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Howdy, little cats. Here is an article on the US war on drugs written by Peter Dale Scott last year: Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection. Humans may find here an entry into real life US politics and cats will find lots of names.

Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection

Peter Dale Scott

August 17, 2008

Recently I published two articles pointing to suggestive similarities between
the recurring deep events in recent American history — those events which,
because of their intelligence aspects, are ignored, misrepresented, or covered
up in the American media. The first article pointed to overall similarities
in many deep events since World War II. The second pointed to surprising points
of comparison in the two deep events which were followed shortly by major U.S.
wars: the John F. Kennedy assassination and 9/11. In the background of all these
events, I suggested, was recurring evidence of the milieu “combining intelligence
officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld.”¹

In
this essay I shall first attempt to lay out the complex geography or
network of that milieu, which I call the global drug connection, and
its connections to what has been called an “alternative”
or “shadow” CIA. I shall then show how this network, of
banks, financial agents of influence, and the alternative CIA,
contributed to the infrastructure of the Kennedy assassination and a
series of other, superficially unrelated, major deep events.

In this narrative, the
names of individuals, their institutions, and their connections are
relatively unimportant. What matters is to see that such a milieu
existed; that it was on-going, well-connected, and protected; and
that, with increasing independence from governmental restraint, it
played a role in major deep events in the last half century.

This
of course strengthens the important hypothesis to be investigated,
that this on-going milieu may also have contributed to the disaster
of 9/11.

Paul Helliwell, OPC,
and the CIA

In areas where Communist forces have appeared strong, the United States, at least
since 1945, has resorted repeatedly to supportive counterviolence from mobsters
involved in the drug traffic. At first, as in post-war Italy, these arrangements
were temporary and ad hoc, as when Vito Genovese, a New York mafia leader,
was installed as interpreter in the Allied Military Government office of Col.
Charles Poletti, a former New York Tammany politician.²
Then in 1947 William Donovan, now a corporate lawyer and no longer the head of
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), reportedly financed a May Day massacre
of leftists in Sicily, organized by the recently deported Detroit mafia figure
Frank Coppola.³

Such arrangements
became more centralized in 1948, after the newly created National
Security Council created an Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) to
carry out “subversion against hostile states” –
i.e., conduct law-breaking as national policy. Thanks to OPC, the
U.S. began giving significant covert support to organized
drug-traffickers around the world, in the Far East, Europe, and
eventually the Middle East and Latin America.

These world-wide activities became more and more inter-related. Since at
least 1950 there has been a global CIA-drug connection operating more
or less continuously. Especially with the passage of time, this
connection has contributed to unexplained deep events and the
consolidation of the global dominance mentality, at home as well as
abroad. More specifically, the global drug connection is a factor
underlying such unexplained deep events as the JFK assassination, the
second Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, and Iran-Contra.

The global drug connection is not just a lateral connection between CIA
field operatives and their drug-trafficking contacts. It is more
significantly a global financial complex of hot money uniting
prominent business, financial and government as well as underworld
figures. It maintains its own political influence by the systematic
supply of illicit finances, favors and even sex to politicians around
the world, including leaders of both parties in the United States.
The result is a system that might be called indirect empire, one
that, in its search for foreign markets and resources, is satisfied
to subvert existing governance without imposing a progressive
alternative.

One significant organizer of the post-war global drug connection –
between CIA, organized crime, and their mutual interest in
drug-trafficking — was former OSS officer Paul L.E. Helliwell.
Helliwell, who was head of the Special Intelligence
branch of OSS in Kunming, and later an officer of OPC and the
CIA, was simultaneously the owner of the Bank of Perrine in Key West,
Florida, “a two-time laundromat for the Lansky mob and the
CIA,” and its sister Bank of Cutler Ridge.⁴
Here we shall see a number of interrelated mob-CIA money-laundering
banks in the global drug connection, of which the greatest was
undoubtedly the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

Most people have never heard of Paul Helliwell. Mainstream books about CIA
wrongdoings, like Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, make no
mention of him, of his important CIA-related bank, Castle Bank in the
Bahamas, or for that matter of an even more important successor bank
to Castle, BCCI. In the flood of CIA documents released since 1992,
one does not find the name of Helliwell in the archival indices of
the National Archive, the National Security Archive, or the
Federation of American Scientists. In the million declassified pages
stored and indexed on the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation,
Helliwell’s name appears exactly once — and that is on a
list of documents that were withheld from review during the
CIA’s search in 1974 for records concerning, of all things,
Watergate!⁵

This silence, even in internal CIA files, about the principal
architect of the post-war CIA-drug connection, is eloquent.

Most of what we know about Helliwell derives from the press reaction to
the successful CIA effort to block an IRS investigation in the 1970s,
known as Operation Tradewinds, of his money-laundering banks. This
struggle with Helliwell and the CIA began in 1972, when IRS
investigator Richard Jaffe, tracing the funds of arrested marijuana
and LSD dealer Allan George Palmer, learned that Palmer “had
personally brought some of his money south to the Perrine-Cutler
Ridge Bank for deposit.”⁶

Jaffe learned also that the funds had been deposited in the account of a
Bahamian entity called Castle Bank. According to Jim Drinkhall in the
Wall Street Journal, this bank was “set up and
principally controlled” by Helliwell, who “was
instrumental in helping to direct a network of CIA undercover
operations and ‘proprietaries.’”⁷
Drinkhall wrote that the CIA shut down Jaffe’s investigation of
the Castle Bank because Castle

was the conduit for millions of dollars earmarked by the CIA for the
funding of clandestine operations against Cuba and for other covert
intelligence operations directed at countries in Latin America and
the Far East.⁸

Drinkhall further noted what Helliwell is probably most famous for (and what I have written
about in The War Conspiracy):

In 1951, Mr. Helliwell helped set up and run Sea Supply Corp., a concern
controlled by the CIA as a front. For almost 10 years, Sea Supply was
used to supply huge amounts of weapons and equipment to 10,000
Nationalist Chinese [KMT] troops in Burma as well as to Thailand’s
police.⁹

But Drinkhall did not point out what is now not disputed, that both the KMT troops in Burma
and the Thai Police were the two main arms of the CIA-KMT-Burma-Thai
drug connection, and were involved together in the growth and
trafficking of opium for the world market, including the United
States.¹⁰

Helliwell’s favors for the CIA were not restricted to the Far East. Along with
two old associates from the KMT-Burma drug connection, Frank Wisner
of the CIA and General Claire Chennault of the CIA’s airline
CAT, Helliwell “also worked CIA operations in Central America
as early as 1953-54. In those days, the target was Guatemala and its
government.”¹¹

Like Chennault and his old associates from his days in China, Whiting
Willauer and William Pawley, Helliwell then assisted the CIA in
operations against Guatemala in 1954, and after 1960 against Castro.
According to Drinkhall,

One former federal official who helped scrutinize Castle says, “Castle
was one of the CIA’s finance channels for operations against
Cuba.” Mr. Helliwell reputedly was one of the paymasters for
the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, as well as for other
“extensive” CIA operations throughout Latin America.¹²

As for ex-convict Wallace Groves’ connection to the CIA, a number
of CIA documents have since been released that confirm this
relationship. According to one of them,

The Wallace GROVES, mentioned in the attachments as being connected with
Meyer LANSKY and the Mary Carter Paint Co./Resorts International,
Inc., is identical with the Wallace GROVES who is the subject of OS
file #473 865. This file reflects that from April 1966 to April 1972,
GROVES was of interest to the [CIA] Office of General Counsel for the
utilization of GROVES as an advisor or possible officer of one of the
Project ???? entities. Additional information
in this file would suggest that GROVES was connected with Meyer
LANSKY.¹³

I suspect that these “Project ???? entities” involved the use of off-the-books funds not included in the authorized CIA budget.

Helliwell’s Connection to Off-the-Books Operations

Since the publication of Drinkhall’s article, almost every reference
to Helliwell has described him as a paymaster for the Bay of Pigs, a
claim which I am about to question. But a sense of the scale of
Helliwell’s financial involvement with the CIA can be gathered
from the CIA’s sequestering of almost $5 million from another
Helliwell-related entity, Intercontinental Diversified (I.D.C.).
Drinkhall again:

Although there is no reference to the CIA in the SEC proceeding concerning
Intercontinental, a former CIA official in a recent interview made an astonishing
statement. He said that between 1970 and 1976, almost $5 million of Intercontinental
funds was siphoned out for the agency’s use “because we had friends there.”
Indeed the CIA apparently had a better arrangement than mere friendship. CIA
documents show that Wallace Groves, the founder of Intercontinental and holder
of 46% of its shares until he sold his interest for $33.1 million in 1978, was
secretly working for the CIA from 1965 to 1972.

Assuredly bankers do not transfer millions of dollars out of friendship. A
more credible speculation is that Helliwell was the paymaster, not for officially
authorized operations such as the Bay of Pigs, but for dispensing some of the
funds from off-the-books operations such as the KMT drug traffic out of Burma
supported by his own creations, the CIA proprietaries Sea Supply and Cat Inc.
(later Air America).

Jonathan Marshall once wrote categorically that “Helliwell laundered CIA
funds through the Bahamas-based Castle Bank.”¹⁴

But this claim may require clarification. I.D.C. was a spinoff from
an Asian company, Benguet Mining, that was represented by Helliwell’s
firm and partly owned by the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.¹⁵
Thus payments from Asia reached I.D.C., and it is my speculation that
it was these off-the-books funds, rather than funds from the
congressionally authorized CIA budget, that were used by Helliwell to
finance off-the-books operations.¹⁶

One of these may have been political payoffs, starting in the Bahamas
itself.

In the early 1970s, IRS agents reported evidence, gleaned from taped
conversations, that Intercontinental, operating through Castle Bank,
had paid Bahamas Prime Minister Lyndon O. Pindling $100,000 to grant
the holding company a two-year extension of its [Grand Bahama] casino
gambling license.¹⁷

But the CIA as well as the casino had a penchant for corruption, and Castle was only one
part of a network of banks and agents corrupting governments
worldwide. Thus Castle

also did mysterious transactions with a Cayman Islands firm, ID Corp. ID’s
sole owner, the American Shig Katayama, became know as one of the key
facilitators of Lockheed Corp.’s huge payoffs to Japanese
politicians in return for airplane contracts. Of Katayama one
Japanese journalist charged, “his real job (in the early 1950s)
was to handle narcotics for the U.S. intelligence work.”¹⁸

By the 1960s if not earlier, the CIA was using its global connection to
distribute non-governmental funds through agents of influence like
Adnan Khashoggi and Yoshio Kodama, in the form, for example, of
payoffs added into international Lockheed sales contracts.¹⁹
In May 1965, five months before the anti-Sukarno coup of September
1965, Lockheed payoffs in Indonesia were redirected from a supporter
of President Sukarno to a new middleman who was backing the
anti-Sukarno General Suharto.²⁰

This was at a time when “Congress had agreed to treat U.S. funding
of the Indonesian military (unlike aid to any other country) as a
covert matter, restricting congressional review of the president’s
determinations on Indonesian aid to two Senate committees, and the
House Speaker, who were concurrently involved in oversight of the
CIA.^” Thus, Lockheed payments passed through
middlemen were used to frustrate the expressed will of the U.S.
Senate, which passed a resolution to cut off military aid to
Indonesia altogether.²¹

Helliwell’s Connections to the Mob

But if Helliwell’s CIA connections were big-time, his connections
to the mob, and particularly Meyer Lansky, were no less so. The Bank
of Perrine was the preferred depository of Lansky funds reaching
America from the Bank of World Commerce in the Bahamas, established
by Lansky’s point man John Pullman in 1961.²²
One of the bank’s directors was Alvin Malnik, Lansky’s
heir in Miami Beach, and a stockholder was Ed Levinson, a business
partner of Lyndon Johnson’s Senate aide Bobby Baker, whose
title, before he was arrested and convicted for tax evasion, was the
Secretary of the Democratic Majority in the U.S. Senate.²³
Helliwell had a second Lansky connection as legal counsel for the
small Miami National Bank, used by Meyer Lansky to launder his
foreign profits and skim from the Las Vegas casinos.²⁴

Though usually described as a mob bank controlled by Lansky, the Bank of
World Commerce opened on to an international scene in which the CIA
had an interest. Funds reached it from the International Credit Bank
in Switzerland, which had been founded by the Israeli gunrunner Tibor
Rosenbaum, and acted

as banker to joint business ventures of European Jews and the state of
Israel. But it also financed the acquisition and movement of weapons
to Israel and its allies, particularly in Africa and central America,
and reputedly acted as paymaster for Mossad, the Israeli secret
service, in Europe.²⁵

According to Alan Block, Pullman’s bank had another subsidiary in the Bahamas, “united in some shadowy way with Intra Bank in Beirut,
Lebanon.” Intra owned the Casino de Liban, “whose gambling concession was controlled
by Marcel Paul Francisi, France’s top heroin dealer. Some investigators were
convinced that Lansky and Francisi were partners in heroin racketeering, and
that Lansky and his associates had a piece of the casino as well.”²⁶
Francisi in turn teamed with a local Lebanese exporter of morphine base, Sami
El Khoury, who in turn had “a long-term business relationship”
with Lucky Luciano in Sicily, Lansky’s pre-war ally in New York City
and now a major European trafficker.²⁷

Sami El Khoury had protection from the Lebanese
police, and possibly the CIA as well. Alfred McCoy saw official correspondence
of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) discussing, in August 1963, “whether
to use Sami El Khoury as an informant now that he had been released from prison.”²⁸
One of the two FBN correspondents, Dennis Dayle, later told James Mills that
El Khoury, “among the top international traffickers of all time,” did become
an informant.²⁹
And in the 1990s Dennis Dayle, having retired as a top DEA investigator in the
Middle East, told an anti-drug conference that “in my 30-year history in the
Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my
investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”³⁰

The
Castle Bank was yet another “dual purpose laundromat”
serving both the CIA and the mob. The mob’s interest in Castle
was seriously understated in Jim Drinkhall’s Wall Street
Journal article, which mentioned only that among a lengthy list
of account holders at Castle were “three men — Morris
Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, and Samuel A. Tucker — who have been
described in Justice Department documents as organized crime
figures.”³¹
(Kleinman and Helliwell had numerous real estate investments in
common with Burton Kanter, the Chicago lawyer who with Helliwell
organized Castle Bank.)³²

