From the Radio Free Michigan archives ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu. ------------------------------------------------ - Why We Must Defeat Ollie North - When I concluded my primary campaign last spring, I announced that my chief objective in the general election campaign, no matter who won the primary, would be the defeat of Oliver North. I believed then, and I believe now, that his election to the U.S. Senate would be a disaster for the nation and Virginia. In mid-June, I formed a political committee to further this end. It is named Defeat that Son-of-a-Bush Commmittee (Defeat that SOB), and it is registered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Because of the nature of the committee, FEC rules do not permit it to coordinate with any particular candidate or electoral campaign; its objective is purely the negative one of defeating Oliver North. The SOB committee can receive contributions of as much as $5,000 per person in furtherance of its objective. Its expenditures have no limit but what is raised. Our activities are just getting under way. We have received our first shipment of 10,000 bumper stickers, out of what we expect to be at least 100,000. I have personally gone on some radio shows to get the word out, and hope to begin a radio advertising campaign in the near future. - An Insider for Bush - But the guts of our campaign is included in this pamphlet--the documentation that Oliver North is no champion for the little guy, but a part of the political apparatus of former President George Bush. As such, he was personally on top of bringing planeloads of cocaine into the United States as part of the Contra operation, of carrying on an illegal arms trade with the communists he was supposedly fighting, and of running dirty tricks operations against anyone who got in the way of his fundraising and other illegal operations. As will be amply clear from the selection of the documentation which we include here, there is more than enough evidence on the public record to indict Ollie North for heading a conspiracy to import narcotics into the United States. Many individuals are in federal prison as a result of far less evidence. You might say that Ollie North had a right to keep certain secret intelligence operations from the glare of publicity in congressional hearings. There's no way you can say that he had a right to carry on massive drug trafficking into the U.S.A., to the benefit of known drug traffickers, and to the detriment of our children. The necessity of the SOB committee's work is becoming increasingly clear. Despite the breaking of a national wire story in mid-June on North's drug-running, the major press has continued to black out his real crimes. It's going to take an intensive campaign by political activists to ensure that the credulous are educated on the real history of Ollie North. This is a campaign of utmost importance to moral individuals from all political parties and all states of the Union. North says he's pro-family, but he's against a family getting a living, union wage. The only families he serves well are those of his cronies, and the drug mafia families. So, I urge you to become active now. Order your bumper stickers--we'd appreciate donations or contributions, but there's no set price. Call us about meetings we can address, or where Truth Squads should appear to expose Ollie's crimes. And circulate this pamphlet!! Ollie North is part of the George Bush apparatus which not only destroyed the economy and law in this country, but is determined to destroy our lawfully elected President and any political force that gets in its way. To protect the rule of law, and the commitments of our Constitution, this charlatan must be defeated. I hope to hear from you soon. {Nancy Spannaus August 1, 1994} - Chapter 1 - - The Ollie North Myth - On Nov. 25, 1986, a myth was born. It was on that day that Attorney General Edwin Meese--for the first time--linked the recently exposed illegal Contra support operations, with the Iran arms-for-hostages scandal. Meese linked these two hitherto separate operations--previously labelled ``Contragate'' and ``Irangate'' or ``Iranscam''--by revealing that monies from arms transactions between Israel and Iran had been ``diverted'' to the Contras. ``The only person in the United States government that knew precisely about this,'' declared Meese, was Oliver North, a member of the staff of the National Security Council operating out of the White House. From that point on, the ever-compliant news media focussed all their attention on Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, and on something that came to be called ``Iran-Contra.'' Then, most of the media devoted their efforts to trying to find out how much President Reagan knew about what Ollie was doing. This diversion was eminently successful. North himself has enjoyed perpetuating these myths, myths which placed him center stage, masterminding covert operations, tirelessly fighting communists and terrorists. To top it off, Ollie has portrayed himself as falling on his sword for his President, Ronald Reagan. Nothing could be further from the truth. By no means was Oliver North a renegade, or a loose cannon on the National Security Council staff. He was a staff member of a well-defined but secret operating structure, a structure which was headed by none other than Vice President George Bush. This apparatus ran a myriad of covert operations, spied on U.S. citizens, ran guns all over the world, and was responsible for bringing a virtual flood of drugs into the United States. It is George Bush, not Ronald Reagan, whom North has protected to this day. You can prove this to yourself simply by looking at North's 1991 book {Under Fire}. Ollie is quick to say that he is convinced that ``President Reagan knew everything''--but he {never} describes the role of George Bush. Mr. North devotes an entire chapter of his book to providing profiles of all the top officials he worked with--President Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, CIA Director William Casey, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, Admiral John Poindexter--with one glaring omission: his real boss, George Bush. Bush's ``secret government'' apparatus--built up from 1982 to 1986--drew upon the CIA and the Department of Defense's ``special operations'' capabilities. But the operations run by Bush's White House apparatus were neither ``CIA'' nor ``Pentagon'' operations. Rather, they were set up in order to bypass the official agency structure of the federal government. Senate Chief Counsel Arthur Liman, who conducted the Iran-Contra hearings, called the ``Enterprise'' run by Oliver North and his cronies ``a CIA outside the CIA.'' Others called it a ``secret, parallel government.'' - Bush's `Secret Government' - To understand how Bush's ``secret government'' worked, we must look at the ``crisis management'' apparatus in the White House and the misnamed National Security Council staff (which is not a ``staff'' for the National Security Council, but a staff for White House operations involving national security). In December 1981, President Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, designed to ``unleash'' U.S. intelligence agencies from the restrictions of the 1970s. E.O. 12333, governing all ``foreign intelligence'' operations, included provisions for the use of private ``assets'' by the intelligence and law enforcement community. E.O. 12333 also designated the NSC as ``the highest Executive Branch entity'' for review, guidance, and direction of {all} foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, and ``special activities'' (i.e. covert operations). This effectively put the NSC in charge of the CIA, military intelligence, special operations, etc. This did not mean the President's National Security Adviser, but the NSC staff structure--which for these areas was run by George Bush. How did that work? In January 1982, National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) Number 2 was issued, which formalized the National Security Council structure, including for Central America. NSDD-3, to which Secretary of State George Shultz vigorously objected, put Bush's SSG and its subordinate Crisis Pre-Planning Group (CPPG) right between the President and the Secretary of State, followed by the interagency committees. During December 1982, in between the adoption of E.O. 12333 and NSSD-2, National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) Number-3 had been issued. Entitled ``Crisis Management,'' this completed the first phase of George Bush's takeover of intelligence and secret operations. NSDD 3 created the Special Situation Group (SSG), headed by the Vice President. Then, on May 14, 1982, the CPPG was created under Bush's Special Situation Group. The CPPG was an interagency body with representatives of the CIA, Pentagon, White House, State Department, and others. Its staff coordinator was ... {Oliver North}. Thus, under NSDD-2 and NSSD-3, one man was in charge of the ``secret government'' machinery. This structure combined, as much as possible, all intelligence and foreign policy ``crisis management'' under the operational control of the Vice President of the United States. This was George Bush--Ollie North's real boss. - Chapter 2 - - `Continuity of Government:' A Domestic Dictatorship - Ollie North's first major project as a staffer at the National Security Council had nothing to do with Iran or the Contras. In truth, Ollie wasn't called upon to organize support for the Contras until 1984, and it wasn't until late 1985 that he got involved in trading arms for hostages in Iran. What was ``Mr. Iran-Contra'' doing before there was any such thing as ``Iran-Contra''? Ollie had been detailed to the National Security Council staff in August 1981. His first big project there involved what is known as ``continuity of government,'' or COG, and in it, he worked for none other than George Bush. Listen to Ollie's own words. In his book {Under Fire,} North describes ``my first major assignment at the NSC'' as involving contingency plans for enabling the President and the country's leadership to continue to function and communicate in the event of nuclear war or other extraordinary disaster. North calls it simply ``The Project,'' and says that this was ``where I came to know George Bush.'' Eleven years later, on April 18, 1994, {The New York Times} reported some facts about that project. In a front-page story, the {Times} reported that the Pentagon was planning to shelve its ``Doomsday Project,'' the plan to enable the nation's military and civilian leadership to survive a six-month nuclear war. This project, said {The Times}, ``was an amalgam of more than 20 `black programs'--so highly classified that only a handful of military and civilian personnel knew of them.'' The ``continuity of government'' program was elaborated in National Security Decision Directive 55, signed by President Reagan in January 1983 and still classified top secret. NSDD-55, said {The Times,} ``was drafted by, among others, Oliver L. North, then an obscure Marine on the National Security Council staff.'' And, {The Times} continued, during the Reagan administration, ``the project was supervised by Vice President George Bush.'' The CIA's Charles Allen became its deputy director. {The Times} says that in the Reagan and Bush administrations, the program involved military officers, CIA officials, and private companies run by retired military and intelligence personnel. This ``private'' side was typical of the covert intelligence operations run by Bush's ``CIA outside the CIA.'' A public version of the same operation went under the label of ``emergency preparedness,'' and was the subject of an earlier presidential directive, NSDD-47, signed in July 1982, in which North was also deeply involved. This revolved around the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and included a secret interagency ``continuity of government'' committee made up of about 100 top government officials. In August 1989, {U.S. News & World Report} published a story called ``America's Doomsday Project,'' which, it noted, ``many government bureaucrats call COG, short for `continuity of government.'