Forward – He Who Has The Gold Makes The Rules

The Secret History of the Drug War from the 1920’s and onward, starts to get really heavy with lots of twists and turns between corrupted federal and state agencies, mafia bosses and syndicates, merciless corporations and bent politicians, as well as monarchies and brutal oligarchical agendas. This article unveils the truth about why medical marijuana prohibition happened, it is a long and complex tale that will be divided into several parts for the reader’s convenience. As I stated in my thesis, the goal of these reading’s is to illustrate how the American Drug War built large and lasting institutions throughout the 20^th century, how Republican Party primacy was achieved through the War on Drugs and how the Drug War evolved into a uniquely American mechanism of state oppression that would shake the very foundations of our democracy. References and a wider array of empirical evidence will be sited here from time to time but most will be reserved for the book that will be released by this author, hopefully within the year. These articles are primarily for public consumption, meant to educate the public on why our laws are the way they are and to stimulate thought and discussion as to how our laws may evolve to the greater benefit of our families, livelihoods and our democracy.

At the advent of Prohibition there were several political, social and economic circumstances that have to be considered to fully understand its rationale:

• America in the late 19^th and early 20^th century had become a state defined by hyper-patriotism, messianic racism, eugenics and racial science, religious revivalism and reactionaries, political corruption and Gilded Age greed.

• The British Opium Wars and the American Civil War heavily enriched a faction of Robber Barons known as ‘The Consortium ’, ‘The Opium Cartel’, ‘The Robber Barons’ and ‘The Gold Ring’. The Opium Cartel would dominate Republican politics following the Civil War and would include many powerful Republican figures of the Robber Baron Era including William Huntington Russell, John D. Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt, E. H Harriman, George Herbert Walker, Leland Stanford, Collis Potter Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, Jay Gould, Andrew Mellon and Warren Delano Jr.

• Opium was used prior to 1906 as a medicine and as a weapon of vice against enemy nations. The Anglo-American Opium Cartel profited heavily from both producing both opium and morphine, while owning Chinese Opium Dens and controlling the Chinese people trafficking trade to California through Chinese organized crime. Medical marijuana and marijuana were viewed as competitors to opium and opiate products in America. The Opium Cartel would come to dominate and monopolize western US railway through opium imports from China to California to make morphine. Trade liberalization of opium in the late 1800’s would allow the Opium magnates to help other industrialists build their monopolies through banking deposits and loans.

• Many of the opium magnates would become major railroad, chemical, oil, tobacco, alcohol and finance powers themselves but the most powerful would evolve their corporations into the pharmaceutical companies that we know today as ‘Big Pharma’. This cabal of ultra-wealthy and their financial networks would historically be known as ‘America’s 60 Families’, the American super-elite who intermarried with ‘the landed gentry’ of Europe. Many powerful American figures would come out of this dynasty, most notably President’s Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, VP Nelson Rockefeller, George Bush and George W. Bush, and many others. In the 21^st Century, these interests are represented by a faction within the Republican Party that controls Tobacco, Alcohol, Pharmaceuticals, Oil and Prisons otherwise known as the Neo-Conservatives.

• At the beginning 20^th century, Republicans and Democrats were divided into four camps:
  • Roosevelt Progressives (Republican) – Strong military, Gold Standard, Nativist, Big Business, Robber Barons, Anti-Labor, Eugenics, Big Pharma, Big Alcohol, Big Tobacco, Big Firearms, KKK, Close Ties to Europe, Chemical Companies and Banks.
  • Taft Progressives (Republican) – Isolationist, Gold Standard, Anti-Trust, Pro-Labor, Pro-Minimum Wage, Pro Food Control, Public Works, Urbanization, Women’s Suffrage.
  • Business Progressives (Democrat) – Strong military, Gold Standard, Big Business, Anti-Labor, Eugenics, KKK, Social Conservatives and Temperance, Religious Reactionaries, Prohibitionist, Women’s Suffrage.
  • Southern Democrats, Free Silver and Free Soil (Democrat) – Isolationist, Anti-Trust, Pro-Farmer, Pro-Labor, Religious Revivalist, Prohibitionist, Nativist, KKK (mixed pro and con), Anti-Gold Standard, Anti-Eugenics, Small Business.

American politics by 1900 became completely controlled by political machines and big business interests of the American elite, elections were more often than not rigged and were also racially bias due to Jim Crow laws and segregation. Yellow journalism became a powerful tool to influence finance and politics and many newspapers were first opened by the elite, like William Randolph Hearst, the New York Times and the Oppenheimer Family, to harness the power of the media to achieve their political goals. American politics were largely defined by the outcome of the civil war and the imposition of the Gold Standard by the Republicans upon the American people. Wedge politics was heavily influenced by British racial theories and Protestant Revival ministers during the mid-to-late 1800s and as a result social ills were largely attributed to foreigners, targeted ethnicities and classes, their religions, and the industries they were associated with. Newspapers owned by wealthy industrialist families would exploit racial tension and fear as a means to suppress Marxism, Socialism and the new labor movements called ‘Unions’.

The Gold Standard became an economic imposition throughout the world as Great Britain, the holder of the world’s reserve currency at the time, the Pound Sterling, had used the policy to repatriate its own gold from China. Great Britain held a large empire throughout the world that benefitted from global fiat exchanges of the pound which has surfaced out of necessity through the Napoleonic Wars. Large debt excesses to China after 1820 emerged due to gold settlement policies and the British, in order to stave off inflation and economic disarray, engaged in a policy of opium purchases and sales to China.

The plot to sell opium for gold was highly complex and could not have been achieved without the help of American railroad industrialists. China’s population suffered opium epidemics into the 1840’s and realized England was attempting to hook their population on an English owned product prior to returning to a Gold Standard; this would give the British the opportunity to reverse the trade balance and strengthen the British Pound. Regulatory intervention was blocked by the first Opium War and hot money investment flowed into China through the development of the opium trade in California; a market and money bubble would emerge in China during the American civil war through medical narcotics demand from China.

The California Opium Baron’s would pioneer the California railroad industry to ship Chinese and British gold across the United States to New York where it would be delivered to London. Lincoln knew that the Northern Republican elite were descended from British merchant aristocracy and created the fiat greenback as a way to stave off British influence over the Union economy during the war as they were backing both sides. This financial process, after Lincoln’s assassination, led to the creation of the Republican Gold Ring, the consolidation of the 60 families and inevitably the imposition of the Gold Standard in America by the Anglo-American financial elite.

We will explore America’s evolution with medical marijuana through the early 20^th century as Prohibition, corrupt government and organized crime would jostle to gain control of the distribution of the herbal medicine.

Superpatriotism

The noise from among the different medical marijuana camps in recent years have left most Americans, speculating in bewilderment about the reasoning behind marijuana’s prohibition. Figures like Don Duncan of American’s For Safe Access, Thomas Forcade of High Times and Keith Stroup of NORML have often misled the public by primarily attributing marijuana prohibition to petty racism and cultural attitudes of the late 1930s.  Wiser heads like Jack Herer left evidence pointing to more sinister machinations surrounding the chemical company DuPont Nemours (DuPont-Astor-Roosevelt), Monsanto, Koch owned paper companies like Georgia Pacific and to no surprise, Big Tobacco companies like Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds.

However, even with all of this ‘evidence’ the citizenry seem unable to draw a definitive conclusion as to why medical marijuana is illegal, it just doesn’t add up. If medical marijuana was used as a medicine in America for almost 150 years, why would it be suddenly just taken away? Was fervent patriotism and racism enough? How could the medical community so recklessly group marijuana with opium? Were Big Tobacco and Big Pharma politically able to do it alone?

The key to understanding all of the above, is to inherently understand the nature and foundation of Prohibition itself. In order to do this we must take an honest and sober look at the politics and society of the United States up to the initiation of Prohibition in 1919. America from the Spanish American War onward had been imbued with a sense of Superpatriotism that was commonplace among the Western nations prior to World War in 1914. The American economy had rapidly emerged as the world’s leading industrial economy and like so many industrializing nations, had found itself in a state of class war between Big Business and the newly emerged organized labor.

Anti-Saloon League Poster

The rise of labor power in America came as a symptom of organized industrial corruption that had come to pervade all aspects of society from the 1880s through the 1920s. Big Business responded to labor with violent repression through their political front men and by sponsoring racial-religious organizations like the Temperance Movement, the Anti-Saloon League, the KKK, the Know Nothings and other various Protestant nativist groups that would keep the middle and working classes divided. America was also defined by an immense wealth disparity between the rich and poor. The wealthy insulated by the Gold Standard from the working classes, indulged in Eugenics and Racial Sciences to justify not only their race but also their positions in society and in the world.

This amalgamation of forces would soon spiral out of control under the dictatorial presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The period of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency was defined by racial hyper-nationalism that can only be resembled in very small part by American patriotic fervor experienced during Ronald Reagan and 9/11. The hyper-nationalist movement was intensely public, demagogic, intimidating, exceptionalist and intensely race based; claiming that Protestant white America had been blessed by God through genetics to lead the world. Wilson himself was a pawn and collaborator of big business interests; the Republican-Consortium  machine had put their weight behind him following their disastrous experience with William Howard Taft and Wilson had shown to be a trustworthy replacement. Wilson himself was a high ranking member of the KKK and had silently supported the marketing of heroin over morphine for Big Pharma while publically endorsing the limiting of alcohol, marijuana and natural medicines, blaming them for bringing about the influence of socialism and communism.

Woodrow Wilson

Wilson’s personality was able to successfully merge The Temperance Movement, Women’s Suffrage, the KKK, Anti-Saloon League and Know-Nothings into one far right extremist faction under Democratic leadership that he used as a political tool to carry out his ambitions. The Temperance and Women’s Suffrage Movement would distract from labor and provide political cover for Wilson, while the KKK and Anti-Saloon League would play the violent role of the strike breaker and riot ultra. Wilson played upon the racial fears of the South and incited Protestant ministers with propagations of anti-Semitism, interracial relations and plots from the Vatican to improve his standing.

“The Second Klan saw threats from every direction. A religious tone was present in its activities; “two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers,” says historian Brian R. Farmer. Much of the Klan’s energy went to guarding “the home;” the historian Kathleen Bleeits said its members wanted to protect “the interests of white womanhood.”

“The pamphlet ABC of the Invisible Empire, published in Atlanta by Simmons in 1917, identified the Klan’s goals as “to shield the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood; to maintain white supremacy; to teach and faithfully inculcate a high spiritual philosophy through an exalted ritualism; and by a practical devotedness to conserve, protect and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, principles and ideals of a pure Americanism.“

“The massive immigration of Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe led to fears among Protestants about the new peoples, and especially about job and social competition. The Great Migration of African Americans to the North stoked job and housing competition and racism by whites in Midwestern and Western industrial cities. The second Klan achieved its greatest political power in Indiana; it was active throughout the South, Midwest, especially Michigan; and in the West, in Northern California, Colorado and Oregon. The migration of both African Americans and whites from rural areas to Southern and Midwestern cities increased social tensions.”

Wilson’s suppression of the labor movement was essential to the power of Big Business at this time. Big Business, especially Big Pharma, were undergoing a transition into the war economy in 1914 following the passage of the Federal Reserve Act the year prior to centralize finance. Large businesses began centralizing operations and staking their bets in war contracts behind the armies of the warring European nation states. Wilson passed several unlawful executive orders curbing laborers first amendment rights to speech and assembly to help suppress labor resistance for the American corporations while they engaged in grand scale war profiteering. During the war, labor strikes were met with brutal reprisals, including the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 at John D Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, in which 1200 striking coal miners and their families were brutally attacked by the Colorado National Guard resulting in the deaths of 25, including women and children who had been burned alive. Wilson derided the unions as socialists, enemy saboteurs and German sympathizers; with his extremist lobby groups promoting alcohol, opium and marijuana as the cause of labor unrest.

Ludlow Massacre

Marijuana use would have its first negative use association during World War I as it was often used by tradesmen and unionists in their downtime to heal from work stresses. Marijuana was blamed for the laborers affinity for communism and socialism, derided as being confused from their overuse of medicinal and herbal marijuana leading to their subversive nature. These newspaper articles and campaigns would become the precursor to William Randolph Heart’s Reefer Madness campaigns in the 30s. The KKK and the Temperance Movement saw an easy target in Marijuana, they could achieve their political ends by linking marijuana use to minorities and whites of low social standing. Republican and Democratic city administrations saw the opportunity to expand the power of their police forces by supporting these political agendas, by banning marijuana use police forces could freely enter minority neighborhoods and increase arrests. Cities could also impose greater neighborhood controls on the basis of drug use. This led to a spread of prohibitive ordinances in many cities throughout the country following the Harrison Tax Act of 1914.

William Randolph Hearst

Marijuana was especially targeted by the Californian conservative oligarchy because of the deep resentment held towards minorities by new Southern white immigrants who had been disaffected by their exploitation under Southern Reconstruction. Many Southerners and Mormons, following the Civil War moved to California to capture the tail end of the Gold Rush; following 1880 another large influx of Southerners and Northern Know-Nothings moved to California to participate in the oil and logging boom. They established conservative bastions throughout the state, most notably in San Diego, Anaheim, Long Beach, Simi Valley, Pasadena, Bakersfield, Fresno, Oceanside, Sacramento, Ventura and Oroville. Strong bureaucracies within these city governments were created to ensure the continuation of the personal and corporate interests of the new Southern gentry and bar ethnic minorities from equitable representation. Many of these administrations expanded in the 20’s and 30’s, drawing their ranks from the KKK, Nazi sympathizers, and Southern recruits with strong segregationist beliefs. These types of individuals were especially targeted for police recruitment, filling the ranks of the LAPD, SFPD and countless Sheriff’s Departments throughout the state.

KKK in Anaheim

America under Wilsonian Democracy brought about the triumph of elite wealth over the middle and lower classes in not just industry but in education and ethics as well. The rise of Communism and Marxism throughout Europe had created a boogeyman for the American industrialist to use against the American laborer.  This fear would be used to promote American involvement in World War I. William Jennings Bryan, a champion of the poor and faithful from the South had watched his influence within the Democratic Party wane under the power of Wilson’s Business Progressives’ and their alliance with the Southern KKK. Bryan had previously struggled against the Republicans under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt to combat the Gold Standard and the economic subjugation that had resulted for the American farmer. Bryan now found himself now found himself battling against the Progressive’s in all aspects of politics while serving as Wilson’s Secretary of State. For one, the Progressive’s had asserted eugenics, social Darwinism and racial sciences as fact rather than theory; pushing the rejection of religion and monotheism from the classroom in favor of a racial science based curriculum. Bryan would later take this on in the infamous Scopes Monkey Trials in the mid-20s. More importantly, The Progressive Republicans and Democrats, united by William Randolph Hearst and Big Pharma and led by Theodore Roosevelt, began to put immense pressure on Wilson to enter World War I.

Big Pharma profited immensely from World War I by selling opium, morphine and heroin to the European nations through military contracts, especially to Russia who was ill equipped but possessed the largest army. By 1915, Russian losses were mounting and the American industrialists had become concerned that Russia would not be able to continue to purchase the massive quantities of narcotics needed to supply their troops. Big Pharma seeking to continue the war time profits and an extension of the war heavily funded the Republican and Democratic KKK to pressure Wilson into putting US troops in the war. Bryan, a political enemy of Big Pharma and a pacifist, had led the passage with the Temperance Movement of the Harrison Tax Act of 1914 in a bid to limit the power of Big Pharma in America and end the nation’s Heroin epidemic that occurred during the previous decade. Bryan, with good intentions, supported the Act to damage the opium trade, seeing it as the source of Republican power and the money power behind the Gold Standard and the Robber Barons; he actually encouraged the use of marijuana as a regulated medicine but saw ‘the regulations of poisons’ as a pretext to limit the power of the Opium trusts.

William Jennings Bryan

“Bryan epitomized the prohibitionist viewpoint: Protestant and nativist, hostile to the corporation and the evils of urban civilization, devoted to personal regeneration and the social gospel, he sincerely believed that prohibition would contribute to the physical health and moral improvement of the individual, stimulate civic progress, and end the notorious abuses connected with the liquor and opiate traffic. Hence he became interested when its devotees in Nebraska viewed direct legislation as a means of obtaining anti-saloon laws.”

However, with the Harrison Tax Act, Big Pharma had successfully directed the Republicans to amend the tax act with the goal of leaving foreign sale and distribution of opium and heroin legal and abolish copyrights and patents of foreign formulas that had been held by Germany on the grounds of national defense. Trading embargoes by the German’s during World War I, along with supply shortages to Russia compelled Big Pharma to support US entry into the war to create a new market for its highly regulated opiates. Lobby pressure on Wilson’s Administration forced Bryan out of the White House in 1915, radicalizing Bryan to put his full power behind Prohibition and the new Anti-Evolution movement that had surfaced as an extreme response to the inculcation of eugenics in schools. Bryan saw these movements as an effort in social morality, not so much as to what they represented, but in that the Democrats could effectively combat the influence of the Northern Industrialists using the ethical platform.

President Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt, Bryan’s adversary, enjoyed a very strong post-presidential public and political reputation and was able to portray Bryan’s efforts, prior to WWI, to coordinate the US Army against Pancho Villa during the Mexican Civil War as ‘weak and humiliating’ to a hyper-nationalist public. The British blockade in 1916 on continental Europe would put pressure on the industrialist’s war profits and in turn, the pressure was put on Wilson’s re-election to ensure compliance with their demands for US involvement in the war. Wilson catered to the Republican’s demands, moving left politically to assuage labor voters, bringing in the coalition of Roosevelt Republicans to narrowly defeat Charles Evan Hughes and the Taft Republicans in the 1916 election. Wilson’s successful re-election allowed the floodgates on war profiteering to slam wide open. Famous Marine General Smedley Butler would later recount the utter corporate corruption that occurred during WWI in his now infamous book “War is a Racket”. Record gold imports by the US Treasury and US corporations for arms and supplies sales to Europe during World War I would occur at this time, enriching many American industrialists beyond their wildest dreams. The transfer of gold from Europe to America would be key to both America’s future economic power and key to the dominance of American big business in the century to come. Sales of opiate medication was the number one tradable item for gold during World War I and always remember “he who has the gold makes the rules”.

The Great War Changes The World

World War I

World War I is one of the most generationally traumatic events to ever occur in human history. It was the culmination of centuries long rivalries between the church, the monarchy and the moneyed elite for control of at the first the continent of Europe and then the world. World War II, nuclear weapons, The War on Drugs, financial crimes and panics of nations, and revolutions that followed would never have occurred without it. World War I was the first change in the order of the world since the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Charlemagne.

World War I was carefully crafted and planned by the monarchy and moneyed elite as a sick and perverse social and economic experiment; as we had discussed before, racial and cultural supremacy along with eugenics were cultural beliefs of the day. The elite viewed racial theory as a form of ultimate human competition with themselves being the best competitors of their own races and nations. The monarchs were at the head of the elite bloodlines and marriage into royal bloodlines became an obsession of the American and European industrialists from the 1880s to the 1920s. King Edward VII, King of England from 1901-1910 and son of Queen Victoria, had viewed the Third French Republic and the new German Empire as an existential threat to Anglo domination of the world. Edward was a politically powerful king with a vast network of friends in the international financial community who created the idea of the war as a potential goldmine for war profiteers and as a way to ‘keep Europe in balance’. France, Russia, Austria and Germany would square off on the continent of Europe while British and American pharmaceuticals, gun-makers, banks, oil and chemical manufacturers, steel makers and the shipping industry would all profit heavily from supplying the war effort. American and British gold supplies were heavily interlinked, thus America could be used as a source of war credit for England to maintain the war for several years.

King Edward VII

Edward also saw the war as the way to maintain the international supremacy of the British Empire, something that had come to be challenged in recent years by German super-nationalism and German gold mining. The king wanted pound sterling financial supremacy to continue and this could only be done by heavily indebting the other European nations through war.   He manufactured the Entente Cordial with France to create a balance of military alliances with Russia and England against Germany and Austria-Hungary; he often criticized his own nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, known for his temper, to openly to stoke diplomatic tensions. Edward also reformed the British military in preparation for war, creating the Expeditionary Force with the thought that the French would bear the brunt of the assault. German militarism under the Kaiser had also taken a hostile tone with the dismissal of Bismarck and the realignment of foreign policy for a war with England. The moneyed elite on both sides wanted the war, to expand their own wealth, redefine international trade, test the mettle of their military machines and to see which European tribes were indeed superior on the battlefield.

War broke out in 1914 following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Serbia. Kaiser Wilhelm promised German support against Serbia, taking the bait offered by King Edward and triggering a war with Russia and the alliance system. The war break out in colonial hotspots around the globe but the primary focus of the war would be on the Western Front between France and Germany and the Eastern Front between Germany and Russia. Trench warfare, tanks, machine guns, air warfare and chemical warfare would make their debut reigning chaos across Europe. American troops were committed to the war in 1917.

World War I Map

Shades of the Iraq War persisted throughout the conflict with cost plus contracts, supply shortages, unsupplied payments and pay offs to participant commanders. Wilson and the Northern Industrialists transformed the US economy into a war economy of whose basis was total profit for the wealthy at the expense of poor. The Federal Reserve Act enforced the new Federal Income Tax to subsidize the war profiteers, using the tax monies to pay for the war contracts. Big Business were able to essentially wash their own money through the war knowing that any taxes paid would go to pay the contracts and war bonds they held. The First World War proved to be the most single profitable event for the American Upper Class beyond the Civil War itself, pushing them to a new height of power and influence unseen before in the world.

World War I’s legacy would impose its mark on every major military event since its occurrence, for it would trigger a chain of events that would lead to some of the most infamous events in world history. Engineering of war contracts by big financial names like JP Morgan, Rockefellar, Bernard Baruch and many other kings of Wall Street led to the beginning of Wall Street’s winner take all economy in the 20s as the Upper Class saw that they could plunder the populace at will. Wages had remained stagnant despite the imposition of production increases for the war, management refused to pass profits downward and labor unions were formed to oppose both the war and the harsh conditions that they were subject to by employers.

The war would claim 39 million lives, both soldier and civilian, and would rewrite the balance of power for the entire world. The monarchy of Russia had been completely overthrown by a communist revolution and was left in a brutal state of civil war; the monarchy of Germany itself had also been overthrown and had been replaced by an oligarchical republican government. France and England found themselves in a state of financial and military disarray, exhausted resources and war time debts to the United States had left them in a dependent position. Most of the European countries left the gold standard during World War I, however the US had remained on the standard to allow its industrialists to settle supply shipments in gold payment. The United States would emerge as the wealthiest nation in the world.

The Labor Crisis of 1919

1919 was a bell weather year for the United States as social pressures at home reached their boiling point and exploded. Despite the conclusion of the war, the United States remained in a state of wartime centralization and it had appeared that Wilson had no intention of demobilizing the power of the war profiteers. The Russian Revolution of 1918 also had empowered the spirits of labor movements worldwide as the Empire of the Russian Tsar collapsed under a workers revolution and a new Soviet state had been established much to the shock of the entire western world. Europe itself had devolved into a state of conflict between socialists and the emerging fascist groups born out of the disaffected military elite fighting to retain their royalist privileges. In the United States there was a feeling of disdain and skepticism following the war toward the economic rhetoric of the Upper Class, and the government itself which was seen as servants of wealth and pickpockets of the people.

The First Red Scare broke out in 1919 over a dispute between newly formed labor unions and the war time provisions business leaders had used to oppress and bust the unions. The action began right away in early January when the Seattle General Strike broke out with over 60,000 shipyard workers striking for higher wages. The strike paralyzed Seattle and there was a general fear among the wealthy class that America now risked a Proletarian Revolution as seen in the Soviet Union just a year before. The Mayor of Seattle had 3000 police and federal troops engage with the rioters deriding them as anarchists. The Yellow Press owned by several members of the 60 Families and upstarts like William Randolph Hearst accused the Strike as being an attempt at Communist revolution. The General Strike would end the following month following labor negotiations and the government would respond to the striking workers with the creation of the Overman Committee.

“The Overman Committee was a special 5-man subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary chaired by North Carolina Democrat Lee Slater Overman. First charged with investigating German subversion during World War I, its mandate was extended on February 4, 1919, just a day after the announcement of the Seattle General Strike, to study “any efforts being made to propagate in this country the principles of any party exercising or claiming to exercise any authority in Russia” and “any effort to incite the overthrow of the Government of this country. The Committee’s hearings into Bolshevik propaganda, conducted from February 11 to March 10, 1919, developed an alarming image of Bolshevism as an imminent threat to the U.S. government and American values.”

Tensions were further inflamed following the landmark Supreme Court decision of Schenck vs. The United States, a case where one Charles T. Schenck, a member of the American Socialist Party, had been indicted under Wilson’s Espionage Act of 1917 for distributing subversive anti-war leaflets to military draftees during World War I stating that the Draft was illegal under the 13^th Amendment. Schenck had appealed under his First Amendment rights but the Supreme Court upheld his conviction. To many this was seen as a travesty of justice and a declaration that the courts would be against organized labor for the time to come. The American Legion was formed following the verdict to put down unions by hiring unemployed veterans to form mercenary like security squads that would assist the police in quelling strikes and riots. Mitchell Palmer, an avowed anti-labor politician, was selected by Wilson to be his last Attorney General and squelch the labor menace.

April grew even tenser, as prominent labor leader IWW head Eugene Debs was incarcerated for speaking out against the war and the Wilson Administration’s perpetuation of the war economy. The Boston Telephone Strike would soon follow as 9,000 telephone operators went on strike in New England. Strikebreaking groups were successfully beaten back by unions and the wage increases were implemented. Union reactionaries responded to the Debs imprisonment by mailing 36 mail bombs to several government officials, Attorney General Palmer and industrialists including John D Rockefeller. Unions like the AFL, CIO and IWW started looking for financial backing to step up their resources against the increased political pressure from the money industrialists. Strikebreakers were often aided by the police and the local city machines which were often ran by the Irish Mobs on behalf of the city’s landed gentry. Jewish and Italian gambling racketeers from ethnic immigrant gangs out of Cleveland and New York had rivalries with the Irish dating back to the late 1800s and would start providing financing and muscle to unions to help them conduct their strike activities against the municipal apparatus.

These racketeers would help finance the May Day Strike of 1919 which was a multi-city general labor protest in Boston, New York and Cleveland. Police tried to stop the marches but were overran by union organizers and mob thugs. Veterans and soldiers joined in the protest burning their military uniforms and government war propaganda. The largest protest was organized in Cleveland in support of the union candidate for Mayor; the Rockefellar Consortium organized a group of War Loan workers to form a gang and attack the protest, leading to a riot and street violence. Rockefellar and Oppenheimer-owned news magazines blamed the laborers, drug use and communism for inciting the War Loan workers to attack.

The following month in June eight large mail bombs with up to 25 pounds of dynamite each were sent to several US cities with political and business targets alike. Mailers were sent with the bombs accusing the recipients of inciting class warfare and domestic subjugation.  The newspapers worked hard to frame the entire labor movement as an anarchist movement and this was aided by Wilson’s doubling down on Women’s Rights to Vote and Prohibition to keep the family focus on social management rather than labor rights. However by Mid-Summer the Chicago Race Riots would break out in what became known as Red Summer.

Chicago Race Riots

Red Summer was a culmination between labor tensions ongoing throughout the year and the influx of African American labor from the South into the Northern industries that had started during the decade. African Americans were largely blamed by the racial policies of the Wilson government as being socialist instigators in their demands for equal rights in both society and the workplace: “Authorities viewed African Americans’ advocacy of racial equality, labor rights, or the rights of victims of mobs to defend themselves with alarm. In a private conversation in March 1919, President Wilson said that “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America.”

Riots broke out all over the country with race riots breaking out in South Carolina, Texas, Arizona, and Illinois. Struggles between blacks and whites broke out in the military over Wilson’s policies of re-segregation, undoing much of the progress that had been achieved since the Civil War. Chicago saw the greatest violence break out between the black community and the police over police killings and unsolved murders. Government accusations of communism led to white lynch mobs killing black citizens throughout the country. Militias on both sides were formed leading to several skirmishes through the South. Race riots would continue ceaselessly for all three summer months of 1919.

Deep divisions among the socialist political representatives emerged during their attempt to organize. Some factions wanted to work for Lenin’s Comintern, while others proposed an independent American communist organization and center-left unionist organizations. The Boston Police Strike would also break out during Red Summer, the AFL unionized the policemen who immediately went on strike for higher wages and benefits.

“Police Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis denied that police officers had any right to form a union, much less one affiliated with a larger organization like the AFL. During the strike, Boston experienced two nights of lawlessness until several thousand members of the State Guard supported by volunteers restored order, though not without causing several deaths. The public, fed by lurid press accounts and hyperbolic political observers, viewed the strike with a degree of alarm out of proportion to the events, which ultimately produced only about $35,000 of property damage. A report from Washington, D.C. included this headline: “Senators Think Effort to Sovietize the Government Is Started.” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge saw in the strike the dangers of the national labor movement: “If the American Federation of Labor succeeds in getting hold of the police in Boston it will go all over the country, and we shall be in measureable distance of Soviet government by labor unions. “The Ohio State Journal opposed any sympathetic treatment of the strikers: “When a policeman strikes, he should be debarred not only from resuming his office, but from citizenship as well. He has committed the unpardonable sin; he has forfeited all his rights. The strikers were called “deserters” and “agents of Lenin.” The Philadelphia Public Ledger viewed the Boston violence in the same light as many other of 1919’s events: “Bolshevism in the United States is no longer a specter. Boston in chaos reveals its sinister substance.” President Woodrow Wilson, speaking from Montana, branded the walkout “a crime against civilization” that left the city “at the mercy of an army of thugs.”

In September of 1919, the AFL voted with the steelworkers unions to have an industry-wide strike. Half of the US steel industry was immediately shutdown posing a threat to the power of steel barons like Andrew Carnegie. The Steel Barons paid the newspapers handsome sums to turn public opinion against the steelworkers and brought in 40,000 immigrant scabs to work the factories. Union power was widely blamed on the influences of alcohol and the vices of alcohol, marijuana, prostitution and opiates. The political discourse had become dominated by the radical KKK, Eugenics, Anti-Union and Temperance Movements who were all calling for large scale sterilization and prohibition programs. Rejection of law became popular as a cultural motif for the 1920s because government overall was seen as corrupt and subservient only to the upper classes. Narcotics abuse had also become an urban problem with the rise of popularity of heroin and the prevalence of post-war opium addiction. Heroin had out popularized Medical Marijuana as the narcotic of choice during that decade but had been regulated out of the market by the Harrison Tax Act, leaving a market opportunity for a Jewish gambler and fixer named Arnold Rothstein.

- The Green Chazzan

Continue to Part 2…

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Mr. Arnold

Arnold Rothstein – The Original Mr. Big

Arnold Rothstein was the Boss of All Bosses, literally the founder of American organized crime and one of the greatest criminal masterminds to have ever lived. Rothstein was born in 1882, the son of a wealthy Jewish immigrant racketeer and was known to be a natural at probability, mathematics, and was well read on matters of business. Rothstein started taking over Manhattan gambling rackets at a young age by his late twenties expanded his personal rackets to fixing horse races; providing horse race tips allowed Rothstein to network informants and earn friends within the private banking community. Rothstein became connected to members of New York’s Tammany Hall and of New York high society through the popularity of his no tax elite gambling halls. Rothstein conducted business with members of the 60 Families including the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Hearst, Goulds, Morgans and other members of the railroad and banking trusts from California. After becoming a millionaire in 1912, Rothstein moved on to large scale racketeering and started creating the building blocks for the first organized crime organization in the United States using his financial prowess as support.

Rothstein rose to power in what became known as the infamous Black Sox Scandal. Rothstein had successfully rigged the 1919 World Series and was acquitted along with the players in the ensuing investigation. Records related to the court case also disappeared and this was attributed to payoffs made by Rothstein during that time. Rothstein saw opportunity in the disaffection of the general public with the political class and his golden goose came with the passage of the Volstead Act following the Boston Police Strike. His money and connections with bootleggers and former alcohol dealers would serve him well in setting up a vast network of private clubs where alcohol could be enjoyed at prohibition prices. His fixing of the World Series had made him and his associates from Chicago, Cleveland and New York immensely wealthy and they were eager to profit from Rothstein’s further ventures.

Bureau of Narcotics Raid

Rothstein’s organizing of the underworld into organized municipal syndicates would go largely without criticism and unnoticed as the government focused its resources on crushing labor unions and communism. The Palmer Raids would begin in November of 1919, with Attorney General Mitchell Palmer appointing one, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Department of Justice’s General Intelligence Unit. Hoover was to compile a list of labor leaders and communist sympathizers to round up for investigation and arrest. Large groups of labor sympathizers were rounded up and charged under the Espionage Act and deported many of the convicted to Europe. The Syndicate was formed under the leadership of Rothstein known in the underworld as ‘Mr. Arnold’ or ‘Mr. Big’, was facilitated by his infamous sub-bosses: Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz and Legs Diamond.

Lucky Luciano

Several of Rothstein’s associates from Tammany Hall were looking to go into filmmaking but were barred from film production on the East Coast due to industrial patents held by Thomas Edison and his associates at the Motion Picture Patent Company. Rothstein worked with Cleveland and Chicago Syndicates to set up the movie studios in Los Angeles to produce films and promote west coast rackets as railroad expansion brought in eastern migration.  Rothstein introduced the concept of racketeering theatres, triggering company battles for movie rights and display rights at theatres; he achieved this by hustling the construction workers unions and manipulating union tactics to coerce the theater owners. Rothstein’s associate Lepke Buchalter, who would later go on with Rothstein to form Murder Inc., was put in charge of setting up a new movie studio system on the west coast to take over the movie production industry. Rothstein provided loans for the new studios and expanded his control of construction unions to the national level. He financed the Selwyn Brothers, Samuel Goldwyn, Louie B. Mayer, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Moe Dalitz to form now infamous studios such as MGM, Paramount, United Artists and 21^st Century Fox.

Bugsy Siegel

Rothstein’s organization of the Mob couldn’t have come at a better time. The labor crisis of 1919 evolved into an economic crisis in January of 1920 as the war demobilization sharply contracted the economy. The United States entered a very severe bout of deflation that lasted for seven months, crushing the middle and lower class labor forces as Wilson reestablished the Gold Standard; this move would tarnish his administration and bring about Republican victory. Returned veterans could not find jobs, labor strikes crippled industries, the reimplementation of the Gold Standard and wage stagnation crippled the economy devastating many municipal economies throughout the country. Organized crimes’ fortunes enhanced when Warren Harding, the Ohio Republican candidate for President won his election under the slogan of “A Return to Normalcy”. Harding was a puppet of the Ohio oil and railroad interests, represented by the “Ohio Gang” a band of politicians and industrialists selected for Harding’s cabinet; but he also fell under the influence of Lou Rothkopf, Arnold Rothstein’s head of the Cleveland syndicate. Harding’s victory was a free pass to economic control for the Mob; alcohol and marijuana speakeasies were quickly established in every major urban area throughout the country. Harding with the Federal Reserve cut taxes, lowered interest rates and increased the money supply, making the availability of dollars more easily available in the market. Rothstein essentially possessed the perfect racket, his organized syndicates around North America would peddle vice to the public while taking in their increased supply of dollars; in turn Rothstein had these dollars converted to gold. The gold increased in value as Harding issued more dollars into the economy and allowed Rothstein to have a medium in which to easily launder the Mobs speakeasy monies. The gold would be stored at mob friendly banks in the City of London and New York. This would inevitably begin the cycle that led to the Gold Crisis of 1931 and the acceleration of the Great Depression.

President Warren Harding

Another powerful medium for Rothstein and Rothkopf’s monies was the newly established film industry; large sums of cash were often accepted in 1920’s California without question. The Depression of 1920-21 had absolutely crushed the speculative oil boom that had driven the state following the Gold Rush; the Southern conservatives, city administrations and police departments could not resist the large influx of mob cash and the allure of Hollywood glamour that had stimulated the imaginations of millions around the world. The arrival of Rothstein’s agent, Bugsy Siegel, would change Los Angeles’ destiny forever; as his dynamic personality was able to merge the interests of the California conservative elite with that of organized crime. Traditionally, since the late 1800s, the Irish Mob made it a habit of implementing themselves within city political machines to protect their neighborhoods from corruption and abuse at the hands of other ethnic gangs. Under Rothstein’s unified syndicate model the Irish Mob retained significant influence as the gatekeepers for mafia activities being ran by other ethnic gangs like the Italians and the Armenians. The Irish would maintain control of the cities’ apparatus, the city hall, the police department and the public works administrations; the Italians would function as the gangland muscle and the operators; the Armenians would be the transporters and the Jews would be the money men; collectively these groups would birth the American Mob.  Irish control of the Los Angeles Police Department and LA County Sheriff made it easy for Rothstein to corrupt the police; the Sheriff practically operated as his personal squadron, covering up the misdeeds of famous Hollywood celebrities who worked for Rothstein’s studios while exposing the deeds of others to the press for profit. The American Mob’s racist sentiments in the twenties enhanced the situation of police abuse towards minorities. The police were expected to ignore and even aid syndicate activities while also being directed to make arrests predominantly in Black and Latino neighborhoods; race based arrests were easy media sensations and could easily maintain the prestige of the police force while covering for their participation in the rackets. Rothstein was practically in control of 25% of  United States business by 1925.

‘A Return to Normalcy’

The United States had retained the Gold Standard following the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913; the natural inflation from the 1880’s had been hyperextended by the artificial inflation created during World War I. The Labor Crisis of 1919 slowed the government response to the economy leading to the Depression of 1920-21. Warren Harding won a landslide victory, restoring Republican power under the guidance of the Ohio Gang using the slogan ‘A Return to Normalcy’. Harding responded to the crisis with import-export tariff’s and a job’s program but troubles remained far from over as the new administration began to blatantly hand over the reigns of economic power to the wealthy. Prohibition Laws became a tool of domestic surveillance with the Bureau of Prohibition and the Executive Office itself being notoriously corrupted by mob influence. Union tensions heightened quickly during the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest civil uprising in US history and the origin of the infamous Mother Jones, when 3000 police had a massive shootout with 10,000 armed coal miners. The blood shed was to remind the unions that the government was willing to help the corporations use force against them.

Battle of Blair Mountain

Harding’s government also brought about the Lochner Era, a time of an extremely conservative Supreme Court that gave the constitution to the large corporations on a silver platter. The Lochner Court was vehemently anti-union and struck down many attempts at pro-union legislation and attempts to implement child labor, minimum wage and maximum work hour laws. The Court also aggressively struck down taxes against large corporations, many among them being Syndicate interests. Harding’s government was very similar to that of George W. Bush’s, the origins of the term cronyism began with Harding’s government due to criticisms resulting from civic abuses by the Ohio Gang. This cabal of White House officials firmly entrenched interests sympathetic to the American oil cartel. This led to the Teapot Dome Scandel when the Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, gave a no bid contract on Naval oil reserves to Sinclair Oil and Pan American Petroleum. In return, Fall received millions of dollars (in todays money) in bribes and pay offs. The congressional Democrats successfully led an inquiry into the abuse and found the assets Fall had used to purchase with the bribe money, the scandal became the Watergate of its time and the court proceedings lasted well beyond Harding’s death in 1923. Fall would become the first cabinet member to be convicted of bribery.

Secretary Albert Fall

Governance under Harding had collapsed with the Teapot Dome scandal and his death in office and the more respectable Vice President Calvin Coolidge was thrust into the presidency. Coolidge was also a Presidential patsy for the landed elite just as Harding was before him, but unlike Harding, Coolidge was more politically astute and was able to cover for many of the crimes perpetrated by the US Republican oligarchy. Coolidge oppressed the farmer class heavily during his tenure, allocating many of the benefits of government services to the urban service, business and financial sectors. Coolidge made one, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Bureau of Investigation which was to administrate the Mann Act, an anti-prostitution racket agency that was primarily used to collect information on philandering officials and prominent men.  He appointed a rogue’s gallery of politicians to his cabinet to transform the economy into a state of ‘scientific taxation’, which was a euphemism for lowering taxes for the rich and deregulating industry. Herbert Hoover was made Secretary of Commerce, he transferred authority of child labor back to the states and created a mass deregulation program for the economy. Andrew Mellon was also named Secretary of the Treasury; Mellon was opposed to medical marijuana over strongly held racial and classist beliefs. Coolidge made it his mission to fulfill Harding’s obligation to roll back the taxes that the wealthy had instituted during World War I; the war contracts that the wealthy had benefitted from were gone and the financial elite desired to transform the US into a service/financial based economy based on theories of Hayekian supercapitalism. The US had become immensely wealthy through obtaining European gold in World War I and were able to extend their money supply to expand development like never seen before. New York became the hub for the global elite and Hollywood entered its Golden Age through the wealth expansion; lower rates instituted by the Federal Reserve also stimulated economic excess. Taxes were cut three times under Coolidge in 1924, 1926 and 1928; government services were also cut which increased the financial burden on state and local governments.

Calvin Coolidge

The lower class accounted for over half the US population in the 1920s; wages and profits among the lower and middle class stagnated throughout the 20’s in a similar manner to that of the 2000’s while business profits hit new high watermarks thanks to the easy money. Because of the wage stagnation, low rates, deregulation and easy money, lending criteria was tossed out the window after 1925 by investment banking institutions. ‘Buying on Margin’ became a casual social term. Financial products and instruments that were normally available only to the oligarchical elite were made available to the public at large. Because of the asset and liquidity bubble being generated by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury department, banks offered margin deals on American stock to the middle and lower classes as a means of retirement savings. The American people, largely uneducated in finance, were unaware that the government had created an artificial economy based on low rates, hot money, European bonds, and cheap fiat. Meanwhile, the Republican government was asset stripping itself, reducing taxes and lowering receipts, selling valuable government land to private owners instead of profiting on leases, dismantling government income and also allowing the sale of federally held gold.  However the economy, after 1927 became largely built on the Federal Reserve’s monetary expansion as European investors began to slowly withdraw assets to fight the onset of the Depression brought upon by World War I.

US culture became greatly defined by what was described in the Great Gatsby in the mid-20s, a have and have not culture. This was called the ‘Weimar Culture’ attributed to attitudes also seen in post-war Germany during the inflationary era of the Weimer Republic. The youth were called ‘The Lost Generation’, disillusioned by war and Wilson’s domestic dictatorship; this generation produced many great authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot and many others. Cultures like Dadaism emerged that resembled metrosexual cultures of today. Urban populations grew rapidly, crime became a public norm, liberal views of equality for women and gays became prevalent especially among the urban educated, and violation of the Volstead Act or Prohibition was widely in vogue. Family units widely collapsed during the 20s following the early 1920 depression and the fast money environment that ensued afterwards made it economically difficult to sustain having children. The divorce rate increased sharply during the 20’s and the definition of relationships with women widely changed. A sexual revolution of sorts occurred; cosmetics, which had previously only been used by prostitutes and clothing models became extremely popular for the flapper culture.  Open relationships and divorce became normal, especially with the economic difficulties men faced versus the cultural promotion of wealth and excess in the Roaring 20’s. This was widely viewed as a rejection of the ‘Victorian’ way of life. Eugenics was considered ‘science’ and extreme nativism became culturally popular. Xenophobia was a widely held belief following World War I with much of the economic malaise being blamed on the Europeans. The KKK, like the Tea Party, rose up as a reaction to this new liberal culture. The KKK would prove to be the most radical Prohibitionists, forming their own Prohibition Anti-Saloon League lynch mob’s to bust alcohol and medical marijuana speakeasies (“tea pads” in Los Angeles)

“The white, native-born Protestant American, as a member of the religious and racial majority, was usually incapable of doubting his native institutions. The blame for the maladies of his world must rest elsewhere. And so he looked to other influences – Roman Catholics who supposedly challenged Protestant hegemony and the separation of church and state. Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants crowding onto American shores, Negroes seeking more equitable treatment, American Jews who kept living costs up while wages went down, and numerous other elements of frustration before which he felt helpless. Then the Klan entered his community and offered him a way to fight back. It’s not surprising that the Klan’s strongest supporters were residents of the rural and isolated countryside and city dwellers who had just recently arrived from the farm who were shocked by the lifestyles they witnessed in the big city. The drastic changes of the preceding half century had largely passed them by and lessened their influence in the country they felt they had once dominated. Now resentment of city and city people and nativism came together in the form of the Ku Klux Klan.” – Indiana State Library

Mr. Arnold took to expanding his control over the open US economy through industrial racketeering. Bootlegging proceeds were used to gobble up real corporations like construction companies that would then be used to extort monies from companies they developed for. The actual bootlegging would be left to men from the lower gangland echelons while Rothstein and his higher up associates would provide social and legal cover. Often Rothstein would have his speakeasies and marijuana clubs ceremonially raided by the police under his payroll so that the business would be left alone from future investigations. Rothstein’s gangland penetration of local police departments and Henry J. Anslinger’s Bureau of Narcotics would be critical to his development of the international heroin trade. Rothstein, seeing the opportunities present under Narcotics Prohibition, bailed out several major Chinese opium traffickers in California to assume control of their business in return. To domestically traffic the opium, Rothstein bought a series of art galleries around the country and would often ship fermented heroin through art pieces to keep the authorities unaware. Rothstein would establish the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach and San Francisco as two of the largest drug trafficking ports in all of North America.