Alan Block suggests
that in fact Castle became an active bank when it was necessary
rapidly to transfer funds from Mercantile Bank and Trust in the
Bahamas, another Helliwell bank that, “like Castle…was a
conduit for CIA money,”³³
and was about to go under. The funds were moved “at the
vigorous urging” of Kanter,

because
among the accounts in peril was one held by Morris Kleinman, a
notorious organized crime figure since the days of Prohibition. On
this matter, Castle’s president, Sam Pierson…stated it
had to be done or “Kanter will end up face down in the Chicago
River.”³⁴

Kanter
seems to have specialized in handling the tax aspects of legitimating
mob wealth. In addition to founding Castle Bank with Helliwell, he
was “energetically at work in California” on the La Costa
real estate development, which also involved former Cleveland
syndicate member Moe Dalitz, “a part owner of several gambling
casinos, including the Desert Inn and the Stardust Hotel.”³⁵
Block links Kanter to La Costa’s ability to receive major
funding from the corrupt Teamsters Central States Pension Fund:
“Kanter’s access to the Pension Fund likely came from
Allen Dorfman, a friend and business associate. Murdered in 1985 to
prevent him from talking about mob investments, Dorfman was an
important Fund official and racketeer.”³⁶

The CIA, the Mob, and Off-the-Books Operations

Helliwell was
not the only CIA connection to the mafia, nor the most highly placed.
Plots to assassinate Castro in 1960 were initiated from the CIA’s
Office of Security through a go-between, Robert Maheu, whose
independent business had been launched with the help of an Office of
Security retainer. It was Maheu who transmitted the CIA assassination
proposal to John Roselli.³⁷

A more on-going
relationship to the mob was maintained by the CIA’s
Counterintelligence (CI) Staff Chief, James Angleton. He too used a
go-between–the New York lawyer Mario Brod–who, according to a CIA
memo, was a CI Staff agent in New York City from 1952 to 1971.³⁸
One of the sensitive CI Staff agents handled by Brod in New York was
Jay Lovestone, the AFL-CIO International Affairs Chief who
transmitted funds to strong-arm gangs in Marseille allied with
Corsican drug traffickers who were part of the Lansky-Luciano global
drug connection.³⁹

According to Doug
Valentine, Lovestone’s assistant Irving Brown was implicated in
drug smuggling activities in Europe, at the same time that he used
CIA money to establish

a
“compatible left” labor union in Marseilles with Pierre
Ferri-Pisani. On behalf of Brown and the CIA, Ferri-Pisani (a drug
smuggler connected with Marseilles crime lord Antoine Guerini), hired
goons to shellack striking Communist dock workers.⁴⁰

Lovestone,
a former Communist turned militant anti-Communist, together with his
mentor David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment
Workers’ Union, had also fought the creation of the more
militant CIO union movement in the 1930s, and the United Auto Workers
of Walter and Victor Reuther in particular.⁴¹
The rival UAW-AFL, which Lovestone favored, turned to mobsters for
muscle, and hired as its New York regional director John Dioguardi, a
member of the Lucchese mafia family.⁴²
Dioguardi was later blamed by U.S. Attorney Paul Williams for the
blinding of labor journalist Victor Riesel and the subsequent murder
of the man who threw acid in Riesel’s face.⁴³

Another sensitive
agent handled by CI Staff agent Brod, Angleton’s go-between
with the mob, was the Russian defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, whom
Angleton segregated from the regular CIA bureaucracy in his unending
search for a high-level mole inside the CIA. Angleton (according to
his biographer Tom Mangold) was “quietly building an
alternative CIA,” with its own communication system, archive,
and vault, using very dubious information from Lovestone and
Golitsyn. The heart of this alternative CIA was CI’s “inner
sanctum: the super-secret Special Investigation Group”
(CI/SIG), where were assembled files to show that Henry Kissinger and
Averell Harriman were possible KGB moles.⁴⁴

A
third sensitive agent handled by Brod was Herbert Itkin, a
controversial double agent working with the mob on the one hand, and
CIA and FBI on the other. But like Itkin, Brod himself “had
contacts with the Mafia.”⁴⁵
A CIA flap occurred in 1970 when Itkin was being used by the Justice
Department and FBI to prosecute a number of mob figures with one-time
connections to Havana, such as James Plumeri, Ed Lanzieri, and Sam
Mannarino, for illegal kickback arrangements with the Teamsters. The
U.S. Attorney telephoned the CIA’s Legal Counsel to advise that
Mario Brod had entered the courtroom in order to work with the
defense.⁴⁶

According
to Court records, “The defense sought to call Mario Brod, who
was described as Itkin’s contact with the Central Intelligence
Agency. It was stated that Brod would testify that he would not
believe Itkin under oath and that Itkin’s reputation for truthfulness
was bad.”⁴⁷
The CIA’s Legal Counsel concurred with the U.S. Attorney’s
steps to block Brod from testifying. His office noted Brod’s
explanation of his behavior for the record: “One of the
defendants by the name of Lenzieri [(sic), i.e., Edward the Buff
Lanzieri] was Brod’s only contact inside the Mafia who would
alert Brod if he was in personal danger.”⁴⁸

But
Brod may have been acting out of more than self-interest, for it has
been suggested that some of the mafia defendants in the kickback
trials also had a deeper CIA connection, even if off the books.
According to Dan Moldea, two of the defendants, John La Rocca and Gabriel Mannarino, had been involved in Cuban gunrunning operations
with Hoffa; and he suggests that Hoffa persuaded La Rocca and
Mannarino, along with two other kickback defendants (Salvatore
Granello and James “Jimmy Doyle” Plumeri), “to
cooperate with the agency.”⁴⁹

Moreover, all of the defendants in the kickback trials where Itkin
testified, and Brod tried to intervene for the defense, were members
of so-called “paper locals” in the Teamsters (and earlier
the UAW-AFL), controlled by Plumeri’s nephew, John Dioguardi.

In
June 1975, six months after the leak about Angleton and Operation
CHAOS that led to Angleton’s ouster, Time magazine
alleged that the CIA had used Brod’s mafia contacts, Plumeri
and Granello, “to do some spying in Cuba in preparation for the
1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.”⁵⁰
(I have found no corroboration for Time’s claim in
released CIA documents.)

Like
Brod, Angleton himself allegedly had mafia contacts, and on at least
one occasion intervened to prevent another part of the CIA from
investigating the banking of illegal Lansky skim from Las Vegas. A
senior official in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department asked
John Whitten, the CIA’s one time chief of the Mexico/Panama
desk in Western Hemisphere Division, to investigate numbered bank
accounts in Panama because Las Vegas gamblers were using them to
smuggle cash, “which they skimmed off the top of their daily
take.” Using his CIA pseudonym “John Scelso,”
Whitten testified to the Church Committee about Angleton’s
actions.

At
that time we were in an excellent position to do this…. I
thought it was a great idea. And promptly this came to Mr. Angleton’s
attention, and we had to brief him on it, and he said, well, we’re
not going to have anything to do with this. This is the Bureau’s
[FBI’s] business. And whammo, end of conversation. We were
called off. I went to Colonel J.C. King, who was at that time the
Chief of the WH Division, and told him this, and J.C. King
said….well, you know, Angleton has these ties to the Mafia,
and he is not going to do anything to jeopardize them. And then I
said, I didn’t know that. And he said, yeah, it had to do with
Cuba.⁵¹

Angleton’s defense of Lansky’s skim cannot be separated from his second function
in the CIA, as handler of the Israel desk. Angleton’s connections with Mossad
dated back to World War II, when he had coordinated OSS operations in Italy
with the Jewish underground headed locally by Teddy Kollek (later Israel’s Mayor
of Jerusalem).⁵²

Angleton’s “Alternative CIA” and Its Legacy

Moreover CI/SIG, the “inner sanctum” of Angleton’s
“alternative CIA,” affected U.S. history significantly in
1963. Its so-called 201 or “personality” file on “Lee
Henry Oswald” (the man known to the world as Lee Harvey
Oswald), had been filled with false and falsified information since
it was opened in December 1960. And two messages in the 201 file were
falsified again in October 1963, in such a way as to allow Oswald to
be a credible “designated suspect” in the assassination
of John F. Kennedy one month later.⁵³

The
falsification of Oswald’s 201 file may have originated as a
legitimate counterintelligence operation. I have argued that the
uniquely falsified messages were part of a so-called “marked
card” or “barium meal” test to determine if and

where leaks of sensitive information were occurring. This was a
familiar technique, and was the responsibility of the CI/SIG, which
was responsible for the 201 file.⁵⁴

But
by October 1963 we see signs that CIA cables on Oswald were also
being manipulated, in order to enable him to become a designated
suspect in the November 22 assassination of President Kennedy. A CIA
teletype to the FBI in October 1963 (drafted by a CI/SIG officer)
withheld the obviously significant information that Oswald had
reportedly met in Mexico City with a Soviet Vice-Consul, Valeriy
Kostikov, believed by CIA officers to be an officer of the KGB.⁵⁵
This withholding helped ensure that Oswald would not be subjected to
surveillance by the FBI after the alleged encounter, surveillance
which presumably could have limited his ability to become a
designated suspect by his presence at a particularly sensitive corner
in Kennedy’s Dallas parade route. I have argued that similar
CIA withholding from the FBI of information about two alleged 9/11
hijackers, Nawaz al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdar, likewise made it
possible for them to play the role of designated suspects by
preventing FBI surveillance, as well.⁵⁶

CIA
Director William Colby forced Angleton to resign from the CIA in the
post-Watergate climate of December 1974, following public revelations
about Angleton’s involvement in the CIA’s possibly
illegal Operation CHAOS (the surveillance of Americans in the United
States). This spelled the end of Angleton’s “alternative
CIA” in the Counterintelligence Staff. For about another year
leaks like the one we saw about CIA links to Brod’s mobsters
continued to expose (and in this way help terminate) the morass of
CIA links to Cuban exile terrorists and other members of the global
drug connection.

But
in 1976 the climate changed dramatically, after Donald Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney in the so-called “Halloween massacre”
(managed from President Ford’s White House) replaced CIA
Director Colby with George H.W. Bush, and sent Rumsfeld from the
White House to be Secretary of Defense. If 1975 was the
post-Watergate year of dramatic disclosures about CIA involvement
with Cuban exiles and mobsters in assassination efforts, 1976 was the
year in which mob-connected Cuban exiles and the Chilean intelligence
agency DINA, both involved in drug trafficking, indulged in a wave of
terrorist killings. These included the blowing up of a civilian Air
Cubana airliner and the assassination in Washington of former Chilean
foreign minister Orlando Letelier.⁵⁷

However,
the CIA was now no longer the sole or perhaps even the chief point of
U.S. contact with the DINA-sponsored international Operation CONDOR,
which carried out multiple killings. U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay
Robert White, a career State Department official whose antipathy to
these murders cost him his job after Reagan was elected, heard from
the Paraguayan Armed Forces Commander that “intelligence chiefs
from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay used
‘an encrypted system within the U.S. [military]
telecommunications net[work],’ which covered all of Latin
America, to ‘coordinate intelligence information.’”⁵⁸

Henry
Kissinger, who in 1976 was in his last year as Secretary of State,
played at best an equivocal role vis-à-vis this wave of
right-wing violence. Before lecturing Chile publicly in Santiago for
its human rights violations (”The condition of human rights…has
impaired our relationship with Chile and will continue to do so.”),
Kissinger privately assured Pinochet that he was compelled by U.S.
politics to say this, and that in fact his main concern was the move
in the U.S. Congress to cut off aid to Chile.⁵⁹

U.S.
protection and even support for the terrorists of 1976 has continued
to the present day. Luis Posada Carriles, the principal architect of
the Air Cubana bombing, “served prison time in Venezuela for
the Cubana bombing;” and “later, in the 1980s, he worked
again on behalf of the CIA in Central America, helping to coordinate
the Contra supply network.”⁶⁰
Posada was arrested and convicted again in Panama in 2000 for an
assassination attempt on Fidel Castro, this time with Guillermo Novo,
one of Letelier’s murderers. Both men were promptly pardoned by
Panama’s outgoing president.⁶¹
In May 2008, Posada was honored by 500 fellow Cuban Americans at a
sold-out gala in Miami, after charges against him for illegal entry
into the United States were thrown out by a federal judge in Texas.⁶²

CIA Director Bush also promoted Theodore Shackley, who for years had
handled the CIA’s maverick Cuban exiles in Miami. According to
Kevin Phillips,

In
late 1976, Bush had also protected wayward or hot-triggered Agency
operatives — veterans of everything from Chilean assassinations
to Vietnam’s Phoenix Program and improper domestic surveillance
– from indictment by President Ford’s Justice
Department.⁶³

But the spirit of
post-Watergate restraint returned to the CIA under President Carter
and his CIA Director, Admiral Stansfield Turner. Thanks largely to a
series of leaks about his friend, Edwin Wilson, Shackley’s
standing in the CIA diminished until he left in 1978.⁶⁴

However,
it is the argument of William Corson and Joseph Trento that the
spirit of an alternative and more activist CIA survived under
Shackley in exile. Trento writes that Shackley was supported by the
Shah of Iran’s Safari Club (see below), and by Richard Helms,
U.S. Ambassador to Iran. The regular CIA Station Chief in Iran
“repeatedly complained that Helms seemed to be running his own
intelligence operations out of the embassy,” and that CIA
veterans who had worked under CIA officer Theodore Shackley, “formed
the cadre of a private, shadow spy organization within America’s
official intelligence service.”⁶⁵

Helliwell, Castle, and the Overworld

We
have not yet dealt with the overworld connections of Castle Bank. The
most affluent depositors there “were members of the fabulously
rich Pritzker family from Chicago, clients of the Kanter firm.”⁶⁶
Block observes that the Pritzkers, whose vast holdings include the
Hyatt hotel chain, also obtained a loan from the Teamsters Pension
Fund for a hotel-casino investment in Nevada, and that “Jimmy
Hoffa and Allen Dorfman worked personally on Pritzker loans.”⁶⁷

