.com]
The CIA used the MIA-POW mission, Poshepny said, “as a cover to gather intelligence and conduct its manhunt [in Indochina].”

American Pisces​

Valentine’s interview with Poshepny is one of the highlights from his new memoir, Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2023).
The book in essence recounts Valentine’s journey of discovery—as if in a Joseph Conrad novel—about the dark side of the U.S. empire.
Valentine’s political awakening occurred at the age of fourteen on the day JFK was assassinated when he told his father excitedly that they had caught the culprit. Douglas Valentine, Sr., responded in a rather kindly voice: “The guy they got didn’t do it, Doug. You can count on that.”

[Source: douglasvalentine.com]

[Source: douglasvalentine.com][IMG alt="Text

Description automatically generated"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...ated-1.jpeg?resize=174,174&ssl=1[/IMG][Source: thriftbooks.com]
Valentine’s first book, The Hotel Tacloban (1987), told the story of his father, whose Army records were doctored in order to cover up a mutiny that took place in the POW camp where he was detained during the Pacific War in the Philippines. The rest of his unit had been wiped out on a secret U.S. Army mission in New Guinea.
[IMG alt="Two people posing for a photo

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...utomat.jpeg?resize=330,254&ssl=1[/IMG]Douglas Valentine with his father, Douglas Valentine, Sr. [Source: dougasvalentine.com]
Former CIA Director William Colby read The Hotel Tacloban and gave Valentine “the keys to the CIA kingdom”—top-secret documents and access to CIA veterans who participated in the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, which Colby ran.
Phoenix was a counter-terror operation designed to wipe out the leadership of the National Liberation Front (NLF—South Vietnam resistance organization to U.S. invaders) that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.
Published in 1990, Valentine’s book exposed the murderous methods of Phoenix, which later guided the Department of Homeland Security during the age of the War on Terror. William Colby, whom Valentine characterizes as a “homicidal maniac,” said that Phoenix was also a model for the 1965-1966 Indonesian massacres, where more than one million suspected communists were killed, many of them identified by CIA blacklists, after a CIA-backed coup.

William Colby—a “homicidal maniac” who ran the Phoenix Program. [Source: youtube.com][IMG alt="Qr code

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...-with.jpeg?resize=685,1024&ssl=1[/IMG][Source: flickr.com]

Hugh Tovar [Source: cia-spotters.blogspot.com]
The CIA Station Chief at the time, Hugh Tovar, also helped run the secret war in Laos.
In the 2000s, Valentine published a two-part history of the CIA’s complicity in the drug trade—The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack—and another book entitled The CIA as Organized Crime.
[IMG alt="Text

Description automatically generated"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...ated-2.jpeg?resize=270,406&ssl=1[/IMG][Source: douglasvalentine.com]
Pisces Moon provides some key back story and further rich insights into the workings of the CIA. After years of research, Valentine came to the realization that the CIA was the dark shadow of the U.S.: Its officers fit with the observation of English writer D.H. Lawrence that “democracy was a sort of by-play” and that “the American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

D.H. Lawrence [Source: theparisreview.org]
One OSS officer told Valentine about a scenario where an eight-year-old boy was found listening to a secret meeting, and the OSS men knew what they had to do—because otherwise he could give away their plans to the enemy.
Many of the CIA officers who Valentine came across were outright psychopaths who had found in the CIA a way of attaining social respectability and making a good living while engaging in a life of crime.
Contrary to popular illusions cultivated in Hollywood films, the craft of intelligence, Valentine tells us, is not a noble one.
Agents lie and deceive on a daily basis. They amass information so that the U.S. government—following the precedent of previous colonial powers like Britain, which it learned from—can manipulate people, and in many cases destroy them, like it did with the Hmong in Laos.
[IMG alt="A person wearing sunglasses

Description automatically generated with low confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...omatic.jpeg?resize=157,275&ssl=1[/IMG]Douglas Valentine [Source: douglasvalentine.com]

​

----------------------------------------------------[END OF PART ONE; SEE BELOW FOR PART 2]------------------------------------------------

 

[Apollonian]

-------------------------------------------------------[HERE'S PART 2 TO ABOVE]-----------------------------------------------------------