Old Big Pharma

Almost immediately Rothstein saw a higher return on the syndicate’s heroin sales over their marijuana sales. With heroin their customers could not help but come back for more and would be willing to pay higher prices once their addictions sat in. Marijuana users tended not to use heroin and were ultimately less profitable than their opium addicted counterparts. The narcotics money was washed through the same process that the alcohol and cigarette monies went through, cash would go unreported and would be laundered into gold. Rothstein maintained private agreement with members of the Anglo-American opium oligarchy, to maintain shipments of opium to America from Turkey, India and the Far East in exchange for gold, which Rothstein could easily reproduce. The shipments, in tandem with the illegal alcohol shipments from Canada and Mexico, revealed the beginnings of a private business consortium that was willing to put its full weight behind Rothstein and the American Mob to continue a banned but extremely profitable business from being restricted by a sovereign government. Rothstein, by the time of his death, possessed influence over every major Alcohol and Tobacco distributor in the world; every city machine and sizeable municipal police force was in his pocket; the film industry, under the guidance of his lackey Louis B. Meyer, had become a very lucrative source of income and he had the silent backing of the Anglo-American Pharmaceutical companies that were quietly selling him opium to be sold on the street. The industries under Rothstein’s stewardship would eventually become the Big 5 of Marijuana Prohibition: Big Alcohal, Big Tobacco, Police/Prison Unions, Big Pharma/Opium and Big Oil who became involved with Rothstein after he brought new investment into Southern California.

Louis B Meyer

Organized crime would rule the United States from 1921 until 1932. The power of money was all prevailing following the Financial Crisis of 1920 and Prohibition had practically handed the newly organized Mob a bottomless bank account. Operations under Rothstein were notoriously smooth and came to be known as the Golden Age of the Gangster as ethnic gangs worked in harmony to keep Rothstein’s new cash flows maintained. In the mid-1920’s, Rothstein’s associate, Lou Rothkopf of the Cleveland Mob, came to influence a Bureau of Prohibition officer named Henry J. Anslinger. Rothkopf put Anslinger in charge of overseeing the northeastern heroin rackets, arresting competition and protecting the Syndicate’s operations. Rothstein, realizing the usefulness of having a corrupt police demagogue under his payroll, floated Anslinger several busts to promote his career as a drug czar. The notoriety and connections gave Anslinger official duties as a US drug control advisor and international narcotics control authority. He was promoted by the US government to travel throughout Europe and evaluate the drug control programs of the Western European nations. As the US’ narcotics representative, Anslinger made contact with Rothstein’s business associates within the Anglo-American Opium Cartel; he found that they were very pleased with the outcome of the drug control treaties. Profits had never been higher, despite opium’s international ban, Rothstein’s drug ring had created a large and highly lucrative domestic heroin market in an America powered by hot and fast cash. The British oligarchy, hampered by the economic costs of World War I, empowered Anslinger to set up heroin processing plants throughout the world using their embassies and diplomatic anti-narcotics missions as cover. They realized that the greater the drug sales in the United States, the sooner they would be able to economically recover their war losses through Rothstein’s laundered gold exports to the City of London. Anslinger would travel to all of the major opium producing regions of the world to establish covert factories that would synthesize the raw opium into heroin, the most notorious being the French Connection established between Turkey, Indochina, Sicily, Corsica and Marseilles.

Harry J Anslinger

However as the money grew, so did the greed among the gangs. Through an unfortunate twist of fate, the Boss of all Bosses, Arnold Rothstein, was assassinated in the fall of 1928 in a barbershop that he owned. The lynchpin to the entire American Syndicate had been killed and the power vacuum left behind by Mr. Arnold was immense. The government launched an immediate investigation into Rothstein’s syndicate, uncovering large heroin networks throughout New York State and Chicago. International heroin production centers were also unveiled in France, Holland and Belgium by the Bureau of Narcotics as being the key to Rothstein’s narcotics empire, however the Bureau had already relocated most of the critical operations to Southern France and Italy by the time of the raids. The Syndicate quickly fell into turmoil as Italian Bosses like Al Capone violently put their foot forward to assume control of the alcohol rackets. Future mob kingpins Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello targeted the gambling and narcotics rackets with the intention of quickly reestablishing the primacy of the Syndicate’s operations as they had been under Rothstein.

Al Capone

With Mr. Arnold’s death, the decorum that had previously taken place within the Mob was gone. Between 1929 and 1934 the American Mafia was virtually a mobsters free for all. Gangs quickly struck out on their own, developing their own scams and rackets; violently competing with each other for control of shipping lanes and turf. The anarchy was accelerated by the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Rothstein’s Gold Ring had reached its nadir, too many dollars (liquidity) had been removed from the economy by the public’s love for the illegal alcohol and narcotics industries. The government, already having cut taxes several times on the populace, found itself in a financial crisis as too much money had been created relative to the national gold supply. The German economy entered hyperinflation in 1929; the European economy had become dependent on War Reparations and the issuance of new bonds to be bought by American investors. The imbalance of the global economy created a crisis in European bonds by 1929 as European countries failed to economically recover from World War I; the default of bonds created a stock market contagion that quickly spread to the United States. As the stock market began to collapse, large margin calls began to wipe out large blocks of liquidity in the market; the US economy had become severely overextended by the speculative bubble. The agricultural and manufacturing sectors had declined due to deregulation, union busting and debt; these sectors composed of the majority of the US economy and were not strong enough to insulate America from the economic shocks to the financial and services sectors. Loans dried up and banks began to become insolvent as their capital investments were reduced to zero.

Collapse

The Dust Bowl

Hoover was considered to be a ‘useful idiot’ by Andrew Mellon and the Ohio Gang who had persuaded Coolidge to exit stage right in popularity in favor of Hoover, who was a staunch careerist. Mellon had become the spokesman for the American oligarchy in the 1920s and owned one of the largest international banking firms in New York. He had a great reputation for using fiscal policies to ease credit and reduce the public debt. He was keenly aware of the situation that had materialized within the United States, a large pool of fiat liquidity had amassed without the proper Gold supply to back it; imminent defaults on European bonds would have led to large losses and a categorical reduction in the US gold supply to make good on those losses. Mellon and the Federal Reserve had expanded the dollar supply so rapidly during the Roaring 20’s that the United States could only pay 40% of its gold liability. To protect the bullion interests of the oligarchy, Mellon raised the interest rate and sharply contracted the money supply to deflate the dollar back to gold parity. This decision was fine for oligarchical interests who held large bullion and dollar supplies but was utterly devastating for the American farmer and manufacturer who watched as the prices of their products bottomed out, killing thousands of farm businesses and factories throughout the country. Many of the service sector businesses had become mob owned after 1925 and these businesses practically evaporated with the US money supply.

Hoover returned to the playbook used by Harding and Coolidge; putting forward ideas to cut taxes to stimulate growth while investing in large infrastructure projects to stimulate employment. However, unbeknownst to Hoover, a large portion of the assumed tax base had been fraudulent due to the flourishing of organized crime under the previous administrations. The large majority of the population were farmers, mal-investment led to an overproduction in agricultural goods which compounded with the deflation created by Mellon and the Federal Reserve, crushed the commodities market and all of the American farmer’s profits with it. Manufacturing goods followed suit as factories lost their customer bases and raw material vendors. There was literally no tax base left to be had. Hoover scrambled to provide government aide to the public sectors, creating public works programs to build new federal buildings, passing large agricultural subsidies, and prevailing wage acts to boost growth. Hoover, however would not break with Mellon’s view of keeping a balanced budget, refusing to push the government into debt to stave off the Depression. Instead he ran with suggested ideas like deporting 500,000 migrant workers and helping pass the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff which exploded like a bomb on international trade.

Andrew Mellon

In 1929, following the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Hoover became aware of the large hand of international narcotics that had taken control over the economy of the United States. Vast quantities of heroin and alcohol were being produced outside of the country and the dollar income from those sales was being used to buy US and foreign gold. It became apparent that the Bureau of Prohibition had become completely corrupted, thus Hoover commissioned Mellon to use the authority of the Treasury to divide the Bureau into two organizations: The Bureau of Prohibition which was to be formed from new recruits and led by Eliot Ness; and the Bureau of Narcotics, which drew recruits from the old bureau and was led by Henry J. Anslinger. Hoover hoped to mitigate the Bureau’s corruption by focusing them on tackling heroin rackets ran by minorities not realizing that it was the Bureau who managed them. Heroin imports and sales had declined temporarily following the assassination of Arnold Rothstein; the US government mistook this for a decline in popularity of the drug when in fact the Bureau of Narcotics was already in the process of making the international heroin trade more efficient by establishing the French Connection.

Hoovervilles

The final nail in the economic coffin would come in 1931. Eliot Ness’s Untouchables had ferociously dismantled Al Capone’s alcohol empire, breaking the Canadian-Seagram’s Connection and pushing the Italian Mobs back into competition for the narcotics rackets. Ness was a national hero in a decade of practical lawlessness and it became clear that public opinion had staunchly turned against the Mob following Capone’s brutal massacres. Traditionally gangland activities had always stayed incognito and behind-the-scenes, but Capone, an Italian, had loudly brought the bloody violence, public corruption and racket competition before the scrutiny of the public. The landed gentry had also earned the ire of the public at large as they were blamed, and rightfully so, for bringing about the economic devastation that had ripped the world apart. Calls for bigger government and the seizure of the wealth’s ill-gotten assets created a panic among the American elite who saw an existential threat to their status in society with the rejection of lessee-faire capitalism as an economic ideology.

Trade unionists and economic liberals like Franklin Delano Roosevelt became popular as political candidates, calling for increased taxes and the seizure of monetized commodities. Andrew Mellon, facing impending impeachment, called for a meeting between the Anglo-American elite which included Averill Harriman, leader of the Consortium  and one of the richest bankers in New York. Harriman and Lord Montague Norman of the British Central Bank made a shocking proposal: Norman would raise the interest rate on the pound from 1% to 5%, 1.5 points above the US prime rate with an additional 0.5% on all gold deposits and that all gold would be guaranteed by the English Crown. The Dollar had proven to be a formidable adversary to the international dominance of the British Pound following the First World War. Norman viewed his plan as a painful necessity in maintaining the Pound as the global reserve currency which in turn would maintain the power of the British Empire. Norman’s rate hike would become historically infamous as the coup d’grace to the global economy; literally overnight, vast sums of gold deposits exited the private accounts and accounts of Central Banks around the world. The gold was quickly centralized in the City of London which guaranteed depositor safety from the Crown and higher rates of interest. An international currency crisis immediately followed as non-pound denominated currencies collapsed from the sudden decline in gold reserves. The US economy entered the worst period of deflation in its history, the sudden loss of gold reserves put the economy into complete freefall; banks closed, loans and deposits vanished with the loss of dollar reserves. New money could not be created and old money was being hoarded as prices declined by the hour. The Republican moneyed elite had reached the depths of their own greed and depravity, they had successfully defrauded their own country, the entire country, through the use of organized crime.

Bonus Army Massacre

The Great Depression was an unspeakable horror. By the end of 1931, industrial production collapsed by 46%, prices fell by a third, foreign trade declined by two-thirds and unemployment soared by over 600%.  Urban cities filled with citizens from the South and Mid-West, desperately searching for work. Hoovervilles became common with the large population of homeless erecting tent cities to support themselves. The most notorious Hoovervilles’ were in New York’s central park, the Port of Seattle and The Bonus Army, an assemblage of 17,000 World War I veterans and their families in Washington DC led by the famous General Smedley Butler. The federal government had not honored several of the certificates issued to veterans from World War I and Hoover met the protestors with violent reprisals from the local police and the Army which eventually drove the Hooverville from Washington DC.

Continue to Part 3…..

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Part 1

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/07/27/the-devils-work-marijuana-in-20s-and-30s-part-1/

Part 2

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The New Dawn and A New Deal

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The use of medical marijuana began to slowly return to popularity in the United States starting in 1930. Farmers and factory workers frequently suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder linked to the Great Depression as well as previous experiences fighting in World War I and they used medical marijuana to keep themselves mentally intact during the harsh, trying times of the Great Depression. The mentality of the entire country experienced an intense sea change as economic ideas surrounding government based central planning were entertained as a replacement for free market capitalism, which had led the country to utter disaster. The American oligarchy became an object of ridicule and absolute contempt by the American public. This could not have been enunciated more by the remarkable landslide election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, considered to be a far left candidate in his era. FDR promised to use the government to make war against the “economic royalists” and “disaster capitalists” who had brought the nation to its very knees. The wealthy absolutely despised Roosevelt from the very beginning, he surrounded himself with liberal thinkers and his way of doing business was intensely different from that of his Republican predecessors.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Roosevelt, having been born out of a family that had profited heavily from the Consortium’s control of the Republican Party for many decades, was deepfully resentful of his wealthy brethren. Aristocratic jealousies and rivalries towards his natural talents and charisma culminated in his rejection and blackballing from the Porcelian Club, an elite club at Harvard for the wealthy elite, led to deep resentment and hatred for his own, the landed gentry. Roosevelt, through his wife Eleanor, was immensely sympathetic toward the plight of the American people who had been absolutely crushed by almost 50 years of absolute domination and excess by the wealthy elite and the economic collapse that resulted thereafter. Roosevelt declared that his election was a “…more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms” and he was even subtly hinting at the effort the American people would face against the domination of the syndicates, something he would receive help with from a close friend and patriotic mobster, Joe Kennedy. Roosevelt’s victory coalition largely consisted of union members, polish, Italians, jews, and blacks. Roosevelt refused to work with Hoover or compromise with the Republicans regarding an economic solution, knowing full well that they had sold out the economy to America’s criminal and enemies. However, Roosevelt would not be so fortunate as to go untested by the American oligarchy who had become content with their gold heist, regardless of the economic consequences. They would marry into the Anglo-American oligarchy and be able to have their finances stored abroad while ruling a new sharecropper nation domestically. The oligarchy had no intention of having FDR stop them from utterly dominating their newly conquered nation.

Roosevelt took office in 1933, the same year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The economy was devastated, over 2 million people had been made homeless and deflation continued to rule global trade. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt stated:

“Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence… The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

Roosevelt’s First 100 days was known for the enaction of the New Deal, the largest scale domestic reform ever known in US history. The New Deal would be based on an anti-monopoly anti-oligopoly tradition; bigness was seen as a form of wasteful central planning. Safety nets would be enacted; the minimum wage, child labor laws, workers compensation, unemployment compensation, unemployment relief, Social Security, public employment and health insurance would be created in America for the first time. Ideas from Wilson’s mobilization were tooled around increasing job production and harnessing middle and lower class purchasing power. The government would regulate the unfettered competition, the government would stand to protect the people from the abuses of the landed class, the government would stop the monopolies and create jobs, the government would cure the infection of organized crime that had seized its claws into the very fabric of society and the government would tax the rich to pay for all of it. New Deal opponents would be derided publically as the Old Right, servants of the landed class that had brought about the financial apocalypse around them.

Averall Harriman

The Depression hit every aspect of life, farms were destroyed, factories closed, job evaporated and both food and money were scarce. The US had been reduced economically to that of a Third World nation within in its own time. The impact on US heavy industry spread throughout the world. European nations collapsed and both fascist and socialist dictatorships took power throughout Europe. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, and Mussolini all came into their prime during the 1930s. Canada, reliant on illegal alcohol exports to the US, saw their economic output cut in half as impoverished Americans could no longer afford simple liquor sales. American tariffs crushed Caribbean and South American trade. China and Japan went to war over territory, with Japan trying to stave off depression through a war economy. The Consortium came under the power of Colonel Henry Stimson, John Foster Dulles, George Herbert Walker, and Averall Harriman during FDR’s reign, the group had become wealthy making loans through Walker and Harriman’s banking interests to Nazi Germany. The German government was  very uninhibited when it came to human rights limitations on chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Harriman and Prescott Bush would become the bankers that funded Nazi Germany’s economic programs during the 1930s. Stimson was commissioned to bring down FDR at any cost and he decided to do so by utilizing his Anglican connections to agitate a war in Europe.

Col. Henry Stimson

Stimson knew he could not touch FDR politically, he was simply too popular and the newly redirected Federal Bureau of Investigations had become a formidable opponent as well. Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, was one of the New Deal architects and even more liberal than Roosevelt was. The Economy Act balanced the federal budget by reorganizing the government but allowed for future deficit spending for emergency economic action. Congress distributed the Bonus Bill to the World War I veterans, something previously denied by the Republican government. The New Dealers promoted Keynesianism with balanced budgets as a pragmatic approach to creating start-up economic expansion. FDR passed the Emergency Banking Act which reopened shuttered banks with new cash injections from the Federal Reserve; Treasury officials were given greater law enforcement power as many banks had been previously owned by the Syndicate and were not eligible for Treasury funds. The Glass-Steagall Act limited interaction between the Commercial and Investment Banks to protect the consumer from the frauds that had been perpetrated by the banking community during the 1920s. The banking reform created unprecedented economic stability. The Securities Act of 1933 was enacted to create the SEC to monitor the banks owned by the wealthy and protect the stock market from speculative attacks by traders loyal to either the City of London or their own greed.

WPA Project

Public relief agencies were created to immediately aid the working poor and create jobs. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) created the National Recovery Administration which had a blanket mandate to raise consumer purchasing power through job creation and industrial regeneration. The NRA worked closely to empower unions and give the workers greater ownership of the workspace in which they operated. Wages had to be fair and working conditions had to be safe and fair. Price stabilization was enacted to control deflation and the NRA aided in this by creating jobs in industries like coal production. The NRA became a major target for the American upper class and the Republican Party as it regulated industry in a way that to them was unheard of and far more equitable to the middle and working classes. The Public Works Administration created millions of jobs building bridges, airports, roads, dams, post offices, courthouses and highways. The Resettlement Administration (RA), the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), rural welfare projects sponsored by the WPA, National Youth Administration (NYA), Forest Service and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were created to develop forests, the national parks, create utility infrastructure for towns, build schools and reforest lands to improve the environment which had been devastated by the Dust Bowl, a product of corporate farm mechanization and centralization. The Tennessee Valley Authority was created as one of the largest dam projects the world had ever known. The FHA was created to regulate housing and trade was liberalized to end the trade gridlock created by the Republican tariffs. The Gold Standard was suspended to allow the Treasury to inject emergency liquidity to stave off the disastrous deflation; the Wall Street brokers smirked at this knowing that much of America’s gold had been sent to London in 1931.

Most importantly, Roosevelt repealed Prohibition and not just Alcohol Prohibition; he also repealed the 1922 Narcotics Drug Import and Export Act and curbed the Harrison Tax Act to make medical marijuana and more importantly, hemp, economically available. The Bureau of Narcotics oversight over medical marijuana and hemp was severely limited by the New Deal, and the advent of the AAA at first. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) was originally created to regulate food prices, giving farmers a chance at last to fight Wall Street speculators and obtain fair food prices. Hemp was the most widely cultivated, most widely distributed and most profitable crop the farmers were allowed to produce from 1933 to 1945.

To quote Jack Herer:

“Modern technology was about to be applied to hemp production, making it the number one agricultural resource in America. Two of the most respected and influential journals in the nation, Popular Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering, forecast a bright future for American hemp. Thousands of new products creating millions of new jobs would herald the end of the Great Depression….As early as 1901 and continuing to 1937, the USDA repeatedly predicted that, once machinery capable of harvesting, stripping and separating the fiber from the pulp was invested or engineered, hemp would once again be America’s number one farm crop….The prediction was reaffirmed in the popular press when Popular Merchanics published its February 1938 article “Billion Dollar Crop…a trillion dollar industry by today’s standards.

New Deal Hemp Farm

From the article Jack is referencing:

“American farmers are promised a new cash crop with an annual value of several million dollars, all because a machine has been invented which solves a problem more than 6,000 years old. It is hemp, a crop that will not compete with other American products. Instead it will displace imports of raw materials and manufactured products produced by under paid [immigrant] and peasant labor and it will provide thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land…..Hemp is the standard fiber of the world. It has great tensile strength and durability. It is used to produce more than 5,000 textile products, ranging from rope to fine laces, and the woody hurds remaining after the fiber has been removed containmore than 77% cellulose, and can be used to produce more than 25,000 products, ranging from dynamite to Cellophane.

From the farmers point of view, hemp is an easy crop to grow and will yield from three to six tons per acre on any land that will grow corn, wheat, or oats….Thousands of tons of hemp hurds are used every year by one large powder company for the manufacture of dynamite and TNT. A large paper company, which has been paying millions of dollars a year in duties on foreign made cigarette papers now is manufacturing these papers from American hemp grown in Minnesota….Our imports of foreign fabrics and fibers average about $200 million a year; in raw fibers alone we imported over $50 million a year in the first six months of 1937. All of this income can be made available to Americans.

New Deal Hemp Company

1930’s Hemp Field

Excerpt from New Deal Era literature:

“Aside from the suspension of the Gold Standard (the first and foremost important price lifting measure) and the closing and re-opening of the banks, the most spectacular early measures of the New Deal were the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act. Both were nullified by the Supreme Court which, by these very decision, contributed greatly to the outcry for judicial reform. The AAA gave subsidies to farmers for taking land out of cultivation, and did much to raise farm purchasing power in consonance with the basic aim of the New Deal….Within one year the AAA increased farm income by 38% and farm purchasing power by an estimated 25% through the inauguration of the very production control method that was originally used by the industrialists. The cost of the fam subsidy was paid for by a small imposed sales tax. The NIRA, approved June 16 1933..’intended’ to (1) legalize those voluntary trade associations which President Hoover had discouraged by removing the restraints of anti-trust laws; (2) to make them effective by bringing the recalcitrants into line through compulsion; but (3) to bestow these privileges upon trade and industry in return for their acknowledgement of social responsibility in the form of concessions to labor and the consumer….the cold blooded, ruthless fashion in which the industrialists consciously moved to vitiate these provisions of the section that was beneficial to labor perhaps did more to educate the country about the socially irresponsible character of the big proprietors than had all the preachments of the radicals for years. Moreover the pathetic eagerness with which a vast multitude grasped at just $12 a week, and the outcry from the Southern Industrialists against such ‘high wages’ drove into public consciousness the fact that labor in the United States, except its aristocracy in the AFL craft unions, had long been fiercely exploited at coolie pay. Details of the farm situation highlighted in the debate around the AAA, also had a similar educative effect, so that if the New Deal did nothing else it succeeded, in these and other of its efforts, in implanting a deep suspicion in the public mind about the motives and methods of the big feudalistic proprietors, who habitually masquerade as simple businessman.

The gigantic program of unemployment relief embarked upon by the New deal was of direct aid to retail trade and to the farmers in that the money paid out to the unemployed went immediately to the purchase of necessities. Several government agencies were created to handle the projects, but the WPA, launched on May 6 1935, finally consolidated all the divisions of relief. Works Progress funds were allocated to naval building, to municipal improvements, and construction where local governments shared part of the cost, to reforestation, and many other ends; the principal aim however was to get money into circulation. In connection with the building and construction phases of this program there was of course, a demand for cement, stone, machinery, steel, and lumber, which was of benefit to heavy industry; but the benefit was neither so great nor as immediate as that conferred upon industries more closely aligned with the retail market.

Meanwhile, various measures designed to hamper banks in their domination of heavy industry were passed under presidential authority. The first of these was the Banking Act of 1933, which divorced commercial and investment banking, provided for insurance deposits, and vested in the Federal Reserve Board the right to control loans entering speculative channels. The separation of the deposit and underwriting functions of the banks was a blow directed consciously at JP Morgan , and measurably weakened the power of that and other private banking houses. Not at all strangely, this action was sought and approved by Winthrop Aldrich, chair of the Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. Weakened under Hoover, the Rockefellers were strengthened for a time by the New Deal- by the sharp rise in oil prices, and the improvement of the real estate market, and although John D Rockefeller Jr. outwardly maintained his Republicanism, the Standard Oil clans helped the New Deal at many points and manifested cordiality to its acts. The New Deal reciprocated by doing nothing in its early stages at least, to disturb or injure the Standard Oil Empire. After passage of the Banking Act, JP Morgan immediately set up Morgan Stanley for handling securities issues, but as this branch was effectively segregated from the central house the firm could no longer function as freely as of old. Extension of the powers of the Federal Reserve Board by giving it control over the open market committee and over the reserve requirements of membership banks also weakened JP Morgan power in finance…symbolic of the new regime Marriner S. Eccles, small banker and mining entrepreneur from Utah, was made governor of the Reserve Board. Control of the money market was transferred to Washington, was thereafter to be by whoever controlled the government.”

-Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s 60 Families (1937)

Despite FDR’s ability to unite the middle and working class into an industrial powerhouse he still faced grave issues with the American oligarchy and the Republican establishment. The oligarchy may have lost complete control of the Presidency but they still retained power over the Supreme Court and large portions of the press. FDR often had to defend his New Deal initiatives in the US Federal Court system against the Republican activist judges seeking to rule his recovery programs unconstitutional on behalf of the oligarchical interest. He responded to this by unveiling the second half of the New Deal which passed the Social Security Act, creating welfare and a social safety net; the Wagner Act, giving unions the right to form and collectively bargain; the WPA was expanded even further to create major projects like the Lincoln Tunnel, LaGuardia Airport, the Bay Bridge, and many other large urban restoration projects that laid the seeds for later Great Society projects. The Revenue Act of 1935 hit the wealthy the hardest, it was literally designed to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom. The bill imposed an income tax of 79% on incomes over $5 million, making the tax code equitable for the first time since its implementation. The rich called Roosevelt a ‘traitor to his class’ in utter hatred of his dismantling of their empire of greed. He also enacted the Housing Act of 1937 to abolish slums and create a housing authority.

Lend-Lease Hemp Promotion

New Deal Hempfield

FDR also opened a new front against the Anglo-American elite by empowering the FBI to initiate surveillance against them. Fiorello LaGuardia, the notorious anti-Mafia Mayor of New York, came to power in 1932 as well on a large anti-crime ticket; he worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover to bring down ‘The Big Heat’ on the American Syndicate. He had Lucky Luciano arrested, purged the New York police force of corruption, led search-and-destroy lynch mobs against Syndicate casinos and black market rackets. The Syndicate responded by unleashing their assassins on a country wide bank robbing spree to destabilize the economy. Hoover worked with notorious gangster hunter Melvin Purvis to bring down Syndicate bank robbers like John Dillinger, Ma Barker, Babyface Nelson, Creepy Karpis, and Machine Gun Kelly. The FBI also played a pivotal role in rounding up the criminal members of the KKK, especially those who had penetrated Southern California city administrations in the 1920s and set up racial rackets. LaGuardia was also joined by Thomas Dewey, a Republican prosecutor; a former Wall Street trader, that sought to end New York corruption after losing much of his fortune in the crash. Dewey targeted Lucky Luciano’s Upstart “Commission” which had taken over the power vacuum left by the fall of Mr. Arnold and Al Capone.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia

“One of his biggest prizes was gangster Dutch Schultz, whom he had battled as both a federal and state prosecutor. Schultz’s first trial ended in a deadlock; prior to his second trial, Schultz had the venue moved to Malone, New York, then moved there and garnered the sympathy of the townspeople through charitable acts so that when it came time for his trial, the jury found him innocent, liking him too much to convict him.

Dewey and La Guardia threatened Schultz with instant arrest and further charges. Schultz now proposed to murder Dewey. Dewey would be killed while he made his daily morning call to his office from a pay phone near his home. However, New York crime boss Lucky Luciano and the “Mafia Commission” decided that Dewey’s murder would provoke an all-out crackdown. Instead they had Schultz killed.”

• MacMillian, The Five Families (2008)

The Mafia suffered further setbacks as fascism took over continental Europe and Benito Mussolini began a purge of Sicilian mob leaders to consolidate power within Italy. This disrupted the French Connection which relied heavily on Turkish opium in the 1930s and for Sicilian intermediaries which had been disconnected by Fascist Italy. Narcotics income practically went to zero after the New Deal’s AAA reform decriminalized medical marijuana and hemp. When Mussolini took power in the mid-twenties he went on a tour of the country to present his new leadership program of fascism to the entire country; when in Palermo, he was received by Don Francisco Ciccio, the mayor of Palermo who insulted Mussolini when he was told he would not need a police escort. Mussolini responded that fascists did not need a peasant escort insulting Ciccio. The Don ordered the townspeople not to attend Mussolini’s speech and released patients from the local mental ward to attend instead. The deeply angered Mussolini appointed Cesare Mori to form a secret police in Sicily that would end the Mafia dominance once and for all. Mori would be one of the most swift, effective and brutal opponents the Mafia had ever encountered.

Cesare Mori

“Mori took up his post in Palermo in November 1925 and remained in office until 1929. Within the first two months he arrested over five hundred men, a number that would only grow in the following years. In January 1926, he undertook what was probably his most famous action, the occupation of the village of Gangi, a stronghold of various criminal gangs. Using carabinieri and police forces he ordered house-to-house searches, picking up bandits, small-time Mafia members and various suspects who were on the run. He did not hesitate to lay siege to towns, use torture, or take women and children as hostages to oblige suspects to give themselves up. These harsh methods earned him the nickname of “Iron Prefect”.

Mori understood the basis of Mafia power. In order to defeat the phenomenon, he felt it necessary to “forge a direct bond between the population and the state, to annul the system of intermediation under which citizens could not approach the authorities except through middlemen…, receiving as a favour that which is due them as their right.” Mori’s methods were sometimes similar to those of the Mafia. He did not just arrest the bandits, but sought to humiliate them as well. If he could exhibit a strong central authority to rival the mafia, the people would see that the Mafia was not their only option for protection.

Mori’s inquiries brought evidence of collusion between the Mafia and influential members of the State apparatus and the Fascist party. His position, however, became more precarious. Some 11,000 arrests are attributed to Mori’s rule in Palermo. That led to massive amounts of paperwork in order to prepare for the trials, which may have been partially responsible for his dismissal. Mussolini had already nominated Mori as a senator in 1928, and in June 1929 he was relieved of his duty. The Fascist propaganda proudly announced that the Mafia had been defeated.”

• Newark, Mafia Allies (2007)

Roosevelt’s Challenge

Seeking to preemptively stop the Supreme Court from dismantling the second New Deal, FDR attempted his court packing plan with the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. The bill allowed the President to power to appoint an additional Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, up to a maximum of six. FDR had also punished many of the Lochner Era judges by pushing them out of the court through pension cut threats. The court attempted to stop one of FDR’s critical measures: Executive Order 6102. This order seized the gold held by the wealthy, in the form of coins, bullion and certificates and exchanged them for dollars at fixed rate. This was to prevent the wealthy from manipulating the money supply with their gold and London accounts as they had previous done throughout the last 50 years. The court ruled that the government could not seize the gold, even though it was being done to protect the currency from speculative attack by the European powers. Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes had a personal vendetta against FDR and also had close relations with the British Royal Family, the Dutch Royal Family and the Du Pont family who were ardently opposed to FDR’s allowance of hemp production. Hughes led the challenge against FDR’s attempt to break the railroad monopoly, the New Deal farm subsidies, stock market regulations, the NRA and NIRA, the AAA and the New Deal coal program. The Supreme Court ruled on many of these on “Black Monday” on May 27, 1935. Roosevelt’s court packing bill was unfortunately defeated, but his attempt to unseat the oligarchies power in the court led to more desperate and violent ends to stop his reforms.

Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes

FDR won a stunning landslide reelection in 1936 much to the chagrin of the American landed elite. He had a strong anti-imperialist foreign policy which derided the exploitation and immiseration caused by the British and French Empires and their colonialism of other continents. FDR also wished to renounce the right to unilateral intervention in South America and give more diplomatic power to international bodies. He became more critical of Adolf Hitler, especially as FDR’s enemies began to rally around Hitler with Henry Ford. Col. Stimson, head of the Anglo-American Consortium  began conspiring with Churchill on ways to compel FDR to comply with British wishes and also on ways to assassinate FDR as well. He had already been the target of several coup attempts, one most infamously participated in by Prescott Bush and Averall Harriman called the Business Plot. The coup was averted by the testimony of Smedley Butler who became opposed to the American oligarchy after the Bonus Army massacre. The Consortium  would be indicted again by FDR for supplying illegal monies and arms shipments to Hitler during World War II in 1942 under the Union Banking Corporation, those named in the indictment included many Consortium  leaders: Averell Harriman, E Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush, Samuel Pryor, Fritz Thyssen, and Robert Lovett.

Prescott Bush

One of the top targets of the oligarchies response to FDR’s court packing attempt was the new hemp crop propping up the Middle Class. Not only was it an industrial threat to the Anglo-American oil, pharmaceutical and vice companies but it was the main engine driver of FDR’s New Deal programs and the oligarchy believed that if the crop could once again be controlled it’s decline would also defeat the New Deal.

“In the mid-1930.when the new mechanical hemp fiber stripping machines and machines to conserve hemp’s high cellulose pulp finally became state-of-the-art, available and affordable, the enormous timber acreage and businesses of the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division, Kimberly Clark USA, and virtually all other timber, paper and large newspaper holding companies stood to lose billions of dollars and perhaps go bankrupt.

Coincidently in 1937, DuPont had just patented processes for making plastics from oil and coal as well as a new sulfite process for making paper from wood pulp…accounting for over 80% of all the companies railroad carloadings over the next sixty years into the 1990s. If hemp had never been made illegal, 80% of DuPont’s business never would have materialized…jeopoardizing the lucrative financial schemes of Hearst, DuPont and DuPont’s Chief Financial backer, Andrew Mellon of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh”

-Jack Herer

Andrew Mellon

Andrew Mellon, evil billionaire and executive harbinger of the Great Depression immediately set to work employing his ex-cronies within the Bureau of Narcotics, chiefly Henry J. Anslinger to reinstitute marijuana and hemp prohibition through a press based social engineering campaign using Hearst’s media resources. Anslinger was actually married to Mellon’s niece and he shared in Mellon’s lucrative financial ties. The idea for the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was developed originally to create a tax to profit off the sale of medical marijuana and hemp synthesis as a medical application, it was originally designed from firearms taxes but both Mellon, DuPont, Anslinger and Hearst intended to meddle with the act to generate a different result.

“In the secret Treasury Department meetings conducted between 1935 and 1937, prohibitive tax laws were drafted and strategies were plotted. Marijuana could not be banned outright; the law called for an ‘occupational’ excise tax upon dealers and a transfer tax upon dealings in marijuana. Importers, manufacturers, sellers and distributors were required to register with the Secretary of the Treasury and pay the occupational tax.”

-Jack Herer

Anslinger led a very public, racially charged campaign backed by the American oligarchy against medical marijuana. He was opposed by the AMA and Fiorello LaGuardia, but Anslinger abused his Bureau of Narcotics position to strip pro-marijuana doctors of their licenses, corralling the AMA into submission despite medical evidence to the contrary. Anslinger debated publically with LaGuardia while leading a highly publicized drug seizure campaign with the Bureau of Narcotics against medical marijuana. Medical marijuana dealers were derided as being ethnic and of the criminal underworld. Racist and classist media was used to turn American views against marijuana as a corrupting illicit drug. Reefer Madness was born. The blow to the AAA by the Supreme Court firmly put medical marijuana back in Anslinger’s jurisdiction and abusing the regulations of the Marijuana Tax Act, he barred all marijuana dealers from being federally licensed by the Treasury Department effectively putting a halt to hemp production at the national level. Marijuana production for hemp would only be allowed going forward by the Bureau of Narcotics for oligarchical dealers that wished to grow hemp on their lands in US territories for the military.

FDR also faced another challenge from the Department of the Navy in which Henry Stimson had become very influential and was bringing the relationship between US and British naval intelligence closer for his own purposes. This led to penetration of Naval Intelligence by British Intelligence who openly recruited members of the American syndicate to serve as intelligence operatives in Europe. Stimson sought to counter FDR next by realigning the military apparatus and officer’s corps behind him which was more effective than trying to bribe FDR military loyalists like Smedley Butler, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower. Stimson also directed the oligarchies efforts to unseat Vice President Henry Wallace during the Democratic National Committee and replace him with Harry Truman, a Stimson loyalist and someone who could eventually turn Eisenhower to their influence. He was much colder and calculating than the brash Harriman, Bush and Walker business coup attempts, which had failed numerously throughout FDR’s tenure; the public battles with the court also brought more criticism against oligarchical power and gave FDR more strength to expand the New Deal. FDR had also started the Lend-Lease program with the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, an economic program for the British and French that demanded payment in gold. If Hitler went to war, FDR could repatriate gold through lend lease, Stimson knew that more extreme measures would be necessary.

Henry Wallace

Stimson and John Foster Dulles began to direct members of the Consortium to begin increasing financial and military backing to Adolf Hitler and the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany. This occurred most notably during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 which served as preliminary war game for the greater conflict to come. Hitler would conquer Europe, Hitler would destroy their rivals, Hitler would conquer the world and anoint the wealthy the master race of all Earth. Competition among the American oligarchy and the British peerage broke out over who was pro-New Deal and who was pro-Hitler. Neither accepted Stalinist Communism, but both stood behind the economic miracles of the American New Deal and Nazism. Both ideas were similar in method but differed immensely in execution; both ideas revolved around central planning but while FDR sought to support and restore market conditions, Hitler sought to fundamentally alter the world order. Neither of them wanted the dominance of a British reserve currency any longer; the British had destroyed the world economy and a new reserve currency had to emerge. Hitler’s aggression towards the Jews and other European states beginning in 1938 was the end result of decades of evil and excess by an unforgiving and unapologetic sect of the power elite. The Consortium could not seize the reins of power in America back from FDR and the New Deal Democrats, so they preferred to destroy it by backing Hitler’s plans for world domination. Stimson would also provoke the Japanese by utilizing his connection to strain trade relations between the Japanese Empire and the US. FDR routinely plotted against Stimson and Churchill with Vice President Wallace and Joe Kennedy; he had become keenly aware of what the American oligarchy and the British oligarchy were trying to perpetuate but he faced a big problem, the American gold still remained within City of London vaults and that the power of the Consortium would continue until America could repatriate the stolen precious metals. FDR knew Stimson and the Consortium wanted to drag America into the war to force a war economy that they could control, especially through opium and pharmaceutical sales for the war injured; he opposed the war on that principle, having now spent his Presidential career in battle with these oligarchical forces. However, he knew that he would eventually have to convince the American people to make war, otherwise financial recovery would be impossible because the Nazi’s would seize American gold reserves in London that were needed to pay down the Depression debts.

Adolf Hitler

This ultimate prospect was what forged the fateful, albeit temporary alliance, between FDR and Stimson that lasted from 1940 to 1945; unifying the American public with the American elite to stop the ultimate evil that was Adolf Hitler from ruling the world. By 1940, the British had been defeated by the Nazis at the Battle of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain raged against the English isles; the Royal Family now paid for its sins in the face of total annihilation against the Frankenstein monster of their own creation, the Nazi War Machine. The City of London was under constant bombing by the German Luftwaffe and fears that the international and royal gold reserves of London would be seized by a foreign power became a reality for the first time. The Nazi’s had already confiscated Jewish and foreign gold from seized territories throughout Europe and were using the proceeds to generate currency to continue the massive wear effort; seizing the City of London would be the economic coup d’grace and the ultimate triumph for Hitler. Both FDR and Stimson feared that the United States would never recover from such a blow nor remain under the control of either side, but rather through financial obligation to Nazi Germany. However, despite cooperation, the Consortium continued to work against FDR and the New Deal by financially aiding the Nazis and funding strikebreakers like the KKK, American Legion and the German Bund; namely the Bush and Walker families who envisioned a Nazi victory in Europe.

Nuremburg

Stimson, in an uneasy affair, would become Roosevelt’s Secretary of War in 1941. Stimson appointed top members of the Consortium, Robert Patterson, Robert Lovett, the Dulles Brothers and Stimson’s right hand, John McCloy, to executive positions within FDR’s cabinet. Stimson also elevated the career of Republican loyalist General George Patton in an attempt to coerce Gen Dwight Eisenhower under his influence to maintain rank over Patton. The Consortium reached out to Lucky Luciano to provide top recruits from the Mob that could serve as officers within the Army and Navy of whom Stimson and his loyalist officers could use to form the OSS under the purview of Consortium officer William Donavon. Stimson’s new group of Consortium upstarts would later be instrumental in the assassination of John F Kennedy. Stimson, along with Oppenheimer, is considered one of the fathers of the atomic bomb; he took direct personal control of the project and his advice was followed at every aspect by both Roosevelt and Truman. Stimson overruled military officers when they opposed his views and often destroyed their careers. This would be proven later when under his influence Gen Douglas MacArthur was pushed from the military high command by Stimson’s lackey Harry Truman.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

“He was the only top government official who tried to predict the meaning of the atomic age—he envisioned a new era in human affairs. For a half century he had worked to inject order, science, and moralism into matters of law, of state, and of diplomacy. His views had seemed outdated in the age of total warfare, but now he held what he called “the royal straight flush.” The impact of the atom, he foresaw, would go far beyond military concerns to encompass diplomacy and world affairs, as well as business, economics and science. Above all, said Stimson, this “most terrible weapon ever known in human history” opened up “the opportunity to bring the world into a pattern in which the peace of the world and our civilization can be saved.” That is, the very destructiveness of the new weaponry would shatter the ages-old belief that wars could be advantageous. It might now be possible to call a halt to the use of destruction as a ready solution to human conflicts. Indeed, society’s new control over the most elemental forces of nature finally “caps the climax of the race between man’s growing technical power for destructiveness and his psychological power of self-control and group control–his moral power.”

• Stimson’s Memoir

John McCloy

Stimson’s White House coup came in early 1945, when Henry Wallace was unseated as Vice President at the Democratic National Convention in January; he had feuded publically with many of the oligarch’s over labor rights and had been trashed repeatedly for it in the newspapers. The political effects of the media’s assault finally took their toll and he was replaced by Harry Truman, a pawn of Averall Harriman. This event was shortly followed by FDR’s assassination on April 12 of 1945; he had already suffered declining health after several poisoning attempts between 1941 and 1944. He was poisoned while vacationing at his personal retreat in Georgia, his death was attributed to stress from years of political struggle, overwork, sleeplessness and general declining health from traveling to peace negotiation with Britain and Russia. FDR’s son alleged that Stalin informed him that Churchill had ultimately been responsible for the poisoning of FDR, possibly beginning at the conference at Yalta. Stimson retired at the end of the war, but before doing so he appointed members of the Consortium to Truman’s cabinet, they would be infamously known as “The Wise Men”: McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, the Dulles Brothers, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen and Averall Harriman.