|'' According to this article, the Reagan administration undertook a review of COG programs shortly after coming into office, and found that much of the technology used in the program had not been updated since the 1950s and 1960s. ``In 1982, a new secret agency was created,'' reported {U.S. News}. ``It was called the Defense Mobilization Planning Systems Agency, and its officials were instructed to report to then Vice President George Bush.'' The first major exposure of this project was published in 1987, by {The Miami Herald}. It called the Continuity of Government program ``a virtual parallel government.'' ``Lt. Col. Oliver North,'' reported {The Herald}, ``helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.'' {The Miami Herald} reported that North assisted FEMA from 1982 to 1984 in revising contingency plans for dealing with nuclear war, insurrection, or massive military mobilization. North was involved in planning and running ``readiness'' exercises, which utilized scenarios involving domestic protests over U.S. military adventures abroad, or massive social unrest due to economic depression conditions following a global financial collapse. During his July 1987 testimony in front of the congressional hearings, North and his lawyer Brendan Sullivan ridiculed the ``suspend the Constitution'' allegation, but he has admitted everything else. A recently published book on the CIA, {Eclipse}, by Mark Perry, reports that CIA Director William Casey designated Charles Allen as the CIA's representative to the COG project, and that this was what brought Allen into contact with Oliver North. Perry's book quotes Allen--perhaps somewhat whimsically--as saying during a COG meeting: ``Let's see now. Our job is to throw the Constitution out the window.'' In {Under Fire,} Ollie writes: ``During my work on The Project, I wrote several directives which President Reagan signed, authorizing further steps to be taken to ensure that our government could not be rendered impotent by enemy action or an extraordinary disaster. This was also where I came to know Vice President Bush.'' North's next statement is quite revealing, in light of later charges that Mr. Bush was actually conducting a coup against President Reagan in 1986: ``As first in line to succeed the President, he took an active interest in this program. I briefed him often, and he asked detailed and penetrating questions about how things worked, and how they could be improved. It was obvious that his interest was more than a formality.'' ``Even at the NSC, only a handful of people were aware of The Project. But for me, it was enormously satisfying,'' wrote Ollie North, the candidate who has now been miraculously reborn as an ``outsider.'' [box] - Iran Contra Hearings: North - - Would Suspend Constitution in Case of Emergency - During the congressional Iran-Contra hearings in 1987, the issue of the ``continuity of government'' project came up in the following rather startling manner: {{Rep. Jack Brooks:}} Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster? {{Chairman Sen. Daniel Inouye:}} I believe the question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area. So may I request that you not touch upon that, sir? {{Rep. Brooks:}} I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in the Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency that would suspend the American Constitution, and I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was, but I wanted-- {{Chairman Inouye:}} May I most respectfully suggest that that matter not be touched upon at this stage? If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an Executive Session. {{Brendan Sullivan}} (North's lawyer): Well, I must say, the inferences from that statement are ridiculous. {{Chairman Inouye:}} We'll decide whether it's ridiculous or not. -- - Chapter 3 - - Kissinger the Matchmaker: Ollie and the Contras - While continuing to work on Bush's ``Project Doomsday,'' and serving as the NSC liaison to FEMA, North took on his second major assignment at the NSC. This was to serve as the NSC liaison to the Kissinger Commission on Central America, starting in the summer of 1983. Prior to this, North says, he had been invited to participate in a ``Saturday morning study group'' on Central America held weekly at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. North made a number of trips to Central America on particular assignments, and then took at least one major trip to Central America and Mexico with the Kissinger Commission in early October, 1983. Rep. Michael Barnes, a congressional adviser to the commission, noted Ollie's eagerness to attach himself to Kissinger. ``He hung out with Henry,'' Barnes said. ``Ollie has quite a remarkable facility for ingratiating himself with important people ... more often than not, he was at Henry's elbow.'' A few months later, in December 1983, he accompanied George Bush to El Salvador. In both his congressional testimony and his book, Ollie gushes forth with fawning praise for the manner in which Mr. Bush supposedly faced down Salvadoran military leaders. ``I know a wimp when I see one,'' said Mr. North, ``and George Bush was no wimp.'' - North and Grenada - Ollie's first big ``success'' at the NSC was his coordination of the U.S. invasion of Grenada in October 1983. As NSDD-2 and NSDD-3 prescribed, the invasion was set in motion at a meeting of the Special Situation Group, a meeting convened by George Bush, on Oct. 20, 1983. North was made the liaison between the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is ironic that North became a rising star at the NSC because of Grenada, since from a military standpoint--command and control, communications, special forces operations--the operation has been judged a failure. U.S. forces had overwhelming superiority in numbers and weapons, yet suffered 29 killed and 152 wounded. Four Navy SEALS drowned in an accident; three Marine pilots were killed trying to rescue other SEALS. Four Army Rangers were killed, and others dismembered, when two U.S. helicopters crashed into each other. A senior intelligence officer was quoted in one published account calling the whole thing ``Ollie North's charade.'' - The Contras - Ollie's involvement in supplying and financing the Nicaraguan Contras began in 1984-85. Previously, the support operations for the Contras were first run out of the CIA, with Defense Department assistance. The first Boland Amendment was passed in December 1982, putting restrictions on CIA and Pentagon support for the Contras. When the second Boland Amendment was passed by Congress in October 1984, all CIA operations in support of the Contras had to be officially terminated, and the secret support operation began to be run out of the White House. The Contra supply operation went ``private,'' under the supervision of George Bush. Much of this was organized by retired CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, a friend of Bush's Vice Presidential National Security Adviser Donald Gregg from their days in Vietnam. In late 1984, Gregg introduced North to Rodriguez, who had already been working in Central America under Bush's direction for over a year. In January 1985, Bush's office arranged for Rodriguez to set up a Contra resupply depot at Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador. This became the principal air base later used by the North-Secord operation; it was also, according to eyewitnesses, a major drug transshipment point. At the recommendation of CIA Director William Casey, North enlisted special operations veteran Gen. Richard Secord to aid the Contra supply operation. Secord recruited a staff from the pool of retired Army and Air Force Special Forces operatives, most of whom had, at one point or another, been posted to the CIA-linked Special Operations Division at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Room 2C840--a room which will take on special significance later in our story. Secord had already begun, in 1983, to create a network of private companies to run arms smuggling and covert operations, as part of CIA Director Casey's ``privatization'' of intelligence operations. This private network of companies formed the core of the North-Secord ``Enterprise,'' and was also referred to as ``Project Democracy'' by North, Secord, and company. Secord's first purchase of arms for the Contras came from Red China at the end of 1984. Later on, Poland also became a major source. In late summer of 1985, Secord began organizing the air supply operation for the Contras; and in September, North asked Rodriguez to allow Secord to use Ilopango Air Base. North was not ``running'' the Contra supply operation, anymore than he was ``running'' any other operation. He was simply carrying out policies set by Bush and to a lesser extent by CIA Director Casey, who were both running parts of the Contra operation. The person who knew the least about what Ollie was actually doing was President Ronald Reagan. And in fact, the North-Secord air-lift operation was in most respects subordinate to the side of the operation being run by Bush's office through Felix Rodriguez. When the C-123 was shot down over Nicaragua on October 5, 1986, with three crewmen killed and Eugene Hasenfus captured, the first notification to Washington was from Felix Rodriguez to Bush's office. Unable to reach Don Gregg, Rodriguez instead spoke to Bush's military aide Sam Watson, who notified the White House situation room. A few hours later Rodriguez called Watson again with more information about the downed flight, identifying it as one of North's. This was how the White House and the NSC learned about the incident which threatened for a while to engulf and bring down the Reagan presidency. -- - Chapter 4 - - North Beats the Rap - ``I'm the most investigated man on this planet,'' says Ollie North when confronted with charges of his involvement in drug-running. Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh spent $100 million dollars ``trying to lock me up for jaywalking,'' Ollie complains. ``No one, not even the special prosecutor, not the congressional inquisition, raised that charge [drug-running]. We all know it's wrong,'' Ollie told a radio interviewer in Bluefield, West Virginia, on June 10. Wrong. Ollie's lying again. Although Ollie claims that he was hounded relentlessly by Special Prosecutor Walsh, the truth is that Walsh's original mandate from Congress was defined very narrowly, concentrating on the Iranian arms sales, the ``diversion'' of funds from the Iranian arms sales to the Contra operation, and on the Contra support operation as a violation of U.S. law. Walsh then construed his mandate even more narrowly, prosecuting North for lying to Congress, and for accepting illegal gratuities. Walsh's voluminous final report never mentions drug trafficking. Even on those charges on which he was indicted, North escaped the central, most serious charge against him--the conspiracy count. Counts 1 and 2 of the original indictment against him were dismissed in January 1989. How did North wriggle out of those counts? The Reagan-Bush administration (which Bush was running by that time), withheld crucial classified information from the court, protecting itself and North, and thus forced the dismissal on the grounds that North could not get a fair trial unless the information were made available to him. Neat trick. The truth is, for all of his whining, Ollie North was treated with kid gloves. He was {never} prosecuted for his most serious criminal offenses--the two most important being his complicity in bringing tons of deadly, illegal drugs into the United States, and his use of police-state harassment and frameups as part of the targetting of the ``secret government's'' opponents. In his famous congressional testimony, North was thrown ``softballs,'' which not only helped him expound on side issues and develop his ``renegade'' image, but also helped set up the conditions under which he could ``beat the system'' and walk away free, despite his lying to Congress. When Congress granted immunity to North and others for their testimony--over the strenuous objections of the special prosecutor--it set up the basis on which North's convictions were later vacated by the federal appeals court. At no point during the official ``Iran-Contra'' investigations, did those examining North actively pursue his complicity in drug-trafficking operations that were bringing planeloads of dope into this country, for sale and distribution in the neighborhoods of America, perhaps to your own children. According to the U.S.'s former top agent in El Salvador, Celerino Castillo, he and his associates were ordered by DEA headquarters to keep all their case files open, so that the special prosecutor's office could not get access to them, on the grounds that these were ``active investigations.'' - The Kerry Committee Evidence - The sole exception to this pattern was the investigation conducted by a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, sometimes called the ``Kerry Committee'' after Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass). The evidence compiled by that committee alone would have been enough to prosecute and convict Oliver North and his confederates for conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States and many other offenses. People are sent to prison every day in the United States on {far less} evidence than the Kerry Committee report contains against Oliver North. To be convicted of a drug conspiracy, a defendant need not actually touch or use the drugs; he only need know of the conspiracy, to tacitly agree with it, and to commit one ``overt act'' in pursuit of the conspiracy. Approving payments to known drug-traffickers (which North did), or approving the involvement of known drug traffickers in Contra support operations (which North also did), would qualify as overt acts in any prosecutor's handbook. In fact, by normal prosecutorial standards, Ollie would probably qualify as a ``drug kingpin.'' Let's look at some of the evidence. -- - Chapter 5 - - Ollie North: Drug Kingpin - - The Evidence Against Him - Six months before the ``Iran-Contra'' story was ever heard of, a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee--known as the ``Kerry Committee''--opened a major investigation into the international drug trade, particularly focusing on allegations of illegal gun-running and narcotics-trafficking associated with the Contras. Sources close to the investigation have told this news service that 75% of the evidence on Contra