Interviews with More Legendary Spooks​

Valentine’s memoir is most riveting when he recounts the interviews that he carried out with CIA legends who ran secret operations during the Indochina War.
Among them was Jack Shirley, who coordinated training of the Thai Border Patrol Police and Police Aerial Reconnaissance Unit (PARU), oversaw creation of an unconventional warfare center in Thailand, served a tour in Vietnam, worked with Vang Pao in Laos, and ran Khmer mercenaries into Cambodia in an attempt to destabilize Prince Sihanouk’s neutralist government.
Characterized by Poshepny as a “cocksucker,” Shirley was hostile to Valentine when they met at a bar in Bangkok’s famous red-light district. Valentine described Shirley as “physically repellent; short and fat with a long nose that nearly touched his upper lip. The more he drank, the more he ranted about how liberals, the media and the peace movement lost the war.”

Jack Shirley on the right, with yellow shirt, at a pub in Bangkok with Anthony Poshepny on his left. [Source: teakdoor.com]
When Valentine asked Shirley about CIA drug smuggling, Shirley sat back, glared at him and said, “I knew that’s what you were after. The conversation ends here,” adding: “Why are you biting your lower lip? You’re not so tough now, are you? Buy me a beer, then go.”
To Valentine, Shirley embodied a macho Christianity and racist imperialist worldview that led ultimately to the election of Donald Trump.
Valentine wrote that “a famous writer once described spies as ‘a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards—little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.’ Shirley pretty much fit the bill.”
Valentine had a friendlier interview in Chiang Mai with William Young, a CIA paramilitary specialist who had run intelligence operations into China while working with Hmong guerrillas in the Laos secret war.
Young’s brother Gordon was also a CIA officer who worked undercover in Laos as a narcotics officer and was sent to Con Son prison in South Vietnam to make sure that political prisoners being held in the infamous Tiger Cages did not build any escape tunnels.
The brothers had grown up in a missionary family in Burma and spoke Lahu, Wa, Shan and Yunnan Chinese. They set up a radio post on mountaintops outside Chiang Mai so they could communicate with KMT assets and with their father helped facilitate the indigenous and KMT drug trade beginning around 1951.

William Young [Source: telegraph.co.uk]
Young told Valentine about how opium caravans would leave Laos and hook up with small groups of low-level Lahu, Wa and Shan waiting inside Burma, which penetrated at times 200 miles into China.
When asked to assess the drug war, Young said that the U.S. effort in Laos was implemented through Thai military intelligence, which put the Thais in position to act as middlemen in the drug trade. Young also mentioned Robert “Dutch” Brongersma as the pilot who oversaw CIA involvement.

Civil Air Transport CIA Pilot Robert “Dutch” Brongersma. [Source: sandiegocitynewsandtruehistories.com][IMG alt="A person wearing a helmet

Description automatically generated with low confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...atical.jpeg?resize=264,349&ssl=1[/IMG]General Ouane Rattikone [Source: themillenniumreport.com]
When Valentine asked Young about Corsicans, Young said that Corsican brothers at Le Concorde Restaurant in Vientiane ran drugs with General Ouane Rattikone, Royal Lao Army chief and a CIA asset, until the 1967 opium war and the start of the Cultural Revolution in China, after which Rattikone consolidated the business.
The CIA gave Rattikone free passage because he was in contact with people in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and because PRC agents had penetrated the KMT. Rattikone’s Chinese commercial agent in the drug (and thus spy) business, Mr. Heng, was instrumental in this arrangement.[6]
Vang Pao was meanwhile given his own private airline so he could ferry opium from the CIA secret base at Long Tieng on the Plain of Jars to South Vietnam where it was cooked into heroin by a Chinese chemist operating under Rattikone’s protection.
[IMG alt="A picture containing text, mountain, outdoor, nature

Description automatically generated"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...-natu.jpeg?resize=576,467&ssl=1[/IMG]Airstrip at secret CIA base at Long Tieng, Laos, that was used for opium smuggling. [Source: politicallyonpoint.blogspot.com]

[Source: ebay.com]

The Biggest Untold Story of the Secret War​

Yet another interesting interview that Valentine conducted was with Dr. Charles Weldon, a country doctor from Louisiana and World War II veteran who worked for the CIA in Laos under cover as a USAID administrator, serving as chief of the Ministry of Public Health in Vientiane.
Dr. Weldon had worked in Laos with Dr. Tom Dooley, another CIA doctor whose book, Deliver Us From Evil (1956), falsely claimed that the Viet Minh had disemboweled thousands of Vietnamese women.[7]
Dr. Weldon blew Valentine away when he told him the big untold story of the secret war in Laos was the venereal disease infestation within the over-sexed CIA colony, the result of officers having unprotected sex with tribal women and then with each other’s wives. The wives would come to him for penicillin, begging for secrecy.