General Douglas MacArthur

The Wise Men of the Consortium would be instrumental in putting a halt to the reforms implemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. The Wise Men empowered Anslinger to further ends and put a young Congressman named Joseph McCarthy under his wing to serve as a protégé. The Wise Men would retool the CIA to go after the OAS’ opium fields in Indochina and from there they would restart the international opium trade with the help of their mafia connections established through Lucky Luciano, who would be freed from jail along with his mafia associates in Italy under the guise of anti-communism. The same lines from the 1920’s Red Scares would be drummed up again, marijuana use would be blamed on unionists, socialists and communists. The Wise Men would work with the Syndicate Upstarts in Hollywood to bring Ronald Reagan to power within the Hollywood union; Reagan persecuted many of the left wing stars under the guise of anti-communism to remove their influence from opposing Syndicate/Wise Men influence in Hollywood. The major opposition to the Wise Men came in the form of FDR’s close friends General Douglas MacArthur and Joe Kennedy, father of JFK, RFK and Ted Kennedy. Joe Kennedy was FDR’s business and Syndicate confidant, the head of the old Irish Mob, a bootlegger, a marijuana smoker, and a man with contempt for the likes of Capone, Luciano and especially Stimson. He was known with actively feuding with many of FDR’s enemies, including the Canadian Bronfman/Seagram’s families which Kennedy competed with using distilleries managed by FDR’s son, James Roosevelt. Samuel Bronfman was also a member of the Consortium and a founder of modern Canadian conservative power brokers.

Joe Kennedy

General Douglas C. MacArthur, super-patriot and epic war hero, successfully retained much of the power of the American military command from the Wise Men until midway through the Korean War when Averall Harriman and Dean Acheson were successfully able to put enough pressure on Truman to force a removal over MacArthur’s perceived insubordination to the Wise Men’s intentional mismanagement of the conflict. Korea, to the Consortium, was a distraction to be created while ex-syndicate members now represented in the Italian Mob, CIA, MI6 and OAS set up opium facilities in Turkey, Sicily, France, Spain, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Burma to create an international opium distribution network that was more vast than any other known in world history, yet secret and hidden from the public through control of media outlets and trafficking flows. Joe Kennedy was wiser than his counterpart and used his wealth to financially align himself with Joseph McCarthy as a form of protection primarily for John F Kennedy, whom he was already grooming for President to restore the New Deal. He also groomed his other son Robert Kennedy to become Attorney General and use his families’ connections to effectively combat the Italian Mafia that had been borne from Luciano’s Commission. Kennedy knew he would have to fight the Republican Wise Men in the top world, the Mafia Commission in the underworld and the Consortium in the back world to protect the gains achieved socially and economically by the New Deal. Joe Kennedy would die shortly after JFK would become President. He would not witness the assassinations of his sons at the hand of the Consortium, nor would he see the dismantling of his friend and mentor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s, achievements for the American people be dismantled following the election of Richard Nixon and the era of Consortium rule that was to follow.

JFK

Barack Obama

This story is a tale of truth from the 20^th century, buried deep beneath 100 years of propaganda, misdirection, lies and subjugation. The Drug War is illegitimate, it is a form of slavery that was originally designed for depopulation, but is now designed for a jailhouse population and to keep humanity sick and poor so that the Consortium may continue to profit. Right now, our President Barack Obama, stands like FDR before the financial power of the Consortium; he has been trying to free marijuana from the constraints of Prohibition’s bondage, knowing full well, just as FDR did, that hemp can save an economy and marijuana could save the health of the planet from industrial disease. You must help humanity by helping the President free this medicine, please share this story with everyone you know; the Consortium have pledged themselves to death and profit, we must oppose them by pledging ourselves to life and you can do that by sharing this knowledge with others. Baruch Hashem.

- The Green Chazzan 

**Special thanks to the American Patient’s Rights Association for their excellent research! 

What happened after? Check out our Narc vs. Narc series!

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/04/22/narc-vs-narc-the-origins-of-the-modern-medical-marijuana-movement/

Reference List **Being Updated**

• Katcher, Leo (1959). The Big Bankroll. The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein, New York: Da Capo Press ISBN 0-306-80565-0
• Cohen, Adam, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (2009)
• Herer, Jack. The Emperor Has No Clothes. (2007) 
• Lundberg, Ferdinand. America’s 60 Families. (1937)
• Rothbard, Murray. America’s Great Depression. (1963)
• Nixon, Edgar Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs (1969)
• Zinn, Howard, ed. New Deal Thought (1966)
• Kessler, Ronald. The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded. Warner, 1996
• Gerber, Larry G. The Limits of Liberalism: Josephus Daniels, Henry Stimson, Bernard Baruch, Donald Richberg, Felix Frankfurter and the Development of the Modern American Political Economy (1983)
• Roosevelt, Eliot. As He Saw It. (1974)

Patrick Rohde is the Regulatory Affairs Director of the American Patient’s Rights Association, a political consulting group that has specialized in medical marijuana laws and medical marijuana regulatory issues. Mr. Rohde has played a significant role in federal medical marijuana reform, lobbying members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Select Intelligence Committee and officials within the Department of Justice, providing critical input and expertise that led to the creation of the Cole Memorandum in 2013 and the issuance of new Treasury guidelines for the medical marijuana industry this year. His organization, APRA, is currently working with the members of Congress on developing regulatory criteria for the first national marijuana law in over 100 years. He is with us today to discuss medical marijuana reform, pending marijuana legislation and current events that play a significant role in the future of marijuana decriminalization.

Simon Kokeba: Patrick, your background is in environmental science and political consulting with the Democratic Party, out of all the issues you must have come across throughout your career, why Medical Marijuana?

Patrick Rohde: I would definitely say the diverse range of pharmacological properties of medical marijuana began to attract my interest as a medical marijuana patient in college. I was fascinated with how the different strains had different rejuvenating effects on my body and I became almost obsessively curious with learning everything I possibly could about medical marijuana. I wanted to know why it made me feel healthier, why my gym performance seemed to increase not decrease and how it mitigated medical issues of my own that I initially believed were exclusive from marijuana treatment. I took a part-time job as a volunteer at a local dispensary to learn more and that experience changed my life; not only was I able to heal myself but by learning about medical marijuana from its growers and masters I was able to understand how medical marijuana heals others, namely those with chronic illnesses and terminal diseases. Working in that clinic, I watched how individuals with cancer, AIDS/HIV, MS, Psoriasis, Epilepsy, Diabetes and a number of other cutaneous and pulmonary conditions associated with industrial disease, had their conditions mitigated, by the medical marijuana and medical marijuana by-products.

SK: How effective was the treatment compared to the pharmaceuticals those patients already used?

PR: For many of the patients, marijuana acted as a complementary and sometimes supplementary medication. We found that patients taking medical marijuana with their prescriptions saw the most positive results in regards to their conditions; Diabetes patients most notably saw changes in regard to their blood sugar levels when using the medical marijuana with their medication. We also saw that patients who medicated with strains that had a CBD-THC balance provided the most positive results.  Some strains of marijuana were shown to have less invasive treatment and greater results than currently available topical treatments for psoriasis, especially industrial borne psoriasis; we also saw similar results with the same topical treatment for veteran patients that suffered third degree burns from wounds suffered at war. Immunologists who work with us have indicated that the cannabinoids seem to trigger a production of several types of white cells, and that this cellular production may lead to the mitigations of many auto-immune diseases, as well as, recovery from cancer and remission from AIDS. This potential is why I have applied my professional skills to this industry, because medical marijuana is a potential cure to some of the worst diseases to ever afflict mankind, and may become the trillion dollar pharmaceutical business of tomorrow that leads the US economic recovery. The industry just needs more professional bench strength to get the information out there that will effectively teach the public about why medical marijuana is profoundly beneficial and should be reintroduced into pharmaceutical commerce.

SK: You have been to Washington several times now to meet with Congress on this issue, what is your impression of national decriminalization?

PR: My impression is national decriminalization is coming soon; I think the President wants it. We have made a good case over the years for the economic expansion medical marijuana would provide, the federal government just didn’t understand the kind of regulatory framework that needed to be applied to the medical marijuana industry. It’s not unreasonable, every white market industry in the world is regulated, so it is natural to ask the question how do we regulate medical marijuana. We have now provided answers to that question and the government now has a framework that they can work with to craft the nation’s first legal marijuana law in over a century. I believe the President will reschedule before he leaves office, but before he does there are a several legal steps he still must take.  We cannot just simply pass a state law or make a federal law, there are also international treaty obligations with the United Nations from the Reagan and Nixon Eras that must be amended and both the President and the State Department will have to deal with that prior to the public issuance.

SK: You have called for a federal medical marijuana body that would act more in the capacity as a federal public health regulator rather than a law enforcement body like the DEA. You have argued that environmental health is more important than mitigating narco-trafficking within the marijuana industry, however law enforcement continues to argue that the industry provides the Cartels with more access to our markets, what do you say to that?

PR: This is a detailed answer, but in regards to the War on Drugs, Law Enforcement and especially the DEA among them, has failed to stem international and domestic narco-trafficking. Narcotics sales and narcotics consumption has never been higher; it’s not limited to low income neighborhoods anymore, narcotics in America now bridges all ages, races and classes. More and more evidence is coming to the surface that Law Enforcement corruption has played a significant role in the expansion of criminal narco-trafficking networks throughout the United States, and especially on the West Coast. Many DEA officers have retired to go into the medical marijuana business on behalf of some the criminals they used to arrest; what expertise could a DEA official provide to a dispensary? Most certainly not growing lessons. The DEA can’t reform, they have had forty years to prove that they could provide reasonable regulation and accurate academic studies regarding medical marijuana and they have failed in both capacities to do so. DEA is considered by the public to be the most corrupt Law Enforcement agency in the country and given the information like that your organization provides, it’s easy to see why. More importantly the general public needs to realize that the prohibition of medical marijuana is a public health crisis. Cancer and AIDS are global epidemics, 1 out of 2 males and 1 out of every 3 females throughout the world, will contract cancer in their lifetime; if medical marijuana truly is part of the cure, then laws restricting marijuana for medical use, exist as a moral abomination. The DEA is a law enforcement agency, they do not have the capacity nor the expertise to address a public health crisis, and most certainly not one associated with terminal illnesses. We give them billions of dollars a year to expand the cost of our own prison systems; why not give billions of dollars to an agency specializing in medical marijuana that has a purpose to improve medical parameters and reduce healthcare costs through alternative non-invasive therapy? And while we are at it, why not have this agency study medical marijuana and create environmental health rules that improve its medical efficacy?

SK: But what about the Cartels?

PR: Well, in maturity we must also consider that foreign medical marijuana sales within the US account for up to 80% of current international narcotics sales and that medical marijuana effectively provides a front for heroin and cocaine trafficking by organized crime. However, after essentially a 40-year case study we have seen that DEA has done nothing to stem the issue of narcotic addiction or narco-trafficking, if anything since the Bush Administration, the situation has become increasingly worse and that is being reflected by the violence we are seeing in Mexico and Central America. Medical Marijuana has been proven to effectively rehabilitate opiate users in the past, both the Cartels and domestic pharmaceutical companies are already aware of this.  The American public must understand that Drug Cartels, through their American attorneys are lobbying the Republican Congress in the United States to block reform to federal marijuana laws; and the primary purpose is to insulate their drug sales and money laundering operations using medical marijuana and medical marijuana clinics as fronts. The same groups also wish to prevent pharmaceutical marijuana from wiping out their own illicit trafficking markets.

The biggest victims of the narco-trade are the marijuana patients themselves, patients with cancer, AIDS/HIV, MS, auto-immune diseases, environmental and chemical exposures along with many other chronic conditions who need medical marijuana, sometimes to survive. Make no mistake, medical marijuana is a medicine. A medicine that stimulates the Central Nervous System and improves the body’s Immune System; that is why it works well as a retroviral for AIDS patients and that is why it fights cancer. So, ask yourself, what is the motive when a government agency like DEA, along with California Police Unions, Big Corporate Attorneys, members of the Republican Party, and even prominent liberals of the financial community including groups like Marijuana Policy Project and the League of California Cities, have done everything within their power to prohibit the availability of this pharmaceutical through unfair regulations and political obstructionism? Clearly these parties have presented a conflict of interest and do not share any social responsibility towards the persons of whom these laws were intended. That is why I believe a new agency must be formed that has an internal accountability system to prevent the systemic corruption that occurred within DEA and will have the power to confiscate the powers of Law Enforcements regulatory oversight over medical marijuana in the interest of public health.

SK: Yes, you recommended that the new agency be split into three co-equal administrations with powers to nullify each other. Don’t you think this would generate regulatory confusion?

PR: Normally I would say yes, but medical marijuana is by far an exceptional business because it transcends several business sectors: healthcare services, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Along with this comes the history of the Drug War and the remnants of that history that must be addressed in a manner that ultimately benefits the patients. We believe the new office should be one dedicated to public health and wellness, that is why two of the branches are dedicated to public health and environmental health; the idea is to be able to learn from and improve upon medical marijuana, so we will need the facilities to properly research new developments. Environmental health standards will be important to pharmaceutical standardization, which is important to patient safety and wellness. AIDS patients and other patients who are at risk from mold and plant disease really require regulatory protection. We also know from our experience with the DEA that the new department will need checks and balances, we would prefer to see scientists and doctors have the ability to overrule law enforcement officials on issues of public health.

SK: Some marijuana advocates have pushed for deregulation, what is your response to that?

PR: Deregulation is simply irresponsible. Medical marijuana is medical because it is a medicine and all medicines are regulated in the interest of public health and safety. By no means am I advocating limiting who may grow or how much they may grow or what strain they grow, the more the merrier, but we need to make sure that any marijuana that is furnished to a patient or reaches a storefront collective is in proper saleable condition. Meaning no mold, no plant disease, no offloading a bad crop because you want the money; basically what we are saying is you need to care and you need to have compassion for your patients just like any other pharmacy would. Prop 215 was the Compassionate Use Act, meaning you need to take care of your patients by making sure their bud is medical grade all of the time. This isn’t a bad thing, federal regulation will protect American growers from foreign competition and create jobs for American’s throughout the country to produce medical marijuana and hemp for domestic use and export. We are seriously looking at a potential multi-Trillion dollar market in ten years if we play our cards right. Our proposal would create a massive job expansion both in the private and public sector, as new employees would be required to fill the demand. We want people to be able to open collectives, start new farms and nurseries, produce hemp and medical marijuana based products and expand patient services. In return the government will have to create regulatory services for these businesses; expansion and employment will come with that.

SK: Do you see the system you are proposing ending up like the one we are seeing unfolding in Uruguay?

PR: Not at all, this is America and we are going to do things the American way. Having a centralized government distributor is not the way to go and runs the risk of being overregulated in favor of opposing business interests. We don’t want history to repeat itself, so the idea is to decentralize medical marijuana production and distribution along with decentralizing regulatory structures from a law enforcement model to a regulatory compliance model that we see with all normalized US business sectors. We want to create opportunity for Americans, one of my biggest frustrations is that medical marijuana’s narrow emergence has made it difficult for many Americans to get their feet wet in this industry and that has inhibited its domestic normalization.

SK: Because people aren’t regularly collecting a paycheck from it, or aren’t willing to admit to it.

PR: Right. But people would see it differently if their neighbor’s incomes depended on it, nobody begrudges the pharmacist or the farmer from going to work every day. When people depend on you for their health, to survive a terminal illness; your profession should be respected not derided. Many of these growers are not drug dealers, they are skilled farmers who are taking care of many individuals’ grandparents, parents, and children. The government must reschedule and set a clear line so that the public can see and understand the difference. Marijuana must be demystified to be normalized and the public must receive the education to make the best choices for their health with regards to how they use medical marijuana. By educating the public about how medical marijuana strains work, the medical marijuana movement will gradually gain mass acceptance.

SK: When marijuana is decriminalized, do you predict it will overtake alcohol in terms of social popularity?

PR: No, I think marijuana is used for medicinal purposes and will retain its own space within the social sphere.  However, given some of the medicinal properties it’s not hard to imagine a future with a significantly lower population of alcoholics and opiate addicts. There is much to look forward to.

SK: Final question, you are currently working on advocacy issues in the County of Los Angeles and the City of Long Beach especially, why there areas and not states without marijuana laws?

PR: Without a strong base this movement cannot expect to grow with strength. Long Beach represents a significant patient base in California that uses medical marijuana for their conditions; the city itself carries one of the highest populations of AIDS/HIV patients in the United States. It was formerly the premiere city for medical marijuana legislation but since 2010 we have had significant problems with the Long Beach City Police and the Long Beach City Attorney’s office with activities that borderlines organized racketeering. The new Mayor Robert Garcia has proposed a new ordinance however Long Beach’s significantly poor track record with federal and state compliance has attracted our attention along with that of federal investigators. I am currently performing oversight of the Long Beach legislative process between the ordinance committee, the planning commission, the local police and the city council to ensure that the new ordinance is legal and does not infringe upon our patients HIPAA or ADA rights or subject our patients to entrapment by the Long Beach Police Department. I am also concerned that Long Beach’s Police Chief Jim McDonnell is running for Los Angeles County Sheriff. At the July 17th, Planning Commission meeting he gave a strong speech in favor of marijuana prohibition and I believe this is something Los Angeles residents should be concerned about. We are also concerned with the abuse of Proposition D by the City of Los Angeles, niether the Long Beach City Ordinance or Proposition D is in compliance with state or federal law on medical marijuana and must bring themselves into compliance or face legal remedy by the patients in federal court.

SK: The struggle continues. We will include the link to the dvd download for our readers. We want to thank you Mr. Rohde for joining us today. You can check out Patrick Rohde and APRA’s materials on Twitter, Facebook and Google. **Update** Mr. Rohde will be joining us again for an interview next week to discuss the current crisis in global affairs and how that affects medical marijuana.**

@Patr1ck_Rohde                 @APRA_Org                    facebook.com/apra.pp

Long Beach Planning Commission:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0mWjvAH-tfUbHpjQklCOHMyMTA/

Long Beach Police Rackets:

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/05/30/long-beach-corruption-unveiled-local-news-connects-police-and-city-council-to-marijuana-rackets/

-Simon Kokeba 

Damn it Henry! Those damn Jews told the truth!

Due to the increased popularity of our Secret History of the Drug War Series, Team Chazzan is providing an index of all of our Secret History of the Drug War Articles in chronological order for your readership convenience, including our recent title The Devil’s Work: Marijuana in the 20’s and 30’s.

1. The Marijuana and Opium Trades – (1700s & 1800s)

The Secret Past of Marijuana Laws: The Plant and the Poppy

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/03/26/the-secret-past-of-marijuana-laws-the-plant-and-the-poppy/

2. Marijuana in Colonial America – (1700s) 

America: The Venetian Republic Parts 1-2

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/04/27/interlude-america-the-venetian-republic-part-i/

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/04/27/interlude-america-the-venetian-republic-part-2/

3. The Power of the Opium Cartel (Mid 1800s to early 20th Century) 

The Opium Mob 

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/03/27/the-opium-mob/

4. The Roaring 20’s and the Great Depression (Early to mid-20th Century)

The Devil’s Work: Marijuana in the 20’s and 30’s Parts 1-3

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/07/27/the-devils-work-marijuana-in-20s-and-30s-part-1/

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/07/27/the-devils-work-marijuana-in-the-20s-and-30s-part-2/

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/07/27/the-devils-work-marijuana-in-the-20s-and-30spart3/

5. The DEA Years (Vietnam War to Current) 

Narc vs. Narc: The Origins of the Modern Medical Marijuana Movement

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/04/22/narc-vs-narc-the-origins-of-the-modern-medical-marijuana-movement/

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/07/16/narc-vs-narc-2-the-california-cannabis-coup-detat/

The Marijuana Mafia

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/03/19/the-marijuana-mafia/

Marijuana and the California Water Crisis

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/02/24/marijuana-and-the-california-water-crisis/

Activities in Ohio

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/03/21/ohio-gears-up-for-legal-vs-medical-marijuana-showdown/

An example of what our patients are up against and a reminder of who we are fighting for, A Must Watch Marijuana Special From Vice News:

Peace & Love.

-The Green Chazzan 

Today we are pleased to present our readers with a special presentation by Patrick Rohde of the American Patients Rights Association that was made to the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Select Intelligence Committee last year, offering recommendations and guidelines for the future of federal medical marijuana regulations. Mr. Rohde has spent five years evaluating the medical marijuana industry and this presentation details regulatory criteria based on his conclusions.  He would like to clarify that recommendations in this presentation were made in argument against regulations that provide for over regulation by municipal law enforcement including tactics like ‘drugged driving’ like Colorado State Law, Proposition D and SB1262.  

“Regulations regarding ‘driving under the influence of 3 micrograms of THC or greater’ is pseudoscience and an abuse of regulatory oversight; I could have 3 micrograms of THC in my blood stream from medical marijuana that I medicated with over a month ago. I could have 3 micrograms in my blood even by simply inhaling too much second hand. As you will see in this presentation, APRA wishes to see such decisions on public health reserved for physicians and laboratories with expertise. Hopefully this will offer insight to the medical marijuana movement to follow a new path going forward. We need to get practical if we want to flourish; legitimate farmers and cultivators need to realize that can get what they want as long as the government can have their pound of flesh with the cartels”

-Patrick Rohde

Enjoy:

Team Chazzan is proud to present the latest and greatest seminar held by Patrick Rohde of the American Patient’s Rights Association, in conjunction with and sponsored by, the California Medicinal Cultivator’s Association. This seminar was given to a select group of growers, operators and activists including the author of Prop 215, Dennis Peron and the Pioneers of Medical Marijuana. The topic in discussion was the impending California Water Regulations, which you will see is becoming one of the most serious existential threats to this industry. Mr. Rohde is a California certified Environmental Scientist who has been in the environmental compliance industry for over 9 years and possesses a good standing with the medical marijuana community for his continued advocacy for federal decriminalization and medical use as both a patient and a researcher.

DISCLAIMER: THIS PRESENTATION IS FOR CALIFORNIA GROWERS!

Enjoy:

-TheGreenChazzan

Governor Jerry Brown

“If the United States was a grow-op, California would be the Mother…”

• Madeleine Johnson, Pioneer of Medical Marijuana

It’s A Trap!

California is under attack; there is just simply no other way to put it. The Medical Marijuana industry of this state, while appearing to flourish on the surface, has a problem in its roots that has gone widely unseen by the public eye. Medical Marijuana farmers, growers and cultivators know about it. Since the fall of SB1262, the Correa Bill, the Medical Marijuana producing regions of California have been under open siege by an aligned consortium of rapacious law enforcement and corporate entities that seek to deprive the growers of their land, their right to individually cultivate and their ability to compete with the Legalization States that have already fallen under the control of this insidious corporate cabal.

SB 1262 itself was a failed coup attempt by the same ravenous false prophets that divided and conquered the spirit of the medical marijuana movement with Proposition 19. The Correa Bill was openly sponsored by Consortium entities including The League of California Cities, The California Peace Officers Association, The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, George Soros and the Marijuana Policy Project, Pharma, The Drug Enforcement Agency w/ Americans For Safe Access and silent partners from the Alcohol & Tobacco industries that have been targeting California growers for years. This consortium of out-of-state corporate interests and in-state law enforcement interests have proved to be the greatest obstruction to the normalization of California Marijuana Laws that have been in legal existence for almost 18 years. We have discussed the Consortium’s activities against California growers at length in our previous “Narc vs. Narc” series, where we have identified members of this so-called Marijuana Mafia led by powerful members of the 1%. SB1262 was defeated through the combined effort of the Pioneers of Medical Marijuana, Jeff Patterson & His Patient Coalition, the American Patient’s Rights Association and many others to inform the public of the poison pills contained within the bill.

Jeff Patterson & The Patients Against SB1262.

“In a court of law within the United States, especially in regards to Medical Marijuana laws, it must be made clear to the public that when we say ‘Medical’, we are asking for Regulation by a Public Health Department or a Public Health official, who is a Medical Doctor. When we ask for ‘Legalization’, we are inherently asking for regulation by Law Enforcement. When Law Enforcement makes medical decisions we see growers, operators and patients go to jail, we see drugged driving and entrapment, and we see that only the large corporate interests get a fair shake. This hasn’t happened in California because we are protected by our medical rights; HIPAA, ADA, ACA and so on. You also cannot tax a medication without an Act of Congress, it’s federally prohibited. People need to remind themselves that it is much easier and more seemly to prosecute a fraudulent physician than a corrupt policeman for violating our civil rights. Anyone who supports an agenda that limits the availability of strains, demands scientific constraints, regulation by a law enforcement entity and corporatization of the industry should be looked at very carefully and with great skepticism, especially by California growers and operators”

• Patrick Rohde, American Patient’s Rights Association™

Richard Lee – DEA/Consortium Agent

Since the defeat of SB1262, over 2 million pounds have been seized throughout California with the number exponentially increasing every day. The most significant raids in Mendocino County occurred like a thunderclap to announce the 2016 Legalization Ballot Initiative led by George Soro’s Marijuana Policy Project. Once again, a new blitzkrieg by the out-of-state 1% interest to usurp California’s marijuana hegemony from the California growers who built it. The seizures have been perpetrated under the direction of Governor Jerry Brown, who has received a sizeable campaign donation for his future Senate bid from Richard Lee, the founder of Oaksterdam and a former DEA agent from Texas. The idea is to create a campaign of relentless persecution against the Green Triangle on the basis of a manufactured water crisis and Brown’s hypocritical admonition of ‘the stoners’ taking over California. Brown has coordinated the County Sheriffs of Northern California to work with the DEA to raid farms on the basis of groundwater violations using the state’s new drought bill. The disingenuous drought legislation was perpetrated through a scientific fraud that we have discussed at length in our article “Marijuana and the California Water Crisis”; a fraudulent EPA report that has prohibited groundwater extraction from the critical Bay Delta region of the Sacramento Delta to starve the Central Valley out of water and pave the way for marijuana land grabs, new housing developments and ag-land turnover to oil fracking. Jerry Brown has reached into his old playbooks to use EPA groundwater violations to justify land-asset seizures for the medical marijuana growers. Under EPA rules, such groundwater violations could extend to penalties associated with RICO ie. Felony Land Seizure and Felony Land Auction. Brown will use the Felony Land Auctions of Northern California lands to deliver the California industry to the Consortium on a silver platter.

George Soros

Memories are short as Governor Brown has a history of creating manufactured environmental crises to pass strong-arm legislation against the interests of Native Californians on behalf of outside corporate donors. Monsanto and Cargill, large scale industrial agricultural companies that share ownership interest in the Marijuana Policy Project, got their first upper hand in California thanks to the manufactured Medfly crisis in 1980-81. Governor Brown, securing a deal with Big Ag and Big Chemical for future Senate ambitions, allowed hundreds of small and medium scale farms to have their crops ravaged so that they would either abandon their lands or pay the high price through Brown’s mandatory organo-chloride diktats. Memories also forget that Governor Brown presided over the Sensimilla Wars of 1978 and 1979. The first ever large scale state-federal joint operation raids of the Green Triangle. Brown would join NORML leader Keith Stroup in infamy, as being a sell out to the Medical Marijuana movement. Brown wanted his 1982 Senate run and Stroup couldn’t allow Peter Bourne to stop the courtroom gravy train for NORML’s legal counsel. History often repeats itself.

LEAR Raid

The Consortium has also resorted to hiring the private mercenary firm LEAR to illegally invade the properties of several California growers throughout the Northern Counties; destroying crops, seizing plants and seeds, and illegally misrepresenting themselves as federal agents. LEAR and its operatives ARE NOT LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS; ANY AND ALL RAIDS CONDUCTED BY LEAR ARE CRIMINAL ACTS. Violations include Trespass of Property, Theft, Grand Theft, Larceny, Home Invasion, Assault, Assault With a Deadly Weapon and Impersonating Federal Officials. The Sheriff’s Departments of Mendocino, Trinity, Shasta, Siskiyou, and Madera Counties have played dumb to their knowledge of LEAR’s highly illegal activities on US soil. All raids by LEAR should be videotaped for prosecutorial evidence and legal cases against LEAR for the felonies committed above should be pursued immediately at both the state and federal levels.

LEAR Illegal Trespass and Home Invasion

Frauds and Carpetbaggers

California growers must learn to defend themselves from these out-of-state interests. We are faced with fighting BC Beaster Cartels, Colorado Beer Barons, Kentucky Tobacco Planters, Texas DEA Agents, Mexican Mota Handlers, Ohioan Snake Oilers, DC Douchebags and Floridian Con-Artists who have come to harvest the Mother Plant that is OUR STATE. We are California, the provider of seeds and high quality medical marijuana for the entire United States, let alone the world. Our hippie forbears brought us the best seeds from around the world in the 1960s, they built the farms and the industry from the 60’s on with blood, sweat, tears and mandatory minimum sentences. We have built a billion dollar industry yet we are now challenged by the most hateful competition from Corporations, Corrupt Law Enforcement and Red State Carpetbaggers desiring to ride in and make new rules for an industry that they gave nothing for. We have allowed ourselves to be divided by these people.

Richard Lee & The Marijuana Mafia

Steph Sherer – DEA Agent (Possibly Active)

It is these people that came from Texas to introduce Proposition 19. It was these people that worked to undermine Prop 215 and SB420, to deliver our movement unto Law Enforcement. It was these people: the Don Duncan’s, the DeAngelos, the Steph Sherer’s, the Richard Lee’s, the Carl Kemp’s, the Wannabe McMansioners, the Hollywood Obsessed, the Canadians, the Prop 19 Bullshit Artists, the Coloradan’s with the BC seeds; all of the so-called ‘Green Rushers’ who have given nothing back to our state except contempt, heartache and a will to pillage anything that isn’t nailed down. It was these people that infected the minds of our state’s movement with ravenous greed in order to tempt us into betraying our friends so that we may be divided, conquered and enslaved. Now the same Green Rushers are running around California claiming to be the ‘Saviors of the Medical Marijuana Movement’. They constantly propose ‘New Regulations’, ‘Better Regulations’, ‘Taxation’ and ‘Legalization’ but this is a smoke screen for the desire for power and control over assets that they do not own nor did they shed a bead of sweat to earn. These people are False Prophets, pure and simple. California’s Medical Marijuana Law, Prop 215 and SB420, written by Dennis Peron and the Pioneers of Medical Marijuana misses only one critical aspect, federal recognition through the Rescheduling of Medical Marijuana; otherwise the patient’s rights and cultivators rights within the state are protected by State Law. The same cannot be said for any other state in the Union with a Medical Marijuana Law.

Former Texas DEA Agent – ASA Leader – Don Duncan

A good example of this mentality can be told through the story of Kim and Edward Quiggle. The pair presented themselves as a Country Bumpkin grower couple from Ohio that had come to support Prop 215, but were in fact Con-Artists from Florida with a veiled Red State hatred of California and an open envy over their lack of control over California’s Medical Marijuana industry. The disingenuous scammers opened a dispensary in Long Beach called the High Quiggle Healing Center. Mr. and Mrs. Quiggle had been skilled Southern conmen with a history of financial obscurity, that had bribed members of Chase Bank and Bank of America to offer them financial services; in exchange for the services the Quiggles would collect the patient’s data and use it without their knowledge to conduct tests on them using medical marijuana strains to develop marijuana pharmaceuticals for the large corporate interests. The Quiggles presented a veneer of being stalwart advocates of patient’s rights, drawing many Pro-Medical advocates to them in hopes of mending the divisions created by Prop 19 and Richard Lee.

Floridian Con Kim Quiggle

Instead, Kim Quiggle diverted the Medical movement to serve her financial purposes, using the movement to obtain and sell information on the California industry to outside corporate interests. She obstructed attempts to reform medical marijuana at the federal level, stealing research and work performed by the American Patient’s Rights Association, The Pioneers of Medical Marijuana and other Pro-Medical Groups in a failed attempt to claim it as her own intellectual property at a federal hearing. Kim Quiggle repeatedly declared her intent to become the leader of the national movement, simultaneously calling for raids against her grower’s and vendor’s competition, and calling for a limitation of strain availability to strains in which only she had a surplus advantage. Kim Quiggle stole millions of dollars from California, illegally funneling her profits from the Long Beach dispensary through a Trust under her control to bank accounts in Ohio and Florida; giving nothing back to the state that made her a multi-millionaire and gave both her and her husband infamy.

After defrauding her vendors, growers, patients, advocates and volunteers; ‘Mrs. Quiggle’ came under the attention of the local Long Beach Police Marijuana Racket for not paying her fair share to the local political bosses. The Quiggles had bribed several officers within the Long Beach Police to tip them off about impending raids and when it was discovered that her place had come under scrutiny for fraudulent activity with patients’ medical records, she announced a ‘sudden death in the family’ and fled the state allowing her patients and volunteers to be rounded up and imprisoned when the raid came down on her dispensary. Both patients and volunteers who were at High Quiggle during the raid received felony and misdemeanor sentences, all received probation and criminal records in Long Beach’s notoriously Kangaroo Courts, medical needs were not considered. After letting her own staff hang, the Quiggles returned to quickly steal the patient’s HIPAA records and notes regarding treatment of AIDS patients; defrauding several of her local allies in the process and quickly selling off her materials to the local Salvadorian Mob so that evidence could be conveniently placed in more ‘felony-prone’ hands.

This example of Carpetbaggery is not unique but it is profound in that it illustrates the utter lack of disregard that the out-of-state interests have for the patients and citizens of California. They talk a big game, make big promises, promise support and dreams of grandeur; next thing you know, California money is being stuffed in a suitcase, records have gone missing, strains are killed, seeds disappear, wheel chaired patients are imprisoned along with the young college volunteers whose career dreams were flushed down the toilet by an act of heartless greed.

The California Medicinal Cultivators Association AKA The Big California Union 

How can we, the Medical Marijuana community of California allow these injustices to go on? How can we allow ourselves to be so utterly victimized by these out-of-state predators? What must we do to protect our interests in this state? Our friends may have an answer:

“The biggest problem that the Medical Marijuana industry in California faces today is a lack of formal organization; it’s a strange amalgamation of different people with different lifestyles against a highly efficient and experienced organized bureaucracy. How can California growers and cultivators expect to overcome a massive bureaucratic entity like the DEA without some kind of formal organization? They simply do not have a chance. Therefore organization by the growers, to protect their interests, is both a material necessity and social requirement.

California has historically faced this kind of ‘foreign’ pressure. When Alcohal Prohibiton ended in the 1930s, both foreign and out-of-state liquor consortiums like Coors, Seagrams and Amhuesuer Busch attempted to use their influence to seize control of the best lands in California for growing hops. Like the Consortium today they paid corrupt law enforcement and public officials to pass county by county Wet-Dry laws that contradicted the federal decriminalization of Alcohol and allowed for independent brewers to be legally victimized in a court-of-law. So what did the California independent breweries do? They formed a Union to protect their interests.

This Union of California Brewers was led by Arthur Samish, one of the most influential lobbyists of all time. He had a reputation for standing up for the individual and small business interests of California using a technique called ‘Select and Elect’. This meant a political organization that could be fairly representative of the industry had to be formed. A statewide grower’s union, with the ability to raise funds through organization, identify candidates that would protect the industry from foreign interests, select them for election and use the funds to get them elected. ‘Select and Elect’. Why not? What better way to ensure safety than make sure your regulators are your own people; this is common corporate practice in America today. It is known as Regulatory Capture.

Arthur Samish’s Brewers Union and his Capture technique, Select and Elect, is why California has some of the best microbreweries in America today. From Stone Brewery in San Diego to Anderson Valley in Northern California. The farmers, the brewers, were able to keep their lands and keep the industry that they had bled for by forming a Union to organize and drive out the foreign interest. The Brewers realized, as the California Growers must realize now, is that they are the stewards of California’s most precious resource, out fertile land. So how can we apply these lessons to the Medical Marijuana Industry in California?

First, California Growers must set their political differences aside and unite to form a union. It can be called the California Medicinal Cultivators Association, has to be suitable, not stoner, some kind of name that fits the purpose and carries a weight of serious political intent with it. The Union must be formed to defend the interests of Proposition 215 and SB420, and not for any other purpose. The growers must pick a leader, to me the choice is obvious in someone like Dennis Peron. It should be someone, like Dennis, who has stayed consistent in their beliefs, is politically wise and politically game, does not have a conflict of interest and places the California people above all else , but the growers must realize this for themselves.

The Union must be statewide and it must have the ability to congregate to perform votes and create rules. Union leaders should have term limits. There should be a bureaucratic and democratic process for voting and making decisions as a Union. The Union must be able to approve business dealings and manage its finances. The Union should be able to form committees and collect fees for the purposes of executing Select and Elect. Pro-Medical Marijuana programs should be sponsored by the Union to defend the interest of California growers against political opposition. This is what large corporations and unions around the country do, instead of rejecting the system at large, they play to win.

Union members should have advantages over non-union members. Union members should be restricted to those born in the state or who have held residency for longer than 17 years. Union members should have fixed pricing on seeds, pounds, clones and other products over non-union members. Out-of-state persons should be encouraged to form their own union, in their own state. Non-Union members should be sold seeds, pounds, clones and other products on a graduated pricing scale, a Graduated Bulk Adjustment Rate if you will, and they should pay no less than 20% above the fixed Union rate at all times.

Votes should pass by simple majority and elections should be determined by absolute majority. The Union should be presided by an elected five person panel and the Union should have the ability to recall these panel members by vote. The five person committee should serve as the leadership counsel for the Union and should consist of one Chairman who represents the Union. The committee should have the ability to sanction Union members for breaking Union Code and issue sanctions against threatening non-Union entities.

Most importantly California Union members should not compete with one another. The competition must be acknowledged from beyond our borders, Colorado, Arizona, Washington, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, Holland, Australia, this is our competition. Colorado and Mexico have already flooded the Los Angeles market, the largest marijuana market on the globe, with their low quality seeds; lowering both price while simultaneously lowering the medicinal quality of the medication. They have taken advantage of Northern California’s disorganization to slowly whittle away at the native market share of Los Angeles.

In this regard the upcoming Legalization Initiative for 2016 is very dangerous for California growers. Mr. Soros and the Marijuana Policy Project hope this legislation will serve as a coup de’grace to the California industry. The initiative will be the Root Rot that kills the Mother Plant and makes way for Consortium controlled Legalization states like Colorado. The actions taken by Colorado growers in the Los Angeles market indicate that they fully intend to replace California’s rightful place as the world’s #1 seed distributor, something that would be utterly catastrophic to the supply of medical grade marijuana throughout the world.

The scientific facts show that the California’s climate and topography consistently yields better Medicinal Grade Marijuana than other states like Colorado and Washington which have seasonal weather and inconsistent soil types. That is why the out-of-state interests desperately covet California’s crops, California’s seeds, California’s knowledge and most importantly California’s land.

• Patrick Rohde, American Patients Right’s Association™

Food For Thought

American Patients Rights Association™

American Patients Rights Association™

Well you heard it yourselves. California Cultivators of Medical Marijuana Unite! You have nothing to lose! Everything to gain! The Time Has Come. We must gather around Proposition 215 and defend our rights, tooth and nail. Set aside your differences, seek counsel in the wise elders of old; the people you could always trust to keep fighting the good fight for the patients. We started this business to find cures for AIDS and Cancer and look how far we have come. You have all given too much, lost family, loved ones, property and memories. Do not let your sacrifices be in vain.

Remember The Past, Protect The Future

Further Reading

Narc vs. Narc: The Origins of the Modern Medical Marijuana Movement

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/04/22/narc-vs-narc-the-origins-of-the-modern-medical-marijuana-movement/

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/07/16/narc-vs-narc-2-the-california-cannabis-coup-detat/

http://thegreenpulpit.com/the-secret-history-of-the-drug-war/narc-vs-narc-the-series/narc-vs-narc-iii-cartel-rising-restored/ (restored, copy and paste)

The Marijuana Mafia

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/03/19/the-marijuana-mafia/

Marijuana and the California Water Crisis

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/02/24/marijuana-and-the-california-water-crisis/

May God Seal Our Fate With Blessings

- The Green Chazzan

Warrantless Medical Marijuana Raids Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Finds

Pot may be federally illegal, but so is police activity that violates due process. This week, a federal court sided with California medical marijuana patients who are suing Lake County officials for the possibly illegal removal of their cannabis plants. Federal judge Thelton Henderson issued an injunction against the county Tuesday, saying police have to stop ripping up gardens without due process. That’s a major victory for medical cannabis advocates. They say California officials are policing medical marijuana activity illegally some eighteen years after California voters legalized the plant for medical purposes….

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/LegalizationNation/archives/2014/10/16/warrantless-medical-marijuana-raids-unconstitutional-federal-judge-finds

SoCal Cops Adopt Shady Marijuana Raid Tactics Seen In Mendocino

Tensions are high this year in marijuana country, where rumors of a gang of mysterious armed men — who descend from the sky in helicopters to cut down cannabis gardens — have been swirling for the past few months.
At first, ripped-off pot growers in Mendocino and Lake counties suspected private security teams or even crooks dressed up as cops as the perpetrators. After all, the tactics used have been described as paramilitary — lots of camo, no badges —  and no charges or even records of the “raids” are filed or left behind….

http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2014/10/15/socal-cops-adopt-shady-marijuana-raid-tactics-seen-in-mendocino

Judge halts Lake County warrantless raids on medical pot patients

After a series of warrantless raids on the homes of medical marijuana patients under a voter-approved ordinance in Lake County, a federal judge has called a halt, saying officers need court approval before entering private property and seizing pot plants. The patients are likely to succeed in showing that the searches violated their constitutional rights and were not justified by any emergency, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco said Tuesday in an injunction that bars further raids without a warrant. Denying an injunction “would leave numerous medical marijuana patients in Lake County vulnerable to future warrantless seizures of their medicine, which could lead to significant pain and suffering,” Henderson said…..

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Judge-halts-warrantless-raids-on-homes-of-medical-5825112.php

When Misguided Cops Turn The War On Weed Into A War On Growing Things

If law enforcement officials around the country are going to continue cracking down on marijuana grow operations, especially in heavily armed, unannounced raids, maybe they should consider hiring a botanist or two.Earlier this month, Dwayne Perry of Cartersville, Georgia, was startled out of his bed by a low-flying helicopter. Moments later, WSB-TV reports, heavily armed officers and K-9 units with the Governor’s Task Force for drug suppression showed up, apparently believing they were about to make a weed bust. What they found instead: okra. The vegetable….

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/14/marijuana-plants-police_n_5948122.html

Paramilitaries Are Eradicating California’s Illegal Marijuana Grows

In the world-renowned California marijuana growing region known as the Emerald Triangle, the telltale “whoop-whoop-whoop” sound from helicopters combing the sparsely populated mountains during pot harvest season typically sends paranoia through the roof. This year is no exception. For the past month, local law enforcement and the feds have been conducting raids across the Emerald Triangle — Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties in California — using a massive ex-military chopper bearing a worn-down or scraped off US Air Force insignia, eradicating tens of thousands of plants. But this year, there have reportedly been more cases of state and local law enforcement targeting small farmers with fewer than 50 plants, in compliance with state and local regulations, according to Tim Blake who runs the annual cannabis competition Emerald Cup….

https://news.vice.com/article/paramilitaries-are-eradicating-californias-illegal-marijuana-grows

San Bernardino to crack down on medical marijuana

A study into possibly allowing some medical marijuana dispensaries is out, and a new program of more aggressive enforcement is in. That’s the decision the City Council came to in a closed-session discussion Monday, City Attorney Gary Saenz said. “At this time, the full Common Council has, by consensus, determined that the city will continue its total land-use ban against dispensaries; will not, at this time, ordain to allow regulated dispensaries, and will incorporate additional and more aggressive methods of enforcement in our quest to rid, or significantly reduce, the number of illegal dispensaries operating in our city,” Saenz said….

http://www.sbsun.com/general-news/20141008/san-bernardino-to-crack-down-on-medical-marijuana

Pulling the plug on pot: Anaheim cuts electricity, power to illegal stores

The city is turning the lights off at medical-marijuana dispensaries that illegally opened across the city in a move to get them to leave. The strategy has worked. Last month, nine dispensaries closed, Anaheim spokeswoman Ruth Ruiz said, and eight others likely will be closed by the end of the week. Additionally, 11 others soon will be ordered to shut down or have their water and electricity cut off by Anaheim, which, unlike many cities, operates its own utilities, Ruiz said….