drug-dealing was never used by the Kerry Committee. Nevertheless, what is there is devastating, and is sufficient to sink the ``U.S.S. Ollie North'' many times over. Jack Blum, an investigator for Sen. Kerry, testified to the committee on Feb. 11, 1987 that the Contras move drugs ``not by the pound, not by the bag, but by the ton, by the cargo planeload.'' The final committee report, entitled ``Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy,'' and issued in December 1988, stated that the committee had uncovered considerable evidence relating to the Contra network, which substantiated many of the initial allegations put in front of the committee when it began its investigation in the spring of 1986. The report states: ``On the basis of this evidence, it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.'' The committee report found that these links included: @sb|``|Involvement in narcotics trafficking by individuals associated with the Contra movement. @sb|``|Participation of narcotics traffickers in Contra supply operations through business relationships with Contra organizations. @sb|``|Provision of assistance to the Contras by narcotics traffickers, including cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services and other materials, on a voluntary basis by the traffickers. @sb|``|Payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies.'' In a number of instances, the Kerry report documents Oliver North's personal knowledge or involvement in these matters involving drug traffickers or drug money. @sb|So-called ``humanitarian'' payments to the Contras made through the ``Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Organization'' (NHAO) were personally overseen and supervised by North. The Kerry Committee report shows that many NHAO payments went to companies known to be involved in drug trafficking. @sb|SETCO (see below) ``received funds for Contra supply operations from the Contra accounts established by Oliver North.'' @sb|DIACSA, a company under Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation in 1985-86 for drug trafficking and drug money laundering, was used by the principal Contra organization, the FDN, for ``intra-account transfers.'' ``The laundering of money through DIACSA concealed the fact that some funds for the Contras were through deposits arranged by Lt. Col. Oliver North.'' The State Department continued to make payments to the Contras through DIACSA even {after} the top officials of the company were indicted for cocaine trafficking and money laundering in January 1985 and thereafter. @sb|North suggested to the DEA in June 1985 that $1.5 million in drug money carried aboard a plane piloted by informant Barry Seal be provided to the Contras. - Ollie's Confederates - The people Ollie North worked with in the Contra operation could make up an international police lineup of drug traffickers and terrorists. Here are some of his most notable associates: {{Juan Ramo@aan Matta Ballesteros:}} This Honduran cocaine kingpin was convicted in July 1990 of conspiracy to kidnap, torture, and murder DEA agent Enrique Camarena. {The Los Angeles Times} (July 7, 1990) said that Ballesteros ``is reputed to be one of the world's biggest drug kingpins.'' At the time of the Camarena affair, Matta Ballesteros was the owner of a Honduran charter airline, SETCO Air, that was paid over half-a-million dollars by the U.S. State Department to airlift ``humanitarian aid'' to the Contras in a program run by Ollie North from the White House. Other funds, drawn directly from secret North-Secord bank accounts in Switzerland, were also funneled into SETCO Air. The Kerry Report states: ``SETCO was the recipient in 1986 of $185,924, in State Department NHAO office funds for the transportation of humanitarian assistance to the FDN [Contras] based in Honduras. A 1983 U.S. Customs Service report stated that `SETCO aviation is a corporation formed by American businessmen who are dealing with Matta and are smuggling narcotics into the United States.' The Matta referred to in the report is Juan Matta Ballesteros, a major cocaine trafficker in the region, and wanted by U.S. law enforcement agencies for the brutal murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico.'' An Aug. 9, 1985 entry by Oliver North into his notebook removes any shadow of a doubt that North was fully aware of the Contra-cocaine connection: ``Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.'' The Honduran plane referenced by North was owned by Matta Ballesteros. {{Rafael Caro Quintero:}} According to CIA contract agent Laurence Victor Harrison, Matta and Mexican dug cartel figures Caro Quintero and Felix Gallardo, enjoyed North and the CIA's protection in return for letting Central American ``freedom fighters'' be trained at dope ranches in Mexico, and for flying arms shipments to the Contra supply bases in Central America. According to a report published in {The Washington Post} on July 5, 1990, a ranch near Vera Cruz, Mexico, owned by Rafael Caro Quintero, the mastermind of the Camarena torture-murder and the head of the Mexican drug mafia, was used by the CIA to train Central American guerrillas. According to DEA informant Laurence Victor Harrison, the CIA used Mexico's Federal Security Directorate (DFS) ``as a cover in the event any questions were raised as to who was running the training operation. Representatives of the DFS, which was the front for the training camp, were in fact acting in consort with major drug overlords to ensure a flow of narcotics through Mexico into the United States.'' {{Francisco Chanes}} and {{Frank Castro}}: Ollie North and company were aware of the cocaine connection even earlier, according to other government records. On Sept. 26, 1984, the Miami Police Department provided FBI Special Agent George Kiszynski with an investigative report identifying a network of Miami cocaine-traffickers which was pouring money into the Contras' coffers. Within days of the report being turned over to Kiszynski, according to congressional testimony, it had been passed on to Oliver ``Buck'' Revell, North's FBI liaison for the White House Central America program. The Miami Police Department document stated in unambiguous terms: ``Frank Castro is a close associate of an individual by the name of Francisco Chanes ... Chanes is a narcotics trafficker ... Chanes was giving financial support to anti-Castro groups and the Nicaraguan Contra guerrillas; the monies come from narcotic transactions ... Frank Castro contacted Mr. Coutin to give the Legion Cubana financial support to fight the Nicaraguan Sandinista Marxist Government ... the financial support was from drug monies.'' Frank Castro, a convicted Cuban-American marijuana and cocaine smuggler, was a mainstay of the Contra recruitment and resupply operations in Miami. When the Miami police report was passed to the FBI and eventually on to the North-led interagency task force, the Miami investigation was quashed and all Contra cocaine links suppressed. Jack Terrell, a soldier-of-fortune who worked with the Contras for a time, says he was introduced by Tom Posey of CMA (Civilian Military Assistance) to a Cuban named Francisco `Paco' Chanes, part-owner of Ocean Hunter Seafood in Miami, which bought frozen seafood from {Frigori@aaficos de Puntarenas}, a Costa Rican seafood company. Terrell says Chanes offered him a million-dollar bribe to help smuggle cocaine into the U.S. in frozen lobsters. Chanes said that CMA would get a lot of money from the operation. The Kerry report states: ``Frigorificos de Puntarenas, a Costa Rican seafood company, was owned and operated by convicted drug traffickers, Luis Rodriguez, Carlos Soto and Ubaldo Fernandez. Frigorificos received $231,587 in humanitarian assistance funds for the Contras from the State Department in late 1985 and early 1986. Luis Rodriguez was finally indicted on September 30, 1988 for drug smuggling which took place between November 1980 and January 1983.'' {{John Hull}}: John Hull's ranch in Costa Rica, whose airstrip was used by the North-Secord Contra arms and resupply operation, was also a transshipment point for Colombia cocaine bound for the United States. The Kerry report states the following: ``John Hull was a central figure in Contra operations on the Southern Front when they were managed by Oliver North, from 1984 through late 1986.... ``Five witnesses testified that Hull was involved in cocaine trafficking....'' One witness, pilot Gary Betzner, testified that his flights had carried weapons for the Contras to the Hull ranch, and then he carried drugs from the Hull ranch to the U.S.A. {{Steve Samos}}: Steve Samos is a top drug-money launderer in Panama. In January 1987, {The Wall Street Journal} reported that Mr. Samos was used by the North-Secord operation for two purposes: 1) Samos created Amalgamated Commercial Enterprises (ACE) in November 1984; ACE was used to administer the airlift operation from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the Contras; its role was thoroughly established by special prosecutor Walsh. 2) Samos also has extensive dealings with Panama's Banco de Iberoamerica, which {The Wall Street Journal} said may have been used for Contra financing; it was also part of the money-laundering apparatus which Samos set up for marijuana smuggler Jose@aa Antonio Ferna@aandez. {{Michael Tolliver}}: Pilot Michael Tolliver, a convicted drug smuggler, testified before the Kerry committee that at one point he had flown 20 tons of marijuana to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, in exchange for weapons for the Contras. The U.S. government settled a civil insurance claim for a plane flown by Toliver which crashed in 1983; Toliver said he had been hired to deliver weapons to the Contras and he often brought back drugs on the return flight. In a deposition in another case, Tolliver testified that he had received payments for the drugs from Felix Rodriquez. Federal Judge Patrick Kelly accused the U.S. government of engaging in ``criminal conduct'' in the Tolliver case. He said the case ``stinks to high heaven'' and ``involves the transport of drugs by agents of the United States, or with the acquiescence of the United States.'' {{Mansur Al-Kassar}}: Al-Kassar is a notorious Syrian heroin, hashish, and marijuana smuggler who became North's ``second channel'' to Ayatollah Khomeini. After all, funding the Central American Contras was not the only thing Ollie North was doing--he was also mixed up in the Middle East. Al-Kassar has been convicted of drug-trafficking in England and France, was expelled from Spain when Spanish authorities photographed him hosting Medellin Cartel figures Pablo Escobar and Rodriguez Gacha at his Marbella estate, and has been on Interpol's watch list since the late 1960s. The CIA lists Al-Kassar as a KGB agent, and scores of law enforcement agencies list him as a leading international terrorist, with ties to Abul Abbas and Abu Nidal. Al-Kassar sold Soviet-made weapons to the Black September group of Abu Nidal and to the Syrian-sponsored Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) of Ahmed Jibril. Despite these credentials, Al-Kassar was brought onto the North team and paid millions of dollars to funnel Soviet-made arms to the Contras. In 1986, one transaction alone netted Al-Kassar $1.5 million in payments from the North-Secord Lake Resources Swiss bank accounts. - The Mena, Arkansas Story - Former CIA contract agent Terry Reed, and investigative reporter John Cummings, have recently written a book called {Compromised} which describes Reed's personal experiences in dealing with the Bush-North secret operations in Arkansas and later in Mexico. (An exclusive interview with Terry Reed on this and related subjects appeared in {Executive Intelligence Review} magazine, Vol. 21, No. 23.) The individual in charge of the operation introduced himself to Reed as ``John Cathey''--whom Reed later discovered to be Oliver North. After working on the secret (and illegal) Contra training and arms supply operations in rural Mena, Arkansas for over a year, Reed was later sent to Mexico to set up a machine-tool manufacturing operation there which could be used as a front for arms shipments and intelligence operations. In July 1987, he discovered that ``ex''-CIA agent Felix Rodriguez--a central figure in the Contra operations under the name of ``Max Gomez''--was using Reed's company and warehouse to ship tons of cocaine into the United States. After a showdown with Rodriguez, Reed and his family fled Mexico and returned to the U.S.A. When Reed contacted Oliver North in November 1987, hoping to go to Washington and tell his story. North told Reed to lay low, and to stay as far away from Washington as he could. - Felix Rodriquez's Role - The drug-running role of Felix Rodriquez, described by Terry Reed and also documented by the Kerry committee, has also been recently confirmed by the U.S. DEA's top agent in El Salvador from 1985 to 1991. Former DEA agent Celerino (``Cele'') Castillo, gave interviews in mid-June to {The Texas Observer} magazine and to the Associated Press, charging that Oliver North knew all about the drug flights in and out of El Salvador. Castillo says that the North network and the CIA ``were running large quantities of cocaine to the United States via Ilopango,'' the military air base in El Salvador. He told Associated Press that shipments were flown