Kanter and Castle
Bank also planned developments with other members of the overworld,
such as Henry Ford II and his wife, Christina.⁶⁸
Mercantile, the predecessor bank to Castle, represented investments
from two shipping magnates: the billionaire Daniel K. Ludwig, and the
extremely wealthy Norwegian shipbuilder Inge Gordon Mosvold, who was
perhaps fronting for Ludwig.⁶⁹

Mercantile
and Castle interlocked closely with another Helliwell Bahamas bank,
eventually called Underwriters Bank, Limited. Here the majority
holder with 95 percent was the American insurance conglomerate
American International Underwriters Corp. [AIUC], which began as part
of the insurance empire headed by former OSS agent C.V. Starr, and is
today part of the giant multinational AIG. Block correctly reports
that AIUC “was an insurance conglomerate with suspected ties to
the C.I.A. in Southeast Asia.”⁷⁰

I
have written elsewhere how the C.V. Starr group was represented in
Washington by Thomas (”Tommy the Cork”) Corcoran, and
headed after World War II by Corcoran’s former law partner,
William S. Youngman. It thus interlocked with the so-called Chennault
circle (or Chennault’s “Washington squadron”), the
powerful cabal put together with Roosevelt’s blessing in 1940
to enable the equipment, staffing, and financial support of General
Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers in China.⁷¹

Corcoran
had been a key figure in Washington since the 1930s, when he headed
“FDR’s informal intelligence service and international
spy operations long before there was an OSS.”⁷²
By the 1950s, when he was said by Fortune to maintain “the
finest intelligence service in Washington,” his lobbying
activities had become intimately involved with influencing CIA covert
operations:

Most
of [his clients] are companies with international interests and he
has a choice clientele in this field. It includes United Fruit Co.,
American International Underwriters Corp. (part of the C. V. Starr
interests in Asia and elsewhere) and General Claire Chennault’s
Civil Air Transport, Inc. In late 1951 Corcoran, for one
example, was working his intelligence service overtime keeping up
with American policy on Iran—what the State Department did in
this affair would be a guide to what it might or might not do to keep
his client, United Fruit, from being thrown out of Guatemala.⁷³

Helliwell
and Corcoran played a crucial role together in the prolongation of
Chennault’s Asian influence, when the two men persuaded Frank
Wisner of OPC to purchase and refinance Chennault’s post-war
airline CAT (later the CIA proprietary Air America). Also figuring in
this important decision was William Pawley, a key figure in
Chennault’s so-called “Washington squadron” during
World War II.⁷⁴
Together with Sea Supply Inc., Helliwell’s other creation, CAT
became the chief logistic infrastructure for the KMT drug-trafficking
troops in Burma.⁷⁵

Helliwell and the Politics of Influence

Helliwell
and Corcoran’s law firm, Corcoran and Rowe, also cooperated
with William Donovan in using Thai money to influence Congress.
Helliwell himself was a key organizer for the Republican Party in
Florida, helping to win the state for Eisenhower in 1952 and thus
launching the Republican ascendancy in the South. (Helliwell later
became close to Nixon’s companion, Bebe Rebozo.)⁷⁶

Corcoran
and Rowe, meanwhile, were Democrats, the latter close to the upcoming
Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson. Corcoran in the 1940s had
managed the accounts and political business of Chiang Kai-shek’s
brother-in-law, T.V. Soong, who by diverting millions in Chinese gold
to his California accounts had become one of the richest men in the
world.

Together
with Soong, Corcoran lobbied successfully for a lend-lease program to
Nationalist (KMT) China, and to a private American Volunteer Group
recruiting pilots from the armed forces for a private company headed
by Corcoran’s friend, William Pawley. In fact, the pilots were
being recruited to fight in China as part of Chennault’s
irregular Air Force, for Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT:⁷⁷

In
effect, Corcoran was running an off-the-books private war in which a
private company, China Defense Supplies, was diverting some of the
war materiel destined for China to a private army, the American
Volunteer Group.⁷⁸

After
the war, Soong, Corcoran, and Pawley became strong backers of the
pro-KMT China Lobby.⁷⁹
The State Department officers unfortunate enough to be entered in
T.V. Soong’s “black book” became targets of the
purges conducted by J. Edgar Hoover and later Joseph McCarthy.⁸⁰

The
Soong-backed China Lobby’s fortunes declined dramatically with
those of McCarthy in 1954. At this point Corcoran and Donovan, who
had previously collaborated on Chennault’s preemptive purchase
via CAT of China’s commercial air fleet in 1949, collaborated
again to maintain the flow of funds from Asia to influence Congress.
The new source was the Thai dictator, Phao Sriyanon, a major
beneficiary of the KMT drug network established by Helliwell, Sea
Supply, and CAT. (At the time of his death as an exile in
Switzerland, Phao was said to be “one of the richest men in the
world.”)⁸¹

After
scandals and exposés had forced the revamping of the China
Lobby in Washington,

the
private arm of the Thai Lobby had mustered its own resources….
Through Donovan, [OSS veteran Willis] Bird [Sea Supply’s
purchasing agent in Bangkok], or his other CIA connections, Phao had,
by that time, hired lawyer Paul Helliwell…as a lobbyist in
addition to Donovan. Donovan [who received a reported $100,000 from
the Thai government] and Helliwell divided the Congress between them,
with Donovan assuming responsibility for the Republicans and
Helliwell taking the Democrats.⁸²

How did Helliwell, an
influential Republican lawyer working full-time in Miami, “take”
the Democrats? By acting in his role as Thai Consul in Miami: his
annual reports as a foreign lobbyist reveal that he passed tens of
thousands of dollars a year to James Rowe, of Corcoran and Rowe.

Helliwell, Resorts International, and the Politics of Corruption

Helliwell
and his banks also handled real investments for the Lansky crowd:

Among
the Florida real estate companies that benefited from Helliwell’s
sleight of hand was General Development Corporation, controlled by
Louis Chesler, a Florida real estate developer and associate of
Lansky, and “trigger Mike” Coppola, a Lansky crony.
Chesler was the partner of Wallace Groves….Chesler and Groves
were partners in a gambling venture with Resorts International,
through a Grand Bahamian company whose counsel was the law firm of
Helliwell, Melrose, and DeWolf.⁸³

Resorts
International, formerly the Mary Carter Paint Company controlled by
James Crosby, was the majority owner of a Bahamas resort, Paradise
Island, which was unable to obtain a license until Wallace Groves was
brought in as a partner in 1966. The well-known reaction of a U.S.
Justice Department official to this change of ownership was, “The
atmosphere seems right for a Lansky skim.” Years later,
“lawyers for New Jersey’s Gaming Enforcement Division
would oppose the granting of a gambling license to Crosby and his
company [Resorts International], citing ‘links with
disreputable persons and organizations,’ and specifically their
record on Paradise Island.”⁸⁴

Like
Helliwell and Groves, so Resorts International was part of the global
CIA-mob connection. According to a 1976 CIA memorandum included in
its Meyer Lansky Security file,

Resorts
International, Inc., is the Subject of OS [Office of Security] file
#591 722. This file reflects that Resorts International, Inc. was of
interest to Cover and Commercial Staff, DDO [Operations Directorate],
in 1972 and 1973.⁸⁵

As
the same CIA memo makes clear, this was after a 1969 book, The
Grim Reapers by Ed Reid, had exposed the company’s
connections to Wallace Groves and, through its casino manager Eddie
Cellini, to what the CIA memo called “the gambling activities
of the organized crime boss Meyer LANSKY.”⁸⁶
Resorts International, in other words, occupied a “cut-out”
intermediary role between the CIA and Eddie Cellini, just as (we
shall see in a moment) a similar cut-out role was performed in 1960
by the CIA’s Bay of Pigs leader, Tony Varona.

1972,
the year in which Resorts became “of interest” to the
CIA, was also the year in which Meyer Lansky was indicted in Miami,
along with Dino Cellini (Eddie’s brother). One of the charges
in the indictment was that “in 1968 Lansky maintained at least
some control over running junkets (a profitable part of a casino
operation) to the Paradise Island Casino.”⁸⁷
I shall argue later that both Resorts and the Lansky indictment may
have been “of interest” to the CIA in these two years
because of the showdown at that time between Nixon and the CIA in the
wake of the Watergate break-in.

The
CIA may have been aware of the allegations, which surfaced in 1972,
that funds from the Paradise Island casino were being secretly
carried to Nixon and his friend Bebe Rebozo, by a casino employee.
This was Seymour (Sy) Alter, an associate on the one hand of Lansky
and his man Eddie Cellini, and on the other hand “a friend of
Nixon and Rebozo since 1962.”⁸⁸
The funds came from the Paradise Island Bridge Company, a company
partly owned by an officer of Benguet International, a firm
represented by Paul Helliwell.⁸⁹
It is likely that Nixon himself had a hidden interest in the Bridge
Company, which might explain the revelation through Operation
Tradewinds that a “Richard M. Nixon” (not otherwise
identified) had an account at Helliwell’s Castle Bank.⁹⁰

The CIA, Eddie Cellini, Edward K. Moss, and the CIA-Mafia Plots

But
there was more to the CIA-Resorts connection. Back in 1967 Resorts
casino (at that time, Paradise Island) had hired as its casino
manager Eddie Cellini, who had formerly managed Lansky’s casino
in Havana’s Hotel Internacional.⁹¹

1967 was the year that the CIA’s Inspector-General, in his
Report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, had written that
Eddie Cellini and his more famous brother Dino

were
believed to be in touch with [Tony] Varona [member of the CIA’s
front group for the Bay of Pigs Operation]… and were reported
to have offered Varona large sums of money for his operations against
Castro, with the understanding that they would receive privileged
treatment ‘in the Cuba of the future.’⁹²

The
Inspector-General’s Report was written to deal with the
political flap raised by Jack Anderson’s spectacular charge in
1967 that John F. Kennedy might have possibly been killed as the
result of an assassination plot against Castro “which then
possibly backfired” against Kennedy himself.⁹³
Jack Anderson’s ultimate source for the story was John Roselli,
a mob member disgruntled that his cooperation with the CIA on the
assassination plots had not protected him from conviction and
possible deportation.

Researcher Alan A.
Block notes that it was strangely imprudent of Paradise Island to
have hired Eddie Cellini in 1967, when it had just weathered an
organized crime scandal of its own.⁹⁴

But the CIA was facing the even bigger organized crime scandal raised
by Jack Anderson’s column, and the I-G Report had just told CIA
Director Helms that Cellini was possibly a go-between in the
assassination plots between the two plot principals Varona and Santos
Trafficante.⁹⁵
One possibility is that Resorts hired Cellini to ensure that he would
not join Roselli in going public.

There is an important
FBI report reproduced without demurrer in a CIA document contained in
its Lansky Security file, which is almost devoid of references to
Lansky but could very well be called a file on the CIA-mafia plots.⁹⁶
According to this FBI report, the contact between Varona and the
Cellini brothers, representing the mob, was through a Washington
public relations agent named Edward K. Moss:

Verona
[sic] has taken on Edward K. Moss as his assistant for raising funds
to finance operations against Castro….Julia Cellini is alleged
to be Moss’ mistress and operates a secretarial service [that]
is really a front for Edward K. Moss’ activities….Julia
Cellini’s brother, Dino Cellini and his brother (first name
unknown), are active fronts for two of the largest casinos that
operated in Cuba until the Batista regime….It is alleged that
the Cellini brothers are in close contact with Tony Verona [sic]
through Edward K. Moss and have offered to contribute considerable
sums of money (reported as high as two million dollars) through
Edward K. Moss to Tony Verona to finance operations against the
Castro regime with an understanding that they would have the major
slice “in the Cuba of the future.”⁹⁷

According to the same
CIA memo, Moss was a past president of the Public Relations Society
of America. At the same time, according to a verbal report from Dun
and Bradstreet to then-CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson, “Moss’
operation seems to be government contracts for the underworld and
possibly surfaces Mafia money in legitimate business activities.”⁹⁸

All this supplies some
context to the decision of the CIA Office of Security, on November 7,
1962, to secure a Covert Security Approval (CSAS) for the use of Moss
by the Political Action Group of the CIA’s Covert Action (CA)
staff.⁹⁹
This of course was more than a year after the FBI had advised the CIA
that reportedly “the Cellini brothers are in contact with
Varona through Moss and have offered to contribute as high as two
million dollars to finance anti-Castro operations.”¹⁰⁰
Furthermore, FBI information sent to the CIA indicated that Moss’s
mistress Julia Cellini and her brother Dino Cellini were alleged to
be procurers, while “the Cellini brothers have long been
associated with the narcotics and white slavery rackets in Cuba.”¹⁰¹
The CIA itself had notified the FBI on December 16, 1960, that Julia
“Cellino” had advised that her brothers “have long
been associated in the narcotics and white slavery rackets in Cuba.”¹⁰²

Still
further FBI information indicated that Dino Cellini “was
formerly associated with Joseph Francis Nesline WFO [i.e.,
Washington] top hoodlum, in a gambling operation.”¹⁰³
I have written elsewhere how Meyer Lansky and Joe Nesline
“systematically used sexual blackmail [i.e., through white
slavery] to compromise a number of people in Washington who were
politically influential.”¹⁰⁴

The
CIA remembered that Moss was a questionable character; a memo of
November 28, 1962 referred to his “‘unscrupulous and
unethical’ business practices.”¹⁰⁵
According to the I-G Report and other memos, “A memorandum
prepared by CA [Covert Action] staff in 1965 states that records do
not show any use made of Moss;”¹⁰⁶
but this carefully worded language would not of course rule out use
made of Moss off the books. In fact, the Moss folder’s
documents confirm the CIA’s interest in him, and many documents
concern Julia, Eddie, Dino, and Goffredo Cellini.

The
documents concerning Moss, the Cellinis, and Varona are very
revealing. The FBI alerted the CIA to their relationship and the
offer of two million dollars to Varona, “in view of the serious
implications of [mob] infiltration of this CIA-supported activity
[against Castro].”¹⁰⁷
On January 23, 1961, the FBI communicated their concerns to the new
Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, then in office for less than a
week.¹⁰⁸

The
response of the CIA was the opposite of what decorum might expect:
instead of distancing itself from Moss and his associates, the CIA
warmed to them. The CIA arranged for poison pills to be supplied via
the mafia to Varona, who in February 1961 became the point man in the
CIA-mafia plot to kill Castro.¹⁰⁹
In 1962 Varona was selected again to participate, as ZRRIFLE-2, in
William Harvey’s renewed assassination plots against Castro.¹¹⁰
And in the same year, as we have seen, the CIA took steps to use Moss
himself.