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/anaheim-637604-city-marijuana.html

Robert Randall – The First Legal Marijuana Patient

Over the past several months The Green Chazzan and friends have laid a number of issues going on throughout the country with the medical marijuana movement. There are so many incidents, raids, political stooges and bent legislation attempts that it’s hard to keep a lid on what is most important in this fight to Reschedule Medical Marijuana to a Schedule V pharmaceutical. So The Chazzan has assembled a simple list of the Top 5 obstacles the Medical Marijuana movement faces in every state in which there is a marijuana law.

Police and Municipal Corruption

Hey it’s almost Election Day! Can’t you tell? The raids are out in full force especially because Midterms often mean elections for Judgeships, Prosecutorial Positions, Police Chiefs, Fire Chiefs, and all kinds of other political administrators are going to be held, and that means it’s time to look “Tough on Crime”. Already we see the DEA and local Sheriff tearing up Arizona, Colorado and Southern California especially since Governor Jerry Brown has essentially declared war on the marijuana industry at the behest of corporate interests. If you are an operator it’s in your best interest to be extra mindful within the two weeks of Election Day, especially if local inspectors, meter maids, and police have taken a sudden extra interest in your business establishment. While some dispensaries are raided for their collaboration with the Cartel and the Consortium, many local agencies and legal officials will use election time to take advantage of the system to collect extra taxes on other growers and dispensaries.

We just simply can’t talk about the history of medical marijuana without discussing the history of police corruption in the United States. Since the 1920’s, law enforcement entities throughout the country have held the arbitrary position as the black market industry’s self-appointed regulator and lead racketeer. Police departments throughout the United States have ran ‘shakedown’ bribery rackets on medical marijuana distributors for almost a century from doctors to street corner dealers; evolving from shaking down minorities in the 50’s and hippies in the 60’s to collecting monthly taxes from medical marijuana dispensaries in modern times.

The Federal government must be made to understand that it is difficult to bring the industry into compliance because of the conflict of interest held by local law enforcement and the local prison systems. Attempts by dispensaries to come into compliance must be open, fair and transparent which is why the federal government must establish public health and environmental health guidelines for the states but the industry must guide the federal government on this matter due to the lack of expertise, especially on the East Coast.

Deputy Attorney General James Cole

“Police and municipal racketeering of the medical marijuana industry inherently sets a price floor for every harvest…”

Why? Because knocking down growers up north keeps the marijuana price high so that the Police and DEA can extract larger incomes when it comes time to ‘tax’ the dispensaries.

Dispensary owners in Los Angeles County, the ‘Mecca of Medical Marijuana’, continue to lament over the shakedown racket perpetrated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Measure D, a vile ‘regulation by law enforcement’ bill marketed as ‘legalization’ passed in Los Angeles County segregated dispensaries in LA between pre-regulation ‘Pre-ICO’ and post-regulation ‘Post-ICO’ collectives.

Steve “Not” Cooley

Almost all Pre-ICO collectives were able to obtain their exemptions by extensively bribing the LA County Sheriff or select members of the LA City Council and the illustrious Board of Supervisors. Pre-ICO permits were also issued to collectives owned by members of the LA City Administration including former DA Steve Cooley and former LA Sheriff Lee Baca, who owned a dispensary indirectly through his secretary. The remaining collectives that remained Post-ICO after refusing to kowtow under the LA Sheriff’s extortion racket have remained the victim of continued municipal racketeering by the Sheriff and local police entities.

Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell

Measure D in itself is a federally illegal statute as it contradicts the guidance issued by the US Justice Department in the Cole Memorandum of 2013. Los Angeles faces an even tougher battle ahead as the notorious self-avowed Prohibitionist, Jim McDonnell, the police chief of Long Beach, is currently the front runner to be Lee Baca’s replacement. McDonnell is far more cunning and corrupt than Baca, having severely racketeered the Long Beach marijuana dispensaries under his tenure along with manipulating crime statistics and allowing the heroin trade to expand out of the Port of Long Beach. Should McDonnell succeed in becoming LA County Sheriff, he will prove to be a worthy political adversary to all within the California medical marijuana movement. His rival Paul Tanaka, the Mayor of Gardena, does not have a much better record but is by far the lesser of the two evils.

Colorado, Washington State and Hawaii have also had their fair share of problems from law enforcement entities picking the winners and losers of newborn dispensaries. Law Enforcement entities in this ‘Legalization’ states have used ‘drugged driving’ provisions and other legal loopholes to entrap patients and dispensary operators alike in arbitrary state compliance rackets. ‘Legalization’ laws have put law enforcement at the helm of making regulatory decisions, law enforcement may determine how marijuana laws in their state are interpreted and retain the right to impose new regulations at both the cultivator, operator and patient’s expense.

Alison Holcomb – Corporatist Extraordinaire

There have also been attempts by some of the lesser skilled growers to influence city and county administrations to limit what strains may be used; typically pushing for the 12 highest yielding and easiest to grow strains in which they could retain market advantage. Other growers have also limited county and state regulations to CBD only strains in a greedy attempt to corner their own state markets. Growers of this nature need to be isolated and ran out of the industry because they are harmful to us and beneficial to corrupt police and municipal officials. There are over 1000 known strains of medical marijuana throughout the world, all with unique and complex cannabinoid complexes that have yet to be fully understood in terms of medical benefits. So who are these growers, many without a college degree let alone a high school education, to decide which strains are medically valuable and which are medically not valuable?. Persons with low quality seed banks, incentives to do large scale thousand plus plant operations with low quality but high volume turn out. These claims are not based in science, only in greed and a lack of craftsmanship.

Patrick Kennedy – Alcohal and Tobacco Lobbyist

These same entities have also played a significant role in championing municipal and county based ‘marijuana bans’ throughout California and other states with marijuana laws. A method created by Americans For Safe Access and the League of California Cities to eliminate competition and maintain the shakedown rackets. We have spoken about how municipal bans work in our Coalition of Corruption series, but just a quick refresher; municipal bans have been put in place throughout California and the only dispensaries exempted from the bans have either successfully sued the municipalities in court or they have had their place secured by ASA through pay-offs or law enforcement sponsorship. However even successful lawsuits have proven not to be enough given the recent raids in San Bernardino County and Orange County; the City of Anaheim brutally discriminated against marijuana businesses just last week by cutting off all water and power to dispensaries that wouldn’t cave to the city’s extortion demands.

Many will argue that the cities have the right to govern themselves but we argue that they must do so in a lawful manner. This is America, not Honduras. Most cities brought in medical marijuana dispensaries to cover up other fiscal discrepancies and shortfalls following 9/11 and the 2008 crash, with most operations peaking around 2006 and 2010 during the heights of the conflict in Afghanistan for both administrations. Many cities, to thwart federal investigators, initially brought in medical marijuana as a means to transfer monies from other illicit rackets to the medical marijuana dispensaries. However the cities liberal enaction of medical marijuana laws brought with it an influx of locals, northern hippies and out-of-state con artist carpetbaggers that stymied the cities plans for an easy transition.

LEAR Mercenary Raid

State corruption has taken a step further now that the Sheriff’s Departments of several counties throughout California have used the Open Fields Clause to justify the non-intervention of their departments towards the highly illegal mercenary raids being conducted by LEAR Corporation and Blackwater (Xe) throughout the state. This program has been tacitly backed by Governor Jerry Brown in exchange for Consortium and Prison Guards Union donations to both his reelection and future Senate ambitions.

Con Artists and Scams

The Medical Marijuana movement is rife with Con Artists, Frauds, Racketeers, Frontmen, Informants, Clowns, Charlatans, Crooked Lawyers and just genuinely psychotic people with strange backgrounds.

Cheryl Shuman in Diabolical Selfie #1000562744   *public domain btw*

Currently in Del Ray Oaks in Monterey County we are seeing Cheryl Shuman of ‘Echelon Cannabis’, a notorious Hollywood con, known for running a Hollywood Madame service under the guise of a movie set optician business. Startups that work with Mrs. Shuman’s CNBC sponsored entrapment scheme will quickly find themselves in deep waters; she has made it her business to understand what is and isn’t protected by Marijuana Laws including copyrights and trade secrets related to medical marijuana products. Mrs. Shuman quickly steals her ‘new partners’ products knowing full well there is no legal recourse against her for doing so; she will even go as far as to steal marketing materials from other organizations and rebrand them for her own purposes. Shuman knows she is violating the RICO Act and the Cole Memorandum and isn’t afraid to let her business associates know that they are doing the same once they have entered her trap.

More About Shuman’s Hollywood Background: https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Cheryl_Shuman

Any of the victims that dare to resist are quickly reminded that Mrs. Shuman is associated with Norton Arbelaez Jr., the son of one of the most powerful cartel bosses out of Bogota, Colombia. Arbelaez Jr. and Sr. are two of the most powerful members of the Consortium, the cabal of corporate and cartel interests that are seeking to transfer control of the industry and its seeds to a small group of well moneyed hands. Arbelaez serves as the representative of the Colombian Cartel’s portion of the international marijuana trade, working in concert with Marc Emery of the Canadian Cartel, Arjan Roskam of Holland, George Soros (DPA) and the Marijuana Policy Project and the Sinaloa Cartel of Mexico to stop independent growers in the United States, especially California, from out-competing them with their superior medicinal marijuana quality.

Norton Arbelaez Jr.

Mrs. Shuman has been using the Colombians to protect herself and her family from members of Italian organized crime. The buds in her so-called ‘Beverly Hills’ aka South Central based marijuana club are most certainly BC Beaster quality and any Hollywood type foolish enough to buy buds from her is most certainly slumming their greens at top tier pricing. With already such colorful characters, one can only imagine the cavalcade of characters being rolled out for the Ohio and Florida marijuana bills.

Lack of Education

There is a stunning divergence within the Medical Marijuana movement that has severely debilitated its ability to function cohesively as a unit and that is the Education Gap. Many members of the movement do not have a college education, let alone a high school diploma; they do not understand legal statutes, financial markets, basic business management, government processes and many other functions necessary to be successful in today’s society. Street smarts and natural businesses smarts can get you far but eventually legal walls appear that create complications. Being unable to deal with these complications in the proper legal manner has led to abuse by law enforcement, attorneys and doctors alike; seeking to take advantage of the education gap for their own profit and social gain.

This is why a statewide cultivators union is important, to protect the rights and freedoms of the growers from the educated abusers like the police, marketers, billionaires and lawyers. The union will create a pathway for cultivators to work with educated supporters like botanists, horticulturalists, biologists and environmental scientists. The new generation of young growers, cultivators and activists are seeking to use their knowledge to support and expand the world of medical marijuana and this must be harnessed by the senior leadership of the movement as it stands. The growers and pioneers must educate this new generation through a centralized medium on how the Medical Marijuana really works lest they become servants and victims of the Consortium.

Jamaican Growers Union

The Los Angeles Times interviewed Deputy Director James Cole of the US Department of Justice, author of the 2013 Cole Memorandum. He stated that he wanted California to get its ‘regulatory act together’, meaning to bring state law in compliance with the federal guidelines of the Cole Memorandum. This warning could apply to all Marijuana states that desire to avoid federal raids. We also can’t forget that its midterm season and without a doubt the increase in both state and federal raids are coinciding with a ‘tough on crime’ image.

Deputy AG James Cole – Federal Marijuana Czar

There is also a severe lack of political education within the movement that can be largely attributed to misinformation and revisionist history campaigns by High Times Magazine, NORML and Marijuana Mafia organizations like ASA, MPP and DPA.

Ask Yourself:

How Many Times Have You Voted For A Judge That Promoted Marijuana Convictions?

How Many Times Have You Researched The Judges and Prosecutors on Your State’s Election Ballot?

Do You Know Your Local Judges’ Stance on Medical Marijuana? What About Your Local Prosecutor?

In elections, these questions matter. Judges and Prosecutors make Marijuana Convictions possible. No court support effort in the world is as effective or as powerful as a ‘YES’ or ‘NO’ VOTE against a prosecutor or a judge in a major election. Want to send a message to the courts? Why not vote out the judges that maintain the marijuana rackets and support police racketeering? Why waste your money on ineffective court support organizations when you can do so much more damage by actually voting in an election?

Corporatism

As if we didn’t have enough problems, let’s turn to the Big Elephant in the room. The Fortune 500 corporations and the billionaires that own them. They are a problem. Why? Because they want their cut of the layer cake, a slice of the marijuana pie. They don’t want to do anything to build it, they simply want to dominate it with their money and corner the seed market so that they can make the rules.

The billionaires of America know that medical marijuana and legal hemp pose an epic commercial challenge to the industries they have owned and controlled for the past century. Who can corner such a freely distributed yet proprietary seed? Monsanto and Cargill believe they can, George Soros believes he can, RJ Reynolds and Altria are sure going to give it their best shot, Merck, Teva, Astra Zeneca and don’t forget the Alcohol industry, they won’t let the decline of alcoholism go quietly.

What is their strategy? Their tactics? It’s simple, outlaw the small and medium size grower and dispensary operators. Narrow the strains down to only the high volume strains that can be reproduced easily and then outlaw grows that produce less than 1000 plants, screw medical value it’s all about marketing and money for the billionaires. Medical value strains can be patented instead by Monsanto or Merck and be sold to patients at extraordinary rates just like many major medications for the terminally ill today that is what the billionaires want to see. A continuance of the same old, same old, no cures, just treatments and the flow of money to hospitals and drug companies will continue unabated.

The whole sorry situation in America’s hospitals today are only just beginning to change with Obamacare. You will hear Republicans scream about the cost of Obamacare but those healthcare costs could be reduced if medical marijuana was rescheduled by the government. The simple truth is these billionaires are using their influence to run the medical marijuana industry in a manner in which it will not compete with their current business interests. The Consortium is working to establish regulations throughout North and South America that excludes the wealthy from punishment for the use of cannabis but maintains criminal punishments for the poor who use marijuana as a medication the most.

The ‘Old Oligarchs’ as Aristotle keenly put, do not wish to see progress trump their control, they would prefer the detriment of the public to such an outcome. In Aristotle’s tale, The ‘Old Oligarch’ did not like the Athenian Navy because it strengthened the Athenian democracy and diminished his own power. The Old Oligarchs of America do not like medical marijuana because it is a plant of the people, for the low, middle and high to share and heal with and it diminishes their power which comes from the profits of pharmaceuticals, alcohol and tobacco, prisons, food, and other forms of commodity control.

George Soros

That is why the Wall Street Hedge Funds, the big businesses and oligarchical entities like George Soros are doing their best to divide and conquer the industry. Using banners like Safe Access, Safety First, Responsibility and all kinds of other fear mongering Anti-Saloon League type propaganda language. Paying front-men like Marc Emery, Don Duncan, Gary Johnson, Alison Holcomb, Rick Steves, and retired law enforcement officials to tout ‘Legalization’ aka corporate domination of the medical marijuana industry. The same group of corporate raiders are now slowly invading the State of Oregon, touting a measure much similar to the one they already passed in Washington State and hoping for another California Coup in 2016. The end result of these ‘Legalization’ Bills is that the non-corporate competition and the home grower get raided, the patient continues to be drug tested, business as usual.

Consortium Spokesman Rick Steves

The key signs to look for in sniffing out oligarchical legislation are the following:

• Drugged Driving
• Cannabinoid Limits
• Strain Type Limits
• Home Grow Bans
• Prohibitions of Small Scale Grows
• Dispensary Limits
• License Issuance Limits and Lotteries
• Municipal Bans with Exemptions

Internal Division

The biggest problem affecting the whole medical marijuana movement from uniting behind federal rescheduling is the internal division within the movement caused by the aforementioned symptoms. Through the limelight we have lost sight of why we initially started this movement, to help the patients fight terminal diseases and that is what we must continue to do. We have allowed the desire for glamour and wealth to cloud our drive to reschedule and decriminalize medical marijuana at the national level. We must federally reschedule medical marijuana as a cohesive unit so that we may all live in health and liberty as we deserve.

The billionaires will continue to try to co-opt and control the movement, to keep us sick so that they may continue to profit off our deaths for generations but through education and newfound wisdom we can learn how to heal ourselves through the Earth that God created.

Bereishis 1:11-12

 “God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation; herbage yielding seed, fruit trees yielding fruit each after its kind, containing its own seed on the earth. And it was so. And the earth brought forth vegetation: herbage yielding seed after its kind, and trees yielding fruit, each containing its seed after its kind. And God saw that it was good.”

Bereishis 1:29

“God said, “Behold, I have given you all the herbage yielding seed that is on the surface of the entire earth, and every tree that has seed-yielding fruit; it shall be yours for food”

All pharmaceuticals either come from chemicals manufactured in a laboratory, herbs from the earth or combinations thereof. Both Big Pharma and Big Food, want to corner the seed industry so that they can continue to profit from a monopoly over the resources of the earth just like any other oligarchical entity like Big Oil or Big Mining. Marijuana, another resource from the earth is not exempt from the desires of the large corporate billionaires.

The Consortium

We have to accept the reality that state and federal regulation of medical marijuana is inevitable but we have to organize to ensure that the regulations are both equitable and open for patients, growers and operators not just large corporate entities and law enforcement. Growers must unionize on a state by state basis to ensure that proper markets that are conducive to industry growth are created and to defend the inherent interests of the industry from predatory interests. The likes of the Drug Policy Alliance, The Marijuana Policy Project and Americans For Safe Access do not work for you, they work for very large, very wealthy and powerful corporate entities that have no interest in seeing an industry with the independence that medical marijuana currently has. But with independence comes responsibility which is why growers must take it upon themselves to organize and establish what responsible, fair and conducive regulations look like.

“When your parents do not have the money to pay the medical bills, no one will pity you….When you are beaten by your competitors, no one will pity you…”

• Jack Ma, CEO of Ali Baba

Brutally honest but a true statement about the state of globalized business, meaning that our competition does not care if we live or die, nor will anyone care if we lose the fight against them. However there is a chance, like the tortoise versus the hare, they are fast and well-resourced but they are still playing our chess game and we have the ability to change the rules. We must:

1. Form Statewide Unions
2. Set Inter-Union Rates and Rules
3. ‘Select and Elect’ Politicians and State/Municipal Bureaucrats that are Pro-MMJ
4. Lobby Congress to Reschedule Medical Marijuana to Schedule V
5. Repeal Municipal and County-By-County Dispensary Bans
6. Establish Weights and Measures,
7. Establish Environmental Standards For Growing
8. Sale Standards For Each State
9. Establish “Regulation By Doctor” Laws in Every State/Curtail “Regulation by Law Enforcement” and “Drugged Driving” Programs at both State and Federal Level
10. Lobby Congress to Open Up Medical Marijuana Research Programs For Healthcare, Domestic Growth, Research and Development

Protesting, making arbitrary and uncoordinated referendums and gathering behind false ‘Marijuana Messiahs’ is not the answer, in this technological age we must have a well-coordinated multi-dimensional approach that utilizes the media, the legislature, the internet, public and private forums, political analysis and mass networking. We must learn to work together by forming alliances with like-minded medical growers that want to see this industry survive and expand over the next 40 years.

We have to beat the corporations and police unions at their own game by organizing a union that can play the political game on even ground through harnessing the financial power of our industry through an organized legal conduit that benefits those contributing to it.

Here is an example of a conceptual model created by Patrick Rohde of APRA that details how the ‘Select and Elect’ process works:

Conceptual Organizational Model – APRA™

APRA™

APRA™

“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand….”

• Mark 3:25

However this process will only work if the growers settle their differences and come together in each state or it will most certainly end in failure. Farmers, growers and cultivators must come together in California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Montana to fight for the right to personal/home grows, open strains, open seeds, open markets, fair regulations, equitable regulations and the sustainability of an industry you helped create.

- The Green Chazzan

This is a New Series on the Green Pulpit called Required Reading where we bring you books, videos and articles that discuss the formation of the Anglo-American Business Consortium, the formation of the American Narcostate under Republican Primacy and its effect on the international drug trade. This series is meant to inform the American citizen as a follow up to our previous series, the Secret History of the Drug War which can be found here:

http://thegreenpulpit.com/the-secret-history-of-the-drug-war/

Required Reading

1. America’s 60 Families – Ferdinand Lundberg

Details the history of the cabal of Anglo-American billionaires known as the Consortium from 1865 to 1937, from its origin following the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination to their political war with FDR during the Great Depression. Describes the elite Anglo-American families in detail, describes the assets that they control and their class war against American labor.

2. As He Saw It – Elliot Roosevelt

Details the struggles between FDR and Winston Churchill, a prominent member of the Consortium; describes how FDR fought the Anglo-American Consortium to free Africa and the Asian colonies from European domination and FDR’s plan to undo European global control over international trade.  

3. The Emperor Wears No Clothes – Jack Herer

Details the history of marijuana and hemp production in the 1930s; discusses how international control of the cannabis and hemp markets were essential to the success of many European empires.

4. Blacklisted News: Secret Histories From Chicago to 1984 – Numerous Authors

Blacklisted book, details US government corruption and Republican control of the international narcotics trade from Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 to Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984 including stories from the 20’s and 30’s. Stories about the recent history of the Consortium. Details the US Narcostate and shares experiences from Hippies, gangsters and Zippies that witnessed the government’s participation in the domestic narcotics trade.

5. Memoirs of Dennis Peron – Dennis Peron and John Entwhistle

Memoir of Dennis Peron’s fight for Medical Marijuana with the San Francisco Police and California Political Machine in the 1970s, the AIDS Crisis in the 1980s and the fight for Proposition 215, the first Marijuana Law in the United States in the mid-1990s. 

6. Freeway Ricky Ross: The Untold Autobiography – Freeway Ricky Ross

Freeway Ricky Ross discusses how he introduced Crack Cocaine into the United States with the help of the Reagan CIA and members of the Consortium within the US military. Author took the fall for the military officials involved in the Iran-Contra Affair.

7. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion – Gary Webb

The book that got its author, Gary Webb, assassinated. Investigates connections between the US intelligence agencies, the drug cartels, foreign mercenaries, multi-national corporations and domestic drug dealing within the United States. Investigates how the Consortium was nearly exposed during the Iran-Contra Affair. 

 —

Required Viewing

Behind The Iran-Contra Affair (1988) – 1 hour

*Via Youtube in 8 parts

Part 1

Part 2

Col. Oliver North

Part 3

Part 4

Freeway Ricky Ross

Part 5

Part 6

George HW Bush

Part 7

Part 8

Further Reading

http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/9712/

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Anti-Communist_League

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_V._Secord

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlaub

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_America

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras

More to Come as Part of Our Holiday Hidden History Special! 

- The Green Chazzan 

Editor: This article details the re-emergence of government narcotics trafficking during the 1930’s as both a tool of foreign espionage and domestic political control. The model created by Carbone, Spirito and Sabiani would go on to be used by governments and intelligence agencies worldwide to control the flow of international narcotics.  

Heroin Fascism: Marseilles, the ‘30s 

by Anonymous (1983)

Sabiani, Carbone and Spirito

“The first link between the Corsicans and the political world came about with the emergence of the 1920’s of Marseilles’ first ‘modern’ gangsters. Francois Spirito and Paul Bonnaventure Carbone (the jolly heroes of the popular 1970’s French film Borsalino). Until their rise to prominence the milieu was populated by number of colorful whose most stable form of investment was usually 2 or 3 prostitutes. Carbone and Spirito changed all that…their 20-year old partnership permanently transformed the character of the Marseilles milieu.

The enterprising team’s first major venture was the establishment of a French staffed brothel in Cairo in the late 1920’s. Upon their return to Marseilles, they proceeded to organize prostitution on a scale previously unknown. But more significantly, they recognized the importance of political power in protecting large scale criminal ventures and its potential for providing a source of income through municipal graft.

In 1931, Carbone and Spirito reached an “understanding” with Simon Sabiani, Marseille’s Pro-Fascism deputy mayor, who proceeded to appoint Carbone’s brother director of the municipal stadium and open municipal employment to associates of the two leaders of the French underworld. In return for these favors, Carbone and Spirito organized an elite corps of gangsters that spearheaded violent Fascist street demonstrations during the depression years of the 1930s.

All across Europe fascism was gaining strength: Mussolini ruled Italy, Hitler was coming to power in Germany, and emerging French Fascist groups were trying to topple the republic through mass violence. Communist and Socialist demonstrators repeatedly rushed to the defense of the republic, producing a series of bloody confrontations throughout France. In Marseilles, Carbone and Spirito were the vanguard of the Right Wing.

In February of 1934, several days after an inflammatory speech by a Fascist army general, massive street demonstrations erupted on the Canbiere, Marseilles’ main boulevard. The thousands of leftist dock workers and union members who took to the streets dominated the political confrontation until Carbone and Spirito’s political shock force fired on the crowd with pistols. The national police intervened, the workers were driven from the streets and the wounded were carted off to the hospital.

After 4 years of battling Sabiani’s underworld allies in the streets, the left settled its political differences long enough to mount a unified electoral effort that defeated Sabiani and placed a Socialist mayor in office. Although the leftist electoral victory temporarily eclipsed the Fascist-Corsican Alliance, the rise of fascism had politicized the Marseilles underworld and marked its emergence as a major political force in city politics.

General Francisco Franco of Spain

Although they had lost control of the municipal government, Carbone and Spirito’s economic strength had hardly declined. The emergence of organized narcotics trafficking in the US provided Carbone with the opportunity to open a heroin laboratory in the early 1930’s, while the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War enabled him to engage in the arms traffic.

Carbone and Spirito found their political influence restored in 1940, when German troops occupied Marseilles. Faced with one of the more active resistance movements in France, the Nazi Gestapo unit assigned to Marseilles became desperate for informants and turned to the most prestigious figures in the underworld, who were only too willing to collaborate.

On July 14, 1942 the French Resistance showed its strength for the first time by machine gunning the headquarters of a pro-German political organization in downtown Marseilles (the PPF, who director was the ex-mayor Simon Sabiani). The following afternoon Carbone and Spirito handed the Gestapo a complete list of all involved. For these and other invaluable services, they were lavishly rewarded. This prosperity was short lived, however, for in 1943 Carbone was killed en route to Marseilles when his train was blown up by the Resistance and following the Normandy landing in 1944, Spirito fled to Spain with Sabiani.

In 1947, Spirito came to the US where he enjoyed an active role in the New York-Marseilles Heroin traffic. However he was arrested in New York 3 years later on a heroin smuggling charge and sentenced to 2 years in Atlanta Federal Prison. Upon his release he returned to France, where he was arrested and tried for wartime collaboration with the Nazis; however, after only 8 months in prison, he retired to manage restaurants in the French Riviera, where he remained active in the heroin business.”

*Article from Blacklisted News: Secret Histories From Chicago to 1984

- The Green Chazzan 

***EDITOR: The military wing of the Consortium was first formed during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services special operation, Operation Jedburgh. The Jedburgh Teams were the countries first modern elite commandos. They would become connected in Heroin trafficking through the French Resistance, who used the heroin sales to raise money for arms; the heroin was provided by the Spirito-Carbone network through Corsica and Marseilles. Many of the Jedbergh Team commandos would go on to join OSS China, where they would replicate the narco-terrorism techniques used by the French against the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia. OSS China would become the upper echelon of the newly formed CIA and take control of Southeast Asian heroin.

General John K. Singlaub, Colonel Lucien Conein, and Mitch Werbell III were highly trained commando special operatives that could have easily been classified as ‘super soldiers’ in their own right. The three men have pioneered many of the United States advanced special forces techniques and have accolades from numerous wars; they also pioneered narco-trafficking techniques using military and police assets to control drug flows internationally. General Singlaub is the primary military of the Consortium, having trained many officers within the military high command of the U.S. Army; Colonel Conein and Mitch Werbell III, a legendary mercenary and global arms dealer, became key architects of the DEA and the Consortium control of the international drugs-arms-cash system.

Excerpts from Operation Jedburgh

by John Simkin (1997) – Part 1

Jedburgh Team Profiles

General John K. Singlaub

General John K. Singlaub

John K. Singlaub was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War. He was parachuted into Nazi occupied France as part of Operation Jedburgh and helped to organize the French Resistance before the D-Day invasion. Later he was sent to OSS China where he worked with Ray S. Cline, Richard Helms, E. Howard Hunt, Jake Esterline, Mitchell WerBell, Paul Helliwell, Jack Anderson, Robert Emmett Johnson and Lucien Conein. Others working in China at that time included Tommy Corcoran, Whiting Willauer and William Pawley.

Singlaub joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and he was sent to Manchuria during the Chinese Civil War. In 1951 he became Deputy Chief of the CIA station in South Korea. Later he moved to Laos where he worked closely with Ted Shackley. In 1964 Singlaub became chief of Military Assistance Command Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG). This was an unconventional warfare task force that oversaw assassination and paramilitary operations throughout Southeast Asia. MACV-SOG now took over Oplan 34-A from the CIA. Ted Shackley, CIA chief in Laos, reported having monthly meetings with Singlaub. According to one report, Singlaub “oversaw political assassinations programs in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand” (Bill Moyers, Inside the Shadow Government).

Laos Secret War

In 1966 Ted Shackley was placed in charge of CIA secret war in Laos. He appointed Thomas G. Clines as his deputy. He also took Carl E. Jenkins, David Morales, Rafael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez and Edwin Wilson with him to Laos. According to Joel Bainerman it was at this point that Shackley and his “Secret Team” became involved in the drug trade. They did this via General Vang Pao, the leader of the anti-communist forces in Laos. Vang Pao was a major figure in the opium trade in Laos. To help him Shackley used his CIA officials and assets to sabotage the competitors. Eventually Vang Pao had a monopoly over the heroin trade in Laos. In 1967 Shackley and Clines helped Vang Pao to obtain financial backing to form his own airline, Zieng Khouang Air Transport Company, to transport opium and heroin between Long Tieng and Vientiane. In 1968 Shackley and Clines arranged a meeting in Saigon between Santo Trafficante and Vang Pao to establish a heroin-smuggling operation from Southeast Asia to the United States.

Gen. Vang Pao

In 1969 Ted Shackley became Chief of Station in Vietnam and headed the Phoenix Program. This involved the killing of non-combatant Vietnamese civilians suspected of collaborating with the National Liberation Front. In a two year period, Operation Phoenix murdered 28,978 civilians. As a specialist in unconventional warfare and covert operations, Singlaub kept a low profile. However, he eventually became chief of staff of the United Nations Command in South Korea. He was forced to resign in May, 1978 after criticizing President Jimmy Carter and his plans to reduce the number of troops in South Korea.

According to Peter Dale Scott, ten days before his retirement, Singlaub attended a meeting of right-wingers who “Didn’t think the country was being run properly and were interested in doing something about it”. The meeting was hosted by Mitchell WerBell. Singlaub now joined forces with Ted Shackley, Ray S. Cline and Richard Helms to get Jimmy Carter removed from the White House. In December, 1979, Singlaub and retired General Daniel Graham headed a delegation from the American Security Council, a private right-wing organization, on a trip to Guatemala. Singlaub pointed out that Ronald Reagan “recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done” in order to destroy communism in Guatemala. “death squad activity in Guatemala increased dramatically following the trip.” Upon his return to the United States Singlaub called for “sympathetic understanding of the death squads” (The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era).

Singlaub returned to Guatemala in 1980. This time he went with General Gordon Sumner of the Council for inter-American Security. Singlaub again took a message from Ronald Reagan who was now campaigning for the Presidency of the United States. Singlaub told his audiences that “help was on the way in the form of Ronald Reagan”.

World Anti-Communist League Meeting

Singlaub now became involved in extreme right-wing politics. He joined the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Established in 1966 by the intelligence organizations of Taiwan and South Korea to provide anti-communist propaganda. Fascists played an important role in the WACL and at least three European chapters of the organization were controlled by former SS officers from Nazi Germany. By 1980 the WACL agreed that “Argentine counterterror and torture specialist would be dispatched to El Salvador to assist in the anti-communist struggle there”. (Inside the League) With a $20,000 loan from Taiwan, Singlaub created the U.S. Council for World Freedom (USCWF) in 1981. Singlaub was an advocate of unconventional warfare, which he defined as “low intensity actions, such as sabotage, terrorism, assassination and guerrilla warfare”. Singlaub made clear that the USCWF would provide “support and assistance to the democratic, anti-communist Freedom Fighters of the world.”

In a speech in San Diego, Singlaub argued: “I am convinced that our struggle with Communism is not a spectator sport. as a result of that view, we have opted for the court of action which calls for the provision of support and assistance to those who are actively resisting the Soviet supported intrusion into Africa, Asia and North America. The geographic regions of WACL must not only provide support to the freedom fighters who are engaged in combat in their own region, but they must develop plans of action to support the resistance movements in other regions of the world.” Over the next few months committees were established to determine the needs of anti-communist resistance movements in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan.

Singlaub enjoyed a good relationship with Ronald Reagan and in 1982 USCWF was granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. Singlaub had to give an undertaken that “at no time will the USCWF ever contemplate providing material or funds to any revolutionary, counter-revolutionary or liberation movement”. Soon afterwards Singlaub helped establish a company called GeoMiliTech Consultants Corporation (GMT) a Washington-based arms trading company. In 1984 it is believed that Singlaub organized a shipment of weapons, ammunition and C-4 explosives to the Contras (Moyers).

In January 1985, Singlaub visited South Korea and Taiwan in order to obtain money and weapons for the Contras. Later that year Singlaub developed a plan for a large military action called the “Rainbow Mission” which involved the invasion of Nicaragua by Americans and Contras. This plan was approved by Robert Owen and Oliver North. Soon afterwards Singlaub procured a $5.3 million of Eastern bloc arms for the Contras through GMT. This included 500 pounds of C-4, five ground-to-air missiles, grenades and mortars. Questions began to be asked about Singlaub’s relationship with Oliver North. On 7th October, 1985, Robert McFarlane denied that: “Lieutenant Colonel North did not use his influence to facilitate the movement of supplies to facilitate the movement of supplies to the resistance. There is no official or unofficial relationship with any member of the NSC staff regarding fund raising for the Nicaraguan democratic opposition. This includes the alleged relationship with General Singlaub.”

In October, 1985, Congress agreed to vote 27 million dollars in non-lethal aid for the Contras in Nicaragua. However, members of the Ronald Reagan administration, including George Bush, decided to use this money to provide weapons to the Contras and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Gene Wheaton was recruited to use National Air to transport these weapons. He agreed but began to have second thoughts when he discovered that Richard Secord was involved in the operation and in May 1986 Wheaton told William Casey, director of the CIA, about what he knew about this illegal operation. Casey refused to take any action, claiming that the agency or the government were not involved in what later became known as Irangate.

Wheaton now took his story to Daniel Sheehan, a left-wing lawyer. Wheaton told him that Thomas G. Clines and Ted Shackley had been running a top-secret assassination unit since the early 1960s. According to Wheaton, it had begun with an assassination training program for Cuban exiles and the original target had been Fidel Castro. Wheaton also contacted Newt Royce and Mike Acoca, two journalists based in Washington. The first article on this scandal appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on 27th July, 1986. As a result of this story, Congressman Dante Facell wrote a letter to the Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, asking him if it “true that foreign money, kickback money on programs, was being used to fund foreign covert operations.” Two months later, Weinberger denied that the government knew about this illegal operation.

Gen. Richard V Secord

Singlaub agreed to divert press attention away from the activities of George H. W. Bush, Oliver North, William Casey, Donald P. Gregg, Robert Owen, Felix Rodriguez, Rafael Quintero, Ted Shackley, Richard L. Armitage, Thomas G. Clines and Richard Secord. He gave several interviews where he admitted raising money for the Contras. This included an article in Common Cause where he claimed he had raised “tens of million of dollars… for arms and ammunition”. This money was raised via the World Anti-Communist League. Most of this money came from the governments of Taiwan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. As the U.S. Neutrality Act bans a private American organization from supplying weapons to foreign groups, Singlaub established a secret overseas bank account to collect this money.

On 5th October, 1986, a Sandinista patrol in Nicaragua shot down a C-123K cargo plane that was supplying the Contras. That night Felix Rodriguez made a telephone call to the office of George H. W. Bush. He told Bush aide, Samuel Watson, that the C-123k aircraft had gone missing. Eugene Hasenfus, an Air America veteran, survived the crash and told his captors that he thought the CIA was behind the operation. He also provided information that several Cuban-Americans running the operation in El Salvador. This resulted in journalists being able to identify Rafael Quintero, Luis Posada and Felix Rodriguez as the Cuban-Americans mentioned by Hasenfus.

George Bush w/ Crack Bag

In an article in the Washington Post (11th October, 1986), the newspaper reported that George Bush and Donald P. Gregg were linked to Felix Rodriguez. It gradually emerged that Singlaub, Richard L. Armitage, William Casey, Thomas G. Clines, Oliver North, Edwin Wilson and Richard Secord were also involved in this conspiracy to provide arms to the Contras. On 12th December, 1986, Daniel Sheehan submitted to the court an affidavit detailing the Irangate scandal. He also claimed that Thomas G. Clines and Ted Shackley were running a private assassination program that had evolved from projects they ran while working for the CIA. Others named as being part of this assassination team included Rafael Quintero, Richard Secord, Felix Rodriguez and Albert Hakim. It later emerged that Gene Wheaton and Carl E. Jenkins were the two main sources for this affidavit.

Six days after the publication of Sheehan’s affidavit, William Casey underwent an operation for a “brain tumor”. As a result of the operation, Casey lost the power of speech and died, literally without ever talking. On 9th February, Robert McFarlane, another person involved in the Iran-Contra Scandal, took an overdose of drugs. In November, 1986, Ronald Reagan set-up a three man commission (President’s Special Review Board). The three men were John Tower, Brent Scowcroft and Edmund Muskie. Richard L. Armitage was interviewed by the committee. He admitted that he had arranged a series of meetings between Menachem Meron, the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Defence, with Oliver North and Richard Secord. However, he denied that he discussed the replenishment of Israeli TOW missiles with Meron.

According to Lawrence E. Walsh, who carried out the official investigation into the scandal (Iran-Contra: The Final Report): “By the spring of 1985 it became clear that Congress would not rescue the Contras any time soon. The House defeated a $14 million supplemental aid package in March, leaving the Contras to rely on North and his associates. Alfredo Calero found himself surrounded not only with recommended arms brokers like Secord – who by June 1985 had arranged several large arms shipments – but also willing broker/contribution solicitors like Singlaub.” Walsh also discovered that: “CIA officers in South Korea informed CIA headquarters on January 28, 1985, that retired U.S. Army Major General John K. Singlaub had asked the governing political party to contribute $2 million to the Contras. The Koreans told CIA personnel that some signal from the U.S. Government endorsing the Singlaub request would be necessary.” Walsh obtained a memorandum from Oliver North to Robert McFarlane discussing this issue.

In 1991 John Singlaub published his autobiography, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century. The reviewer in The New York Times wrote: “In this readable, often engaging memoir, Jack Singlaub sounds like the kind of guy you would want with you in the trenches. But not necessarily after the shooting stops.”

Colonel Lucien Conein

Col. Lucien Conein (rear)

Lucien Conein was born in Paris in 1919. Five years later his widowed mother arranged for him to live with her sister in Kansas City, who had married a soldier in the United States Army (he had served in France during the First World War).

When the Second World War broke out in 1939 Conein returned to France and joined the French Army. After the German invasion in 1940 Conein returned to the United States. He now joined the U.S. Army but because of his knowledge of France he was transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In 1944 he was sent to Vichy France with orders to help the French Resistance attack the German Army during the Allied landings in Normandy. He worked with the Jedburghs, a multinational band directed by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

While in France, Conein began working with the Corsican Brotherhood, an underworld organization allied with the resistance. Later Conein was to say: “”When the Sicilians put out a contract, it’s usually limited to the continental United States, or maybe Canada or Mexico. But with the Corsicans, it’s international. They’ll go anywhere. There’s an old Corsican proverb: ‘If you want revenge and you act within 20 years, you’re acting in haste.’ “With the death of Adolf Hitler and the surrender of Germany in April, 1945, Conein was sent to Vietnam where he helped organize attacks against the Japanese Army.

At the end of the Second World War, Conein returned to Europe as a member of the OSS. This included organizing the infiltration of spies and saboteurs into those countries in Eastern Europe under the control of the Soviet Union. Conein later joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and was involved in covert operations in several different countries. In 1951, Gordon Stewart, the CIA chief of espionage in West Germany, sent Conein to establish a base in Nuremberg. The following year Ted Shackley arrived to help Conein with his work. The main purpose of this base was to send agents into Warsaw Pact countries to gather information needed to fight the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The venture was not a great success and the governments in both Poland and Czechoslovakia announced that they had smashed several CIA espionage rings. Later he worked with William Harvey in Berlin.

CIA Chief Ted Shackley

In 1954 Conein was sent to work under General Edward Lansdale in a covert operation against the government of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. The plan was to mount a propaganda campaign to persuade the Vietnamese people in the south not to vote for the communists in the forthcoming elections. In the months that followed they distributed targeted documents that claimed the Vietminh had entered South Vietnam and were killing innocent civilians. The Ho Chi Minh government was also accused of slaying thousands of political opponents in North Vietnam. In the late 1950s Conein worked closely with William Colby, the CIA station chief in Saigon. Conein helped to arm and train local tribesmen, mostly the Montagnards, who carried out attacks on the Vietminh. These men also guided Vietnamese Special Forces units who made commando raids into Laos and North Vietnam.

President John F. Kennedy eventually became convinced that President Ngo Dinh Diem would never be able to unite the South Vietnamese against communism. Several attempts had already been made to overthrow Diem but Kennedy had always instructed the CIA and the US military forces in Vietnam to protect him. In order to obtain a more popular leader of South Vietnam, Kennedy agreed that the role of the CIA should change. Conein provided a group of South Vietnamese generals with $40,000 to carry out the coup with the promise that US forces would make no attempt to protect Diem. At the beginning of November, 1963, Diem was overthrown by a military coup. After the generals had promised Diem that he would be allowed to leave the country they changed their mind and killed him. Nguyen Van Thieu now became the chairman of a 10-member military directorate.

It has been suggested that Conein might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In his book, The Last Investigation (1993), Gaeton Fonzi points out that Conein was closely connected to E. Howard Hunt and Mitchell WerBell, two men suspected of the crime. Joseph Trento has also pointed out that Conein worked with Ted Shackley and William Harvey at the JM/WAVE CIA station in Miami in 1963. Leroy Fletcher Prouty claimed that Conein has been identified as being in Dallas on the day of the assassination. Whereas Ron Ecker and Jack White have suggested that he was standing at the corner of Main and Houston at the time Kennedy was killed. However, Larry Hancock has investigated Conein and believes he never left Vietnam during 1963.

Conein in Vietnam

Conein left the CIA in 1968 and became a businessman in South Vietnam. In 1970 E. Howard Hunt introduced Conein to President Richard Nixon. Two years later Nixon appointed Conein to the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he directed an intelligence-gathering and operations unit. It has been claimed by William Turner and Warren Hinckle in their book, Deadly Secrets, that this work included “plots to assassinate key international drug figures”. In 1972 E. Howard Hunt considered hiring Conein for the group that bungled the 1972 Watergate burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Conein later told the historian, Stanley Karnow: “If I’d been involved, we’d have done it right.” Lucien Conein died after a heart attack at Suburban Hospital, Virginia, on 3rd June, 1998.