Dr. Tom Dooley in Laos. [Source: pinterest.fr]

In the Company of Monsters​

One interview that Valentine said made him nauseous was one he conducted with Thomas G. Clines, a CIA adviser to Vang Pao, who bragged about overseeing Phoenix-style operations in Cuba where anti-Castro commandos trained by the CIA used blowtorches to burn the faces off Communist mayors and cadres in rural Cuban villages.
Valentine was also sickened by interviews he conducted with “All-America war criminals” Theodore Shackley, the CIA Station Chief in Laos in the mid 1960s, who had a photo on the wall of his Alexandria, Virginia, office of the CIA’s secret Long Tieng base; and with Richard Secord, a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair, who had overseen the air war over Laos that killed thousands of rice farmers on the Plain of Jars and the 1972 Christmas bombing over North Vietnam that resulted in thousands more civilian deaths.

Thomas G. Clines [Source: wikipedia.org][IMG alt="A person wearing glasses

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...all-1.jpeg?resize=245,339&ssl=1[/IMG]Theodore Shackley [Source: nndb.com][IMG alt="A person in a uniform

Description automatically generated with low confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...ally-g.jpeg?resize=379,480&ssl=1[/IMG]Richard Secord [Source: wikipedia.org]
Valentine wrote that he developed a form of PTSD from being in the company of “monsters like [John] Muldoon, Shackley, Clines and Secord who were all proud of the horrors they visited upon Vietnam and Laos.”

Bad Karma of Empire​

Valentine’s memoir provides an important “critical analysis of how Western imperialists impose their will on foreign nations,” with a “focus on the ‘dark arts’ of religious propaganda and CIA psychological warfare (psywar) and drug trafficking operations during the Cold War, and how they ultimately corrupted America—what William Burroughs, speaking about England in The Place of Dead Roads (1983), called “the backlash and bad karma of empire.”

William S. Burroughs [Source: flashbak.com]
Valentine notes that the U.S. support for the regional drug trade went back to the 1920s when the Coolidge and Hoover administrations began supporting Guomindang commander Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) in China’s civil war with the Communists, despite Chiang’s alliance with Chinese Green Gang operatives Dai Li, the chief of Guomindang intelligence, and Du Yuesheng, the Asian Al Capone.

Du Yuesheng [Source: alchetron.com][IMG alt="A picture containing text, person, wearing, person

Description automatically generated"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...ing-person.jpeg?resize=284,371&ssl=1[/IMG]Dai Li [Source: ww2db.com]

Chiang Kai-shek [Source: rudebutgoodblogspot.com]

Desmond Fitzgerald [Source: jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com]
During World War II, OSS Detachment 101 allied with opium-growing tribes in Burma, including the Kachin, with whom future CIA Deputy Director of Plans, Desmond Fitzgerald, smoked opium as an initiation rite.[8]

Kachins allied with OSS Detachment 101 in Burma during the Pacific War. [Source: arsof-history.org]
When the KMT lost the Chinese civil war in 1949, the CIA helped set up Chiang and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, as powerbrokers in Taiwan, which provided a regional base for CIA subversion. Journalist Sterling Seagrave identified Chiang Ching-kuo, who oversaw the KMT’s intelligence service in Taiwan, as a key man in the drug trade.
Additionally, remnants of the KMT army established a base in northern Burma, where the CIA oversaw the drug traffic and ran KMT agent networks into China in an attempt to sabotage and destabilize the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Valentine writes that the “CIA was like a godfather, it provided for the earthly needs [of the KMT soldiers led by Generals Li Mi and Li Wenhuan and their families] and covered up its central role in the Golden Triangle drug trade.”
[IMG alt="A person smiling for the camera

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...n-autom.jpeg?resize=386,436&ssl=1[/IMG]Chiang Ching-kuo [Source: thediplomat.com]