to Florida, Texas, and California. ``Oliver North was running the operation. His pilots were known drug traffickers listed in government files and these people were being given U.S. visas.'' Castillo told {The Texas Observer} that the drugs were flown into Ilopango from South America, stored in Hangars 4 and 5 there, and were then smuggled northward for sale in the United States. ``Hangar 4 was owned and operated by the CIA, and the other hangar was run by Felix Rodriguez, [alias] `Max Gomez' of the Contra operation. ``Basically they were running cocaine from South America to the U.S. via Salvador,'' Castillo continued. ``That was the only way the Contras were able to get financial help. By going to sleep with the enemy down there.'' He said that North's agents and the CIA were at the two hangars overseeing the operations ``at all times.'' In a Feb. 14, 1989 memo to U.S. attache@aa Robert Stia in Guatemala, Castillo identified more than two dozen known drug smugglers frequenting Hangars 4 and 5, among the pilots hired by Oliver North. ``Now all these contract pilots were documented [in DEA files] traffickers, Class I cocaine violators that were being hired by the CIA and the Contras. And the U.S. embassy in El Salvador was giving visas to these people even though they were documented in our computers as being narcotics traffickers.'' Castillo says that in 1986, he reported the cocaine smuggling to George Bush in person and to the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador. As to the ambassador's response, Castillo reports: ``His words to me were that it was a covert White House operation run by Colonel Oliver North and for us to stay away from the operation.'' On Jan. 14, 1986, Castillo says, he met Vice President Bush at a cocktail party at the U.S. ambassador's house in Guatemala City. Castillo described to Bush his job as chief of the U.S. drug law enforcement in the region. When Castillo told Bush minute details of North's drug-running operations, Castillo reports, Bush ``just smiled and he walked away from me.'' At a press conference in Washington on Aug. 2, 1994, Castillo again reiterated his belief that North knew that narcotics were being run out of the air base in Ilopango. ``All of his pilots were drug-traffickers,'' Castillo said. A majority had been arrested for drug-trafficking. ``He knew what they were up to and refused to do anything about it.'' Castillo said he had two informants at Ilopango who had access to all the flight plans and the pilots. The informants saw the drugs and the money, and the pilots also talked freely about cocaine they were taking to the United States and about the money. When the DEA ran the names of the pilots through their computer, ``every single one of them was documented as a narcotics trafficker in DEA files.'' Castillo also pointed to the 543 pages of Ollie North notebooks which make reference to drugs and drug trafficking, as identified by the Kerry Committee. ``Robert Owens, his buddy, was warning him and advising him that the Contras were heavily involved in narcotics trafficking.'' Castillo also disclosed that there is still an open DEA investigation on North. He said that the DEA has a case, No. GFGD 91-39, in which North is being investigated for smuggling weapons to the Philippines with known drug traffickers. - Ollie Defends a Narco-Terrorist - All of Ollie's campaign promises to get ``tough on criminals'' are a farce in light of what Ollie actually did in the case of Jose Bueso-Rosa. Bueso-Rosa was convicted in a U.S. court in 1985 in connection with a plot to assassinate the President of Honduras, a plot which was funded by a multi-million dollar cocaine deal. The Justice Department had called the case the ``most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.'' Yet, Ollie directly intervened with federal authorities to try and keep Buena-Sosa from having to serve his U.S. prison sentence! The Kerry report states that senior U.S. government officials, including North, ``intervened with a federal judge to obtain a reduction to five years in the sentence for Honduran General Jose Bueso-Rosa, who was convicted in 1985 of conspiring to assassinate President Suaza Cordoba of Honduras.'' The Kerry Report also reports that the assassination attempt was to have been financed by the proceeds from the sale {in the United States} of $40 million in cocaine. According to the Kerry report, Oliver North ``suggested that efforts be made on Bueso-Rosa's behalf'' to keep him from disclosing details of his support for the Contras. At a meeting of top State and Justice Department officials on Sept. 24, 1986, after Bueso-Rosa had already been sentenced to prison, North demanded that Bueso be released and sent back to Honduras, rather than going to a U.S. prison. North did not succeed in preventing Bueso-Rosa from going to prison, but he did succeed in having him transferred from a medium-security facility in Alabama, to the minimum-security ``Club Fed'' prison camp at Eglin Air Force base in Florida. North's strenuous and repeated efforts on Bueso-Rosa's behalf were even opposed by FBI and Justice Department officials, as well as DEA officials. One U.S. law enforcement official, testifying before the Kerry committee, said outright that the intervention of North and others had ``undermined President Reagan's policies'' in the areas of anti-terrorism and anti-narcotics. Justice Department official Mark Richard testified that he had told North that his efforts would undercut the Justice Department's position that ``this man is a serious international terrorist.'' Top FBI official Oliver Revell, then working closely with North on other matters, recently told {The Washington Post}: ``There was no way we could do something for someone who had been involved in drug trafficking against the United States.'' But that didn't stop Ollie. -- - Chapter 6 - - Ollie and the East Bloc - Although Ollie loves to brag about how he was ``fighting communists and terrorists,'' here also, the reality is very different. Oliver North worked hand-in-glove with communists and terrorists as part of the worldwide gun-running network of which his ``Enterprise'' was a major component. Some of this began to come to light after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In December 1989, angry East German citizens, accompanied by television camera crews, went to a highly guarded site near Rostock, and uncovered a huge secret arms and ammunition depot. The depot had been under the control of a little-known East German state company, IMES GmbH. Hours later, the man alleged to have been the mastermind of a multi-billion-dollar illegal arms-smuggling trade, which also involved narcotics, went underground. This was Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, a 57-year-old, 220-pound East German communist nicknamed ``Big Alex,'' who had controlled East German foreign trade as its deputy foreign trade minister. Schalck was also a colonel in the East German State Security machinery, known as the ``Stasi.'' Soon thereafter, West German authorities revealed that Schalck had fled to the West and turned himself over to West Berlin police, requesting to be placed in protective custody. By February 1990, the West German press was reporting that Schalck was in the U.S.A., at a special CIA ``debriefing'' camp near Washington. IMES was a key part of a major international network over which Schalck had presided since 1967. A web of secret Swiss, West German, Liechtenstein, and ``letterbox'' firms in other nations, were used by the East German regime and the Stasi for the smuggling operations, overseen by Schalck under the Department of Commercial Coordination of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, or CoCo. According to West German reports, Schalck and his CoCo reported directly to party boss Erich Honecker and the Central Committee of the East German Communist Party (SED). On Jan. 27, 1990, a dispatch datelined Berlin appeared in the conservative West German newspaper {Die Welt}. The front-page report, citing sources high up inside the East German regime, reported that Schalck and his operation at the East German Foreign Trade Ministry ``played a decisive role'' in narcotics traffic. The East Berlin Schoenefeld Airport, controlled by Schalck's ministry, according to these reports, served as the central ``crossroads, ... above all for Libya and Syria as well as Iran,'' in their international drug trafficking. IMES had first come to light in the West when documents were seized by Swedish Customs officials at the Malmoe offices of Swedish businessman Karl-Erik Schmitz on Sept. 29, 1985, over a year before the ``Iran-Contra'' story broke in the U.S.A. The Malmoe raid produced thousands of pages of material which documented international smuggling routes employed by what was known in the trade as the ``explosives cartel,'' an elite group of western companies including Bofors-Nobel of Sweden and related firms in West Germany, the United States, Belgium, Italy, France, Holland, and Great Britain. It is also the case that this Swedish-based worldwide arms smuggling network was fully integrated into the networks used by the North-Secord ``Enterprise.'' Scandinavian investigators familiar with the Schmitz affair state bluntly that the network of Schmitz and that of Ollie North are one and the same. Schmitz is known to have used a CIA proprietary air charter service, St. Lucia Airways, for some of his illegal shipments. St. Lucia Airways was also used for CIA and ``Enterprise'' arms shipments to Angola and Iran, and it provided Richard Secord with the plane on which North, Robert McFarlane and others travelled to Teheran in May 1986. - East Bloc Arms Deals - This now brings us to the strange cases of two Danish ships, the {Erria} and the {Pia Vesta}. On April 28, 1986, the North-Secord Enterprise sent a team, including Albert Hakim and former CIA official Tom Clines, to Copenhagen where they set up a web of dummy companies. Clines and friends met with Tom Erik Parlow and his business partner, Danish ship charterer Svend Andersen. Clines for years had a special friendship with the Norwegian businessman Parlow, who reportedly spent entire summers at Clines's U.S. summer home. The Copenhagen meeting was reported by Secord to North in a coded message sent via their KL-43 encryption devices. According to the 1993 Final Report of the Iran-Contra Independent Counsel (the Walsh Report), Clines ``had developed significant contacts with arms dealers in Western Europe and behind the Iron Curtain.'' Clines, according to Walsh, ``oversaw the logistics of purchasing weapons from private suppliers in Europe and arranging for their delivery to Central America.'' The Walsh Report also reports that on April 28, 1986, Hakim and Clines purchased a ship called the {Erria}, ``which the Enterprise had leased a year earlier for weapons shipments to the Contras.... Thomas Parlow became the {Erria}'s Danish shipping agent.'' The Walsh report says that Hakim would telephone Parlow with shipping instructions, and Parlow would communicate them to the ship's captain. The {Erria} was used by the Enterprise for a number of purposes, including shipping East bloc arms to the Contras. The Walsh report, for example, states that in July 1986 the {Erria} left Portugal with a shipment of arms picked up in Poland and in Portugal destined for the Contras. Secord also directly arranged for communist arms, in one instance purchasing a shipload of weapons from the People's Republic of China in late 1984, according to the Walsh report. At the same time that the Enterprise was buying the {Erria} in April 1986, it was also arranging, through Svend Andersen's S.A. Chartering, to charter the {Pia Vesta}. On May 6, 1986, a week after Clines and Hakim were in Copenhagen, the {Pia Vesta} departed Rostock, East Germany, where it had been loaded with a shipment including 32 military trucks and 200 tons of arms, including 1,500 Soviet AK 47 assault rifles, and 1,440 RPG rockets. The {Pia Vesta} left Rostock with ``end user certificates'' which falsely labelled its cargo ``32 specialized trucks and spare parts.'' Where did the arms come from? The East German state-owned shipping company, VEB Deutrans, had delivered goods from Schalck-Golodkowski's IMES for loading at Rostock, and IMES in East Berlin had drawn up papers dated April 15, 1986, claiming that the cargo was headed for Peru. - Star Productions - Captured papers from the ship further revealed more about the false documentation provided by IMES and Deutrans. The papers declared that the purchase of the ``cargo'' was ordered by a company named Marnix. Records reveal that Marnix was acting on behalf of a Geneva-based French national, George Starkmann, owner of a Geneva firm, Star Productions SA. A declassified NSC memo from Tom Clines to Oliver North dated March 17, 1986, names ``Star Production'' and one ``George Stockman'' in connection with Secord's supplying arms and aircraft for the Contras. It was Star Productions SA, which actually paid IMES for the weapons loaded onto the {Pia Vesta} in Rostock. More curious still is the fact that the money Star Productions used to pay IMES originated from the Banco Arabe Espanol of Madrid, whose head is the former head of Qaddafi's Libyan National Bank, Abdulla A. Saudi. Someone should ask Ollie North why he used a Libyan-controlled bank to finance a