Mitch Werbell III

Mitch Werbell III

Mitchell Werbell, the son of a former Czarist calvary officer, was born in Philadelphia in 1918. During the Second World War Werbell joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and saw action in Burma and China. According to Gaeton Fonzi, this enabled Werbell to join “the superspy fraternity” that included Allen W. Dulles, William Casey, Richard Helms and E. Howard Hunt. After the war, Werbell lived outside of Atlanta. He also worked as an arms dealer. Werbell ran a series of weapon manufacturing and marketing firms including Military Armament Corporation, Defense Services and Quantum Ordnance Bankers. Werbell distributed advanced weaponry to selective foreign groups.

In 1959 WerBell did covert work for Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. During this period be became friends with Gerry P. Hemming, Bernardo De Torres and Gordon Novel. Hemming and Torres were both representatives of WerBell in his arms sales business. WerBell was also rumoured to be involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Roy Hargraves told Noel Twyman that WerBell supplied silencers used by the gunmen in Dallas. Another source said that WerBell was involved with Jack Ruby.

Fulgencio Batista

WerBell was interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi while carrying out research for his book, The Last Investigation (1993): “There’s a helluva lot I ain’t said yet, and there’s a helluva lot I ain’t gonna say yet… I’ve been in so many places, so many countries, so many revolutions, it’s beginning to get all mixed up in my mind… We don’t play with people like that (Jack Ruby). I mean, it’s as simple as that. This guy Ruby, he called, I didn’t know who the hell he was, but that was years ago.”

WerBell also did covert work in the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. In 1966 WerBell served as adviser on Project Nassau, a planned invasion of Haiti by Cuban and Haitian exiles to oust the dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. In 1967 WerBell formed a partnership with Gordon Ingram. Together they distributed the Ingram M-11, a hand-held, quiet machine gun. Six years later WerBell and his arms company, Defense Services, were indicted for allegedly trying to sell some of these Ingram submachine guns to a federal undercover agent. He was also indicted for proposing to sell 2,000 of these weapons to Robert Vesco in Costa Rica. Later, both these charges were dropped. Mitchell Livingston WerBell III died of cancer in 1983.

Sources

1. H. Crerar, Special Warfare (2000)

John K. Singlaub, speech at a World Anti-Communist League meeting in San Diego (4th September, 1984)

John K. Singlaub, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (1991)

Joseph E. Persico, review in The New York Times of John K. Singlaub’s Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (4th August, 1991)

David Corn, Blond Ghost: The Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades (1994)

Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997)

Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (1993)

Alan J. Weberman, Coup D’Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1975)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Jedburgh

EDITOR: Richard Helms, the former CIA director was actively involved in expanding Consortium narcotics activities prior to and during the Vietnam War. He was a key figure for the Bay of Pigs invasion, The Consortium strongly desired an attack on Cuba because Fidel Castro had confiscated a large portion of Consortium Gold that had been laundered into Cuba by the Italian Mafia under the previous regime. Helms was also actively involved in setting up the South American Cocaine Networks through assassination programs during the Nixon Administration. E. Howard Hunt was a major suspect in the JFK Assassination Investigation and was a top level operative in the Nixon White House. Hunt played a major role in carrying out the dirty work of the Nixon Administration and was directly involved in the Watergate cover-up and subsequent investigation. Hunt played a major role in facilitating DEA activities in South America.

Excerpts from Operation Jedburgh

by John Simkin (1997) – Part 2

Jedburgh Team Profiles

Richard Helms

Richard Helms

Richard Helms was born in St Davids, Philadelphia, on 30th March, 1913. After graduating from Williams College, Massachusetts, he joined the United Press news agency and in 1936 was sent to Nazi Germany to cover the Berlin Olympic Games. On his return to the United States he joined the advertising department of the Indianapolis Times. Two years later he became national advertising manager. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor Helms joined the United States Navy. In August, 1943, he was transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that had made established by William Donovan. The OSS had responsibility for collecting and analyzing information about countries at war with the United States. It also helped to organize guerrilla fighting, sabotage and espionage.

After the surrender of Germany in 1945, Helms helped interview suspected Nazi war criminals. Helms remained in the OSS and in 1946 was put in charge of intelligence and counter-intelligence activities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The following year Helms joined the recently formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). His first task was to mount a mount a massive convert campaign against the Communist Party during the Italian General Election. This was highly successful and this encouraged President Harry S. Truman to establish the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), an organization instructed to conduct covert anti-Communist operations around the world. In August, 1952, OPC and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged to form the Directorate of Plans (DPP).

Frank Wisner was appointed head of the DPP and he appointed Helms as his chief of operations. In December, 1956, Wisner suffered a mental breakdown and was diagnosed as suffering from manic depression. During his absence Wisner’s job was covered by Helms. The CIA sent Wisner to the Sheppard-Pratt Institute, a psychiatric hospital near Baltimore. He was prescribed psychoanalysis and shock therapy (electroconvulsive treatment). It was not successful and still suffering from depression, he was released from hospital in 1958.

Allen W Dulles

Wisner was too ill to return to his post as head of the DDP. Allen W. Dulles therefore sent him to London to be CIA chief of station in England. Dulles decided that Richard Bissell rather than Helms should become the new head of the DPP. Helms was named as his deputy. Together they became responsible for what became known as the CIA’s Black Operations. This involved a policy that was later to become known as Executive Action (a plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power). This including a coup d’état that overthrew the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 after he introduced land reforms and nationalized the United Fruit Company.

Other political leaders deposed by Executive Action included Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, General Abd al-Karim Kassem of Iraq and Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam. However, his main target was Fidel Castro who had established a socialist government in Cuba. In March I960, President Dwight Eisenhower of the United States approved a CIA plan to overthrow Castro. The plan involved a budget of $13 million to train “a paramilitary force outside Cuba for guerrilla action.” The strategy was organized by Bissell and Helms. An estimated 400 CIA officers were employed full-time to carry out what became known as Operation Mongoose. Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA Technical Services Division was asked to come up with proposals that would undermine Castro’s popularity with the Cuban people. Plans included a scheme to spray a television studio in which he was about to appear with an hallucinogenic drug and contaminating his shoes with thallium which they believed would cause the hair in his beard to fall out.

Fidel Castro

These schemes were rejected and instead Bissell and Helms decided to arrange the assassination of Fidel Castro. In September 1960, Bissell and Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), initiated talks with two leading figures of the Mafia, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. Later, other crime bosses such as Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante and Meyer Lansky became involved in this plot against Castro. Robert Maheu, a veteran of CIA counter-espionage activities, was instructed to offer the Mafia $150,000 to kill Fidel Castro. The advantage of employing the Mafia for this work is that it provided CIA with a credible cover story. The Mafia were known to be angry with Castro for closing down their profitable brothels and casinos in Cuba. If the assassins were killed or captured the media would accept that the Mafia were working on their own.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had to be brought into this plan as part of the deal involved protection against investigations against the Mafia in the United States. Castro was later to complain that there were twenty ClA-sponsored attempts on his life. Eventually Johnny Roselli and his friends became convinced that the Cuban revolution could not be reversed by simply removing its leader. However, they continued to play along with this CIA plot in order to prevent them being prosecuted for criminal offences committed in the United States.

When John F. Kennedy replaced Dwight Eisenhower as president of the United States he was told about the CIA plan to invade Cuba. Kennedy had doubts about the venture but he was afraid he would be seen as soft on communism if he refused permission for it to go ahead. Kennedy’s advisers convinced him that Fidel Castro was an unpopular leader and that once the invasion started the Cuban people would support the ClA-trained forces. On April 14, 1961, B-26 planes began bombing Cuba’s airfields. After the raids Cuba was left with only eight planes and seven pilots. Two days later five merchant ships carrying 1,400 Cuban exiles arrived at the Bay of Pigs. The attack was a total failure. Two of the ships were sunk, including the ship that was carrying most of the supplies. Two of the planes that were attempting to give air-cover were also shot down. Within seventy-two hours all the invading troops had been killed, wounded or had surrendered.

After the CIA’s internal inquiry into this fiasco, Allen W. Dulles was sacked by President John F. Kennedy and Richard Bissell was forced to resign. Helms now took over the Directorate for Plans. His deputy was Thomas H. Karamessines. Helms now introduced a campaign that involved covert attacks on the Cuban economy.

In 1962 Helms became increasingly involved in the Vietnam War. By this time President John F. Kennedy was convinced that Ngo Dinh Diem would never be able to unite the South Vietnamese against communism. Several attempts had already been made to overthrow Diem but Kennedy had always instructed the CIA and the US military forces in Vietnam to protect him. Eventually, in order to obtain a more popular leader of South Vietnam, Kennedy agreed that the role of the CIA should change. Lucien Conein, a CIA operative, provided a group of South Vietnamese generals with $40,000 to carry out the coup with the promise that US forces would make no attempt to protect Diem. At the beginning of November, 1963, President Diem was overthrown by a military coup. The generals had promised Diem that he would be allowed to leave the country they changed their mind and killed him.

Conein

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Helms was given the responsibility of investigating Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA. Helms initially appointed John M. Whitten to undertake the agency’s in-house investigation. After talking to Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City, Whitten discovered that Oswald had been photographed at the Cuban consulate in early October, 1963. Nor had Scott told Whitten, his boss, that Oswald had also visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico. In fact, Whitten had not been informed of the existence of Oswald, even though there was a 201 pre-assassination file on him that had been maintained by the Counterintelligence/Special Investigative Group.

John M. Whitten and his staff of 30 officers, were sent a large amount of information from the FBI. According to Gerald D. McKnight “the FBI deluged his branch with thousands of reports containing bits and fragments of witness testimony that required laborious and time-consuming name checks.” Whitten later described most of this FBI material as “weirdo stuff”. As a result of this initial investigation, Whitten told Richard Helms that he believed that Oswald had acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On 6th December, Nicholas Katzenbach invited John M. Whitten and Birch O’Neal, Angleton’s trusted deputy and senior Special Investigative Group (SIG) officer to read Commission Document 1 (CD1), the report that the FBI had written on Lee Harvey Oswald. Whitten now realized that the FBI had been withholding important information on Oswald from him. He also discovered that Richard Helms had not been providing him all of the agency’s available files on Oswald. This included Oswald’s political activities in the months preceding the assassination.

Whitten had a meeting where he argued that Oswald’s pro-Castro political activities needed closer examination, especially his attempt to shoot the right-wing General Edwin Walker, his relationship with anti-Castro exiles in New Orleans, and his public support for the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Whitten added that has he had been denied this information, his initial conclusions on the assassination were “completely irrelevant.” Helms responded by taking Whitten off the case. James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Branch, was now put in charge of the investigation. According to Gerald McKnight (Breach of Trust) Angleton “wrested the CIA’s in-house investigation away from John Whitten because he either was convinced or pretended to believe that the purpose of Oswald’s trip to Mexico City had been to meet with his KGB handlers to finalize plans to assassinate Kennedy.”

Tet Offensive

President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Admiral William Raborn, head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Helms became Raborn’s deputy but became increasingly influential over decisions being made in Vietnam. This included the covert action in neighboring Laos and the formation of South Vietnamese counter-terror teams. The following year Johnson promoted Helms to become head of the CIA. He was the first director of the organization to have worked his way up from the ranks. His standing with Johnson improved when he successfully predicted a quick victory for Israel during the Six Day War in June, 1967. However, Helms information about the size of enemy forces in Vietnam was less accurate. Johnson was told in November, 1967, that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces had fallen to 248,000. In reality the true figure was close to 500,000 and United States troops were totally unprepared for the Tet Offensive.

Under President Richard Nixon, Helms agreed to implement what became known as the Huston Plan. This was a proposal for all the country’s security services to combine in a massive internal surveillance operation. In doing so, Helms became involved in a secret conspiracy as it was illegal for the Central Intelligence Agency to operate within the United States. In 1970 it seemed that Salvador Allende and his Socialist Workers’ Party would win the general election in Chile. Various multinational companies, including International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), feared what would happen if Allende gained control of the country. Helms agreed to use funds supplied by these companies to help the right-wing party gain power. When this strategy ended in failure, Nixon ordered Helms to help the Chilean armed forces to overthrow Allende. On 11th September, 1973, a military coup removed Allende’s government from power. Allende died in the fighting in the presidential palace in Santiago and General Augusto Pinochet replaced him as president.

Augusto Pinochet

During the Watergate Scandal President Richard Nixon became concerned about the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Three of those involved in the burglary, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio Martinez and James W. McCord had close links with the CIA. Nixon and his aides attempted to force the CIA director, Richard Helms, and his deputy, Vernon Walters, to pay hush-money to Hunt, who was attempting to blackmail the government. Although it seemed Walters was willing to do this, Helms refused. In February, 1973, Nixon sacked Helms. His deputy, Thomas H. Karamessines, resigned in protest. The following month Helms became U.S. Ambassador to Iran. James Schlesinger now became the new director of the CIA. Schlesinger was heard to say: “The clandestine service was Helms’s Praetorian Guard. It had too much influence in the Agency and was too powerful within the government. I am going to cut it down to size.” This he did and over the next three months over 7 per cent of CIA officers lost their jobs.

On 9th May, 1973, James Schlesinger issued a directive to all CIA employees: “I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or might have gone on in the past, which might be considered to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency. I hereby direct every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information should call my secretary and say that he wishes to talk to me about “activities outside the CIA’s charter”. There were several employees who had been trying to complain about the illegal CIA activities for some time. As Cord Meyer pointed out, this directive “was a hunting license for the resentful subordinate to dig back into the records of the past in order to come up with evidence that might destroy the career of a superior whom he long hated.”

In 1975 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began investigating the CIA. Senator Stuart Symington asked Richard Helms if the agency had been involved in the removal of Salvador Allende. Helms replied no. He also insisted that he had not passed money to opponents of Allende.

Frank Church

Investigations by the CIA’s Inspector General and by Frank Church and his Select Committee on Intelligence Activities showed that Helms had lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They also discovered that Helms had been involved in illegal domestic surveillance and the murders of Patrice Lumumba, General Abd al-Karim Kassem and Ngo Dinh Diem. Helms was eventually found guilty of lying to Congress and received a suspended two-year prison sentence.

In its final report, issued in April 1976, the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities concluded: “Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied.” The committee also revealed details for the first time of what the CIA called Operation Mockingbird. The committee also reported that the Central Intelligence Agency had withheld from the Warren Commission, during its investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, information about plots by the Government of the United States against Fidel Castro of Cuba; and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had conducted a counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) against Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

On 16th May, 1978, John M. Whitten appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). He criticised Richard Helms for not making a full disclosure about the Rolando Cubela plot to the Warren Commission. He added “I think that was a morally highly reprehensible act, which he cannot possibly justify under his oath of office or any other standard of professional service.” Whitten also said that if he had been allowed to continue with the investigation he would have sought out what was going on at JM/WAVE. This would have involved the questioning of Ted Shackley, David Sanchez Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, Rip Robertson, George Joannides, Gordon Campbell and Thomas G. Clines. As Jefferson Morley has pointed out in The Good Spy: “Had Whitten been permitted to follow these leads to their logical conclusions, and had that information been included in the Warren Commission report, that report would have enjoyed more credibility with the public. Instead, Whitten’s secret testimony strengthened the HSCA’s scathing critique of the C.I.A.’s half-hearted investigation of Oswald. The HSCA concluded that Kennedy had been killed by Oswald and unidentifiable co-conspirators.”

John M. Whitten also told the HSCA that James Jesus Angleton involvement in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was “improper”. Although he was placed in charge of the investigation by Richard Helms, Angleton “immediately went into action to do all the investigating”. When Whitten complained to Helms about this he refused to act. Whitten believes that Angleton’s attempts to sabotage the investigation was linked to his relationship with the Mafia. Whitten claims that Angleton also prevented a CIA plan to trace mob money to numbered accounts in Panama. Angleton told Whitten that this investigation should be left to the FBI. When Whitten mentioned this to a senior CIA official, he replied: “Well, that’s Angleton’s excuse. The real reason is that Angleton himself has ties to the Mafia and he would not want to double-cross them.”

Whitten also pointed out that as soon as Angleton took control of the investigation he concluded that Cuba was unimportant and focused his internal investigation on Oswald’s life in the Soviet Union. If Whitten had remained in charge he would have “concentrated his attention on CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami, Florida, to uncover what George Joannides, the station chief, and operatives from the SIG and SAS knew about Oswald.” When he appeared before the HSCA Whitten revealed that he had been unaware of the CIA’s Executive Action program. He added that he thought it possible that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been involved in this assassination operation. Richard Helms died on 22nd October, 2002. As one commentator pointed out at the time: “Helms had gone to his grave with the sole knowledge of what Congress did not manage to uncover.” His autobiography, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the CIA, was published in 2003.

E. Howard Hunt

E Howard Hunt

Everette Howard Hunt was born in Hamburg, on 9th October, 1918. During the Second World War Hunt served in the Office of Strategic Services. After the war he joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and for a while was stationed in China. While there he met and married Dorothy Hunt. In 1949 Hunt establish the first postwar CIA station in Mexico City. He also worked closely with President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua.

Hunt was involved in clandestine operations in Guatemala against President Jacobo Arbenz. The plot against Arbenz became part of Executive Action (a plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power). Tracy Barnes was eventually placed in charge of what became known as Operation Success. David Atlee Phillips was appointed to run the propaganda campaign against Arbenz’s government. According to Phillips he initially questioned the right of the CIA to interfere in Guatemala: In his autobiography Phillips claims he said to Barnes: “But Arbenz became President in a free election. What right do we have to help someone topple his government and throw him out of office?” However, Barnes convinced him that it was vital important that the Soviets did not establish a “beachhead in Central America”.

Jacobo Arbenz

The CIA propaganda campaign included the distribution of 100,000 copies of a pamphlet entitled Chronology of Communism in Guatemala. They also produced three films on Guatemala for showing free in cinemas. David Atlee Phillips, along with Hunt, was responsible for running the CIA’s Voice of Liberation radio station. Faked photographs were distributed that claimed to show the mutilated bodies of opponents of Arbenz. William (Rip) Robertson was also involved in the campaign against Arbenz. The CIA began providing financial and logistic support for Colonel Carlos Castillo. With the help of resident Anastasio Somoza, Castillo had formed a rebel army in Nicaragua. It has been estimated that between January and June, 1954, the CIA spent about $20 million on Castillo’s army. On 18th June 1954 aircraft dropped leaflets over Guatemala demanding that Arbenz resign immediately or else the county would be bombed. CIA’s Voice of Liberation also put out similar radio broadcasts. This was followed by a week of bombing ports, ammunition dumps, military barracks and the international airport.

Carlos Castillo’s collection of soldiers now crossed the Honduran-Guatemalan border. His army was outnumbered by the Guatemalan Army. However, the CIA Voice of Liberation successfully convinced Arbenz’s supporters that two large and heavily armed columns of invaders were moving towards Guatemala City. The CIA was also busy bribing Arbenz’s military commanders. It was later discovered that one commander accepted $60,000 to surrender his troops. Ernesto Guevara attempted to organize some civil militias but senior army officers blocked the distribution of weapons. Jacobo Arbenz now believed he stood little chance of preventing Castillo gaining power. Accepting that further resistance would only bring more deaths he announced his resignation over the radio.

In 1959 Hunt visited Cuba and decided that Fidel Castro posed a serious threat to the security of the United States: “I wrote a top secret report, and I had five recommendations, one of which was the one that’s always been thrown at me, is that during… or… slightly antecedent to an invasion, Castro would have to be neutralized – and we all know what that meant, although I didn’t want to say so in a memorandum with my name on it.” Hunt played an important role in planning the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Hunt was CIA station chief in Mexico during the early 1960s and was rumored to have been involved in the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. It was falsely claimed that he was one of the men arrested in Dallas on the day of the murder. In 1970 Hunt officially retired from the Central Intelligence Agency. On the advice of Richard Helms, Hunt went to work for Robert F. Bennett, the head of the Robert Mullen & Co, a small public relations company in Washington.

Egil Krogh

On 7th July, 1971, Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman appointed Hunt to the White House staff. Working under Egil Krogh and Gordon Liddy Hunt became a member of the Special Investigations Group (SIG). The group was (informally known as “the Plumbers” because their job was to stop leaks from Nixon’s administration). On 15th May, 1972, Arthur Bremer tried to assassinate George Wallace at a presidential campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland. Wallace was hit four times. Three other people, Alabama State Trooper Captain E. C. Dothard, Dora Thompson, a Wallace campaign volunteer, and Nick Zarvos, a Secret Service agent, were also wounded in the attack.

Richard Nixon was deeply shocked by this event. He told Charles Colson, a member of his White House staff, that he was concerned that Bremer “might have ties to the Republican Party or, even worse, the President’s re-election committee”. Colson now phoned Hunt and asked him to break-in to Bremer’s apartment to discover if he had any documents that linked him to Nixon or his main political opponent in the presidential election, George McGovern. According to Hunt’s autobiography, Undercover, he refused to carry out this order.

Bob Woodward reported in the Washington Post: “Within hours of the Wallace assassination attempt, a White House official was asked by the Washington Post about the identity of the governor’s attacker. During a subsequent conversation that evening, the official raised the possibility of Bremer’s connection to leftist causes and the campaign of Sen. George McGovern, through literature found in his apartment…. One White House source said that when President Nixon was informed of the shooting, he became deeply upset and voiced concern that the attempt on Gov. Wallace’s life might have been made by someone with ties to the Republican Party or the Nixon campaign.”

Later that year the SIG became concerned about the activities of Daniel Ellsberg. He was a former member of the McNamara Study Group which had produced the classified History of Decision Making in Vietnam, 1945-1968. Ellsberg, disillusioned with the progress of the war, believed this document should be made available to the public. Ellsberg gave a copy of what later became known as the Pentagon Papers to Phil Geyelin of the Washington Post. Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee decided against publishing the contents on the document.

Daniel Ellsberg now went to the New York Times and they began publishing extracts from the document on 13th June, 1971. This included information that Dwight Eisenhower had made a secret commitment to help the French defeat the rebellion in Vietnam. The document also showed that John F. Kennedy had turned this commitment into a war by using a secret “provocation strategy” that led to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents and that Lyndon B. Johnson had planned from the beginning of his presidency to expand the war.

G Gordon Liddy

On 3rd September, 1971, Hunt and Gordon Liddy supervised the burglary of a psychiatrist who had been treating Ellsberg. The main objective was to discover incriminating or embarrassing information to discredit Ellsberg. Another project involved the stealing of certain documents from the safe of Hank Greenspun, the editor of the Las Vegas Sun. Later, James W. McCord claimed that Greenspun was being targeted because of his relationship with Robert Maheu and Howard Hughes. In 1972 Gordon Liddy joined the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Later that year Liddy presented Nixon’s attorney general, John N. Mitchell, with an action plan called Operation Gemstone. Liddy wanted a $1 million budget to carry out a series of black ops activities against Nixon’s political enemies. Mitchell decided that the budget for Operation Gemstone was too large. Instead he gave him $250,000 to launch a scaled-down version of the plan.

One of Liddy’s first tasks was to place electronic devices in the Democratic Party campaign offices in an apartment block called Watergate. Liddy wanted to wiretap the conversations of Larry O’Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and R. Spencer Oliver, executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen. This was not successful and on 3rd July, 1972, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord returned to the Watergate offices. However, this time they were caught by the police. The phone number of Howard Hunt was found in address books of two of the burglars. Reporters were able to link the break-in to the White House. Bob Woodward, a reporter working for the Washington Post was told by a friend who was employed by the government, that senior aides of President Richard Nixon, had paid the burglars to obtain information about its political opponents.

James W McCord

Hunt threatened to reveal details of who paid him to organize the Watergate break-in. Dorothy Hunt took part in the negotiations with Charles Colson. According to investigator Sherman Skolnick, Hunt also had information on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He argued that if “Nixon didn’t pay heavy to suppress the documents they had showing he was implicated in the planning and carrying out, by the FBI and the CIA, of the political murder of President Kennedy” James W. McCord claimed that Dorothy Hunt told him that at a meeting with her husband’s attorney, William O. Buttmann, she revealed that Hunt had information that would “blow the White House out of the water”.

In October, 1972, Dorothy attempted to speak to Charles Colson. He refused to talk to her but later admitted to the New York Times that she was “upset at the interruption of payments from Nixon’s associates to Watergate defendants.” On 15th November, Colson met with Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman at Camp David to discuss Howard Hunt’s blackmail threat. John N. Mitchell was also getting worried by Dorothy Hunt’s threats and he asked John Dean to use a secret White House fund to “get the Hunt situation settled down”. Eventually it was arranged for Frederick LaRue to give Hunt about $250,000 to buy his silence.

Charles Colson

However, on 8th December, 1972, Dorothy Hunt had a meeting with Michelle Clark, a journalist working for CBS. According to Sherman Skolnick, Clark was working on a story on the Watergate case: “Ms Clark had lots of insight into the bugging and cover-up through her boyfriend, a CIA operative.” Also with Hunt and Clark was Chicago Congressman George Collins. Dorothy Hunt, Michelle Clark and George Collins took the Flight 533 from Washington to Chicago. The aircraft hit the branches of trees close to Midway Airport: “It then hit the roofs of a number of neighborhood bungalows before plowing into the home of Mrs. Veronica Kuculich at 3722 70th Place, demolishing the home and killing her and a daughter, Theresa. The plane burst into flames killing a total of 45 persons, 43 of them on the plane, including the pilot and first and second officers. Eighteen passengers survived.” Hunt, Clark and Collins were all killed in the accident.

The following month Howard Hunt pleaded guilty to burglary and wiretapping and eventually served 33 months in prison. He later told People Magazine (20th May, 1974): ”I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land. `I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country.” In a comprehensive analysis of Hunt’s work published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, Gore Vidal argued that Hunt might have written the diary that was found in the car of Arthur H. Bremer, the man who attempted to assassinate George Wallace of Alabama.

JFK

In August, 1978, Victor Marchetti published an article about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the liberty Lobby newspaper, Spotlight. In the article Marchetti argued that the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had obtained a 1966 CIA memo that revealed Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming had been involved in the plot to kill Kennedy. Marchetti’s article also included a story that Marita Lorenz had provided information on this plot. Later that month Joseph Trento and Jacquie Powers wrote a similar story for the Sunday News Journal.The HSCA did not publish this CIA memo linking its agents to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hunt now decided to take legal action against the Liberty Lobby and in December, 1981, he was awarded $650,000 in damages. Liberty Lobby appealed to the United States Court of Appeals. It was claimed that Hunt’s attorney, Ellis Rubin, had offered a clearly erroneous instruction as to the law of defamation. The three-judge panel agreed and the case was retried. This time Mark Lane defended the Liberty Lobby against Hunt’s action.

Lane eventually discovered Marchetti’s sources. The main source was William Corson. It also emerged that Marchetti had also consulted James Angleton and Alan J. Weberman before publishing the article. As a result of obtaining of getting depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner and Marita Lorenz, plus a skillful cross-examination by Lane of Hunt, the jury decided in January, 1995, that Marchetti had not been guilty of libel when he suggested that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by people working for the CIA.As a result of the failed legal action, in June, 1995, Hunt filed for bankruptcy protection from his creditors. Hunt spent his final years quietly in his home in Miami’s Biscayne Park neighborhood with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt.Edward Howard Hunt died of pneumonia on 23rd January, 2007. His memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond was published in May 2007.

R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978)

Howard Hunt, interview for the television programme, Backyard (21st February, 1999)

Fabian Escalante, The Secret War: CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-62 (1995)

E Howard Hunt, Undercover (1974)

Lalo J. Gastriani, Fair Play Magazine, The Strange Death of Dorothy Hunt (November, 1994)

Victor Marchetti, The Spotlight (14th August, 1978)

Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (1991)

Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (1974)

Bardach, Slate Magazine (6th October, 2004)

David Wise and Thomas Ross, Invisible Government (1964)

Cord Meyer, journal entry (1st February, 1969)

John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (1986)

Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (1983)

Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the CIA (2003)

EDITOR: Thomas Corcoran was the original bagman for the Jedburgh Teams and was their main connection to members of the oligarchical establishment. He was the creator of OSS China and masterminded the opium-for-guns trade out of Southeast Asia. Corcoran had very strong political connections in both the Democratic and Republican parties and was often able to use the CIA to support his war profiteering and drug trafficking efforts. Corcoran was also one of the main operatives behind the notorious United Fruit Company in Central America and also shared an active role in the Bay of Pigs.

Excerpts from Operation Jedburgh

by John Simkin (1997) – Part 3

Jedburgh Team Profiles

Tommy Corcoran

Tommy Corcoran

Thomas Corcoran, the son of a lawyer, was born in Rhode Island on 29th December, 1899. He was educated at Brown University and Harvard Law School. Corcoran’s most important influence at university was Professor Felix Frankfurter. He wrote that Corcoran was “struggling very hard with the burden of inferiority imposed on him because of his Irish Catholicism”. Frankfurter was impressed with Corcoran’s progress and introduced him to his close friend, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. After graduating in 1926 he was invited by Holmes to become his legal clerk.

In 1927 Corcoran joined the law firm established by William McAdoo. At the time it was run by George Franklin and Joseph Cotton. In 1932 Eugene Meyer, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, was looking for a general counsel for the newly established Reconstruction Finance Corporation. After talks with Franklin he appointed Corcoran to this post. Meyer resigned in 1933 and was replaced by Jesse H. Jones. After Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover he asked Felix Frankfurter to assemble a legal team to review the nation’s securities laws. Frankfurter selected Corcoran, Benjamin Cohen and James Landis for the task. Corcoran, a member of the Democratic Party, readily accepted the post. Together they drafted the legislation that created the Securities and Exchange Commission.

William E. Leuchtenburg, the author of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963), has pointed out: “Corcoran was a new political type: the expert who not only drafted legislation but maneuvered it through the treacherous corridors of Capitol Hill.” Ray S. Cline added: “Corcoran… says that his greatest contribution to government in his long career was helping infiltrate smart young Harvard Law School products into every agency of government. He felt the United States needed to develop a highly educated, highly motivated public service corps that had not existed before Roosevelt’s time.”

Corcoran also became involved in advising Franklin D. Roosevelt over foreign policy. Although he had liberal views on domestic issues, Corcoran was passionately anti-communist. This was partly because of his Roman Catholicism. Roosevelt initially favoured giving help to the Republican government in Spain. However, Corcoran was a supporter of the fascist movement led by General Francisco Franco. As Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson pointed out in their book, The Case Against Congress: A Compelling Indictment of Corruption on Capitol Hill: “Long before Pope John and Pope Paul made it clear they were not in sympathy with the Catholic hierarchy of Spain, the reactionary wing of the Catholic Church in the United States had been conducting one of the most efficient lobbies ever to operate on Capital Hill. It was able to reverse completely American policy on Spain. During the Spanish Civil War, Thomas G. Corcoran, a member of the Roosevelt brain trust, worked effectively at the White House to keep an embargo on all U.S. arms to both sides.”

Corcoran knew that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini would continue to provide both men and arms to Francisco Franco. Roosevelt’s decision enabled fascism to win in Spain and become entrenched in Europe. Roosevelt later told his cabinet that he had made a “grave mistake” with respect to neutrality in the Spanish Civil War. Roosevelt was angry with Tommy Corcoran over his advice on Spain. He also began to see that Corcoran was becoming a problem for the administration. He had upset a lot of powerful figures in Congress with his arm twisting tactics. Corcoran had also tried to unseat those who attempted to resist Franklin D. Roosevelt. For example, Walter George of Georgia claimed that Corcoran had the “power of saying who shall be a senator and who shall not be a senator.”

One day in early October 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt told Corcoran that he wanted him to resign from the administration. He wanted him to carry out a covert mission and it was “too politically dangerous” to do this while serving in his government.

Roosevelt believed that the best way of stopping Japanese imperialism in Asia was to arm the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. However, Congress was opposed to this idea as it was feared that this help might trigger a war with Japan. Therefore, Roosevelt’s plan was for Corcoran to establish a private corporation as OSS China to provide assistance to the nationalist government in China. Roosevelt even supplied the name of the proposed company, China Defense Supplies. He also suggested that his uncle, Frederick Delano, should be co-chairman of the company. Chiang nominated his former finance minister, Tse-ven Soong, as the other co-chairman. For reasons of secrecy, Corcoran took no title other than outside counsel for China Defense Supplies. William S. Youngman was his frontman in China. Corcoran’s friend, Whitey Willauer, was moved to the Foreign Economic Administration, where he supervised the sending of supplies to China. In this way Corcoran was able to create an Asian Lend-Lease program.

Tommy Corcoran had originally been an isolationist. However, he now knew that he could make a fortune out of the arms trade. His first major client was Henry J. Kaiser, a successful businessman from California. Corcoran had helped Kaiser obtain lucrative government contracts while working for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Kaiser paid Corcoran a retainer of $25,000 a year. Corcoran then introduced Kaiser to William S. Knudsen, head of the Office of Production Management. Over the next few years Kaiser obtained $645 million in building contracts at his ten shipyards. Kaiser’s two main business partners were Stephen D. Bechtel and John A. McCone. Kaiser had worked with Bechtel in the 1930s to build many of the major roads throughout California. In 1937 McCone became president of Bechtel-McCone. On the outbreak of the Second World War McCone joined forces with Kaiser and Bechtel to establish the California Shipbuilding Company. With the help of Corcoran, the company obtained large government contracts to build ships. In 1946 it was reported that the company had made $44 million in wartime profits.

Corcoran’s work with China Defense Supplies caused some disquiet in Roosevelt’s administration. Henry Morgenthau was a prominent critic. He argued that in effect, Corcoran was running an off-the-books operation in which a private company was diverting some of the war material destined for China to a private army, the American Volunteer Group. Resistance also came from General George Marshall and General Joseph Stilwell, the American commander in Asia. Marshall and Stilwell both believed that Chiang Kai-shek was completely corrupt and needed to be forced into introducing reforms. Stilwell complained about Corcoran’s ability to present Chiang in the best possible light with Roosevelt. Stilwell wrote to Marshall that the “continued publication of Chungking propaganda in the United States is an increasing handicap to my work.” He added, “we can pull them out of this cesspool, but continued concessions have made the Generalissimo believe he has only to insist and we will yield.”

Chiang Kai-Shek

Corcoran was also coming under pressure from the work he was doing for Sterling Pharmaceutical. His brother, David worked for the company and was responsible for getting Corcoran the contract. However, it was revealed in 1940 that Sterling Pharmaceutical had strong links with I. G. Farben. The FBI discovered that Sterling had conspired with Farben to control the sale of aspirin. In other words, had formed an aspirin cartel. According to one FBI report, Sterling were employing Nazi sympathizers in its offices in Latin America. Rumours began to circulate that Burton Wheeler would announce that he was appointing a subcommittee to investigate the relations between American and German firms. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced he was ready to prosecute any American company aiding and abetting a German company in any part of the world. On 10th April, 1941, the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to Sterling Pharmaceutical. Soon afterwards newspapers began to run negative stories about the company. One claimed that Sterling was helping the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels fulfill his pledge that “Americans would help Hitler win the Americas.”

On 2nd June, 1941, Roosevelt appointed Francis B. Biddle as his new Attorney General. Biddle was a close friend of Corcoran’s. The day after his appointment, Biddle accepted a settlement offer from Sterling in which the company would pay a fine of five thousand dollars. Later, it was agreed that Sterling would abrogate all contracts with I. G. Farben. In Congress there was speeches made calling for an investigation into the role played by Corcoran in protecting the interests of Sterling Pharmaceutical. Senator Lawrence Smith argued: “It is common gossip in government circles that the long arm of Tommy Corcoran reaches into many agencies; that he has placed many men in important positions and they in turn are amenable to his influences.”

After the United States entered the war against Japan, Germany and Italy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Roosevelt selected Colonel William Donovan as the first director of the organization, who had spent some time studying the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an organization set up by the British government in July 1940. The OSS had responsibility for collecting and analyzing information about countries at war with the United States. The OSS gradually took over the activities that Corcoran had helped set up in China. In 1943 OSS agents based in China included Paul Helliwell, E. Howard Hunt, Mitch Werbell, Lucien Conein, John Singlaub and Ray Cline. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, some OSS members in China were paid for their work with five-pound sacks of opium.

One month after the dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tommy Corcoran joined with David Corcoran and William S. Youngman to create a Panamanian company, Rio Carthy, for the purpose of pursuing business ventures in Asia and South America. Soon afterwards, Claire Lee Chennault and Whiting Willauer approached Corcoran with the idea of creating a commercial airline in China to compete with CNAC and CATC. Corcoran agreed to use Rio Cathy as the legal vehicle for investing in the airline venture. Chiang Kai-shek agreed that his government would invest in the airline. Corcoran anticipated he would own 37% of the equity in the airline, but Chennault and Willauer gave a greater percentage to the Chinese government, and Corcoran’s share dropped to 28%.

Civil Air Transport (CAT) was officially launched on 29th January, 1946. Corcoran approached his old friend Fiorella LaGuardia, the director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). He agreed to award a $4 million contract to deliver relief to China. This contract kept them going for the first year but as the civil war intensified, CAT had difficulty maintaining its routes. The OSS had been disbanded in October 1945 and was replaced by the War Department’s Strategic Service Unit (SSU). Paul Helliwell became chief of the Far East Division of the SSU. In 1947 the SSU was replaced by the Central Intelligence Agency.

CAT needed another major customer and on 6th July, 1947, Corcoran and Claire Lee Chennault had a meeting with Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the new director of the CIA. Hillenkoetter arranged for Corcoran to meet Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination. Wisner was in charge of the CIA’s covert operations. On 1st November, 1948, Corcoran signed a formal agreement with the CIA. The agreement committed the agency to provide up to $500,000 to finance an CAT airbase, and $200,000 to fly agency personnel and equipment in and out of the mainland, and to underwrite any shortfall that might result from any hazardous mission. Over the next few months CAT airlifted personnel and equipment from Chungking, Kweilin, Luchnow, Nanking, and Amoy.

In 1948, Lyndon B. Johnson decided to make a second run for the U.S. Senate. His main opponent in the Democratic primary (Texas was virtually a one party state and the most important elections were those that decided who would be the Democratic Party candidate) was Coke Stevenson. Johnson was criticized by Stevenson for supporting the Taft-Hartley Act. The American Federation of Labor was also angry with Johnson for supporting this legislation and at its June convention the AFL broke a 54 year tradition of neutrality and endorsed Stevenson. Johnson asked Tommy Corcoran to work behind the scenes at convincing union leaders that he was more pro-labor than Stevenson. This he did and on 11th August, 1948, Corcoran told Harold Ickes that he had “a terrible time straightening out labor” in the Johnson campaign but he believed he had sorted the problem out.

Jorge Ubico

In 1949 Sam Zemurray asked Corcoran to join the United Fruit Company as a lobbyist and special counsel. Zemurray had problems with his business in Guatemala. In the 1930s Zemurray aligned United Fruit closely with the government of President Jorge Ubico. The company received import duty and real estate tax exemptions from Ubico. He also gave them hundreds of square miles of land. United Fruit controlled more land than any other individual or group. It also owned the railway, the electric utilities, telegraph, and the country’s only port at Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic coast. Ubico was overthrown in 1944 and following democratic elections, Juan Jose Arevalo became the new president. Arevalo, a university professor who had been living in exile, described himself as a “spiritual socialist”. He implemented sweeping reforms by passing new laws that gave workers the right to form unions. This included the 40,000 Guatemalans who worked for United Fruit.

Zemurray feared that Arevalo would also nationalize the land owned by United Fruit in Guatemala. He asked Corcoran to express his fears to senior political figures in Washington. Corcoran began talks with key people in the government agencies and departments that shaped U.S. policy in Central America. He argued that the U.S. should use United Fruit as an American beachhead against communism in the region.

Chief of OSS China – Paul Helliwell

In January, 1950, Civil Air Transport (CAT) relocated its base of operations to the island of Formosa, where Chiang Kai-shek had established his new government. The following month, the Soviet Union and China signed a mutual defense pact. Two weeks later, President Harry S. Truman signed National Security Directive 64, which stated that “it is important to United states security interests that all practical measures be taken to prevent further communist expansion in Southeast Asia.”

The support of the government in Formosa was to become a key aspect of this policy. In February 1950, Frank Wisner began negotiating with Corcoran for the purchase of CAT. “In March, using a ‘cutout’ banker or middleman, the CIA paid CAT $350,000 to clear up arrearages, $400,000 for future operations, and a $1 million option on the business. The money was then divided among the airline’s owners, with Corcoran and Youngman receiving more than $100,000 for six years of legal fees, and Corcoran, Youngman, and David Corcoran dividing approximately $225,000 from the sale of the airline.” Paul Helliwell was put in charge of this operation. His deputy was Desmond FitzGerald. Helliwell’s main job was to help Chiang Kai-shek to prepare for a future invasion of Communist China. The CIA created a pair of front companies to supply and finance the surviving forces of Chiang’s KMT. Helliwell w as put in charge of this operation. This included establishing the Sea Supply Corporation, a shipping company in Bangkok.

The CIA now launched a secret war against China. An office under commercial cover called Western Enterprises was opened on Taiwan. Training and operational bases were established in Taiwan and other offshore islands. By 1951 Chiang Kai-shek claimed to have more than a million active guerrillas in China. However, according to John Prados, “ United States intelligence estimates at the time carried the more conservative figure of 600,000 or 650,000, only half of whom could be considered loyal to Taiwan.”

After the war Tommy Corcoran continued his work as a paid lobbyist for Sam Zemurray and the United Fruit Company. Zemurray became concerned that Captain Jacobo Arbenz, one of the heroes of the 1944 revolution, would be elected as the new president of Guatemala. In the spring of 1950, Corcoran went to see Thomas C. Mann, the director of the State Department’s Office of Inter-American Affairs. Corcoran asked Mann if he had any plans to prevent Arbenz from being elected. Mann replied: “That is for the people of that country to decide.”

Allen Dulles

Unhappy with this reply, Corcoran paid a call on the Allen Dulles, the deputy director of the CIA. Dulles, who represented United Fruit in the 1930s, was far more interested in Corcoran’s ideas. “During their meeting Dulles explained to Corcoran that while the CIA was sympathetic to United Fruit, he could not authorize any assistance without the support of the State Department. Dulles assured Corcoran, however, that whoever was elected as the next president of Guatemala would not be allowed to nationalize the operations of United Fruit.”

However, political groups continued to resort to violence and in 1949 Major Francisco Arana was murdered. The following year Arbenz defeated Manuel Ygidoras to become Guatemala’s new president. Arbenz, who obtained 65% of the votes, took power on 15th March, 1951. Corcoran then recruited Robert La Follette to work for United Fruit. Corcoran arranged for La Follette to lobby liberal members of Congress. The message was that Arbenz was not a liberal but a dangerous left-wing radical.This strategy was successful and Congress was duly alarmed when on 17th June, 1952, Arbenz announced a new Agrarian Reform program . This included expropriating idle land on government and private estates and redistributed to peasants in lots of 8 to 33 acres. The Agrarian Reform program managed to give 1.5 million acres to around 100,000 families for which the government paid $8,345,545 in bonds. Among the expropriated landowners was Arbenz himself, who had become into a landowner with the dowry of his wealthy wife. Around 46 farms were given to groups of peasants who organized themselves in cooperatives.

In March 1953, 209,842 acres of United Fruit Company’s uncultivated land was taken by the government which offered compensation of $525,000. The company wanted $16 million for the land. While the Guatemalan government valued $2.99 per acre, the American government valued it at $75 per acre. As David McKean has pointed out: This figure was “in line with the company’s own valuation of the property, at least for tax purposes”. However, the company wanted $16 million for the land. While the Guatemalan government valued it at $2.99 per acre, the company now valued it at $75 per acre.