More on the CIA, Moss, and the Politics of Corruption: Adnan Khashoggi

The
indirect relationship of the CIA to Moss through a cut-out (Varona)
appears to have survived into the 1970s. By this time the cut-out was
Adnan Khashoggi, who for a while (like T.V. Soong and Phao Sriyanon
before him) was known as “the richest man in the world.”
Khashoggi was also listed in the Kerry-Brown BCCI Report as one of
the “principal foreign agents of the U.S,” and at some
point in the 1970s he engaged Edward K. Moss as his public relations
agent.

Khashoggi
replicated the politics of corrupt influence through money and sex
which we have already encountered. His contributions to Nixon’s
election campaigns — some legal, some illicit — were
investigated by the Senate Watergate Committee. Khashoggi is said by
some to have given $1 million to Nixon covertly in 1972, allegedly in
a briefcase which he “mistakenly” left behind in Nixon’s
San Clemente residence.

In
addition, Khashoggi is known to have deposited several million
dollars (some say $200 million) in the bank of Nixon’s friend,
Bebe Rebozo.¹¹¹
He then “withdrew all but $200,000 of it in the form of checks
written to ‘cash’ and signed over to the Sands Hotel”
in Las Vegas.¹¹²
It was as if Khashoggi was using the Sands as his personal
laundromat. Known as “the biggest high roller ever to hit Las
Vegas,” Khashoggi would lose as much as $250,000 in one fling.¹¹³

The
Sands was one of the Las Vegas casinos originally part-owned by Meyer
Lansky, and from which proceeds were skimmed to be deposited (as we
saw) in the Miami National Bank.¹¹⁴
In the 1970s the Sands was now owned by Howard Hughes; but two
veterans of the Lansky era, Carl Cohen and Jack Entratter, continued
to work in the casino.¹¹⁵
Khashoggi meanwhile involved in his business deals the manager of
Hughes’ Vegas properties, F. William Gay; and eventually, when
Hughes was spirited secretly out of Vegas to Wallace Groves’
resort in Freeport, Bahamas, it was in Khashoggi’s plane.¹¹⁶

Even
in the Hughes era, Las Vegas casinos continued to be preferred sites
for the laundering of money (disguised as gambling losses). This
practice was so well established that eventually, in Operation
Casablanca, U.S. Customs actually created a fake casino near Las
Vegas at which top-level Mexican bank officials congregated and
“avidly discussed how to handle the latest half-billion dollars
in drug proceeds already on hand.”¹¹⁷
In one important case, thousands of dollars in money wrappers from
the Stardust casino (mentioned above) were found on a suspected
drug-smuggling plane in Florida.¹¹⁸

There
are also reports that in addition to money, Khashoggi “used sex
to win over U.S. executives.” The bill for the madam who
supplied girls en masse to his yacht in the Mediterranean ran to
hundreds of thousands of dollars.¹¹⁹

The
CIA’s interest in Khashoggi and Moss was not limited to the
funds the two men had accessible. By the 1970s, Moss was Chairman of
the elite Safari Club in Kenya, where he invited Khashoggi in as
majority owner.¹²⁰
And as former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once
revealed publicly, the intelligence chiefs of a group of countries
(France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran under the Shah) met
regularly at the Safari Club to conduct covert operations which the
CIA was unable to carry out in the wake of the Watergate scandal.¹²¹

CIA
officers such as Miles Copeland and James Critchfield became part of
Khashoggi’s milieu. They advised Khashoggi on diplomatic
initiatives, such as a proposed Mideast Peace Fund that would reward
both Israel and Palestine for recognizing each other.¹²²
Khashoggi had the ability to negotiate with the Israelis; he is said
to have been introduced to the Israelis by former gunrunner Hank
Greenspun, the politically influential editor of the Las Vegas
Sun.¹²³

In
general, Khashoggi represented the post-war emigration offshore of
immense wealth and the power it conveyed. He served as a “cut-out,”
or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to those he
represented. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the
list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s
1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting their
official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through
the bank of Nixon’s friend, Bebe Rebozo.¹²⁴

All
this suggests that the CIA’s interest in Moss — as later
in Khashoggi, in Wallace Groves, in Operation ???,
and in Eddie Cellini’s employers at Resorts International –
had to do with irregular funding for off-the-books covert operations.
And if any such funds were passed, the context suggests that the man
fingered to handle them would have been Paul Helliwell, the man the
Wall Street Journal reported was “‘deeply
involved’ in financing a series of covert forays between 1964
and 1975 against Cuba.”¹²⁵

Helliwell, Castle Bank, Bruce Rappaport, and BCCI

Through
this rapid survey of Helliwell’s banks we have seen that he was
central to a connection between the worlds of intelligence, organized
crime, global drug trafficking, political influence, and speculative
investment, often in hotel-casinos, with overworld figures. But the
connection was not one engineered by Helliwell himself; there were
other powerful people in the background, some of whom would maintain
the connection after Helliwell died in 1976 (just as Castle Bank was
beginning to attract the attention of journals like Newsweek).

One
of the most important may have been former OSS Chief William Donovan
(about whom we shall have more to say). According to Pete Brewton,

One
of the attorneys in the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
case made the statement that Kanter was introduced to Helliwell by
General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the famous leader
of the OSS during World War II, and Helliwell’s OSS boss.
Kanter denied that. “I personally never met Bill Donovan. I
believe I may have spoken to him once by phone at Paul Helliwell’s
request…”¹²⁶

Another
OSS figure, more directly involved, was Helliwell’s partner in
the Florida bank holding company (called HMT and later Florida
Shares) that owned the Bank of Perrine and the Bank of Cutler Ridge.
This was

E.P.
Barry, who had been a U.S. military intelligence officer in the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. By the end of
the war, he was the head of U.S. Counterintelligence (X-2) in
Vienna…. Barry … was a longtime associate of [CIA
Director] William Casey, according to a Castle Bank officer.¹²⁷

Barry
was simultaneously a key shareholder in Florida Shares and in the
Inter Maritime Bank of Bruce Rappaport, a close friend and business
associate of William Casey. Rappaport, an oilman and oil tanker
broker “thought to have ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence,”
had numerous connections to the world’s largest-ever
intelligence-drug laundromat — the Bank of Credit and Commerce
International (BCCI).¹²⁸
The Gokal shipping family of Pakistan, leading BCCI investors who
later contributed to BCCI’s bankruptcy, was also shareholders
with Rappaport and Barry in the Inter Maritime Bank.¹²⁹
Alfred Hartmann, a board member of BCCI, was both vice-chairman of
Rappaport’s Swiss bank, Bank of New York-Intermaritime, and
also head of BCCI’s Swiss subsidiary, the Banque de Commerce et
de Placements (BCP).¹³⁰

And
according to Block and Weaver, “Rappaport worked the National
Bank of Oman (a BCCI/Bank of America joint venture), helping funnel
millions of CIA and Saudi dollars to Pakistan for the Afghan rebels
during its 1980s war with the Soviets.”¹³¹
Rappaport’s key man in Oman was Jerry Townsend, an alleged
former CIA operative who now ran Colonial Shipping Co. in Atlanta,
where he knew BCCI associate Bert Lance.

BCCI
and an Israeli intelligence agent were also involved in Medellin arms
sales, via a “melon farm” in Antigua partly financed by
William Casey’s friend, Bruce Rappaport.¹³²

Bruce
Rappaport … owned the land on which Maurice Sarfati, a former
Israeli military officer, set up his melon farm. And one of
Rappaport’s banks in Antigua made a large loan to Sarfati—which
was never repaid. Sarfati (who also walked away from a loan
guaranteed by OPIC, the U.S. government insurance agency) took it
from there, first cultivating government officials and then providing
entree to their offices to his compatriot Yair Klein.

Klein’s work [was] in Colombia, where his Israeli-licensed “security”
company, Spearhead Ltd… trained the hit squads of the Medellin
cocaine cartel in assassination and bombing techniques, was beginning
to attract unwelcome attention. …. In 1988, Klein was in
Antigua, looking for a new way to provide arms to his Medellin
client, Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha.¹³³

Rappaport’s apparent links to Mossad raise the question whether Helliwell’s
connections to Lansky’s Bank of World Commerce and Tibor
Rosenbaum did not also constitute a connection to Mossad. The same
question is raised by Helliwell’s legal representation
(according to the Martindale-Hubbell Legal Register) of the Eastern
Development Company: a firm of this name cooperated with Lansky, Hank
Greenspun, and others in the supply of arms to the nascent state of
Israel.¹³⁴

It is clear that Jews were, like many other minorities, a constituent in
the global drug connection. More importantly, they were an important
part of the financial infrastructure of that connection — but
even at this level they did not operate alone. The global drug
connection combined Jewish banks in Florida and Switzerland with
those of Teochew, Fujian, and Hokkien Chinese in Southeast Asia and
Hong Kong, the Muslims of Bank Intra and later BCCI in the Middle
East, and furthermore Italian banks like those of Michele Sindona and
Roberto Calvi, both members of the intelligence-linked Masonic Lodge
P-2, and both murdered after their banks failed from mafia
involvement.¹³⁵

It is my impression that none of these ethnic minority elements ever
surpassed in power the dominant role of figures from the mainstream,
like Donovan and Helliwell.

(As a person deeply committed to nonviolence, I also have to acknowledge
that the violence of the ethnic groups in the global drug connection,
although later powerful and indeed intelligence-related, had its
origins in redressive violence, against a system dominated above all
by European and American interests.)

One of these mainstream figures was the mysterious E.P. Barry, an
investor with both Helliwell and Rappaport. One of the very few
things known about Barry is that he was in OSS during World War II,
and that towards the end of the war Donovan appointed him head of OSS
Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna.¹³⁶

OSS X-2, or Counterintelligence, was the most secretive and highly
classified of the OSS branches, and the one whose precise mission was
to penetrate the German Sicherheitsdienst [SD].¹³⁷
According to a 1946 OSS Report, “an equally interesting X-2
activity was the investigation of RSHA [SD] financial transactions”
(Operation Safehaven).¹³⁸
In the course of these investigations, the U.S. Third Army took an SD
major “on several trips to Italy and Austria, and, as a result
of these preliminary trips, over $500,000 in gold, as well as jewels,
were recovered.”¹³⁹

Some of the Nazi gold recovered under Barry’s supervision was
subsequently used to finance U.S. intelligence operations in Germany
in the immediate post-war years.

Barry, with this intriguing background, represents the continuity between
the Helliwell intelligence-drug connection which flourished until
1972 (the year the IRS’s Operation Tradewinds began to
investigate the Bank of Perrine) and the BCCI intelligence-drug
connection which flourished after 1972 (the year BCCI was founded).

Like Khashoggi before it, BCCI had the ability to broker
Arab-Israeli-China arms deals, as well as its contacts to western
intelligence and politicians. Indeed, the bank seems to have largely
inherited Khashoggi’s function as an agent of influence in the
Middle East and elsewhere after the United States, by the Corrupt
Federal Practices Act of 1978, outlawed direct payments by U.S.
corporations to foreign individuals.¹⁴⁰

BCCI also inherited and vastly expanded Khashoggi’s use of money to
influence and corrupt American politicians. BCCI’s Pakistani
president, Agha Hasan Abedi, rescued Jimmy Carter’s Treasury
Secretary Bert Lance from bankruptcy, and thereby developed a
relationship with Carter himself.¹⁴¹

A Senate report on BCCI concluded that

BCCI’s systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary,
payments to, prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries
in which BCCI operated. …The result was that BCCI had
relationships that ranged from the questionable, to the improper, to
the fully corrupt with officials from countries all over the world,
including Argentina, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, China,
Colombia, the Congo, Ghana, Guatemala, the Ivory Coast, India,
Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan,
Panama, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname,
Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Zambia, and
Zimbabwe.¹⁴²

And
from two well-researched books by journalists from Time and
the Wall Street Journal, we learn that among later
highly-placed recipients of largesse from BCCI, its owners, and its
affiliates, were

Ronald Reagan’s
Treasury Secretary James Baker, who declined to investigate BCCI;¹⁴³
and

Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
which declined to investigate BCCI.¹⁴⁴

The CIA, BCCI, and a “Long Tradition of Shady Banks”

But Barry is not the only link between the drug banks of Helliwell and
BCCI. A more central figure is General George Olmsted, the head of
the Washington bank holding company known as the International Bank.¹⁴⁵
In March 1973 Olmsted had the International Bank (which “had a
reputation as a CIA bank”) buy 66 percent of the capital stock
of the failing Mercantile Bank in the Bahamas (Castle’s
predecessor), even though “International’s officers knew
the actual state of Mercantile’s financial health.”¹⁴⁶
Starting in 1977, International started to sell its stock in
Financial General Bankshares (later known as First American), a major
American bank holding company, to BCCI front men, who later took over
First American for BCCI.¹⁴⁷

The most common explanation is that the CIA not only used the bank, but
had helped develop it. Journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, the
authors of the definitive book on BCCI, speculated that the CIA’s
relationship with its founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, might have gone back
to before BCCI’s founding in 1972. They observed also that BCCI
was only the latest in an overlapping series of money-laundering
banks that did services for the CIA — Deak & Company,
Castle Bank & Trust, and Nugan Hand.¹⁴⁸

The Global Connection and Narcotics

One of these interlocking banks, the World Finance Corporation in
Florida, became the target of “perhaps the largest narcotics
investigation of the decade.” But the investigation, “involving
scores of federal and state agents, had to be scrapped after a year
because the CIA complained to the Justice Department that a dozen top
criminals were ‘of interest’ to it.”¹⁴⁹

Another drug-linked bank was the Australian Nugan Hand Bank, which chose as
auditor Price Waterhouse in the Bahamas in 1976, the year that both
Castle and Mercantile were collapsing.¹⁵⁰