General Li Mi [Source: ww2db.com][IMG alt="A picture containing text, linedrawing

Description automatically generated"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...-descriptio.jpeg?resize=236,288&ssl=1[/IMG]Li Wenhuan [Source: gt-rider.com]
Valentine writes that KMT and U.S. mercenary pilots working for Civil Air Transport—the airline set up by Clare Chennault to ferry supplies to Chiang’s forces in the Chinese civil war that became known as Air America—flew opium back to Taiwan, from where it was sold on the world market.
Thailand also became a major center of CIA drug trafficking and anti-communist subversion after the CIA aided in the overthrow of nationalist Pridi Phanomyong, and imposed a mafia clique run by a collection of right-wing drug traffickers closely allied with the CIA.
Some of the key dirty work in fortifying the new regime was carried out by a renegade CIA officer, Willis Bird, and Paul Helliwell, who had set up a private military supply company (Sea Supply) that served as a cover for clandestine arms and drug smuggling by the CIA and its local friends.

[IMG alt="A group of people standing in front of an airplane

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...n-airplane.jpeg?resize=550,355&ssl=1[/IMG]Sea Supply [Source: jedi2002th.blogspot.com]
The latter included rogue police chief Phao Sinyanon, Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn, and Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, the cousin of right-wing General Phoumi Nosavan, who came to power in a CIA-backed coup in Laos in 1959.

Phao Sinyanon [Source: transcend.org][IMG alt="A person in a military uniform

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...utoma-1.jpeg?resize=322,445&ssl=1[/IMG]Thanom Kittikachorn [Source: amazon.com]

Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat [Source: wikipedia.org][IMG alt="A person in a uniform

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...ly-g-1.jpeg?resize=199,267&ssl=1[/IMG]General Phoumi Nosavan [Source: fromanativeson.com]
Field Marshal Sarit consented to the transportation of opium into South Vietnam, where the drug trade was controlled by generals allied to the Diem clique and CIA, including Ngo Dinh Nhu (South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother), and Nguyen Cao Ky, a flamboyant Air Force officer who served as the Washington backed Prime Minister of South Vietnam from 1965 to1967.
These same venal officials were the ones to preside over massive carpet bombing campaigns, with the CIA assassinating any political candidate—like Quinim Pholsena in Laos—who advocated for peace.
[IMG alt="A person sitting at a desk

Description automatically generated with low confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...omatica.jpeg?resize=353,512&ssl=1[/IMG]Nguyen Cao Ky [Source: j-hawker.blogspot.com][IMG alt="A person in a white shirt

Description automatically generated with medium confidence"]https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagaz...utomatical.jpeg?resize=630,342&ssl=1[/IMG]Ngo Dinh Nhu [Source: politico.com]

[Source: outlet.historicimages.com]
Perhaps the country worst affected was Cambodia, where the CIA backed a coup in 1970 and drove the peasantry crazy through a massive bombing campaign that fueled the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

Cambodian children wandering through the ruins of their town after carpet bombing by the Nixon administration. [Source: reddit.com]
When the latter came to power in 1975 led by Pol Pot, they tried to force the peasants who had fled to the city back to the countryside to build a peasant utopia that turned in fact into a genocidal dystopia resulting in the torture and death of up to two million Cambodians from 1975 to 1978.

Khmer Rouge soldier brandishing a pistol. [Source: reddit.com]
Amazingly, the CIA now backed the Khmer Rouge because of their hatred of the Vietnamese who liberated Cambodia in 1980 and imposed a proxy leader (Hun Sen) whom the CIA tried to overthrow.

[Source: english.cambodiadaily.com]
The CIA also in the 1980s tried to organize Hmong refugees in Thailand who had lost everything to reinvade Laos and overthrow the communist Pathet Lao who took over Laos in 1975 following the massive CIA bombing campaign.