Corcoran contacted President Anastasio Somoza and warned him that the Guatemalan revolution might spread to Nicaragua. Somoza now made representations to Harry S. Truman about what was happening in Guatemala. After discussions with Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA, a secret plan to overthrow Arbenz (Operation Fortune) was developed. Part of this plan involved Tommy Corcoran arranging for small arms and ammunition to be loaded on a United Fruit freighter and shipped to Guatemala, where the weapons would be distributed to dissidents. When the Secretary of State Dean Acheson discovered details of Operation Fortune, he had a meeting with Truman where he vigorously protested about the involvement of United Fruit and the CIA in the attempted overthrow of the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz. As a result of Acheson’s protests, Truman ordered the postponement of Operation Fortune.

Jacobo Arbenz

Tommy Corcoran’s work was made easier by the election of Dwight Eisenhower in November, 1952. Eisenhower’s personal secretary was Anne Whitman, the wife of Edmund Whitman, United Fruit’s public relations director. Eisenhower appointed John Peurifoy as ambassador to Guatemala. He soon made it clear that he believed that the Arbenz government posed a threat to the America’s campaign against communism.

Corcoran also arranged for Whiting Willauer, his friend and partner in Civil Air Transport, to become U.S. ambassador to Honduras. As Willauer pointed out in a letter to Claire Lee Chennault, he worked day and night to arrange training sites and instructors plus air crews for the rebel air force, and to keep the Honduran government “in line so they would allow the revolutionary activity to continue.” Eisenhower also replaced Dean Acheson with John Foster Dulles. His brother, Allen Dulles became director of the CIA. The Dulles brothers “had sat on the board of United Fruit’s partner in the banana monopoly, the Schroder Banking Corporation” whereas “U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was a stockholder and had been a strong defender of United Fruit while a U.S. senator.”

Guatemala

Walter Bedell Smith was moved to the State Department. Smith told Corcoran he would do all he could to help in the overthrow of Arbenz. He added that he would like to work for United Fruit once he retired from government office. This request was granted and Bedell Smith was later to become a director of United Fruit. According to John Prados, the author of The Presidents’ Secret War, Corcoran’s meeting with “Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith that summer and that conversation is recalled by CIA officers as the clear starting point of that plan.” Evan Thomas, the author of The Very Best Me; Daring Early Years of the CIA (2007) has added that: “With his usual energy and skill, Corcoran beseeched the U. S. government to overthrow Arbenz”.

The new CIA plan to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz was called “Operation Success”. Allen Dulles became the executive agent and arranged for Tracey Barnes and Richard Bissell to plan and execute the operation. Bissell later claimed that he had been aware of the problem since reading a document published by the State Department that claimed: “The communists already exercise in Guatemala a political influence far out of proportion to their small numerical strength. This influence will probably continue to grow during 1952. The political situation in Guatemala adversely effects U. S. interests and constitutes a potential threat to U.S. security.” Bissell does not point out that the source of this information was Tommy Corcoran and the United Fruit Company.

John Prados argues that it was Barnes and Bissell who “coordinated the Washington end of the planning and logistics for the Guatemala operation.” As Deputy Director for Plans, it was Frank Wisner’s responsibility to select the field commander for Operation Success. Kim Roosevelt was first choice but he turned it down and instead the job went to Albert Hanley, the CIA station Chief in Korea. Hanley was told to report to Joseph Caldwell King, director of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. King had previously worked for the FBI where he had responsibility for all intelligence operations in Latin America. King suggested Hanley meet Tommy Corcoran. Hanley did not like the idea. King replied: “If you think you can run this operation without United Fruit you’re crazy.” Although Hanley refused to work with Corcoran, Allen Dulles kept him fully informed of the latest developments in planning the overthrow of Arbenz.

Tracey Barnes brought in David Atlee Phillips to run a “black” propaganda radio station. According to Phillips, he was reluctant to take part in the overthrow of a democratically elected president. Barnes replied: “It’s not a question of Arbenz. Nor of Guatemala. We have solid intelligence that the Soviets intended to throw substantial support to Arbenz… Guatemala is bordered by Honduras, British Honduras, Salvador and Mexico. It’s unacceptable to have a Commie running Guatemala.”

Barnes also appointed E. Howard Hunt as chief of political action. In his autobiography, Undercover (1975), Hunt claims that “Barnes swore me to special secrecy and revealed that the National Security Council under Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon had ordered the overthrow of Guatemala’s Communist regime.” Hunt was not convinced by this explanation. He pointed out that 18 months previously he had suggested to the director of the CIA that Arbenz needed to be dealt with. However, the idea had been rejected. Hunt was now told that: “ Washington lawyer Thomas G. Corcoran had, among his clients, the United Fruit Company. United Fruit, like many American corporations in Guatemala had watched with growing dismay nationalization, confiscation and other strong measures affecting their foreign holdings. Finally a land-reform edict issued by Arbenz proved the final straw, and Tommy the Cork had begun lobbying in behalf of United Fruit and against Arbenz. Following this special impetus our project had been approved by the National Security Council and was already under way.”

Albert Hanley brought in Rip Robertson to take charge of the paramilitary side of the operation. Robertson had been Hanley’s deputy in Korea and had “enjoyed going along on the behind-the-lines missions with the CIA guerrillas, in violation of standing orders from Washington.” One of those who worked with Robertson in Operation Success was David Morales. Also in the team was Henry Hecksher, who operated under cover in Guatemala to supply front-line reports.John Foster Dulles decided that he “needed a civilian adviser to the State Department team to help expediate Operation Success. Dulles chose a friend of Corcoran’s, William Pawley, a Miami-based millionaire”. David McKean goes on to point out that Pawley had worked with Corcoran, Chennault and Willauer in helping to set up the Flying Tigers and in transforming Civil Air Transport into a CIA airline. McKean adds that his most important qualification for the job was his “long association with right-wing Latin America dictators.”

The rebel “liberation army” was formed and trained in Nicaragua. This was not a problem as President Anastasio Somoza and been warning the United States government since 1952 that that the Guatemalan revolution might spread to Nicaragua. The rebel army of 150 men were trained by Rip Robertson. Their commander was a disaffected Guatemalan army officer, Carlos Castillo Armas. It was clear that a 150 man army was unlikely to be able to overthrow the Guatemalan government. Tracey Barnes believed that if the rebels could gain control of the skies and bomb Guatemala City, they could create panic and Arbenz might be fooled into accepting defeat.

Area of CIA activities in the 1950’s

According to Richard Bissell, Somoza was willing to provide cover for this covert operation. However, this was on the understanding that these aircraft would be provided by the United States. Dwight Eisenhower agreed to supply Somoza with a “small pirate air force to bomb Arbenz into submission”. To fly these planes, the CIA recruited American mercenaries like Jerry DeLarm. Before the bombing of Guatemala City, the rebel army was moved to Honduras where Tommy Corcoran’s business partner, Whiting Willauer, was ambassador. The plan was for them to pretend to be the “vanguard of a much larger army seeking to liberate their homeland from the Marxists”.

Arbenz became aware of this CIA plot to overthrow him. Guatemalan police made several arrests. In his memoirs, Eisenhower described these arrests as a “reign of terror” and falsely claimed that “agents of international Communism in Guatemala continued their efforts to penetrate and subvert their neighboring Central American states, using consular agents for their political purposes and fomenting political assassinations and strikes.” Sydney Gruson of the New York Times began to investigate this story. Journalists working for Time Magazine also tried to write about these attempts to destabilize Arbenz’s government. Frank Wisner, head of Operation Mockingbird, asked Allen Dulles to make sure that the American public never discovered the plot to overthrow Arbenz. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, agreed to stop Gruson from writing the story. Henry Luce was also willing to arrange for the Time Magazine reports to be rewritten at the editorial offices in New York.

The CIA propaganda campaign included the distribution of 100,000 copies of a pamphlet entitled Chronology of Communism in Guatemala . They also produced three films on Guatemala for showing free in cinemas. Faked photographs were distributed that claimed to show the mutilated bodies of opponents of Arbenz. David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt were responsible for running the CIA’s Voice of Liberation radio station. Broadcasts began on 1 st May, 1954. They also arranged for the distribution of posters and pamphlets. Over 200 articles based on information provided by the CIA were placed in newspapers and magazines by the United States Information Agency.

The Voice of Liberation reported massive defections from Arbenz’s army. According to David Atlee Phillips the radio station “broadcast that two columns of rebel soldiers were converging on Guatemala City. In fact, Castillo Armas and his makeshift army were still encamped six miles inside the border, far from the capital.” As Phillips later admitted, the “highways were crowded, but with frightened citizens fleeing Guatemala City and not with soldiers approaching it.” As E. Howard Hunt pointed out, “our powerful transmitter overrode the Guatemalan national radio, broadcasting messages to confuse and divide the population from its military overlords.” There was no popular uprising. On 20 th June, the CIA reported to Dwight Eisenhower that Castillo Armas had not been able to take his assigned objective, Zacapa. His seaborne force had also failed to capture Puerto Barrios.

According to John Prados, it all now depended on “Whiting Willauer’s rebel air force”. However, that was not going to plan and on 27th June, Winston Churchill, the British prime minister berated Eisenhower when a CIA plane sank a British merchant vessel heading for Guatemala. The bombing had been ordered by Rip Robertson without first gaining permission from the CIA or Eisenhower. Robertson had been convinced that the Springfjord was a “Czech arms carrying freighter”. In reality it had been carrying only coffee and cotton. Frank Wisner had to make a personal apology for the incident and the CIA later quietly reimbursed Lloyd’s of London, insurers of the Springfjord , the $1.5 million they had paid out on the ship.

Arbenz had been convinced by the Voice of Liberation reports that his army was deserting. Richard Bissell believes that this is when Arbenz made his main mistake. Jacobo Arbenz decided to distribute weapons to the “people’s organizations and the political parties”. As Bissell later explained: “The conservative men who constituted the leadership of Guatemala’s army viewed this action as the final unacceptable leftward lurch, and they told Arbenz they would no longer support him. He resigned and fled to Mexico.” President Harry Truman became highly suspicious of Corcoran’s activities and he arranged for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to place a tap on his phone. Despite his shady business dealings he was never convicted of a criminal offence. Thomas Corcoran died on 7th December, 1981.

Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times (1991)

Robert A. Caro, Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (2002)

Ray S. Cline, Secrets, Spies and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (1976)

David McKean, Peddling Influence (2004)

William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Nicaragua

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_the_Americas

EDITOR: The mysterious Paul Helliwell was the Station Chief of OSS China, the leader of the renegade commando group and the original architect of the CIA drugs-for-arms trade that would be the center of the Consortiums power. He was one of the top operatives for the CIA, the Mob and the Consortium, helping expand narcotics operations worldwide. Helliwell also controlled the finances of Operation J/M-Wave, the main CIA team picked from former Jedburgh Elite that was to conduct the Bay of Pigs assassination program. William Pawley was also key CIA figures in expanding the global narcotics trade in Central and South America. He was Tommy Corcoran’s main partner in Air America. He played a significant role in the Bay of Pigs and Operation J/M-Wave. Operation J/M-Wave was the CIA operation to assassinate Castro and recover the Consortium assets through the overthrow of Cuban communism.

Excerpts from Operation Jedburgh

by John Simkin (1997) – Part 4

Jedburgh Team Profiles

Paul Helliwell

Paul Helliwell (Left)

Paul Lional Edward Helliwell was born in 1915. He was a lawyer before he joined the United States Army during the Second World War. Later he was transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he served under William Donovan. Helliwell was sent to China where he worked with Ray S. Cline, Richard Helms, E. Howard Hunt, Jake Esterline, Mitchell WerBell, John K. Singlaub, Jack Anderson, Robert Emmett Johnson and Lucien Conein. Others working in China at that time included Tommy Corcoran, Whiting Willauer and William Pawley.

In 1943 Colonel Paul Helliwell became head of the Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS in Europe. Helliwell was replaced in this post by William Casey in 1945. Helliwell became chief of the Far East Division of the War Department’s Strategic Service Unit, an interim intelligence organization formed after OSS was closed down. In 1947 Helliwell joined the Central Intelligence Agency. In May 1949, General Claire Chennault had a meeting with Harry S. Truman and advocated an increase in funds for Chaing Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Army (KMT) in his war in China. Truman dismissed the idea as impractical. However, Frank Wisner, was more sympathetic and when Mao Zedong took power in China in 1950, he sent Helliwell to Taiwan.

China 1947

Early 1949

China Advances on Opium Producing Regions (1949)

Helliwell’s main job was to help Chaing Kai-shek to prepare for a future invasion of Communist China. The CIA created a pair of front companies to supply and finance the surviving forces of Chaing’s KMT. Paul Helliwell was put in charge of this operation. This included establishing Civil Air Transport (CAT), a Taiwan-based airline, and the Sea Supply Corporation, a shipping company in Bangkok. It was Helliwell’s idea to use these CIA fronted companies to raise money to help support Chaing Kai-shek. According to Joseph Trento (Prelude to Terror): “Through Sea Supply, Helliwell imported large amounts of arms for the KMT soldiers to keep the Burmese military from throwing them out of the country. The arms were ferried into Burma on CAT airplanes. CAT then used the “empty” planes to fly drugs from Burma to Taiwan, Bangkok, and Saigon. There the drugs were processed for the benefit of the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt government on Taiwan.”

Civil Air Transport (CAT), later renamed Air America, provided the CIA with the air power needed to sustain its covert operations for the next twenty-five years. Helliwell was to play an important role in running these covert, and often illegal operations. By the late 1950s it became clear that Chaing Kai-shek would never be strong enough to invade China. The main focus changed to stopping the spread of communism to countries like Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. At the time, the main group fighting communism in the region were the large private armies controlled by the drug lords. For example, General Vang Pao was employing his 30,000-man army to help the Pathet Lao. In return for joining the CIA, Helliwell helped Vang Pao to modernize the drug trade. William Corson claims that: “Portable heroin processing facilities were brought in. It was a creation of the CIA’s technical services division.” Some of these profits went to help CIA run some unofficial covert operations.

Gen. Vang Pao (Laos)

In 1960 Paul Helliwell was transferred to provide business cover for the CIA’s Cuban operations. According to Peter Dale Scott (The Iran Contra Connection) Helliwell worked with E. Howard Hunt, Mitch WerBell and Lucien Conein on developing relationships with drug-dealing Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was during this period that Helliwell met Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines. Helliwell later became CIA paymaster for JM/WAVE. In this way, Shackley was able to finance unofficial CIA operations against Cuba.

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Helliwell was sent by the CIA to the Bahamas where he set up offshore banks for CIA use. At first he established the Mercantile Bank and Trust Company and then the Castle Bank and Trust Company. Helliwell also ran the American Bankers Insurance Company based in Galveston, Texas. This provided insurance cover for businessmen who cooperated with the CIA. Helliwell also created the Intercontinental Holding, a company in the Cayman Islands that owned the Lear jet used by Barry Seal for his drug running activities. Helliwell also established a Miami office for the Sea Supply Corporation. According to Joseph Trento (Prelude to Terror): “The primary objective of Helliwell’s operations in Florida was to cement the CIA’s relationship with organized crime.” This included Santos Trafficante, who had a common business interest in Asia, the “successful exportation of Chinese white heroin.”

According to Daniel Hopsicker (Barry and the Boys), Helliwell ran Red Sunset Enterprises in Miami. Hopsicker claims it was a CIA front company set up to recruit frogmen and explosives experts for Operation Mongoose. In 1973 the Internal Revenue Service began an investigation called Operation Trade Winds. During its investigation it discovered that some major organized crime figures such as Morris Dalitz, Morris Kleinman and Samuel A. Tucker were using the Castle Bank and Trust Company. It soon became clear that the bank was laundering CIA funds and drug profits. The IRS eventually announced that it was dropping its investigation of Castle Bank because of “legal problems”. According to the Wall Street Journal, the reasons for this was “pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency”.

Gangster Moe Dalitz

The CIA now needed a new bank. Later that year, Frank Nugan, an Australian lawyer, and Michael Hand, a former CIA contract operative, established the Nugan Hand Bank. Another key figure in this venture was Bernie Houghton, who was closely connected to CIA officials, Ted Shackley and Thomas G. Clines. Nugan ran operations in Sydney whereas Hand established a branch in Hong Kong. This enabled Australian depositors to access a money-laundering facility for illegal transfers of Australian money to Hong Kong. According to Alfred W. McCoy, the “Hand-Houghton partnership led the bank’s international division into new fields – drug finance, arms trading, and support work for CIA covert operations.” Hand told friends “it was his ambition that Nugan Hand became banker for the CIA.”

Helliwell continued to work as a lawyer in Miami and served as legal counsel to a Panamanian holding company that controlled a Bahamian gambling casino connected with Meyer Lansky. Paul Helliwell died from emphysema on 24th December, 1976.

Paul Helliwell, instructions to all agents of the Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS in Europe (26th January, 1943)

“Psychological warfare is the employment of all moral and physical means other than orthodox military operations which tend to: destroy the will and ability of the enemy to resist; deprive him of the support of his allies and neutrals; increase in our own troops and allies the will to victory. This must be consonant with national policy and coordinated with orthodox military operations. The implements of psychological warfare include open propaganda, black propaganda, subversion, and sabotage, special phases of economic and political pressure, and cultural contacts. Since psychological warfare can be waged successfully only when supplemented by adequate intelligence, it becomes necessary that a flow of information regarding the psychological state of mind of groups and populations in both enemy and neutral countries, and their reaction to psychological warfare conducted by our agencies and those of our allies, be available to this office. Therefore, supplementary to your present activities, it is desired by the Director that you secure and send reports regarding the vulnerabilities of enemy groups, both civil and military, and neutral populations which can be exploited for psychological warfare.”

Paul Helliwell, Instructional Memorandum on Intelligence Operations (1943)

“Relatively accurate facts can be secured as to the activities of the civil government, and the parties or political groups exercising power at the moment, and these reports should be in considerable detail. The more difficult task of securing accurate information as to minority political groups and subversive political organizations constitutes a very real challenge to the Director. He must develop contacts within such groups, or place loyal agents in such groups as members. Such opposition forces should be assisted in every possible way in their aim to interfere with the functioning of the government in power. Financial support should be offered and, if accepted, should be given in such a way that that future actions of the group can be controlled. This can best be accomplished by requiring that one of our agents be given a high position in the organization and that he exercise control over the finances. … Efforts should be made to foment social unrest in the hostile national by agitating the current social problems and pitting one class against the other. A sub-Director who is thoroughly acquainted with the history of the hostile nation and its peoples should be assigned to study this problem and direct a planned campaign. … In studying his territory the Director will know the key points in the enemy installations but generally such points will be carefully protected and sabotage of such point must be the act of “desperate” men who have been especially selected and especially trained. … Propaganda should be divided into two categories, one being the Propaganda Reconnaissance Agent and the other the Propaganda Distributing Agent…”

“Orders to employees must always be verbal, definite and understandable. It is best to repeat orders, and to have the employee repeat the order, until it is positive that it is clearly understood. Orders should never be given in writing… The disposition to be made of an employee who proves to be unsatisfactory or disloyal should be a part of the Director’s plan. If the employee proves to be disloyal and is in possession of dangerous information, he should probably be killed…”

“Informers should be made available to known hostile agents and false or misleading information furnished. These informers may be either unwitting individuals or agents engaged (in a) deliberately planned campaign. The activities of known enemy organizations or agents might be embarrassed by rendering anonymous reports to police authorities and thus subjecting them to embarrassing inquiries. When possible their activities might be made the subject of reports to newspapers and thus secure them unfavorable publicity. The wives and relatives of known hostile agents should be given scandalous information, and embarrassing information of this type should be disseminated so that it reaches the ears of the superiors of a hostile agent.”

Opium

Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (1987)

“So the CIA began supplying the KMT through two front companies: Civil Air Transport, headquartered in Taiwan, and Sea Supply Corporation, headquartered in Bangkok. Only a few people with top security clearance knew that both companies were covertly owned by the U.S. Government. They are important, not only for what they did in the 1950s, but also because they were precursors of organizations that touch directly on Nugan Hand in the 1970s.

After China was given up on, the focus of U.S. efforts in East Asia shifted to Indochina. Civil Air Transport was then transformed into (among several successor entities) Air America. That was the airline Michael Hand worked closely with as a CIA contract agent. Many of the CIA associates whose money first helped Hand get started in business in Australia were Air America employes.Sea Supply Corporation, for its part, was founded and run by a lawyer and CIA operative named Paul Helliwell.

During World War II, Helliwell had been chief of special intelligence in China for the OSS. Colleagues from those days told the Wall Street Journal’s Jim Drinkhall that Helliwell, then a colonel, regularly used to buy information with five-pound shipments of opium (“three sticky brown bars,” one man said). Drinkhall also reported being told that Helliwell ran an operation code-named “Deer Mission,” in which OSS personnel secretly parachuted into Indochina to treat Ho Chi Minh for malaria. After the heyday of Sea Supply in the 1950s, Helliwell moved to Miami and became an important figure in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the CIA’s other battles against Castro. His Castle Bank both funneled money for the CIA and, privately, operated as a profitable tax-cheat business. Its unexpected demise in the mid-1970s directly coincided with the growth of Nugan Hand. Considering the gaggle of brass from the U.S. intelligence community who helped push Nugan Hand into orbit in the late 1970s, there has been understandable speculation that Nugan Hand was Castle Bank’s successor.”

Largest Heroin Producing Regions After 1950

William Pawley

William Pawley

William Douglas Pawley was born in Florence, South Carolina, on 7th September, 1896. His father was a wealthy businessman based in Cuba and Pawley attended private schools in both Havana and Santiago. He later returned to the United States where he studied at the Gordon Military Academy in Georgia. In 1925 Pawley began work as an estate agent in Miami. Two years later he began working for the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. In 1928 Pawley returned to Cuba to become president of the Nacional Cubana de Aviacion Curtiss. He held this post until the company was sold to Pan American Airways in 1932.

Pawley now became president of the Intercontinent Corporation based in New York. The following year he moved to China where he became president of the China National Aviation Corporation. Over the next five years he built three aircraft factories for the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. Pawley also formed a business relationship with Tommy Corcoran. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had asked Corcoran to establish a private corporation to provide assistance to the nationalist government in China. Roosevelt even supplied the name of the proposed company, China Defense Supplies. He also suggested that his uncle, Frederick Delano, should be co-chairman of the company. Chiang nominated his former finance minister, Tse-ven Soong, as the other co-chairman.

Corcoran

For reasons of secrecy, Corcoran took no title other than outside counsel for China Defense Supplies. William S. Youngman was his frontman in China. Corcoran’s friend, Whitey Willauer, was moved to the Foreign Economic Administration, where he supervised the sending of supplies to China. In this way Corcoran was able to create an Asian Lend-Lease program. Pawley also worked closely with Claire Lee Chennault, who had been working as a military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek since 1937. Chennault told Tommy Corcoran that if he was given the resources, he could maintain an air force within China that could carry out raids against the Japanese. Corcoran returned to the United States and managed to persuade Franklin D. Roosevelt to approve the creation of the American Volunteer Group.

William Pawley became involved and he arranged for one hundred P-40 fighters, built by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, that had been intended for Britain, to be redirected to Chennault in China. Pawley also arranged for the P-40 to be assembled in Rangoon. It was Tommy Corcoran’s son David who suggested that the American Volunteer Group should be called the Flying Tigers. Chennault liked the idea and asked his friend, Walt Disney, to design a tiger emblem for the planes. On 13th April, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a secret executive order authorizing the American Volunteer Group to recruit reserve officers from the army, navy and marines. Pawley suggested that the men should be recruited as “flying instructors”.

In July, 1941, ten pilots and 150 mechanics were supplied with fake passports and sailed from San Francisco for Rangoon. When they arrived they were told that they were really involved in a secret war against Japan. To compensate for the risks involved, the pilots were to be paid $600 a month ($675 for a patrol leader). In addition, they were to receive $500 for every enemy plane they shot down. The Flying Tigers were extremely effective in their raids on Japanese positions and helped to slow down attempts to close the Burma Road, a key supply route to China. In seven months of fighting, the Flying Tigers destroyed 296 planes at a loss of 24 men (14 while flying and 10 on the ground).

Flying Tigers

In 1944 Pawley became president of the Industan Aircraft Manufacturing Company in Bangalore, India. Pawley was responsible for building India’s first ammonium-sulfate plant in Trannvanacore. After the war Pawley became a diplomat. In 1945 Harry S. Truman appointed Pawley as U.S. Ambassador to Peru. Soon afterwards left-wing newspapers in Lima began to claim that Pawley was making “lucrative deals” for himself in Peru. This involved transporting unspecified goods in and out of Peru.

In 1948 Pawley became Ambassador to Brazil. During this time he became a FBI informant. He passed information to J. Edgar Hoover claiming that Spruille Braden, the Ambassador to Argentina was under the control of communist advisers such as Gustavo Duran and George Michanowsky. In a document dated the 7th September, 1948, Pawley suggested that Braden was attempting to expose “non-existant and imagery Nazis in Latin America” as a cover for his communist sympathies. Pawley also claimed that William A. Wieland, who worked as a press officer for the embassy in Brazil, held “anti-capitalist” views.

Pawley continued to be involved in various business projects. He was a close friend of President Rafael Trujillo and together with George Smathers, had invested in the bauxite industry in the Dominican Republic. He was also extremely friendly with Fulgencio Batista and in 1948 he established Autobuses Modernos in Cuba. A company he later sold to Batista.

Chiang Kai Shek

On 7th November, 1949, Pawley sent a memorandum to the State Department suggesting that a small group of Americans should be sent to Formosa in order to help protect the government of Chiang Kai-shek. Pawley claimed that Dean Acheson rejected the idea after consulting with advisers such as Owen Lattimore, John C. Vincent and John Davis. In February, 1951 Pawley became special assistant to Acheson. Later that year he held a similar post under Robert A. Lovett. However, he discovered that the State Department considered him to be a reactionary and he was denied access to secret documents concerning Latin America.

Pawley was an active member of the Republican Party. A close friend of both President Dwight Eisenhower and CIA director Allen W. Dulles, he took part in a policy that later become known as Executive Action (a plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power). Pawley played a role Operation Success, a CIA plot to overthrow the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 after he introduced land reforms and nationalized the United Fruit Company. John Foster Dulles decided that he “needed a civilian adviser to the State Department team to help expediate Operation Success”. Dulles selected William Pawley. In his book Peddling Influence (2005), David McKean argues that Pawley’s most important qualification for the job was his “long association with right-wing Latin America dictators.”

Fulgencio Batista

Gaeton Fonzi points out in his book, The Last Investigation: “Pawley had also owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana’s bus, trolley and gas systems and he was close to both pre-Castro Cuban rulers, President Carlos Prio and General Fulgencio Batista. (Pawley was one of the dispossessed American investors in Cuba who early tried to convince Eisenhower that Castro was a Communist and urged him to arm the exiles in Miami.)”

In March 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower, disillusioned with Batista’s government, insisted he held elections. This he did, but the people showed their unhappiness with his government by refusing to vote. Over 75 per cent of the voters in the capital Havana boycotted the polls. In some areas, such as Santiago, it was as high as 98 per cent. Some members of the State Department came to the conclusion that it would be in America’s best long-term interest in Cuba to be seen as opposing Batista. William A. Wieland, Director of the Caribbean and Central American Affairs, was against America providing support for the Cuban dictator. As the U.S. Ambassador of Cuba, Earl E. T. Smith was later to tell a Senate Committee: “He (Wieland) believed that it would be in the best interest of Cuba and the best interest of the world in general when Batista was removed from office.”

Wieland was not the only one who took that view. According to Pawley and Smith, Roy R. Rubottom, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, John L. Topping, Chief of the Political Section and the Chief of the CIA Section, held similar opinions. Pawley and Smith also identified Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times as being an important figure in providing support for the idea of regime change in Cuba. Smith pointed out that “Matthews wrote three articles on Fidel Castro, which appeared on the front page of the New York Times, in which he eulogized Fidel Castro and portrayed him as a political Robin Hood.

On 9th December, 1958, Pawley had a meeting with Fulgencio Batista. Pawley told Batista that he was losing the support of the American government. Pawley suggested that the Cuban dictator should resign and allow an anti-Castro and anti-Batista caretaker junta to take over. Batista rejected the idea and on 14th December, William A. Wieland, speaking for the State Department instructed Earl E. T. Smith, to inform Batista that he no longer had the support of the US government and that he should leave Cuba at once. On 1st January, 1959, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic.

Cuban Revolution

Pawley later told a Senate Committee on Latin American Affairs: “I believe that the deliberate overthrow of Batista by Wieland and Matthews, assisted by Rubottom, is almost as great a tragedy as the surrendering of China to the Communists by a similar group of Department of State officials fifteen or sixteen years ago and we will not see the end in cost of American lives and American recourses for these tragic errors.” After Batista was overthrown by Fidel Castro, Pawley pressurized President Dwight Eisenhower to provide military and financial help to anti-Castro Cubans based in the United States. Recently released FBI files suggest he worked closely with Manuel Artime in efforts to overthrow Castro.

In the winter of 1962 Eddie Bayo claimed that two officers in the Red Army based in Cuba wanted to defect to the United States. Bayo added that these men wanted to pass on details about atomic warheads and missiles that were still in Cuba despite the agreement that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bayo had originally fought with Fidel Castro against Fulgencio Batista. He disagreed with Castro’s policies after he gained power and moved to Miami and helped establish Alpha 66. His story was eventually taken up by several members of the anti-Castro community including Gerry P. Hemming, John Martino, Felipe Vidal Santiago and Frank Sturgis. Pawley became convinced that it was vitally important to help get these Soviet officers out of Cuba. To help this happen he communicated with James Eastland, the chairman of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, about this story.

CIA Chief Ted Shackley

Pawley also contacted Ted Shackley, head of the CIA’s JM WAVE station in Miami. Shackley decided to help Pawley organize what became known as Operation Tilt. He also assigned William (Rip) Robertson, a fellow member of the CIA in Miami, to help with the operation. David Sanchez Morales, another CIA agent, also became involved in this attempt to bring out these two Soviet officers. In June, 1963, a small group, including Pawley, Eddie Bayo, William (Rip) Robertson, John Martino, and Richard Billings, a journalist working for Life Magazine, secretly arrived in Cuba. They were unsuccessful in their attempts to find these Soviet officers and they were forced to return to Miami. Bayo remained behind and it was rumored that he had been captured and executed. However, his death was never reported in the Cuban press.

William Pawley died of gunshot wounds in January, 1977. Officially it was suicide but some researchers believe it was connected to the investigations being carried out by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. However, a relative Cash Pawley, has argued: “Bill Pawley had acquired a severe case of Shingles years earlier, which had progressed across his entire body (even the soles of his feet). He had been unable to lay down, stand or become comfortable in any position. The pain was excruciating, and there was no modern medicine(s) for a cure or even proper pain management at the time. Therefore, Mr. Pawley suffered day in and day out, until he just could not do it anymore. This was the reason for his suicide.”

Bay of Pigs

Operation J/M-Wave

Location of J/M-Wave

JM WAVE was the Central Intelligence Agency station in Florida. Located south of Miami in a heavily wooded 1,571-acre tract. The numerous buildings were said to belong to Zenith Technological Enterprises.

After the Bay of Pigs disaster President John F. Kennedy created a committee (SGA) charged with overthrowing Castro’s government. The SGA, chaired by Robert F. Kennedy (Attorney General), included John McCone (CIA Director), McGeorge Bundy (National Security Adviser), Alexis Johnson (State Department), Roswell Gilpatric (Defence Department), General Lyman Lemnitzer (Joint Chiefs of Staff) and General Maxwell Taylor. Although not officially members, Dean Rusk (Secretary of State) and Robert S. McNamara (Secretary of Defence) also attending meetings.

At a meeting of this committee at the White House on 4th November, 1961, it was decided to call this covert action program for sabotage and subversion against Cuba, Operation Mongoose. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy also decided that General Edward Lansdale (Staff Member of the President’s Committee on Military Assistance) should be placed in charge of the operation.

The CIA JM WAVE station in Miami served as operational headquarters for Operation Mongoose. The head of the station was Ted Shackley and over the next few months became very involved in the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. One of Lansdale’s first decisions was to appoint William Harvey as head of Task Force W. Harvey’s brief was to organize a broad range of activities that would help to bring down Castro’s government. By the spring of 1962, JM/WAVE employed more than 200 CIA officers. They in turn ran over 2,200 Cuban agents. JM/WAVE had a navy of over 100 craft, including the 174-foot Rex,that had the latest electronic equipment and 40-millimeter and 20-millimeter cannons. The CIA station also had a large number of V-20 Swift craft and access to F-105 Phantoms from nearby Homestead Air Force Base.

Gen. Edward Lansdale

William Harvey was ordered to activate an assassination plot against Fidel Castro. This became known as the ZR/RIFLE project. Harvey arranged for David Sanchez Morales to move from Mexico City to join the project based at the JM WAVE station. In the winter of 1962 Eddie Bayo claimed that two officers in the Red Army based in Cuba wanted to defect to the United States. Bayo added that these men wanted to pass on details about atomic warheads and missiles that were still in Cuba despite the agreement that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Bayo’s story was eventually taken up by several members of the anti-Castro community including William Pawley, Gerry P. Hemming, John Martino, Felipe Vidal Santiago and Frank Sturgis. Pawley became convinced that it was vitally important to help get these Soviet officers out of Cuba.

William Pawley contacted Ted Shackley, the head at JM WAVE. Shackley decided to help Pawley organize what became known as Operation Tilt. He also assigned Rip Robertson, a fellow member of the CIA in Miami, to help with the operation. David Sanchez Morales, another CIA agent, also became involved in this attempt to bring out these two Soviet officers. In June, 1963, a small group, including William Pawley, Eddie Bayo, Rip Robertson, John Martino, and Richard Billings, a journalist working for Life Magazine, secretly arrived in Cuba. They were unsuccessful in their attempts to find these Soviet officers and they were forced to return to Miami. Bayo remained behind and it was rumoured that he had been captured and executed. However, his death was never reported in the Cuban press.

- The Green Chazzan 

EDITOR: This excerpt details the history of the Bush family and how they rose to prominence within the American upper class during World War I and World War II. Senator Prescott Bush, a notorious anti-Roosevelt Republican and convicted traitor in World War II, would set the stage for his son, George HW Bush to one day emerge as leader of the Consortium and President of the United States.

The Merchants of Death

Excerpts from ‘George Bush’ by Dr. Webster Tarpley (1992)

Prescott Goes to War

Prescott Bush

President George Herbert Walker Bush was born in 1924, the son of Prescott S. Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. We will begin the George Bush story about a decade before his birth, on the eve of World War I. We will follow the career of his father, Prescott Bush, through his marriage with Dorothy Walker, on the path to fortune, elegance and power.

Prescott Bush entered Yale University in 1913. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Prescott had spent the last five years before college in St. George’s Episcopal preparatory school in Newport, Rhode Island.Prescott Bush’s first college year, 1913, was also the freshman year at Yale for E. Roland ( “Bunny” ) Harriman, whose older brother (Wm.) Averell Harriman had just graduated from Yale. This is the Averell Harriman who went on to fame as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II, as a governor of New York State, and as a presidential advisor who was greatly responsible for starting the Vietnam War.

The Harrimans would become the sponsors of the Bushes, to lift them onto the stage of world history. In the spring of 1916, Prescott Bush and “Bunny” Harriman were chosen for membership in an elite Yale senior-year secret society known as Skull and Bones. This unusually morbid, death-celebrating group helped Wall Street financiers find active young men of “good birth” to form a kind of imitation British aristocracy in America.

Averall Harriman

World War I was then raging in Europe. With the prospect that the U.S.A. would soon join the war, two Skull and Bones “Patriarchs” , Averell Harriman (class of 1913) and Percy A. Rockefeller (class of 1900), paid special attention to Prescott’s class of 1917. They wanted reliable cadres to help them play the Great Game, in the lucrative new imperial era that the war was opening up for London and New York moneycrats. Prescott Bush, by then a close friend of “Bunny” Harriman, and several other Bonesmen from their class of 1917 would later comprise the core partners in Brown Brothers Harriman, the world’s largest private investment bank. World War I did make an immense amount of money for the clan of stock speculators and British bankers who had just taken over U.S. industry. The Harrimans were stars of this new Anglo-American elite.

Averell’s father, stock broker E.H. Harriman, had gained control of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1898 with credit arranged by William Rockefeller, Percy’s father, and by Kuhn Loeb & Co.’s British-affiliated private bankers, Otto Kahn, Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg. William Rockefeller, treasurer of Standard Oil and brother of Standard founder John D. Rockefeller, owned National City Bank (later “Citibank” ) together with Texas-based James Stillman. In return for their backing, E.H. Harriman deposited in City Bank the vast receipts from his railroad lines. When he issued tens of millions of dollars of “watered” (fraudulent) railroad stock, Harriman sold most of the shares through the Kuhn Loeb company.

The First World War elevated Prescott Bush and his father, Samuel P. Bush, into the lower ranks of the Eastern Establishment. As war loomed in 1914, National City Bank began reorganizing the U.S. arms industry. Percy A. Rockefeller took direct control of the Remington Arms company, appointing his own man, Samuel F. Pryor, as the new chief executive of Remington. The U.S entered World War I in 1917. In the spring of 1918, Prescott’s father, Samuel P. Bush, became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board. The senior Bush took national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with Remington and other weapons companies.

Bernard Baruch

This was an unusual appointment, as Prescott’s father seemed to have no background in munitions. Samuel Bush had been president of the Buckeye Steel Castings Co. in Columbus, Ohio, makers of railcar parts. His entire career had been in the railroad business– supplying equipment to the Wall Street-owned railroad systems. The War Industries Board was run by Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street speculator with close personal and business ties to old E.H. Harriman. Baruch’s brokerage firm had handled Harriman speculations of all kinds.

In 1918, Samuel Bush became director of the Facilities Division of the War Industries Board. Prescott’s father reported to the Board’s Chairman, Bernard Baruch, and to Baruch’s assistant, Wall Street private banker Clarence Dillon. Robert S. Lovett, President of Union Pacific Railroad, chief counsel to E.H. Harriman and executor of his will, was in charge of national production and purchase “priorities” for Baruch’s board. With the war mobilization conducted under the supervision of the War Industries Board, U.S. consumers and taxpayers showered unprecedented fortunes on war producers and certain holders of raw materials and patents. Hearings in 1934 by the committee of U.S. Senator Gerald Nye attacked the “Merchants of Death” — war profiteers such as Remington Arms and the British Vickers company –whose salesmen had manipulated many nations into wars, and then supplied all sides with the weapons to fight them.

Percy Rockefellar

Percy Rockefeller and Samuel Pryor’s Remington Arms supplied machine guns and Colt automatic pistols; millions of rifles to Czarist Russia; over half of the small-arms ammunition used by the Anglo-American allies in World War I; and 69 percent of the rifles used by the United States in that conflict. Samuel Bush’s wartime relationship to these businessmen would continue after the war, and would especially aid his son Prescott’s career of service to the Harrimans.

Now, arms production in wartime is by necessity carried on with great security precautions. The public need not know details of the private lives of the government or industry executives involved, and a broad interrelationship between government and private-sector personnel is normal and useful. But during the period preceding World War I, and in the war years 1914-1917 when the U.S. was still neutral, interlocking Wall Street financiers subservient to British strategy lobbied heavily, and twisted U.S. government and domestic police functions. Led by the J.P. Morgan concern, Britain’s overall purchasing agent in America, these financiers wanted a world war and they wanted the United States in it as Britain’s ally. The U.S. and British arms companies, owned by these international financiers, poured out weapons abroad in deals not subject to the scrutiny of any electorate back home. The same gentlemen, as we shall see, later supplied weapons and money to Hitler’s Nazis.

The Great Game

On May 1, 1926, Prescott Bush joined W.A. Harriman & Co. as its vice president, under the bank’s president, Bert Walker, his father-in-law and George’s maternal grandfather–the head of the family. Bush would demonstrate strong loyalty to the firm he joined in 1926. And the bank, with the scope and power of many ordinary nations, could amply reward its agents. George Bush’s Grandfather Walker had put the enterprise together, quietly, secretly, using all the international connections at his disposal. Let us briefly look back at the beginning of the Harriman firm–the Bush family enterprise–and follow its course into one of history’s darkest projects.

The firm’s first global lever was its successful arrangement to get into Germany by dominating that country’s shipping. Averell Harriman announced in 1920 that he would re-start Germany’s Hamburg- Amerika Line, after many months of scheming and arm-twisting. Hamburg-Amerika’s commercial steamships had been confiscated by the United States at the end of the First World War. These ships had then become the property of the Harriman enterprise, by some arrangements with the U.S. authorities that were never made public.

The deal was breathtaking; it would create the world’s largest private shipping line. Hamburg-Amerika Line regained its confiscated vessels, for a heavy price. The Harriman enterprise took “the right to participate in 50 percent of all business originated in Hamburg” ; and for the next twenty years (1920-1940), the Harriman enterprise had “complete control of all activities of the Hamburg line in the United States.” Harriman became co-owner of Hamburg-Amerika. The Harriman-Walker firm gained a tight hold on its management, with the not-so-subtle backing of the post-World War I occupation of Germany by the armies of England and America.

Just after Harriman’s public statement, the St. Louis press celebrated Bert Walker’s role in assembling the money to consummate the deal:

“Ex-St. Louisan Forms Giant Ship Merger”

The story celebrated a “merger of two big financial houses in New York, which will place practically unlimited capital at the disposal of the new American-German shipping combine….” Bert Walker had arranged a “marriage” of J.P. Morgan credit and Harriman family inherited wealth.

W.A. Harriman & Co., of which Walker was president and founder, was merging with the Morton & Co. private bank–and Walker was “[p]rominent in the affairs of Morton & Co.,” which was interlocked with the Morgan-controlled Guaranty Trust Co. The Hamburg-Amerika takeover created an effective instrument for the manipulation and fatal subversion of Germany. One of the great “merchants of death,” Samuel Pryor, was in it from the beginning. Pryor, then chairman of the executive committee of Remington Arms, helped arrange the deal and served with Walker on the board of Harriman’s shipping front organization, the American Ship and Commerce Co.

Walker and Harriman took the next giant step in 1922, setting up their European headquarters office in Berlin. With the aid of the Hamburg-based Warburg bank, W.A. Harriman & Co. began spreading an investment net over German industry and raw materials. From the Berlin base, Walker and Harriman then plunged into deals with the new dictatorship of the Soviet Union. They led a select group of Wall Street and British Empire speculators who re-started the Russian oil industry, which had been devastated by the Bolshevik Revolution. They contracted to mine Soviet manganese, an element essential to modern steelmaking. These concessions were arranged directly with Leon Trotsky, then with Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet dictatorship’s secret intelligence service (K.G.B), whose huge statue was finally pulled down by pro-democracy demonstrators in 1991.

With the bank launched, Bert Walker found New York the ideal place to satisfy his passion for sports, games and gambling. Walker was elected president of the U.S. Golf Association in 1920. He negotiated new international rules for the game with the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland. After these talks he contributed the three-foot-high silver Walker Cup, for which British and American teams have since competed every two years. Bert’s son-in-law Prescott Bush was later secretary of the U.S. Golf Association, during the grave political and economic crises of the early 1930s. Prescott became USGA President in 1935, while he was otherwise embroiled in the family firm’s work with Nazi Germany.