shipment of East bloc arms, under the guise of ``fighting communism.'' After sailing through the Panama Canal towards Peru, the {Pia Vesta} turned back to Balboa, Panama. On June 14, 1986, officials of the Panamanian government, acting reportedly on orders of General Noriega, who himself had been reportedly alerted by Peru's President Alan Garcia, boarded the {Pia Vesta}, discovered the arms and the false end-user documents, and impounded the vessel and its contents. A subsequent investigation by the Peruvian Senate concluded that the {Pia Vesta} was carrying arms destined for the Contras in Central America. However, other evidence later emerged indicating that the ship's cargo of East bloc weapons was part of a deception operation being run out of the Bush-North secret government apparatus in the NSC. The real destination of the East bloc arms was to have been the Marxist rebels in El Salvador. The weapons were to be the bait in an elaborate ``trap,'' in which the arms would be captured, and then identified as of East bloc origin, in order to give Washington a public pretext to escalate its covert operations in Central America. The {Erria} had been purchased for the Enterprise in the name of Dolmy Business Inc., a Panamanian shell company, which Walsh found to be owned by the Compagnie de Services Fiduciaries (CSF) of Geneva. The Walsh report declares: ``Financial management of all Enterprise assets was done in Switzerland by Compagnie de Services Fiduciaire (CSF) controlled by Willard Zucker, an American tax lawyer living in Geneva.'' Zucker in fact was the Geneva representative of New York law firm, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, whose senior partner was Kenneth Bialkin--a top official of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith. Bialkin, working with Zucker, had arranged for Robert Vesco to take control of the old Meyer Lansky money-laundering apparatus of Investor's Overseas Services (IOS) from Bernie Cornfeld. Zucker then ran an asset-stripping operation on IOS, and left the company to form CSF in September 1971. Informed reports say that CSF is simply a reorganization of the same money-laundering networks used by Lansky, under a new, less-publicized name. Vesco today is based in Havana, reportedly under the personal protection of Fidel Castro. He went there following an extended stay in Costa Rica, where he fled after being charged by Swiss authorities of embezzling what the U.S. authorities estimated in 1973 to be $392 million through his network of Luxembourg and Swiss ``shell'' bank accounts. From Havana, Vesco is said to coordinate financial and other services for the worldwide cocaine trafficking operations of the Colombian Medellin cartel. -- - Chapter 7 - - Bush's `Terrorism Task Force': Ollie's Plumbers Unit - Ollie North is now campaigning as a candidate who will oppose ``big government'' and who will fight for our liberties against the ``Washington crowd.'' But during the years 1981-86, no one was more of an insider than Ollie North, and no one had less regard for our liberties. We now look at the police-state apparatus which George Bush and Ollie North used to hound their enemies--for harassment, dirty tricks, and frameups. In the first part of this pamphlet, we saw how a secret ``crisis management'' apparatus was created in the White House and National Security Council, operating under the direct control of George Bush. This included the Special Situation Group (SSG) chaired by Bush, and the SSG's subordinate Crisis Pre-Planning Group (CPPG), of which Oliver North was the staff coordinator. We saw that North was the NSC representative to the Continuity of Government and related ``emergency management'' projects. That apparatus continued to grow. In April 1984, President Reagan signed NSDD 138, creating the ``Terrorist Incident Working Group'' (TIWG, or ``Tee-wig'') which reported to Bush's Special Situation Group. Then, in July 1985, President Reagan named Bush to head up a new Terrorism Task Force, consisting of representatives of the Defense Department, CIA, State Department, NSC, plus the FBI's Oliver ``Buck'' Revell, and the Israeli Amiram Nir. (North also claims to have written the NSDD establishing the VP's Task Force.) The task force's report, issued in February 1986, created a permanent extension of the task force: the Operations Sub-Group (OSG), officially a sub-group of Mr. Bush's TIWG. It also established a permanent counter-terrorism office located in the NSC staff, headed by--guess who?--Oliver North. Mr. North's two assistants, Craig Coe and Robert Earl, were simply reassigned from Mr. Bush's task force. The Operations Sub-Group (OSG) was an interagency coordinating group which operated so as to bypass the regular intelligence and law enforcement agencies. For example, when the FBI's Buck Revell was operating under the authority of the OSG, he would report to the OSG, not to the FBI director. The OSG was used, among other things, to run domestic surveillance and ``dirty tricks'' against Bush's enemies, particularly against opponents of the Contra policy. The OSG overlapped heavily with the Continuity-of- Goverment project. For example, the CIA's Charles Allen was his agency's representative to {both} COG and the Operations Sub-Group. The domestic side of North's operations was investigated by Congress, but the results were never made public. The pro-establishment magazine {Foreign Policy} reports: ``Congressional investigators did draft a chapter about the domestic side of the scandal for the Iran-{contra} report, but it was blocked by House and Senate Republicans.'' - The Case of Jack Terrell - One well-documented incident of Operations Sub-Group targeting of the secret government's ``enemies' list'' is the case of Jack Terrell, who was a source for congressional investigations and news media exposure of the Contra operation beginning in March 1986. Terrell had also been interviewed by federal investigators in Miami who were looking into both gun-running and drug trafficking in connection with the Contras, and was thus a federal witness. Two news media programs based on Terrell's information had a particularly strong impact. The first was a segment on National Public Radio (NPR) run on May 5, 1986, which triggered a renewed round of inquiries, and, says Terrell, the White House/NSC ``picked up the pace of its efforts to silence critics through intimidation and smear tactics.'' Then, on June 25, 1986, CBS-TV's ``West 57th Street'' news magazine show ran a piece on the secret Contra program, after which Oliver North and Richard Secord set into motion their own plan to silence Terrell. This first involved Secord's deploying of the ``Enterprise'' security agent, Glenn Robinette, to find out what Terrell knew, by posing as a lawyer representing investors who wanted to do a movie and book using Terrell's information. On July 17, 1986, North wrote a ``Top Secret'' memo to National Security Adviser Poindexter, entitled: ``Terrorist Threat: Terrel.'' North began: ``Several months ago, a U.S. citizen named Jack Terrel [sic] became an active participant in the disinformation/active measures campaign against the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance.... Terrel has appeared on various television `documentaries' alleging corruption, human rights abuses, drug running, arms smuggling, and assassination attempts by the resistance and their supporters. Terrel has also been working closely with various congressional staffs in preparing for hearings and inquiries regarding the role of U.S. government officials in illegally supporting the Nicaraguan resistance.'' North's memo went on to claim that one of the security officers for Project Democracy (i.e., Robinette) had evaluated Terrell as ``extremely dangerous,'' and possibly a foreign agent. Never one to be confined by the truth, North even alleged that Terrell had offered to assassinate the President of the United States. North told Admiral John Poindexter that the FBI ``is preparing a counter intelligence/counter-terrorism plan for review by OSG-TIWG tomorrow.'' Admiral Poindexter turned down North's proposal that he discuss this with the President and the Attorney General, and instead asked North to give him another memo, with the results of the OSG evaluation. Ten days later, North gave Admiral Poindexter a drastically toned-down memo, which omitted any reference to the assassination threat or to Terrell as a foreign agent, but which mentioned that ``his charges are at the center of Senator [John] Kerry's investigation in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.'' Meanwhile, Buck Revell was deploying the FBI's Special Operations Groups (SOG) to conduct intensive surveillance of Terrell. An FBI memo released by the congressional Iran-Contra Committee says: ``we need full-time SOG coverage of Terrell''--which resulted in heavy surveillance of Terrell, including FBI agents following Terrell from Washington to Miami and back. Revell and North were doing this, at the same time Terrell was a government witness regarding the Contras! This got to be too much even for FBI officialdom. The FBI liaison to the NSC asserted that North ``was trying to interfere with a bureau investigation into allegations that the Contras were involved in running drugs.'' Revell himself tried to cover his own rear end, by telling {The Wall Street Journal} that he and others at the FBI were concerned that North might be running a ``plumbers' unit'' out of the White House. The congressional Iran-Contra Committee report cited the Terrell case as one of {seven} instances which ``show how the NSC staff, and North in particular, tried to prevent exposure of the Enterprise by law enforcement agencies. We do not mean to impugn the integrity of the law enforcement officials involved.... The fault lies with the members of the NSC staff who tried to compromise the independence of law enforcement agencies by misusing claims of national security.'' -- - Chapter 8 - - North vs. LaRouche - Oliver North's first documented operation against Lyndon LaRouche came in connection with North's services for the Kissinger Commission on Central America. In March 1984, LaRouche wrote to President Reagan, warning of the dangers of carrying out Kissinger's policies, and in particular, of the danger of playing into the Soviet strategy of tying down the United States in escalating insurrection and warfare in the Americas. It was Oliver North who made a written recommendation to the White House on March 15, 1984, that LaRouche's letter ``should {not} be answered. Mr. LaRouche simply wants the attention of a reply--and would probably use such a response irresponsibly.'' Around this same time, two top officials of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a hate organization which had just finished collaborating with NBC in broadcasting lies about LaRouche, met with NSC officials and demanded that the NSC cut off all contact with LaRouche. The ADL's intervention was reflected in a NSC internal memorandum written some days after the meeting, on March 22, 1984, which reported that the ADL officials ``emphasized their concern re the possibility of some sort of NSC link with the LaRouche organization.'' Why was the ADL worried about a link between the NSC and LaRouche? On March 4, 1984, NBC-TV had broadcast a 20-minute attack on LaRouche, designed not only to instigate a legal frameup of LaRouche, but also to force the Reagan administration to break off all contact with LaRouche and his associates. In preparing the NBC program, one of the people interviewed was Dr. Norman Bailey, a special assistant to President Reagan on the NSC. Dr. Bailey acknowledged meeting with associates of LaRouche on a number of occasions. ``This I found quite useful quite simply because they have in my view one of the best private intelligence services in the world,'' Bailey told NBC. ``They are also strongly in favor of certain programs that the administration is very much in favor of also.'' One of the programs to which Bailey was referring was President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Lyndon LaRouche first began designing and advocating a ballistic missile defense system employing new physical principles in 1977, and by early 1982, 14 months before President Reagan's March 23, 1983 televised announcement of SDI, LaRouche was asked to function as a White House back-channel for high-level ``private'' discussions with Soviet diplomats. LaRouche's discussions with Moscow representatives covered a broad range of SDI-related issues, including the economic benefits of a crash program to develop and deploy ballistic missile defense. All of this was known to North's boss, George Bush. Richard Morris, executive assistant to William Clark, President Reagan's national security adviser during 1982-83, later testified in court that LaRouche and associates had had many meetings with NSC staff to discuss policy issues. Morris said that there was a group in the NSC staff hostile to LaRouche, who described Mr. LaRouche as a communist, a fascist, a member of the KGB, etc. Three NSC staff officials named by Morris as heading up this anti-LaRouche cabal were Walter Raymond (who was in charge of ``public diplomacy''), Kenneth de Graffenried, and Roy Godson (a long-time LaRouche watcher who had tried to incite the FBI against LaRouche as early as 1976). In his book {Under Fire}, Oliver North is quick to line up with the anti-LaRouche Bush clique. He writes that in early 1983, ``an adviser to a senior government official sent me a weird magazine clipping about an Israeli conspiracy to dominate the world--and suggested I might want to look into it.'' The article, North says, turned out to be from a magazine ``put out by Lyndon LaRouche and his followers''--which North cites as an exmple of the ``distinct anti-Israel bias'' in some government circles. Other examples North cites are the State Department and former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. - `Public Diplomacy'' and John Train - The core of what later became known as the ``Get LaRouche Task Force'' had its origins in the secret White House/NSC apparatus and the anti-LaRouche cabal within it. In early 1982, CIA official Walter Raymond was brought into the NSC to head a government propaganda and disinformation operation known as ``Public Diplomacy.'' Raymond was recommended for this job by George Bush's national security adviser Don Gregg, also a CIA veteran. The ostensible purpose of this apparatus was to organize ``private'' news media support for the secret government projects, such as the Contras and the Afghanistani Mujaheddin. It was described by another official who worked with the group as a ``vast psychological warfare operation.'' Raymond then engineered the creation of an Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean in the State Department, which operated under the direction of a Restricted Interagency Group (RIG) run by Oliver North. In late 1982, Henry Kissinger began writing to FBI Director William Webster to demand an FBI investigation of LaRouche; when the FBI didn't move fast enough, Kissinger's cronies raised the issue at a January 1983 meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which spurred the FBI into action within a matter of weeks. About the same time, Walter Raymond was instrumental in establishing a ``private donors executive committee,'' wealthy businessmen who could be drawn upon to support specific programs of the secret government's covert apparatus, either financially or by placing stories in the news media. One of the first projects of this group was a meeting which took place in April 1983 at the New York apartment of financier John Train. This meeting planned out every significant news media attack on LaRouche over the next few years, beginning with the NBC-TV slanders in January and March of 1984, which set the stage for the subsequent judicial frameup and imprisonment of LaRouche and a number of his associates. The NSC's Roy Godson, the ADL's Mira Boland, and NBC's Patricia Lynch were among the attendees at the Train salon meetings. - Stings and Scams - In August 1984, the Bush-North secret government attempted a clumsy frameup operation against associates of LaRouche, particularly targeting Jeffrey Steinberg, one of the heads of security intelligence for LaRouche. Based on information fed to the CIA by former Army special forces sergeant Fred Lewis and two of his associates, Gary Howard and Ron Tucker, the FBI put out the phony story that Steinberg had a $20 million kitty to finance assassinations of Latin American drug dealers; and it labelled Steinberg a ``terrorist threat''--the same way this same apparatus labelled Jack Terrell less than two years later. Steinberg was then added to the FBI's ``Terrorist Photo Album''--a file of persons and organizations opposed to Reagan administration policies in Central America. This compilation even included U.S. senators and congressmen. The FBI temporarily opened a spurious ``terrorism'' investigation of Steinberg, which had to be dropped in 1985 for lack of any evidence--without Steinberg ever even being informed of this foisted and fraudulent ``investigation.'' The targeting of Steinberg via the phony ``terrorism'' allegation was particularly ironic. He had been one of the principal authors of the 1978 book {Dope, Inc.,} which exposed the role of major financial institutions, eastern and western intelligence agencies, and terrorists, in the world drug trade. The initial contact with Fred Lewis had come as the result of Steinberg's role in arranging the safe escort of a LaRouche associate and leading anti-drug activist from Colombia to the United States following a kidnapping incident. Following the first targeting of Steinberg, the Lewis-Howard-Tucker trio attempted a clumsy scam operation involving Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner. The trio had told relatives of Sakharov and Bonner that they could arrange for them to escape from the Soviet Union, and then Howard approached Steinberg in late 1984 seeking financing for the operation. LaRouche and his associates turned down the request; the FBI subsequently investigated the trio for conducting an ``advance fee scam.'' An FBI document disclosed in 1988 stated that Lewis, Howard, and Tucker ``claimed they had previously been requested by the FBI and CIA to penetrate the LaRouche organization.'' A more precise reading of just who was deploying them is indicated by the fact that Howard and Tucker were part-time deputies for Sheriff Gary Painter in Midland, Texas, where the Bush family oil company, Zapata Oil, is based, and where Sheriff Painter is known to be personally close to George Bush. Howard and Tucker told {The Washington Post} that in 1986 they had met with Bush's chief counsel, C. Boyden Gray. We will meet Fred Lewis again soon, in connection with Oliver North and Richard Secord. - The Frameup Begins - In the autumn of 1984, coordinated with ``Public Diplomacy'' news media attacks, a federal grand jury witchhunt was launched against LaRouche's 1984 presidential campaign organization in Boston. In the fall of 1985, North asked Texas businessman (and reputed CIA contract employee) Phil Mabry to monitor a list of organizations, both ``liberal'' and ``conservative,'' including the LaRouche group. (Mabry said that North had already brought up LaRouche before this.) LaRouche was on Mabry's list of ``conservative groups'' to monitor. His assignment was: ``Keep close watch & discredit, disinfo [disinformation] on all above.'' North also asked Mabry to write to the FBI to ask them to investigate a list of liberal groups opposing U.S. policy in Central America. North told Mabry that he could guarantee results, and that ``[o]ur man Buck will take care of things''--referring to Oliver ``Buck'' Revell, who was the FBI representative on Ollie's Operations Sub-Group. Indeed, Mabry addressed a letter to FBI Director Webster--and he got a reply signed by Buck Revell. Mabry later told {The Boston Globe} that North's technique was the following: ``Ollie told me that if the FBI received letters from five or six unrelated sources, all requesting an investigation of the same groups, that would give the bureau a mandate to go ahead and investigate.'' Meanwhile, associates of LaRouche were in direct competition with Ollie North's private fundraising operations. One notable example is Barbara Newington, one of the largest private contributors to the Contra support operations, who also contributed in the range of $2 million to organizations identified with LaRouche. According to the Walsh Final Report, Mrs. Newington was the second-largest private contributor to North's Contra operations. Two of North's fundraising operatives, Carl ``Spitz'' Channell and Richard Miller, later each pled guilty to a felony, involving illegal use of a tax-exempt organization. According to Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, the private fundraising also was part of the central conspiracy charge against North, which had to be dismissed prior to trial because the Reagan-Bush administration refused to allow the use of classified information in his trial. North's sidekick Channell fed warnings and slanders about LaRouche to Mrs. Newington, and on the weekend of May 3-4, 1986, North and Channell held a weekend outing at her Connecticut estate, after which she soon ceased her ``LaRouche'' contributions. (See Chapter 9.) Mrs. Newington's principal contact among LaRouche's associates was Michael Billington. Billington was viciously targeted by the Get LaRouche Task Force and was indicted three times--two federal indictments, plus the state of Virginia. He is now serving a 77-year sentence in Virginia. - `Our Man Here' - On May 5, 1986, immediately after North's weekend outing at Barbara Newington's estate, Richard Secord sent an encoded message to Oliver North. The message, marked ``Secret,'' included the phrase: ``Our man here claims Lewis has collected info against LaRouche.'' The ``Lewis'' was Fred Lewis, whom we have met before, as the ex-Green Beret who was one of the instigators of the 1984 effort to label Jeffrey Steinberg as a ``terrorist.'' The May 5 message was sent from Secord to North on a KL-43 encryption device. North had improperly obtained these portable devices from the National Security Agency, and distributed them to Secord, Richard Gadd, Felix Rodriguez, and others in his network, enabling them to send messages in a secure manner via telephone lines or radio transmitters from anywhere in the world. Secord was in possession of one of North's illicit NSA encryption machines, and marked his messages as ``Secret,'' even though he was a private citizen and had no classification authority! (That date, May 5, 1986, has already come up in our story: Jack Terrell reported that the May 5, 1986 NPR program on Contra gun-running and drug-smuggling set off a new White House/NSC campaign to silence its enemies.) In May-June 1986, soon after the ``our man here'' message was sent, the federal grand jury investigation of LaRouche's campaign organizations in Boston, which had been languishing for almost two years, was reactivated. The issues behind the growing campaign to frame up and eliminate LaRouche were much bigger than North himself would have known. As we have indicated earlier, Kissinger and Bush, Ollie North's real controllers, understood better, for example, the Soviet demands to eliminate LaRouche, especially after President Reagan adopted LaRouche's proposal for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in March 1983. Using perjured testimony from witnesses provided by the ``Train Salon'' gang, particularly NBC's Pat Lynch, the Boston grand jury issued indictments against 17 organizations and individuals associated with LaRouche on Oct. 6, 1986--including Michael Billington and Jeffrey Steinberg. At the same time, federal and Virginia state and local officials carried out a massive armed raid on offices of LaRouche's associates in Leesburg, Virginia. Standing by during the raid was an armored personnel carrier owned by ARGUS--a Project Doomsday-linked private entity operating in Virginia and other states. The local organizer of the raid was then-Deputy Sheriff Donald L. Moore--the Get LaRouche Task Force's point man in Leesburg--who also had been deputized by the U.S. Marshals. Moore says that he had served as a lieutenant in the same Marine company as Ollie North in Vietnam in 1969, where they were both platoon leaders. (The company, prophetically, was called ``Kilo company.'') (According to court documents, Moore was later diagnosed as suffering from ``Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,'' and was subject to fits of anger, emotional outbursts, and flashbacks, all attributed to his Vietnam experience. Ollie North has similar problems; North was hospitalized in 1974 for psychiatric treatment, after he was found running around naked, babbling incoherently and waving a .45.) - The Leesburg Raid - On Oct. 6, 1986, as more than 400 local, state and federal law enforcement officials carried out an early-morning raid against offices of LaRouche-associated publishing companies in Leesburg, Va., Moore was eager to launch a bloody assault on the farm where LaRouche was staying at the time. In fact, Moore had proposed a plan for the attack on LaRouche's residence. The logistical backup for that support was to be provided by the ARGUS private army apparatus. The attack was called off after LaRouche dispatched a telegram to President Reagan on the evening of Oct. 6, warning of the planned assault. The raid by heavily armed police and FBI agents--backed by helicopters and armored vehicles--against the LaRouche-associated businesses was one of the largest police actions ever carried out in the United States. Another highly irregular feature of the raid was what happened to the two truckloads of documents which were seized by the FBI and other agencies from the publishing companies' offices. Strangely enough, the documents were whisked off to a Marine Corps facility located at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C. The use of the Marine building was arranged through Ollie North's friends in the Pentagon's Special Operations Division. The official request for use of the military facility was sent on Oct. 1, 1986 to Room 2C840 of the Pentagon--the Special Operations Division, then known as the Joint Special Operations Agency (JSOA) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is the Pentagon's CIA-linked center for counter-terrorism operations, which functioned as a deployable asset of the ``crisis management'' apparatus coordinated by North at the NSC. It was also the same office, naturally enough, from which Secord had