After its spectacular collapse in 1980, Australian investigators
concluded that Nugan Hand had been involved in the financing of major
drug deals, as well as the laundering of profits: two official
investigations “placed Nugan Hand in the critical role of
surreptitiously transferring drug income overseas, where it obviously
could be reinvested in more illegal drugs.”¹⁵¹

Nugan Hand collected an impressive number of former CIA officers, including
its “mysterious puppetmaster” Bernie Houghton, who back
in the 1950s allegedly took the place of Helliwell in Bangkok, and
former CIA Director William Colby. Of particular interest is the
involvement with Nugan Hand of Thomas Clines, a CIA officer in Laos
under Theodore Shackley who later resigned to work in the outsourced
intelligence network of Edwin Wilson. When the Nugan Hand Bank
collapsed spectacularly in 1980 (with the suicide or murder of Frank
Nugan), it was Thomas Clines who helped spirit Houghton quietly out
of Australia,¹⁵²
The two men, along with Edwin Wilson and Theodore Shackley and BCCI,
then participated in off-the-books covert operations against the
Soviets in Afghanistan, working not for the CIA but for the Safari
Club.¹⁵³

The CIA office in Chiang Mai, when the main business of the city was
opium trafficking, was on the same floor as the local office of the
DEA. According to Jonathan Kwitny, “The DEA receptionist
answered Nugan Hand’s phone and took messages when the bank’s
representatives were out.” Nugan Hand’s representative
there, Neil Evans has said he was present when Michael Hand and Ron Pulger-Frame –
the former Deak & Company courier who went to work at Nugan Hand
– discussed the shipment of CIA money to the Middle East, Saudi
Arabia, and Panama. Evans has said Nugan Hand moved $50 to $60
million at a time for the CIA, and also that Nugan Hand was involved
in Third World arms deals.¹⁵⁴

Evans also told Australian television that the millions he handled were “garnered
from the drugs transiting the area. The bank, he put it starkly, was
a ‘laundry’ for Meo [Hmong] tribesmen and other poppy
growers.”¹⁵⁵

In The Road to 9/11 I describe how Casey’s reliance on BCCI
to distribute U.S. assistance to the Afghan mujahideen fighting the
Russians led to most aid reaching the faction of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
the leading drug trafficker in Afghanistan who soon (thanks to aid
from the U.S. and Pakistan) became perhaps the leading heroin
trafficker in the world.¹⁵⁶

This pattern of a drug connection repeated itself in the 1990s, after the
USSR withdrew from Afghanistan and BCCI collapsed soon thereafter. In
Azerbaijan (under oil company cover), veterans of CIA operations
under Shackley and Clines in Laos, like Richard Secord, Heinie
Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, set up an airline on the model of Air
America which soon was “picking up hundreds of mujahideen
mercenaries from Afghanistan.”¹⁵⁷
The Arab Afghans’Azeri operations were also financed with
Afghan heroin.

Loretta Napoleoni has argued that there is an Islamist drug route of
al Qaeda allies across North Central Asia, reaching from Tajikistan
and Uzbekistan through Azerbaijan and Chechnya to Kosovo.¹⁵⁸

This leads us to the paradoxical fact that in 1998 Clinton came to
the support of the al Qaeda-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). He
did so even though “[i]n 1998, the U.S. State Department listed
the KLA … as an international terrorist organization, saying
it had bankrolled its operations with proceeds from the international
heroin trade and from loans from known terrorists like Osama bin
Laden.”¹⁵⁹

Finally, if former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds is to be believed, this same
flow of heroin has been financing the corruption of Congress under
George W. Bush. Edmonds was fired from the FBI in 2002, after
accusing a colleague of being a security threat. She has since
contested her firing in a whistleblower suit which the government has
blocked by invoking the State Secrets privilege. She has also been
prohibited from speaking publicly about her case.

According to Daniel Ellsberg, Edmonds’ concern is the al Qaeda connection
described by Napoleoni:

Al Qaeda, she’s been saying to Congress, according to these interviews, is financed
95% by drug money - drug traffic to which the U.S. government shows a blind
eye, has been ignoring, because it very heavily involves allies and assets of
ours - such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan - all the
‘Stans - in a drug traffic where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed
in Turkey, and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of Europe’s
heroin, by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo - Albanian Muslims
in Kosovo - basically the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army which we
backed heavily in that episode at the end of the century….Sibel
says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the
House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish
sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money.¹⁶⁰

In 2005 Sibel Edmonds’ charges were partly aired in Vanity Fair. There it was
revealed that she had had access to FBI wiretaps of conversations among members of the American-Turkish Council (ATC), about bribing elected U.S. officials, and about “what sounded like references to large-scale drug shipments and other crimes.”¹⁶¹

Conclusion: A Continuous Succession of Drug-Related Deep Events

Mafias and empires have certain elements in common. Both can be seen as the systematic
violent imposition of governance in areas of undergovernance. Both
use atrocities to achieve their ends; but both tend to be tolerated
to the extent that the result of their controlled violence is a
diminution of uncontrolled violence. (I would tentatively suggest an
important difference between mafias and empires: that, with the
passage of time, mafias tend to become more and more part of the
civil society whose rules they once broke, while empires tend to
become more and more irreconcilably at odds with the societies they
once controlled.)

In this book we have seen an overlap between the infrastructures of the American mafia and the indirect American empire. And in this chapter I have attempted to describe the epicenter of this overlap in a milieu, expanding at its outer limits into a global nexus that I have called the global drug connections, with intimate links to both the U.S underworld and U.S. overworld. The nexus links U.S. intelligence to the intelligence
services of many other countries, including Taiwan, Israel, Italy, and Chile. It also oversees financial contributions to the leading politicians of many countries, including both parties of the United States.

All of the major deep events in recent American history, and all of the major expansions of the U.S. indirect empire since World War II, can be linked to this
global drug connection:

• The first U.S.
  postwar presence in East Asia was established in conjunction with the
  drug-financed KMT in Taiwan.
• The U.S. presence
  in Southeast Asia began with Sea Supply’s support for KMT drug
  traffickers in East Burma, then expanded in the mid-fifties with the
  drug-financed PARU force into Laos, while the CIA secured Saigon by
  controlling drug distribution there.
• The interlocking finance company Deak & Company,
  founded by OSS veteran Nicholas Deak, “was reportedly used by the CIA to finance
  covert operations, including the 1953 overthrow of democratically elected Iranian
  Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq.”¹⁶²

The 1954 overthrow of democratically
elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was partly achieved
with the support of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, a major figure in
Lansky’s arms pipeline to Israel in the 1940s, and whose Guardia Nacional was
deeply involved in Caribbean drug trafficking thereafter.

• The introduction of CIA covert forces in Laos in 1960,
  which eventually grew into a drug-financed irregular army of tens of thousands,
  was achieved with a force that grew out of the Sea Supply operation in Thailand.
  The CIA’s private war in Laos, which President Kennedy sought vainly to contain,
  was the true starting point of the U.S. war in Vietnam.¹⁶³
• Angleton’s “alternative CIA,” CI/SIG, manipulated and falsified its “intelligence”
  about Lee Harvey Oswald in such a way as to prepare him to be the designated
  suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
• The overthrow of democratically elected Indonesian President Sukarno in
  1965 was achieved in part by covert assistance through Lockheed Corporation
  payoffs, and in part by the intervention of Sasakawa Ryoichi, a CIA agent
  of influence, along with his friend Kodama Yoshio, with the yakuza
  in Japan.¹⁶⁴
  Sasakawa and Kodama were also recipients of Lockheed payoffs facilitated partly
  by Deak & Company, and partly on the scene by Shig Katayama, whose ID Corp.
  in the Cayman Islands conducted mysterious business transactions with Helliwell’s
  Castle Bank.¹⁶⁵
  BCCI provided the initial infrastructure for the CIA intervention in Afghanistan
  in 1979, and the ensuing alliance with the major drug trafficker Gulbeddin
  Hekmatyar. Pakistan’s President Zia arranged for Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s
  National Security Adviser, to work with Lt.-Gen. Fazle Haq; while a BCCI informant
  told U.S. authorities that Fazle Haq was “heavily engaged in narcotics trafficking
  and moving the heroin money through the [BCCI] bank.”¹⁶⁶
  [See article Addendum for
  footnote clarification, added 2/20/2009.] Hekmatyar in the next decade received
  more CIA aid than any other CIA asset before or since.
• In 1970, a CIA officer with the pseudonym Henry J. Sloman, who was
  also “a high-risk smuggler directly linked to the Mafia,”
  was dispatched to Chile, where he became involved with the right-wing
  plotting to assassinate General René Schneider,
  commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army.¹⁶⁷
• Orlando Letelier was murdered in Washington in September 1976 by a
  team including Cuban exile drug-traffickers, working for the
  drug-financed Chilean intelligence agency DINA. Though the US
  Government was already aware of DINA’s Operation CONDOR for
  such foreign-based murders, CIA Director Bush chose publicly to
  deflect suspicion away from DINA.¹⁶⁸
• According to Robert Parry, Alexandre de Marenches of the Safari Club
  arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with
  Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October
  1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments
  in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran.
  (This was the so-called Republican “October Counter-surprise.”)
  Parry suspects a role of BCCI in both the funding of payoffs for the
  secret deal, and also the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to
  Iran.¹⁶⁹
• In 1981 Mehmet Ali Agça, a member of the Turkish
  drug-trafficking Grey Wolves, attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul
  II. Le Monde diplomatique later reported that the
  assassination attempt was organized, at the request of Turkish mafia
  chief Bekir Celenk, by Abdullah Çatli, a drug-trafficking
  Grey Wolf leader of death squads for Turkish intelligence. Le
  Monde diplomatique added that Çatli conducted underground
  operations for the Turkish branch of the CIA’s Gladio
  (stay-behind) organization, and that one year later Çatli
  visited Miami with the notorious Operation CONDOR killer, Stefano
  delle Chiaie.¹⁷⁰
• Shackley, Khashoggi, and BCCI were instrumental in inaugurating the
  illegal Iran-Contra Connection of 1985-86, which diverted funds from
  arms sales to Iran to support of the Contras in Honduras and Costa
  Rica.¹⁷¹
• The looting of Russia during the Yeltsin era in the 1990s saw funds
  channeled through Rappaport’s Inter Maritime Bank into the Bank
  of New York, where Rappaport also had an important if not controlling
  interest.¹⁷²
• In 1991, Shackley’s colleague Richard Secord created an airline
  in Azerbaijan which arranged to fly in hundreds of mujahideen from
  Afghanistan recruited by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.¹⁷³
• U.S. support for the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1998, a group backed
  by al-Qaeda and financed in part by drugs, led to revelations that
  for years at least one of the KLA leaders had a longtime relationship
  with the U.S. private military company MPRI.¹⁷⁴ (As late as 1997 the KLA had been recognized by the United States as
  a terrorist group supported in part by the heroin traffic.)

(The list could be indefinitely expanded. For example, the conversion of
Australia into a dependable U.S. ally can be dated to the fall of
democratically elected Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, in
which Penny Lernoux and others have seen the hidden hand of the Nugan
Hand Bank.¹⁷⁵)

This deep continuity underlying U.S. expansion since World War II helps
make credible the startling phenomenon described in our last chapter
– namely, that deep events such as the Kennedy assassination
and 9/11 are not unrelated, or the product of forces attacking
America from outside. Rather, at least in part, they surface into
public awareness out of the deep connection described in this
chapter, a connection whose presence is ongoing but almost completely
unacknowledged.

Further Conclusion: The Increasing Threat to Stable Democracy

But when this list of covert interventions and deep events is viewed
synoptically, a pattern can be seen of increasing deviation from the
policies of the public state. The assistance of the global connection
for the CIA’s interventions in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954)
was in support of operations previously sanctioned by the National
Security Council (and before that the Council on Foreign Relations).

But the drug-financed evolution of a CIA-trained force in Thailand into
an offensive force invading Laos was an operation explicitly not

authorized by the National Security Council. As Daniel Fineman has
noted,

JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] preference for direct aid to French forces
forced the NSC [National Security Council] in September [1953] to
authorize implementation of only phase one [”strengthening
Thailand’s will and ability to resist”], postponing
indefinitely execution of the provisions in phase two taking the
psychological war to neighboring countries.¹⁷⁶

And the falsification of Oswald’s file by Angleton’s CI/SIG,
although it may have been initially authorized as a legitimate tool
in the search for an alleged mole in the CIA, eventually facilitated
the successful assassination of John F. Kennedy and the ensuing
cover-up. At this point, the global connection was no longer simply a
force acting in support of the public American state; it had
developed relations with forces attacking the public state.

This pattern of increasing deviation can be used to refine our notion of
the American deep state. Initially the deep state can be identified
with the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the creation (invisible
at the time) of the National Security Council that facilitated the
original Helliwell-CIA-mob connection. With the absorption of OPC
into the CIA in 1953, the American deep state ceased for many years
to exhibit the relatively coherent and disciplined concentration of
authority that one sees in the deep states of Turkey or Italy or
Colombia, or at one time in Chile and Argentina. At this stage the
American deep state was unified by the economy of drugs but not much
else. Its nebulous connection to legitimate power had shrunk to
Angleton’s “alternative CIA,” and even this ceased
when Angleton was fired in December 1974.