USGA Walker Cup

In 1925, Bert Walker and Averell Harriman headed a syndicate which rebuilt Madison Square Garden as the modern Palace of Sport. Walker was at the center of New York’s gambling scene in its heyday, in that Prohibition era of colorful and bloody gangsters. The Garden bloomed with million-dollar prize fights; bookies and their clients pooled more millions, trying to match the pace of the speculation-crazed stock and bond men. This was the era of “organized” crime–the national gambling and bootleg syndicate structured on the New York corporate model.

By 1930 Walker was New York State Racing Commissioner. The vivid colors and sounds of the racing scene must have impressed little George as much as his grandfather. Bert Walker bred race horses at his own stable, the Log Cabin Stud. He was president of the Belmont Park race track. Bert also personally managed most aspects of Harriman’s racing interests.

After the firm’s 1931 merger with the British-American banking house Brown Brothers, Prescott Bush became managing partner of the resulting company: Brown Brothers Harriman. This was ultimately the largest and politically the most important private banking house in America. Financial collapse, world depression and social upheaval followed the fevered speculation of the 1920s. The 1929-31 crash of securities values wiped out the small fortune Prescott Bush had gained since 1926. But because of his devotion to the Harrimans, they “did a very generous thing,” as Bush later put it. They staked him to what he had lost and put him back on his feet.

Depression Era Hemp Farm

Prescott Bush described his own role, from 1931 through the 1940s, in a confidential interview:

I emphasize … that the Harrimans showed great courage and loyalty and confidence in us, because three or four of us were really running the business, the day to day business. Averell was all over the place in those days … and Roland was involved in a lot of directorships, and he didn’t get down into the “lift- up-and-bear-down” activity of the bank, you see– the day- to-day decisions … we were really running the business, the day to day business, all the administrative decisions and the executive decisions. We were the ones that did it. We were the managing partners.”

But of the “three or four” partners in charge, Bush was effectively at the head of the firm, because he had taken over management of the gigantic personal investment funds of Averell and E. Roland “Bunny” Harriman. In those interwar years, Prescott Bush made the family fortune which George Bush inherited. He piled up the money from an international project which continued until a new world war, and the action of the U.S. government, intervened to stop him.

Control of Nazi Commerce

Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take control of the Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had organized the American Ship and Commerce Corp. as a unit of the W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual power over Hamburg-Amerika’s affairs. As the Nazi project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held by the Harriman Fifteen Corp., ran by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker.

In many ways, Bush’s Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for the entire Nazi project.

Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War I chief executive, Wilhelm Cuno, and with the line’s bankers, M.M. Warburg. Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for a Hitler dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi Party. Albert Voegler was chief executive of the Thyssen-Flick German Steel Trust for which Bush’s Union Banking Corp. was the New York office. He was a director of the Bush-affiliate BHS Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Harriman-Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line. Voegler joined Thyssen and Flick in their heavy 1930-33 Nazi contributions, and helped organize the final Nazi leap into national power.

Thyssen Steel

The Schroeder family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi activities of Harriman and Prescott Bush, closely tied to their lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles. Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive Thyssen-Huautte foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush’s New York bank partner. Kurt von Schroeder was treasurer of the support organization for the Nazi Party’s private armies, to which Friedrich Flick contributed. Kurt von Schroeder and Montagu Norman’s protégé Hjalmar Schacht together made the final arrangements for Hitler to enter the government. Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Certain actions taken directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping line in 1932 are ranked among the gravest acts of treason in this century.

The U.S. embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that the “costly election campaigns” and “ the cost of maintaining a private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men ” had raised questions as to the Nazis’ financial backers. The constitutional government of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. embassy reported that the Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler’s forces.

IG Farben

Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism were shot or intimidated by privately armed Nazi Brown Shirts. In this connection we note that the original “Merchant of Death, ” Samuel Pryor, was a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp. Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms and a central figure in the world’s private arms traffic, his use to the Nazi project was enhanced as the Bush family’s partner in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping. The U.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington after it was joined in a cartel agreement on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period leading up to Hitler’s seizure of power, the Senators found that “German political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American … guns…. Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference. The Nazis and Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner. The principal arms coming from America are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great. ”

The beginning of the Hitler regime brought some bizarre changes to the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Prescott Bush’s American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to be the corporation’s official, designated representative on the board of Hamburg-Amerika. Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American sponsors that the Hitler government was good for Germany: “ For the last few years business was considerably better than we had anticipated, but a reaction is making itself felt for some months. We are actually suffering also under the very active propaganda against Germany, caused by some unpleasant circumstances. These occurrences were the natural consequence of the very excited election campaign, but were extraordinarily exaggerated in the foreign press. The Government is firmly resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever. ”

Ships Built by UBC Loans

This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jewish business magnate, was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated rather serious “ alarm ” inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi operations. On March 29, 1933, two days after Max’s letter to Harriman, Max’s son, Erich Warburg, sent a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asked Frederick to “use all your influence ” to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including “ atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc. ” Frederick cabled back to Erich: “ No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of] German goods[,] merely excited individuals. ” Two days after that, On March 31, 1933, the American-Jewish Committee, controlled by the Warburgs, and the B’nai B’rith, heavily influenced by the Sulzbergers (New York Times), issued a formal, official joint statement of the two organizations, counseling “that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged, ” and advising “ that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed. ”

The executive board of the Hamburg Amerika Line (Hapag) met jointly with the North German Lloyd Company board in Hamburg on Sept. 5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two firms were merged. Prescott Bush’s American Ship and Commerce Corp. installed Christian J. Beck, a long-time Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines (Hapag-Lloyd) on Nov. 4, 1933. According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the Nazi Labor Front rode with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New York offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done in Germany against the constitutional German government.

In mid-1936, Prescott Bush’s American Ship and Commerce Corp. cabled M.M. Warburg, asking Warburg to represent the company’s heavy share interest at the forthcoming Hamburg-Amerika stockholders meeting. The Warburg office replied with the information that “we represented you ” at the stockholders meeting and “ exercised on your behalf your voting power for Rm [gold marks] 3,509,600 Hapag stock deposited with us. ” The Warburgs transmitted a letter received from Emil Helfferich, German chief executive of both Hapag-Lloyd and of the Standard Oil subsidiary in Nazi Germany: “ It is the intention to continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the same basis as heretofore…. ” After the meeting with the Zeppelin passenger, the Harriman-Bush office replied: “ I am glad to learn that Mr. Hellferich [sic] has stated that relations between the Hamburg American Line and ourselves will be continued on the same basis as heretofore. ”

Two months before moving against Prescott Bush’s Union Banking Corporation, the U. S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German Lloyd, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in the pre-seizure report that Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney representing the Nazi firm. In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Co., led by Averell Harriman’s first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States.

Prescott Bush

This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler’s economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder. John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster’s friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become the Republican U.S. Senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of “covert action government, ” that both of these Dulles brothers were the lawyers for the Bush family’s far-flung enterprise.

John Foster Dulles

Throughout the 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged debt restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued by Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between the interest owed to selected, larger investors, and the needs of the growing Nazi war-making apparatus for producing tanks, poison gas, etc. Dulles wrote to Prescott Bush in 1937 concerning one such arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable Company, owning Nazi Germany’s only telegraph channel to the United States, had made debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank during the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements, which had originally been reached with non-Nazi corporate officials. Dulles asked Bush, who managed these affairs for Averell Harriman, to get Averell’s signature on a letter to Nazi officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote:

Sept. 22, 1937

Mr. Prescott S. Bush

59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y.

Dear Prescott,

I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic] Cable Company to Averell Harriman…. It would appear that the only rights in the matter are those which inure in the bankers and that no legal embarrassment would result, so far as the bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in the modification of the bankers’ agreement.

Sincerely yours,

John Foster Dulles

Dulles enclosed a proposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman’s signature, and the changes went through.In conjunction with these arrangements, the German Atlantic Cable Company attempted to stop payment on its debts to smaller American bondholders. The money was to be used instead for arming the Nazi state, under a decree of the Hitler government. Despite the busy efforts of Bush and Dulles, a New York court decided that this particular Hitler “law ” was invalid in the United States; small bondholders, not parties to deals between the bankers and the Nazis, were entitled to get paid.

Trading With The Enemy

In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America was preparing its first assault against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot. On Oct. 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.

Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.’s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland “ Bunny ” Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush. The order seizing the bank “ vests ” (seizes) “ all of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York corporation, ” and names the holders of its shares as:

“ E. Roland Harriman–3991 shares ”
[chairman and director of Union Banking Corp. (UBC); this is “ Bunny ” Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn’t get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed his personal investments]

“ Cornelis Lievense–4 shares ”
[president and director of UBC; New York resident banking functionary for the Nazis]

“ Harold D. Pennington–1 share ”
[treasurer and director of UBC; an office manager employed by Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman]

“ Ray Morris–1 share ”

[director of UBC; partner of Bush and the Harrimans]

“ Prescott S. Bush–1 share ”
[director of UBC, which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George Walker; senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman]

“ H.J. Kouwenhoven–1 share ”
[director of UBC; organized UBC as the emissary of Fritz Thyssen in negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; managing director of UBC’s Netherlands affiliate under Nazi occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany; director and chief foreign financial executive of the German Steel Trust]

“ Johann G. Groeninger–1 share ”
[director of UBC and of its Netherlands affiliate; industrial executive in Nazi Germany, subordinate of Fritz Thyssen]

On Oct. 28 1942, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.  U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on Nov. 8, 1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942. In this action, the government announced that it was seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis’ U.S. partners to carry on the business.

Thyssen with Hitler

These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime were, tragically, too little and too late. President Bush’s family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the “ Thyssen family ” of “ Germany and/or Hungary ”–“ nationals … of a designated enemy country. ”

By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corp. were legally front men for the Nazis, the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way were Hitler’s Nazis themselves hired, armed and instructed by the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? Let us examine the Harriman-Bush Hitler project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek an answer for that question.

Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally recognized as the most important German financiers of Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Germany. At the time of the order seizing the Thyssen family’s Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had already published his famous book, I Paid Hitler, admitting that he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since October 1923. Thyssen’s role as the leading early backer of Hitler’s grab for power in Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932. The order seizing the Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the perpetrators who had been nailed.

Frtiz Thyssen

But two weeks before the official order, government investigators had reported secretly that “ W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist. ” Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. “ [C]ertain of [Harriman’s] associates would serve as directors…. ” Thyssen agent “ H. J. Kouwenhoven … came to the United States … prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection…. ”

When exactly was “ Harriman in Europe sometime prior to 1924 ”? In fact, he was in Berlin in 1922 to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George Walker’s presidency. The Union Banking Corporation was established formally in 1924, as a unit in the Manhattan offices of W.A. Harriman & Co., interlocking with the Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS) in the Netherlands. The investigators concluded that “ the Union Banking Corporation has since its inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it through the Dutch bank by the Thyssen interests for American investment. ”

Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen in 1922, W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between New York and the “ Thyssen interests ” in Germany. By putting up about $400,000, the Harriman organization would be joint owner and manager of Thyssen’s banking operations outside of Germany.

How important was the Nazi enterprise for which President Bush’s father was the New York banker?

Vereinigte Stahlwerke

The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush’s Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or German Steel Trust) led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war, Congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units. The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following approximate proportions of total German national output:

50.8% of Nazi Germany’s pig iron
41.4% of Nazi Germany’s universal plate
36.0% of Nazi Germany’s heavy plate
38.5% of Nazi Germany’s galvanized sheet
45.5% of Nazi Germany’s pipes and tubes
22.1% of Nazi Germany’s wire
35.0% of Nazi Germany’s explosives.@s8

Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1926. That same year, a friend of Harriman and Bush set up a giant new organization for their client Fritz Thyssen, prime sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new German Steel Trust, Germany’s largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926 by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade of Prescott Bush’s father Sam Bush from the “ Merchants of Death ” bureau in World War I. In return for putting up $70 million to create his organization, majority owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company two or more representatives on the board of the new Steel Trust.

Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen’s own confidential accounts, for political and related purposes, were run through the Walker-Bush organization; the German Steel Trust did its corporate banking through Dillon Read.

The Walker-Bush firm’s banking activities were not just politically neutral money-making ventures which happened to coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of the firm’s European business in those days was organized around anti-democratic political forces. In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew this retort from Bert Walker, written from Kennebunkport to Averell Harriman: “ It seems to me that the suggestion in connection with Lord Bearsted’s views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent…. I think that we have drawn our line and should hew to it. ”

Bert Walker

Averell Harriman met with Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. A representative of the firm subsequently telegraphed good news back to his chief executive Bert Walker: “ … During these last days … Mussolini … has examined and approved our c[o]ntract 15 June. ”

The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America, Germany and Britain, weakening all governments. It also made the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing to do whatever was necessary to retain his new place in the world. It was in this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined on the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany. W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and rich in assets from their German and Russian business, merged with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, on January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker & Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush and Thatcher M. Brown as the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family firm continued operating under its historic name–Brown, Shipley.)

Robert A Lovett

Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman’s lawyer and railroad chief, had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott’s father. Though he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the junior Lovett soon replaced his father as chief executive of Union Pacific Railroad. Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for Hitler. Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A. and in England, had carried on their ships fully 75 percent of the slave cotton from the American South over to British mill owners. Now in 1931, the virtual dictator of world finance, Bank of England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been boss of Brown Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as the most avid of Hitler’s supporters within British ruling circles, and Norman’s intimacy with this firm was essential to his management of the Nazi project.

A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an agreement had been made “in Berlin ” to sell an 8,000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel. Nazi tanks and bombs “settled” business with the invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. The Nazi army had been equipped by Flick, Harriman, Walker and Bush, with materials essentially stolen from Poland by Flick. There were probably few people at the time who could appreciate the irony, that when the Soviets also attacked and invaded Poland from the East, their vehicles were fueled by oil pumped from Baku wells revived by the Harriman/Walker/Bush enterprise.

Nazi Invasion in Poland

Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the Nazis’ share in the Silesian-American Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Enemy nationals were said to own 49 percent of the common stock and 41.67 percent of the preferred stock of the company. The order characterized the company as a “business enterprise within the United States, owned by [a front company in] Zurich, Switzerland, and held for the benefit of Bergwerksgesellschaft George von Giesche’s Erben, a German corporation….

Bert Walker was still the senior director of the company, which he had founded back in 1926 simultaneously with the creation of the German Steel Trust. Ray Morris, Prescott’s partner from Union Banking Corp. and Brown Brothers Harriman, was also a director. The investigative report prior to the government crackdown explained the “ NATURE OF BUSINESS: The subject corporation is an American holding company for German and Polish subsidiaries, which own large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. Since September 1939, these properties have been in the possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country in its war effort. ” The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to regain control of the European properties after the war.

- The Green Chazzan

The Bay of Pigs & Operation J/M-Wave        

Inside the CIA’s Miami Training Camps by Jorge Varona (1977)

Bay of Pigs – Captured Agents

All four of the former agents I talked to had joined the CIA either before or during the Bay of Pigs training period. Two were in the invasion; and two were in the Cuban underground. One of them said: “I don’t know when they will need me again”.

When Cuban exiles began arriving in the United States in 1959 many thought the best way to go back to their country was a war in which a powerful ally was needed. The ally was there in the form of a sympathetic United States government which sponsored the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion – an invasion which had an end result, the consolidation of the government of Prime Minister Fidel Castro.

Cubans in general have had a dichotomous attitude toward the United States: traditionally Cubans have distrusted the “Colossus of the North” while expressing great admiration for American political stability and know-how. The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was easily blamed by many on the inexperience and ‘lack of guts’ of the late President John F. Kennedy; the disgruntled exiles, however, kept alive their hopes of getting control of their homeland by joining up with an arm of the government which was sympathetic and powerful: The Central Intelligence Agency.

Not all Cubans who fought against Castro were CIA followers, but those days in the camps in Guatemala had seen strong friends grow between the trainees and the CIA instructors. When the invaders came back, many gravitated to the US Army and others stayed close to the intelligence community in the Miami Area.

Carlos Prio Socarras

CIA recruitment of operatives and agents began even before Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista was overthrown. Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis has admitted he was recruited to work for the CIA while he was ferrying weapons to Cuban rebels under the direction of former Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras. The CIA maintained a large network of operatives on the island nation up to the 1961 U.S. sponsored invasion, when most of them were arrested and neutralized by the Cuban secret police (known as G-2). Those agents who were not caught had to go into hiding, and were, for the most part, neutralized.  Only a small hardy group survived and still may be working today.

But it is the Miami based CIA groups, the ones functioning in Miami that grew and were used by American intelligence to form an intelligence network which extended through Latin America and Europe in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Following the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA began a recruitment drive in Miami among Cuban exiles and trained many of them in the commando raid tactics which were used in the 18-month period between the invasion and the October 1962 missile crisis.

Following the crisis, CIA Cuba activities became more covert, since the ‘understanding’ reached by American President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev precluded any direct invasion of Cuba. To gather the information in this article; four former CIA agents were interviewed; two of these were Principal Agents who acted under direct orders from the CIA. CIA headquarters were located at the J/M-WAVE, a number of offices buildings and warehouses located at the University of Miami’s south campus. J/M-WAVE operated under the guise of Zenith Technological Services, an electronics firm which was supposed to have been engaged in doing weapons research for the Department of Defense. Even though The Company has denied it, Sturgis confirmed he was involved in assassination plots against Castro and other Latin leaders, many of these operations were hatched from J/M-WAVE.

All agents interviewed had first come in contact with the CIA either before or during the Bay of Pigs training period. Two participated in the invasion and two were members of the Cuban underground. They will be known only by their first names since they do not wish to compromise their lives. One of them said “I do not know when they will need me again”.William R. Amlong described the CIA Miami operation in the March 9, 1975 Miami Herald as “the largest anywhere in the world outside of the Langley Headquarters in Virginia”. During the height of the CIA Cuban operation over 400 officers of the CIA connected with propaganda, paramilitary and infiltration operations worked out of there. At this headquarters, the activities of more than 1,500 Cuban Exile operatives were coordinated. These operatives according to ‘Rolando’, one of the agents, operated freely in Miami, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Spain, France, West Germany and Italy.

With the conclusion of the missile crisis and the return of the Bay of Pigs invaders to American soil, the CIA operation began to enter the infiltration and harassment of Cuba phase in which small teams went to Cuba to deliver radios, explosives, and weapons to underground elements. This was the apogee of the Cuban operation, which lasted with official sanction until early 1965, when Lyndon Johnson brought his own political clout to the White House.

The recruitment of Cuban Exiles was described by the agents as follows: Immigration and Naturalization Service authorities screening exiles would tip off the CIA as to whom they though could be an effective agent. Local exiles already working for the CIA would in turn go to visit them and invite the new arrivals to visit one of the many safe-houses that “La Compania” had in Miami. One of these was the Old Revolutionary Council house just north of downtown Miami. The CIA tried to recruit farmers and fisherman who knew the coast and who could help the infiltration teams get into Cuba without being seen. Training began with classes in Miami, where the recruits began learning about tactics and weapons. These classes were usually held at the house of the Principal Agents. Most of the time the CIA tried to have the Cuban PA’s very visible in from of the Cuban recruits in order to gain their confidence.

Those recruits who would actually become agents and not just operatives would be sent up for further training at Eglin Air Force Base in Pensacola, Florida (where, perhaps not coincidentally, the Watergate burglars would be imprisoned in 1974). Some of the training in guerilla warfare took place in the Okeefenokee Swamp in the Florida panhandle and southern Georgia. The recruits stayed for one month at this base. From here the recruits went to several bases near the CIA headquarters in Virginia, where they received further training in commando tactics, raids and weapons. Training at these bases lasted for a month.

J/M-Wave, Florida

According to ‘Roland’: “From here we were taken in closed planes to another base. We did not know where this base is. There we took training in explosives and demolition”. This type of training was held regularly until at least 1968.

At least two of the agents confirmed about 300 men received training in demolitions. The training varied while some were taught demolition on dry land, others learned all about underwater charges. This phase of operation ceased in large scale right after Lyndon Johnson took over in 1965. The 1965-1968 period saw an increase in the infiltrations for the purpose of gathering intelligence and rescuing agents inside Cuba. It is also believed that in this period some more of the assassination plots against Castro were hatched in Miami. While official U.S. policy at the time was one of ‘hands off’ Cuba, local authorities often looked the other way when Cuban Exiles, especially CIA agents or operatives, were caught breaking the neutrality laws.

“I remember when we caught one of these guys who had a lot of explosives and weapons in his house” said a former Dade County policeman who is now self-employed. “The Feds came in and took everything we had, saying that they were going to draw up federal charges against this man. They took everything, the weapons, the explosives, everything. We told them that we needed something so that we could bring our own charges against the man (who was active in anti-Castro activities) and federal agents left the State Attorney a case of hand grenades. Well, as it turned out, there was no regulation in Dade or Miami covering possession of hand grenades, so we had to let him go.”

Since Cuba could not be the object of a massive CIA operation, the Cia began using the recruited exiles to check on pro-Castro activity in Europe and Latin America. Already well known is the manhunt of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in Bolivia, in which at least 2 of the agents interviewed participated in minor roles. Exiles also participated in the covert propaganda work in Chile which helped to defeat Salvador Allende in 1964.

Salvadore Allende

The CIA operation in Miami was divided into ubiquitous cells. Normally, one cell did not know what the other was doing, in case one of the groups was caught in Cuba. There was also another reason for this: usually members of one cell were political enemies of another cell. There were cells of people connected with former President Prio, other cells consisted of former allies of Batista, and other cells were comprised of former members of Castro’s revolutionary army. Men who would normally not be able to work together because of irreconcilable political conflicts worked this way together. This way, with Machiavellian precision, the CIA did for exiles what they could never do: band together to fight Castro.

The same political division was used by the CIA to keep any of the groups from reaching a position of relative strength. A good example of this was the campaign of vituperation against Manolo Ray, a liberal center-left former Castro minister who headed a powerful and popular exile group. Ray was accused of being a ‘Fidelista sin Fidel’ or one who liked the revolution but hated Castro, and his campaign lost much influence over the affair.

Nixon

The CIA usually kept informants as members of most groups and managed to control even the most fanatical nationalists. As the anti-Castro activity began to be more closely controlled with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, the CIA kept on its payroll a ‘secret police’ in Miami, which numbered anywhere from 200 to 300 Cuban Exiles. Men like Watergate burglar Eugenio Rolando ‘Muscalito’ Martinez belonged to this group. The CIA and some of the agents claim the group was officially disbanded in 1972, though most of the men remained on retainer as ‘consultants’. Martinez was still collecting $100-a-month from the CIA when he was caught in the Democratic National Headquarters. Members of this group trained at the J/M-WAVE facility. Others took training courses at the ‘School of the Americas’ in Fort Gulick at the Panama Canal Zone.

In Miami the cloak-and-dagger activities of the CIA quickly became mixed up in the narcotics traffic since many of the operatives were dealing heroin and marijuana. These dealers had what amounted to official protection because of the work they did. Part of the official protection the CIA had in Miami extended to the Miami Police Departments and also to the Dade County Sheriff’s office. Former Miami Police Chief Bernard Garmire provided some of the official protection the CIA operatives needed. This extended to having the CIA operatives keep a close eye on independent Anti-Castro groups; they usually busted their members when it appeared they were about to execute freelance raids on Cuba. During the 1972 Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Miami Beach, CIA operatives infiltrated most anti-Castro groups and often set them off against each other or against left-wing groups protesting the convention.

The CIA also sponsored front companies which served as support for the Company. An example of this is the Hialeah Egg Factory in which many of these operatives worked, among them Jose Antonio Prat, who mysteriously ‘killed himself’ in Miami in early February of 1976. One of the front men of the factory is a retired CIA agent known as Richard ‘El Americano’ who spent 12 years in Castro’s dungeons for espionage.

Up to 60 of these front companies grew around Miami; often they had names similar to real companies and would even sell similar products. Unsuspecting calls to them would invariably bring excuses about ‘not having the material available’. The receptionists would lie about the whereabouts of salesmen and even to credit ex-employees confirming former employment and salaries. Many of these corporations were not officially registered with the state of Florida but were seldom ever prosecuted or brought to the public’s attention.

The same is true of a number of used car lots which opened up in Miami and were run by some of the Cuban Exiles in the 1960s. U.S. Representative William Lehman, a used car dealer in North Miami, told the Rockefellar Commission that he believed there was some unfair competition from the CIA because their dealerships undersold the market. Cuban Exiles who normally worked other jobs preferred to work this way and were paid directly, to seldom sell a few cars while plotting Anti-Castro activities in air conditioned offices.

Cuban Exiles in Miami

Although the CIA activities slowed down in 1972, along with the agents claim that recruitment has stopped altogether, a legacy has remained in Miami. The trainees did not quite stop working after the CIA cooled them down. Many set up their own training schools and as late as 1973, they kept training other exiles in the use of weapons and explosives. A paramilitary Parachute Club, the ‘Golden Falcons’ was the place where Humberto Lopez Jr., the convicted terrorist and Rolando Otero Hernandez, another terrorist now in Chile, first joined together and learned about bomb making under the CIA.

At a small office near SW I Street on 22 Avenue, CIA operatives trained in explosives and booby traps by the special forces taught young Cubans how to handle most weapons in the American military as well as Russian and Eastern European weapons. Training in booby-traps and grenades were held under the direction of Conrado Rodriguez. Usually the classes were well illustrated with weapons and taught by four expert marksmen. Even though many agents have claimed to stop these activities, men like Max Gorman Gonzalez are still reluctant to speak with reporters, afraid of compromising their business relationship with the CIA. It is interesting to note that while Frank Sturgis claims to have stopped the CIA activities, he was seen training the Exiles on how to recruit among their own for forces in Angola.

“When Bernard Barker, one of the Miami Watergate burglars, entered federal prison, he encountered an old Bay of Pigs comrade jailed for violating US neutrality laws in a freelance raid against Cuba. Chico, as he was nicknamed complained that America wasn’t what it used to be…”

In Hialeah, the Egg Factory is still working and the Power Chemical and Paper Corporation still operates with salesmen doubling as agents. At 1800 NW River Drive, CIA operatives are still recruiting forces to fight in Angola as early as the Spring of 1976.

- The Green Chazzan

The Bay of Pigs & Operation J/M-Wave        

The Bay of Pigs and The Kennedy Assassination by Dr. Webster Tarpley (1992)

Presidential Portrait of JFK

“…JM/WAVE …proliferated across [Florida] in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion. A subculture of fronts, proprietaries, suppliers, transfer agents, conduits, dummy corporations, blind drops, detective agencies, law firms, electronic firms, shopping centers, airlines, radio stations, the mob and the church and the banks: a false and secret nervous system twitching to stimuli supplied by the cortex in Clandestine Services in Langley. After defeat on the beach in Cuba, JM/WAVE became a continuing and extended Miami Station, CIA’s largest in the continental United States. A large sign in front of the […] building complex reads: US GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS PROHIBIT DISCUSSION OF THIS ORGANIZATION OR FACILITY.

Donald Freed, Death in Washington (Westport, Connecticut, 1980), p. 141.

The review offered so far of George Bush’s activities during the late 1950′s and early 1960′s is almost certainly incomplete in very important respects. There is good reason to believe that Bush was engaged in something more than just the oil business during those years. Starting about the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in the spring of 1961, we have the first hints that Bush, in addition to working for Zapata Offshore, may also have been a participant in certain covert operations of the US intelligence community.

Bush Sr.

Such participation would certainly be coherent with George’s role in the Prescott Bush, Skull and Bones, and Brown Brothers, Harriman networks. During the twentieth century, the Skull and Bones/Harriman circles have always maintained a sizable and often decisive presence inside the intelligence organizations of the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, the Harriman and related Anglophile financier factions of Wall Street have generally regarded those parts of the state apparatus dealing with intelligence and covert operations as their own very special property, property which had to be kept seeded with control networks in order to be effectively steered from above. For George Bush to interface with the intelligence community while ostensibly engaged in his business career would be coherent with that well-established pattern.

A body of leads has been assembled which suggests that George Bush may have been associated with the CIA at some time before the autumn of 1963. According to Joseph McBride of The Nation, “a source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities.” 1 By the time of the Kennedy assassination, we have an official FBI document which refers to “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency,” and despite official disclaimers there is every reason to think that this is indeed the man in the White House today. The mystery of George Bush as a possible covert operator hinges on four points, each one of which represents one of the great political and espionage scandals of postwar American history.

These four cardinal points are:

1. The abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, launched on April 16-17, 1961, prepared with the assistance of the CIA’s “Miami Station” (also known under the code name JM/WAVE). After the failure of the amphibious landings of Brigade 2506, Miami station, under the leadership of Theodore Shackley, became the focus for Operation Mongoose, a series of covert operations directed against Castro, Cuba, and possibly other targets.
2. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the coverup of those responsible for this crime.
3. The Watergate scandal, beginning with an April, 1971 visit to Miami, Florida by E. Howard Hunt on the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion to recruit operatives for the White House Special Investigations Unit (the “Plumbers” and later Watergate burglars) from among Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veterans.
4. The Iran-contra affair, which became a public scandal during October-November 1986, several of whose central figures, such as Felix Rodriguez, were also veterans of the Bay of Pigs.

George Bush’s role in both Watergate and the October surprise/Iran-contra complex will be treated in detail at later points in this book. Right now it is important to see that thirty years of covert operations, in many respects, form a single continuous whole. This is especially true in regard to the dramatis personae. Georgie Anne Geyer points to the obvious in a recent book: “…an entire new Cuban cadre now emerged from the Bay of Pigs. The names Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, Rolando Martinez, Felix Rodriguez and Eugenio Martinez would, in the next quarter century, pop up, often decisively, over and over again in the most dangerous American foreign policy crises. There were Cubans flying missions for the CIA in the Congo and even for the Portuguese in Africa; Cubans were the burglars of Watergate; Cubans played key roles in Nicaragua, in Irangate, in the American move into the Persian Gulf.”  Felix Rodriguez tells us that he was infiltrated into Cuba with the other members of the “Grey Team” in conjunction with the Bay of Pigs landings; this is the same man we will find directing the contra supply effort in central American during the 1980′s, working under the direct supervision of Don Gregg and George Bush.  Theodore Shackley, the JM/WAVE station chief, will later show up in Bush’s 1979-80 presidential campaign.

CIA Chief Ted Shackley

To a very large degree, such covert operations (and the great political scandals attendant upon them) have drawn upon the same pool of personnel. They are a significant extent the handiwork of the same crowd. It is therefore revealing to extrapolate forward and backward in time the individuals and groups of individuals who appear as the cast of characters in one scandal and compare them with the cast of characters for the other scandals, including the secondary ones that have not been enumerated here. Howard Hunt, for example, shows up as a confirmed part of the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, as an important part of the chain of command in the Bay of Pigs, as a person repeatedly accused of having been in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, and as one of the central figures of Watergate. (One wonders what secrets, after all, were contained in Howard Hunt’s safe, the contents of which were so conventiently “deep sixed” by FBI Director Patrick Gray.)

E Howard Hunt

George Bush is demonstrably one of the most important protagonists of the Watergate scandal, and was the overall director of Iran-contra. Since he appears especially in Iran-contra in close proximity to Bay of Pigs holdovers, it is surely legitimate to wonder when his association with those Bay of Pigs Cubans might have started.

1959 was the year that Bush started operating out of his Zapata Offshore headquarters in Houston; it was also the year that Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. Officially, as we have seen, George was now a businessman whose work took him at times to Louisiana, where Zapata had offshore drilling operations. George must have been a frequent visitor to New Orleans. Because of his family’s estate on Jupiter Island, he would also have been a frequent visitor to the Hobe Sound area. And then, there were Zapata Offshore drilling operations in the Florida Strait. On all of these activities, the official “red Studebaker” biographical material and the Zapata Offshore annual reports are extremely cryptic.

Prescott Bush

The Jupiter Island connection and father Prescott’s Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones networks are doubtless the key. Jupiter Island meant Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, C. Douglas Dillon and other Anglophile financiers who had directed the US intelligence community long before there had been a CIA at all. And, in the back yard of the Jupiter Island Olympians, and under their direction, a powerful covert operations base was now being assembled, in which George Bush would have been present at the creation as a matter of birthright.

During 1959-60, Allen Dulles and the Eisenhower Administration began to assemble in south Florida the infrastructure for covert action against Cuba. This was the JM/WAVE capability, later formally constituted as the CIA Miami station. JM/WAVE was an operational center for the Eisenhower regime’s project of staging an invasion of Cuba using a secret army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles organized, armed, trained, transported, and directed by the CIA. The Cubans, called Brigade 2506, were trained in secret camps in Guatemala, and they had air support from B-26 bombers based in Nicaragua. This invasion was crushed by Castro’s defending forces in less than three days.

Allen Dulles

Before going along with the plan so eagerly touted by Allen Dulles, Kennedy had established the pre-condition that under no circumstances whatsoever would there be direct intervention by US military forces against Cuba. On the one hand, Dulles had assured Kennedy that the news of the invasion would trigger an insurrection which would sweep Castro and his regime away. On the other, Kennedy had to be concerned about provoking a global thermonuclear confrontation with the USSR, in the eventuality that N.S. Khrushchev decided to respond to a US Cuban gambit by, for example, cutting off US access to Berlin.

According to some accounts, the code name for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Pluto. 4 But Bay of Pigs veteran Howard Hunt scornfully denies that this was the code name used by JM/WAVE personnel; Hunt writes: “So perhaps the Pentagon referred to the Brigade invasion as PLUTO. CIA did not.” But Hunt does not tell us what the CIA code name was, and the contents of Hunt’s Watergate era White House safe, which might have told us the answer, were of course “deep-sixed” by FBI Director Patrick Gray. One code name frequently used by CIA Miami Station personnel appears to have been “Don Eduardo,” roughly the Spanish equivalent of “Mr. Edward” or perhaps “Mr. Ed.” According to reliable sources and published accounts, the CIA code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion was Operation Zapata, and the plan was so referred to by Richard Bissell of the CIA, one of the plan’s promoters, in a briefing to President Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on March 29, 1961.  Does Operation Zapata have anything to do with Zapata Offshore?

Formerly Zapata

More on Zapata & George Bush : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbinger_Group

Then there is the question of the Brigade 2506 landing fleet, which was composed of five older freighters bought or chartered from the Garcia Steamship Lines, bearing the names of Houston, Rio Esondido, Caribe, Atlantic, and Lake Charles. In addition to these vessels, which were outfitted as transport ships, there were two somewhat better armed fire support ships, the Blagar and the Barbara. (In some sources Barbara J.) 8 The Barbara was originally an LCI (Landing Craft Infantry) of earlier vintage. Our attention is attracted at once to the Barbara and the Houston, in the first case because we have seen George Bush’s habit of naming his combat aircraft after his wife, and, in the second case, because Bush was at this time a resident, booster, and Republican activist of Houston, Texas. But of course, the appearance of names like “Zapata,” Barbara, and Houston can by itself only arouse suspicion, and proves nothing.

After the ignominious defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion, there was great animosity against Kennedy among the survivors of Brigade 2506, some of whom eventually made their way back to Miami after being released from Castro’s prisoner of war camps. There was also great animosity against Kennedy on the part of the JM/WAVE personnel.

David Atlee Phillips

During the early 1950′s, E. Howard Hunt had been the CIA station chief in Mexico City. As David Atlee Phillips (another embittered JM/WAVE veteran) tells us in his autobiographical account, The Night Watch, Howard Hunt had been the immediate superior of a young CIA recruit named William F. Buckley, the Yale graduate and Skull and Bones member who later founded the National Review. In his autobiographical account written during the days of the Watergate scandal, Hunt includes the following tirade about the Bay of Pigs: “No event since the communization of China in 1949 has had such a profound effect on the United States and its allies as the defeat of the US-trained Cuban invasion brigade at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.”

OSS China

Out of that humiliation grew the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, guerrilla warfare throughout Latin American and Africa, and our Dominican Republic intervention. Castros’ beachhead triumph opened a bottomless Pandora’s box of difficulties that affected not only the United States, but most of its allies in the Free World. These bloody and subversive events would not have taken place had Castro been toppled. Instead of standing firm, our government pyramided crucially wrong decisions and allowed Brigade 2506 to be destroyed. The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away.9

Hunt was typical of the opinion that the debacle had been Kennedy’s fault, and not the responsibility of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, who had designed it and recommended it. After the embarrassing failure of the invasion, which never evoked the hoped-for spontaneous anti-Castro insurrection, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, his Harrimanite deputy Bissell, and CIA deputy Director Charles Cabell (whose brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time Kennedy was shot).

During the days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy was deeply suspicious of the intelligence community and of proposals for military escalation in general, including in places like South Vietnam. Kennedy sought to procure an outside, expert opinion on military matters. For this he turned to the former commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific Theatre during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur. Almost ten years ago, a reliable source shared with one of the authors an account of a meeting between Kennedy and MacArthur in which the veteran general warned the young president that there were elements inside the US government who emphatically did not share his patriotic motives, and who were seeking to destroy his administration from within. MacArthur’s warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various tentacles in the intelligence community.

General Douglas MacArthur

It is a matter of public record that Kennedy met with MacArthur in the latter part of April, 1961, after the Bay of Pigs. According to Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson, MacArthur told Kennedy, “The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the chicken house.” 10 At the same meeting, according to Sorenson, MacArthur “warned [Kennedy] against the committment of American foot soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot this advice.” 11 This point is grudgingly confirmed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide who had a vested interest in vilifying MacArthur, who wrote that “MacArthur expressed his old view that anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland [of Asia] should have his head examined.” 12 MacArthur restated this advice during a second meeting with Kennedy when the General returned from his last trip to the Far East in July, 1961.

Kennedy valued MacArthur’s professional military opinion highly, and used it to keep at arms length those advisers who were arguing for escalation in Laos, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He repeatedly invited those who proposed to send land forces to Asia to convince MacArthur that this would as good idea. If they could convince MacArthur, then he, Kennedy, might also go along. At this time, the group proposing escalation in Vietnam (as well as preparing the assassination of President Diem) had a heavy Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones overtone: the hawks of 1961-63 were Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and some key London oligarchs and theoreticians of counterinsurgency wars. And of course, George Bush during these years was calling for escalation in Vietnam and challenging Kennedy to “muster the courage” to try a second invasion of Cuba. In the meantime, the JM/WAVE-Miami station complex was growing rapidly to become the largest of Langley’s many satellites. Its center was at the former Richmond Naval Air Station south of Miami, which had been a base for antisubmarine blimps during World War II. During the years after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, this complex had as many as 3,000 Cuban agents and subagents, with a small army of case officers to direct and look after each one. According to one account, there were at least 55 dummy corporations to provide employment, cover, and commercial disguise for all these operatives. There were detective bureaus, gun stores, real estate brokerages, boat repair shops, and party boats for fishing and other entertainments. There was the clandestine Radio Swan, later renamed Radio Americas. There were fleets of specially modified boats based at Homestead Marina, and at other marinas throughout the Florida Keys. Agents were assigned to the University of Miami and other educational institutions.

Henry Cabot Lodge – Ambassador to Vietnam

The raison d’être of the massive capability commanded by Theodore Shackley was now Operation Mongoose, a program for sabotage raids and assassinations to be conducted on Cuban territory, with a special effort to eliminate Fidel Castro personally. In order to run these operations from US territory, flagrant and extensive violation of federal and state laws was the order of the day. Documents regarding the incorporation of businesses were falsified. Income tax returns were faked. FAA regulations were violated by planes taking off for Cuba or for forward bases in the Bahamas and elsewhere. Explosives moved across highways that were full of civilian traffic. The Munitions Act, the Neutrality Act, the customs and immigrations laws were routinely flaunted. 13 Above all, the drug laws were massively violated as the gallant anti-communist fighters filled their planes and boats with illegal narcotics to be smuggled back into the US when they returned from their missions. By 1963, the drug-running activities of the covert operatives were beginning to attract attention. JM/WAVE, in sum, accelerated the slide of south Florida towards the status of drug and murder capital of the United States it achieved during the 1980′s, when it became as notorious as Chicago during Prohibition.

It cannot be the task of this study to even begin to treat the reasons for which certain leading elements of the Anglo-American financial oligarchy, perhaps acting with certain kinds of support from continental European aristocratic and neofascist networks, ordered the murder of John F. Kennedy. The British and the Harrimanites wanted escalation in Vietnam; by the time of his assassination Kennedy was committed to a pullout of US forces. Kennedy, as shown by his American University speech of 1963, was also interested in seeking a more stable path of war avoidance with the Soviets, using the US military superiority demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis to convince Moscow to accept a policy of world peace through economic development. Kennedy was interested in the possibilities of anti-missile strategic defense to put an end to that nightmare of mutually assured destruction which appealed to Henry Kissinger, a disgruntled former employee of the Kennedy administration whom the president had denounced as a madman. Kennedy was considering moves to limit or perhaps abolish the usurpation of authority over the national currency by the Wall Street and London interests controlling the Federal Reserve System. If re-elected to a second term, Kennedy was likely to have re-asserted presidential control, as distinct from Wall Street control, over the intelligence community. There is good reason to believe that Kennedy would have ousted J. Edgar Hoover from his self-appointed life tenure at the FBI, subjecting that agency to presidential control for the first time in many years. Kennedy was committed to a vigorous expansion of the space program, the cultural impact of which was beginning to alarm the finance oligarchs. Above all, Kennedy was acting like a man who thought he was president of the United States, violating the collegiality of oligarchical trusteeship of that office that had been in force since the final days of Roosevelt. Kennedy furthermore had two younger brothers who might succeed him, putting a strong presidency beyond the control of the Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment for decades. George Bush joined in the Harrimanite opposition to Kennedy on all of these points.

JFK

After Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963, it was alleged that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis had both been present, possibly together, in Dallas on the day of the shooting, although the truth of these allegations has never been finally established. Both Hunt and Sturgis were of course Bay of Pigs veterans who would later appear center stage in Watergate. There were also allegations that Hunt and Sturgis were among a group of six to eight derelicts who were found in boxcars sitting on the railroad tracks behind the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza, and who were rounded up and taken in for questioning by the Dallas police on the day of the assassination. Some suspected that Hunt and Sturgis had participated in the assassination. Some of these allegations were at the center of the celebrated 1985 defamation case of Hunt v. Liberty Lobby, in which a Florida federal jury found against Hunt. But, since the Dallas Police Department and County Sheriff never photographed or fingerprinted the “derelicts” in question, it has so far proven impossible definitively to resolve this question. But these allegations and theories about the possible presence and activities of Hunt and Sturgis in Dallas were sufficiently widespread so as to compel the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) to attempt to refute them in its 1975 report. 14

According to George Bush’s official biography, he was during 1963 a well-to-do businessman residing in Houston, the busy president of Zapata Offshore and the chairman of the Harris County Republican Organization, supporting Barry Goldwater as the GOP’s likely 1964 presidential candidate, while at the same time actively preparing his own 1964 bid for the US Senate. But during that same period of time, Bush may have shared some common acquaintances with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Republican Super-Racist – Barry Goldwater

Between October, 1962 and April, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina were in frequent contact with a Russian emigré couple living in Dallas: these were George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne. During the Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy assassination, de Mohrenschildt was interviewed at length about his contacts with Oswald. When, in the spring of 1977, the discrediting of the Warren Commission report as a blatant coverup had made public pressure for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination irresistible, the House Assassinations Committee planned to interview de Mohrenschildt once again. But in March, 1977, just before de Mohrenschildt was scheduled to be interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi of the House committee’s staff, he was found dead in Palm Beach, Florida. His death was quickly ruled a suicide. One of the last people to see him alive was Edward Jay Epstein, who was also interviewing de Mohrenschildt about the Kennedy assassination for an upcoming book. Epstein is one of the writers on the Kennedy assassination who enjoyed excellent relations with the late James Angleton of the CIA. If de Mohrenschildt were alive today, he might be able to enlighten us about his relations with George Bush, and perhaps afford us some insight into Bush’s activities during this epoch.