recruited a number of key personnel for his ``private'' Contra supply operation starting in 1984. The head of the Joint Special Operations Agency, at Room 2C840, was also a member of the NSC Operations Sub-Group, along with North, the FBI's Buck Revell, and the CIA's Charles Allen--all known LaRouche-haters. Two months later, after the Leesburg raid, FBI agents searched Oliver North's own office in connection with the ``Iran-Contra'' investigation. Among the documents in North's safe which had not been shredded, was found a printed copy of the ``our man here'' KL-43 message. It was handed over to special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. - Mistrial in Boston - In early 1988, during the trial of LaRouche, Steinberg, Edward Spannaus, and others in Boston, a copy of the secret Secord-to-North message was obtained by a co-defendant of LaRouche by means of a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request to the special prosecutor's office. Release of the ``our man here'' message blew the LaRouche case in Boston wide open. ``Our man here'' was first identified by federal prosecutors as the FBI's Buck Revell. A few days later, ``our man here'' was re-identified as one John Cupp by government prosecutors. Richard Secord said the same thing in a newspaper interview. Cupp had ``retired'' from the military just a few months before the date of the North-Secord message, and had gone to work for Secord's Contra supply operation, traveling back and forth to Central America. He often worked out of Felix Rodriquez's base at Ilopango. Cupp's last official posting, before joining Secord's operation, had been to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Room 2C840. Most of the last two months of the trial was spent in hearings on classified information and on government misconduct. When the federal task force realized they were losing the case in Boston, they scuttled it. A mistrial was declared in May 1988. The jurors took a poll among themselves, and told {The Boston Herald} that they would have acquitted all defendants on all charges. While vowing to retry the case in Boston, the federal task force was secretly agreed on moving it instead to Alexandria, Va. The federal court there, with the Pentagon and CIA headquarters close by, is the government's favorite venue for trying cases involving the intelligence community and the secret government. Here, federal prosecutors could be certain of ramming through a conviction--by preventing any more evidence on the Bush-Kissinger-North operation from coming out, and by preventing the evidence that the defendants already had from being presented to the jury. Still, Bush's secret government team took no chances. The foreman of the jury which convicted LaRouche along with Mike Billington and five others, was one Buster Horton, identified at the time only as a Department of Agriculture official. Buster Horton, it later turned out, was no ordinary Agriculture Department employee. Government documents subsequently obtained by LaRouche and his defense team showed that Horton had served as one of his agency's representatives on the FEMA ``continuity of government'' committee--alongside Oliver North. -- - Ollie's Buddies in Loudoun County, Virginia - The Bush-North ``secret government'' apparatus extended its tentacles directly into Loudoun County, Virginia, where the publishers of {New Federalist} and associates of Lyndon LaRouche have been headquartered since the mid-1980s. Recently, a number of North's co-conspirators there have come to grief. The Loudoun-based paramilitary organization known as ARGUS (Armored Response Group U.S.) organization, is reported to be a Loudoun component of the FEMA/Doomsday apparatus. ARGUS units were on stand-by during the October 1986 raids in Leesburg, and were ready for the planned bloody assault on Lyndon LaRouche's residence. ARGUS was a product of the same circles that sponsored North's operations. The financing for ARGUS came from some of the same very spooky foundations--such as the Hanes Foundation and the Ohrstrom Foundation--which also funded Carl ``Spitz'' Channell's National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, and PRODEMCA, a ``Project Democracy'' front, both of which were used to funnel ``private'' donations into Ollie North's Contra projects. In June 1992, the Loudoun Board of Supervisors ordered the Sheriff's Department to sever all ties with ARGUS, of which the local sheriff, John Isom, was a founder along with ``Major General'' J.C. Herbert Bryant, Jr., the self-styled ``commander'' of ARGUS. On June 14, 1994, Bryant was indicted by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia. He was charged with impersonating a U.S. marshal and carrying a pistol without a license, and now faces up to nine years in federal prison. The local point man for the Get LaRouche Task Force in the mid- and late-1980s was Loudoun County Sheriff's Deputy Donald Moore--who bragged that he had been in the same unit as Ollie North in Vietnam. Moore testified that he viewed his anti-LaRouche campaign in Loudoun in the same terms as pacification of a ``strategic hamlet'' in Vietnam. In February 1992, Moore was fired from the Sheriff's Department. In September 1992, Moore was arrested along with four accomplices, and charged with conspiracy to kidnap LaRouche associate and du Pont heir Lewis du Pont Smith. Moore escaped conviction only through the intervention of a corrupt judge who rigged a not-guilty verdict. In 1993, one of Moore's accomplices, Galen Kelly, a kidnapper for hire, was convicted for another kidnapping, and was sentenced to over seven years in federal prison. Two other accomplices also entered guilty pleas. Then, on June 3, 1994, Moore pled guilty to a felony in the same kidnapping. On July 29, Moore was sentenced to eight months in prison, two months home confinement, and an additional year of supervision. He was immediately sent off to the Alexandria jail, where he is awaiting transfer to a federal facility. -- - Chapter 9 - - Ollie North's Role in Putting Me in Prison - - And Why He Should Take My Place - - by Michael Billington - {This article first appeared in the national newspaper} The New Federalist,{ Vol. 8, No. 28, Aug. 1, 1994.} As this newspaper has documented, several new ``inside'' witnesses have stepped forward in the past period to reveal the massive flow of drugs which were run under the cover of Col. Oliver North's ``Contra supply'' operation. These crimes, although well-documented, have been virtually blacked out from press coverage. During the period of 1983-1987, I was involved, in collaboration with Lyndon LaRouche and others, in exposing this drug dealing and its sponsorship by the Kissinger-allied banking institutions in New York and London. I was unaware of North's personal role in the drug running until the ``Iran-Contra'' affair broke in October 1986. As I was to learn, however, Lt.-Col. North was {very much} aware of {my} activities during that same period. It is now known that North, working directly under Henry Kissinger and George Bush, was actively involved in the federal-state-private Get LaRouche Task Force, attempting to disrupt, discredit, and, if possible, kill or incarcerate LaRouche, while breaking up his organization. The ultimately successful railroad of LaRouche into prison in 1989 on charges known to be false by everyone involved in the prosecution, also resulted in 11 others being condemned to prison time, either in the federal case or in the parallel case brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. (A New York case is still under appeal.) I received ``special treatment'' in these cases: I was the only one charged in {both} the federal and the Virginia cases, with the Commonwealth and their carefully selected judges turning cartwheels to deny my constitutional protection from double jeopardy. After serving 3 years in a federal prison, I was condemned to 77 years (!) in the Virginia prison system for political activities which were known to be totally within the law, but which were a serious threat to the lawlessness of Bush, North, and their backers. My ``special treatment'' was the result of my personal role in confronting North amongst a layer of conservative, wealthy Americans whom North was organizing to support his covert drug deals under the cover of ``Contra support.'' North was simultaneously using his position as a U.S. government official to discourage Americans from supporting LaRouche's efforts to unite the nations of North and South America behind effective measures to crush the drug trade and the drug armies which were wreaking havoc across Ibero-America. - LaRouche's War on Drugs - Lyndon LaRouche and associates launched a War on Drugs movement in 1978, publishing a magazine by that name. In 1978, LaRouche commissioned the now-famous book {Dope, Inc.} The focus of the campaign was to identify the controllers of the drug business among the British and American banking institutions. Besides the devastation wrought upon the minds of millions of American youth by drugs, the {business} of Dope, Inc. was then providing over $200 billion per year to the U.S. banking system. A national economy which was already close to bankruptcy had become ``drug dependent,'' in the sense that a flow of drug dollars was a major prop to the overextended banking system. To stop drugs, we warned, required joint military collaboration with the nations of Ibero-America, and a crackdown on the U.S. banks which laundered the money. Between 1978 and 1988, I was directly involved in this War on Drugs, including public organizing in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, a campaign for Congress in New York, and fundraising efforts for our publications and our activities. I came to know a number of people who were to become victims of an illegal scam run by North and some of his seedier associates in the Washington neo-conservative circles. In particular, I came to know a woman named Barbara Newington, a widow in her 50's who lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. Barbara Newington had responded enthusiastically to the appeal of the newly founded Schiller Institue, which was headed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the wife of Lyndon LaRouche. The Schiller Institute was dedicated to building a cultural and scientific renaissance as the necessary prerequisite for reversing the ongoing social and economic decay of the western world. Barbara Newington was the primary financial sponsor of the 10,000-strong March on Washington sponsored by the Schiller Instiute on Martin Luther King Day in January of 1985, whose theme was to build the Strategic Defense Initiative, and to use the technologies generated by that process to develop the African continent and the rest of the Third World. Barbara Newington was to become the primary financial sponsor of a series of dramatic developments in our War on Drugs over the course of 1985 and 1986. At some point during early 1985, Oliver North's fundraiser, Carl ``Spitz'' Channell, went to see Mrs. Newington, and began a process of calls, meetings, and arranged trips to Washington intended to persuade her to cut off support for the LaRouche organization and divert the money to the illegal Contra support. U.S. government official and U.S. Marine Colonel Oliver North and his cohort ``Spitz'' Channell lied to Mrs. Newington (and others) that donating money to purchase weapons for the Contras was not only legal, but {tax deductible!