But according to Joseph Trento, the connection was indirectly restored by
a “shadow CIA” working for the Safari Club and Saudi
intelligence; and by the 1980s this shadow CIA “was not only
working for the Israelis but also was involved in covert operations
from Central America to Iran.”¹⁷⁷

It is certain that, with the blessing of Casey, — who had his
own direct contacts with Rappaport, BCCI, and the global drug
connection — Shackley, Khashoggi, and their contacts led to
Iran-Contra.¹⁷⁸ At least one member of Shackley’s group, Richard Secord, then
created an airline which brought Islamist mujahideen to Afghanistan.
Another, neocon Michael Ledeen, contributed not only to Iran-Contra
but also, with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, to the creation of
the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).¹⁷⁹

Indeed, the decision of William Casey to work with the global connection, and
more specifically BCCI and Theodore Shackley’s contacts in
Iran-Contra, cannot be fully understood by focusing on the history of
the global drug connection alone. Casey’s actions must be seen
in the context of what Irving Kristol has called the intellectual
counterrevolution of the 1970s, the successful reversal of
Kissinger’s and Carter’s moves towards détente
with the Soviet Union, and of the post-Watergate reforms introduced
by Senator Frank Church and others. As I have written elsewhere, a
key moment was the so-called Halloween massacre in 1975, which saw
among other things the firing of Angleton’s nemesis, William
Colby, the appointment of Rumsfeld to Secretary of Defense, and the
end of Kissinger’s long tenure as National Security Adviser.¹⁸⁰

By 1976 the intellectual counterrevolution had consolidated a new
anti-Kissinger coalition consisting of a) Cheney and Rumsfeld inside
the Ford Administration, b) the Committee on the Present Danger
lobbying for a vastly increased defense budget, and c) neocons like
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who came together to work against
Kissinger’s SALT agreements and (with the help of the CIA’s
new director, George H.W. Bush) to radically escalate the CIA’s
estimate of the Soviet threat. Casey played an important role in this
anti-Soviet coalition, and in 1976 he joined the CPD along with
long-time members of the global connection like Ray Cline
(Helliwell’s old OSS associate from Kunming), Jay Lovestone,
and George Olmsted.

The anti-government bias of the new neocon right has extended to
increased dislike for the CIA, now seen as an enemy rather than an
ally.¹⁸¹ But even the new outsourced forces of violence in private security companies (PSCs) like Blackwater have recruited from the violent
resources of the old global drug connection — specifically, in
Blackwater’s case, from the paramilitary forces in countries like Colombia.¹⁸²

In short, the recourse to the illicit violence of the global drug
traffic, which began in the panicked early years of the Cold War, has
continued ever since to increase and metastasize, until it is now an
increasing threat to constitutional democracy. It is not easy for
most people to understand this. In the short run, illicit violence
breeds the redressively violent opposition which justifies its existence — so that today the PSCs in Iraq and Afghanistan earn multimillion dollar contracts to fight the resistance they themselves have provoked.

But the new system of indirect empire does not appear to be a stable one:
if there is a momentary respite in Iraq, it is because opposing
cadres have found it more fruitful to fight in Afghanistan. Rather,
indirect empire is a violent substitute for politics, to deal with
situations which only politics can ameliorate.

If this country were serious in wishing to deal with the problem of
terrorism, it would seek to reduce, rather than increase, the
oppression which is producing redressive violence in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, Lebanon, and Palestine. The present course
is more likely to aggravate the deteriorating status quo, and also to
accelerate the waning of American resources, influence, and good
will, even among our allies.

Is it utopian to think that the present course can be corrected?
Probably yes, as long as most Americans believe that 9/11 was an
attack engineered solely by a group of malevolent Arabs. But a saner
policy might ensue if it were shown that 9/11, as Sibel Edmonds has
intimated, was a deep event involving elements from America’s
global drug connection.

What I have called America’s global drug connection has been
responsible in the past for global terrorist activities like
Operation Condor, and also for strengthening drug networks as
so-called parallel governments in countries like Laos, Pakistan,
Lebanon, Turkey, and Colombia. For decades this country has been
largely in denial about U.S. complicity in this state of affairs,
projecting responsibility for terrorism instead on the Soviet Union
(”the Evil Empire”) and more recently Iraq and Iran (”the
Axis of Evil”).¹⁸³

To overcome these decades of denial will not be easy. But it will be a
necessary step towards diminishing terrorism, and restoring a saner
world.

---

ADDENDUM, 2/20/2009

Clarification from Peter Dale Scott: I know of no grounds to accuse Pakistani
Lt.-Gen. Fazle Haq of having profited personally from the drug traffic.

In The Road to 9/11 (pp. 73, 75), as earlier in Drugs, Oil, and
War, I quoted an earlier book as asserting that Pakistani Lt.-Gen. Fazle
Haq, governor of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), was allegedly “heavily
engaged in narcotics trafficking.” My quotation was from The Outlaw
Bank, by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne (p. 48, cf. p. 52); but I could
also have cited similar claims in Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin
(p. 479), Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout (p. 269),
or M. Emdad-ul Haq, Drugs in South Asia (p. 201).

It seems clear that when Fazle Haq was governor, he was also an important CIA
contact and supporter of the Afghan mujahideen, some of whom — it was no secret
— were supporting themselves by major opium and heroin trafficking through
the NWFP. A senior American official in Washington also told Beaty and Gwynne
(p. 52) that Fazle Haq, who was “our man,” was himself “running
the drug trade.” One could easily conclude from all these books that Fazle
Haq was profiting personally from the drug trade. However the late governor’s
son, Dr. Arshad Khan, has written me, denying that this was the case. After
much correspondence with Dr. Khan, I would like to state that I am persuaded
by his denial.

Therefore I want to make clear that I know of no grounds to accuse
Fazle Haq of having profited personally from the drug traffic.

My reasons for doing so are not based on proof from evidence – it is
virtually impossible to prove a negative. It is rather that I became convinced
of Dr. Khan’s bona fides, above all after he diligently pursued, at my request,
a reference used by Emdad-ul Haq to support his claim that “A Pakistani newspaper
in 1993 reported that [General Haq’s] son had been convicted of charges of drug
trafficking in New York.” The source — in Dawn (9/27/93) – turned
out to be not a news report, but a letter to the editor; and it referred only
to the arrest of “the son of a provincial governor” (unnamed). Dr. Khan supplied
another news story from The
Pakistan Daily Times, (10/4/02), showing that the arrestee was in fact the
son of Fazle Haq’s successor, Abdul Ghafoor Khan Hoti. ^A

By this and other examples, Dr. Arshad Khan convinced me that he was working
to establish the true facts, not obscure them. It is frequently the case that
many books repeat an innuendo without any one of them having evidence to support
it. It seems to be the case here that while American authorities at the time
assumed Fazle Haq was involved in the drug traffic, no author has in fact produced
any reason to implicate Fazle Haq personally in the profits from that traffic.

On occasion I have retracted unsupported statements after threats of a law
suit. I want to make it clear that at no time in my lengthy correspondence with
Dr. Khan did he ever threaten me with a law suit. I am retracting freely after
my extended reassessment of the case.

Addendum Footnote: ^A
Pakistan Daily Times, (10/4/02): “Aurangzeb Hoti, his father’s first
cousin and son of Abdul Ghafoor Khan Hoti, former NWFP governor, hinders his
smooth sailing. Aurangzeb was arrested on an American airport carrying narcotics
when his father was governor. Later he was sentenced to five years of imprisonment.”

---

ENDNOTES

1
“9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics,”
Global Research; cf. Peter Dale Scott, The
Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007),
4-7, 14-17, etc.

2
Alan A. Block, East Side-West Side:
Organizing Crime in New York, 1930-1950 (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983), 109.

3

Gaia Servadio, Mafioso
(New York: Dell, 1976), 125-28.

4
R.T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of
Debt (New York: Linden/Simon and Schuster,
1987), 295 (”laundromat”). For Helliwell’s
ownership, see Alan A. Block, Masters of
Paradise (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 1991), 165-66.

5
CIA Memo dated 24 April 1974, “RYBAT/JMSPUR/PLVWCADET Traffic
Removed from C/WHD Personal Files during Watergate File Search.
Traffic can be found in sealed sensitive envelope in safe No. 1322
located in WH/COG, Room 3D46,” NARA #
104-10095-10326. C/WHD (Chief of Western Hemisphere Division) in
1974 was Theodore Shackley, discussed below. All of the CIA and FBI
documents discussed in this essay can be seen on the Mary Ferrell
website, http://www.maryferrell.org/.

6
Block, Masters of Paradise,
161-62, 166.

7
Alan Block subsequently learned that it was the bank’s
co-founder, Chicago lawyer “Burt Kanter, more so than
Helliwell, who was instrumental in Castle’s formation.”
He cites speculation that it was originally set up on behalf of the
former Cleveland mob racketeer, Morris Kleinman (Block, Masters
of Paradise, 172).

8
Jim Drinkhall, “IRS vs. CIA: Big Tax Investigation Was Quietly
Scuttled By Intelligence Agency,” Wall
Street Journal, April 18, 1980.

9
Wall Street Journal,
April 18, 1980.

10
Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence
Hill Books/ Chicago Review Press, 2001), 168-74; Block, Masters
of Paradise, 169 (Thai police).

11
Alan A. Block and Constance A. Weaver, All Is
Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and
International Organized Crime (Westport,
CN.: Praeger, 2004), 38; citing Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen
Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the
American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1983), 119. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The
War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich,
MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 47, 67.

12
Wall Street Journal,
April 18, 1980.

13
CIA Memo of 18 August 1976 for Chief, Security Analysis Group, NARA
#104-10059-10013. The margin of the memo carries the following
handwritten reference to Sam Giancana, the major figure in the
CIA-mafia assassination plots against Fidel Castro: “for file/
Sam GIANCANA/ not mentioned.”

14
Jonathan Marshall, Drug Wars: Corruption, Counterinsurgency and
Covert Operations in the Third World (Forestville, CA: Cohan and
Cohen, 1991), 54; citing Drinkhall, Wall Street Journal,
April 18, 1980.

15

Block notes that the spinoff of I.D.C. from Benguet was accompanied
by a “payment of $329,439 to a Hong Kong Bank” (possibly
into a Marcos account) (Block, Masters of
Paradise, 98).

16
Profits from the Philippine gold mine, and possibly gold itself,
reached I.D.C. from Asia. But I have not seen corroboration for the
claim of Sterling and Peggy Seagraves that Groves and Helliwell were
actually moving parts of the Japanese wartime gold hoard to the
Bahamas “out of the Philippines, masquerading as gold from
Benguet Mines” (Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors:
America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold
[London: Verso, 2003], 147). It is, however, of interest that the
Marcos family also entered into business dealings with the
CIA-related Nugan Hand Bank (see below), which some say included
negotiations for the surreptitious shipment of Marcos’ gold
(Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots [New York: Norton,
1987], 182, 186-87, 190).

17
Lernoux, In Banks We Trust,
83.

18
Marshall, Drug Wars,
54-55. Cf. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Government Operations,
Oversight Hearings into the Operations of the
IRS (Operation Tradewinds, Project Haven, and Narcotics Traffickers
Tax Program), Hearings (Washington: GPO,
1975, 909; Peter Dale Scott, Coming to
Jakarta: A Poem about Terror (New York: New
Directions, 1989), 99-103. It is not known if ID Corp. and I.D.C.

were related.

19
For the CIA’s close involvement in Lockheed payoffs, see Anthony
Sampson, The Arms Bazaar (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 137,
227-8, 238. The U.S. Air Force was also involved. San Francisco
Chronicle, October 24, 1983, p. 22, describes one such
USAF-Lockheed operation in Southeast Asia, “code-named
‘Operation Buttercup’ that operated out of Norton Air Force Base in
California from 1965 to 1972.”

20

“The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,”
Pacific Affairs,
LVIII, 2 (Summer 1985), 239-64: “A 1976 Senate investigation
into these [Lockheed] payoffs revealed, almost inadvertently, that
in May 1965, over the legal objections of Lockheed’s counsel,
Lockheed commissions in Indonesia had been redirected to a new
contract and company set up by the firm’s long-time local agent or
middleman. Its internal memos at the time show no reasons for the
change, but in a later memo the economic counselor of the U.S.
Embassy in Jakarta is reported as saying that there were “some
political considerations behind it.” If this is true, it would
suggest that in May 1965, five months before the coup, Lockheed had
redirected its payoffs to a new political eminence, at the risk (as
its assistant chief counsel pointed out) of being sued for default
on its former contractual obligations. The Indonesian middleman,
August Munir Dasaad, was `known to have assisted Sukarno financially
since the 1930’s.’ In 1965, however, Dasaad was building
connections with the Suharto forces, via a family relative, General
Alamsjah, who had served briefly under Suharto in 1960, after
Suharto completed his term at SESKOAD. Via the new contract,
Lockheed, Dasaad and Alamsjah were apparently hitching their wagons
to Suharto’s rising star: ‘When the coup was made during
which Suharto replaced Sukarno, Alamsjah, who controlled certain
considerable funds, at once made these available to Suharto, which
obviously earned him the gratitude of the new President. In due
course he was appointed to a position of trust and confidence and
today Alamsjah is, one might say, the second important man after the
President.’”

21
A Senate amendment in 1964 to cut off all aid to Indonesia
unconditionally was quietly killed in conference committee, on the
misleading ground that the Foreign Assistance Act “requires the
President to report fully and concurrently to both Houses of the
Congress on any assistance furnished to Indonesia” (U.S. Cong.,
Senate, Report No. 88-1925, Foreign
Assistance Act of 1964, p. 11). In fact the
act’s requirement that the president report “to Congress”
applied to eighteen other countries, but in the case of Indonesia he
was to report to two Senate Committees and the Speaker
of the House: Foreign Assistance Act, Section 620(j).

22
Tom J. Farer, Transnational Crime in the
Americas: An Inter-American Dialogue Book
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 65.

23

Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris, The Green Felt
Jungle (New York: Pocket Books, 1964),
217-20. Levinson had fronted for Lansky at the Sands casino in Las
Vegas.

24
Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in
Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2003), 7, 60-61, 198, 207; citing Penny Lernoux, In
Banks We Trust (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 42-44,
84.

25
Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt,
22.

26
Block, Masters of Paradise,
51. Intra Bank also had a Bahamian branch, Intra Bahamas Trust Ltd.

27
Newsday, staff and editors of, The Heroin Trail (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 137 (Francisi); McCoy, The
Politics of Heroin, 39 (Luciano). El-Khoury “used
Luciano’s money to buy off Lebanese police and customs agents”
(Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA,
Drugs, and the Press [London: Verso, 1998], 131).

28
McCoy, Politics of Heroin,
541.

29
James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where
Crime and Government Embrace (New York:
Dell, 1978), 70.

30
Scott and Marshall. Cocaine Politics
(paperback edition), x-xi. Dayle made this statement during a
videotaped teleconference, in the presence of Marshall and myself.

31

Wall Street Journal,
April 18, 1980. Dalitz, Kleinman, and Tucker, all veterans of the
gambling scene in Cleveland, later had a controlling interest in the
Desert Inn casino in Las Vegas (Investigation
of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce:
Hearings before the [Kefauver] Special Committee to Investigate
Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, U.S. Senate, 81st Cong., 2nd
Sess. and 82nd Congress, 1st Sess., Part 10, US Government Printing
Office, [Washington DC: 1950], pp. 907-926). Block’s and
Weaver’s later and more detailed study claims that Dalitz did
not have an account at Castle, but adds former Lansky associate Lou
Rothkopf to the list of mob figures who did (Block and Weaver, All
Is Clouded by Desire, 45).

32
Block, Masters of Paradise,
189.

33
Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust
(Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984; citing Wall
Street Journal, May 23, 1977, February 17,
1981; also, Parapolitics,
Spring 1981), 88: “Like Castle, Mercantile was a conduit for
CIA money, and Price Waterhouse accountants were `under orders’
to make sure `outsiders’ did not have access to the books. If
they probed around, said a CIA source, they ‘could unravel a
trail to the intelligence community.’”

34
Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire,
40; cf. Block, Masters of Paradise,
188-91, where Kleinman is called “perhaps a hidden owner”
of Castle.

35

Block, Masters of Paradise,
163; New York Times,
September 1, 1989 (”part owner”).

36
Block, Masters of Paradise,
164.

37
CIA Inspector General’s Report of 1967 on CIA-Mafia Plots to
Assassinate Castro, pp. 15-16, NARA #151993.08.11.16:44:08:750007,
pp. 3-4.

38
Memo of 5 September 1975 to DDO from CI Staff Chief George Kalaris,
NARA #104-1010-10003, p. 2.

39Tom
Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton:
The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York:
Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, 1991), 314-15.

40
Douglas Valentine, “The French Connection Revisited: The CIA,
Irving Brown, and Drug Smuggling as Political Warfare,” Covert
Action, http://www.covertaction.org/content/view/99/75/.

41
Paul Buhle, “Lovestone’s Thin Red Line,” Nation,
May 6, 1999, http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990524/buhle.

42

House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation
of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
Appendix to Hearings, Volume IX (March 1978), 47.

43
Ed Reid, The Grim Reapers: The Anatomy of
Organized Crime in America (New York:
Bantam, 1969), 174.

44
Mangold, Cold Warrior, 329-30;
cf. 305, 337. Other authors have written that Dulles and Angleton
maintained a “second agency,” or “agency-within-the
Agency;” see e.g. Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy
Trinity (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1991), 260.

45

Mangold, Cold Warrior, 105.

46
Memo of 4 November 1970 from John K. Greaney, Assistant General
Counsel, CIA, NARA #104-10106-10374.

47

“United States of America, Appellee, v. Leonard Russo, et al.,
Defendants-Appellants”

48
Memo of 4 November 1970 from John K. Greaney, Assistant General
Counsel, CIA, NARA #104-10106-10374. Robert Sam Anson once claimed
that two of the defendants in these kickback trials, John Larocca
and Gabriel Mannarino, were acquitted in 1971 when “one of the
star witnesses turned out to be the local head of the CIA”
(Robert Sam Anson, “They’ve
Killed the President,” [New York:
Bantam, 1975], 296). Anson told me that this witness was Brod, but I
have found no court record that Brod’s testimony was accepted
into the court record.

49

Dan E. Moldea, The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters,
Rebels, Politicians, and the Mob (New York:
Paddington Press, 1978), 130-31.

50
Time, June 9, 1975,
14.

51
Church Committee, Testimony of John Scelso, 7 May 1976, 41-42, NARA
#157-10014-10083, 45-46. Angleton’s response suggests that he
may have believed what Hank Messick and others later charged: that
Lansky had somehow obtained protection from the Bureau [Hank
Messick, John Edgar Hoover
(New York: David McKay Co., 1972], 229-31, etc).

52
William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento, Joseph J. Trento, Widows

(New York: Crown, 1979), 71.

53
For details see Scott, War Conspiracy, 387; Peter Dale Scott, Deep
Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files, 1994-1995 (Ipswich,
MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007), 30-33.

54
See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government
Files,1994-1999 (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007),
17-18, 92; also Peter Dale Scott, “Oswald and the Hunt for Popov’s Mole,”
The Fourth Decade, III, 3 (March 1996), 3; www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=519798.

55
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.

56
See discussion in Peter Dale Scott, “The JFK Assassination and
9/11: the Designated Suspects in Both Cases,” Global Research,
July 5, 2008,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9511.

57
J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States:
Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 139-75; John Dinges,
The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies
Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New
York: New Press, 2004), 190-98, 248-50; Peter Kornbluh, The
Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and
Accountability.

58
McSherry, Predatory States,
95; citing White cable of October 13, 1978,
foia.state.gov/documents/State/Chile3/000058FD.pdf (a URL inactive
in 2008); also Diana Jean Schemo, “New Files Tie U.S. to
Deaths of Latin Leftists in 1970s,” New
York Times, March 6, 2001.

59

“I can do no less, without producing a reaction in the U.S.
which would lead to legislative restrictions. The speech is not
aimed at Chile…My evaluation is that you are a victim of all
left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was
that you overthrew a government which was going communist”
(Dinges, The Condor Years,
159-62); citing Department of State Bulletin
75 (July 5, 1976), 4 (public speech).

60
McSherry, Predatory States,
159.

61
McSherry, Predatory States,
161.

62
Los Angeles Times,
May 7, 2008,
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/07/nation/na-posada7.

63
Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty:
Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of
Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), 280.

64
Joseph J. Trento, The
Secret History of the CIA (New York:
Forum/Prima/Random House, 2001), 436-37. In 1978 Trento himself was
the recipient of a leak linking Wilson to Shackley.

65
Trento, The Secret
History of the CIA, 395 (Helms), 344
(cadre).

66
Block, Masters of Paradise,
191.

67
Block, Masters of Paradise,
192: “The major Pritzker link to the Teamsters was crafted by
Stanford Clinton, ” a lawyer “who represented some of
Chicago’s leading hoodlums” and also had a Castle
account.

68
Block, Masters of Paradise,
195.

69
Block, Masters of Paradise,
171; cf. 32-33.

70
Block, Masters of Paradise,
172-73, 182.

71
Scott, The War Conspiracy,
46-47, 60, 64-68, 263,
278-79.

72
OSS officer and Corcoran friend Ernest Cuneo, quoted in David
McKean, Peddling Influence: Thomas “Tommy
the Cork” Corcoran and the Birth of Modern Lobbying (Hanover,
NH: Steerforth, 2004), 286.

73
“Lawyers and Lobbyists.” Fortune,
February 1952, p. 142; quoted in Scott, The
War Conspiracy, 47.

74

Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The
Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence
Network (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005),
9.

75
Scott, The War Conspiracy,
278-79

76
Block, Masters of Paradise,
170.

77
McKean, Peddling Influence,
140-43; Scott, War Conspiracy,
64-65.

78
McKean, Peddling Influence,
149-50.

79
Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War,

Vol II (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 107,
153; Trento, Prelude to Terror,
9.

80
Oral History Interview with Arthur R. Ringwalt, June 5, 1974, Truman
Library, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/ringwalt.htm.

81
Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and
Insurgency Since 1948 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm
Books, 1999), 192; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and
War, 51, 187, 192-93, etc.

82

Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The
United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947-1958
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 1997), 214-15; cf. 206.

83
Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden
City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 82-83.

84
Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swann, The
Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon
(New York: Viking, 2000), 242.

85
Memo of 18 August 1976 to Chief, Security Analysis Group, NARA
#104-10059-10013; also partially released as p. 6 of Meyer Lansky
Security File, 1993.08.13.17:42:12:560059.

86
Memo of 18 August 1976 to Chief, Security Analysis Group, NARA
#104-10059-10013; Reid, The Grim Reapers,
119-23.

87

Jeff Gerth, in Sid Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian (eds.), Government
by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from Dallas to Today
(New York : New American Library, 1976), 138.

88
Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of Power,
242, 252; Jim Hougan, Spooks,
398. Cf. Denny Walsh, New York Times,
January 21, 1974; Gerth, in.Government by
Gunplay, 137-39.

89
Block, Masters of Paradise,
94-96; Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of
Power, 244-45.

90
Summers with Swan, The Arrogance of Power, 244-45, 253-54.

91
Block, Masters of Paradise,
46, 101.

92
Inspector-General’s report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel
Castro, 29-30; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The
New Revelations in U.S. Government Files, 1994-1995 (Ipswich,
MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007), 60.

93
San Francisco Chronicle,
March 3, 1967, 41; quoted in Scott, Deep
Politics II, 67.

94

Block, Masters of Paradise,
100-01.

95
Inspector-General’s report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel
Castro, 29-30; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep
Politics II, 59

96
Some of the documents in this file, including the FBI Report quoted
in this paragraph, are incorporated into the Inspector-General’s
report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 29-30; quoted in
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II,
59. In addition, the CIA’s report on its interest in Resorts
International, quoted above, carries the handwritten notation “for
file/ Sam GIANCANA/ not mentioned.” The allusion to Giancana
makes sense in the context of the CIA-mafia plots, but as far as I
know not otherwise.

97
“MOSS, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 14 May 1973, in
Meyer Lansky Security File, p. 9, NARA #1993.08.13.17:42:12:560059.
The CIA used the misspelling “Verona” which occurred
just once in the FBI source document, and ignored the correct
spelling “Varona” which was abundantly used as well.
Note below their use of “Cellino” (rather than
“Cellini”) and “Lenzieri” (for Lanzieri) in
related CIA documents. By this device both the FBI and CIA could
avoid responding to document searches for the correct name. For
example in the 1940s the CIA told the French that they had no
documents on the SS war criminal Klaus Barbie, whom they were
harboring. The American documents referred to him systematically as
“Barbier.”

98
“MOSS, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 14 May 1973 from
Jerry G. Brown for Deputy Chief, Security Research Staff, NARA
#1993.08.13,17:42:12:560059.

99
“Moss, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 19 April 1967
[at the time of the I-G Report mentioning Moss], NARA
#104-10122-10006;
Inspector General’ Report on CIA-Mafia Plots to Assassinate
Fidel Castro (henceforth I-G Report), NARA # 104-10213-10101, p. 38.
Cf. memo of 7 November 1962 in CIA’s Edward K. Moss folder, p.
26, NARA #1994.05.03.10:54:53:780005.

100
“Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI Memorandum of January 16,
1961 to A. H. Belmont, 105-76826-20; NARA #124-90055-10139.

101
“Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI Memorandum of January 16,
1961 to A. H. Belmont, p. 2, 105-76826-20; NARA #124-90055-10139.
Cf. “Moss, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA Memo of 14 May 1973,
in Meyer Lansky Security File, p. 9, NARA
#1993.08.13.17:42:12:560059; CIA letter of 16 December 1960 to FBI,
FBI file 105-76826-18; NARA #124-90055-10133.

102

CIA letter of 16 December 1960 to Director, FBI, FBI File
105-76826-18; NARA #124-90055-10133. Apparently no copy of this
letter has been released from CIA files.

103
“Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI Memorandum of January 16,
1961 to A. H. Belmont, p. 2, 105-76826-20; NARA #124-90055-10139.

104
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 145; cf. 238-40.

105
“Moss, Edward K. #172646,” CIA Memo of 28 November
1962, NARA #1994.05.03.10:54:53:780005.

106
I-G Report, p. 38.

107
“Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI Memorandum of January 16,
1961 to A. H. Belmont,” p. 2, 105-76826-20; NARA
#124-90055-10139.

108
FBI Memorandum to Attorney General, January 23, 1961, NARA #
124-90055-10140.

109
Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World
of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000), 194; citing I-G Report.

110
Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: U.S.
Covert Operations Against Cuba (Washington:
Potomac Books, 2005), 181.

111
Summers with Swan, Arrogance of Power, 283 ($1 million); Robert Baer,
Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), 43 (briefcase); Kessler,
The Richest Man in the World, 170 (”several million”); Renata Adler,
“Searching for the Real Nixon Scandal,” Atlantic (December 1976), 76–84
($200 million). Khashoggi admitted publicly to a gift of $43,000 to the Nixon
campaign in 1972.

112
Kessler, Richest Man in the World,
170.

113
Kessler, Richest Man in the World,
142, 181.

114
It has been alleged that at the Sands in 1960 the FBI saw the
casino’s courtesy prostitutes “running in and out of”
Senator Jack Kennedy’s suite, and a million dollars was
allegedly given to Kennedy in a brown leather satchel by the hotel’s
owners (John William Tuohy, “The Sands,”AmericanMafia,
August 2001,
http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_155.html).

115

Omar Garrison, Howard Hughes in Las Vegas
(New York: Dell, 1970), 48-49, 56, 58; Peter Dale Scott, Crime
and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate
Connection (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press,
1977), 29.

116
Kessler, Richest Man in the World,
149-50.

117
Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and
the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America,
1947-2000 (New York: Knopf, 2001), Prologue.
Sally Denton later enlarged on the details: “When it became
clear 70 United States, American, banks were involved, had the
complicity, knew about every single one of the wire-transfers and
transactions — banks including Chemical Bank, Bank of New York,
CitiBank, American Express –… President Clinton and Madeline
Albright stepped in and intervened and stopped the entire
investigation and closed all of the cases” (Discussion at Taos
Community Auditorium on October 12, 2002;
http://www.taosplaza.com/taosplaza/2003/pages/tmff_drugs.php).

118

Gigi Mahon, The Company That Bought the
Boardwalk (New York: Random House, 1980),
136.

119
Kessler, Richest Man in the World,
275–78. A friend of Khashoggi’s, Larry Kolb, reports
that Khashoggi himself essentially corroborated the story that
Khashoggi and John Kennedy had a friendship in the 1950s that
“evolved primarily out of whoring together” (Larry J.
Kolb, Overworld: The Life and Times of a
Reluctant Spy [New York: Riverhead/Penguin,
2004], 236). The woman who destroyed the presidential aspirations of
Senator Gary Hart in 1987 was one of Khashoggi’s many girls.

120
Kessler, The Richest Man, 238, 240.

121
Prince Turki bin Faisal gave Georgetown University alumni a frank
account of the Safari Club’s formation in response to
post-Watergate restrictions: “In 1976, after the Watergate
matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally
tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send
spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In
order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in
the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the
Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Morocco, and Iran.”