George de Mohrenschildt

Jeanne de Mohrenschildt rejected the finding of suicide in her husband’s death. “He was eliminated before he got to that committee,” the widow told a journalist in 1978, “because someone did not want him to get to it.” She also maintained that George de Mohrenschildt had been surreptitiously injected with mind-altering drugs. 15 After de Mohrenschildt’s death, his personal address book was located, and it contained this entry: “Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland.” There is of course the problem of dating this reference. George Bush had moved his office and home from Midland to Houston in 1959, when Zapata Offshore was constituted, so perhaps this reference goes back to some time before 1959. There is also the number: “4-6355.” There are, of course, numerous other entries, including one W.F. Buckley of the Buckley brothers of New York City, William S. Paley of CBS, plus many oil men, stock brokers, and the like. 16

In 1957, de Mohrenschildt was approved by the CIA Office of Security to be hired as a US government geologist for a mission to Yugoslavia. Upon his return he was interviewed by one J. Walter Moore of the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service, with whom he remained in contact. During 1958, de Morhenschildt visited Ghana, Togo, Dahomey; during 1959 he visited Africa again and returned by way of Poland. In 1959 he married Jeanne, his fourth wife, a former ballet dancer and dress designer who had been born in Manchuria, where her father had been one of the directors of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. During the summer of 1960, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt told their friends that they were going to embark on a walking tour of 11,000 miles along Indian trails from Mexico to Central America. One of their principal destinations was Guatemala City, where they were staying at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961, after which they made their way home by way of Panama and Haiti. After two months in Haiti, the Mohrenschildts returned to Dallas, where they came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, who had come back to the United States from his sojourn in the Soviet Union in June, 1962. By this time de Mohrenschildt was also frequenting Admiral Henry C. Bruton and his wife, to whom he introduced the Oswalds. Admiral Bruton was the former director of naval communications, and had superintended a comprehensive modernization and reorganization of the navy’s means of keeping in touch with ships, planes, missiles, submarines, and the like.

Oswald

It is established that between October, 1962 and late April, 1963, de Mohrenschildt was a very important figure in the life of Oswald and his Russian wife. Despite Oswald’s lack of social graces, de Mohrenschildt introduced him into Dallas society, took him to parties, assisted him in finding employment, and much more. It was through de Mohrenschildt that Oswald met a certain Volkmar Schmidt, a young German geologist who had studied with Professor Wilhelm Kuetemeyer, an expert in psychosomatic medicine and religious philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, who compiled a detailed psychological profile of Oswald. Jeanne and George helped Marina move her belongings during one of her many estrangements from Oswald. According to some accounts, de Mohrenschildt’s influence on Oswald was so great during this period that he could virtually dictate important decisions to the young ex-marine simply by making suggestions. Oswald was in awe of de Mohrenschildt, according to some.

According to some versions, de Mohrenschildt was aware of Oswald’s alleged April 10, 1963 attempt to assassinate the well-known right-wing General Edwin Walker. According to Marina, de Mohrenschildt once asked Oswald, “Lee, how did you miss General Walker?” On April 19, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt went to New York City, and on April 29 the CIA Office of Security found that it had no objection to de Mohrenschildt’s acceptance of a contract with the Duvalier regime of Haiti in the field of natural resource development. De Mohrenschildt appears to have departed for Haiti on May 1, 1963. In the meantime Oswald had left Dallas and traveled to New Orleans. According to Mark Lane, “there is evidence that de Mohrenschildt served as a CIA control officer who directed Oswald’s actions.” Much of the extensive published literature on de Mohrenschildt converges on the idea that he was a baby sitter, handler, case officer, or control agent for Oswald on behalf of some intelligence agency.  De Mohrenschildt’s pedigree evokes haunting parallels to the typical figures of the PERMINDEX networks of Georges Mandel, Ferenc Nagy, Max Hagerman, Max Seligman, Carlo d’Amelio, Lewis Mortimer Bloomfield, and Clay Shaw, to which public attention was called during the investigations of New Orleans district attorney James Garrison. It is therefore highly interesting that George Bush’s name turned up in the personal address book of George de Mohrenschildt. The Warren Commission went to absurd lengths to cover up the fact that George de Mohrenschildt was a denizen of the world of the intelligence agencies. This included ignoring the well-developed paper trial on de Mohrenschildt as Nazi and communist sympathizer, and later as a US asset abroad.

Photo of Bush at CIA

The Warren Commission concluded:

The Commission’s investigation has developed no signs of subversive or disloyal conduct on the part of either of the de Mohrenschildts. Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witnesses contacted by the Commission has provided any information linking the de Mohrenschildts to subversive or extremist organizations. Nor has there been any evidence linking them in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy.

On the day of the Kennedy assassination, FBI records show George Bush as reporting a right-wing member of the Houston Young Republicans for making threatening comments about President Kennedy. According to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and related FBI documentation, Bush received a highly sensitive, high-level briefing from the Bureau:

Date: November 29, 1963
To: Director Bush

Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State
From: John Edgar Hoover, Director
Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY NOVEMBER 22, 1963

“Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963 advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in US policy, which is not true.

Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President’s policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President’s death represents a great loss not only to the US but to all Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.

An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that those individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.”

Castro

This FBI document identifying George Bush as a CIA agent in November, 1963 was first published by Joseph McBride in The Nation in July, 1988, just before Bush received the Republican nomination for president. McBride’s source observed: “I know [Bush] was involved in the Caribbean. I know he was involved in the suppression of things after the Kennedy assassination. There was a very definite worry that some Cuban groups were going to move against Castro and attempt to blame it on the CIA.” 20 When pressed for confirmation or denial, Bush’s spokesman Stephen Hart commented: “Must be another George Bush.” Within a short time the CIA itself would peddle the same damage control line. On July 19, 1988 in the wake of wide public attention to the report published in The Nation, CIA spokeswoman Sharron Basso departed from the normal CIA policy of refusing to confirm or deny reports that any person is or was a CIA employee. CIA spokeswoman Basso told the Associated Press that the CIA believed that “the record should be clarified.” For the CIA to volunteer the name of one of its former employees to the press was a shocking violation of traditional methods, which are supposedly designed to keep such names a closely guarded secret.

This revelation may have constituted a violation of federal law. But no exertions were too great when it came to damage control for George Bush. It makes perfect sense for George Bush to be called in on a matter involving the Cuban community in Miami, since that is a place where George has traditionally had a constituency. George inherited it from his father, Prescott Bush of Jupiter Island, and later passed it on to his own son, Jeb.

Bush and Noriega

- The Green Chazzan 

**EDITOR: This piece starts to bring the whole room together. As one can see, it was OSS China that initiated the global narcotics trade after World War II and sustained it for decades to come using their influence over CIA covert action and US foreign policy.

The CIA’s Involvement with Drug Smuggling by Dark Politics (Post 2008) – Part 1 

Opium Finds Its Way To Asia

Chinese Opium Den

The origin of opium can be traced back to the Middle East region of Mesopotamia circa 3100 B.C. Centuries later Alexander the Great exported the narcotic eastward to India in 330 B.C. By 400 A.D. it became a large market in China where it was introduced by Arab traders.

Southeast Asia got its first dose of opium in 1500 when Portuguese, while trading along the East China Sea, initiated the smoking of opium. Within two centuries the Dutch were exporting shipments of Indian opium to China and the islands of Southeast Asia. In 1729, Chinese emperor Yung Cheng issued an edict which prohibited the smoking of opium and its domestic sale, except under license for use as medicine. Nevertheless, the use of opium increased, and by 1750 the British East India Company assumed control of Bengal and Bihar, the opium-growing districts of India. British shipping dominated the opium trade out of Calcutta to China. By 1767, opium exports by the British East India Company to China reached a staggering two thousand chests of opium per year. In 1793, the British East India Company established a monopoly on the opium trade. All poppy growers in India were forbidden to sell opium to competitor trading companies.

In 1799, Chinese emperor Kia King banned opium completely, making trade and poppy cultivation illegal. Foreign merchants then turned to smuggling. Charles Cabot, a smuggler from Boston, Massachusetts, attempted to purchase opium from the British and then smuggle it into China under the auspices of British smugglers. Another American, John Cushing, acquired his wealth from smuggling Turkish opium to Canton. For example, John Jacob Astor of New York City and owner of the American Fur Company purchased ten tons of Turkish opium which he shipped on to Canton.

The First Opium War

In 1839, the first Opium War broke out, and the Chinese ordered all foreign traders to surrender their opium. The British responded by sending warships to China. Two years later, the Chinese were defeated by the British which demanded heavy reparations, including the cession of Hong Kong to Great Britain The Second Opium War erupted in 1856, and the British again demanded indemnities from China, forcing the emperor to legalize opium. By the turn of the century and after 150 years of failed attempts to rid the country of opium, the Chinese finally convinced the British to dismantle the India-China opium trade. In the 1850s, British merchants began importing Indian opium to Burma and selling it through a government-controlled monopoly. In 1886, the British acquired Burma’s northeast region, Shan state. Production and smuggling of opium along the lower region of Burma thrived despite British efforts to maintain a strict monopoly on the opium trade.

By the turn of the century, the French joined the British in monopolizing opium in Southeast Asia. In the 1940s, the ‘Golden Triangle’ — Burma, Laos, and Thailand — became a major player in the profitable opium trade. During the early years of World War II, opium trade routes were blocked and the flow of opium from India and Persia was cut off. Fearful of losing their opium monopoly, the French encouraged Hmong farmers to expand their opium production. After Burma gained its independence from Britain in the 1940s, opium cultivation and trade flourished in the Shan states.

Early Complicity in Drug Trafficking

The “multinational” business of drug trafficking can be traced back to the 1940s, even before the CIA was created following World War II. Before the creation of the CIA in 1947, Allen Dulles assembled the Flying Tigers, an inner clique within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Dulles had close ties with Eastern billionaire families, and he was able to run clandestine operations out of the White House. The OSS-mafia alliance emerged soon after the agency was formed. The OSS was first headed by Earl Brennan who helped plan the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy in World War II. During the war, He had close ties with the head of the Vatican’s Vessel Operation, Monsignor Giovanni Batista Montini who was also an aid to Pope Pius XII. Montini suggested that Brennan recruit Italian exiles such as Masons business leaders, and mafia members to corroborate with the Allies in their invasion. In 1963, Montini become Pope Paul VI.

Colonel Paul Hellwell of the OSS began to smuggle heroin from Burma and sold it in ghettos in the United States. Grown in Burma and processed in Shanghai, OSS agents ran across this bonanza while attempting to bolster the right wing regime of Chiang Kai-shek and to prevent Mao Tse Tung from ascending to power. Flying Tigers were OSS mercenaries who were financed with secret funds. Hellwell observed how Chiang sold opium to Chinese addicts and used the revenue to purchase weapons for his troops. Hellwell created Sea Supply, an OSS proprietary company, out of Miami and used it to carry guns across the ocean to China. The opium was grown in Burma, so Hellwell moved on to Southeast Asia in order to consolidate his operation.

Chief of OSS China – Paul Helliwell

In the late 1940s, Hellwell was named the Burmese consulate in Miami and was able to secure a monopoly on opium in Burma. From there, opium was processed in Shanghai, and then it was exported to the United States on Sea Supply boats. In return, Hellwell shipped guns back to China. The OSS used the mob to distribute heroin in big cities throughout the United States. Another OSS connection was the German Gestapo. Dozens of leading Gestapo figures and SS spies were used. Their spy networks and personal war records could be used to survey and control the Soviet Union. After these Nazis arrived in Georgetown, they were used by the newly created CIA in a drug running role. They were educated at Fort Benning and then used extensively in Latin America by local militaries. They were partially funded by the revenue generated from Burmese heroin exported to China for refining, and then exported to ghettos in the United States. After Mao solidified his power in 1949 revolution, drug trafficking in China began to diminish, partially because the death penalty was carried out against convicted dealers.

The OSS did not confine itself only to the Far East. While the bulk of American heroin originated in Asia, smaller amounts were produced in Marseille by the Corsican syndicates in the 1940s. Drug trafficking was certainly not at a premium during World War II. Transoceanic shipping was disrupted during the war years as a result of submarine warfare. Consequently, the power of Marseilles’ Corsican syndicates was weakened. In addition, Sicily’s mafia was smashed by two decades of Mussolini’s repressive regime.

The Marseilles Syndicate

After World War II, the OSS created a situation which helped revive the Sicilian-American mafia and the Corsican underworld. The alliance with the mafia was maintained by the CIA in order to check the growing strength of the Italian Communist Party. For example, the Corsicans in Marseilles smuggled raw opium from Turkey and refined it into high grade heroin for export to the United States. Marseilles relied on a handful of expert chemists who were able to produce high grade number four heroin. After the transformation of the OSS into the CIA, Marseille’s Corsicans fell under the protection of the French intelligence service which allowed heroin trafficking to operate for another 20 years. By 1965, Marseilles syndicates were able to double their production and operated between 20 and 25 laboratories which produced 50 to 150 kilograms of heroin each month. It was estimated that 4.8 tons of pure heroin was exported to the United States in 1965 alone.

The American government was concerned that both the French and Italian communist parties would rise to power in free elections in their respective countries. On the homefront, the government was concerned of the rising strength of the New York longshoremen’s union and a series of strikes which threatening to erupt a year after World War II ended. To counter the communist parties’ influence in France and Italy as well as to stamp out the longshoremen’s power in New York, the newly formed CIA turned to the mafia’s drug traffickers. The mafia connection assured the CIA the resources which they critically needed: hit-men to help carry out their illicit operations and additional funds to help finance their activities.

Santo Trafficante

After spending 10 years of a 30-to-50 year sentence in prison for drug trafficking, New York’s mafia leader Lucky Luciano given clemency and released from Albany’s Great Meadows Prison in 1946. In exchange, he promised to cooperate with American authorities. He returned to Italy and was able to build a black market which had been abandoned by the Genovese family. He then expanded his operations by forging close ties with the Marseilles syndicate. He imported raw opium from the Middle East and processed it in laboratories in Italy. Luciano’s top deputy was Meyer Lansky who had first contacted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Luciano initially purchased 200 kilos of heroin and shipped it on to Cuba. Lansky was given a monopoly on Cuba’s gambling operations plus assurances that Sicilian heroin could be shipped from Marseilles to Havana and on to the United States. In return Batista and his assistants received half the profits from the casinos. Lansky and Luciano chose Sicilian-born Santos Trafficante of Florida to run the Cuban gambling and drug business. Luciano made sure that Havana’s prostitutes were addicted to heroin and paid them with diluted forms of the drugs as well.

Meyer Lansky

The CIA armed and funded the Corsican syndicates to break up longshoremen’s strikes in 1947 and 1950. Harry Bridges had been known for his leadership in general strikes in San Francisco in 1934, and he moved on to New York City where he worked to unionize dock workers. The CIA paid the mafia to assault and harass union leaders and workers. Some were even murdered. The CIA also used psychological warfare against the unions. Anti-union pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and posters discouraged workers from continuing the strike. Meanwhile in Europe, the CIA continued to work with drug traffickers in its war to thwart the election of communists in democratic elections. By the late 1940s, Marseilles had become the postwar heroin capital of the Western world. And Italy’s mafia still maintained its strength as the most powerful component in Europe.

The CIA’s protection of the Corsican syndicate continued into the 1970s. Frank Matthews, one of the East Coast’s prime heroin dealers, brought in $130 million annually. In 1973, he was finally arrested for drug trafficking in Las Vegas. Matthews was released on $325,000 bail and returned to New York with $20 million in cash. According to the Justice Department charges against nine of his suppliers were dropped at the insistence of the CIA which contended that prosecutions would jeopardize national security interests.

From Florida to Asia

Allen Dulles

The Italian mafia continued to maintain a stronghold in the United States. In the 1950s, the CIA once again turned to the mafia to foil communism — this time in Cuba. The very year that the right wing Batista government was overthrown, Operation 40 was organized as an assassination unit to kill Fidel Castro. Organized crime leaders Santo Trafficante and John Roselli, with the knowledge of Vice President Nixon, were heavily involved in importing drugs from Laos. After the failure at the Bay of Pigs two years later, Operation 40 was replaced by Operation Mongoose, a larger scale paramilitary organization. Its purpose was also to overthrow the Castro regime. The CIA officials who directed Operation Mongoose were Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines. Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban refugee, was hired to be a member of a special assassination team. Rodriguez worked under Shackley in Miami, Florida. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, dozens of anti-Castro sympathizers were indicted for drug trafficking.

CIA Chief Ted Shackley

After the defeat of the French at Dienbienphu in 1954, the United States quickly moved to fill the void. In that decade, over a thousand tons of opium was being cultivated in the Golden Triangle — Laos, Burma, and Thailand. This amounted to 70 percent of the entire world’s illicit opium supply. In addition, this marked the first time that number three heroin (three to six percent pure) was being refined. As a result, the Thai government launched an opium suppression campaign which compelled most of the planters to switch to heroin. In the 1960s large quantities of number three heroin were being refined in Bangkok and northern Thailand. It was during this decade that both Shackley and Clines were transferred from Florida to run CIA operations in the heart of Southeast Asia as well as in the heart of the world’s largest heroin region.

During the Vietnam War, the White House drug team was headed by Lucien Conein who once had ties to Corsican drug dealers in Southeast Asia and Marseilles. The CIA urged Conein and the White House to accept a plan to carry out a series of assassinations against drug kingpins. According to a White House memo, “With 150 key assassinations the entire heroin-refining industry can be thrown into chaos.” However, the CIA’s list included a hand-full of names of drug dealers in Southeast Asia, and none of them were the principal players. Additionally, the White House decided to concentrate in Turkey where less than 5 percent of the world’s opium supply was grown.

The Golden Triangle

Opium in the Golden Triangle

During the heated cold war in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, large scale decisions were made by the CIA in its Langley, Virginia headquarters. The agency’s operants were given a large scale of autonomy in the field. The agency did not ask questions as long as those on the payroll produced results. One of the major objectives of these factions was to gain control of opium trade in their regions. A large amount of duplicity, which included tortures and murders, occurred among various groups: CIA headquarters, its operatives in the field, and drug lords.

After World War II the French returned to Indo-China and became directly involved in drug trade with the Hmong tribesmen in the highlands of Laos. At first, the French attempted to eliminate opium addiction in 1946. However, desperately short on funds, French intelligence and paramilitary organizations became involved in opium trafficking in order to finance their covert operations against Ho Chi Minh in the north. By 1951, French intelligence controlled most of the opium trade in the region. The French started top secret Operation X which resulted in a steady supply of Hmong opium into the dens of cities such as Saigon and Danang.

In 1950 President Truman implemented the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) which approved a CIA invasion into southern China. This meant that CIA operants need to infiltrate various local tribal units particularly in the Golden Triangle — Burma, Laos, and Thailand. The CIA recruited agents such as William Colby who years later was elevated to CIA director. When CIA operants moved into the Shan states in the Golden Triangle region of northern Burma, opium growers operated only randomly. However, the region soon was transformed into one of the largest growing opium regions in the world. The CIA needed an alliance with the KMT, which had just been driven out of China by Mao Tse-tung a year before, and the Thai police in order to bolster its position in the region.

CIA Director William Colby

The KMT exported their opium harvests usually by mule train across the mountains or by unmarked American C-47 transportation planes to Thailand for processing. Some was flown on to Taiwan. In 1950 the CIA purchased bankrupt Civil Air Transport (CAT) for $950,000 and used their fleet of planes to run weapons to KMT General Li Mi in Shan province, and the planes returned to Bangkok filled with opium. Shortly afterwards, CAT was renamed Air America. General Phao Siyanan, head of the Thai police since a CIA orchestrated coup overthrew General Phin Choohannan in 1948, purchased most of this opium. Thus, the KMT became a pivotal force in opium trade in Southeast Asia. With CIA support, the KMT remained in northern Burma until 1961 when the Burmese army finally drove the right wing army into Laos and Thailand.

In 1951, Operation Paperclip, a joint CIA-KMT effort to reconquer China’s Yunnan province, was approved. The CIA’s first objective was to accomplish an intelligence-gathering mission inside China. In addition, the CIA trained and funded 10,000 KMT forces. Unmarked C-46 and C-47 transport planes began making supply drops into northern Burma. The next year KMT troops and some CIA operants crossed 60 miles into China but were forced to turn back after facing fierce resistance. The CIA also realized the importance of funding other smaller factions in the Shan states, so that no one element could consolidate absolute power in that region. Maintaining instability in the Golden Triangle prevented any one group from controlling and regulating opium trade.

General Khun Sa

However, American aid to the KMT soon dropped off significantly when drug lord Khun Sa began to extend his influence in the mountainous region of the Shan states just south of China. Khun Sa began his military career with the KMT when he was 18 years old and was trained in both arms and opium by the CIA-supported army. As Khun Sa extended his influence into the Shan states, the CIA was slowly edged out along the Burma-China border, and were no longer able to use that area too stage subsequent attacks into Yunnan province.

In the 1960s, thousands of KMT mercenaries made their way across the mountains of the Golden Triangle to eastern Burma. Khun Sa’s army was defeated by KMT General Ouane Rattikone in the 1967 Opium War, and his troops fled into central Laos. Khun Sa was arrested and released at a later date, but by that time the size of his army had dwindled to about one thousand. Khun Sa not only lost major casualties among his troops, but he also lost his monopoly on opium trade in the Shan states.The Opium War left Rattikone and the KMT in control of 80 percent of the opium trade in Burma. During the duration of the KMT’s dominance in northern Burma — from the end of World War II to 1960s — his CIA subsidized army increased opium production by nearly 500 percent from 80 tons to 500 tons annually. The Golden Triangle provided approximately 33 percent of the world’s illicit opium trade.

The severe drought of 1978-80 took a heavy toll on illicit drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle. However, by the 1980s, opium trade became the most prosperous ever in that region. Even though Thai and Burmese military operations increased, heroin laboratories in the mountains in the two countries managed to operate without serious incidents. The Shan leaders became more splintered, and the Burmese Communist Party (BCP) collapsed. This opened the door for Khun Sa to return to the Shan states.

General Lo Hsing Han of Burma

By the early 1970s, he recovered his lost territory in the central Shan states, but the BCP quickly moved into the mountain areas just south of the China border, posing a large threat to Khun Sa expansionist policy. Three factions began to position themselves: Khun Sa, Chinese warlord Lo Hsing-han, and the Shan State Army (SSA). Like Khun Sa, Lo Hsing-han began his army career in the KMT and emerged as one of the principle opium dealers in Shan province. In 1972, the Nixon administration branded him the “kingpin of the heroin traffic in Southeast Asia.” After Khun Sa was defeated in the 1967 Opium War, Lo Hsing-han became the largest single opium merchant in the province. The SSA was founded in 1958 and was political in nature. Its chief concern was to regain Ragoon and to abolish Shan authority in that region. It was not directly involved in opium trade. The size of its army was 2,700 and the troops were armed with American weapons which were purchased on the black market.

In 1973, the Burmese government disbanded its militia groups in Shan province. In an effort to consolidate his power in the region, Lo Hsing-han turned to moderate elements in the SSA for support in controlling. The two groups proposed that officials at the American embassy in Bangkok be informed that they intended to sell 400 tons of Shan opium for $20 million. The two groups also requested American support for the purchase of all opium controlled by smaller Shan factions in the Golden Triangle at a fixed price. They insisted that this would eliminate all heroin trade in the area. However, Lo Hsing-han was arrested in 1973 by Burmese officials and charged him with — not drug trafficking — but high treason and rebellion. The following year, the Burmese government released Khun Sa, who had spent five years in solitary confinement, and returned him to his troops in Shan province. Now Khun Sa easily replaced Lo Hsing-han as the drug kingpin in the Golden Triangle.

Khun Sa forged ahead by forming an alliance with the conservative factions of the SSA and was involved in skirmishes with the revitalized KKT. Khun Sa once again he proposed that he purchase the entire Shan province opium crop. This request was rejected by the State Department after Congressional hearings took place in 1975. In 1975, the SSA broke into two factions. The larger and more moderate group broke away from the conservative faction and joined the BCP. The other faction joined forces with fragments of the KMT and formed the Tai-Land Revolutionary Council. Furthermore, to complicate issues, several rightist independent armies combined to form the National Democratic Front (NDF), an anti-communist coalition which was made up of 13 groups.

Golden Triangle

In 1977, an agreement regarding the division of opium trade in the Golden Triangle was reached between Khun Sa and the leader of the revitalized KMT. Khun Sa was allowed to maintain a base inside Thailand, and this served as his headquarters for control of 40 percent of Burma’s opium exports and the annual collection of $850,000 in transit fees from others who crossed through the region. Between 1976 and 1978, the Burmese government, using American helicopters, began a series of military operations aimed at destroying the Shan armies and their opium operations. Government forces were able to destroy some poppy fields, but they did not enter BCP-controlled regions. The BCP controlled one-third of the area, and even though they were not involved in opium trade, they did allow private dealers to cultivate opium.

Opium production plummeted after 1975. After the United States withdrew from Vietnam, black market operations dwindled, making it difficult for Shan rebels to purchase weapons. In addition, between 1978 and 1980 the Golden Triangle was hit with two droughts. This was followed by two seasons of intense monsoon rains, reducing the region’s opium production to a record low. The usual 600 ton opium harvests were cut to 160 tons in 1978 and 240 tons in 1979. Recovering from this two year failure, the region began to produce a bumper crop in the 1980s.

Richard Armitage – Bush Crony

Khun Sa stated that Richard Armitage, at that time an envoy in the American embassy, financed drug smuggling in Vietnam and Bangkok from 1975 to 1979. CIA agents Daniel Arnold and Jerry Daniel trafficked weapons and drugs with Khun Sa. The operation was believed to be at its peak in 1975 and 1976 under George Bush. In a letter to George Bush, Gritz maintained that Khun Sa claimed that he had once engaged in narcotics transactions with Richard Armitage, who later became the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Shackley, as well as other American officials. Bush was head of the CIA in 1976 when Khun Sa said that he was selling drugs to top CIA officials. Gritz says that, strangely, nobody in the American government was interested in an investigation. Gritz later testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s International Narcotics Control Task Force.

By 1983, Khun Sa strengthened his forces, and opium production was on the rebound. With Hong Kong chemists and over ten refineries, Khun Sa increased his holdings, controlling 75 percent of Golden Triangle opium production. Khun Sa was able to defeat KMT forces, and he destroyed numerous heroin facilities. With a virtual monopoly on opium trade in the Golden Triangle, Khun Sa was only briefly attacked by Thai and Burmese government forces which were able to secure a small area. Khun Sa was forced to evacuate some of his heroin laboratories, but he merely moved them into Laos.

Khun Sa had eliminated all his rebel rivals, and by 1986 he was refining 80 percent of the opium harvest in the Golden Triangle. The king of opium trade, Khun Sa had risen to become the world’s largest single heroin trafficker by controlling 60 percent of the world’s illicit opium supply.

In 1986, Bo Gritz went to Burma with White House approval to meet with Khun Sa who supposedly had information on American MIAs. Khun Sa said that he wanted to end the opium and heroin traffic in his territory and to expose American officials involved in the drug smuggling. Gritz claimed that he took this message to the United States government and was told by Tom Harvey of the National Security Council that “there is no interest here” in the Khun Sa overture. Gritz had in his possession 40 hours of video tape of Khun Sa who “charged American officials, both past and present, with being the chief buyers of drugs produced in that part of the world.” He also claimed that he wanted to stop drug trafficking, but that the United States government would not let him. Khun Sa said that the CIA were some of his best customers. He offered support to the DEA to alert them of drug movements, but this was rejected at the headquarters level. In 1988, the government of Burma fell into the hands of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Its goal was to bolster the nation’s economy by doubling opium exports, and within two years 60 percent of the world’s heroin — valued at $40 billion a year — was exported from Burma.

Also in 1988, the single largest heroin seizure was made in Bangkok. The 2,400-pound shipment of heroin, en route to New York City, originated from Khun Sa in the Golden Triangle. Two years later in a meaningless gesture an American court indicted Khun Sa in absentia on heroin trafficking. He was charged with importing 3,500 pounds of heroin into New York City over the course of 18 months, as well as holding him responsible for the source of the heroin seized in Bangkok. Specifically, he was charged with being the owner of a 2,400 pound shipment which was intercepted in Bangkok en route to New York City in 1988. This was the largest single heroin seizure ever. In 1990, Lo Hsing-han was released from prison and was welcomed back by the same factions which had driven him out. He met with Burmese government officials and soon thereafter opened 17 new heroin factories in the Golden Triangle.

By 1995, the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia remained the leader in opium production, yielding 2,500 tons annually. According to American drug experts, new drug trafficking routes from Burma through Laos, to southern China, Cambodia and Vietnam were drawn up. In 1996, the SLORC cut a deal with Khun Sa. He had been indicted by the United States Justice Department six years before, but SLORC refused to extradite him. Instead, he was given the Burma-to-Thailand taxi concession and a 44 acre ranch where his son plans to build a gambling and shopping complex. The agreement also reportedly included a deal allowing him to retain control of his opium trade in exchange for ending his 30 year old war against the government. Underground activist groups, operating along the Indo-Burma border, have continued to purchase arms and ammunition from Khun Sa’s soldiers.

Laos

Col. Lucien Conein (rear)

In Laos the CIA’s complicity in drug trafficking resulted from its alliance with the Hmong tribes who, since the 1950s, had been used by the French to fight Vietnamese leftists. As early as 1959, CIA operative Lucien Conein stated that eight teams were training Hmong tribesmen on the Plain of Jars. In 1960 the CIA began recruiting units to patrol the border with China and even to send Yao and Lahu tribesmen into Yunnan province to monitor traffic and to tap telephone lines. Operating out of Vientiane, the CIA also sent recruits to the patrol the Vietnam border as well as to send Green Beret commando units into North Vietnam to sabotage the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By far the largest goal of the CIA was to wage its secret war against the Pathet Lao in northern Laos. From 1960 to 1974, the CIA maintained a secret army of approximately 30,000 tribesmen in the mountains of northern Laos. This originated with Vientiane CIA station chief Shackley and his Clines, his assistant.

The first mission of the CIA was to place a puppet in power. The CIA needed to forge alliances with tribes and warlords inhabiting the northern Laos. In order to maintain its relationship with the warlords while continuing to fund the struggle against nationalistic Marxist movements in Laos and North Vietnam, the CIA first had to choose a career military official. The agency decided upon a career military leader, Lieutenant Vang Pao. Next, the CIA used several tactics to gain respect and support among the Hmong. Immediately elevated to a general, Vang Pao’s power had to be solidified in order for him to gain political support among the tribesmen in Laos’ scattered villages. First, the agency found a way for Vang Pao’s son and daughter to marry the children of Touby Lyfoung, a prominent and popular Hmong cabinet member. Second, the CIA usually chose a popular Hmong leader, with whom the agency could work, for every tribal area as its commander.

Gen. Vang Pao

To gain support from the Hmong, the CIA supplied the tribesmen with rice. This enabled them to concentrate on growing the cash crop of opium. The Hmong relied on support from Air America for their rice supplies. Thus, the air power became the essential factor which allowed the CIA to keep Vang Pao in power. After Vang Pao was able to consolidate his power, the CIA helped him to sustain an army of 30,000 men from a tribe of only 250,000 people. The CIA relied on the villagers to supply the manpower to continue to replace the wounded and killed. By the early 1970s 30 percent of the Hmong recruits were 14 years old; another 30 percent were 15 and 16; and the remaining 40 percent were over 45.

In return for providing recruits, the Hmong opium growers received CIA support and their economy flourished. Also, Vang Pao’s control over the opium industry gave him more authority, especially when he needed to recruit young soldiers. Thus, the CIA relied on Vang Pao to supply soldiers in its secret war, and the CIA supplied his tribesmen with rice while opium was grown and frequently flown on CIA planes.CIA operant Tony Poe was assigned as the chief adviser to Vang Pao and to supervise his secret army’s operations. Poe promised Hmong soldiers one dollar for a Pathet Lao’s ear and ten dollars for a severed head. On the one hand, Poe frequently refused to allow opium to be transported on Air American planes. On the other hand, he ignored the prospering heroin factories and never stopped any of Vang Pao’s officers from using American facilities to manage illicit drugs.

CIA Chief Ted Shackley

Another CIA operant, Edgar Buell, was assigned to the Plain of Jars where a large portion of the secret army was trained. Buell became in charge of dispatching Air America planes to drop rice and other necessities to the Hmong. In addition Buell used his expertise in agriculture to improve the Hmongs’ skills in the cultivation and production of opium. While the United States was at its peak involvement in the Vietnam War, morphine base was being processed in the Golden Triangle and then exported to Hong Kong and Europe. In 1968 Shackley met in Saigon with Trafficante, Clines, and warlord Vang Pao, setting up a heroin smuggling ring to the United States. A Green Beret official speaking to Green Beret officers stated that “Shackley had been responsible for 250 political killings in Laos.”

None of the opium refineries mastered the technique to produce high-grade number four heroin which is 90 to 99 percent pure. By 1969 expert chemists from Hong Kong were imported into the Golden Triangle region, and they produced limited amounts of high grade heroin for tens of thousands of American GIs in South Vietnam. By 1970 the amount of heroin available to Americans was unlimited. The opium harvests were transported by Vang Pao’s officers and then flown on Air America UH-1H helicopters to processing plants in Vientiane and Long Tieng.

Nixon

However, with the beginning of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy in the months to follow, the market for heroin drastically dropped. Then Chinese, Corsican, and American syndicates began sending large shipments of number four heroin directly to the United States. As a result of these massive exports to the United States, the wholesale price for a kilogram of number four heroin in the processing plants in the Golden Triangle actually increased by 44 percent — from $1,240 to $1,780 — in less than one year. At the same time, the price of raw opium in the villages jumped from $24 to $45 per kilogram. In 1970 the number of heroin addicts in the United States reached 750,000. More than a thousand tons of opium was being raised in the Golden Triangle.

By 1973, the United States was losing in Vietnam and in Laos as well. The CIA was forced to import approximately 20,000 Thai mercenaries in order to replenish the exhausted Hmong troops who could not provide additional recruits. That yea,r the Laotian government signed a truce with the Pathet Lao, ostensibly ending the CIA’s secret war. Slowly, the CIA abandoned over 300 landing strips and turned over its aircraft to the Laotian government. In 1974 on orders from the Laotian government, Air America abandoned its facilities. As Pathet Lao soldiers increased their presence in Laos, Vang Pao’s military and dwindled to 6,000 troops. Usually, Vang Pao retreated rather than to fight, and eventually the Pathet Lao marched into Vientiane. Vang Pao finally agreed to flee to Thailand, and the CIA provided transportation for him and his top officers.

Afghanistan and Pakistan

After World War II, very little opium was being produced in Afghanistan. However, right wing dictatorships in neighboring countries thrived on opium production. In neighboring Iran, the powerful American and Anglo oil companies and drug dealers shared many of the country’s resources. Intelligence agencies estimated that Iran was producing 600 tons of opium a year and had 1.3 million opium addicts. When Mohammed Mossadegh was elected prime minister and the shah was forced to flee, the new populist government moved to suppress opium trade. However, after a CIA coup placed the shah back on the throne, drug trafficking once again prospered until 1979 when an Islamic revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini into power.

In Pakistan under King Mohammed Zahir, feudal estates scattered throughout the country maintained small opium fields. However, after a 1978 coup Mohammed Daoud seized power, and opium traffic began to expand rapidly. He was followed by Noor Mohammed Taraki, a reformer who worked to phase out the poppy fields and replace them with consumption crops. Opium production began to plummet, but Taraki was killed in a military coup in 1979. General Zia ul-Haq ascended to power, and he created the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) to oversee intelligence on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

The ISI pressured the CIA into accepting Zia’s policies with the Mujaheddin across his border in Afghanistan. The ISI brokered a deal which brought about an alliance between the CIA and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of a small guerrilla unit in Afghanistan with close ties to the Pakistani government. In the next ten years half of American aid to Afghanistan went to this group. Hekmatyar eventually proved himself brutal and corrupt, becoming one of the premier drug dealers in that region.

Islamabad CIA station chief John Reagan met with Hekmatyar in May 1979, seven months before the Soviets moved into Kabul, and agreed to make the first of many shipments of arms to the rebel army. Over the next two years, CIA covert aid increased tremendously. Islamabad soon became the largest foreign CIA station to run a covert war. Within ten years the United States had funneled in $3 billion in aid to the Mujaheddin, and the CIA had provided the rebels with $2 billion in covert aid. Sixty percent of those funds were given directly to Hekmatyar who purchased weapons in order to protect his opium fields. Pakistani General Fazle Huq was assigned to overlook military operations near the Afghan border. Huq ensured that Hekmatyar received the bulk of CIA arms shipments, and he also protected his 200 heroin laboratories. In 1982 Interpol identified Huq as a principal catalyst in Afghan-Pakistani opium trade.

Very little heroin was refined in Pakistan before the rise of the Mujaheddin emerged in 1979. Then the guerrillas began to expand their opium production and shipped the raw drug to Pakistan border refineries for processing into heroin. They sold it to Pakistani refiners who operated under the protection of General Fazle Hug, the governor of the province near the Khyber Pass and adjacent to Afghanistan. Trucks from the Pakistan arm’s National Logistics Cell (NLC) arrived with CIA arms from Karachi and returned loaded with heroin. They were protected by the ISI and therefore protected from vehicle searches.

Zia al-Haq

The Reagan and Bush administrations frequently placed the blame for opium trade on the Soviets. However, it was the Mujaheddin and Pakistanis who were directly involved in trafficking drugs. Zia’s personal physician, Dr. Hisayoshi Maruyama, was arrested in Holland with 17.5 kilos of high grade heroin. Haji Ayub Afridi, one of Zia’s associates who had served in the Pakistani General Assembly, purchased large quantities of opium from the Mujaheddin. Another Zia ally, Hamid Hasnain, vice president of one of Pakistan’s largest banks, also ran a drug ring.

By the 1980s, American aid to Afghan rebels declined, so their leaders expanded opium production in order to maintain their armies. In southern Afghanistan, Nasim Akhundzada controlled the most fertile and irrigated areas. He became known as the “King of Heroin” and controlled most of the 250 tons of opium in his province. Meanwhile, Pakistan became one of the world’s largest addict populations in the 1980s.

Gulbadeen Hekmatyar

When the Mujaheddin first emerged in Afghanistan in 1979, there were about 200,000 drug addicts in the United States. As poppy fields quickly expanded in the areas which they controlled, that number had jumped to 450,000 by 1981. In 1989 Afghanistan and Pakistan produced and shipped 50 percent of all the heroin in the world. Between one-third and one-half of the heroin used by addicts in the United States was imported from heroin growers in Mujaheddin controlled areas. The annual consumption of these Afghan narcotics amounted to roughly three tons, and it was valued in the billions of dollars. Hekmatyar’s chief rival in the opium business was a fellow Mujaheddin, Mullah Nassim. In 1989, Hekmatyar successfully plotted his assassination and consolidated his position as the principal Afghan drug lord.

In 1990 Time magazine ran a story claiming that the United States “was embarrassed by the widely bruited connections between the drug trade and the elements of the insurgents, including such fundamentalist Islamic groups as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Hezbi-I Islami.” Then the Washington Post printed a story charging that American officials had refused to investigate charges against Hekmatyar and Pakistan’s ISI. Yet the CIA ignored the allegations since it would have diminished their effectiveness in running covert operations in the region.

Mullah Omar

Civil war has raged since the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet forces. Although the United States government withdrew military support for the Mujaheddin, various Afghan ethnic and political factions have competed for power. In 1994 the extreme fundamentalist Sunni sect known as Taliban emigrated from Pakistan and settled in Afghanistan’s outlying mountains around Kabul. Supported by the United States, Taliban captured the capitol and declared Afghanistan an Islamic state in September 1996. The Taliban sect under Mullah Omar immediately imposed a campaign of tyranny in the areas under its control. The Taliban continued to thrive on the opium business which amounted to twice the size of the government’s budget.

In addition to Taliban’s influence in Afghanistan, large areas of the north were controlled by another warlord, Abdurashid Dostum. In May 1997, a coup within Dostum’s forces led by General Abdul Malik led to Dostum fleeing the country. They immediately announced a peace agreement had been reached to reunify Afghanistan under Taliban control, and a delegation of 60 Taliban leaders arrived to sign a peace treaty. The Taliban victory was celebrated by Pakistan. In addition, corrupt factions within Pakistan’s security forces benefitted by the opium trade which increased under Taliban rule. Taliban has been hostile to Russia, Shiite Muslim Iran, the moderate Sunni Islamic republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and Turkey.

The Australia Connection

In the 1970,s drug profits from the secret war in Laos were funneled into the Nugan Hand Bank. Shackley denied that he maintained a secret account in this Australia-based bank, which was founded Michael John Hand and four officials from CIA-owned Air America. In Chiang Mai Thailand’s branch office, the director of the bank claimed that he handled $2.6 million in drug revenues in less than six months. He maintained that the money was laundered for Laotian Meo tribesman and other heroin dealers. According to the Australian Royal Commission, Nugan Hand was the principle conduit for laundering the money for major narcotics transactions from the Golden Triangle and importing heroin into Australia in the 1970s. The Nugan Hand bank also moved money globally for the CIA. In 1980 the Nugan Hand Bank collapsed, $5 billion in debt.

The Nugan Hand Bank had several branches in Saudi Arabia, Europe, Thailand, and South America. Several of the bank’s officials had CIA connections. The larger Bangkok office was run by the former CIA chief of that city. In Sydney it was a CIA bank in all but name. Among its officers were a network of United States generals, admirals and CIA employees, including former CIA Director William Colby, who served as one of its attorneys. Some of its branch managers included Air Force General LeRoy Manor, who later corroborated with Air Force General Richard Secord and Colonel Oliver North on covert actions to liberate the 52 American hostages taken in Iran in 1979. In addition Patry Loomis, a CIA operative who worked under CIA station chief Shackley in Saigon, was a close associate of Nugan Hand’s representative to Saudi Arabia, Bernie Houghton. Loomis also helped Ed Wilson, later to be implicated in Iran-Contra, recruit Green Berets to train Libyans. Wilson was also an associate of Houghton. In the mid-1970s Wilson used the Nugan Hand Bank and worked with Houghton to supply 3,000 weapons and 10 million rounds of ammunition to the CIA-backed rebels in Angola.

Civil War in Angola

In 1975, Wilson went to work for Task Force 157 was set up to attempt to topple the left-leaning Labour government of Gough Whitlam. Task Force 157 was set up by Henry Kissinger as a mini-CIA. It was actually separate from the CIA and probably was set up by Kissinger so he could deny any connection between what the Task Force 157 was doing and the CIA. The personnel of Task Force 157 included Wilson with his numerous connections to Nugan Hand Bank officials and Shackley. Michael Hand, an ex-American Green Beret, went on from the Green Berets to work in intelligence work for the United States government.The concept of Task Force 157 were two-fold: first, to set up operations against the Whitlam government. Second, to go ahead with using Australia as a base for certain clandestine United States operations such as arms dealing and smuggling of contraband goods and using the Nugan Hand Bank as the cover.

Australian PM Tony Abbot

On two occasions Admiral Bobby Inman, former deputy director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the CIA, said on that he expressed deep concern that investigations of Nugan-Hand would lead to disclosure of a range of dirty tricks played against the Whitlam government. CIA operant Christopher Boyce said: “If you think what the agency did in Chile was bad, in which they spent 80 million dollars overturning the government of Chile there, the Allende government, you should see what they are doing in Australia.”

In April 1982, Bush met with Australian Labor leader Hayden to discuss the CIA’s role in the Nugan Hand Bank. Many Australians could not understand why the CIA wanted to bring down the government of a loyal ally, whose Labour party was striving to make social reforms, especially since it was the war-time Labour administrations which had built up the special relationship with America.

To be continued…

- The Green Chazzan