Brimming with Hungry Ghosts​

Valentine suggests at the end of his memoir that CIA and military propaganda—which valorizes U.S. soldiers who commit war crimes and indoctrinates the public in the ideology of American exceptionalism—is the root cause of the political corruption in the United States today and American neo-fascism embodied by Donald Trump.
Valentine tells a story about how the OSS recruited a Kiowa Indian and Japanese Nisei with connection to the leader of the Black Dragon Society, a paramilitary ultra-nationalist group, for a suicide mission into Nagasaki which was obliterated by the atomic bomb on August 9, 1945, along with 400 allied prisoners of war.
Valentine sees the mission as a parable for how U.S. intelligence agencies manipulate minority groups and use right-wing criminals—who are discarded or killed with little thought after their utility has run out.
This modus operandi fits a long trend in U.S. history going back to the Indian Wars and slavery, an inescapable part of the country’s DNA.
Valentine writes that the United States, like all of North and South America, is “brimming with hungry ghosts invisible to its militant Christian nationalists—the millions of indigenous people who were slaughtered and African-Americans who were enslaved and lynched.”
There are also the ghosts of millions of Southeast Asian peoples whom the same militant Christian nationalists believed were “better dead than red,” along with the millions of victims of the drug trade that the CIA oversaw through the Cold War.

---

1. In Richard Ehrlich’s obituary of Anthony Poshepny/”Tony Poe” in the Asia Times, Poe “…dropped decapitated human heads from the air on to communists and stuck heads on pikes.” According to his funeral announcement Poshepny was awarded two CIA stars, the agency’s highest honor, and two Purple Hearts. Bangkok’s Patpong Museum describes how Mr. Poe paid Hmong mercenaries to bring him enemy ears and heads to prove they killed communists. ”I threw two heads from an airplane, it was a Dornier plane,” Mr. Poe, laughing, told Ehrlich in his San Francisco home in 2001 before he died in 2003. “The heads landed right in that [Lao] bastard’s front door. We were flying at 100 feet.” “I had a bunch of heads in my hut and the blood was seeping through the floor. It was sticky. And [CIA officer] Bill Lair said, ‘Get rid of those goddamn heads,’” Mr. Poe said. Poe angrily sent ears in a bag to then-U.S. Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley in Laos after being mocked as no threat to the enemy. ↑
2. A Bronze Star recipient as an army intelligence officer in World War II and graduate of the University of Chicago who received a Master’s degree in psychology from George Washington University, Hart served as CIA Station Chief in South Vietnam from 1966 to 1968, and headed the CIA’s European Division from 1968 to 1971. ↑
3. Poshepny liked CIA Station Chiefs in Laos—Theodore Shackley and Hugh Tovar—but hated Shackley’s replacement, Larry Devlin, who, he told Valentine, “was an A**hole prone to boasting that he’d arranged the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.” ↑
4. Valentine notes that “a few years after Wolf was published, the CIA published a revised version of the bust in Undercover Armies: CIA and Surrogate Warfare in Laos 1961-1973. A footnote on page 537 cites an anonymous CIA officer as saying: “A U.S. narcotics agent named Taylor, visiting Vientiane to try to make a drug arrest, identified Touby as a direct participant with Gen. Phoumi Nosavan [CIA-backed General who mounted right-wing coup in 1959], in a transaction involving 100 kilograms of opium. Vang Pao asserted that Touby’s role was peripheral, more as an accessory than as a principal.” The “Touby” referred to above, Touby Lyfoung, represented the Hmong’s political interests in Vientiane while Pao handled military affairs. For years, Touby had managed the Hmong’s opium business with the French and thus was a convenient fall guy. But the CIA’s apocryphal account is proof it knew all about Nosavan’s drug trafficking and covered it up.” ↑
5. Morales was involved in the CIA’s 1954 Operation PBSUCCESS overthrow of the Guatemalan government; was part of the CIA’s Miami-based CIA’s JMWAVE station employing more than 200 CIA officers who paid over 2,200 Cuban agents. JMWAVE was complicit in some of the 637 documented CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro; he told the BBC: “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a b*tch (President Kennedy) and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.” ↑
6. General Ouane oversaw heroin-refining labs in Ban Houei Sai, Laos, from which the heroin was brought via boat to Hong Kong. ↑
7. The International Rescue Committee, founded by the CIA, sponsored Dooley’s missionary work in Laos where he befriended and promoted the drug-smuggling fascist, General Phoumi Nosavan. ↑
8. Desmond Fitzgerald joined the CIA in 1950; the Far East Division in the 1950s; the Cuban Task the Force in 1962-63; chief of the Western Hemisphere Division in 1964; headed clandestine operations in Central America, Cuba America, Cuba, and was Deputy Director of Plans in 1965. ↑