122
Kolb, Overworld, 238,
242–43.

123
Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The
Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000 (New
York: Knopf, 2001), 72; citing laudatory article on Greenspun in the
Jerusalem Post, July 1993.

124
Investigative reporter Jim Hougan reports the incredulity of
congressional investigators that Lockheed was the only large
corporation not to have made a contribution to Nixon’s 1972
election campaign (Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America—The
Private Use of Secret Agents [New York: William Morrow, 1978],
457–58).

125
Drinkhall, Wall Street Journal,
April 18, 1980. Drinkhall also reported that “Helliwell
reputedly was one of the paymasters for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs
invasion in 1961,” a claim repeated in virtually every book
dealing with Helliwell since that time (except my own). I have
looked at dozens if not hundreds of CIA Bay of Pigs documents, many
of them concerning financial payments to anti-Castro individuals and
groups, and I have never seen any document involving either
Helliwell or an unidentified cryptonym.

126
Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush
(1992), 296-97

127

Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire,
36-37; citing Robin Winks, Cloak & Gown:
Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New
York: William Morrow, 1987), 377-78 (X-2 in Vienna).

128
Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits:
The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial
Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 384
(”ties”).

129
Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire,
86. Abbas Kassimali Gokal, whom British prosecutors accused of
stealing $1.3 billion from BCCI, was a board member of the Inter
Maritime Bank from 1978 through 1982. In 1997 Gokal was sentenced to
13 years by a UK court for his role in the BCCI fraud.

130
Truell and Gurwin, False Profits,
384. Truell and Gurwin claim that Hartmann went from Intermaritime
to BCCI; the Kerry-Brown BCCI Report claims that Rappaport recruited
Hartmann from BCCI/BCP for his own bank.

131
Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire,
85.

132
U.S. Congress. Senate, 102nd Cong., 2nd Sess. The BCCI Affair: A
Report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from Senator
John Kerry, Chairman, and from Senator Hank Brown, Ranking Member,
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations,…
September 30, 1992, 1-2. Cited henceforth as the Kerry-Brown Report,
69.

133
Jane Hunter “Covert Operations: The Human Factor,” The
Link , August 1992, Volume 25, Issue 3, 8,
http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=139&aid=183&pg=8.

134

Leonard Slater, The Pledge
(New York: Pocket Books, 1971), 175.

135
Sindona had links to the Italian intelligence service SISMI, to drug
traffickers like Rosario Gambino, and to the Nixon Administration.
See Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The
Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the
Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987),
71, 73; Lernoux, In Banks We Trust,
178-79, 193-95, etc.

136
Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire,
36; citing Robin W. Winks, Cloak & Gown:
Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New
York: William Morrow, 1987), 377-78.

137

Smith, OSS, 165.

138
Operation Safehaven began as a U.S. Treasury effort to trace the
movements of stolen Nazi gold, and possibly implicate Nazi
collaborators in America. Taken over by OSS X-2, it recuperated SS
assets that were used instead to support former SS agents.

139

Anthony Cave Brown, The Secret War Report of the OSS / edited
by Anthony Cave Brown (New York: Berkeley, 1976), 565-66.

140
Ronald Kessler, The Richest Man in the World (New York:
Warner Books, 1986), 162, 300; Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne,
The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New
York: Random House, 1993), 54, 80, 263-64.

141
Truell and Gurwin, False Profits,
83-87.

142
Kerry-Brown Report.

143
Beaty and Gwynn, 357.

144
Truell and Gurwin, False Profits,
373-77.

145
Olmsted’s intelligence connections dated back to wartime
service on the staff of General
Albert Wedemeyer in China, where he was in charge of clandestine
operations and in that capacity worked with OSS. He was thus a
senior figure in what I am tempted to call the OSS China connection,
which united so many of the people who were prominent in Helliwell’s
post-war global drug connection. We have already mentioned Helliwell
himself, who was head of the Special Intelligence branch of OSS in
Kunming before he created Sea Supply Corp in Bangkok. Willis Bird
was the deputy chief of OSS China and then became the most important
figure in Sea Supply after Helliwell’s return in 1951 from
Bangkok to America. C.V Starr, later represented by Corcoran, opened
his insurance empire in China to the creation of an OSS network
outside the OSS-KMT cooperation agreement. See Richard Harris Smith,
OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central
Intelligence Agency
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 267 (Starr), 273
(Bird), 326 (Helliwell). But this is not the whole picture.
Elsewhere I have dealt with the post-war activities of other members
of the small OSS Detachment 202 under Paul Helliwell in Kunming: E.
Howard Hunt, Ray Cline, Lou Conein, John Singlaub, and Mitchell
WerBell. All of these men went on to develop post-war connections
for the CIA with drug-traffickers: Hunt in Mexico, Cline in Taiwan,
Conein in Vietnam, WerBell in Laos, and Singlaub with the World
Anti-Communist League which Hunt and Cline had helped to create
(Scott, Drugs, Oil,
and War, 20, 207).

146
Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire,
41; cf. Block, Masters of Paradise,
191.

147
Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire,
41-42; Truell and Gurwin, False Profits,
40-43, etc.

148
Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 123-24; cf. 128-29:
Expanding over seven pages on these and many other intelligence
connections, they asked whether the bank’s illegal acquisition
of an American bank holding company, First American Bankshares, was
not in fact serving the purposes of U.S. intelligence:

“No one can deny
that virtually every major character in the takeover was connected
in one way or another to U.S. intelligence: Olmsted who controlled
the company [First American] for years; Middendorf, who headed the
group that acquired it from him; Abedi, who arranged for clients of
BCCI to buy the company from Middendorf’s group; [Mohammed
Rahim Motaghi] Irvani,, the chairman of one of the dummy companies
set up to carry out the acquisition; [his partner Richard] Helms,
who advised Irvani; [former Saudi intelligence chief Kamal] Adham,
the lead investor in Abedi’s group; [Clark] Clifford, who
steered the deal through the regulatory maze and then became the
chairman of the company….Can all this be a coincidence? Or is
it possible that First American was affiliated with U.S.
intelligence all along and that it was simply passed from one group
of CIA associates to another, and then another? No proof has emerged
that this is what happened, but it is certainly not a far-fetched
theory.”

149

Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (New York: Norton,
1987), 96.

150
Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots,
162. BCCI also used Price Waterhouse as its auditor. In addition,
BCCI and Nugan Hand used the same law firm and registered agent
(Bruce Campbell & Company) in the Cayman Islands (Truell and
Gurwin, False Profits,
125).

151
Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots,
243.

152
Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots,
334-35.

153
Trento, Prelude to Terror,
313-14.

154
Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots,
207, 208.

155
James A. Nathan, “Dateline Australia: America’s Foreign
Watergate?” Foreign Policy
(Winter 1982-83), 183; quoted in Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale
Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra
Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era
(Boston: South End Press, 1987), 38.

156
Scott, The Road to 9/11,
126-27.

157
Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue
Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet
Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999),
272-75. Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli
arms, with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another
associate of Oliver North. The mujahideen were recruited in
Afghanistan by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leading recipient of CIA
assistance in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and most recently a leader
of the al Qaeda-Taliban resistance to the U.S. and its client there,
Hamid Karzai. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War,

7, 8, 20.

158
Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated:
Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror
Networks (New York:
Seven Stories Press, 2005), 90-97: “[IMU leader] Namangiani’s
networks in Tajikistan and in Central Asia were used to smuggle
opium from Afghanistan. It was partly thanks to Namangiani’s
contacts in Chechnya that heroin reached Europe” (91)….
“It was thanks to the mediation of Chechen criminal groups
that the KLA and the Albanian mafia managed to gain control of the
transit of heroin in the Balkans” (96). Napoleoni does not
mention Azerbaijan, which however lies between Uzbekistan and
Chechnya.

159
“KLA Funding Tied To Heroin Profits,” Washington
Times, 5/3/99.

160
Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06,
http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.com/2006/10/ellsberg-hastert-got-suitcases-of-al.html.

161
Vanity Fair,
September 2005. According to the ATC web site, “As one of the
leading business associations in the United States, the
American-Turkish Council (ATC) is dedicated to effectively
strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of
commercial, defense, technology, and cultural relations. Its diverse
membership includes Fortune 500,
U.S. and Turkish companies, multinationals, nonprofit organizations,
and individuals with an interest in U.S.-Turkish relations.”
It is thus comparable to the American Security Council, whose
activities in 1963 are discussed in Scott, Deep
Politics, e.g. 292.

Edmonds has been partially
corroborated by Huseyin Baybasin, another Turkish heroin kingpin now
in jail in Holland, in his book Trial by
Fire: “I handled the drugs which came
through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England.” But
as he adds: “I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out
with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part.”
Baybasin claimed he was assisted by Turkish officers working for
NATO in Belgium (”The Susurluk Legacy,” By Adrian
Gatton, Druglink Magazine,
Nov/Dec 2006,
http://adriangatton.com/archive/1990_01_01_archive.html).

162
Marshall, Drug Wars,
55; citing Tad Szulc, “The Money Changer,”
New Republic, April 10, 1976, 10-11.

163

See Scott, The War Conspiracy.

164
Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of
Sukarno, 1965-1967″ Pacific Affairs
(Vancouver, B.C.) 58.2 (Summer 1985), pp. 239-64.

165
AMPO (Japan), January
1974, 44 (Indonesia); David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza
[New York: Macmillan, 1986], 90 (Deak); Marshall, Drug
Wars, 54-55 (Katayama, Kodama). Kodama and
Sasakawa were both arrested by the U.S. for war crimes but not
prosecuted. In 1941 Kodama had plotted the assassination of Japan’s
Prime Minister Konoye by dynamite, to block his attempted peace
negotiations with the U.S. Kodama then made a fortune in Shanghai
during World War II, allegedly in part through his control of the
drug traffic in conjunction with the kempeitai.
Kodama and Sasakawa both became staunch supporters of the Asian
People’s Anti-Communist League,that as we have seen has had
persistent connections to the post-war Asian drug traffic.

166
Beaty and Gwynn, The Outlaw Bank, 48. [See Clarification of this footnote, published 2/21/2009.

167
Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger
in the White House (New York: Summit, 1983),
279, 290.

168
Dinges, The Condor Years,,
190-98.

169
Robert Parry, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty
from Watergate to Iraq (Arlington, VA: Media Consortium, 2004),
112-38, etc.; Scott, Road to 9/11, 99-107. According to
Parry, Michael Ledeen was also part of this effort.

170
“Turkey’s pivotal role in the international drug trade,” Le
Monde diplomatique (July 1998), http://mondediplo.com/1998/07/05turkey.
Cf. Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism
in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2005), 237-38. Author
Claire Sterling attempted to blame the KGB for the assassination attempt,
and her view that the KGB was the heart of what she called a global “terror
network” was forced on CIA analysts by William Casey and Robert Gates (see
final footnote below).

171

Iran-Contra Affair,
Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra
Affair, 100th Congress. 1st Session, H. Rept No 100-433, S. Rept No.
100-216, pp. 164, 166, 228, etc.

172
Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire,
95-116, etc. Burt Kanter, the co-founder of Castle Bank, was
recurringly involved in Rappaport’s IMB-BONY dealings (Block
and Weaver, 100, 102, 193, 105, 113).

173
Scott, Road
to 9/11,
163-65, 351; Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan
Diary, 272-75.

174
Scott, Road to 9/11, 167-68,
citing Michel Chossudovsky, “Macedonia: Washington’s Military-Intelligence
Ploy,” Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, http://www.transnational.org/SAJT/forum/meet/2001/Chossudov_WashingtPloy.html.

175
Lernoux, In Banks We Trust,
72; cf. Mother Jones,
March 1984.

176

Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The
United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947-1958
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 1997), 179-80; cf. FRUS, 1952-1954, 12, 1, 689-90.

177
Trento, The Secret History of the CIA,
410.

178
Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra
Affair, 100^th
Congress. 1^st
Session, H. Rept No 100-433, S. Rept No. 100-216, p. 164.

179

Trento, Prelude to Terror,
283-84.

180
Scott, Road to 9/11,
52-53.

181
See Rowan Scarborough, Sabotage: America’s
Enemies Within the CIA (Washington: Regnery,
2007); Kenneth R. Timmerman, Shadow Warriors:
The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender
(New York: Crown/ Random House, 2007),

182

“It works like this: Blackwater, for example, will win a U.S.
government contract; it will then subcontract with itself–that is,
with Greystone–to do the job. From there, Greystone looks to its
network of international affiliates, firms like Pizarro’s Grupo
Tactico in Chile or ID Systems in Colombia, which maintain informal
relationships with what are known in the trade as “briefcase
recruiters”–individuals with connections to the local
paramilitary scene” (Bruce Falconer and Daniel Schulman,
“Blackwater’s world of warcraft,” Mother
Jones, March-April 2008). Cf. Jeremy
Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s
Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York:
Nation Books,
2008).

183

This false ideology was enforced even inside the CIA. Author Claire
Sterling wrote a book called The Terror
Network, claiming “that all major
terrorist groups were controlled by the Soviet Union.” The
book, with little credibility today, was warmly endorsed by then
Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who passed it to William Casey,
who presented its thesis to the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence. Casey also assigned top CIA terrorist analysts and
Soviet experts to prepare a special national intelligence estimate,
or SNIE, based on Sterling’s book. When the experts reported
there was no merit to Sterling’s claims, Casey’s Deputy
Director of Intelligence, Robert Gates, had their negative
assessment rewritten and reversed by new low-level personnel who had
just arrived in the Agency. See Mark Perry, Eclipse:
The Last Days of the CIA (New York: William
Morrow, 1992), 47-49, 319-320. Today Robert Gates is America’s
Secretary of Defense.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, is the author of The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and
the Deep Politics of War (August 2008). This essay draws on the concluding section
of the new book, which can be ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press
by clicking here at www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/MFF_Store. His
website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.

In addition, Peter Dale Scott’s The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the
Future of America is available at the 911truth.org
store.

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Edit history: Added four endnotes 10/28/08 12:44pm; added Addendum, Clarification to footnote 166 2/20/2009

Hugh, got it through? Does any human believe something changed since then? If yes, then read what Sibel Edmonds said recently. The business she describes there follows exactly the same pattern as outlined in the above article written by Peter Dale Scott. Funny to see, that the old mafia CIA networks are still in place.