} All of this is in the {Congressional Record} from the Iran-Contra hearings. Although North has never publicly admitted his responsibility for the drug trafficking run under his (and George Bush's) direction, he did admit to the illegal arms sales to the Iranian terrorist regime, supposedly in exchange for hostages, and the use of the proceeds of those sales to supply the Contras. North describes this illegal diversion of funds as a ``neat idea.'' Throughout 1985 and 1986 I was in regular contact with Barbara Newington, briefing her on various projects and arranging briefings with others who were coordinating these projects, both within the U.S.A. and in Ibero-America. - The Cover Story - In 1985, the LaRouche-associated weekly magazine {Executive Intelligence Review} began to document that, under the cover of fighting communism, the Contra apparatus, including its pilots, logistical capabilities on the ground, and so forth, was fully integrated into the Medellin-based regional cocaine trade. Although Newington was aware of Henry Kissinger's leading role in Central America, due to his appointment in 1983 as head of the U.S. Commission on Central America, she was hesitant to accept the mounting evidence that the Contra-support controversy in the press--both pro and con--was orchestrated to divert attention from the necessary continent-wide fight against narcoterrorism. Although she discussed with me the general content of what she was being told by Spitz Channell, she had been instructed not to mention North, nor the fact that the Contra support was being passed off as a U.S. government-approved policy. The Contras would ``draw the line on communism,'' she was told, and worrying about drugs or narcoterrorism elsewhere would only divert attention from the courageous Contras. Barbara Newington eventually turned over several million dollars to North's scam. Whether that money ever made it to the Contras is not known, although the ``fundraisers'' admitted to Congress that they took a large chunk for their ``services.'' As was subsequently revealed in the ``Iran'' side of the Iran-Contra deal, far larger amounts of money were being obtained from the Ayatollahs and diverted for the Contras, than the few millions contributed by wealthy Americans. The point is that North's work with Mrs. Newington and dozens of other leading sponsors of conservative causes was not simply for the money, but to win conservative support for a policy of collaboration with drug-runners and terrorists, while parading as patriots, and, in the process, to use the aura of official government authority to wage financial warfare against LaRouche's privately financed efforts. North's activities were at all times carried out in close collaboration with other members of the Get LaRouche Task Force. - Why Kissinger Hates Us - A brief review of the extraordinary developments on several fronts of the {real} War on Drugs during 1985 and 1986, and our critical role in these developments, will clarify why Kissinger and his controllers in New York and London (as well as their boy Ollie) were so intent on sabotaging our work and throwing us into prison. In 1982, in response to requests from prominent politicians and economists associated with the government of President Jose Lopez Portillo in Mexico, Lyndon LaRouche wrote a program for the development of the Americas, called ``Operation Juarez.'' LaRouche proposed that the nations of Ibero-America create an alliance of sovereign nations in order to deal with common issues in a united way. These common issues included the debt crisis, which had just reached an explosion point, as well as the {international} apparatus that ran the drug business in each nation, and the threat of the terrorist armies, which were connected to that business. Most important, LaRouche proposed continent-wide infrastructure development for the Americas as a whole, especially in energy and transporation. This was presented as the prerequisite for building strong national economies, free of the devastating ``conditionalities'' being imposed by the International Monetary Fund which were rapidly destroying the productive potential of every Ibero-American nation. LaRouche insisted that such a policy would also contribute to a recovery of the U.S. economy by providing export markets for high-technology industrial production, but that Ibero-America must be prepared to go it alone if the U.S.A. chose to follow the IMF/Kissinger policy. Between 1982 and 1985, the ``Operation Juarez'' proposal gathered support from nationalist leaders across Ibero-America, who recognized the urgent need to launch aggressive development policies in league with their neighbors. However, it became increasingly clear that one of the greatest threats to these efforts was the enormous economic and military power of the drug cartels. LaRouche called for a Spanish language edition of {Dope, Inc.} to be prepared as ammunition for the War on Drugs in Ibero-America. In January of 1985, {Narcotrafico, S.A.} was published, dedicated to Colombia's ex-Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, who had been gunned down by the drug armies in April 1984. (Lara Bonilla had met on various occasions with LaRouche's associates in Colombia, including Max Londono, and had personally expressed concern over threats against Londono from the drug cartels). Barbara Newington was again an enthusiastic sponsor of the Spanish-language book and the various conferences held to release the book in Ibero-America. The reaction to the book was electric. Tens of thousands of copies spread rapidly throughout Ibero-America, while newspapers carried extensive coverage of the charges and documentation of the Kissinger-allied banking families ``above suspicion'' who actually ran and protected the drug trade. A leading Peruvian paper serialized the book. Those exposed also reacted swiftly. Within weeks, in Venezuela, the powerful Cisneros clan, obtained a pliant judge who banned the book in Venezuela and jailed the local representatives of the publisher, who were later deported from the country. It was the first book to be banned in democratic Venezuela since the 1950s. A high official in the Venezuelan government had been preparing to cosponsor a conference with {Executive Intelligence Review} to announce the release of the book, when Cisneros made his move. In Peru in mid 1986, Manuel Ulloa, the former prime minister and another Rockefeller business buddy, brought a suit for slander over the documentation in {Narcotrafico, S.A.} that Ulloa's pro-IMF economic policies had led to an expansion of the drug trade in Peru. Ulloa lost the suit, and a subsequent appeal. In July 1985, a new President of Peru took office. Alan Garcia, who shocked the world by declaring in his inaugural address an all-out war on drugs, linked to a rejection of the debt collection conditions of the IMF. The LaRouche-linked Schiller Institute and the{ Executive Intelligence Review} (EIR) mobilized support for the Peruvian President throughout the world, while proposing that these steps become the impetus toward uniting Ibero-American policy along the lines of LaRouche's ``Operation Juarez.'' In July of 1985, a conference was held in Mexico of trade union leaders from various Ibero-American nations, forming a Schiller Institute Ibero-American Trade Union Commission (COSIIS). This commission became the kernel of an Ibero-American-wide alliance of political, military, trade union, and church leaders committed to the integration of the Ibero-American economies, a joint war on drugs, and joint debt negotiations with the IMF. When Alan Garcia was inaugurated in July of 1985, he appointed one of the Peruvian members of the COSIIS, Juan Rebaza, to a government post, and later to a cabinet position. In August of that same year, a Colombian friend of the COSIIS, Jorge Carrillo, was appointed minister of labor in his country. He subsequently appointed LaRouche associate Max Londono, as his adviser. When the narco-terrorist M-19 seized the Colombian Justice Palace in November of 1985, killing 11 supreme court justices and burning all files related to drug cases, Carrillo and other members of the cabinet stood firm behind President Belisario Betancur and the Colombian military in suppressing the rebellion and preventing the fall of Colombia to the direct control of the drug cartels at that time. A delegation of COSIIS members from various countries travelled to Peru in August 1986, to meet with President Garcia. They presented him with another book published by the Schiller Institute, called {La Integracion Iberoamericana,} on LaRouche's proposed economic policy for Ibero-America. Together with {Narcotrafico, S.A.}, this book became the programmatic link among nationalist forces across the Americas that were determined to destroy the scourge of drugs and unleash the productive potential of the Ibero-American nations. In Guatemala, during the course of 1985, the authors of {Dope, Inc.} helped bring together nationalist Guatemalan military leaders committed to a serious war on drugs, with private U.S. citizens with access to U.S. officials also involved in combatting drugs. A proposal made by LaRouche for U.S./Guatemalan intelligence and related cooperation in anti-drug deployments was approved and successfully carried out in one specific case, under the code name GUATUSA. The spread of LaRouche's ideas across Ibero-America, including into Bolivia, led the head of the anti-drug efforts in that nation, Gen. Lucio Anez, to write the following for publication: ``The war on drugs by Lyndon LaRouche, as a war, is the only adequate approach to face that problem. It is from that standpoint that collaboration between the United States and Latin America should proceed.'' Gen. Anez travelled to the U.S. in 1988 to testify on behalf of the LaRouche defendants in our federal trial in Alexandria, Virginia. - Chronology of Crimes - Taken as a whole, the influence of LaRouche in Ibero-America during 1985 and 1986 reached a critical point, such that the successful crushing of the drug cartels and their international banking sponsors became a real possibility. It was this potential which motivated Barbara Newington to provide critical financial support to virtually every step of the unfolding process. Throughout the U.S.A., citizens who had followed LaRouche began to sense that his intelligence had been accurate and that his method worked. In March of 1986, two LaRouche supporters won statewide primary elections in Illinois, campaigning heavily on the War on Drugs platform. Kissinger and the Get LaRouche Task Force escalated efforts following the Illinois election victories, with North playing a key role. The following is a partial grid of North's role against LaRouche between 1983 and 1986: {July 1983}: North becomes the liaison between the National Security Council (NSC) and Kissinger's Commission onf Central America. {October 1983}: North accompanies Kissinger on a visit to Central America. {January 1984}: North helps draft the official report for Kissinger's Commission. {Summer 1984}: North begins his role in the Contra supply operation. {March 1984}: LaRouche writes to President Reagan, warning him of the dangers inherent in following Kisisnger's proposed policies in Central America. North intervened to recommend that the letter {not} be answered, saying that LaRouche ould ``probably use such a response irresponsibly.'' {Spring 1984}: Kissinger intervenes with the Marine Corps to extend North's position at the NSC. {Spring 1985}: ``Spitz'' Channell, the leading fundraiser for North's ``Enterprise'' front, appeals to Barbara Newington to finance the Contra supply effort, and slanders LaRouche, discouraging her from supporting LaRouche-connected activities. {Jan. 13, 1986}: North's notebook entry: ``Kissinger re;Int'l fundraising mtg w/Spitz - Dave Fisher - CALL! Special event for Barbara.'' Fisher was Channell's partner and reputed lover. {May 3-4, 1986}: North and his wife, together with Channell and his friend Dave Fisher, spend the weekend at Mrs. Newington's estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. Mrs. Newington's congressional testimony during the Iran-Contra hearings revealed that when she questioned North about the ``others'' who were soliciting her support for anti-drug and anti-subversive operations in Ibero-America, North personally instructed her to divert all her support to Channell and Fisher. North also arranged for a ``sweep'' of Newington's phone, supposedly to check against taps by unnamed enemies. It is at least likely that North was more interested in {placing} a tap on her phone, with which he could monitor the frequent briefings that I and my associates gave Mrs. Newington concerning our many activities. That North was actively engaged in such spying and disruption of LaRouche-related activities was proven by an encoded message North received the following day, May 5. {May 5, 1986}: North cohort Richard Second, using an encryption device illegally provided to him by North, wrote to North that ``our man here claims Lewis has collected info against LaRouche. Let's see how polygraph goes.'' The memo was found in North's safe by special Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. (``Lewis'' was Fred Lewis, an intelligence stringer who had been active in other covert operations against LaRouche associates involved in the War on Drugs.) {Summer 1986}: Barbara Newington's support for LaRouche-related activities fell off sharply, although she continued occasional, smaller contributions until her role in the North scam became public. {Oct. 6, 1986}: massive government raid on the Leesburg, Virginia headquarters of our organization and on several regional offices in other states. I was arrested in Leesburg, together with two members of our security staff who had written portions of {Dope, Inc.} This was the first of {four} different arrests I experienced in Leesburg over the following two years, all related to the same organizing and fundraising activities. The local officer overseeing the various cases was Sheriff's Deputy Don Moore, Ollie North's alleged tentmate in Vietnam. Moore took particular delight in personally arresting me on one occasion, parading himself before the cameras with me in handcuffs. (Moore later ran a kidnapping attempting against an associate of LaRouche, and has been convicted of complicity in yet another kidnapping.) {Every aspect} of our documentation of the drug-running and other crimes of the Bush/North ``secret government'' apparatus has been substantiated by subsequent revelations and confessions of those involved. Those Americans--nd especially those Virginians--who are horrified by the effect of drugs in the destruction of our nation, must demand that Oliver North answer for his role in that destruction, and must also demand the full exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, myself, and my other associates who are being held as political prisoners for the ``crime'' of fighting for justice for our nation and for the world. (This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the Radio Free Michigan site by the archive maintainer. Protection of Individual Rights and Liberties. E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu)